The End of TikTok, CCP Spies, Audience Ad Reads, Work Life Balance
Watch out.
Speaker 2:George, we're live. Welcome to Technology Brothers, the most profitable podcast in the world. Today that was awkward. Today, we are talking about probably we can get that edited. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Edit that out. Today, we are talking about a sternly worded letter that was sent from Elizabeth Warren to none other than Sam Altman. It came on a beautiful, beautiful stationary, from the United States Senate in Washington, DC.
Speaker 2:This broke, just today, January 17th, addressed to Sam Altman. And it reads the following. Dear mister Altman, in the 2 months since the election, big tech companies, including OpenAI, have made $1,000,000 gifts to president-elect Donald Trump's inaugural fund in what appears to be an effort to influence and sway the actions and policies of the incoming administration. Specifically, on December 13, 2024, reporting confirmed your intention to personally donate $1,000,000 to the inaugural fund. So what's weird about this is that there's making it out to be like, oh, $1,000,000 is so much, but, like, that's not even enough to buy a single Koenigsegg.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And yet it's like, oh, a $1,000,000. It's like
Speaker 1:And Sam That's it. Sam wouldn't drive Sam wouldn't daily a car for less than $1,000,000.
Speaker 2:No way.
Speaker 1:So think about however much your daily driver costs. That's the kind of political donation that we're talking about.
Speaker 2:Is the change that you find in the seats of the Koenigsegg. Yeah. This is not this is not real real sway.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So what's what's what's insane about what's insane about this is, I mean, Elizabeth Warren always, from my experience, likes to likes to kinda play dumb. Yeah. Right? Like, she's clearly an intelligent woman.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And she's clearly very shrewd politically. And she likes to come out and make these, like, very, emotional sort of, statements and demands while clearly just ignoring all the facts. And so the facts, you know, the reality is, why do people make political donations? Yeah. It is to influence politicians.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Right. Like, why it's not just out of, nobody, you know, people, don't don't make $1,000,000 donations to, you know, just just purely for fun. Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah. For sure. It's interesting because it's it's like this is this is breaking news because it's targeting OpenAI and Sam Altman and AI is this huge topic and jobs And
Speaker 1:it's interesting, like, how quickly the the Dems have turned on Altman, who I believe was historically generally pro.
Speaker 2:He was he almost ran for governor of California as democrat. I I know he's donated before. And, yeah, this is just, like, part of, like, the vibe shift that this time around in Trump 2 point o, people are much less sounding the alarm bells around. Like, this is, like, the worst thing ever. And so, it actually goes into this in the letter.
Speaker 2:Big tech companies have come under increased scrutiny from federal regulators for antitrust violations, violations of privacy, and harms to workers, which is gonna competition.
Speaker 1:Which is gonna go out the window to some degree. Like, with
Speaker 2:the antitrust?
Speaker 1:Yeah. The antitrust. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And so, yeah, if you're pro antitrust, I guess you're upset that big tech is cozying up to the new Trump administration. Although some of the Trump appointees have been somewhat pro antitrust in the sense that, if their constituents are, you know, like, small business owners
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:They might actually want to bring that company.
Speaker 1:That Japanese steel company from acquiring.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That. And then, so, yeah, antitrust is a is a lever is, like, a hammer that can be used in multiple ways.
Speaker 2:And what's interesting is that back when the antitrust against big tech started and there was a push against Google and then Amazon very early on, Elizabeth Warren was one of the most outspoken voices, but Josh Hawley was also one of the most outspoken voices. And it was this weird moment where
Speaker 1:Josh Hawley explain you Josh Hawley.
Speaker 2:Josh Hawley is a, I believe, a senator. Might be a congressman. I'm pretty sure he's a senator, and he, is a is a Republican and was, like, loosely in the teal universe through JD. It was kind of like people were thinking that, like, there might be, like, a tech squad, like, Rashida Tlaib and AOC, and Ilhan Omar. There might be that.
Speaker 2:If if if they got JD and, and, who else? Arizona guy. Lake Masters. Lake Masters. Yep.
Speaker 2:And also Josh Hawley in. You'd have, like, a you have a little bit of, like, strength in numbers because those 3 guys collectively have the same sort of philosophy around tech, but not
Speaker 1:The same puppet master.
Speaker 2:But but but but but and and and they they could kind of break from the mainstream Yeah. Ideology of the Republican Party. And so, Elizabeth Warren goes on to say, we are concerned that your company and other big tech donors are using your massive contributions, again, not that massive, to the inaugural fund to cozy up to the incoming administration in an effort to avoid scrutiny, limit regulation, and buy favor. You have a clear and direct interest in obtaining favors from the incoming administration. Your company and mother many other big tech company donors are already subject to ongoing federal investigations and regulatory actions.
Speaker 2:For example, Amazon, which donated $1,000,000 to Trump's inaugural fund, is the subject of multiple ongoing regulatory actions, including multiple FTC suits related to anti consumer and anti competitive practices, a DOJ investigation into fraudulent schemes to obtain credit, and over 300 Open National Labor Relations Board NLRB cases alleging unfair labor practices. Apple CEO Tim Cook donated $1,000,000 to Trump's fund while Apple is the subject of a DOJ antitrust suit as well as 20 NLRB cases. Google, which donated 1,000,000, was found by federal court to have an illegal monopoly over the online search market. Meta donated a $1,000,000 and is the subject of an ongoing, CFBPB into the improper use of financial data and an FTC antitrust suit for monopolistic practices. But now, Microsoft donated a million and is subject to multiple open
Speaker 1:Now they're showing the funny thing here is that Elizabeth Warren has, like, taken more money from, like, big finance than, like, any politician in history. Like, she is truly the most toxic Yeah. Politician of all time. And, we don't we don't talk
Speaker 2:about politics
Speaker 1:or ever. Ever. Yeah. But if but if I were to to, you know, sort of, extrapolate on Elizabeth Warren, I wouldn't have a lot of, my mother once told me, if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all. And I don't have a single word.
Speaker 2:Oh, no. This is funny because it's, like, listing off, like, you know, every big tech company donated, and every big tech company is, like, under, significant pressure from the government. But there's a flip that you could flip this around and be like it'd be like, well, we're suing every single tech company. Like, why aren't they donating to us? Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's like it's a Yeah. Maybe maybe Maybe
Speaker 1:they're they're kind of
Speaker 2:It's not like it's not like all these donations were made, and then all the lawsuits started. Yeah. It's like, clearly, the company was like, well, we had to spend $500,000,000 on legal bills last year.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Like, maybe we
Speaker 1:should spend 1,000,000.
Speaker 2:Maybe we should spend 1,000,000.
Speaker 1:Crazy because Elizabeth Warren's Robinhood fluctuates 1,000,000 of dollars every hour with with the with the the, you know, she's she's, you know, prominent, investor herself. And so is that true at all?
Speaker 2:I thought it was all Nancy Pelosi was the
Speaker 1:the the the the I think I think they track. I think they track.
Speaker 2:Warren's doing well too? Okay. Well, she closed out the letter saying
Speaker 1:By any by like, to be clear Yeah. She it's it's just so disingenuous to come after somebody for making political donations when she has been the beneficiary of big business for her entire career.
Speaker 2:Yep. It is critical that federal regulators continue to evenly handed even handedly apply competition, consumer protection, anti discrimination laws, and any other rule of law that applies to your company, but the industry's efforts suggest that big tech companies are trying to curry favor and skirt the rules. This would be good for billionaire tech executives, but it is bad for America. If left unchecked, big tech monopolies will threaten consumers' rights, run rush hour over workers, and squash competition while stifling innovation. These donations raise the question about corruption and the influence of corporate money on the Trump administration and Congress, and the public deserve answers.
Speaker 2:Therefore, we ask that you provide responses by January 31, 2025. And the question here is when did, when and under what circumstances did your company decide to make these contributions to the Trump inaugural fund? And there's a couple other questions, but, very interesting. I think, there I mean, obviously, like, you know, we're we're we're we're joking around, but there is something to you know, antitrust laws exist for a reason. The true extracted monopolies do destroy shareholder value and economic value, and there are good reasons for many of the laws that are in place.
Speaker 2:The question is just like, is this a has this been, like, a pattern of abuse? The the the the the toughest thing about the tech monopolies is that, you can look at a, you know, the Google search monopoly, which is very clearly true. But previously, like, the the the Sherman Antitrust Act was defined as consumer harm. Yeah. So it needs to be 2 steps.
Speaker 2:1, you have a monopoly, which can be quantitatively measured by the, HHI. Are you familiar with this? The, Hirschman Hirschfeld index, something like that. The HHI is a mathematical calculation for, economic concentration in a particular industry. So Yeah.
Speaker 2:You basically take the the market size and you and you of each company, you square them Yeah. Or some something like that. And so you get, so with with search market, it's extremely high because Google has, like, 90%. It's very obvious. But that's not enough to just say, hey.
Speaker 2:There's only one company in there. We gotta break them into 2 because sometimes a certain industry just might only have 1 player. Yeah. The question is, are they abusing that monopoly power to raise prices on customers? Yeah.
Speaker 1:And with Google, it's hard to argue because you Free product. Free product. You can get a lot of value Yep. From the Google ecosystem.
Speaker 2:And then on the back end, the the real customer where they get the money from are the ads buyers.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And, of course, ads buyers can move to other platforms. They can Yeah. Easily move over So maybe
Speaker 1:so I looked it up.
Speaker 2:And it's an auction. Yeah. So so so they're very it's very hard for Google to to supply demand. Yeah. To to to artificially raise prices of their ads.
Speaker 1:So I so I looked it up, and and here's the thing. So I figured it out. So so Elizabeth the data. I looked at the so we looked at the data. We're be we've been preparing a TED Talk, by looking at the data.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So I looked at the data. Elizabeth Warren loves mutual funds. She's, you know, an active investor in in some of these funds. And I think some of the frustration from this letter might actually be that through all those funds, she's in you know, she herself has a lot of her net worth in some of these big tech companies, and she might be angry as a indirect shareholder that that money is being spent on her political opponents when it could be profit for her.
Speaker 1:Right? So she's like, maybe it's more of, like, this long con of if you keep that money in the business, distribute it out, do some buybacks, my assets are gonna go up. Because she's a she's a centi centi millionaire. Really? Yeah.
Speaker 1:They've they've No way. Yeah. They not Senti. Sorry. So she she has some some somewhere between she has 10 plus $1,000,000 of, like, known assets.
Speaker 1:Sure she's taking some, you know, hush. We're just like I I I just feel I just feel like, she's trying to slander tech. I'm gonna slander her.
Speaker 2:Let her rip her up.
Speaker 1:Let her rip her up.
Speaker 2:Let her rip her up. Let her rip her up. Let her rip her up. No. But I think
Speaker 1:it was I think it's just this frustration of saying, you know, her being like, I want that to be I want that money to be going to buybacks Yep. To help my bags instead of helping my political opponents.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And she feels some sort of entitlement to some of that. You know?
Speaker 2:Well, it it is funny because, like, you you look at the antitrust stuff against Google, and one of the first person one of the first people to kind of, like, argue that, Google had become this, like, lethargic monopoly was Peter Thiel, of course. Yeah. With this idea that, he did that famous debate between him and Eric Schmidt, talking about Google has something it was, like, 50,000,000,000 at the time. Now it's, like, maybe a 150,000,000,000 of cash reserves. And they have all this money, and they don't innovate, and they don't actually deploy it.
Speaker 2:And it and it's a testament that they're out of ideas. Yeah. They don't have a place to go sink that way to get a return. And and so even though and this was, like, all stagnation theory just arguing that, you know, you need to look no further than Google without best engineers, the the the the most agentic founders at the helm. Like, you have this in credit.
Speaker 1:Google could have done Starlink.
Speaker 2:They could have done so many different things.
Speaker 1:They could have done so many
Speaker 2:different things. And and they had all the resources, and they couldn't justify any of those investments.
Speaker 1:Yeah. The one the one thing that's interesting with with Warren is when you look at a lot of these senators and politicians that are just really annoying, right, like the sort of boomer generation, they clearly need to move on. They're sort of holding progress back in a bunch of different ways. The the unfortunate thing is Elizabeth Warren is quite quite annoying to me is, but good for her is she has, like, a lot of vigor. Like, she seems a lot healthier than sort of some of these other even on the Republican side, these guys that are just like, what's the guy's name who's constantly just like,
Speaker 2:Mitch McConnell.
Speaker 1:Mitch McConnell. Poor guy. Like, he clearly like, his staff is just sort of, like, shepherding him around. Like, he should be in a, you know, retirement home. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Just sort of, like, MPC ing out on, you know, interview, like, on national television just being like
Speaker 2:Yeah. I would I mean, I would you you look back to the founding fathers and you read their ages, and it's like, oh, yeah. They had, like, a cracked 18 year old rating. Like, the the constitution for them, like with the quills. Like, the oldest dudes is, like, oh, yeah.
Speaker 2:They're, like, 28 year old guy working on this. Yeah. It would be so
Speaker 1:All we want is to average out.
Speaker 2:You're so amazed when we flip it. Instead of 35 plus, it's 35 or under.
Speaker 1:And we had Vivek, so Vivek has been silent. Vivek has been put. Vivek maybe Vivek is prepping for the cage. Maybe he's, like, he wants to go founder mode again. He's, like, politics, I've had enough.
Speaker 1:I wanna show all these jocks, like, how to how to build a $1,000,000,000 of enterprise value in 90 days at PMF or die.
Speaker 2:I really just want a a president who's, you know, 19 years old, chugs Red Bulls and Celsius all night, and he's just like, yeah.
Speaker 1:Well, isn't there a middle isn't there a minimum? 30
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. 30 35 is the minimum age.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:But I think it should be the maximum age. We need gamer president, somebody who's gonna just grind with the boys.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We need we need a president here sort it out. Who insists that the White House press secretary does the the brain rot. Like, what is it called? What what are those BBC.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What are the videos called? Where, like, they have like, we need the Subway Surfers. The Subway Surfers videos where it's like the the person talking and then some, like, car, like, racing. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I would just love I would just love a vigorous president. Someone who can who can get out and play.
Speaker 1:I want the I want
Speaker 2:solve it.
Speaker 1:I want the night. Yeah. The the press secretary is is doing the, like, TikTok streaming, like, you know, midway. They're like, alright. So, you know, the president has made it clear that, you know, and they're like, ice cream.
Speaker 1:So good. Excuse me.
Speaker 2:It's great. Well, let's move on to our our real top story today. TikTok.
Speaker 1:Before we jump, we're gonna talk about TikTok today, but, I'd like to help our audience get a little bit more empathy with this story. And so I'd like to, just teach them a quick word of of of of Mandarin that they can use throughout their day, which is which means beer. So if you want to if you're trying to find common ground, between, you know, you and somebody, I doubt any of our listeners are on Red Note. But if you go on Red Note, just comment on a bunch of posts, which means I really enjoy beer, and that will find, like, sort of some common ground. Because, again, the the Chinese people are not the enemy.
Speaker 1:It's the CCP Exactly. The enemy. So Exactly. It's important to, you know, clarify that.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So, let's start with just setting the the table a little bit with this article from The Information, kinda giving an overview of the current status. So, TikTok prepares for an immediate shutoff of in the US on Sunday. So they're gonna shut down the app. TikTok plans to shut off shut off its app for US users on Sunday, a the day federal law will ban the app unless the Supreme Court intervenes to block the ban.
Speaker 2:And we have an update there. The Supreme Court ruled, unanimously to uphold the ban. So I think we need 9 9 sized dong bangs for 9 Supreme Court justices. Sounds great.
Speaker 1:Set 9?
Speaker 2:It's close enough.
Speaker 1:Close enough. Well Bravo to the Supreme Court. That's, they they do get it right over there.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But should we take a moment of silence for the the bank shareholders? The Jeff Susquehanna Okay. And Jeff Yell.
Speaker 1:Okay. Who what what ad should we run?
Speaker 2:Bose again. Again, moment of silence for everyone who lost money on TikTok.
Speaker 1:This moment of silence is brought to you by David Protein, the highest concentration of protein per calorie of any bar in the market.
Speaker 2:K. Back to the show. So under the plan, people attempting to open the TikTok app will instead see a pop up message directing them to a website with information about the ban, one of the people said. TikTok plans to give users the option to download all their data so they can take a record of their personal information with them. Under a law passed last year, TikTok will be banned on January 19th in the United States unless it has cut ties with its Chinese parent, ByteDance.
Speaker 2:So that was the sale, proposal. TikTok has appealed to the Supreme Court to overturn the law on First Amendment grounds and is awaiting a decision, but questions from Supreme Court justices at oral arguments of the case last Friday suggested the court would likely uphold the law, which they did. The law doesn't require tick TikTok to turn off the app. Instead, the law requires App Store operators like Apple and Google to stop making TikTok available for downloads. It also requires Oracle, TikTok's cloud provider, to stop hosting the app's US data, user data, then that's Project Texas, which we'll talk about later.
Speaker 2:The app had expected had been expected to continue operating past the band date for people who already had downloaded it. Because if you already downloaded it, you don't need it from the store until software updates by Apple or Google start to cause problems. In that scenario, the immediate impact of the ban would be limited to preventing new users from downloading the app. Proactively turning off the app, though, in contrast ensures that all of TikTok's users will be affected immediately. TikTok plans to help explain comments by a lawyer representing TikTok, Noel Francisco, at the Supreme Court hearing on Friday when he said the app would go dark if the court didn't intervene.
Speaker 2:In an email to TikTok employees reported by The Verge, the company said it was planning for various scenarios. Your employment pay and benefits are secure, and our offices will remain open even if the situation hasn't resolved before the January 19th deadline. As the date of the ban approaches, speculation is increasing on health.
Speaker 1:TCP is so generous.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:I'm glad that they care about their employees even in the midst of all this turmoil.
Speaker 2:It's great. What adds to the uncertainty is that Donald Trump will be inaugurated for his 2nd term as president on Monday, a day after the ban is due to go into effect. Trump said that he opposes a ban partly because he doesn't want to see a strengthening of Instagram owner meta platforms. He may be more inclined than the current administration to take action to help restore TikTok if users start to complain. And and Trump has also actually done quite well on TikTok.
Speaker 2:And, and then also, Jeff Yass from Susquehanna was a big Trump donor early on, and so there were a lot of questions about where Trump would land on a TikTok ban. But, we
Speaker 1:we we talked to Josh Before we before we, like, I guess, go into the rest because there's gonna be Sure. We'll give some backstory on TikTok, but, we're also gonna be dunking on TikTok quite a lot. But we're not heartless. There are are gonna be people that are affected by this. I there there's the Zoomers, obviously, who are just, you know, wildly addicted to the app, and their argument is that TikTok is better in many ways than reels still.
Speaker 1:Like, it has better search. They say it has better discoverability. There are also businesses that run their businesses on TikTok. Yeah. And for those people, I basically think at this point, they've had, like, a year pass of warning that, like, this is, like, going away shaky ground and could go away and so I think for those people, the people running like TikTok shop agencies are gonna not, you know, they're gonna be like bummed out, but again they can just pivot to focusing on these other
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Channels. I do think it was it was great for commercial activity, probably better than some of these other platforms.
Speaker 2:Yeah. They did have a lot of And then technical innovations. Most of them have been ported over already. Like, I think even, on on YouTube, you can have pinned products, but it's usually just for merch. It was usually like a Teespring, like a shirt integration.
Speaker 2:But now you can actually pull in products from any Shopify store because they deepen that integration, and I'm sure Meta will do the same. Yeah. So
Speaker 1:And then the and then the actual, like What makes creators that have built million plus, you know, anywhere from, the that sucks for me. Yeah. Like, getting it taken away. Yep. But I think that the, if you were taking content creation as a, you know, profession, you should understand that you need to be everywhere.
Speaker 1:Yep. You can't be reliant on a single platform. If x was getting banned right now, we would be, we would be in shambles. The lights would all be off. We'd be drinking.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We'd probably just be like, yeah, try. So so I do understand why people are, like, almost traumatized by this whole thing, but I but it's still necessary. Yeah. It's like it's it feels like telling, like, your kid who's having a tantrum, like, it's gonna be, like, you know, they're they're they're you know, anybody who has, like, a 2 year old understands, like, a kid can have a tantrum, but then time just passes and they they, like, bounce back.
Speaker 2:I do have a little bit of a promoted post calls to action. If you have created on TikTok, if you've solved the algorithm, if you've gone mega viral, if you're a TikTok editor, TikTok creator, and you're looking for your next thing, please contact us. We're trying to do more on YouTube Shorts and more on Instagram Reels, And so we'd love to talk to you about helping us on content strategy, editing, promotion, anything that we can do to get the show more viral and do more clips. We do a lot of horizontal clips on x right now, but we definitely wanna get on the vertical clips as well. We have some ideas that we're testing out, but, the more support we have, the better.
Speaker 2:So, with that, we we we wanted to give you the full history of TikTok, go through the the story. It's over a decade old at this point, almost. I guess, 2015 musically, started. So let's go through, the history of TikTok, and then we'll break down some of the analysis about what's going on in the band.
Speaker 1:And it's, I mean, there's so much good stuff here. I'll I'll hold this joke for a second because, it's it's you know, you'll you'll see it in a second. So why don't you start with
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:First the first bullet point that we have. Alex Zhu. 2012. 2012. Over a decade ago.
Speaker 2:He was working as a UI designer at SAP.
Speaker 1:And you know why I like this? What? It's because SAP is our sworn enemy Oh, really? As as smart business owners that run on ramp. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Many many of these big companies, you know, have these complex integrations on SAP. They're wasting, you know, quite a lot of time and and, you know, you know, really sort of, ruining the lives of their employees by forcing them to use this sort of legacy software instead of a It's kind
Speaker 2:of a Jacob's gun situation.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It makes sense that it makes sense that, TikTok, which is, you know, our enemy social media company, was started by a guy who worked for our enemy finance automation.
Speaker 2:Interesting. Yeah. I haven't put that together. So he's in his mid thirties working as a UI designer at SAP. He gets this extremely fake job as the in house futurist focused on the future of education.
Speaker 2:He's working on massively online open courseware, which is actually very cool. And there's companies like Coursera and Udacity that we're launching around this time. He realized that video lectures were too long and hard to engage with for most people. You gotta go brain rot. This was so he starts cicada education with Louis Yang focusing on short form educational videos, and that was the last time anyone learned anything from TikTok.
Speaker 2:But, of course, that business fails, so they pivot to what becomes Muscial. Ly. He's on the train. I think he was going from he was riding the Caltrain from Silicon Valley to SF. He was commuting to his job, and he sees these kids using their phones to create selfie videos with music and overlays, basically lip sync videos.
Speaker 2:And they decide to create an app that focuses on making that super easy.
Speaker 1:And so this was just to contextualize it. When I first saw Muscial. Ly videos, like, being reposted to other platforms Yep. It was the first time I felt old on the Internet. Yep.
Speaker 1:Because I was like, why are these kids Yep. Like, why are these people dancing and lip synching? Yep. But it it weirdly for me, I really started noticing it around. I feel like at this point, maybe maybe maybe I just really noticed it late, but it it felt like I started to really pay attention to it in 2020 Yep.
Speaker 1:When it made sense where I was like, okay, nobody can leave their house and go dance or go to the bar or anything. Like, teenagers can't go to house parties. They can't go to football games because of COVID. Oh, yeah. It actually makes sense that they wanna just dance and, like, it's it's more efficient to just dance online than it is to, like, go and Yeah.
Speaker 1:You know, try to get attention in in some other setting. So,
Speaker 2:I mean, like And for
Speaker 1:a while for a while, it was very cringe
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 1:For people to go on music. Totally. And people would do it sort of ironically Yeah. Yeah. And then the app.
Speaker 1:And then I even remember the first time, I downloaded I don't know if I downloaded Musically or TikTok, but my first impression with TikTok was, like, I opened the app and it served me a highly relevant video, and it probably was just fate or luck or chance. But I was like, I was impressed.
Speaker 2:I was
Speaker 1:like, and then and then
Speaker 2:the outrigger really was incredible. Yeah. And still still.
Speaker 1:And there was there was I heard I heard I have no idea if this is true. But fortunately, we're not journalists, so, we don't have to get the facts right all the time. But, I heard that that their algorithm, which was so was was was kind of like a Scale AI sweatshop model where there was, the the rumor was like imagine just warehouses and warehouses in China where people are just sitting there being like, you know, is this is this funny? Like, is this a dog? Like classifying the videos, like, very manually.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And I'm sure it got more and more automated over time. But it's the kind of thing China can do where they're like, oh, we want the best algorithm. Let's put 200,000 people on it. And they're just kind of, like, clicking buttons.
Speaker 2:I mean, that's very real for the for the censorship of the Chinese Internet. Like, they were able to just throw millions and millions of people at it.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And now AI is kind of caught up, and they can censor a lot of stuff automatically.
Speaker 1:And for me, the interesting thing here is is, I studied abroad in in in Shanghai in, 2016. Yeah. And it, well,
Speaker 2:you were one of those guys, like, Trump wins and you got to leave the country?
Speaker 1:It was actually very weird because I was watching watching. I was there in the fall. Yeah. And so all of the chaos and terminal, turmoil of the election I was watching unfold online while in in China. But then from a from a tech from a technology standpoint, I mean, a lot of, you know, most of the people in China would use VPNs to use Instagram and Google products and stuff like that.
Speaker 1:But, so this was already happening. Like, Chinese China had banned all of these western apps entirely. You could still get around it. And so I never understood from the very beginning why we would allow China, you know, China, has done
Speaker 2:some The thing is is that it wasn't a Chinese app to begin with. It was just an app made by a Chinese dude
Speaker 1:who Yes. Yes. But the thing but the thing that the thing that
Speaker 2:The ByteDance deal happened much later. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Which we gotta go into. But but, the honest truth is that anyone who is Chinese, the government expects them to act on behalf of the state. It is an expectation.
Speaker 1:Maybe. Yeah. I think it's different. I think it's different if somebody is like, renounces their citizenship as here, but but, China, from my experience on the ground, everyone has feels an obligation to serve the state in some way or another.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, it kinda happened in World War 2. There's, like, the, like, all the German dudes who lived in America. Like, Germany was like, come back and fight for us. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And people went.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But it's not Or or if you're gonna stay, you're gonna share information back
Speaker 2:and
Speaker 1:basically act as, you know Yeah. Amateur espionage.
Speaker 2:But you can think of Alex Zhu as kind of like the Chinese Nikita beer.
Speaker 1:Yeah. In a
Speaker 2:sense that he was like a he was like a growth hack master at the time.
Speaker 1:Shit poster.
Speaker 2:Answer no about that. But, I mean, the the the growth hacks that they used to grow musically were really genius. So one of the first ones was, there's an API on the iPhone for the iTunes store where you can pull in music previews, and you don't have to pay any licensing fees for those because they're just 15 second clips. Very cool. And so you could have access to the entire iTunes music library, every single song Yeah.
Speaker 2:So smart. Without needing to actually go to, you know Yeah.
Speaker 1:That was my impression too. I was like, how do they have Instagram at the time had no music on the platform.
Speaker 2:And so if you wanted to add music, you would have to, like, download the video, download this, like, steal the song by downloading it and then put it together. And then it was really hard.
Speaker 1:I would have to, like, send censors.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And then they took it
Speaker 1:down because
Speaker 2:it was like, oh, you don't have the rights to that. Yeah. But but they figured out that they could that they could pull that in. Eventually, they did the deals to actually get the money to the record labels. But that that was a huge, huge, growth hack.
Speaker 2:And then they also did this thing where they'd they'd, watermark the videos with Muscial. Ly. And so when you downloaded the video and shared it on a different platform, it would have that watermark in there, kinda like the stake.com thing. Yeah. And so that drove a whole bunch of viral growth because you're like, oh, I'm seeing this thing.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. That was super smart.
Speaker 2:Really, really smart. And so the app launched in China, Japan, Europe, and the US with the US audience picking it up globally. Kuaishou, the Chinese app started in 2011 as a gift maker tool, but later transformed into a short form video platform. So around this time, basically, everyone who's doing content or social media is realizing 2 things. Like, short form video is the future, and and we're shifting from the social network ranking what's in your, one degree of separation, like, what are your friends posting, to just Raw entertainment.
Speaker 2:Yeah. What is the best content across the entire platform regardless of whether you follow that person or it's a huge account or a small account? And that's why if you set up for a long time, if you set up a new TikTok account, you could post literally anything and you get 500 views immediately Yeah. With no followers.
Speaker 1:Well, and they also saw this. So and and, Near on Yeah. Posted something that's like, we actually created the metaverse, but it's it's in the form of short form Yep. Content. Yep.
Speaker 1:One other thing with TikTok that they they did well is very clearly they were using bots early on to drive engagement, drive views, and and many, many creators would would basically knew that a lot of their you would you could go on TikTok and get a ton of followers and views quickly. Yeah. And it was clear that they were just artificially inflating those numbers, but there was enough real people actually tuning in that it didn't matter. Right?
Speaker 2:Yep. Yeah. And so, during this time, they they they get the Muscial. Ly app up. It launched as a as a broad short form video platform in 2014.
Speaker 1:This is all yeah. This is all And
Speaker 2:they did a ton of, like, app store optimization and keyword stuffing in the title. I think it said, like, Muscial. Ly, like lip sync battle. And then, on Thursday nights, the downloads would spike because there was a lip sync battle TV show, which was, like, national, like, primetime TV. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And that had initiated from this Jimmy Fallon like, they had a segment on the Jimmy Fallon show called lips, lip sync battles. And so that turned into its own TV show. People would see that, go to the App Store, and search. Even though I don't think they had a legitimate deal, they were just kind of, like, keyword hijacking that.
Speaker 1:That's cool.
Speaker 2:So, yeah, very smart there. They gained visibility through the App Store, LipSense. And this
Speaker 1:is also there's this transition happening from social media, which is suddenly my my friends are more entertaining than Jimmy Fallon Yep. To, my friends are entertaining, but random strangers online are actually more entertaining.
Speaker 2:Who are like
Speaker 1:And this was happening this was already happening with the Kardashians. Yep. Like, well, it's much more interesting to follow what Kylie Jenner is doing because she's, like, dating rappers and having babies than than some random person from your hometown who just had, like, an super early pregnancy.
Speaker 2:So in 2015, Muscial. Ly focuses like, they find the product market fit, around lip sync videos. They change the onboarding flow to as soon as you download the app, it's like, let's make your first lip sync video. It's not just like a blank canvas. Pick a song.
Speaker 2:Let's lip sync to it. And musical artists actually start flipping the model and growing on TikTok by promoting their music, and Old Town Road was the first example by Lil Nas X.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And then at at this time, it became suddenly every artist you could blow up over. It was what was cool here is American, you know, any artist globally could become a star overnight by having the right song. Yep. The other thing that was interesting about the change to algo feeds is it became, much harder for these creators to monetize.
Speaker 1:Totally. Because if you run and you could run an ad, let's say you have, like, a 1000000 followers on TikTok. If you're putting up a lip lip syncing video or dancing video, you'll get a lot of views. But then if you're like, this video is presented by, Procter and Gamble. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Like, Procter and Gamble makes a bunch of great soaps. Everybody's, you know, like, at that, you know, 500 views.
Speaker 2:You just won't get it. Won't get served. As opposed to if you look at, you know, a podcaster who has an RSS feed and someone listens to every single episode, well, the downloads are not we talked to David Senter about this. Like, his downloads might fluctuate by, like, 10% Yeah. Episode to episode, but it's always in the same band.
Speaker 1:Steady.
Speaker 2:Whereas if you're in an algo feed like a TikToker, you could you you could fluctuate by 2 orders of magnitude.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Easily.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And you have, you know, podcasts allow you to do things like, Ricky Bobby in Talladega Nights where he sold the windshield. Exactly. And, it's harder to sell the windshield on TikTok.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. It it's very hard to make the integrated content even if you're doing stuff in the background.
Speaker 1:I've seen sites I I ignored the platform as an advertiser because I was doing a ton of stuff on YouTube at the time, and I just didn't.
Speaker 2:We never did it, mostly because it was a very young audience, and we don't advertise nicotine to kids. So we we stayed away from it. But, but I I don't know that there was ever, like, really good money there. I think for, like, very specific products, it could work.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It was the big it was the massive what what are those, the D'Amelio. They would get, like, a shoe deal or something like that. And and there was way to do to do, like, product placement.
Speaker 2:If it's a very visual product, you can actually explain it under 60 seconds. Like, it needs to be very precise.
Speaker 1:And you remember this time Snapchat was also they launched their whole creator fund. They were paying out, like, $1,000,000 a day, which was cool to see that money, going to someone other than just, the team Yeah. The executive.
Speaker 2:Well, I mean, that's a great bridge to, have you have you listened to the I think it's a light speed or something. What Alex Zhu did a a talk about how he sees building a social network, and it's seen as, like, one of the defining moments in, like, social network thought leadership, essentially. Yeah. And he he compares building a social network to founding a country. Initially, creators are attracted to the platform with the promise of fame and potential wealth creation.
Speaker 2:The first step is to centralize the economy. Sounds familiar? And ensure initial talented creators succeed. They start paying content creators and connecting them with advertisers. The second step is to decentralize and create opportunities for new creators.
Speaker 2:Algorithmic feeds enables newcomers to be discovered and succeed on the platform. And so he had this whole idea of of social and economic mobility within the platform and the viability of a middle class on TikTok is crucial for the platform success. And so and, yeah, the the idea is, like, you need this like, when you switch to the algo feed, it is not enough just to get likes from like your friends. You need professional content creators. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And so you have to be able to come on and discover, okay, this person has massive talent. Let's get them to a 1000000 followers and let's make sure that the that the creator fund is flowing to them very quickly so that they're incentivized to make this their
Speaker 1:free time job. Yeah. And and to be clear, as much as we, are dunking have have dunked on TikTok, I've posted about it. I'm sure you have. Solana has posted for years about it.
Speaker 1:Everything that Alex did with this app is genius. Yep. And the story is actually amazing. And the app is fundamentally although there's a lot of brain rot, it's fundamentally, like, a a very cool app. Oh, yeah.
Speaker 1:It's just that it's not appropriate for, over time, due to Brightdance deal, it's clear that it turned into an Spy app. An influence channel. And it's not even to be honest, it's not even about the fact that TikTok is putting a, you know, a CCP camera in the pocket of every American. The issue is more of, going back to this analogy which we've talked about before. It's it's you wouldn't have wanted, you know, during, the Cold War to have Russia own The New York Times.
Speaker 1:Right? And every single day, it's it's sort of elevating content that's pro Russia, you know. And and and over time, this stuff was proven that people on TikTok had much more positive opinions of China. Yep. They would stop any content associated with the Uighurs, which is a genocide that that Chinese government has carried out.
Speaker 1:And so all this stuff is is it's not a conspiracy. There's enough there's a body of proof that TikTok, it became a very strategic asset. Yeah. The most it's a it's digital psychological warfare.
Speaker 2:Yep. And and just pulling the levers on what are we censoring, what are we amplifying does have, like, an incredible impact on the the viewership, which is, like, a 100,000,000 Americans.
Speaker 1:It's crazy.
Speaker 2:And so in 2016, Musically had 10,000,000 daily active users and over 90,000,000 users in total, up from 10,000,000 the previous year. And in 2016, Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg were trying to enter the Chinese market. Zuck invites the cofounder of Muscial. Ly, Alex Zhu, to potent to discuss a potential acquisition. I think they go for this walk in the, Silicon Valley Highlands, and and they're discussing this.
Speaker 2:Despite being a Chinese app, Muscial. Ly had a significant presence in the US with a team in Santa Monica and a perception of being an American social media app. In 2017, they decided to launch and grow in China having initially focused on the West. And, Chinese business model for social app, the the Chinese business model typically relies on direct monetization such as, virtual goods, gifting, and tipping rather than advertising.
Speaker 1:Ice cream. So good.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Content companies in China need to work closely with the CCP, ensuring their content upholds the party's laws and wishes. A different we really need to go live so we can do this. Stop it. Stop it.
Speaker 2:And so
Speaker 1:Thank you for the banana, Ben.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And so, in late of 2017, ByteDance, which was already pretty huge, they launched Douyin, TikTok's Chinese version. And then that's to
Speaker 1:be the one the one the really the one that got away. Because imagine if Zuck had another app with a 100,000,000 Americans or just this perfect ad platform of that has this amazing social graph, that has this platform of that has this amazing social graph, that has this amazing, you know, interest graph. We know that Duck would be doing
Speaker 2:This is the flip side
Speaker 1:of the billion a year.
Speaker 2:Stuff. This is the flip side of the Elizabeth Warren stuff of, like, yeah. Like, you know, Zuck might have a bit of a monopoly over social networking, but, if if he had a little bit looser reign during this time, he could have acquired TikTok, and we wouldn't be in this massive
Speaker 1:Well, it it's even I mean, the deal fell fell through for unknown reasons. And it's totally possible that that that Alex wanted to do the deal. Yeah. And there were certain players
Speaker 2:I don't think it was actually the American FTC that blocked the deal. No.
Speaker 1:It's much
Speaker 2:more like the Chinese FTC. Yeah. Yeah. Who said, no. You can't sell this to the Americans.
Speaker 1:Because it would've just turned into imagine the the number of Winnie the Pooh memes on the day of the acquisition.
Speaker 2:And so ByteDance had launched Douyin, Chinese TikTok's version. And so, Musically is facing, like, competition because they wanna grow internationally, but now they're getting pressure from ByteDance. So ByteDance kinda is like a carrot and stick situation going on. Hey. We could buy your company, pay you a bunch of money, or we can compete with you internationally and close off this international market.
Speaker 2:You know that Zuck is gonna come for you with Reels. Snapchat's doing stuff. Like, you're gonna face a lot of pressure. Maybe the time to get out is now. And so, eventually, Douyin has launched his TikTok in the US because they they they do the, they do the acquisition towards the end.
Speaker 2:Bytedance launches TikTok internationally as a shot across the bow against Muscial. Ly. Muscial. Ly is struggling to enter the Chinese market, and they enter, and they entertain acquisition talks from 2 other Chinese companies. Tencent is a big investor and acquirer of content around the world, while ByteDance has never taken an investment from Tencent, Alibaba, or Baidu.
Speaker 2:And, Tencent should have gotten TikTok because that that would have been on brand for them. But they, but they kind of missed, like, missed this. And so, the acquisition goes through for between $800,000,000 and a $1,000,000,000 which feels low now, honestly. I mean, it's like a $100,000,000,000 company, but maybe worth nothing. We'll see.
Speaker 2:Although they probably made well over $1,000,000,000 in free cash flow.
Speaker 1:The other thing is is I don't ByteDance has been a pretty liquid stock in the secondary market. I don't feel that bad for anybody who is any American that was in
Speaker 2:I disagree with that. I I I think that even though it's like a liquid stock, it's actually very hard to repatriate dollars that are in China. I think if you have, like, a multibillion dollar position, it is very difficult to get out and get that money.
Speaker 1:I'm talking about the you know, let's say you're a family officer. Sure. Sure. Sure. $5,000,000 just by chance.
Speaker 1:You could have gotten out of that position.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But for the big for the big shareholders, there was actually a proposal at one point for, like, a one time repatriation of Yeah. Of American money that's stuck in China and and just kind of do some sort of trade deal that says, like, hey. We're gonna, like, decouple a little bit, and we're gonna let this happen, and everyone's gonna and we're gonna figure out what the the terms of that trade are to get that done. But, you know, it's been, you know, hugely successful.
Speaker 2:Users spend an average of 52 minutes a day on the app, which is significantly higher than any other social network. And then people start worrying about TikTok's influence. I'm on 68.
Speaker 1:And do you remember when they, do you remember when they they combine the apps and there was just tick tock and then tick tock was the number one advertiser on META?
Speaker 2:Well, they didn't they didn't combine the apps. That's what's interesting. What they did was they actually released a new app and then they drove downloads from 1 to the next.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Kind of a good version.
Speaker 1:But I think they said that. Did they not allow you to port your followers?
Speaker 2:Yeah. I think you'd log in and port and they and they, like, they duped to the back end database and created a new and combined app, putting in the app stores.
Speaker 1:But you remember instead of super when meta was, like, basically Yeah. They it made sense for them to take because it was 1,000,000,000 of dollars being spent.
Speaker 2:I think I think they advertise on Snapchat even more.
Speaker 1:Yes. They really are. Yeah. They should But all and and that that was that sort of catch 22 where you're just kind of
Speaker 2:Yeah. You want the money, but, you know, you're also forking over your users to a different app. It's rough. And so, TikTok is a Huawei sized problem and a potential national security threat to the US as US military personnel use TikTok, and TikTok is gathering their location data, their facial data, and their biometric data. The the data for the version TikTok in Western countries is stored in the US, but legally, it is owned by ByteDance, which may be forced to give the data to the Chinese government if requested.
Speaker 2:There are concerns about whether TikTok censors posts about the Hong Kong protest, and US politicians are calling for the Committee on Foreign Investment in the US to review TikTok. And this was, like, the huge mess. CFIUS is supposed to review every, international acquisition of American company, and they, and, they they got the TikTok call wrong because they're just like, some, like, dumb, like, lip syncing app. Like, who cares? Like, this isn't this isn't US Steel.
Speaker 2:You know? This isn't, like, yeah, some weapons manufacturer. But in fact, it was an incredibly important, company. And so Facebook attempted to buy Musically in 20 in 2016, and then they launched their own TikTok competitor, Lasso, in 2018 that I think flopped, but then eventually, they figured it out with reels. So in October of 2019
Speaker 1:I remember Lasso.
Speaker 2:I never I don't think I ever really used it, but I probably demoed it for a little bit.
Speaker 1:That's the thing. Zuck is trying to Zuck's not afraid to to fail Yeah. Which is cool.
Speaker 2:So in October of 2019, Zuck gives a speech at Georgetown calling out Chinese owned social media, specifically TikTok as a national security threat and a threat to western values and ways of life. CIVVIA's review was opened on the Musically acquisition in 2019, potentially leading to a reversal of the acquisition, but it was not Zach. First.
Speaker 1:That is that the, Yeah. What's the right analogy for Zach, you know, screaming that TikTok is a national security threat? There's so many good ones. Mhmm. I mean, just, yeah, just coming out and, it's always good when you can say that your number one competitor and threat to your business model is a national security threat.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:We should say, All In podcast is a national security threat.
Speaker 2:I think people have said that. That's true. This is actually true. Yeah. So, I mean, a lot of a lot of seismic shifts in the social media landscape because of TikTok, huge shift to, algorithmic feeds, and, and just viewing it as like a it's almost like a Netflix style app.
Speaker 1:And they really basically forced every other platform. I don't know about Snapchat since I haven't used it in years, but they forced pretty much every platform to switch to more of even even YouTube is all always algorithmically driven, but you could still, like, show up on your home page and see, like, the videos you subscribe to. It was a
Speaker 2:huge deal when they flipped on that on YouTube. And every every creator was yeah. Default feed used to be you would go, and you would see your subscriptions feed. So it was if you subscribed, you know, it was it it it's like like, thanks for watching. Subscribe to the channel.
Speaker 2:People used to say that on on YouTube, because when you open up the app, it would just show you, oh, the person that I subscribed to posted a new video. I'll watch it. So I watch every video. It was more like an RSS feed. Then they switched to a recommended feed as the primary feed, and all the views went crazy because if you
Speaker 1:Some people benefited.
Speaker 2:Some people benefited. And suffer. And and and the the whole all the content became more algorithmically driven. You see the mister Beastification of YouTube where the thumbnails and titles and video concepts get more extreme because you have to win in the algorithm. You're you you cannot count on your fan base or your subscriber base, like, seeing every video.
Speaker 2:So you have to win in the free market every single time, which is Yeah. Difficult, but also, you gotta earn it. And it just kinda depends
Speaker 1:on the the the the Yeah. And your your point of view, we we were talking about this yesterday.
Speaker 2:You released a video recently about
Speaker 1:Nike that did almost a 1000000 views.
Speaker 2:Nike got, like, 20,000, and then Visa got 600,000.
Speaker 1:Oh, it was flipped. It was flipped.
Speaker 2:So funny. And they were, like, very similar videos. I think
Speaker 1:Release for them the same
Speaker 2:Yeah. Like, 2 weeks or something. And the Nike one, I kinda messed up the title thumbnail. The Visa one nailed it.
Speaker 1:And you're not like you're kind of like it doesn't actually like, the whole thing of the content creation is you just need to put a lot of stuff. Exactly. So it's not like you're sitting there. You're like, yeah. That my Nike video is actually good.
Speaker 1:I'm proud of it. Yeah. But at the same time, it's kind of on you. You you that something could have been better thumbnail, the title, or whatever.
Speaker 2:So what that tells me is, like, is, like, I think the channel has, like, 500 k subscribers. Probably about 5% of those are, like, true fans that watch everything regardless of the title film. They basically have, like, the notifications turned on or the subscriber feed. But that Visa one got more views than my subscriber base. Therefore, it must have just gone out in the algorithm and done well.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But, yeah, it's it's it's a it's a knockout drag out fight there. And so, yeah, you either have to be really, really good at nailing the algorithm every single time.
Speaker 1:I also think consistency only consistency matters and creators Yeah. That sort of train their audience that we release every Friday at 9 AM, and people are kind of waiting for that.
Speaker 2:And at a certain point, you can also get to a place where you're averaging views out. So it's like, yeah, you might have a miss that gets 30 k views and then a win that gets 500 k views. But if you get, you know, 3 of each of those every single month, you know, like, yeah, my channel gets 3,000,000 views every single month, and I'm counting on that. So I'm running ads against
Speaker 1:Yeah. And I and and as somebody who's, you know, bought tens of 1,000,000 of dollars of of YouTube creator ads through branded native, my my first company. Creators would always tell me I get 5,000,000 views a month. Yeah. And I would tell them I do not care Yeah.
Speaker 1:Because I'm gonna buy an ad on one of those videos. Yeah. So I'm going to price the ad based on your least performing Sure. Videos. Right?
Speaker 1:Because if I I can't go back to the advertiser and say, you know, you you you paid thinking you were gonna get 200,000 views, and then you got 20,000 views. Yep. They're gonna be pissed.
Speaker 2:Well, there's there's another thing with that where, I talked to a creator that has, like, millions of millions of subscribers, and he said views don't matter for actually driving conversions. What he says is that, like, I have a 1000000 followers of a 100000 true fans. If a video goes viral and gets 5,000,000 views, those like, the 100,000 that watch the true fans, they are the ones who will convert because they trust me. The 4,900,000 of people that just randomly saw my viral video, they don't care about what I'm selling and say
Speaker 1:they won't buy. Buy. But sometimes impressions an advertiser, impressions matter. Totally. And and you wanna get in front of those people, and maybe you run a Facebook ad against them later and cover them down the line.
Speaker 2:So But but but there is, like, a very, there's, like, a trade ratio there for for the true fans watching versus so there's always this question, especially on TikTok. It's like, how many true fans do these people have, or are they just going viral in the in the in the feed? So let's swap over to Strutechery's analysis. Ben Thompson, has written about the TikTok ban many, many times.
Speaker 1:Are we starting with his
Speaker 2:The, yeah, TikTok ban approaches generational implications, which
Speaker 1:I guess The the
Speaker 2:the red book. I wrote about the TikTok ban when congress was considering it, but it mostly stayed away from the topic given the uncertainty of whether or not it would actually happen. Well, this is the last update before the deadline, so time to catch up. To refresh, he wrote in Ben Thompson wrote in favor of TikTok banning TikTok back in 2020, and his objection was less about user data than about giving a foreign adversary militarily, economically, and ideologically access to the hearts and minds of Americans. This is the point of don't let the Russians own NBC during the Cold War.
Speaker 2:That remains my primary concern. And if ever anything, the the fact that the Chinese government is clearly calling the shots in terms of ByteDance's response to this ban confirms my contention that TikTok was ultimately under the control of the Chinese Communist Party.
Speaker 1:Got them.
Speaker 2:What is clear is that, it would have been far better to have acted in 2020, but at that point, we were still in the president Trump supports this, so it must be bad era of politics. The great irony, of course, is that president-elect Trump is now opposed to the ban for some combination of not wanting to give Meta more power, satisfying prominent reporters, prominent supporters, and the fact that Trump has found great success on TikTok. Even so, it's not clear that
Speaker 1:I don't buy the great success angle because that guy will get views anywhere from anyone at any time. Yeah. And That's true. Again, that attention, I don't believe so the if if the average person is spending an hour a day in the app Yep. That attention will shift back to other platforms where Trump also is
Speaker 2:And the narrative of this election was not it's the TikTok election. It was it's the podcast election. And where do those podcasts live? Spotify, YouTube, RSS feeds.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And so I think if any of those were at risk of banning
Speaker 1:Joe Rogan.
Speaker 2:Yeah. If there really was, it'd be weird. But if there was some situation where it's like Rogan is gonna get banned, that would be much more of a lever for Trump Yeah. Than, than TikTok. So I agree with you on that.
Speaker 1:There are all things he's been for saying this. Crazy. I was just thinking, Alec, how is Alex Jones back operating under the InfoWars?
Speaker 2:Is he? He's I thought he was the I thought he lost the I thought
Speaker 1:he lost the IP, but he's putting out new content under Infowars. Really? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's crazy. And it it just These things are, like, so odd. Well yeah. But and and also I don't know who bought it. It's how do you Did you can't buy it?
Speaker 2:Wasn't that the was not the was that a joke, or was that real? Who? I thought the onion.
Speaker 1:Oh. Or did
Speaker 2:he die with the onion?
Speaker 1:You never know. You never know with that.
Speaker 2:But I think he was upset.
Speaker 1:But it it just gives the show, like, banning
Speaker 2:At this point, Alex Jones doesn't need the Infowars IP. People just know Alex Jones.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And he also could just slap InfoWars on a video and, like, screw it, kinda stop him from doing that. But anyways
Speaker 2:That so it's not clear that Trump can do anything about the deadline, which is one day before his inauguration. It's so funny how these political decisions get, like it's like, oh, the the let's set the deadline the day before, like, the last possible day. It's really, like, waiting to do your homework until the very last second. The other less discussed reason for the ban is the fact that basically every US consumer tech product is banned in China. I am sympathetic to the argument that the US is supposed to be a free market, but at some point, and Trump's rhetoric on trade would seem to agree, openness depends on a level playing field, which is certainly not the case when it comes to a product like TikTok.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Facebook tried to go, got banned. Google tried to go and got banned. Uber got kicked out and couldn't deal with that. Even Airbnb had some weird structure there, and that didn't work.
Speaker 2:Like, just No. So so here's
Speaker 1:here's here's the the reality of being a foreign company trying to build technology in China.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:They will let you come and they will let you build, but they will stall you. Yeah. They'll kick you off banking rails. They'll do all this stuff to just make it so that you cannot succeed over there until a Chinese clone is able to copy and learn enough about your features that they just do what you're trying to do. And I experienced this.
Speaker 1:I was, I was, working out of a place called China Accelerator, one one word, and it's basically like the YC of China.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:I was, like, interning for this company that was a Israeli company who had taken money from China Accelerator to launch this sort of, like, retail marketplace for foreign designers to sell into China. And once a week, they would kick us off like they would shut down the bank account. And by the end, I felt like it was intentional to purely just disrupt the business because a bunch of other Chinese companies had started copying what what this company was doing. Wow. And I was, like, at the first couple times I was I I would be the intern, so I'd get sent down to the bank to be, like, hey, guys, like, why is our account frozen?
Speaker 1:Yeah. And then they would be, like, like, they just, like, install, install, install. I'd be there for, like, 4 hours. I'd be like, this is ridiculous. So
Speaker 2:so Ben goes on and says, and speaking of freedom, while I think TikTok's argument that the ban is a violation of the First Amendment doesn't hold up because there are other forums available for creators and there's a Supreme Court precedent in terms of deterrence on such matters to national security concerns, it's worth acknowledging that banning TikTok would destroy an immensely immensely valuable asset for anyone with a following on the platform. Indeed, this is an underexplored angle of social media censorship debate. Banning users doesn't cost them money, but a following is a valuable asset nevertheless. That too is another reason why it would have been much wiser to deal with this issue in 2020 than in 2025. The value destruction for TikTok users would have been much smaller.
Speaker 1:Good point. Good point. Ben, goaded Yeah. Goaded analyst.
Speaker 2:Yeah. You don't find this guy in the truth zone very often.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:So he says, now again, all of this analysis may be moot if the Supreme Court rules in ByteDance's favor, which they did not. It is also possible that TikTok is sold at the last minute to an American company. Mister Bezos was saying he was gonna buy it. It was there was a talk about maybe Elon's gonna get it.
Speaker 1:About Bench who was trying put together Yeah. Like, a a coalition.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I gotta deal
Speaker 1:with Zoom. But so it's just very obvious that there's a ton of people that would it's a great asset.
Speaker 2:Yep. But they don't wanna sell it. Yeah. Because that's not what it's about. It's not about the money.
Speaker 2:They do it for the love of the game.
Speaker 1:They they do it for a lot of geopolitical warfare. Yeah. Great power competition.
Speaker 2:I noted previously that the 2 most compelling acquirers from a business perspective are Amazon or Walmart, thanks to the potential tie into their ecommerce businesses. But there was a rumor earlier this week that Elon Musk slash x could be the buyer. He's obviously palatable to Trump, but also could be to China as well given Tesla's large presence in the country, which, needless to say, presents plenty of its own complications. TikTok did deny the rumor, but, 1, it is unlikely that TikTok is in control of the process given that, 2, it is unlikely that ByteDance is in control of the process since, 3, the Chinese government is the entity that has the final say. Even in that light though, it makes total sense for ByteDance in China to carry this process to the very last hour in the hope of a rev of a reprieve.
Speaker 2:Indeed, the fact that the service is planning on locking out existing users, which isn't required by law, suggests that the goal is raise an outcry and a last minute change of heart. All that noted, the most interesting and uncertain outcome of the ban, is if it actually proceeds as planned, and TikTok just suddenly disappears. Trump is right that the most obvious potential beneficiary is Meta and Instagram with its Reels products. But I think he and observers broadly are underestimating what a massive deal it would be for Meta to actually fill the TikTok void
Speaker 1:permanently. So why has Snapchat not made a run? Because there's a lot of people you know, we just got a message in one of our group chats from somebody saying, from the lone ranger saying you should create Tech Talk by the Technology Brothers that's just pure grade a American software Yeah. And run this back. And, like, that's funny, but I I don't believe that a I think a lot of people will try to compete and use this moment to drive new downloads.
Speaker 1:But to me, someone like Snapchat who has a very similar audience, they already have the distribution. Why are they not rolling out an algo feed and try They have one. They have one?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. And and and they
Speaker 1:and they clear about it.
Speaker 2:They do vertical content, and they have a huge, creator fund, and people can get crazy monetization by taking it into Snapchat. There was a whole game for a few years of people just taking YouTube content, repurposing it for vertical Snapchat, and making a lot of money.
Speaker 1:Yeah. My my my question though is historically, Evan and the Snapchat team were quick and they would launch new features and, like, they're very they're scrappy. Right? They had to be against Meta, but there's some there's a list of, know, somebody was replying to one of my posts being like bad take. Here's like 10 features that TikTok has that none of the other platforms have.
Speaker 1:And so if you want to win over these creators, you would in theory try to hit, you know, the top.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, you're like, if you abstract that question, it's really just like, why why is Snapchat not moving faster as a company? And and, also, why don't they have a culture? Evan only have
Speaker 1:they only have 1 b b Boeing Business Jet.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And So they're just, like, a lot of these waiting team, like, canceled flights or
Speaker 1:Yeah. That could be a big they have their own private
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Like, hangar at, Santa's. But
Speaker 2:I do think that there is a little bit of potentially a culture where at at Meta, Zuck kind of broke the glass on, like, it's it's okay to copy things.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Because I bet that, like, the like, Meta for the first I mean, Facebook
Speaker 1:certainly broke the glass. I mean, he just straight up
Speaker 2:smacked it. And then
Speaker 1:Stories is I use stories now more than the main feed.
Speaker 2:Exactly. And so, I bet you in the first few years of of Facebook, the culture was very much like, we are inventors. We are pioneering new user interfaces and new user experiences. We created the feed. They created the feed.
Speaker 2:Like, they created all sorts of different things. They created the poke. They created the green they
Speaker 1:they created the kava brain the But
Speaker 2:then at a certain point, Zuck saw that Instagram was taking off and was like, we need to add pictures to our we we add photos to our product, and they and they actually launched
Speaker 1:Instagram. Had photos.
Speaker 2:They they had photos, but they didn't have a dedicated Instagram clone. They actually launched a clone at one point. They launched a video clone. Like, he like, there must have been internally pushback against, like, I'm a product manager. I'm an engineer.
Speaker 2:I like working on the cool stuff that's innovative.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Why are you putting me on this copycat product? But somehow, culturally, Facebook got through that and it became like, yeah. We're just here to make money, and we don't wanna get our lunch eaten by some new start ups. And you should occasionally
Speaker 1:build do it. You should build features that your users are excited to use. Exactly. Thread seemingly has created a new ecosystem for people that on you know? And they have this amazing every I get notifications, it's like some thread that looks interesting.
Speaker 1:And if I wanna see it, I gotta download the app.
Speaker 2:I don't
Speaker 1:have the app downloaded.
Speaker 2:And so and so something happened with Metasculture where it was like, hey. Look. You know, we're just out here to build the best experience possible, get ARPU up, drive value, shareholder value, create the best company. We don't want someone just coming along and eating our lunch, so copying is not a pejorative at this company. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I don't know if that's happened at Snapchat. I think at Snap, they might have a culture of, like, no. We actually focus on, like, the innovation stuff, which is a lot more it's harder to do it at a big scale
Speaker 1:It's hurting them at this point.
Speaker 2:And it's more random. Like, you can't guarantee that you're gonna be able to come out with some amazing new UI innovation.
Speaker 1:And it's so I I I I think that most of our listeners will understand that it's it's much cooler to just be a massive business and do something less innovative than be a tiny irrelevant company that's doing something super innovative. Exactly. It doesn't matter if you're super innovative in terms of impact, scale Yep. And revenue potential if you have no users. Yep.
Speaker 1:Right? Exactly. So, yeah. And it's interesting. Like, I can answer your question.
Speaker 1:I do think I do think there's some cool, like, if I if I, you know, enjoyed building consumer social apps, there are some cool things where you could, you know, create an app today that's, like, sign in, you know, and we will port over Yeah. You know, you know, you can figure out sort of hacks and mechanisms to try to port. I I thought that, I don't remember when I had Advanced audio. I was trying to pitch you on, like, some shit to do with it.
Speaker 2:Maybe I wonder if any of these I mean, I really think, like, 99% of the TikTok time spent on that app will flow to Meta, YouTube Shorts, and then Snapchat, I do think will be a beneficiary. But maybe they maybe they capture 5% of, like, the bleed over. So, there's another interesting section in this Ben Thompson article. I had an interesting conversation with someone who operates in the consumer market, and he was casually refer referring to different generations by their dominant social network. There's the Facebook generation, the Instagram generation, and the youngest cohort is the TikTok generation.
Speaker 2:For Instagram to extend its reach downwards by a generation would be a huge deal that would reverberate for years. Because that generation, if they can really pull them over to Instagram fully, they're just gonna be able to get ad revenue from them for, you know it's it's perpetuity. Because once you get locked in, there are a lot of people that are still using Facebook because that's their dominant generation. And and that's what they and and, like, a lot of millennials are still on Instagram and have just stayed with that. And we'll be out there
Speaker 1:through the Facebook, it's it's kind of interesting how Facebook marketplace is still as relevant as ever Yeah. Seemingly with everyone Totally. Even though the main app Yeah. Yeah. You know, nobody I know is posting on there.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But older people do. Yeah. For sure. And then so Ben takes the the opposite tact and says, there's also a reason why it might not happen.
Speaker 2:Younger generations don't wanna be on Boomer social networks, and I'm sorry to announce Boomer is an adjective for anything that is older than you is here to stay, which is to say we are never getting rid of Boomers. One potential beneficiary could actually be Snapchat, but there is also but there might also be an opportunity for a new social network rare and improbable as that.
Speaker 1:I would I would love to see. You remember you know, Alex Ma? He did, Oh, yeah. Not be real, but the the what was the the ad that you had to, like, take a picture every I don't know. No.
Speaker 1:He had what was what was Alex Mozart? Or I
Speaker 2:don't know.
Speaker 1:Like, yeah, this benchmark led the series a
Speaker 2:The front back?
Speaker 1:No. That was 1. He had a social audio, Paparazzi.
Speaker 2:Oh, Paparazzi.
Speaker 1:Where you take pictures of your friends. Okay. Which was which was a cool Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:User experience because it became cringe on Instagram to post pictures of yourself Yeah. And, like, the candid moments of, like, I'm taking a picture of you at the studio Yep. And then it goes on your feet. Yep. Like, that that
Speaker 2:so my my my take on new social networks is that the the arrow of progress only moves in one direction, and, effectively, you get sloppier as things as time goes on. And so you you really like like, the thing that will kill TikTok is not, oh, be real, take one picture per day. It's actually the thing that gets someone to lock in on TikTok for 3 hours instead of 1 hour. And when I was thinking about, like, if I wanted to kill TikTok, like, what would I actually do from first principles if the goal was not to heal brain rot and also kill TikTok and get out of the CCP relationship? You have to think about it just from beating TikTok and and then deal with the brain rot stuff later.
Speaker 2:And my conclusion was that you needed a TikTok feed that didn't require any input whatsoever. So if you look at the if you look at the iteration between Snapchat or or, Instagram and and Reels. The difference is that on Instagram, you see a square, and then it only takes up a half of the the screen real estate. And then you have to scroll, and you have to scroll precisely. Because if you scroll too much, the you might see one photo halfway at the top and one photo halfway at the bottom.
Speaker 2:Right? And so reels, the innovation there was that it takes up the full screen. And so even the tiniest little tab, it's it's like rubber bandy sticky. Yeah. And so you're either on 1 TikTok or you're on the next TikTok.
Speaker 2:You're never halfway between them. And so one's always playing. So it's very easy to just slip into, like, one more, one more, one more. And then on the next, they actually switch to the next one.
Speaker 1:It reminds me of America's Funniest Home Videos Yeah. Which was at the time some of the most entertaining content in the world because it was just one video at a time. I remember do you remember being a kid on YouTube Yeah. In the early days where, like, I remember you'd have, like, 4 or 5 of us around, like, the one desktop computer and everybody would be like, dude, this funny video. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And then you'd just be sitting there being like, what did what was you know, like, yeah. Yeah. 1 video. Yeah. What was that one video of Skateboard fall.
Speaker 1:Like And and everybody's kind of creating the feed
Speaker 2:Exactly. Like,
Speaker 1:you know, at that moment.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And so my my conclusion was that if you wanted to defeat TikTok, you would have to have the camera always on the front facing camera, read the facial expressions of the person. And if you see that they're getting bored, you scroll to the next one. That's And if you see them laughing, if you see them laugh, it's like this is a positive signal for the algorithm. If you see them engaged, you're like, oh, they're interested in this.
Speaker 2:This was an interesting TikTok. Let's show the next one.
Speaker 1:That's ultimate.
Speaker 2:Wire hook. Because you just sit there. You don't even need to use your thumb to go like this. You can just watch it and you can just go, And then it shows you another funny one.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Or
Speaker 2:oh. And then it's like, oh, that was shocking. Show them another shocking one. You're like, oh, look. I'm looking off.
Speaker 2:Show a different thing.
Speaker 1:Way or they're paying attention to that.
Speaker 2:Exactly. And then maybe the viral loop could be the the camera is recording too. And so if you like it, you can post your response and immediately duet. It's like a reaction video. So it's like I'm watching the TikTok and it's like I see something funny.
Speaker 2:I'm like, That's funny. Oh, yeah. That's good. Send send my reaction to my network of my friends. And so it's even more sloppy, even more brain roddy.
Speaker 1:Yeah. The the end state is the metaverse where everyone is just
Speaker 2:just locked in, just looking at content for 24 hours a day or anything. And then you go to sleep and then you wake up and do it again.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And then every one of our listeners are just figuring out how to properly monetize
Speaker 2:it. Exactly. Exactly. But, yeah, I I do think that I wanna I I like it.
Speaker 1:It's it's, you know, the Instagram eventually, you know, you see an ad and to just buy the product, you just have to go.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:You know? Yeah. I don't even have
Speaker 2:to. I mean, I mean, I've I've seen this pattern. This pattern developed somewhat on x where if you get in the the video feed, you click on one video, then you scroll up, you'll see one video. And when that video ends, sometimes it'll play the video twice, but sometimes it just scrolls to the next one. So you can hands free
Speaker 1:A lot of people don't like that.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But you can but you can effectively hand free watch videos Yeah. Instead of just watching them loop, which requires you to move your thumb, which seems so minor, but that actually is a a friction point. If you remove the thumb entirely, you get you get to be more viral.
Speaker 1:I've noticed sometimes I'll I'll have a video playing on, like, a reels type product to YouTube or or reels. And it's kind of funny because if you if you leave your phone somewhere, you walk away to do something else, and then it's just replaying the video. Kind of annoying. You want it.
Speaker 2:You just move the next one.
Speaker 1:The addict. The rat and you that's like, the cocaine button. Yeah. I want it
Speaker 2:to just juice reward. Yeah. The monkey juice reward.
Speaker 1:Let's talk about Little Red Book. The Little Red Book. Initially, I posted, if you download Red Book, you're a trader that should be sent on the first boat to Beijing, or you should be forced to write the national anthem a thousand times. Yeah. You know?
Speaker 1:Oh, say can you Yeah. Pledge of Allegiance. Yeah. Yeah. Pledge of Allegiance is better.
Speaker 1:But then I realized that American users are going on their posting and, there's that, senior partner at Andreessen, future GP, woman, what one of the Venture Twins? Venture Twins? Yeah. She was posting that, there, there was actually starting to, you know, founders were going on there and having conversations with the Chinese founders. If you don't know, in China, a lot of the venture funds are are state funded, and the founders have to sign, like, a full personal guarantee.
Speaker 1:Oh, yes. So if you raise $5,000,000 and your company doesn't work out, they're gonna take your house
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:To, like, repay it. Yeah. And she posted a screenshot of an exchange for American founders. We're like, yeah. It's like it's actually like risk capital.
Speaker 1:Yeah. If your company doesn't work, like, you know, you don't lose your house. And all the Chinese founders were like, wait, what? Really? And, and then I saw another thing that, creatine cycle, Atlas, He, he should really pick a name, Atlas or Creatine Cycle.
Speaker 1:It's kind of we've I like both names, but so Atlas posted
Speaker 2:Now let's tighten up the brand, Atlas.
Speaker 1:So Atlas posted a screenshot. There was, like, an American girl who posted, like, a TikTok style video, like an exercise gear. And he posted, you know, China gave us COVID. We gave them gooning because all all the comments all the comments are just like, oh, wow. I like these American girls.
Speaker 2:It's a real cultural exchange going on.
Speaker 1:Cultural exchange. And and
Speaker 2:Let's go. Let's give a little bit of background on Little Red Book. It's a Chinese video network that competes with Douyin by dance's version of TikTok within China from a from a column on China Global Television Network's website, which is state owned. The recent surge of foreign users flocking to a Chinese social media apps, Zhaohongshu, following the looming threat of TikTok's ban in the US has given rise to the term TikTok refugees. This mass migration to an alternative platform underscores the deeper divide between government policies and public sentiment.
Speaker 2:As Little Red Book climbed to the top of Apple's App Store Monday, it became evident that many members of the public remain unconvinced by the government rationale for targeting TikTok. At the heart of the issue lies the question of national security. The US government has repeatedly asserted.
Speaker 1:And TikTok's claim, ByteDance's claim has been that the American government is banning TikTok because of free speech. And it's sort of this self reinforcing thing where the people the people on TikTok are are saying, I need TikTok. It's important to me. Yeah. You're hurting businesses.
Speaker 1:It's a free speech outlet. And then the Chinese government is saying, yeah, look, they just want to ban you because
Speaker 2:Free speech. They don't want you to It's so funny this idea that, like, the yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The Trump administration and Elon are definitely banning free speech where you can say whatever you want on X and it's, like, pretty deranged.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. 90%. Meanwhile, the true American social media platforms are getting more racist. Yeah.
Speaker 1:More homophobic.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah. Like the r word, we can just say that now.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. You have $1,000,000,000 executives.
Speaker 2:That a TikTok thing? Did that come from TikTok? I don't think so.
Speaker 1:Crazy.
Speaker 2:There are already a lot of humorous interactions happening on Little Red Book, but I chose this specific article because it both includes some interesting and pertinent facts about the situation and and is also a great explanation of how China is gonna take the wrong lessons from this episode. Specifically, the article frames the TikTok refugee phenomenon as public dissatisfaction with the government, which, of course, it is. But what is lacking is the contextual understanding to realize that US citizens are publicly dissatisfied with the government as a matter of birthright.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:This is true. Everyone everyone is everyone's bothered by the government in America. That's the Cultural. American thing you can be. Indeed, you can make the case from a certain perspective that it is the TikTok refugees that are the real US propaganda.
Speaker 2:They are giving the a middle finger to the US government by freely expressing themselves at on Little Red Book, which is honestly kind of great and also will be very hard for the Chinese to grok. It is not a good sign in terms of understanding that the author of this column is relying on random Twitter user quotes to make a point.
Speaker 1:I was still calling it Twitter.
Speaker 2:When they, when the entire point is that Americans can and will say whatever they want. The problem for Little Red Book and the reason I think this migration will be short lived is that this contingent isn't really going to give a damn about Little Red Book's moderation slash censorship concerns. The reality is that one of the most important parts of censorship operating at scale is triggering self censorship. Keep in mind the note above about the loss of entailed in a ban, and that's not just not going to happen with TikTok refugees. What is much more likely is that Little Red Book pulls itself from the US app stores in a week or 2.
Speaker 2:In the meantime, I'll enjoy the memes, and who knows? Maybe there will be some sort of value that comes from, this sort of cultural exchange. If anything, this little episode is a reminder of what was lost to the great firewall. And to take this full circle, that itself is a reminder that China started it.
Speaker 1:Ben is so good. Body You gotta this this show should just be us reacting to Ben Thompson.
Speaker 2:I mean, we gotta cover him, like, every every time. When there's good stuff, like, you gotta
Speaker 1:The man cook. Did Tim Cook? He car is Tim Cook.
Speaker 2:Ben Cooks. That piece is great. Ben Thompson. I mean, he's also out there on the front lines living in Taiwan. So I feel you did.
Speaker 2:Lived in Taiwan. That. And so all this stuff hits really hard. A woman from Taiwan? I think so.
Speaker 2:But, yeah, I mean, he's been deeply involved in in analyzing this. I mean, he was writing about this back in 2020.
Speaker 1:Taiwan has ever invaded.
Speaker 2:We're getting him a an 857. We're gonna land the
Speaker 1:we gotta take the chopper into Taiwan.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Protect Ben Thompson for sure. TSMC, we can rebuild. We cannot rebuild.
Speaker 1:There's no there's only one Ben There's
Speaker 2:only one Ben Thompson. There are plenty of people that can do chip fab. Over the last week, the this is from 2020.
Speaker 1:Wait. Should we
Speaker 2:Yeah. I feel like Let's flip over to Solana. I mean, this is this is good. This is a lot of older stuff. I don't know that we need to go through all of this stuff.
Speaker 1:Banger first line from Solana. All is fair in love and info war.
Speaker 2:Let's go.
Speaker 1:Strong start. You have the article too? No. No. You Why don't why don't
Speaker 2:you read this one? Yeah. Yeah. Read
Speaker 1:this. Okay. Solana says, last week following a classified hearing with officials from the FBI and justice department, which we still know nothing about and which for some reason almost nobody has covered. A bipartisan group of lawmakers resurrected Trump's attempt at TikTok divestiture, which would force TikTok's Chinese parent, ByteDance, to sell the company. There's no forcing the CCP.
Speaker 1:They're they're strong in that regard. Yep. That's my addition. Ostensibly, the purpose of the bill is to mitigate CCP surveillance of US citizens, which has persisted for years despite TikTok's project Texas promises to the contrary. Of course, we're putting the data in Texas.
Speaker 1:Well, let's actually so funny. It's a smart move from them to be like Yeah. Our our data centers are in Texas. Yeah. But this time around, in a surprise political twist, the Democrats are relatively quiet on the issue while Republicans, the driving force behind divestiture under Trump, are loudly divided.
Speaker 1:The other thing here, we we haven't even covered this. We should hit DGI on Monday because they have the next target. Okay. DGI DGI this last week Yeah. Raised the the it used to be you couldn't fly a DGI drone into into Restricted airspace.
Speaker 1:Restricted airspace, like, near airports and things like that.
Speaker 2:And it was more than that. It it did they have a whole geofencing system that you can't even fly it at, like, Yosemite because, like, that's national land. They have a no drone warn the no drone Yeah. Yeah. Rule.
Speaker 2:And so that that's baked into the madness, and we just can't turn
Speaker 1:it on. Yeah. It's responsible for
Speaker 2:You know, free speech is important. And, also, flying
Speaker 1:a drone every They decided this week, I I'm guessing they were I'm guessing their point of view was we're gonna get banned. Let's get capture because DGI is actually insane. Right?
Speaker 2:It is
Speaker 1:correct. It is. If you could create like, let's say you're the the CIA of China, and you want to get as much, and you want millions of spies. Right? That are, you know, collecting real time information.
Speaker 1:Imagine you, a spy that's a robot Yeah. That sends all the data back to you.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And it actually gets purchased by by US consumers who fly it on your behalf across the entire so map everything so they can map everything. And so, I think DGI is probably like, yeah, we're cooked here. Let's just, you know, take away the restrictions. Yeah. Capture kind of as much data because DGI, again, it's the same situation as TikTok.
Speaker 1:They have a better product in the market. It's cheaper and better than other drones at that price point. And so, of course, people are saying, I'm gonna get the DJI drone. It's just a rational decision. Just like it's a rational decision for a lot of consumers to open TikTok.
Speaker 1:Right? So they're next. I'm looking forward to that. And, that
Speaker 2:one's gonna be rough because there are not a lot of great American drone companies. And
Speaker 1:Well, and also your hardware device that US consumers have purchased that they're gonna say, you what? You bricked my DGI. Like
Speaker 2:Basically, I mean, I think that I think that the main thing is
Speaker 1:that the brick Apple bricks that brought us yearly. So it can't be too bad.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, I think the main thing is just stopping the flow of new drones and then stopping the software updates so that they can't add new things that make it worse. And then also, probably really watching out for some sort of event that would cause everyone to put their drones in the sky at the same time. Because, sure, you could look at, like, okay, there's, I don't know, 5,000,000 DJI drones in the US right now. 99.9% of those are collecting dust in closets right now.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Because someone got on Christmas. They flew it around a few times. They realized, hey. Actually, I don't do backflips off of ski mountains with a team of people that can fly drones and get sick video of me. It's the GoPro.
Speaker 1:Some of our listeners
Speaker 2:some of our listeners do that. Yeah. But but a lot of these drones just collect dust, and so, like, does the CCV have the ability to turn on your drone and fly it out of your closet? No. Like, they just cannot do that.
Speaker 2:It's not possible. It's not possible.
Speaker 1:How is it not?
Speaker 2:Because, I mean, like, the the DJI Air is literally the wings fold down and put it in a case. Like, it it doesn't have the power. The motors are not strong enough to bust out of a case and, like and then also bust out of your door and break through the flap.
Speaker 1:After after After Israel, like
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Doing Yeah. They probably they can melt the battery, cause a little fire, it'd be a little bit disastrous. The bad thing that you don't want is there's a new generation of, like, DJI fours or fives or whatever, and those have bombs on them.
Speaker 2:And then all of a sudden, there's, like, hey. It's DJI July, and there's some meme where everyone needs to be flying their drones at the same time, and there's a 1,000,000 drones up in the sky, and then they're all taken over at the same time. That would be really,
Speaker 1:really bad.
Speaker 2:But if they did that
Speaker 1:if they did that,
Speaker 2:it would be all out. Drones that are flying right now, you would have, like, a 1000 drones in the air. Like, there's just aren't that many flying at a at a given time. So I don't think it's that much of a threat. But, it should still be Yeah.
Speaker 1:It is beautiful beautiful like, I I have to respect China's work on this. Like, getting millions of drones Yeah. That are that have cameras and microphones Yeah. Into American hands.
Speaker 2:The surveillance stuff is for sure real. Like, all islands is good. Yeah. So you you know that in China, you can't drive Tesla's near Tesla sells very well in China, but you can't drive Tesla's near the Forbidden City because they know that they have cameras, and they don't want Tesla mapping that area. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Which is fascinating.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And so Here here's a good line. Super cool thing. So so jumping forward with Solana, Trump's so Trump, has had to change your heart around TikTok. He's like, yeah.
Speaker 1:Maybe this thing's not so bad. Yep. We don't really know why. Here's potentially one reason. Trump's apparent change of heart in favor of America's most popular Chinese app followed days of libertarian Rand Paul's defense of the company begging an interesting question.
Speaker 1:What do Paul and Trump have in common? Allow Solana to tell you. His name is Jeff Yass, a major GOP donor and an investor in ByteDance, therefore, TikTok. Presently sitting on a stake in the company worth over $30,000,000,000. Insane.
Speaker 1:So Jeff is Jeff's Jeff's cooking with that. He's not super gonna be super happy on Sunday.
Speaker 2:That's like just that one position puts you in, like, the some of the top AUM of, like, any hedge fund manager.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I'm pretty For years for years, Yaz has both supported Paul and lobbied hard against TikTok divestiture. There are never harder rumor has it than he lobbied Republicans last week. Boom. Roasted.
Speaker 1:He is also, for the past couple of years of his swampland career, been a fierce opponent of Trump, but all that changed just days before the TikTok drama bubbled over. So where's Elizabeth Warren now when we need her to call this out? I I wish Elizabeth Warren
Speaker 2:did try to really best have a monopoly on drones.
Speaker 1:Write a letter. Write a letter. Let's call out Jeff. Yes. Like, come on.
Speaker 1:Like, that's, Jeff, you're welcome to come on the show. You've got the AUM for it. Anyways, this all yeah. Anyways, Solana calls it an incredible scandal, and, of course, she's probably one of the very few people that's actually writing about this. And Rand Paul is posting, Trump helped solve TikTok data problem through project Texas.
Speaker 1:Such a such a scam that they
Speaker 2:Doesn't it have a good overview of what project Texas is in there? I wanted to see that.
Speaker 1:Yes. So a bullet A brief history lesson on project Texas. So this was developed when people said, hey. TikTok is clearly storing, you know, by storing all this data in China. So project Texas was developed by TikTok, not the government.
Speaker 1:It was not developed under Trump's tenure, but president Biden's. 3, following China's refusal to let go of TikTok, one account of, and I can't believe it needs repeating, we are obviously in a state of significant conflict with this country, and their government's ability to spy on US citizens is a powerful tool at their disposal. Trump actually ordered the app to be sold or banned, a policy that, number 4, Biden reversed. Over the course of Biden's tenure, available evidence indicates TikTok repeatedly abetted the CCP spying on US citizens, but the but the president's abrupt turn in favor of divestiture along with the entire House Commerce Committee seems more to do with the classified security revelations mentioned at the top of this piece. Yeah.
Speaker 1:These, by the way, didn't happen in a vacuum. So, it's I'm gonna skip forward a little bit. It's worth noting every high profile TikTok defender has felt the need to lie about the bill in order to make their critique even remotely palatable. Right? But despite their insistence to the contrary, TikTok has not been quote, unquote banned.
Speaker 1:There is no bill to ban TikTok. There is presently a bill in play to force a CCP controlled company to sell TikTok, which would remain in operation but free of the CCP. Politicians and public figures getting this wrong are doing so purposefully. And while the question of TikTok's existence might be understandably controversial, why would it matter so greatly to any American that the CCP specifically maintain control of the spy app? This brings me to Vivek Ramaswami, truly one of the worst losers in the bunch.
Speaker 1:The thing is, good old fashioned quid pro quo corruption, while disgusting, is as American as apple pie, and at least it's understandable and that I literally understand the motive. But to the best of my knowledge, Yass isn't paying the Vivek, but Vivek's supposed to be a nationalist naturally amenable to a more symmetric trade. So what gives? Then he provides an update here, I guess, it was after they released. While it's basically impossible to find on Google, a reader tipped me off.
Speaker 1:Turns out Jeff Yass has funneled 1,000,000 of dollars into the Vex pack. Mhmm. So Ready to go. Jeff Jeff.
Speaker 2:I've Send us some money, and then we can start promoting TikTok. So
Speaker 1:I I, I don't I don't know Jeff, but he's acting a little bit like a traitor here. I'm not gonna lie. Like, I understand he's holding 30,000,000,000 of ByteDance stock, but doesn't ByteDance have some value outside of
Speaker 2:Yeah. Wind down the position for sure.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Wind down the position of this it's not like it goes to 0. No. Like, ByteDance has other Yeah. Business lines.
Speaker 2:So The cost base for that investment was, like, nothing
Speaker 1:Yeah. Compared to 30,000,000,000. So you could have rotated out, but at the same time, I you have to imagine ByteDance wanted big American shareholders Totally. This whole time. Totally.
Speaker 1:And then you probably told him, nope. You're not getting out. Yeah. Because they could block the sales, especially something that big. So, famously, Vivek pivoted from the position TikTok should be banned because it is a uniquely powerful form of digital Fentanyl, which he he called it digital Fentanyl to the position TikTok should not be banned because I kid you not, he had dinner with Jake Paul who told him TikTok was important to the youth.
Speaker 1:Jake Paul. The Paul brothers, you know, getting involved in in, geopolitical, psychological warfare.
Speaker 2:We love
Speaker 1:to see it. But Vivek's message Thursday evening in support of a fairly distorted depiction of Trump's position really left me wondering, what does this guy actually want? Immediately following the new the now standard bit of banned propaganda, which he altered after I roasted him for it, the back debunked a string of arguments nobody in Washington is making. First, he tackled the addictive social media critique of the TikTok that he himself popularized months before his first pivot in favor of the CCP, then he drew a false equivalency between ByteDance's actual legal obligation given it's a Chinese company to share American data with the CCP and Airbnb scandalous sale of US user data, which led to a national uproar in high profile firings. Vivek's position.
Speaker 1:Yes. Sending data to is bad, but this bill only targets one company. Another lie. He also endlessly repeated by the yass queens. And this really is a golden age of journalism.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I I think we're actually in it, and it's because people like Ben Thompson, people like Mike Salana are running their own this this is like Pulitzer running Yeah. His media empire where he's like, I'm gonna say what I want. That's wild. The first piece here is easily debunked.
Speaker 1:The bill targets companies from China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea, but the second bit consists of a more cleverly constructed piece of rhetoric. Sure. A broad privacy bill targeting sloppy American companies in addition to literal Chinese spies sounds great, but Vivek knows how hard it is to pass legislation. He knows a small handful of companies pose outside risk to the United States, and he knows some broader privacy push will be mired in Washington bullshit for years. Practically then, it's clear he just wants the CCP to control the company, which is insane.
Speaker 1:How do we drive all the way from China virus, quote, he's putting this in quotes, China virus, which Vivek has said to, I will defend China's access to American data with my life. It's a strange position for a America First politician as was Vivek's position, the entire US startup ecosystem should die following the collapse of the regional bank. Back then in the case of Silicon Valley Bank's collapse, he fell on standard libertarian rhetoric entirely out of step with his otherwise populous campaign, arguing every startup that made the grave sin of trusting their cash in a bank should go to 0 for their ignorance, while every other American at every other bank should be protected. Odd behavior for a nationalist who presumably sees interest in the ongoing existence of an American business ecosystem. I mean, this is the the greatest roast of the vac since, like, 3 weeks ago, which is which is wild.
Speaker 1:Do we wanna go through the rest of this?
Speaker 2:No. I I think I have a good closer, which was, when Ben Thompson was debating this
Speaker 1:The last the last thing I would say, divestiture is way too moderate to ban the app. That's Solana's position, which I agree with.
Speaker 2:And great Coogan's Law coinage. Solana often refers to it just as the spy app Yeah. Which I love. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:It is the spy app. It's the spy app.
Speaker 1:It's because spying is not just about data collection. It's about influence. Yeah. Right? It's about sending your little minions into the country and being like, hey.
Speaker 1:You really shouldn't you know, here's how you really think about this
Speaker 2:or whatever. But when when Ben Thompson was debating the TikTok stuff last year, he had this great so a a lot of the debate centered around, like, free speech. Like, can you be can you really say that you're pro free speech if you're pro pro banning TikTok? And he quotes Ralph Waldo Emerson, his essay in Self Reliance where, Emerson says, consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, and I really like that. And it's basically this idea of you need to have some level of ideological flexibility.
Speaker 2:And Yeah. And you cannot get you cannot put the blinders on and just say, I believe in free speech at all cost no matter what. Because then when something gets thrown your way that has other, you know, third party externalities and impacts, you wind up making very, very bad decisions. And so, this is just it's just an important thing whenever you're thinking of these, like, difficult tech and political issues to not get too focused on a specific consistency and actually and actually try and understand the whole picture, which I think is what we try to do today.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And and Vivek, he's had some hilarious moments, and he's great. Reminds me of of Obama in many ways and and, and, Newsom in their ability to just yap. Yeah. Like, some of the greatest yappers of all time.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Totally.
Speaker 1:But it's so easy to point out the consistencies inconsistencies with his and and what you're saying is it's okay to be inconsistent in terms of application of these ideologies. Yes. But in Vivek's case, it's okay. You were super you know, you were ready to let the start up economy just burn Yep. Even though you're a populist.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And then now you're flip flopping on something that, Yeah. I don't know. I I I truly believe that anybody that's taking donations Yeah. From a major ByteDance shareholder Yeah.
Speaker 1:And then going out and saying that they will that TikTok should only stay in the control of ByteDance, which we've now determined through this entire last hour is ultimately in you know? Yeah. CCP is calling the shots, then, you know, I I believe that's, like, traitor behavior. And I don't believe that Vivek has a place in the US government after what I've seen here.
Speaker 2:We'll see how it shakes out. But Maybe maybe
Speaker 1:that's it. Around.
Speaker 2:You
Speaker 1:know? One thing one thing our audience can rely on us for, we do not get into politics.
Speaker 2:Talk about politics. Yeah. Well, let's, let's go to something completely I get this. Yeah. Let's take a quick break.
Speaker 2:We'll be right back, folks. Welcome back to the Technology Brothers podcast, still the most profitable podcast in the world. We are gonna jump into the timeline, but first, we wanna bring you some promoted posts from our loyal fans who have given us some fantastic reviews.
Speaker 1:So yesterday, we yesterday, we put put out a call to action. If you leave us a review on Spotify, iTunes, or wherever you listen to podcasts, please put an ad in it or your whatever. It could be an ad for you personally. It could be an ad for your business. It could be an ad for your parents' business.
Speaker 2:For a different company that you just have an affiliate.
Speaker 1:Company like, if you love Ramp Yeah. Do it put a Ramp ad in there, and we'll we'll so every, every review, we will read out on the show. And so this is just our little way of, you know, do a little for the show. The show will do a little for you.
Speaker 2:Exactly. One hand washes the other.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Here we go. So the first one comes from, Varun Ram Ganesh over at, Warp. He says, need that bottle of Dom now? He says, great podcast. I am the hairdresser for Jordi and John.
Speaker 2:Together, they've given me 1,000,000 of dollars. For my 40th birthday, Jordi gave me a shiny red f 40 and personally delivered by John on his 737.
Speaker 1:It is, and he's not wrong here.
Speaker 2:So he's not at work.
Speaker 1:He in his his day, you know, his day job is shitposting and building, you know, one of the top payroll companies in the world. Yep. Then sort of nights and weekends, he's a celebrity hairdresser. We had to beg. We had to beg to get in.
Speaker 1:He said, you guys aren't real celebrities. You're niche and Internet micro celebrities. You don't actually mini sells. You can't afford the kind of cuts I give. And and we we we worked out some some some in kind trades, and we made it happen.
Speaker 1:And our hair has never looked better, John. So It's
Speaker 2:been fantastic.
Speaker 1:To, PG.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Let's go to Anthony Baird, Berardi Berardi. He says, precede round is filling up fast. Get in early while you can. He says, shout out to the brothers.
Speaker 2:Technology Brothers, I think that's illegal. I don't think he General I don't think he can generally solicit. Yeah. But but but Nice try.
Speaker 1:We're gonna take it as he did this as a joke.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's a
Speaker 1:joke. But and we're an entertainment show, so we're gonna read it out. And maybe people Oh,
Speaker 2:so he says shout out to the brothers. Technology Brothers has quickly become my go to source for all things tech, business, and politics, except they never discuss politics on the show. Thank you. From the size gong to low tam bangers to Jory's frequent ankle exposure, the this podcast has it all. This Technology Brothers review is sponsored by my startup, Citraimer.
Speaker 2:Citriimer is an early stage material science company manufacturing carbon negative high performance resins and plastics from citrus waste. Our resin are cost and perform the same as petroleum based incumbents and remove 1.5 tons of c 02 from the atmosphere for every ton of material produced. Citraemer is actively raising a precinct to expand their engineering team, conducting manufacturing demos with customers, and reach pilot production scale. Send a DM to a bad
Speaker 1:financial advice. We don't share investment opportunities. We take the full allocation ourselves typically. But, honestly, super cool.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Whoever if you want to if you want to do the deal, you're going to need some sharp elbows to keep us out of that.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We by the time you're listening to this, we'll have taken 200% of the allocation.
Speaker 2:With super pro rata.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Keep it out for hours. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Keep it out.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We're Thank you thank you for
Speaker 2:the review. I guess, if I just buy the whole company and fire the CEO. Yeah. Sorry, Anthony. It's right out of
Speaker 1:the job. Really sharp elbows. We're gonna lever you up. Yeah. And slice of leverage on it.
Speaker 1:Venture debt. Let's put some insane covenants in there.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It needs to be backed by your house. Do you have a house? We're taking that house too.
Speaker 1:There needs to be a new venture debt product that basically says if you're not achieving a 100% month over month growth, like, the whole all the equity holders are wiped out
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And you get taken over.
Speaker 2:And your house gets taken too.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. So, reach out to Baldo if you're looking for some financial engineering support.
Speaker 2:I like that Baldo is, like He's
Speaker 1:just he's Baldus
Speaker 2:say his first name and people know on the show.
Speaker 1:Baldus studies finance at Cornell in economics. Like, he's an expert financial engineer. There we go. Studied from the.
Speaker 2:Great. Okay. So Thomas Disney, I guess, from the Disney Fortress. You made us money in entertainment.
Speaker 1:Great. Great.
Speaker 2:So the air to the Disney Fortune, says trying to load and unload missiles in Ohio help with an annual contract? He says load trailers fast. Listen to this podcast with all your extra time. Slip Robotics delivers groundbreaking robots as a service solution designed to load and unload trailers in just 5 minutes. This innovation unlocks magnificent or significant labor savings, minimizes equipment and product wear, and prioritizes operator safety by keeping them out of trailers.
Speaker 2:Curious about the impact on your bottom line? Use our ROI calculator at sliprobotics.com to discover how Slip Robotics can revolutionize your operation by saving time and money. And speaking of time savings, why not use that extra time to tune in to the Technology Brothers podcast? It's as innovative as the tech we deliver. Thank you.
Speaker 2:That's a great integration.
Speaker 1:Great app.
Speaker 2:Bringing it back to the show. One hand washes the other. Understood the mission delivered perfectly.
Speaker 1:We might have to read this one again.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And it's and it's great to see, an heir to such a dynasty as the Disney fortune Right. Something in hard tech.
Speaker 1:He's also looking with a help, help with an andro contacts.
Speaker 2:So Good luck.
Speaker 1:There's definitely some Luke Metro. Hit up Thomas Disney. Hit him up. Some stuff happen.
Speaker 2:Love to see it. So let's go to a, a fantastic thread by Eric Gleiman, CEO of Ramp. We were riffing about this idea a couple weeks ago, maybe months ago, talking about, you know, a lot of people are complaining about waste in the federal government. Doge is in the air. Everyone's talking about government efficiency.
Speaker 2:Well, what if we put the government on ramp? And it, started as a joke, but it's getting gaining a lot of steam. And Eric, took
Speaker 1:It's funny because we were joking about it, but not it was not a joke at all. Exactly. We were a 100%. Yeah. You know, clear that the the the the gover the federal government
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And every aspect of our government should have better visibility into their spend.
Speaker 2:No. It started as a joke. And then and then immediately, I I I was just wondering, like, wait. So, like, when a DOD employee goes on a trip, like, how do they actually categorize their receipts? Like, do they have a sister?
Speaker 2:And, like, probably not. Everything runs on paper and pencil. Like, I've worked for the government. It's awful. And so, yeah, bringing in new technology makes a ton of sense.
Speaker 2:And so Eric says, imagine a company losing money for 20 years straight and failing 7 audits. The CFO would get fired. Right? That's our government, which spent half its budget deficit on interest. It doesn't have to be this way.
Speaker 2:Here's how businesses balance profitability and growth, and how government can do the same. For the past 23 years, the US government has been breaking the golden rule of budgeting. Make more money than you spend. Say what you will about corporate flaws, but the private sector generally operates by this rule because those who don't eventually cease to exist. While governments are not companies, making more money than you spend is one area companies have lessons to offer.
Speaker 2:And so it's worth studying. What can we learn from the private sector? For years, tech companies prioritize growth over profits. That is until the 2022 market crash forced them to do the reverse. The result improved cash flow margins from 3% to 16%.
Speaker 2:Meanwhile, in the public sector, government spending only went up while companies I gotta say Stupid. Gleiman's a very presidential
Speaker 1:CEO. Totally. He when you listen to this, you just get this sense of, confidence. Right? Like, he's, you know, not talking down to you.
Speaker 1:He's explaining some of these sort of more complex issues. He's, illustrating them. So, anyways, one of the Zoomers will say I'm No. Glazing, but, it's hard not it's it's hard not to glaze when you're talking about the most important financial
Speaker 2:Well, let's, let's continue on here. He says, let me be clear. While companies must react to market conditions, the government operates without this pressure increasing spending regardless.
Speaker 1:Or is that ours? Give us your George w.
Speaker 2:George w. He says, the US government has many priorities. Efficiency hasn't been one. Can you take a page of the private sector's playbook to improve its efficiency? Think of any business or agency as a vehicle trying to move forward.
Speaker 2:One way to increase that vehicle's velocity is by applying thrust, but another way is to reduce drag. The efficiency formula of increasing context and control focuses on the drag factor of this equation. Change of it change in velocity is c times thrust minus drag. So you can increase thrust, or you can decrease drag. Of the, the most effective businesses have efficient operations that control that that provide a high level of context and control.
Speaker 2:Context to understand and audit exactly where your dollars are going, software, vendors, consultants, travel, meals, and control to proactively and precisely manage where spend occurs, e g auto declining out of policy spend. The more context and control an organization has, the more it can unlock its own performance velocity. Wasteful expenses represent the drag holding organizations back. What does this look like for the government right now? A $100,000,000,000 in Medicare, Medicaid fraud, 200,000,000,000 of SBA loan fraud, 236,000,000,000 in improper payments, $536,000,000,000 wasted.
Speaker 2:That's 7.9% of the government's entire budget down the drain. What would happen if you imply if you applied the efficiency formula? Imagine massive programs like Medicare and Medicaid using real time tracking and automated controls to cut down on fraud. Don't overspend is great, but can't overspend is better. This is a this isn't a hypothetical.
Speaker 2:It's a real possibility. Very clearly technical very clearly technically possible with modern systems and one that TriRamp customers have been using for years. When the US cuts bureaucracy and ramps velocity, exceptional things happen. Research is funded. Infrastructure is restored.
Speaker 2:Meaningful service to the American people is provided. Our GDP is 2 x the next largest nation. We don't have a revenue problem. We have a drag problem.
Speaker 1:Like how he he just gave a subtle jab to Yeah. To, our friends across the Pacific?
Speaker 2:Yeah. For much deeper and research on the problems as well as actionable ideas, see research dot contrary.com. Thank you to Contrary Research and the Ramp team for your hard work on this. Yeah. Very interesting to kind of start with something that was kind of, you know, a joke, but then we realized there was, like, a deeper meaning.
Speaker 2:And then that's, like, kind of the heart of comedy is, like, there's usually it's funny if there's, like, some sliver of truth. And then Yeah. To see the contrary people and the ramp team go and dig into what that would actually look like is is pretty fascinating. I I want to go a step further, though. I wanna see a a much deeper dive.
Speaker 2:We were talking about this, like, talking to the Anduril guys and some people who, do government contracting. Like, how does the money for a missile actually get transferred? Like, like, what rails are they using? I wanna know the full tech stack of the government. I wanna see it in extremely granular detail and understand, you know, is that even part of the problem?
Speaker 2:Is that where things are broken, where they're breaking?
Speaker 1:You know, the the Disney, like, business graph. Yeah. It's probably like that. You need that kind of graphic for a single payment, you know? Totally.
Speaker 1:It's just like, well, this thing needs to approve this and, you know, you need to get sign off over here and take the physical copy Yeah. And carry it to the next building.
Speaker 2:When it works for the Department of Commerce, timesheets were done on paper with pen and paper and turned in into, like, a physical box that then would get
Speaker 1:That was back in the eighties. Right?
Speaker 2:It's 2010. Fuck. 2011. So is that insane? That's crazy.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Like, one of the biggest sources of alpha at work was just using Google Maps and and spreadsheets, which were not they were not procured by the US government. It was just it was just my personal account. And there's so much of that. Even in military context, there's stories about, soldiers using Google Maps and and satellite imagery from goo from just the Google Maps product on their personal device to understand, like, how do I get from one military base to the next?
Speaker 2:Yep. Like, because we don't have the tool, like Yeah. Internally. We don't have a we we haven't procured anything. Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's fascinating. Rough. And, of course, like, you can't do that on the payment side in the same way. Although Make
Speaker 1:sure that the the the real thing here is by the time the US federal government does sign up for ramp, does it really is only a matter of time? You already have, the Kamala campaign was using it. You're sort of one step. You could imagine Yeah. You know, if Kamala had one, she might have come in and said, I love this Ramp software.
Speaker 1:I love Ramp Business Corporation so much. We roll this out everywhere. So it's inevitable. The question is, are we gonna get credit for the initial joke as starting domino effect of of converting the federal government to a to a customer. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I would hate to see a situation where the US government resolves that $530,000,000,000 in waste, but we don't get credit.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That
Speaker 2:would be a
Speaker 1:disaster. Crazy. Yeah. Yeah. That'd be a dark day
Speaker 2:for the pod. It'd be rough. Yeah. But that's why we're talking about it. We're canonizing it
Speaker 1:into the when OpenAI trains their model, their next model on this episode. So You're like, well, the Technology Brothers actually
Speaker 2:You know, when some small child asks in an American history course in 2095, why does the US government run on ramp? They'll say, well, let's let me tell you that. Technology, brother. Yeah. Podcast.
Speaker 2:Originally riffed out by Geordie Hayes, the the transformation of America into a financial powerhouse started in late 2024.
Speaker 1:Started on a podcast like many great things. 16.
Speaker 2:Great. Well, let's stay with Eric. He has another post. This was a banger today. I think he had over a 1000 likes.
Speaker 2:He says genuine career advice. Hang this poster in your room or closet. And it's a, a picture or poster that says, believe in your fucking self. Stay up all fucking night. Work outside of your fucking habits.
Speaker 2:Know when to fucking speak up. Fucking collaborate. Don't fucking procrastinate. Get over your fucking self. Keep fucking learning.
Speaker 2:It goes on and on and on like that. And I and I like this because, obviously, you you know, like, we talk about feng shui. We talk about
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Astrology and and mantras. And, like, even, like, kind of silly inspirational stuff like this does actually work its way into your brain. And if you and if you surround yourself with these kind of, like,
Speaker 1:rest of the
Speaker 2:closet, I couldn't Yeah. It looked like it
Speaker 1:was like Closet is almost like clothes on either side, which is cool.
Speaker 2:But, also, this was interesting to me for the reason that, you know, Eric is a pretty buttoned up presidential CEO, and and the f word is something that has has truly crossed over into, totally acceptable and inoffensive to everyone, which I think is good. Because when I when I grew up, the f word was censored on most TV and radio, but then other words were allowed. And I'm pretty sure, and and there's been kind of a renegotiation over what words will be okay to be used, what words will need to be censored. And I think, you know, I I I draw the line at the r word. We don't need it.
Speaker 2:But the f word punches just at the right level sometimes, and it just adds a little bit of spice to whatever you're saying.
Speaker 1:And, you know, if I'm Doesn't have the same to say, f that, Geordie.
Speaker 2:No. Exactly. But if I if I call someone a fucking idiot, that hits just as hard as
Speaker 1:the r word for me. Freaking idiot.
Speaker 2:Freaking. Yeah. The freaking was very funny.
Speaker 1:I need that. Yeah. I want that, for for my son's room. Just just replace with freaking.
Speaker 2:Freaking. Freak.
Speaker 1:Just freaking you can just freaking do things.
Speaker 2:Let's let's do one more, banger post, and then we'll move on to a promoted post in a bucket poll. We'll say, Garrett Todd says there is a real there's I think he's saying there's one real renaissance man left, and it is Nat Friedman. While most tech billionaires spend their time away on frivolities and psychedelics, he bankrolled the translation of the Herculaneum papyri and is now tackling the poison in our food supply. And, I mean, we gave Nat Friedman brother of the week. You've heard these stories in the pod before, but, you can't give him enough credit for setting just a very different pace of play for the the tech elite.
Speaker 2:And it's just
Speaker 1:I have a I have a, you know, evolved opinion on the scroll stuff. I, I've posted recently that, the only alpha left in life is finding these rare scrolls, manuscripts, books, PDFs that OpenAI hasn't had a chance to feed into, 01 yet. And I think that, it's very possible that that, Nat is, only sharing 1% of the scrolls that he's actually doing. It's just sort of like, look. I'm the sort of benevolent billionaire.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I'm doing this public work, but really, he's trying to get all of this, like For himself. Fair knowledge for himself. K. And he's consuming it and then just deleting it out of destroying the original Skrulls.
Speaker 1:Like, because, in the end and he's probably gonna be the last guy with a job. Yeah. He's gonna be the last man with a good old fashioned, you know
Speaker 2:Yeah. What what should Nat's next project be? It seems like he's kind of crushed the schools.
Speaker 1:I like him. I'd like to see him go Indiana Jones mode. So hire a team of former seals. Yep. Get a few Blackhawks and a nice yacht.
Speaker 1:What's he looking for? Dropping into dropping into countries and and sort of taking their relics, like, act by force. Taking their relics by force. Maybe he occupies the pyramids for a while and takes applies some of this.
Speaker 2:I think you can just go to the the Louvre.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. But a lot
Speaker 2:of that's already been by.
Speaker 1:A lot
Speaker 2:of the hard work
Speaker 1:I'd like to see, more billionaires start to occupy spaces that they they don't actually have a right over. Yeah. So, like, you know, people, you know, talking about Greenland. Alright. Let's let's, you know, let's, you know, send a landing force.
Speaker 1:Let's, like, take one of their most nice, like, vacation towns. Right? Like, let's start there and not Yeah. Have it purely just be a conversation.
Speaker 2:You know what I'd like to see? A sort of land yacht. You know how yachts there's this big, like, competition for, like, the Like, a very yacht? Yeah. I wanna see someone build a car that's 200 feet long.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Like, kind of a tank. So it's sort of steamrolls.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. You say
Speaker 1:it's like with a steamroller thing in a Exactly.
Speaker 2:Those huge dump trucks that move, like, mining equipment around. You know, like, a 100 feet tall.
Speaker 1:Wasn't there something like that in The Incredibles? What remember that, you remember that that, it was a drill bit in the front so you could actually go through the earth too? That's nice. If you want if you want had a a yacht with a drill bit. Yeah.
Speaker 1:An earth yacht that could just, like, come up in an area and then, like, dive deep on into the core and just, like, cruise around and then pop up. Yeah. That'd be a great asset. And and Earth yacht. It's everybody says, oh, Elon's so ambitious.
Speaker 1:He's thinking about Mars. Everybody else is thinking about the moon, but why isn't Elon talking about land yachts? The core. In the core. The core.
Speaker 1:Let's look down. Right? The ocean's a great mystery, but the core is an even greater mystery. You don't hear about people, you know Yeah. People go deep in the ocean.
Speaker 2:There does seem to be also mega alpha in submarines. I mean, there's all these yachts, but very few people build submarines correctly. Half or half Every guy, Ocean Gate was a disaster.
Speaker 1:I know, but that was just that was that was, that was a psyop to get people to stop, you know, to to get people against these sort of amateur submarines. Yeah. Which in the reality is, like, if if I look down your phone, you talk with a bunch of beaners all the time. Yep. Every other person in your text has their own private submarine captain crew.
Speaker 1:They can go down under the water for a decade and and and be fine. So Well,
Speaker 2:that's why, you know, privately, a lot of people refer to Atlantis as, like, the sun valley of the ocean.
Speaker 1:The new sun valley.
Speaker 2:The new sun valley. Yeah. Going to Atlantis.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Anyway, race down to we'll have to do a deep we'll have to do a deep dive specifically on
Speaker 2:A literal deep dive. A literal deep dive. On Atlantis, The Lost City.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I'm not super prepped for,
Speaker 2:Let's do the Lockheed one. He's he's shilling. We're shilling on behalf of him.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:I saw this post, and I was like, he's doing
Speaker 1:a So this is a this is a promoted post of a shill. Lockheed Lockheed, says I almost never show my investments, but after a week with Impulse Labs, it is very hard not to. Had high expectations, but it has consistently exceeded. Speed to boil water is incredible. Temperature control, ease of use, all perfect.
Speaker 1:Love Impulse Lights. And, yeah. I don't know a ton about this company, but it it it's kinda seemingly like the time, you know, everybody was coming out against gas stoves, saying that, you know, they're toxic and wasteful and and have a negative environmental impact. And impulse seems like they perfectly timed it of not just creating an electric stove, but creating a something better than Yeah. The gas stove, better than fire.
Speaker 1:One of my first inventions is man. So there's a little bit of hubris. You're really trying to tune the gaps.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I'm I actually It's Promethean effort.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Promethean effort to reinvent the stove. And,
Speaker 2:hopefully, he won't be struck down for his hubris. Yeah. But I I think he's built different.
Speaker 1:He's built different.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And he's He may
Speaker 2:even be better than the guys.
Speaker 1:The CEO of Impulse? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He's certainly He's a lucky I would put through a lucky He's certainly, you know, developing products in that way.
Speaker 1:So anyways, we gotta get this one one of these at the studio. I I really want to be able to cook a steak mid episode on the table That'd
Speaker 2:be great.
Speaker 1:And have it and and we'll just go back and forth Yeah. Finish the episode.
Speaker 2:So Korean barbecue style. Yeah. Yeah. Sure.
Speaker 1:So in both labs, if you send us send us one of these, we'll start doing Korean barbecue episodes where we just Yeah.
Speaker 2:In between the Dom episodes,
Speaker 1:we'll just exotic meat. Barbecue. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:The likes You've been really so John this'll be another episode. John's been obsessed with feasting on lion because he keeps saying, I'm I'm I'm, like, built the same. Like, we just had I
Speaker 2:Well, there's a study. There was a study. A bunch of MIT, Harvard, and, Stanford researchers got together, and they studied the food supply. And they find They looked at the data. They looked at the data, and they found that scientifically what's going on when you consume animal meat is that you absorb the power from that animal.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And so if you eat a lion, you become more like a lion. If you eat a bull, you become more like a bull. Yep. And so, just just from a from a physiologic You don't wanna be
Speaker 1:doing lamb. Exactly. Even though it's, you know, that it
Speaker 2:And certainly never a plant because you just want to sit there. You want
Speaker 1:to be eating oysters. You develop a hard,
Speaker 2:hard outer shell. Exactly.
Speaker 1:Exactly. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Let's go to a bucket pull. Oh, from none other than Baldo. Congratulations.
Speaker 1:Baldo.
Speaker 2:Baldo says, anyone else miss Greta yapping about climate change on the TL?
Speaker 1:Let's go.
Speaker 2:I love that we printed this out with Yeah. 20 of these notes.
Speaker 1:So we snipe this before Yeah. Clearly, like, within seconds of it of it going out. But,
Speaker 2:I mean, you know what's a good one when you can still see the scroll bar there on the screenshot? I refer to this like being, like, a big game hunter on the timeline. When you're when when you see something, you screenshot it so fast, the scroll bar hasn't disappeared from your phone, so it shows up in the screenshot. This is like I had to screenshot that.
Speaker 1:That's good. It's great. Yeah. I, I got to say, did she fall off after the there was that behind the scenes video where she was, like, clearly.
Speaker 2:Wasn't she like an Altitude or something?
Speaker 1:Well, there was that whole arc, but she she plays a character. Mhmm. She's a smart Yeah. Young content creator. And they kinda caught her out of character, and they caught her, like, faking some of these arrests.
Speaker 1:And and I think it just it all really caught up at once, and and that's one of the issues if you're not being authentic. And, you know, you're just, anyway so, Greta, I'm sure she'll have a redemption arc. Yeah. Everybody deserves a redemption arc. So
Speaker 2:My all my my take on Greta was that there was a fork in the road. She's clearly a very talented young person. She could've if she'd just done a Thiel Fellowship, she would've built, like, 5 nuclear reactors by now
Speaker 1:and
Speaker 2:probably had a massive impact on climate change. And instead, she just became, like, an annoying shit poster, which is very sad to see. So build. I mean, that's the that's the answer to all this stuff. You know?
Speaker 2:It's always so funny when, like, the environmentalists are, like, throwing paint on electric cars, and you're just like, okay. So you believe in nothing? Let's go to, Nir. Nir says, we kind of created the matrix, and all it took was infinite scroll plus short form video, yet billions are trapped in it. Techno optimist for everything except short form video.
Speaker 2:It's an interesting take. I do I do worry about wire heading as being, like, the the bad outcome of all this. We created the matrix. People are in the matrix looking at infinite Yeah.
Speaker 1:That was that was the post actual reference earlier on the show. 5. Yeah. It, yes. Sometimes, this thing that everybody's anticipating emerges, and it doesn't look exactly like
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:It would maybe feel more like The Matrix if everybody had their Apple Vision Pros on. Yep. It was just fully locked in.
Speaker 2:That's almost like a secondary, like
Speaker 1:I just think it's interesting how sci fi how influential sci fi is on human development and innovation that if you really wanted to influence the future now, you would be making sci fi movies. That seems to be in the same way that you can have an impact through building technology companies. If you created an Angel Studios just for new sci fi concepts right now, you could be influencing the world in 30 or 50 years and be thinking about, okay, what does the world look like with ASI? What does the world look like where every home has a nuclear reactor?
Speaker 2:Yeah. What We're talking to Sham, Sham Sankar about this at Palantir, the CTO. Yeah. He just started a new film studio, and Jerry Carmen starting to do his first sci fi film. Like,
Speaker 1:some action. Yeah. No way.
Speaker 2:And so Can we
Speaker 1:can we cameo in that, Jason? Yeah. Jason. Sorry.
Speaker 2:I think You
Speaker 1:need 2 2 guys that can yap. Yeah. Where are those guys?
Speaker 2:I mean, the hard part about good sci fi is that, yeah, it really does all come from, like, the seed of the idea. Yeah. And
Speaker 1:and But it also to have enough cultural impact Yeah. And get into them and you have to do it Hollywood style blockbuster. I think it
Speaker 2:Yes. But I think that you only get that. You only earn the right to do the Dune style treatment.
Speaker 1:That's what I'm saying. You gotta
Speaker 2:Unless you have a brilliant idea first. And we are, we have a short we have a shortage of, like, great ideas about the future of sci fi. People are very uncertain about what things will look like. Yeah. We've already mapped out, like, flying cars, robots, LLMs, aliens.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Like, there aren't a lot of people that are talking about, like, truly new science fiction stuff.
Speaker 1:Well, we're talking about lanyards with drill bits that that allow, you know, being there to travel deep in the Earth's crust for you know, and get in the first half to get to China in an hour.
Speaker 2:But, yeah, I mean, there aren't there I I I need to dig into it because there's the Hugo Awards that do, the best sci fi books of the year and the best sci fi shorts of the year. And I bet if you dig through some of those award winning sci fi shorts, there's some interesting concepts that haven't really percolated into the zeitgeist yet. But it's always hard. It's like, you know, it's it's it's hard to find, like, the next cutting edge music trend unless you're really in it and going to shows, small places, and listening to random stuff. And then you find some seed of something that becomes popular, and then and then all of a sudden, it becomes becomes mainstream.
Speaker 2:There's probably something like that going on in the sci fi fiction scene. Yep. I'm just not tapped into it, but I'd like to be because, I love this stuff, and it's really cool. Have you ever watched Love, Death, and Robots Netflix? It's really cool.
Speaker 1:I've seen, like, 5 films in 5 TV series.
Speaker 2:So Love, Death, and Robots is an anthology series, where they they licensed short form, short science fiction stories and then had, CGI and animation studios go and create, like, film versions of these animated versions of these. And it's great. And you can watch them, and some of them are 3 minutes, and some of them are 10 minutes, and some of them are funny. Some of them grapple with, like, really so there's, like, a one that's, like, a horror story, basically. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:And and it's a cool way to kind of surface these, these, like, famous sci fi stories in, like, a lighter touch where I don't think it's as expensive as, like, shooting Dune. But,
Speaker 1:yeah. Yeah. But people have talked about doing a tech positive Black Mirror before, which would be Black Mirror is just like Yep. You know, talking you know, basically demonstrating the horrors of technology. Yep.
Speaker 1:But there could be
Speaker 2:Very entertaining.
Speaker 1:Of that. Yeah.
Speaker 2:But the problem is is that I think a lot of people get lost because they say, I I wanna make a techno optimist Black Mirror, but then they forget that every great story needs a villain. Yeah. And you have to have conflict for the story to be engaging whatsoever. It cannot just be We can't exist
Speaker 1:without tech journalists, and tech journalists can't exactly let us.
Speaker 2:Exactly. Yeah. You you can't just do the story of, like, oh, yeah. We developed rockets, and we went to Mars, and it was great. Like, no one's gonna watch that.
Speaker 2:It's just boring.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:You need conflict. You need the rocket to bring.
Speaker 1:And Musk Yes. You know, fighting, and then they they they get to gridlock in their lawsuit. And then they just say, let's get in a MMA match while I rocket to Mars.
Speaker 2:Here we go.
Speaker 1:And the winner takes over Mars and subsequently controls the universe. There we go. Elon would have an edge there, I think.
Speaker 2:I think so.
Speaker 1:Okay. Just just,
Speaker 2:I have some
Speaker 1:heads up. I got, like, basically, like 20 minutes? Like, 10:10 minutes.
Speaker 2:Well, let's go to Elon saying, please be a bit more positive, beautiful, or informative. Please post more positive, beautiful, or informative content on this platform. Very funny post because, people were, like, screenshotting the next to Elon's, like, most aggressive post. But Aaron Slodov, took the assignment, literally and delivered. He says, be me, human, living in 2024.
Speaker 2:Ancestors crushed oceans and wooden boats. Now we're building spaceships. Literally have all human knowledge in my pocket and can learn anything. Great great grandparents died from simple infections. Now we're editing genes to cure diseases.
Speaker 2:Watching humans casually land rockets like they're playing curveball space program. Can instantly connect with anyone on Earth and share ideas for free. My feeling when we're building quantum computers and artificial brains, each generation builds something impossible for the last one. We're not just planning Mars missions. We're testing rockets right now.
Speaker 2:That feeling when born just in time to witness humanity becoming a multi planetary, civilization. Great post.
Speaker 1:Great post.
Speaker 2:A lot of good stuff.
Speaker 1:Great poster.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Great poster.
Speaker 1:Great event thrower. Yeah. Great builder.
Speaker 2:I feel like I feel like x has been pretty positive this this week.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Ever ever ever since that Elon said, hey.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And, also, the fires, like, brought out a lot of
Speaker 1:I mean,
Speaker 2:some vitriol against politicians, but generally a lot of support. And, yeah, I mean, did you see the catch yesterday? The cops are knocking
Speaker 1:again?
Speaker 2:And it was like, I didn't I didn't even hear the buildup for the catch. Like, last time they did it, there was like, oh, I know some people that are going to watch it live. And will they want? Will they do it? Will they won't?
Speaker 2:Won't they do it? And this time, it was just like, oh, yeah. They caught it again. Like, okay. It's old.
Speaker 1:And the crazy thing was the visual of all all everything they sent up.
Speaker 2:The breaking up? The breaking up. Yeah. Because the actual Starship disintegrated. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Which I think was, like, a failure for that test, but still, they caught the booster, which is cool. Yeah. So kind of like a some good, some bad out
Speaker 1:of that,
Speaker 2:I guess.
Speaker 1:Shout out to Red Bull Futurist.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 1:He posted the second they caught it. He was like, something like, that was cool. Let's do it again. Yeah. Like
Speaker 2:No. That is the sentiment.
Speaker 1:Back to work. And then other other SpaceX employees were showing Yeah. Like, you miss here's what you miss. And it's like showing all the rubble and then Yep. Explosions and all the times that it didn't work.
Speaker 1:And it really is, explosions and all the times that it didn't work. And it really is, Yeah. You
Speaker 2:know, the the the catch is so interesting because, I've I've seen some some SpaceX critics say, like, oh, well, like, you know, we we have rockets that land. It's just called the Space Shuttle. Like, the Space Shuttle would go up and was reusable. It would land, and then you'd put it back on a rocket. But the time just to get the Space Shuttle back upright is, like, days.
Speaker 2:And, like, you have to change everything out and stuff. And so having that booster that can just go up and then come back down, and it does it in a matter of minutes. It's not like it's up there for, like, days, and then it comes back. It comes back down. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And and then they refuel it, and it's ready to go. And you can you can imagine you can see that at least, structurally, the the design will enable, like, dozens of flights per day, like, pretty easily. And that throughput is gonna be really, really important. And it's probably under discussed because just watching it is, like, so amazing. But what what's really amazing is the the the the, like, the machinery for high throughput rocketry that Elon's obsessed with.
Speaker 2:And this is the same thing with, like, manufacturing Teslas at scale. Like, the the guy just loves, like, scaling up, like, you know, mass manufacturing. Let's go to
Speaker 1:He's a mass monster.
Speaker 2:He's a mass monster. Mass to orbit, getting big. Let's go to Jeff Lewis. He says, at the top, there's no such thing as work life balance. The healthy way to integrate business and life is via love.
Speaker 1:Great point. I I I went through this at, I think, around 21, 22. Yeah. And, at the time, I was facing pressure from people in my life to say, like, you need more work life balance and all this stuff. And my reaction at that time was I don't I don't want to work less.
Speaker 1:I actually wanna work more. I'm trying to set my life up so that I can work harder, longer, etcetera, and do this for many, many years. But what was true about that was there were certain aspects of the way that I was working that weren't negatively impacting my life. And so finding that balance of and getting to a place where you love work, where if I'm if I'm up late sending emails, well, if I love the work, then that's not a negative experience. Yep.
Speaker 1:It's a negative experience if you hate what you're doing. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Is that is that how you interpreted the love section of that? That was the that was the only thing that I that I didn't fully understand about the post was the health and safety business.
Speaker 1:I mean, that's that was my interpretation of have if you have a love for business and love
Speaker 2:your life.
Speaker 1:Craft and and, and your life, which to me is family and friends. Yeah. Right? Like and that and I'm fortunate that, you know, we're not friends. We're strictly business partners.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:But, I'm fortunate that I love the work, and I love Yeah. My life, and I love that they intersect.
Speaker 2:So we have to have dinner. It's fine because we'll be able to Yeah.
Speaker 1:Business the entire night. You know, we're gonna have dinner, and our wives will be, like, can you guys just stop playing the character for literally 2 minutes so that we can order?
Speaker 2:I mean, literally at the at the last dinner, it was, like, you know. No. Actually 15 minutes of pleasantries and then, like, 2 hours of, like, let's play the next activation.
Speaker 1:Sarah was, like, hey, just some feedback. Like, if you're gonna get both families together and, like, you know, we're gonna have, like, a nice dinner, could you just, like, try to spend, like it's fine if you spend, like, half the time, like, talking about work, but, like, you guys spend all days together. Could you at least, like, could you just, like, talk about something else
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Like, a little bit? And I was like, okay. Yeah. You're right. It's ridiculous.
Speaker 1:Anyways, love what you do. Love your life. Oh, it's all one thing. That that was the other thing is it's all one thing. There's no business is life.
Speaker 1:Life is business. It's all one thing. You gotta love it all, the good and the bad. The highs and the lows, the bangers and the flops.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I went to dinner last night at Restoration Hardware. Nice. They have they have restaurants now.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And then all the food items are shaped like the cloud couch. That is
Speaker 2:I couldn't help myself from making so many jokes. I was like, so is this like a pop up or is this, like, permanent? Like, oh, well, like, yeah, it's actually permanent. Like, they're gonna have the restaurant in the store forever. And I was like, is that in Oh, so it's it's in I was added
Speaker 1:in any of that. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It was in Montecito. LA. I was like, oh, so more like the IKEA model than the Home Depot model. We're like it was like I was like, oh, go to dinner at Restoration Hardware.
Speaker 2:That's great. I mean, I love getting a a hot dog outside of a outside of a Home Depot. I get them the IKEA meatballs.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:Like, because it's great. It's a Costco model. Yeah. Yeah. Chicken bake.
Speaker 2:You can get everything. I was like, so what so we're at a restaurant. What what's the equivalent of a chicken bake if I get if I'm here? Like, what what's what's your specialty? What should I get?
Speaker 1:At Ferrisch, they're just like, sir, please not leave. We're gonna have to escort you out. You've been there for 4 hours.
Speaker 2:I was polite. I was polite. But it was very funny being like, I'm I I you walk into the restaurant, there's just, like, a bed there because they, like, sell, like, furniture. Yeah. Anyway, we should wrap
Speaker 1:up last. Yeah, let's wrap. Let's wrap up. We're going to do one more call to action.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:We want to advertise your companies unless you can afford, you know, you know, package in the 6 to 7 figure range, you're gonna wanna, just skip the negotiation and just go straight to our review section, Spotify, Apple, and leave us a 5 star review. And Take a screenshot. Something about the show, but then, really spend the bulk of the reviews talking about your business, what you're working on, and why it matters Yep. And a call to action, and then we'll read it out on the show. Fantastic.
Speaker 1:Thank you, brothers. We will see you on Monday.
Speaker 2:Thanks a lot.