everyone would love to have a monster dividend portfolio, one that spits out huge dividends day after day thousands and thousands of dollars a portfolio of businesses that produces so much income every single week, every month that you can live off of it, it completely subsidizes and replaces your active income dividends after all our passive income, it's money that you make without having to lift a finger, you have to do the initial upfront work, you have to buy the
investment, but once you've done that yourself, Set you earn passive income via dividend. This is not only what my entire portfolio centered around, but it's also my ultimate goal to get to the point where I'm no longer reliant on active work. We're working is an opportunity. It's a choice. It's not a requirement. That is the goal of passive income. Now, I've been building this portfolio publicly for some time. I do it under public scrutiny, you can see the changes that I
make. You can see the buys that I do and you can see the cells that I make, but in this episode So I'd like to do something a bit different than show you just the most recent trades. I'm making. I'd rather show you the lessons that I've learned in building a monster dividend portfolio over the past four years.
I want to go over what I think. Are the biggest mistakes that divot investors are making what I think are the biggest things they should be focusing on and how I believe investors today can get to their goals as fast as possible. So this is going to be a good one. We're going to be going over five years of investing and summarizing my best lessons. In this episode. Now of course we have some other news to get to as well.
Mark Zuckerberg is on the Move meta has released their initial plans to compete with Twitter. So metas doing what they do historically which is copy, other social media competitors. And they do this very effectively. I'll be giving you my opinion on this Twitter copycat and on the subject of meta. And Mark Zuckerberg, we get a see in detail. What Mark Zuckerberg, initial response was of the Vision Pro. I have a lot of thoughts.
So we'll be going into this as well, and then it's Friday, the day where we turn to tick, tock to get the best tips on finance and investing. And this tip is specifically on house hacking. This is the all-time best house hacking hack ever. So, we'll be looking at this and I'll be giving my reaction here at the end of this episode. So, as always, if you like this type of content, if you like the transparency, we have hair. Make sure to thumbs up the video. Subscribe to the channel.
Now, let's go ahead and Jump Right In first of all, we'll start off with building a monster dividend portfolio. This is something that I've been trying to work on for 5 years
now. I've been focusing my portfolio around building up, passive income that's Remain the ultimate end goal of this portfolio and while doing that over the past five years and having the opportunity to run a YouTube channel and spending an incredible amount of time studying investing, I've been able to see a lot of things that work at a lot of things that don't work when trying to do this. So what I hope to do is is basically share everything that I've learned along the way.
I want to start off with the basics when we're building a monster dividend portfolio. There's three basic ways that this works, three basic ways, that it compounds. And I've gone over this in previous video so I'll just go over it. Briefly, first of all, we buy into companies that pay a dividend. This is the first way that we grow a dividend portfolio and along with number one here, I would say that an important step is having a consistent income to begin with.
You can't leap over to passive income without having Having an active income. So you need to have a stable job. You need to have a stable income and you need to have your budgeting down. So you have money every single week to add to your portfolio. But once you have that money, you need to start putting it to work and put it to work as soon. And as frequent as you can step, one by companies that pay a dividend that pays you the initial dividend yield. The initial dividend yield is
what gets the ball rolling. You have money flowing into your account. For example, in this Folio I've earned a total of twenty one thousand five hundred and ninety-four. Dollars in dividends. These have been growing the entire time that I've been investing. This number always goes up, it never goes down. Companies are always paying me? Dividends step two is pretty basic. We reinvest the dividend once a company pays you out.
Cash flow. Use it to buy other companies that you consider to be high return opportunities. So as you have money, flowing in every single week, and every month in dividend payments, look through your portfolio. Oh and see which ones are offering the best opportunity at a given time. My way of doing this is I use something called the dip finder. It's a tool that I've built. We're basically just shows which companies are in a dip at a given time. I can select different time.
Metrics are like last month, and I can see which companies are doing really well, and which companies are struggling a bit. These are all of my core Holdings. So, when I select, the last month, I can see right here that Canadian Pacific, MasterCard and Vici are in the red. They've gone down over The past 30 days, SP Global on the other hand has gone on a pretty good run. Microsoft is doing great, apples doing great Costco's doing good,
Texas Roadhouse is doing good. So, these companies that are up a lot over the past 30 days, I'm going to avoid. I'll just let them continue to run and then I'll buy the companies that I think are really good that have gone down in value and guess what? Just a couple days ago, I bought more VG. I bought more because it's trading down and I think it offers Great Value. This is me following know, Prior to taking the dividends that I'm paid. And reinvesting it into the best
high return opportunity. Then we have number three. The company growing the dividend over time. So this changes the criteria in which we choose companies to invest in, we don't only want companies that pay a dividend. We want companies that pay a growing dividend and by growing, I mean growing beyond the rate of inflation, we can take a Verizon as a counter example here. This company does pay a dividend and the dividend is technically growing. It's been Rolling by two point
three, nine percent. But unfortunately inflation has been above two point three, nine percent. Even if we were really charitable and said that inflation was only two percent, this dividend is flat, it's really not growing at all. The dividend payment adjusted for inflation is the exact same today than it was a decade ago. So while Verizon pays a dividend it does not pay a growing
dividend. On the other hand, every single company within my portfolio, every one of them, pays not only a steady dividend, they pay a a growing dividend. I can take spe Global. For example, SP Global pays a consistent growing dividend and it has done. So for years and the dividend is growing far above the rate of inflation at 12%. MasterCard pays a very consistent dividend and it's growing at a very rapid rate 25%
per year. And like I said, this is the same for every company into it Apple, Microsoft Vici, Texas, Roadhouse, Costco, so on and so forth. All of them pay consistent and growing dividends and that step 3 and these are the three basic steps of building a monster. Dividend portfolio. You buy companies that pay a dividend, you reinvest that money from the dividends back into companies that pay dividends and it grows your
dividend income. And then importantly, you try to focus on companies that not only pay a consistent dividend, but they pay a growing dividend far above the rate of inflation. All of these three together are really powerful. The compounding effect they have is almost magical. In fact I'm reading this book that's an in-depth study on Buffett's life called the snowball. And it extensively goes through his entire history.
And one of the things that points out is that he's basically a dividend growth investor throughout his entire life, especially his early life, he was always accumulating stakes in companies that paid him excess cash flow Buffett, use that excess cash flow to buy more companies that paid growing amounts of excess cash flow. That is literally the snowball. It's Buffett's investing strategy.
The reason that Berkshire doesn't pay a And is because Buffett is playing the role of the investor reinvesting. The cash flows but otherwise he's running the company in the exact same way as a dividend growth investor. Buying good companies that pay excess cash reinvesting that cash to buy more companies and focusing on companies that can really grow that cash pile over time.
The magical effect of this is a strong compounding Snowball Effect. Now that seems simple enough, but even given those instructions, what I notice is Is a lot of dividend investors. Make some very critical errors and that's where I want to go over where dividend investors are failing where they're falling short. And when I give these critiques a lot of these criticisms are basically criticizing myself. Five years ago, I was making a lot of these same mistakes that I've since corrected.
So let me go ahead and go through them. The first thing that I'd say that dividend investors make a mistake on is the focus on starting yield. The starting yield is what the company's yield is. Right now, today, that is the main focus of a lot of dividend investors. They seek companies that will instantly give them a high starting yield, and a lot of companies have a high starting yield are not the best
companies. We can look at a lot of different examples here, we can look at Verizon again. As an example of this, this is a company that Learners investors in with a very high, starting dividend yield, a yield of 7.3 one percent. So you may look at this and think, wow, I buy $100 of this and I get 7 Dollars and 31 cents back every single year. That's pretty good. That's a much higher yield than then a company like MasterCard.
So Verizon is the better bet. I'm getting more cash flow through owning this company the temptation to buy into companies with these very Hefty starting yields, without looking at the fundamental drivers of the company leads to lots of under performance. Verizon has been a horrible company to own going down, 28 percent over the past five years in the past. Ten years, even with dividends this companies, basically given no returns. So that's seven percent juicy starting yield.
You're getting has given you absolutely no returns over the past 10 years as the rest of the market has raised up. And why is that well for one, Verizon really hasn't grown Revenue that much in the past. 10 years. The cash flows look very similar over the past 20 years. They've been diluting shareholders as well to finance their operations and they have a breathtaking amount of debt. The amount of debt is Is literally over 100 billion
dollars. So this giant Telecom company, that's luring investors in is really nothing more than a value trap. The company has caught investors and kept them there in a company that's producing zero returns over extended periods of time. And this isn't the only one to do this. We have Investments like AT&T, this is one investment that I was in. I barely eked out a return on this company by simply luckily timing the buy and sell of it. But overall 18, he was not an
attractive investment. What really lured me into AT&T was the same thing that lured. Many other investors into this
company. The starting dividend yield of nearly seven percent the high very high starting yield that was so it's just so tempting to buy into companies where you think you're going to get paid back that much every single year, what it really turns out to be where you're waiting around hoping that the company will at least maintain its value while it pays out this cash flow and the case of Verizon and AT&T AT&T the company's fundamentals are very poor.
The competitive Dynamics are very poor, the profitability, the balance sheet are very poor, and the Investments, as a result, stumble AT&T is down 41 percent over the past decade. And they recently just slash their dividend to half of what it used to be. Making it. So that even the people that were in this company, for the dividend are not getting their payday anymore.
So the number one mistake here is crucial to avoid for every investor don't focus on. The starting yield if your major focus is finding companies with high starting yields, most of those companies are Pathways their roads down to companies that are many cases value traps. In fact, I would argue that the higher the starting yield, the more likely the company is to become a value trap. It's not the case in every
company. Some companies do have that magical mix of a high starting yield while still being an attractive Growth Company. But in most cases, High starting yields mean value trap. Soooo. Ironically, one of the things that I get criticized the most on my channel is that I'm a dividend investor that focuses, too much on companies with low. Starting yields, I recently bought into SP Global, SP Global only has a point. 95 percent starting yield, very low, this isn't any AT&T or Verizon?
I also bought into Master card. MasterCard, has even a lower starting yield Point 61 percent. No, not all companies that I buy have very low. Starting yields, some of them are a bit higher in the restaurant category. Roadhouse was a company that I bought the at the time, I was buying, it had a two point, five percent starting dividend yield.
This one has a decent yield but it's still no Verizon or AT&T but either way a lot of my companies have a lower starting yields than most dividend investors and this is done intentionally. The companies that I'm focusing on are not value traps, they're not companies that have flat risky or low growth dividends they are companies that have the economic capability to grow their dividends at very Rapid rates. While Texas, Roadhouse only has
a starting dividend. Yield of 2%, that's nowhere. Close to Verizon or AT&T. It has something different than Verizon or AT&T the dividends growing. And it's growing at a very, very fast rate back in. 2011, the dividend was only eight pennies per share, eight cents per share. And then, the most recent dividend, 10 years later is 55 cents per share, it's compounded at an annualized rate of 16.4% per year. So the dividends for five times bigger than it was a decade ago,
four or five times bigger. That means that the investors that bought 10 years ago. Now have a yield on cost of over eight percent higher than the Verizon or AT&T dividend.
And while they've had that incredible dividend growth four or five Xing their dividend payment, they've also had massive capital appreciation 347 percent so investors in Texas Roadhouse are sitting much more pretty than the investors and Xander AT&T the ones that were suckered in to the high starting yields have flat dividend payments or ones that are being cut companies that haven't made any gains. And they overall have total returns that are negative.
The investors it instead focused on companies that can grow their dividend. Payment have a dividend payment, that's four or five times what it was 10 years ago and gains and capital appreciation that are 350%. The evidence routinely favors companies that focus on dividend growth, not companies that Focus. Sun-hi starting yields, we can take MasterCard as another
example. This is one that a lot of dividend investors will criticized for having a very low starting yield only Point 61 percent, it seems insignificant at first look. But when you consider the actual growth of the dividend over time, it puts things into context back in 2011. The dividend payment was two pennies per share over the past five years, like, Texas Roadhouse. They've been growing the dividend at around 18 percent per year when you Compound.
Something even at a low starting base at 20% per year. The growth is astronomical. That compounding turns a very low, starting yield into a very high dividend payment. In a short amount of time going from two pennies to half a
dollar in 10 years. What this reminds me of is the experiments with Children of delayed gratification whether they can wait a minute to get a marshmallow or two marshmallows, a couple minutes later, the kids that were willing to delay gratification a little bit longer had overall better. Burns. I think as investors we get tested in the same way, are you really needing that high
starting yield right now today? Or can you delay that gratification a little bit invest in, very good companies, will 5x your dividend payment, over the next 10 years. Give you capital appreciation and a boosted amount of income at the same time the way Ted judge. If a company is able to pay you a growing dividend over. The next decade is all about the financials of the company.
If you use qual trim.com as an example, to look at a company, we have Texas here, Road House. How do I judge of Texas Roadhouse can pay me a growing dividend over time? Well, there's a couple important things I can. Look at first of all, is the growth profile of the company. We look at the revenue. Growth is the revenue growing on a consistent basis above the rate of inflation. In the case of Texas Roadhouse, that is a yes and it's growing organically not through Acquisitions.
So it's growing every single year year over year at twelve point five six percent without doing major acquisitions. Next thing that we look at is the free cash flow. Growth of the company in the case of Texas Roadhouse, is this growing on a semi consistent basis? Yes, it is. In fact, it's growing at a very fast speed 15 percent over the past 10 years, the cash flows are the initial thing. The company has to pay the
dividend. So if the free cash flow is not growing and the dividend is growing, that just means that the company's paying you a higher percentage of their free cash flow and eventually, they cannot maintain that they'll have to cut it like they did with it. Until wild Texas Roadhouse is growing the free cash flow over time leading to a fast. Growing dividend companies like Intel had cash flows that were shrinking. They were flat for a long period of time.
Then they went down and so did the dividend the dividend follows the cash flows. If the cash flows grow very fast, the dividend will grow fast. If the cash flows shrink, the dividend will shrink. So back to Texas Roadhouse. We look at the cash flows. We look at the net income growth. We look at the earnings per share growth. This is a good growth profile. It gives me confidence that this
company has a long history. They have the recipe of growth, the management has been able to do this on a consistent basis and aside from a lot of things, you hair past results in specific, companies is oftentimes indicated of of future results, especially if the same situation and environment exists. Nothing has really changed competitively in terms of Texas Roadhouse. So I expect similar levels of growth in the future. And then finally, the balance sheet is a huge indicator of a
country's. Company's ability to pay future dividends. In the case of Texas Roadhouse, we can take a look at their cash and debt. They have more cash than debt right now. In fact, last quarter, Texas Roadhouse paid off the remainder of all of their long-term debt. So they have zero long-term
debt. The only thing they have in terms of liabilities is their Capital leases which are basically rental payments on their restaurants, but this is it, they have a lot of cash, they have no long-term debt which gives them an incredible amount of The in their Capital allocation so not only do I have incredible confidence that this company can continue to pay a dividend.
I have lots of confidence that they can grow at a continually attractive rate and this all comes down to the financials and economics of a company invest in companies that are paying a dividend that have growing revenues cash flows, net income earnings per share companies that have declining share count and strong balance sheets. Those are ones that will be able to continually pay growing dividends in the future.
So I believe David investors would be Well, served to stop focusing, their efforts so much on high starting guilds instead, focus on companies that have everything in place to have, strong organic dividend growth for a long period of time in the future companies that can do this. Have great economics, good competitive Dynamics companies that have very strong balance sheets. These are ones that lead to Alpha 2 out performance.
These are the strong dividend companies that pay year after year, after year, the ones that have the high starting yields, the ones that are value traps, they Often lead investors down the worst route where they're stuck in a company where the only reason they own, it is a dividend and they eventually capitulate and end up selling it. We've all been in those companies at one point or another, so it's time to focus on better companies.
Now, the next big mistake that I see a lot of different investors making is over diversification. Now diversification is not all bad, I don't think you should be all inning a single company. That is overall, very risky. There's two different types of basic risks in the stock market. There's Specific risk. What are specific to a company, meaning the management team. The chance, the company does fraud the chance to company, gets out competed by a different company.
Those are all specific risks to a specific company, but then there's systemic risk. Systematic risk is the risk of the overall World economy. Things like pandemics things, like Wars things, like famine. These are systemic risks that we really can't diversify away from so diversification. Is an opportunity for us to lower the amount of risk of specific risks, specific to any singular company, but the data
shows empirically that. Once you have over seven to 10 different companies, the specific risk is basically Diversified away to the max extent. It's mostly gone at that point and Beyond then layering on more and more companies can companies, 15 companies, 20 companies, 25, 30, 35 40 45, you're getting no more. If it's of reduced risk at that point all you're doing is cluttering a portfolio. Full of tons of different companies without the benefit of any measurable risk reduction.
Not only are you not really getting any additional benefit of reducing specific risk. But you're also getting the downside of having an overly complex portfolio of a group of companies that you can't possibly pay attention to extensively. So you're making individual Investments but you're spreading them out across so many companies that you really can't keep up. All of them in my portfolio, I've tried to mimic it where I'm getting the most bang for my buck.
I have ten core positions SP Global MasterCard into it Microsoft and Apple. That's 5vg, Costco Texas, Roadhouse Canadian Pacific and Union Pacific right at ten core positions. I'm getting the maximum benefit of reducing specific risk. I'm right in that nice. Part of the curve there, but I also don't have so many companies that I can't possibly keep track of them I can.
Keep track of 10 companies so I do believe in being Diversified but not being over Diversified at a lot of portfolios, I see from dividend vestries, our portfolios with 50 different companies. So many companies that half the time. I think these investors can't even remember the amount of companies they have in their portfolios. If you're doing that, you're just lazily investing putting money into dozens and dozens of companies without properly doing research on them.
And then finally, the last thing that I see a lot of dividend investors doing that I think is Mistake is investing into bad Industries, bad companies and bad Industries. Now this can come off as a very harsh. Criticism me saying that these are bad companies but this is just my opinion. I do think a lot of the Investments That dividend investors by are in companies that are a lot of Industrials their Capital intensive.
They're overly complex, a lot of these industries are incredibly difficult to operate it and I've made this same mistake before. So when I'm criticizing other people's Investments, I'm criticizing. My previous Investments as well. I used to own three hundred dollars of Boeing. It was one of my first Investments, I viewed the company as this big duopoly with Airbus, it was just one of the big companies that seemed like, it was unbeatable to me.
But what I quickly learned is, that Boeing is an incredibly complex company. It has an entire chain of events that has to happen. Huge manufacturing processes tons of quality assurance tons of liability potential lawsuits. Long-term contracts, the amount of complexity in this business Is incredible running, it would be trying to run a small
country. So, Boeing's, one of these companies, it's incredibly complex difficult to understand very Capital intensive, and has tons of various risk factors that investors can't properly put into their analysis. There's no way you can accurately quantify the amount
of risk in this company. And I see the same thing with a lot of other industries that I considered a not be the greatest Industries to invest in Intel being an example of how unpredictable it is to be a chip maker and videos leading the race. Right now and videos what's
drawing everybody's attention. But in tell what's King not too long ago they controlled the world with chips and now how far they've fallen and I see so many investors getting drawn into these companies 3M. Another company having a high dividend yield that's been one. That's so far, has been a value trap for a long period of time down nine percent over the past
10 years. The companies that I've been gravitating to and I've been trying to urge investors to gravitate to are ones that are more simple and have it. An onyx that are better for longer periods of time. SP Global shares, a monopoly between them and Moody's. Both companies benefit mutually, I've been bullish on Microsoft
for a long period of time. A company that has great competitive Dynamics by virtue of its massive, monopolistic mode, even Costco's a company that seemingly more expensive, but it's more predictable and it has a more simple business model that's easier to operate and easier to execute. It's much easier to open up a new warehouse and sell some memberships than it is to try to.
Create the next big aircraft. So my final piece of advice for dividend investors is to focus on industries that are overall. Good Industries, where everybody's winning in that industry where you're fishing in a good Pond. Not trying to pick winners. Among the losers focus on companies that aren't Capital intensive or overly complex ones
that are simple and predictable. If we do this I think we'll have better returns overall and I think that dividend investing will be looked at more favorably. Overall, it won't be so associated with buying Boeing complex companies that are many cases value traps. This is what I've been doing with my portfolio. It's the strategy that I've been merging over to and I think it more closely mimics and aligns with what Warren Buffett did his entire career, especially his early career focusing.
On companies that not only paid him cash loads but they had strong organic growth profiles. That would pay him growing cash flows in the future and then reinvesting those cash flows into other good opportunities. So that's my thoughts overall on this issue and my biggest Advice of what I've learned over the past five years. Let me know what you think. If you disagree. That's fine. But let me know, either way, I'd be happy to discuss in the
comments. Now, moving on we have some big news from Mark Zuckerberg, making some big moves. He's now competing directly with Twitter meta, has unveiled two employees, a standalone app at plans to launch through Instagram to compete with Twitter. Now it's interesting wordage. There they say it's a standalone app but they're going to launch it through Instagram. We'll get to what That means in a minute here.
They say that this was revealed by Chris Cox, the chief product officer Cox told employees that meta has heard from creators and public figures. Who want a quote sanely run platform. The people that I think want a sale iRun platform are a lot of. I think politicians that don't like the Elan is running Twitter, they don't like that. He's running the platform. It's a highly political thing. So people have very, very strong views on Ilan. Some people don't like them if they don't like Him.
They don't want to support the platform so they want an alternative. Those people are the one that are saying that elon's, not saying he's not running the company saying lie, so they want an alternative and met as their to the rescue. The company is in talks to have people such as Oprah Winfrey, and Dali Lama commit to using the app. Adding that meta hopes to launch it. Quote as soon as we can, and the app is internally codenamed, project 92, a person.
Familiar with the software said, why they named it that I have no clue, it sounds kind of Cool. But we don't know anything about the name there. So we don't have much details on this. But let me make a very early judgment here based on the history that I've studied with meta. This is what they're best at. This is right in their wheelhouse. This is what they consider to be their super power. They can take different features from different social media, they can integrate it or rebuild it.
And then they can push major usage and engagement on. It Mehta has proven their ability to do this over and over and over again. Reels and stories were features that they took from different platforms. They integrated it onto an existing platform, to great success. But this is a bit of a more aggressive challenge. They're not only trying to just integrate a new feature. They're trying to completely replicate Twitter and do it better and build it to a
successful platform. So this is what they're good at, but I think this is a bit more aggressive. I think it's a bit more risky, but I'm still going to side on the side of meta. I think they'll be able to pull this off. I think they'll be able to push Major engagement and usage on the Twitter competitor.
And the reason being is that they've proven again, that they're incredibly good at this, what they're doing is they're launching it through Instagram. So what I assume they're going to be doing with this, is there going to be using your information? You've already given them on Instagram to Auto populate accounts on this new Twitter, competitor. Now that you have your account already made you already have the onboarding process done. All you have to do is just log in and open it up.
Up. You have your Twitter copy account? Some meta is removing all the friction by using all the information. They already have to bridge. The gap between Instagram and the Twitter competitor if they did it that way, that would be a brilliant move by meta and make the chances of success even greater for this. So we don't know if this is going to be ultimately successful so far, but if I was a meta investor I would be pretty bullish on this.
I do think it's something that's going to be a likely success. Now, on the same subject of meta and Mark Zuckerberg We get to see his initial first public reaction to the Apple Vision Pro headset. A little bit of background between Mark Zuckerberg and apple.
Mark Zuckerberg is very calm, and he's very level-headed in the way that he talks about Apple and the way that he talks about Tim Cook, but I believe strongly the underneath, this very calm demeanor, there is a certain hatred that he has for Apple. I don't think that he only dislikes the company and has a friendly competition with him. I think he has utter disdain for them. Apple has Been bullying meta mercilessly.
Doing add changes doing things that hurt his business and take billions of dollars out of his company, his employees and his wallet. And he doesn't like that. Mark Zuckerberg is incredibly competitive, he shown that in both his personal life and his business life. He doesn't like being beholden to Apple in order to circumvent apple and their App Store policies.
Mark Zuckerberg has been looking for ways to go around the hardware Monopoly that Apple has and his way of doing that is not The phone, not through the laptop but through the headset he believes that this is the next generation of computing. He's come out with the Oculus. He's made massive investments into this category and hopes to have his own physical platform where he no longer has to operate through Apple's App Store Monopoly, but then we have apple releasing The Vision Pro
in my estimation. I think that Apple did what they do best. They came out with a premium item as higher. Resolution lower latency has very good specs. It's very good. Build quality and overall seems like a highly polished device. It comes in at a more expensive price point and that's the major Focus. But here we have the head-to-head battle between meta and Oculus in all of his various headsets and the Apple Vision Pro.
Here's what Zuckerberg said, in his initial reaction, seeing the Vision Pro release a few high-level thoughts. I mean first you know, I do think that this is A certain level of validation for the category, right? Where, you know, we were the primary folks out there before saying hey, I think that this virtual reality augmented reality mixed reality. This is going to be a big part
of the next Computing platform. I think having Apple come in and share that vision We'll make a lot of people who are fans of their products really consider that. And then, the first one that he makes is one of product and category validation by Apple entering, in to the a, our VR headset game. They have thus validated that category of product is being a valid product. And that logic seems simple. I think this is a very good. Go to reaction by Mark Zuckerberg.
The problem is, this is the reaction that literally, every CEO says, when Apple steps into their category and competes directly with them, take, for example, when Apple stepped into fitness, they offer a fitness service called Fitness Plus, Peloton, was already in this game. They're the biggest ones by far in this category. The Peloton CEO was one of optimism saying that it's quote, quite a legitimization of Fitness content.
That is the big headline their apple entering into the category is a good thing. It Is this Fitness content and its overall going to lead to Greater sales for Peloton, but the stock price since this was posted for Peloton is down around 70% and there's no evidence whatsoever that Apple entering in to Fitness. Content has helped Peloton
whatsoever. All it's done, is created a massive competitor to something that they uniquely owned, companies should be able to legitimize their own products without having the biggest, most powerful company in the world compete directly with them. When Apple Competed with Amazon
with the fire phone. It didn't help them and it certainly didn't help the zoom when they competed with Microsoft when Apple steps in and competes headfirst with a separate company saying it. Legitimizes a category is a nice thing to say but I don't see a lot of evidence that that's the case. The next thing that he moves on to is the big price point, really consider that. And then of course the thirty five hundred dollar price you know on the one hand to get it forward.
All the If they're trying to pack in there on the other hand, a lot of people aren't going to find that to be affordable. Apples headset. At $3500 is unaffordable way too expensive for most people. This reminds me a little bit of Steve Ballmer being asked about the iPhone. They let me ask you about the iPhone and the Zune. If I may Zoom was getting some traction, then Steve Jobs goes to macworld and he pulls out this iPhone. What was your first reaction when you saw that $500?
The first thing that comes out of his mouth and criticism of Apple being a legitimate competitor to Microsoft was five hundred dollars at the time. That was extremely expensive for phone far more expensive than any competitor or any existing phone on the market. And apple was likewise scoffed at and mocked for being way too expensive and far Out Of Reach of other people. Now, Mark Zuckerberg doesn't say this with as mocking of a tone but the concern is very similar.
So I think there's a chance that that them Again, actually increases demand for the overall space. That Quest 3 is actually the primary beneficiary of that. Because a lot of the people who might say, Hey, you know, this, like I'm going to give another consideration to this or, you know, now I understand maybe what mixed reality is more. An inquest 3 is the best one on the market that I can that I can afford and it's great. Also, right? It's, I think that's and, you know, in our own way.
I think we're in there. A lot of features that we have where we We're leading on, maybe in a way, the Vision Pro will create more demand for meta, but I don't typically see that the case throughout history, when people want an Apple device, they don't say you, I want an iPad but the iPads a little too expensive. So I'm going to go get a Kindle. I'm going to go get, I'm gonna go get a Fire tablet.
That's not often the case. There's always a secondary Market, maybe that will happen in some cases. But in most cases, when real users want to pay for a real device, they get the That they want, they have different ways of financing different ways of saving different ways of paying for it. If someone really wants to get an iPhone, they're going to find a way to get it. And then obviously over time, the companies are just focused on somewhat different things, right?
Apple has always, you know, I think focused on building really kind of high-end things, whereas our Focus has been on it's just we've a more democratic ethos. We want to build things that are Are accessible to a wider. Number of people, we've sold tens of millions of quest devices. My understanding just based on rumors I don't have any special knowledge on this is that apple is building about 1 million of their of their device, right? So the next thing he brings up
is one of accessibility. His company is building stuff. That's accessible by many, many people, it's not priced out of them. This is another argument that looking at the data, it falls flat. He's painting apple as this company that only sells premium devices to only a very small number of users apples. And All base. Over the past seven years has estimated Lee doubled from 1 billion installed devices to over 2 billion installed devices. If Apple's devices are so undemocratic.
And so inaccessible, then why do they have an installed base of devices that exceeds 2 billion that doesn't stack up? Obviously, lots of people are able to get apples devices. Lots of people from various income levels, we kind of come at it from different places. We're very focused on social
interaction, communication. Being more active rights as Fitness, there's gaming, there are those things now whereas I think a lot of the use cases that you saw in and apples launch material were more around people sitting, you know, people looking at screens which are great I think that you will replace your laptop over time with with a with a headset. But but I think in terms of kind of how the different use cases that the companies are going after and they're there.
They're a bit different for for where we are right now. This is another reaction that I think is a little soft. I think it's a bit weak. He's trying to paint apples devices, being antisocial and his devices being very, very
social. But when we looked at the actual presentation, there's not much distinction in terms of social capability, Apple demonstrated, plenty of social apps with FaceTime 3D videoing, looking at a wall of people and friends and real time, there's lots of this type of thing of them, standing up and being active as they're working, and a big thing. To keep in mind is the hardware and device. Capability is just the product that's able to launch the apps.
The app Builders will get into the Vision Pro now and build, many social apps, I anticipate that on the Vision Pro on Apple's devices, there will be just as many social capabilities as there are on metas. Now overall, I like the fact that Mark Zuckerberg will sit down and speak. So candidly about his reaction and about his goals and Ambitions. I think it's good that he's competing with happel, but if I have to pick the overall, Or of, who I think would dominate this Market.
My vote still stands with apple. I think they'll have much bigger market, share of the overall, economics of this device category, similar with how they do with the tablet, with the MacBook, with the phone with the are pods with every other device, category that they're in. I see no big distinction with headsets now.
Finally, we get to the most important part of the show, this is where we get our best tips, our best advice financially, this is what on the best house hacking tip ever, which comes He's at a very important time because right now it's difficult to get into homes. They're very expensive. This person right here, has a solution for it. People are always complaining about how expensive housing as they say. It's so unaffordable, they can't afford it. 20% down is just as too much for them.
I think they're just making excuses in my opinion, but let me tell you what, how much is a 20% down payment on a 1 million dollar house? Two hundred thousand dollars, two hundred thousand. Okay, let me ask you this. How many kidneys do you have to? Alright, that caught me off guard. They're a little bit. He went from, what is the down payment on a million-dollar home? A 20% down payment? And now we're talking about, I think I heard kidneys.
How many kidneys do you have? We went from house hacking to now human biology. Let's go ahead and keep listening here. I think I know what direction he's going but let's let's take a look now. How many kids? Is, does the average person need to survive? One. How much do you think that you could sell a kidney for in the black market today? 250 300 350 will say to you take your kid and you sell it 200. I thought this is a house hacking tip, not a human hacking tip.
He's saying that you can hock your kidney on the black market for a quarter million. Now I have no way of verifying this. I have not looked into the price of a kidney maybe this is correct. That's a lot of money. Two hundred fifty thousand dollars but I'd still rather have my Kidneys and instead of trying to do some type of illegal surgery. But regardless let's just assume for a minute.
This is accurate information, fifty thousand dollars take that 50 thousand dollars, you put it in your pocket, you don't even look at it. You take that two hundred thousand dollars, you put it on a down payment on a 1 million dollar house. You rent that house for three years. Three years. You make your money back you by your kidney back. You reinsert it back into your body. Now what now you have two kidneys and And you have a 1
million dollar asset. I don't know what to say, I normally am critical of these type of tick-tocks. I think that some of them are a little silly but this one's pretty genius. I must admit you only have to risk death twice by taking your kidney and selling it on the black market. A surgery that I can't imagine being done with the best doctors or surgeons, but then you also have to reinsert it back into your body and reconnect it, which I can't imagine as well as being a great surgery.
And by the way, I I think surgeries are somewhat expensive so out of that 250,000 dollars. Some of it's probably going to the surgeon or whoever's doing the surgery. It seems like he may be leaving out a few details there but there we have it, the most extreme house, hacking tip I've ever heard. That's all for this episode. Have a great weekend. I'll see you in the next one.