Diet TBPN: October 22nd, 2025
23 Oct 2025 · 11 min
A brief podcast episode (Diet TBPN, Oct 22, 2025) hosted by John Coogan discussing: (1) F1's new five-year, U.S.-only rights deal with Apple TV reported at $140–$160M/year, the sport's modest but high-value U.S. audience (roughly 1.1–1.3M average per race; ~30M season total; marquee U.S. races ~3M), and implications for discovery and immersive viewing (Apple Vision Pro); and (2) AI industry news including Meta cutting ~600 AI jobs and blocking ChatGPT on WhatsApp, and Anthropic's large compute talks with Google—plus other tech/business news items.
You're watching TVPN. Today is Wednesday, October 22, 2025. We are live from the TVPN Ultradome. The temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the Capital of Capital. F1 has officially partnered with Apple TV. You probably heard this, but I wanted to go a layer deeper into the strategy that Apple is employing here. So it's a five year partnership, just the United States. ESPN is out, Apple is in the reporting places the annual fee at 140 to 160 million dollars per year now.
Which is not bad because not long ago they wanted 200 and ESPN laughed them out of the way.
Balked. They balked.
Balking is underrated.
It is.
You gotta be Bach max.
And so F1 across the whole season, all the races combined, they pull 30 million viewers. They get about 1.1 million viewers per race last year. I think it's up to 1.3 million this year. And then some of the bigger races in the US by Amy Grand Prix, that gets up to like 3 million for like this whole spectacle. But in general it's a relatively small media property. But it's a really high value audience. It's a very high. It's a very Apple audience, in my opinion.
Apple's audience of people that become fans of a sport because they watch reality television about it, basically fake fans.
Now you will actually be able to buy Apple TV and unsubscribe from the F1 app because you will get F1 for free. And if you open up the F1 app on your Apple TV, instead of opening the Apple TV app, you open the F1 app, you'll be able to log in with Apple TV the service, and you will get full access to the F1 streams, which means not just the race cams and the actual production, but you can watch the individual racers, the individual drivers. I think both the front and the back camera, which is kind of cool. You can watch either. It is a sport built for monitoring the situation, much like ramp is built for saving you time and money, easy use, corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. Do you think this is something that grows F1?
No. I still think of Apple TV as the thing that people are doing, intentional watching on versus just running it. Right. So the reason that ESPN potentially grew F1's audience was because people just wake up on the weekend, they turn on espn.
Yeah.
And it's just on the tv.
Oh, what's on before football or what's on before baseball.
So I think it could potentially shrink the audience in the US but it's very clear that live sports are an area that traditional TV and streaming will continue to have an edge. Because streaming rights exist, it's effectively a monopoly that gets granted to a platform.
Yeah, it seems really powerful. Is there a real lift from having adjacent sports related content that can funnel new viewers into live sport viewing? Apple doesn't have Drive to Survive. So there is a world where Netflix bought the F1 rights. And as soon as you finish the Drive to Survive season, because everyone's watching Drive to Survive all the time. So they, they could just say, hey, click this button and we'll send you a push notification in your Netflix app. When the real race goes live. Apple can do something similar with the F1 movie. If you watch the movie, it could just say, hey, you know, want to watch the real race?
Yeah, but way, way, way less watch.
Way less watch, way less watch time.
The other thing about F1 is just how dangerous it is is also an element. A driver makes a mistake, they could actually die.
Like the business side is what's so fascinating to me because you're not just talking about the athlete, you're talking about the car. So if you're an engineering nerd into the car. But then also if you're a business nerd, you can understand, okay, this team principal is getting fired. They're like the CEO of the organization who's putting the money in. And then what does that, what, what effect does that money have if the content stack works and you're funneling people from the F1 movie to a drive to survive to actually watching the race? Apple has been for the last few years talking about what comes after the screen. And they've been saying it's the Apple Vision Pro. It's immersive video, it's 3D, it's spatial, it's augmented reality. And I was really, really disappointed in the Apple announcement post. Which is beautiful, has some great graphics, bunch of details, but basically all they're saying on Vision Pro is that you'll be able to watch it in Vision Pro, which is like, yeah, of course I could watch ESPN in Vision Pro. I could watch any TV show in Vision Pro. So yeah, they're not doing any 3D content and they're not doing any spatial content, which is, it's not look, it's not turn your head all the way around and look behind you. But it's basically a bubble. It's like 180 degrees. And so with that, it's not that expensive. Everyone's so Expensive. It's like there's a $10,000 camera from Blackmagic. I would set up film.
How would Apple not negotiate the ability to.
I think that they, I think they. The steel man, like the bull case, is that like they're going to do something, they just aren't ready to announce it.
Yeah, that's potentially, you know, out of the million or so people that tune into each race, there's a set of fans that are hardcore that would just buy and use the Vision Pro because.
It would be even just as a novelty a few times. Black Box Infinite had a demo of what watching an F1 race in Apple Vision Pro would look like. But of course, like Black Box Infinite is like a dev shop and they don't have the rights and so this like probably has to be negotiated with Apple and Apple's just not really doing it.
Vegas just unveiled the a massive F1 venue called Bar and Grill. It's the top golfer, F1, most generic name in history.
Extremely, extremely. Since the initial demo of the Apple Vision Pro, critics and analysts Ben Thompson and more have been saying live sports are going to be amazing in Apple Vision Pro because you can just drop a camera there and you don't need to do anything else because he had this demo of putting the camera at the half court line courtside at an NBA game and he was like, it doesn't require any production because if you want to see them go over there, you just turn your head and if you want to know the score, you just look up at the scoreboard because it's the experience of being courtside, which is already the best experience possible.
Metta cuts 600 jobs at AI superintelligence labs. The layoffs do not affect Meta's newest AI hires who are in some case, who are in some cases being paid up to hundreds of millions of dollars.
They're in what's called TB Lab.
Meta said on Wednesday that it cut approximately 600 jobs in its AI division, according to a memo sent to employees that was relayed to the Times. As a company seeks to keep pace with competitors in the furious contest over the technology. The layoffs were in Meta's so called, super so called, so called, so Shots Fired, which is the umbrella name for the company's AI efforts. The division has around 3,000 employees. This seems healthy and normal. I think these 600 people are going to have a bunch of job offers really quickly in my view. Like if you're not meeting the bar at Meta, it's very possible that you would be elite at like thousands of other companies that want to have an AI strategy. So I think these people will be back in the workforce quickly. In a sign of the escalating competition in AI, Meta on Saturday also said it would cut off access to non meta chatbots like ChatGPT on WhatsApp beginning next year. Oh yeah, that means. I didn't even know, you know, 3 billion users will no longer be able to use ChatGPT in the messaging app. Apparently there was like around 50 million people that were primarily using ChatGPT through WhatsApp.
Whoa, that's WhatsApp power user.
Makes sense. You can just chat with somebody.
Kevin says it had many, many millions of happy users. If you're one of them, you can migrate to our app, website or browser. Let's hear it for Atlas RT. If you agree that WhatsApp is better with ChatGPT, let's go. All of the hyperscalers hate each other. I think super, super intelligence is over if you're at Meta. My for you is to start working on hyper intelligence because the super intelligence thing is just obviously, it's obviously last year's news. Do you agree?
Giga intelligence.
Giga intelligence. That might be a 2030 goal.
Anthropic is currently in compute discussions with Google in a deal valued in the high tens of billions.
That's a lot.
That's a lot of billions if Anthropic prioritizes Google infra over aws. It's very telling on AWS AI infra and AWS AI strategy is cooked without Anthropic. Ultimately, I don't think it should be a huge surprise that Anthropic is interested in working with Google. Google owns roughly 4, 14% of anthropic. If they were in charge of Apple today, the first thing that they would do is buy Anthropic. Yeah, it's a very kind of weird take in my view.
Anthropic scaling revenue. They're doing B2B token generation and they need more compute. And so they went to the biggest.
Compute provider, very Drake Coded. Yes, I had someone tell me that I fell off. Ooh, I needed that.
Anthropic gets wildly disproportionately less MSM coverage than OpenAI despite approaching 3/4 of its revenue size because its quiet blowout success severely hurts the broader AI bear case. You'd think the fastest growing scale technology company ever would provide a lot more fodder for the press.
OpenAI has 10 times the deals and 10 times the products getting announced.
That's true if you're in the business of like the mainstream media. Like you need to put the water issue or the electricity issue or the financial issues in terms people can understand. People understand ChatGPT. So you put that in the headline and you get more clicks than if you say a clock.
I wonder how Anthropic tries to track weekly actives because they have a lot of their users are using the product through other front ends.
OpenAI ships a browser. Anthropic ships a blog post. DeepMind solves Navier Stoke Meta Eff it. Let's do a layoff. Let me tell you about Google AI Studio. The fastest way from prompt to production with Gemini. You can chat with models, you can vibe code, you can monitor usage.
Louvre heists are always a false flag by the art world. To increase notoriety of certain works, do not fall for the Frankish tricks the.
Louvre has been heisted from multiple times. They really got to step their game up.
Yeah. Do you think the management team over there is thinking we shouldn't have. We shouldn't have been so scrappy on security considering we have billions of dollars.
I think if I was in charge of loop security, I wouldn't have thought about the furniture elevator Vector of attack.
See this dashboard? It gives executives actionable insights into critical business functions. Classic true story, I'm sure. Nvidia says space isn't just for stars anymore. Star Cloud's H100 powered satellite brings sustainable high performance computing beyond Earth. Have we got a compelling pitch for space data centers yet? Have a wonderful evening.
Leave us five stars on Apple Podcast and spot cheer.
More from John
Shifts In The Creator Economy, Kylie Jenner x Meta, GPT 5.6 Limited Release | Diet TBPN
Snap Specs, Taste, Midjourney Hardware | Eric Newcomer, Merrill Lutsky, Carter Reum, Swami Sivasubramanian, Thomas Suarez, Mark Gurman, Ryan Daniels, Isaiah Granet
Midjourney Medical, AI Talent Wars 2.0, Jake Paul Joins | Derek Thompson, Rene Haas, Robert Slaughter, Rob Reid, Thais Castello Branco, David Senra, Jake Paul & Geoffrey Woo
YC Demo Day Lightning Round, New Snap AR Glasses, SpaceX Rips | Garry Tan, Andrew Lee, Stamatios Floratos, Hugo Frisk, Efraín Torres, Russell Smith, Payton Case, Akshay Trikha, Diana Hu, Harj Taggar, Connor Hayes, Luke Burgis, Anda Gansca