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Technology's daily show (formerly the Technology Brothers Podcast). Streaming live on X and YouTube from 11 - 2 PM PST Monday - Friday. Available on X, Apple, Spotify, and YouTube.
You're watching TVPN. Today is Thursday, 10/23/2025. We are live from the TVPN UltraDome.
Speaker 2:The temple of technology, the fortress of finance, capital of capital.
Speaker 1:But first, I wanna tell you about ramp.com. Time is money saved both. Easy use corporate cards. Go Pay. Got it.
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Speaker 2:Six years ago, the browser company of New York was born. This week, its acquisition by Atlassian closed. The name, the brand design, etcetera, were all incredibly thoughtful, but they weren't new. Roughly a hundred and fifty years ago, was standard practice to name a company like they did. The Prudential Insurance Company of America founded
Speaker 1:a Standard practice sounds like a good name for a company.
Speaker 2:The way that you named a company. Yeah. Weren't trying think of back then,
Speaker 1:you weren't trying to
Speaker 2:think of, like, acute.com. Why don't we just name it what it is? And so what I'd
Speaker 1:like to Name it what it is or name it who we are. Goldman Sachs. Morgan Stanley.
Speaker 2:So what was what was amazing about this naming convention, this isn't an essay, is just, like, how explicitly clear it is what the company does. Yeah. The Edison Electric Illuminating Company of New York. Yep. I can imagine what they do.
Speaker 2:Yep. 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, fourth, fifth, sixth, you know, etcetera, company that use this sort of convention, basically does the exact opposite.
Speaker 2: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
Speaker 1:as well. There are people that probably found out about it after they found out about five copycats. This is what Instagram did. Right? Instagram was bourbon originally.
Speaker 1:And then once Instagram hit, they were like, we have a new brand. Yeah. We have a cool thing. And then, of course, everyone copied Instagram. Instacart copied Instagram's name and it worked.
Speaker 1:Yep. So, yeah, not always a total anti signal.
Speaker 2:Yeah. 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 some only so many English words that mean something, and there's just so many companies being created.
Speaker 2:It's it's quite challenging. Good artist copy, great artist 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.
Speaker 2:I even talked to a founder earlier this year and he was like, yeah. We're our our design our website and products is gonna look exactly like linear.
Speaker 1:I was like That admittedly?
Speaker 2:I was just like It's insane. There's probably something better if you just really thought hard and, like, spent the time to think through, like, what 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 nineties Apple ad, please.
Speaker 2: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, TAC, that none of those groups had ever played in. I feel lucky to love the the hunt for a great domain.
Speaker 1:For sure. Yeah. That feels like OpenAI and Anthropix most recent campaigns to me. The AlphaGo documentary. You've seen it.
Speaker 1:Right, Tyler? Yeah. Yeah. Many times. Many times?
Speaker 2:He didn't just watch. He studied. Did you smoke a heater? Probably watch. He's a civilian dude.
Speaker 2:Smoke.
Speaker 1:Further up the supply chain, a single year of NVIDIA's revenue almost matched the past twenty five 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.
Speaker 2:Because they should rebrand as the semiconductor company of Taiwan.
Speaker 1: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.
Speaker 2:The big question is, like, where is the energy gonna come from? Are all these new data centers willing to bet that, we will discover new sources of energy?
Speaker 1:Elon has been publicly saying, like, this is the biggest data center with the most energy.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It was it was framed as a gut.
Speaker 1:Bombshell. Yeah. It was framed as camera at it, and it's big. It's big. It's the bay it's bigger than everything else.
Speaker 1:Not to be, like, a total decelerating, like, tree hugger. It's just, like, let's not give each other cancer.
Speaker 2:Surprised we haven't seen somebody, like, protesting on top of a data center yet. Yeah. You think somebody would have scaled one and and
Speaker 1:I they also
Speaker 2:People used to do this with with trees.
Speaker 1:Right? They they would
Speaker 2:just climb to the top of a tree and then it get cut down.
Speaker 1:This happened in Anthropic. Right? But for doom reasons, not for not for Environmental. Environmental reasons. What about just a good old fashioned wood fired data center?
Speaker 1:Tyler, can we figure out what it would take
Speaker 2:A wood fired data center.
Speaker 1:Generating tokens the old fashioned way. Exactly.
Speaker 2:Can you imagine late nights with the fellas just tossing wood Yeah. The hearth?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Just timeline was in turmoil a little bit yesterday. People refuse to believe that there is at least a probability that in fifty 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 the Meta Vibes app becomes so addictive?
Speaker 1:You can't turn it off, and it destroys your life. Like like, maybe I've read the sci fi. I I 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.
Speaker 1: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.
Speaker 2:If you really wanted to give Sora the chance to become a consumption platform, you wouldn't have made Sora two available via API for anybody to generate. The TAM of people that today only wanna watch AI video Yep. Is basically zero.
Speaker 1: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.
Speaker 2:The biz the business use cases, I mean, think about how many platforms are trying to help people generate ads for social ads. Yeah. Right? Yeah. Generate, you know, content for various videos.
Speaker 2: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.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes. Yes.
Speaker 2:And the broader conversation of how having children in your thirties at any point is exhausting. Yeah. 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?
Speaker 1:You gotta you gotta summarize these, and I'll hit the gong for every positive bull signal out there.
Speaker 2:Multiples are nowhere near dot com level.
Speaker 1:We We got room to run.
Speaker 2:CapEx 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 from, you know, even more craziness is the overall state of the economy. Right?
Speaker 2: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 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.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Scoop 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. I think he's running the experiment of, like, just, you know, basically going to the world and saying one one media industry, please.
Speaker 1:Basically, it feels like he's trying to build some sort of new conglomerate.
Speaker 2: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, twenty four, forty eight hours, and returned it.
Speaker 1:He did.
Speaker 2:He just said it was Okay. Not the the the thinness of the phone was not worth the the battery 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 TV your reminder that, yes, nicotine increases focus also is very habit forming. Duh.
Speaker 2:I know that it's habit forming. I've quit nicotine, you know, five or five or six times.
Speaker 1:Yes. I typically quit it, like, every night before I go to bed.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And then it back up. Yeah. It's not carcinogenic unless smoked, vaped, dipped, snuffed. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And is an is an unusual stimulant because it simultaneously focuses and relax you. Also raises blood pressure.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:So again, do your own research.
Speaker 1:Also, 21. Don't get in the game unless you're 21, Tyler.
Speaker 2:Travis Kelce is teaming up with an activist group to invest in and revive Six Flags. Did Travis Kelce, like, get three wishes when when he was, like, 11 to and he's like, I wanna be a football player. I wanna date the biggest pop star in the world, and I wanna take over.
Speaker 1:It's a it's a $200,000,000 deal. He bought 9% of the theme park operator. Do you like theme parks?
Speaker 2:No. I kinda grew out of theme parks.
Speaker 1:We might have
Speaker 2:There's something beautifully dark about a humanoid that's walking, and then it suddenly turns into this insect play.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Thing. 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.
Speaker 1: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.
Speaker 1:No. No. We just need the fire extinguisher because it's a good safety policy. You gotta be ready to take this thing out. You have to be ready to take this thing out.
Speaker 1:Jordy, what do you think? How are you taking this thing out?
Speaker 2:Jordy, I think you strap charges to it. A vest that that
Speaker 1:And then we have we have an explosive device set. At any moment, it explodes.
Speaker 2:Basically, going so hard. It has a Kevlar suit over it. Okay. Explosives on the inside.
Speaker 1:Oh, so it explodes inward.
Speaker 2:Explodes inward.
Speaker 1:Yes. Know. Scrubbing a suicide vest on a door lock is the is the last that's the last thing I would do. I think 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?
Speaker 2:I think this is what you would expect. Right? People try ChatGPT. They love it. They stick around.
Speaker 2:It becomes a part of their life. It becomes like, you know, a a kind of muscle memory Yeah. Quick quickly. It's become a, you know, 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.
Speaker 2: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 gonna crack it with a detective who wears an actual fedora unironically. I mean, this guy really
Speaker 1:There are so many weird things about this photo.
Speaker 2:Okay. Okay. Okay. Yep. I knew this was too good to be too good to be true.
Speaker 2: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 the door is a passerby, not a detective on the case. Yeah. There you go. Didn't stop it from getting 42,000
Speaker 1:lines. 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.
Speaker 2:We have some breaking news. What's up? We you've heard about, you know, funds that directly buy, you know, equity Yep. In in companies. True.
Speaker 2:You've heard about secondaries funds that that buy stakes in in other funds, and we've got something new. We got some breaking news. We've now got tertiary funds.
Speaker 1:Let's go. Quaternary funds next.
Speaker 2:More interesting news. Self driving taxi company Waymo is now doing 876,000 rides per month in California. Six x increase over the past year, and a 69 x increase since August 2023.
Speaker 1: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, the self driving taxi stuff, mostly because he thinks, like, he needs more data. Like, because even at Uber and Waymo, like, they don't necessarily know what the consumer behavior will be. Like, will the consumer stay with Uber, and they'll order an 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.
Speaker 1:Like, you wanna do all that in one app, Or will people say, I I use the Waymo app for most things, and then when I wanna go into the snow and use a human driver for some specific route, then I'm happy to open up the the the Uber app.
Speaker 2:Right now, Waymo is quite a bit more expensive per trip basis than Uber. And so it's possible the rideshare market, you know, used to be bifurcated a little bit between Uber and Lyft. Lyft was always, you know, I remember when I was in college, was using Lyft more because it was like slightly cheaper.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And it's possible that Waymo ends up becoming, like, more of a luxury good and people will just have the Waymo app. Thanks for hanging out with us.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much for tuning in today. We will be back tomorrow at 11AM sharp.
Speaker 2:Can't wait.