Motley Fool Money - The GDP Growth Myth

Episode Date: October 7, 2024

Some economic measures are indicators for investors, others are red herrings. We unpack why gross domestic product is a sign of economic growth, but not always shareholder returns.   (00:12) Buck Ha...rtzell and Dylan Lewis discuss: - What’s behind the sudden interest in China’s Shanghai Composite and its 20% run in September. - Research showing that high GDP growth doesn’t always turn into strong market returns for investors outside the U.S. - What to look for internationally, and why DLocal is a great small cap to study. (20:52) Can you find friends on a dating app? Platonic friends, that is. Mary Long caught up with Motley Fool Senior Analyst Alicia Alfiere for a look at Bumble, a dating app company that recently changed a foundational feature and is looking for growth in the friendship market.  Vote here to help Motley Fool Money take home Signal’s Best Money & Finance Show for 2024.   Companies discussed: BABA, TCEHY, MELI, DLO, BMBL, MTCH Host: Dylan Lewis Guests: Buck Hartzell, Mary Long, Alicia Alfiere Producer: Ricky Mulvey Engineers: Tim Sparks, Rick Engdahl Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 This episode is brought to you by Indeed. Stop waiting around for the perfect candidate. Instead, use Indeed sponsored jobs to find the right people with the right skills fast. It's a simple way to make sure your listing is the first candidate C. According to Indeed data, sponsor jobs have four times more applicants than non-sponsored jobs. So go build your dream team today with Indeed. Get a $75 sponsor job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply.
Starting point is 00:00:27 When does growth not lead to growth? Motleyful money starts now. I'm Dylan Lewis, and I'm joined over the airwaves by Motleyful analyst Buck Hartzell. Buck, thanks for joining me. Thanks for having me, Dylan. It's great to be here. I'm really glad I've got you here today because we are going global and we are going to be talking about some things that you've been following,
Starting point is 00:00:54 some articles that you sent over my way, taking a look at the run in China's market recently, as well as some research out that maybe one leading economic indicator not the best sign for investors or maybe one that they should be a little cautious of. To kick us off, this is our kind of why now for this conversation. September was truly a magic month for investors in China. Shanghai Composite Index up over 20% in the last two weeks of the month. That run took the index into the positives, brought things back to about two-year highs.
Starting point is 00:01:24 What's going on with what we're seeing here in China, Buck? Yeah, I mean, you mentioned it, Dylan. And I would caution people, we'll get into China here in just a second. But we're bottoms up investors here at the Fool. And what that generally means is I spend all my days looking at individual companies and I don't spend much time at all forecasting GDP or looking across different kinds of macroeconomic variables. And there's a reason for that, Dylan, and it's largely because, A, I can't do it. I don't think I can kind of predict these things. There's too many variables that go into it.
Starting point is 00:01:55 And the other thing is a lot of the macro indicators and things that we see are lagging. So they're lagging indicators. When we look at stocks, they're forward-looking vehicles. So we call them complex adaptive systems, the stock market, so it's forward-looking. And that's why stocks go down long before we ever hear about whether we're in a recession or not. So anyhow, with that as a lead-in, we've seen some interesting things happen in China and that market. Obviously, there's a lot of people there. It's a gigantic market.
Starting point is 00:02:21 And it's been a growth story over the last few decades as the middle class has emerged in China. But yeah, you're right, five days, up 21%. That's remarkable for a big economy like that year-to-date. think it's up 12%, but then if you kind of widen your lens and you know like at the full, we generally think in three to five year increments around here, we're not like what happened this month or this week or this quarter. Over the last three years, that market is up about six percent in total. So not great returns over three years, but certainly, you know, wonderful returns over the last few days. And that's largely because of government speak, right?
Starting point is 00:03:01 So they've announced large fiscal stimulus policies to support the marketplace. This is something we saw them do previously. And so it's a reaction that say the government's saying, hey, we're paying attention and we're going to support the economy. We're also going to support our stock market. And to me, that doesn't get me particularly excited. But for some investors, obviously, that's in the newspaper and it's going to have a run on stocks when Big Brother government is supporting us.
Starting point is 00:03:27 When we see a major index move like that, we pay a little bit of attention. And I feel like, you know, there are some parallel stories happening in China and the United States when it comes to the rate picture, the consumer environment, and really the market participants looking at anything that could stimulate some growth, get consumers a little bit more willing to spend, kind of take the burden off of them as a very positive thing for stocks and for companies in those countries. Right. And it generally is. But there is a difference between the U.S. and China. And I would kind of focus on that a little bit in that largely in the United States, about 67% of our GDP of our economic production is due to consumer demand, right? Consumers drive the day. That's the way it works over here.
Starting point is 00:04:16 China's a little bit different. It's kind of like the government drives the day. The government decides where things get invested, who gets capital, who gets to borrow, and what projects are done. and they do that on a massive scale. They do five-year plans of what their things are, their agenda is, and it's driven largely by government. Not the same here in the U.S. It's driven by the consumer, and I'd say that's a big difference.
Starting point is 00:04:40 The other thing I'd say is, like, you can make a five-year plan, but as your economy grows and matures and gets more complex, it's much more difficult to do that from a top-down-driven standpoint and be efficient with it. My example is, I said this, my kids a couple years ago, There's a lot of cupcake places around here in Alexandria, Virginia. I'm like, I don't know that we can support all these cupcake places, right? And it turns out that the economy is pretty efficient.
Starting point is 00:05:08 You know, there's not as many cupcake places today as there were five years ago here because there wasn't enough demand. The other option is you can say the government could legislate how many cupcake places you can have per capita in Alexandria, Virginia. And I would argue that that's not going to be as efficient, right? It's not going to be as efficient as capitalism and the free flow of money because entrepreneurs get in there and make decisions every day, every second, based on the best return. So anyhow, government-driven economy, consumer-driven economy, two different things. You noted that the long-term returns for China have not looked great over the last couple of years.
Starting point is 00:05:44 Part of that is, I think, the Chinese government looking at some of the very big leading private sector companies and being a little bit more restrictive with what they are able to do. and that has dampened the growth outlook. It's also had some geopolitical concerns, I think, for investors. I feel like looking at China, I am hard pressed to find an analyst here at The Fool that is really excited to put new money into businesses in the country. And the ones that are still being very selective. What's your take on investing in China right now? My take is the same as it's been for the last several years. and that is, I think it's largely uninvestable for U.S. investors.
Starting point is 00:06:27 And there's a lot of reasons why. And I'll start with the big ones. But the first big one is it's illegal for us to own stocks in Chinese companies in China. Like it's legal, right? But they get around that by they formed VIEs. These are typically shell companies that are in the Bahamas or somewhere in the Caribbean. There's nobody that really works there. and you buy basically an interest in the VIA, which is nothing. It's literally nothing. You don't
Starting point is 00:06:56 have an underlying interest in the shares that you're buying in those Chinese companies. You just have a portion of the VIE. And if push came to shove, you'd end up in a Chinese court to talk about your ownership rights of an entity that is a shell company in the Bahamas when it's literally the law is you can't own Chinese stocks. Now, they want capital from North America, and the government has kind of turned a blind eye to that over the last several years. But that is a big sticking point for me for investing in China, the whole structure and it being illegal. The other thing I'd say is just the regulation that environment over in China is not as robust
Starting point is 00:07:36 as it is in other more fully developed countries. And so there's risks that are implied in investing in China. The other ones that I would put in there is just like the government rules the day. They decide at the end of the day who gets money, who doesn't, and they can be kind of capricious sometimes. You mentioned some of those large technology companies became pretty powerful. Their owners became very wealthy. Jack Maul is one of those from Alibaba. They were going to spin out their financial arm, which was Ant Financial.
Starting point is 00:08:06 And the government said, no, you aren't. And by the way, you don't own what you think you own in that. And Maul made the decision to speak out a little bit against the government. and then he disappeared for a while. You kind of went undercover. And so it's one of those places where government decisions can have a huge impact on your value creation or value destruction. You don't really know which way it's going to go.
Starting point is 00:08:31 And so I'd say China is one of those places that's very difficult for us to invest. The last part I'd make about it is China was on a building rampage for many years. And a lot of their incentives for local governments were to grow GDP and make investments. Unfortunately, those weren't, you know, demand-driven investments. Those were top-down government-driven investments for building all kinds of things, some of which are empty and not even being used now because the goal was growth, not necessarily good, efficient growth that's demand-driven. So anyhow, there's some issues, particularly in the real estate markets there in China that that countries needs to work through.
Starting point is 00:09:11 I think one of my favorite things about investing is you could tell me data points, even data points in the future. And I would probably get the other elements that would follow wrong or not necessarily have the complete picture because of the nuance and context that comes in. China's GDP growth, perfect example of that it has outpaced the United States in many years recently. That has not necessarily turned in to great returns for investors. That is, as it turns out, a broader trend that we're observing and we are observing thanks to some research from Professor Derek Hostmeier at George Mason. The headline here from WSJ, the countries with the highest growth rates in gross domestic product are associated with lowest
Starting point is 00:09:53 market returns. Buck, help me make sense of this. Repeat that. That's weird, right? The highest growth countries have the worst returns. That doesn't seem rational, right? But the fact is it is. And I would go further, Dylan, and say, you could probably do a study about this and include individual stocks, right? Why would some individual stocks that are growing much faster than the average company in the S&P 500 underperform? Well, the reason is the same as countries underperform. Investors know that they're growing more quickly and they bid up the price of those stocks, right? So just like they think, hey, China is the biggest market in the world or it's going to be. And they're growing really quickly.
Starting point is 00:10:39 We're going to invest in those stocks and those stocks go up. And what happens is you end up with a long period of time where those stocks aren't great investments. You're basically talking about 2020 to 2021 here with tech and high growth businesses. Yes, absolutely. Yeah. And now that is absolutely true. We didn't see it just 2021. We saw it in 1999 in 2000, 2001, right?
Starting point is 00:11:02 Where we saw that was the dot-com bubble. But tech stocks became, they went up to unreasonably. reasonable levels of valuation. And then we had a long period. Microsoft for one of those companies back then, one of the great companies in the world, that company, you know, went nowhere for a decade or more, even though the business was growing, sales were growing, but the multiple is so high in the early 2000s that it took a decade to kind of work off all that and then grow again. And it's been a wonderful investment since then. But anyhow, yeah, so those countries, whether it be, you know, China or India or all kinds of different countries that are growing quickly doesn't mean that their
Starting point is 00:11:42 stock markets are going to do the best. India is one I mentioned. They were actually one that did have positive returns among those. And there's been a lot of changes in that marketplace, which make India an attractive place, I think, to be an investor. There's a problem, though. It's really difficult for U.S. foreign nationals to invest in India. So it's hard for us to buy stocks in India, and that's unfortunate, because I think that economy is coming along in the right direction. I 100% follow you on the high growth expectations and maybe countries and companies within them not necessarily being able to live up to those. We are also looking, when we look at international companies, at businesses that are subject to currency effects.
Starting point is 00:12:24 And countries that are big exporters benefit tremendously from a weak currency. If a currency strengthens, puts you in a spot where you are making everything a bit more expensive on the global stage. We saw that play out with some of the currency moves and company valuations in Japan just back in August. That strengthening yen, meaning that exports wound up being a bit more expensive, really hurting some of the growth prospects for Japanese companies, even though in a broad economic sense, not a bad thing that the yen is maturing. I think mostly my take on all of this buck is it is darn hard when you are looking at these swirling economic indicators to do anything that is thesis-drive.
Starting point is 00:13:04 with it. Yes. Yes. I don't think I can do it. I don't think I can look at an individual marketplace and say, hey, I'm going to invest in Japan this month. Next month, oh yeah, it's a great idea to rest in Europe. Next month we're going to Canada or whatever else. I don't think that's a great way and a winning way to invest. I think the best way to invest is have a process that looks at what are the great companies out there and invest in those companies? And just like the countries, right, price matters. even the greatest company on earth is a bad investment done at the wrong price. So it's like we see that happen all the time. I'll give you one example that's recent, right?
Starting point is 00:13:41 Like eBay is a company that everyone has heard of, right? They're the online marketplace. Buyers and sellers come together. And they've updated their model a little bit. So it used to be all used things on eBay and now it's not the case. Most of the things that are sold on eBay are actually new. But anyhow, over the last 12 months, When we take a look at eBay, the stock is up 52%, Dylan.
Starting point is 00:14:07 And how did revenues do you think do at eBay over those 12 months? Just based on the premise of the question buck, I'm going to say that they were not lighting the cover off the ball or absolutely killing it. I think you're right. I mean, it's a pretty mature marketplace. It's one of the largest in the world. Actually, revenues were up 2.5%. Wow. So the question is, how can you get a company that grew their revenues only two and a half percent, much lower than some of these high growth companies, yet the stock was up over 52 percent.
Starting point is 00:14:40 By the way, that doesn't include dividends over the last four quarters. Dividends were $1.4. I didn't include those. I just looked at the stock price. So it's actually higher than the 52 percent by a bit. So how do you think they could do that? Earnings power. Got to be earnings power.
Starting point is 00:14:55 I'll tell you what, they've done one thing that's remarkable. They have a great business that generates a lot of recurring cash flows, Dylan, and what they've done is they've eaten themselves. eBay has bought back their stock to an incredible tune. I mean, if you look at the last five years, so the most recent quarter and you go back to 2019 for the same quarter ended in June, their diluted share count is down almost 42%. So they bought back 41.6%.
Starting point is 00:15:25 of their stock in five years, their share count went from 838 million shares down to 489 million in the most recent quarter. So what happens, even if you're not growing, when you shrink that share count, your earnings per share goes up nicely, even if you're only growing 2.5%, right? And they didn't need to leverage their balance sheet in order to do that. They didn't have to borrow billions of dollars. They just used the 2 to 2.5 billion in free cash flow that comes in every year and bought back a lot of their stock. Here's the key at attractive prices, right? So that can do a lot for investors.
Starting point is 00:16:03 So buck to wrap us up here, I think a lot of folks have looked at some of these emerging markets that we've talked about as potential growth opportunities and kind of exciting places to be watching for the market. We are saying, hey, just because there is GDP growth here does not mean that there is something investable right off the bat. what should investors do with this information, aside from just kind of having it in the back of their brain when they're looking at companies? Yeah. So the big lesson about this is price matters, right?
Starting point is 00:16:30 The other thing is there's risks sometimes that you take on when you invest overseas, that you can't be aware of or know or forecast. And so taking those two things into account, there's one area, and I think if we widen our lens and we go back decades and stuff, one of the things that we know as investors is that small caps tend to outperform large caps. But recently, that's not the case. Large caps have been on a big run here in the United States, and small caps have underperform. We also know that typically when there's rate cuts, which would be just had a 50 basis point rate cut, small caps generally benefit disproportionately. So they do better than large cap stocks.
Starting point is 00:17:07 That has not been the case most recently. And so as an investor, it makes me interested in small cap stocks, right? So that's a place that I naturally gravitate to when I see that, hey, small caps are probably cheaper than large caps, cheaper than they've been in maybe 40 years. And so I think that's a good place for investors to look. Warren Buffett said, I was at the annual meeting this past year. And one of the things that he said, if he had a million dollars, a person asked him a question, they said, you had a million dollars, you said you could earn 50% a year. Would you look at small cap stocks and, you know, how would you do that? He said, basically, I would get familiar with every small
Starting point is 00:17:43 cap stock. And he didn't go on. He was insinuating that he would buy the best of them. And he would do 50% a year. So that's that's Warren Buffett. I respect his opinion. He's a pretty smart person. So I'll throw out one example of this in a small cap stock that I think is valuable and interesting in a lot of ways. But it also gets some international exposure because we've been talking about, hey, it's nice to get exposure to some of these growing economies and those types of things. The company is D-L-L-O. And this company provides payment services. And they're a small-cap company. They're about $2.5 billion. But the interesting thing is, is they decided to go into very difficult markets to do transactions in.
Starting point is 00:18:24 And they build up the infrastructure. You've got to know the regulations, all the currencies, do all that kind of stuff. And a lot of the big tech companies here, particularly in the U.S., and they deal with five of the six largest tech companies in the world, they didn't want to mess around with payments. That's not their business, right? And so they sign up and they use a company like DeLocal to handle all that for them. And it's a business in a box.
Starting point is 00:18:45 So they can transact and do all those kind of transactions. And for that, DeLocal collects a fee. And this is a company that's been free cash positive, free cash flow positive from their very early days. They make plenty of profits. And there's something interesting that's going on right now. By the way, they're found in Uruguay, which is kind of interesting because not many tech companies out of Uruguay. They hired a new CEO, and his name is Pedro Arndt, and he came over from Mercado Libre. I think a lot of people in the Foolish Universe are familiar with Mercado Libre.
Starting point is 00:19:14 They're a great payments company out of Latin America. They kind of rule that market. They also have an eBay equivalent. So they have a marketplace as well. But anyhow, they're a huge company. And he was their longtime CFO, 15 years or so as the CFO at Mercado Libra. He knows how to build business in payments and build scale. And when you look at businesses, there's kind of three things, right?
Starting point is 00:19:40 You have to found a business and run it well. The second one is you have to scale the business. And the third thing is you have to run it at scale. Those are three different skill sets. He has the ability to do all of those. And I think he's a great addition. And it's an attractive company that's also buying back their stock, which plays into the eBay kind of thing, example we just showed, but it's a smaller.
Starting point is 00:19:58 It's a fast-growing company. But they also find their stock attractive and they're buying it back. And that benefits us as passive shareholders, our share of the pie grows with each buyback. So I would say if you're interested in some international exposure, you want to look in kind of those small cap cheaper areas, but also have the growth and exposure to multiple markets. They're now going into Africa, which is a very difficult place to transact. And they're figuring that out. DeLocal is an interesting company to look at. You know, getting up to speed on every small cap, maybe a little bit daunting, but you gave our listeners here a nice primer on one in particular.
Starting point is 00:20:35 I appreciate it, Buck. Thanks for joining me today. You're welcome, Dylan. Thanks for having me. All right, a quick reminder before our next segment, Motleyful Money is currently in the running for Signals Best Money and Finance podcast. Voting is open for the next week, and we'd love it if you can weigh in and help us take home the trophy. We'll be sure to drop a link to where you can vote in the show notes. Coming up next on the show, can you find friends on a dating app? Plotonic Friends, that is. My colleague Mary Long cut up with Motley Fool's senior analyst Alicia Alfieri for a look at Bumble, a dating app company that recently changed a foundational feature and is looking for growth in the friendship market. What does leadership really look like?
Starting point is 00:21:21 On The Power of Advice, a new podcast series from Capital Group, you'll hear from athletes, entrepreneurs, and executives who've led on the field in the boardroom and in their communities. It's not about titles. It's about impact. Discover what drives them and the advice they carry forward. Subscribe and start listening today. Published by Capital Client Group, Inc. Alicia, founder and CEO, Whitney Wolf Hurd, or founder and one-time CEO, former CEO, Whitney Wolf Hurd, stepped down as Bumble CEO a little less than a year. year ago. She was like a massive part of the Bumble story. Why did she hand over the reins? Yeah, well, so she founded Bumble back in 2014. And when you think about it, her journey of just about 10 years had to have been massive and exhausting, right? She took a company public. She ran this public company for several years. And she stepped back. The reasoning for this was that she wanted to focus more on the big picture of Bumble.
Starting point is 00:22:21 then on those day-to-day things. And so she became the executive chair of the board. This past April, Bumble relaunched its app and it made some tweaks to kind of what was its signature move that women make the first move on the app. Made some tweaks to that. That's still mostly the case, but per management that thinking here was that for some women, having to make the first move, felt more like a burden than it did an opportunity. And so it's still early. But do we have any insight into whether that change has led to increased engagement on Bumble, whether that's helped them or hurt them? Yeah. So the company said in their latest earnings call that they believe that the relaunch created a better experience for female users. And that's really important because
Starting point is 00:23:04 this company built its flagship app, that's Bumble, with women specifically in mind. And the company says it believes it saw better engagement, more matches coming up for women and more users with high quality profiles, but we don't have user metrics like we might normally see in like a social media platform, right, where we see hours spent on the platform or something like that. We do have stats on paying users, which has been going up for Bumble as well as its other apps like BADU, but average revenue per user or ARPOO is declining on a year-over-year basis for Bumble as well as its other apps. And some of this is driven by different geographies, but some of it speaks to some of the other issues that Bumble is having. Yeah, so maybe let's talk about some of those other issues because when we
Starting point is 00:24:01 were going back and preparing for this call, you flagged a particular one for me, but like product market fit and how Bumble's maybe lost its way there a little bit. So can you walk us through that? Yeah, definitely. So in the last earnings call, the company was talking about a few different problems that raised concerns for me. One of them was the intent of its users, that sometimes there was this mismatch of intent. Well, the whole purpose of a dating app like Bumble is to find someone who's like-minded in terms of what they're looking for in a relationship, right? And again, this is where product market fit comes in. It means you are finding the right solution at the time. the right time for your consumer. So you have to know your market. You have to know your target
Starting point is 00:24:52 demographic. If you want to eat the world, as it is, if you want to take over the world, then you're likely going to need more than one kind of product to do that for something like dating. Because again, there are all kinds of different intents. But if you're trying to solve a specific problem, you do need to make sure that you match those users up with their intent and make sure that people find what they're looking for. Otherwise, you're going to have an issue in terms of people wanting to pay for your app, right, to go from the freemium to the pay version. Ahead of this conversation, you had told me that you believed in the long-term viability of the
Starting point is 00:25:30 online dating scene and dating apps in general, but that this was maybe a situation where, okay, potentially you have an opportune industry, but some troubled companies. Are there any dating apps that really seem to be getting this right right now? Well, and you say right now, that's the key part. I think it's pretty tricky right now. So there have been several articles that I've read over the last year or more that have talked about how younger daters specifically are tired of apps and want to meet people in real life or IRL, if you're an old millennial like me. I believe the industry over the long term, I believe in its viability because it's really hard to meet people organically as you get older. not just significant others. Also friends, right? Think of the last time you tried to broaden your
Starting point is 00:26:22 circle of friends if you are past your 20s. It gets really difficult. In terms of other players, so match holdings is a big one. They have a lot of different apps, including plenty of fish and Tinder and Hinge. And they've had some ups and down too. What's interesting with them is they talk about their individual apps. And I think this is the solution where you know you have different dating pools within the market and you're trying to grab each of them. Right. So, for example, Tinder, monthly active users declined in the last quarter, but that was mostly because the company is purposefully culling users that aren't actually looking to connect and they think that this is going to help in the future. And then Hinge, whose tagline is something like the app that's
Starting point is 00:27:11 built to be deleted, I think. Designed to be deleted. They're doing pretty well. So 24% increase in paying users, 19% increase in revenues for paying user. The company is saying that, you know, the marketing here has been resonating. And they're also creating interesting tools to push users to have the behavior that's going to work for that app. So the thing that I found interesting is they have this your turn limits.
Starting point is 00:27:41 feature. So the idea behind this is that it's supposed to be helping to drive better conversations among users and hopefully increasing your chances of having a chat turn into a date. And they do this by having a limit. So I don't know what the limit is, but let's just say it's 15 conversations. So once you get to 15 in order to start another new chat with someone that you find interesting, you have to close another one. So you had mentioned earlier that, Bumble's kind of foray into this friendship space and expanding beyond the dating area. They seem to underline this as a big growth area for the company. Do you have any color on how Bumble BFF, and they also have a separate app for it, Bumble
Starting point is 00:28:26 for Friends, how either of those ventures are playing out? Well, so it appears to me that they're still building this out. And Bumble mentioned recently that they purchased, I believe the app is called Geneva, which is a group and community app that helps people connect through shared interests. And that can hopefully help the company to build out this ability to create community. And the company is looking to release this increased capability from Geneva later this year. So hopefully we'll see something like that. But for me, I thought that this part of Bumble could really represent a great growth opportunity
Starting point is 00:29:07 because I think regardless of your relationship status, I think most people would like to have another friend in their lives. I don't know anyone who has told me that they have their fill on friendship. Maybe there are people out there. And I think if that's you, then you have one. But most people, I think most people could be interested in the ability to make a friend, especially someone that already has a shared interest. And, you know, meeting them through an app or online first could really take a lot of the pressure out of like a first meeting with someone could really lessen that pressure, right, if you already know, hey, Mary also likes to write. So now when we meet up for coffee, we could hang out and talk about what our latest writing project is,
Starting point is 00:29:55 right? And so that could be really exciting, I think, for the company. Yeah, the friendship space is really interesting to me because I think that this, as you said, is a genuine problem that's playing out in a lot of places, especially cities. The loneliness epidemic that we started to really hear about in COVID, I think that that continues and is really real. Bumble in other dating apps might tell you explicitly or implicitly that these apps are a way to combat that epidemic. And I'm going to close us with an existential question because I've started to see, even in Denver, I get ads on Instagram all the time for something called Time Left, which is a French startup, which, yes, uses an algorithm, but you don't spend much time on an app. Ultimately, you fill out a few questions, and it immediately puts you at this table with allegedly like-minded people, and you pay $12 to meet those people in person. And so, you know, that is a tech offering, but it really underscores the immediate in-person meeting in a way that dating apps haven't quite figured out how to do. So anyway, the existential question that I want to
Starting point is 00:31:06 close us on is, this is a problem. And I see and kind of respect the tech companies that are trying to address it. But is this perhaps a problem that technology can't solve? Loneliness is a tricky problem. I think it is part of the, let's be really philosophical. It is part of the human condition. And I don't know if technology can solve it or solve part of it, but I would really like it to be something that technology can help us solve. There are so many examples of how technology can bring us together and help us find our people, you know, that people with similar interests and like-minded souls. And that would be really wonderful if Bumble or another company can can, can be able to create that community for people, whether you're going to a new city or you have
Starting point is 00:32:03 a new hobby or you're lonely or you just like people in general. I think that would be wonderful. As to the company that has you paid $12 to meet people in real life, I hope, I mean, I hope they can ensure that it's going to be a good or at least interesting experience, right? So I have tried it out and I will table that for another day or perhaps offline. the podcast. But my review, if anyone listening has also seen these time left apps and has debated, I thought it was worthwhile. But more to say there. Another time, Alicia. I love that. I love that. As always, people on the program may own stocks mentioned in the Motley Fool may have formal recommendations for or against, so don't buy or selling anything based solely on what you hear.
Starting point is 00:32:54 I'm Dylan Lewis. Thank you for listening. We'll be back tomorrow.

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.