NEWSMAX

From semianalysis in the restream waiting room. Let's bring him into the TVPN ultra dome. Doug, how are you doing? Welcome to the show. How did you decide to take a vacation in the fall of 2025? You were off for two days. No days off. We're in the midst of the biggest. We're like, oh, it's going to be. It's going to be mellow. There's not going to be any news. No days off. So every single time I take a vacation, stocks always drop. But, dude, I did. I proposed to my girlfriend in Japan. That's the reason why I went. So, yeah. Yeah. Well, we're gonna hit the goal. That's massive news. Anybody can pull together a 200 billion dollar LOI. But to to find true love is beyond special. So congratulations. What's a hundred billion between friends today? I saw the 100 billion. The 100 million Brookfield thing. I was like, dude, don't even. It's just another day, man.

Faster, sleep deeper and wake up energized. And I want you to tell me, which Ferrari do you like? Because we finally have the Ferrari bench results in a Ferrari in Minecraft. This one's from GPT 5.1 Pro. With the same prompt as if we scroll down, we can see what Gemini 3 Pro did. Which one do you think is better? Which do you think is more Ferrari? I mean, the Minecraft Ferrari Gemini 3 actually looks something like a. I think I like the Gemini 3.12 GPD51 Pro. Doesn't look anything like it got red. It's missing. Just like with the Gemini 3 Pro. You can see. What I like about it is you see that little yellow dot on the hood? It's clearly like that's where the Ferrari logo goes on an actual Ferrari. And it knew to put that in there. It's just a little bit more. The wing is a little more articulated and opinionated. It feels like it's more disconnected from the overall structure, but still an interesting challenge, and I'm very excited to see where this benchmark goes because it's just so visual. It's so tangible. Like, okay, I understand what this should look like. And it really illustrates all the hallucinations. Anything else you want to close out with? I will close out by saying it's point. Pouring rain so hard that I'm hearing it through through our earbuds. Okay. So if you are in la. Yeah, yeah. Be safe.

And if you are constantly sort of pandering and figuring out like, how to execute other people's dreams, wishes and visions and what the hell are you actually making. Yeah. And you don't want to get to a place where your content is better than. Better than the product. And I'm sure that's like, you know, a lot of the more, the more you time you spend on content, like the, the more greater there is a likelihood that, that it could get to that point, I think. Yeah. I mean, but like, do you guys care about what you see on social media still? Like, I actually think there's a bifurcation that's happening with what people see versus what actually people are going to eat. I do think that there's, I don't know, maybe the Steel man argument for the viral over the top, you know, TikTok that gets me to go to a restaurant is that it can in some ways create like a shelling point and like a coming together. Like if there's something that's trendy and, and it's an excuse for me to pull my extended family, my friends, different people, and it just gets us an opportunity to kind of come together there and experience that like, even silly trendy, over the top thing. I think that there's something that can be good about that, but it's certainly not like the primary reason why I go to a particular restaurant. No, I mean, that's the thing is like, I actually, I. We're working on a show and I can't say which or where, but you know, sort of the thesis is we're going to take these lists that people find or things that are viral and actually go out of our way to avoid it. Okay. You know. Yeah. Go next door to the restaurant that you're supposed to go eat at. Okay. Oh, that's cool. That's very cool in principle. Right. No, I like that as a philosophy. The other thing is.

Can go. I feel like I've been going to AI generated restaurants for some time now. You know, it just hasn't called AI. That's funny. It's a good take. Are you excited about drone drone delivery? You know, that's one thing where I thought it was going to be a total zero. I'm dead wrong about that one. I think it's definitely going to be a thing. And well, isn't it exciting as a chef to know like, if I make this, it will arrive hot? No, it's not going to arrive. Well, that's a whole other thing with this whole. The one thing I will tell you under the food delivery space and I've talked to just about everyone under the sun over the past 10 years that's tried to start up a food delivery company because they're like, oh, this guy's done it a few times. Let me just sort of steal all the ideas and I'll tell them every time. I'm like, unless you've created some kind of new technology to cook the food, it's going to be hard to really make the food hot ultimately. Right. Like, how should I say this? There's no new technology to make the food better. None. So the delivery drone, unless it's cooking the food as it flies, it's always. Going to be limited and an oven in the air, basically. Yeah. I mean like, that's just the truth. Right. Like, and also a lot of these places just have a bottleneck because everybody wants to eat at 6:30, 7 o'. Clock. So there's just, there's not much you can do to make the food go out faster. Yeah. Or hotter. And more importantly than not everything can be delivered well. Like French fries will never be able to be delivered well. Right. The next step is going to be whoever makes the food literally right outside the house or apartment. Have you heard any pitches on that? I have any. No, you don't have to give names but like it gets to the point where it's like a street. We just have like a massive proliferation of like street carts and it's. And maybe, maybe like. Well, I mean, I'll tell you this, a lot of these pitch, I haven't been 200 couple years because I just don't want to do it anymore. But a lot of times there'll be a very success, like a chef that's worked 20 years at a three Mission Star restaurant making the food, you know, and it comes out and I'm always like, is this person going to be making the food? You're going to get this quality talent making the food at every single sort of satellite location. And the answer is, they haven't even thought that far. And the other answer is, that's not a reality. You know, you might as well be pitching me a unicorn. Literally, a unicorn with a horse and a horn on it, because it's not going to ever work. Because that's the hard part about this business. Right. Cooking is still a physical endeavor. And for all the VC money and tech money, it can't sort of solve that riddle of how do you make physical labor go away or done better? So you don't think you're very bearish on the humanoids chefing up? No, I'm not bearish on that either. I spoke to somebody.

AI penetration max? Who the hell knows? Don't, don't name it. Don't, don't name it. That. Another question. Another question. Xai and Nvidia announced like a new data center project in Saudi yesterday. I don't know if you caught that. Do you see, do you see Xai just getting into the cloud, into the AI cloud business and helping power and helping basically deliver infrastructure for other companies? No, not until this conversation. But they're the best. They're the best at being quick. So if you have infinite capital and the zoning laws can be whatever the hell they want them to be, I would sign up Xai to put up a cluster as fast as possible. They're the quickest with Colossus. I think they literally have the speedrun record and Saudis want it. Dude, they want it so badly. And I think with this new we're allowing to export it and I mean, yeah, if they can buy it, bro. And Xai is going to be like, give me money in my pocket. I'm going to make a Saudi Grok and then I'll make a Grok 5. So I think that, dude, X is down for business and I think they like, Tesla's always been supported by a lot of different funders and I bet you some of the people who took X private probably were Saudis. So. Yeah, might as well make sense. That's true. Yeah, they actually were. I remember quick take on the, on the Brookfield deal. You mentioned it early.

Hobbyist and just muzzle Hoberman and Peter, we'll be okay. Yeah, yeah. Live life. Yeah. I mean like the, the dual pressure right now from, from like just labor costs on one side and then, and then just like declining alcohol sales. Like it's just creating. I mean, I've seen some. The place we go for Breakfast adds like 4% on top of every bill for, for benefits. I'm sure that that's helpful, but like it's a very real cost. Right. It's now 25% between effectively for or 24% for service. @ the end of the day, food needs to be more expensive and, and I'm not. It. It just sort of has to. And it can't be sort of be passed down. I think I've been talking about this for many, many years. I don't know why, but people have a real allergic reaction when it talks to raising prices. For example, I think, you know, it's good. I'm pro. When a restaurant jacks up their prices to like. I'm hoping we see a restaurant where the ability to eat there is basically like going to a Taylor Swift conference. A secondary, secondary market. Yeah. You know, like that's what has to happen. I do believe there's going to be innovation again. The problem with the restaurant industry as a whole to mitigating this decline in beverage sales is that we are too slow and prodding to try new things out, to embrace new technologies. As my spiel and joke about this as a whole, we're so goddamn allergic and slow to changing things. We still are using the imperial system instead of the metric system. I mean, that's so dumb. The metric system is scientifically proven to be more accurate and more effective. Why are we still using ounces, pounds? It's so dumb. America, baby. It's because we're Americans. We do things the dumb way. Sometimes Americans can still do it, but as an industry. Yeah, I know as restaurant leaders, we can just use the metric. Just use metric. But. And again, you know that it's bad when drug dealers use the metric system. But drug dealers use the metrics. That's right. So what the hell are we doing here? So if we adopt the metric system as an industry, what are we doing here? Yeah, yeah, yeah. What a mess. What a mess. Last question. We've got a bunch of people in the chat have asked, who do you think is going to win the AI race Hot take.

Wall. Dude, we don't. We are squatting. Thank you to our squatting overlords who let us work here. We're sick. We're super happy about that. But okay, if you just do the math, man, because here's the thing. I think all the hyperscalers could raise like $2 trillion. Like I really think the number is so large. In fact, I'm trying, I'm trying. I was looking at the free cash flow and then you multiply it by 10. If you, if they were paying 10% interest, like 10% interest and it's trillions of dollars because they produce so much hundreds of billions. No. Okay, so I'm going to give you the maxed out version of how I think about what we could do. So leverage the new. Leverage the new report from something analysis leverage max. Also, also, I've been told by, I've been told by my corporate overloads, you have to star the inference max. That's super important. You have to start inference max on GitHub. Sorry, before. So how. Everyone go star Inference Max on GitHub, please. Thank you. That'll help. So I think they could probably raise something like $6 trillion by 2029. And is that like a 5% interest rate you're assuming on like corporate debt? Basically. And that's. We are paying. Yeah. So we just, essentially we're doing the current corporate interest. We're just saying like, hey, the current market rate. There are actual problems with how this is done. But like, let's use meta. Meta is the most likely, like the most aggressive version of this. You completely do all your data center capex off the balance sheet, you have Blue Owl come in, pay for all that, you do a sale, lease back, and then you spend the rest of the money just buying GPUs. And you could probably do like you could. And then they can issue debt in the market that's like 50 bips above the government. And also the rating agencies are like, okay, as long as you don't have more than one turn of debt by 2029, you're good to go. We did that number for all of them, for all the hyperscalers. X Oracle. Oracle is pretty tapped out. $6 trillion, that's the big number. That's great. But here's the thing. So if Oracle's tapped out already and they're about to spend.

Find. So, yeah, that that kind of position will be a robot. No questions about it. That makes sense. What's the most overrated trend in food right now? Oh, man, I'm trying to stay positive these days, guys. I think there's a way to answer the question by just saying, like, there's things that can be popular now that are not dirt, like dirt. Durable trends. So. Well, I would say the. The most annoying trend is that everything has to be the best. This hyper. Hyperbole. Right. I have to have the best X. This restaurant has to be, you know, world class number one. And they hate to tell it to you guys, but I think most people wouldn't even know what best is if they ate it. Yeah. And I think for the most part, I'm just now on this mantra personally of does it bring you joy, does it bring you happ? And that's really all that should matter. It's such a relative subjective thing. But more importantly, I'm just trying to tell people, like, good is hard to do. Like, just good is hard. And I think we need more people to sort of appreciate just good or like even boring good than the world's best. Oh, my God, this is the greatest thing I've ever had. That, to me, is the worst trend in the world is, you know, and the media and shafts, we're all part of the problem too, right? You know, all these lists and it's all stupid ultimately. Yeah. But do you think. Do you think we'll ever get to a point where.

Conversation. But this is the. I think about. Oh, I love it. Last question on my side. I'm curious how restaurant operators are planning around America just drinking less than ever. Yeah. Well, that is the. You know, I feel like the boy cried wolf. I've been sort of screaming this flag for a long time. This has been, this is the real existential threat. Like for example, la. The biggest thing that happened in LA over the past 10 years in food was really ride sharing because people were getting drunk. And you saw that in revenues. Restaurants are going through the roof. And if anything, restaurants was a bubble. Right. Too many restaurants. And I think we're still sort of in this bubble. That's a whole other conversation. But I think that you can see now, at least in la, people are drinking much less. I think you see a younger generation maybe taking some edibles. They're just not. You know, the crazy thing is I. Kids just don't drink anymore. Like kids start when they start a tab, which is crazy to me. They close it out every time. Yeah. Is going on. Like they're never going to know what it's like to wake up at three in the afternoon being like, shit, I left my credit card at that bar. I got to go back and get it. They're too responsible. They're closing out every time. There's a responsibility. Hurting small businesses. It is. It is hurting small businesses. And, and, but I think that there is. If you look at the sort of. The only look at the blended numbers for most restaurants or beverage sales, I think that it might look flat or down, but it's actually, I think way worse. Because once you split out the 1% or the 1% that are drinking like these huge bottles of expensive wine. Right. And that is through the roof right now, again, talking about the barbell experiential thing, like people that are drinking things that no one else can really afford. That's gone like 3x4x for the past five years. It really has. And you know, younger people are not drinking cocktails and they don't want mocktails because mocktails are actually way more difficult to make than a regular cocktail with alcohol in it. But nobody wants to drink it for the same. Or more. Why is it. Why is it more? Why is it more difficult just to actually deliver something? Imagine if we were making the alcohol too. Yeah. From scratch. That's hard to do. That's. And that, you know, normal restaurant. Restaurant ratio was 70 to 30% for the most part. You want 70% food. I mean, this is not the. I like roughly roughly 70% food to 30% dev sales. And I think that is completely shifted. And for 10%. Yeah. I mean, like if you want 10 of your, you know, profit, for example. Right. Like something's going to give when you're down like 18 on BEV sales. You know, I think that's the average right now or something like that. 15, 18. So I don't have an answer. Food needs to get more expensive. I've been saying that for a long time, but that comes across as terrible when people read that as a pull quote. Yeah. Because it's already expensive. So I don't know what the answers are. I will tell you that, like, you know, it's one of the reasons why I invested in athletic brewing in 2019 because I saw the data within our own restaurants. It was slowly going down year after year. Just a little bit like half a percent, 1%. But, you know, and I'm, I think that's what we can do is sort of figure out what the alternatives are. I don't have the answer, but isn't one. Isn't. One of the challenges is like these non alk products, like somebody's not like, like there's not the incentive to have the second or third. Like I feel like a lot of this stuff, people just have one. They, they get a little bit of the taste, but they're not getting like a real. They're not like getting, they're not, they're, they're just like not getting drunk. Right. So they're not going to. You guys drinking as much as you used to? Absolutely not. No. You know, I feel like the way I used to was like Don Draper and Mad Men. The amount I used to drink. Yes. Yeah. You know, and you know, part of that is just a generational shift. But I can assure you, if you talk to people under a certain age group, the younger Gen Z, they think of drinking like it's smoking cigarettes. Oh, yeah. It's just not something they want. I've seen this in kitchens. Like, you finished your 12, 14 hour day, all you wanted was that cold beer at the end of their shift, and now they don't want that. Yeah. And I just don't. I'm just like, what is happening? You know, And I'm not saying they're wrong. It's just so that we're sort of dinosaurs. Different interpretation. Like the data didn't change, but it was contextualized through podcasts and there's a lot of health data out there. You could maybe call a little bit of the Huberman effect, But there's a whole bunch of. There's a long lineage of folks who have been, like, actually ringing the alarm bells on the health consequences of drinking alcohol, even in small amounts. And so I feel like that's what's really cascaded. Yeah. Maybe what we should do. Restaurants should start a lobbyist and just muzzle Hoboman and Peter. Tia, and we'll be okay. Yeah. Yeah. Live life. Yeah. The dual pressure right now from.

Scalar's X Oracle. Oracle's pretty tapped out. $6 trillion, that's like the, that's the big number. That's great. But here's the thing. So if Oracle's. Tapped out already and they're about to spend four years where free cash flow is going to be negative, how does that actually work? So here's the thing about this though is free cash flow doesn't like. Free cash flow goes negative if you assume there's no revenue growth. But this is kind of like a shale. Well, okay, you get a lot of your money on a GPU cluster up front. Let's say five year economic life. People are going to fight me about this, but whatever, you will have your payback for a brand new cluster in something like 18 months. And so after that on the like, let's say on the 18 to 24 to 36 months, which is like the two to three year, you're just going to start now, you're going to start to gather in cash and, and that cash you can go turn around and borrow more against or respond again. And so that's where this like, you know, the shale, One of the reasons why shale went so insane in terms of Supply is like 12 month payback period, which is way more insane than what this is, but like 12 month pay, so you get all your money back. You can just do it again, do it again, do it again. So I think next year Oracle will make a lot more money and they're going to be able to raise against a lot more money. There we go. Yeah, but they're tapped out this year. Yeah, that makes sense. Okay, I have kind of a lightning round because I know you have a hard out in a few minutes.

Companies and part of their workflows, I think they'll, they'll. It's possible to like make it up in volume. Yeah. This is so funny. The way Shield puts it. Truth bomb from TK Tipping is a hack to maximize price. It's psychology. Consumers are willing to pay more in tips than they are willing to pay in fees for or menu price. So a $16 burrito plus a $4 tip feels far cheaper to people than a $20 burrito that has no, a no tip option. But again, from a, from a, from a, from a business standpoint, I don't, I don't know. I don't know if it's exactly the same thing. I feel like businesses like want to have like more predictable, more predictable costs, not have that like variability. And like, okay, sometimes the fees are like this, sometimes the fees are like that. I think this will be a better consumer experience. A lot of companies, you know, will give like credits to their employees, which is like you get $20 of credits. Yeah. Every day. And then whatever. You're kind of like spending on top of that you have to eat. And so I think consumers will. Could very likely like picnic more. So we'll see. Yeah, the, this was one of the original like D2C evolutions that happened with a lot of like shopify merchants. I remember looking at, I think it was like Kylie cosmetics. And there was a trend for a while that was like, consumers want transparent pricing. Don't do all the crazy psychological hacks. So you'd be like, yeah, I'm just gonna put it's 30 bucks and that's what it is. And it has free shipping and that tax and shipping is included. And it's just like what we say up front is, feels really good, feels really good to say that. And then you go to like the high performing stores and all across the board it would be like 9.99. And then you go in and there's like $6.42 added in taxes. And then you add shipping and it. Each like a pop up that's laddering. One minute to add, flattering you up and just like keeping you on the real. Reeling you in like a fish. Adding, adding fees, adding fees until you're like, okay, well now I'm like entered all my information and I'm ready to click the button. And so yeah, okay, you added two more bucks. Whatever, I'll just deal with it. So these psychological hacks are just like somewhat inevitable, but avoiding them, I think in the short term is a great go to market. I just wonder if there's something. If there's something like, truly, like, counter position that will be durable. Like Costco. Kirkland Costco, like, has not. Has been like, the low cost, affordable option. And that model has held for, like, decades. Right. The one thing, the one thing that we learned from having somebody on the team call Picnic is that they are focused on higher volume orders. Like teams of like, 25 and up. Yeah. And so I think that. I think that they're just betting, like, hey, there's. We can. We can get a lot of volume. We will be able to handle having. It's one person that goes around and picks up every order from all the different restaurants. Right. And so it's quite a bit less of one individual's time, much higher order volume than when a company is like, hey, we're giving credits to people. And then each employee is making individual orders. And then there's like, ends up being like, 20 drivers on the road to deliver one lunch, which, like, makes no sense. I have one more take on this delivery question, but first I need to tell you about cognition.

And he would have a very nice day, as you might imagine. Yeah. So anyways, we were talking about that. Travis responded and you can get into it and kind of give your reaction. Yeah. So Travis said delivery app tipping isn't about feedback, feedback mechanisms, it's a tool for maximizing the price paid by consumers. Eaters are economically irrational with tip. For every $1 in tip, they economically behave as if it were 80 cents. This is just a hypothetical figure, but it's directionally true because you feel emotionally good about tipping. Mentally you give it less. It feels less painful to part with those dollar purchase. Yeah. Than gas buying gas. Exactly. So if you, the way you look at, if you, if there's $10 in taxes and $10 in tip, you'll be like, oh, I feel good about the $10 in in tip. That feels like $8 and the taxes. That feels bad. Right. And it happens that less price elasticity for the same price. So couriers are also economically irrational with tip. For every $1 in tip they economically be, they economically behave as if it were $1.20. Again directional. And so you feel good when you're tipped and so you treat those dollars more as more valuable. And so this is a hack on the human psyche which apps must implement and maximize or miss out on economic surplus that their competitor will use to defeat them. And so even you know, your whole brand is built around our app doesn't tip. Remember this happened with Uber. If your competitor is using tips, if they implement tips, they will just be making more money than you because of this economic inefficiency that arises from the nature of the human psyche. That is very, very interesting. The app that decides to pay the same net amount to the courier, but as a square deal via a drop fee plus tip will lose market share every day to an equal marketplace player that implements and ma optimizes tip. Now equal marketplace player, that's doing a lot of lifting because it's hard to just spin up like, you know, I can't just start an Uber right now. It's, it's hard. But he makes a very good point here. And so what's interesting is that I read this as adding tipping is inevitable. Adding tipping is inevitable. We're not doing it right now, but eventually someone will come to the market do it, we will have to in order to compete. Is that not the read here? So the, the different, the difference here is that I think that one picnic is like is already counter positioned. Right. So it's pricing thing, it's a flexibility standpoint. It's also counter positioning on like focusing on one key buyer. Obviously, you know, the doordashes, the Uber Eats have their kind of like corporate offerings. But I think like just creating a, creating a different and more transparent model makes a lot of sense. He's also like, I think you have to factor in there's a lot like TK has been kind of like secretive about cloud kitchens, secretive about Otter, which is like the toast or square competitor that he has. And so when I hear like no fees, no tips, like, it just screams like, there's been so many attempts at food, food delivery and just like new restaurant concepts that have been venture backed and a lot of them haven't worked out right because it's just like becomes unsustainable. And so I think that, I think Travis is basically, by focusing on a key customer type, trying to make it up with volume and then having this like vertical approach. I just like, I want to believe that, I believe that he's somewhat of a masochist and that like going and trying to win in food delivery is just like the hardest arena. Just like food in general. We have David Chang coming on at noon, which I'm excited to talk with him about. But it's just like the most competitive space. It's low margin all the way down. But I think that he, I believe just given the domain expertise, I believe that he's, he has a real play here and a real strategy. And I think that already we were talking with the person on our team that handles food ordering. He got on the phone with Picnic yesterday and he was like, this offering is way better than what we're seeing with the other delivery apps and wants to switch to it immediately. So again, if TK can make the model sustainable, I think it'll be quite competitive. Yeah, I mean you would imagine that vertical integration should allow true lower prices, like true cost competitiveness. That's like, you know, an age old business adage. If you vertically integrate, you can undercut your competitors and just offer lower prices. Almost like, you know, buying Kirkland brand at Costco is typically like sort of like the canonical example of like heavy verticalization. And there's, there's a ton of other examples. But I wonder, I still wonder, is, is this like the. I remember in the early days of Uber, like it was amazing because you didn't need to think about the tip. And so that mental load wasn't there. And there was the star rating system and it felt like they're actually like the VCs might have been subsidizing it a little bit, but it felt. Felt affordable on the rider side and on the driver side. It felt like people were getting paid pretty well and everyone was sort of happy. But maybe the VCs weren't, but they wound up getting, you know, a stake in a $200 billion company. So, you know, I think it all worked out for everyone involved. But it seems like Travis is reflecting on this idea that tipping was inevitable to come to the Uber ecosystem. Is tipping going to come to the Waymo ecosystem? Is tipping going to come to this Picnic ecosystem, the Picnic product, Eventually. I don't know. Do you think Picnic will have tipping in 10 years? I just view this more as, like, a corporate service in its current positioning. True. Than a consumer service. And when a consumer is buying food. Yes, it is. If you're ordering food delivery, it is. It is not a. It is like, it is a luxury. Right. Like, food delivery has been extremely normalized. But if you, you know, you know, rewind to 40 years ago and ask like, oh, how often do you get food delivery? Most people will be like, I never get food delivery. I just go pick it up myself. Right. So it is a luxury. But this is being positioned, like, as corporate offering. And I think that if Picnic can get just, like, deep relationships with a bunch of these different companies that have, you know, I listed off some of the logos before. If they can. If they can just become embedded in these companies and part of their workflows, I think they'll. They'll. It's possible to, like, make it up in volume. Yeah. This is so funny. The way SHIELD puts it, Truth Bomb from tk. Tipping is a hack to maximize.

So yeah, yeah, I mean I think everyone wants that sweet bench and yeah, I don't know, I just think it's just like this weird. I think it's just like a perfect vibes time on the like the finance side. Dude, people are freaking out about the market Fed cut. It's not going to happen. And so it's like I learned this yesterday but this is like the second longest run above the 50 DMA which is like stock chart males astrology vibe, the second longest run since like 1997. And so it's just like we've, we've been, we stocks have been going up for quite some time and sometimes they can go down or even sideways. And so I think people are freaking the fuck out and it's kind of a long, long, long, powerful run. And, and, and also I think that people are freaking out because like stocks go down, people's vibes get bad and then they're like bro, maybe it's actually over. Maybe it's actually over. Like nothing changes sentiment like price man. Totally. What did you think about. The Financial Times published an article that was pretty, I felt pretty misleading. They said Oracle is already under.

When everyone's asleep and shit. It was just really weird. Yeah, totally. Well, welcome back. Well, yeah. What's going on with Nvidia? Take us through how you're processing the news. We, we've been batting around two takes. One was. We're extra analytical over here. The first take we had was Jensen was, was seen drinking a beer and therefore he will not just drinking a beer, chugging. It was linking arms in South Korea. This is our rigor. So I, I was confident that they were going to do quite well. And then we just seem to be in the era where things beat on earnings and then immediately sell off for some reason because expectations are so high. And maybe we're in that era now. But how are you processing it? I think it's like almost a perfect beat. It's very clean. You have like almost nothing to complain about. Margins, which was like a story last year. Doesn't matter. Like they did a great job. They had a pretty solid like a meaningfully above buy side consensus. It's, it's like a perfect quarter. You have no problems with it. But the thing is you're the biggest, most profitable company or not most profitable, but like you're one of the biggest companies of all time. Perfection is expected every single time you report. So I think it's totally fine. Dude, I'm being serious. It's just totally fine. Like stocks do go down. People forgot about that. People forgot. Stocks can't go down. They do go down. They go down sometimes, man. It's crazy. What is the interpretation of or what should The Read Beyond Gemini 3. The TV.

Uav online. You're watching TVPN. Today is Thursday, November 20, 2025. We are live from the TVPN Ultradome, the Temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. Ramp.com Time is money, save both easy use, corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, a whole lot more all in one place. Nvidia beat earnings and job. The job numbers came back very positive. 119,000 new jobs and Nvidia beat earnings. The revenue came in at 57 billion for the quarter, up 62% from this quarter last year. Fantastic result for Nvidia. Of course, that's why the stock's selling off and the market's melting down. And Bitcoin's down 10%. That was Bitcoin. That was my prediction after yesterday. It was one of your predictions. But I was, but I was. I was wrong on the timeline. Yes, interesting. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It pumped shortly and now, now everything's selling off. Very unclear where we go. But I did think it was just interesting that the. I didn't really piece this together until like some grand thesis or actually write a piece about it. But I did think it was funny that we are in a world where demand for robots is surging and also demand for human labor appears to be surging. Like Nvidia. You know, the chips that they make sell artificial intelligence that should be replacing human labor, and yet the job demand is surging as well. And it's notable, they said they have visibility for a half a trillion dollars in revenue through 2026, which, I mean. It seems crazy, but it's not enough anymore. But I mean, they're making 57 billion a quarter just for the next quarter. Guidance is at 65 billion. Analysts had predicted that revenue guidance would be 62 billion. So everything is trending up. Jensen said we've entered the virtuous cycle of artificial intelligence. AI is going everywhere, doing everything all at once. What a great quote. Tyler's very happy about Jensen. And I'm also happy about Restream one livestream, 30 plus destinations. If you want to multi stream, go to restream.com so we talked about it a little bit yesterday on the show. There's a new product from Travis Kalanick, the founder of Uber, of course. It's called Picnic. We discussed it on the show yesterday and we got a reply from none other than Travis Kalanick himself. Why don't I read his reply and then you could kind of take us through what you wrote in the newsletter. Well, why don't I start with a little bit of Context that he can add to it, please. I wrote in the newsletter this morning, of course, the subject of the newsletter was Daddy's Home. And that is, of course, Travis Kalanick. Travis is back on the timeline. It's so good to see him back on the timeline. He's never not been doing business, but he's been so quiet and he's been. So he's dropping like deep Alpha on the market that he's operating in. That is like non like in my view. It makes sense what he shared, which we can get into, but I never looked at it exactly like that. But he's obviously back on the timeline with Picnic. Picnic is a new business under City Storage Systems. Okay, so you don't know the name City Storage Systems, but Cloud Kitchens is actually a subsidiary of City Storage. I thought Cloud Kitchens was the top. That's what I thought too, but it's actually the opposite. City Storage Systems, great name. If you want under the radar holding company to verticalize food delivery. Sure. So Picnic is kind of a front facing platform focused on meal delivery. The offer sounds too good to be true. Meals delivered from 50 plus restaurants with no tipping and no fees. They also bundle orders so a company can order from 10 or so different restaurants. Get it all ordered at the same time. He's got a bunch of customers already. Wells Fargo, Live Nation, EY, KPMG, PwC, and a bunch more. And so we were talking yesterday about how broken the tipping experience is when you're tipping directly. It's a way to encourage great service by like tipping. If you're checking into a hotel and you're tipping, you know, somebody on the way in, they're incentivized to make your stay great. Same thing, you know, valet tipping. On the way in, they're going to park your car right up at the front. I saw a viral, maybe Instagram reel or something about a guy who says that whenever he checks into a hotel, he says, you know, we always tip the valet when we're here. We tip the bellman and the person that cleans. But you know, you folks at the front desk just don't get enough, enough love. And so here's a nice crisp $100 bill. And he says the best folks really get tipped. They never get tipped. And he said every time he does it, he gets upgraded to an insane suite. And so he was just like sharing this Alpha, I think it's, I might give it a try. At the hotel I worked up, Michael Jordan would stay and he just actually would carry around like 10 grand. And just any, he was just handing, handing it out like candy on the property. And he would have a very nice day, as you might imagine. So anyways, we were talking about that. Travis responded and you can get into it and kind of give your reaction. Yeah. So Travis said delivery app tipping isn't about feedback mechanisms. It's a tool for maximizing the price paid by consumers. Eaters are economically irrational with tip. For every $1 in tip they economically behave as if it were 80 cents. This is just a hypothetical figure, but it's directionally true because you feel emotionally good about tipping. Mentally you, you give it less. It feels less painful to part with those dollar purchase. Yeah. Than gas buying gasoline. Exactly. So if you, the way you look at, if you, if there's $10 in taxes and $10 in tip, you'll be like, oh, I feel good about the $10 in in tip. That feels like $8 and the taxes that feels bad. Right. And it happens that less price elasticity for the same price. So couriers are also economically irrational with tip. For every $1 in tip they economically behave as if it were $1.20. Again directional. And so you feel good when you're tipped and so you treat those dollars as more valuable. And so this is a hack on the human psyche which apps must implement and maximize or miss out on economic surplus that their competitor will use to defeat them. And so even you know your whole brand is built around our app doesn't tip. Remember this happened with Uber. If your competitor is using tips, if they implement tips, they will just be making more money than you because of this economic inefficiency that arises from the nature of the human psyche. That is very, very interesting. The app that decides to pay the same net amount to the courier but as a square deal via a drop fee plus tip will lose market share every day to an equal marketplace player that implements and max now equal marketplace player that's doing a lot of lifting because it's hard to just spin up like you know, I can't just start an Uber network right now. It's. It's hard. But he makes a very good point here. And so what's interesting is that I read this as adding tipping is inevitable. Adding tipping is inevitable. We're not doing it right now, but eventually someone will come to the market do it. We will have to in order to compete. Is that not the read here? So the, the different, the difference here is that I think that one picnic is like is already counter positioned. Right. So it's pricing thing It's a flexibility standpoint. It's also counter positioning on like focusing on one key buyer. Obviously, you know, the doordashes, the Uber Eats have their kind of like corporate offerings. But I think like just creating a, creating a different and more transparent model makes a lot of sense. He's also like, I think you have to factor in there's a lot like TK has been kind of like secretive about cloud kitchens, secretive about Otter, which is like the toast or square competitor that he has. And so when I hear like no fees, no tips, like, it just screams like, there's been so many attempts at food, food delivery and just like new restaurant concepts that have been venture backed and a lot of them haven't worked out right because it's just like, becomes unsustainable. And so I think that, I think Travis is basically, by focusing on a key customer type, trying to make it up with volume and then having this like vertical approach. I just, like, I want to, I want to believe that. I believe that he's somewhat of a masochist and that like going and trying to win in food delivery is just like the hardest arena. Just like food in general. We have David Chang coming on at noon, which I'm excited to talk with him about. But it's just like the most competitive space. It's low margin all the way down. But I think that he, I believe just given the domain expertise, I believe that he's, he has a real play here and a real strategy. And I think that already we were talking with the person on our team that handles food ordering. He got on the phone with Picnic yesterday and he was like, this offering is way better than what we're seeing with the other delivery apps and wants to switch to it immediately. So again, if TK can make the model sustainable, I think it'll be quite competitive. Yeah, I mean, you would imagine that vertical integration should allow true lower prices, like true cost competitiveness. That's like, you know, an age old business adage. If you vertically integrate, you can undercut your competitors and just offer lower prices. Almost like, you know, buying Kirkland brand at Costco is typically like sort of like the canonical example of like heavy verticalization. And there's, there's a ton of other examples. But I wonder, I still wonder is, is this like the. I remember in the early days of Uber, like it was amazing because you didn't need to think about the tip. And so that mental load wasn't there. And there was the star rating system and it felt like they're actually, like, the VCs might have been subsidizing it a little bit, but it felt. Felt affordable on the rider side and on the driver side, it felt like people were getting paid pretty well and everyone was sort of happy. But maybe the VCs weren't, but they wound up getting, you know, a stake in a $200 billion company. So, you know, I think it all worked out for everyone involved. But it seems like Travis is reflecting on this idea that tipping was inevitable to come to the Uber ecosystem. Is tipping going to come to the Waymo ecosystem? Is tipping going to come to this Picnic ecosystem, the Picnic product? Eventually? I don't know. I just. Do you think Picnic will have tipping in 10 years? I just view this more as. Like a. As a. As a corporate service in its current positioning. True. Than a consumer service. And when a consumer is buying food. Yes, it is. If you're ordering food delivery, it is. It is not a. It is like, it is a luxury. Right. Like, food delivery has been extremely normalized. But if you, you know, re. You know, rewind to 40 years ago and ask like, oh, how often do you get food delivery? Most people will be like, I never get food delivery. I just go pick it up myself. Right. So it is a luxury. But this is being positioned, like, as corporate offering. And I think that if Picnic can get just, like, deep relationships with a bunch of these different companies that have. You know, I listed off some of the logos before. If they can. If they can just become embedded in these companies and part of their workflows, I think they'll. They'll. It's possible to, like, make it up in volume. Yeah. This is so funny. The way SHIELD puts it. Truth Bomb from tk. Tipping is a hack to maximize price. It's psychology. Consumers are willing to pay more in tips than they are willing to pay in fees for or menu price. So a $16 burrito plus a $4 tip feels far cheaper to people than a $20 burrito that has a no tip option. But again, from a business standpoint, I don't know if it's exactly the same thing. I feel like businesses want to have more predictable costs, not have that variability. And okay, sometimes the fees are like this, sometimes the fees are like that. Yeah. I think this will be a better consumer experience. A lot of companies, you know, will give, like, credits to their employees, which is like, you get $20 of credits. Yeah. Every day. And then whatever. You're kind of like, spending on top of that, you have to eat. Yeah. And so I Think consumers will could very likely like picnic more. So we'll see. Yeah, the, this was one of the original like D2C evolutions that happened with a lot of like Shopify merchants. I remember looking at, I think it was like Kylie cosmetics. And there was a trend for a while that was like, consumers want transparent pricing, don't do all the crazy psychological hacks. So you'd be like, yeah, I'm just gonna put it's 30 bucks and that's what it is. And it's free shipping and that tax and shipping is included. And it's just like what we say up front is, feels really good, feels really good to say that. And then you go to like the high performing stores and all across the board it would be like 9 99. And then you go in and there's like $6.42 added in taxes. And then you add shipping and it's. Like a pop up. And it's flattering one minute to add to your cart you up and just like keeping you on the real, reeling you in like a fish. Adding, adding fees, adding fees until you're like, okay, well now I'm like entered all my information and I'm ready to click the button. And so yeah, okay, you added two more bucks. Whatever, I'll just deal with it. So these psychological hacks are just like somewhat inevitable, but avoiding them I think in the short term is a great go to market. I just wonder if there's something, if there's something like truly like counterposition that will be durable like Costco. Kirkland Costco, like has not. Has been like the low cost affordable option. And that model has held for like decades. Right. The one thing, the one thing that we learned from having somebody on the team call Picnic is that they are focused on higher volume orders like teams of like 25 and up. Yeah. And so I think that, I think that they're just betting like, hey, there's, we can, we can get a lot of volume. We, we will be able to like handle having. It's one person that goes around and picks up every order from all the different restaurants, right? Yeah. And so it's quite a bit less of one individual's time, much higher order volume than when a company is like, hey, we're giving credits to people. And then each employee is making individual orders. And then there's like ends up being like 20 drivers on the road to deliver one lunch. Which like makes no sense. I have one more take on this delivery question, but first I need to tell you about cognition the makers of Devon Devin is the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. My question is, what is TK's drone strategy? What's his autonomous delivery strategy? Because he's vertically integrated at the kitchen level, he has the point of sale system, he has the sort of ordering front end, you can interact directly with him. He's cutting out several of the middlemen. But is he going to be a logical partner for Zipline? Is he going to be a logical partner for Coco and Starship and these robotics companies that are delivering food? Ryan Oskinhorn here says people aren't ready for how much better food tastes when it arrives 5x faster. That's a hilarious take because like, in fact I have tasted food right when it's made like it's not, it's not like an entirely novel thing. But what he's pointing at here is that Zipline is, is getting food delivered in four minutes as opposed to cars that take 20 minutes. And so hot food arrives hot, which is certainly a benefit, but it just does create more of like a, you know, benchmark to the, to the actual restaurant restaurants. I tried, I'm trying to find if Travis is an investor in Zipline. The Google AI overview says yes, Travis Kalanick is an investor in Uber. Gemini says, I could not find definitive evidence that. Okay, so, so the AI overview says. Yes, we will do. Gemini says there's no evidence. Maybe we can ask him. I, I wonder, I wonder if that's like a logical partner. I mean on the self driving side, his original vision at Uber, it felt very much like he needed to own that technology. He wanted to be not just a, like a buyer of it from a different company. It seemed like while he was at Uber, he considered self driving technology as critical path as something that should be owned by Uber. And then once he was out, the company spun down atg, their advanced autonomy group. I mean, but think, think about it. So I mean right now if you look at city storage systems, you have cloud kitchens, which is making the food, you have Otter, which is like the payments and ordering infrastructure. And then now you have Picnic, which is like the front end. And any type of delivery method actually like fits into that system. Right? So I think he's being, I would imagine he'll either add a strategy, but potentially more likely he'll just integrate with a variety of drone delivery and then autonomous vehicle delivery and continue to use traditional labor. So we'll see. Well, let me tell you about Gemini 3 Pro. You've probably heard about it. But we're telling you about it anyway. Google's most intelligent model yet with state of the art reasoning, next level vibe coding and deep multimodal understanding. I took it for a spin in AI studio this morning, had it build a scrollable like you know, as you scroll the bubbles move around and tries to visualize how DeepMind and Google Brain merged and these, these sort of like generative UI around deep research reports I think are going to be really, really fun. I need to continue iterating on this. Particular one, but Gabe says how could it be a logical partner if this product is for larger teams like Jordi just said, teams of 25 plus. Don't think a zipline can fit 25 different orders in the. Great point. That's a good point. Keller said they can fit two full grocery bags worth of food in their drones. 25. Yeah. But what it'll come down to is the actual cost. Your team does a group order and instantly get swarmed by drones. Yeah, that would happen. I mean, yeah. I mean right now you order on Picnic, one delivery driver is like driving around to a bunch of different restaurants and getting all that food and bringing it to the office. You can imagine like six different drones end up carrying out. No, I mean I think for this particular, for, for this particular like use, it just feels like they will be much, much more a buyer of like a Waymo type autonomy solution as opposed to a zipline autonomy solution, I would assume. Yeah. I just think. I think the most notable thing about Picnic is Travis doesn't want to just sit at the infrastructure layer of food delivery. Right. He wants to own the end customer experience in the brand. So. Yep. Well, we have a beautiful picture of Alex Karp's watch. The Patek Philippe aquanaut with the orange band. We love to see it. We clocked this TJ the wheel a long time ago. Jensen, one of Jensen's leather jackets. Jensen, of course, has many leather jackets. I've only seen Karp in one single aquanaut. There is a fascinating story of how Carp wound up with this particular watch. We'll have to get him to tell it on the show though. At some point we'll also have to tell you about Cognition, the makers of Devon, which I already did. I already did Cognition. I'm out of it today. Adio. Adio. Is the CRM build scales and grows your company to the next level. We. Our routine. Our routine is so dialed in that if we go to bed like two hours later than normal just throws everything off. We had a very, very chaotic Morning. Yeah, but we're back. We're back. Nano Banana is remarkable. Look at this Golden Gate Bridge image. It generates the image and also all of the diagrams around it. This is how Tyler sees the world. By the way, Sundar says you went bananas for Nano Banana. Now meet Nano Banana Pro. It's state of the art for image generation, editing with more advanced world knowledge, text rendering precision, plus controls. Built on Gemini 3. It's really good at complex infographics, which is awesome, much like how engineers see the world. That's very fun. We were playing around with it this morning. It is absolutely wild. It's really, really good. The text is flawless. There's just truly. It doesn't make any mistakes with text anymore. We were in the era of the text look good, but you would still see a double S. Every once in a while, one thing would go wrong and. And now we're in a much better spot. There's still one test that it fails. That's the Where's Waldo test. If you have it, go generate a Where's Waldo? It will not be. It will like you. You will clearly be able to tell. Me this morning, did you generate that? I had Tyler generate that one. I generated another one. This. This is like the most funny Where's Waldo ever. John, like, says, like, where's Waldo? And I'm like, are you. Are you. Are you messing with me? Is this a joke? And it's like this massive crowd of people, and then Waldo is standing on a stage going like this. Yeah. For some reason, it did not hide the Waldo at all. Like, Waldo was jut out just perfectly in the center. Very obviously, most novice wears Waldo. It was very novice. And then also, there were actually two Waldos. And as you dig in, normally when you're hunting around Where's Waldo? There's different little sub stories that are happening. And this was more just like a generic crowd. I mean, still remarkably impressive, but that is currently my go to evaluation, and we got a lot closer. But it's not superhuman. It's not super Waldo yet. Anyway, we have Doug o' Laughlin from Semianalysis in the restream waiting room. Let's bring him into the TVPN ultradome. Doug, how are you doing? Welcome to the show. How did you decide to take a vacation in the fall of2025, you were off for two. No days off. We're in the midst of the biggest. You were like, oh, it's bubble. It's going to be mellow. There's not going to be any news. No days off every single time I take a vacation.