Diet TBPN: October 21st, 2025

Our favorite moments from today's show, in under 30 minutes. TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.com Figma - https://figma.com Vanta - https://vanta.com Linear - https://linear.app Eight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpn Wander - https://wander.com/tbpn Public - https://public.com AdQuick - https://adquick.com Bezel - https://getbezel.com Numeral - https://www.numeralhq.com Polymarket - https://polymarket.com Attio - https://attio.com/tbpn Fin - https://fin.ai/tbpn Graphite - https://graphite.dev Restream - https://restream.io Profound - https://tryprofound.com Julius AI - https://julius.ai turbopuffer - https://turbopuffer.com fal - https://fal.ai Privy - https://www.privy.io Cognition - https://cognition.ai Gemini - https://gemini.google.com Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00John Coogan?

  You're watching TVP. Today's Tuesday, October 21st, 2025. We are live from the TVP N Ultra Dome, the temple of technology, the fortress of finance.

• 0:08Jordi Hays?

  The capital of capital.

• 0:09John Coogan?

  There we go. Massive news out of OpenAI. They launched their browser. It had been rumored for weeks now, months now. The browser wars have been heating up. OpenAI dropped a trailer announcing the browser, which is called Atlas.

• 0:26Jordi Hays?

  By the way, the Atlassian browser company acquisition just closed today.

• 0:30John Coogan?

  Oh, I'd love to play the video from OpenAI announcing their browser, Atlas.

• 0:46John Coogan?

  I like the different sound cues. This one. It sounds kind of like typing on an iPhone.

• 0:51Jordi Hays?

  I mean, it's it sounds exactly like.

• 0:53John Coogan?

  Is that what it sounds like? Okay. I turn. It's funny. I like the sound cue in videos, but I turn it. I certainly turn the sound off on my actual phone. So I don't actually hear it very regularly. So this is you're on all trails. Is that the website? So you're in Coursera and you're saying cheat on my homework. Wall Street Journal summarizes for me. Interestingly, the Wall Street Journal actually has AI summaries now in every article, just a couple bullet points. There I don't go to them a lot, though.

• 1:21John Coogan?

  So it does some online shopping. Tyler, were you were you successful in your prompt? Give me your review.

• 1:30Jordi Hays?

  People are saying, you know, it's new browser. It's not just a browser. I think it's kind of a whole new way to really use the internet.

• 1:35John Coogan?

  Browse the web.

• 1:36Jordi Hays?

  To browse the web.

• 1:37John Coogan?

  Will this be successful?

• 1:41Jordi Hays?

  I believe that ChatGPT, especially once it had like some close to live search.

• 1:48John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:48Jordi Hays?

  Was five to 10 times better than Google search.

• 1:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:52Jordi Hays?

  For a lot of searches.

• 1:53John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:54Jordi Hays?

  And my prediction is that Atlas in its current form.

• 2:00Jordi Hays?

  Might be 1.1 times better than Chrome.

• 2:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:04Jordi Hays?

  And that will not be enough to get large scale consumer adoption. I'm not super bullish, but I think it's great that they're taking a big shot on goal and it makes sense strategically.

• 2:15John Coogan?

  Well, if you're looking for a product that is 10 times better, go to ramp.com. Time is money, say both easy to use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting and a whole lot more all in one place.

• 2:22Jordi Hays?

  Me, my daily driver in a peaceful corner of the internet safari power user.

• 2:27John Coogan?

  Safari power user.

• 2:28Jordi Hays?

  First of all, let's say thank you to Sam Altman for constantly creating content.

• 2:32John Coogan?

  It really is like the bull market in tech news. There's always something to talk about.

• 2:37Jordi Hays?

  Always.

• 2:37John Coogan?

  Always something.

• 2:38Jordi Hays?

  Sam a story. Wall Street Journal's OpenAI piece makes you realize Sam Altman must succeed or he could be a real problem for an otherwise sterling industry. Dot, dot, dot.

• 2:49John Coogan?

  Sam Altman is kind of becoming the preeminent deals guy of the modern tech era. He's like, the deals are so big and they're coming so quickly that a lot of people are asking like, is Sam just so good at deals? That all the counterparties are actually making mistakes by tying their fortunes to OpenAI. If OpenAI doesn't deliver and Oracle does all the build out, but then or OpenAI doesn't have the revenue. Is Oracle in trouble? That's the narrative right now. So the question is like, why are these deals happening? I don't think Sam's gotten any Fox here now that he's 40. He's going to be a silver fox.

• 3:26John Coogan?

  But he's always been a great deal maker, even going back to his very first company where he got, uh, he got looped acquired. When the company wasn't doing that well, it was sort of one of the first Aqua hires that turned out really well. But now everything has three, four, five extra zeros after it. And I think that the reason isn't just that he's become a better deal maker. It's that he actually has more leverage now.

• 3:45Jordi Hays?

  When you have the breakout consumer product of a generational tech trend.

• 3:49John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 3:49Jordi Hays?

  You have a lot of leverage. If you're running AMD or Nvidia or Oracle or any hyperscaler, you know, computing company. And you have to go in front of shareholders and they're asking you. Are we doing anything with OpenAI? The company that scaled to over a billion users?

• 4:08John Coogan?

  The thing that will be the next Google, the next Amazon, the next Microsoft?

• 4:11Jordi Hays?

  And if you have to go in front of them and say no?

• 4:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 4:14Jordi Hays?

  They're like, okay, what exactly do you do?

• 4:17John Coogan?

  Why are you missing this? OpenAI could swap out the underlying model and still accrue the vast majority of value. So hypothetically, you could have ChatGPT, Chat.com powered not by GPT-5, but instead powered by Gemini or Claude and still see positive user growth monetization. Because at the end of the day, most of the users aren't there for the model. They're there for the app, they're there for the ecosystem, they're there for the platform now. Joel Spolsky in 2002 coined this phrase, commoditize your complements. And so anything that complements your product, you want to be a commodity so that it can bring more content onto the platform. This was the thesis behind Meta open sourcing Llama.

• 4:59John Coogan?

  If it's free to generate content, there will be more content on the platform. Just like the Sony camera, you know, commoditized the video production, made more content for YouTube. All of their partners are looking at them, whether they're Google with a CPU program, Amazon with Tranium, OpenAI saying AMG is pretty good.

• 5:16Jordi Hays?

  Sam's looking at that margin profile, just being like, Jensen, I'm so happy. The whole industry is losing money.

• 5:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 5:23Jordi Hays?

  And they're like, we're trying to find the one guy that's making money.

• 5:26John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 5:26Jordi Hays?

  And they see Jensen, he's absolutely printing.

• 5:28John Coogan?

  If only there were another plate that we could eat off of. And Jensen's just there with like the massive Thanksgiving dinner on his plate. And so everyone's kind of incentivized to like work against the video.

• 5:37Jordi Hays?

  Obviously Jensen would have been incredibly frustrated by this for a number of reasons. His reaction, very presidential, was, I saw the deal. It's imaginative, it's unique and surprising, considering they were so excited about their next generation product. The Pew says, enjoy the vague posting while it lasts, my friends. Soon all the AGI companies go public and ruin an AI's shitposts are also called security violations.

• 6:05Jordi Hays?

  Martin Shkreli says jail is not so bad. It's funny because OpenAI is, uh, some, somebody at OpenAI Legal is gonna probably

• 6:12John Coogan?

  See this.

• 6:13Jordi Hays?

  Send this to Will.

• 6:14John Coogan?

  Well.

• 6:14Jordi Hays?

  His post to him and be like, hey, look, like, a lot of people are gonna read into this that gonna go public soon.

• 6:20John Coogan?

  Genuine question, for VC firms invested in both frontier model labs and coding application layer companies, how do you handle the discrepancy between the two? Since coding is number one on the roadmap of the labs versus other products which are more adjacent.

• 6:35Jordi Hays?

  If you're a company, I don't, I don't think there's huge downside here.

• 6:38John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 6:39Jordi Hays?

  Like, VCs tend to give immense support for their winners.

• 6:43John Coogan?

  I think something similar might have happened with, uh, Palantir and Databricks, which had some same investors, actually, but there was this thesis of like, well, if Databricks is the database layer and they allow you to do AI on top of that, like, what is Palantir's role? And they, and they, they kind of wound up partnering.

• 7:00Jordi Hays?

  Venture investors want to become, want to invest in companies that become so successful that they launch products that ultimately compete in a bunch of different adjacent categories and ultimately compete with a range of their portfolio companies. Like, that is ultimately what success looks like.

• 7:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:16Jordi Hays?

  Something I've been thinking about a lot is this dynamic between Anthropic, where all of their revenue comes from having the best coding model.

• 7:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:24Jordi Hays?

  Which is very different than having a lot of revenue because you have a hit consumer product, because you have to keep training the next model.

• 7:32John Coogan?

  Pets.com is the go-to slur of the dot com era. Let's see, Pets.com burned $182 million of total investor capital before going bust. Today, just US online pet goods sales is $38 billion a year, 70 billion total market cap, including portions of Amazon and Walmart.

• 7:53Jordi Hays?

  Lesson, should have invested more in Pets.com. Like, makes sense to take a really big swing at a, what became a $38 billion.

• 8:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 8:03Jordi Hays?

  Market.

• 8:04John Coogan?

  Uh, US East is down from Syriac and it's, uh, what, what exactly is this image from? Is this like Rome falling? Is this the fall of Rome? This is very.

• 8:13Jordi Hays?

  Do we know what caused it yet?

• 8:15John Coogan?

  Uh, wasn't it database migration or something? Some data? Oh, no DNS configuration, I think was the, was the root, something like that. The outage began around 3am Eastern Time when Amazon made a technical update to a widely used AWS database service, DynamoDB. The update, which included an incorrect domain name service or DNS information for DynamoDB, kicked the database offline in Amazon's critically important Northern Virginia data centers.

• 8:42Jordi Hays?

  Really exposed the insane dependency.

• 8:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 8:45Jordi Hays?

  So we're taking it on prem.

• 8:47John Coogan?

  This was my take yesterday. We're going back to sticks and stones. We're going back to pen and paper, baby. The computer revolution is over. AI is dead.

• 8:55Jordi Hays?

  So tuxedo Sam says, meet James Hamilton. He's Amazon's literal, very top engineer, the brain behind all the data centers. He lives in a custom yacht and does not give an F about any RTO.

• 9:07John Coogan?

  Wow. So it, it claims that his yacht made landfall and this is like.

• 9:12Jordi Hays?

  Okay, okay.

• 9:12John Coogan?

  AWS update.

• 9:13Jordi Hays?

  Fake news.

• 9:14John Coogan?

  But it was digitally altered. It was fake news. Moving on.

• 9:17Jordi Hays?

  Coinbase and Kobe announced that Coinbase is acquiring Echo.

• 9:20John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 9:21Jordi Hays?

  Uh, Echo is an angel list like platform.

• 9:24John Coogan?

  Cool.

• 9:24Jordi Hays?

  Uh, for crypto. So they help, uh, groups of people invest in different projects.

• 9:29John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 9:30Jordi Hays?

  Uh, they paid 375 million. And so you can think of this as a effectively a $400 million.

• 9:35John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 9:36Jordi Hays?

  Uh, acquisition.

• 9:37John Coogan?

  It's such a creative way to get a little bit more attention on an acquisition that would have been, would have been cool, but it wouldn't have had a narrative to it where people were like, this is crazy. Oh, it actually all makes sense now. So it was a really good Mission Impossible rip off the mask. Coinbase isn't actually crazy. They're not actually paying 25 million just for a podcast.

• 9:55Jordi Hays?

  One of the most iconic quotes from a tech CEO of this century.

• 9:59John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 9:59Jordi Hays?

  From Chesky said, I was basically going room to room, just pouring out this stream of consciousness manifesto like Jack Kerouac writing on the road. I basically said, we're not just a vacation app. We're going to, uh, M dash, we're going to be a platform, a community.

• 10:17John Coogan?

  What's funny is like I think of Airbnb as a community from like day one.

• 10:20Jordi Hays?

  What does community mean now?

• 10:21John Coogan?

  Like I met my co-founders on Airbnb. I met in Y C.

• 10:25Jordi Hays?

  My pushback would be that maybe the last 10 times I've used Airbnb, it was to book a vacation rental.

• 10:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 10:32Jordi Hays?

  And I didn't necessarily want to meet the house.

• 10:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, also, once I was traveling and I was staying in an Airbnb in New York and it was very clear that the the owner of the house like wanted to meet me and like wanted to like make friends. And in that, in that context, I was like, I don't, I don't, I don't know. Like, I, I, I'm here on a business trip now. I kind of don't want to make a new friend. You seem cool, but like I'm good. Apparently Anthropic spent 2.66 billion on Amazon Web Services in the first three quarters of 2025, around 100% of their estimated revenue.

• 11:07Jordi Hays?

  This article is implying that Anthropic has basically 0% margins, but it's possible that some of, like they're paying to serve and run the models.

• 11:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:18Jordi Hays?

  For customers, API clients, but they're also training. You can now fundraise in Stripe Atlas. It's very cool. Stripe Atlas generates a significant amount. I forget the exact percentage, but a meaningful, I think, double-digit percentage of all C corps created are created with Stripe Atlas. I built this product at Party Round and it's very useful. It's not a great business, but it makes sense to, you know, tie it into the, to the Stripe ecosystem.

• 11:44John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about TurboPuffer. Search every byte. Serverless vector and full text search. Built from first principles and object storage. Fast, 10x cheaper and extremely scalable. The world is changed, subtle and obvious. For the first time in living memory, the scope of live player action expands.

• 11:59Jordi Hays?

  Thinking of tech companies as nations, right? If you start thinking of OpenAI in the context of like a, a, a nation state and the nation state is saying like, we're going to need trillions of dollars. We're going to need a huge amount of energy. And yes, it's going to be distributed all over.

• 12:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 12:14Jordi Hays?

  It's not that crazy for, you know, a country to be saying like, we need to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on,

• 12:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 12:21Jordi Hays?

  on, it's like a, you know, digital nation state.

• 12:24John Coogan?

  Still feels like the US government is at the top of the stack and the tech companies answer to the US government. But I do wonder if there's some element of flipping that will happen at some point or has already happened. Like, did you know that Walmart spends more money than the United Nations?

• 12:44John Coogan?

  Isn't that remarkable?

• 12:45Jordi Hays?

  Did you see this picture? Uh, there it's looks like somebody found uh them filming the OpenAI.

• 12:53John Coogan?

  Is this real or is this just someone dressed up as Ilya? ChatGPT 21 says this movie's gonna be sick and it looks like-

• 12:59Jordi Hays?

  It looks like Joseph Gordon Levitt-

• 13:01John Coogan?

  Oh, you think so?

• 13:02Jordi Hays?

  -who's supposedly playing Ilya, right?

• 13:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, maybe. Oh, it does look like him. He's playing Ilya?

• 13:07Jordi Hays?

  It would make sense that they would film in San Francisco.

• 13:10John Coogan?

  Anyway, wild, wild, gonna be a good movie. Hopefully it pumps some people up. We'll see. It's probably gonna be a brutal hit piece.

• 13:16Jordi Hays?

  I wonder if we're gonna see any releases of uh who's playing Rune?

• 13:19John Coogan?

  I would love to know who's playing Rune.

• 13:21Jordi Hays?

  Okay, let's pull up this video.

• 13:23Speaker 02

  Every story you love.

• 13:27Jordi Hays?

  Is this a new Mac MacBook Pro? Is that where we're getting?

• 13:31John Coogan?

  I don't know. It seems just like a pro Apple creativity vibe reel.

• 13:34Jordi Hays?

  It's a Mac ad, John.

• 13:36John Coogan?

  It hits extremely emotionally because uh that that uh ad is voiced by Jane Goodall, who passed away on October 1st of this year. Uh, she was, of course, the British primatologist. She studied monkeys. Uh, she studied chimpanzees. Warren Buffett missed out on $50 billion in profits by selling Apple too early. Uh, Barron's calculated that he sold 650 million dollars, uh 650 million shares at an estimated price of $185. Now they're at $263. He might have made more money than any investment manager ever with that trade. Um, and it was sort of a, sort of a narrative violation because he's often bought, you know, these

• 14:20John Coogan?

  low PE ratio stocks and not stayed out of techno- and just generally stayed out of technology. Of course, Apple kind of violated them both, but it was a fantastic six-

• 14:29Jordi Hays?

  Crazy, because I remember when the trade war hit, the tariffs, Liberation Day, everyone was like, oh, Buffett is a genius, right? He looked so smart for selling when he did and then, of course, ripped back up because nothing ever happened.

• 14:45John Coogan?

  Nothing happens. Absolutely remarkable day. Well, thank you to everyone in the chat. Thank you to everyone who's listening and supporting us.

• 14:52Jordi Hays?

  Can't wait for tomorrow.

• 14:53John Coogan?

  We will see you tomorrow.

• 14:54Jordi Hays?

  Have a great evening.