TBPN Live - Diet TBPN: October 16th, 2025

Episode Date: October 17, 2025

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You're watching TBPN! Today is October 16th. It's Thursday, 2025. We are live from the TBPN Ultradome. The Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance. The capital of capital. Big news. We covered it a little bit yesterday, but big news out of... Sometimes when something just hits the timeline and we're live and we're doing the show, it's hard to process how significant something is. What a funny turn of events. In the meantime, while Open AI is, fighting for their life on the timeline against allegations of moving into adult content.

Google is saying, hey, we cured cancer. We've done it. We cured cancer. Yeah, which way Western lab. Yeah, yes, exactly. They didn't actually cure cancer, but they made some progress, and it's definitely updating some people

on what AI can do in bio, what AI can do in cancer research generally. It's very complex. I'm not an expert in bio or any of this stuff, really. So I needed to use a call of duty metaphor. And so I read the piece. It comes from Sundar Pichai. He says, time is money, save both,

easy use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting and a whole lot more all in one place. Go to ram.com, just kidding. He said, an exciting milestone for AI and science, our C2S scale 27B foundation model, built with Yale, and based on Gemma, generated a novel hypothesis about cancer cellular behavior. which scientists experimentally validated in living cells.

Now, that is not in people. It's not in mice. It's not in rats. It's just in cells. And this is just one potential link between a drug and cancer cells. But it's very exciting, very promising. In Call of Duty, there are a bunch of players on the map. Some of them are on your team.

Some of them are on the other, the opposing team. Exactly. Stand by. The opposing team, you can think of them as cancer cells. when cells develop cancer, when tumors exist, they are on the enemy team. You've got to hunt them down. You've got to find them.

The people that are hunting them down, those are the killer T cells. That's your immune system. Ideally, you want all the tumors, all the cancer cells, to be really obvious to your immune system. So your immune system can go around and get a bunch of headshots,

double kills, 360 no scopes. Of course, of course. But it's hard because a lot of these cancer cells, a lot of these tumors, they exist in what Google puts them as like, it says they, it says that they're cold tumors, basically they're invisible to the body's immune system. You want to turn them hot. You want them to light up on the mini-map.

How do you do that? You got to pop the UAV. And why this is special, why everyone's obsessed with this, why everyone's white-pelling so hard, is because they used AI to do this. And so right now, if you just look at the scoreboard in your Call of Duty world, AI got one point on the board. have been desperately hoping that AI systems would be able to discover novel cures for cancer. My question is, does open AI really have time to even compete on this front?

Right. It's very easy for Google with hundreds of billions of dollars of revenue to dedicate resources to projects like this, whereas this doesn't feel core to open. AI's like even roadmap, right? What ends up being funny is that the timing, right, within a basically a 24-hour period, you get the erotica announcement fast followed by this and well-played by Google. This is exactly what you want to see based on all the promises we've been getting for the last decade. So I think like Google deserves a huge pat on the back, but everyone, the industry should be breathing a sigh of relief being like, okay, we're actually doing what we've been saying.

going to do. Is this the chat GPT moment for AI and bio, or is this the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge that took 20 years until Waymos were on the street? Tyler, figured out. It's neither optimistic nor pessimistic. It's just being real and stating what is the case. It's a system with gigantic memory and retrieval ability, not a system that can event solutions to new problems. A big moment and it's a win for the world. My question is like, okay, if Can Google, whatever the process that led to this discovery, can Google produce thousands of these? Like, what is the Mercor scale AI of AI bio? How long will it be until the first FDA-approved AI-generated cancer drug hits the market?

At some point, you tap all the debt, you tap all of the capital markets, you hit some sort of like, you know, fundamental law of physics around how fast you can move sand around the world and turn it into silicon or how fast you can spin up a new power plant or new nuclear power plant. Like some of these things just take time and regulation like the, the, like there is the chance that this stuff gets regulated to the point where there's no fast takeoff. Like we should have seen a fast takeoff in nuclear energy production once we figured out how great nuclear energy was and we just kind of regulated it out of existence. The NRC stopped approving stuff and we just didn't see nuclear energy production. Like you can see it's exponential and then it's sigmoidal

because it just turns into an S curve because we just said, yeah, we're actually good. Interesting cultural indicator that Volvo quietly rolled out armored versions of their family cars direct to consumer over the summer, probably nothing. Let me tell you about Figma. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design development teams to build great products together. President Trump says that India's Prime Minister Modi has agreed to stop buying Russian oil.

Wow. Trade deal. Polly markets that were officially in a trade war with China. I'm not exactly sure how that's defined. There was a market on that? I guess, yeah. Well, Trump came out and said yesterday. He said, we are in a trade war with China.

Yeah, so that's the end of that. That solves it. But who knows, these trade wars can be very short. and, you know, I guess India's playing ball. Joe Lonsdale quoted the announcement yesterday that we shared around Airborne, of course, getting approved. He said, finance done right enables massive job creation and wealth for a civilization and complements builders.

Apparently, the Trump admin is planning to set four prices across a range of industries to combat market manipulation by China, according to Scott Besson. It's very odd that they're pulling that out as a tool instead of just. focusing on tariffs i don't know it seems like there's so many other ways to uh to deal with a trade war than just they like to they're like a they're like a dj you know like sometimes a dj's up there and like really turn in all the different knobs sometimes you just letting the music play you know that is a very funny metaphor for david solomon like the knobs are there right they should get david solomon in there he's already a dj he's already turning the knobs why not have him

turn the knobs of the global economy my my framework is that as much as trump and g beef yeah i believe that Trump respects G. Joe Wisenthal says, all businesses are banks, except for banks, banks are media companies. Wow, he said this back in 2018. That's crazy, from Earth. This is because Mr. Beast has filed a trademark to launch his own bank.

The organization will be called Mr. Beast Financial. We talked a little bit about this yesterday. Automate compliance, manage risk, approve trust continuously. Vance's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security compliance process and replaces with continuous automation. Paris did an investigation.

added 60 plus lab tests on leading protein supplements and found that quite a lot of them had high levels of lead. This wasn't surprising to me. And the reason for that is that a lot of different food has high levels of lead, even food that would appear to be, like, quote, natural, right? So like dark chocolate is a good example. There's a lot of dark chocolate brands have high levels of lead.

Is lead more of a cause for concern than microplastics? I feel like what was it last year, Nat Friedman with the plastic list, like really shifted the conversation to levels of microplastics. And I think people kind of like stop paying attention to lead. The way that you need to think about it is there's basically healthy levels. There's certified levels. And then there's like legal level. Healthy levels, like ideally it's zero, right?

Like lead, I'm actually, I'm sure somebody, some skits I will be like, actually. I like a little bit of lead is actually good for you. Because it makes me more aggressive, right? Yeah, yeah. Doesn't it make you a little crazy? Yeah, if you want to have a strong Q4, you know, up the lead and then detox and do one. Yeah. New Year, new you.

Yeah. Let's watch this launch for you. Everyone wants to be different. It starts with a familiar feeling to feel stuck. to feel stuck. The circular Rotary was really cool. And the piano, like, changing out what's around it. I think that's a very interesting use of AI.

Can we go fuller screen? No absurdity isn't designed in a studio. Fighting a robot. There we go. It's discovered in obsession. Born from truth so raw, it feels like madness to everyone else. This is cool. A beautiful disregard for your own limit.

A truth your body understands before your mind is the most absurd. Yeah, it's just interesting when it's difficult to make something, it's valuable, and when anyone can have it instantly, it's absolutely worthless. My guess is that these might work, as in they might get views, but I don't think they will build your brand at all. It does seem like they're building more of a SaaS-like product on top of AI image. Gen. General Catalyst just shared a video they did for a part of called Zavo. Okay, let's pull it up.

This isn't a restaurant. It's a battlefield. Every ticket is a ticking clock. Your best soldiers are following. See, this looks like not AI generated. This looks like they layered in their actual product. But maybe that's part of the workflow in the pipeline. They need some drop shadow on that logo. It's an ERP for restaurants.

Yeah. So you use that to run your restaurant. That's what I got from that. Is that correct? The first agentic point of sale for restaurants and retail payments, point of sale on AI agents in one platform to build the future of autonomous commerce. Over 400 businesses. I already used Zava to accept payments and manage operations.

I mean, it did deliver that message to me, and it grabbed my attention a little bit. So, I don't know. Worth. Yeah, the opening scene was particularly bad, but at the same time, it was probably a good hook. Exactly. If they had figured out a way to do this with the founder as like the key person and like some blend of AI plus the actual I mean that's coming would be that's for sure coming I mean V-O3 launched yesterday and 3.1 and has like pretty phenomenal character consistency I was looking at

some demos part of it as an advertising enjoyer I like to like without having knowledge try to analyze when I see a video when I see a campaign yeah I'm trying to clock you know based on the stage of the company, how much did they spend on this? For example, like, if Airbnb comes out with a launch video, I, like, expect it to be incredible because it's Airbnb, and they probably spent, like, half a million dollars, like, producing this ad. Apple ads, when they get, like, oh, Spike Jones is directing it. And you're like, he does movies.

And then with it with Seed Stage companies, personally, I enjoy being able to clock. Okay, they clearly had to be scrappy here. Like, they spent, like, 10, 15, 20K maybe on this video. Yep. But it's amazing because it's, like, really. it's genuinely a really great idea. I think, like, the actual output generally looks great. It doesn't, but I would say the idea itself is not,

I don't know if it's, like, strong enough, basically. There is a, like, an underrated side of using AI in a creative way that does show resourcefulness, and it can show being on the cutting edge. It's a way to tell your audience that you know how to pop a TIE, the models in unique and innovative ways that just dropped today. Is there a good analogy between, I'm graduating from law school, instead of going into the big law firm world, I'm going to start a law firm that uses something like Harvey on day one

and really leans into the frontier of let's do as much as possible and set this company up from day one to be AI native such that maybe our business model is different. Maybe we're not so focused on billable hours, or we have some sort of different model that is enabled by AI. We're still a bunch of lawyers, but we're using AI very effectively. Is that at all, can we draw any analogies between that and the D-to-C e-commerce era? We're basically who had brands who said, our secret, how we're going up against Nassley, how we're going up against Coca-Cola is we have Shopify. We have SaaS and they don't. And it turns out, Mark Zuckerberg says, actually, I'm planning to be the middleman here.

That's a great take. I don't want to... The money that you were going to spend on rent, well, I'm actually going to need to spend twice as much with me. PayPal and Wise are taking shots at each other. Did you see this? PayPal said, normalize sending money instead of memes and got 9,000 likes on threads, a real ripper over there.

And Wise says normalize sending money with transparent fees. Oh, dog session. Let me tell you about Google AI Studio, the fastest way from prompt to production with Gemini, chat with models, vibe code, monitor usage. You can try Nana Banana. You can talk to Gemini live. Did you hear that yesterday, Paxos mistakenly minted 300 trillion of their stable coins? Stablecoin issuers like Paxos and Circle and Tether. They mint new stable coins.

They had an internal error apparently. It sounds like it was a fat finger. They accidentally minted $300 trillion. But how fat of a finger do you have to add? I imagine like four extra zeros? Maybe the dev fell asleep on the keyboard moment. Before we move on, let me tell you about profound. Get your brand mentioned in chat, GPT,

reach millions of consumers who are using AI to discover new products and brands. Born in Texas, in a Texas town of less than 1,000, writes the most iconic rock album of the past 50 years. Quits music before its release, becomes electrical engineer for AMD, makes it to Sony's vice president of technical standards, helps create Blu-ray, doesn't elaborate.

We need to convince the younger generation that this is actually the path that you want to go on in life. Go on a short but generational run as a musician and then go work in tech. This is cool. The Mint is making some new coins, showcasing innovation from each state. There are four ones next year, according to Sheal,

including Steve Jobs for California. They're doing Dr. Norman Borla, Borla, Borla. The Kray won supercomputer for Wisconsin. Do you know who these guys are? Steve Jobs for California. And Minnesota with mobile refrigeration. That's a huge breakthrough. Let's give it up for mobile refrigeration.

I know the Kray's supercomputer. Tyler, can you find out how many of the Steve Jobs coins they're going to make? Because I feel like these things could instantly trade at the moon. Like a hundred times. Yeah. Yeah, I'll look that up. And then also Norman Borla was an act. agronomist, agriculture guy, and he kind of did a lot of stuff that influenced the green revolution.

Orr-farm farming. People were having a lot of conversations surrounding Open AIs numbers from the Financial Times. Of course, they have 800 million weekly active users. Five percent of those are paying 40 million. 13 billion in AARR, which implies a $325 annual ARPU or $27 a month per paying user. and this post went pretty viral. Google would turn 800 million users into 32 billion of revenue. The gap between 13 billion and 32 billion,

it's not as much as I feel like it should be based on how young chat GPT is. Like, you can't actually advertise on it yet. Like, they don't have an ads product. And so it's pretty remarkable that they're monetizing at the rate that they are already. That was my takeaway from this. Open AI is making $13 billion in revenue, but burning like 20, right?

And so you add those together. You get about $33 billion in revenue to fully offset the burn, which is kind of like exactly Google's monetization rate. Open AI is projecting to get to $100 billion of revenue. The projections are crazy. We should go through those. Dreamly polite thread by Epoch. Open AI's projection implies it gobbling up about half of all software revenue by 2028.

They're going to be creating a massive ads business. They're going to be capturing a ton of. They have partnership with Walmart that they announced. I think it was Monday. I'm sure they'll announce a big partnership with Amazon. They have a partnership with Shopify. They will flip the switch and start to take a percentage of all the transactions that they're already driving. So I think that, of course, the $100 billion in a few years is ludicrous, but I don't know that it's impossible.

One way bubbles pop, a technology doesn't deliver value as quickly as investors bet it will. In light of that, it is notable that Open AI is projecting historically unprecedented revenue growth from $10 billion to $100 billion over the next three years. It took Nvidia something like seven years to go from $10 billion to $100 billion. Meta, Tesla, Amazon, Apple, Walmart, Google, they were all in the six to 10-year camp. Chachip is phenomenal at creating packing lists for travel. and that's something that it could have been its own SaaS product there might be a tool out there

like packing list for travel.com might exist and now ChatsyPT just like does that for you on the fly and it's something that Google used to like route you to that one off piece of software. The government that I pay 40% of my income too has been shut for three weeks and nothing in my life has changed.

It's a rabbit staring in the mirror. I mean the reason is that the government is not It is shut down, but most of the government agencies have like six to eight weeks of cash, remember? I'm glad they have runway. They have runway. They have runway. Maybe they'll have to call soft bank and say, hey, we need a bridge. You can take 20% of the United States government.

Starlink is live on United. This is great news. I wonder when this will actually be fully live. I imagine that it's going to be a slow rollout, and they will work through. You know, one plane at a time, but it's now live on board the first mainline aircraft. And if you've ever used Starlink on a plane, it's remarkable. The timeline remains in turmoil over Nikita Beer. Nikita said at this point, I think creator payouts does more harm than good, and we need to off ramp to a different system. And Elon said, no, the issue is that we're underpaying and not allocating payment accurately enough. YouTube does a much better job. And so Polymarket put up. a market for Nikita Beer out as head of product at X this year. And Nikita said, this is how I win.

So he is in the trenches. Now he can hedge. Posts are so easy. Everybody that posts on X knows that oftentimes their best posts took the least amount of effort. Whereas on the YouTube creator side for creators that are actually building a business, the average YouTube creator probably is inversely correlated in that some of my best videos have taken the most amount of effort, like my top five videos took the most amount of effort, some creative spark, and then a ton of investment and everything from production to the

editing process. So again, I think YouTube creators certainly deserve to be paid well. Open AI is an amazing company, and these are impressive numbers. Also, a company losing 20 billion a year with 13 billion of revenue, making business deals that project hundreds of billions in future spending with a private valuation of half a trillion. is mental. It's one thing to be super bearish on a company that has massive losses and very minimal revenue. It's much harder, given the history of companies that are in capital wars, like, you know, look back at Uber and Lyft. The big critique of Uber was it's losing money. It's never going to make money. Yep. So, have you seen Uber's market cap recently? I think it's like

200 billion. TK. Yeah, 192 billion in a 15 PE ratio. like this business matured and is doing fantastically it's pretty pretty remarkable like they very much like fought the capital war and won and this was in a blog posted an open a i employee posted they said an unusual part of open a is that everything and i mean everything runs on slack there is no email i maybe receive 10 emails in my entire time there if you aren't organized you will find this incredibly distracting if you curate your channels and notifications you can make it pretty workable zephyr is sharing Broadcom's fifth customer is an Apple or XAI. It's Anthropic. They won't design a new

chip. They will be buying TPUs from Broadcom. That's very interesting that they're not buying them directly. Expect Anthropic to announce a funding round from Google soon. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify and we will see you tomorrow. Thank you for tuning in.