Diet TBPN: October 16th, 2025

Our favorite moments from today's show, in under 30 minutes. TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.com Figma - https://figma.com Vanta - https://vanta.com Linear - https://linear.app Eight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpn Wander - https://wander.com/tbpn Public - https://public.com AdQuick - https://adquick.com Bezel - https://getbezel.com Numeral - https://www.numeralhq.com Polymarket - https://polymarket.com Attio - https://attio.com/tbpn Fin - https://fin.ai/tbpn Graphite - https://graphite.dev Restream - https://restream.io Profound - https://tryprofound.com Julius AI - https://julius.ai turbopuffer - https://turbopuffer.com fal - https://fal.ai Privy - https://www.privy.io Cognition - https://cognition.ai Gemini - https://gemini.google.com Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  You're watching TBPN.

• 0:04John Coogan?

  Today is October 16th. It's Thursday 2025. We are live from the TBPN UltraDome, the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance.

• 0:13Jordi Hays?

  The Capitol of Capital. Um, big news. We covered it a little bit yesterday, but uh, big news out of Google. 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.

• 0:26John Coogan?

  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.

• 0:39Jordi Hays?

  Which way, Western lab?

• 0:41John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yes, exactly. Uh, they didn't actually cure cancer, uh, 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. Um, it's very complex. I'm not an expert in uh, bio or, or, or any of this stuff really. So, um, I needed to use a Call of Duty metaphor. And so I read the piece. Um, it comes from Sundar Pichai. He says, um, 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 GMA generated

• 1:25John Coogan?

  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.

• 1:52Speaker 03

  Journalistic, force-headed, go ahead and stand by.

• 1:54John Coogan?

  The opposing team, you can think of them as cancer cells when. 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.

• 2:19Jordi Hays?

  Three sixty no scopes.

• 2:20John Coogan?

  Of course, of course. But it's, 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 minimap. How do you do that? You've 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 use 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.

• 2:54Jordi Hays?

  People have been desperately hoping

• 2:57John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:57Jordi Hays?

  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, the timing, right? Within a, basically a twenty-four hour period, you get the erotica announcement, fast followed by this.

• 3:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:36Jordi Hays?

  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.

• 3:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:45Jordi Hays?

  So I think, I think like, Google deserves a huge pat on the back. But everyone, the, 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.

• 3:55John Coogan?

  Is this the ChatGPT moment for AI in bio? Or is this the two thousand and five DARPA grand challenge that took twenty years until Waymos were on the street?

• 4:06Jordi Hays?

  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. A big moment, and it's a, it's a win, win for the world. My question is, like, Okay, if can can Google, whatever the the process that led to this discovery, can Google produce thousands of these?

• 4:35John Coogan?

  Like, what is the mercuror 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 uh 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

• 5:20John Coogan?

  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.

• 5:37Jordi Hays?

  Interesting cultural indicator that Volvo quietly rolled out armored versions of their family cars direct to consumer over the summer, probably nothing.

• 5:45John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about Figma. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. President Trump says that India's Prime Minister Modi has agreed to stop buying Russian oil. Wow.

• 5:57Jordi Hays?

  Trade deal.

• 5:58John Coogan?

  Polly markets that we're officially in a trade war with China. I'm not exactly sure how that's defined.

• 6:02Jordi Hays?

  There was a market on that?

• 6:03John Coogan?

  I guess, yeah.

• 6:04Jordi Hays?

  Well, Trump came out and said yesterday, he said, we are in a trade war with China.

• 6:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, so that that's the that's the end of that.

• 6:11Jordi Hays?

  That solves it.

• 6:12John Coogan?

  But who knows? These these trade wars can be very short and, you know, I guess India is playing ball.

• 6:18Jordi Hays?

  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 floor prices across a range of industries to combat market manipulation by China, according to.

• 6:40Jordi Hays?

  Scott Besson.

• 6:41John Coogan?

  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.

• 6:50Jordi Hays?

  They like to, they're like, uh, they're like a DJ, you know? Like sometimes a DJ is up there and like really turning all the different knobs. Sometimes he's just letting the music play, you know?

• 6:59John Coogan?

  That is a very funny metaphor for David Solomon.

• 7:01Jordi Hays?

  Like the knobs are there, right?

• 7:02John Coogan?

  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?

• 7:07Jordi Hays?

  My, my framework is that as much as Trump and G beef.

• 7:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:12Jordi Hays?

  I believe that Trump respects G.

• 7:14John Coogan?

  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. Uh, this is because Mr. Beast has filed a trademark to launch his own bank. The organization will, will be called Mr. Beast Financial. We talked a little bit about this yesterday. Automated compliance, manage risk, prove trust continuously. Vantage's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation.

• 7:38Jordi Hays?

  Paris, uh, had, did an investigation.

• 7:41John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 7:42Jordi Hays?

  Uh, did 60 plus lab tests on leading protein supplements and found that a, quite a lot of them had, uh, high levels of lead. Um, this wasn't surprising to me.

• 7:57John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 7:58Jordi Hays?

  And the reason for that is that a lot of different food has high levels of lead. Even, even food that, uh, would appear to be like, quote, "natural," right? So like dark chocolate is a good example of this. A lot of dark chocolate brands have high levels of lead.

• 8:15John Coogan?

  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, shifted the conversation to, uh, levels of microplastics? And I think people kind of like stopped paying attention to lead, but.

• 8:30Jordi Hays?

  The way that you need to think about it is there's basically healthy levels.

• 8:34John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 8:34Jordi Hays?

  There's, um, certified levels.

• 8:37John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 8:37Jordi Hays?

  And then there's like legal level. Healthy levels, like ideally it's zero, right?

• 8:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 8:42Jordi Hays?

  Like lead, I, I'm actually, I'm sure somebody, some skit I will be like, "Actually."

• 8:46John Coogan?

  I like a little bit of lead.

• 8:47Jordi Hays?

  A little bit of lead is actually good for you.

• 8:48John Coogan?

  Cause it makes you more aggressive, right?

• 8:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 8:50John Coogan?

  Doesn't it make you a little crazy?

• 8:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, if you want to have a strong Q4.

• 8:54John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 8:54Jordi Hays?

  You know, up the lead and then detox in Q1.

• 8:57John Coogan?

  Exactly, yeah.

• 8:58Jordi Hays?

  Um, new year, new you.

• 8:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, let's watch this launch.

• 9:01Speaker 00

  Everyone wants to be different. It starts with a familiar feeling to feel stuck.

• 9:10John Coogan?

  The circular motif here 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?

• 9:23John Coogan?

  Fighting a robot? There we go.

• 9:27Speaker 00

  Born from truth so raw, it feels like madness to everyone else.

• 9:34Speaker 00

  A beautiful disregard for your own limits. A truth your body understands before your mind.

• 9:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's just interesting when it's difficult to make something. It's valuable.

• 9:48John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 9:49Jordi Hays?

  And when anyone can have it instantly.

• 9:51John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 9:52Jordi Hays?

  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.

• 10:02John Coogan?

  It does seem like they're building more of a SaaS like product on top of AI image gen.

• 10:07Jordi Hays?

  General Catalyst just shared a video they did for.

• 10:12John Coogan?

  Zavo?

• 10:12Jordi Hays?

  Zavo, so let's pull it up.

• 10:22John Coogan?

  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 in the pipeline. They need some drop shadow on that logo. It's an ERP for, for restaurants.

• 10:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 10:36John Coogan?

  So you, you use that to run your restaurant. That, that's what I got from that. Is that, is that correct?

• 10:41Jordi Hays?

  The first agentic point of sale for restaurants and retail payments.

• 10:45John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 10:45Jordi Hays?

  Point of sale on AI agents in one platform to build the future of autonomous commerce. Over 400 businesses. I already use Zavo to accept payments and manage operations.

• 10:54John Coogan?

  I mean, it did deliver that message to me and it grabbed my attention a little bit. So I don't know. Worth.

• 11:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the opening scene was particularly bad, but at the same time it was probably a good hook.

• 11:05John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 11:05Jordi Hays?

  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

• 11:14John Coogan?

  I mean, that's coming.

• 11:15Jordi Hays?

  Would be.

• 11:16John Coogan?

  That's for sure coming. I mean, VO3 launched yesterday, uh, 3.1 and, uh, and has like pretty phenomenal character consistency. I was looking at some demos.

• 11:25Jordi Hays?

  Part of it is an advertising enjoyer. I like to like, without having knowledge, try to analyze when I see a video, when I see a campaign.

• 11:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:33Jordi Hays?

  I'm trying to clock, uh, you know, based on the stage of the company, how much did they spend on this?

• 11:38John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 11:38Jordi Hays?

  For example, like if Airbnb comes out with a launch video, I like expect it to be incredible.

• 11:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:42Jordi Hays?

  Because it's Airbnb and they probably spent like half a million dollars like producing.

• 11:47John Coogan?

  I mean, the Apple ads, when they get like, oh, Spike Jones is directing it and you're like, he does movies.

• 11:52Jordi Hays?

  And then with, with, with seed stage companies.

• 11:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:55Jordi Hays?

  Personally, I enjoy being able to clock. Okay. They clearly had to be scrappy here.

• 11:58John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 11:59Jordi Hays?

  They spent like 10, 15, 20 K maybe on this video.

• 12:03John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 12:03Jordi Hays?

  But it's amazing because it's like real, it's genuinely a really great idea.

• 12:07John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 12:07Jordi Hays?

  I think like the, the actual output generally looks great. It doesn't, but, but I would say the, the idea itself is not, I don't know if it's like strong enough, basically.

• 12:19John Coogan?

  There is a, like a 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, the big law firm world, I'm going to start a law firm that uses something like Harvey on day one and, and really leans into the frontier of let's do as much as possible and set this, and set this company up from day one to be AI

• 13:03John Coogan?

  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 D to C e-commerce era where basically you had brands who said, our secret, how we're going up against Nestle, how we're going up against Coca-Cola.

• 13:27Jordi Hays?

  Cutting out the middleman.

• 13:28John Coogan?

  Is, is we have Shopify. We have SaaS and they don't.

• 13:30Jordi Hays?

  It turns out Mark, Mark Zuckerberg says, actually I'm planning to be the middleman here. I just.

• 13:36John Coogan?

  That's a great take. Yeah.

• 13:37Jordi Hays?

  I don't wanna.

• 13:39John Coogan?

  It's a hundred percent.

• 13:39Jordi Hays?

  The money that you were gonna spend on rent, well, I'm actually gonna need you to spend twice as much with me.

• 13:44John Coogan?

  PayPal and Wise are taking shots at each other. Did you see this? PayPal said, normalize sending money instead of memes and got nine thousand 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 Nano Banana, you can talk to Gemini live.

• 14:13Jordi Hays?

  Did you hear that yesterday Paxos mistakenly minted three hundred trillion of their stable coins? Stablecoin issuers like Paxos and Circle and Tether, they minted new stable coins.

• 14:27John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 14:27Jordi Hays?

  They had an internal error.

• 14:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:29Jordi Hays?

  Apparently that, and they, it sounds like it was a fat finger. They accidentally minted three hundred trillion.

• 14:36John Coogan?

  But how fat of a finger do you have to add? Like, I imagine like four extra zeros.

• 14:40Jordi Hays?

  Maybe the dev like fell asleep on the keyboard.

• 14:44John Coogan?

  Before we move on, let me tell you about Profound. Get your brand mentioned in ChatGPT. Reach millions of consumers who are using AI to discover new products and brands.

• 14:51Jordi Hays?

  Born in Texas, in a Texas town of less than a thousand, writes the most iconic rock album of the past fifty years, quits music before it's released, 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 wanna go on in life. Like, go on a short but generational run as a musician and then go work in, go work in tech. This school, The Mint, is making some new coins showcasing innovation from each state. There are four ones next year, according to Sheil, including Steve Jobs for California. They're doing Dr. Norman Borla, Borlo?

• 15:36Jordi Hays?

  Cray won supercomputer for Wisconsin.

• 15:39John Coogan?

  Do you know who these guys are?

• 15:40Jordi Hays?

  Steve Jobs for California and Minnesota with mobile refrigeration.

• 15:45John Coogan?

  That's a huge breakthrough.

• 15:46Jordi Hays?

  Let's give it up for mobile refrigeration.

• 15:48John Coogan?

  I know the Cray supercomputer.

• 15:49Jordi Hays?

  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 like a hundred times.

• 15:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 15:58Speaker 04

  Uh, yeah, I'll look that up. And then also Norman Borla was an agronomist, agriculture guy. And he kind of did a lot of stuff that influenced the green revolution.

• 16:06John Coogan?

  He or a farm farming.

• 16:08Jordi Hays?

  People were having a lot of conversations surrounding OpenAI's numbers from the Financial Times. Of course, they have 800 million weekly active users. 5% of those are paying 40 million, 13 billion in A U A R R, 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.

• 16:39John Coogan?

  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 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 revenue, but burning like 20, right? And so you add those together, you get about 33 billion in revenue to to fully offset the burn, which is kind of like exactly Google's monetization rate.

• 17:11Jordi Hays?

  OpenAI is projecting to get to 100 billion of revenue.

• 17:14John Coogan?

  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.

• 17:24Jordi Hays?

  They're gonna be creating a massive ads business. They're gonna be capturing a ton. They have partnership with Walmart that they announced, I think it was Monday. If 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.

• 17:51John Coogan?

  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 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 six to 10 year camp. ChatGPT 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 packinglistfortravel.com

• 18:34John Coogan?

  might exist. And now ChatGPT 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.

• 18:44Jordi Hays?

  The government that I pay 40% of my income to has been shut for three weeks and nothing in my life has changed.

• 18:51John Coogan?

  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 of cash, remember?

• 19:00Jordi Hays?

  I'm glad they have runway.

• 19:02John Coogan?

  They have runway. They have runway. Maybe they'll have to call SoftBank and say, hey, we need a bridge. You can you can take 20% of the 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 onboard the first mainline aircraft. And if you've ever used Starlink on a 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,

• 19:47John Coogan?

  the issue is that we're underpaying and not allocating payment accurately enough. YouTube does a much better job. And so, Polly Market put up a market for Nikita Beer out as head of product at X this year. That this is how I win. So he is in the trenches.

• 20:04Jordi Hays?

  Now 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 that are actually building a business.

• 20:18John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 20:19Jordi Hays?

  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. 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.

• 21:02Jordi Hays?

  It's much harder, given the history of 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.

• 21:11John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 21:12Jordi Hays?

  So.

• 21:13John Coogan?

  Have you seen Uber's market cap recently? I think it's like 200 billion.

• 21:19Jordi Hays?

  TK.

• 21:20John Coogan?

  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.

• 21:37Jordi Hays?

  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.

• 22:03John Coogan?

  That's very interesting that they're not buying them directly.

• 22:05Jordi Hays?

  Expect Anthropic to announce a funding round from Google soon.

• 22:09John Coogan?

  Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify and we will see you tomorrow. Thank you for tuning in.