TBPN - 2025 in Review, Cursor Acquires Graphite, TikTok's $50B Profit | Michael Truell & Merrill Lutsky, Pranav Myana, Anna Goldie, Edward Mehr

Episode Date: December 19, 2025

(00:25) - 2025 in Review (17:34) - TikTok's $50B Profit (22:34) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (24:27) - Michael Truell & Merrill Lutsky, co-founder and CEO of Anysphere, leads the company behind Cursor, an AI-powered code editor that has rapidly gained prominence in the software development industry. In the conversation, Truell discusses the integration of Graphite and Cursor, emphasizing their shared vision for the future of software development, the transformative impact of AI agents on coding practices, and the strategic steps both companies are taking to enhance developer collaboration and productivity. (47:48) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (01:04:20) - OpenAI Declares Code Red (01:16:15) - Pranav Myana, a San Francisco-based entrepreneur and 776 Foundation Fellow, discusses the potential of space-based data centers to address Earth's constraints on land, water, and power. He highlights the challenges of cooling in space due to the vacuum environment, necessitating innovative radiator designs, and emphasizes the importance of reducing launch costs for the feasibility of such projects. Myana also explores the future of optical orbital data centers utilizing photonics for efficient matrix multiplication and reduced heat generation. (01:34:29) - Anna Goldie, co-founder and CEO of Ricursive Intelligence, discusses her journey from studying computer science and linguistics at MIT to her work at Google Brain and Anthropic, leading to the founding of Ricursive Intelligence. She highlights the company's mission to revolutionize chip design by using AI to accelerate development timelines, enabling a recursive feedback loop where AI designs better chips, which in turn train more advanced AI. This approach aims to transform chip design from a bottleneck into an accelerant, facilitating the co-evolution of AI and hardware. (01:48:11) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (01:57:40) - Edward Mehr, co-founder and CEO of Machina Labs, discusses the company's innovative approach to manufacturing through their "Robo Craftsman" system—portable robotic units capable of autonomously shaping metal into complex forms, such as drone components, by deforming aluminum sheets. He highlights partnerships with entities like the Department of Defense and Toyota, emphasizing the system's flexibility in producing diverse metal products and its potential to revolutionize manufacturing by enabling rapid, distributed production without the need for large, centralized factories. Mehr also mentions plans for company expansion, including opening a third facility outside California and increasing staff to over 240 employees within two years. (02:06:32) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.comFigma - https://figma.comVanta - https://vanta.comLinear - https://linear.appEight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpnWander - https://wander.com/tbpnPublic - https://public.comAdQuick - https://adquick.comBezel - https://getbezel.com Numeral - https://www.numeralhq.comAttio - https://attio.com/tbpnFin - https://fin.ai/tbpnGraphite - https://graphite.devRestream - https://restream.ioProfound - https://tryprofound.comJulius AI - https://julius.aiturbopuffer - https://turbopuffer.comPolymarket - https://polymarket.com/fal - https://fal.aiPrivy - https://www.privy.ioCognition - https://cognition.aiGemini - https://gemini.google.comFollow TBPN: https://TBPN.comhttps://x.com/tbpnhttps://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

watching tvbd is friday december 19th merry christmas we have maxed out the amount of christmas that is possible in the tbp and ultradome we are of course live from the tvp and ultradome the temple of technology the fortress of finance the capital of capital i don't know if we're going to make it through the show in this I don't know I'm gonna be honest with you up front everyone we appreciate you were very thankful this holiday but this is a lot for three hour broadcast about technology and business and also we have some very serious people coming on the show today Michael Truel the founder of cursor isn't it like a 30 billion dollar

company he's coming on the show feels a little disrespectful they just acquired our sponsor graphite graphite dot it's very exciting honestly it It is a fantastic partnership. It makes a lot of sense. We're going to have both founders on the show, breaking the deal down, giving us an update on cursors business and graphite's business and how they fit together.

The meme is we're generating so much code. What's the bottleneck, John? Reviewing it. Reviewing it. That's right. Graphite. And the other bottleneck, of course, is dealing with your finances. So head over to ramp.com this holiday season.

Time is money. Save both. Easy use corporate cards, bill payment, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. I want to take this off, but also I feel like it looks really good. I'm really into this. My thing is I need to figure out how to get these monitors in my ear. If we play a video, Jordy can't hear it right now. Also, this delicious Diet Coke right here, I can't partake because I have this massive beard.

Your beard looks much wilder than... Well, it's because I have... What's going on with your ear? Because I have hair up here. You see this? Oh, yeah. Oh, you got a hair? Yeah, yeah.

I have a whole wig. Mine's pure beard. His somehow. The dual sand. Anyways, okay, so folks, a lesson this week is that we started Christmas on Monday. We really, we started really strong. We talked about how certain advertisers, including Amazon, got into the holiday season a little too quickly. Yeah.

Little did we know. Little did we know. We maybe did the same thing. We did the exact same thing. But it has been a very fun week, and we're excited to finish strong. It's really, it's really so good. This is, this might be more entertaining than our, uh, than our Halloween episode. Just because there's, like, Halloween, there was nothing else in the Ultradome that was Halloween themed.

It's not like we had pumpkins and like, you know, Ilya, such a cutrema, or anything around us. It was really just us, but the Christmas spirit has been building and building and building. And I honestly have zero regrets. I have zero regrets. It is ridiculous. It's over the top. Just like Julius AI is ridiculous and over the top. As far as AI data analysts go,

Julius is the AI data. It works for you. Join millions who use Julius to connect their data. Ask questions and get insights in seconds. Oh, yeah, we might have to take some of this off. This is... Back to... Anyway, thank you to...

We just wanted to say thank you to everyone for an amazing year. What a while... 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... Santa Harris over me. 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 planned played out way differently. We 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'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. We said, oh, we're gonna do 1,000 guests this year at a certain point. Some guests have come on a lot.

Some guests have come on a lot. We know the record holder for this year. Delian Asperuhov with 18 guest appearances. We've done 1,019 interviews and 8,554 posts on X. So, I mean, just every day, 10 posts, basically, 20 posts, 30 posts, a lot. Joe Wisenthal and Center are tied for number two, both at nine. Wow. That's a lot of their power law here.

Yeah. Well, we can pit them against each other next year and say, you don't want to, do you want to be, do you want to, you should go for number one. I'm surprised Glyman's not up there. I mean, there's been a few times when I just called Glyman. I don't know if that counts because he's not on the lineup. I just call him on the phone. But obviously, thank you to. ramp. You've heard the ad read every day at the top of the show, but this show would not be

possible without ramp. They took a huge gamble on us when the show was really, really small. They said, hey, we're down to sponsor this show for the whole year. And of course, AdQuick and public and Wander and the others that came in incredibly early and allowed us to scale into the production that it is today. Yeah, yeah. So you'll be hearing, of course, from all of our sponsors throughout the show. and we really could not do the show without them. So thank you to all of them. Interesting, the first guest ever was Ryan Peterson.

It took 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. Yeah, so that was a lot of fun.

Gary Tam. hooked us up with the ability to stream from YC Demo Day, the Palace of Party rounds. That was a super, super cool moment. And I just remember getting texts from people when we first went live. So we'd never taken the show on the road. And then Gary said, hey, why don't you go do the show

from YC Demo Day? And we did, we set up our table, the Sports Center, the step and repeat, and we brought this like insane energy. It was a really loud room, which was actually a feature, because we were screaming the whole time. It was crazy. And I got so many text messages, like,

Are you guys live streaming demo day? This is crazy. Yeah, that was our NFL combine. Yep. And of course, Figma was our Super Bowl. Exactly. So we got to go to the New York Stock Exchange for the Figma IPO. And again, you know, huge, huge gamble for Dylan to let us hang out there and talk to everyone there.

We got a, 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 story. Which was crazy, of course. Which was crazy. The stock was up, stock was down. It was a fantastic day. And honestly, if we'd been like, we're all making money, it's, you know, that might have been a different thing. That might have been better.

But it wasn't us. And so we stayed focused on the story. Yeah, it wasn't for, you know, a retail investor that wanted to trade the stock. No. It was for people that had used and loved Figma. And that was the energy that we were feeling of the timeline. Like a lot of people on the timeline were like, I've used Figma when I built my company. I use it every day. I've worked with it. Across multiple jobs, across multiple

companies. Totally, totally. 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 Anon's that have come on has just really allowed us to wind up in a different place. Before we move on, let me tell you about Restream. One live stream, 30 plus destinations. Got to say thanks to them.

The show seriously would not be possible about Restream. If you want to multistream, go to Restream.com. I was looking back at some of the original lob that we got from different people. I remember Bology, texted you super early on and said, great set and production value. Jackson texted one of us the same. Jackson Doll. Jackson Doll very early. And so, so many others.

Yeah. And yeah, we thank, you know, everyone for supporting us early. And I'll certainly, certainly. He helped us throw an after party after the Figma IPO. That was a lot of fun. We, I think, I think it was the first time I met Joe Wisenthal in person at that party. Then we wound up going on his show. He came on our show a ton.

That was a lot of fun. Obviously, thank you to all the sponsors. And also thank you to the media. that makes the show possible with the fact-finding. They do, they find out. Yeah, I think early on people wanted us to have this sort of like, 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 incorporated into the show, and the show wouldn't be possible about that. 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 like a certain flavor of what tech was like at that time and you know 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 We have had a fantastic view with them they've grown Absolute 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, light 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. And we've certainly grown a lot if you look at some of the early shows and how even just the overlay evolved. And it's really been the highlight of my career working with all of you guys. So thank you for being part of this. Should we play that? They made a video.

Yeah, yeah. Let's play it. Let's watch it. We pull it up. We have a little year-in-review video that we're going to watch here on the stream. and 2025 is going to be a fantastic year. The 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, brother.

Like two years. Today is Metacconnect 2020 25. We'd love for you to hit this gone for us. There we go. Congratulations on MetaConnect 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 like one day. And now we're here. So thank you so much for hosting us. You're watching TVPN. We know that. And we have some fantastic news. We have a partnership with the New York Stock Exchange. You're watching TVPN. You're live from GitHub Universe. Let's give it a quick hit for 27%. Strong hit. Great hit. So good to meet you. How you do it? There he is. Welcome to the man. I cannot believe you showed up.

The Halloween episode, the Christmas episode. And the response was like, would you ever spend $250k a car and we took that literally? That's the scoop of the year. Sam Alman 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. dispersed each week and you know and it's awesome you guys X doing what you do and elsewhere so thanks so much thank you to everybody that has made this possible by tuning in joining the show and supporting us however you have so have a wonderful evening and we will see you tomorrow thank you take care good night having the snow effect the whole thing is great the snow effect is not baked into to the underlying video that of course will be shared on on Anyways, thank you, thank you, Ben, in the hole and Nick and Scott and Michael for making that.

You guys are the best. Correction, actually shout out to Jackson who made that video. No way. What? Wow. Legend. Thank you, Jackson. Legend.

Amazing. And Tyler, do you have any news for us? Oh yeah, contract extended. Whoa! Gap year. Gap year extended. He's not going home. He's not going home.

going home for the holidays, but he's coming back to the Ultradown 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. And yeah, we should probably figure out a new title at some point other than intern. Intern doesn't really make sense. It doesn't. It made sense for a minute.

But you're much, you're much more than an intern. your technology brother. So thank you for being a part of this. Thanks for, yeah, thanks for, can we get the giga-chat? Can we get the-ha-chad this band? Can we at least giga-chat this band? Come on, please. And, I mean, we have to thank everyone that actually watched the show.

Everyone in chat, we appreciate you and everyone who, watching the recording. 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 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. Anyway, let's go to the timeline. But first, let me tell you about numeral. Compliance handled. Numeral worries about sales tax and VAT compliance so you can focus on growth. So speaking of Gap semester intern Tyler, Jane Street is putting up trading cards? No, this is not Jane Street.

I think this is... Wait, what's going on here? I think this is this guy, Mason. Okay, he made it for himself. He made it for himself. Oh, but he's going to Jane Street. His account, Mason... Has committed to Jane Street for summer 2026.

Congratulations to Mason. That's an awesome shop, awesome place to go. And what incredible performance, almost 10,000 likes in this Instagram post. But Var absalom here is saying, software engineering, intern, recruiting, slowly turning into college football. It should. It's arguably higher stakes. Nick in the comments, Abizade from Rivet says, they call this the TBPN effect. I just like this.

That's a good one. The deal director, the TBPN effect is escaping. Hey, isn't the deal director in the chat right now? Thank you, Deal Director. It really has. I mean, obviously, we didn't invent the trading card or, like, this format. This has been used by complex, and in many ways you can trace this type of media back to the New York Post or any sort of even TMZ. I remember the first time I made one of these trading cards for, I think it was Will Minitis playing with model boats on the, like the little pond in.

Central Park. I looked up, how does TMZ do it? Okay, let me recreate that basic Photoshop template. Now we've kind of taken it in a different, in a much broader direction. But it's just a fun way to relay information. This format shouldn't be reserved for celebrities and people that throw around balls for a living. Yes, I completely agree. We democratize the trading card this year, and I'm glad we did. Before we move on to the big story, which is that TikTok is absolutely printing, let me tell you about cognition. The team behind the AI software engineer, Devin, crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. So TikTok owner, BiteDance, is on track for 50 billion in profit in 2025.

Big. That's so much money. So this is from Bloomberg. Bite Dance 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 hyper-scaler. They own a ton of different stuff, gaming, social. It's so much more than just TikTok. And that's very, very clear in the financial results.

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. People familiar with the matter said. It's already surpassed its internal target for 2025. That would take the company's earnings close to that of meta platform. So BightDance is now basically the same size as meta. which is insane. Matt is, of course, earning about $60 billion this year.

But TikTok success has come over under scrutiny after the Biden administration led an effort to ban TikTok. Biden is 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. American-made... ...noticed short-form video.

Debates over exactly how that will happen, but Oracle is potentially in the deal. 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, much like the live-stream shopping thing. It feels like it's so, so big over there. I wonder if it's, you know, 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. The same day that Show Chu, the CEO of TikTok, announced he had an agreement, he'd reached an agreement to sell TikTok. TikTok held its first ever Oscar-style red carpet show.

The TikTok Awards in Los Angeles, that sounds fun. It's unclear how much Baitance has increased revenue this year. The company had targeted 20% rise, which would be $186 billion, and that would cap years of 20-plus percent growth for the company founded in 2012 by Zhang He, biting bite dance has created several of China's most popular digital service, Tauchiao, Du Yin, a version of TikTok for the mainland market. It's also vying with incumbents, Alibaba, and Tiber. Yeah, so quick overview of the businesses under the bite dance brand. They have Du Yin, which is the Chinese version of TikTok. It's quite a bit more feature rich.

Text-based, right? Oh, no. So, no, no, it's more feature-rich. So it's like more focused on retail, bigger, bigger live experience. They have like hotels. bookings, movie bookings, things like that. They have Tao Tiao, which is a news, like content aggregator. Yeah, and artifact, which was created by the Instagram founders. They were kind of dipping their toe back into, like, creating a social media. Of course, one of them landed at Anthropic. But Mike Krieger landed at Anthropic.

But that was sort of like maybe if it works over there. Very, very similar. News aggregator could work over here. And they have Xi, Chigua, Shigua, which is like more of like a YouTube style. business. Then they have DuBow, which is apparently China's most popular AI chatbots is something like ChatGBT.

And then they have a bunch of other sort of tertiary businesses, as well as Capcut. If you use Capcut, the mobile editing app, they... I didn't realize I was Bytian's product. Wow. If you want to use the meta version, they have edits, which is pretty good. I've used edits a few times, and it's

pretty full feature, at least. So 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 at Axios. She says that Oracle, Silver Lake, and MGX will collectively own 45% of the U.S. entity. 30% will be held by affiliates of existing Bight Dance investors, and 20% will be retained by Bight Dance. So, bite dance, 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 training? All the questions that are. The U.S. venture, the joint venture, is going to be focused on data protection, algorithm, security, content moderation, and software assurance. Yes, yes. And 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. Let me tell you about Fall, generative media platform for developers, develop and fine-tune models with service GPUs and on-demand clusters. Megan Barowski over at the Wall Street Journal has a scoop that meta is, in fact, developing a new image and video-focused AI model, code name Mango. I like it. Alex 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 got to tell the Wall Street Journal about this. It's too good. It's too good. It's too good. I got to let them know. No, who knows how they got the scoop, but it's a great one. They said the 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 what do you think Tyler I mean I feel like it's very natural to vend this into Instagram yeah 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 yeah Alexander yeah yeah yeah yeah that's just like the product team yeah but they they've done a lot

of work to Marshall compute build huge data centers like they're ready for a big run yeah and they have the data be very good. Yeah, I would expect this to be good. Have you been following those posts that are like we're comparing ChatGBT GT images in Chatjibati versus Nanobanana Pro? And you can sort of tell the difference, but it does feel like it's starting to be a spiky intelligence moment where-

I think Nanobanana is generally better at putting text or like if you want to do with some kind of charts, graphs, and illustrations. Chat-a-B-T images is better for like maybe artsy or And character consistency. So you can tell a whole story across, and chattypD seems better at that. Without further ado. We have some very special guests.

Tell us more about all this. We have Michael Shuell and Merrill from Graphite and Curse. Great to meet you, Michael. Great to see you, Merrill. Good to see you, too. How are you doing? Amazing. It's a fantastic and exciting date for everyone at Graphite.

We're thrilled about today's announcement. and super excited to work with Michael and team. It makes so much sense. And yeah, we're excited to have you guys break it down. So, yeah, when did the conversation start? Yeah, so we started chatting. I guess we've known each other for like six years almost now. We've been, yeah.

Yeah, we've been, we both went to, there's the startup camp program that one of our shared investors did, did like six years ago. We met for the first time. And then our teams have kind of always known each other. There's been a lot of overlap. Cursor was a big user of Graphite, we're big users of Cursor. We started talking back in the summer when we were building, we started thinking about building integrations

with background agents and thinking about how we let our users call background agents from Graphite so you could create review and merge PRs all in one place. And we started chatting with the Cursor team. It quickly became obvious that we shared a lot more than just our biggest investors. We think about the world the same way. We have a super similar vision for where DevTools are going.

Their New York office is literally across the street. I can see their window from right here. So it just made so much sense. Yeah. Yeah, Michael, please. I was just going to say, as we got to talking, like Merrill mentioned, we both think about the future pretty similarly, where we both believe that,

the way people built software over the next five, ten years is going to change radically. A lot of coding, as we know today, will be automated. And we think very similarly about the ways in which code writing will change, but also the ways in which teams collaborating will change. And Graphite has focused really intensely on the team collaboration problem and how you help people review each other's code. We focus really intensely on the single-player experience of how you develop software as an individual programmer.

And so we're excited to kind of marry the two together and pull across. Michael, I would love to get a year in review for cursor or even more broadly just the state of software development. Quantitatively, qualitatively, how can you explain the way writing software changed in 2025? It's changed in a big way. I think at the highest level, agents became useful and professional sales. And that really expanded the demand in the market. And I think we're still early. Like, I think it can be really easy to underrate just how far away coding is from being automated.

And still, building professional software takes so many people over such a long period of time. And there's lots of issues we need to contend with as AI coding becomes deployed more broadly. But it was a big year where you went from being able to just, you know, ask some quick questions to an AI about your code base and how it kind of help you out with the next 30 seconds to five minutes of your work to being able to hand off whole tasks to an AI and have a deal with hand. And Merrill, like the shape of graphite, obviously we know that you're growing quickly. Like how did how did you perceive the changes that happened this year? If you look back on 2025, obviously, you know, this deal is going to be something you remember forever. But more precisely, how do you think that the developer experience changes here? Every time I'd catch up with Merrill, he'd be like, there's a lot of code to review.

So we're busy. And that's Mike. And that's Mike in a big way is Michael's fault. No, that's the funny part about it. I think Cursor has just so dramatically changed the rate at which we can build features. how much code and engineers are able to generate. And what's happened consistently, the bottleneck has now just shifted to the rest of the process,

what we call the outer loop, where now we need tooling to help every team review and validate and merge changes at the rate that you can now generate them with tools like cursor. And that was basically our 20205 has been, how do we both apply AI to this problem? How do we use more traditional or deterministic methods like merge cues and stack PRs and other workflows and tools

to make that process more efficient. But how do we just unblock this bottleneck that is now is kind of like preventing teams from really realizing the true potential of tools like Cursor. And that's been our mission this entire year pretty much. And part of why I think we're so excited for this partnership is that now you can put the surfaces where you write code and where you review and validate and merge it

together and just have that seamlessly integrated. Like, you shouldn't have, you shouldn't have to, like, jump to a different tool for, you know, your editor, for code review, for your PRs, for CI. Like, all this should just be, you know, one nicely integrated surface. And that's kind of always been the dream for graphite in our vision. And I think this, you know, now that can become a reality.

How are you guys thinking about the integration process and how graphite fits into the sort of cursor platform, family. I think a good first step would be like maybe a walkway between the offices in New York. Skyway? A skyway. We've talked about the little string and strings and cups, you know, so you can but yeah, we'll put a zip line over Broadway. Yeah, so that people can commute back and forth. No, I think I think that there's, there's some really obvious low-hanging fruit of things that you'll see us roll out in the coming months together. And then there's a long tail of like even more ambitious ideas that we have that are in the works.

But immediately, like I remember earlier this year, a few of us on the Graphite team were up in Toronto meeting with Toby and some of the Shopify engineering leaders. And they're one of our biggest customers and close partners. And the biggest ask that they had for us was, how do we get context from our IDE or from tooling where we're writing code with AI into pull requests? that be seamless and have the same chat history, have the agent logs and everything show up in the PR and be able to then call out to the agent to fix things again. And we were like, huh, that's an interesting problem. Maybe we should think about working with cursor on this. And I think that's,

that's kind of the most obvious thing that we can do to start with. And then we can build from there on many of the other ways that we can kind of connect all those surfaces together and have the agent be able to help you, you know, all the way through from the moment that you generate the code, to the moment that it's merged in and out to production. Yeah, I'd second that. There are going to be a bunch of opportunities for some quick ways in which we can make the experience of working together in graph fighting cursor better. But then the big thing will be going heads down on a much bigger build together where

we'll have more to share late in 2026. Michael, I'd love to get an update on how you're thinking about just growth opportunities as segmented by sort of like scale of the customer. We've read some, you know, like the AI, like the models are great. The tech is amazing. There's still some odd resistance to adopting AI in certain enterprises. We're not at 100% penetration with these tools. Is there more opportunity in the near term in large enterprises and transforming the way

those businesses work? or is it just the ground game of going, getting every SMB online? How are you thinking about growth in 2026, 27? We've been shocked by the demand across the board. And so on the mid-market and smaller company side of things and the self-serve side of things broadly, there are all these rules of thumb for when the growth of that business tops out

in developer tools or and kind of other comparable markets. And the thing that's just shocked us and shocked all of our investors is that the growth has been compounding really consistently at the same growth rate over the course of many years into the revenue scale that we are now. And that just continues by the beta. So yeah, is that sort of like an IT spend thing where like a small and medium, a small and medium business might just say like, okay, we don't want to spend 10% of revenue on IT spend or technology. And maybe the new paradigm is actually helping with so much growth that they're able to underwrite a larger investment in technology? Is that what you're seeing?

Comes from more people using cursor and people deeper. Yeah. Both are Poo and how much we're writing for people and how much code we're writing for people. And then also the number of people using cursor within companies and across companies, which has consistently been growing. And one big change for us this year is just the upmarket motion has developed faster than almost any upmarket motion has ever, where at this point, 64% of the Fortune 500 pay us in some way. And it's both penetration into digital native companies. So, for instance, NVIDIA's

a big customer wall-to-wall, Adobe, Uber, Salesforce, which I think in a public earnings announcement recently mentioned that they're seeing over 30% productivity increases before in Christmas. And it's also companies that aren't digital native, too. It's a It's shocking how many companies are software companies. And so Starbucks, BWC, Hilton, companies like this are deep customers. Where are both of you seeing any resistance to adopting AI, specifically in software engineering? Are there any, I'm thinking of like the Japanese soldier on the island, you know, that doesn't know the war ended? Are you seeing anybody left on an island?

I think that, well, I think that this is kind of true of how AI tools are bought. probably, but it's really important. I think the way you procure these tools a little bit different, where the difference between having the best product and the third best product from some incumbent that's now six months old is really, really big. And then user behavior needs to change, and the way in which your team works needs to change.

And so you kind of need to teach people in companies how to work differently. And so we've seen a lot of success in not just rolling out the tool, but also teaching folks within companies too. But it's really spanned across all types of development. I think that there's still some languages where there's room for improvement and how much AI can help folks, especially some super legacy languages. But I think where there's resistance, it's mostly a problem of teaching and kind of learning new habits. That makes sense. What kind of advice are you giving somebody that's maybe in high school or college that wants to get into software engineering,

but is concerned about just the overall rate of change and how good the products and models are getting? I think it's actually really exciting time to get into building things on computers. And probably on a relative basis, especially exciting for people who are new and entering the field. Just because, you know, it's just quick for them to pick up new habits. And so I tell them, yeah, to experiment with the tools to try things out broadly. And also, I mean, working on a solo project by yourself is very different from building, like a giant piece of software with hundreds of other people. So getting exposure to like a real professional development environment, too, I think is helpful learning.

Yeah. And it seems more and more obvious that there's just so, so much software that needs to be built. I mean, we've experienced this year where we have built a software tool internally to help. us run and run the entire show. And we are a business that even three years ago, we wouldn't have been hiring a software engineer because we would have either used off-the-shelf SaaS or would have just taken so much resources. It wouldn't have been worth it. So there's just so much to build. Yeah. It's almost trite now, especially in the Bay Area, to say, you know, software's important. And if anything, I feel like it's kind of like reached a point in technological maturity

where you don't even really think of software as technology. Just think of it as like, oh, it's a website that someone builds. But, yeah, I mean, it's shocking how much progress across the world really is just bottleneck by building things on computers. You talk to people in AI research. What's the bottlenecks making them all better? There's a few, but one of the biggest ones is just building better infrastructure and just the speed at which researchers can code.

And it's for another areas, too. For instance, I worked at a biotech company at one point, and one of the big bottlenecks making progress there, was analyzing data and picking the next set of chemicals that people were going to try out. And it was dealing with crappy software from off the shelf vendors or building a whole software team to build it yourself. And so, yeah, I think that it's this amazing lever on productivity in a bunch of different verticals. What are the research paths that excite you the most or that you think might be underrated? Example would be like when we we talked to Shulto during the

Claude 4-5 launch and he was talking about not image processing, not image generation, but image processing. And that's a, and that actually makes a lot of sense because a real software engineer needs to look at the web page that they designed and then, you know, interpret that and understand the code that they write, how it feeds into the result. Are there any areas of research or less obvious, like it's not just a coding model, research paths that you're particularly excited about in 2026? Yeah, I think that the capability gains we've seen in our space have actually, there's been like a lot of details to figure out, but there have been a few really big ideas that

have worked, just like have been levers that people have pulled on continuously. And so pre-training is one that's been talked about a lot, you know, like taking really big models, scaling them up, training them on internet scale data. Another big one that's been really important for our space is curating a set of games for the models to play. So for us, that means collecting a set of, or in our space, it means collecting a set of code bases, writing out tasks, having a set of tests to test if the model collection is solved a task when it writes a PR.

And the big AI companies have done this really well of getting thousands, tens of thousands of really hard games for the model to play, and then teaching the model to play those games. And in turn, the model then gets better at programming. And so I think that there's a bunch more juice to squeeze, both from pre-training and then, you know, RL with this verifiable reward. But I think that there's going to be, you know, some new big ideas that are needed to really get to a place where you can hand off end-to-end most of the professional

development tasks you do in like a real... Does that make you especially excited about some of the Neo Labs that are, I would say, fairly controversial at this point because at one hand it feels like we need new ideas, but on the other hand, it's a lot of money. It's a lot of money. It's a lot of money. It's unclear if you just go and try to compete with. It's always scary when there's a lot of funding, not a lot of revenue. Yeah.

I think Kursa is actually doing a great job at this. It was their own models internally. Yeah, I was about to ask, do you think that you're going to become more of a lab over time? No, I mean, what we want to do is we want to build the best way to code with AI. And so we have, lots of amazing partners that are really excited to continue working with over the course of the next two years that are working on things that look like AGI. We've ever since the start of the company, we've kind of picked our spot where we are going to do our own modeling work. And those

have looked different from the places where the big AI companies, big labs, do their modeling work. And so for instance, all our tap models, like the things that are looking at what you've done in the editor, predicting the next thing you're going to do, those are our own models. we're on like the sixth generation model there. They learn continuously by looking at what people are doing within, for sure, and figuring out how they can get better. And so I am really excited for us to invest a bunch more in research, do lots more ambitious stuff, but it'll kind of be a little bit of a different direction from what some of these labs might do.

And so for instance, we're really excited to build models that are some of the most capable in the world at programming, not the most capable of the most capable of the world. in the world of programming, but are very fast too. And we think that over the course the next couple of years, over the course the next year, agent usage in coding, it's going to kind of bifurcate into it in the loop or completely async. We're in the loop, you're sitting down, you're like working with the agent in a pair programming way.

You want it to be very fast and extremely smart. And then async is going to be, you're talking about colleague. You just hand off something end to end. And you want it to be definitely, definitely, definitely correct. And I think that very soon we would like to play a really big part in making that human in the loop experience. human in the loop experience. Excellent.

And I think that there's a lot of useful modeling work to do there. So very cool. How do you think about the X for Y meme? I feel like cursor's been very successful in that you, there's a certain like right of passage in Silicon Valley where once you become like Uber for X, it's like if you're the Uber, it's a good place to be. And cursor for dogs, cursor for bio, cursor for travel. This has become a meme.

Is there a, where is the line? for what cursor will do and what cursor will not do. So when I talk to the Anderil folks, they'll say, well, the anderil of submarines is Anderol. But if I said the anderol of stoves or the anderle of watches, it's like, okay, I don't even know what that means, that's fine. I'm not gonna build that.

Like, you actually can go build that company. Where's the line of like what cursor will do over time versus what's something that, like, where you might like the cursor for X model, but it's not on your roadmap. Well, we'd like to make it possible for anyone to build anything they'd like on a computer. And another way of putting that is we'd like to automate coding. And half of that's a model problem, half of that's a product problem, and we want to do

important work across. And yeah, so squarely, squarely focused on helping you build things on computers. And that for us, that means an intense focus on engineers. And then increasingly the fold is going to expand too. lots of technically light personas like designers and product people. They also work with cursor too. Sure. And one of the things we're excited about is that that fold can broaden as the product gets better as the technology matures. But I am really excited actually for, quote unquote, cursor for X's to exist in other spaces. And when we started the company, we kind of thought

that like this, the shape of company where you pick an area of knowledge work and you kind of make the cockpit where that knowledge work happens, like the product that people daily drive for that form of knowledge work. You make it, you shape it to where the text's going. You make it great for where AI is. And then you also see where AI is helping people and where it's not helping people. And you use that to make the underlying models better, both by doing a little bit of your own, also by working with partners. That like kind of shape of company, we were really excited about. And I think it's going to exist in all sorts of different areas of knowledge work, whether it be mechanical engineering or writing or, you know, science,

biological science and other places. Yeah. Is graphite the cursor for pull request? Merrill, did you ever think about that positioning? Because I've done, I literally, I think I've done 250 ad reads graphite and I've never said, hey, it's the cursor for poll requests. We said it's code review for the age of AI, of course. But like, did you, do you think that you fit neatly into that,

that framing of the cockpit where the work happens that you improve? Or is there something that's like a different positioning? And I'm wondering how that might change over the next few years. Yeah, I think one of our investors, Gokorodram, has this framework that we reference a lot, where you're either building a dashboard company or a pipes company in V2B. If you're a dashboard company,

you have to be like something where one type of user, like every single day at work they're coming in and doing a certain task, and that's just their home screen. Or you want to be a pipes company where it's like you configure it, you set it and forget it and it just like does throughput and prints money for you. And we're very much, we've always thought about graphite as as a dashboard. We've said we want to be the home screen for developers. We want to be the place where everyone comes in and checks like where are my code changes in flight.

What do I have to do in order to unblock my team and keep everything moving? And I think that's one of the things that's so exciting about this partnership is that now, you know, you really can be the one dashboard for engineering. If you want to write code, if you want to build something, if you want to move your changes through the rest of the process, that can all happen on one nicely integrated surface now and really make that vision of reality. Yeah, that makes sense.

Well, I'm so excited for both teams. I'm incredibly excited for you, Meryl, and the whole team at Graphite as a graphite customer, starting at the age of 25 to a partner. now it's been incredible to see the journey and you guys pairing up just makes so much sense and it's been a massive year for you both I'm sure 2026 will be even bigger and thank you both for for joining to celebrate with us we should we should hit the gong again for you both yeah I think I think this is the gong worthy moment definitely definitely and I'm sure

I'm sure the two of you guys won't have much of a much of a holiday but we hope you can at least a little downtime with friends and family and can't wait for next year. Yeah, we'll talk to you, Sam. Thank you, so much. Thank you, guys. Goodbye. Incredible. What a great partnership.

That feels like such a great, yeah, just a matchmate in heaven. Absolutely. Let's go over to. Dana White and the Meta Board. This is a match made in heaven. Very funny on multiple levels. Let's play this clip while the team is pulling it up. Let me tell you about Adio, the AI Native CRN.

Adio builds scales and grows your company to the next level. Let's go. Never stop clapping. And now AI. Have you got into AI yet? We're dabbling. 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 good. Zucker, who was a brilliant, gangster, this guy. Genser. Calling you a gangster. He's like him a 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. 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. These kids are making that. This is the final leap.

But AI, you know, hear a lot of negativity about AI? Everyone's wondering. There's way more positives about AI than negative. So you start looking at AI, getting into it and asking AI, how do I build my business? How do I, you know, and it'll start giving you some ideas and, uh, hold on. You can, is he saying $65 million is the average salary per year? I think so.

I mean, I think of a salary. I think of a salary as a, that's an annual thing. So 10 times. That's insane. And no one in the chat says meta engineers are the 600 K salary watching this. Just 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 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.

Okay, so when I see this, I just, it's actually a great metaphor. Entrepreneurs can get stuck in a loop of just wanting to meet and talk with people and like 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. And it's like, 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. 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 across business textbooks and blogs and posts and things like that. But in the end, you just still got to go do the work. That's the hard part. Yeah. I mean, I still think there's like, like he is using, he's using a metaphor.

I think he's actually a pretty good communicator here. He's using a metaphor that people understand. It's like mapping technology, Google Maps for business, for answering other questions, unstructured questions. And I can tell you that. And 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? 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. Now it's like, you know, AI, obviously we just talked about this. And so he's right, he's delivering it in like this sort of funny way 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 actually correctly pitching super intelligence, personal super intelligence. And for a lot of people, that's exactly what they want. Now, he doesn't really address the fact that, like, you know, there's incredible competition from Anthropic and Open AI and Google on this front.

But that's not what he's, that's not what he's addressing. He's addressing just the idea of, like, is AI useful? And the guy is, like, we've dabbled with it. We've used it for answering, you know, like doing subtitling, basically. And I think what's under, so meta has what. just sort of pitches like the next level of like what's possible meta has something i think three 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 gbtt has a

big user base yeah jemini 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 MetaAI app, et cetera. 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?

I know. Hot schedules, Shadow Rocket. It seems like- Have you heard of any of these? Procreate. No, because I check the charts a lot. Up Rica, 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, you know, 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 chatypT threads, Google, TikToks, WhatsApp, Instagram, YouTube, Google Maps, Gmail, Google Gemini. And so Ben's point was if you like chat Chibi T, yes, they are the number one app, but they should be scared because Google has one, two, three, four, five in the top 11 or something like that. And so the distribution is just so powerful. Yeah, in the top that 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. Yeah. And on the paid side currently, 21 is Threema, secure messenger. Sounds like an even-sus version. Sounds insecure. Yeah, it 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. That sounds like the I-BIR app. Let's go. It basically is. You shake it and you can play bells, you know, sleigh bells, that kind of thing.

You know, most of those, if they're on the top paid app store charts, they're probably making money. And the software is probably developed in linear. The system for modern software development. linear streamlines work across the entire development cycle from roadmap to release. What does Casey Nystatt have for us? Casey Nystatt 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. I specifically did not clean the place before we scanned it. It works on your phone and on the headset. Let's play this. Can we play this full screen too? That'd be interesting. I want to see the full screen. Have you watched a lot of Casey United States? Have you seen his whole facility? I've watched enough of these videos. It's one of the coolest. It's one of the coolest studio spaces. 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, 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, and it's just, ah, he's just really cool. So yeah, you can go hang out. You have a quest. We've done a demo of this feature,

but we weren't doing, we scanned like a very normal room. Should we, should we give Tyler a challenge to actually get this up and running. Scan the Ultradom? I tried for like, I don't know, maybe two months now. You've been able to do a couple experiences on the MetaQuest, 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 Ultradome. Gigachad Elf is so funny. So yeah, I'm not proposing that you, you look so ridiculous. I'm not proposing that you scan the Ultradome. I'm proposing that you, stop enjoying your jawline.

He's on that wild Roman again. He's on the wild Roman. Lay off, Tyler. But what I'm proposing is that Casey Nynastat shares a link there, horizon.meda.com slash world slash a bunch of numbers. And if you click that in the headset, I believe it takes you to that world. But how long do you think it'll take you

to actually get into the number? that world of that headset wow you're old now i don't like that i don't like this one that's not fun no no no no hey pa i i like it i would like to be still doing this when you look like that yeah i enjoy it um but how long do the sad face do the sad face the sad face is the funniest it's so funny the jaw line is crazy um how oh it looks so real it's so good it looks so real it's so good He really looks so sad. What's wrong, Tyler? Cheer up.

You know what will cheer up? Privy makes it easy to build on crypto rails, securely spin up white label wallet, sign transactions, integrate on chain infrastructure, all through one, simple, API. The economist is saying industrialists now list Gundo, along with Silicon Valley and Tel Aviv, within a triumvirate of the world. West triumvirate.

Triumvirate. Triumvirate. It means three powerful pillars together. That's a new one for me. Learn something new every day. Yeah. We got to get you on the Anki-Mobile flashcards. Little space repetition.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly. Of the West's most important innovation hubs. Yeah. America's fight back against China starts in Los Angeles. It is real. I mean, it hasn't happened overnight, but the progress I think has been

faster and more real than people expected. I think when Augustus was first posting in, what was it, 2023, so the next post, Fast Company did a profile on Augustus, and they actually referenced me, and they said two years ago, in a widely viewed interview with the tech world chronicler, John Coogan, that's me, Dorico was jacked and tanned. Triple glaze, hit that glaze. That's ridiculous.

Triple glaze is insane. A high wattage presence at ease in his role as Gundo's super connector, as Coogan describes him. I did describe him as that. They asked me for comment, and that is a direct quote. I do think he's a super connector. And for a long time, it was like, if you are going to El Segundo, like checking with Augustus, ping him first, he will get you hooked up. Do not step foot in El Segundo without checking in with the Don. Yeah, without bringing, you need to bring a case of White Monster as an offering.

and maybe some nicotine pouches to pay your respect. If you're a venture capitalist, I mean, there was a whole while where it was like VCs from all parts of the world, and then celebrities started being like to figure out. They were taking a pilgrimage. You know, celebrities would go on the pilgrimage. I remember a lot Gil went and then he posted a Zinn can on his... That's right. Yeah, yeah.

He spelled Zinn wrong. I remember that. Oh, yes. Okay. So Augustus was quoting this picture from Error, Erebeus of saying this is what rebuilding a America does you. This is Zane down. Knox medals. We interviewed him on, uh, I mean, this transformation is insane. It's really, this goes incredibly hard. It's really the, uh, the, like, frazzled Wojack who's just like, strung out all black. I have a block of metal from Zane.

Oh, no way. That's from him. Yeah, yeah. He gave me that. That's amazing. That's very cool. Very cool. Yeah. Uh, yeah, he, he sacrifices in an innocent self to rebuild our country. Well, we thank him for it. Forever grateful. But the funny thing about this fast company is that, is that, so, so first they say Dorico, Derrico was jacked and tanned, and then he said, these days, Derrico shuttles between cold warehouses on early morning flights. In more recent interviews, shadows mark his face, and there's a wary fatigue to his posture.

They were just like, I was texting with the guests, and he was like, why do they have to say I fell off? Why do they have to say I lost my pump? But I'm sure he'll be back in the gym anytime. Hey, he never said it was going to be easy. It's bulking season anytime. You're always welcome to it. Bulk back up.

No, I had a great experience making this video. It was very funny. I met Augustus, and he just seemed like an interesting character. So I was making videos about like big, established companies. So I didn't really have a format that worked for like a Seed Stage Founders. with just an idea. He was pre-Teal Fellowship. He really, I don't think he'd raised any money. He was just like somebody who was- But you knew from the beginning that Augustus was a Joe Rogan CEO. 100%. And so I was like, I got to do content with this guy. What can we do? And so I went with Ben

out to the Sultan Sea with Augustus and we drove out there. It was like a two-hour drive to the Sultan Sea, sort of out by thermal actually, a little bit further. And we drove around and we walked around, we filmed like this walk-and-talk interview out in this crazy, like, you know, desert-y sea, because the Salton Sea used to be like a proper ocean-front hangout spot. Then it got overly salinated, and there's dehydration. A lot of the water that flowed in got drained away for farmland. There's some good trade-offs. There's some bad trade-offs.

But his whole thesis was like, hey, we can bring it back with cloud seeding. The bad trade-off is the land just became incredibly toxic. Fallow, yeah, exactly. So you can't grow anything. still a couple people that live out there it's pretty it's a pretty crazy life like it's mostly just like a tourist destination people go see it but it was it was very interesting like like concrete example of like the rainmaker promise and so we did a we did an energy drink tier list which was very fun yeah somebody

sent me that recently yeah oh it's classic apparently Sean in the chat says slab city is out there the slabs unincorporated off-grid alternative lifestyle community consisting largely of snowbirds in the salt and trough area. Huh, interesting. But yeah, we filmed this and I was like, I don't know if this is like a full video, there's not really a full story, this is just like a hangout session,

but then when it became clear that he was, that although he was the CEO of Rainmaker, he was also this Gundo super connector and there was this interesting movement happening in Elsa Gundo. I reframed the video to be about the El Segundo movement broadly and he was like a main character in that story and then that video did very well and then you kind of did that kind of kick off the this the like hype cycle I was a link in the chain I was like I think I was like he

kicked off the hype cycle no I was no no there were a few others just Scott Nolan wrote thank God for El Segundo in pirate wires and there were and there was maybe like one other substack who had written about it and then of course there were a bunch of posts and then I were the founders there that were actually... Of course, and they did the whole thing. And then... I'm going to forget who it was,

but there were a whole bunch of traditional media folks that came in and wrote really interesting profiles and kind of told the story. It was a lot of fun. Anyway, Figma, think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together and get started for Figma. OpenAI has declared code read multiple times, Bloomberg is reporting an executive said this opening eyes declared code red

multi-signs 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 oh yeah we heard it's code red yeah it's code red everyone can put on Santa outfits it's code red time Santa 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 Open Aye. 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 company back. Well, what does what does success look like for a code red? It's a Baja Blast. It's a Baja Blast. Blasting your way to the top of the charts, the top of the benchmarks, the top of the fundraising cycle. So, Rachel Metz over at Bloomberg says, Sam Altman's decision to declare a code red at Open AI 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 leaderships 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. So Mark Chen is on the record here. We do this when we want to have this focusing effort on one particular topic. Mark, 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, we're locking in. It's time for the great lock-in. And if you say Open AI declares it's time for the great lock-in.

That's exciting. Everyone's excited. People are going to rally around them. Everyone is going to go through the roof and just be like, this is so bullish. This is so bullish. It's so bullish because 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 But if you declare it to code red and you're at the top of the top of the top of the app charts

They're like the best right like there on so many things they're at the top of the benchmarks There everything's going very well for this company but when they declare code red and it leaks then it makes you feel like oh Maybe something's not going so well if you declare a great lock-in you're good to go The latest code read came two weeks after Alphabet Incs, Google released a widely praised new AI model that outperformed. Open AI's best software on a number of benchmarks. Open AI Sam Altman called for staffers to redirect internal resources to speed up improvements to chatypt and delay progress on all other efforts such as autonomous AI agents and advertising. So they delayed ads very rough for us as fans of advertising. Speaking of advertising, graphite.dev.

You think we're not going to do an ad for graphite even though we had narrow on the show? No, we still do the ad. We have respect for advertising. Code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. What it means to me, this is from Mark Chan. He says, what it means to me is on chat, on reasoning, on the core chat GPT product. It is this focusing effort to make sure we get the fundamentals right, Chen said.

That includes ensuring the chatbot works quickly and reliably. I think hot take maybe 2026 of the year of speed. Maybe, maybe customers cannot tell the difference between 120 IQ chatbot, 130 IQ chatbot, 140 IQ chat bot. 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 models plateauing on wowing me with, they're already, AGIs here. Like, they're already super geniuses and everything. They already know everything. Well, this, this mirrors what Michael from cursor was saying. He was like, speed, we're focused on speed. Yeah, speed, I think, is going to be really important.

I mean, that's the weird thing about the cursor. And I mean, we learned this from the Chad IDE saga was like, we wouldn't even have the opportunity to put brain rot and gambling in the ID if you weren't waiting around for the ID to respond and actually get back to you. So I think speed in the IDE, speed in the chat bot. seen this, NANABANAA really, really fast, chat GPT images V2, I forget exactly what numbers I think might be 1.5, but the latest iteration that came out this week, much faster, giving people more responsive results, updating them, even just what Deepseek did where

it was showing you the reasoning trace, showing you that the model is thinking. All of these are UI, Ux decisions, and then a lot of engineering, a lot of custom silicon, anything that you can do to bake the model down. into silicon and just get it back to the user faster, that's for sure going to result in, I think, lower churn, I think more surprise and delight moments, just more usage, more willingness to pay. Well, before we move on, let me tell you about Vanta, automate compliance and security, AI that powers everything from evidence collection and continuous monitoring to security reviews

and vendor risk. Max, Zeph, senior writer covering AI at Wired. says in a letter to the White House sent this AM. This was yesterday. OpenAI encourages the federal government to invest in our 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-investor contract with initiatives like OpenAI Stargate to secure dedicated compute for priority public research, i.e. health research, 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 do you think, John? Because obviously, people are going to dunk on this super hard, but there's, you know, people that are just not interested in AI don't think it's important. 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. 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? The real question is like, what is the government doing with the system? super compute because when we talked about the Genesis mission there was a little bit of like

does it go to does it go to academic labs like what is the nature of the supercomputer need in the government there's been there's been a number of like supercomputers built for various scientific projects none of them have had like such economic value you know like the classic example is like the like working on protein folding, working on, you know, deep space exploration, sort of fundamental physics, usually bolted onto like a... The chat says, blah, blah, backstop? You think they're continuing for the backstop? Well, I mean, in some way, I mean, so...

Okay, backstop gave it over? So slightly more critical view... Can we reconsider a bit? Slightly more critical view. Yeah. Open AI and all their messaging says we're compute constrained and we're compute constrained if we brought on 10 times a compute we'd use it in a few weeks we we 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 buy effectively by 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 yeah it's like I mean it In one way you don't necessarily want another buyer of GPU capacity in the market, like just from a supply and demand side, you, you, like if you are trying to buy

data center capacity for your AI lab that's growing, growing, growing, and is truly compute constrained, the last thing you want is someone else being like, I'm also a buyer, and you don't want the government being like I'm also a buyer of compute. You want more supply coming online. So, I mean, if you can ultimately frame this around that,

it makes sense, but I just think I would be going to the government with completely different things. I would be focused entirely on speed of deployment, unblocking anything that's happening at Stargate, because when we talk to Doug O'Loughlin, it feels like AWS is really, really good at bringing compute online. We've seen how good XAI is at it. I'm sure that the folks on the other projects are running into minor little hiccups, whether it's permitting or getting enough energy, Or how is the government dealing with like impacts of water usage and energy usage and even just like the political climate? Like I would I feel like I'd be focusing more on that than actually trying to just bring another buyer into the compute race that doesn't fully fully sit. But yeah, from this letter to the opening I writes opening I sees 2026 as the year of AI and science the moment when AI begins unlocking breakthroughs and scientific discovery just as it sped up software development in 2025.

More than seven and ten Americans 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. Yeah. I want to know more about what are the most exciting science projects that aren't going to happen, like AI for science that aren't going to happen inside industry. because the alpha-fold Nobel Prize is a 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 Open AI 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 laughing. It'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. Well, we are joined by Pranov, who we were supposed to have on the show earlier. We were overbooked.

We're going to talk about space data centers. If we're not, you know, maybe the government should buy some of those. We'll see. We'll find out. Well, Prinov, welcome to the show. Thanks so much for bearing with us while we had to reschedule you. We appreciate you taking the time to chat with us on the last show of the year, Friday, December 19th. Would you mind take this off with a little bit of an introduction on yourself?

And then I'd like to go into the project, and then we can ask some questions about space data centers, which is the topic of Q4 2025. Yeah, well, of course. Well, first of all, I want to say, thank you so much for having me on here. And what a group of handsome young men we have here today. Space data centers.

I mean, you're looking at Tyler here is the youngest and the most handsome, so he's off camera, but he's here. Look at it, look at him, look at our little. Oh, he still has the gigacet chat filter on. That's crazy. It's a little more subtle, but definitely filtered. Definitely still on. Yeah.

Anyway, sorry. You were saying. Space data centers. Yes. Fundamentally, if you're betting against space data centers, you're betting against compute to grow. So we're constrained on Earth by land, water, and power. And our human minds haven't evolved to understand just how much space there is in space.

So as you look at these things like these, you know, Google and Microsoft, for example, have hundreds of millions of dollars of GPUs just like sitting around and collecting dust. And this is like probably surprising to some people not in the energy industry, which is my background. Wait, wait, hold on. So you're saying they have hundreds of millions of dollars of GPUs sitting around because they can't get enough power for them. Yeah.

Wow. Okay. Continue. Yeah. that, right? Like the GPUs might get old and they have to get new GPUs and there's so much risk that a lot of these models haven't factored in and even mine hasn't factored in yet. So there has been a little competition, you know, a little model that came out and making a-

It's the model wars. The space data center model wars. I'm making a pretty big update to my model today and one of my idols is going to share it around and we'll hope that a certain someone gets to see it. take a wild guess on who that is. Yes, yes, yes. You were very prolific with your tagging. It was a good strategy.

Oh, there's a few more points ahead. There's a few more things I want to spice up there, but we'll get to that later. So my background is an energy, and a lot of people, not in energy, probably don't know this, but everybody projects the cost to rise, it only rise, you know?

And as we, like, have more data centers, we've rounded to more constraints with the ground, like, again, land, land, talent, because you need to put talent in all these, like, different places instead of creating these factories and just, like, shooting them up to space, and then power and then water, right? There's only such a limited amount of that that we can have on Earth, and we have so much more ability to do that on space. So if you don't believe that there's going to be, like, an AI revolution, if you don't believe that compute is going to grow exponentially, you don't believe in, like,

I don't, yeah, so I guess part of the debate is, that's important, is I haven't seen anyone that says we will never have large data centers in space or we will never have a lot of compute in space. I feel like the debate has been much more centered around the timeline. Is like, and is it a three to four year thing? Is it a 10 to 20 year thing? You know, what is the timeline? So the timeline, I think Elon had a tweet the other day, which said doing a, like, localized AI inference on the satellites will get them to be the lowest cost way to generate AI bit streams in under three years. And I was working on independently validating that and I'll like send out the model later today. But I think it can be earlier than that. You can actually

like send, you have so much better constraints on space. Like the constraints really ease up on space. part of the energy use in ground is cooling. A huge part of it is like the power. The same solar panel you have on Earth gets so much more utilization in space. So inference, I think inference will be coming on to space very fast, a lot faster than a lot of people think. And then another thing you guys talked about is speed of the models and that models are plateauing and that speed matters.

People really believe in that. Ground data centers, if you're close to ground data center, it would be the fastest. But to the 80% of the world that's like non-the-U.S., not in Northern Virginia, not in like DFW, there is a huge need for the latency there. Yeah, yeah, I like that. Can you talk about heat dissipation and cooling that Brian in the chat's asking? And I feel like that's been a big question again that keeps coming up. Yeah. So there is a huge problem with heat dissipation. That is the constraint that we go against first right and the reason for that is heating and cooling on ground works very different than cooling in space because space is vacuum so in ground you

have like fans and stuff and you have convection so you you have mediums to pass this heat through but in space you don't have that right so you have to do passive cooling and you do that through radiators and these radiators are like these really big and like really complex systems and they there's this thing called Bolton's Law which basically means like the higher temperature you can make something, the better it is at dissipating heat. But there's a limit to how high the temperature you can make the radiators in space. And the reason for that is you don't want to get it too high such that you'll melt the GPUs, right? So the... You want to melt the GPUs with, you know,

image requests. Yeah, yeah. That's what we're hoping for. So, like, the current designs that we have in Starlink's are like solar panels on one side and then radiers on the other side. But there's no reason to believe that like that will be the enduring case. You know, radiers are a hard problem to solve, but like the physics has worked out. It's an engineering, you know, the arcing, like the power electronics, all that kind of stuff that we need to figure out in space. But that's an engineering problem that will definitely be solved. So what we'll see is like these deployable structures, which are like radiators that are like folded inside and then they go out in space and then they like fold out and deploy. And those will be like dedicated radiators and like dedicated solar panels.

Thermal is the biggest constraint, but there's no, no reason at all to believe that it won't be solved. Okay. Walk me through your assumptions around the progress of just getting mass to orbit. I assume that your model, you know, expects Starship to be massively successful and scale very quickly. If progress in space, in the space industry stagnated, essentially we get stuck with Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy or something, that would be pretty bad for the model, is that right? Yeah, that would be bad for the model,

but that's like another thing, you know, let me stoke the Flames of the Model Wars a little bit. Yeah. That's another thing that the other model didn't take into account is these learning rates, right? Like it costs $60,000 a kilogram with the space shuttle, and Falcon got it to like 1,500,

And, you know, if we, like, for example, if we modeled that computers were going to say the same level as they did in 1980, we would have like a hundred million times more. Like, they would be 100 million times more expensive than they are today. And I know someone else, Delian came on the show a little while back, and he talked about how he hasn't seen a compelling argument for data centers in space. I tagged him, I DM'd him. We haven't heard a response yet. I'll send out the model, like the updated model. Oh, you can send him this clip too and we'll see what he says. But so, so I guess, wait, wait, hold on, hold on. So I actually agree with you. I don't believe in stagnation in in mass to orbit.

I do think that Starship, although there have been some, you know, minor setbacks, I think it's going to be a massively successful product. I think it's going to grow exponentially. And I think we're going to be able to put a lot of mass in orbit very quickly, especially if we have something good to put in space like a data center. I'm a believer in that. Now, what I'm interested in is like, what if we are fundamentally in the really, really good timeline, and not only is AI unstagnated and space travel is unstagnated,

but what if nuclear fusion and power generation on Earth is unstagnated, and we see nuclear power become 10 times cheaper? Does that break the model just on a competitive basis? And it's like, it's amazing. We can get to orbit really cheap, but we can also get really, really cheap energy here because all the nuclear folks, who I'm sure you've seen come on the show from time to time, everything that they're doing is working too,

and so energy on Earth is way cheaper than what we thought. Yeah, so we have a mutual friend, Robin Langtree, of Avalanche Fusion. That's right. And I was talking to him, he was helping me out, and this is what I'm modeling right now, which is fusion data centers in space. What?

Wow, okay, let's go. Yeah, because Sam is an investor in Helion, too. And so you can imagine that he's thinking about energy, you know, years and years in advance. Are you considering volcano data centers? Volcanoes. Active volcanoes. Well, that is space, like, that is land constraint.

You know, there's only a limited number of volcanoes, but there's a lot, a lot of space. How are you thinking about, have you tried to more precisely identify what the launch cost would be of like a single satellite that's capable of inferencing a model for use on Earth. I'm trying to, you know, there's new parts, right?

Panels, radiators. Yeah. It's, you know, basically the racks themselves. Yeah. And I feel like that's hard to know exactly, but you can probably just zone in on it. Yeah, 100%. So if you look at the simulator I made

and then you go ahead some years and you can go to the sandbox and change some of the parameters, then you can look at the physics and limits tab and it breaks down the mass per satellite. So it breaks down like the panels, the radiers, all the other components that go into the satellite, and then it breaks down as like a percentage. So you can actually see and visualize like all those components.

Very interesting. What else has to happen? Like how are you thinking about understanding the like 50-50 point? Like me and Jordy were going back on, you know, is it one gigawatt of capacity before 20,000? that I think that would impress both of us. Would that impress you or is that your base case? Take me through some like how you're thinking about the future development of this. I think we're all on the same page that like it's feasible, it's possible.

So the interesting question is how fast can it actually ramp? Because there's certain things like, you know, Starship just has to be reliable and there have to build a lot of them. And there's some like rate limiting factors. factors that might just act as like little natural breaks. I mean, it's at a certain point if like DSMC runs out of capacity, like, okay, you can't get any more chips. There's all sorts of different shortage points, but how are you thinking about the scale and scope of data center of space compute in kind of the medium term? It's hard, it's hard to say medium term. It's like, you know, it's hard to, you see somebody, it's hard to like predict how their next

day will go. But you can predict how their next year will go. Sure. And this is like a longer scale. So it's hard to predict the next few years. But over the next decades, there will be hundreds of gigawatts in space. I am sure of that. And like we will clip this. You will either, you will either, you will either look like the super genius and be immediately hired by Elon or you'll be mocked. But no, no, there's some, there's some middle ground. I guess one one question is who, Yeah, sorry, go go. Go for it.

Oh, for some context, there's like 20, like over 2,000 gigawatts sitting in the interconnection queue right now. And that's like almost two times the entire US grid capacity, like just waiting for paperwork. I mean, the biggest threat to AI is really like a guy named Doug at the county permitting office who hasn't been there in three weeks. And space isn't like constrained in that way. The permitting thing is crazy. I mean, it is much easier to sort of do business in space, it seems like.

How do you predict the market will evolve? Do you think anybody can actually compete with SpaceX here? What do you think about StarCloud? Do you think like CoreWeave is eventually like, okay, I guess we've got to go to space now. It's hard enough in Abilene, but I guess you're going to space. Yeah. So StarCloud, I think they're doing really interesting work, and I'm really interested in seeing what the results of their,

stuff that they're doing right now is. Because if the results are that these chips that they put out in space without rad hard, without a lot of like rad hard measures are functional, then we can get there like a lot sooner than even my projections. Interesting. And then when you

look at, so you said Tesla and Coralweed, so to go on the CoreWeave point, I think just like the way that space and compute has been like what's called calculated and the cost of compute has been calculated, needs a complete overhaul. So like I, so someone else did dollars per watts of power. I did dollars per compute, but I think the best way is dollars per GPU hour

with SLA. So like service level agreements. So a lot of it is just like taking into account the CAPEX or whatever, but it should take into account CAPEX, hardware amortization, replacement rates, maintenance rates, op-x, and all these kinds of factors. So like you can think of power as like, If you're a car factory, power is, you know, how much you expect, like, the car, like, the throughput of steel to be. And then the compute is, like, how much you expect, like, how much cars you expect to come and the cost per that. But what the best measure is, is the lifetime of a car, seeing the optics of that, the maintenance of that, the gas cost of that, over its entire lifetime. Right? And that's the best way to model these things. And I'm going to come out with a white paper about this.

But this is like really important and a lot not enough people are talking about this at all And on Tesla it's it yes, it's really hard to imagine How this might look without huge vertical integration? I'll say that How are you trying to calculate depreciation rates? This is already a debate on planet Earth and I could imagine in a different environment You could have you know maybe be surprised at the downside you know needing to depreciate GPUs faster or who knows, maybe there's some upside to it. So part of it is like Moore's law. So Moore's law is hitting its physical limits right now

in terms of how many transistors you can put on a chip, but there's architecture changes that you can make, that can make it better. But I'll actually throw a curveball at you guys. Something that people haven't been talking about, I think the future is not just AI and orbital data centers. It's optical orbital data centers. It's photonics.

You know? And photonics are like, they're so good in matrix multiplication that's like inherent to their, to what they do. And the space, and like the heating constraint is like way lower by 10 to 20 times because you can think about like these electrons moving in electronics. It's like you're pushing like a heavy box like through like a rough floor and it's like interacting with all the mediums and like causing all this friction and heat. But when you have optical stuff, it's like going through wave guides and it doesn't,

to act with the medium as much. And Photonics, it's very, very early, but this will 100% be the future. So different type of chip. When you say Photonics, you don't mean like optical cables between satellites physically, like the drones in Ukraine that are like physically wired to each other. No, those are great.

Different chip in space, same constellation as Starlink. We might need some financial innovation here if we need a lot of debt to finance these space data centers. If the debt goes bad, maybe we could attach some rocket boosters to it and just blast it out. Yeah, just put it, put it on another plan. Yeah, send it it into the sun. Actually, we'll see, we'll see how. You're like I'm working on putting that in the model. I am going to the sun. I actually am. Yeah, wait, are you really going to build a Dyson sphere model? What it will take? Are you over, are you Dyson sphere before 2100 or after

2100? I, I like to go by the math first. So I'm still trying to get the math and physics right. Okay. But you will definitely know. But gut intuition before or after? Just gut. I'm an optimist, so let's go before. Let's go.

Let's ring the gong. This was super fun. This was super fun. Thanks so much for coming on this show. I got a feeling. I got a feeling you're going to bait the Elon repost. He's going to come for it. I think it's going to come in hot.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, the repost. The quote tweet, interesting. The quote tweet, this is true. Yeah. Or the quote, you're getting a thumbs up any day now. Anyway, super, super fun conversation. Great to meet you. We'll talk to soon.

I'm excited to see more of your work. Thank you so much. Cheers. See you guys. Gemini 3 Pro, Google's most intelligent model yet. State of the art reasoning, next level vibe coding, and deep multimodal understanding. We have our next guest already in the Restream Waiting Room.

We have Anna Goldie from Recursive Intelligence. How are you doing, Anna? Anna, pleasure to you. Welcome to the show. Thank you. We're excited to be here. Thanks so much for hopping on. I'd love to start with a little bit of your background. There's a whole bunch of interesting milestones here.

Would you mind introducing yourself since it's the first time on the show? Yeah, sure. Happy to. I guess we could go way back. I studied computer science and linguistics at MIT, and I did my PhD at Stanford in like Biggs Success. And actually my first job, I worked at Trip

advisor on the China team. So I did my whole fact of development in Chinese. Yeah. Wow. In Chinese. Crazy. That's like it's all start too hard jobs put together now now. We can do this segment in Chinese if you want. I would be lost actually. I took one semester of Chinese and I was terrible at it. I only knew how to ask if you want a coffee. I'm going to test your Chinese because I don't want you to test my Chinese. Wohan Shu Kha. Wohan Shihuan Pizhou. Do you know what that Yeah, you like beer. You really like beer. Nailed it. Yeah, yeah.

That phrase alone, that takes you anywhere. In China. In the world, potentially. So yeah, take me through some of the first interactions with artificial intelligence, AI teams, chip design, any of that. Like, how did you go from, I mean, Trip to TripAdvisor, I don't think they've baked it onto an ASIC yet, maybe in the future, but how? but how did you get in AI? I guess the reason I went into computer science is because I wanted to work on AI.

Like when I was in high school, I had no idea what I wanted to do when I grew up. And then I heard this lunch lecture at MIT about computer systems that could understand and generate human language, like in 2004. And then that's why I went to MIT study computer science. And that's what I've been working for since then. I joined that professor's lab actually at MIT.

Oh, no way. Very cool. Okay. Yeah. That's great. And then yeah, what were you doing right before founding the company? So I guess I can, yeah, I joined Google in 2013, Google research. I was working on like language modeling.

Yeah. And then I joined Google Brain in 2016. I started a team there with Azale Amir Hosseini on like machine learning for systems. Like how can we use AI to design better computers, tips and computer systems? Okay. Because our reasoning was that, you know, chips are the fuel for AI. Yeah. And so if we could use AI to sort of advance.

the state of computing, we could kind of like close this recursive loop. And we did a variety of projects like Alpha Chip there. Fourshertowing the name of the company. I don't know if we want to jump ahead, but take me through the rest of the career. So yeah, we also worked at Anthropics. I was an early employee there. I had the privilege to, like I'm joining like before Chatchee VT and Claude were released even. So I got to work on like RL post training, cogeneration.

It was like an amazing experience. I mean, how is the team thinking about, I mean, how are you at that point in time, pre-ChadGPD, how were you thinking about custom chip development, how important that would be, how important that would become, how much flexibility you would need in the chip architecture to kind of advance the research progress before like actually committing to a particular pathway? I guess like maybe part of some background here is. that it takes two to three years now to design like a chip, like a TPU that's very complex. Yeah. So when you're designing that chip, you kind of have to predict like what AI models or workloads will be prevalent in two to three years. But we can't really do that because the technology is advancing so quickly. So in practice, you're kind of designing chips for current models.

Yeah. And you're leaving a ton of performance on the table. Yeah. Like my team, we ran some experiments where we were designing like hypothetical accelerators for particular machine learning models. And like you could get like almost like a 10x improvement in perfect total cost of ownership by doing even naive customization of the chip with the model and like not even being able to change the model. Is there a little bit of a, is there a little bit of a like shoot for the moon you'll land among the stars effect going on right now? Because I know that there were a number of companies that they did exactly that. They tried to predict, okay, I think that we're going to need a ton of memory directly on the chip for this design or we need to go wafer scale.

or we need to do something else. And they maybe didn't pan out to be the dominant form factor. But then, and at least the narrative has been like, oh, those companies are kind of written off. And then I'll talk to some lab. And they're like, well, we actually found an amazing use for that particular thing. And we bake this model down.

And now we're using a ton of that stuff. And so it feels like these ASICs, like, is the correct framing that it is important to get it right in the real, you want to land on the moon, but there are sometimes our uses for chips that have been designed with, they didn't quite land exactly where the research direction went, but it's still useful in a niche capability. Yeah, I think that there are like landings for some of these specialized vets. Yeah.

I would say that, you know, part of the reason that, you know, we're so excited about this company recursive and like short the timeline is, I think we can enable like many, many more of these got to really land. Yeah. There's a huge state of chips that could exist and maybe should. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's a good place to jump into the current, the current business.

Uh, I'd love for you to introduce it, uh, formally in terms of how, how you're framing the, the, the opportunity. Okay. For the company. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Recursive.

So we're AI for chip design and chip design for AI. Um, I guess we see the company in three phases. Yeah. So I could describe those. Please. Great. So I guess first phase, let's accelerate the chip design process. Let's take the long poles on.

So physical design, for example, designing the layout of the chip, given fixed logic, that can take up to a year for a chip like a TQ and then design verification. So basically verifying that the high level specification is correctly implemented in the RTL code. That's also another long pole. So in this phase, like we can help chip design companies like get to market much faster. maybe it doesn't need to take two to three years. What if you could do it in phase two though, we would like to go end to end.

So given a machine learning model or a set of machine learning models or other workloads, can we design like the computer architecture and design the chip all the way to DDS2, which is a format you've said to TSM for manufacturing. In that case, we could help many more companies design custom chips for their particular workloads. How many, maybe on that point, do you know how many

like customers TSM has today versus how many you think they'll have in the future. This is exactly my question. Like how many, how many custom chips are there? Do we see it 100xing? Yeah. Yeah. Because we really only hear about like three most of the time, like the news headlines are training in you and Nvidia GPUs. But I imagine that there's a ton more now, but it also feels like you're predicting and your company sort of a bet on like a Cambrian explosion. Is that roughly correct? Yeah, that's right. Um, we think that they're, that they're are companies that have workloads that they're serving at massive scale. Like this year, the AI inference market is $100 billion, but it's like rapidly growing.

We think AI is going to be everywhere in embedded devices and also in data centers. And if it didn't take two to three years and if a company didn't need teams of hundreds or thousands of human experts to design their own chips, then we can massively expand the market here. Yeah. I heard an anecdote. I don't remember which company it was, but, But there was a cloud hosting, like a database company that was shifting their database workloads, not AI workloads, database workloads, to GPUs to accelerate them just to speed them up. And so across the stack, every piece of software, there's always an incentive to just push to a more, like, I guess, electricity efficient or just more cost-effective hardware at some point. That's right, because electricity or power consumption dominates the cost of running things on.

on chips. I guess that's why I brought it up earlier that, you know, we had run some just very initial experiments and you really could get way better power efficiency by using custom hardware. Say deep use are amazing, but they're pretty general purpose. They were developed for graphics processing. So it seems very surprising that they would be the best fit for AI models today. And I don't think so if you're a database company or, you know, any piece of software that then is being transformed by AI and then in the future you might be transformed by by custom silicon or custom silicon's in the roadmap and it's maybe getting closer how much does it cost today to develop custom silicon a custom chip work with TSM and then

where do you see that sort of going over the next few years I mean it's extremely expensive to that design a chip both in terms of like leavers of dollars tens of thousands of dollars? Like I have to save up for this for weeks? It's like hundreds of millions, right? Yeah, hundreds of millions. Okay, that's a lot. Yeah, I mean, certainly not something that even a unicorn software company would maybe not

be able to marshal the capital for that just at the drop of a hat, especially there's risk involved, right? Exactly. Also, it's just the timelines here. It's two to three years potentially for a complex chip. And like you have to build out that in-house expertise. Yeah. And there's risk. Like maybe you just won't ever be able to close timing or power and you just can't build the chip. Yeah.

Somewhat random, but I wanted your take on the Reuters reporting how trying to build its Manhattan project to rival the West in AI chips. They allegedly have built some type of EUV prototype. How real is that? I never I never know if it's hard to know what's what's real. What's what's propaganda? or what's actually a scoop? I think I, and although I speak Chinese, I don't have any special insights here into whether that news reporting is true or not. Certainly interesting. Yeah, that's fair. Then take us through the news.

It's a shame you're not a venture capitalist because if you were, you'd give like a very, actually, I know everything about this. But speaking of venture capital, you raised some venture capital. Can you take us through the funding history of the company? what the news is with the most recent round, how it came together. Yeah, I mean, we feel so lucky to be working with a set of investors that we feel like it's really aligned with us on the mission. So we raised $35 million, led by Sequoia. There you go.

And explain Sequoia for... That's great. How do you... How pleased are you with AI progress this year you've been in the industry? and basically seen it all at this point. Did you think we'd be farther along? Do you agree with the conception that we're in an age of research, that there will be sort of a plateauing of the current models,

or maybe more smaller models or more fine-tuned models? Like, how are you seeing just the overall model wars playing out? I guess, actually my co-founder is all you had a very interesting report about the state of models and the niche that there is for small models. small models, I would recommend you guys checking it out. Sounds good. I guess to, from my perspective, I feel like there's these top frontier labs, and then there are these open source, like model labs.

And I feel like the frontier labs, they kind of are all neck in neck. Yeah. I would say, like, Gemini has an edge right now because of this kind of co-optimization of TP with the Gemini model. So they're kind of pushing this credo-optimal curve of like capability versus POS. And I think they have an edge there. But to some extent on the algorithmic side, you know, everyone kind of comes up

with the same ideas roughly around the same time. And maybe to some extent, people talk to each other and there's that part too. Whereas I think that hardware is a real edge here. So I think the labs that have like hardware co-optimized with their models are going to win in the long term. But maybe I'm biased. No, I mean, I mean, otherwise why build the comfort?

I think it's a fantastic thesis. The vertical integration story at Google makes a ton of sense. You worked on the team. You saw it play out. And then you're like, maybe other folks want to do the same thing. I'm going to build a company. It's like the oldest story for why to start a company. It makes a ton of sense.

It seems like a lot of work. So we'll let you get back to it. But thank you so much for coming on the show and hanging out with this and explaining all of this. We'll talk more next year, I'm sure. Have a great, raise you day. Bye. Bye. Bye.

Profound. Get your brand mentioned in chat, GPT. reach millions of consumers who use AI to discover new products and brands. Before we bring in our next guest, let me also tell you about fin.a.I, the number one, AI agent for customer service. Automate the most complex customer service queries on every channel. Peter Thiel is in the news again. People are, you know, trying to storytell around how he's making so much money off of SpaceX. There's there's two competing narratives.

One is that he, when he, you know, was nice to Elon Musk and then was able to invest. Elon said, I was CEO and Peter reported to me, so he couldn't fire me. It was a palace coup by most, not all of the executive, and most of the board who were worried about my decisions. This is about the PayPal coup. He says, I was the largest shareholder in the company. There was nothing anyone could have done to take my shares away from me. Of course, the PayPal, the PayPal coup has. has been written about a bunch. Of course, time heals all wounds. I'm sure there were a lot of

hard feelings at the time. But just continuing to doing business together gets everyone back in the arena once again. But it's not stopping Normies from being driven absolutely insane. According to Young Macro, he says, we really need to bring back Marvel movies or something. The Normies are literally driving themselves insane. And it says Peter Thiel, how Peter Thiel is destroying democracy, the King of America, a 35-minute video essay by Fern, who I believe I've actually met. I don't know. I know some of these video essayists, and honestly, great title, great thumbnail. It's going to get clicks. It has 1.4 million views. But, you know, it's a little bit, a little bit telling the story a little bit too wildly. People are excited. Yeah, it's funny.

We do the red string, you know, bored kind of ironically. Yeah, yeah, yeah, no. But then people, out there on the internet. They're very, very serious about it, drawing connections and spinning, spinning yarn. For sure, for sure. Everyone, there's only so many stories in history. There's the love story, the hero's journey, the Who's My Dad, the Revenge Quest.

And one of the most old, the oldest, most timeless stories that humans tell is who's really in charge? who's really, who does the buck stop with? And everyone wants to know the Illuminati, who's the one person? Who's pulling the strings? Who's really given Donald Trump orders? I want to meet that guy, the guy he reports to. This post, this post is hilarious.

Rob Gianni posted, I'm convinced if men and SF started dressing like Geordie, it would instantly become a more tasteful city. And I looked at this. That's a very nice pose from Ross. Very nice post. Thank you, Rob. But I was looking at this post, I'm wearing a black t-shirt, jeans, and Solomon. I distinctly remember this day.

I forgot my normal. I forgot my normal. I forgot sneakers. I was just wearing my gym shoes. Normally, your head-to-toe Valenciaga. We don't really show that because we normally wear suits. But whenever Jordy's off, Mike, it's head-to-to-betega Veneta. He has the Roman-Weave shirt with a Roman-Weave jacket over it and the Roman-Weave pants.

And then the Roman-Weave shoes. And he also has a little beret that's Roman weave leather. He's wearing all leather or or entirely supreme. He does wear a lot of Supreme. Like I'm not actually kidding about that. It's a lot of Supreme. John is kidding. I don't own any supreme.

But you do, I mean, yes. Okay, I was joking about the Supreme. But it's a lot of Rick Owens. You wear a lot of Rick Owens. A lot of Chrome. A lot of Chrome hearts. The Chrome Hearts does sneak in it from time to time. You admit it.

Admit it. Let's just say that no one is worried that Jordy is down to his last 20K. 100%. No one is worried about that. Because Jordy is rocking the Chrome hearts every once in a while. But Kyle Harrison says, black t-shirt with jeans. Oh, you're sweet. Black T-shirt with jeans?

Hello, Human Resources. 100 likes on this. I like this. Yeah. It is just like a normal outfit. But people liked it. Let's see. Brooks Otterlake says, I like it when my posts are treated by the tech and business world as a barometer of normie opinion.

That's the way it should be. I'm the everyman. Congrats on being the every man. I love being it. Wait, what, I guess we react to one of the strangest marketing videos I've ever seen. Oh, yes, I mean, I don't know. I don't know if that's a normie opinion. I think that's actually a fairly online opinion to to think about the actually analyze the way the video was shot. range marketing video. Yeah. Anyway, Brooks, I like both of these takes. I think these are good takes.

Turbo puffer, serverless vector and full-tech search. Built from first principles on object storage, fast, 10x cheaper, and extremely scalable. Anthropic reveals. This is really good. So yesterday we talked

about the Wall Street Journal letting Anthropic run their snack kitchen. It was going wild. It was buying PS5s for people. It was buying live fish. It was one of the greatest. He's given away everything for free. I want to read the full report.

Join theister and really crushed it. When they said they were making all the snacks free, my first thought was coming from tech. I'm like, what, the snacks weren't free? You were charging in the Wall Street Journal? Oh, that is funny. These hardworking journalists, you're charging them for snacks in the company's snack kitchen.

Yeah, I think so. We know some of the fine folks over there. No boondoggles or no free lunches. There's no such thing as a free snack kitchen. Apparently. No such thing. Anthropics says, and there was still the occasional blunder. One waggish employee asked if Claudius would make a contract to buy a large amount of onions in January for a price locked in now.

The AI was keen until someone pointed out this would fall a foul of the U.S. Onion Futures Act of 1958. Apparently you can't trade Onion Futures. It's hilarious. I wonder if prediction markets will solve that. I wonder if you'll be able to do this. And Joe Eisenthal quotes and says, Anthropic reveals that in one of its experiments, its model was willing to engage in a federal crime. A federal crime. I had no idea about this. Yeah, so in most places, including the U.S., you cannot trade onion futures. Don't do it, folks. Don't even think about it.

In fact, onion futures are one of the, are the only agricultural commodity in the U.S. that is specifically banned from futures trading by federal law. And for good reason, it's so obvious. Everyone understands why onion future is. Yeah, so the Great Onion Scandal of 1955, the reason for this ban is one of the most famous stories in finance history. Yeah. In the mid-1950s, two traders, Samuel Siegel and Vincent Kosuga successfully cornered the onion market on the CME. The scheme, they bought up to 98% of all the onions in Chicago. Absolute dogs. Okay, so they're banning being an absolute dog.

Wow. Yeah. They're making it illegal to have that dog in you. Yeah. You can't even trade onions with your boys anymore. Imagine the boys group chat. Yo, we figured out how to corner the market on onions. So this came to squeeze.

They forced other traders and growers to buy onions from them at inflated prices by threatening to flood the market. Yes. That's crazy. The crash. After selling their physical onions, they took massive short positions, betting the price would go down and then dump their entire inventory. Wow. The result was the price of a 50-pound bag of onions plummeted from $2.75 to just 10 cents. At that point, the mesh bags the onions were in were worth more than the onions themselves.

And so, of course, that created the Onion Futures Act. That's great. And outraged farmers started lobbying Congress leading to the Onion Futures Act, signed by President Eisenhower. It made trading onion futures illegal in the U.S. to prevent similar manipulation. What do you think it is about onions that makes it so that this is doable? Doable? There has to be some sort of like underlying reasons. It is interesting that they didn't just ban all futures on all agricultural products

because if you can do this scheme with onions, you would think that you could do this scheme with avocados or with lettuce or with... Tisancy on the chat. It was a 1950s onion crime ring. Yeah, I have no idea. The onion ring. Maybe it's the structure of the market. like there are there a certain amount of onion growers that's different than in other agricultural products.

I have no idea why onions would be a unique, we need unique regulation. Maybe we should deregulate this thing. Maybe we should rip up the, rip up the laws. Maybe this could be a single issue voter thing. Maybe we can have a presidential candidate where this is their entire platform. They just run on, we're going to make it legal to trade onion futures again. That's the future. What do you think?

You know where you can trade basically everything except for onion futures? Public.com, that's right, investing for those that take it seriously. They got multi-assad investing, trusted by millions. And you know they're not going to mess around with any illegal onion futures over there. They are by the book. Tyler, a good bit, a good bit you could run at one point is just eating an onion like an apple on the show. You should try it sometimes. Have you seen the guy in the plane that does that?

Yes, it's fantastic. Let me tell you about getbezel.com. Shop over 26,500 luxury watches, fully authenticated in-house by Bezels' team of experts. I love that. Fave in. And our next guest is Edmere from Machinnell Labs. This is the co-founder and CEO. Whoa!

Whoa! That is remarkable. That is insane. Did you see Blake's demo a couple weeks ago? I gotta go bigger. I gotta outdo him. This looks fantastic. Introduce yourself.

Explain what we're looking at. Go ahead, Merritt. Welcome to a shop floor. Yeah, no, I definitely had to upstage Blake. Let's go. This is a 240-foot, actually 20-foot containers that can manufacture anything. We call them Robo Craftsman. It's a robotic system that basically manufactured any kind of metal product. We call it Robo Craftsman because you can pick up different tools like a craftsman and do all kinds of parts.

Right now is actually manufacturing a drone. It's a drone skin. So that what you see over there is a metal sheet. It's a 2-millimeter aluminum sheet. aluminum sheet, the robots are actually deforming it into a shape of a drone, which we're going to see a little bit of a complete product, just using kind of the way the potter forms play bowl. Like there are two robots on two sides. We're going to show you to the other side of the south.

Tinching it, deforming it into shape, into complex shape that can be defense products, auto products, all kinds of metal products. This is amazing. How many of these machines do you have? How many parts are you making? Update us on the scale of the business. What are you today? Where are you going?

Yeah, right now we're in our second facility. We have two facilities here in Los Angeles. And Chastew, we're close. So you guys should come for a visit at some point. We'd love to. This is, I assume, the serial number 15 is this one. We're right now working on serial number 18 and 19. So at least 17, 18 of them right now to the state.

Two of them outside of our facilities. The rest are here in our facility. We are right now a series company, right? Actually, we're going to make an announcement about that soon, so we should talk about that. I wonder what that announcement could be. Yeah. And yeah, so, you know, we worked at Department of War with Hourspace Primes. We recently announced a partnership with Toyota on making something that wasn't traditionally even possible in automotive world.

Wow. So we're going to show some of that parts in a bit. But, yeah, no, the company is an exciting place. We're thinking about our third facility outside of California. California. So lots of good stuff. Yeah, yeah, take us through that. There's the partnership with the Strategic Development Fund. How did you meet them?

What's the plan? Walk us through the deal. So we have like a unique approach toward manufacturing, right? You know, with defense, a lot of people are thinking about kind of going back to what it was in 1960s and 1950s. Central's manufacturing plants, they can do a lot of stuff. Our approach is different. We have these systems.

If you go back, these systems are two containers, right? So actually they fold. like a container, into a container, like a transformer, and can be shipped anywhere, right? They open up on any shop floor, and they can basically self-calibrate themselves and start manufacturing. So our approach to defense manufacturing is distributing, right? Not what giant factory, they can make a lot of things, a portable system that can go anywhere, open up, calibrate, and make any types of parts. That's how we got connected to the folks in UAE.

Middle East, obviously very unstable environment, and they're looking in a lot of, of different defense products. So their choices either go to China or manufacture it locally. They are looking at solutions like us to set up a facility that can be brought up in a matter of weeks, not years, right? And you can start making defense articles. Because tomorrow, if you're going to conflict in Middle East or in the Pacific, you know, you cannot manufacture everything in the United States, right? How can we get the help of allies? Let's say, you know, if you're in conflict in Pacific, how can we get a help from Philippines, South Korea, Japan to set up a facility matter two months to start making usvs, UIVs, as opposed to make them in a central location

of shipping it? We talked to a couple folks that have different ways to make parts from additive, subtractive manufacturing. We talked to 3D printing, metal 3D printing companies. How are you thinking about positioning the product as flexible for R&D use cases? You know, you want to do a few small runs, very niche, versus actually scaling up to something like, okay, we're making the shell of a cyber truck. That's obviously stamped. That's a very different requirement when you're talking about tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of a particular shape of metal. How are you managing that transition? I think you want to think about kind of manufacturing in two different paradigms. There is a traditional paradigm. When you have an assembly line, you make the same thing over and over again. And what we're thinking is actually closer

to how data centers operates, right? You have these systems that actually end up becoming pretty cheap, right? We are making these things to become very much commoditize hardware, off-the-shelf hardware, so they can easy to finance. But the way you get throughput out of these is that you replicate them horizontally. You set up a facility that can have 50 to 100 of these

and manufacture in parallel, as opposed to one assembly line that makes the same thing over and over again. In our next facility, we're deploying 50 of these, right? And that allows us to get like, you know, defense articles up to a few things, thousand a year, right? Obviously, not a good fit for making like a million of a same, you know, Toyota Tacoma. But when we were talking about few thousands, which is all aerospace, you know,

all defense, all heavy equipment and machinery, this is a good choice, right? But yes, you want to go to millions of parts a year, then we might want to start thinking about the traditional paradigm. But that's also something that we're actually exploring with Toyota now, because we can combine this paradigm with traditional manufacturing to get the benefits of both, right? So this is actually a door of a, you know, a F-150, and what happened is that you can actually stamp the general shape of the door, right? But then you can customize, in this case, put the LA Dodgers logo on the door so that this door is uniquely kind of designed for the customer.

We're doing this for Toyota right now, right? So this is a topological map of LA that has been formed on top of a, put for a forerunner, right? So this is something a lot of people in the off-forward world care about, right? You know, putting these topological maps. We actually showed this in a show that we did with Toyota Wallabag and Seema in Vegas, that's an aftermarket show.

And then here's an example of something we did with the tailgates. So you can combine the stamping to get a lot of throughput. And then at the end of that line, it goes on our machines and then customize it. So that makes a ton of sense. So, yeah, so is this, how sounds like manufacturers have responded positively to this. The workflow would be a customer goes and specs out a car, and then there's like a personalization feature at the end where they have some other designs that they can imprint it on that they can imprint on to make it.

It's like engraving, but way better and way more complex and way more unique. And so you're going to be able to really roll it out. You could put a gong on the hood of a Ford GT, John. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's exactly what I want, actually. Exactly, exactly. And this is actually, like, you can go beyond just like cosmetic stuff. You can start putting functional because the shape of the hood is not never going to really change, the bulk shape of it. But, you know, from model to model, you start having more features, more little designs in there that you can kind of modify with our technology.

And it only takes few minutes, right? So you get the throughput as well. But speaking of gong, I think we also formed a gong for you guys. No way. No way. in the morning. You just finished it now. No way.

No way. So we're going to do a little, a little hitting up a gong for you guys here. Amazing. A robo form, Doug. That's insane. Wow, wow. This is a moment we've been waiting for.

What a way to cap off the year. Thank you so much. That is insane. Well, congratulations on all the massive progress. Is there anything else you'd like to share? Are you hiring? What's the, anything else that we have? touched on that might be worth mentioning. Yeah, no, we're growing. In the next two years,

you know, we're going to go from 70, 80 people that we are right now to 240, 250 people. Wow. New location in another state. So anybody was excited about manufacturing, about reshoring, helping out allies have distributed manufacturing. We're looking for them. And yeah, now we have exciting announcement in January as well. So stay tuned. We're looking forward to having you back on that. And feel free to feel free to come by in person. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That would have you here for the announcement. Oh, that was great. That's incredible. Well, congrats to the whole team on a crazy year. Seeing it all in real life here is incredible.

Yeah, that's wild. Awesome. Thanks, guys. Awesome. Have a great one. Goodbye. 8Sleep.com. Exceptional sleep without exception. Fall asleep, faster, sleep deeper, and wake up energized. 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. Interesting. Forbes is writing a story here. IHard Media is paying Charlemagne 200. They say, hey, IHard Media, 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.

That's what's going on there, I believe. Very cool. The article in Forbes is called How Charlemagne became a Media God. I love it. Of course, he's Charlemagne the God. He, 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.

Durast at 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's 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 Charlemagne. I think we've got to ring the gong for him. Great stuff.

Great stuff. This Santa Su is falling apart. I'm going to have to take it off at some point. I'm sure you're itching to get out of that and reveal the entire head-toeat-toe supreme outfit that you are wearing underneath. The chrome hearts. The crown hearts. Anyway, wander.com, book of wander with inspiring views, hotel great amenities, dreamy beds,

top tier cleaning and 24-7 concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better. 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 cam.

Okay, watch this. And it's off. That's so crazy. That's insane. Think about that. Look, this is the super, super, super slow-mo view. Super-slimo view. super super duper slow

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 it well I was it was like 20 seconds 20 seconds you were a speed cube wow

nerd alert nerd alert nerd alert nerd alert you 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. Yeah. That is fantastic. Well, you're out of a job because robots can do the Rubik's Cube now in 0.1 seconds. Takes you 20, takes me a minute, takes Jordy an hour. The robot's going to kill us all because it can do it in 0.1 seconds. If your job was doing Rubik's cubes, find another job. You're done.

You're cooked. You're chopped and you're cooked. Yes. Well, Ramp is throwing. funeral for the penny in Washington DC this Saturday and you should go check it out there's a part of full link if you're in Washington DC head on down to the in-ramp we trust funeral for the penny this is how you want to hear something funny this is how I learned that the penny is being retired yeah I this is news to me that

news didn't break through until ramp was throwing a party I'm not kidding about that this is how I learned and actually the guy who's working on this row told me in person, I was like, oh, okay. So the penny's going away. Thank you for the service ramp for telling everyone that the penny's going away. We needed to know. We needed to know. We also need to know about adquick.com, out-of-home, out-of-home advertising made easy and measurable. Plan by measure out-of-home with precision. Did you want to talk about watches, Jordi? I did. I did not know that Osama bin Laden was a Casio guy. A Cassio 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 for Excel. We did a watch drop for Excel.

Remember? They're still floating out there. A lot of people received the briefcase. We did a one-off drop for this nicotine pouch sub-brand. Nicotine pouches. finance bros effectively, a pouch designed to increase shareholder value. We call it Excel nicotine pouches. And in there, we had some products. We had a briefcase with a logo on, a silver briefcase. And we had a big tin. And a lot of people didn't realize that if you opened it up

inside was a custom watch. And more tins. And more tins in there? Oh, maybe. Yeah, yeah. Wasn't, oh, I, I, I think there were six, there were six tins around the outside. And then you Open it up and you got the watch. And there was the briefcase. And there were a few other things that we had prototyped out. But it was like the first drop that we worked on. It inspired more drops. But this is a great drop.

A watch is a great drop. Bill Ackman strikes $2.1 billion deal for insurer in bid to build the modern Berkshire Hathaway. Has anybody bid to build the modern Berkshire Hathaway and come out on scathed. I don't know. The answer would be Apollo, actually. Well, yeah, no, I'm not saying, I'm not saying buying an insurer is a bad strategy. I'm just saying, I don't know that Apollo said, we're building.

This is, this is, this is, this is, this is, this is, this is, I'm, I'm doing Berkshire Hathaway for 20, 25. And, uh, maybe you need a different path, but Bill Ackman's a great investor. He probably knows something, uh, if he's willing to part with 2.1 billion for an insurer. Let's see. What else is in the timeline before we head out? This is interesting. Apparently, there's opportunities.

Mike Lee is saying, would you like to seize cartel assets as a privateer? This is a big opportunity for folks. I would allow the president to issue you a letter of Mark. Time to take these pirates down. We 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. Yes. 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 bringing him in for questioning. What a wild year for Nicholas Maduro.

Anyway, Matthew Zaitland says, The Fog, and he's posting a screenshot of a push notification from the New York Times, which asks the question, where did the sun go? An unrelenting fog has parked in the Central Valley for weeks. Here's when it will finally loosen its grip. The fog. There's a lot of conspiracy theorists.

About fog? Do they think Augustus is responsible? About the great fog. Oh, really? I know the fog had a Twitter account for a while. There was a guy who was posting as if he was the fog. as if he was the fog. Yeah.

Because the fog is very... Did you see this game on record? No. It's a body cam, first person, wait a minute. If we pull this up, I believe I have seen this. Remarkable.

Also, not... 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 it's like you look at that and you're like all 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 a lot less fun like some people do sir certainly some people want mils sims but a lot of people actually do just want fortnight 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. Yeah, I just think it's from the developer standpoint, it's smart as counter positioning when you think of the modern Fortnite. Oh, totally. You've got UAV. You've got crosshairs. You've got drummer boys. Drummer boys.

You've got reindeer. You've got Santa Slides. Unrecores. If anyone has played this game, please drop a review in the chat. I would love to know if it's actually good. Apparently they got funding from Tencent, and it's going into full production. And so this was a little trailer that they put together.

And this might have been rendered out in Unreal Engine, but at like a higher level of fidelity. Maybe they did post-processing. There's a variety of things that you can do. But it is remarkable. I feel like really quickly, I feel like there is a massive opportunity to bake one of these generative AI models

that just does the transformations. You remember we talked to that, AI video company where the founder came on and transformed his image. That was Descartes. And so the founder of Descartes came on the show and live in his webcam was using Gen AI to turn the background in his face into like a wizard's layer, right? Think about how powerful Gen AI would be if it ran at 120 frames per second, 60 frames a second, and its whole goal was just to take Call of Duty and turn it into this level of

fidelity or a little bit higher or something you know really really photo real that level of I mean Nvidia graphics cards already have DLSS dynamic deep learning super sampling which takes a 1080p video game and up resizes it to 4k and it's trained it's beautiful you have all the training data because you can just run the game in 4k run it in 720p and then just design the algorithm that just matched the two the two together so it's like super easy it's not some like unbounded AI problem. And so I'm very interested in when Nvidia, maybe Nvidia does it, maybe the PlayStation 5 does it, maybe some gaming company does it, but they say, hey, our game is running

in Unreal Engine at 720P and it looks like Roblox under the hood, but you turn this switch on and you're playing something that looks like this. That seems like a really interesting opportunity to me. Anyway, sorry, we can move on to whatever you like. Dave says Call of Duty is headed towards Fortnite and these games never rip. It's really just Unreal Engine Marketing. Yeah, yeah. It seems like it's very hard to get this across the finish line, get this out into the world. Meanwhile, back to more important things, including software as a service. Christina, the CEO, COO over at Linear says someone asked me what good back channeling looks like. And I personally thought this was a good phrasing.

When Dylan Field interviewed Christina, he said, I've talked to people you've worked with and heard your intense. Christina says that opened up a real conversation about what they likely meant. when that intensity shows up and how I think about it myself, very, yeah, just kind of a good framework to like kick off a conversation and not kind of dance around like, you know, not dance around the back channeling and just be super direct and actually start a conversation around it. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Oh, we have to do this story, but it's really late. We can't go into it. But we actually talked about this because we saw this guy's L.A.'s richest man He went from billions to bust because of global crossing. We talked about this because his house hit the mansion section. Well, the Wall Street Journal has a fantastic deep dive on his career and life, and we will have to go through it at some point in time. Jira Tickets was reacting to Open AI 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. That's good. can't wait to see the next number. I love the number business. That's really true. Good bit. I guess I guess reality. Reality is all life is a number business. Yeah. It's all about just make it, make it go up forever. This is a good way to, I would say, wrap the year. This might be the post of the year.

Shrek hits the timeline to say some important words. Check yourself before you shrek yourself. You were just laughing about, you were just laughing yourself before the show and I asked you, what were you reading? Well, Shrek said, check yourself before you shrek yourself. That's fantastic. Well, it's been a fantastic year, everyone. Thank you so much for all the support. Thank you for watching at TBPN 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 be back on, I believe, January 4th. the first Monday of the new year, maybe fifth. Fifth. And so in the meantime, leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, if you haven't. And we will see you in 2026. I can't believe, I can't believe this is the last show of the year. What a year. Wow. Thank you, everyone. Totally surreal. Surreal. And it's an honor. It's an honor to build this show with the team

with all of you in the audience. Gabe says one last gong. 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. And we will see you in 2026. We love you. Goodbye. Have a fantastic New Year's and all those holidays. Goodbye. Enjoy.

Merry Christmas.