TBPN - Diet TBPN: October 23rd, 2025

Episode Date: October 24, 2025

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You're watching TVPN. Today is Thursday, October 23rd, 2025. We are live from the TBPN Ultradome. The temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. But first, I want to tell you about ramp.com. Time is money, save both. Easy-use corporate cards, bill pay. County, a whole lot more all in one place. Six years ago, the browser company of New York was born. This week, its acquisition by Atlassian closed.

The name, the brand design, et cetera, 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 found an agent's. The standard practice sounds like a good name for a company. The way that you named a company. You weren't trying to think of back then. You weren't trying to think of like a cute.com. Why don't we just name it what it is?

Name it what it is or name it who we are. Goldman Sachs. Oregon Stanley. So what was amazing about this naming convention, this isn't in the essay. It's just like how explicitly clear it is what the company does. The Edison Electric Illuminating Company of New York. I can imagine what they do. So the browser company of New York was a perfect name for a specific reason.

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, four, fifth, six, you know, et cetera, a 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, my industry. I'm going to do the cool thing as well.

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. We have a cool thing. And then, of course, everyone copied Instagram. Instacart copied Instagram's name and it worked. So, yeah, not always a total anti-signal.

In defense of copycat branding, naming startups 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 artist copy, great artist, Steel. 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. It's like that, admittedly. I was just like, there's probably something better if you've just really thought hard and 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 and 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, tack, that none of those groups had ever played in. I feel lucky to love the hunt for a great domain.

For sure. Yeah. That feels like Open AI in Anthropics' most recent campaigns to me. The AlphaGo documentary, you've seen it, right, Tyler? Yeah, yeah, many times. Many times? He didn't just watch. He studied.

Did you smoke a heater while you watch? Yeah, just a really... Further up to supply chain, a single year of Nvidia's revenue you almost match the past 25 years of total R&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. They should rebrand as the semiconductor company of Taiwan.

And the conclusion is basically like, if AGI is coming soon, America's 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. 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. Elon has been publicly saying, like, this is the biggest data center with the most energy. Yeah, it was framed as a god. Bomb shell.

Yeah, it was framed as a godshot. We pointed a camera at it, and 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. Surprise we haven't seen somebody like protesting on top of a data center yet. Yeah. You think somebody would have scaled one.

And I also, people used to do this with trees, right? They would just climb to the top of a tree and was going to get cut down. This happened at Anthropic, right? But for doom reasons, not for environmental reasons. What about just a good old-fashioned wood-fired data center? Tyler, can we figure out what it would take? A wood-fired data center. Generating tokens the old-fashioned way.

Exactly. Can you imagine late nights with the fellas just tossing wood in the hearth? Yeah. Timeline was in turmoil a little bit yesterday. day. 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 the 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? If you really wanted to give SORA the chance to become a consumption platform, you wouldn't have made SORA too available via API for anybody to generate. The tam of people that today only want to watch AI video is basically zero.

If I'm an open AI 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. The business use cases, I mean, think about how many platforms are trying to help people generate ads for social ads, right? 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. Yes, yes, yes. And the broader conversation of how having children in your 30s at any point is exhausting. Now, basically, the younger you are, potentially, in some ways, it will be easier. why we are not in an AI bubble in four charts. You got to summarize these and I'll hit the gong for every positive bowl signal out there.

Multibles are nowhere near dot com level. Cappex is growing but funded by cash flow. Largest tech co-valuations lower than 1999. Concentration in the market isn't necessarily negative. 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. Scup 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 The buyout drama continues. Company still weighing a public, aka a hostile offer for Warner Brothers. I think he's running the experiment of like just, you know, basically going to the world and saying one media industry, please. Basically, it feels like he's trying to build some sort of new conglomerate. There's virtually no demand for the iPhone Air. I have a friend who used to work at Apple.

He bought the iPhone Air, used it for, I think, like 24, 48 hours and returned it. He just said it was not the thinness of the phone was not worth the battery tradeoffs. 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. I know that it's habit forming. I've quit nicotine, you know, five or six times. Yes. I typically quit it like every night before I go to bed.

Yeah, and then pick it back up. Is not carcinogenic unless smoked, vape, dipped, or snuffed. Yeah. And is an unusual stimulant because it simultaneously focuses and relax you. Also, raises blood pressure. Again, do your own research. Also, 21 plus. Don't get in the game unless you're 21 plus, Tyler.

Travis Kelsey is teaming up with an activist group to invest in and revive six-flats. Did Travis Kelsey, like, get three wishes 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. I want to take over. It's a $200 million deal. He bought 9% of the theme park operator. Do you like theme parks?

No. I kind of grew out of theme parks. I mean, there's something beautifully dark about a humanoid that's walking. and it suddenly turns into this insect like... Yeah. 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. Yeah, and then the AI becomes sentient and then tries to kill us, right? That's why we need the fire extinguisher. Well, that's what... No, no, we just need the fire extinguisher

because it's good safety policy. You've got to be ready to take this thing out. You have to be ready to take this thing out. Jordy, what do you think? How are you taking this thing out? I think you strap charges to it, a vest that... And then we have it. Yeah, it has an explosive device.

At any moment, it explodes. Yeah, basically, it has a Kevlar suit over it. Okay. Explosives on the inside. Oh, so it explodes inward. Yes. I don't know how... I'm like, stopping a suicide vest on the robot is the last thing I would do.

That's the last thing I would do. ChatGPT's customer retention. What do you think about this? How do you square this with the early? data that we saw that showed that, hey, there might be some slowing adoption. I think this is what you would expect, right? People try Chad Chupit. They love it. They stick around. It becomes a part of their life. It becomes like, you know, a kind of muscle memory 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.

I mean, this guy really... There are so many weird things about this photo. Okay, okay, okay, yep. I knew this was too good to be true. 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 the fedora is a passerby not a detective on the case yeah there didn't stop it from getting

42,000 lines look at the look at the woman in the back it uh all the way on the right her face is like perfectly lit like this is a remarkable photograph we have some breaking news uh we you've heard about you know uh funds that directly buy you know equity in in in companies, you've heard about secondaries, funds that buy stakes in other funds, and we've got something new. We've got some breaking news. We've now

got tertiary funds. Quadronary funds next. 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. Do you think they wind up working with Uber long term or not? Ben Thompson was talking about he has been writing a lot about the Uber, Waymo, the 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 into the snow and use a human driver for some specific route, then I'm happy to open up the Uber app. Right now Waymo is quite a bit more expensive on a per trip basis than Uber.

And so it's possible the ride share 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. Yeah. 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. Thank you so much for tuning in today. We will be back tomorrow at 11 a.m. Sharp Pacific.

Can't wait.