The Best One Yet - 🥬 “Organic Doritos?” — Whole Foods’ amazonification. Palantir’s anti-college recruiting. AI’s unpopularity problem. +Nvidia’s chicken stock

Episode Date: November 4, 2025

Palantir doesn’t want college experience… so it’s hiring 18-year-olds for full-time jobs.Did you notice Doritos at Whole Foods?... Because the organic grocer has been “Amazonified.”AI has a PR problem: Everyone hates it… except every company is focusing on it.Plus, Nvidia’s CEO Jensen Huang crushed beers at dinner… and Korean chicken stocks jumped.Got a question for the CEO of Lyft? Leave us a voicemail here: https://tboypod.com/shoutouts$PLTR $AMZN $NVDANEWSLETTER:https://tboypod.com/newsletter OUR 2ND SHOW:Want more business storytelling from us? Check our weekly deepdive show, The Best Idea Yet: The untold origin story of the products you're obsessed with. Listen for free to The Best Idea Yet: https://wondery.com/links/the-best-idea-yet/NEW LISTENERSFill out our 2 minute survey: https://qualtricsxm88y5r986q.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_dp1FDYiJgt6lHy6GET ON THE POD: Submit a shoutout or fact: https://tboypod.com/shoutouts SOCIALS:Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tboypod TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@tboypodYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@tboypod Linkedin (Nick): https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicolas-martell/Linkedin (Jack): https://www.linkedin.com/in/jack-crivici-kramer/Anything else: https://tboypod.com/ About Us: The daily pop-biz news show making today’s top stories your business. Formerly known as Robinhood Snacks, The Best One Yet is hosted by Jack Crivici-Kramer & Nick Martell. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This is Nick. This is Jack. It's Tuesday, Tea Boy, Tuesday, November 4th. And today's pod is the best one yet. This is a Tea Boy. The top three pop business news stories you need to know today. Big week. I'm sorry, huge week.

Fasties. Jack and I are interviewing the CEO of Lyft this week. Right after Lyft's earnings, we're getting the CEO in the pod. The CEO is David Richard. And he's not just the leader of Lyft the company. He's a Lyft driver, too. True story. So, let us know if you've got questions, you want to ask the CEO of Lyft. then Jack and I will get him on the pod.

DM us your questions at T-Boy Pod, and we'll ask them to the CEO of Lyft. If you left something, though, in the back of the car, this is not the question to ask the CEO of Lyft. We should point that out. Although, if it was something sentimental, this is your best chance to get that thing back. In the meantime, we got three fantastic stories for today's,

T-boy, Jack, what do we got on the pot? For our first story, Whole Foods is getting a junk food aisle against their will. The order is coming from Amazon corporate. Whole Foods is being. fully Amazonified, and it is a sign that things just ain't working. For our second story, Palantir just reported earnings, but everyone is talking about their new graduating class? Because Palantir has 22 18-year-olds who aren't going to college,

they're going straight to the tech company instead. And our third and final story, with Americans heading to the poll this election day. Today, we're looking at one bipartisan topic, artificial intelligence. You see, AI has a major PR problem. Everyone's seems to hate it, and yet every company is betting on it. We'll explain why. We got the answer for you. But yeties, before we hit that wonderful mix of stories. Oh, what a mix of stories. No one else is doing that mix. Love the mix, Jack. Sometimes stock rise after an earnings report. Sometimes stocks jump after an analyst upgrade. And sometimes stocks pop if a CEO is pounding a beer and fried chicken at a bar in South Korea. Okay, that one just happened. Here's the news. Jensen Huang, this

CEO of NVIDIA was in Seoul, South Korea over this weekend for some business meetings. So we went out to dinner with the chairman of Samsung and the chairman of Hyundai. Those are three pretty big companies, Nick. Jack, wanting to crunch the number context for us over there. NVIDIA is America's most valuable company worth $5 trillion. Okay, Samsung and Hyundai, those are South Korea's number one and number five most valuable companies. What's going on over there?

Jack, maybe NVIDIA chips are going to end up in Samsung phones? Or maybe NVIDIA's chips are going to do self-driving hundas. Or maybe none of that, because those stocks aren't the ones that popped. It was actually the food. That's right. News of this high-profile A-list business meeting sent the stock of every food involved soaring. Get this. Shares of Cherrybro, a South Korean chicken processor jumped 30% after this dinner.

Is Invidia going to invest in wings like they're investing in chips? The restaurant they dined at? It's not publicly traded, but their fried chicken rival is. And that stock soared 20% of. 20% on Friday. Bessie's Jack and I saw the news. There has never been a hotter day for fried poultry stocks in history. Now, when Jensen left a restaurant, he said this to reporters who were gathered outside.

And we think it's this quote that actually boosted the fried chicken stocks. I love fried chicken and I love beer, and I love fried chicken and beer with my friends. Okay, we repeat. The CEO of NVIDIA said that and chicken stocks jumped. I think that's what Wall Street calls a contact high. Yeah, Bessies, this ain't investment advice, but I mean, I guess it was invest. I'm an advice. If Jensen goes to your restaurant, your stock's going to pop.

Denny's, we're looking at you. Jack, let's get our three stories. Fifteen years before this song, two boys from the Northeast met in the dorm. They had an idea to cause a cultural storm. It's the best one yet, but the best is an norm. Jack Nick, that's it. This 50% that's a fat tip. Tea Boy City on your at list.

If you know, you know, because we're ready to go. We can't wait no more, so just start the show. First, a quick word from our sponsor. For our first story, Whole Foods has now a secret stash of Pepsi, Doritos, and junk food if you ask for it. Whole Foods is getting fully Amazonified, and it's a lesson on the top rule of acquisitions. But best is, in order for Jack and I to tell this story, let's go back 10 years ago to the biggest controversy in Isle 6. Are you thinking of what I'm thinking of Jack? Asparagus water.

Oh, Asparagus water. 2015, Whole Foods introduced asparagus to water. And sold it for six bucks a bottle. Yeah, it was a real thing, by the way. It was just a plastic, clear water bottle, mostly with water, but with three sticks of asparagus. Yeah, this kind of captured the whole brand that's thinking about it. Organic, curated, elite borderline ridiculous.

This was asparagus. It was an April Fool's joke, but not April Fool's. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Asparagus water was Whole Foods incarnate. But in 2017, Whole Foods got acquired by Amazon for 13. $7 billion. At the time, it was Amazon's biggest acquisition ever. In fact, at the time, Jack and I did an interview on CBS about this deal.

And Jack, what did we say the deal was about? Correction. You did an interview on CBS. I couldn't get to the studio. So I coached you from the back room. Do you remember? I was in your ear. Yeah, it was like I was in makeup and Jack was talking to me.

And now, most people would have said this was about scaling up and doing more ridiculous water. But to Jack and I, Whole Foods getting acquired by. Amazon was about logistics. Here's what we said in 2017. Amazon would use Whole Foods's as 460 physical stores as distribution points for their e-commerce delivery, pickup, and returns nationwide. Basically, the Whole Foods location in Union Square of Manhattan is the most valuable logistics real estate in the country. With Whole Foods, Amazon could ship every single New Yorker kombucha in like 30 minutes. But here's the update, Yetis. Nearly a decade after

that deal, Whole Foods's brand is getting Amazonified like never before. Because Amazon is introducing completely processed, completely inorganic junk food. Jack, the asparagus water is rolling over in its water bottle. According to the Wall Street Journal, frustrated Amazon executives are forcing a whole bunch of prime into Whole Foods. Basically, they're trying to make Whole Foods more like Amazon and everything store to cater to more kinds of customers, basically every kind of customer. So at the Philadelphia Whole Foods, there's actually a back room. Yes. Not open to the public. Secret.

And it's filled with tide pods. Two liters of Mountain Dew. Double six packs of chips a hoys galore. Shh, Jack, we're not even supposed to talk about this. Apparently Amazon execs are hiding this because they think they would upset Whole Foods hardcores. But if you're an Amazon Normie and you just want your kick of Doritos, you can open up the Whole Foods app and they've got the Doritos in the back. They'll bring it out.

Again, not organic Doritos. This is like regular Doritos at a Whole Foods. This also sounds really inefficient. if you think about it. Well, it is, but Jack and I still call it the cheating room, because like Cheat Day, it is full of anti-Hole Foods indulgences. Fun fact, I only eat Doritos during the Super Bowl. I've seen you take a couple cheat days, Jack. Oh, by the way, at the Chicago Whole Foods, it's even more blatant, right, Jack? Amazon converted the lovely coffee area they used to have into an Amazon-branded grocery section that's right next to the Whole Food branded grocery store.

I mean, rarely do you see this type of tension in one of the one of the food. brand. Like they've turned Whole Foods into two conflicting worlds under one roof. One is Bougier organic store. The other is lower priced everything. And I got to ask you, Jack, how does the founder of the original Whole Foods feel about this whole thing? Not good. He hates it, but there's nothing he can do. In fact, on a podcast last month, he said, I married my daughter off to the richest man in the world for $13 billion. Which can buy a lot of Doritos. So Jack, what's the takeaway for our buddies over at Whole Foods? Two-thirds of all corporate acquisitions fail. And this is proof of it. Yadies, Amazon is flat out, not happy about how this

$13 billion acquisition's gone. And we're seeing it right now. Since Amazon acquired it, Whole Foods has only added 10 new stores per year, which is way slower than Sprout markets, which is considered a rival. They open 30 stores a year. What about sales? Only rising 5% a year at Whole Foods since the deal, growing slower than that organic molasses. And most important is that the market share of Whole Foods in American grocery is still just 4%. Jack, sprinkle on that context, baby. That's half the market chair of Albertsons, one third the market chair of Costco,

and one fifth the market share of Walmart. And Amazon hates trailing Walmart. Plus, besties, adding Doritos, Pepsi, and Hot Pockets is not the only sign that Amazon's Amazonifying Whole Foods, right? This last one is brutal. Yeah. It is taking away the 20% off employee discount that employees have always had when they shop at Whole Foods.

Basically, Amazon. Amazon's lost patience. Every dollar they invest in Whole Foods is a dollar not invested in cloud computing or AI. So it's not going to treat Whole Foods as a precious different brand anymore. What went wrong? Maybe Whole Foods in Amazon were simply too different to get along, or maybe they only went halfway, and they should have done this years ago. Which leads to an unofficial rule that Nick and I have heard about in business school and in Silicon Valley. Two out of three corporate acquisitions fail, and this one is proof. For our second story, 18-year-old, Elislea.

high school students are applying to Ivy League schools, and they're applying to Palantir. Introducing the new Palantir Fall Fellowship, where the PayPal Mafia send their kids instead of college. Oh, Palantir Yetis, the $500 billion publicly traded company that's also named after a sightseeing warp from Lord of the Rings. I love when you pretend that you're a Lord of the Rings fan. I just try to throw out there when I can. It's limited to Palantir and Gandalf. Well, Palantir is also the best stock so far of 2025, and it quadrupled last year. Now shall not pass the earnings. Palantir founded by Alex Karp, and its biggest client is the United States government. The Department of Defense is its sugar daddy.

Palantir has become controversial, especially this year, for a big contract they signed with ICE earlier this spring. Now, while all the other tech companies balk at supplying the United States military with artificial intelligence, Alex Karp of Palantir relishes it. And you see it in the earnings report that was announced yesterday. Jack, what kind of numbers did they get? Palantir's revenue grew by 77%. They added 204 new clients who are paying at least a million dollars a year for their AI software. But besties, what Jack and I really got fascinated with about Palantir lately is they're the first for-profit company we've seen compete against Harvard, Yale, and Princeton.

Forget the Ivy League. This is the AI League. Yeah. What are they doing, Jack? Palantir is challenging American universities with the Palantir Fall Fellowship. Get this. Instead of campuses, Palantir's four-month fall fellowship has 18-year-olds roaming conference rooms. At Palantir's Fall Fellowship, you don't get grades, you get performance reviews. And at Palantir's Fall Fellowship, you can forget about the frat parties, because you'll be tracing the idea of a suspected terrorist by following the dirty money. It's like an internship.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, it is. But no time for late night Zod Jack on Friday night. I got a PowerPoint presentation with the United States Air Force Base Base. in Abu Dhabi. According to a Wall Street profile of this fall fellowship, there is some academic curriculum taught to these 18-year-olds. Yes, they are taught Western civilization. You learn about the West, capital W, American history, and you get it all with a decidedly pro-American bend. Yeah, Bessie's, Jack and I have read Alex Carp's book, his philosophy, and he thinks colleges are failing and are trashing and not appreciating Western values. It was interesting learning his perspective. But if you want to apply to the Pounder Fall Fellowship,

You're going to need a tutor. Yeah. I don't know if you qualify, Nick. We've never talked about our SATs. Yeah, well. But you need at least a $1460 to apply. Oh, and if you think you can take the ACT instead, you're going to need a 33 plus on that exam.

500 applied for this inaugural class, and 22 were accepted. But the biggest surprise about the Palantir Fall Fellowship is that it's got the opposite business model of your college. Instead of paying $90 grand for tuition, you get paid in this fellowship. That's right. And the inaugural class of $20,000. fellows finished up this month. Some of the 18-year-olds, they're going to get a full-time offer to be a Palantir analyst.

Others will go off to regular college afterwards with a very unique gap semester. But they will all be representing a growing challenge to academia, spearheaded by the PayPal mafia. And they will all be killed if they tell their classmates about that AI software. What's the takeaway for our buddies over at Palantir? The disruption of American academia starts with the PayPal Mafia. Yeties, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and David Sacks. All of them, South African, all co-founded PayPal,

and all of them became billionaires when PayPal sold. And they're all now using their influence more than ever to change politics, business, and society. Now, interestingly, Alex Karp did not found PayPal, but he's tied with this PayPal Mafia. Peter Thiel was actually his co-founder for Palantir. And if this Palantir Fall Fellowship sounds like the Teal Fellowship? And it does, Jack?

That's because it is. Yeah. Peter Thiel's program goes, back to 2011 when he began encouraging high achievers to drop out of college and get a $100,000 check to start a company instead. Peter Thiel, Alex Karp, and for years, Elon Musk has openly ridiculed the value of MBA degrees. We do think this is an interesting, different perspective, consider, although Jack and I loved our college and MBA experiences, Jack and I met as college freshman year roommates. Yeah, I look back at my days at Middlebury and Ann Arbor, Michigan, with tremendous pride and accomplishment. Well, David said,

Alex Carp, Elon Musk, and Peter Thiel, they are all cut from the same wrist-taking cloth. And they would call it, this is what it's known as, first principles thinking. They question everything that society considers unquestionable, including college being key

to a prosperous life. Now a quick word from our sponsor. For our third and final story, AI's got a huge popularity problem. Investors are all in on an AI revolution that nobody wants. So we'll tell you the real, honest reason. Investors and us workers are all rushing into artificial intelligence.

Yaddies, let's pause the pod for a sec here. Why don't you just listen for a moment to this honest, albeit cynical pitch for artificial intelligence that Jack's going to kick off? Imagine a technology so advanced. It can create fake videos that are so real looking, you will lose track of what is real and what is fake. A technology is so smart. It can do your desk job way better than you for free. And once we put AI and robots, it'll be able to do all human work, physical and intellectual, better than we can. All right, Jack, I'm almost sold. Any caveats I should know about with this new tech? Well, sometimes it lies, and we don't know why it lies, but it's only sometimes that it lies.

It's like a dog that pees or poops in the house. We're working on it. It's going to go down. Okay, what about energy consumption with this new technology? I'm glad you mentioned energy. We need 100 new nuclear plants that's going to cost like a trillion dollars just to power it. Okay, so Jack, are you telling me this thing's going to cause electricity prices to pop and accelerate global warming? Oh, our carbon footprint's going to be huge after this. Sounds awesome. Where do I sign? Okay, everything we just said is true, albeit cynical. When presented this way, it begs the obvious question.

Jack, why the heck are we doing this? Why the hell are we doing AI? Which leads to the big news, besties. There is now broad bipartisan opposition to artificial intelligence across the country across every boundary. Today is election day. People are voting for New York City's mayor, the governors of Virginia, New Jersey,

and there's some other state offices, too. And Axios got access to some private polling data. And it turns out the one thing that Democrats, Republicans, and independents all agree on is... Hating AI. Yeah. Fake videos.

Real job displacement. Higher electricity bills. It's no wonder everyone's against it. Except for one group that is supportive of AI right now. And who's that, Jack? Those who think they can make money off it. More on that in a second. But in the meantime, with a socialist likely to become New York City's new mayor, it is worth paying attention to this particular tension.

The AI revolution is happening because of capitalism. And capitalism has at an all-time low in popularity right now in America. And its embrace of AI could make it even more so. So, Jack, what's the takeaway for all our buddies curious about the state of AI? The real reason for AI is not to make the world a better place. It's to make money. Yeties, workers.

Even if you don't like it, you are probably embracing AI so you don't get left behind. You're doing it for existential phoma. Ultimately, the key reason people use AI is because you don't want to lose your job. And politicians now, on both sides,

say that we must win the AI race or China will win the race. And there's truth to that, but it hides the true driver of all of this. We're racing into AI, to make money. Yeah, the best quote we've heard on this, NVIDIA's CEO Jensen Wong. He said there will be more millionaires created in AI than created by the internet. And it reminds us of the rush to outsource manufacturing to China that happened in the 80s, 90s and 2000s. Yeah, Jack, why don't you tell us a little more?

Moving factories from Wisconsin to Wuhan, that was hugely profitable. A lot of people made a lot of money, but it proved enormously unpopular in the long run. And it could be the same with this global AI FOMO. We need a policy to make sure it doesn't, though. Let's first get honest about why we're doing AI in the first place. It's a FOMO-driven gold rush driven by investors. Jack, could you whip up the takeaways for us for T-Boy Tuesday? Whole Foods is getting junk food pushed into their aisles by corporate up at Amazon. Is this Doritos farm raised? That is. It is the unofficial proof of our unofficial rule of mergers and acquisitions. Two out of three deals don't work. For our second story, Palantir just announced big earnings growth as their inaugural fall fellows near graduation.

American academia is being disrupted by the PayPal Mafia and their anti-college fellowships. And our third and final story, there was broad, bipartisan opposition among Americans about AI. But investors love it anyway. AI is hyperscaline because there's hyper amounts of money to be made. But Yeties, this pod's not over yet. Here's what else you need to know today. First, New York City is voting today for mayor, and there is an 89% likelihood that Democrat socialist Zora Mamdani wins, according to the predictions markets. In Virginia and New Jersey, they're voting

for their new governor in closely watched elections. Oh, and two other votes, by the way? Tomorrow, the Supreme Court is expected to rule on the legality of President Trump's terror. And on Thursday, Tesla shareholders are going to vote on Elon's $1 trillion pay package. You got to love that first Tuesday week of November. A lot of ballots this week. And second, toilet paper icon Kimberly Clark is acquiring Tylenol icon Kenvue for 48 billion bucks. It's going to make a medicine cabinet colossus. A pantry powerhouse.

If you know, you know. Ironic, by the way, because Johnson and Johnson spun off Kenvue just a couple years ago, but now it's getting spun back into somebody else. Which proves the most eternal truth of business. The lawyers and the bankers always win. like a toilet roll that was re-proled up. Anyway, the third and final, you got to know, Zuckerberg just got his second permanent physical store over the weekend, Meta Labs in West Hollywood, lovely Los Angeles. It's to showcase Meta's Oculus VR headsets and their fancy ray-band sunglasses.

It's got like a skateboard theme. Reminder, by the way, Zuck's newest glasses have a screen on the lens. You got to see it to believe it. So Zuck is letting you see it in real life at their second physical store. But then you look at a mirror and you may not believe it, so you may take them off. a third and fourth meta lab store are coming to Las Vegas and Fifth Avenue in New York City. Now, time for the best fact yet. This one discovered by Jack in our T-Boy deep dive research on the Whole Foods story. Jack, what do we got? So Whole Foods was founded like 40 years ago, starting in Texas.

And customer service was going to be their differentiator. So they didn't put numbers on the aisles. You know why? Well, first of all, have you noticed there are no numbers on the aisles at Whole Foods? I've never noticed that. I didn't notice it, but apparently it's the case. It's so that if you're walking around looking for the sourcrow and you find somebody who works at Whole Foods and you say,

excuse me, where's the sourcrow? They can't just say aisle six. They have to walk you over there and have a little chat with you. What are you using the sourcrap for? How are you going to grill those brots? It's all about, you know, people-to-people connections. Whole Foods, they don't have numbers on their aisles, so you become best friends with the horses there.

Yep. Yeah, that's it. Yetis, you look fantastic today. And if you have got a shout out for the show, if you've got the best fact yet, if you have got a question for the CEO of Lyft, we got a form in this episode description. Just fill it out.

It's a Google form, and we can get your voice or your question on the pod. And we love doing that. By the way, you look fantastic. Jack, you are glowing right now. What do you say we do this tomorrow? Can't wait. See you there.

And before we go, a happy birthday to legendary Yeti, Mia Pans are living in Montclair, but born and raised on co-hatsy. it by the sea just as I pass it. And happy birthday to James McLeod of Buffalo, New York. Oh, and he just had his first grandchild, and it's a big birthday week for the entire McLeod family.

And the bills finally took down the chiefs. Congratulations, James. And Brittany Wade, happy 30th birthday celebrating all across New York City. And happy birthday to Derek Toomey in Madison, Wisconsin. And Denise and Andy Cho from Silver Spring, Maryland, have got their three-year wedding anniversary, 11 years as best friends. You guys are looking fantastic. And congratulations to Grace McCool for passing the bar exam in Washington, D.C.

Hope you get some M&A deals. And a shout out to the winner of the T-Boy business-themed Halloween costume contest. Jack, what is it, who is it? The Dup Diva. Yeah, looks like Lulu Lemon, but in reality, it's Costco. Congrats to Amanda Wittam, a legendary bestie. She's going for two in a row. Just outside boss.

This is Jack. I own Stock of Lyft.