Motley Fool Money - Mark Zuckerberg’s Second Act?

Episode Date: September 25, 2026

Meta had a big week as Muse continues to be the hottest product in AI and Meta Connect introduced new glasses, a VR headset, and a charm all powered by Muse. But is this another AI flash in the pan or a fundamental change in how we use technology? Plus, we discuss Oracle’s data center problem, the best tech hardware of 2026, and TPUs in space. Travis Hoium, Lou Whiteman, and Emily Flippen discuss: - Meta’s New Hardware - Muse’s Future - Oracle Declard Force Majeure - Ranking Tech Hardware - TPUs in Space - Stocks On Our Radar Companies discussed: Meta Platforms (META), Alphabet (GOOG), Stitch Fix (SFIX), Royal Caribbean (RCL), Oracle (ORCL). Host: Travis Hoium Guests: Lou Whiteman, Emily Flippen Engineer: Dan Boyd Disclosure: Advertisements are sponsored content and provided for informational purposes only. The Motley Fool and its affiliates (collectively, “TMF”) do not endorse, recommend, or verify the accuracy or completeness of the statements made within advertisements. TMF is not involved in the offer, sale, or solicitation of any securities advertised herein and makes no representations regarding the suitability, or risks associated with any investment opportunity presented. Investors should conduct their own due diligence and consult with legal, tax, and financial advisors before making any investment decisions. TMF assumes no responsibility for any losses or damages arising from this advertisement. We’re committed to transparency: All personal opinions in advertisements from Fools are their own. The product advertised in this episode was loaned to TMF and was returned after a test period or the product advertised in this episode was purchased by TMF. Advertiser has paid for the sponsorship of this episode. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Mark Zuckerberg is back on top of Silicon Valley and Motley Fool Him Gems Investing. Welcome to Motley Fooling Jim's Investing. I'm Travis Hoym. I'm joined today by Lou Whiteman and making her triumphant return, Emily Flipping. Emily, welcome back to the show. Hey, it's great to be here. I'm surprised you asked me back, Travis, but I'm sure I'll be bringing a lot of less than popular hot takes. Emily is so busy. We have to book her months in advance. Yeah, yeah. I will step aside if Emily wants to come on. You know that. All right, guys, let's start with Meta's huge week.

This has been the talk of the market. And investors are really paying attention. Over the past month, meta stock is up 33%. That is not usual for a company that is now worth nearly $2 trillion. So this is really moving markets. But I wanted to start with the devices that they talked about. They had Meta Connect this week. We had some more glasses.

Those are kind of incremental changes. And then you have this new charm that is not out yet, but is going to come out at least in the next few months. Emily, when you look at META's device strategy here, anything get excited to you? Does having a muse agent on your face get you excited as either a user or an investor? I'm going to probably surprise you by saying, yes, I actually do think that for the first time in a while,

we're talking about MetaConnect making headlines, and that's because I can see genuine use cases for their hardware for the average person. Now, I'm primed to say this. I think shares of meta were up something like 15%. heading into MetaConnect. So there was already some positivity around their AI initiatives, in particular, their AI agent muse. But the thing that got me most excited is just how practical a lot of their hardware is increasingly

becoming. I'm not talking about the Tomogachi. That's a little kitschy. But I am talking about how realistic their meta glasses have become, especially with their partnership with Rayban, this time around, they're actually launching glasses that do not have the camera attached. And I would say that this has been the biggest kind of like headline against meta. since their move into glasses and hardware has been, how creepy is it that somebody is potentially

filming you with their mediglasses on? And it made people who were legitimately using meta glasses feel weird, even if they were using them in a perfectly legitimate way. So being able to buy a pair of metal glasses without the camera, wear them around, say, in private spaces like in your house or out in public without necessarily drawing attention, that to me is a step in the right direction. Lou, what do you think? It's a step in the right direction.

Look, as someone who wears glasses, the idea of not having the... them take them off and not see when I'm out in public. That, that I guess is a selling point for me. I still don't know if I see. I still come back to this, but I don't think we give the smartphone enough credit. I still don't know if there really is the normals need a second device. I think the first device is pretty good. So I still don't think this is a big winner. I know why they're doing it. I would want to be off of these ecosystems too. You know, they're making them slightly less useful, I guess without the camera, but more practical. And it is.

It seems like it's neat. It's gimmicky. It's going to be early adapter catnip. And I don't think two years from now this is going to really have changed the world at all. Lou, I want to go into what meta is probably thinking here. Because one of the themes that we've talked about in the past with Meta and with Mark Zuckerberg in particular is that he would love to own a platform. He literally renamed the company Meta Platform. even though meta doesn't actually have any platforms.

They have apps. They are an advertising company at their core. But I don't disagree that these are really, really interesting pieces of hardware. But is this enough to become a platform? We'll talk about Muse in just a moment. But these two things go together where Muse is going to be this AI agent, the hardware of the glasses, the charm, the Tamagachi charm thing, is going to be the thing that you can talk to kind of passively throughout,

your day if you want. The idea there then would be that the platform side of this would be companies then can then connect to that. So you can connect your email. You can connect your Uber. You can connect all kinds of different things. And that's how they become a platform. Is that something that's even possible for them?

Or is this not a 10x gain in hardware or literally just having the device that's already a platform in your pocket? It's possible. But again, like what moves consumer behavior, Travis? We've had fun with this. The first smart fridge was, what, 2000? And we're still not having robots order all our groceries. Consumer behavior is hard to change when things are good enough.

And there's both the wow and then there's the day to day. I love going to Cirque de Soleil. I do not want to live in Cirque de Sala. This is fun. This is neat. This is new. But is this going to be, am I going to change my life to make this part of my life? That is, even if it's great products, that is such a hard thing to do.

You throw in the fact that we've already given all of the permissions that are needed or a lot of them to other companies that could sort of copy this. I get why Zuck's doing it. I don't blame them for doing this and maybe I'm underestimating it. But I've just seen so many AI companies declared the winner in just two years when something new comes out only to see let's all get bored of it or just normal. it and look for the next big thing in weeks. And I don't know. Until I see otherwise, I kind of think Muse is having its moment and then we'll move on to something else.

Emily, I wanted to tee this up. Lou let us hear. But, you know, Muse has been a very popular app, number one in all of the app stores getting a ton of attention. But just in the last 24 hours, I noticed a change in the discussion in sort of these, you know, Twitter is kind of where tech people are talking about these things. as people are talking about what's going on. This comes from Ben Carlson of Riddle's asset management.

I tried it for one morning, fun parlor trick. I feel like the tech people who try to optimize everything in their lives are overselling this stuff for regular people. Can two things be true here that this hardware is really cool? Muse is an amazing app. And also, it's just not going to change the world? Or how should we think about this? Because the stock is up 33% in a month.

I actually think it might be the opposite. And the reason I say that is I disagree with Carlson here. I mean, I think something like a personal assistant, an AI-driven personal assistant is actually something that a lot of average people can use. But to lose point, you need to give them a reason to change their behavior. And right now, that involves coming out with an AI assistant for which the barriers to entry are incredibly low. The trust is really high.

And people can seamlessly integrated into their lives without having to change too much behavior. And that to me, on the retail side of AI is one of the more practical implication. And I understand META's push here because to your point, they've been constantly trying to get people into their hardware to cut out the middleman in this case, Apple, of course, so they don't have to pay them fees. And they need to give people a reason to buy the hardware. And they're saying, if we come out with the first, the best AI personal assistant, that gives people a reason to come in and buy our hardware. And that to us, maybe it's not world changing, but it is game changing for us as a company. I think the issue with META and the reason why Mews in this case is probably a little bit overhyped is because I just don't think meta is that partner for AI personal assistant when they're going up against companies that already have better and more trusted amounts of data on their users. I'm thinking about Google and a potential launch of a Gemini powered AI assistant later this year. Lots of people use Google for Gmail. They use Google Calendar. That seamlessly integrates. That's information and data they already have. Even on a business case like Apple, who has invested less

and direct AI, but a lot of data flows to your iPhone already. That in terms of integration for the average user is a lot easier. In the case of meta, you're having to hook up so many third parties to meta's AI personal assistant, that I actually think that barrier is the issue. And I'd be surprised if three months from now, we're still talking about Mews being, say, the number one app on the App Store. Let's think about this if it wasn't AI.

Let's say it's a new widget or something or something like that. Just as an investor, is Mew is anything patented? Is it anything? Is it magic that it can't? If not, it's a challenge. We talked about this earlier this week. Is there any moats in the world of AI? And it doesn't seem as there is.

And look, option one is. is that, you know, Zuck spent a lot of money on a team of AI researchers. Maybe he's just able to create magic that no one else can. And if so, that's a huge competitive advantage. Option two, which I think is more likely is that, you know, they got here first. If Gemini, if the Gemini team wasn't working on exactly that, they can now pivot and move to exactly that. And six months from now, what seemed like again, remember when ChatGTP was like, wow, open AI is going to be worth a quadrillion dollars because who else could do this?

And then three months later, you know, we got that answer. This feels like a similar moment. And as an investor, I think that should at least, you at least need to keep that in mind, even if you are very, very bullish about meta right now. It should at least that downside or that risk should be in your head. The other thing that we don't have a great answer to is how they're going to monetize this. You know, Mark Zuckerberg has said, hey, we'll just, we'll take a small cut of each transaction that happens with Muse.

That involves getting people to put their credentials in Mews, their credit card, you've got to connect your Uber account or your Walmart account, whatever it is. There's a lot of trust to be built there connecting all those financial institutions

you can connect to Mews. That's a pretty heavy lift. And the thing that I, we talked about this before the show, but when I tried out Mews, and if you have not tried it, I do recommend that you just try it out, connect something that's kind of low risk

and just see how powerful it is because it's been very useful for sort of basic day-to-day things. But I'm not connecting, you know, my financial information. I'm not connecting, you know, a lot of these accounts so that it can, like, go book flights for me because that just seems like a bridge too far. And it's easy enough to do those things where we stand today. All right.

Well, Travis, just one more thing, even if you were going to do that, I know a trillion pennies adds up, and that's how these things work. But when you're spending hundreds of billions of dollars a year on compute and you are used to a double-digit return on invested capital. I don't even know, even if everyone does sign up for everything, that's a lot of just incremental fees. Yeah, I don't know how the payoff happens here. Yeah. Don't forget that meta has a phenomenal business model in advertising, and it isn't quite clear if the affiliate model that there seem to be going to is necessarily better. But phenomenal product. I want to give Mark Zuckerberg credit because this is a great product. It seems

like the people that he hired about a year ago spending several tens of billions of dollars acquiring companies and hiring talent is at least paying off for right now. When we come back, we're going to talk about what's going on in New Mexico. You're listening to Motley Fool, Hidden Gems, Investing. You just found out that your sales team is at risk of missing quota. Don't panic. Just ask Rippling AI. Since it's built on your real-time people and business data, Rippling AI can pull metrics from Rippling and Salesforce into a meeting-ready dashboard showing quota attainment, headcount plan, and monthly revenue to quota by region. In seconds, you'll see exactly what's behind your quota risk and fix it before it's missed. Question answered, action taken,

crisis averted. When you have critical business questions that need answers, don't just file a ticket and wait weeks for an outdated report. Describe what you need and have Rippling AI build it instantly from your live people and business data. Whether it's a dashboard with detailed charts or automated workflows with the right triggers, conditions, and approvals. Ready to rule your business? Head to rippling.a.ai slash fool to get the only AI built to give you full visibility and take complex actions across your entire organization. That's R-I-P-P-L-I-N-G-A-I-S-O-O-L.

Sign up for exclusive access today, rippling. com. Welcome back to Molly Fool, Hidden Gems, investing. This week, Oracle invoked force majeure. I don't know, am I saying that right, Lou? Basically. On one of its Stargate contracts, Lou, what is a force majeure? So I think literally in French, it means superior force.

It's a legal term. It's kind of baked away in most contracts, but you, the interesting is, we don't hear about it, but basically it's a safety net. It is, if there is an unexpected, uncontrollable event, I have an excuse not to fulfill my duties as part of a contract. It's not supposed to be run in the mill, but here we are. To lose point, I mean, he just said, you don't hear about it very often. Yeah, there's a reason for that.

Prior to coming to the flow, I worked in Energy Project Finance. All of these contracts have force-measure options. But outside of something extraordinary happening, it's kind of considered like the nuclear option when it comes to these types of contracts. It's not, in my opinion, routine business. And it's so interesting to me that Oracle and its counterparties here are all making this out to be like, oh, nothing to see here. Yeah, that's what was really striking to me, Emily, is that.

that they have kind of blown this off. The stock was down a little bit and it recovered. And it was kind of like, ah, no, this is. I mean, this, the remaining performance obligations from Open AI are a major reason to own Oracle's stock today. When do we actually see force majeure used? Because this doesn't, this isn't something that gets headlines very often.

So when has historically this been something that we've, we've heard more about? So, I mean, COVID is a great example. Extreme, non-foreseeable situation. are typically when you'll have somebody looking to get out of a contract. And unfortunately, of course, we don't have, we're not privy to the contract that exists between Oracle and its developer. But we do have some indication. There's been some reports that Oracle is on the hook, I suppose, for supplying energy, procuring power for this data center. And we've seen headlines that that might be a challenge, including getting approvals as part of this deal. And if I had to venture a guess,

I would imagine they're trying to invoke force measure because they're really unable to get the power that they need within the timeline they expected. And as a result, they don't expect the project to meet its construction period, although again, worth noting that everybody is saying, that's not the case. We're still going to meet all these deadlines. Again, I don't think you invoke force measure if nothing is going on behind the scenes that has you particularly concerned. And if nothing is going on behind the scenes that has you particularly concerned, then why is Oracle basically fighting for pennies on this contract by getting negative headlines. It begs another question about, is this a yellow flag for the financial state of Oracle right now? Right. I think they, yeah, the Y them and why now is

the most interesting part of this. And the why them, look, I'm not surprised that it's Oracle and not alphabet or meta. You know, we've talked about just the relative strength. And not that Oracle doesn't have any money. They have an established business too. But they are, they've been the one since the beginning. It's funny, this is a cast of characters. This is everyone, Blue Owl is involved. here, everyone that we've been talking about like, oh, really, in this. So maybe that's it. But the why now, too, because to Emily's point, I mean, I haven't watched this, but this project has been sort of like many data center projects, kind of taking punches for months now. I wonder, is, you know, is one of Oracle's lenders getting nervous? Is Oracle looking to go back

the debt markets? And this is the question they're getting. So they're trying to kind of flex here. I mean, I could just be total conspiracy theory. It could just be Oracle's doing their end of quarter assessment and realizes, okay, this is, you know, we need to update this. But I do think that it's, yeah, this is not something that is routine. And it is, maybe it's just telling us what we already know that we were right to wonder about this particular group of players relative strength compared to others. But the funny thing about this, Travis, is that I can see us doing, I can see this never coming up again, or I can see this being the biggest story when we do a year in review.

This is like the Bear Stearns moment. Right, right. Yeah, I mean, I think both is possible. Either this will be a footnote or like, yeah, we'll get to the end of year and like, wow, why aren't we more focused on this? I think both are possible. And it's kind of terrifying that I have no idea which one is true. If you look at the numbers, they just pulled up Boricals balance sheet as of their August

2026 quarter, $37 billion worth of cash, about $125 billion worth of debt. And one of the things that I track is what are those debt costs? cost doing. And the two companies that I look at pretty regularly is Oracle and CoreWeave. And the cost of that debt has exploded. So Emily, it seems like that's the challenge here is, you know, this entire market is invested in this AI buildout. But that build out from the bit hyperscalers to the neoclouds to Oracle is now being built on debt. That cost of debt is going up. It's going out for everyone. But it's also going up more for these companies that are because bond markets are starting to say, hey, is there really a big pay?

off here? Yeah, and you can look at the credit default spreads on a lot of the debt, especially Oracle's, and you can see how wide those spreads are, which does indicate that on the secondary markets, there's not a lot of demand, so to speak, in the sense that people who are taking on these obligations, right, purchasers of this debt would be taking it on for a pretty substantial discount to what your expected returns would be, which I think says a lot about the perceived risk behind a lot of these companies. Now, I do think it's worth noting, like Oracle, I've said this before, and I'll repeat it again, it's kind of the canary and the coal mine to me because it is so heavily levered. It just faced a credit rating downgrade. Their free cash flow negative,

they didn't have the incredible balance sheet that a lot of the other hyperscalers had when they started to make these initiatives and these buildouts of things like massive data center. So when I think about the domino's falling to the extent that somebody thinks they're going to fall, Oracle is kind of like that first domino that could be tipped. And that's why we have so much focus on why they're, in this case, penny pinching over what. would be a rent increase in a couple of years if they weren't able to force measure. So it does beg the question of like, why this, why now? And if it starts to happen to Oracle, who else could it happen to as well?

So here is, I'm trying to be a practice here. And here's why I think all this could be a good thing or matter. It's because there's people like us, lawyers, pundits, everybody has been arguing forever. Like, all right, well, is Blue Owl exposed here or no, Oracle isn't exposed here? Why don't we just go like hash it out? I don't know. You know, like if they actually follow through here, at least instead of just debating legal ramifications and who's on the hook for where,

what, maybe we'll get a little clarity on like a non-hypothetical. Maybe. I don't know. Like, I don't wish Oracle harm, but maybe if this plays out, we can actually answer some of these questions instead of just speculate about them. Yeah, it's so interesting. We talked earlier in the show about the AI products that are coming out. Those are incredible.

I don't think any of us are debating that there's a ton of important technology being built. But then underneath it is, what's the business bottle? who's going to pay for all this debt? And even a company like Meta, we don't have a great answer. So lots of that to come over the course of the rest of the year in 2027. We'll be back in a moment. Welcome back to Molly Fool, Hinn-Gems, investing. In this segment, we like to have a little fun with investing. So I wanted to rank the top tech products of 2026. We got the new charm and some new glasses from meta this week. So where does that rank with Apple Duo? Waymo's OG? Is that their new? new vehicle?

I don't know exactly. Oh, hi? Is that I say? That's probably right. It sounds better than what I said. Fitbit Air or the Garmin Circa. So these new smart watches that don't actually have a watch on them. They're just kind of connecting your data.

The aura ring, aura, by the way, going to be going public here maybe in the next week or so. And the figure Helix 3 can't quite buy this humanoid robot yet. But if it can fold my laundry, it may actually be worth something. So Emily, those are the products that I want you to rank today. Which one is going to have the most lifetime profit? At the end of the day, we're investors.

We want products that make money. Which one's actually going to make money for these companies? Yeah, when he first asked this question, I was thinking to myself, sales. That's an easy one. No, but profits really does add an extra dimension here. And I think, in my opinion, I think I'll fight anybody who disagrees with me on the first one. It has to be the Apple duo, right? The flip phone from Apple, they're selling it for nearly $2,000.

They have by far the biggest scale, incredibly profitable company. I mean, Apple does not miss. Yeah. To that point, you're really, really insulting the people at Apple if you think that they are going to do this if they can't make a profit on it. They're not flat. They introduced the Air, the iPhone Air a year ago. We're already talking about that essentially coming to its end of life because it hasn't sold very well. You don't think that's possible for the duo?

It's certainly possible, but I will say Travis with this list you gave us, he set the bar pretty low. Yeah. And also it's profit on a unit basis then again. I don't think I want a tablet as a phone personally, but I don't do a lot of, like I'm old. I have TV. So I mean, I'm not the target audience. I live in fear of, you know, teenagers that instead of they're distracted by their phone, that their entire face is covered as they're walking down the street because of these huge things.

So I don't know. But look, I do think that there's a market for this. And I do think that Apple has priced it to be profitable. So I think, again, as Emily said, I don't see a lot of profits on this list, so I lean in there. If I could offer another one, though, I'm going to go to the other extreme, kind of the most boring thing on here, whether it's the Fitbit A or the Garmin product. And again, I'm going to lean on Apple here. If Apple is suddenly, according to reports, scrambling to come out with their own version of this, I, again, I, this is, I'm boring and consistent on this. I don't think we need new smart screens.

I think that I have a smart watch and I hardly ever use, to be honest. I think just something that collects whatever health data because I do see value there, but doesn't have a screen and is lower cost. I think that's a hit. And again, if you're talking profits, it's also without that screen, not that expensive. I think the world is moving not towards more screens, sorry, Zuck, but fewer screens and just My phone works pretty well and little kind of add on things like a Fitbit Air where it's just collecting kind of your health data you want without the added bells and whistles. That they might be on to something there.

What do you think? Is that a compelling product, Emily? Well, I'm balancing those, you know, I don't disagree. We're talking about a high volume product and something like the Fitbit Air, Garmin Circa. I'm trying to balance it against another one on your list, Travis, which was the ORARing 5, which is effectively, in my opinion, the same thing. but it does sell at a higher price point. Now, I hate to give a nod to ORA ring here because I actually really hate the rings.

I think they're ugly. I think they're for people who just won't, you know, sacrifice and go get yourself a nice big Garmin smart watch like I have. But I don't love what I've seen in the documents here for or ahead of going public. But they do have incredible gross margins on their product. I think there's a lot of power users who are probably willing to pay up for it. So I think I actually rank the ORR ring higher than the Fitbit Air or Garmin Circa in terms of, you know, total profits that they can generate.

Now, do I like ORA as a company? Is this me telling investors to go out and buy this IPO? No, no. And there's so many reasons for that. But another one being O'Ring is kind of like, in my opinion, Fitbit back in, was it, what was it, what, 2016, 2017? I have some flashbacks to what it was like to be a Fitbit bull, of which, of course, I was back then.

And I think, or in my opinion, it's probably headed in the same direction. So is the basic idea here from both of you that the band that's collecting information from your wrists, that's kind of socially acceptable. It has a little bit of staying power. But the ring that is collecting information has a little less staying power as a device we're going to be wearing a decade from now. I think it has less power users in terms of the data that it's able to collect. And I think that's, if you look at the performance of Garmin recently, I think that's a great example. of it because these Garmin devices that they've launched, their fitness segment has been an incredibly strong performer for them because they're niche. They find the person who swims every day, the person

who golfs, the person who runs, and they find, okay, what's the best, most valuable data that we could provide to that niche? And how do we get them to pay $2,000 for this watch? And in my opinion, that's the only reason Garmin has been able to sustain itself in the world of Apple watches, which is for the more everyday consumer. Or a ring, in my opinion, is trying to be the Apple watch without actually being a watch. It collects minimal amount of data. The data, in my opinion, it's not particularly useful that it does connect or particularly reliable. But it's a fashion statement. It's cheaper. It's easily accessible. But ultimately, is it the sort of thing that people really devote themselves to and wear every single day? In the case of the Apple watch, you had your iPhone

attach, all your data there for Apple. So it makes a lot of sense for why that had staying power. In the case of garment, it was more niche. That has staying power. I don't see the staying power with or unless somebody comes around and acquires them and gives us a reason to put it on every day. And it feels like small sample size, but everyone I know who has an aura also has a garment or an Apple watcher. So I think Emily's right that it is sort of a status thing. I mean, look, I played a lot of basketball growing up. I almost had to wear a wedding watch. So I don't think I am the target because I can't get rings on my hand. So maybe I'm just missing out on the fun. but it feels more fad than some of these other things.

We'll see. I think it is maybe higher margin than some of these other products, but also maybe less total addressable market or less staying power. One more, though, if you want like profitability, whatever you want to, however we want to pronounce the Waymo vehicle. Yeah. Look, they are, this is their core business,

so they have to be, you know, to make it profitable. Their cost right now is pretty high. so if they can self-develop and actually have a form that optimizes what they do, I would think that lifetime profitability, this could be a dark horse, assuming Waymo's tech continues to work as we want because it seems like that this is maybe second only to ORA because the ring is their only business, but this is the one that is most core to the business in terms of if Waymo is going to work, they need to design a purpose-fit vehicle that works. So this may be the Dark Horse winner on profits.

Yeah, and if you're not familiar with the Ohio, this is a purpose-built vehicle like Lou said. So it's actually made by Zeker. It's made in China coming over to the U.S. It's essentially just a small van, but there's no driver in it. It's built to be fully autonomous with all the hardware built in.

So instead of having this stuff that's added on afterwards, like we have with traditional Waymo vehicles or even with like the new Lucid vehicles, it's all integrated. So it's kind of like where we seem to be going in the future. But Emily, that seems to be a pretty compelling thing for them because they've proven the tech. Now it's a matter of how do you bring down the cost and actually make this into a real business. Yeah. And let me let me just pose that one step further.

Okay, let's say you do bring down the costs. Where's your revenue coming from? It's ride share. So you're thinking to yourself, what I'm basically doing is in the case of the oh high, I am basically just replacing the Ubers of the world with these robotic vehicles. And that's your addressable markets. And we know how challenging it has been for Uber and how many years it took to generate sustainable profits on their platform now.

In the case of Waymo, they would not necessarily be sharing those with the drivers. And that was obviously and continues to be a big headwind for the Ubers of the world. But I will say, I actually kind of disagree with Lou here because I don't see the same opportunity for profits just based off of how Waymo is planning on finding value. you're finding revenue from the Ohio itself, which is to your point, a purpose-filled taxi vehicle. Now, I think Waymo can get there eventually, and I think eventually they will be selling a lot of these products to the general populace. And in that case, I think that's where a lot of their margin will come from. But when I'm looking out over the next, like, you know, we didn't determine a

timeframe, but let's say five years, five to 10 years. I just don't think, I think the Ohio is an example of what Mamo can do with an attempt to spread awareness, to spread adoption of self-driving vehicles, I don't think it is going to be a big profit generator for them. All right. We kind of have two product categories left. Meta's products in the humanoid robot from figure. Emily, where do you stack those up? Oh my gosh.

Well, you know, I never thought I'd be putting something behind meta here, but here I am. I think in the case of meta, I actually mentioned at the top of the show, but I'm, I'm pretty bullish. I think if they're able to get people onto the AI assistant about how many people may adopt their new glasses as a result. And even for people who aren't onto their AI assistance, the glasses in general, not having a camera, I actually think that with the press and the positive direction in that regard to product development, the new glasses at the price point, which I think there, aren't they just right around? Someone help me out here. There's several different price points,

and that's one of the things that's interesting because they do have a lot of partners, actually, you know, so there's Oakley glasses, there's Ray Band glasses. There's becoming many more options for users. Yes. And in this case, I'm thinking of specifically at the Rayband glasses. That's probably the next one I'd put up in terms of profits. And I even would put the Tomoguchi. I hate calling it a Tamagotchi, but the charm, the charm that they attach as part of this hardware initiative. I almost put that above the figure Helix 2, which is the humanoid robots, not just because

there's obviously so much uncertainty about what humanoid robots look like, but I could see a world in which if hardware does take off for meta, these things become almost like collectors items for the power users. Maybe they don't sell a lot, but maybe they're able to demand a premium. Who knows? Yeah, I think I'm pretty skeptical. And again, Emily did a good job bringing up a time frame because that does matter with Waymo. I still, I even think glasses are going to end up being a fad.

I don't think there's any permanence in any of these product categories. I think we're going to use them. We're going to get sick of them. I mean, at best, maybe the arc of a tablet, which is done pretty well. But again, tablets sort of feel like yesterday's news. I'd still put it over. I mean, Travis, you say you'd love to have a robot to do your laundry, but is laundry really so painful that you'd pay $20,000, $30,000 to have it do the laundry? Yes.

As the person who's not allowed to do laundry anymore in our house, yes, probably. I may be a long way off, but A, I am still skeptical about, you know, how these things do fine motor skill movement. in a variety of things. I know the challenges that they're having in factories that if you wanted to be fine motor skills, it has to be specialized. So this kind of humanoid replacement,

like Rosie can go fold your laundry and then do your dishes and do all of these different fine motor skills tasks, that feels like a long way off, very expensive and not a lot of profits. All right. Well, the vote is,

sounds like incremental products are going to be more successful than these revolutionary products. It's an interesting way to look at tech today. When we come back, we're going to talk about the Stocks on our radar. You're listening to Motley Fool in Jem's Investing. As always, people on the program may have interest in the stocks they talk about, and the Motley Fool may have four more recommendations for or against, so don't buy ourselves

stocks based solely on what you hear. All personal finance content follows the Montley Fool's editorial standards and is not approved by advertisers. Advertisements are a sponsored content and provided for informational purposes only. To see our full advertising disclosure, please check out our show notes. All right, I wanted to get to one of the interesting news items that came out last night. That is TPUs in space, Lou. We've been talking about all the opportunities in space for months. We've been talking about data centers in space, which seemed like a pipe jam and a crazy idea.

But this project may go into space next week. That seems like something pretty interesting. It is. But data centers in space, let's do a big asterisk here. I saw, we're measuring this in kilowatts, not gigawatts, okay? and we're measuring it in less. Several orders of magnitude difference between a kilowatt and a gigawatt. And not even several kilowatts from what I saw.

Okay. So what we're talking, we're talking about a server in space and not really a data center. But look, this is good. Incremental progress. Tests are good. We have been talking about will this work, will this work at scale, all of that? We need to at least start doing this and find out if it works. I remain skeptical.

Look, I mean, it's a different industry. but look at QuantumScape, which has been a favorite among investors because of the promise of solid state batteries. And sure enough, we've seen that solid state batteries, they work. We've known this now for decades and Quantum Skates Chemistry. They proved that out years ago. And yet we're still not driving them anywhere. You know, they can't be done at scale. They can't be done.

I think that there's something similar here that, yes, let's get some TPUs up there, see how they behave, see how long they last, to see if our radiation and our heat sucks work and all of that. Maybe this is the first step towards data centers in space, but this is not, oh, wait, it happened. You know, we're a long way from that. Emily, it also seems like this is something that will be welcome for a lot of people around the world who don't necessarily want data centers, not in their backyard, but just around them at all.

Yeah, it's rare that you have an initiative in the AI space that, you know, the general populace and Elon Musk are both behind, which is, yeah, sure, send the data centers out of space. But I will say, you know, we're as investors when we think about these things. We're not scientists, obviously. We're not the people who are actually doing the really important work behind how to make that feasible. But we do have the option to listen to people and listen from experts.

And when I hear Elon Musk come out and say, we're going to have, you know, it's going to be cheaper to build a data center in space in two to three years and it will be to build it on Earth. And then I also have a team of engineers coming out from Google saying, yeah, we're testing this out right now, but it's probably going to be 10 plus years before we're practicing. which is, in my opinion, it's still a very short time frame. But before we're practically actually doing anything with data centers in space, I know who I personally lean towards believing, but I do think it's great that there is

general social acceptance of the concept of data centers in space, which at the beginning of the year sounded crazy to me. How terrible is it going to be when it turns out that AI does just wipe out the humanity, but it does so by giving Martians a cheat code and they can come in or something like that? Have we thought this through people? I don't know. At least there's no force majeure in space. All right, let's get to the stocks on our radar.

Emily, you're up first. We'll bring in Dan Boyd behind the glass for his thoughts. So this is a bit of a surprising one for me, but the stock on my radar this week is Stitch Fix, the ticker is STFX. And the reason Stitch Fix is on my radar is because they reported yet another what the market deemed to be dismal quarter. I mean, shares of this company are down 90 plus percent from where they were even just a few years ago.

And that's because ultimately personal styling, especially in the advent of AI, has had a hard time keeping people engaged, keeping them buying stuff on their platform. But I made this mistake with Peloton in the past where I wrote off investments entirely because I perceived them as completely uninvestable and discounted how much a niche audience can really stick around. And one of the things that I saw a Sitchfix this quarter was that they have a niche supply of people who are very engaged, high retaining, loyal users of their platform. I still think the company has a lot of existential threats, but I am wondering to myself, how cheap is too cheap for Stitch Fix when it comes to the fact that it seems like there's a group of users for this program and this app that will not churn. Dan, what are your thoughts on Stitch Fix for your clothes? Well, you know, I actually used to be a Stitch Fix user. Really? And I enjoyed it.

I thought it was great because I do not like clothes shopping whatsoever. But I stopped for two reasons. One, it's quite expensive. And two, the pandemic and the switch to working from home means I just don't need nice clothes very much. So the ones I have are fine, right? So, yeah, it just was something that I didn't need anymore. Dan, you should take more pride in your clothing. Re-sign up for Stitch Fix.

See what they send to you. Yeah, I'm sure my two-year-old and four-year-old would appreciate that. If back to the office, maybe the most bullish case for Stitch Fix, Lou, what are you looking at this week? All right, Dan, I want to look at Royal Caribbean. Cruises, ticker RCL, and look, I am not looking at it because I want to take a cruise. God no, that's the last thing I want to do. But rather, I'm looking at it because Royal Caribbean did something I thought was pretty interesting this week. They took a 50% stake in resort operator sandals, spending $3 billion for it. Now, look, I mostly know sandals from a subplot in the office,

but they do have a portfolio of 18 all-inclusive resorts throughout the Caribbean that are very, very popular. I think this is interesting because RCL, look, they're trying to expand behind the boat. Management sees a $35 billion market opportunity here. By comparison, Royal Caribbean did like $20 billion in revenue in the last 12 months. So even if, you know, I know total redressable market games, but if they can actually get past the boat and find something here, that's interesting. It's also interesting to me because cruise lines kind of left for debt after COVID, they have rebuilt themselves to the extent that now they can invest billions in a questionable consumer market where, you know, otherwise you'd think they'd be battening down to hatches, pardon the pun.

So I think, you know, this pivot is interesting. It could be a differentiator. I'm watching closely. I'm curious how this works out. Dan, cruises and sandals? Yeah, so sorry, Lou, but there's, I don't think any power on this earth that can make me be interested or invest in a cruise company. I find the idea of cruising absolutely important. I'm actually with you there. Make it official, Dan, which one's going on your watch list? Surprising everyone, we're going to go with Stitch Fix this time around. Oh, congratulations, Emily.

That's all the time we have for today. Thanks for listening to everybody. Thanks for it to Dan Behind the Glass, Lou and Emily for joining me. We'll see you here tomorrow.