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Technology's daily show (formerly the Technology Brothers Podcast). Streaming live on X and YouTube from 11 - 2 PM PST Monday - Friday. Available on X, Apple, Spotify, and YouTube.
You're watching TBPN. Today is October 16. It's Thursday 2025. We are live from the TBPN Ultradome, the temple Of Technology, the fortress
Speaker 2:fortress of finance.
Speaker 1:The capital of capital. Big news. We covered it a little bit yesterday, but big news out of
Speaker 2:Google. Sometimes when something just hits the timeline and we're live and we're doing the show, it's hard to process For sure. How significant something is.
Speaker 1: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.
Speaker 2:Yeah, which way? Western Lab.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yes, exactly. They didn't actually cure cancer. But they made some progress, and it's definitely updating some people on what AI can do in bio, what AI can do in cancer research generally. It's very complex. I'm not an expert in bio or any of this stuff, really.
Speaker 1: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 to use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting and a whole lot more all in one place.
Speaker 1:Go to ram.com. Just kidding. He said, An exciting milestone for AI and science, our C2S scale 27B foundation model built with Yale and based on GEMMA generated a novel hypothesis about cancer cellular behavior, which scientists experimentally validated in living cells. Now, that is not in people, it's not in mice, it's not in rats, it's just in cells. And this is just one potential link between a drug and cancer cells, but it's very exciting, very promising.
Speaker 1: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 -Authoristic force headed towards -Exactly. The stand The opposing team, you can think of them as cancer cells. When cells develop cancer, when tumors exist, they are on the enemy team. You've got to hunt them down.
Speaker 1:You've got to find them. 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, three
Speaker 2:three sixteen sixteen endoscopes.
Speaker 1: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 mini map.
Speaker 1:You've do do got to pop the UAV. And why this is special, why everyone's obsessed with this, why everyone's whitepelling 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.
Speaker 2:People have been desperately hoping that AI systems would be able to discover novel cures for cancer. My question is, 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 Yep. To dedicate resources to projects like this, whereas this doesn't feel core to OpenAI's even roadmap.
Speaker 2:What ends up being funny is timing. Within basically a twenty four 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.
Speaker 1:Is this the ChatGPT moment for AI and bio? Or is this the two thousand and five DARPA grand challenge that took twenty years until Waymo's were on the street?
Speaker 2: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 event solutions to new problems.
Speaker 2:Big moment. And it's a win for the world. My question is, Okay, can Google whatever the process that led to this discovery, can Google produce thousands of these?
Speaker 1:Like, what is the Merkor 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 fundamental law of physics around how fast you can move sand around the world and turn it into silicon, or how fast you can spin up a new power plant or new nuclear power plant. Some of these things just take time and regulation. There is the chance that this stuff gets regulated to the point where there's no fast takeoff.
Speaker 1: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, can see it's exponential, and then it's sigmoidal because it just turns into an s curve because we just said, yeah, we're actually good.
Speaker 2:Interesting cultural indicator that Volvo quietly rolled out armored versions of their family cars direct to consumer over the summer. Probably nothing.
Speaker 1: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. Wow.
Speaker 2:Trade deal.
Speaker 1:Polymarket said we're officially in a trade war with China. I'm not exactly sure how that's defined.
Speaker 2:There was a market on that?
Speaker 1:I guess. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Well, Trump came out and said yesterday. He said, we are in a trade war with
Speaker 1:China. Yeah. So that that's the that's the end
Speaker 2:That of solves it.
Speaker 1:But who knows? These these trade wars can be very short, and, you know, I guess India's playing ball.
Speaker 2:Joe Lonsdale quoted the announcement yesterday that we shared around Arabor. Works 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 Besson.
Speaker 1: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 a trade war than just
Speaker 2:They like to they're like a DJ, Sometimes a DJ is up there and really turning all the different knobs. Sometimes you just let the music play.
Speaker 1:That is a very funny metaphor for David Solomon.
Speaker 2:Like, the knobs are there, right?
Speaker 1: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?
Speaker 2:My framework is that as much as Trump and Xi beef, I believe that Trump respects Xi.
Speaker 1:Joe Wiesenthal says all businesses are banks except for banks. Banks are media companies. He said this back in 2018. That's crazy. From Earth.
Speaker 1:This is because MrBeast has filed a trademark to launch his own bank. The organization will be called MrBeast Financial. We talked a little bit about this yesterday. Automate compliance, manage risk, improve trust continuously. Vantage's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation.
Speaker 2: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 quote natural.
Speaker 2:So dark chocolate is a good example. There's a lot of dark chocolate brands have high levels of lead.
Speaker 1:Is lead more of a cause for concern than microplastics? I feel like what was it last year, Nat Friedman with the plastic list really shifted the conversation to levels of microplastics. And I think people kind of stop paying attention to lead, but
Speaker 2:The way that you need to think about it is there's basically healthy levels.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:There's certified levels. Mhmm. And then there's like legal levels. Healthy levels, ideally it's zero. I'm sure some skits I would be like, actually
Speaker 1:I like a little bit lead.
Speaker 2:A little bit of lead is actually good for you.
Speaker 1:Because it makes you more aggressive,
Speaker 2:right? Doesn't it make a
Speaker 1:little crazy?
Speaker 2:Yeah, if you want to have a strong Q4,
Speaker 1:Exactly.
Speaker 2:You know, up the lead and then detox in q one. Yeah. New year, new you.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Let's watch this launch
Speaker 3:Everyone wants to be different. It starts with a familiar feeling, to feel stuck. Circular material The feeling is really cool. And
Speaker 1:the and the piano, like, changing out what's around it. I think that's a very interesting use of AI.
Speaker 3:Absurdity. Can we go fuller screen? Absurdity isn't designed in a studio. Fighting a girl about that. It's discovered in obsession.
Speaker 3:Born from truth so raw, it feels like madness to everyone else. This is cool. A beautiful disregard for your own limits. A truth your body understands before your mind is the most Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's just interesting when it's difficult to make something Mhmm. It's valuable.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:And when anyone can have it instantly Yep. 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.
Speaker 1:It does seem like they're building more of a SaaS like product on top of AI ImageGen.
Speaker 2:General Catalyst just shared a a video they did for Zavo. Called Zavo. So let's pull This it isn't
Speaker 1: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 in the pipeline. They need some drop shadow on that logo. It's an ERP for restaurants. So you use that to run your restaurant.
Speaker 1:That's what I got from that. Is that correct?
Speaker 2:First agentic point of sale for restaurants and retail payments, point of sale on AI agents, one platform to build the future of autonomous commerce. Over 400 businesses already use Zava to accept payments and manage operations.
Speaker 1:I mean, did deliver that message to me, and it grabbed my attention a little bit. So I don't know.
Speaker 2:Worth Yeah, the opening scene particularly bad. But at the same time, it was probably a good hook Exactly. If they had figured out a way to do this with the founder as the key person. And some blend of AI plus the
Speaker 1:actual I mean, that's coming. Be That's for sure coming. I mean, VO3 launched yesterday at three point one and has pretty phenomenal character consistency. I was looking at some demos.
Speaker 2:Part of it as an advertising enjoyer, I like to, without having knowledge, try to analyze. When I see a video when I see a campaign, I'm trying to clock based on the stage of the company, how much should they spend on this? For example, if Airbnb comes out with a launch video, I expect it to be incredible because it's Airbnb, and they probably spent like half a million dollars producing
Speaker 1:And these this Apple ads, when they get like, oh, Spike Jones is directing it. And you're like, he does movies.
Speaker 2:And then with with seed stage companies
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Personally, I enjoy being able to clock. Okay. They clearly had to be scrappy here. Yep. Like, they spent like $10.15, 20 k maybe on this video.
Speaker 2:Yep. But it's amazing because it's genuinely a really great idea. I think the actual output generally looks great. But I would say the idea itself is not I don't know if it's strong enough, basically.
Speaker 1: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 model that is enabled by AI. We're still a bunch of lawyers, but we're using AI very effectively.
Speaker 1:Is that at all can we draw any analogies between that and the D2C 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 And Cola we have the middleman. We have Shopify. We have SaaS, and they don't.
Speaker 2:It turns out Mark Zuckerberg says, actually, I'm planning to be the middleman here. Just That's
Speaker 1:a great take.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's true.
Speaker 1:It's a 100%.
Speaker 2:The money that you were gonna spend on rent, well, I'm actually gonna need you to spend twice as much with me.
Speaker 1:PayPal and Wise are taking shots at each other. Did you see this? PayPal said normalize sending money instead of memes and got 9,000 likes on threads. A real ripper over there. And Wise says normalize sending money with transparent fees.
Speaker 1:Oh, dog session. Let me tell you about Google AI Studio, the fastest way from prompt production with Gemini. Chat with models, vibe code, monitor usage. You can try Nano Banana, you can talk to Gemini Live.
Speaker 2:Did you hear that yesterday Paxos mistakenly minted 300,000,000,000,000 of their stablecoins? Stablecoin issuers like Paxos and Circle and Tether, they mint new stablecoins.
Speaker 1:They
Speaker 2:had an internal error apparently. It sounds like it was a fat finger. They accidentally minted 300,000,000,000,000.
Speaker 1:But how fat of a finger do you have to add? I imagine like four extra zeros.
Speaker 2:Maybe the dev fell
Speaker 1:does feel like cat on the keyboard. 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.
Speaker 2:Born in 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, on a short but generational run as a musician and then go work in go work in tech. This is cool. The Mint is making some new coins showcasing innovation from each state.
Speaker 2:There are four ones next year according to Schiele, including Steve Jobs for California. They're doing Doctor. Norman Borlaue, Cray one supercomputer for Wisconsin.
Speaker 1:Do you know who these guys are?
Speaker 2:Steve Jobs Norman. In California Borlaue. In Minnesota with Mobile Refrigeration.
Speaker 1:That's a huge breakthrough.
Speaker 2:Let's give it up for Mobile Refrigeration.
Speaker 1:I know the Cray supercomputer.
Speaker 2: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 The moon. Like a 100 times. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2: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.
Speaker 1:He ora farmed farming.
Speaker 2:People were having a lot of conversations surrounding OpenAI's numbers from the Financial Times. Of course, have 800,000,000 weekly active users. 5% of those are paying 40,000,000.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:13,000,000,000 in ARR, which implies a $325 annual ARPU or $27 a month per paying user. And this post went pretty viral. Google would turn 800,000,000 users into $32,000,000,000 of revenue.
Speaker 1:The gap between $13,000,000,000 and $32,000,000,000 it's not as much as I feel like it should be based on how young ChatGPT 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.
Speaker 1:OpenAI is making $13,000,000,000 in revenue but burning like 20,000,000,000 right? And so you add those together, you get about $33,000,000,000 in revenue to fully offset the burn, which is kind of like exactly Google's monetization rate.
Speaker 2:OpenAI is projecting to get to 100,000,000,000 of revenue.
Speaker 1: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.
Speaker 2:They're going be creating a massive ads business. They're going to be be capturing a ton. They they have partnership with Walmart that they announced. I think it was Monday. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:They've I'm sure they'll announce a big partnership with Amazon. They have a partnership with Shopify. Yeah. They will flip the switch Yep. And start to take a percentage of all the transactions that they're already driving.
Speaker 2:So I think that, of course, the $100,000,000,000 in a few years is ludicrous, but I don't know that it's impossible.
Speaker 1: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 $10,000,000,000 to $100,000,000,000 over the next three years. It took NVIDIA something like seven years to go from $10,000,000,000 to 100,000,000,000 Meta, Tesla, Amazon, Apple, Walmart, Google, they were all in the six to ten year camp. Chattypuyt's phenomenal at creating packing lists for travel. And that's something that it could have been its own SaaS product.
Speaker 1:There might be a tool out there. Like packinglistfortravel.com might exist. And now ChatGPT just does that for you on the fly. And it's something that Google used to route you to that one off piece of software.
Speaker 2:The government that I pay 40% of my income to has been shut for three weeks, and nothing in my life has changed.
Speaker 1: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? So they can I'm glad they
Speaker 2:have runway.
Speaker 1:They have runway. They have runway. Maybe they'll have to call SoftBank and say, hey, we need a bridge. You can take 20% of the United States government. Starlink is live on United.
Speaker 1: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.
Speaker 1: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 Yeah.
Speaker 1:In the trenches.
Speaker 2:Now he can hedge. Posts are so easy. Everybody that posts on X knows that oftentimes their best posts took the least amount of effort, whereas on the YouTube creator side, for creators that are actually building a business, the average YouTube creator probably is inversely correlated in that some of my best videos have taken the most amount of effort. Like, my top five videos took the most amount of effort, some creative spark, and then a ton of investment in everything from production to the editing process. Again, I think YouTube creators certainly deserve to be paid well.
Speaker 2:OpenAI is an amazing company, these are impressive numbers. Also, a company losing $20,000,000,000 a year with $13,000,000,000 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.
Speaker 2:Yep. Have you seen Uber's market cap recently?
Speaker 1:I think it's like $200,000,000,000
Speaker 2:TK.
Speaker 1:Yeah, dollars 192,000,000,000 and a 15 PE ratio. This business matured and is doing fantastically. It's pretty remarkable. They very much fought the capital war and won.
Speaker 2:And this was in a blog post in 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, will find this incredibly distracting.
Speaker 2: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.
Speaker 1:That's very interesting that they're not buying them directly.
Speaker 2:Expect Anthropic to announce a funding round from Google soon.
Speaker 1:Leave us five stars in Apple Podcasts and Spotify, and we will see you tomorrow. Thank you for tuning in.