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Tyler
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.
David
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.
Tyler
What a funny turn of events. In the meantime, while OpenAI is fighting for their life in the timeline against allegations of moving into adult content, Google is saying, hey, we cured cancer. We've done it. We cured cancer.
David
Which way? Western lab.
Tyler
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. In cancer research generally. It's very complex.
Nikita
I'm not an expert in bio or.
Tyler
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 ramp.com just kidding. He said an exciting milestone for AI and science are C2s, scale 27B. Foundation model built with Yale and based on 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 side. The opposing team.
David
Standby.
Tyler
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 gotta hunt them down. You gotta 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 endoscopes, 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 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 minimap. 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.
David
People have been desperately hoping that AI systems would be able to discover novel cures for cancer. Right? My question is, does, does OpenAI 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 OpenAI's like even roadmap, right? What ends up being funny is that the timing, right? Within 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 Google deserves a huge pat on the back. But the industry should be breathing a sigh of relief being like, okay, we're actually doing what we've been saying we were going to do.
Tyler
Is this the ChatGPT moment for AI in bio or is this the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge that took 20 years until Waymos were on the street?
David
Tyler, figure it 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 invent solutions to new problems. Big moment and it's a win win for the world. My question is like, okay, if Ken Google, whatever the process that led to this discovery, can Google produce thousands of these?
Tyler
Like, what is the Mercur 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.
Nikita
You know, fundamental law of physics around how fast you can move sand around the world and turn it into silicon.
Tyler
Or how fast you can spin up a new power plant or new, new nuclear power plant like these. 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, 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.
David
Interesting cultural indicator that Volvo quietly rolled out armored versions of their family cars direct to consumer over the summer. Probably nothing.
Tyler
Let me tell you about figma. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design development teams build great products together. President Trump says that India's Prime Minister Modi has agreed to stop buying Russian oil.
David
Wow. Trade deal.
Tyler
Holy market. Said we're officially in a trade war with China. I'm not exactly sure how that's defined.
David
There was a market on that, I guess.
Tyler
Yeah.
David
Well, Trump came out and said yesterday, he said, we are in a trade war with China.
Tyler
Yeah. So that's the end of that.
David
That solves it.
Tyler
But who knows? These trade wars can be very short and, you know, I guess India's playing ball.
David
Joe Lonsdale quoted the announcement yesterday that we shared around Erebor, 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 floor prices across a range of industries to combat market manipulation by China. According to Scott Bessant.
Tyler
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 deal with.
David
A trade war than just they like to. They're like a dj, you know, sometimes a DJ is up there and really turn in all the different knobs. Sometimes you just let the music play.
Tyler
That is a very funny metaphor for David Solomon.
David
Like the knobs are there, right?
Tyler
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?
David
My framework is that as much as Trump and Xi beef, I believe that Trump respects Xi.
Tyler
Joe Weisenthal 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 Proof Trust Continuously Vantage Trust Management platform. Takes the manual work out of your security compliance process and replaces with continuous automation.
David
Paris did an investigation. Yes, did 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 natural. Right. So dark chocolate is a good example. A lot of dark chocolate brands have high levels of lead.
Nikita
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.
Tyler
And I think people kind of like stop paying attention to lead.
David
But 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 levels. Healthy levels. Like, ideally, it's zero.
Nikita
Right.
David
Like lead. I'm actually. I'm sure somebody. Some skits I will be like. Actually, I like a little bit. A little bit of lead is actually.
Tyler
Good for you because it makes you more aggressive.
David
Right? Yeah. Yeah.
Tyler
Doesn't make you a little crazy.
David
Yeah. If you want to have a strong Q4.
Nikita
Exactly.
David
You know, up the LAD and then detox and Q1. Exactly.
Tyler
Yeah.
David
New year, new you.
Nikita
Yeah.
Tyler
Let's watch this launch.
Narrator
Everyone wants to be different. It starts with a familiar feeling to feel stuck. The circular is really cool.
Tyler
And the. And the piano, like changing out what's around it. I think that's a very interesting use of AI absurdity. Can we go fuller screen?
Narrator
Absurdity isn't designed in a studio fighting a robot. Discovered in obsession. Born from truth. So raw it feels like MA to everyone else. This is cool. A beautiful disregard for your own limits. A truth your body understands before your mind is the most.
David
Yeah, it's just interesting. When it's difficult to make something, it's valuable. Yep. And when anyone can have it, instantly it's absolutely worthless. My guess is that these are might work as in they might get views. But I don't think they will build your brand at all.
Tyler
It does seem like they're building more of a SaaS like product on top of AI ImageGen.
David
General catalyst just shared a video, a video they did for called Zavo.
Tyler
So let's play that.
David
Pull it up.
Nikita
This isn't a restaurant.
David
It's a battlefield.
Nikita
Every ticket is a ticking clock. Your best soldiers are falling.
Tyler
See this? This looks like not AI generated. This looks like they layered in their actual product. But maybe that's part of the workflow and the pipeline. They need some drop shadow on that logo. It's an ERP for restaurants.
David
Yeah.
Tyler
So you use that to run your restaurant. That's what I got from that. Is that correct?
David
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 use ZAVA to accept payments and manage operations.
Tyler
I mean, it did deliver that message to me and it grabbed my attention a little bit. So, I don't know, worth.
David
Yeah, the opening sequence was particularly bad, but at the same time, it was probably a good hook.
Tyler
Exactly.
David
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.
Tyler
That's for sure coming. I mean, VO3 launched yesterday 3.1 and has, like, pretty phenomenal character consistency. I was looking at some demos, part of it.
David
As an advertising enjoyer, I like to, like, without having knowledge, try to analyze. When I see a video, when I see a campaign, 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 be incredible because it's Airbnb and they probably spent like half a million dollars, like, producing these ads, Apple ads.
Tyler
When they get like, oh, Spike Jones is directing it and you're like, he.
David
Does movies and then 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. But it's amazing because it's like, real. It's genuinely a really great idea. I think, like, the. 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 strong enough.
Tyler
Basically, there is 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 puppeteer 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. 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 D2C E commerce era where basically who had brands, who said our secret, how we're going up against Nestle, how we're going up against Coca Cola? Cutting out the middleman is we have Shopify, we have SaaS, and they don't.
David
Turns out Mark. Mark Zuckerberg says actually I'm planning to be the middleman here. I just.
Tyler
That's a great take.
David
Yeah, I don't want to. The money that you were going to spend on rent. Well, I'm actually going to need you to spend twice as much with me.
Nikita
PayPal and Wise are taking shots at each other.
Tyler
Did you see this?
Nikita
PayPal said normalize sending money instead of memes and got 9000 likes on threads. A real ripper over there. And Wise says normalize sending money with transparent fees. Oh, don't session.
Tyler
Let me tell you about Google AI Studio.
Nikita
The fastest way from prompt to production with Gemini. Chat with models, vibe code, monitor usage. You can try nanobanana. You can talk to Gemini live.
David
Did you hear that yesterday Paxos mistakenly minted 300 trillion of their stablecoins? Stablecoin issuers like Paxos and Circle and Tether, they mint new stablecoins. Okay, they had an internal error apparently and it sounds like it was a fat finger. They accidentally minted 300 trillion.
Tyler
But how fat of a finger do you have to add? Like I imagine like 4 extra maybe.
David
Maybe the dev like fell.
Tyler
It does feel like a cat on the keyboard.
Nikita
Before we move on, let me tell you about profound get your brand mentioned in chatbots.
Tyler
Reach millions of consumers who are using.
Nikita
AI to discover new products and brands.
David
Born in Texas, in a Texas town of less than a thousand. 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 new, the younger generation that this is actually the path that you want to go on in life. Like go on a short but generational run as a musician and then go work and 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 Scheele, including Steve Jobs for California, they're doing Dr. Norman Borlaw Borlow, Cray 1 supercomputer for Wisconsin.
Tyler
Do you know who these guys are?
David
Steve Jobs for California and Minnesota with mobile refrigeration.
Tyler
That's a huge breakthrough.
David
Let's give it up for mobile refrigeration.
Tyler
I know the Cray supercomputer.
David
Tyler, can you find out how many of the Steve Jobs coins they're gonna make? Because I feel like these things could instantly trade at moon like a hundred times. Yeah, yeah, I'll look that up. And then also Norman Borla was an agronomist agriculture guy. He kind of did a lot of.
Nikita
Stuff that influenced the green revolution or farmed farming.
David
People were having a lot of conversations surrounding OpenAI's 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 ARR, 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.
Tyler
The gap between 13 billion and 32 billion. It's not as much as I feel like it should be based on how young ChatGPT is. Like the. They don't. 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. OpenAI is making 13 billion in revenue, but burning like 20.
Nikita
Right.
Tyler
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.
David
OpenAI is projecting to get to 100 billion of revenue.
Tyler
The projections are crazy. We should go through those. Extremely polite thread by epoch. OpenAI's projection implies it gobbling up about half of all software revenue. By 2028.
David
They're going to be creating a massive ads business. They're going to be capturing a ton. 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 a few years is. Is ludicrous, but I don't know that it's impossible.
Tyler
One way bubbles pop. A technology doesn't deliver value as quickly.
Nikita
As investors bet it will. In light of that, it is notable that OpenAI 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 6 to 10 year camp. ChatGPT is phenomenal at creating packing lists for travel and that's something that it.
Tyler
Could have been its own SaaS product.
Nikita
There might be a tool out there like packing list for travel.com might exist and now ChatGPT just does that for you on the fly and it's something.
Tyler
That Google used to route you to.
Nikita
That one off piece of software.
David
The government that I pay 40% of my income to has been shut for three weeks and nothing in my life has changed.
Nikita
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?
Tyler
So they can.
David
I'm glad they have Runway.
Nikita
They have Runway. They have Runway. Maybe they'll have to call Softbank and.
Tyler
Say hey, we need a bridge.
Nikita
You can, 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 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.
David
He can hedge posts are so easy. Every 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 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 the top five videos took the most amount of effort, some creative spark and then a ton of investment in everything from production to the editing process. So again, I think YouTube creators certainly deserve to be paid well. OpenAI 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, look back at Uber and Lyft. The big critique of Uber was it's losing money. It's never going to make money.
Tyler
Yep. Have you seen Uber's market cap recently?
Nikita
I think it's like 200 billion.
David
TK.
Tyler
Yeah, 192 billion and 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.
David
And this was in a blog post that an OpenAI employee posted. They said an unusual part of OpenAI is that everything, and I mean everything, runs on Slack. There is no email. I maybe received 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 isn't Apple or xai. It's Anthropic. They won't design a new chip. They will be buying TPUs from Broadcom.
Nikita
That's very interesting that they're not buying them directly.
David
Expect Anthropic to announce a funding round from Google soon.
Tyler
Leave us five stars on Apple, Podcasts and Spotify and we will see you tomorrow. Thank you for tuning in.
Hosts: Tyler, David, Nikita
Date: October 16th, 2025
This episode delivers a fast-paced rundown of major developments in technology, AI, and finance, marked by Google’s major cancer research announcement, ongoing OpenAI controversies, fresh trade tensions, corporate AI product launches, and the latest financial and creator economy news. The hosts bring their signature irreverence and sharp commentary, weaving in tech metaphors and industry references throughout.
00:00–05:37
02:54–05:37
05:37–07:38
07:38–14:14
13:30–14:14
14:13–14:44
14:51–16:08
16:08–17:51
17:51–18:40
18:40–19:08
19:08–20:04
20:04–21:11
21:11–22:09
Tyler on Google's Cancer Annoucement:
“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.” (00:41)
David on AI Milestones:
“Is this the ChatGPT moment for AI in bio or is this the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge that took 20 years until Waymos were on the street?” (03:55)
Tyler on Regulation and Progress:
“Some of these things just take time and regulation…we just didn’t see nuclear energy production. It’s exponential and then it’s sigmoidal because…we just said, yeah, we’re actually good.” (04:58)
David on Creator Payouts:
“The average YouTube creator probably is inversely correlated in that some of my best videos have taken the most amount of effort. Like the top five videos took the most amount of effort, some creative spark and then a ton of investment…” (20:32)
Tyler on SaaS Displacement:
“ChatGPT is phenomenal at creating packing lists for travel…That could have been its own SaaS product.” (18:27)
This episode offers sharp analysis, running jokes, and inside-baseball on the most pressing tech, business, and cultural headlines—making it an engaging catch-up for listeners who want more than the surface-level tech news.