Diet TBPN: November 5, 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.

• 0:00Jordi Hays?

  Everybody wanted to know what we would do if we didn't podcast today. I guess we'll never know.

• 0:05John Coogan?

  In breaking news yesterday, Jared Isaacman has been re-nominated, I guess is the term. He's back in the contention for to be NASA administrator.

• 0:19Jordi Hays?

  Do we know why he was originally taken out of the running?

• 0:22John Coogan?

  According to the White House, so according to the White House, the, the, the, the reason is that he had donated previously to Democrats. But then Ars Technica and a couple other outlets reported that it was because of the Elon Musk Trump dust up that happened.

• 0:40Jordi Hays?

  Still can't believe that was a real day on X.

• 0:42John Coogan?

  It was a crazy day. And so Isaacman got pulled and Secretary Duffy stepped in, Sean Duffy. But now Isaacman's back in the picture, of course, at the Charlie Kirk Memorial. You might've seen Elon Musk and President Donald Trump sitting down, having a handshake, maybe making amends. There's been speculation as to things, it seems to be water under the bridge. They seem to have healed all wounds, I suppose. Thank you, Mr. President, for this opportunity. It will be an honor to serve my country under your leadership. The support from the space-loving community has been overwhelming. These are the most exciting times, the dawn of, since the dawn of the space age.

• 1:23John Coogan?

  And I truly believe the future we have all been waiting for will soon become a reality. This is inspiring. I'm very excited that he could potentially be in the seat. The big reason, he's an entrepreneur and I think entrepreneurs make great leaders generally.

• 1:39Jordi Hays?

  He can fly fighter jets?

• 1:40John Coogan?

  He can fly fighter jets, flying a big machine.

• 1:42Jordi Hays?

  You're leading people that are going to risk their life by flying in big, fast machines?

• 1:47John Coogan?

  Totally. I don't think people understand how crazy of an entrepreneur he is. He started Shift4 Payments. It had a few other names, but he started his company when he was 16 years old. 16. And it's like a serious business, billions in revenue, real earnings. The P/E ratio is 25x. It's a $6 billion company. Yeah, it's not a hyperscaler, but it's like very serious.

• 2:10Jordi Hays?

  Four thousand employees.

• 2:12John Coogan?

  Four thousand employees, hundreds of billions of payment volume. And it also does the the payments for Starlink. I don't know if this is more important. This is probably less important, but he's been to space. Jared Isaacman has been to space, which is just crazy. He's kind of like really earned his bona fides as someone who's like loves space and.

• 2:28Jordi Hays?

  He can probably say no one likes space more than me.

• 2:31John Coogan?

  The debate was it moon versus Mars. Moon versus Mars. Where should you prioritize things? It sounds silly, but it really is real because there are different pro uh different companies, different organizations, different constituents. And so on the moon side, you have the Artemis program, which is the SLS rocket and the Orion capsule. And so on the other side, you have Elon, who has always been prioritizing Mars, Mars, Mars, let's go to Mars. Jared Isaacman said at the time, why is it taking us so long? And why is it costing us so much to go to the moon? And I think it's a good question. We're not new to go trying to go to the moon. We've sent humans there six times. The fact that we haven't been able to scale our rocket program to a point where moon

• 3:11John Coogan?

  missions are too cheap to meter has become a bit of a stain on American ingenuity. We should have just scaled it up and just cut the cost by 20% every year and we would be getting up and back.

• 3:22Jordi Hays?

  Shouldn't be a lost art.

• 3:23John Coogan?

  And and it is a lost art to the point where people ask, is it real? How did we do this? SpaceX has become the best hope at the reversal of this and Elon has been much more focused on Mars than the moon. And so the debate around Isaacman centers on this tie on his ties to Elon Musk. He's tied to Elon Musk through shift four. He processes payments for Starlink. And also, he obviously literally went on top of SpaceX rocket and went to space. NASA does have a thumb that it can put on the scale because it has funding and it has the ability to help and the ability to approve different things.

• 3:57Jordi Hays?

  NASA's funding, they also know how to spend money.

• 4:00John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 4:01Jordi Hays?

  You look at how much money they've spent on on Orion.

• 4:04John Coogan?

  And so that money could go to SpaceX, could go to Mars, could go to the moon. And and there's a and there's an open debate and I don't think this is like a left, right issue. Wasn't George Bush really into going to Mars and then?

• 4:14Jordi Hays?

  Yes, President George W. Bush was quite interested in Mars exploration. January of 2004, he announced vision for space exploration at NASA headquarters. The plan directed NASA to return humans to the moon by around 2020. And then they proceeded to spend 20 billion. To make a broken Orion capsule.

• 4:34John Coogan?

  I mean, the real miss is should have taken all the all the war on terror money and put it into moon missions and just been like, we're going to war against the moon. There's oil on the moon. Is he going to make the correct decision about what what celestial body to prioritize? Versus, oh, did he donate to this? Or is he the left wing or right wing? Or did he say the right thing?

• 4:54Jordi Hays?

  It's also interesting because-

• 4:56John Coogan?

  All that stuff is window dressing for the big question for NASA, which is moon or Mars?

• 4:59Jordi Hays?

  You don't think trying to counterbalance China's efforts in space should also be top of mind? Or is that is that?

• 5:05John Coogan?

  I think that is all upstream of moon versus Mars. Based on what we're seeing from China on the moon progress. Maybe we do need to prioritize in the moon more. Maybe Elon is somewhat wrong on that. Elon, for years, was not framing things in geopolitical ways. He was just saying it's humanity versus the cold vacuum of space. And so humanity needs to go to Mars because that's a true different planet. And if something happens to the moon and Earth, like you can truly start over on Mars. That's not the case with the current geopolitical situation. But now we have Jensen Huang, we have Elon Musk, and we have Sundar Pichai all saying,

• 5:50John Coogan?

  we're going to do data centers in space. So collectively, you have what 10 trillion in market cap? That's like, hey, we're going to we're going to be taking this seriously. And I do think that that's a NASA question.

• 6:00Jordi Hays?

  Elon's post from a couple of days ago, quantum computing is best done in the permanently shadowed craters on the moon. Croc?

• 6:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, this is real. Croc?

• 6:12John Coogan?

  Devon, cognition, they're the makers of Devon. Devon's the AI software engineer. Cross your backlog with your personal AI engineering.

• 6:20Jordi Hays?

  David in the chat was saying-

• 6:24Jordi Hays?

  Uh, referencing that Elon is actually more and more moon-pilled. He did post.

• 6:28John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 6:28Jordi Hays?

  Confounded two days ago. He said SpaceX will lean in big on the moon.

• 6:32John Coogan?

  Yes. Yes.

• 6:34Jordi Hays?

  And Arthur McWater said, "We should annex it," which Solana has been.

• 6:40John Coogan?

  Yes, pushing on.

• 6:41Jordi Hays?

  Saying for quite a while now.

• 6:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, "Moon should be a state." It's a classic. "I am inevitable," says Ken Kurtland, uh, showing a cool collage of Jared Isaacman. What a crazy story.

• 6:53Jordi Hays?

  "I would like to inform everyone that data centers in space still make me want to blow my brains out. Thank you for your attention to this matter." Sundar yesterday said, "Our TPUs are headed to space, inspired by our history of moonshots from quantum computing to autonomous driving. Project Suncatcher is exploring how we could one day build scalable ML compute systems in space, harnessing more of the sun's power, which emits more power than a hun- than 100 trillion times humanity's total electricity production. Like any moonshot, it's going to require us to solve a lot of complex engineering challenges. Early research shows our Trillium generation TPUs, or our tensor processing units, purpose-built for AI, survive without damage when tested

• 7:36Jordi Hays?

  in a particle accelerator to simulate low Earth orbit levels of radiation. However, significant challenges still remain, like thermal management and on-orbit system reliability." It is pretty funny to think about, you know, before, before we had satellites, like scientists just being like, "You want to put radio equipment in orbit? And then you want to use it to communicate with..."

• 7:59John Coogan?

  You want to watch TV in space.

• 8:02Jordi Hays?

  You want to watch space TV.

• 8:03John Coogan?

  You want, you want space TV.

• 8:04Jordi Hays?

  That makes me want to blow my brains out.

• 8:05John Coogan?

  What are you going to call it? Dish networks?

• 8:07Jordi Hays?

  Oh, you want to put a camera on one of those too?

• 8:09John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 8:09Jordi Hays?

  You want to take pictures?

• 8:10John Coogan?

  You want to take pictures?

• 8:11Jordi Hays?

  And send it down to us here?

• 8:13John Coogan?

  A camera in space?

• 8:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, for sure.

• 8:14John Coogan?

  For sure. "The science fiction future we dreamed of might actually be coming true." And Elon Musk signed off on Sundar Pichai's, uh, Suncatcher project and says, "Great idea, lol."

• 8:28John Coogan?

  It is so funny that like Elon can't just be like, no, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm keeping all of a large capacity for myself. Like he, he doesn't have, I guess he doesn't have the ability to do that really. I think it's like, I think it's illegal. Cause if you're like a railroad, you can't say like, I, I'm, uh, you need like net neutrality effectively.

• 8:45Jordi Hays?

  One way to infer the bubble isn't going to pop soon is that all the people who have been wrong about everything related to artificial intelligence. Indeed, they have been desperate to be wrong. Uh, they suck on their wrong, wrongness like a pacifier. Believe the bubble is about to pop.

• 9:00John Coogan?

  When I think about people who have been wrong about artificial intelligence, I mean, sure, there's people that are, that have been like, AI will never pass the Turing test, but there's also like the Leas or Yudkowsky, which was like, AI is going to kill us like next year. And like, I would put them both in those camps and is, is Leas are saying that the bubble is going to pop? I don't know. Is he?

• 9:19Jordi Hays?

  Bub talk?

• 9:19Speaker 02

  I don't think so.

• 9:20Jordi Hays?

  Let's go to the bub corner.

• 9:21John Coogan?

  Let's go to the bub talk. Let's go to the bubbler.

• 9:23Speaker 02

  I don't think he's been saying that.

• 9:24John Coogan?

  No. Okay. So, so who is, who is Dean Ball sub tweeting here? That's the question.

• 9:29Jordi Hays?

  It's hard to argue that it's, that AI is going to be this runaway death machine and also that it's about to pop.

• 9:37John Coogan?

  Do you know Ball?

• 9:39Speaker 02

  All right. How many times are we going to make this joke? No, I, I think it's mostly about, there's a bunch of like journalists that like mainstream journalists that talk about like, oh, AI is like, it just.

• 9:48John Coogan?

  Yes, yes. 100%, 100%.

• 9:50Speaker 02

  Interesting. And also it's going to pop.

• 9:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There, there, there's a, I don't know if he's a journalist, but there's a blogger who was trying to argue simultaneously that Sam Altman has never like created anything in his life. He's non-technical. Like he's not, he's not responsible for any like success. Uh, but then simultaneously was arguing that like, he moved recklessly quickly to launch chat GPT against the board's like desires. And it's like, literally both of those can't be true simultaneously.

• 10:18Jordi Hays?

  For me, the. Gellman amnesia effect has just been crazy lately because there's people whose content that I read that don't historically cover AI and they're starting to talk about AI and there's just in a single short essay that they're writing there's there's easily like 10 to 15 things that are either wrong or just I completely disagree with the take okay, maybe I need to be a lot more critical of of some of their other writing.

• 10:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, there was someone who was like super critical of crypto during the crypto bubble and then came out like super doom pilled like we're gonna all get a paperclip next year and I was like, uh, like maybe I should be buying NFTs like it's like he's so wrong about the paper clipping thing that I need to go back and revisit maybe he was actually wrong about the NFT question because like but of course like the truth is that he was correct about NFTs being a bubble and just happened to be also wrong about us all dying to AI and you know, a matter of days. A socialist just got elected mayor in the heart of the financial world at the top of the greatest bubble of all time. Yeah, people are not happy. They're moving to Florida, I guess.

• 11:31Jordi Hays?

  I think a lot of the people that said they were gonna move are waking up this morning and

• 11:39Jordi Hays?

  seems unlike, you know, we'll see the the big issue for New York State from a

• 11:47Jordi Hays?

  tax revenue standpoint is is there's they don't actually need a million people to leave for it to have a material impact on budgets.

• 11:55John Coogan?

  I think people people overestimate how communist New York can become in a year and underestimate how communist New York can become in a decade. I generally think that people are freaking out thinking that there's gonna be a 45% wealth tax next week. We'll see, we'll see what actually gets put in place, but good luck to all the folks over in New York City.

• 12:20Jordi Hays?

  There are many themes that could be developed more here, but let me make a few quick points for now. Nick, I certainly would not suggest that our polished policy should be Embrace millennial attitudes unreflectively. I would be the last person to advocate for socialism. But when 70% of millennials say they are pro-socialists, we need to do better than simply dismiss them by saying that they are stupid or entitled or brainwashed, we should try and understand why. And from the perspective of a broken generational compact, there seems to be a pretty straightforward answer to me, namely that when one has too much student debt, or if housing is too unaffordable, then one will have negative capital for a long time and/or find it very hard to start accumulating capital in the form of real estate. And if one has no stake in the capitalist system, then one may well turn against it.

• 13:05John Coogan?

  And there is this weird question of student debt that I think gets completely left out of the equation. And it's so, so important. It feels like if your life's work is like you want to be a doctor, like you just have to go to college. But if you do want to be something that's a little bit more flexible, a little more creative, a little more entrepreneurial, you can probably drop out of college. But it depends on like a whole bunch of other factors. Like if you're rich and you're going to graduate without any debt, there's pretty, there's a pretty limited downside to going to college because you get to just hang out and vibe code apps and do whatever. It just sucks to go through that and then come out with $200,000 in debt.

• 13:44John Coogan?

  I feel like so many people boil it down to like college good or college bad as opposed to like college a good bargain or college a bad bargain.

• 13:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the other thing, school is a way to buy time to figure out how you want to spend your time. But if you don't know how you want to spend your time and how you want to spend your career, how you want to start your career, then school, I think a lot of people are just doing it to kill time. So they're not just sitting. Tyler, what's the capital of Nigeria?

• 14:15Speaker 02

  Uh, let me think about that for a second. Uh, Abuja.

• 14:18Jordi Hays?

  There you go. See, that's, that's clearly in action.

• 14:21John Coogan?

  The Substack X relationship is going all over the place. Have you seen this?

• 14:26Jordi Hays?

  Even correcting for fake views traffic to Substack links from X's app substantially. Full post reads, signups, et cetera. Also track, we're so back. I thought it was very unfortunate that X and Substack got

• 14:40John Coogan?

  In such a fight.

• 14:40Jordi Hays?

  In such a fight. It was bad for all the writers on the platform who are some of the best, the best posters on X. Like their businesses were impacted by it. I don't really think the two platforms are that competitive. Obviously, Substack does want to be more of a of a of a social platform. I don't know how much of a threat the social product of Substack is, so.

• 15:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, what's interesting is like the X had review, I believe, was the was the email newsletter product. They never really invested in it. They ultimately shut it down. And it's interesting that no other. There's something about like the email and taking the audience with you that's just so revolting to a true social media company. Like, if you're a social media company, it'd be so easy for Instagram to have an email newsletter product, or LinkedIn to have an email newsletter product built in, right? And yet they don't, because they want control and they see it as counter positioned. And so, for some reason, the

• 15:47John Coogan?

  folks at Twitter bought Review and were doing email newsletters, and then fully pulled back from it because it was just it just did not make sense for them to keep going. But I don't know. We'll see. Here's a list of domains that X has excluded from using the new in-app link viewer on iOS for, and it's apple.com, wayfair.com, grok.com, instagram.com, fb.me, tiktokv.com, and open.substack.com. And so what does that mean? It's like, it's like, if you click on those, you won't go to the new in-app link viewer on iOS? And so you need a different website for those or something like that?

• 16:28Jordi Hays?

  I have no idea.

• 16:29John Coogan?

  Absolutely insane to me that one of my friends hasn't bought the Getty House in the Berkeley Hills yet. Perfect techno monastery, or at least a rationalist AI dev polycule house. Would be a tragedy if it got in the hands of someone boring. Do you know about this house, Tyler? Have you been here?

• 16:45Jordi Hays?

  No, I've heard of it. It's called the Temple of Wing.

• 16:47John Coogan?

  Is this where your polycule meets up?

• 16:50Jordi Hays?

  What?

• 16:51John Coogan?

  If you put the technological republic, which is Alex Karp's book, and abundance, which is Ezra Klein and Eric Thompson's book, side by side, says Young Macro, you'll note the defining bipartisan tendency of the late 2020s is, quote, "We need to become a lot more like China, and with this, we vindicate Nick Land as the only serious thinker to have correctly identified Nietzsche's prescience as that of a supply-side reform pundit." In opposition to the normie right, who read him as a conservative, the continental canon,

• 17:30John Coogan?

  who read him as a bad word that I'm not going to say, and as the Anglophone liberal left, left-liberal offshoots of the continental canon who haven't read him. And so what Young Macro is saying is that, is that both the abundance, who you could think about Ezra Klein, this is the left, this is the New York Times, and Alex Karp and Peter Thiel and the Palantir, this is the conservative side, the left and the right, are actually unified. We need to build more. We need to create abundance through capitalism.

• 18:06Jordi Hays?

  Young Macro, undoubtedly one of the greatest thinkers and posters of our time. He made sure this post was fact-checked by real Landian neo-deepstatists.

• 18:14John Coogan?

  [laughing]

• 18:15Jordi Hays?

  Okay, we have some, some breaking news.

• 18:18John Coogan?

  Breaking news?

• 18:19Jordi Hays?

  The CFO of OpenAI says people are not exuberant enough about AI.

• 18:24John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 18:24Jordi Hays?

  Bloomberg has an article, "OpenAI Chief Financial Officer Sarah Fryer Suggested The Market Is Overly Focused On Anxiety About A Possible Bubble In The Artificial Intelligence Sector And Should Muster More Exuberance About The Technology's Potential."

• 18:38John Coogan?

  I got some, I got some exuberance for you right here.

• 18:44John Coogan?

  It's coming. Artificial intelligence, it's coming.

• 18:50Jordi Hays?

  Uh, Joe Weisenthal says, not surprised that Bitcoin has fallen so much lately. I've been talking about a Bitcoin bubble for over 10 years. Bitcoin has now performed worse than US treasuries in 2025.

• 19:01John Coogan?

  Bitcoin just kind of like, like round-tripped, right?

• 19:04Jordi Hays?

  Meta, S H I T T Y frontier model, no cloud share, culture is F.

• 19:09John Coogan?

  On Meta, what, what do you think the probability is that they launch a GPU cloud in the next five years or two years even?

• 19:16Jordi Hays?

  Greater than 50% chance.

• 19:17John Coogan?

  So they have a ton of, they have a ton of GPUs.

• 19:20Speaker 02

  I mean, yeah, I think that's like very high, right? Cause it seems like they're not going to do open source. So it's like, why are they making the model?

• 19:25John Coogan?

  How high is it? Because they've literally never done enterprise, never done B2B. It's like a completely different motion for the company.

• 19:32Jordi Hays?

  Pretty aggressive takes here, but entertaining.

• 19:35John Coogan?

  But they do think Apple is going to look, look smart for sitting this one out. Um, Google is going to be the biggest company in the world by the end of 2026 in suspended Capitals opinion. Good luck to them.

• 19:47Jordi Hays?

  Pinterest is down 22%.

• 19:50John Coogan?

  22% is where it landed.

• 19:52Jordi Hays?

  Tough right now. You can beat, you can beat and your stock will go down and you miss and your stock goes down.

• 19:57John Coogan?

  So Reddit's twice the size market cap wise. Well, Reddit is like the AI data broker company and Pinterest is like, kind of just getting slopped up.

• 20:07Jordi Hays?

  Reddit is headed for the same future.

• 20:09John Coogan?

  Would be interesting to think about where Pinterest goes in a post AI future. The AI slop was infiltrating like pretty quickly and it was very frustrating because.

• 20:19Jordi Hays?

  What percentage of new Reddit, like written content is AI?

• 20:24John Coogan?

  The same question as like X, like on X, it should be the easiest thing to AI, right? 140 characters, 280 characters. What percentage of the posts that you actually read and interact with? Do you think are AI like 1% right?

• 20:38Jordi Hays?

  This feels like every third post that I read is written by.

• 20:43John Coogan?

  I I don't feel that way at all. I feel like maybe it's because of I feel like it's more like my following tab. But I feel like I'm seeing like a Joe Weisenthal post. I know he's not using AI. Then I see a Joe Lonsdale post. I know he's not using AI. Then I see Brad Gersner post. He's not using AI. Then I see Tyler. I watched Tyler post. He doesn't use AI for his posts. I see a you post. I I like when I'm scrolling through the timeline, I'm seeing people that are just not using AI for whatever reason. There it's not. It's like it's just not. That's not the that's not the point. And that's not like the whole structure. And so um. He I don't know. I I would imagine that certain subreddits are tight enough where it's very easy to clock if they've been like taken over by AI.

• 21:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 21:28John Coogan?

  There would be value to that, but I don't know. China has overtaken the US in cumulative open source AI model downloads as A16Z. Oh, we also have some. We also have some updates on the um. On the solar panel company that we were digging into yesterday.

• 21:44Jordi Hays?

  Turns out it was built by the Chinese. They built a Trina Solar.

• 21:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 21:49Jordi Hays?

  Built this facility and then due to some regulatory pressure, they're a forced seller.

• 21:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 21:57Jordi Hays?

  And then it was taken over by what is now T1 Energy.

• 22:01John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 22:02Jordi Hays?

  And so everyone was like, wait, we know how to build facilities like this. And everyone got really excited, including.

• 22:09John Coogan?

  Us, yes.

• 22:10Jordi Hays?

  Of course, it turns out that it was actually built by the Chinese.

• 22:14John Coogan?

  It's built in America. That's that's the important thing.

• 22:16Jordi Hays?

  So let's study it.

• 22:17John Coogan?

  I regard TSMC Arizona as like a win for American dynamism. Yeah, we'll bring over whoever's building the best stuff and build it here and all just take a factory in America that's owned and operated by another country. Because if there's some geopolitical crisis, like at least it's within our borders, that's better than it being halfway across the world, right? A16Z said. China has overtaken the US in cumulative open source AI model downloads. I'm going to make a series of bets on the little guy to start. We are going to be granting out compute up to 100K per project to support new experiments on GCP. If you have an idea for an open source model that you'd like to explore, I'd like to hear from you. So go hit up.

• 22:58Jordi Hays?

  I DM'd with Lewis a little bit yesterday about this project. He's working on pulling together the compute resources, but very excited about this one. And it'll be fun to follow.

• 23:10John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for watching. We'll see you tomorrow.

• 23:12Jordi Hays?

  We love you.