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

Summary

TBPN Podcast Episode Summary
Episode: "Year in Review, TikTok Aims for $50B, Dana White on the AI Race | Diet TBPN"
Date: December 20, 2025
Hosts: John Coogan, Jordi Hays
Special Guests: Casey Newton, Ben Thompson, Tyler

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Overview

This lively year-end episode of TBPN reflects on the show’s growth, memorable moments, and tech industry highlights of 2025. The hosts discuss record financials at TikTok's parent company ByteDance, evolving AI strategies at Meta, the ongoing U.S. TikTok deal, and OpenAI’s overtures to government. There are heartfelt thank-yous, playful banter, and insights into what drives success in media and technology today.

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Main Themes & Discussion Points

1. 2025 TBPN Year in Review

• Show Growth and Highlights:
  • Completed 225 livestreams, nearly reaching 1,000 unique guests.
  • “We interviewed 912 unique guests and we're also doing another five today…almost hit a thousand guests.” — Ben Thompson [01:05]
  • First ever guest: Ryan Petersen, who joined during a chaotic time in global trade.
  • Covered highlights like YC Demo Day, NYSE Figma IPO (“Figma was our first Super Bowl.” — Casey Newton [02:57]), and frequent guest appearances by tech insiders (e.g., Delian Aspar, record 18 appearances).
• Acknowledgements:
  • Thank yous to regular viewers, team members behind the scenes, and collaborative media.
    • “This show wouldn't be possible without [the media].” — Casey Newton [04:05]
    • “Every little thing that you see on this show…is due to someone on our team being inventive…” — Ben Thompson [04:57]
  • Special video shout-out to the team, produced by Jackson. Contracts for contributors like Tyler (“Contract extended. Tyler is not going home.” — Tyler [08:02]).
• Audience Engagement:
  • Multiple ways to connect: livestreams, condensed “diet” versions, newsletters, and collectible trading cards.

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2. ByteDance/TikTok's $50 Billion Milestone

• Scale of Success:
  • ByteDance reported ~$50B profit for 2025, nearing Meta’s annual earnings.
  • "ByteDance is now basically the same size as Meta, which is insane." — Ben Thompson [09:35]
• U.S. TikTok Restructuring:
  • Under regulatory pressure, ByteDance to spin off TikTok's U.S. arm.
  • Upcoming ownership: Oracle, Silver Lake, MGX (45% collectively); ByteDance retains 20%.
  • Focus of new U.S. entity: Data protection, algorithm security, and content moderation.
    • “Retraining the content recommendation algorithm on US user data to ensure the content feed is free from outside manipulation.” — Casey Newton [11:38]

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3. Meta’s New AI Models and Boardroom Stories

• New Models (Mango and Avocado):
  • Meta to release new image/video AI models in 2026; emphasis on integrating into Instagram and other properties.
    • "It's very natural to vend this into Instagram." — Tyler [12:46]
• Dana White Goes All-In:
  • Guest segment with Dana White discussing Meta’s aggressive AI hiring and Zuckerberg’s leadership.
    • “We just hired like 10 kids…average salary is like $65 million…” — John (as Dana White) [13:41]
    • (Hosts joke about likely confusion between annual salary and overall compensation.)
  • AI’s use as an entrepreneurial coach: Good for generating strategies, but “execution is everything.”
    • “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.” — Casey Newton [14:45]

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4. Distribution Power of Big Tech Apps

• Dominance in App Markets:
  • Paid apps are niche; free apps dominated by big tech: ChatGPT, Threads, Google, TikTok, WhatsApp, Instagram, YouTube, Google Maps, Gemini.
    • “If you like ChatGPT, yes, they are the number one app, but they should be scared because Google has…five in the top 11…” — Ben Thompson [17:14]
  • Meta sits in a powerful position due to its platforms’ reach (3-4 billion+ active users).
    • “If we build a great model, we can start distributing it through WhatsApp, through Instagram, through Facebook…” — Casey Newton [16:18]

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5. OpenAI: Code Red Culture & Government Partnership

• Frequent ‘Code Reds’:
  • OpenAI has declared “Code Red” multiple times, instructing employees to focus on urgent priorities.
    • “It's not a Code Red if it's Code Red every day at your company.” — Ben Thompson [19:59]
  • Hosts joke about comms/PR framing; suggest calling it “the great lock in” to sound more positive.
• Government Compute Partnerships:
  • OpenAI encourages public-private partnerships, e.g., Stargate, for supercomputing access.
    • “This feels like an advertisement for a sales product. This feels like an SDR being like, I'm ready to rock.” — Ben Thompson [23:21]
  • Discussion about whether governments should self-build supercomputers or contract out.
    • “Do you want the government…to build an end-to-end supercomputer, and how good would the actual result be versus…buying capacity from our data centers?” — Casey Newton [24:06]

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6. Media, AI, and Tech in Pop Culture

• Charlamagne's Major Deal:
  • Signed a $200M, five-year extension with iHeartMedia, coinciding with a Netflix deal for the Breakfast Club.
    • “Very cool.” — Casey Newton [26:29]
• Tech Capabilities & Random Bits:
  • Robot solves Rubik's Cube in 0.1 seconds; team competitive banter around speedcubing skills.
    • “Nerd alert.” — Ben Thompson [27:54]
  • Discussion on gaming realism with the game “Unrecord” and its ultra-lifelike bodycam footage.
• Watch Collecting and Global Affairs:
  • Brief joke about famous figures wearing Casios; talk turns to privateering and U.S. Venezuela policy.

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7. Closing, Community, and 2026 Hopes

• Memorable Sign-Offs:
  • “It’s been a fantastic year, everyone. Thank you so much for all the support.” — Ben Thompson [30:30]
  • “Check yourself before you Shrek yourself.” — Shrek meme, [30:30]
  • “One last gong for 2025. What a year.” — Casey Newton [31:12]
• Sincere Appreciation:
  • Thanks to viewers, teammates, audience for a “totally surreal” year.
  • “It's an honor to build this show with the team and with all of you in the audience.” — Casey Newton [31:02]

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• “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.” — Ben Thompson [01:16]
• “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." — Ben Thompson [04:25]
• “If you do it right, the locking in that you do today will benefit your great grandchildren.” — Casey Newton [05:48]
• “Code Red. Code Red. Yeah, we heard red.” — Casey Newton [20:11]
• “Check yourself before you Shrek yourself.” — Shrek meme quoted by hosts [30:30]

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Key Timestamps

• [01:05] — Year-in-review stats, guest record, team appreciation
• [09:34] — ByteDance's $50B profit milestone, TikTok’s US restructuring
• [12:00] — Meta’s new AI models, “Mango” and “Avocado”, future business implications
• [13:12] — Dana White on Meta's AI push and boardroom anecdotes
• [17:06] — App store review; distribution dominance analysis
• [19:56] — OpenAI’s Code Red, company culture and PR, government partnerships
• [26:00] — Charlamagne’s media deal, pop culture
• [27:27] — Speedcubing robot; team banter
• [30:30] — Shrek sign-off, thank-yous, closing reflections

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Tone

The episode balances irreverent humor and holiday spirit with incisive analysis of tech industry trends. The close-knit community between the hosts, crew, and audience is palpable throughout, combining friendly jabs, high-energy riffing, and moments of genuine gratitude.

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End of Summary

Transcript

[Casey Newton]

Watching TVBS.

[Ben Thompson]

Is Friday, December 19, 2020.

[Casey Newton]

Merry Christmas. Merry Christmas.

[Ben Thompson]

I don't know if we're gonna make it through the show in this costume.

[Casey Newton]

I don't know.

[Ben Thompson]

I'm gonna be honest 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.

[Casey Newton]

Okay, so folks, the lesson this week is that we started Christmas on Monday. We started really strong. We talked about how certain advertisers, including Amazon, got into the holiday season a little too quickly. Little did we backfire on them. Little did we know we maybe did the same thing.

[Ben Thompson]

We did the exact same thing.

[Casey Newton]

But it has been a very fun week and we're excited to finish strong.

[Ben Thompson]

It's really so good. This might be more entertaining than our Halloween episode. We just wanted to say thank you to everyone for an amazing year. What a wild ride. So at the beginning of the year.

[Casey Newton]

This show, Remember last year, didn't we do like a Christmas Eve episode?

[Ben Thompson]

I think so.

[Casey Newton]

We just weren't willing to stop.

[Ben Thompson]

Yeah, no, it was a really intense schedule, but we weren't live. We, we didn't have guests, we didn't travel for the show. Yeah, we had this whole thesis that like 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 played out way differently. We have the numbers. We actually did 225 livestreams 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 a thousand guests. Some guests have come along.

[Casey Newton]

You know the record holder for this year, Delian aspar.

[Ben Thompson]

Uhoh. With 18 guest appearances. We've done 12, 19 interviews and, and 8554 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.

[Casey Newton]

And he ended up coming on a lot this year because of how much chaos there was in global trade.

[Ben Thompson]

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.

[Casey Newton]

Yeah, that was our NFL combine.

[Ben Thompson]

Yep.

[Casey Newton]

And of course, Figma was our first Super Bowl.

[Ben Thompson]

Exactly. So we got to go to the New York Stock Exchange for the Figma ipo. And again, you know, huge, huge gamble for, for Dylan to let us hang.

[Casey Newton]

Out and nay re there.

[Ben Thompson]

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.

[Casey Newton]

Action, more focused on the story, which was crazy.

[Ben Thompson]

Which was crazy. The stock was up, 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. Obviously 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.

[Casey Newton]

I was looking back at some of the original love that we got from different people. I remember Balaji texted you super early on and said, great set. Jackson texted one of us the same and so many others.

[Ben Thompson]

And also thank you to the media that makes the show possible with the fact finding.

[Casey Newton]

They find, yeah, I think early on people wanted us to have this sort of adversarial relationship, adversarial relationship with the media. But 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.

[Ben Thompson]

And a lot of the profiles, I mean, from the very early days, we were reading like 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, 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. We've had a fantastic year with them.

[Casey Newton]

They've grown absolute legends.

[Ben Thompson]

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.

[Casey Newton]

And it's. 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 part of this. They made a video.

[Ben Thompson]

Yeah, yeah.

[Casey Newton]

Let's play it.

[Ben Thompson]

Let's watch it. We have a little year in review video that we're going to watch here and 2025 is going to be a fantastic year. Lock in.

[Casey Newton]

The locking in that you do today will benefit your great grandchildren.

[Ben Thompson]

I agree.

[Casey Newton]

If you do it right.

[Ben Thompson]

Yeah.

[Casey Newton]

So do it, do it, do it like two years.

[Ben Thompson]

Today is Meta Connect 2025. We'd love for you to hit this gong for us. There we go. Congratulations on Mediconite 2025. This is a big moment for us. I mean, we just started a couple months ago. It's been, this has definitely been on like the vision board of and now we're here. So thank you so much for hosting us.

[Casey Newton]

You're watching tbpn.

[Ben Thompson]

We have some fantastic news. We have a partnership with the New York Stock exchange.

[Casey Newton]

You're watching TVPN.

[Ben Thompson]

We're live from GitHub universe.

[Casey Newton]

Give it a quick hit for 27%.

[Ben Thompson]

Strong hit.

[Casey Newton]

Great hit.

[Ben Thompson]

So good to meet you. How are you doing?

[Casey Newton]

There he is.

[Ben Thompson]

Welcome to the show.

[Casey Newton]

Cannot believe he jumps.

[Ben Thompson]

I can't believe he showed up. The Halloween episode, the Christmas episode and.

[Casey Newton]

The response was like, would you ever spend 250k on a car? And I took that literally.

[Ben Thompson]

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.

[Casey Newton]

Good luck to you guys. Keep doing what you're doing. You're just, you're just electric.

[Ben Thompson]

There we go. What you guys do is great. I also think that you're transforming the way that media is dispersed each week. And you know, and it's awesome you guys are on X doing what you do and elsewhere. So thanks so much.

[Casey Newton]

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.

[Ben Thompson]

Thank you.

[Casey Newton]

Take care.

[Ben Thompson]

Good night.

[Casey Newton]

Having the snow effect.

[Ben Thompson]

The snow effect is not baked into the underlying video. That of course will be shared on.

[Casey Newton]

Anyways, thank you. Thank you. Ben and the hole and Nick and Scott and Michael, for making that. You guys are the best. Actually shout out to Jackson who made that video. No way. What? Wow. Legend.

[Ben Thompson]

Thank you, Jackson.

[Casey Newton]

Legend. Amazing. And Tyler, do you have any news for us? Oh, yeah.

[Tyler]

Contract extended.

[Casey Newton]

Gap year. Gap year extended. Tyler is not going home.

[Ben Thompson]

He's not going home.

[Casey Newton]

Well, he's going home for the holidays. He's coming back to the Ultra Dome next semester.

[Ben Thompson]

The jaws of life.

[Casey Newton]

Contract extended. He's sticking around. It has been a fantastic year. 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.

[Ben Thompson]

Intern. Doesn't really make sense.

[Casey Newton]

It doesn't. It made sense for a minute, but you're much more than an internal. Your technology brother. Can we get the Gigachad? Can we get.

[Ben Thompson]

Yeah, can we at least giga chat this band?

[Casey Newton]

Can we Gigachad this?

[Ben Thompson]

Come on, please. Production. We have to thank everyone that actually watched the show. Everyone in chat. We appreciate you and everyone who watch. Everyone who. 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 TVPN product, in a 20 minute version, in the newsletter, 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.

[Casey Newton]

Big.

[Ben Thompson]

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 years. 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. Meta is of course earning about 60 billion this year. TikTok success has come over under scrutiny after the Biden administration led an effort to ban TikTok. ByteDance is now close to finalizing a plan to hive off the video service in the US which will going to be American made.

[Casey Newton]

American made.

[Ben Thompson]

Potentially short form video debates over 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 livestream shopping. The livestream shopping thing, it feels like it's so, so big over there. I 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 for the sale of the United States unit. The deal should close January 22nd. This is from Sarah Fisher, the media correspondent 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, you know, the Chinese entity sort of becomes the minority investor. It sort of goes into American hands loosely or Western hands and 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?

[Casey Newton]

All the venture, the joint venture is going to be focused on data protection, algorithm security, content moderation and software assurance and retraining the content recommendation algorithm on US user data to ensure the content feed is free from outside manipulation. Will be interested to see if there's any noticeable effect for TikTok users.

[Ben Thompson]

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 codename Mango.

[Casey Newton]

I like it.

[Ben Thompson]

Alex Wang and Chris Cox talked the new models Mango and Avocado in a Q and 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.

[Casey Newton]

It's simply too good.

[Ben Thompson]

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 get 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?

[Tyler]

I mean I feel like it's very natural to vend this into Instagram.

[Ben Thompson]

Yeah.

[Tyler]

And like this model, like I would be very surprised if people are surprised by this right because like, the, the mid journey in vibes, like, that was not msl, that was Alexander Wang.

[Ben Thompson]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Tyler]

That's just like the product.

[Ben Thompson]

But they've done a lot of work to Marshall compute, build huge data centers. Like they're ready for a big run.

[Tyler]

Yeah.

[Ben Thompson]

And they have the data.

[Tyler]

Very good.

[Ben Thompson]

Yeah. I would expect this to be Dana White and the Meta board. This is a match made in heaven.

[John]

Have you got into AI yet?

[Casey Newton]

Yeah, we're dabbling.

[John]

Okay. So Meta, AI. I got, you know, I'm on the board for Meta. I just got back from the Meta board meeting, so.

[Casey Newton]

Good.

[John]

Zuckerberg, who was a brilliant gangster, this guy, These people who, who try to talk about him and everything else. I'm so blown away and impressed by this guy. He's an animal.

[Ben Thompson]

I agree with that.

[John]

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 that these kids are making that account.

[Ben Thompson]

It's so funny that this is the final leap.

[John]

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?

[Casey Newton]

How do I.

[John]

You know? And it'll start giving you some ideas and hold on, you can.

[Ben Thompson]

Is he saying $65 million is the average salary per year?

[Casey Newton]

I think so. I mean, I think of a salary. I think of a salary as a.

[Ben Thompson]

That's an annual thing.

[Casey Newton]

As an annual thing.

[Ben Thompson]

So 10 times. That's. That's insane.

[Casey Newton]

And Noah in the chat says, meta engineers with a 600k salary.

[Ben Thompson]

Okay. So yeah, yeah, keep playing this from.

[John]

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.

[Ben Thompson]

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.

[Casey Newton]

Okay, so when I see this, but I see this, I just.

[Ben Thompson]

It's actually a great metaphor.

[Casey Newton]

Entrepreneurs can get stuck in a loop of just wanting to meet with and talk with people and like, get ideas and get strategies. 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.

[Ben Thompson]

Yeah.

[Casey Newton]

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. But in the end, you just still got to go do the work. That's the hardest part.

[Ben Thompson]

I think he's actually a pretty good communicator here because 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. Like. And so he's. He's right. He's delivering it in, like, this sort of funny way, and he's. And he brings, like, this crazy. This crazy energy to the performance. But he is correct in, like, the pitch in this idea. He's. He's actually correctly pitching super intelligent personal superintelligence. 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. That's not what he's addressing. He's addressing just the idea of like. Of, like, is AI useful?

[Casey Newton]

Meta has something, I think, 3, 3 and a half to 4 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, ChatGPT has a big user base. Yeah. Gemini has a big user base. But we have 4 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, et cetera.

[Ben Thompson]

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. So the 2025 top paid apps. And this is wild. It's like, have you heard of any of these?

[Casey Newton]

I know.

[Ben Thompson]

Hot Schedules, Shadow Pocket, it seems like, have you heard of any of these? Procreate?

[Casey Newton]

No, because I check the charts a lot.

[Ben Thompson]

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. It's literally ChatGPT, Threads, Google, TikTok, 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 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 in the top 11 or something like that. And so the distribution is just so powerful. And Meta has that distribution, so they're also a contender and they can stay in the game.

[Casey Newton]

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. Sounds like an even sus version.

[Ben Thompson]

Sounds insecure.

[Casey Newton]

Yeah, sounds very insecure. Number two is Pocket God, which is a game that includes Call of Booty.

[Ben Thompson]

Wait, Call of Pocket God. Isn't that a nickname for AGI? AGI has been solved.

[Casey Newton]

This is just like a mobile game. And then number 23 is jingle real Motion Shaker Instrument.

[Ben Thompson]

Stacey Neistat did a project with the meta quest 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 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 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?

[Casey Newton]

Scan the Ultradome.

[Tyler]

I 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.

[Ben Thompson]

So I'm not saying Scan the Ultradop.

[Casey Newton]

Gigachad Elf is so.

[Ben Thompson]

I love the Gigachad Elf. That's so good. So, yeah, I'm not proposing that you. You look so ridiculous.

[Casey Newton]

Do the sad face. Do the sad face.

[Ben Thompson]

The sad face is the funniest one. It's so funny. The jawline is crazy. Oh, it looks so real. It's so good. I don't like this one. No. You really look so sad.

[Casey Newton]

What's wrong? Tyler, cheer up. Cheer up.

[Ben Thompson]

OpenAI 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.

[Casey Newton]

Code Red. Code Red. Yeah, we heard red.

[Ben Thompson]

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 OpenAI. How many Baja Blasts have there been? Because we know that after every Code Red, there is an equal and opposite Baja Blast that gets the code.

[Casey Newton]

Well, what does success look like for Code Red? It's a Baja Blast.

[Ben Thompson]

It's a Baja Blast. Baja blasting your way to the top of the charts, the top of the benchmarks, the top the of 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. There's a phrase for this that doesn't turn into a negative press cycle. It's called a lock in. You just tell everyone it's time for.

[Casey Newton]

The great lock in.

[Ben Thompson]

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.

[Casey Newton]

People are going to rally around that.

[Ben Thompson]

Everyone is going to 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 going to be even better.

[Casey Newton]

They're going to go even harder.

[Ben Thompson]

Hot. Take maybe 20, 26, the year of speed, maybe. Customers cannot tell the difference between 120 IQ chatbot. 130 IQ chatbot. 140 IQ chatbot.

[Casey Newton]

What can they tell the difference?

[Ben Thompson]

Speed.

[Casey Newton]

That's right.

[Ben Thompson]

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 with they're already AGI is here.

[Casey Newton]

In a letter to the White house sent this a.m. this was yesterday. OpenAI encourages the federal government to government to invest in or contract with initiatives like OpenAI Stargate to secure compute for public research. The full thing is leverage public private partnerships for supercomputing. We 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 be 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, what do you think, John? Because obviously people are going to dunk on this super hard but there, there's, you know, people that are just not interested in AI don't think it's important, don't think.

[Ben Thompson]

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, 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 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 an advertisement for a sales product. This feels like an SDR being like I'm ready to rock.

[Casey Newton]

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 compute for these projects. OpenAI and all their messaging says we're compute constrained and we're compute constrained. If we brought on 10 times the 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 computers. And so to also be messaging the government and saying hey, we'd like you to invest and buy, effectively buy capacity for government researchers from our data centers. Those things are. You can, you can balance them. But it's a little hard to. 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 7 in 10Americans believe we need new innovations and solutions to challenges in scientific and medical research. And they kind of go on kind of setting up the kind of ask.

[Ben Thompson]

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 OpenAI to actually cure cancer and obviously the other, you know, pharmaceutical companies and all sorts of health companies. Why are you laughing?

[Casey Newton]

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 laughing. It's a goat sound, Brandon. It's a goat sound. 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.

[Ben Thompson]

Charlamagne 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.

[Casey Newton]

Interesting. Forbes is writing A Wait, so iHeartMedia is paying Charlamagne 200?

[Ben Thompson]

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 gotta have Charlamagne host it because he's the talent.

[Casey Newton]

Very cool.

[Ben Thompson]

The article in how Charlamagne became a Media God, I love it. Of course, he's Charlemagne, the God. On a chilly night in November, radio personality Charlamagne, 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 pea coat, 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. So congratulations to Charlamagne there's 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 solved. That's so crazy.

[Casey Newton]

That's insane.

[Ben Thompson]

Think about that. Look at. This is the super, super slow mo view. Super slow mo view. Super, super duper slow point. 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.

[Tyler]

My best ever. When I was like, you can do it. It was like 20 seconds.

[Ben Thompson]

20 seconds.

[Casey Newton]

Yeah.

[Ben Thompson]

You were a speedcuber.

[Casey Newton]

Nerd alert.

[Ben Thompson]

Nerd alert. Nerd alert.

[Casey Newton]

The no, look. Is that really.

[Ben Thompson]

Yeah. Oh, yeah. He's got it. He's got it. He's got it.

[Tyler]

I used to be much better.

[Ben Thompson]

I used to be much better. Did you want to talk about watches, Jordan?

[Casey Newton]

I did. I did not know that Osama bin Laden was a Casio guy.

[Ben Thompson]

A Casio guy.

[Casey Newton]

Also, apparently base couldn't get the rm. Base has a watch as well.

[Ben Thompson]

Watch drop is cool. I like a watch drop.

[Casey Newton]

We like a watch drop. And would you like to seize cartel assets as a privateer?

[Ben Thompson]

This is a big opportunity for Phil.

[Casey Newton]

Would allow the president to issue you a letter of marquee. Time to take these pirates down. We did talk about.

[Ben Thompson]

Did we create this?

[Casey Newton]

We did say at the beginning of the year we were highlighting the reward for Maduro.

[Ben Thompson]

Yes.

[Casey Newton]

Very early, before this whole Venezuela saga really kicked off.

[Ben Thompson]

It definitely ramped up from the time we talked about the fact that the State Department was interested in bringing him in for questioning.

[Casey Newton]

Did you see this game unrecord?

[Ben Thompson]

No.

[Casey Newton]

It's a body cam. First person shoot.

[Ben Thompson]

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. Looks so real. It's like you look at that and you're like, oh, this looks like the best game ever. This looks way better than Call of Duty. In fact, the modern gamer and really you or me, like, 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, we're, you know, I'm going to play something that's a little cartoony. As long as the mechanics work.

[Casey Newton]

JIRA Tickets was reacting to OpenAI now aiming to raise 100 billion at a $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. That's good. Can't wait to see the next number. I love the number business.

[Ben Thompson]

That's really true.

[Casey Newton]

Good bit. Reality is, life is a number business. It's all about make it go up forever. This is a good way to, I would say, wrap the year. Shrek hits a timeline to say some important words. Check yourself before you Shrek yourself.

[Ben Thompson]

You were just laughing. You were just laughing to yourself before the show and I asked you what were you reading? And you said, well, Shrek said, check yourself before you Shrek yourself. It's been a fantastic year, everyone. Thank you so much for all the support. Thank you for watching TVPN and engaging with us in all different ways. We really appreciate you and hope you have a fantastic holiday season. Merry Christmas. Happy New Year. We will see you in 2026.

[Casey Newton]

I can't believe. I can't believe. This is. This is the last show of the year. What a year.

[Ben Thompson]

Wow.

[Casey Newton]

Thank you, everyone. Totally surreal.

[Ben Thompson]

Surreal.

[Casey Newton]

And it's an honor. It's an honor to build this show with the team and with all of you in the audience.

[Ben Thompson]

Gabe says one last gong.

[Casey Newton]

One last gong. One last gong for 2025. What a year. You pull up your pants, he's got sweats on underneath. Don't worry. One last gong. Boom.

[Ben Thompson]

Merry Christmas. Happy New Year. Merry Christmas. And we will see you in 2026 year, folks.

[Casey Newton]

We love you.

[Ben Thompson]

Goodbye.

[Casey Newton]

Have a fantastic New Year's and all those holidays.