The Compound and Friends - Big Tech Earnings Week With Alex Kantrowitz, Two Small Caps on Josh’s Radar, Robots Take White Collar Jobs at Amazon

Episode Date: October 28, 2025

On this TCAF Tuesday, hear an all-new episode of What Are Your Thoughts with ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Downtown Josh Brown⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ and ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Michael Batnick⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠! This episode is sponsored by Public. Fund your account in five minutes or less by visiting http://public.com/WAYT   Sign up for ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠The Compound Newsletter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ and never miss out! Instagram: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://instagram.com/thecompoundnews⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Twitter: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://twitter.com/thecompoundnews⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ LinkedIn: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-compound-media/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ TikTok: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.tiktok.com/@thecompoundnews⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Public Disclosure: All investing involves the risk of loss, including loss of principal. Brokerage services for US-listed, registered securities, options and bonds in a self-directed account are offered by Public Investing, Inc., member FINRA & SIPC. Public Investing offers a High-Yield Cash Account where funds from this account are automatically deposited into partner banks where they earn interest and are eligible for FDIC insurance; Public Investing is not a bank. Cryptocurrency trading services are offered by Bakkt Crypto Solutions, LLC (NMLS ID 1890144), which is licensed to engage in virtual currency business activity by the NYSDFS. Cryptocurrency is highly speculative, involves a high degree of risk, and has the potential for loss of the entire amount of an investment. Cryptocurrency holdings are not protected by the FDIC or SIPC. See terms and conditions of Public’s ACATS & IRA Match Program. Matched funds must remain in the account for at least 5 years to avoid an early removal fee. Match rate and other terms of the Match Program are subject to change at any time. Alpha is an experimental AI tool powered by GPT-4. Its output may be inaccurate and is not investment advice. Public makes no guarantees about its accuracy or reliability—verify independently before use. *Rate as of 9/26/25. APY is variable and subject to change. Investing involves the risk of loss. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be or regarded as personalized investment advice or relied upon for investment decisions. Michael Batnick and Josh Brown are employees of Ritholtz Wealth Management and may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this video. All opinions expressed by them are solely their own opinion and do not reflect the opinion of Ritholtz Wealth Management. The Compound Media, Incorporated, an affiliate of ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Ritholtz Wealth Management⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, receives payment from various entities for advertisements in affiliated podcasts, blogs and emails. Inclusion of such advertisements does not constitute or imply endorsement, sponsorship or recommendation thereof, or any affiliation therewith, by the Content Creator or by Ritholtz Wealth Management or any of its employees. For additional advertisement disclaimers see here ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://ritholtzwealth.com/advertising-disclaimers⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. Investments in securities involve the risk of loss. Any mention of a particular security and related performance data is not a recommendation to buy or sell that security. The information provided on this website (including any information that may be accessed through this website) is not directed at any investor or category of investors and is provided solely as general information. Obviously nothing on this channel should be considered as personalized financial advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any securities. See our disclosures here: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://ritholtzwealth.com/podcast-youtube-disclosures/⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to an all-new edition of the compound and friends. Tonight's show is sponsored by our friends at public. More on public in just a moment. I want to spend a second just saying thank you to everybody who came out to the live event we did in New York and to all of you guys who listened to it on Apple and Spotify or watched it on YouTube, the reviews, all the comments. We love you back. And that was, as you guys could tell, a pretty emotional moment for me.

Kramer is somebody that I grew up reading and idolized and having the opportunity to talk to him about his career in front of 120 or so of our biggest fans. It just meant the world to me. So I just wanted to say thank you. All right, tonight is, what are your thoughts? We had a special guest, Alex Cantowitz, popped by to get us ready for Tech Earnings Week or what I call. All earnings week at the AI Circus. So Alex walked us through all the big storylines for Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Meta. We got into some Nvidia stuff, some open AI stuff.

There's just, there's a lot in there, and I really want you to hear it. So let's get into the show and enjoy. Welcome to The Compound and Friends. All opinions expressed by Josh Brown, Michael Batnik, and their castmates are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of Ridholt's wealth management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon for any investment decisions. Clients of Ridholt's wealth management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast.

All right, Michael, I don't know if you know this. All the gangsters are here. Of course. Where else would they do? I'm looking at the live chat. It's going crazy right now. Should we do, let's do the, let's do the sponsor. And then we'll give some shoutouts.

How does that sound? Okay. All right. Today's show is sponsored by Public. Public is the investing platform for those who take it seriously. you can build a multi-asset portfolio. I'm talking stocks, bonds, options, crypto, and more. Okay.

You can also access, don't want to do you guys. I didn't know it was my turn. Silence, I'm talking. You can also access to industry leading yields like the 3.8% APY. You can earn your cash with no fees or minimums. But what sets public apart? What sets public apart? AI isn't just a feature.

It's woven into the entire experience. From portfolio insights to earnings call recaps, public gives you smarter context at every touch point. Plus, earn an uncapped 1% match when you transfer your portfolio, including IRA transfers, rollovers, even contributions. Fund your account in five minutes or less, paid for by public investing. Full disclosures in podcast description. Sorry, took me a minute, but I'm in the game now.

Okay. Let's say some hellos really quickly. Michael Skyrose is here. Serpentor 1080 says, what up? What up? Mark Morris is here. Matt Davison, KPS Fred. Rigotony Capital, great handle.

We'd love to see it. Nicole is in the chat. Boys, say hello. Be polite. Who else is here? Everyone. The whole, oh my goodness. Do we have a...

It's Alice Cantowitz, you guys. How are you guys doing? What's up, man? So glad you're here. Both. Great to be here. What a week. Alex, I feel like, I feel like it's like day two as I'm looking at your background. I'm not doing homework assignment, but it's not day one anymore. You want him to judge?

No, he's got to update the book. So here's a thing. If you try to write a book today, given how much AI news is happening, your book is going to be like a year out of date by the time it prints. So there will be another book. It's just we got to wait a couple years to figure out where the ending is. You have to write books as, like, a look back at what happened. You can't, you can't, I read, I tried to read Ray Kurzweil's AI book this summer. I got halfway through it.

Every other paragraph, he's like, by the time you read this, this might not be relevant, but. So how much of that can I read? No, you know what? Sorkin did it right. He waited 100 years to write the final, like, the final, like, 1929 expose. This is the case. All right.

I'm so glad you decided to stop by today. because it's earnings week in the AI circus and all the, I think we get five of the Mag 7 reporting this week, everybody except for Tesla and it, which already reported, and in video, which comes at the end of November. But it starts tomorrow and it's relentless through the end of the week. So what a great, what a great moment to just take stock of what's happening, company by company. But, Michael, I think you have a chart to set the table first. Yeah, so this is all short-term stuff. So it doesn't really, really matter in terms of where we are in the cycle. But I wish that we weren't so bold up going into the reports.

You have Apple at an all-time-high today. $4 trillion. Apple today. Microsoft. I mean, it's all how Google is going vertical. So listen, you don't get to choose. But throw this chart up. So Chart kid did a three-day rolling three-day return look back at tech.

versus X-Tech. And it's the strongest three-day stretch of the year. And if you zoom out, even back to like the dot-com bubble, it's up there. I mean, this is a notable, notable run. So expectations are super high going to the print.

And again, short-term, but they better deliver. You know what this means to me? It means that we should not take the post-earnings reaction in the first day or the after-hours as being overly meaningful. A lot of these stocks just went vertical going into these reports, and it would be totally normal for a company to have a great report and the stock not go up. Oh, Nvidia is down 6%. Who cares? It's back to where it was on Tuesday. Yeah, I'm with you on that. Tomorrow, we'll get alphabet. So I guess I don't know if we're starting an alphabetical order.

But let's do it. Let's do Gug. Expectation for revenue, 100 billion to remind. mind the viewers, that's for the quarter. That would be up 13.5% year-over-year. Earnings for share, $2.27, which would be 6.8% year-over-year. Let's do this chart real quick. Here's what the last year has looked like. I am the schmuck who sold it over the summer around 200. So missing out on the last 70 or so points in the stock.

Oh, yeah. I'm the schmuck who sold it at 170. I'll do you one better. Alex, these are what I think are the big themes here, but I want you know a lot more about this than I do. I think the big themes that people are looking for, whether or not there's erosion in search due to people starting their searches with chat GPT.

I know that's a big one. There's been no sign of it yet. And Gemini has been a pretty powerful way of Google counteracting that, but that's out there. I think people are excited to hear about Waymo. they don't publish financials, and it is in the other category, the Moonshots category, but I do think it's a big deal that they've rolled out in so many markets over the course of the summer.

And I guess the third thing would be any color that they could offer on things like that are far, far out on the horizon, like quantum. And, you know, obviously data center spend, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But what do you think are the big themes of this particular report? There's two big ones. No, offense. No, I'm sure I did. Cloud.

Right. What I should I mean? The data center, that's like the obvious thing. Oh, and YouTube. Yeah, of course. YouTube, good point. So I'll take these, a couple of them are pretty interesting and worth thinking into. First is the question about whether search is going to be disrupted from AI has, I wouldn't

say it's been settled yet, but it's been answered at least in the short term. I mean, we're talking about a Google that's going to do 13% revenue increase if it hits consensus this quarter. where three years after chat GPT came out and search is not going away. So I think that question has been answered and to some degree at this point. Is there a long-term threat that chat GPT will take this over potentially? But one of the things that I've realized or one of the things I've seen is that your behavior with chat GPT and your behavior in search are generally fairly different.

I think Google still is the leader for Internet search. Now, I think there's like this new category that's generative AI conversations. that it's going to have to face on face off with chat ch pt about but i think that's largely additive um the cloud stuff is is really interesting can we can we go back to search really quickly before you move on yes it's too early for there to be any fundamental uh thing to say but do you feel the next concern on alphabet is the um the atlas browser that chat chpt launched because if that ends up being a thing that a lot of people try and like, Chrome is, like, really important to search.

I wouldn't suggest that within the course of the next 90 days, there's going to be a sea change in the way people use the Internet. But, like, is that going to be the next question about Google searches dominance, like whether or not Chrome can withstand an assault from OpenAI on the browser side? I'm not worried about Chrome. I spent a lot of time using the Atlas browser last week and reading about how other people have, other people have used it. It's a real fun tool. It's, it's different. I think it is the future of browsing. However, Google has the deep mind team

within it. It's a little bit worse than, right? Exactly. It's a little bit worse than OpenAI on product. But the idea that Google is just going to sit there and keep Chrome Chrome as Open AI brings these innovations to market, I think is not going to be the case. I think that, you know, this could be a Snapchat meta situation where like Snapchat comes out with stories, meta comes out with stories. It's as easy as clicking a button on the browser and you're going to, you'll be able to get this type of functionality that's definitely going to be the case with Chrome. And, you know, with browsers, many have tried to unseat Google and few have succeeded.

And really by few, I mean none. Like, it is one of the most difficult things to get. Tell us about cloud. Cloud is going to, so this goes to your earlier point, Josh, about like, Let's kind of relax when the earnings results come in because we're obviously in this point of like a big run-up. And, you know, we don't fully know the full story as soon as the quarterly results come in. So just to give the Google example, investors were upset last quarter when Google gave guidance that it was going to raise, I think, capital expenditures from like $75 billion to $85 billion. And they're like, what are you doing spending all this money?

And then a couple months later, it announces a partnership with Anthropic worth tens of billions of dollars. So the money is just flowing in a like a basically unprecedented way in cloud. So it's going to be really easy to hold on to some signals that you don't have the full picture on. I would not go bananas if you see some numbers you don't like because there could be a broader story. A few months that actually turned those numbers into a good thing. The anthropic deal with alphabet I think is worth double clicking on because this is the first time they have ever done a chip deal directly with a third party. You've had access to TPUs for seven years now

if you were using the cloud and renting them, renting that access. But now this is like a million TPUs directly for the usage of Anthropic. It strikes me as like a new phase in Alphabet's chip ambitions. And I don't know, like is it a one-off or? Is this like a whole new thing that Alphabet might start doing that the street might be looking at them more like a real invidia competitor? So I think this is the beginning of a new, really important strategic alliance between Google and Anthropic. And I think the timing of it isn't a coincidence. So if you're Anthropic or if you're Google, you're looking at the fact that OpenAI has gone and teamed up with

Nvidia and Oracle and they have Microsoft. And you're saying, hold on a second. Especially if you're a dance partner. Exactly. And if you're Google and you see that, you're just like, we need a counterweight here. And so Google, of course, has its own effort, but it is a big investor in Anthropic to the tune of billions of dollars as well. If there was ever a company that it was going to try to position as a counterweight as well, it would be anthropic. And that's what's happening. Pretty big blow to Amazon considering their investment in the company. Oh, yeah. I mean, I went through some of the Amazon numbers now and the Amazon initiatives and sort of came to the like, what are you doing? conclusion here. Their efforts on... There's another one I've been wrong about all year. Let's pause on Amazon because we're going to get there in a second. Let's do META. 49.4 billion in revenue for the

quarter expected. That would be almost 22% year-over-year growth. Earnings of $6.66, which would be 10.5% year-over-year growth. Also spending like crazy doing all sorts of new versions of financing data center buildouts like Hyperion, also spending as though this were existential to the company because it probably is and working with some really big partners of financial partners on Wall Street in the process. Michael and I behind the scenes,

we're talking about some of these deals that they've been striking. This is going to be, the analysts are going to be all over this in the Q&A about these off-balance sheet financings between Blue Owl and BlackRock's involved and Pimpco's involved and they're getting approval from rating agencies that it's not going to impact their credit. Like, this is the next phase of the cycle

and the analysts are going to be all over it. So, Alex, just to put a fine point on what Michael's saying, which is I think the most interesting thing about going into this quarter, Pimco basically was able to take down $27 billion worth of debt for all sorts of investors

you know, as like a fund. And it looks like immediately after these bonds to finance the data center, it looks like immediately afterward, you saw BlackRock become one of the largest holders. They tucked away a bunch of these bonds in their portfolio. The price of the bonds went up so much that Pimco actually was able to net $2 billion in profit right off the bat, like immediately in reselling.

The bonds hit 110. cents on the dollar. And concurrently, S&P Global comes out and says this is a plus credit, like immediately. Facebook does something really clever where they structure this type of spending as though it's operating as opposed to financial, meaning they're taking these four-year leases on different data centers. Makes our balance sheet look cleaner. Right. So it's not it's not a capital asset sitting directly on the balance sheet. It looks more like a lease. So there's a lot happening here and it's happening fast.

Everyone's in the mix. Citadel was making markets in the bonds. Blue Owls involved on the equity financing side. FTC is trading them. Yeah. It's a lot happening here. So tell us what your take is and whether or not you think this will be material to the call. Well, I would defer to you guys about what the impact of that is going to be.

It seems to me like you're against. into, well, yeah, actually, can you elaborate on that, Josh? Yeah, no. That's as far as I go. Big mistakes to defer to us. Big mistake to defer us. Oh, that was, okay. I think that you're seeing a lot of these companies get really, really creative.

I think that might be one way of putting it when it comes to AI funding. They're trying to do whatever they can to continue to operate as normal while putting, you know, a tremendous amount of money into these data centers. And if you're meta, you really see why. This quarter is a quarter over, really over the past few weeks. You've seen Sam Altman, which, you know, Meta has three trillion, no, sorry, three billion people using their products. And OpenAI now has 800 million weekly active users on chat GPT. And a few weeks ago, Sam Altman said, you know, we're going to let people become friends with them and have romantic relationships with them.

Going as far as to like have erotic roleplay with these bots, if you can verify that they're adults and that's a big if. So if you're a meta and you're the friend company, right? you see this start to come up in your rearview mirror. You basically do whatever you can to get ahead of it. That's why Mark Zuckerberg is spending all these, you know, billions of dollars recruiting AI researchers. And you sort of like, you realize that it's fairly, it's going to be existential for the company because we have this moment where

we have a loneliness epidemic. Being friends with people like real humans online isn't doing it for folks. It's not solving the crisis. And people are turning to artificial intelligence. And so it's a pretty big threat to you. That's an interesting take. And I haven't heard anyone say that before, but that's an interesting take. Like, meta doesn't have to worry about a new social network.

It has to worry about a replacement for the failed experiment that is social network. This is a f*** up thing to say because you're saying that it's an existential threat that the loneliness epidemic that they might not be able to monetize the collapse of society that they help to create. Well, that's maybe he said that. I don't think he said that. That's what I heard. But you're on the right track, Batnik. I mean, there is like, there, there is all sorts of sad things going on in our world right now. And tech is partially responsible for sure.

And I would even say, oh, please, finish your thought. I would just say social media itself is no longer a thing. I mean, you really just have group chats and you have like lean back stuff like reels and TikTok. I'm in 10 different text chats with different groups of friends. that I've made over the years, that's like 9,000 times more fulfilling than anything I get from traditional social media.

And my friends are cavemen like me. It's not like I'm chatting with brilliant people. You could trust me. Is Mark going to get asked about the fact that they've just restructured their AI unit for what I've read is the fifth time? There seems to be a lot of internal dissatisfaction engineers that want to be on the AI team, but they're not, or they're working on old AI products

like Lama that already look like they're going to be out of date before they're finished. And with all that hiring, there's also a lot of shuffling around of personnel. Is it chaotic or is this just like too many reporters are trying to cover this? And this is just what it looks like when you're investing in new products. It is chaotic. I mean, we saw a note from, oh, I know it's chaotic. I mean, you saw this note from Zuckerberg saying that. They want to go towards superintelligence.

What have you seen since then? Have we seen a roadmap from them? Have we seen any product progress at all? I haven't. And you do run into morale issues when you pay some people, you know, I don't know, a billion. What was it, $100 million, even though they made a dispute. No, they don't pay them. They buy the company that the person started a week ago for a billion dollars.

No, no, no, guys, they give them infinite credit to have sex with the robots. Well, that might be in the future. That's probably what we'll all be fighting over. Okay. So you think beneath the surface, like, this is not a situation where the world is eagerly awaiting Lama 6 and all is well with meta's strategic plans for AI. You think there's a lot of concern. I'm concerned. I mean, in tech, in tech, you could have failures and the failures can turn into successes, right?

We've seen that in so many different areas. But right now, Lama is a failure. It is not setting the standard for open source. It's been lacked by China in some ways. And Mark Zuckerberg has moved off it. The most recent large run just didn't work the way that they hoped to. And so now you have this sort of amorphous effort in the middle of the company. Again, I am waiting to see a roadmap.

Once I see the roadmap or at least some vision about what they're working on, that's fine. But to trust them with all this I'd paid talent, you know, going after this sort of, you know, pie-in-the-sky idea of super-intelligence without any details. It's just not a place I'm in. Chart back on, meta, real quick. Do you think that what you're saying partially explains the fact that this is among the Mag 7 names that has not taken out, meaningfully taken out, the January high or the July high? Like, it looks more like Amazon, I guess, I would say, than it looks like Apple or Microsoft.

And do you think that that's what you're saying is an explanation for that? I think, yeah, the fact that there hasn't been a roadmap, at least a concrete one, combined with the fact that maybe the market is realizing that AI friends are a bigger disruption than, you know, to Facebook, then let's say search would be, or chat GPT would be to Google search to me is the issue. And by the way, it's like, it's not a new idea. I have 10 years ago, I was within Facebook, you know, doing some reporting stuff. And they were talking to me about how they wanted to build AI friends. They've always had the vision. And they've just been a little slow.

And, you know, we're in a moment now. I also think the headlines are bad. It's dystopian. Like, it's, I don't think like Zuckerberg is excited to say AI friends are here. I don't know. I mean, that's what they're doing. They're building the AI friends within Messenger and they can be celebrities or they're he's leaning in.

He's leaning into that. So that is where they want to go. It is dystopian. But Open AI has been executed. year. Last meta question, the vibes rollout. So basically, it's a feed composed entirely of AI slop. I don't know that maybe it's fun. It's like Sora 2 launch was looked at by the early adopters as, oh my God, this is so fun. The meta thing kind of, it seemed like DOA, but maybe it's not and the first impression is wrong. Is that like a sideshow that doesn't really make it?

matter yet. It's just them experimenting in public. I think that's exactly right. It is a side show. It doesn't matter. It hasn't gone anywhere. And by the way, SORA is also going to fall off. I mean, one of the issues with Sora is after you use it for a week or so, you sort of stop figuring out what you want to use it for because every video looks the same. And AI is the average of averages, right? So if you think about like all the emails that have been written by Chatsyp. The images, the videos, they all have a feeling of sameness because the model is just outputting sort of the average of what it's trained on. That's what it does. And so, um, Sora just fell off as the number one app in the app store. I think it lost out to, was it like Danny's hot chicken or something

like that? Yeah, nobody, nobody cares. So I think it will fall off as well. Alex, before, hold on, before we get time, is I just last question. We have, we have five minutes left, so we're going to keep this quick. If you had one question to ask, uh, Zuckerberg, if you wanted to call, what would you ask him? I mean, I would just ask him straight up. You're, you, you had a vision, at least for the metaverse. It didn't work out. right, but you had a vision, a bunch of people hanging out in virtual reality. What is your vision for superintelligence? Good question.

Okay, let's throw up this five-year chart of the Macs seven names, and one is obviously lagging behind the others in a dramatic way, and it's Amazon. It's not even close. It's not even beating the S&P 500. What a loser. And the main reason, I mean, there's a bunch of them. It's behind on AI, but their crown jewel, AWS, which was driving basically off its profits at one point in time.

It's still the biggest. It's still the behemoth. It's still doing a ton of operating income. It's still got juicy fat margins. But it is seeding ground in a meaningful way to both Alphabet and Microsoft John. Let's throw this chart up, please. So even though it's the biggest, look at the revenue growth compared to its biggest competitors. And then Lex chart, then I'll give it to you, Alex.

It's nowhere in AI cloud revenue. This is projections, obviously. But look at it. That's black. AWS is black compared to Google, Microsoft, which is predicted to be the winner in Oracle. I mean, it's nowhere in the future. Kramer told us, according to the tech CEOs he talks to, and you can probably imagine who those people are, the word on the street or the word in the valley is that nobody really

wants to write to AWS anymore. They don't see it as the cutting edge sandbox that it once was. and I have no idea if that's true or not, but just passing that along. And I think that maybe as part of the conversation is that people don't view AWS as being in a leadership position on AI relative to, let's say, Microsoft or even Google at this point. Like, are they right? And if so, what does Amazon have to say on this call? Well, if you think about it, like you get, it's almost like the home teams and the way that they play in each stadium. So if you go into Azure, the home team is open AI, right?

And actually, one of the most interesting things about the deal that Microsoft and OpenAI announced today is that I think Microsoft's going to have access to Open AIs IP to 2032, which is, okay, it's only about seven years, but that is a long time in this moment. And 20% of the profits. Yeah, great deal for Microsoft, by the way. Amazing deal for Microsoft. Unbelievable deal for that. Keep their equity. All right. So what does Amazon have to establish here then?

Well, then you go to the home team within Google Cloud. cloud and it's Gemini, which is a great model in its own right. Amazon just, I mean, they have Anthropic. Anthropic is the number one AI model for enterprise. So you would think that that would help, but you could also get Anthropic elsewhere. So I think that they don't have this flagship model. They do have some nice tools to build AI models like Bedrock and people are, people are using that or build AI applications. But they don't have the juice right now. So I don't I mean, it's really hard for me to tell exactly what they need. You'd want, basically, the state of the art.

They actually made their own attempt to build their own models, but no one talks about them at all, and that was announced a year ago. So I think that, like, what Amazon could do is this is still a sales, it's a sales business. So it will have to step up sales, maybe give credits, maybe, you know, figure out a way to get programs to build programs, where they can get AI startups to be working with. AWS more than they are? I mean, it's not laws for them. They still do a lot of really

meaningful work with AI. But it is one of those moments where you do have like the proprietary models. They're, they're uneven right now. Now, maybe, okay, so one philosophy about this is maybe you wait for all these models to commoditize, which they might eventually. And then it sort of doesn't matter which model you have. So Amazon's going to spend, Amazon's going to spend about a third of its conference call talking about groceries. And you will not hear that on the NVIDIA call or the alphabet call. So that's one thing. Matthew Stevik in the chat says, I remember Jassy making a very small thing that stood out to me on the April 2025 earnings call about how the NVIDIA chips are so expensive. That's a really great call out, Matthew.

And I remember that too. And there's a lot of talk about application-specific integrated circuits, taking the place of Nvidia GPUs for certain workloads, they're more cost efficient, et cetera, et cetera. And it strikes me that we're not in the phase of AI adoption and build out where cost effective

is the thing that gets investors excited. I think or programmers excited, I think people really want the best tools, not the cheapest. And if that's where Jassy is going with their priority roadmap, maybe that's problematic in

of itself. What do you think about that idea? I mean, it's spot on. And just to sort of put a bow on that, when I speak to people who are deploying this technology, they will tell me that the difference between deploying a model that gets like 99% of the stuff right versus 95% is massive. You almost can't work with something that has that big of a gap. So that is basically the whole ballgame here is that some AI models will just be more accurate and better and therefore worth a massive premium, even if the almost as good models can do effectively almost what they do, but for a fraction of the cost, because you ultimately errors in the stuff and economically valuable activity are going to be quite costly.

Can we keep you for two more real quick? Yeah, let's do it. All right. Let's do Microsoft. One year chart, please. Microsoft, it appears to me, has godfathered this whole situation. They seem to be the only company that has. Altman in a position where he's got to do deals that maybe aren't perfectly advantaged to Open AI, but offer a lot of advantage to Microsoft.

And that's a pretty good place to be in. Today, they made it official. I don't have the numbers in front of me, but Microsoft's going to keep 20% of the profits, which is a lot of money potentially. Also sort of has the inside track on all things, chat GPT, Open AI, in a way that it wasn't clear even six months ago. or three months ago, if they would keep that, constant headlines about they're not getting along, the playground's not big enough for both of them, blah, blah, blah. I don't know if they've totally put that to bed.

The share price and reaction in Microsoft today tells me the street seems to think that they have, and this is now paving the way for OpenAI's full conversion to a for-profit, ultimately an IPO company. Am I on the mark here with that interpretation? Yeah, I mean, one thing I'll say. First of all, there have to be profits. I mean, Open AI is expected to lose something like $120 billion by 2029. So there might be some time there. But here's what Microsoft gets with this deal. You know, the equity was a little bit less than some people might have expected, given the extent of the profit they were entitled to and the money they put into Open AI. But Microsoft gets such a large chunk of Open AI, 27% of the public benefit corporation. It gets an entitlement to the profits. It gets access to the And I think most importantly for Microsoft is it sort of gets off the Sam Altman rollercoaster. It has its stake.

If Open AI succeeds, Microsoft gets a piece of that. If Open AI doesn't succeed, it's upside or its downside is limited. Whereas like if Microsoft says, there's no succession, in other words. Like they're going to, it's they're together. Well, correct. But also like if Microsoft were to like, so Microsoft base, I think Microsoft had this option in front of it. Keep funding Open AI and basically betting the entire Microsoft. on open AI or allow open AI to go to the oracles, the invidias of the world to build the

infrastructure and then just kind of negotiate with open AI for a piece. And that Microsoft went with that second option. And I think that's brilliant because it basically like we'll get 27% of the company if these big risky things that Oracle and Nvidia are doing with open AI pan out. And if they don't, basically very little downside. They actually had this crazy thing written into the agreement, which I think is now put to bed, where once open AI achieved, achieves AGI, Microsoft, like, loses a whole bunch of their state. Like, could have been tens of billions of dollars. Like, that was the deal.

And who declares when Open AI has achieved AGI? Open ADI declares. Polymarket. Right now. Now there's an independent board that will review that. So. But it's a financial. Now it's about replacing actual workers.

It's not this nebulous concept. Like, it's a financial test to see whether or not. they've achieved AGI. It's like if you were Saudi, you were just kind of sweating it out, hoping Sam wouldn't say those magic three letters. Yeah. Last one, Apple, give me a one year. So Apple made a record high today.

Nice. Hit $4 trillion a market cap. Stocks $269. Michael say it. I already did. Nice. Look, I, I, uh, it's $102 billion in revenue expected when they report, which I think is Thursday.

That's a, only 7.6%. year-over-year growth, but it's huge numbers. Earnings, $1.77, would be almost 8% year-over-year growth. And it looks like the new phone is a hit. What else do you think is relevant to know going into the – what should we all be watching for when they have their call? iPhone 17, I think, is all that matters. I mean, they're going to give us some numbers on a week of iPhone 17 sales.

All the reports, the third-party reports have said that those sales have been through the roof. So it would be great if the Apple confirmed that, that would be great news for the company. I mean, it went through a couple of years of low to stagnant growth on the iPhone. And if that could be restarted, there was 13% iPhone growth in the most recent quarter. If they could restart that, that would be massive because the only thing that really was growing at an impressive clip was services and that was on a fairly low base. So to me, the company is the iPhone company. It's always going to be the iPhone company. And if it's able to revitalize the growth in that business, I think that's really all you need if you're Tim Cook.

in the chat, Situation Zero says, Apple will make a deal for Gemini to power Siri. So I was talking on CNBC about this today. With Microsoft and the OpenAI soap opera now resolved, to me, this really puts pressure on Apple to not just rely on its App Store partnership with ChatGPT, but to like really do something that can power Siri

and set it apart. And I just felt like the most obvious thing, is that once again, Google and Apple run into each other's arms. If you had to guess when Apple revamps its Apple intelligence and Siri product in 26, if you had to guess, would, in fact, Gemini be the technology that that's going to be built on? Or is there some dark horse like a perplexity deal or Apple's own foundational model? Like, what do you think is going to happen there? I mean, the dark horse for me would be Anthropic.

We know that Anthropic and Apple have spoken. Apparently, Anthropic wanted a lot of money to be able to. power, Siri, and that sort of broke down. So I think Google probably is the most likely candidate if you're Google. It's great. You get more data for your models. You get exposure. You might get people to sign up for like big, you know, personal cloud deals. And that would be good if you're Google. And you know Apple is desperate. So you probably get some pretty good terms if you make that decision. I want to tell you, you are the best. It's so important that we talk to people like you that are eating, sleeping and breathing this stuff. Because we're Wall Street, we're Morlocks,

and you're in Eloy. I don't know if you know the reference. I listen. You know your stuff. All right. So you're among the Eloy and you are out and about in that world, and we have to hear from you. So thank you so much for stopping by. I know the audience appreciates your time. Let's tell everybody where they can listen to you on an ongoing basis. Yeah. So you can listen to me on Big Technology Podcast. We're in all podcast apps. We have the CEO of Medium coming on this week to talk about how AI is going to change writing, and we break down all the AI news every Friday. So it's been great having you both on, and it's always fun to speak with you. You guys are great. Thank you. Thank you so much, Alex. All right, have a great night.

I love him. Do you love him? I do love him. What's not to love, right? He knows what's going on and he knows how to explain it. That was for talk. Yeah. No, he's the best. Okay. Let's do a little bit of stock market. Liz, I got some darned Kantwitz. No, I don't. Let's do some stock market stuff. So the stock market is ripping. More, more buyers and sellers.

And one of the reasons, of course, is because companies just can't stop, won't stop. Throw up this charge on. U.S. companies, at least, to be clear, companies in the S&P 500, are beating estimates to a degree that we haven't seen since the days of the pandemic. Pretty hard to believe, huh? Look at this. It's crazy. And this is with tariffs. Right? And it's not like, dude, it's not like estimates. Remember, in 2022, we spent a lot of time talking about estimates need to come down. Estimates need to come down. They're not coming down. Like, it's not like, I mean, analysts are not being super conservative. The bar is here. Keep jumping over it.

Yeah. No, I think that's exactly right. And I think like the analysts are tired of getting sandbagged and having low estimates and then seeing these companies exceed because it's it's not that the analyst cares that much about the published number versus their estimate and being so close. You feel stupid in front of clients who are trying to trade these stocks and you keep telling people to curb their enthusiasm and then they go up 20 points. I think the analysts don't want to be in that position anymore. But they also don't want to they also don't want to get out over their skis. It's like, guys, come on. At this point, what are you more worried about, though? If you're doing cell-side research on AMD and Micron,

you're way more worried about getting leapfrogged than you are about getting over your skis. Me personally, I feel like the risk is always to the downside. Like, I would much rather be conservative and companies just question and you just go, listen, right, as opposed to like getting all bowled up at the top. It's like, you donkey! Like, now? Yeah. Well, I, yeah, I guess, I guess.

that's probably a pendulum, just like everything else. Sure. All right, one other thing I want to mention. Chart Kid made this. I've never seen it before. Here's what we're looking at. We're looking at the number of all-time highs in a year, juxtapose with the max drawdown for the year.

So all the way on the left. Oh, this is so sick. All the way on the left, the companies that are on the zero of the y-axis or companies, or companies are years that haven't seen an all-time high, okay? those are bare markets by definition. And then what we're looking at, the red dot is 2025 year-to-date, looks very similar to 1998, where you had a 20%, give or take, drawdown, and yet tons of all-time highs, 35-year-to-date. 98, of course, was LTCM and the Russian Rubel and all that sort of stuff,

and market hiccup for a second, and then boom, off to the races again. What a charm. This is so great, and I'm going to tell you another thing, in the summer of 98, when, keep this up, in the summer of 98, so you had, all right, so this is saying in 98 in the full year, you made almost 50 new, new all-time highs. Unreal. And then a 20% drawdown. I remember that 20% drawdown. It was in the summer, and Greenspan came out and dropped rates, like not by a little bit. I forget the actual number, but it wasn't 25 basis points, and it wasn't on schedule.

It was a surprise weight cut. It was in response to the fact that they were trying to do this long-term capital hedge fund blow up. They were trying to, like, do a workout with other banks on the street. They did a self-bailout, basically, without taxpayers being involved. But they were also countering, like, just massive disruption across Asia. It wasn't just the Russian ruble. It was the Thai bot.

It was all these currencies that on the surface, you feel like it's obscure. It doesn't matter. But when it's every currency, one after another, blowing up. And bond markets going completely too. Yes. So they did this sort of one-off, intramitting surprise cut. And it immediately brought order back to the markets and the NASDAQ. And I remember it like it was yesterday, even though it's like 27 years ago, I wasn't

managing money. I was like a cold caller, but I was watching the TV with all the brokers. And that reminds me a lot of how fast the turnaround was this April, where it was like, we're going to do these insane tariffs. And then like a few days later, no, we're really not going to do that. It's literally, it's, it's eerie how much those two things match up. So shout to chart kid, Matt. That's a really sick visual. I love, I love what this guy's doing. All right. Let's talk about the robots. So last thing, put that chart back up. So, by definition, is 1995 the best year ever for the stock market? Yeah, because it went straight up.

There was no chill. 80 new all-time highs and no drawdowns. It was that and then 2017 to my memory. Yeah. So, guys, if you're staring at this chart, that's 95 is all the way to the right. No drawdowns. 2021 is right next to it. Yeah.

Great chart. Love it. So good. So, okay. So there was, there's been articles written about what Amazon is doing inside of the warehouses. They've got all sorts of robots. Some are newer than others, but able to do all sorts of things in terms of moving gigantic things around the factory, and then taking up the packages and all sorts of robots, machines. Okay, so obviously a lot of factory workers are being displaced, replaced, but then we got news yesterday or this morning, actually.

There was speculation that they were going to cut 30,000 corporate jobs. It's 14,000 corporate jobs, obviously, a meaningful number. They wrote a blog post today about it. They said this generation of AI is the most transformative technology we've seen since the Internet, and it's enabling companies to innovate much faster than ever before. We are convicted that we need to be organized more leanly with fewer layers and more ownership to move as quickly as possible for our customers and businesses. And the rest of the street, and it's already happening, is going to take this AI as cloud

cover to get lean and do whatever they have to do. And the street is rewarding it. So it's scary. Yeah. But it's, look, it's where it's going. And it started out with, all right, we're just not going to hire more people. So anyone that resigns or retires before we add that person back, like I add a new version of that person back, let's see if we don't have to. And that went on for a while. And now it's flipped over and now it's just like straight up. We have too many people. Like we, how could we ever maximize the potential of this AI technology if we have this many people in the way, so to speak? Here's the New York Times. Internal documents show the company that changed how people shop has a far-reaching plan to automate 75% of its operations. Amazon's U.S.

workforce has tripled since 2018 to 1.2 million. But the automation team, expects the company can avoid hiring more than 160,000 people in the United States it would otherwise need by 2027. That would save about 30 cents on each item that Amazon picks, packs, and delivers to customers. That's dystopic. Here, by the year 2023, that would translate to more than 600,000 people whom Amazon didn't need to hire. Put the chart up. Number of Amazon employees per facility on the left. You can see that is now cascading lower since the pandemic. Packages handled is rocketing higher.

Packages handled end-to-end per employee. So these are the pick-and-pack robots. These are the conveyor belts. These are the truck-loading robots. This chart is never going to reverse. Do you agree with that? I do, I do. So throw up a few more charts that we made.

So Amazon went crazy, particularly during the pandemic. It wasn't their fault. All sorts of supply chain disruptions and issues, and they overhired. And they've spent the past couple of years riding that ship. And this number will never reach a new all-time high. 1.5 million employees. And did you know that they are the second largest employer? I did know this.

In the United States. Behind Walmart. Yeah, I did know this. And Walmart is only behind the federal government. And that's it. Like, you know what I mean? Like, these numbers are insane numbers of people. And, yeah, if Amazon is, if Amazon is going to stick to its roots of, you know,

it's always day one. And, you know, there's always room for delighting the customers with more efficiency. Of course, this is where it's headed. But I think what's shocking people, Michael, is that these aren't warehouse jobs. This 14,000 is white. collar employees. So this is everything from engineers to like assistant vice presidents. But this is no longer about people in the warehouse.

This is now biting into bone. Well, one of the, one of the people quoted in one of these articles that's been so Monday over the past week said, when I got hired, Bezos was like six. There was like six managers between me and Bezos. Now there's like 28 or whatever the number is between me and Jassy. Like there's so much bloat and fat. That's how tech companies die. All right.

Wall Street Journal. this is this is this is this is not just the story of amazon this is now the story of corporate america how's this for a lead it is the corporate gamble of the moment can you run a company increasing sales and juicing profits without adding people yes american employers are increasingly making the calculation they can keep the size of their teams flat or shrink them through layoffs without harming their businesses a i blah blah blah many companies seem intent on embracing a new real lean model of staffing, where more roles are kept unfilled, and hiring is treated as a last resort. At Intuit, every time a job comes open, managers are pushed to justify why they need to

backfill it. Quote, that typical behavior that settles in, and we're all guilty of it, is historically, if Jane Doe leaves, I've got to backfill Jane. Now when someone quits, the company asks, is there an opportunity for us to rethink how we staff? 100%. This is the story, you made a comment at the top of the show about profitability and margins and like this is where it's coming from, but less bodies. Revenue growth minus headcount growth. It's great for earnings. Terrible for society.

So UPS was was in on the mix today. Here's a headline from Bloomberg. UPS jumps after sweeping job cuts, push profits above estimates, throw this chart up. UPS has been a dog for the last 10 years. But interestingly, I didn't realize that it actually kept pace with the market until the 20, until 2022. They announced earlier in the year that they are severing ties with Amazon, who is their largest and least profitable and most time-consuming customer. The stock fell 15% that day. It was like the worst day in two decades or something like that.

So I was looking through its call today. And operational update, this is the first thing they wrote, integrated agentic AI and tower, next-gen, gen, brokerage capabilities to streamline formal entry processes. They spoke a lot about this on the call. obviously Amazon was mentioned a million times, but they're laying off tens of thousands of people. And guess what? The stock market loved it. You know, it's a cold world.

Loved it. But the stock was up, I don't know, 9% today. Same thing with Target. Target cuts 1,800 corporate jobs, corporate jobs, not people in the store. No, these are paper pushers. Its first major layoffs in a decade and look at the chart. Again, I mean, this thing has been punished a long time, but the stock market loves it. So it's going to keep happening.

I think it'll keep happening so long as the share. price reaction is positive. And it will be positive because I think Wall Street now understands the year of efficiency is becoming the decade of efficiency. There's no end in sight to the levels of efficiency that these companies need to pursue. Great for investors. I don't want to say horrible for society because I don't want to go crazy. No, it is. But it's, it's, we don't have enough time on the show to cover it, but it absolutely is. And if this wasn't your signal to own the robots and be an investor in the market. I don't know what you're waiting for.

I told you 10 years ago. That was the name of the game. Strategy is the first digital asset treasury company to receive a rating on its debt. S&P issued its first ever rating in the space. And it gave strategy a B minus, which is junk. but I think with a very good explanation why it's not a commentary on the way the company's being run at all. It turns out it's just a lack of dollar liquidity, which is incidental to the company's whole point of existing, which is to not hold dollars. I mean, B-Midus is not bad. We were C-students.

It's not bad. That's right. No, that's my point. They're not saying this company is trash. They're just saying, like, typically when we look at other companies, we would want to see more dollar liquidity. In the case of strategy, the whole purpose of its existence is to be short dollars and long the coin. So it's like, it's not a, it's not a disrespectful B minus, but it's a B minus nonetheless. But it forced S&P to actually look at this thing like a company on the, from on the debt side, because they're a big debt issuer. What are your thoughts? Yeah, no, I mean, I have nothing else to add. I want to throw some charts on because can I, can I Can I have a critique?

Could you stop with the price and the market cap charts? I mean, throw this chart up. Yes, Sean, to make this, this is garbage. Come on. This is beneath you. Wait, what did I do? This is a thing that you do. You ask for the price and the market cap, and it's the same chart.

Here's what you do. I just wanted the, I wanted the market cap number. I wanted to point out it's an $80 billion market cap with B minus rated debt. That's what I wasn't comparing the price with the market cap. I wanted the data. I wanted the data because that's, I think that's highly relevant. I wanted to ask you, how many junk rated publicly traded companies do you think have a market cap above $10 billion? Well, almost none.

I wish you asked me that's what I was looking for. Because we could have found it. All right, let me so, let me, this is how you chart. This is how Matt, this is, you went to Sean, no offense. Hold on. I went to Matt. is the chat is not happy with you. So just saying,

mommy and daddy are fighting. Tell Michael the chill. I will not chill. Josh getting called out. We have standards here. We are professional chartists. So I brought the good stuff. You're getting cooked.

I brought the good stuff. Oh yeah? Oh yeah? This is how you cook. Chart on, please. All right. What I show. You made the same chart.

No, I did an asshole. I'm showing the value of their Bitcoin. versus their market cap. This is not the same as what you did. And then, hold on, chart off. Yeah, what's so funny, moron? What's so funny? Mommy and daddy are fighting.

I feel like this is my fault. All right, chart back on. Okay, look at this chart. So the Bitcoin versus the market cap. And then what Chart kid did on the right hand side was he divided it. So early on, when strategy was the only game in town, formerly known as micro strategy at the time, It was the only way for people to get crypto exposure in their broker account outside of GBTC.

In like a stock wrapper. This was the vehicle of choice and it traded at a mega premium. And even in the early days of this most recent bull market, look at that run. Holy cow. It was 3.5 times a premium to its underlying. And guess what? Woosh. Other way.

This thing is getting cooked. One more chart. One more chart. Next one. Okay, here we go. So this is that chart. Zoomed in a little bit. Actually, I'm sorry.

This is a different chart. bad. This is strategy divided by Bitcoin. And investors are just not having it anymore. This is, listen, I don't need MSTR to get my leveraged exposure to crypto. If I want leverage exposure, I could literally just get it. I don't need this anymore. And I don't know how this premium comes back. This is Jim Chanos's trade from the short side. He's long, he's long Bitcoin. I don't know if he's using the ETF or not. I actually, I think I'm seeing him for dinner in a couple of days. I'll ask him.

It is working. Yeah, it's working. He's killing it with this trade. And look, this is one of those things where when he rolled it out. I'm like, yeah, of course, that's going to work. And then two minutes later, it's like, no, wait a minute. Of course, that's not going to work. Because everything's, because everything's fucking stupid now.

But it did work. And I'm really happy for him. I think your explanation, like it was the only way for people with traditional brokerage accounts to be long bitcoin and then all of a sudden it wasn't i think it's just leaving one thing out i think you're right what i think you're missing one component there was a moment shortly after the election but before the inauguration of donald trump where all of these crypto things were being one by one the trump family all of them don junior money a coin like they were all like saying don't worry gensler's done that era's over everything's

gonna get fixed david sacks in the white house blah blah blah there was like i don't i want to say that was like a four to six week period of time michael sailor was on tv five days a week in that period of time that's when he like the sailor phenomenon we we had him at future proof in Miami, which was March. So, like, there was this, there was this season, the season of Sailor where he was like, you couldn't turn your head left or right without seeing somebody talking about strategy or him explaining it to somebody. And that, I think, played a really big role in getting the share price to three and a half times the value of their Bitcoin. And I think I would just point out, it's really hard to keep that media momentum up.

I seem to be the only person that's capable of doing it for more than a year or two. So it is not easy to make those appearances and tell the story. And so I think that's a miss. I haven't seen them around lately. There comes a point where you can't, there's no more podcasts left to do. Well, you're right. If you don't have a new story, they don't book you on the shows. I am excited to listen to the call because everything that he's been saying, it's not working anymore.

And I don't know how you get that mojo back. I mean, I would offer myself up as a consultant if he wants. All right. Anyway, interesting, though, for people that are interested in reading about micro strategy as an issuer, visit S&P, I think we've come to make the case. I have two small cap stocks breaking out. One of them is your idea, but it was my idea a generation ago. Let's put this up.

IMAX. I told you I found my pitch from two. 2004 when I was selling this shit over the phone. Anyway, I was right 21 years ago. And you were right. And you were right one years ago. IMAX is the most important entertainment company in Hollywood other than Netflix and Disney. I would say it's number three.

Every major release coming out in the next year, but probably the next five years, is desperately locking up as many. iMac's theaters as they can they're building new 70 millimeter theaters um because that extra large format is not available enough the converted theaters at amc and cinemark like the the distributors the studios the chris nolan um odyssey okay they're actually this is true iMac said there is so much demand for tickets that the exhibitors the theater the theater companies themselves are converting as many of their theaters to iMX as they can so they can get in on the selling tickets early thing like as soon as possible they put the

tickets up for iMacs format a year in advance no one in the film industry has ever thought to do this it's the first time they sold it out in like an hour yeah it's crazy you cannot see the odyssey and it's the greatest cast ever assembled for a movie like this we should point out but it doesn't matter it's proof of concept we're now treating movies like concerts we're buying tickets six months a year in advance and there's not enough capacity for iMacs so they're going to make a lot of money selling the cameras the equipment because chris nolan filmed this movie in iMacs which is the thing that we should point out it's not a regular movie converted it's filmed in iMacs they call it fFi on the call that's like a thing now yeah filmed for iMacs

yes so they're going to sell a ton of equipment to other studios who want to have one of these a year, which they all should. This is how you get a billion-dollar movie, by the way. The conversion fees, existing theaters that want to become IMAX's, I read that the backlog is 500 theaters or something and growing. They announced a huge deal at the Cinemark yesterday. Yes. So there's tons of money to be made.

This is a small cap stock. It's some weird thing where it's like Canadian, but it's based in New York, blah, blah, blah. I think this is just the crowned. jewel of the film industry, and it's become the most indispensable part of opening a movie. They're going to have things like Netflix commissioned Greta Gerwig, who made Barbie, to do Narnia, and it's exclusively coming out in IMAX. You can't see it in a regular theater. Like, there's stuff coming out in IMAX that I think is paving the way for this to be a

much bigger story, and I think the stock continues to work. So, bravo to you. I'm not in it. I'm waiting for a sell-off to buy it. It'll probably go to 50 before I have a chance. Did we have that chart up? One more time. I had a technical chart.

I don't know where this thing came. There we go. Like, this is going to go, right? 36. It didn't leave you. Like, what are you waiting for? All right. Next.

Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Hold on. I have two things to add. I can't let you go without this. I love the case. On the call, they said the North American box office was down 11% in the third quarter. And the IMAX box office globally was up 50%. throw up this chart.

This is the share of the box office, domestic, China, global, international, ex-China. And it's up until the right, obviously. Look at the next chart. Top 10 grossing IMAX titles. So to your point, it is a concert. When people want to see something on the big screen, they're going to IMAX. And then you mentioned, like, the slate that's coming up. Yeah, it's huge.

And everybody's in on it. So it's going to continue to work. Look, right. You have a Super Mario movie coming. You have another avatar. You have Toy Story 5, the Superman spin-off Supergirl. These are all going to open so big on IMAX screens. Dune Avengers.

Yeah, it's working. Oh, yeah, Dune 3. There's so much on the slate for IMAX. And companies cannot live without that now if they plan on exhibiting. It's not enough to just put these films in theaters. You're not going to hit your potential. You need them in IMAX theaters. And I can't believe this stock is not fully reflecting that reality yet.

David Ellison, David Ellison should buy the company. It's a billion-dollar market cap. There is an overhang with the China business. It's like a subsidiary, and it's not, I don't think it's wholly owned with IMAX, and I think it's part of what's been a problem with the stock in this era. But I feel like that's the kind of thing that could get cleaned up if they figure it out. What's the other one? What's the other one?

A two-fer. Yeah, Etsy. We buy charge that look like this, right? Let me say. we certainly do can i show you here's here's a price here's just a price chart we buy we buy charts like this no we do but but but what is etsky chotsky chotchkes what is this um it's sort of a cross between amazon and ebay with a twist it's this is people who make their own crafts and i know that sounds ridiculous but like let me cook there's a lot of home design stuff

It's not just people making key chains and bracelets. There are people who like fashion these incredible fixtures, metal, like they, it's people, it's giving, it's basically like a Shopify. I shouldn't have said Amazon. It's a Shopify mixed with an eBay. It's a combination of vintage things with crafts that people actually make. And the people who use it absolutely love it. I've never bought anything from Etsy.

I've never sold anything on Etsy. I don't have that first-hand experience, but I'm going to tell you three things. Number one, when prices in the economy are high, Etsy is a pretty obvious go-to place to buy people gifts because you're not buying from corporations. You're buying from the people who make these things. Number two, they just announced AI seller tools. They're in the AI business too. The goal is to keep people on the site and not bounce off because they can't find the thing

they're looking for and they're going to utilize AI to make that process smoother and more efficient, basically sell more things. Number three, Lone Pine just took a huge stake in the company and that guy almost always, Steve Vandelle, that guy almost always wins. And this is the area that he wins in. This is what his fund has become synonymous with. These consumer-facing platforms that have the ability to get much larger, he tells. tends to invest at these kind of turning points. I know we don't have a long-term chart of Etsy. This stock went into an 80% drawdown and is now on the verge.

It's now making a, hold on, making a 52-week high, but it's really erasing, like, years of underperformance. And it sort of looks like it's finally figured out its business model, and it's having a moment. So I'm not in this stock. It's a small cap. So be careful. I think the market cap is like $7 billion. It's tiny.

Its name is much bigger than its market cap. Most people who are on the internet are aware of Etsy. Very fewer investors are aware of Etsy, the stock. I love that disconnect. I feel like I max benefits from that disconnect. Yeah, I like the story. I think this is a good pitch. It was out of my radar.

So look, don't say I never gave you nothing. I brought two gems, two small cap gems to the table tonight. Yeah. Okay, mystery chart time. John, if you would please, all right, would you catch this fall? falling knife. Well, is there a ratio chart or is a penny stock? It's a ratio chart. But would you catch this falling knife? No. Okay. Next chart. Wait. Back. Back. If I were in the knife catching business, I would catch this falling knife because it looks like it just got,

it became, it went from a downtrend to a caricature. So, so stretched too far to the downside. Yes. I would agree. Um, next chart. Okay. Would you, take profit to it? Will you sell this chart? Maybe. I don't have enough information to say yes. I'm just just purely based on the charts. No, because I never sell anything. Good for you. That's why you're a good investor. Okay, these are the same charts. One is, I just flipped the numerator denominator denominator. What are you playing games with me now? I am. I'm playing games with your heart. I'm playing mine games with me? Wait, it's the same chart, but you showed it to me upside and downside yeah john go back and i said two different things about what i would do that's not good

no no no you were pretty consistent no i honestly that was better than i thought because you you were pretty consistent um all right so these are i can't i can't give clues without giving it away just guess honestly i can't give a clue without giving it away what do you can't give a clue without giving it away we spoke about we spoke about this dynamic at the top top of the show Ooh. We did? We did. Okay. So one is Amazon and the other is... Think bigger. Think broader. Zoom out. Okay. Oh, all right. So one is tech and the other is the S&P?

Close enough. It's the S&P divided by the equal weight. I mean, this thing really crashed or reverse crashed, whatever. Wait, so which is going up, though? The S&P is going up. Correct. So cap weighting destroyed equal weight. over the past couple of sessions like destroyed do you know uh chart off do you know there are four of these bad boys four mag seven stocks in the dow there's four all right so i forgot wait amazon two of them got added last year i didn't even know i didn't even know i didn't realize google apple invidia is not yes it is invidia's in the dow yeah i think so i think they added it last year i know no yeah i think it replaced intel did it uh let me ask jemina i

You son of a gun, big if true. I think they did. So meta's not in? Yeah. They replaced Intel on November 1st, 2024. Boy, was that a buying opportunity in Intel, by the way. You didn't realize that, did you? I had no idea.

Do you know that Amazon's in the Dow? Yeah. I said Amazon, Apple, and Google. So what's not? And Microsoft. Meta's not? Meta is not. Isn't that interesting?

And Tesla probably never will be. Meta is not in the Dow. It's the only one. other than... It's Elon and Zuckerberg are not in the Dow. That's disrespectful. I wonder why...

Isn't that interesting? Wait, I have one more thing to say. Meta and Tesla are not in the Dow, and they're the only ones with their original founder as CEO other than Nvidia. So Microsoft's in the Dow

with the third CEO, right? Alphabets in the Dow with the second... Amazon's in the Dow with the second CEO. Alphabet, I think, is on its third. That was so weird. Eric Schmidt.

So of the top five companies, by wait, it's Goldman, Microsoft, so that's the only one, Caterpillar Home Depot, and United Health. Yeah, that it's right. Yeah, sure. Because it's price, but Apple's important in there. Invidia is getting to become important. Wow. Wow, wow, wow.

I had no idea that of Nvidia was in there. All right. This is a great place to put a pin in it and say thank you to everybody who joined this for the live. Hey, guys, two things. Number one, thank you so much for the huge outpouring of affection and feedback for the episode we did with Jim Kramer. If you haven't seen that yet, it's right here on the channel or listen to it on our podcast feed. We put it up as a special last night.

Thank you so much. We really love all of your comments and all the nice things that everyone said. And hope we can see you at the next live teacaf that we do. tomorrow is animal spirits first thing in the morning we'll do ask the compound later in the day and then at the end of the week we have an all new compound and friends new guest and it's it's going to be a good one new guest uh same old michael and josh so thank you guys so much for watching and listening we love you we'll talk to you soon You know,