Nvidia Restarts China Sales, Vibe Coding Backlash, Peptide Craze | Diet TBPN

Summary

TBPN Diet: Nvidia Restarts China Sales, Vibe Coding Backlash, Peptide Craze (March 18, 2026)

Episode Overview

In this episode, hosts John Coogan and Jordi Hays, joined by regular contributor Tyler, dive into some of the week's most pressing topics in tech and biotech: Nvidia's renewed chip sales to China and what it means for geopolitics and industry, the App Store’s crackdown on “Vibe coding” AI apps, and the explosive interest in peptides—fueled by a forthcoming debate with Martin Shkreli. The show features high-energy, informed discussion peppered with in-jokes, cultural references, and a healthy cynicism about hype cycles.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Nvidia Restarts AI Chip Sales to China (00:00–07:21)

• Nvidia’s Big Move:

  • Nvidia announced the restart of AI chip production for China after significant regulatory back-and-forth.
  • The background: US chip export bans to China (2022, under the Chips Act) were meant to retain tech advantage and beef up domestic manufacturing, but have caused global supply and economic ripples.
  • John: “The big news out of Nvidia yesterday was that Nvidia says it's restarting production of AI chips for sale in China… The company's supply chain is fired up after months of mixed signals from the Chinese market.” (00:12)

• Geopolitical & Economic Rationale:

  • Discussion on TSMC’s importance and the risk calculus of a Taiwan invasion.
  • If China can’t buy advanced chips, the strategic risk equation for Taiwan shifts, potentially increasing instability.
  • Tyler: “Stronger and economic engine, massive chip shortage. Right now you see old chips being valued basically more than they were when they launched.” (01:10)
  • John explains the paradox: restricting chips to China could make military conflict more tempting for Beijing if access to foreign fabs is lost either way.
  • The hosts debate second-order effects such as the benefits of keeping China partly plugged into the AI ecosystem to reduce chances of outright conflict.

• Regulatory See-Saw:

  • Commerce Department had previously blocked exports of Nvidia’s “nerfed” H20 chips; now, H200 (more advanced, but not the top-tier GPU) exports are approved with a revenue-sharing export tariff.
  • U.S. government thus balances security fears against financial and industrial benefits.
  • Companies like Deepseek reportedly found ways to nearly match “nerfed” chips to full-capacity performance, blurring technical lines further.

Notable Quote:
John: “It’s always been difficult to parse the various arguments around selling chips to China because there’s an insane amount of money at stake and many, many people whose basically their full time job is to advocate for a particular position.” (03:30)

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2. Cerebras vs Nvidia & GTC Conference Critique (07:38–10:09)

• Cerebras Throws Shade:

  • Andrew Fe (Cerebras CEO) claims Nvidia’s “next-gen inference chip” is technically inferior and is attempting to solve a problem his company has already tackled with wafer-scale chips.
  • Fe asserts, “Nvidia's biggest GTC announcement was a $20 billion bet on the same problem that Cerebras solved six years ago.” (07:38)

• GTC Conference Trends:

  • Increasing criticism that GTC has become about financial hype rather than real technical innovation
  • John: “GTC has turned into a conference less about tech and innovation and more about pumping your bags by getting a Jensen soundbite on some niche supply chain player.” (09:23)

Memorable Moment:
Tyler jokes the scene is like LinkedIn: “On a long enough timeline, they will all come to X. It might take 30, 40 years. They'll make it over to the dive bar eventually.” (09:33)

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3. Vibe Coding Apps and Apple’s Crackdown (10:16–16:13)

• Definition Clarification:

  • Brief humor on the difference between “Vibe coding apps” and “Vibe coded apps.”
  • Apple has blocked updates to AI-powered mobile coding apps (e.g., Replit, Vibe Code) that can generate or alter app functions without App Store review.

• Implications for Devs:

  • Apple’s control rooted in longstanding rules prohibiting apps from running unapproved code.
  • Hosts note Apple’s interest in protecting App Store revenue and platform stability, even as web-generated apps proliferate via tools like Replit.
  • John: “Developers say it sounds like you're able to basically like generate an app with Replit and then use a preview of it that maybe is functioning a little too much and effectively allowing Replit the app to do things that Apple didn't approve of.” (11:33)

• Broader Industry Impact:

  • The crackdown impacts innovation but also continues Apple’s legacy of “review everything” for security/control, at the cost of peer-to-peer style experimentation.
  • Tyler: “But test flight is still like, it's certainly not designed for…it's not like social peer to peer experience. Like you still have to opt into the test flight network.” (14:55)
  • Jokes about Roblox as the “Roblox of Vibe coding” and the addictive nature of building simulators.

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4. Peptide Craze & Martin Shkreli's Critique (16:51–24:23)

• Peptides, Hype, and Reality:

  • Martin Shkreli gives a crash course on peptides, pharmacology, and why most “peptide bros” are uninformed.
  • Shkreli: “If you can’t tell me what the target is and how the drug is binding to it, you do not have a drug. You have delusion.” (17:32)
  • Emphasizes that proper drugs require rigorous, double-blind, placebo-controlled studies. Dismisses anecdotal or “biohacker” evidence for most peptides.

• Hosts’ Reaction:

  • Entertained but largely agree, noting risks like unregulated shops selling mislabeled compounds and inherent dangers from incomplete safety data.
  • John: “Clinical reality is far harsher. Without a double blind, placebo controlled study, there is often nothing to talk about. If I hear but I know dozens of people…” (19:04)

• San Francisco Edge-Seeking & AGI Timelines:

  • Tyler wonders if many are betting on AGI before long-term health risks (e.g., “it might give me cancer in 20 years, but I think we’ll cure cancer in ten”).
  • John: “You want to be jacked now because all things equal, if the cancer risk of both scenarios is zero, you’d rather be jacked for 45 years as opposed to 40.” (24:03)

• Upcoming Debate:

  • Tease of a Monday show debate between Martin Shkreli and Max Marchioni (Superpower), promising a showdown over peptide claims and biopharma ethics. (21:53)

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5. Private Credit, AI, & Spam Apocalypse (24:24–29:15)

• Private Credit Markets & AI Impact:

  • Discussing claims that AI-driven productivity may cause sector-specific pain but won't trigger a 2008-style global crisis.
  • Citing Eric Seoufer/“Mobile Dev Memo” on economic resilience and efficiencies offsetting software sector disruptions.

• Industry Jokes and Risks:

  • Tyler imagines private credit bosses being “concerned” about gains being too “private,” muses on regulatory risks, and laughs at banking metaphors (“don’t call it a shadow banking system. It's just merely parallel in darkness.”) (27:38)

• Spam Crisis:

  • Bill Gurley and Nikita (X/Twitter tech leader) are quoted predicting the total inundation of digital channels (Inbox, iMessage, phone calls) with AI-generated spam.
  • Nikita: “Prediction: in less than 90 days, all channels we thought were safe from spam and automation will be so flooded that they will no longer be usable in any functional sense.” (28:55)
  • Calls for new spam laws to distinguish between human and machine-initiated communication.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

Nvidia/China/TSMC

• John: “It’s always been difficult to parse the various arguments around selling chips to China because there’s an insane amount of money at stake...” (03:30)
• John (paraphrasing argument): “The more the economies are interlinked the less likely there is a conflict. So all of this underscores the importance of TSMC Arizona, Samsung, intel broadly as well as startup fab projects...” (04:00)

Cerebras vs Nvidia

• Andrew Fe (via John): “Nvidia's biggest GTC announcement was a $20 billion bet on the same problem that Cerebras solved six years ago.” (07:38)

Vibe Coding Crackdown

• John: “Developers say it sounds like you're able to basically like generate an app with Replit and then use a preview of it that maybe is functioning a little too much and effectively allowing Replit the app to do things that Apple didn't approve of.” (11:33)
• Tyler: “Roblox is the Roblox of Vibe coding.” (13:44)

Peptide Mania & Biopharma Real Talk

• Martin Shkreli (via Tyler/John): “If you can’t tell me what the target is and how the drug is binding to it, you do not have a drug. You have delusion.” (17:32)
• John: “Clinical reality is far harsher. Without a double blind, placebo controlled study, there is often nothing to talk about.” (19:04)
• John: “You want to be jacked now because all things equal, if the cancer risk of both scenarios is zero, you’d rather be jacked for 45 years as opposed to 40.” (24:03)
• Tyler: “How much would we have to pay you a day to not lift anything heavier than a single piece of paper?” (24:14) [Lighthearted banter]

Private Credit & Spam

• Tyler: “Don’t call it a shadow banking system. It's just merely parallel—in darkness.” (27:38)
• Bill Gurley (quoted): “I fear that AI has decimated the traditional email inbox as we know it. Too many personalized sloppy mail slip through the spam filter. Hope someone builds a better mousetrap. This one is cooked in its current form.” (28:40)
• Nikita (quoted): “Prediction: in less than 90 days, all channels we thought were safe from spam and automation will be so flooded that they will no longer be usable in any functional sense.” (28:55)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Nvidia/China Chip Sales: 00:00–07:21
• Cerebras Critique & GTC: 07:38–10:09
• Vibe Coding/Apple Crackdown: 10:16–16:13
• Peptide Craze & Shkreli Take: 16:51–24:23
• Private Credit, AI, and Spam: 24:24–29:30

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Summary for Non-Listeners

This episode encapsulates why TBPN is at the heart of Silicon Valley’s obsessions: rapid-fire analysis, unvarnished takes on tech geopolitics, cutting through the hype in AI hardware and developer tooling, and an eye for the cultural tidal waves (biohacking, AI-driven finance, spam apocalypse) shaping tech’s future. Whether you're tracking chip wars, the fate of indie coders under Apple, or wondering if peptides can really cheat biology, this discussion is sharp, witty, and skeptical—everything you’d want from a 30-minute tech salon.

Transcript

[John]

The big news of the day, more news out of Nvidia gtc. Lots of Nvidia announcements. The stock is up. It's a $4.44 trillion company. That is big. But the big news out of Nvidia yesterday was that Nvidia says it's restarting production of AI chips for sale in China. Specifically, Jensen Huang says the company's supply chain is fired up after months of mixed signals from the Chinese market. We've been tracking this for a long time, of course. Chips were banned from sale for sale to China in 2022 by Joe Biden under the Chips Act. That also unlocked billions of dollars in incentives for American chip manufacturing. And then the narrative flipped back and forth, back and forth on what are the risks and what are the costs and benefits of actually selling chips to China back in 2022 after the Chips act, which if you want to read up more on it, we've interviewed Chris Miller, the author of Chip War. It's a great book and the calcul been pretty clear like on the first pass, the first order effects. AI is an important technology. America wants an advantage in the air race, the build out. So less chips for China means more chips for America.

[Tyler]

Stronger and economic engine, massive chip shortage. Right now you see old chips being valued basically more than they were when they launched.

[John]

Yeah.

[Tyler]

Which implies there's plenty of demand in America. So you'd want to keep those here.

[John]

And, but, and plenty of demand at TSMC from American chip makers specifically. I mean even Apple is sort of getting crowded down there on the 2 nanometer, which I think is better for phones than for GPUs. But they're, you know, they're grappling with what the compute boom, what the AI build out boom will be for their business. In the past, China's dependence on foreign technology companies has been seen as a key bargaining chip. Why would China invade Taiwan when they need to keep TSMC manufacturing facilities online? Chip manufacturing is extremely precise. One of these factories isn't going to withstand a rocket hitting it. So if there is any sort of broad military action in Taiwan, TSMC probably gets a little bit damaged. I mean even the tiniest earthquake, they

[Tyler]

have to track the weather.

[John]

Yes.

[Tyler]

Outside of the facility.

[John]

Exactly.

[Tyler]

If the weather outside of the facilities

[John]

is fluctuating at all, it's not inside. Taiwan is famous or TSMC is famous where they don't even need apparently like a detection system or a push notification to their employees if there's an earthquake. If the employees sense that there's an earthquake. They just get up and go to the factory and start working on things. It's not like they need to like oh, we need to email all the employees. The employees just know because that's the level of sensitivity over at the TSMC fab. So if you want to keep TSMC producing chips, you can't invade Taiwan. And so by banning the export of chips to China, the cost to China of a Taiwan invasion decreases. And so if China can't access TSMC chips anyway, it's, it's a lot less risky to go to war. And that was always the risk with hardcore chip bans. In 2022 the Russia Ukraine war was about six months old. Global conflicts have grown significantly since then. Obviously we've been tracking the Iran war and America's military is potentially stretched thin. So the risks of a Taiwan conflict are higher than ever. And so you add to the fact that everyone agrees that we will be in chip constrained, the chip shortage through at least 2030 and the need to keep TSMC supplying chips to American companies is extremely important. It's always been difficult to parse the various arguments around selling chips to China because there's an insane amount of money at stake and many, many people whose basically their full time job is to advocate for a particular position.

[Tyler]

Yeah, not to mention how much of everyone's retirement accounts Nvidia actually makes up

[John]

holding up the world economy. Right, that's the meme. There are good arguments on both sides. One that keeps getting trotted out is you know, it's important to keep China dependent on the American AI stack and it's reasonable. The better argument might just be dependent on a functional TSMC fab. There is, there are benefits to the CUDA ecosystem and to the idea that whatever models get built there will be applicable here. We'll be able to transfer those that research and development that happens over there very quickly. The more the economies are interlinked the less likely there is a conflict. So all of this underscores the importance of TSMC Arizona, Samsung, intel broadly as well as startup fab projects like the tariff apps. Well we're traveling this like long and narrow road but I'm coming around to the idea that selling some chips to China is the best possible move at this particular moment in time. It was easy to stick with like the first order logic of just we want the chips because we can use them to power our economy so we

[Tyler]

should have them even if they are getting chips. It's not like the party is going to say actually the domestic, our domestic supply chain is no longer important because we're getting a drip of a 200.

[John]

Yes. So there's.

[Tyler]

They're still going to keep the momentum that they have. Just wouldn't be, wouldn't be like them.

[John]

There's a lot of debate over that because momentum comes from.

[Tyler]

You can take some of the wind out of the sails.

[John]

Yes.

[Tyler]

But they can just spend more, slow the momentum, potentially.

[John]

That's the argument is that, is that by limiting demand, like there's a local, local fab in China that just says, a chip maker that, that says, okay, well you know, our demand is, is half as much, so we're gonna, so like we can't afford to scale. Sure, we have the money, but we don't really need to deliver this because there's no buyer. So you don't get the process level of like execution. You don't get the excellence that comes from actually needing to run the real business. It becomes more of like NASA than SpaceX. That's always the risk with like, you know, you're just throwing government money after it. Nvidia and the Trump administration have been involved in a complicated tango over the sales of its advanced artificial intelligence chips in China. Last April, the Commerce Department halted exports of the H20, a processor Nvidia designed explicitly for the China market. That was the nerfed H200 that was not supposed to be able to train as advanced of models. But it was reported that the high flyer team behind Deepseek sort of figured out how to use those chips effectively. So there was a debate over is the H20 actually just as useful as the H200 or close to it or closer? It's sort of a moot question now because H200 is coming to China, which is the more advanced version, the not nerfed version. So the company's fortunes turned again in December when the U.S. said it would allow Nvidia to sell its H200 processor, a chip that is a generation behind its most powerful series series of GPUs as long as the company shared 25% of its sales with the US government. So there's basically an export tariff. GPUs or graphics processing units are powerful chips used in AI training, AI models. I think everyone knows this, but until Tuesday, the status of the B200 or the H200 in China was unclear. In Nvidia's most recent earnings report, the company said that although it had received approval to ship small amounts of H200 products to China, to date we have not generated any revenue from those sales. Wang said that in recent weeks, demand signals out of China have strengthened. We have been licensed for many customers in China, we've received purchase orders from many customers and we're in the process of restarting our manufacturing. Our supply chain is getting fired up.

[Tyler]

In other news, JRR Tolkien used Gen Z brain rot slang over 70 years. That's how ahead no way he was. And the quote maggots jeered the end Cigars. You're cooked.

[John]

You're cooked.

[Tyler]

White skins will catch you and eat you. They're coming.

[John]

Oh, he's like using it literally like you will be cooked by the some, I don't know, villain, I suppose. So the orcs will cook you if you if you fall behind, I suppose. Nvidia's biggest GTC announcement was a $20 billion bet on the same problem that Cerebras solved six years ago, says Andrew Fe, the CEO and founder of Cerebras.

[Tyler]

Shots fired.

[John]

Shots fired indeed. He says their next gen inference chip, not available yet, has 140 times less memory and less memory bandwidth than Cerebras. To run a single 2 trillion parameter model, you need 2,000 GROQ chips. On Cerebras, that's just over 20 wafers. Even paired with GPUs, GROX maxes out at 1,000 tokens per second. We run at thousands of tokens per second today and every day in production now. Why? When you connect 2,000 chips together, every Internet connect has latency, every cable has overhead. It doesn't matter what your memory bandwidth is on paper, if you're bottlenecked by the wiring between the thousands of tiny chips. We solved this with wafer scale, one integrated system, little interconnect tax. Jensen told the world that fast inference is where the value is. He's right. It's why the world's leading AI companies and hyperscalers are choosing Cerebras. And so he puts up a little graphic of Cerebras versus Rubin plus Grok together on one system and he is touting 90 times the amount of memory, 90 times the number of chips needed to run a 2 trillion parameter model. Bubble boy is having some criticism of GTC because apparently people are getting up and asking questions that are intended to pump bags. He says GTC has turned into a conference less about tech and innovation and more about pumping your bags by getting a Jensen soundbite on some niche supply chain player.

[Tyler]

They say LinkedIn is the only social platform where you can post a sloppy reaction poll and it will get tons of engagement.

[John]

We need to do this.

[Tyler]

Wow. They're just really throwing shots. I give LinkedIn a chance on a long enough timeline, they will all come to X. Yeah. It might take 30, 40 years. They'll make it over to the dive bar eventually.

[John]

Maybe. I like that semianalysis leans into the particular, like rough edges of every platform. Like, I follow them on Instagram and they actually post just like hilarious Vibe reels and brain rot.

[Jordy]

It's just like brain rot.

[John]

Yeah, yeah. But often it's completely not.

[Jordy]

I'm the only one that's liking them. I comment on a lot of the video.

[John]

Yeah, I comment. Yeah, it's amazing. Like they are not having broad success. But as far as like, what Instagram?

[Jordy]

Well, it's like, you know, the fine details of, you know, inference max or something.

[John]

Yeah.

[Jordy]

And then it's like Minecraft Parkour.

[John]

Yeah.

[Tyler]

Apple cracks down on Vibe coding apps. It's over for you, Tyler. Apple's moves come as Vibe coding apps help people create apps.

[John]

Vibe coding apps, not Vibe coded apps.

[Tyler]

I know. It's over for him times two.

[John]

No, because he doesn't. He doesn't Vibe code on a phone.

[Tyler]

I'm kidding. I'm kidding, I'm kidding.

[John]

Vibe code on a phone.

[Tyler]

I'm kidding. But Apple's move comes as Vibe coding apps help people create apps for Apple devices as well as web apps that aren't listed in the App Store. Apple has quietly prevented AI Vibe coding apps such as Replit and Vibe Code, which help people create games and other applications, from releasing updates to their mobile apps on the App Store unless they make modifications. Company confirmed it has told some app developers that the Vibe coding capabilities violate long standing App Store rules that say an app can't run code that changes the way it or other apps function. Apple's crackdown is happening at a time when Vibe coding apps are emerging as a potential threat to the company by helping developers create web apps that aren't listed on its App Store, a key source of revenue and profits for Apple. Some of these Vibe Coding apps also help developers create apps for Apple devices. That ability has likely contributed to the explosion of new apps launching on the App Store in recent months, leading to a slowdown in approval process in some cases. Developers say it sounds like you're able to basically like generate an app with Replit and then use a preview of it that maybe is functioning a little too much and effectively allowing Replit the app to do things that Apple didn't approve of.

[John]

If you search Vibe code, you get an ad for replit as the first response. Replit is number three in dev tools, has 14,000 five star reviews or reviews. Then Vibe Code is listed as Vibe Code. Website builder has 3.3k. Pretty solid. It doesn't look like it's charting, but it says learn how to Vibe Code. No experience needed. Build websites with professional designs. Much more focused, I think, on stat content. But there's been a number of these, like, website builders in the App Store for a very long time. Then Replit ranks number two when you search for Vibe Code because it says Replit. Vibe Code Apps. Would you download this app, Jordy? I don't know.

[Tyler]

Insane.

[John]

I don't know if you can see,

[Tyler]

but it's definitely Vibe Coded. The App Store preview.

[John]

It's like a graphic, like an AI image of the Gigachad using the computer. It's very funny, but, man, there is so much IP infringement. Love a code not from lovable. Love a code build with Vibe Code. They're like, I wonder who they're trying to SEO against. Do you remember that company that was doing Vibe coding on the iPhone and they would tap your phone and basically airdrop you the app? We talked to them at YC Demo day last year.

[Tyler]

Yeah, yeah.

[John]

And. And there's a number of these companies that are trying to be like the AI game Store, sort of like the meta simulator, like build a simulator and create a harness that's really good at Vibe coding a game. It feels like a really valuable category if you can crack it. But you are going to be bumping up against the App Store all the time.

[Tyler]

You just have to compete with Sam Altman, Dario Amade.

[John]

Yeah, maybe Amjad. I do wonder if there will be some sort of. I mean, Roblox would be like the bigger one, maybe, or does it come out of Codex and Claude code instead, like for gaming?

[Tyler]

I just think Roblox is just going to continue to be like. Roblox is the Roblox of Vibe coding.

[John]

And yet we did not build our simulators in Roblox.

[Tyler]

Yeah, but they're not like massive multiplayer

[John]

games and we want people to be able to click a link and use it on their phone immediately.

[Tyler]

Like, we have a new simulator coming, by the way. We're addicted to simulation.

[John]

We do love simulators.

[Tyler]

This one we're putting a little bit more effort into and John's already addicted.

[John]

I would say this one is, like, just actually fun.

[Tyler]

But we're going for impact. We're going for fun.

[John]

But, you know, Apple's had this long standing policy around do not, do not. Like, they Want to review the software and. So you can't create an app that rewrites its software.

[Tyler]

Yeah. I wonder if Apple can do anything to create more like a peer, like a mini. Like sort of peer to peer experience. Because I remember I was like learning how to build iOS apps when I was like an early teenager and I was so frustrated that I had built Pong, but I couldn't just like share it with my dad and say like, hey, you can play this. Like, it just wasn't. It was.

[Jordy]

You can do test flight, right?

[Tyler]

Yeah, test flight. But. But test flight is still like, it's certainly not designed for.

[John]

It's not like social peer to peer experience. Like you still have to opt into the test flight network. Do all these. Do all these jumps. Like for some reason it is weird that it kicks me out of the Apple ecosystem when I get a text. A test flight.

[Tyler]

Rock says high key Tyler could make better Siri and repl it with $1,000 budget. For his last thousand bucks. He's down to his last thousand bucks.

[John]

That's a good challenge.

[Tyler]

The question is, how much is Apple itself vibe coding? Because the software quality in the apps that I use.

[John]

Mark Gurman said they're using cloud all the time, right? Yeah.

[Tyler]

But to me, I'm saying so far, my experience recently I've had an issue with the most important application on my phone, which is.

[John]

You were complaining about the photos app. The.

[Tyler]

That was just poor design.

[John]

The phone app has gotten a lot.

[Tyler]

Yeah. John finally came around because the phone app is. You're like, okay, I'm going to hit this button. I might be calling this person out of the blue, even though I just want to.

[John]

And I'm not sure what phone line I'm calling them on. I guess they're designing for a world where people only have one phone number, but I still have a lot of people. This is blowing your mind, Tyler. But back in the day, like a home phone, back in the day, people used to have multiple phone lines, multiple phone numbers. It's true. I'm so unk. But yes.

[Jordy]

Like a work phone.

[John]

Yeah, like a work phone. I mean, when I was at ff, I had two phones, but two phones, two phones. That's right. But a lot of people will have a home phone and a mobile phone. And so that was the thing that you saved in your contact book a long time. And the problem with the new, the new iOS phone app is that I've been calling randomly people on their home phone if I have it saved. So I need to maybe Go delete those numbers or like put them in like a comment field so that it always calls their iPhone. Because I have moved to just calling people on their mobile phones.

[Tyler]

But we got to go over to SF with Martin Shkreli.

[John]

Yeah, Wait. Oh, okay. This is part two. We're just jumping straight into the story.

[Tyler]

We're going straight into part two.

[John]

We're going straight into part two.

[Tyler]

He says, have you ever had the thing that you know a lot about become the current thing that's happening now with peptides. Holy shit. I don't know where to start. Pharma basics. Most people obsessed with peptides don't know a few things. Peptides as pharmaceuticals have been around since the 1950s. Overnight, a peptide is just a small protein. Peptides. Peptides have extremely short half lives, often on the order of seconds or minutes. So if you're saying you're interested in peptides, you're saying I'm interested in biopharmaceuticals, but only drugs with very weak pharmacokinetics. Cokinetics. Pharmacokinetics. That's a new word for me. Drugs of which peptides are subgroup usually have a specified target. This is an electrostatic interaction, usually hydrogen bonding between the atoms of the drug and the atoms of the target. Typically, but far from always a receptor. If you can't tell me what the target is and how the drug is binding to it, you do not have a drug. You have delusion. Next. Drugs are rigorously tested. Rigorously. Not only for safety reasons, just identifying the pharmakinetics of a substance, how it travels in the body.

[John]

Pharmacokinetics.

[Tyler]

Pharmacokinetics. It's a collaborative. They're linking and building.

[John]

Exactly.

[Tyler]

Is arguably the most important starting point for any medicine. How is it metabolized? What is its half life? Without this basic information, you can't even begin to have a medicine. You can start pharmacokinetics in animals and scale to humans. But you also need a few therapeutic. Hypothesis. Hypothesis. This is a thoroughly vetted biological idea considered a priority. As to why this medicine just might work. You very rarely discover these after the fact. Determining target engagement requires assays. Assays, assays.

[John]

This is going to be a rough one.

[Tyler]

This is a rough one also. I guess I didn't think not a priori brutal. A priori brutal exposed. What assay was your drug tested in? What did it show? Direct target engagement is very important to falsify your biological hypothesis. And you can continue.

[John]

John Preclinical studies are so manufactured and fraudulent in today's day that I wouldn't rely on them for biological hypotheses unless they are from an incredible lab, were done a priori, et cetera.

[Tyler]

There we go.

[John]

Clinical reality is far harsher. Without a double blind, placebo controlled study, there is often nothing to talk about. If I hear but I know dozens of people. One more time, exclamation point, exclamat, exclamation, point, exclamation point. Screw the FDA and pharma.

[Tyler]

Really?

[John]

Really? Coming from Martin Shkreli, he is saying maybe don't screw the FDA and pharma. When most of the SF and elsewhere crowd talks about peptides, they're not thinking and this is gonna be a hard one for me. Octreotide. They're thinking some random stuff that's been thrown in animal models and is not FDA approved. Look, I'm not a softie. If there was a drug that could help me or my family, I'd find a way to get it. But I'm also not stupid and spent 20 years looking at pharmaceuticals. Drug companies like to make money. Drug companies love looking at random molecules and putting them in clinical trials. There are thousands of biopharmaceutical companies that are publicly traded. It is not hard to do a clinical trial from a university. If your drug has never been tested, there is a reason. The reason is not that you are a biopharmaceutical genius who has found something cool that everyone else missed. The FDA plays an important role. They make sure that whatever is on the label is actually in the drug. That's why prescriptions are important. If I operated one of these research chemical shops, wildly illegal I might add, I would just ship people alanine or something. No one would have any idea that it was. That it wasn't bpc, BS or whatever is popular right now. The other side of the argument, there has to be some unapproved drug out there that's useful to take. Yes, there are. Plenty of that is how I made a living, says Martin Shkreli. But it is not for you world traveler to think about this. The things you know do not apply to pharmaceuticals. It's not that you're not smart. I'm sure you're smarter than I. It just takes practice and time to understand medicine. I believe some places will even require you to go to school before you can decide who takes what drug. Just ask your doctor for medical advice. There's a reason you don't do surgery on yourself, fly a plane by yourself, et cetera. But Martin, I want to optimize my health.

[Tyler]

You could fly a seven.

[John]

I could. That is.

[Tyler]

That's the take.

[John]

I agree.

[Tyler]

We don't need studies to know that you could land.

[John]

I could land 47 if I needed to.

[Tyler]

If you. If it was asked of you.

[John]

Yeah, 100%. But Martin, I want to optimize my health. No, stop it. You're not sick. It's all nonsense. Leave medicine to physicians. You do not know what you are doing. Become a physician if you are that interested or spend a lot of time and money on biopharma. I have zero doubt you'll change your mind. There are no healthcare professionals that I know of who give an shit about these unapproved research chemicals. There are actual dying people in the world. Duquesne muscular dystrophy, Pecan Lafora. Go fix those diseases. You'll make someone and their family a lot happier than LARPing that you know about medicine. This has to end. Lots of debate.

[Tyler]

Yeah. So we are going to. We have a debate. Max Marchioni from Superpower will be coming on Monday at 12 to debate Martin Shkreli, the professor himself. So we're going to have a little debate. Superpower, I believe cells, these small proteins and so it'll be an interesting conversation. So Monday at 12 Pacific we can look forward to the great debate.

[John]

When people talk about peptides they mostly mean things like retatrutide. Reta which is in stage 3 clinical trials and looking extremely good or BPC1 which has tons of clinical and anecdotal evidence. Your critique is just self aggrandizing fluff that falls apart when you apply it to the actual examples most people are using. So he's saying look, most people aren't using this stuff. That's like crazy far out there. They're just pulling forward things that are actively being worked on by the pharmaceutical.

[Tyler]

Just another pod guys, this great post would be even better if you were in a flow state with a low dose of reta.

[John]

Martin does not think. He doesn't like BPC157. He says BPC157 has no evidence lmao. Retatrutide is literally a biopharmaceutical from Eli Lilly pyrite.

[Tyler]

Yeah. I mean the concern with BPC157 has always been that it could accelerate cancer growth.

[John]

Yes.

[Tyler]

It's not creating stimulates growth.

[John]

Yes.

[Tyler]

And so because it hasn't been studied well enough in humans, that is a risk that people I think.

[John]

Yeah.

[Tyler]

Should be aware of.

[John]

How much of this is actually because of people's AGI timelines. Is there a real overlap in San Francisco between, like, yes, it might give me cancer in 20 years, but I think we will cure cancer in 10. So if it makes me look good in the next five.

[Tyler]

But I think it's all about. People just want some type of edge.

[John]

Yeah.

[Tyler]

They want to alter their state.

[John]

Yep.

[Tyler]

It's somewhat. Basically human nature.

[John]

Yeah.

[Jordy]

You can make the same argument for. For why you should wait, though, because then in 10 years, AGI will create like a super drug that will just instantly make me jacked.

[Tyler]

Oh, right.

[Jordy]

It's like, you can do it.

[Tyler]

No one has a decade to wait to be.

[John]

Yeah, you want to be jacked now because all things equal, if the cancer risk of both scenarios is zero, you'd rather be jacked for 45 years as opposed to 40.

[Tyler]

How much would we have to pay you a day to not lift anything heavier than a single piece of paper?

[Jordy]

There's no amount of money you can't.

[Tyler]

That's right.

[John]

Exactly.

[Tyler]

You can't wait 10 years. Private credit and the AI value reallocation starts with a quote. The essence of technology is, in a lofty sense, ambiguous. Such ambiguity points to the mystery of all revealing I. E. Of truth.

[John]

Martin Heidegger.

[Tyler]

The familiar intuition about the emergence of any new technological paradigm is that new methods of engaging with the world create uncertainty, which is most easily interpreted through the lens of perceived negative outcomes. As private credit markets deteriorate, it's tempting to not only to blame AI for that decline, but also to extrapolate any dislocation to its logical extreme. That is where rising default expectations among software companies are increasingly framed as early signs of a global systemic crisis. The most convenient analogy is the G

[John]

and yesterday carried no interest was giving a little bit of a doomer take around some of these software private equity deals. But he was not ringing alarm bells to the tune of the global financial crisis. Correct. He was just saying that some of these deals are underwater. Some of these investment professionals might be needing to join different firms to find different opportunities. Sort of the bull case for special situations. Right.

[Tyler]

Leaving the firm and be like, I didn't really work on it. I was an investor, but I didn't do much investing during 2018-2022. I was. I was mostly just sitting there saying, guys, like, I don't think we should do this deal. I guess the beauty of private credit is that you have all these different funds that are being deployed, that have been deployed on different time horizons, that have longer Time horizons in general. Right. And so you can have basically like a rolling collapse versus like a,

[John]

versus

[Tyler]

like a run on the bank where you have like one day where everyone realizes it's kind of like the worm, like you were doing the worm yesterday. Kind of like that.

[John]

Yeah, that does not seem great. It's like a wave starts small and it gets bigger and bigger and bigger. This framing is incomplete, says Eric Seoufer in Mobile Dev Memo. It isolates the destructive effects of AI while ignoring the mechanisms through which those effects propagate and where value ultimately accrues. In this piece of. He makes the case that contemporary economic conditions bear no resemblance to those leading up to the global financial crisis of 2008. Any weakening in various categories of the software landscape as a result of AI will not only mostly remain contained there, but will likely lead to economically expansionary productivity gains and efficiencies that offset potentially disproportionately losses in private credit. That's very exciting. I'm only on my second Diet Coke. Okay, don't talk to me, don't talk to me until I've had my 10th energy drink. This is what the Fed had to say. Private credit has emerged as one of the fastest growing segments of non bank financial intermediaries, NBFIs over the past 15 years or so, reaching a total asset class size of 1.34 trillion in the US alone by the middle of 2024. A report from Morgan Stanley published in October of 2025 estimated the size of the private credit market at the start of 2025 at 3 trillion. Private credit is an asset class that functions as a parallel banking system. Don't call it a shadow banking system. It's just merely parallel in darkness.

[Tyler]

Look, I'm going to be, I'm going to be, I'm going to be concerned. Here's what I'm going to be concerned. And you have leaders at these private credit firms that say, you know, look, private credit's amazing.

[John]

Yeah.

[Tyler]

But yeah, it's, it's unfair that we're keeping all these gains private and we need to make them public.

[John]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Tyler]

So some type of like federal kind of involvement sector could make sense.

[John]

It would also be really, really bad if like one of the most respected leaders of one of the biggest banks in the world was to compare the industry to like cockroach. Yes. Like some really, like, you know, some bug. That would be, that would be a problem.

[Tyler]

You don't want to be compared to a scuttling creature.

[John]

No, no, no. Maybe a Soaring Eagle. Instead, there are some soaring eagles in this portfolio of private credit assets.

[Tyler]

Bill Gurley says, I fear that AI has decimated the traditional email inbox as we know it. Too many personalized sloppy mail slip through the spam filter. Hope someone builds a better mousetrap. This one is cooked in its current form. Great use of the word cooked.

[John]

Interesting.

[Tyler]

Nikita was saying 2-11- Prediction in less than 90 days, all channels that we thought were safe from spam and automation will be so flooded that they will no longer be usable in any functional sense. Imessage phone calls, Gmail email inbox certainly feels that way. Nikita says spam laws will need to be rewritten written soon. Machines should be prohibited from communicating with humans unprompted. So this will actually make your job just actually just hitting like the button. Because like no, a machine didn't send that, a human did. The human hit the button and you're gonna have to press a button like, you know, 10,000 times a day if you're BDR sending sales emails.

[John]

So we'll see you tomorrow. Goodbye.