Mark Zuckerberg’s Second Act?

In this episode of Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing, Motley Fool contributors Travis Hoium and Lou Whiteman and Motley Fool analyst Emily Flippen discuss:

• Meta's new hardware.
• Muse's future.
• Oracle declared force majeure.
• Ranking tech hardware.
• TPUs in space.
• Stocks on our radar.

To catch full episodes of all The Motley Fool's free podcasts, check out our podcast center. When you're ready to invest, check out this top 10 list of stocks to buy.

A full transcript is below.

This podcast was recorded on Sept. 25, 2026.

Travis Hoium: Mark Zuckerberg is back on top of Silicon Valley, and Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing starts now. Welcome to Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing. I'm Travis Hoium. I'm joined today by Lou Whiteman and, making her triumphant return, Emily Flippen. Emily, welcome back to the show.

Emily Flippen: 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.

Travis Hoium: Emily is so busy. We have to book her months in advance.

Lou Whiteman: I will step aside if Emily wants to come on. You know that.

Travis Hoium: Guys, let's start with Meta's huge week. This has been the talk of the market. 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 two trillion dollars. 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 incremental changes. 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 use agent on your face gets you excited as either a user or an investor?

Emily Flippen: 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 Meta Connect making headlines, and that's because I can see genuine use cases for the hardware for the average person. Now, I am primed to say this. I think shares at Meta were up something like 15% heading into Meta Connect. There was already some positivity around their AI, initiatives, in particular, their AI agent Muse. 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 Tamagotchi; that’s a little kitschy, but I am talking about how realistic their Meta glasses have become, especially with their partnership with Ray-Ban. T

his time around, they're actually launching glasses that do not have the camera attached. I would say that this has been the biggest headline against Meta since their move into glasses and hardware has been how creepy is it that somebody is potentially filming you with their metaglasses on. I made people who were legitimately using Meta glasses feel weird, even if they were using them in a perfectly legitimate way. Being able to buy a pair of Meta glasses without the camera, wear them around, say in private spaces in your house or out in public without necessarily drawing attention, that to me is a step in the right direction.

Travis Hoium: Lou, what do you think?

Lou Whiteman: It's a step in the right direction. Look, cause somebody who wears glasses, the idea of not having them take them off and not see when I'm out in public. 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 the normals need a second device. I think the first device is pretty good. 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. They're making them slightly less useful, I guess, without the camera, but more practical. It seems like it's neat, it's gimmicky. It's going to be early adopter catnip. I don't think two years from now, this is going to really have changed the world at all.

Travis Hoium: 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 Platforms, 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, the glass, the Tamagotchi charm thing, is going to be the thing that you can talk to passively throughout your day if you want. The idea there then would be the platform side of this would be companies can then connect to that. 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 over literally just having the device that's already a platform in your pocket?

Lou Whiteman: 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. There's both the wow and then there's the day-to-day. I love going to Cirque du Soleil. I do not want to live in Cirque du Soleil. This is fun. This is neat. This is new. But am I going to change my life to make this part of my life? 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 copy this. Look, I get why Zuck's doing it. I don't blame him 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 normalize it and look for the next big thing in weeks. I don't know, until I see otherwise, I think Muse is having its moment and then we'll move on to something else.

Travis Hoium: Emily, I wanted to tee this up. Lou let us here, but Muse has been a very popular app, No. 1 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 Twitters where tech people are talking about these things. Finance people are talking about what's going on. This comes from Ben Carlson of Riddles 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.

Emily Flippen: I actually think it might be the opposite. The reason I say that is I disagree with Carlson here. I think something like 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. 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 integrate it into their lives without having to change too much behavior. That's to me, on retail side of AI, is one of the more practical implications. 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. They need to give people a reason to buy the hardware. They say, if we come out with the first, the best AI personal assistant, that gives people a reason to come in and buy our hardware. 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 Muse 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 in direct AI, but a lot of data flow through 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, too Meta's AI personal assistant that I actually think that barrier is the issue. I'd be surprised if three months from now, we're still talking about Muse being the Number 1 app on the app store.

Lou Whiteman: Let's think about this if it wasn't AI. Let's say it's a new widget or something like that. Just as an investor, is Muse anything patented?

Travis Hoium: This is a challenge. We talked about this earlier this week. Is there any moats in the world of AI? It doesn't seem like there is.

Lou Whiteman: Look, Option 1 is that 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. If so, that's a huge competitive advantage. Option 2, which I think is more likely is that, they got here first. If Gemini team wasn't working on exactly that, they can now pivot and move to exactly that. Again, remember when ChatGPT was like, Wow. OpenAI is going to be worth a quadrillion dollars because who else could do this? Then three months later we got that answer. This feels like a similar moment. As an investor, I think you at least need to keep that in mind, even if you are very bullish about Meta right now, at least that downside or that risk should be in your head.

Travis Hoium: The other thing that we don't have a great answer to is how they're going to monetize this. Mark Zuckerberg has said, Hey, we'll take a small cut of each transaction that happens with Muse. That involves getting people to put their credentials in Muse, their credit card, you got to connect to 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 Muse. That's a pretty heavy lift. We talked about this before the show when I tried out Muse. If you have not tried it, I do recommend that you just try it out, connect something that's low risk and just see how powerful it is because it's been very useful for basic day to day things. But I'm not connecting my financial information. I'm not connecting a lot of these accounts so that it can 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.

Lou Whiteman: 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 computers, 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. I don't know how the payoff happens here.

Travis Hoium: Don't forget that Meta has a phenomenal business model in advertising, and it isn't quite clear if the affiliate model that they 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.

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Travis Hoium: Welcome back to Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing. This week, Oracle invoked force majeure. Am I saying that right, Lou?

Lou Whiteman: Basically.

Travis Hoium: On one of its Stargate contracts, Lou, what is a force majeure?

Lou Whiteman: I think literally in French, it means superior force. It's a legal term. It's baked away in most contracts. The interesting thing 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 running a mill, but here we are.

Emily Flippen: To Lou's point, he just said, You don't hear about it very often. There's a reason for that. Prior to coming to the full, I worked in Energy Project Finance. All of these contracts have force majeure options. But outside of something extraordinary happening, it's considered like the nuclear option. When it comes to these types of contracts, it's not, in my opinion, routine business; it's so interesting to me that Oracle and its counterparties here are all making this out to be like, nothing to see here.

Travis Hoium: That's what was really striking to me, Emily, is that they have blown this off. The stock was down a little bit, and it recovered, and it was like, no, the remaining performance obligations from OpenAI are a major reason to own Oracle's stock today. When do we actually see force majeure used? Because this isn't something that gets headlines very often. When has historically this been something that we've heard more about?

Emily Flippen: COVID is a great example. Extreme non-foreseeable situations are typically when you'll have somebody looking to get out of a contract. Unfortunately, of course, 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. We've seen headlines that that might be a challenge including getting approvals as part of this deal. If I had to venture a guess, I would imagine they're trying to invoke force majeure 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.

lthough 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 majeure if nothing is going on behind the scenes that has you particularly concerned. 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?

Lou Whiteman: I think the why them and why now is the most interesting part of this. The why them, look, I'm not surprised that it's Oracle and not Alphabet or Meta, 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've been the ones 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, really? In this so maybe that's it. But the why now, too, because to Emily's point, I've been watching this but this project has been many data center projects taking punches for months now, I wonder, is one of Oracle's lenders getting nervous? Is Oracle looking to go back to debt markets, and this is the question they're getting, so they're trying to flex here? It could just be total conspiracy theory, it could just be Oracle's doing their end of quarter assessment and realizes, we need to update this. But I do think that this is not something that is routine, 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 this never coming up again, or I can see this being the biggest story when we do a year in review.

Travis Hoium: This is like the Bear Stearns moment.

Lou Whiteman: I think both is possible. Either this will be a footnote or we'll get to the end of year and like, why weren't we more focused on this? I think both are possible and it's terrifying that I have no idea which one is true.

Travis Hoium: If you look at the numbers, I just pulled up Oracle's balance sheet as of their August 2026 quarter, $37 billion worth of cash, about $125 billion worth of debt. One of the things that I track is, what are those debt costs doing? The two companies that I look at pretty regularly is Oracle and CoreWeave, and the cost of that debt has exploded. Emily, the challenge here is this entire market is invested in this AI ,build-out but that build-out from the hyperscalers to the neoclouds to Oracle is now being built on debt. That cost of debt is going up for everyone but it's also going up more for these companies that are built because bond markets are starting to say, "Hey, is there really a big payoff here?"

Emily Flippen: 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, purchasers of this debt would be taking it on for 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 Oracle, I've said this before, and I'll repeat it again, it's the canary in 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 builds of things like massive data centers. When I think about the dominoes falling to the extent that somebody thinks they're going to fall, Oracle is 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. It does beg the question of why this, why now? If it starts to happen to Oracle, who else could it happen to as well?

Lou Whiteman: I'm trying to be a pragmatist here and here's why I think all of this could be a good thing or matter. It's because there's people like us, lawyers, pundits, everybody has been arguing forever, like, is Blue Owl exposed here or Oracle isn't exposed here? Why don't we just go hash it out? I don't know, 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 a non-hypothetical. I don't know, I don't wish Oracle harm, but maybe if this plays out we can actually answer somebody's questions instead of just speculate about them.

Travis Hoium: 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 model? Who's going to pay for all this debt? Even a company like Meta do not 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.

Travis Hoium: Welcome back to Motley Fool Hidden 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. Where does that rank with Apple Duo, Waymo's OG? Is that their new vehicle? I don't know exactly.

Dan Boyd: OHI.

Travis Hoium: OHI. Is that how you said? That's probably right. Sounds better than what I said. Fitbit Air or the Garmin Cirqa, so these new smartwatches that don't actually have a watch on them; they're just connecting your data. The Oura Ring, Oura, by the way, going to be going public here maybe in the next week or so. The figure Helix 3 can't quite buy this humanoid robot yet, but I don't know if it can fold my laundry; it may actually be worth something. 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?

Emily Flippen: When you 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. 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. The flip phone from Apple, they're selling it for nearly $2,000. They have by far the biggest scale, incredibly profitable company. Apple does not miss.

Lou Whiteman: To that point, you're 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.

Travis Hoium: They introduced 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?

Emily Flippen: It's certainly possible, but I will say, Travis, with this list you gave us, you've set the bar pretty low.

Lou Whiteman: 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, I'm old. I have TVs, so I'm not the target audience. I live in fear of 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. I don't know. But look, I do think that there's a market for this and I do think that Apple priced it to be profitable. 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, the most boring thing on here, whether it's a Fitbit Air or the Garmin product.

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, again, I'm boring and consistent on this. I don’t think we need new smart screens; I have a smartwatch, and I hardly ever use it, 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. 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 my phone works pretty well, and little add-on things like a Fitbit Air where it's just collecting your health data you want without the added bells and whistles. They might be on this topic there.

Travis Hoium: What do you think? Is that a compelling product, Emily?

Emily Flippen: I'm balancing those; I don't disagree. We're talking about a high volume product in something like the Fitbit Air, Garmin Cirqa. I'm trying to balance it against another one on your list, Travis, which was the Oura Ring 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 Oura Ring here because I actually really hate the rings. I think they're ugly. I think they're for people who just won't sacrifice and go get yourself a nice big Garmin smartwatch like I have. But I don't love what I've seen in the documents here for Oura head 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. I think I actually rank the Oura ring higher than the Fitbit Air or Garmin Cirqa in terms of total profits that they can generate. As a company, is this me telling investors to go out and buy this IPO? No, there's so many reasons for that. But another one being Oura Ring is in my opinion, Fitbit back in was it 2016, 2017? I have some flashbacks to what it was to be a Fitbit bull of which, of course, I was back then. I think Oura in my opinion, it's probably headed in the same direction.

Travis Hoium: Is the basic idea here from both of you that the band that's collecting information from your wrist, that's 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?

Emily Flippen: I think it has less power users in terms of the data that it's able to collect. 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 their niche. The person who swims every day, the person who golfs, the person who runs, and they find, what's the best, most valuable data that we can provide to that niche and how do we get them to pay $2,000 for this watch? 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.

Oura Ring, in my opinion, is trying to be the Apple Watch without actually being a watch. It collects a minimal amount of data. The data in my opinion, it is 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 thing that people really devote themselves to and wear every single day? In the case of the Apple Watch, you had your iPhone attached. You have all your data there for Apple, so it makes a lot of sense for why that had staying power. In the case of Garmin, it was more niche that has staying power. I don't see the staying power with Oura unless somebody comes around and acquires them and gives us a reason to put it on every day.

Lou Whiteman: It feels like a small sample size, but everyone I know who has an Oura also has a Garmin or an Apple Watch or so suddenly, that's true. I think Emily's right that it is a status thing. 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 fed than some of these other things. We'll see. I think it is maybe higher margin than some of the other products, but also maybe less total addressable market or less staying power. One more, though, if you want profitability, whatever you want however you want to pronounce the Waymo vehicle. Look, this is their core business, so they have to be to make it profitable, their cost right now is pretty high. 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 WeMo's tech continues to work as we want, because it seems like this is maybe second only to [inaudible], because the ring is their only business, but this is the one that is most core to the business in terms of if WeMo is going to work, they need to design a purpose fit vehicle that works, so this might be the dark horse winner on profits.

Travis Hoium: If you're not familiar with the Ojai, this is a purpose built vehicle, like Lou said, so it's actually made by Zeekr, it's made in China, coming over to the U.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. Instead of having this stuff that's added on afterwards, like we have with traditional Waymo vehicles or even with the new lucid vehicles, it's all integrated. It's 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.

Emily Flippen: Let me just pose that one step further. Let's say you do bring down the cost. Where's your revenue coming from? It's ride share. You're thinking to yourself, what I'm basically doing is in the case of the Ojai, I am basically just replacing the Ubers of the world with these robotic vehicles, and that's your addressable market. 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 disagree with Lou because I don't see the same opportunity for profits just based off of how Waymo is planning on finding value, finding revenue from the Ojai itself, which is, to your point, a purpose-built 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. In that case, I think that's where a lot of their margin will come from. But what I'm looking at over the next, we didn't determine a time frame, but let's say five years, five to 10 years. I think the Ojai is an example of what Memo 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.

Travis Hoium: We have two product categories left, Meta’s products and the humanoid robot from Figure. Emily, where do you stack those up?

Emily Flippen: Oh, my gosh. Well, I never thought I'd be putting something behind Meta here, but here I am. I think in the case of Meta, actually I mentioned at the top of the show, but 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 assistant, the glasses in general, not having a camera, I actually think that with the press and the positive direction in that regard to product developments, the new glasses at the price point, which I think aren't they just right around. Someone help me out.

Travis Hoium: 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, there's Oakley glasses, there's band glasses. There's becoming many more options for users.

Emily Flippen: Yes. In this case, I'm thinking of specifically at the ray band classes. That's probably the next one I'd put up in terms of profits. I even would put the Tamagotchi. I hate calling it a Tamagotchi, but the charm that they attach as part of this hardware initiative. I almost put that above the figure helix two, 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.

Lou Whiteman: Yeah, I think I'm pretty skeptical. Again, Emily did a good job bringing up 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 use them. We're going to get sick of them. At best, maybe the arc of a tablet, which has done pretty well but again, tablets feel like yesterday's news. I'd still put it over. 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, $30,000 to have it do to laundry?

Emily Flippen: Yes.

Travis Hoium: As the person who's not allowed to do laundry anymore in our house, yes, probably.

Lou Whiteman: I may be a long way off, but, A, I am still skeptical about how these things do fine motor skill movement on 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. This 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.

Travis Hoium: Well, the vote is sounds like incremental products are going to be more successful than these revolutionary products. Interesting way to look at tech today. When we come back, we're going to talk about the stock centre radar. You're listening to Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing.

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Travis Hoium: As always, people on the program may have interest in the stocks they talk about and The Motley Fool may have formal recommendations for or against, so don't buy or sell stocks based solely on what you hear. Our personal finance content follows the Motley Fool’s editorial standards and is not approved by advertisers. Advertisements are sponsored content and provided for informational purposes only. To see our full advertising disclosure, please check out our show notes.

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 were talking about data centers in space, which seemed like a pipe dream and a crazy idea, but this project may go into space next week. That seems like something pretty interesting.

Lou Whiteman: It is, but data centers in space, let's do a big asterisk here. I saw we're measuring this in kilowatts, not gigawatts, and we're measuring it in.

Travis Hoium: Several orders of magnitude difference between a kilowatt and a gigawatt.

Lou Whiteman: Not even several kilowatts from what I saw. 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 at scale, all of that. We need to at least start doing this and find out if it works. I remain skeptical. Look, it's a different industry, but look at QuantumScape, which has been a favorite among investors because of the promise of solid state batteries. 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. Yet we're still not driving them anywhere. 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, see if our radiation and our heat socks work and all of that. Maybe this is the first step towards data centers in space, but this is not, wait, it happened. We're a long way from that.

Travis Hoium: 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.

Emily Flippen: Yeah, it's rare that you have an initiative in the AI space that the general populace and Elon Musk are both behind, which is, sure, send the data centers out of space. But I will say, 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. When I hear Elon Musk come out and say, we're going to have it's going to be cheaper to build a data center in space in two to three years and it to build it on Earth. Then I also have a team of engineers coming out from Google saying, we're testing this out right now, but it's probably going to be 10-plus years before we're practically, which in my opinion, still a very short time frame. 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.

Lou Whiteman: How terrible is it going to be when it turns out that AI does just wipe out 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.

Travis Hoium: At least there's no force majeure in space.

Lou Whiteman: Yet.

Travis Hoium: Let's get to these stocks on our radar. Emily, you're up first. We'll bring in Dan Boyd behind the glass for his thoughts.

Emily Flippen: 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. The reason Stitch Fix is on my radar is because they reported yet another what the market deemed to be dismal quarter. 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. One of the things that I saw at Stitch Fix was that they have a niche supply of people who are very engaged, high-retention, 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, this app that will not churn.

Travis Hoium: Dan, what are your thoughts on Stitch Fix for your clothes?

Dan Boyd: Well, I actually used to be a Stitch Fix user.

Travis Hoium: Really?

Dan Boyd: 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. The ones I have are fine, so it just was something that I didn't need anymore.

Emily Flippen: Dan, you should take more pride in your clothing. Re-sign up for Stitch Fix. See what they send you.

Dan Boyd: Yeah, I'm sure my 2-year-old and 4-year-old would appreciate that.

Travis Hoium: It’s back to the office, maybe the most bullish case for Stitch Fix. Lou, what are you looking at this week?

Lou Whiteman: Dan, I want to look at Royal Caribbean Cruises, ticker RCL. 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 20 billion in revenue in the last 12 months. Even if 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 left for dead after COVID. They have rebuilt themselves to the extent that now they can invest billions in a questionable consumer market where otherwise, you'd think they'd be battening down to hatches, pardon the pun. I think this pivot is interesting. It could be a differentiator. I'm watching closely. I'm curious how this works out.

Travis Hoium: Dan, Cruises and Sandals?

Dan Boyd: 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 abhorrent.

Lou Whiteman: I'm actually with you there.

Travis Hoium: Make it official, Dan, which one's going on your watch list?

Dan Boyd: Surprising everyone. We're going to go with Stitch Fix this time around.

Travis Hoium: Congratulations, Emily. That's all the time we have for today. Thanks for listening, everybody. Thanks for it. To Dan behind the glass, Lou, and Emily for joining me. We'll see you here tomorrow.

Emily Flippen, CFA has positions in Peloton Interactive. Lou Whiteman has positions in QuantumScape. Travis Hoium has positions in Alphabet, Garmin, and Uber Technologies. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Alphabet, Apple, Figure Technology Solutions, Garmin, Meta Platforms, Oracle, and Peloton Interactive. The Motley Fool recommends Stitch Fix and Uber Technologies. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.