AI Revenue Explodes, Dario’s Memo, McDonald's CEO’s Baby Burger Bite

19:36Big Technology Podcast Hosts:Is it moving exponential? Right? That's the question. I kind of still am on the side of, hey, it's moving fast, but let's not get ahead of ourselves.

19:43Ranjan Roy:Yeah, I think moving fast, but also to the other point, like, a reminder, I'm skeptical about the economics of these two companies, not of the technology. And that's actually what is exciting for me because to see the numbers, to actually see in a 200 to 300 page document desk one with risk factors listed and margins. I mean, no one has any real idea. We've seen lots of reporting. But is there a world where they almost don't divulge everything that typically a company would need to because they don't really need to and then still are able to actually make it out and there's just enough retail energy to kind of keep things going?

20:34Ranjan Roy:Maybe.

20:35Big Technology Podcast Hosts:Possibly. I mean, there's certainly going to be a lot of retail energy. I mean, right now, if you want to buy OpenAI or Anthropic shares on the private markets, there's a premium to them. understandably so because people are going to be dying to get a hold of these stocks even though it's going to come they're going to come out a trillion dollar plus valuations which is just totally insane so we'll see but the other the other side of it is you're going to have losses so big you don't want to end up in like the we work category where you try to pull a community-based ebitda metric and everybody says you're full of shit if you're to choose

21:13Ranjan Roy:I mean, this is almost a gimme question. Who comes up with the 2026 equivalent of community adjusted even to OpenAI or Anthropic?

21:23Big Technology Podcast Hosts:Probably OpenAI. Yeah, I mean, yeah, that was an easy one. I mean, the S1 for Anthropic is going to be unbelievable. And the risk factors, it's like definitely going to be our strident CEO may write memos that destroy our ability to do business with certain governments.

21:38Ranjan Roy:Which we'll definitely get into, but I would highlight that as a key risk factor here.

21:43Big Technology Podcast Hosts:Okay, last bit on spending. Should we talk about Apple? I mean, Apple had some new Macs this week. They're really slick. They're cheap. This is from somebody on X, Josh Kale. Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, and Google are in a spending arms race, plowing over$100 billion per quarter into data centers, while Apple spending is down 19%. Meanwhile, Mac minis are sold out because everyone's buying them to run OpenClaw. Mac studios have a six-week backlog. someone ran quen 3.5 on an iphone yesterday uh the m5 max just shipped with 128 gigabytes of unified memory and runs llama 70 billion parameter model from anywhere the company spending the least on ai infrastructure infrastructure actually became the ai infrastructure i mean maybe apple

22:31Ranjan Roy:wins here maybe all of our complaining is for naught i might have to say something nice about Apple. And it's not going to be the MacBook Neo because come on, it's like, great, you invented a netbook and you kind of completely devalued the entire decades of brand building. But we'll keep that for another conversation.

22:54But hold on.

22:56Ranjan Roy:I do love this point that the company spending the least on AI infrastructure accidentally became AI infrastructure because it does raise the question over where does all of this computing take place and live? And it is fascinating. Again, I mean, I remember a few years ago, people were talking about small models are going to run locally on device. And that's actually going to be how infrastructure gets built out. That throws such a wrench into any of these stories that we've been talking about for the last 30 minutes, like that completely destroys those stories. I mean, honestly, like the, if you can do, and it's not an unreasonable technical thing, right?

23:43Ranjan Roy:It's not like, especially for like day-to-day consumer AI usage, being able to run it locally in a more secure way, especially if there's ever any kind of scandal around open AI is actually training on all of our data, which I mean, you know, like Apple coming in the privacy angle, we got great hardware. You can run AI on it. Tim Cook, Siri might still suck and they still might become the AI champions.

24:13Big Technology Podcast Hosts:Exactly. I was at an event yesterday that Stephanie Link, who's a CNBC contributor and works at Hightower. She ran and a person sitting next to me on the panel I was on had said that he'd spent more in six months on Apple hardware than he had in his life. Now, it's probably a bit of an exaggeration, but the guy is just running multiple open claws and stacking Mac minis. And, you know, I made a joke, and then maybe this is actually what's going to happen, is that this June in Cupertino, Tim Cook is going to come on stage at WWDC, and he's going to start with, agentic ai has always been part of apple's dna we are so excited to release a new generation of mac

24:57Ranjan Roy:minis i mean but if you think about okay like the crazy part is if apple does not lean into this it's insane like actually now that i'm thinking about it like yeah i mean and again regular listeners know even though i'm completely locked into the ecosystem i have very strong thoughts on Apple over the last few years, but like if they give up this moment and actually they have not done any marketing around it, right? Like there's been no active marketing. Totally viral. They released like, and we're going to get into my man, CEO of McDonald's in just a little bit, but like every major corporation gets when you have these moments, you own it, you run with it and they haven't done anything with it.

25:47Like they're almost hiding from it.

25:50Ranjan Roy:And it's like this like dirty little thing happening to the side and like versus this is the coolest thing. Apple is actually cool at the hardware level. Yeah, that's kind of shocking now that I'm thinking about it.

26:03Big Technology Podcast Hosts:There's probably two reasons for it. One of two reasons. One is they realized that open clause is a major privacy liability and it would certainly not behoove them to encourage people to. I just saw someone reporting from like a privacy meetup that like sorry an open claw meetup that nobody trusts that their data is going to be kept safe and basically like you're just exposing yourself if you're using one of these things even if it's on a separate machine that might be one the other one might just be you know pure or incompetence or just slow moving stuff i think it's slow moving i think it's i

26:33Ranjan Roy:honestly i don't think it's i mean i it's the yeah again like hero story they're gonna remain privacy champion open claw does have plenty of risk to actually kind of like make going after that kind of setup but like i really think it's just it came so fast and so unexpected probably i mean you think organizationally like could you imagine like if you were like on the mac mini marketing team like who's on that over the last few years i mean there's like a guy in the corner or just like, yeah, I got Mac Mini under my portfolio.

27:08Big Technology Podcast Hosts:He's not even disclosed to look at the Mac Mini, but he has to market it. That's the Apple culture. I'd love for like a recent Apple departee, somebody who used to work there, to just come on. Well, we can anonymize your voice or whatever and just talk about the culture. So John G. Andrea, if you're listening, just give us a call. We can talk about this. All right.

27:31Ranjan Roy:Hold on, I'm just going to pitch. Tim Cook. pull out your phone, set it up, have your social media team do it, and just put a Mac mini in both your hands. You don't have to take a bite out of it, but just take this moment. Take this. You could riff off the McDonald's CEO so well here. This moment is calling for you, Tim Cook, right now. Own it, Tim. Own it.

27:57Big Technology Podcast Hosts:You're so right.

27:58Ranjan Roy:Take a bite out of it. Just take a bite out of it. Take a bite out of it.

28:02Big Technology Podcast Hosts:all apple would need to do is tweet a picture of tim book with claw hands and wouldn't that be like

28:08Ranjan Roy:the viral marketing moment of 2026 this is it's a layup guys it's a layup just we're giving it to you we're gonna just run with it please you don't have to fix siri just do this for me

28:21Big Technology Podcast Hosts:and i'm on board sometimes these companies do take our suggestions by the way i think uh this week anthropic put a prompt that you could copy to chat chipt to export your memory like i was saying memory's not sticky they built the prompt that we were talking about and you drop it in chat chipt it prints out your memory you paste the memory in claude and then you continue with a bot that

28:45Ranjan Roy:knows you well that was all alex kantruitz right there i'm taking full credit full credit full

28:53Big Technology Podcast Hosts:The Influencing Big Technology podcast will not be denied.

28:56Ranjan Roy:No.

28:58Big Technology Podcast Hosts:New model from OpenAI, GPT 5.4 is here. Birch calls it a step toward autonomous agents. OpenAI is launching GPT 5.4, they say. The latest version of its AI model that the company says combines advancements in reasoning, coding, and professional work involving spreadsheets, documents, and presentations. It's also OpenAI's first model with native computer use capabilities, meaning it can operate a computer on your behalf and complete tasks across different applications. OpenAI says the model can write code to operate computers as well as issue keyboard and mouse commands in response to screenshots.

29:34Big Technology Podcast Hosts:That's two quick reactions here for me. I just did this story about Scale AI, saying that the majority of their training has moved to reinforcement learning, where they train models to act in specific environments, like filling out forms, and then they bake those capabilities back into the model's weights. So it seems like we're starting to see this come to fruition. Also, it's clear that ChatGPT and OpenAI see CloudCode as real competition, and they're trying to catch up.

30:05Ranjan Roy:Yeah, I think so. I have to admit, did you feel this was a big launch? Did you kind of across your feeds in your bones, did you feel this was like a big launch?

30:20Big Technology Podcast Hosts:I think, yeah, this is an important moment for me to reflect on something that I've been meaning to share on the show for a while, which is that we can't really, you know, first glimpses of models sometimes don't tell the full story and we slammed gpt5 and said it was something that just did not leave live up to expectations no i did you you actually you did and you said it was a big advance and i said this this stinks and i mourned oh three actually it was a big advance and so i'm going to hold my my uh assessment for for a moment because sometimes it might seem like a small blip and turn out to be massive let's recap what happened again if you

31:03Ranjan Roy:don't if listeners might recall i had said tool calling and reasoning for kind of like agentic processes was the big step up with gpt5 alex you were just mourning 4-0 sycopency or i wasn't a 4-0

31:18Big Technology Podcast Hosts:guy i was an 0-3 guy i want to make that clear i didn't have a relationship with the model i just like to think a lot. Either way, I'll admit it. I'll admit it. Rajan came out, said this is a big deal. Tool use is important. And I said, this model sucks. It turns out it didn't.

31:35Ranjan Roy:One thing also that was kind of surprising for me is like, okay, you know, like native computer use, interesting, already exists. The fact that they even like, they basically is like, this is going to be a big deal. And you can see the kind of PR machine at work that Bloomberg picks up, like big deal in financial services they basically just did what already clawed in excel or anything like like the excel add-in and google sheets that you can use it directly in there which still why gemini is not great within the google workspace environment is ridiculous to me we've talked about this a number of times talking about skills in chat gpt great everyone has been doing this for months now like like i think all of that just kind of underwhelmed me and this was a pretty big moment for them like they i feel they needed to be a little bit splashier around this and and it just kind of came and went it felt well i will uh i'll hold my reservations my evaluation on this

32:37Big Technology Podcast Hosts:one until i get deeper into the model but um i just thought it was notable that they came in that That they clearly, given the press and the positioning, are going after Claude Code, and certainly they should be. All right. Let's take a break and come back and talk about the latest between Dario Amode and Anthropic and their dispute with the Department of War. And we'll also talk about this McDonald's burger bite that we probably should have started the show with because it might be the most exciting story of the week. All right. We'll be back right after this. Starting something new isn't just hard.

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34:39Big Technology Podcast Hosts:And we're back here on Big Technology Podcast Friday edition with Ranjan Roy of Margins. Okay, so the Anthropic Pentagon story continues to develop. First of all, this is from Bloomberg. The Pentagon notifies Anthropic it's deemed the firm a supply chain risk. The Pentagon has formally notified Anthropic that it's determined the company and its products pose a risk to the U.S. supply chain. And that means that basically if you are working with the Department of War, you cannot use Anthropic. It doesn't mean you can't use Anthropic at all. It just means you can't use Anthropic on those projects.

35:19Big Technology Podcast Hosts:Now, Dario has responded and he says, we believe, this is from a memo that he wrote on Thursday, we do not believe that this action is legally sound and we see no choice but to challenge it in court. So this is where it stands. The Department of War has declared Anthropica supply chain risk. Anthropica is going to fight it. Ranjan, just to pick up our conversation from last week where I said, you know, maybe this is all marketing. I've done like a kind of a 360 on this because the punishment clearly made it made it more serious than a marketing campaign. but then i thought about it and was like well maybe there still are some elements of anthropic trying to position itself in a way to the public that it thought would be beneficial but it just blew up in its face i don't know i'm still trying to figure out how to think about this a full weekend what's your perspective it can it can be both i think it can definitely be

36:16Ranjan Roy:like was the dictator style praise memo or was it a slack message or an official memo it was a slack message slack message like being leaked like those kind of things are they is it purposeful it's it's hard to say because there's i mean again like i actually talked to multiple people this week i didn't realize like how far it had gotten who were had deleted chat gpt i didn't realize it was a whole thing but like the deleted chat gpt in kind of like protest of sam altman and them kind of like playing nice with the department of war so and then obviously claude shot up the charts the download charts and like like there was still a good deal of kind of marketing positive impact for them obviously if that means like it still risks the completely i mean disrupting the business by if you are a supply chain risk and again as you said it feels like it's becoming more clear it's only around specific projects leveraging clod it's not like there's a lot of speculation you know like uh any company that does any kind of work with anthropic does that mean they have to stop doing that even if it has nothing to do with the government it seems like everyone's coming around no that's not yeah uh gonna be any kind of ramification of this so so i still think it's marketing and good marketing right it's just that well i don't think it's good mark it didn't end up the the situation has gotten so bad for

37:51Big Technology Podcast Hosts:anthropic at this point that i don't see uh i don't see it as like if it was marketing it backfired that's how i see it um although claude did hit number one exactly on the app stores did it back We should get to this memo that Dario wrote because I think it's important. So this is the dictator-style praise memo that you referenced. First of all, I'll just go with the results. So first of all, we should also note that OpenAI stepped in and then effectively took the contract that Anthropic was working on that it couldn't agree with with the DAW and then explained it as something that was trying to open the door back for Anthropic.

38:36Big Technology Podcast Hosts:Here's what Dario said. I think this attempted spin gaslighting is not working very well on the general public or the media, where people mostly see OpenAI's deal with the Department of War as sketchy or suspicious and see us as the heroes. We're number two on the App Store now, and then it moved to number one. It is working on some Twitter morons, which doesn't matter, but my main worry is how to make sure it doesn't work on OpenAI employees. So clearly Dario was happy with the way that this was resonating. I mean, why can't it just be also, maybe it's both. Maybe it was a way to position themselves in public, right?

39:10Big Technology Podcast Hosts:Again, remember, they did release their blog post saying they weren't going to go along with the DOW amid the negotiations, which does kind of have this whiff of marketing. But maybe it's also this principled stance that like, and this is where Dario also talks about, about surveillance. He says, against surveillance, he says, the DOW in this memo, the Department of War does have domestic surveillance authorities that are not of great concern in a pre-AI world, but take on a different meaning in a post-AI world. For example, it's legal to the Department of War to buy a bunch of private data on US citizens from vendors who have obtained that data in some legal way, often involving hidden consents to sell to third parties, and then analyze it at scale with AI to build profiles of citizens, their loyalties, movement patterns, and physical space, and much more.

39:57Big Technology Podcast Hosts:So maybe it's both.

40:00Ranjan Roy:I think, you know, this is going to be a bit, I don't want to say hot take-ish, but like, does anyone between these large companies actually already engaging in mass surveillance or the government having access to, i get in a post ai world like the ability to pinpoint and target and mine data is definitely different but like is it really any different than what we've been dealing with for years now like does anyone think again like the i don't know do you see it and this is like a dark thing but like i think there was like a mass shooter in canada was it where open ai had even been reviewing their messages and it's like people are sitting around like so the first one it was kind of nice to realize there is some content moderation apparently somewhere in these organizations but like sitting around just reading people's messages that are flagged like i don't know like is there it's interesting to me that suddenly there is this expectation of privacy which is good and i'm happy about but i think the cynic in me kind of gave up on that a long time ago well it's very interesting

41:13Big Technology Podcast Hosts:you bring that up because I just wrote this story on big technology today talking about how, and it's based off of this viral tweet, so not exactly a new insight, but I thought it was important, you know, quote unquote, service journalism to put out there that if you use any of these chatbots, your conversations are opted in for use in training. And the only way to not have them used in these companies model training is to go into settings and opt out of it. Meaning that like if you haven't opted out, anything you put in there can be used for training. That means your financial documents, your deep emotional connections with 4.0, your medical records.

41:52Big Technology Podcast Hosts:I think that this is important. If you're putting anything sensitive in these bots, you should probably toggle that setting off.

41:59Ranjan Roy:And, I mean, just being like, and then have 100 % full trust that by hitting that toggle off, that your data is safely and securely managed by these companies that are growing, as we've been talking about, at just unprecedented scale. like right it's both and that that have been and that have also like i mean it's certainly more on the open ai side like never exactly been you know uh like cautious or conservative around how they acquire data so i think like so it's both assuming that hitting toggle off protects you perfectly but also agreed having to hit toggle off there's that stanford research paper where they were able to actually kind of like directly show how specific like actions went into training in terms of the terms and conditions so like that's it's yeah i agree it's it's already there

42:58Big Technology Podcast Hosts:like maybe there's this distinction between that being there for model training and the department of war using this for like deeper levels of surveillance that you okay maybe dario knows what's being inputted into these models i don't know or or the models capabilities being able to be used for deeper levels of surveillance because of all the data that it can make sense of i don't

43:21Ranjan Roy:know i i or i was gonna say now that okay maybe i will the more i think about it this idea of like pre-ai versus post-ai world the risks to individuals are significantly greater because It's like in the past, to be able to now go through petabytes of data and be able to pinpoint individuals that are speaking ill of individuals in the government leadership or whatever, now you can actually do that a lot more easily than you would have been able to before. But again, I just feel like that's probably happening already. And I don't think that's even conspiracy theory. I don't know. that's it's there's large companies that are built around building that infrastructure so

44:10Big Technology Podcast Hosts:i just want to stand on the table and say if you're putting sensitive information into these bots do yourself a favor and even though it's not foolproof go hit that toggle off and don't let them train on that data and that's just my my psa agreed toggle off everybody toggle it off All right, should we get to the dictator-style praise before we move to McDonald's? So Dario says about Sam, he says, Behind the scenes, Sam's been working with the Department of War to sign a contract with them to replace us as the instant we are designated as a supply chain risk. But he has to do this in a way that doesn't make it seem like he gave up on the red lines and he sold out when we wouldn't.

44:51Big Technology Podcast Hosts:The real reasons the Department of War and Trump admin don't like us is that we haven't donated to Trump, while OpenAI and Greg have donated a lot. They're talking about Greg Brockman. He's talking about Greg Brockman there. We haven't given dictator-style praise to Trump while Sam has. We have supported AI regulation, which is against their agenda. We told the truth about a number of AI policy issues like job displacement. And we've actually held our red lines with integrity rather than colluding with them to produce safety theater for the benefit of employees, which I absolutely swear to you is what literally everyone at the Department of War, Palantir, our political consultants, etc., assumed was the problem we were trying to solve.

45:33Big Technology Podcast Hosts:I don't think you'll see a paragraph like that from Dario ever again, because he did not expect that to leak. It leaked. It's going to be a change in Anthropik's culture. I think Anthropik will become him, and Anthropik will become much more closed off now that that paragraph has gone out, and he's had to apologize for it. it's really not something you see from CEOs. Sometimes CEOs might think things like this. They certainly don't write them. This kind of leads me to Dario is, he's one of one, like he's a very unique CEO out there. And, and this is, this is quite a moment for that to leak. Obviously then, you know, even though they're still talking with the Pentagon, they got the supply chain risk right after that came out.

46:15Ranjan Roy:Was that, so it was a leaked Slack message. Do we have that right? okay i mean again for all this talk about mass surveillance and kind of like the these companies not protecting your data or leveraging your data in unexpected ways it is kind of ironic i have to say that uh in what he is typing into his computer does kind of make its way out into the it's funny the world yeah but i mean which also is surprising to me like in terms of uh yeah i don't know just what that what i don't know what do you think that says that someone leaked that within anthropic well i noted this because anthropic does have this like

46:57Big Technology Podcast Hosts:pretty trusting culture remember people love dario all the founders are still there no one only couple people have left to meta so i do think this is probably a turning point for anthropic culture or maybe not um where dario is going to be much more careful careful about what he writes in those slack message slack messages i mean i'm glad as a reporter i'm glad it leaked you know it's nice to read what's going on inside these companies but it's definitely it's unfortunate for i think anthropic culture that that's out there

47:25Ranjan Roy:yeah no i think it it actually is a big deal in terms of like they really it felt it feels from the outside and you've been a lot more on the inside and interviewing daria like that culturally they were a more trusting kind of like it was the the happy place to be versus other competitors of theirs so like uh yeah i think it's i think it's gonna be it's a pretty important moment i have to

47:52Big Technology Podcast Hosts:say yeah no i would agree and uh okay on the pentagon side my guess is they still end up coming to an agreement with the pentagon that's where i'm i'm at i was there last week i'm there this week they have the six month uh deadline for for uh claude to be uh removed but they're

48:12Ranjan Roy:still talking i see i'm gonna i'm gonna say i think the part that has changed since last week and i don't know if you read like there was the new york times reporting on like i think it was like 135 school children killed in uh in a missile that like had specifically targeted and then like already there's a good deal of kind of you know like how do you make that kind of mistake especially now as there's as claude is taking out maduro and like taking out come in a and i'm not even sure how to pronounce it exactly um like it's uh like it as this war kind of drags on or i mean not drag like heats up i feel there will be more ramifications around like you are the ai engine that's going to be killing people i mean it is like so so there is it's not just going to be a okay we'll make nice for now it's just the easier way out like there's going to be a cost to that Right.

49:17Big Technology Podcast Hosts:That school was obviously a missed target. And we still don't know 100 % whether it was the US, although it certainly seems like it was. It was a school that was in proximity to an IRGC base. And that target was suggested probably by technology, you would imagine, given how tech-enabled they are. Was it Palantir? Was it Claude? Was it something else? Palantir using Claude? It would more likely be Claude using, well, Claude on top of Palantir data. But either way, I do hope we get an investigation into that. It's obviously, it is a massive, massive tragedy. And one that, you know, the worst possible scenario for the AI companies would be, and I don't know for, I mean, if we learn from it, that would be good.

50:05Big Technology Podcast Hosts:But the worst possible scenario here would be that the, the department of war or the the military became so trusting of the ai that they said okay take the shot like we were talking about last week by the way as i will admit i took that side that at

50:21Ranjan Roy:a certain point i let the uh the ai take the shot um but yeah i mean i think basically and this is all like so dark and tragic to have to talk about but like it's real and i mean that's where like Like there is going to be, if you are the face, and the thing that I think makes this so much more acute for these companies right now is like everyone uses their product. They feel the product. So you can make that very quick mental extrapolation into here's how it could go wrong. It is hallucinated that last week while skiing, it made up a name of a trail when I was asking for recommended. I mean, as stupid as this sounds, like you see that.

51:02Ranjan Roy:so like when you read this story and then you read that their technology is being used into like to make decisions it's not this crazy theoretical thing for people and i think that's actually going to like continue and get bigger over the coming weeks and months yeah oh man i

51:22Big Technology Podcast Hosts:had like seven other stories i wanted to cover this week um and one more thing though on this and then we'll move to McDonald's. So Claude, we have some numbers about how Claude has done in recent weeks, especially after this dust-up with the Pentagon. Anthropics said daily signups from Bloomberg. Anthropics said daily signups have quadrupled. Since the start of the year on Thursday, Anthropics said more than 1 million people are now signing up every day. Third-party estimates from data firm Aptopia found Claude downloads were up 220 % on Tuesday compared with February 2023. Meanwhile, some users raced to delete ChatGPT.

52:03Big Technology Podcast Hosts:After OpenAI struck its own deal with the Pentagon, ChatGPT uninstalls jumped nearly 300 % on Saturday from the day prior. Still, Claude's audience remains a small fraction of the size of ChatGPT's 900 million weekly active users. As of February, Claude had less than 4 % total daily mobile chatbot users, according to Aptopia, while ChatGPT had 42%. i actually i think it's a mistake that claude is leaning so hard into the consumer side of it right

52:35Ranjan Roy:now like i feel that they actually were in app downloads consumer usage i feel they have this like really nice story right now that like hardcore people build big things on claude like then open claw and claude code and like just everything like they have been in like this really attractive place that i don't know to i to to move right back into the kind of gemini world of like just brutal battle and competition in terms of consumers downloading your app and using it it's just not and paying maybe 20 bucks max i don't know i feel that might be a mistake that they're actually kind of celebrating and making a big deal about this

53:20Big Technology Podcast Hosts:maybe so and we should talk about hardcore people building big things because one hardcore ceo chris kemposinski from mcdonald's built a big thing the big arch and then he tried to eat it it's from the new york times when the mcdonald's chief executive chris kemposinski uh posted a video of himself eating lunch last month it was not the burger he was promoting that drew attention it was how he was eating it was shall we say a lack of gusto for mr kim kim uh kemposinski there was no huge bite followed by a performative licking of the lips or rubbing of the tummy i can't believe this is in the new york times no he bit into the burger tentatively almost primely and it gave uh i cannot it gave not i can't wait to devour this delicious fast food item but rather i am contractually obligated to perform a particularly a particular action here and i I am not especially delighted about it.

54:14Big Technology Podcast Hosts:Afterward, he held the burger up for the viewers, revealed a missing nibble, and defying what everyone had just seen, he declared that is a big bite for the big arch. So this is a video that he put, I think, on Instagram. You see him say, I'm so excited to eat this big arch, and he just kind of holds it and looks at it and then takes a tiny little nibble off of it, and this guy is actually being roasted. it uh and i think ranjan you saw it and and i know you have deep thoughts about what it means for our world today so please do share them here i have very deep thoughts about and what this means

54:48Ranjan Roy:for our world today and you know what this was the happiest i've been in the past week in terms of like online culture this made me feel like it was 2011 again like this kind of absurd ridiculous simple kind of online brouhaha. And also what I loved, obviously how this escalated. And actually one of the first margins pieces that ever went viral was about the Popeye's chicken sandwich, kind of like the online Twitter beefs and battles from those days. And like, it's just great for me to see this happening again in the fast food world. And like, what i love about this is one i mean his background is just like boston consulting group consultant harvard mba like he's skinny he's skinny no no he he apparently runs in marathons or ultra i mean he's just like the like disgusting he was made in a lab to be ceo of like a multi multi-billion dollar uh corporation this guy was made for it um how did it get set up was there initial blowback like was there like some junior like i always can't stop thinking about is there some like junior social media manager who came up with the idea and then at what point did they realize this was a win like and like there there was a moment i guarantee you were, he was sat down and he's probably just livid.

56:18Ranjan Roy:Like you guys are making a mockery of me. And then someone has to explain to him, actually, sir, in today's world, you can win this. Like you can win, you can own this. We're going to come out with a second video where you're going to talk about like beef notes and talk about the burger. Like it's a wine tasting. You're going to have your peers from Burger King and Wendy's and even A &W Fast Food, which I'd forgotten about, exists but does. And they came out with one as well. You are going to be the talk of the town. This is going to increase sales dramatically. I don't like McDonald's burgers personally at all in the fast food realm.

56:59Ranjan Roy:And there's a lot of fast food I do enjoy. I want a big arch. I'm going to go this weekend and get a big arch i'm sure sales have to have been seeing a major uptick like like this is one of the best stories of 2026 so far yeah the big arch is 1020 calories which is

57:17Big Technology Podcast Hosts:nearly the amount of a complete big mac meal which comes with the soda and fries this is not for the faint of heart and you see him holding it in this video and it's like i don't think the ceo has seen anything that scared him more and the comments are amazing this is from the new york post man's aura screams kale salad that's the most unnatural thing i've ever seen why does he look scared to bite to bite it it scares me when you call food product which is he called it this is our latest food product latest product and the most like comment was he definitely doesn't eat mcdonald's but do you think like so did you watch the burger king one in the wendy's one yes yes do

57:57Ranjan Roy:they eat do actually does do fast food ceos need to eat their product yes or no yes okay i agree

58:07Big Technology Podcast Hosts:we're not going to disagree on this one i agree it's also i i mean i i am of i pro fitness i'm very engaged in it although to varying degrees i don't think you can be that skinny and be the mcdonald's ceo it's false advertising it annoys me he certainly does he doesn't eat that stuff

58:27Ranjan Roy:I don't know. Maybe he's running marathon. I actually remember when I ran and trained for New York City Marathon, my favorite part of it was being able to eat whatever the hell I wanted and actually getting fast food a lot more. So maybe this guy's cranking out marathons. Maybe he's 1 ,020 calories is like, he's got to be doing that multiple times. Yeah. He's got to do that multiple times a day are you if you are to choose between the whopper wendy's whatever that was and the big arch what are you what are you uh taking that nibble out of neither but i will say

59:08Big Technology Podcast Hosts:that i now know what the big arch is and i gotta hand it to you i think you're right i love how how you're right he must have had that realization where like they knew i didn't want to eat it to oh my goodness, I have made this company.

59:23Ranjan Roy:No, no, no, no. He didn't have that realization. This is what I love. There were meetings. There were people sitting around. There were Zoom calls and slides made. And there was like where some poor social media manager who's on the verge of getting fired has to put together a slide showing impression count correlated to sales growth. and like they this all happened in the last few days there's no doubt in my mind and that is my favorite part of this story i would have to say mcdonald's is down 2.83 on the week

59:58Big Technology Podcast Hosts:so i think you and i this is not investment advice but you and i have just identified a buying opportunity because earnings are gonna be crazy buy the dip by the one chris is uh

1:00:10Ranjan Roy:Buy that dip. And take a little nibble. Not a big bite. Not investment advice. Not a big bite. Just take a little nibble of that dip right now.

1:00:21Big Technology Podcast Hosts:Little nibble. All right, Ronjan, get home safe. Thank you so much for coming on. And great at having you as always. All right. See you next week. All right, everybody. Thank you for listening and watching. We'll have Olivia Moore from Andreessen Horowitz on the show on Wednesday. Looking forward to that. And we'll see you next time. on Big Technology Podcast. Thought Sweetgreen was just salads? Think again. There's a new way to do Sweetgreen. Wrapped and ready. These handheld wraps pack bold flavor and 40 plus grams of protein into something hearty, satisfying, and built for life on the go. From craveable sauces to satisfying textures.

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