Nov 22, 2025 · 29m · tbpn
The State of AI: A Field Trip to TBPN’s Aura Farm + Today’s Top Tech Stories | Diet TBPN
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In this episode of TBPN, hosts John Coogan and Tyler use an illustrative 'Aura Farm' market map to dissect the state of artificial intelligence in late 2025, analyzing major tech giants, venture capital dynamics, compute infrastructure bottlenecks, and macroeconomic spillovers.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. The hosts hold 55% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
The hosts as informed peer 5.8 Guest teaching 1.4 Guest disagreement 1.0 The hosts pushing back 1.2
speaking balance: gold is the hosts, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 16:59 Debating the geopolitical threat of Chinese open-source AI
Co-Host pushes back against John's relaxed Linux analogy, arguing that Chinese open source models exert acute commercial pressure and soft power risks regarding censored topics.
Hardest push from the hosts ▶ 9:11 Correcting the gift horse idiom interpretationJohn immediately steps in to correct Co-Host when he mistakenly suggests the idiom means one should inspect a gift horse's teeth rather than accepting a gift graciously.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 27:40 Chronicle of Ryan Wedding's trajectory to FBI top ten listCo-Host educates John on the complete background of Canadian Olympic snowboarder Ryan Wedding transitioning into real estate, smuggling alliances, and becoming a federal fugitive.
The host holds their own ▶ 8:41 Explaining the gift horse idiom and Wall Street AI anxietyJohn demonstrates command by explaining the historical agricultural roots of assessing horses by their teeth and neatly applying it to Wall Street investors dumping profitable AI equities.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | The hosts as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | The hosts pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pigs at the Trough: Meta and the AI Slop Economy | 5 | 1 | 1 | 1 | Tyler outlines the AI slop trough metaphor with Meta, while John riffs on the business economics of maintaining a slop trough and Oracle protecting its cash flow from debt-seeking AI labs. | |
| The Cash Cow: Nvidia's Dominance and AI Spending Worries | 5 | 1 | 1 | 1 | Tyler and John discuss Nvidia as the solitary cash cow beating earnings amidst market worries, followed by Elon Musk's fast-paced infrastructure buildouts and shipping speed as the bull in a china shop. | |
| Lipstick on a Pig: Apple Intelligence and Privacy Hurdles | 6 | 2 | 1 | 1 | Co-Host and Tyler critique Apple Intelligence as lipstick on a pig. John articulates how Apple's brand history of privacy protection hindered rapid AI rollout compared to Google and Meta. | |
| Looking a Gift Horse in the Mouth: Market Skepticism on AI Returns | 7 | 0 | 1 | 2 | Tyler asks John to explain looking a gift horse in the mouth. John breaks down the historical idiom and maps it to public market tech investors dumping AI shares rather than capitalizing on the megatrend. | |
| The Black Sheep: Andrej Karpathy and Contrarian Timelines | 7 | 1 | 1 | 1 | The group discusses Andrej Karpathy breaking rank on timelines by predicting a decade of agents. John highlights how Karpathy's industry stature shook market confidence, alongside Brad Gerstner's $1.4T question. | |
| The Lion's Share: Microsoft and Satya Nadella's OpenAI Deal | 6 | 2 | 1 | 2 | The co-hosts review Satya Nadella taking the lion's share in the OpenAI partnership. John then details Reddit's historical valuation climb after initially licensing data as an alleged sitting duck. | |
| The Headless Chicken: Perplexity's Multi-Front Expansion | 6 | 2 | 2 | 2 | John questions Perplexity's sprawling multi-front strategy across browsers and terminals. When discussing Chinese open source models as a snake in the grass, John frames them as a Linux-style price anchor. | |
| The Early Bird and the Donkey: Josh Kushner and Anthropic | 5 | 1 | 1 | 1 | Tyler introduces Josh Kushner as the early bird and Anthropic doing donkey work. John defines the drudgery idiom in the context of enterprise coding pipelines before reviewing Google's fat cat status and CoreWeave. | |
| AMD's Strategic AI Pivot: Lisa Su Challenging Nvidia | 6 | 1 | 0 | 0 | John reads reporting on Lisa Su pivoting AMD's product line towards AI compute in 2022 and quadrupling its valuation, followed by a discussion on ultra-luxury nine-figure real estate benchmarks. | |
| Founder Mode and High-Leverage Departures from Big Tech | 5 | 2 | 1 | 1 | Co-Host shares a Meta AI resignation post embracing founder mode, Bernie Sanders calling out AI oligarchs, luxury watch market dynamics, and a theory on Google keeping TPU compute exclusive. | |
| The Olympic Snowboarder Turned Drug Kingpin and Palantir AI Evals | 6 | 3 | 1 | 1 | Co-Host explains the bizarre true-crime saga of Olympic snowboarder turned FBI fugitive Ryan Wedding. John pitches locating top fugitives as the ultimate enterprise eval metric for AI startups challenging Palantir. |
Statements from this episode (9)
Coogan: The profitability of being an AI 'slop farmer' is underrated
“You don't want to be at the, you don't want to be the pig at the slop trough, although sometimes, you know, maybe the profitability of being a slop farmer is underrated.”
Coogan: Cash-rich giants must protect balance sheets from predatory co-borrowers
“If you have a lot of cash flow as a big company, if you have the ability to borrow billions or hundreds of billions in the debt market you have to protect your hen house. Foxes might come by and might want to use you to co-sign a loan.”
Coogan: Apple's Privacy Focus Left It Ill-Equipped for AI vs. Google and Meta
“Apple has been building a brand around We don't access your data. We don't store your data. We would never train on your data. And that put them in an awkward position where they couldn't just snap their fingers and deliver a great AI experience. Whereas Googl…”
Coogan: Amazon has not signed an agentic commerce deal with OpenAI
“Amazon has not done a deal yet with OpenAI for the agentic commerce thing.”
Coogan: Andrej Karpathy broke AI consensus by projecting a decade of agents
“Even though he's worked at OpenAI, even though he's worked at Tesla, he broke rank, he went on the Dwarkesh Patel show, and said, you know what, I think we're more in a decade of agents. I think AGI might not be right around the corner. He took a contrarian st…”
Coogan: Every Financing Round Questions AI Investment Growth and Froth
“The elephant in the room is, is in every conversation, every, every financing round at this point is, is this deal predicated on A continuation of exponential growth in investment, in everything, like how much more, how risky is this relative to the amount of …”
Coogan: Open-source LLMs act as stalking horses to depress proprietary pricing
“It's sort of like, You know, a stalking horse, another, another animal based analogy, but it's sort of a stalking horse for like, Hey Gemini and anthropic. Like if you guys don't lower your prices, we will go to the open source option. And that's sort of what …”
Coogan: Forty buyers chase zero $5M-$7M homes for sale in northern SF
“There's like 40 people that are looking for houses in the five to seven million dollar range in North San Francisco, and there's none for sale.”
Coogan: Countless AI startups copy Palantir's forward-deployed engineer strategy
“You know, there are so many startups these days that are going after Palantir's market, competing in enterprise software, enterprise AI, forward deployed engineers. It's all a bunch of memes. Everyone's, Everyone's keying off of the Palantir strategy.”