Diet TBPN: October 23rd, 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?

  You're watching TVPN.

• 0:01John Coogan?

  Today is Thursday, October 23rd, 2025. We are live from the TVPN Ultra Dome.

• 0:06Jordi Hays?

  The temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital.

• 0:11John Coogan?

  But first, I want to tell you about ramp.com. Time is money. Save both easy use corporate cards, bill pay, county, whole lot more, all in one place.

• 0:17Jordi Hays?

  Six years ago, the browser company of New York was born. This week, its acquisition by Atlassian closed. The name, the brand design, etc. were all incredibly thoughtful, but they weren't new. Roughly 150 years ago was standard practice to name a company like they did. The Prudential Insurance Company of America founded in 18-

• 0:36John Coogan?

  Standard practice sounds like a good name for a company.

• 0:38Jordi Hays?

  The way that you named a company.

• 0:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 0:39Jordi Hays?

  You weren't trying to think of-

• 0:40John Coogan?

  Warner Brothers.

• 0:41Jordi Hays?

  Back then, you weren't trying to think of like a cute.com. Why don't we just name it what it is? And so what I'd like to-

• 0:46John Coogan?

  Name it what it is or name it who we are. Goldman Sachs.

• 0:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 0:48John Coogan?

  Morgan Stanley.

• 0:49Jordi Hays?

  So what was, what was amazing about this naming convention, this isn't an essay, it's just like how explicitly clear it is what the company does.

• 0:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 0:57Jordi Hays?

  Edison Electric Illuminating Company of New York.

• 0:59John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:00Jordi Hays?

  I can imagine what they do.

• 1:01John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:01Jordi Hays?

  So the browser company of New York was a perfect name for a specific reason. Juxtapose, juxtaposing a 150-year-old naming convention with a modern tool such as the web browser was an incredible way to stand out and signal to the world exactly what their mission was and that they would be bringing inspired thinking to the category. Naming a web browser company, the browser company of New York signaled this sort of original thinking. And the problem is that the second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, you know, etc. company to use this sort of convention basically does the exact opposite, right? It signals like, okay, I saw somebody do something cool in my, in my industry. I'm gonna do, I'm gonna do the cool thing as well.

• 1:37John Coogan?

  Yeah. There are people that probably found out about it after they found out about five copycats. This is what Instagram did. Instagram was bourbon originally. And then, once Instagram hit, they were like, we have a new brand.

• 1:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:50John Coogan?

  We have a cool thing. And then, of course, everyone copied Instagram. Instacart copied Instagram's name and it worked.

• 1:56Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:57John Coogan?

  So yeah, not always a total anti signal.

• 1:59Jordi Hays?

  In defense of copycat branding, naming startups is really hard. Every founder's gone through this. There's only so many domain names. There's only so many English words that mean something. And there's just so many companies being created. It's quite challenging. Good artists copy, great artists steal. Linear launched in 2019. The product design, the website was so good that people were just like, I'll take one, please. One linear brand. I even talked to a founder earlier this year and he was like, yeah, our website and products is going to look exactly like Linear.

• 2:30John Coogan?

  Admittedly.

• 2:31Jordi Hays?

  I was just like, there's probably something better if you've just really thought hard and like spent the time to think through like, what could this be? Copying great design signals that you don't value design, in my view. Today, every AI company wants to be the Apple of AI. But sometimes they feel like, okay, you guys went to an ad agency and said, give me one 90s Apple ad, please. Perfectly respectable and even fair to take inspiration from obvious sources in industries. We at TVPN have been vocal about being inspired by ESPN, SportsCenter, Complex and others. But the key is that we took that inspiration and applied it to an area, TAC, that none of those groups had ever played in. I feel lucky to love the hunt for a great domain.

• 3:10John Coogan?

  For sure. Yeah, that feels like OpenAI and Anthropic's most recent campaigns to me. The AlphaGo documentary, you've seen it, right, Tyler?

• 3:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, many times.

• 3:20John Coogan?

  Many times?

• 3:21Jordi Hays?

  He didn't just watch, he studied. Did you smoke a heater while you watched?

• 3:26John Coogan?

  Further up the supply chain, a single year of Nvidia's revenue almost matched the past 25 years of total R and D and capex from the five largest semiconductor equipment companies combined. This is honestly a compelling ode to capitalism. Let's hear it for compelling odes to capitalism. Not only are hyperscalers building new data centers at a much bigger scale than before, they are building them from scratch and competing for the same inputs with each other.

• 3:53Jordi Hays?

  They should rebrand as the semiconductor company of Taiwan.

• 3:57John Coogan?

  And the conclusion is basically like if AGI is coming soon, America is good because we have a head start in the race, but we're running slower. China has a slow start, but they're running faster. And so if AGI comes in 2035, China has a higher probability of it emerging there. You better be advocating for some American electricity.

• 4:18Jordi Hays?

  The big question is like, where is the energy going to come from for all these new data centers willing to bet that we will discover new sources of energy?

• 4:26John Coogan?

  Elon has been publicly saying like, this is the biggest data center with the most energy consumption.

• 4:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it was framed as a

• 4:32John Coogan?

  Bombshell.

• 4:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it was framed as a

• 4:34John Coogan?

  We pointed a camera at it and it's big. It's big. It's bigger than everything else. Not to be like a total decelerating like tree hugger. It's just like, let's not give each other cancer.

• 4:45Jordi Hays?

  I'm surprised we haven't seen somebody like protesting on top of a data center yet.

• 4:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 4:50Jordi Hays?

  You'd think somebody would have scaled one and

• 4:52John Coogan?

  I also

• 4:53Jordi Hays?

  People used to do this with with trees, right? They would just climb to the top of a tree. It was going to get cut down.

• 4:58John Coogan?

  This happened at Anthropic, right? But for doom reasons, not for not for

• 5:02Jordi Hays?

  Environmental.

• 5:03John Coogan?

  Environmental reasons. What about just a good old fashioned wood fired data center? Tyler, can we figure out what it would take?

• 5:11Jordi Hays?

  A wood fired data center. Generating tokens the old fashioned way.

• 5:15John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 5:16Jordi Hays?

  Can you imagine late nights with the fellows just tossing wood into the hearth?

• 5:20John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah. Timeline was in turmoil a little bit yesterday. People refuse to believe that there is at least a probability that in 50 years, people are still watching humans create content. I think many, many people in like traditional media, just in not AGI pilled crazy world. And so is there, is there a possibility that that Meta Vibes app becomes so addictive, you can't turn it off and it destroys your life? Like, like maybe I've read the sci fi, I would put a probability on it. Everyone was like, Meta Vibes will kill everyone. Rune was reacting to that, saying, there's a moral panic about short form video. It's not actually that bad. And so Nir says, do you actually believe this? Like, do you realize the product is the API, not the app as containment, isn't possible?

• 6:04Jordi Hays?

  If you really wanted to give Sora the chance to become a consumption platform?

• 6:11Jordi Hays?

  You wouldn't have made Sora 2 available via API for anybody to generate. The TAM of people that today only want to watch AI video is basically zero.

• 6:23John Coogan?

  If I'm a OpenAI customer as a business and then they come out with Sora and I'm like, I really would like to use that in my business. Like I have an actual business use case. I'm trying to think of what that would be. I don't really know.

• 6:36Jordi Hays?

  The business use cases, I mean, think about how many platforms are trying to help people generate ads for social ads, right?

• 6:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 6:44Jordi Hays?

  Generate, you know, content for various videos. It says something about society that the most controversial thing I have said in recent history is that I wish I would have married my wife sooner. He even said, "Easy for me to say, I met my wife when we were teenagers."

• 6:58John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 6:59Jordi Hays?

  And the broader conversation of how having children in your 30s at any point is exhausting.

• 7:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:07Jordi Hays?

  How basically the younger you are, potentially the, in some ways, it will be easier. Why we are not in an AI bubble in four charts.

• 7:15John Coogan?

  You gotta summarize these and I'll hit the gong for every positive bull signal out there.

• 7:21Jordi Hays?

  Multiples are nowhere near dot com level.

• 7:28Jordi Hays?

  Capex is growing but funded by cash flow. Largest tech coevaluations lower than 1999. Concentration in the market isn't necessarily negative.

• 7:41Jordi Hays?

  I think a lot of what's holding us back from, you know, even more craziness is the overall state of the economy, right? You have trade wars, tariffs, you have a weak labor market, you have an unpredictable admin, you have war in the Middle East, war in Europe, and you have a higher rate environment than we've been used to. If we didn't have those factors, I think it could be a lot crazier. Group alert, people inside Paramount Skydance, say David Ellison, advised by his father, Larry Ellison, are reluctant to pay more than $25 a share for Warner Brothers as the buyout drama continues. Company still weighing a public, aka hostile, offer for Warner Brothers.

• 8:23Jordi Hays?

  I think he's running the experiment of like, just, you know, basically going to the world and saying, "One, one media industry, please."

• 8:30John Coogan?

  Basically, it feels like he's trying to build some sort of new conglomerate.

• 8:33Jordi Hays?

  There's virtually no demand for the iPhone Air. I have a friend who used to work at Apple. Uh, he, uh, bought the iPhone Air, used it for, I think, like 24, 48 hours and returned it.

• 8:44John Coogan?

  He did.

• 8:45Jordi Hays?

  He just said it was not the, um, the thinness of the phone was not worth the, uh, the battery, uh, trade offs. And he also said that phone is so actively trying to conserve energy that it renders things like poorly. Palmer Lucky's comments about nicotine on TVPN, your reminder that yes, nicotine increases focus, also is very habit forming. Duh. I know that it's habit forming. I've quit nicotine, you know, five or, five or six times.

• 9:10John Coogan?

  Yes. I typically quit it like every night before I go to bed.

• 9:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 9:15John Coogan?

  And then pick it back up.

• 9:17Jordi Hays?

  Uh, is not carcinogenic unless smoked vape dipped or snuffed.

• 9:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 9:21Jordi Hays?

  And is an, is an unusual stimulant because it simultaneously focuses and relaxes you, also raises blood pressure.

• 9:28John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 9:29Jordi Hays?

  Uh, again, uh, do your own research.

• 9:32John Coogan?

  Also 21 plus. Don't get in the game unless you're 21 plus Tyler.

• 9:38Jordi Hays?

  Travis Kelsey is teaming up with an activist group to invest in and revive Six Flags. Did Travis Kelsey like get three wishes when, when he was like 11? And he's like, I want to be a football player. I want to date the biggest pop star in the world and I want to take over.

• 9:55John Coogan?

  Uh, it's a, it's a $200 million deal. He bought 9% of the theme park operator. Do you like theme parks?

• 10:04Jordi Hays?

  No. I kind of grew out of theme parks.

• 10:08John Coogan?

  We might have.

• 10:08Jordi Hays?

  I mean, there's something, uh, beautifully dark about a humanoid that's walking and then it suddenly turns into this insect like.

• 10:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 10:18Jordi Hays?

  Thing.

• 10:18John Coogan?

  That is very spooky. If we get one of these, we also have to get a couple desert eagles. Because if it starts acting up, we have to be able to take it out.

• 10:31Speaker 02

  Yeah. And then the AI becomes sentient and then tries to kill us. Right? That's why we need the fire extinguisher.

• 10:36John Coogan?

  Well, that's what, no, no, we just need the fire extinguisher because it's good safety policy. You gotta be ready to take this thing out. You have to be ready to take this thing out. Jordy, what do you think?

• 10:46John Coogan?

  How are you taking this thing out?

• 10:47Jordi Hays?

  I think you strap charges to it, a vest that that

• 10:50John Coogan?

  And then we have, we have

• 10:52Jordi Hays?

  Has an explosive device that

• 10:53John Coogan?

  Release it at any moment, it explodes.

• 10:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, basically a Kevlar, it has a Kevlar suit over it.

• 10:58John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 10:58Jordi Hays?

  Explosives on the inside.

• 10:59John Coogan?

  Oh, so it explodes inwards?

• 11:01Jordi Hays?

  Explodes inward.

• 11:01John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 11:03Speaker 02

  I feel like strapping a suicide vest on Is the last, that's the last thing I would do.

• 11:07John Coogan?

  ChatGPT's customer retention, what do you think about this? How do you square this with the earlier data that we saw? That showed that, hey, there might be some slowing adoption.

• 11:18Jordi Hays?

  I think this is what you would expect, right? People try ChatGPT, they love it, they stick around. It becomes a part of their life. It becomes like, you know, a, a, a kind of muscle memory.

• 11:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:29Jordi Hays?

  Quickly, it's become a, you know, a let's ask chat type of thing. Actual shot, not AI, of a French detective working the case of the French Crown jewels that were stolen from the Louvre in a brazen daylight robbery. To solve it, we need an unshaven, overweight, washed out detective who's in the middle of a divorce, a functioning alcoholic who the rest of the department hates. Never going to crack it with a detective who wears an actual fedora, unironically.

• 11:59Jordi Hays?

  This guy really.

• 12:02John Coogan?

  There are so many weird things about this photo.

• 12:04Jordi Hays?

  Okay, okay, okay, yep.

• 12:06John Coogan?

  It's AI.

• 12:06Jordi Hays?

  I knew this was too good to be, too good to be true. The, the community note says this is, this is, a photo is real, taken outside the Louvre after the jewel theft, but the man in the fedora is a passerby, not a detective on the cape.

• 12:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, there you go.

• 12:19Jordi Hays?

  Didn't stop it from getting forty-two thousand likes.

• 12:22John Coogan?

  Look at the, look at the woman in the back, all the way on the right. Her face is like perfectly lit, like this is a remarkable photograph.

• 12:30Jordi Hays?

  We have some breaking news.

• 12:32John Coogan?

  What's that?

• 12:32Jordi Hays?

  We, you, you've heard about, you know, funds that directly buy, you know, equity in, in companies. You've heard about secondaries, funds that, that buy stakes in, in other funds. And we've got something new. We've got some breaking news. We've now got tertiary funds.

• 12:57John Coogan?

  Quadrannary funds next.

• 12:59Jordi Hays?

  More interesting news, self-driving taxi company Waymo is now doing 876,000 rides per month in California, 6X increase over the past year and a 69X increase since August of 2023.

• 13:14John Coogan?

  Do you think they wind up working with Uber long-term or not? Ben Thompson was talking about like he has been writing a lot about the Uber, Waymo, self-driving taxi stuff, mostly because he thinks like he needs more data, because even at Uber and Waymo, like they don't necessarily know what the consumer behavior will be. Like, will the consumers stay with Uber and they'll order a Waymo when one's available? But then when they'll want one app that can get them anywhere, and so if you say, "Well, I need you to drive me into the snow to go to Big Bear today," like you want to do all that in one app? Or will people say, "I use the Waymo app for most things, and then when I want to go

• 13:55John Coogan?

  into the snow and use a human driver for some specific route, then I'm happy to open up the Uber app."

• 14:01Jordi Hays?

  Right now, Waymo is quite a bit more expensive on a per-trip basis than Uber. And so it's possible the rideshare market, you know, it used to be bifurcated a little bit between Uber and Lyft. Lyft was always, you know, I remember when I was in college, I was using Lyft more because it was like slightly cheaper.

• 14:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:19Jordi Hays?

  And it's possible that Waymo ends up becoming like more of a luxury good and people just have the Waymo app. Thanks for hanging out.

• 14:25John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for tuning in today. We will be back tomorrow at 11 a.m. sharp.

• 14:31Jordi Hays?

  Can't wait.