San Diego Tech News Weekly – December 19, 2021

Hello. Hello. Welcome back. Hello, everyone. We miss you. Hey, Jonah. It's good to see you. Good to see you too.

Happy holidays. Whichever you celebrate. Hope you had a nice Thanksgiving.

Love it. Yeah, it's been a bit, but we wanted to get in some news before the end of the year. This probably might not be the last one for the end of the year either because we got some other year in review kind of news that we'll probably do within the week. But for now we've. It's been a fun last few weeks of December, that's for sure. We got some rain. We got a new women's soccer team.

Hell yeah.

San Diego Wave have named themselves and unveiled their crest. Man, soccer is alive and well in San Diego. That's for sure.

So it's funny, you see the NFL team leave and a void opens up and now we don't just get one soccer team, we get multiple. I see you obviously rocking the the Loyal sweatshirt. Love that. I'm a huge fan. I hope they level up to the MLS one day. It might happen.

Yeah, we lose football and we gain football. We love it. No, the Loyal are with Landon Donovan are. You know, they hit the playoffs this year, first time. It's only year two for them, first of all. First year in front of. In front of fans, so pretty great. We got some stats on an investor call with Lane and Donovan on Friday that. So the Loyal are the number one most watched USL team of all the teams, which is pretty cool because in certain cities, you know, they are certain their teams might be a bigger deal like Phoenix. It's a big, big deal. The Rising. But the Loyal, as they've said all along, San Diego is a great soccer market and people are watching, so that's cool. But to have. So that's. We got a minor league team in the Loyal, but we got a major league women's team here, the Wave. And they just pulled in two huge players to kick off the draft this week. I just want to welcome them to town because we are the official welcoming party. Of course. Alex Morgan, epic US Women's national team. She's won World Cups, she's won Olympics for the U.S. women's team. And she brought in fellow women's national teammate Abby Dahlkemper. So, Abby, Alex, welcome to town. We are thrilled to have you here. We can't wait to watch some games and have you on the show for some tacos and tech. What do you say?

Oh, yeah, let's pick up the phone, jump on the pod with Neil. Does it Feel a little bit like we're catching. Oh, God, I'm going to say I'm going to walk into this one. I was saying catching the soccer wave, but then now that's cheesy as hell. I didn't even intend to do that. But it feels like, you know, San Diego is such like a sort of a transplant city that, you know, with soccer picking up now, people don't really come to our city or are at our city with their soccer loyalties to their previous spots. I don't particularly know much about the New England revolution. I grew up in New England and now I'm here. I'm a loyal fan. Let's go, San Diego. So I think we're in a good place for soccer to blossom.

I think also being a border town, which is foreshadowing for our first story, also helps us being a soccer town as well, because the Zolos in TJ are epic. They are, you know, a top, top team, Mexican team. And they actually did a friendly match with the loyal this season. They came over, they were like, why are we coming to San Diego? And then they were blown away by the audience that came out to watch that. Friendly, which is cool. Yeah. But another great thing happening in our border that just was announced was that the San Diego and Tijuana region won the world Design Capital naming and challenge, defeating Moscow. So first story here, pretty great. But we also need to dive in and explain what does this mean. So every four years a world design challenge is happened for or it is put on and cities compete to showcase that they are a forward thinking and design. Forward thinking region and design forward San Diego or the design for it alliance spearheaded by Michelle Morris. Hey Michelle, we know you're a listener. Worked on not just a city designation but a region. So really two cities showcasing that San Diego and Tijuana together make up this design Forward thinking region.

Metroplex, they call it Metroplex mega region. What, what, what kind of stuff, like what kind of design are they focused on? Is it, is it ecosystem design? Is it like physical buildings? What are they digging into?

It's pieces of that. So it's for sure some elements that you've done some forward thinking design in physical things, but it's also about kind of a culture thing. So quality of life for citizens. How does design thinking actually impact and improve the quality of life? So this can be environmental, cultural, social, economic. So all those things going into how this region has made it better, including like border crossing so that workers can come and cross or travel like the Cross border cbx. That was a spotlight of the tour that they did. You know, they were going up against Moscow, which you know, hard to believe that Moscow was a finalist in terms of thinking about how it's good culturally for its people from a design forward thinking. But hey, you know, everyone's got their own presentation. Previous winners to this have been Seoul, Helsinki, Cape Town, Taipei and Mexico City. But this was the first binational region or binational kind of border town like this to win together. Which is pretty cool because I think a lot of people do really talk about how Tijuana and San Diego really do, are symbiotic to each other. We do that in San Diego for sure. We talk about it. Startup San Diego has, has for years done Startup Week, first night in Tique in Tijuana. I had a board member from Tijuana to make sure we understand each other's cultures and needs for the startup community. But I don't think most of the country, let alone the world realizes that we're actually, you know, reliant on each other so much. Um, so it's a pretty great spotlight which is going to lead up to 2024. So the whole year of 2024 will be a year of events to promote the region including street fairs and celebrations of highlighting the winners designs and a design conference that should bring people around the world as well as just literally putting us on the map. And so definitely tourism is thought of around this, just the highlight for people who look for forward thinking cities. So it's, you know, congratulations to the whole team that put this together. I know there was a big effort from a lot of organizations in town to make this happen. So congratulations and well deserved everyone.

I mean, I mean you're looking at like who else is in the running or is one in the past. I mean this feels almost on the Olympic level with sort of the bidding and sort of getting yourself recognized. So it's, it's definitely, it definitely means a lot for the city. I'm, I'm kind of really curious to see what kind of events we get and what kind of people are drawn to the city from, you know, down from la, as easy as as it is to get here. But you know, across the country and obviously the world, it's going to be really cool.

It is. You know, we are a big city theoretically population wise. I mean the region, TJ and San Diego makes up 7 million people which puts it in top 10 easily in the country for a region in terms of population wise. And yet we don't really go after sports kind of designations. And we haven't gone after, we haven't had a Super bowl here since 2000, no, 2002, I think. We don't go for Olympics. We don't do big city stuff yet. This is the kind of big city stuff we do. And, and as we should, because we are, we're a cerebral city, right? Like we're thinkers, we're building things that change lives. We're not necessarily a sports town, even though we just talked about soccer, you know, but like this is kind of cool for us to be known about by this, by the, by the way of our culture and the things that we work on. So I'm pretty excited to see what comes to this over the next few years.

Well, hey, I mean, I'm looking forward to that. But also kind of as we dial in our fire segues, we can talk about Juneshine pulling in a nice round of funding. And what you might not realize, so juneshine pulls in 24 million, looking a little bit more like a tech company and less like sort of a CPG company. But you might not realize this, but this is a type of alcohol. This is a movement that was literally born in this region. In San Diego, bootscraft started the whole movement. But June China really rocket shipped to the top of the pack there. We saw some on the shelves in Hawaii when we were there. I mean, they were really getting out there. But it's really following this sort of better for you booze craze where people kind of, I guess try to drink a little healthier. I know it feels like a bit of an oxymoron there, but they're really rocketing. So in that round they had two pretty big time investors, Amberstone Ventures and Litany Ventures, which is more known for New age meats, which I think is something that people in the community have gotten behind. And obviously SpaceX is on that list and Liquid Death. So a bit of a variety there, but they clearly saw some value in this movement. And one note on that, kind of seeing seltzer sort of rise really fast with trulies and white claws. But they really, I think, got commoditized. I don't know if you've seen the Topo. Chico's got one now and Svetka's got their own vodka in a can. So it's really kind of getting commoditized to the point where they're a bit stagnant and actually their growth is, is not really following the same trajectory. But what's really cool about this story is. And I looked up, you know, Greg and Forrest, the two founders. If you look at their background, they just met school, did a year or two of some sort of outside work. Forest did some freelance photography, videography and Greg did a little investment banking. It was like two years or so. But they met at USD, right?

USD? Yep, yep. Awesome.

I'd be curious what they were drinking at USD around 2018. You know, are they making their own kombucha? Because this is an interesting story. Remember maybe 10, 15 years ago, everyone was complaining that there was half a percent of alcohol in their kombucha and there it was a big deal. And yet it took another 5, 10 years for people to say, well why don't we just go all the way and make this thing full boo. So they did. They're going to actually use this funding to ramp up production. They actually got Ballast Points old facility and have 30,000 square foot facility. They're going to ramp up production in a couple things. Oh, go ahead.

I just say what's cool about that Ballast Point first of all, which this was, I think their first real production brewery was the Scripps Ranch property, which is where June Shine is headquartered now, which is cool. Also at USD. At the foothill of USD is has been Ballast Point's facility, the Homebrew Mart and one of their tasting rooms. So maybe there was some Ballast Point in the waters for them while they're at school thinking about, hey, these guys did it from, you know, from scratch. Maybe we could in a new category. And you saw the Ballast Point people also go on to do cocktails in a can. Right. So some similarities here. Would have liked to see maybe Ballast Point founders invest in Junesheim be kind of cool. Maybe they did. Maybe it's quiet and secret. But yeah, you love kind of seeing the community, you know, grow and then born new things like this, new legs like June Shine and new categories as well too.

Yeah, I mean in there and they're moving this nationwide and, and they're growing pretty significantly. I mean actually this is the growing 50% year over year. I think seltzer was flat, but maybe you know, 3 to 5% growth. So really not a whole ton there. But if you look at kind of their market share, I mean these guys, you know, with the hard fermented tea, you know, kind of built around getting out in the sun, I've captured 40% market share and it looks like they've sold 10 million cans, which is pretty impressive stuff. A couple of Those are in my fridge. But I'm really curious to see how this expansion goes. They've got a new alcohol, new brand, but they're still kind of up against a bit of a legacy industry where you need a new distributor by state and you need to do this sort of thirds rule. I don't know if you've heard that, where you have to give a third to your distributor and a third to the store. And so it's actually really, really hard to build an alcohol brand. So it's pretty impressive to see what they've done with this so far. You know, I can't, can't wait to see them experiment further. And it feels like you have a little bit more flexibility and freedom to kind of play. I mean, there's only certain so many types of beer that you can brew, and I know I'm probably going to take some heat for that, but it feels like once you get some of these flavors that they're able to bring to the table with, with hard Kombuchas, you know, like Pog Juice and things, things like that, then you really can get kind of creative.

Yeah. And sending it is leading, I think, in some of those brands, too, that you said. June Shine has some of the biggest market share, but Craft down in Chula Vista, right behind them, also a very popular brand. And then local roots up in North County, Ben Vista, another hard Kombucha brand. You know, that's because we've got so much density in the brewing world that it's spun off into new categories now. Even Stone has a hard sell to. Right. Like they have to jump into the. To this as well. You got to imagine Kombucha is on the same trajectory as well, too, where other brands will pick up for this. And so June Shine will be hopefully a leader. Pick either either their own big brand, hopefully they're the Stone of Hurricane Bucha, or they're picked up by someone big. And there's a nice, nice return for everyone. You know, you hope that the brand stays local, which they do, which they've claimed they want to be. They've got some, some celebrities back in them as well, too. I know Whitney Cummings has come in and invested. Our own local celebrity, Damon Melda, I know is involved.

Yeah.

Shout out to. But there's a lot of local, local money in this as well. So just from that regard, we hope it does well to support San Diego too.

I mean, to wrap on that, it really is just like a marriage, like you said of San Diego, sort of healthy, focused lifestyle. And brew centric culture. You know, it's something like this seems, seems bound to explode. And it looks like it has.

Absolutely. Speaking of healthy culture and all about design, a legacy of life changing technologies in San Diego.

And Epic segues, Epic Segways, one of.

Our own public companies, Arena Pharmaceuticals, big biotech company here is just getting picked up by Pfizer. Heard of Pfizer before for a cool $7 billion all in cash. This is like a ring the bell kind of sound good and bad. I would say we'll dive into it a little bit. We don't have a lot of multi digit billion dollar public companies in San Diego. Most are sub 10 billion dol. And this is another one that maybe was on that trajectory and got picked up by Pfizer who is really on a path, a warpath to stack on a ton of revenue which we're going to dive into. So you want to jump into this one?

Yeah, I mean I think this was really interesting. We were talking about this offline but it's a bit of a R and D by acquisition. We were kind of talking about that when a company gets super big like this, it gets really hard to move and be mobile. And sometimes the best way to do some R and D is by buying smaller companies. You know, maybe this is the wrong analogy and you know we use baseball for a minute, but arena, kind of the way that they were built and what we found a little bit in the research is they feel a little bit like a minor league sports team in a sense where they have a ton of prospects, a ton of you know, potential life changing diseases that are almost there. They're sort of, they're building, they're producing and they're getting to that point where they, they might go mainstream but they're not quite there. So it's a really good acquisition for, for Pfizer but they sort of focus on. And what Pfizer is looking to gain out of this are sort of three major categories for you know, immuno inflammatory diseases. So gastro tunnel. Oh God, I'm gonna. For your gut. I'm killing me there. Dermatology and cardiovascular gastroenterology there. How do I do? You did it good enough, I think 80%. But for that one, which I'll refuse to say. Say again. You know, inflammatory bowel disease, irritable bowel syndrome, things that you've kind of seen in super bowl or football ads, things like that. Dermatology. So dermatitis, alopecia, which you might have heard of, and then cardiovascular so acute heart failure and coronary microvascular obstruction. So things that are a little bit, they're in the mainstream, but there are treatments coming. They're looking to kind of support here and looks like Pfizer's trying to get into the game or at least beef up what they can offer with these sort of multiple categories.

Yeah, I mean, analysts claimed on news of this they thought it's a great get for Pfizer, which because they think the one bowel drug that they've got kind of as their lead candidate alone could be a five to $10 billion sales drug, which would immediately put it blast it way past the sale price of 6.7 billion in cash. Pfizer right now did in 2020, did 40, 42 billion in revenue and is claiming that in 2022 it is going to try to get to 100 billion in revenue. So big jumps up, especially when it is at the middle of the vaccine rollout. And sales of vaccine, not just vaccines, but boosters and everything else around it, like pretty murky around what its long term COVID vaccine sales potential are. And yet it's still trying to stack all these other drugs in to get to $100 billion company. So Pfizer, which by the way has a Senegal presence as well too, you can see it right off the five. If you're looking towards Torrey Pines Mesa north of Genesee, you can see it's a building there. Slow go. So benefits us here too as well. And now Arena Pharmaceuticals, part of the fam.

We'll have to know or I don't know, maybe you found this in some research. You know, does the team stay here? Do they operate independently like we saw with a couple previous acquisitions, or is this just get rol right up into Pfizer? I really hope they get to operate as sort of a separate business underneath the Pfizer and Bella and kind of it stays with the San Diego presence, you know, surf lunches and things like that. But you know, we'll have to see as it gets rolled out.

Seems like each big drug company does things differently. Some independent and say we just use our, you know, our dealer network to get the drug out right to the world. Because obviously Pfizer has a great brand name and distribution or. Yeah. Or does it become the Pfizer bowel movement drug? We'll see. But either way, I think it's still a good benefit short term right now for everyone involved at Arena. Depends. I gotta imagine there's like these earnouts that's like as you Hit clinical stages, you get more cash released as well too. So, you know, we'll early to tell, but congrats to arena for building a good company so far.

And one last point, actually, you made this earlier. I thought it was really good. Is like a lot of the COVID news kind of covers up a lot of these other announcements. So I thought that was an interesting point because there is a lot going on in the pharma and the biotech world that you just don't hear about because it's all about testing vaccines and boosters. And so it's good to highlight a story like this can show that these major movements are still happening. Just got to kind of shine a little light on them because of the fog, if you will, of COVID Yeah.

And speaking of movement, it brings us to a great segment number five here in terms of San Diego's transportation and logistics tech world, which after a lot of hyping from us on this podcast, I'm sure it all came from that about talking about how San Diego is a logistics tech city. Shout out Robinhood snacks for at least recognizing that in the Twitter comments, if not on the podcast yet. But the San Diego edc, the Economic Development Corporation, just did a study that talked about our AI cluster, specifically in the transportation world, and especially how that employment growth has been really helping San Diego region during the pandemic. This is a great story to talk about. I think the headline really hides the bigger picture here, is that we have some great AI technology thinkers, doers and companies, and a lot of it is being applied to the transportation cluster or logistics tech. So one AI buzzword we know, but the fact that it's actually finding its way into actual applications, I think it's a big deal. And so we're talking about here. You want to dive a little bit into this?

Yeah, I think it's important to understand kind of what transportation kind of entails because there's a couple of different buckets and categories and maybe we can speak to some of this. But you know, this isn't just, you know, one type of transportation. And we think about it in a lot of different ways, but think about it in a couple categories. So like tech. So Airspace and Boxton, you want to kind of break down what those two do.

Yeah. So in logistics tech, they are doing specific actual kind of tech around routing.

Like SaaS.

Yeah, kind of the SaaS side of this logistics tech piece, you know, whether it's ordering, shipping and actual. The actual movement and tracking of things. So the software side I Think is where aerospace and boxing are focused on this.

So that's a big one. Transportation and safety. Two more, two simple, which we love to talk about, analytics. Both are trying to make sure that we can actually move physical products in a safer way. Two different approaches, but both using robotics at sort of the core, which is super cool. So kind of a different take on logistics.

Both are, both are focused on like trucking. Right. And one is doing like autonomous trucking. So too simple really is allowing our trucks to, to be potentially smarter in some ways and limit the loss of life or, or opening up human productivity to other things, you know, in that transportation space. Whereas Lytics is doing kind of real time tracking and fleet management in general. So not just a truck, but entire fleet. How are they doing? And a whole suite of tools for the truck itself.

Yeah, kind of interesting. They both feel like different stages of the transition in trucking. Like it does feel like we're ultimately headed to autonomous, but I don't know if that's 5, 10, 20 years out for like, you know, the whole transition. And so you need Lytics to kind of potentially at this phase or what they're doing at this phase to kind of make sure that drivers stay, stay alert and safe. One thing to point out that I think is really interesting is it's not always about, you know, monitoring and micromanaging a driver and saying hey, like get off your phone or whatever. There's also a really positive piece to it. There's a reward system. There's like you're killing it and you're one of the best drivers and data unlocks that, you know, management companies might not have ever had. So you can kind of think of it as a positive angle and not just sort of like cameras on your person and sort of calling out bad behavior. So kind of like to put a positive spin if possible. Then we have travel and commute. So Sandag and Cubic, these are mega, you know, mega businesses kind of doing that a little bit more of the sort of standard transportation.

So Sandag is actually a government agency that manages the San Diego County. Well, I'm going to mess up what the acronym stands for, but in a sense, like they are designing our public transportation system, our freeways, our bike lanes, like all the above for San Diego County. They are designing the movement of people of what we just talked about, 7 million people in the region because they are all the way down to the border. The trolley was part of that. So they run their own AI models around. How do you actually get people Moving every day, multiple times a day. Right. So that's kind of interesting from an AI perspective there. And then cubic, which is both an aerospace company and a logistics tech company. I think specific to logistics like they power most of the world's subways, whether it's through ticketing, through scheduling and whole software is behind that. So they also have their own kind of logistic planning around how does a city move, move its people through a specific kind of public transportation. So kind of cool to have them their input on this as well too. Another one is defense, obviously the mobilization of troops of different kinds of tanks and ground and air and water, all the above. Kind of different. How do you move a million person army or our military together around that as well too.

So.

So Booz Allen Hamilton came together and really kind of led the effort in this study. Funded it and supported from I believe research analysis in that regard. You want to talk us through some of the key findings?

There's some cool stats here. I mean this is massive. 11 billion in economic impact for the region. 90,000 local jobs. And during the pandemic, as we were talking about in the past, you know, a lot of, a lot of sort of decrease in jobs and a lot of jobs lost. Obviously we're very tourism focused industry region. They're up 10% despite the pandemic. So it kind of shows the growth of this type of technology growth, this industry and you know, the talent obviously we can either pull or have in the region to kind of work on AI and the transportation sector. Super, super cool to see and really kind of vaults San Diego to the global stage in a sense when it comes to these types of jobs. And you know, I'm kind of excited to see where we go. I mean I really, I like that there's eyes on us for that. And if you actually want to see the full study, it's worth a read. Transportation.san Diegoai.org is where that's listed. You can really dig into kind of what they found, sound found there.

Yeah. And they're going to be doing a quarterly AI study with a different, different application. So AI in transportation was this one and expect quarterly, I think quarterly. I'm sorry, if I'm speaking for the team there, maybe it's three times next year. But in either case it's all AI research focus on different areas that San Diego is gaining from. I think just even from logistics tech. There's a lot of companies we didn't mention that you could see that they were riding a good wave just from their Funding alone. First of all, Tusimbo went public last year on no revenue. So obviously there was growth in demand there. But then flock freight raised to unicorn status over 200 million and is taking over downtown Encinitas Platform Science, another fleet tracking company. There's so many that have been growing and doing riding this wave of the need for logistics tech. Now we just need to find a new way to get freight from China to California and get around that besides air and shipping, I guess we need to send them on rockets. So that's the next thing. Which leads us to a great segue. The hardest segue to pull off here. But another San Diego rocket ship, Jack in the Box is acquiring Orange County's del taco for $575 million.

Nice. Love that.

So we love to see them. Oh I should have gone marriage as our. As our route here. Anyway, the marrying of two fast food giants or as you like to say, fast food for surfer brands.

Can I clarify that was in the article. They self proclaimed themselves. I, I don't know if I agree but anyways that's what they say they are. They say they're fast food for surfers. I'm not sure we should pull some surfers but I thought that was funny.

Yeah, San Diego surfers. I don't know how often you're getting Taco Bell or Jack. Sorry, messing this up Del Taco. Or are you getting Jack in the boxes two tacos for 99 cents or. Or are you tuning into the tacos and tech podcast and hearing another unique place every week of where to go in San Diego? I don't know but do you have.

A map by the way of people's favorite taco shops?

We've got a database shout out to Sasha for creating that initially and we are coming out with a visualization of that in early 2022. So we will have that a little ticker of our top top. The top spots have been named.

I'll raise my hand if you need help. We used to map every scooter and where it was towed last and we did it all in Google Maps. So if that's, if that's helpful. It was fun. Looking back on it might give me some, some minor PTSD of all the scooters being taken by city of San Diego. Sorry. We love you San Diego. We love scooters. It's all positive. But yeah, let me know if you need help. We could use help there.

I know that. I know. I definitely remember that some of the top ones named were for sure the Taco stand. I don't, I gotta go back and see how many times people mentioned Del Taco or Jack in the Box as their favorite taco spot in San Diego.

I have a guess, but I don't want to guess it live. But it would be cool to kind of have taco shop by the, by the name of the guest and then you can kind of do like a taco tour and try to hit them all.

That would be fun by scooter too, you know, let's see how many we can hit by a scooter tour of taco places. I took a scooter last week in the middle of trying to do a full marathon on my own. I ran a half and then I said I'm going to run back to my car and just for fun. But at 18 or 19 miles I ran over a bird scooter, sorry and said, you know what, this would be fun to take the rest away home. But we're here to talk about tacos.

Well, to clarify real quick, before moving on, Neil was only supposed to run a half marathon, completed it, then got the scooter.

Yeah. Yes. Then was trying to run another half marathon but you know, you're nuts.

But yeah, sorry. So Del Taco, like you said, out of OC, founded in 64. So they're, they're, you know, they're an older brand but 99% of their operations are drive thru, which is super cool as far as like being set up for Pandemic. They're already there. I don't know where those 1% shops are. 600 locations across 16 states and about half are franchised. What was really interesting though about this acquisition is both of the two restaurants, Jack in the Box and Del Taco are pretty much in the exact same regions. They pretty much cover the same territory and they're not really gaining a ton from this acquisition outside of operational costs. And it looks like they're able to save about 15 million in cost savings just by being able to kind of improve the, you know, the supply chain Jack in the Box has, you know, 2218 locations over 21 states. So pretty similar. And are mostly 93% franchise owned. One sort of advantage there is Jack in the Box was kind of indicating in their press release is that now they have a little bit more optionality for their current franchisees to sort of spin into, you know, the Dell Taco offerings or a little bit more of, you know, that, that side of the supply chain and so that might help franchisees kind of build bigger businesses. Within the, in their ecosystem.

Well, it kind of reminds me of Carl's Jr. Some, a lot of Carl's Juniors you'll see that have like the Green Burrito under one roof too. Two restaurants under one roof. And I got to imagine that since Carl's Jr. Sorry, since Jackbox already offers tacos, they've got some interesting data to see. You know, is there an interest in tacos at their places? So kind of interesting to see also. I looked up real quick. Jack in the Box has been around since 1951, so some pretty legacy brands here, like Jack in the box, 1950s McDonald's also, same time frame you said Del Taco in the 60s. Kind of interesting to see consolidation now happening this many decades later, for sure. But something else to know is that Jack of the Box already owns a Mexican brand in Qdoba. They tried, yeah. Oh, they spun it out, did they?

Spun out? Yeah, they've been trying to do this for a number of years. In 2003, they bought Qdoba, grew it to 700 locations, and then spun it back out to PE. So they've been wanting to do this. I wonder if this is an ego thing for them at Del Taco or they're like, okay, now is the time. The time is right. But definitely getting the drive throughs, the 99% drive throughs is, is a huge advantage, especially now that we're living in, you know, pandemic, but also kind of a maybe a faster moving, more digital world.

Yeah, well, very interesting to see for sure. I think no matter what the people have spoken, we want tacos. So, uh, Jack in the Box now has even more tacos to offer and that's our show. Thank you everyone for tuning in. We did a pretty good, like, tour of, of San Diego's like top, top industries, from biotech to AI to alcohol to tacos. You know, we hit, I think we hit some of the main, main highlights. We didn't like, do a deep dive on military. It's kind of like maybe our only area that we didn't touch on that San Diego is a leader in. But we still have a week, week or two to go before the end of the year, so you never know.

I'll be honest, after this recording this episode, I think I'm about ready to gear up some, some lunch here and maybe crack a kombucha. I don't know about you.

That sounds great. Yes, I'm with you on that. Cheers. Salud. Enjoy. And if we don't hear from you all before then, a very happy holidays.

Happy holidays, everybody. We'll talk soon.

Take care.