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TBPN is a live tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming weekdays from 11–2 PT on X and YouTube, with full episodes posted to Spotify immediately after airing.
Described by The New York Times as “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession,” TBPN has interviewed Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, and Satya Nadella. Diet TBPN delivers the best moments from each episode in under 30 minutes.
Next, we are live from Palantir AIPCon. Big news from Ramp today. Massive fundraise. We're gonna cover it in a little bit. But first Did
Speaker 2:you hear that?
Speaker 1:We got to talk. Oh, is it still going? I like it. The Ramp song's back. This was this was early days.
Speaker 1:We really stopped about ramp so much. Turned it into a song. The topic of conversation in DC has it's still in AI world, but instead of talking about approving models before they're released today, it's about the biothreat. Brandon Guerrelle wrote in the TBPN newsletter today, the great houses of AI have united behind the biothreat. There's actually a lot more to that because it was a big long list of signatories from AI, but also from the bio world and biotech and even startups.
Speaker 1:We've seen former guests of the show sign on. I'm excited to bring some of those folks back on the show in the coming weeks and hear more about this because I have this belief that as AI advanced, we got cyber because it was such a tight feedback loop, such a tight verifiable reward. Reinforcement learning works really well in that context. Bio has some similar characteristics.
Speaker 2:And it was a very tangible Y2K style moment where there was, let's just say, powerful business strategy.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Is it yeah. It was like, is it over? You start thinking about the consequences of this and you don't need to get to AGI super intelligence guide. You can just have a really powerful tool that creates a new problem and that creates full employment for Nikesh Arora over at Palo Alto Networks, who we had a And, chance to talk to he's been very fortunate in implementing the solutions to the cybersecurity threats posed by new AI systems, some of the new AI capabilities they're rolling but bio might be next.
Speaker 1:And so it's exciting to see that, the great houses of AI are uniting behind the biothreat. So let's take you through this. So, in 1981, a group of researchers published the primary structure of the polio virus genome in the journal Nature. So they're basically open sourcing the sequence for making polio, which just a few years earlier, polio I think was on the decline by 1981, but a very, very problematic virus. It's an RNA virus, meaning that its nucleobases or building blocks are A, C, G, U, if you're familiar with RNA, adenosine, cytosine, guanine, uracil.
Speaker 1:Put more plainly, thanks Brandon Gorell, he says when the researchers published the primary structure of the polio virus, they gave the world the literal sequence of polio virus building blocks in order from start to finish. By the mid twentieth century, before mass vaccination, polio was paralyzing and killing more than half a million people per year worldwide. So you have this pretty deadly virus killing more than half a million people per year worldwide, and you have just open sourced it. What happens? So in 2002, researchers synthesized infectious polio virus from its publicly available sequence data.
Speaker 1:So they didn't actually need any of the polio virus RNA to start. They didn't need it on hand. They didn't need to it's not only they took a little sample and they just cloned it up and made it bigger. They just took the data and they made the actual virus. So this is the shape of the threat.
Speaker 1:If there's a new, if there's a new virus or an existing virus or forgotten about virus and you have the code to it, you can potentially print that RNA and then have the virus in your hands even if you don't have a sample. Instead, these researchers in 2002, they were able to take the published sequence, chemically synthesize short DNA fragments, assemble them into a length DNA copy of the poliovirus genome, and then use the DNA to make the viral RNA to fully recover the infectious virus. So 2005, researchers used these same technologies to reconstruct the Spanish flu, a virus in 1918 that killed six hundred and seventy five thousand Americans and had a two to three percent mortality rate among those infected. Very, very dangerous stuff. So basically, these two reconstructed viruses showed that having a physical virus on hand was no longer necessary as source material to create viruses.
Speaker 1:All you needed was the blueprints as long as you have the code, literally just like text in a text file, a bunch of ATGU, you can go and make this as long as you have the equipment on hand, but that is getting democratized as well. And that's what this AI letter is all about. So that's the situation that we're still in today, except now that we have AI, there are easier ways to potentially reconstruct DNA sequences that could create new viruses. So yesterday, Dennis Hassabis, Sam Altman, Dario Amade, Alex Wang, and dozens of other high profile leaders across AI tech policy, nucleic acid synthesis, and biotech signed an open letter called in support of mandatory nucleic acid synthesis screening and record keeping. You might have seen it on the timeline.
Speaker 1:And at first glance, Brandon here assumed, and I assumed the same thing, assumed it was another press release from a frontier lab claiming it had just discovered new capabilities in one of its internal models that would ultimately lead to catastrophe. A lot of this like doom fear based marketing has been happening. So that was sort of the natural reaction. And that's what Brandon think
Speaker 2:some people's reaction would be, are we not doing record keeping here already?
Speaker 1:That's a great question. And Brandon actually did answer that, but it's not just a PR stunt and it's not a new capability. They're not saying that the models can just create a novel virus, you know, one shot, like that that that that is solved yet. It's not there, but they see it as something that's coming down the pipe. And this letter is not this dangerous new capability.
Speaker 1:It's more asking the US government to force nucleic acid synthesis companies to screen orders for sequences of concern. So, hey, somebody just ordered this. Looks a lot like a virus. Like, what are we doing here? You said that you were trying to treat cancer or you said that you were trying to make a new peptide and all of a sudden you're asking for polio virus or something that looks like polio virus.
Speaker 1:Like, let's dig into this. That's where they're going with that. They also need to verify the legitimacy of the customer and to keep a record of what they're sending and to whom. That's a crazy one that I'm sure you're like, wait, they weren't keeping records? They were a little bit.
Speaker 1:He gets into this. So he says the reason the letter is coming out now is that the threat of nucleic acid synthesis sequencing getting into the wrong hands has been enhanced by AI. So So anyone with an AI tool in the future could in theory, if the models don't have safeguards on them, could create a sequence, so then they go to a nucleic acid sequence company, get printed, send it to them, mix it up, boom, they got a virus, not good. So most of the global nucleic acid synthesis industry has already signed up to do some of this. They did they started this in 2009 with what's called the International Gene Synthesis Consortium, and roughly 80% of commercial synthesis is on board, but membership
Speaker 2:Okay, So 20 is still just hanging out. No, we're good.
Speaker 1:80% of nuclear weapons are safely stored. Don't ask about the other 20%. That's kind of what this letter is getting at. Because 80%, it was a good first effort, 2009, it's been sixteen, seventeen years. There's a new
Speaker 2:reason to
Speaker 1:Yeah, there's a new reason to go further. Let's get that last 20%. That's what they're asking for. Membership is not a strong guarantee that they're actually screening or keeping records of their customers because it's voluntary. The 80% number is also self reported, for example, and a bunch of other factors contribute to the relative flimsiness of their So it's
Speaker 2:not So you can opt government into this program by just saying that you're opting into it, but then even the reporting once you're opted in is voluntary.
Speaker 1:So I think the way this works is the International Gene Synthesis Consortium is probably a nonprofit NGO, non governmental organization. All the companies, volunteer, 80% of commercial synthesis volume has opted into this. And then this organization, the International Gene Synthesis Consortium, they say, hey, we've looked at the market and we're covering about 80% has opted into this. We're on board with 80% and the government isn't coming in and checking the records. They're not actually saying, okay, well, we have a different number because we're the government and you have your this number, let's verify this number.
Speaker 1:It's self reported by that organization. But there's no reason not to trust that organization necessarily. A bunch of other factors contribute to the relative flimsiness of this agreement. HHS also has guidance in place around the issue, but, again, it's voluntary, meaning that the possibility of bad actors getting their hands on dangerous nucleic acid sequences, at least from American companies, still cannot be ruled out. Overall, it's good to see industry leaders signing this letter and doubly refreshing, that the letter is not yet another warning of apocalyptic AI doom, which I think the public has unfortunately come to expect from announcements like this.
Speaker 1:Hopefully, the relevant legislators are paying attention and can make this happen in short order. So, I thought that was a good good breakdown and I agree with a lot of that. Andrew Curran also has some deep dive on this with some more of the signatories. He shares screenshots of all of these and it really is Stops. Yeah, Y Combinator
Speaker 2:Patrick Collison.
Speaker 1:DeepMind, Microsoft, Interconnects, Harvard, tons of stuff. And then over in the nucleic acid synthesis industry, Twist Bioscience, ANSA, Emerald Cloud Lab, and Kathleen McMahon from Valthos is on here. So good news, but obviously, just an early step. This is just an open letter to the government saying, hey, we think you should we want to support this. We think that the government should start thinking about this.
Speaker 1:The other news in the bio world
Speaker 2:Yeah. Mean, the news is just that there's incredible momentum in biotech.
Speaker 1:Feels
Speaker 2:Early like stage biotech. Yeah.
Speaker 1:After Momentum, but not like volume, not scale yet. Because you're looking at $3,000,000,000,000 IPOs going out this year, potentially so much news in AI, microns at a trillion, every chip stock is in the hundreds of billions, trillions. This is much smaller, but
Speaker 2:But it's notable because biotech had been left for dead We in some had a biotech investor on probably fourteen months ago at this point who said, I don't even know. Just looking at the returns so far, I don't know why you would invest in this asset class. But of course, every asset class goes through that kind of phase, and clearly there's a lot of momentum.
Speaker 1:And you would expect that biotech would be similarly power law driven, maybe not as extreme, but if you pull out SpaceX OpenAI Anthropic from the The power
Speaker 2:law is capital universal though.
Speaker 1:Yes, but I feel like the biotech community has a little bit more of a culture of base hits, doubles, triples, where they flip companies pretty frequently in the
Speaker 2:two Yeah, had that, didn't we have a guy on that had sold
Speaker 1:Like three companies. Didn't have one, we were diving $2,000,000,000
Speaker 2:exits.
Speaker 1:Yep, and then he joined another company and sold it for 3,000,000,000 like the next
Speaker 2:So anyways, have Isomorphic Labs spun out of DeepMind, Coinbase, or not Coinbase, but Brian spun out or founded New Limit, you have Retro Binds. They just raised
Speaker 1:a new round, we're gonna get Jacob on the show.
Speaker 2:As well, Altos Labs.
Speaker 1:Jeff, the Chad from Amazon. That's a funny post. As this post puts it. That's Jeff Bezos.
Speaker 2:Anthropic obviously acquired Coefficient Bio as well.
Speaker 1:But Jensen and Larry Ellison at Oracle are also doing stuff. So there 's a lot of activity, it's very fun, and I hope we're gonna be able to cover this a lot more in the near At
Speaker 2:the at what point does, like, a Pfizer or Johnson and Johnson start joining the press release economy of just coming out. I'm not saying it'd be a
Speaker 1:good thing Decent amount
Speaker 2:of money. But coming out and saying, we believe we're right
Speaker 1:at the Because there are partnerships all the time that happen, they're always just like tucked a little bit deeper in the Wall Street Journal because AI is dominating and even private credit takes the front seat to the bio news. There's a whole bunch of deal making going on. Anyway, there's other deal making going on in fintech. We're gonna talk about ramps raised today.
Speaker 2:What's going on in ramp land?
Speaker 1:$44,000,000,000 valuation. Woah. Really, really solid traction just, you know, every twelve, eighteen months, sometimes much quicker. Sometimes they do two rounds in two weeks, but, really solid progress. They raised $750,000,000 at a 44,000,000,000 valuation.
Speaker 1:Last time we grew this fast, we were one twentieth of the size.
Speaker 2:So this most notable thing to me. Lots of chatter on the timeline around other fintech valuations, you compare them
Speaker 1:SaaS apocalypse,
Speaker 2:stuff well, you'd afraid of like Ramp is now worth more than PayPal. PayPal has 32,000,000,000 of revenue. But PayPal certainly has, I would say, probably negative momentum. Yeah. Whereas Ramp has incredible momentum.
Speaker 2:And this is the standout line. They were one twentieth the size the last time they were growing this fast. Yep. And so, yeah, just really, really, really, really impressive execution.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And incredible opportunity still.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So Eric took to the timeline, posted an essay about the third pillar comparing the previous eras of value creation, the two pillars, people and vendors, dating back to 600 BCE. If you're not thinking in millennia, what are you doing here? Tokens emerged as the third pillar in twenty twenty six AD, and he calls it the quadrillion token blind spot, boiled down five hundred years of finance. And it's really just three questions.
Speaker 1:Who spent what? Was it worth it? What's the bill next month? Mean, people get caught up in all these crazy things. I mean, see this with like marketing, I'm sure, and ad buying where people will do all these crazy analyses and ROI, ROAS and all this other stuff, like, And it's always useful to zoom out and just be like, okay, we spent a bunch of money, did the bank balance go up in this company All
Speaker 2:personal and business finance at the end eventually comes down to are we making more money than Yeah, we're
Speaker 1:and I think, yeah, Eric is right to dive super deep into token optimization and thinking about the tools that they're building, but then at the same time, don't get lost in the sauce and actually zoom out and try and understand what is the core value that you're delivering It to your is answering that question. So fantastic news over there. There's some other fundraising news. Sabi, the beanie BCI company is getting preempted at 35,000,000 at 500,000,000 post. This is a leak from Art for Rock.
Speaker 1:We'll see where it goes.
Speaker 2:This is huge for you. Why? Because you are a beanie guy.
Speaker 1:I do like beanies. You love the grown up beanie.
Speaker 2:A beanie in the morning.
Speaker 1:Just keeps it together, yeah. I like a beanie. Very,
Speaker 2:very good. It's interesting. I think that this format, of course I'm sure they can adapt it to other types of hats, but this format certainly maybe makes it harder to build momentum in places like California, at least Southern California, Arizona.
Speaker 1:Big big amongst creative directors though.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Huge. Huge, huge.
Speaker 1:Potentially.
Speaker 2:Silver Lake, every
Speaker 1:It's not too hard to change a beanie into a hat, a cowboy hat, like that's just extra leather around it. Could wrap the beanie in the cowboy hat.
Speaker 2:Can wear Here's what's interesting though, so Arthur Rock, usually
Speaker 1:It's pretty dialed.
Speaker 2:Pretty dialed.
Speaker 1:Pretty dialed.
Speaker 2:It's dialed. It's almost like he has inside information. It's almost like he's somehow
Speaker 1:got Yeah, but I mean, we've talked about the game theory of like, does he work at a real tier one venture capital firm that's seen, is it like, What's the benefit of leaking everything? Is he a lawyer that's seeing all the docs turn around?
Speaker 2:Zero benefit for a lawyer.
Speaker 1:Right? Cloud. The rush of getting likes on the timeline is pretty universal.
Speaker 2:That's You're lawyer.
Speaker 1:You're just like, I need a banger.
Speaker 2:At a fund, for sure.
Speaker 1:And
Speaker 2:I don't know anything else. But he's always taken the view that it can be helpful to the founder to build. Because a bunch of people are gonna see this, that this didn't sort of land in their deal flow or land on their desk, and they're gonna reach out. Right? So it does create momentum, but can certainly be annoying for teams as well.
Speaker 2:Was notable though, so 200,000,000 of LOI from B2B customers. And so very curious what the enterprise play is here.
Speaker 1:Does that mean like through hospital networks or through like the healthcare system? Or is it like Mark Zuckerberg wants to go further? He wants to track the brain waves of the employees, not just Yeah, the mouse
Speaker 2:gonna track your screen.
Speaker 1:Gonna track your brain. Mean, it could go either way. Because you imagine like Neuralink has had a bunch of traction and bunch of amazing, I saw Nolan, first patient, P0, on Rogan talking about playing COD with the neuro, amazing. And you can imagine that at a certain point, like some sort of partnership.
Speaker 2:They have multiple hat form factors.
Speaker 1:There we go. How many hats coming?
Speaker 2:We're good. I was getting really hung up on the beanie. I'm like, there's so many different enterprise or B2B context. Warehouse in Dallas, Texas in the summer.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you don't know. Maybe this kind of B2B. Maybe this $230 LOIs from REI or Patagonia. You you don't know. Who makes beanies?
Speaker 1:It's the Carhartt. Carhartt makes a great beanie. There we go. You don't know any of this stuff. You're you're out, you're out to lunch
Speaker 2:on Beanie the beanie market
Speaker 1:map. It's a good Certainly optimistic. What'd say?
Speaker 2:Goldman expects SpaceX's AI revenue to surge a 100 times by 2030. Huge. Big, big number. I looked at this title and I was thinking like, okay, what's Grok's actual revenue today if you take out
Speaker 1:Yeah. X. What is their AI revenue today? Is it just Grok subscriptions plus Grok tokens? Do you include X subscriptions?
Speaker 1:Do you include a cloud vendor and neo cloud contracts? There's a bunch of different ways to measure it. The smaller the number, the easier it is to 100X, but we have seen other AI companies 100x revenues over two years, over three years, four years. Like the 100x has become, it's not a one of one scenario. Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's happened multiple times. And so we have seen these charts many times and if if they execute well, this is entirely possible. It is it is extremely
Speaker 2:Other notable data points from the road show. Yeah. They the forecast anticipates SpaceX making about 360,000,000,000 of capital expenditures through 2028. Jensen, somewhere fist pumping.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Very excited about that number.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Be a new hyperscaler. Should be unsurprising, but very aggressive. Yeah.
Speaker 1:The new NVIDIA foundation model is also live. We'll have to go check it out and look at the model card soon, see how it's benchmarking. But gotta move on to benchmark because there's new news in the benchmark world.
Speaker 2:Benchmark Moment of silence?
Speaker 1:Moment of silence. Why is that making
Speaker 2:end of an era.
Speaker 1:I guess they have been very focused
Speaker 2:for decades. The last tier one, there was a pure venture capital.
Speaker 1:What did they get called again? Internet boys or something? Oh. Soft boys? There's some book about them that was very funny.
Speaker 1:E boys. E boys is a hit piece of a book title.
Speaker 2:That was a fantastic book.
Speaker 1:But the subtitle makes for it, and it's a fantastic book. And it's a very interesting story where they actually let a journalist come in and see how they E Boys,
Speaker 2:the true story of the six tall men
Speaker 1:in the back He of that clearly wrote the subtitle and was like, I gotta take the edge off of this. It's too glazy. I gotta take it down a notch. And so he threw the E boys in there.
Speaker 2:Anyways, big moves from Benchmark. Tate What's Clark has a scoop in the journal. Benchmark has raised 2,000,000,000,
Speaker 1:2,000,000,000,
Speaker 2:crossed two new wow. And most notably their first ever Did dedicated growth
Speaker 1:they hire anyone who has experience growth investing? Who could possibly do growth investing there? Someone who's maybe at Bond Capital and then Founders Fund, then maybe Kleiner, like someone with that pedigree.
Speaker 2:Yeah, somebody with that kind of background I think would be fantastic.
Speaker 1:Pretty good for growth Now
Speaker 2:that you say that though.
Speaker 1:Yeah?
Speaker 2:Ev Randall.
Speaker 1:Ev Randall, that's right.
Speaker 2:They did pick up
Speaker 1:Ev They did pick him up. They're almost thinking two steps ahead there.
Speaker 2:Are they building their fund strategy now, their entire platform strategy around Randall?
Speaker 1:Potentially, potentially.
Speaker 2:Austin based podcaster, Joe Rogan reportedly being considered for sixty minutes.
Speaker 1:Sixty minutes.
Speaker 2:Looks
Speaker 1:so have to call it two hundred minutes, but I'll because he records long podcasts in sixty minutes. Hundreds. Is it enough
Speaker 2:for him? Hundreds. It's it'll just be called
Speaker 1:Barry, if you're listening, put us in. Put us in the ring. We're ready to go. You need technology, business correspondent, someone who can just chop it up for sixty minutes. We do sixty minutes three times a day.
Speaker 1:We're ready to go. This is gonna be light work for us, Barry. I'm ready. I'm ready. You could do sixty minutes right now.
Speaker 1:You could do sixty minutes tomorrow. You could do sixty minutes. You could do an extra sixty minutes easily. We're putting up to a thousand minutes a week. It's no problem.
Speaker 2:We did consider that at one point early on. Should thought do weekend shows? We do basically a morning show, take a two hour break and come back and do another show?
Speaker 1:Late night show. Yeah, late night show maybe. Anyway, we should talk about the new Audi, the Nuvo Lari. Is this real, motor one? This seems real.
Speaker 2:It's real?
Speaker 1:It's a big deal. It's the it's the brand's first supercar since the r eight, twin turbocharged four liter v eight hybrid, 217 mile per hour top speed. That is 10% faster than a Cayenne Turbo GT. What is the Cayenne Turbo GT market doing right now? Is it tanking?
Speaker 1:Depreciation must be just through the roof on this news because you have a car that's 10% faster, and so what everyone is gonna be rotating out
Speaker 2:I mean, I I I think they
Speaker 1:did it.
Speaker 2:I I think the new Velary
Speaker 1:It's a really cool design. A really
Speaker 2:cool design. Feels like somewhat Cybertruck
Speaker 1:funky, futuristic. I don't know. It just checks the box for, like, the next supercar for me. In a way that the
Speaker 2:Ben says it can't touch the r eight.
Speaker 1:Oh, can't touch the Okay. R Okay. Well, it goes zero to 60 in two point six seconds.
Speaker 2:You for tuning in with us today, folks. We will be back on Monday. Yes. And we look forward to it.
Speaker 1:Some business to do tomorrow, but see you Monday. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcast and Spotify. Sign up for newsletters to tbpn.com, and have a wonderful weekend. We'll see you Bye. Goodbye.