¶ Intro
Welcome to the Joseph Carlson show on today's episode, Microsoft buys the video game maker Bethesda. They make games like Fallout Elder of the Scrolls and doom. This to me is a pretty big push for Microsoft to go into gaming. We know that they have the Xbox. They're already pretty big into gaming but they're just going further and further into the gaming scene. I think that this is a good move for Microsoft. So I'm going to be talking about
this deal. We also have news to epic games has joined Spotify as well as other companies, like match that make Kinder. They've all Joined together and formed a coalition, the Coalition for app fairness. So they're seeking legal and Regulatory ways of addressing apples cax that they have for the App Store. That's what they call it. Right, the 30% Apple digital text. So this is a bigger push to put pressure on Apple to change their policies.
I'm going to be sharing my thoughts on this and then we have Nicola in the news. Of course, Trevor Milton. He resigned last Sunday. He definitely voluntarily resigned. He definitely I wasn't fired from the company. In order to try to salvage this deal with GM and Nicola, that's not what happened. He voluntarily resigned. He also deleted his Instagram and Twitter. They're being investigated by the SEC and the doj. So a lot of news regarding Nicola. I want to check on that as well.
And then we have a portfolio update of my passive income portfolio, On Em, on finance. It's been a pretty rough week. I go to the one week view, we're down about five thousand dollars in the past five days. So that's a pretty, pretty bad week in terms of the Kitt, I'm going to share some thoughts on
this and specific. I'm going to share why this doesn't concern me at all, why I have zero concerns when things like this happen in the market, I'll be sharing a few tips of what I think will make it so that you can invest, completely stress-free. You can put money in the market and you have zero stress doing so so I'll be sharing tips on how to do that. Now, before we get into any of this, I have to mention, I do have a patreon to help support the channel. So I don't have to do ads every
five minutes of the video. The patreon unlocks a lot of benefits like a Discord Investment Group. Episodes of The jalsa, Carlson show a dividend tracking website, as well as a bunch of other things. So you can try that out for free. There's a link in the description if you want to join
¶ Microsoft's push into gaming
it. Okay. The first thing I want to jump into I think is pretty big news. This week. It was announced at Microsoft bought Bethesda. They really bought a company called zenimax, which sounds like some type of pill. It sounds like a Healthcare company zenimax, but really zenimax. Media is the owner of Bethesda. So Microsoft bought the entire company. The the creator of Fallout Elder of the Scrolls and doom. A lot of these really big beloved games by Gamers and now
Microsoft owns them. This is, I think, part of Microsoft's, greater push into gaming, they see gaming as a growing field, Microsoft wants to own a big part of that. And so they've been trying to do a lot of things. Their last attempt was was coming out with mixer, which was going to compete with twitch that didn't work out. So they made an attempt. There. It didn't work out there doing the next thing.
Now, they're buying different game, making companies and I think that this is a Smart move Microsoft will soon be releasing the Xbox series X for 500 bucks. It's going to be the same price as the Sony PlayStation. And the big difference is is that Microsoft is actually releasing I think in terms of the specs, it's a more powerful machine than the Sony PlayStation. So, it's more powerful.
But the downside is, is the exclusive games for the Xbox are pretty weak compared to the exclusive games for the PlayStation. So the PlayStation has a big Advantage. So Microsoft buying De well, that changes things a little bit. Now. They own a really big game studio. So this is definitely going to be something that helps out Xbox sales. So I think the big push for buying this was specifically to have great exclusive games. I think that was the reason they did it. Here is Phil Spencer.
He's the head of Xbox at Microsoft and he's asked a few questions about this acquisition. One of them is just, how does this play into your overall strategy? Yeah. I mean, Gamers love great games. You just mentioned. We've got the Xbox consoles going on, pre-order tomorrow for Next Generation. Just last week. We added Game, Pass Cloud streaming.
So people can play this game pass Library, across all of their phones, Android phones out there and then obviously game paths, which is the largest game content. Subscription out. There are 15 million subscribers and growing. So getting to work with zenimax to bring their amazing collection of games to game passes. Just an incredible opportunity for us. See what he does. He doesn't Focus specifically on the Xbox. Microsoft strategy is no. Longer to be completely
device-specific. They don't want to be just a gaming company for the Xbox or for just phones. They want to basically build out a cloud gaming platform and then have it so that you can play that on whatever type of device you want. The Xbox is offered as kind of a loss leader. They're basically building these five hundred dollar gaming machines that I think cost probably more than 500 dollars to actually manufacture and distribute and they're getting people into their ecosystem.
So again, they can sell their services. There's a Theme among every great company. Right now. You might notice this. It's something I've tried to point out over and over again. The reason that I think Disney's multiple is going to expand subscription Services. The reason that Netflix has done so, well subscription Services. The reason to Amazon has done so well because of their Amazon Prime subscription service Microsoft is a service based company.
They definitely want to do the same thing with gaming. This is their next push into doing that if they don't have the exclusive titles, they I can't draw people into their platform, like Sony has been able to now, the next question is more of a financial one. He asks, what are they going to do with zenimax? What is Microsoft going to do with this company? After purchasing them? Are they going to change any of how its operating, or they going
to just let them do their thing? Our plan is to leave it alone. I mean, zenimax has an amazing track record of building great games. Our goal is to make zenimax. The best zenimax. They can be working individually with their Studios on the great platform technology that we have getting their There's feedback into the things that we need to go build. That's just a critical flywheel for us. Innovating is the feedback of the world's best creators on our platforms.
Now, I'll tell you that this is the answer that, every company gives when they acquire a smaller company. They always say that they're never going to shake things up. They're never going to go and and make different cuts to the company. But usually they do end up doing that. That's not something they're going to announce. They're not going to say.
Yeah, we do plan on firing a bunch of people and restructuring different Departments of the company, but eventually They usually end up doing that. So I hope that Microsoft does keep Bethesda kind of the way it is. I think most the times when a bigger company, acquires a smaller one.
They make the mistake of trying to run the smaller one and the same way that the bigger one runs and usually it's better just to leave the smaller company to run how it has been and what's made it successful in the first place. The next question is asked, is about Apple and their policy with cloud gaming. Apple has confirmed over and over again, that every single app that gets pushed to the App Store needs. Go through their guidelines.
They need to check it for security issues for quality and make sure it's going through their guidelines. And when you have cloud gaming, you can actually push updates through the app without it, going through apples guidelines. So Apple saying that doesn't really work with us. We can't have cloud gaming. And the way that you're trying to do it tell me about the gaming ecosystems.
Overall, Microsoft has spoken out against the way that Apple controls its App Store on those lines, but how is that really different from the purse? Percentage that console makers take on games on their platforms. When you get large-scale General platform General compute platforms, like mobile phones. People should have access to the great content and services that are out there and we remain committed to that. There are over three billion people who play video games today.
Many of them play on phones, and we're committed to Bringing game passed to all mobile phones out there, including Apple phones will continue the conversations, and I'm sure we'll be able to get to some resolution. So there, he gives kind of a generic answer. He really doesn't address.
What he was asked, he says well phones are generic use their more generic use than an Xbox, but that doesn't really address why Microsoft is okay charging people 30% to be on their device and they're saying the Apple shouldn't be able to do the same thing that Apple shouldn't be able to charge 30% to be on their device. Our biggest issue is in a
financial issue. Our biggest issue is that cloud game streaming apps are actually not allowed in the way that game passes built for other platforms. So for us, this is about Gamers having great access to The content from the Creator's, they love on the devices. They own play the games that you want with the community that you want to play on the devices that you have. That's our goal. So he says, they're not worried
about the thirty percent fee. In fact, Microsoft and epic games have completely different concerns about this. Epic games is entirely focused on that 30 percent fee. They have some other asks as well. They want to be able to have their own, you know their own app store on Apple devices, but they're mostly worried about paying 30%. Apple, they say that. That's anti-competitive. Microsoft doesn't really care
about that thirty percent fee. I'm sure they do a little, but their biggest focus is getting cloud gaming. And the way that they imagine it on the iPhone, which apples currently sing. That doesn't really work with how we vet our apps. Now, I have Microsoft as one of my for tech companies Microsoft is a pretty good dividend tech company. You're looking for a company that has substantial growth. It's in the text fair and it's a
dividend pair. Microsoft is a very good one that fits within that mold over the last 10 years. Microsoft has Had a 14.6% compound annual growth rate with their dividend. So that is a pretty rapid dividend growth over a 10-year period and they've done that while keeping their payout ratio study the entire time. So they're rapidly growing their dividend. They're keeping their payout ratio study and the company has
a lot of growth as well. So this company just checks a lot of boxes that I like and the continual move into gaming, I think is very good. I think gaming is just getting started. A lot of people think, well, it's already so big already, so many people game. I think it will just get Bigger and bigger gaming is such a big industry. It's hard to pinpoint which companies are really going to take advantage of it the most but I think Microsoft is a pretty good bet.
They have a lot of advantages. Already the 7.5 billion dollars in my opinion is money very well spent. I think that they'll get a very good return on that. I'm glad that Microsoft did deals like this rather than doing The Tick-Tock deal because I think what that deal, they may have overpaid for something that may have not fit well with the company, but this deal I'm very happy about. It makes me more bullish on Microsoft.
¶ Nikola is a mess
Okay. Next. I want to talk. About Nikola specifically, Trevor, Milton. We know that last Sunday, evening. He voluntarily resigned. He said you just didn't want to bring the company down with them. So, he went to the board and said, You know, guys, I just want to step down. I don't think I want to play a role in this company anymore. I just want to do what's best and step down for the company. You definitely wasn't fired. They definitely didn't force him
out of the company to salvage. This deal with GM and Nicola. I'm sure that's not what happened. He voluntarily resigned from the company. Now, He didn't just resign but he resigned with a golden parachute. So he jumped out of that crashing plane with a golden parachute worth billions of dollars. Now, he's presumed lie in his 32 million dollar Ranch hiding away from the SEC and doj that are both investigating Nicola and Trevor Milton for continually
making fraudulent claims. So that might be what he's doing right now, but he's also found time to delete both his Instagram account and his Twitter account. Which, at this point. I think it was probably a good idea from to delete his Twitter account. Basically his Twitter account right now. Acts as an Evidence, log of all the different fraudulent claims that he's made up until this point. So getting rid of that, that's probably a good thing.
But I think there's a good chance that there's backups of his Twitter feed made. I'm guessing that people have access to that. So I don't think this actually erases it from the internet. Now as you can imagine with the leader of the company. Now stepping down deleting all of his social media presence and basically trying to erase himself from the face of the Earth with that happening as
well as the company being. Exposed for repeatedly, making fraudulent claims about their technology and misleading statements and producing deceptive videos. The stock price has not reacted well, to this since its peak. It's currently down about 75%. That's a pretty significant drop. Now, I made a joke about this. I did a tweet where I tweeted out Nicholas stock in motion and I highlighted from the top of this hill to the bottom of this
hill. So I was referencing the Nicola one video where they rolled the truck down a hill. I just want to highlight at one of the responses, though. It was so good. This is from Aris. He said, fix the camera angle for you and he tilted the image to make it look like it was horizontal and I just really appreciate that response. Good on you Marius, but in all seriousness, this has been a complete disaster for everybody involved in this stock. So far.
The investors that were duped into buying the stock based off of deceptive videos and false pretenses. Now, they're losing money. And of course, they're upset about this. They have every right to be upset about this. So Nicola, that's not only under investigation. Shin-bi, the SEC and the doj also has three lawsuits that are class action lawsuits against investors. That feel like they were duped investing into this company. So that's going on with it as
well. Now, with all of this happening. It's also halted talks with other deals at Nicola had going on one with BP. BP was in talks with helping Nicola form. These hydrogen refueling stations and that deals getting close to being scrapped at this point. So this has been an unmitigated disaster and even with all of this news. Is still one company holding Nicola together. At this point. There's one last thread that's holding Nicola together. And it's GM.
GM has been very stubborn and admitting that they got into this deal without doing the proper research from Bloomberg at notes, that GM has lots of lawyers, accountants managers analysts and engineers. And basically, they have all these smart people working at this company. Why wouldn't they be able to see who they're going into business? With why wouldn't they be able to see? That? Nicola was highly deceptive? It would cause all this problems for the company.
Well, on asked about this, Mary Barra, the CEO of GM said that they did appropriate diligence. That's what they said, appropriate diligence. What does that mean? Appropriate diligence when she was pushed on, exactly what that means. She said, quote thorough review of business legal and Technical matters. That's what she said. A thorough review of the legal Technical and business matters. Okay. So, my question for Mary, Barra would be. Did you know that that Nicola Video was bogus.
Did you know that before the Hindenburg report? I'm assuming that GM didn't have a clue. I know they have lots of smart engineers and analysts and researchers, but that's what deception does it deceives people that are even smart people that video was highly deceptive. I know lots of Engineers that could look at that and unless they were specifically looking at it through a very critical lens. They probably wouldn't have known that that truck wasn't
driving. They filmed in a very specific way to create an illusion. So I think that GM got into this deal without realizing that they had this many issues you're going to be dealing with that nickel is going to be exposed for all this deception. And I think at this point, GM is just trying to not give up this deal. They're trying to salvage it in any way possible because of how one-sided the deal was with Nicola, Nicola gave up a bunch of different things. GM practically gave up.
Nothing. All that. GM gave up was a little bit of their reputation. They just went into business with Nicolas. So that's what GM gave up financially. They have everything. The game from it. So I think that firing Trevor Milton, which is what happened. He was fired from this company. I think the reason that GM and Nicola did that was to try to salvage this deal. They still want to make this deal work.
They still want to make it so they can go into business together and maybe getting rid of Trevor Milton will solve some of their problems, maybe some of the criticisms of Nicola and all the deceptive past. It will all follow Trevor Milton to his Ranch. I doubt that's what's going to happen. But I think that's what they're trying to accomplish here now. I think I will mention as a word
of caution. I know, there's a lot of people that are short this stock, and there's some people that might be saying, well, what Trevor Milton gun, I might jump into the stock now, because maybe it has a better future. Maybe they'll just receive like a fine or something. From the SEC. They can pay the fine and then they'll move on with this partnership with GM that could happen. Maybe that can happen. And the stock price will Trend back upwards, but a word of
caution. I think that, if GM does end up dumping Nicola, I think this stock plummets, It's like you have not seen before. I think the last thread holding Nicola together is GM. If they lose GM, it's game over for Nicola. So, that's my word of caution. If you're investing in the stock, be careful, if they bail on this deal with GM, because if that happens, I think it will be complete. Destruction for Nicola. Now one last thing. I'll mention I did a poll on my
YouTube page. You'll see these in the home screen of your YouTube. If you're subscribed to the channel That red button underneath this video, but the question was, Will Trevor Milton face. Mental charges and I had over 5,000 votes, 68 percent of them said, yes, 32% set know. So this is a lot of people that believe that he's going to face criminal charges. Now, if I had to put myself in one of these buckets, after looking at the evidence of how misleading I believe Nicola was
in so many different instances. I think there's a very good chance that either the doj or the SEC will bring charges against him. They did the same things with Elizabeth Holmes. They charged her, and I don't see too much of a difference here. I Think that a lot of investors were misled by false statements about their technology so I could see them. Absolutely. Bringing criminal charges to Trevor Milton or Nicola. Is it a guarantee?
No, it's no guarantee that they will, but I think there's definitely a case for it. Okay, the last bit of news, I
¶ The Coalition of App Fairness
wanted to go over, was some breaking news that Fortnight maker epic games as well as Spotify. And then the owner of Kinder which is match group. These companies have got together and they formed a coalition called the Shin for app fairness, the Coalition for app fairness a non-profit registered in Washington made.
Its public debut. Thursday, saying most app stores collect excessive commissions from software developers on users, digital purchases and stifle competition by giving unfair advantages to their own products and services. Obviously, the big company, they're targeting care is Apple. Now, this coalition to me takes a much more serious tone than what epic games is done. Epic games has done a lot of shenanigans. Ends. This is the way that you described it.
They have done backdoor access to their own payment system in the App Store. They've launched. Social media campaigns that are silly. They've done what Apple describes is belligerent tweeting. So, this type of antics the epic games is done, I think, is kind of painted the whole movement and a bad light, but coming out with this Coalition, I think,
does it in a more serious tone? The Coalition released a statement that says, quote, the gatekeeper platforms that operate these app stores must not abuse, the control they enjoy and Must adhere to oversight to ensure their behavior promotes a competitive market and provides consumers with Equitable choice. So a statements like that. You can see they're obviously trying to take a more professional tone. This isn't the same type of statement that you've seen epic games and Spotify do
independently. Now, apple is a specifically about this. They said that they declined to comment on the coalition's creation and separately. The company on Thursday said it would be updating its web pages to better illustrate the benefits of the App Store.
So this is Apple's defense. They're basically saying we're going to just come out with a bunch of research, showing how beneficial our app store is. And that's the way that we're going to kind of address these claims because the Coalition and all these people are trying to paint one side of it and we're going to try to illustrate our side of it. Now. I've had some time over the past month or so just to kind of look at this issue.
The whole Apple competing with all these different categories Apple coming out with their apple one bundle that basically disadvantages all these different companies because of their pricing power with it. It does make me question, how much of an advantage? These companies have over other companies. It's pretty incredible.
They can come and compete and basically, every category you can dream of they compete in content and digital news, they compete in movie and TV shows, so they're in movie productions. Like, I've mentioned there a health company. Now, Apple has the Apple watch, which is the most widely distributed Healthcare device, and then they're coming out with apple Fitness Plus. So now they're in Fitness and then they have apple music. So they're in the music's.
Fear as well. And then they have apple podcast. So they're doing that as well. They can basically compete in everything and apples, not alone in this. This is all the big thing stocks Amazon announced recently in the past week that they're coming out with the echelon Prime bike for five hundred dollars. It's a Peloton knock off now, just the announcement of this, the Amazon was entering into what Peloton was doing. Dropped Peloton stock 5% that day.
Just with Amazon saying we're coming out with a knock off of your bike. That's the power. Amazon has. Now this specific example turned out to be completely false Echelon basically said that they had a deal with Amazon that didn't exist.
Amazon said it didn't build the prime bike and it tells Echelon to stop selling it. So it's kind of a funny situation but it shows the power of this, the stock went down 5% when Amazon announced that it was coming out with a bike and then it jumped back up like nine percent the next day after it was revealed that Echelon really had no agreement with Amazon, but the examples clear this shows what these companies can do. Do they can basically compete in
any category they want and any other company that's trying to make progress. They look at them as basically beta testers. Like, does this type of thing work out? If it does, we're either going to buy it or we're going to build out the same thing and use our massive resources, and our ecosystem to gain a massive advantage. In 2019. Steve Wozniak, who was one of the original?
Founders of Apple was asked specifically about this issue, about big companies, like apple and Amazon and Facebook being able to use their already enormous. Advantage to move into other categories. So easily a company that has a strong presence in one market, using that presence to grow. Another Market is sort of
unfair. The example that I used to use long ago was well, if you owned, if you owned all the gas stations and then you said we're converting the nozzles of all of our guests stations and they will only work with a new car that we're coming out with that. Would just be unfair. That would be, you know, using using your power in one market to subsume another and we see this all over the The place.
I mean just apps that are come standard with products like phones, you know, do that to an extent. So I think that's a fair example, if somebody owned all the gas stations and then they created a proprietary unique nozzle. The only worked with a car that they're also releasing. That would be pretty unfair.
I think Regulators would go after that very quickly, but you have apple coming out with apple music that uniquely works with apple Fitness Plus. So those are kind of coupled together and then they bundle all their services together. They make them so that they're more heavily integrated with their products and other third-party software and it's very difficult for other companies to compete with.
It's also a more nuanced and complicated to the point where Congress has a difficult time, even understanding what's going on and how many advantages that Apple has. So at this point, it's too early to tell if Apple's going to receive any type of government intervention or regulation, but I think they eventually will, I think apples so big and so powerful that the government's going to be forced to step in at some point. Another, it's only a matter of
time. But even so that doesn't concern me. I think Apple will find ways to make a lot of money. Even if the government does come in and do some type of Regulation. The stock has been trading down. It's about 18 percent down from its high. I bought Apple at an average price of $90 per share. So that's my average price on it. I'm still up like 21 percent at one point. I was up 48 percent. So that was when it hit the high right now, I'm up 21%.
I still am very bullish on this stock, long term. I think to Apples going to do really Good long term if there is any government intervention, will see how that affects this talk. But right now apple is holding their ground, okay? Time for a portfolio update before I jump into questions. This is my passive income
¶ How to invest stress free
portfolio. It's on a brokerage called M1 finance that you can sign up for this link in the description. There's also a link to be able to view all my Holdings and the current allocation of the portfolio. So I have that updated. There's a link in the description if you want to look at that. I want to go over the last week or so because my gains have gone down. Quite a bit as I'm sure most people have as the market has gone down a lot. September has not been a good month for the market.
Now, at one point. We were about 16 thousand dollars in the green. Right now. We're just hovering around eight thousand dollars in the green, which means over the past week. It's dropped four thousand three hundred dollars and then over the past month. It's dropped $6800. So a lot of losses over the past month. I want to just explain real briefly, why I'm not concerned about this at all. Okay, so I have no stress about this, knowing xiety.
It doesn't concern me. The market could continue to go down and down and down and it wouldn't be something I'm concerned about. And there's a couple reasons, why, the first reason of why I'm not concerned at all. When we have Market sell-offs is because I have a savings. That is the most basic reason why I have a savings if the market sells off. So what it doesn't change my life at all? Just means I have to wait it out
a little bit longer. So if the portfolio enters into the red or if some of these companies sell off, it doesn't really matter. I have a savings if I lose my job or something like that happens. It doesn't really matter because I have a savings. So, the first thing I recommend if you're having stress investing, if you're stressing out about losing money in the market, build up a savings, you should be building up your
Investments and your savings. There's people like Dave Ramsey that recommend like three months of savings and I think that's a pretty good recommendation. So that's the thing. Number one, build up a savings. The second reason why I can invest stress-free. Of what the market is doing is
because I'm not using leverage. Leverage is when you use margin to invest in. So when you're you're taking a loan, you're basically taking someone else's money and you're throwing that into the stock market trying to make money with their money. That's one form of Leverage. Another is using call options and puts different tools like that. The introduce a lot more risk and they introduced a lot bigger potential to lose money. There's a recent survey that 43 percent of retail investors are
trading with leverage 43%. I think this is a mistake for almost everybody that's using leverage. There's some different examples of people that might have specific strategies that are okay, for the huge majority. I think it's a mistake. The bullishness has pushed some retail investors into the world of Leverage forty-three percent of retail. Investors said that they are using options margin or both these strategies amplify gains, but they also magnify losses, which expose an investor to
significant downside risk. Significant downside risk here. Investors that have been using leverage. This one lost. 96 percent of his account which was six thousand five hundred dollars. He said that he was doing really good until September started because the market started to Trend downwards. He was using leverage. So he lost basically his entire account. Here's an account of someone that did call options on Tesla's
battery day. He lost ninety seven thousand dollars in one day because of that trade, here's another user that bet again, call options on Tesla's battery day. He lost. What is it? Five six thousand dollars? Yeah, 6,000. 88% of his account in one day and of course, there's virtually endless examples of this. Here's another user that lost forty thousand dollars in one day 71% of his account. Again using leverage, the biggest thing that you have on your side when you're investing is time.
If companies go down in price like we're seeing over the past two weeks. If you're just invested with your own money, you can wait it out. You have time on your side. That's a huge benefit when you use leverage and you use call options and puts that enters a time constraint. That's a whole new level of risk that you're entering involuntarily. So I don't want that type of risk, in my portfolio. I don't want that type of stress.
So, I just avoid it altogether. The last piece of advice, of course, is to know what you own the Peter Lynch advice. If you buy a bunch of random companies that you really have no clue of what they're doing. It's going to be harder for you, to hang on to them during a downturn. If you've done a lot of research and you're very familiar and comfortable with the companies that you own, it'll be far easier to hang on to him during a downturn.
So I look at the companies I have and I know them pretty well. Well, I've done a lot of research on on all of them, especially my top Holdings. So I have no problems holding these companies into a downturn. So these three things, combined it basically protects me from having any amount of stress investing, if the market continues to Trend down, that's okay. I'll hold onto the companies. I know I'm really well. I'm not using leverage. I have no time constraints.
I can wait this out for a very long time. So, in the meantime, I'm going to continue to buy companies. I think are good deal. Okay, let's get to some emails
¶ Am I concerned about Disney?
to email. Address is Joseph at Joseph Carlson show.com That's a Joseph at Joseph Carlson show.com., You can email me any question or anything on your mind and I'll put it on the episode. This one is from Joe. He says, Joseph you love your Disney and especially their streaming service growth. I have Disney Plus for free for one year. Thanks to my, Verizon Unlimited Plan perks. With this expiring late fall. I'll be canceling. Disney plus, is this a concern
for Disney? How many subscribers will this affect? Okay, Joe. I don't think that this is something to be very concerned about. If you look at every single successful streaming service, whether it's Netflix Disney Plus or even Apple TV, plus all of them. They give away their streaming service for free or at very subsidized cost to get new customers introduced to it. It's hard to get customer engagement into your platform. So a lot of people give trial periods.
Apple TV plus is doing that. If you buy an Apple device, they're giving you a year. Free of Apple TV plus. Now, why would Apple do that to make it a habitual thing to make it part of your life, so, That year is up. You're already so used to getting the Apple TV + that you just continue to pay for it. So they all do this and it's one of the advantages of having such a scalable business. They can offer you Disney Plus for a year. And it really cost Disney nothing to do that.
It really doesn't add much expense to them and there's a good chance that a big portion of the people they give it away to for free. A big portion will stay you say that you're not that might be true. You might cancel it. As soon as the trials up, there might be some time. And maybe Disney will come out with some series that appeal to you in between now and when your trials up, so that could happen. But even assuming that you do cancel and Disney plus trials up.
There's going to be a huge portion of customers that don't, there's never one hundred percent of people that stay after trial. I would assume that Disney plus a similar, they're going to give away a year free to millions of people and they'll have like 60 to 70 percent of those people. Stay beyond the first year and they gained all those customers at essentially know. Cost to them. So I think it's a very effective strategy as long as the drop-off
isn't too significant. I think that it will continually be a net gain for Disney. I think the long-term viability of Disney plus is going to be determined on how many good series they can come out with how many buzzworthy series.
There's different TV series that they might be okay, but they don't have any Buzz. Nobody talks about them, and then their series that people talk a lot about Game of Thrones was a huge buzzworthy Series. So when you get those type of series, your service is going to do. Do really well as a result. The Mandalorian was a series that had a lot of Buzz. So the second season of that, I think will create more interest for Disney. They can't rely on their current Library.
A lot of people are are finding out while I've watched most of the things that Disney has created already. So they need to come out with, with new series, new things like the Mandalorian. That create a lot of Buzz. They need to come out with Marvel and Avenger spinoff series, and different things like that. If they're able to continue to keep Buzz. I think the service will keep growing like crazy and As 12
¶ Is real estate the only way to become wealthy?
months ago. I decided that I needed to start managing my money in a smarter way and have it work better for me. Ever since. I've spent a lot of time, researching learning about the stock market and even how to Value individual companies. I feel like I'm just starting to build a decent portfolio with a mix of, both active and passive elements, and was feeling confident. I'm on the right path. I'm now interested in trading and plan on holding for the
long-term. Now, my partner has said to me that the only way to build wealth is through owning property. I'm going to get nowhere. With the stock market, I'm completely wasting my time. This is totally taken the wind out of my sails and I feel like a failure. I know nothing about property how to manage it or where I would even buy. What are your thoughts on shares versus properties for Building Wealth. Am I wasting my time with
shares? Well Andy, there's a couple problems with what your friend they're saying if he or she is saying that the only way to build wealth, let me get that. Straight. The only way to build a lot of wealth is through owning property. What do they think of? The fact that basically every super wealthy person in America, owns companies. They own stocks, simply put stocks are just a form of owning companies. You have people like Jeff Bezos.
That owns a lot of Amazon stock. You have Mark Zuckerberg that owns a lot of Facebook, you know, people that own a lot of Apple people that own. A lot of Microsoft. These are the wealthy people in America. We have Elon Musk that just became wealthy by guess what? Owning a lot of Tesla stock. That's basically the list. Of all the richest people in the world. They own a lot of companies land does generate wealth over time.
So I don't think that buying a lot of land and building a property on it or just buying a rental, is a bad idea. I think that's a pretty good investment. So I'm not saying that real estate is a bad investment. I think it's a pretty phenomenal investment for Building Wealth, but saying that the only way to build wealth is through owning property is completely ridiculous. They just need to look at any of the richest people in the world.
The top 100. Or the top 500 and every single one of them will have something in common. They own a lot of stocks. They run companies, they own shares in companies. So I would not listen to your friend there on this piece of advice. I do think that owning real estate is a good thing to do. Maybe you can add that into your portfolio down the road, but don't get discouraged about buying productive companies. Historically speaking. There's never been a better investment. Okay?
Well, on that note, I'm going to end this episode there. I appreciate all of you for tuning in. I'll try to have another episode. Out this weekend, and I will talk to you guys soon.