TBPN Year in Review, TikTok Aims for $50B, Dana White on the AI Race | Diet TBPN

0:00We're watching TVVN! It is Friday, December 19th, 2020. Merry Christmas! I don't know if we're going to make it through the show in this costume. I don't know. I'm going to be honest with you up front, everyone. We appreciate you. We're very thankful this holiday, but this is a lot for a three-hour broadcast about technology and business. Okay, so folks, a lesson this week is that we started Christmas on Monday. we really really uh we we started really strong we started we we talked about how uh certain advertisers including amazon got into the holiday season a little too quickly yeah little did we know little did we know for maybe did the same thing we did the exact but it has been uh a very fun week and uh we're excited to finish strong it's really it's really so good This might be more entertaining than our Halloween episode.

1:02We just wanted to say thank you to everyone for an amazing year. What a wild ride. So at the beginning of the year, this show... Remember last year, didn't we do like a Christmas Eve episode? I think so. We just weren't willing to stop. Yeah, no, it was a really intense schedule, but we weren't live. We didn't have guests. We didn't travel for the show. We had this whole thesis that what was missing was actually just two people hanging out, having a conversation. And there actually were a lot of interview shows that were doing a great job. Of course, that all planned, played out way differently.

1:37We have the numbers. We actually did 225 live streams this year. Thank you to so many of you in the chat that I know we're actually watching for all 225 of those. There's a lot of you. We recognize you all. We know we've learned all of your names. It's been fantastic hanging out here with you every day chatting. Across those 225 live streams, we interviewed 912 unique guests. And we're also doing another five today, I think. So we're still adding to that, but we almost hit 1 ,000 guests. Some guests have come up a lot. We know the record holder for this year. Delian Asperuhov with 18 guest appearances.

2:16We've done 1 ,219 interviews and 8 ,554 posts on X. Interesting, the first guest ever was Ryan Peterson. Sort of a wild move just jumping on a live stream with us. We'd never done a guest ever, and it was live. It was very odd. We could talk about anything, but he was totally down to just hop on, and it was a lot of fun. And he ended up coming on a lot this year because of how much chaos there was in global trade. Gary Tan hooked us up with the ability to stream from YC Demo Day, the Palace of Party Rounds. That was a super, super cool moment. Yeah, that was our NFL combine. And of course, Figma was our Super Bowl.

2:57Exactly. So we got to go to the New York Stock Exchange for the Figma IPO. And again, huge, huge gamble for Dylan to let us hang out there and talk to everyone there. And I feel like we landed on a very unique product, interviewing basically the whole board of directors on IPO day. Less focused on price action, more focused on the story around the company. Which was crazy, of course. Which was crazy. The stock was up. The stock was down. And I think that's something we always wanted to come back to is like the posters that make the show possible, the timeline. This show is unique in that that is very much our backbone.

3:29Obviously, we read the Wall Street Journal. We read a lot of the news. But for some of the funny moments, some of the funniest moments, some of the most interesting folks we've had on the show, some of the anons that have come on has just really allowed us to wind up in a different place. I was looking back at some of the original love that we got from different people. I remember Bology texted you super early on and said, great set. Jackson texted one of us the same. And so many others. And also thank you to the media that makes this show possible. The fact finding, they do what they find. Yeah, I think early on people wanted us to have this sort of like adversarial relationship with the media.

4:11but at the end of the day, it's incredibly symbiotic. Media does analysis, fact-finding, all different sorts. We incorporate it into the show, and the show wouldn't be possible without that. And a lot of the profiles, I mean, from the very early days, we were reading a New Yorker profile of Mary Meeker, and that gives you a certain flavor of what tech was like at that time. And without the legacy media, the traditional media, the corporate media, the new media, the legacy new media, the neo legacy media. Without all of them, we couldn't do what we do. And then of course, thank you to the team, the massive, fantastic team here at TVPN.

4:52We have had a fantastic year with them. They've grown. Absolutely legends. Everyone's figured out ways to improve the show. Every little thing that you see on this show across the internet, across everywhere where we exist is due to someone on our team being inventive, coming up with a strategy for how that happens, then implementing it, and then executing it every single day like clockwork with extreme. And it's a performance. Everything that, you know, as we're sitting here, hanging out, talking, they are doing an incredible amount behind the scenes, making sure that the show is dialed. It's really been the highlight of my career working with all of you guys so thank you for being a part of this they made a video yeah yeah let's play it let's watch it pull it up we have a little year in review video that we're gonna watch here and 2025 is gonna be a fantastic year lock in a locking in that you do today will benefit your great grandchildren i agree if you do it right yeah so do it do it do it You're watching TBPN!

6:00Today is Meta Connect 2025. We'd love for you to hit this golf for us. Congratulations on Meta Connect 2025. This is a big moment for us. I mean, we just started a couple months ago. This has definitely been on the vision board of like one day. And now we're here. So thank you so much for hosting us. You're watching TBPN! We nailed that! And we have some fantastic news. We have a partnership with the New York Stock Exchange. You're watching TBPN! We're live from GitHub Universe. Give it a quick hit for 27%. Strong hit. Great hit. So good to meet you. How are you doing? There he is. Welcome to himself.

6:42I can't believe he showed up. The Halloween episode. The Christmas episode. And the response was like, would you ever spend 250k in a car? And I took that literally. That was the best. That's the scoop of the year. Sam Altman has a good sense of humor You guys are really important to me Good luck to you guys Just keep doing what you're doing You're just electric What you guys do is great I also think that you're transforming the way that Media is dispersed each week And it's awesome You guys are on X doing what you do And elsewhere, so thanks so much Thank you to everybody that has made this possible By tuning in Enjoying the show and supporting us However you have So have a wonderful evening and we will see you tomorrow.

7:28Thank you. Take care. Good night. Having the snow effect. The snow effect is not baked into the underlying video. That, of course, will be shared on. Thank you. Thank you, Ben and the whole and Nick and Scott and Michael for making that. You guys, you guys are the best. Correction. Actually, shout out to Jackson who made that video. No way. What? Legend. Thank you, Jackson. Legend. Amazing. And Tyler, do you have any news for us? Oh, yeah. Contract extended. Gap year. Gap year extended.

8:12Tyler is not going home. He's not going home. Well, he's going home for the holidays, but he's coming back for the Ultradome next semester. With the jaws of life. contract extended it has been truly incredible having you here on our set and contributing to the show in such a special way yeah we should probably figure out a new title at some point other than intern it doesn't really make sense it made sense for a minute but you're much more than an intern you're a technology brother can we get the giga chad can we at least giga chad this man come on please in the production. We have to thank everyone that actually watched the show.

8:55Everyone in chat, we appreciate you and everyone who saw. There are so many ways to experience what we do. That is by design. We want to let people, we want to meet them where they are, obviously, in an RSS feed, in a cut down, in a diet TBPN product, in a 20-minute version, in a clip, in the newsletter, in the trading cards. The trading cards themselves are a way to experience what we do here. And so thank you to everyone who enjoyed any of that, no matter how much or how frequently you did. We appreciate you. Let's go to the timeline. So TikTok owner ByteDance is on track for$50 billion in profit in 2025.

9:34Big. That's so much money. So this is from Bloomberg. ByteDance is on track for profits of roughly$50 billion, capping a record year for a Chinese social media leader, making major inroads into e-commerce and new markets. I mean, it truly is like their hyperscaler. They own a ton of different stuff, gaming, social. It's so much more than just TikTok. The Beijing-based parent company of TikTok is on track to hit that milestone after amassing net income of about$40 billion over the year's first three quarters. That would take the company's earnings close to that of Meta platforms. So ByteDance is now basically the same size as Meta, which is insane.

10:08Meta is, of course, earning about$60 billion this year. TikTok's success has come under scrutiny after the Biden administration led an effort to ban TikTok by dances now close to finalizing a plan to hive off the video service in the U.S., which will ensure - It's going to be American-made, American-made short-form video. Debates over exactly how that will happen, but Oracle is potentially in the deal. Despite Washington's scrutiny, TikTok has expanded globally at a rapid clip, including in the U.S. It has been pushing aggressively into e-commerce and live stream shopping. The live stream shopping thing, it feels like it's so big over there.

10:45I wonder if it's somewhat growing here, but it does feel like it still feels like it has not hit a fever pitch in the United States the way it has abroad. TikTok has signed a deal for the sale of the United States unit. The deal should close January 22nd. This is from Sarah Fisher, the media correspondent it at Axios. Oracle, Silver Lake, and MGX will collectively own 45 % of the US entity. 30 % will be held by affiliates of existing ByteDance investors, and 20 % will be retained by ByteDance. ByteDance, the Chinese entity sort of becomes the minority investor. It sort of goes into American hands loosely or Western hands.

11:26And then, of course, the rest of the process can be handled. And you have more leverage to address, like, where is the data stored? How is the algorithm trained? The U.S. venture, the joint venture is going to be focused on data protection, algorithm security, content moderation, and software assurance. So retraining the content recommendation algorithm on U.S. user data to ensure the content feed is free from outside manipulation. We'll be interested to see if there's any noticeable effect for TikTok users. Megan Borowski over at the Wall Street Journal has a scoop that Meta is in fact developing a new image and video focused AI model, code named Mango.

12:11Alex Wang and Chris Cox talked the new models Mango and Avocado in a Q &A with employees this morning. One of those employees said, I gotta tell the Wall Street Journal about this. It's too good. It's too good. It's simply too good. It's too good. I gotta let them know. They said models are expected to be released in the first half of 2026. I mean, they have a lot of data. They should be able to train a great model. I wonder if it's enough to just release a Frontier model and really see any usage, or if this is, again, it's like it needs to be vended into Instagram, into meta properties. What do you think, Tyler?

12:46I mean, I feel like it's very natural to vend this into Instagram. And like this model, like I would be very surprised if people are surprised by this, right? Because like the mid-journey in Vibes, like that was not MSL. That was not Alexander Wang. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's just like the product. But they've done a lot of work to Marshall Compute, build huge data centers. Like they're ready for a big run. Yeah, I expect this to be very good. Yeah, I would expect this to be. Dana White and the Meta board. This is a match made in heaven. Have you got into AI yet? We're dabbling. Okay. Yes, sir. So Meta AI, I got, you know, I'm on the board for Meta.

13:18i just got back from the meta board meeting so good zuckerberg who was a brilliant gangster this guy gangster these people who try to talk about him and everything else i'm so blown away and impressed by this guy he's an animal i agree with that and he is an animal putting all the chips in on ai we just hired like 10 kids that are aged 22 to 28 the average salary is like 65 million dollars these kids are making that it's so funny this is the final leak you hear a lot of negativity about it everyone's wondering way more positives about ai than negative so you start looking at ai and getting into it and asking ai how do i build my business how do i that you know and it'll start giving you some ideas and uh hold on you can is he saying 65 million dollars is the average salary per year i think so i mean i think of the salary i think of a salary as a that's an annual thing as an annual thing so 10 times that's that's insane and noah in the chat says meta engineers with a 600k salary watching this feeling what okay so yeah yeah keep playing this from here to tulsa oklahoma you'd have to go on a map and you'd have to lay out you know your route and all you got to do the same thing for your business map out your route for 26 when i first saw this i thought he was saying like ai will be able to get you directions and i was like Google Maps can do that.

14:42Okay, so when I see this, I just think entrepreneurs can get stuck in a loop of just wanting to meet and talk with people and get ideas and get strategies and learn. And AI is really good at that. You can say, I have an e-commerce company. I want to grow. What should I do? It'll give you a bunch of ideas. It just shows how worthless a lot of ideas are and how important execution is. Some ideas are priceless, right? It's like you want to execute on the right ideas, but oftentimes to find the right ideas, you got to try a bunch of stuff. Yeah. And so AI is at the point where it can give you the perfect strategy, the perfect playbook, even if it's like kind of the average playbook.

15:19But in the end, you just still got to go do the work. That's the hard part. I think he's actually a pretty good communicator here. He's using a metaphor that people understand. Mapping technology, Google Maps for business, for answering other questions, unstructured questions. AI can tell you that. If you think about before, you know, you Google, okay, well, my business needs a website. How do I set up a website for my business? Okay, I need to go to the store and get a book, web development for dummies. This was the thing. Back in the 90s, it was like Java for dummies. And so he's right, he's delivering it in like this sort of funny way.

15:53And he brings like this crazy energy to the performance, but he is correct in like the pitch, in this idea. Yeah, he's actually correctly pitching super intelligent, personal super intelligent. He doesn't really address the fact that like, you know, there's incredible competition from Anthropic and OpenAI and Google on this front. But that's not what he's addressing. He's addressing just the idea of like, is AI useful? Meta has something, I think, three and a half to four billion monthly active users. and so I think in those board meetings you have to imagine they're saying like yeah there's a lot of competition yeah chat GPT has a big user base yeah Gemini has a big user base but we have four billion people that we can start distributing if we build a great model we can start distributing it through whatsapp through Instagram through Facebook through the Meta AI app etc yeah I was listening to Ben Thompson this morning and he was doing app reviews like the review of the top paid apps and the top free apps.

16:58So the 2025 top paid apps. And this is wild. It's like, have you heard of any of these? I know. Hot Schedules, Shadow Rocket. It seems like... Procreate. Have you heard of any of these? Procreate. No, because I check the charts a lot. Skyview. I've heard of that. Tonal Energy, Auto Sleep. They're all like a couple dollars. and most people have not really heard of any of these. If they have, they're like, oh yeah, I use this for this one little thing or this is a niche thing. And then you go to the top free apps and it's like trillion dollar company, trillion dollar company, trillion dollar company.

17:32It's literally ChatGPT threads, Google, TikToks, WhatsApp, Instagram, YouTube, Google Maps, Gmail, Google Gemini. And so Ben's point was, if you like ChatGPT, yes, they are the number one app, but they should be scared because Google has won one, two, three, four, five in the top 11 or something like that. And so the distribution is just so powerful. And fortunately, Meta has that distribution. So they're also a contender and they can stay in the game. So the top, the number 22 free app right now, number 21 is Instagram, number 22 is Whatnot, number 23 is HBO Max. And on the paid side currently, 21 is Threema, secure messenger.

18:13Sounds like an even sus version. Sounds insecure. Yeah, sounds very insecure. Number two is Pocket God, which is a game that includes Call of Booty. Wait, Call of Pocket God? Isn't that a nickname for AGI? AGI has been solved. This is just like a mobile game. And then number 23 is Jingle, real motion shaker instrument. Casey Neistat did a project with the MetaQuest 3 where he scanned his studio. He says it's pretty rad. You can walk around and look at stuff and get close. yeah it's very inspiring from a production perspective because it's practical but it also has so much character that it it tells you a story and so even when he's just filming a little product review and he's making the seventh video of the month or year or whatever you're you're you're brought into his world you understand who Casey is every single one of those items tells a story should we give Tyler a challenge to actually get this up and running Scan the ultradone.

19:15I tried for like, I don't know, maybe two months now. You've been able to do a couple experiences on the meta quest, but you couldn't record your own yet. And I mean, I'm not sure if it's actually, I guess it is out that you can do it yourself. So I'm not saying scan the ultradone. The gigachad elf is so funny. I love the gigachad elf, it's so good. So yeah, I'm not proposing that you, you look so ridiculous. Do the sad face, do the sad face. The sad face is the funniest one. It's so funny. The jawline is crazy. it looks so real it's so good i don't like this one no you really look so sad but what's wrong tyler cheer up cheer up open ai has declared code red multiple times bloomberg is reporting an executive said this it's not a code red if it's code red every day at your company you know what nowhere else it's code red right here code Red.

20:12Yeah, we heard it's Code Red. Yeah, it's Code Red. Everyone, put on Santa outfits. It's Code Red time. Santa's sack is red. The reindeer, the sleigh, these things are red. He was just getting in the Christmas spirit, guys. It was not anything about the business. It was not anything about the shaky ground. The real question that Rachel Metz over at Bloomberg will have to get to the bottom of is, okay, so there's been multiple Code Reds at opening act. How many Baja Blasts have there been? Because we know that after Under every Code Red, there is an equal and opposite Baja Blast that gets the company back.

20:45What does success look like for Code Red? It's a Baja Blast. It's a Baja Blast. Baja blasting your way to the top of the charts, the top of the benchmarks, the top of the fundraising cycle. Sam Altman's decision to declare Code Red at OpenAI earlier this month may have caught the industry's attention, but it wasn't the first time that the artificial intelligence company has done a Code Red. The San Francisco-based startup leadership has made the same decision previously, explicitly instructing employees to drop lower priority tasks and concentrate on a single goal. I'm telling you, it's entirely a comms issue.

21:19There's a phrase for this that doesn't turn into a negative press cycle. It's called a lock-in. You just tell everyone, we're locking in. It's time for the great lock-in. It's time for the great lock-in. And if you say OpenAI declares it's time for the great lock-in. That's exciting. Everyone's excited. People are going to rally around that. Everyone is gonna go through the roof and just be like, this is so bullish. This is so bullish. You can be at the top of your game and if you declare a great lock-in, everyone's just like, oh no, it's gonna be even better. They're gonna go even harder. Hot take, maybe 2026 is the year of speed.

21:51Maybe customers cannot tell the difference between 120 IQ chatbot, 130 IQ chatbot, 140 IQ chatbot. What can they tell the difference? Speed. That's right. If they have to close the app, come back five minutes later, Oh, my deep research report is here. I think the model's plateauing on wowing me. They're already, AGI's here. In a letter to the White House sent this AM. This was yesterday. OpenAI encourages the federal government to invest in or contract with initiatives like OpenAI's Stargate to secure compute for public research. The full thing is leverage public-private partnerships for supercomputing.

22:29We encourage the federal government to co-invest or contract with initiatives like OpenAI Stargate to secure dedicated compute for priority public research, i.e. health research, national security. Just as government-university partnerships built earlier supercomputers, new models could procure capacity on cutting-edge AI systems for use by federally funded researchers. For example, a portion of Stargate's compute might be made available to the National Science Foundation or Department of Energy researchers tackling grand challenges, providing academia access to frontier models without needing to build duplicate infrastructure what uh what do you think john because obviously people are gonna dunk on this super hard uh but there there's uh you know people that are just not interested in ai don't think it's important don't think show me the big tech company that doesn't want to work with the government yeah like it's a knockout drag out fight to win project maven to win cloud hosting contracts the government has data right now and the fight between whether that data is stored on aws oracle google uh azure like that is a somewhat of a bidding war but there are also all sorts of other lobbying efforts to win those contracts it's the game on the field i i don't know i feel like this is not this is not asking for a backstop this is also not asking for nationalization although it is like somewhat predicted in 2027 it feels more like uh like like an advertisement for a sales product this feels like an sdr being like i'm ready i'm ready to rock yeah and i think even for taxpayers do you want the government spending like basically taking on the project themselves to build an end-to-end supercomputer and how good would the actual result be versus just saying like we need to compute for these projects open ai and all their messaging says we're compute constrained and we're compute constraint.

24:26If we brought on 10 times a compute, we'd use it in a few weeks. There's all these things that we can't do because we don't have enough compute. And so to also be messaging the government and saying, hey, we'd like you to invest and effectively buy capacity for government researchers from our data centers, those things are, you can balance them, but it's a little bit hard to. OpenAI sees 2026 as the year of AI and science, the moment when AI begins unlocking breakthroughs in scientific discovery just as it sped up software development in 2025. More than seven in 10 Americans believe we need new innovations and solutions to challenges in scientific and medical research.

25:06And they kind of go on kind of setting up, setting up the kind of ask. It feels like a crucible moment for science in that science was effectively successfully done at a private corporation and if that's the trend then what is the government's role what is the university's role maybe it should just be a race between Google and opening eye to actually cure cancer and obviously the other you know pharmaceutical companies and all sorts of health companies why are you laughing I'm laughing because Brandon Jacoby texted me and said listening to the show while working out the sheep sound almost made me drop a dumbbell on my head from I'm laughing.

25:48It's a goat sound, Brandon. It's a goat sound. Obviously, it's a goat sound. I use that when someone is showing greatest of all time sort of behavior or general excellence. Charlemagne signed a five-year deal,$200 million extension with iHeartMedia, locking him in with the company after it struck a deal with Netflix to stream The Breakfast Club. Forbes is writing a story here. iHeartMedia is paying Charlemagne$200. They say, hey, iHeartMedia, we have a deal with Netflix. We can't lose Charlemagne because The Breakfast Club has already been sold to Netflix. We got to have Charlemagne hosted because he's the talent.

26:29Very cool. The article in How Charlemagne Became a Media God. I love it. Of course, he's Charlemagne the God. On a chilly night in November radio personality, Charlemagne the God is roaming through the aisles of Midtown Comics in New York City, captivated by the heroes and villains that shaped his childhood escapism at the highest level. He says, everybody's here for a purpose. Dressed in a black peacoat, a white hoodie, black jeans, and tan Timberland boots. This isn't the media vigilante that listeners of The Breakfast Club have come to expect over the past 15 years. The 47-year-old comic book nerd leafing through original graphic novels of Batman, Superman, Wolverine, and one of his favorites, Luke Cage, is more subdued and introspective as he considers his public and private personas.

27:13So congratulations to Charlemagne. There's a robot that is solving Rubik's Cubes in 0.1 seconds. That is so fast. Look at this. Look at this. You can't even. Oh, it's in the slow-mo camera. Okay, watch this. And it's off. It's so crazy. That's insane. Think about that. Look at it. This is a super, super slow-mo view. Super slow-mo view. Super, super, duper slow. 0.1 seconds. Wow, it's doing. This is so fast. Wow, it's really doing it. I can do a Rubik's Cube in around one minute. Can you do one? How fast can you do it? Let's cut to Tyler. My best ever when I was like you can do well it was like 20 seconds.

27:4920 seconds? You were a speed cuber. Wow, nerd alert, nerd alert. Nerd alert. The no look. Is that really? Yeah. Oh yeah, he's got it. He's got it. He's got it. I used to be much better. I used to be much better. Did you want to talk about watches, Jordi? I did. I did not know that Osama bin Laden was a Casio guy. A Casio guy. Couldn't. Apparently, base. Couldn't get the RM. Base has a watch as well. Watch drop is cool. I like a watch drop. We like a watch drop. Would you like to seize cartel assets as a privateer? This is a big opportunity for folks. My bill would allow the president to issue you a letter of Mark time to take these pirates down.

28:39We did talk about... Did we create this? We did say at the beginning of the year we were highlighting the reward for Maduro. Yes. Very early before this whole Venezuela saga really kicked off. It definitely ramped up from the time we talked about the fact that the State Department was interested in him bringing him in for questioning. Did you see this game unrecord? No. It's a body cam, first-person shooter. Wait a minute. I believe this is not AI-generated video. This is just incredible Unreal Engine footage. This looks so real. I don't believe—it's crazy. But I think this is actually real. Now, I believe—I thought this game went into beta, and I thought people were playing this, and I believe that even though it's remarkably realistic, it looks so real, it's like you look at that, And you're like, oh, this looks like the best game ever.

29:34This looks way better than Call of Duty. In fact, the modern gamer and really you or me, you don't actually want this level of realism because it makes the game really hard. It makes the game a lot less fun, like some people do. They want great mechanics. And then they're willing to suspend belief and say, hey, I'm going to play something that's a little cartoony, as long as the mechanics work. Jira Tickets was reacting to OpenAI, now aiming to raise$100 billion at an$830 billion valuation. And JT says, wow, new number just dropped. Congrats on the new number. Looks like it's bigger than the old number.