TBPN Live - Diet TBPN: November 5, 2025

Episode Date: November 6, 2025

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Everybody wanted to know what we would do if we didn't podcast today. I guess we'll never know. 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. Do we know why he was originally taken out of the running? According to the White House, so according to the White House, 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. Still can't believe that was a real day on X. 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 have 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 since the dawn of the space age. 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. But I don't... He can fly fighter jets. He can fly fighter jets. You're leading people that are going to risk their life by flying in big fast machines. Totally. I don't think people understand how crazy of an entrepreneur he is. He started shift for 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 PE ratio is 25x. It's a $6 billion

company. Yeah, it's not a hyper-scaler, but it's like very serious. It does 4,000 employees. 4,000 employees, hundreds of billions of payment volume. And it also does 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 is someone who loves space and you can probably say no one likes space more than me the debate was moon versus mars moon versus mars where should you prioritize things it sounds silly but it really is real because there are different companies different organizations different constituents and so on the moon side you have the artemus 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 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 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. Shouldn't be a lost start. And it is a lost art. To the point where where people ask, is it real? How do 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 his ties to Elon Musk. He's tied to Elon Musk through Shift 4. He processes payments for Starlink. And also he obviously literally went on top of a 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. NASA's funding. They also know how to spend money. Exactly.

You look at how much money they've spent on Orion. And so that money could go to SpaceX, could go to Mars, could go to the moon. 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 left-backed. Yes, President George W. Bush was quite interested in Mars exploration. He was Mars guy.

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. I mean, the real mess is it should have taken 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 celestial body to prioritize? Versus, oh, did he donate to this?

Or is he the left wing or right wing? say the right thing. All that stuff is window dressing for the big question for NASA, which is moon or Mars. You don't think trying to counterbalance China's efforts in space should also be top of mind, or is that, is that? 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 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 Wong. We have Elon Musk and we have Sundar Pichai all saying we're going to do data centers in space. So collectively you have what, 10 trillion and market cap that's like, hey, we're going to be taking this seriously. And I do think that that's a NASA question. Elon's post from a couple days ago, quantum computing is best done in the permanently shadowed craters on the moon. Croc? Yeah. Is this real? Crock? Devon? Cognition. They're the makers of Devon. Devon's the AI software engineer. Cross, crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. So David in the chat was saying,

referencing that Elon is actually more and more moon-pilled. He did post. I went back and found it two days ago. He said SpaceX will lean in big on the moon. Yes. Yes. And Arthur McWater said, we should annex it, which Salana has been saying for quite a while now.

Yeah, moon should be a state. It's a classic. I am inevitable. Says Ken Kurtland. He's showing a cool collage of Jared Isaacman. What a crazy story. 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 hundred 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 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 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... You want to watch TV in space. You want to watch space TV. You want to watch space TV. That makes me want to blow my brains out. What are you going to call it, dish networks? Oh, you want to put a camera on one of those, too? You want to take pictures and send it down to us here?

A camera in space. Yeah, for sure. For sure. The science fiction future we dreamed of might actually becoming true, and Elon Musk signed off on Sundar Pichai's Suncatcher project and says great idea, L-O-L.

But it is so funny that E-Long can't just be like, no, I'm keeping all the launch capacity for myself. Like he doesn't have, I guess he doesn't have the ability to do that or really.

I think it's like, I think it's illegal because if you're like a railroad, you can't say like, I'm, you need like net neutrality effectively. 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. They suck on their wrongness like a pacifier, believe the bubble is about the pop. When I think about people who have been wrong about artificial intelligence, I mean, sure, there's people that have been, like,

AI will never pass the touring test. But there's also, like, the L.Azer-Yukowski, which is like, AI is going to kill us, like, next year. And, like, I would put them both in those camps. And is L.EAS are saying that the bubble's going to pop? I don't know. Is he? No.

Let's go to the bub corner. Go to the bub talk. Let's go to the bubler. I don't think he's been saying that. No. Okay, so who is Dean Ball sub-tweeting here? That's the question. It's hard to argue that it's, that AI is going to be this runaway death machine and also that it's about. Do you know Ball?

All right. How many times we're going to make this joke? No, I think it's mostly talking about, there's a bunch of, like, mainstream journalists that talk about, like, oh, AI is like, it just. Oh, yes, yes, 100%. It doesn't do anything interesting and also it's going to pop. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, 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 responsible for any, like, success. But then simultaneously was arguing that, like, he moved recklessly quickly to launch ChatchipT against the board's, like, desires. And it's like literally both of those can't be true simultaneously. For me, the gelman 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 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 some of their other writing. 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 going to all get a paperclip next year. And I was like, uh, like, maybe I should be buying NFTs. Like, he'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. 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. I think a lot of the people that said they were going to move are waking up this morning and seems, you know, we'll see. The big issue

for New York State from a tax revenue standpoint is there's they don't actually need a million people to leave for it to have a material impact on budgets? I think 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 going to 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. 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 policy should be embrace millennial attitudes unreflectively. That 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 their brainwash, 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. And there is this weird question of student debt that I think gets completely left out of the equation when, 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 pretty limited downside to going to college because you get to just hang out and vibe code apps and do whatever.

And it just sucks to go through that and then come out with $200,000 in debt. 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. 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? Let me think about that for a second. Abuja. There you go. See, that's clearly in action. The substack X relationship is going all over the place. Have you seen this?

Even correcting for fake views, traffic to substack links from X is up substantially. Full post, read, signups, etc. I also track, we're so back. I thought it was very unfortunate. that X and Substack got in such a fight. It was bad for all the writers on the platform who are some of the best, but 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 social platform. I don't know how much of a threat the social product of Subsec is. Yeah. What's interesting is like the X had review, I believe, was the, it was the email newsletter product. They never really invested 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 folks of 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 doing.

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, Grock.com, Instagram.com, FB.com, TikTokV.com, and open.com. And so what does that mean? 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. I have no idea. Absolutely insane to me that one of my friends hasn't bought the Getty House in the Berkeley Hills yet. Perfect techno-monist.

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? No, I was called the Temple of Wing. Is this where your polycule meets up? If you put the technological republic, which is Alex Carp's book, and Abundance, which is Ezra Klein and Derek 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, who read him as a bad word

that I'm not going to say. And as the anglophone liberal left liberal offshoots of the continental canon who haven't read him, and so what Young Macro is saying is that both the abundance, who you can think about Ezra Klein, this is the left, this is the New York Times, and Alex Carp 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. 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-deep status. Okay, we have some breaking news. The CFO of OpenAI says people are not exuberant enough about AI. Bloomberg has an article. Open AI 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. I got some exuberance for you right here.

A.I. It's coming. Artificial intelligence. It's coming. Joe Wisenthal 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 U.S. treasuries in 20,000. They coin just kind of like round-tripped, right? Meta, S-H-I-T-Y-F Frontier Model,

no cloud share, culture is F. On meta. What do you think the probability is that they launch a GPU cloud in the next five years or two years even? Greater than 50% chance. So they have a ton of, they have a ton of GPUs. Yeah, I think that's like very high, right? Because it seems like they're not going to do open source. So it's like, why are they making the model?

How high is it? Because they've literally never done enterprise, never done B-to-B. It's like a completely different motion for the company. Pretty aggressive takes here, but entertaining. But they do think Apple is going to look smart for sitting this one out. Google is going to be the biggest company in the world by the end of 2026 in suspended capitals opinion. Good luck to them. Pinterest is down 22%.

22% is where it landed. Tough right now. You can beat and your stock will go down and you miss and your stock goes down. 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. Your Reddit is headed for the same future. It 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... What percentage of new Reddit, like, written content is AI? 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 post that you actually read and interact with do you think are AI? Like, 1%, right? It feels like every third post that I read is written by...

I don't feel that way at all. I feel like maybe it's because I feel like it's more like my following tab, but I feel like I'm seeing like a Joe Wisenthal 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 watch Tyler post. He doesn't use AI for his posts. I see a U post. Like when I'm scrolling through the timeline, I'm seeing people that are just not using AI for whatever reason. It's not, it's like, it's just not, that's not the point. And that's not like the whole structure. And so, I don't know.

I would imagine that certain subreddits are tight enough where it's very easy to clock. they've been, like, taken over by AI. Yeah. There would be value to that, but I don't know. China has overtaken the U.S. and cumulative open source AI model downloads, says, A16Z. Oh, we also have some, we also have some updates on the solar panel company that we were digging into yesterday. Turns out, it was built by the Chinese.

They built Atrina Solar, built this facility, and then due to some regulatory pressure, They were a forced seller. Yeah. And then it was taken over by what is now T1 energy. Sure. And so everyone was like, wait, we know how to build facilities like this. And everyone got really excited, including us, yes. Of course, it turns out that it was actually built by the Chinese.

It's built in America. That's the important thing. So let's study it. I regard TSM, Arizona as like a win for American dynamism. Yeah, we'll bring over whoever's building the best stuff and build it here. And I'll 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 U.S. and 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. 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'd be fun to follow. Thank you so much for watching. We'll see you tomorrow.

I love you.