Diet TBPN: November 5, 2025

0:00Everybody 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.

0:43And 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.

1:23And 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. He can fly fighter jets. He has his own 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 Shift4 Payments. It had a few other names, but he started his company when he was 16 years old. 16. And And it's like a serious business.

2:00Billions 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. Real business. 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. He can probably say no one likes space more than me. The debate was moon versus Mars. Moon versus Mars, where should you prioritize things?

2:35It 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 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 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.

3:17We 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 art. 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 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.

3:57NASA has 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? Yes. President George W. Bush was quite interested in Mars exploration. He was a 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.

4:34I mean, the real miss 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? Or did he 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? I think that is all upstream of moon versus Mars.

5:08Based 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 Wong, we have Elon Musk, and we have Sundar Pichai all saying, we're going to do data centers in space.

5:51So collectively, you have, what,$10 trillion in 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? Croc? uh devon uh cognition they're the makers of devon devon's the ai software engineer cross crush your backlog with your personal ai so david in the chat was uh saying uh 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 um yes and arthur mack water said we should annex it which Solana has been saying for quite a while now.

6:42Yeah, moon should be a state. It's a classic. I am inevitable, says Ken Kirtland. 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 100 trillion times humanity's total electricity production.

7:22Like 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...

7:59You want to watch TV in space. You want to watch space TV. You want 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? Oh, yeah. You want to take pictures? 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 be coming true. And Elon Musk signed off on Sundar Pichai's Suncatcher project and says, Great idea, LOL. well. It is so funny that like Elon can't just be like, no, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm keeping all the launch capacity for myself.

8:35Like he, he doesn't have, I guess he doesn't have the ability to do that. I 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, I'm, uh, 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. Uh, they suck on their wrongness like a pacifier believe the bubble is about 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 touring test but there's also like the eliezer yukowski which was like ai is going to kill us like next year and like i would put them both in those camps and is eliezer saying that the bubble's going to pop i don't know is he bob talk i don't let's go to the bob talk let's go to the bubbler i don't think he's been saying that no okay so So who is Dean Ball subtweeting here?

9:29That's the question. It's hard to argue that AI is going to be this runaway death machine and also that it's about to pop. Do you know Ball? All right. How many times are we going to make this joke? No, I think he's mostly talking about there's a bunch of, like, journalists that, like, mainstream journalists that talk about, like, oh, AI is, like, it just connects token. Oh, yes, yes, 100%. 100%. 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.

10:02He'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 boards like desires. And it's like literally both of those can't be true simultaneously. For me, the gal man 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.

10:43Okay, 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 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 paperclipping 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.

11:28Yeah, 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.

12:14We'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. 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.

13:01And 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 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 limited downside to going to college because you get to just hang out and vibe code apps and do whatever.

13:41And 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 yeah 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 uh what's the uh capital of nigeria uh let me think about that for a second uh abuja there you go see that's 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 also track we're so back i thought it was very unfortunate that uh x and substack got uh such a fight 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.

14:50I 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 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.

15:37uh right and yet they don't because they want control and they see it as counter-positioned and so um for some reason the folks at twitter bought review and were doing email newsletters and then fully pulled back from it because uh it was just it just did not make sense for them to 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 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?

16:28I 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 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? No, I've heard of it. It's called the Temple of Wings. Is this where your polycule meets up? What? If you put the Technological Republic, which is Alex Karp'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.

17:11And 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 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 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.

18:01We 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 Riolandian neo-deep status. We have some breaking news. The CFO of OpenAI says people are not exuberant enough about AI. 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. I got some exuberance for you right here.

18:41AI! It's coming. artificial intelligence it's coming 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 u.s treasuries in 2025 bitcoin just kind of like like round tripped right meta s-h-i-t-t-y 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 b2b 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 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.

19:47Good luck to them. Pinterest is down 22%. 22 % is where it landed. Tough right now. You can beat, 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. Reddit is headed for the same future 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 posts that you actually read and interact with, do you think are AI?

20:36Like 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 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 Gerstner 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 you post. I 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.

21:12That's not the that's not the point. And that's not like the whole structure. And so he I don't know. 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. Yeah, there would be value to that. But I don't know. China has overtaken the U.S. in cumulative open-source AI model downloads, says A16Z. Oh, we also have some updates on the solar panel company that we were digging into yesterday. Pretty big. Turns out it was built by the Chinese. They built Trina Solar, built this facility, and then due to some regulatory pressure, They were a forced seller.

21:57Yeah. 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 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 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?

22:39A16Z said, China has overtaken the U.S. 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. I DMed 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. Thank you so much for watching. We'll see you tomorrow. We love you.