In this episode of Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing, Motley Fool contributors Travis Hoium, Lou Whiteman, and Jason Hall discuss:

• Meta Muse.
• Consumer AI adoption.
• Apple Duo.
• Time machine.
• Inflation data.
• 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. 11, 2026.

Travis Hoium: Apple has this duo, and we have a trio. Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing stars now. Welcome to Motley Fool and Gem's Investing. I’m Travis Hoium, joined by my trio of Lou Whiteman and Jason Hall. Guys, we have a lot to talk about here, but I do want to start with what I think might be the underrated biggest news of the day. Maybe this is our tech bubble. Maybe this is the investing bubble. But Jason, Meta came out with its Muse app. Have you tried this yet?

Jason Hall: I haven't tried it, but I've read through their copious marketing materials and the demo videos and things that they've put together for it. On the surface, and it's funny. Because the big thing we're talking about physically foreshadowing will be the next segment. But I do think this is by far the best packaged AI agent that we've seen for consumers. But we really don't know how well it's going to work in the real world for regular people once we get beyond the initial early adopters, the tech folks that have been involved in building it that have been using it in their real lives. To wanting a personal assistant helping making our lives easier, but there also seems to be a risk that this thing is actually going to throw more noise at people in the beginning. The question is there going to be enough emotional payback for people to stick with it long enough to actually deliver the promise of making life easier?

Travis Hoium: Let's get to what this app does. This is another artificial intelligence app. I was almost rolling my eyes when this came out because we have so many now. There's Gemini from Google. We've got Claude, we've got ChatGPT. To be fair, a lot of the functionality in this Muse app exists elsewhere. It's just hard to use. The interesting thing I downloaded it, I started playing with it a little bit. What was fascinating was it was very Apple like. I think you were alluding to that, Jason. But I hooked in. We need to talk a little bit about the privacy concerns and trusting Meta with all of your information. But what I thought was interesting plugging in just my calendar and email is you can just go, hey, I asked to add the schedule for my kids baseball game. It figured it all out, and it was perfect.

That is one of those massive pain points as a parent, as a person in the world, I get so many emails. Where's that one that has the schedule for this thing? It does just figure it out. First of all, it's Meta taking a page out of Apple's book, and that's partly from the people who they hired about a year ago. Nat Freeman, I think, was one of the people who's really instrumental in this happen in particular. But also, it seems like our digital lives have gotten far more cluttered over the past decade, so many emails, so many text messages. This is almost like the decluttering of that. Maybe that's the bullish case for AI use case, at least in a consumer standpoint.

Jason Hall: You mentioned kids’ sports, and I think you might have sold me, Travis. I have three different apps that I use for my son, just one kid, for his sports.

Travis Hoium: Not to mention school. Schools are on 18 different. It is a mess. There's band, and then there's math club, and it's so much to handle. If it's something that can start filtering those things down, it could be maybe a surprising success. Lou?

Lou Whiteman: Requires work. I don't mean that to be lazy, but the fun thing about enterprises is, if you can go into an enterprise and say, we can save you $0.02 on $1, you're halfway towards a sale, and they will do the work to put it in because it's a longtime saves. Consumers aren't like that. Consumers are any barrier to entry is too much. Travis, you whistled by the trust issues, but this is Meta we're talking about.

Travis Hoium: It's a big one.

Lou Whiteman: It is quite so you're asking me, especially with all the headlines right now, you're asking me, can go ahead and sign over my email account, sign over my calendar, sign over all of these things to a company the trend over the last 10 years is, do they know too much about me already? Even if it wasn't Meta, that's still work I have to do. The paradox here is even if it's as good as you say, Meta almost needs to show us that to motivate us to do the work that it takes to get that result. These things always end up as falling short of what the promise looks like just because if it's a consumer product and it requires changing in behavior or some out-of-the-ordinary behavior, it never ever works out the way the planners hope.

Travis Hoium: Jason, on top of that, I think Lou is right. The interesting thing in this entire space, the background of this is we're talking about trillions of dollars worth of investment here in these products. If there's no payoff, then as investors, which we are on this show, then it makes it really hard to invest in these companies. You can make a great product and it cannot make money. With this in particular, what I think is fascinating is, I think it's a really good product, but Meta does not have very much of my data. I don't use Facebook. I don't really use Instagram. Maybe there are people that your soccer games are all in Meta platforms but the value was really plugging into things like Gmail and my calendar, which is also on a Google product. Is this another case where in three weeks, Google's going to release exactly the same thing, have the exact same functionality, and they're go, Hey, you know what? This data's already in our Wald Garden. Trust us because you already do with all of this stuff.

Jason Hall: That's why frankly, I'm a little dubious that this product, at least from Meta is even going to still exist in five years. Because I don't know if people want something like this from the company behind Facebook and Instagram for all of the reasons that both of you talked about. I think the friction one is a big deal. Maybe you download the app, and then you're like, you want to connect to my what? You want access to what? Now, they're really trying to be upfront about, like, safety with that thing and talking about how Muse actually doesn't see passwords, doesn't see credit card numbers, and how, if you have the AI assistant put together a shopping list of things that you need to buy for your kids first day of first grade, it will automatically make a shopping cart with all of those things in it and then ask you to approve it. Then the system automatically creates a temporary one-time credit card. They're talking about these things about, Hey, guys, you can really trust. They're really leaning into that.

But to Lou’s point, there's so much less friction already for Google users. They already have that information. A lot of people are already using a Google Wallet. Same thing with Apple. If Apple can figure out how to do AI, people already trust those things. I think because the nature of the relationships are already built there, and again, you think about the incentives for Meta is going to have to lose money on this for a long time. Before they get to the point where they can integrate ads or build out those sales partnerships where they get a cut. But maybe they end up with success, and then they pull a reverse Netflix in five years and move people off of the ad based tier onto like a paid premium version, which I do think is probably the economic model that's going to work for this is a paid premium version. [OVERLAPPING].

Travis Hoium: That's my next question for you is what's the business model behind this? Because I think this is the challenge as we think about all the trillions of dollars that are being spent. Many of these companies are losing money, partly because they're building new models, and those are really expensive, but also because even just the inference, especially on the consumer side does not make money. Facebook and Meta is a great example of a company that backed into a phenomenal business model when Sheryl Sandberg came into the company. I don't know that Mark Zuckerberg necessarily wanted to be an advertising company when he started Facebook, but that's where the money is now, but as we look to the future of artificial intelligence, it almost seems ads and modifying what you're seeing with your AI is not a great user experience. Zuckerberg has talked in the last, 24 or 48 hours about, Hey, we think people are going to do commerce on here. We'll take a small cut of that commerce, and that'll be a great business for us. But is that really going to work? Because I have such a hard time figuring out where is the actual money coming from any of these companies if consumers actually do adopt this stuff?

Lou Whiteman: They're the masters at one trillion small cuts really do matter. I guess I shouldn't be dismissive, but I do think you're right. The world is changing. It's not as simple as it was. Remember, we're not just talking about covering the cost. These are companies that have historically enjoyed double digits return on invested capital. There is an even bigger bogie to making this a success than just we covered our cost. If they're spending 300 billion a year, they need to make 600 billion just to make this all work out to historical norms, and as investors, that's the valuations we assign. Ideally, yes, they need to give us a product that's worth us spending 25, 30, whatever it is.

Unfortunately, they have to give it to us for free for an extended period of time and make us I hate to say addicted with these things because that's a hurt word for Meta right now. But they need for an extended period of time to convince us that this is just we can't live without it. That takes a long time and a lot of money. As Jason said, look, I'm not all that tech savvy. I might be better than some. But my quick reaction is that, wow, all of these things are on my phone anyway. My phone should do this, not a new app? Now, we all know that there's apps going on there, but why isn't that Gemini in Siri? The just such natural.

Travis Hoium: I wonder if it will be in six months.

Lou Whiteman: I don't know why it wouldn't be, because not only are they already locked in on one of these things, but it is just there. We continuously underestimate just the fact that the smartphone was an amazing invention. It basically gives us what we need. Things that can just come out of that are much more likely to go with the consumer because that's what the consumer already knows. I'm with Jason. This may be the best product out there, and I'd be surprised if it's success five years down the line.

Travis Hoium: It is a fascinating space because I do think that in 2026, we have seen fundamental shifts in the way that enterprises view AI, that was with some of the Cloud advancements in the opening advancements recently from the enterprise side. This seemed to be something that was really big from a consumer side, but that's it. Is there any money there? That is the trillion dollar question for companies like Meta. When we come back, we're going to talk about Apple's newest product. You listening to Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing.

ADVERTISEMENT: 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.ai/fool to get the only AI built to give you full visibility and take complex actions across your entire organization. That's rippling.ai/fool. Sign up for exclusive access today rippling.ai/fool.

ADVERTISEMENT: Legendary flavors from legendary Xbox games are now at McDonald's. Crispy Golden Garlic and black pepper McDonald's. Cheesy potato bites from fallout 76. Candy Crush Mac flurri. The main mission can wait. Take a side mission to McDonald's. Available until 29th of September from 11:00 A.M. Whilstok slash subct availability. Participation babies.

Travis Hoium: Welcome back to Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing. A couple of years ago, this would have led the show, but maybe tells you where AI is in our Zeitgeist right now, but Apple introduced some new products in next generation of the iPhone, at least the pro version, and then also the new duo. Lou, you are a bleeding-edge tech adopter here. Are you interested in getting a $2,000 foldable phone?

Lou Whiteman: I am bleeding edge. I have the new Pixel already. I agree with that. It looks cool, I guess. A 2,000.

Travis Hoium: It does look cool. The animations are pretty amazing.

Lou Whiteman: But here's the thing, and I'm an old, so I still watch TV on the television and things like that. I don't really think. I don't even have a tablet. It feels to me that, yes, for every use case there is for the bigger phone are just basically a tablet screen on a phone. There's also a time when it's a pain. I'm really not looking forward to all of the Gen Z walking down the street with an entire phone, blocking their eyes [LAUGHTER] instead of.

Travis Hoium: I hadn't even thought of that. We're basically walking around with an iPad in front of us.

Lou Whiteman: I think there's a market there. I think it appears to be a better product. It's not for me. I think I think it'll be an Apple success, but I don't think it's going to be another iPhone moment where it just changes the way everyone does everything. I think it's still a niche product for those who I don't know, like doing spreadsheets or don't have a TV they could watch on their phone, and so just need that screen real estate? I don't think I need more real estate on my phone.

Jason Hall: I don't think it has to be like a watershed product, changing the industry entirely for this to be a success. It's a $2,000 gigantic phone.

Travis Hoium: Does that tell us a lot about Apple? Is, though, because it does seem like the incremental moves are actually enough to keep investors happy and the company happy, and it's fine.

Jason Hall: But I think that Apple's always been like an incremental improvement company. Apple's never been the first mover ever. It did not create the first PC. It did not make the first music device. The iPod was not the first music device. The innovation there was software to be able to buy individual songs. Its biggest innovation has been building an ecosystem over time. The iPhone was simply better than anything else when it first came out. I think it's gotten to a point because of those incremental improvements and building the stickiness of the iOS ecosystem that just the fact that this is an Apple product is immediately going to award it a quarter of this market competing against Huawei, which is huge in China and Samsung, which is the de facto leader in most of the rest of the world. Immediately, a quarter of that market's going to go to Apple. But I think they are also going to expand it. These foldable phones make up less than 2% of global smartphone sales. It's a small segment. But I think the fact that Apple is going to move into it is going to expand that, and they're going to get great margin on this product.

Lou Whiteman: It's interesting because where does Apple go from here? It's I think the interesting question? I think Jason's right that there's a lot of value in just iteration and not just inventing. But if you look at the market share, it almost looks like a World War I trenches where everyone's pretty dug in. If anything, Android is slowly winning people back. Not that it should scare Apple. But one thing that really struck out to me about this whole the announcement and everything, a lot of people were surprised that the phone prices didn't go up more than they did. Apple released all new products across the board. We know the component costs were higher. The memory has been talked about a lot. We were expecting higher prices.

Two possible theories, and either one is, I think, interesting for investors. A, Apple thinks that the component surge is temporary, and so they're just going to ride out the storm except they've warned there's going to be lower margins for now, but they're thinking, we're not going to overextend the consumer. Or option B is, is that as Android phones have evolved, and as these things are basically a commodity now, Apple has less pricing power than we realized that they have plenty of people willing to pay for the upgraded phones, but it's just harder than we realized to really just charge whatever you want for these.

Travis Hoium: If you are shopping for a phone or a computer, it is really easy to see that. I think I've talked about this on the show. I would love to get a new Mac studio. Jumping $2,000 incrementally higher in price to get a new computer is just a nonstarter at this point.

Lou Whiteman: The good news is for Apple investors, is there are plenty of people inside this walled garden that will continue to spend, and I don't think they're in trouble. There is still, after all these years, what's the next big thing? What's the next growth catalyst? What's that? I think Apple is what it is. It's an amazing business with great margins and a great customer base that isn't going away. But I think we still hear. It used to be the Apple car. Then it was the Apple TV. Ironically, guys, with this big phone, maybe this is the Apple TV. Maybe they finally came through. But I do think that as an investor, we just have to accept that this business is great at what it is, and that might be for the foreseeable future, what it is.

Travis Hoium: Jason, the other thing I wanted to bring up is the developer side of things that one of the notes that I heard coming out, and this phone's not going to be out for about another month, but the Beta is not even something that developers can test yet. Apparently, this is not just take your iPhone, your iPad app and just stick it on the new phone. It's a new app, so developers are going to have to do work at the same time. They want to launch this new updated serie, which developers also have to do more work on, are we going to get to this point where people get these new devices, and they just don't work as advertised. I remember that happening in the past with Apple, and it was a black eye on the company for a little while.

Jason Hall: Because that's something that historically Apple has done, even though they're not always never the first mover. They're almost always have been out of the box seamless and great to use. The experience for the user has always been fantastic. That has not been the case, as you said, a couple of times more recently. That is a potential risk, especially for this, which is going to be, this is like a cornerstone product. This is going to be the highest end of its high end product. The fact that you do have really three screens. Apps have to be built differently to be able to operate depending on which mode you're using the phone in. I think what I'm trying to get at is that because the form factor is so different here, there is going to be a learning curve here, but I do think that the people that are buying these are probably diehard Apple users that want this and they're going to be willing to go through a little bit of struggle just to get this phone in their.

Travis Hoium: The fact that they got Netflix on board, I think is a good sign. It will be interesting. I'm happy to see that we have innovation happening in the space, whether it's the Muse app or the new foldable phones. It's exciting to follow tactic in. When we come back, we're going to go on our time machine. You're listening to Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing.

ADVERTISEMENT: Expedia. You're here. But are you here here? You go to Majorca in your head all the time. During meetings in the car, Majorca is on the mind. But when you're ready to go, there's Expedia. The one place you go to go places. Flights, hotels, villas, cars, you can buy more and save on your trip. What are you waiting for? Expedia, the one place you go to go places. Savings vary, subject to availability at or protected.

ADVERTISEMENT: Legendary flavors from legendary Xbox games are now at McDonald's. Crispy Golden garlic and black pepper McNuggets. Cheesy potato bites from fallout 76 and Candy Crush McFlurry. The main mission can wait. Take a side mission to McDonald's. Available until 29th September from 11:00 AM while stocks last, subject to availability, participation varies.

Travis Hoium: Welcome back to Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing. We like to have a little fun and maybe test Lou and Jason's memory of the market in this segment. I'm going to call this the time machine. I want you guys to tell me what these companies were doing 10 years ago. Part of the context here is with all the things that are changing, we're really worried about month to month, week to week, quarter to quarter. But sometimes we forget as long-term investors that we should really be thinking about five, 0 years from now, and sometimes those compounding growth that some of these companies have sneaks up when we look back. We get a few questions for you. Jason, have you go first here. Uber Technologies. Been around for a while. It's now become the Kleenex name in ride sharing. Over the past year, they have done 14.8 billion rides. In 2017, they have not been public super long, so that was the last complete data that we had. 2017, how many rides did they complete? 14.8 billion over the past year, what were they doing a decade ago?

Jason Hall: A few million, maybe. It was tiny compared to what it doing.

Travis Hoium: More than 1,000X, 10,000X.

Lou Whiteman: I don't know.

Jason Hall: This is annual?

Travis Hoium: This is annual rise.

Lou Whiteman: I'm going to go with a billion. Maybe four billion?

Travis Hoium: Lou, you are almost exactly right, four billion. The interesting thing you look at this chart, they had consistent growth 2017 through 2019. 2022, it drops down, and then you go basically back to the exact same growth rate that we had in 2017. It's like 2018 mirrors 2020, which then 2019 mirrors 2021. It's fascinating how the pandemic really set this entire industry back and the adoption rate back in almost a straight line. But again, 14.8 billion rides, I think we often forget how ubiquitous that company became as quickly as it did, because it started I think it was 2009. The company was founded. Disney is known for its movies, but it makes its money and its parks. Lou, operating income for Disney's parks over the past year is $10.8 billion. A decade ago, what was that number?

Lou Whiteman: Ten billion now?

Travis Hoium: $10.8 billion over the past year, yes.

Lou Whiteman: Two-thirds of that is just the markup on the lunch. Look, it worked last time, so I'm just going to say four billion.

Jason Hall: Four billion.

Travis Hoium: You guys split the hair. It's basically tripled in the past a little more than tripled. 3.3 billion. The fascinating thing with Disney's business is the movies, the streaming service gets so much attention, ESPN, but it's really the parks that drive the business. That has been a consistent grower outside of that blip that we talked about in 2020 and 2021. But consistently throwing off cash flow. Jason, I think this is you look at a company like Disney. This is it's not going to end anytime soon.

Jason Hall: It was about a decade ago they had their first new opened theme park with Shanghai at that time. Over the next decade, there's probably another one going to open somewhere, but there have been so many expansions of other things they've added. That's not talk about how much they've expanded the ticket prices. They run that business. They use pricing power to control the experience. They do an extraordinary job with that. There's not too many people in the park. They raise the prices to throttle back demand, and it generates incredible operating income when it works.

Travis Hoium: They really have that mastered. I was there earlier this year, and the difference between them and Universal, you could just see that they've been doing this for what is it? Seventy-five years at this point. Let's go to a little bit bigger growth number. This is going to throw off people who have not been following this industry for a while. But Nvidia their data center revenue. Jason, I think this is going to be up your alley. Over the past year, $278 billion. In 2016, how much datacenter revenue was Nvidia generating? 278 billion used to be what?

Jason Hall: It was a few billion because they were selling GPUs for the Cloud. That was a thing. I'm going to say a few billion, and that might be too big. Wow.

Lou Whiteman: One dollar? No. Their total revenue was a few billion in 2016. I'm going to come with 999 million.

Travis Hoium: 2016, their total revenue to Lou's point, and I'm going in fiscal 2016 was $5 billion.

Jason Hall: I was going to say it was like four or five billion.

Travis Hoium: The data center revenue was $338 million. The compound annual growth rate. This is where compound annual growth rates are just crazy to me looking back at some of these. 84% compound annual growth rate, that leads to a total change percentage wise, of 82,000%. Just crazy how much that business has grown.

Jason Hall: I thought it was a little bigger than that by then, but I guess that was still pretty early in GPUs for the Cloud.

Travis Hoium: [OVERLAPPING] They did not pass $1 billion until fiscal 2018. That was mostly calendar 2017. Then it incrementally went up. It was actually flat 2019-2020. It wasn't until 2021 that things really started to pick up there. Just interesting how quickly that business has grown. Let's go to Tesla. Over the past year, they have sold 1.75 million vehicles. Lou, how many vehicles did they sell in 2016?

Lou Whiteman: Under $99,999.

Travis Hoium: Jason.

Jason Hall: The Model S was the best-selling luxury sedan in the world back then. Like just bar-none l.

Travis Hoium: Are we really playing that this is a luxury vehicle game?

Jason Hall: The Model S that was the category that it was in. It was outselling Mercedes and BMW, similar-sticker-price cars. It's like a few thousand a month. It wasn't like, I'm going to go one less than lose answer.

Travis Hoium: Jason, you win. It was 76,230. They didn't cross 100,000 in 2017. The interesting thing, looking back on them, I think people forget this because the stock has moved so much in so many different directions over the past decade. But their growth really happened after the pandemic began. You can almost go back and see, this is why Elon Musk was like, no, we're going to keep making cars because they almost doubled production in 2021. They were up about 30 or 40% in 2022. Again, similar percentage in 2023. That was actually when they peaked was 2023. But that growth really took off with the Model 3 and Model Y, but it wasn't until a few years after 2016.

Jason Hall: That was the key when the price point came down, and the funny thing is that those cars that you can buy today for 40,000 or $50,000 are better. They have better range. They're more reliable. They're faster than the cars that cost 100,000, $120,000 a decade before.

Travis Hoium: I will continue to contend that Teslas are not luxury vehicles, but I may not win that battle with the market. Final question for you guys in this segment, Costco, phenomenal stock, phenomenal returns over almost any time frame that you want to look at. But Jason, they have 81 million paid members today. How many paid members did they have in 2016?

Jason Hall: Fifty million.

Travis Hoium: Lou?

Lou Whiteman: How much now?

Travis Hoium: Eighty-one million today.

Lou Whiteman: Eighty-one, 40.5.

Travis Hoium: Jason is a little bit closer. This is fascinating to look at Costco's results. They're compound in your growth rate only 6% in the number of members. Not a phenomenal member growth is 47.6 million members in 2016. But yet over that decade, over the past decade, their stock has returned almost 500%. It's a little bit of growth from members. It's a little bit of price increases because they have expanded those margins in their stores. I think they picked up their member fee just a little bit in the past couple of years. But a lot of multiple expansion, too. That's played a big role. The stock IPO trades for 45 times trailing earnings. One of the slower growth companies that we've talked about here, but there's lots of different ways to make money in the market.

Jason Hall: I have nothing to add. Charlie Munger said that, and he was on the board at Costco for a long time.

Travis Hoium: Wise thing to say, when we come back, we're going to talk about inflation and where interest rates may go from here. You’re listening to Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing.

ADVERTISEMENT: Expedia. Hey you, what are you up to? Mindlessly scrolling? Looking at other people's holidays. Mallorca, Canary Islands. What about you? What places would you go? Expedia is the one place you go to go places. Your trip can earn rewards, which you can use towards your next eligible stay. Soon, people will be scrolling your holiday pigs. You'll be the friend's friend, but with rewards. What are you waiting for? Expedia. The one place you go to go places. Turn supply.

ADVERTISEMENT: Legendary flavors from legendary Xbox games are now at McDonald's. Crispy Golden Garlic and Black Pepper McNugget. Cheesy potato bites from Fallout 76 and Candy Crush mud, flurry. The main mission can wait. Take a side mission to McDonald's. Available until 29th September from 11:00 AM, while stocks last, subject to availability, participation varies.

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. All personal finance content follows the Motley Fool's editorial standards, and it is not approved by advertisers. Advertisements are sponsored content and provided for informational purposes only. To see our full advertising and disclosure, please check out our show notes.

The big piece of news that the market is focused on is interest rates. We have the Fed meeting coming up next week. Mortgage rates are up the 30 years at a higher rate than it's been in almost two decades. Lou, we got some inflation data that didn't seem great. Didn't seem like data that's going to get the Fed to cut rates. The big one that came out this morning is CPI, the Consumer Price Index up 3.4%. This is a big deal? Is this not a big deal? How do you think about interest rates and inflation today?

Lou Whiteman: It definitely worth watching. It's not a reason to change you're investing, but I want to separate out rates and inflation because inflation is basically holding steady. That's not great, and there is a lot of pain out there, but we have seen that the economy can hold up at inflation at this level. I don't think it's any reason to panic. It's just we're watching to make sure it doesn't go higher. Rates, on the other hand, I do think are separate. For all the talk about oil, for all the talk about tariffs, I don't think the rates are moving on inflation. They're moving on the fact that you have less demand for bonds than you do. The supply of bonds.

Basically, this is an AI build-out story. We just have a crowding out of treasuries and other government bonds, and that is causing them to have to pay more. Twenty-five 25 basis points, 50 basis points, nothing the Fed does will wipe out hyperscalar demand for capital. They will pay the higher rates. The Fed really can't control and the treasury can't either, but they're finding that out the hard way. You can't really control what the rates are. That's just going to be what it is. The companies are telling us they can handle that, so we don't have to worry about that as investors. We just need to watch to see if inflation spikes and so far so good there, but if that does happen, that could impact the consumer, which causes trouble down the line.

Travis Hoium: Jason, you and I have been talking about energy stocks for a long time, and one of the reasons that I keep an eye on interest rates in particular is because we've seen what happens with energy, solar, and wind. I think is a great example. But when these interest rates go up, cost of capital goes up, it makes it harder to even build out the data center or lose right. The data center buildup is really driving the economy and GDP growth right now. But if that capital gets more expensive, the hyperscalers are in a different category. They have cash, and they can find cash if they need to. But the Neo Clouds, some of the less capitalized companies are going to maybe run into some real problems if suddenly debt costs are 12, 13, 14, 15%, that's when you start to get worried. How do you think about those interest rates in investing, because it seems like certain companies we shouldn't care about and others we should care a lot?

Jason Hall: That's the way it always is, though. The companies that are on the margins are always going to have marginal pressures that affect them. As an investor, I really don't worry about inflation very much, at least not as an isolated thing. It has to be within the context of all the things that we've talked about. I think, too, we are at a point where, 30 years at some of the highest levels we've seen in a couple of decades. But if you zoom out and look at the interest rate chart over the long term, that's because the last two decades have been extraordinarily cheap money. Money still is, historically, relatively cheap, broadly for companies and for individuals that have good credit and are viewed as safe borrowers, money is still very accessible.

But I think as an investor, what I really try to look for in these periods where we have high inflation, and we have something giant where the money is going to keep flowing to it, like AI infrastructure, that's making things expensive for consumers because it's driving up energy costs, and it's making things like your smartphone more expensive because of the run on memory, for example, those things are affecting regular consumers, and it's putting a macro pinch on the companies that sell to them. I try to look for opportunities in really good companies that are kind of getting the macro pinch. But the underlying thesis is still really good for the long term. That's as an investor, my take is look for opportunities in these situations to buy greatness for the long term and not try to pivot and be too nimble in ways that as individual investors, we have no edge to be able to be more nimble than the big fast money can be.

Travis Hoium: Lou I do think about what you said about how historically, these are not really that high interest rates, but it has been a very long time, and you have to be our age in your 40s, probably, investing for a very long time to remember when interest rates were higher than they are today. This is one of the things that it seems like we're going to eventually run into this where, the market goes, wait a second, we're going to have 6, 7, 8% interest rates. I can't I can't buy stocks at 30, 40, 50 times earnings and expect them to beat the market. Is that something that you worry about that we're just overplayed our hands because it has been low interest rates for so long?

Lou Whiteman: Wouldn't that have already played out, though? We haven't been on zero for a while. I think there was a flushing when we came off zero. I don't know if an incremental 100 basis points higher from here, the businesses that can't support actually paying for money are basically already in the past. We work and, some of those things. I think the worst of that is done.

Travis Hoium: We like to end the show with the stocks on our radar. Jason, you're up first this week. What are you looking at?

Jason Hall: TJX Companies, TJX. The last segment we were talking about that I'm looking for companies that the macro factors aren't great for some of their customers, and it's spooked the market a little bit. The stock’s down a ton. It just reported really, really good results. Comps were up 4%, net income was up 24% in the second quarter. The market freaked out a little bit because traffic was basically flat. If you look at it against, like, the context of most of the industry they're in, traffic was down like 3.5% across the industry, according to the data that we have access to. You have a company that's outperforming its sector that's dealing with some temporary macro things. They could last multiple quarters or even multiple years, but long term, we've seen TJX operate through these environments and be a huge winner. It trades for 24 times earnings. That's as cheap as I've seen it in a very long time. Bart, I think this should be your winner.

Bart Shannon: I used to love the company. Then I was a frequent shopper of TJ Maxx and of Marshall's, and I saw the quality decline, and also saw a slight increase in prices because of the tariffs, and no decrease when they got their $330 million refund. I'm not the biggest supporter at the moment.

Travis Hoium: Tough crowd here, but it does seem like you're right. Jason, to put some numbers to it. The drawdown currently in the stock just over the past week or two is about 25, 26%. That's a pretty big hit for a company that does seem like it's performing pretty well, and there's been a lot of pressure across the entire consumer space. Everybody seems to be facing these pressures.

Jason Hall: There was just a lot of price based on continuing to outperform in ways that are maybe were unreasonable. It's just repriced based on not being a perfect business.

Travis Hoium: Lou, what are you looking at this week?

Lou Whiteman: TJ Maxx is funny. It's like shopping at a flea market. You may find the treasure, but there's, what's the opposite of treasure? Anyway. How about this, Bart? I want to give you something to look at, too. I'm looking at Howmet Aerospace, ticker HWM. They make the metal parts that go into jet turbines and gas turbines for data centers and all other complex machines. Shares are down more than 10% this week after one of their big customers, GE Aerospace, announced plans to buy CPP, which is one of Howmet's rivals. I get why the market's concerned here. This is vertical integration for GE, and over time, it could cause GE to take some of that business they're currently doing with Howmet and bringing it in house, but that will take a lot of time, years, if not decades. I think for every dollar in business, Howmet potentially loses to GE, they have the opportunity to take new business from GE's competitors like Pratt & Whitney, who are currently giving that money to CPP and might not want to give it to what is now GE. I think this weakness is a buying opportunity in a great company, and I'm watching closely. Bart, what do you think about airplane parts?

Bart Shannon: Very sexy. Always sexy. But I have to say this is how I met Howmet. This is the first time I've heard of the company. I'm going to be looking into it.

Travis Hoium: Howmet or TJX companies, Which one's going on your watch list Bart.

Bart Shannon: Howmet all the way.

Jason Hall: For Jason Hall, Lou Whiteman, and Bart Shannon behind the glass, I'm Travis Hoium. Thanks for listening. We'll see you here tomorrow.