Title: Ask Me Anything | September 2026 Show: Joseph Carlson - Qualtrim Studio (Investor Exchange) Guest: Joseph Carlson (solo AMA, member questions) Date: 2026-SEP-01 URL: https://www.qualtrim.com/app/studio/watch/00efef12-aa7f-4bdf-9613-883c707a769c Length: 28:27 Note: Transcript from the in-page English subtitle (WebVTT) track of the self-hosted, login-gated Qualtrim Studio video (no youtu.be deep-links); (mm:ss) cues real, grouped ~15s. Fillers (um/uh) and immediate word repeats removed; wording, numbers and names otherwise verbatim (auto-caption mis-hearings left as captioned).
(00:00) Welcome everyone. It's time for and ask me anything. This is where you write questions on the discord and the Ask Me Anything channel, and you can ask about whatever you want, and I'll try to answer as many questions as I can from it. Now I highlighted about 12 different questions that we're going to go through here.
(00:16) So let's go ahead and just jump right in. First of all, we have my financial friend here saying hi Joseph. Congrats on the new baby. Thank you. He's so he's so perfect man. Little babies are so fun. He's just trying to learn everything.
(00:32) It's fun to watch him at this stage. It's kind of nerve wracking keeping something that's a human that's 7 pounds alive. It's crazy, but it's a lot of fun. You say you are very open with your portfolios, so I hope this isn't getting too personal, but I'm curious about your cash position.
(00:49) I know you bought a new house, and I believe you said you're keeping the old one and paying off the new one. Just an update on that. I did sell my old home. Basically, my financial friend. What happened was if you don't sell your home
(01:04) within two years of moving out of it, then it's no longer considered a primary residence when it's no longer considered a primary residence. If you sell it later, then you have to pay capital gains tax of 20% on it in my tax bracket. And to me, that capital gains tax is about $80,000 that I'd have to pay.
(01:23) So I made the decision because I had so much equity gains in that home to sell it and put that money, the money that I made selling it, I sold it for $740,000. I bought it for 370, sold it for 740. And I put that money into the new home.
(01:38) So I paid down an enormous amount of debt of the new home. And that's how I have my new home paid off so quickly, as I use a lot of the gains that I made from the old houses. But I do not any longer own that property. Another calculation I made was that I already have such a complex and demanding business with YouTube,
(01:57) that I did not want to have an additional real estate if I had more free time, if I wasn't wrapped up doing YouTube stuff and related things with Qualtrics in the community, then I'd probably have more energy to work on real estate. But anyways, you continue on saying, I've been curious of the size of your recent buys.
(02:12) With the success of Qualtrics, if you'll soon start to scale up stock purchases. Just working back some math. If you have 13,000 members paying $10 a month and good YouTube views, I think it's pretty conservative to think your revenue is 150,000 a month. It's not quite a 150,000 taper that a little bit, maybe shave off 20,000
(02:30) a month. That's about where I am because not everybody is paying $1,010 a month. Some of you. Oh, geez. Way back when, years ago, signed up for $6 a month. And I didn't raise your prices because I'm trying to be a nice guy, not trying to raise anybody's prices here. But the majority of members are $10 a month. Plus.
(02:46) I do make some money on YouTube and Spotify and ad revenue as well. You say take out 50,000 for expenses related to call, trim 35 to 40% taxes on living expenses and you'd still be at 50,000 a month. But your point here is that I'm making a lot of money, and you're not seeing me throw in money into this portfolio every second, right?
(03:06) If I'm making so much money. Why don't I just throw more and more of that money into the portfolio? Well, there's a reason why. One of them is that I've been paying off my home. Most of my money has been going to paying off the home I have. It paid off. Another reason, though, is that
(03:21) first of all, I am going to be buying more stock in this portfolio. So you're going to be more stock buys. But I want to be opportunistic with them. I want to buy stocks when they're on a good deal. So in the markets racing up, I don't want to just buy every stock left and right. Another thing is that I don't want to put 100% of my money
(03:37) in this portfolio, because if I just build it up super fast with all this business income, this number will go up rapidly. My total portfolio value will rise, but the gains won't rise as much because gains take longer. It takes longer for the story of the company to play out.
(03:53) For these companies to compound takes time. And if I just put 100% of the business into the portfolio, then you'll just see this number go through the roof and this number will stay low because it needs to catch up. And that's not what I want to do. The goal of this portfolio is not to show you
(04:10) how much money I can throw in it by building a successful SaaS business. That's not what I'm trying to do. I'm trying to show good investing. So rather than just putting all my SaaS revenue in the portfolio, I want to invest a good amount and then I want to grow that amount very
(04:26) attractively with high returns by buying very good companies at very good prices. So the goal here is to illustrate good investing. The goal isn't to illustrate how much money I can throw in the portfolio from scaling trim as big as I can. That's not my goal.
(04:41) So I am putting some money into ETFs. I have a couple hundred thousand dollars in ETFs and that mostly goes to either SHG, and I've recently started buying a little VTi. Those are just broad US stock market indices.
(04:56) They're very similar to my portfolio, especially SHG, but I feel like VTI is less opinionated. It's just more of a US stock market thing. Joseph, do you have any thoughts on Chris Camillo? He says he is fascinating to listen to, but his philosophy extends to the point
(05:11) where he recommends ten year olds use leverage to invest in Amazon. We're getting ten year olds leverage now. Okay. Is he just a savant, or can we learn from his takes on having conviction regardless of specific investment in trading strategy?
(05:27) So first of all, I don't know much about Chris. I've only seen a couple clips, so this is a very ignorant opinion. I don't know him enough to criticize him or compliment him. And I'll listen to more videos maybe. But I'd say, generally speaking, if somebody is claiming to be a savant
(05:44) or giving you the strong impression he's a savant, that he knows something you don't. That is, bets are miraculous. I think that the higher you try to portray yourself, the more transparent you should be. So if you're just saying I'm average, then there's no reason to be transparent,
(05:59) because nobody needs to audit you to figure out that your average. If you're saying I'm way above average, I have all this particular knowledge. I'm a savant. My trades are godlike. Yeah, you should be audited. You should have people be able to transparently see your positions, your portfolio, your gain, your loss.
(06:15) They should see your brokerage like I show. They should see this exactly what you bought. Your exact buys cost basis whether you're up or down, how those trades are going week by week because you're claiming a lot,
(06:30) you're giving people this impression. And I think that that's a level of responsibility to be transparent if you're doing that. That's my opinion. I don't know if Chris is doing that or not, but that would be what I would look for. XLM world says Joseph, how do you how do you diligence on Uber's utilization enhance proposition?
(06:48) It sounds great and logical on paper, but these are based on Uber's data. There's some arguments that the Waymo can achieve similar utilization in some of the cities, which fundamentally breaks Uber's most important thesis. Your point on density makes sense. But I guess there is a certain point of scale
(07:03) that Waymo and Tesla can reach to achieve similar levels of density. So far, Tesla has proven, I think, anything worth anything, if you ask me. I know it sounds super pessimistic, but Teslas are not being used
(07:18) in the same way Waymo's are. They're not really being used for anything because there's too many edge cases. They need to solve the edge cases. They need to show that they're not going to have phantom braking. They need to show that they can operate in all conditions, not just ideal conditions. And Teslas really aren't there yet.
(07:33) Waymo is the real deal. Waymo has been operating, doing 500,000 weekly paid rides for a long time now. And so Waymo is really going through I considered them the real competitor right now to Uber. But if you even look at where Waymo is operated than most
(07:50) where they've they've specialized and they started that's like Los Angeles. Uber is still doing good by all accounts in Los Angeles they still have peak density. So even we're Waymo's doing the best. Uber still doing good. I think that Waymo will eat away at the edges of Uber.
(08:05) They'll take some market share in big cities. But Uber has so many places to grow into. They have so much other white space to grow. Plus they're going to have they're going to be a hybrid with lots of tech on their platform. Lots of other companies that license their Avs on their platform
(08:21) that I think Uber will find ways to win. Even if Waymo wins. Do we have room for both? Can Waymo and Uber both win? I think so it's a big market. Transportation's a gigantic market.
(08:36) It's huge. We don't have to have one winner. Visa and Mastercard, Waymo, Uber. Even if Tesla figures it out, I still think they can make it work. I don't think that one of them has to lose for the other to win necessarily. It would be bad for Uber if Waymo just opens everywhere or takes over.
(08:55) Every big city takes up all the demand and there's no other Avs. If that's what it looks like in ten years. Not good for Uber. Cleverly says. Hi Joseph, I'm curious if how curious how you do with three kids. How do you manage? Well, I have four now.
(09:11) I had one more in the mix. One little two week old baby. He's a he's he's doing great. Yeah. How do you manage work, house chores, extended family duties? I'm still waiting a fourth child. I myself have a five year old girl and I am struggling.
(09:28) Sure, I've also a senior to look after, but man, house is a mess. Late to work, no time for hobbies and exercise. I truly am curious to know how you do it. Do you say you only have a five year old girl or do you let me? How do you manage? Still waiting a fourth kid.
(09:44) I can't tell if you have four kids or one. You just have the five year old, you say. I myself have one five year old girl. Okay, so you just have one five year old girl. That's your problem. You got to have more. Got to have more up that to like three, maybe four. So bump that up, bump that number up to four kids and then it starts to get more symbiotic.
(10:01) And I'll explain this in just a minute. Sony 1952 says I have wondered the same thing lol. I have one daughter who is in sixth grade. That's your guys, your problems. You got one. That's the problem. By the time it's 830, I'm ready to hit the bed and I'm 45 years old.
(10:16) Of course you are. You have one kid, who are they going to play with? You. They're going to play with you. They're going to look around and go, where's my. Where's my little brother? Where's my little sister? I guess there's no little brother and little sister. I guess I can spend time on the TV.
(10:31) Maybe I'll have friends over. But friends aren't always over. They don't live with you. So who am I going to? Who am I going to annoy to get attention and engagement and interaction with? They're going to go to you and I know you. They're going to go to you and say, hey, I want to play dad, I want to play.
(10:48) What are you doing today, mom? I want to play, and you're going to I'm tired. I just got back from work. I, you know, I don't have the energy to do it right now. Play with your brother. Play with your sister. Oh, wait. You don't have one. That's the issue. You got to. You got to bump those numbers up, have another 2 or 3 kids. And guess what?
(11:03) When you have more than one, you can have the kids play together or you can join in with them. You don't always have to be the one trying to engage with them 100% of the time, which can get very tiring. It's fun playing with kids, but if you're doing it every three minute, it gets tiring.
(11:18) Very tiring. So I think that it's good. It's actually easier. You're saying, Joseph, how do you have four kids? Like I have one and it's tiring. No, you have it backwards. Four is easier than one, in my opinion. I think it's easier because my 11 year old can play with my nine year old.
(11:35) My nine year old plays with the three year old, and the 11 year old can even babysit the other, the other two, the nine and three year old while we're going. So we'll go on walks around the neighborhood for 35 45 minutes. We'll say, hey, 11 year old baby, sit your two little sisters.
(11:50) Just watch them. You can watch TV, hang around the house, but make sure that they're okay and we can go out and he will take care of the younger ones. He can call us on the phone if there's anything wrong, we can check in on the cameras, but then they're all doing stuff together. It's it's giving us more freedom, more autonomy to go do stuff as well.
(12:08) And later on, when he's older, when he's 14, 15, he can act as a babysitter. My nine year old, she'll get 12 years old. She'll probably be more mature as a babysitter, but she will be able to act as a babysitter as well. And they can watch the younger ones, the one that we just had. They can help out with that one when he's a couple years older.
(12:25) So kids can actually take on more responsibility, more roles, more. It's me when you have more than one. Also, you have them playing together, entertaining each other rather than just putting all of their demands for socialization on the parents. And so I think that is an aspect of it.
(12:43) But also, I would not extrapolate your experience today with how it will be tomorrow or the next day. Five year old, six year old. They're going to grow up so fast. Like in five years she'll be twice as old, so savor it. She's in a special phase right now.
(12:58) She'll literally change in just a couple of years. Be complete. She'll be a different person completely with how much she knows and can do, and she'll be able to do chores and help out and be more and helpful in a lot of different ways. So I would say it's struggle right now, but just give it time.
(13:14) They change and savor this moment because they change very quickly. Lugar says, hi Joseph, if you had to create an ETF portfolio, which ETFs would you buy? If you included the S&P 500, why not diversify more widely, one or several?
(13:29) What would be your strategy? Well, I do own SCG, which is a US growth ETF. It's very similar to my public portfolio and I do own a little bit maybe 30 or $40,000 of VTI, which is the total US stock market.
(13:47) So it's like 5000 companies in the US and it's just market cap weighted. And I own those. I own a couple hundred thousand dollars of those total together. So it's like a 300 or $400,000 position, much smaller than my public portfolios. But I have been adding some money to those as well, and that's just kind of retirement.
(14:05) These aren't strong bets. I don't have an opinion on things. I'm just buying a retirement accounts slice of the US economy, and I'll sit on them for a long period of time. So I don't have any special bets on these. And the goal of them is to be somewhat on opinionated, passive and be just out of sight, out of mind.
(14:23) Those are those are what I'm going for. Their Sparky says. Hi Joseph, thanks for all you do. I was wondering at what price you would consider adding more Google and Alphabet or Google Alphabet. If we look at Google today, I would say probably around 260.
(14:42) That'd be offhand the price that I'd be looking at. It's at 342 today. If it goes down 250, I might be looking to buy more because I think you'd get an attractive, really attractive return at that price. Today. I'm I think it's a little bit it's
(14:58) not expensive, but I think that Google's just at a normal valuation. There's nothing special here. Buyer club says with Google's announcement of the new pixel 11 today, do you think that they are now creating a vertical moat for the next generation of agenda AI? Think of their major competition OpenAI and do not have real hardware.
(15:16) Do not have free cash flow to invest in this area. They'll be beholden to others. Apple does have the phones, but not the AI. Amazon is not in the phones, but does have an AI presence, and Tesla and SpaceX have some AI and hardware presence, but not in the portable consumer space. And meta does not also does not have the phone space.
(15:34) But they do have some hardware with glasses, but not chips. I get to the only real competition for Alphabet is China. Do you agree? If you do, what device and solution do you think Google would work on? I do agree, generally speaking, that the big moat,
(15:49) the big value proposition in Google and the investment thesis does not rely on how advanced Gemini is or if it's the perfect leading model, but rather that Gemini is really good. It needs to be a flagship model. It needs to be up there in the pack, but also it's the distribution, the full stack
(16:04) layer, the fact that they have the infrastructure with the cloud hosting, they have the TPUs for their own, their own processes. They don't have to rely 100% on Nvidia that they have all the software layers upon it, that they have all the business architecture, that they have all the apps,
(16:22) YouTube, Gmail, Google Drive, maps, and then they have the devices that are in people's hands, and then they have the operating system on that device that gives them a million ways to make money. So even if they have an AI that's just like good enough, it's really good.
(16:37) But it may not be the totally best. That'll give people enough use cases to use AI in their business. And I think that Google will be really good at monetizing that. Hi Joseph, I really enjoyed the latest episode on the market bottom, and it's indeed true that I moved to picking index funds and started
(16:52) investing money when I found the market was down 5 to 10%. Look, it's just something I see people get really excited about companies. They go, I'm going to buy this company. I'm going to buy this company. I'm really excited about it. Then the market drops 30% and people go, oh, I'm in the red on these stocks.
(17:08) I look at my portfolio and every stock I pick, I've done a bad job. And they internalize. They internalize the market going down as they don't know what they're doing. The research that they did must have been mistaken because the stocks are below the price.
(17:24) They bought it and now they feel like they're not confident. You lose confidence. So then you want to switch over to ETFs. And unfortunately typically you sell out of companies that recover much higher than the ETFs they go. They bounce back much higher when the market recovers.
(17:39) So it's okay to own ETFs but you don't want to own it's okay to own ETFs. It's okay to own individual stocks. But you don't want to own individual stocks. Then have the market go down then sell and move to ETFs. You either move to ETFs to begin with or you hold the individual stocks
(17:56) through the market downturn because you'll get that nice bounce when they when the market finally recovers. We say this is my first ask me anything question right now I still do investing in Vo and QQ and maintain around 30 to 35%
(18:12) in ETFs and the rest in individual stocks, specifically big companies. Would you advise to move on to the individual stock totally, or is it okay to maintain some ETFs until I reach something like six figures in my portfolio? Oh, I think it's totally fine to have 30 to 35% of your portfolio and ETFs.
(18:29) I think also you're struggling with volatility and you're kind of struggling with being able to control your temperament and not sell stocks during a downturn. You could even up that from 35% to 50%. You could split it down the middle and say, half my portfolio goes into ETFs,
(18:46) half goes into individual stocks, of which I'm really bullish on and I believe will beat the market. So I don't have any problem with doing a hybrid approach. If you want to read about the strategy, there's one called core satellite meaning like the core is the ETF and then the satellite positions, the smaller positions are your individual stocks that you believe will outperform.
(19:07) Do you think this AI infrastructure build out is a scam. And companies like Nvidia are taking advantage of it or anything? It's not a scam. And these hyperscalers can keep spending billions of dollars on non-existing data centers. By the way, I think AI will prove its return
(19:23) in the next 10 to 20 years, but not in the next 1 to 5. I definitely do not believe that AI companies taking advantage of it like Nvidia are scam. And the reason why is because a scam or a con means that there's some type of fraudulent thing being sold here.
(19:41) The thing is really not doing anything, and people are just paying for it for no reason or that it's extremely overhyped, extremely overexaggerated. I'm more inclined to call crypto more in. Not really a scam, but more along those lines than AI.
(19:59) Okay, so if you ask the same question, you believe all the people trying to sell you on crypto is a scam. And do you think that it's going to live up to all this hype? No, I don't think crypto is going to live up to all its hype. I think that it was way overexaggerated. I think the utility of crypto
(20:15) was way overexaggerated because I didn't find it that useful. Businesses don't really use it. People don't use it really that often. There's some niche use cases, but overall it's very talked up to do all this stuff. But yet people are trying to find reasons to use crypto and it's hard to find
(20:30) with AI, it's different with AI. Every business in the world is using it. Not out of force, not out of a good sales pitch. They're using it because it's incredibly useful, and they're finding more and more ways to use it very efficiently and effectively.
(20:46) Every single week. They're integrating it into workflows and processes. They're speeding up things. They're making their work more accurate. They're tackling different categories they couldn't tackle before. They're they're moving into different categories they couldn't move into before.
(21:01) The it's just there's so many ways that it's useful. It's almost incomprehensible. A company can look at vast arrays of data and do analysis on it. They can do insights in it as if they have, like a PhD data analyst working for them.
(21:18) They can cross compare and reconcile things. They can code applications, they can feed it data, they can find trends, they can build apps and specific things for specific reasons for the company. Lawyers can use it to quickly proofread things, to
(21:34) look at cases, to look at history, to, you know, all this groundwork for it. Just in every part of the economy, every major thing a company does, there's like 100 different ways the AI can help. And it's becoming more helpful and that models are becoming better.
(21:50) The context windows are becoming bigger, the hallucinations are becoming smaller and less frequent. I mean, it's just an incredible technology. The revenue that Nvidia is making is because they're selling a lot of GPUs. But I think it's important to point to the revenue
(22:06) that OpenAI and anthropic or clouds making. That's because of companies willingly paying for their product. That's real revenue from real customers because of real use cases. They're not slowing down. They're not trying it out and going, you know what? After a month, we don't need AI. We don't need it.
(22:21) We tried it out for a month. No, they're saying, well, this is pretty good. Maybe we didn't use it perfectly the first month, but we're using a lot better today and we want to use more of it and more of it. We're going to integrate it into more processes now. We also want to make it cost efficient as possible, but we're going to use more in total usage.
(22:37) Companies are using more and more because it's so incredibly useful. Companies like anthropic and OpenAI are growing so fast because it's incredibly useful. I think that I grew up during the 90s, in the early 2000. I remember the internet coming online.
(22:53) I literally remember dial up internet. A lot of people probably don't even know what that is. But when you had to dial into the internet and launch, the internet would take 45 seconds to 2 minutes before you're connected online. Then when you're connected, it just little bits of data you could load.
(23:08) Really nothing special. The internet is very useful, obviously, and AI is the most useful thing I have ever seen. I think since the internet. Now some people say it's way more useful than the internet.
(23:24) I don't know, but I'd say I just nothing else comes to mind. There's nothing else even remotely as useful as has as many use cases can speed up. So many workflows, can solve so many problems, can process so much knowledge that I've ever seen.
(23:39) So I'm in support of the data center build out. I think we should have them in the US. I want them I want more data centers. I understand the concerns and the skepticism. I understand the concerns about water. I understand the concerns about not having them right next to people's houses. Totally understand those concerns.
(23:56) They shouldn't be built in people's backyards. They don't really use that much water. They don't use more than a golf course in a hundred times more useful to society than a golf course. This is coming from a golfer, I. We need more data centers. We need more knowledge processing, problem solving.
(24:12) And these things offer huge amounts. So I'm very in favor of them. I don't think that this is a scam at all, and I think it will be proven more and more over time. The ways that I've been able to change different processes in how I run things myself, not with content creation so much, but
(24:29) more with just behind the scenes business processes of bookkeeping, programing, automation, moderation, all this type of stuff. It just the list just continues to grow. It's absolutely incredible. And you'll see that more and more.
(24:44) Again, you're going to see examples of AI where you go, I didn't know it was really this useful. And it is. Bend. This will be the last one. Bend says hey Joseph, would love to see a video where you go over the stocks that you've sold over the years
(25:01) and see how they perform since you sold them, and compare them to your original reasons for selling. I would think that would be really interesting. That'd be a good one. A lot of people are interested in how the stocks. So there's a couple of things that are interesting on this subject.
(25:16) One of them is if you sell a stock and that stock does well, some people go, oh, I bet Joseph is so upset that that stock is doing well after he sold it. That's not the case at all. I happy the stocks that I sell do well.
(25:33) In fact, if I had to pick, if the stocks that I have sold would do well or do very poorly, I would want every one of them to do well. Because first of all, it reflects better on me when I have stocks that I own and ones that I've sold and that entire basket of ones
(25:49) that I've ever owned doing well, that just means I'm a good stock picker. Like if even if I sold the stock, if it ends up doing really well, that just means my original research and my reason and my stock in the way that I'm finding stocks is good.
(26:04) If I sold stocks and they just did terrible, they never recovered. They weren't good businesses to begin with. They just tanked. That would be a problem with my stock selection. So some people say, oh, he must be furious that Salesforce had a good day. Went up 20%. It went up a bit above where I sold it.
(26:20) Right. It's like a 20% above where I sold it. No, I'm not upset about that. I'm happy Salesforce is doing well. I hope that it continues to recover and goes to $300. It means that the research that I did on Salesforce led me into a good stock that eventually is doing well.
(26:35) Now, the trading is a different criticism. If I'm if you're criticizing when I'm buying, when I'm selling in the trading, that's that might be a valid criticism. But I want every stock that I own to do well in the fullness of time over its full lifetime. I want them to all do well, and I think they will.
(26:51) If I look at the stocks that I sold recently, Salesforce, Equifax into IT, Booking Holdings, Apple, these are great companies. All of these are great companies. My guess is they're going to do really well. Apple's done really well. Booking continues to do great performance into it.
(27:08) I think it has challenges, but it's got such a lock on so many customers. I think it'll do great and Salesforce is doing some incredible things. Equifax, I also think will do well. That would be my prediction because I buy good companies. That's the story here. If you come to this community,
(27:24) if you look at the type of stocks that we do research on, and if a stock is good enough to get into my portfolio, whether I end up selling it later on and trading into a different stock that I have a slight preference for, if it was good enough to get into my portfolio, that's already a very high bar,
(27:40) and in most cases those companies are going to do exceptional in the long haul. So I don't believe it's going to be any different from Equifax, Salesforce, Intuit booking, Apple, Chipotle, you name these companies, they're fantastic. My guess is they're going to do really well. Now.
(27:56) If I did compare them to the ones I currently own, I think the basket of the ones I currently own will do better. And so far they've done a little bit better than the ones that I've sold because I usually buy, you know, I try to keep my portfolio really with the top quality ones, the ones that I think have the best risk adjusted returns.
(28:13) And so that has led me to do well so far. But yes, I want every company I want to do well. And I think they have so far. That's going to be the last question for you today. Hopefully you got something out of this. We'll see you in the next one.