TBPN Live - Diet TBPN: October 27, 2025

Episode Date: October 28, 2025

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You're watching TVPN. Today is Monday, October 27, 2025. We are live from the TBPN Ultron. The Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance, the capital of capital. Over the weekend, there was some debate over Suno. Is anybody paying for AI music? Who's paying for this thing? Music app Suno nearly quadruples annual recurring revenue to $150 million. Can someone explain where this revenue comes from? Who is paying? What's actually going on? What's driving the revenue? Because there's a whole bunch of different buckets of value that you can be extracting if you're Suno the company. The worst possible scenario is that 100% of your revenue comes from someone who's just scraping your API, basically, and trying to distill your model.

If we went back to what happened with Deepseek, Deepseek was paying for GPT4 tokens, but GPT4 obviously was generating money from all over the place and had people paying for knowledge retrieval and a whole bunch of different use cases, coding tokens, all sorts of And if you add up the number of reviews on the iOS and Android app store, it's over a million. Wow. People are realizing that they can go to their favorite artists, like a rapper, let's say, make this future song, make the jazz version of this future song. I saw DMX, X going give it to you, but in 1960s jazz, it's almost just style transfer. It's really just filtering.

It is, I mean, that's the beauty of the Studio Ghibli is that you don't have to come to it with something. that's completely a blank canvas. Good thing about that is that I don't, I don't think the jazz community is up in arms. I think they might be. Maybe, maybe. It's new every time. It's brand new every night.

It's very, very exciting. I think they'll definitely be a lawsuit. Well, of course, like individual artists might try to figure out, okay, are they training on my music? And then in that case, did they buy the music? Because we now have precedent that shows, if you purchase the songs, Can you train on them?

In general, I think this kind of use case is probably like good for the underlying artists. It's just like marketing. It's fan engagement. They're just doing kind of like broad style transfer from a category of music onto this new artist. Will this become a network? It's just so undeniably magical to be able to generate a song.

There is a massive amount of people that will just pay for that magic experience today. I don't believe that these songs are for. listening to yet. I feel like they're for entertainment but not passive listening. Kind of like garage band-esque. You used to need to go and buy every instrument and then all of a sudden

it was like you could pull a piano off of a menu bar and just say I want a piano right now. And what does that do? Well that lowers the barrier to entry. My question becomes you know if I've seen these like reels go viral on Instagram going back to this like future as jazz

music or coding crazy by future as in jazz as somebody who grew up listening to future I love future but I have no desire to like go find it in your heavy rotation and put it and listen to it on the drive home the quality bar for music is actually like quite high to get people to actually start listening totally could you actually play the bongo drums while you talk okay so I think this is like two are yeah is it a competitor to Spotify long term is Is it competitor of Fruity Loops long term or Ableton long term? Or is a competitor to Fortnite long term? Open AI is working on an AI music product.

Yes. I would expect that Open AI eats the category of music as meme. Open AI never met a war. It wasn't interested in fighting. Let me tell you about figma.com. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams built great products together. You can get started for free.

Ghana F you mean 1982, soul funk. 1882. AI cover. Okay, let's play this. I think we won't get just demonetized because of this. That's a beauty. Oh, this is, okay. This is it gonna?

If you just make it so that if I generate a song that's like an AI gunna song that we just listen to, if every person, like, if you can figure out a revenue split that basically takes care of the people that created that the track that inspired it, in that case, it's extremely obvious because it's an existing gun-a-song that's converted into a new song. If you're just paying out effectively the same amount to the producer and the writers and all that stuff, that feels like an easy solution.

Now, the problem is if you're just generating entirely net new music which is like the prompt would be like make me a funk song yep then you're still eating into the potential earnings of like real artists on the platform yep and i don't know how you solve that i mean it's potentially a pull case for spotify because they take can take out why did spotify like lean so heavily into podcasts one because people wanted to listen to podcast and two because they didn't have the same dynamic where they're paying out at such a large amount of their revenue to artists on the platform. So they could go out and pay to acquire, you know, Joe Rogan or whatever,

it was originally for like a year or two years because you were acquiring users that would presumably listen to podcasts and you're not paying out the record label and the artists and all the underlying. That is a good point. Yeah, but yeah, the monetization has to be wildly different between. Yeah, so if I'm an artist, if I'm, if, if I'm going to, and somebody's generating AI gunna. I'm cool with that if...

You're getting paid. If I'm getting paid, like that's a normal song. Why tech bros are getting facelifts now? Whoever this dude is is getting Dr. Ben Tale. He's a 60-year-old who runs a solar and tech business. He had an advanced deep plane facelift and necklift. This looks like a good ad for facelifts, if you ask me. Yeah.

You can't hire anyone over 30 that men in tech are increasingly, spending thousands of dollars on procedures such as mini face lifts, necklifts, and eyelid lifts to beat the signs of aging. The latest addition to the tech bro look is a brand new face. Tyler, maybe you should go 10 years younger. Maybe you should try and look like a 5-year-old. The White House has posted that the console wars are over. They shared an image of Donald Trump donning Master Chiefs battle armor with the plasma sword. really not that sharp on Halo terminology.

You know, we're announcing the console wars are over that Halo is coming to PlayStation. That's exciting. Halo's coming to PlayStation. The two companies have just diverged so thoroughly in strategy. Microsoft owns Xbox, but is very much, like, console agnostic, and Sony is very much, like, all in on PS5

as, like, the core strategy. I wish, I miss when Q4 meant that there was a, Then all I was thinking about was the new cod. That was a simpler time. Here's why AI isn't a bubble today. He's distilled data points and ideas from previous columns and coverage. If you prefer facts and evidence-based reality over vibes and conflated narratives, enjoy. Big tech valuations are reasonable, leverage is low.

We're at the beginning of multiple AI super product cycles in the year ahead. We are in the early innings of a technology computing shift to AI, the largest in decades. Think 1994 versus 1990. 99. My personal timeline was that like the further you went in the 90s, the crazier it got. Like it was like heating up. And there was plenty of people that made insane amounts of money money like prior to the bubble, right? Totally. And a lot of them probably wish they held a bit longer. No, no. I think a lot of them are happy they got out when they did. I've talked to some folks who are like they founded a company in 1994. They sold it in 1998. It does not exist anymore.

It didn't exist in 2002, but they wound up with like $100 million liquid. That's enough to retire. Yeah. Let me tell you about linear. Linear is a purpose-built tool for planning and building products. Need the system for modern software development. Streamline issues, projects, and product roadmaps. You can start building.

Yeah, if you're trying to figure out if we're in a bubble or not, I recommend going outside picking a daisy and just picking the pedals off and going to get to bubble. It does feel like where we are right now. It's a bubble, it's not, a bubble, it's not. And then whatever you end up landing on, that's what's going to happen. The owner of Oreo has trained their own video model for television advertising. They invested $40 million, and they say it cuts production costs by 30 to 50%. I don't know how that's possible. There's a huge amount of budget goes to coming up with good ideas, and then the editing, and then making infinite variations of it.

which I'm sure AI can already do well in some cases. You pay people to come up with great ideas and then execute. The idea is actually the highest margin part. Apparently the Oreo's parent company only spent $100 million on digital print in national TV advertising in the last year. Wait, so they spent $100 million on advertising and $40 million on top. It's hard not to see this being like a huge waste of money that somebody high up said, like, I'm going to be the AI guy at Mondalez.

If you want to make money in the AI boom, go and get $40 million for a project like this. It's genius. Like, you just made so much money. So the friend.com billboard strategy is potentially a new strategy. Just like buy so much advertising that people can't stop talking about it. We don't, we're not just using generative AI. We are generative AI. We are the future of food.

It's the year 2025. You wake up in a progressive white billionaire where the blackface NFT profile picture is saying GM to you, saying wag me, friend. This is a crazy choice. Why did he pick this one? This is like the, how do you do fellow kids, meme? It's such a crazy choice on a million different levels,

even the smoking, even the NFT. I think the crypto community loved it, to be honest. I think they're pretty fired up. If you're one of the 10,000 people that own a punk, a punk, this is a bit of a moment. How are the punks doing? Are they still hanging out? A lot of people have been focused on this chart overlaying stock market performance over job openings and how it basically diverges. At the introduction of ChagipT.

Basically. That's where people like will. Which is also the introduction of high rates. Yes. This is particularly trippy chart crime. The break point was exactly when the COVID-Stimmy bubble pop and the Fed hiked interest rates to the moon. CEOs are desperate for every possible AI narrative, and if they need to do layoffs because they got bloated during COVID, they will say that we're getting efficiency out of AI, and that's a much better reason than like we overhired. Timothy Mellon, a banking error, is said to be the anonymous donor who gave $130 million to the U.S. government to help pay troops during the shutdown.

worth $14 billion personally guaranteed payroll for the armed services. And the only and most recent photo of him is from 1981. The train in the background, you know, with the hair, the stare. He just, he one-shoted photography. At this point, I've lost all motivation to post on X. The new algorithm is so demoralizing. I have 30,000 followers and I'm getting 500 views in an hour. I'm done with this place.

Well done, Elon Musk. And everyone and their mother was dunking on him and saying, You just got paid $10,000 a week ago to post a picture of Steve Jobs' daughter. Thank you to everyone who supports the show. Thank you to everyone in the chat. Thank you to everyone who's listening to the show. We will see you tomorrow live with Sachinadella, the CEO of Microsoft. Can I wait? Can I wait?

Have a great rest of your day. See you then. Goodbye. Cheers, folks.