Sharp Tech with Ben Thompson - AI’s Uneven Arrival, TikTok’s Potential Departure, Xiaohongshu and the Delights of Cultural Exchange

Episode Date: January 16, 2025

Looking to digital advertising history for clues about AI’s impact on the economy, proposed frameworks for AGI and ASI, and why AI benefits are likely to be unevenly distributed in the near term. Then: The logic and continued uncertainty surrounding a TikTok ban in the United States, the delights of Xiaohongshu mania, and a word about TikTok and conflicting principles.

Hello and welcome back to another episode of Sharp Tech. I'm Andrew Sharp and on the other line, Ben Thompson. Ben, how you doing? I feel I'm just seeing a lot of Andrew Sharp. We recorded a day late this week. I'm already back on with you. Do you need more time? We're apparently recording on the holiday on Monday.

Yeah, I mean, geez. That's right. Yeah. I look, I'll happily go back on vacation for 10 days and you could just kick your feet up for a little while here. But I'm excited. This half of the podcast is excited to be back in the trenches with you, the take trenches. Well, let's do it then. All right.

Well, we've got a lot to wrap our arms around on this episode. So buckle up. TikTok may or may not be on the brink of a full-scale ban in the United States. But before we get there, we'll begin with AI and an article that you published on Straterey Monday morning. And it's funny because that article had me thinking back to our first show after the holidays where we got a question about AI adoption among non-tech firms and what sort of tech companies may benefit from helping those companies incorporate AI solutions into their business. And with your article on Monday, I felt like you presented a theory of the case with

respect to AI's impact on the economic landscape, at least as far as it goes in 2025. The title of that piece was AI's uneven arrival. And we can begin with your conclusion. there. You wrote, the most important AI customers will primarily be new companies. Traditional companies, meanwhile, will struggle to incorporate AI outside of whole-scale job replacement, a la. The mainframe, the true AI takeover of enterprises that retain real-world differentiation will likely take years. None of this is to diminish what's coming with AI. Rather, as the saying goes, the future may arrive but be unevenly distributed, and contrary to what you might think, the larger and more successful a company is, the less they may benefit in the

short term. Everything that makes a company work today is about harnessing people, and the entire SaaS ecosystem is predicated on monetizing this reality. The entities that will truly leverage AI, however, will not be the ones that replace them, but start without them. So, Ben, I will let you drive here. Do you want to expound on that conclusion and explain to people how you got there? Well, just one reference in there about the whole scale job replacement. That was a link to my article last year about enterprises and analogizing AI to its potential impact to the arrival of the mainframe that sort of wiped out rear end back offices. I think to really leverage this, you need top down decision making.

You need significant integration projects to sort of make this work. I'm a bit skeptical. I'm not skeptical about AI helping the individual worker. I think that's happening right now. In fact, there's a bit where the individual worker today, I think I've made this analogy on the podcast before, but the individual worker today is like the newspaper companies in the 90s. It's like, wow, we have our core business and we get all these internet customers for free too.

Just more revenue. What's the problem? Yeah. And so there's almost like this real arbitration opportunity that I think continues to be taken advantage of where if you're an employee that has the sort of wherewithal to go and use AI, you're tremendously more productive and or you can be tremendously more lazy while doing the same amount of work because AI is augmenting you. And I think that is a bit of, you know, there's a point of frustration amongst corporations

to a certain extent where there are large gains being realized, but they're accruing to individual employees and not sort of to the enterprise as a whole. So that in and itself is a real motivation to sort of get this done and figured it out, but I'm skeptical of the top down, okay, everyone has an assistant now go and use it sort of bit. Just like, you know, not everyone was going to go and use a computer, you know, the people that benefited from computers, even fast forwarding to the 80s, were the people that wanted computers and wanted to go and use them and then, you know, and would have the wherewithal to figure it out and figure out the use cases for that. So this idea that Microsoft's going

to sell a bunch of co-pilot things or Google just announced, which by the way, was very clever. They're taking away for Google workspace. They're sort of like Microsoft Office equivalent. They're taking away the Gem and I add-on and they're bundling it with the whole thing and then raising the price of the whole thing. That's going to have a way more larger impact on Google's business. Like price raises that apply to everyone and you get to sell it as because you get this new feature.

That's going to be great for their business. and I'm skeptical that it's going to be great for companies. I think they're going to pay more. They're locked in. They're not going to go anywhere. Well, right. But you're not going to be transforming the productivity of a company based on Google's offerings there, I think, is the thesis. Yeah.

It might sort of trickle in through people using this stuff more and more and realizing what's effective and what works. But I am a little skeptical of this. we just suddenly every company is going to be a gazillion times more productive next year because now they have access to AI. And this bit about just the very structure of AI, even if you get to this world of agents and you can actually give a task to an AI and it will go and accomplish it. I did sort of drop my, there's always this discussion. What is AGI? What is ASI? I like that.

Yeah. Yeah, I sort of arrived at AGI is when you can give the AI a task and that AI will. accomplish it. And it might have to access different tools and things to do that along the way. And the exact use cases, so that's like a step up from the assistant level, right? Like, or like the chatbot level where it's directly reactive to what you do. And it's not like a multi-step sort of thing. AGI is, it's like a very conscientious, but it's fairly dumb employee where they're not going to figure out what to do, but if you tell them what to do, they'll go do it. And they'll do a good job. And by good job, it doesn't mean a

perfect job, right? You give a human a job, again, to use a self-driving car analogy, self-driving cars are going to get an accident. The question is, you have to remember humans get an accidents too, right? And you give a job to an employee, and sometimes the employee will screw it up. And you give it a job to an AI, and sometimes the AI is going to screw it up. But it's going to reach a good enough level that, you know, and what you'll see is this sort of bleeding of human jobs where maybe, humans leave and they're not replaced because the current humans can be more productive, right? That is a tried and true method of sort of getting productivity into the workforce is we used to have 10 employees on this team. Now we have eight. You still have the same number of responsibilities. So you're

going to have to figure out how to sort of get it done. Suddenly you reach to AI because you just have more work to do and that is actually how it sort of gets in the organization. I think that's the way a lot of these things are going to happen. as an aside, ASI, artificial superintelligence in this framing is the AI that can decide what tasks to do in the first place.

Right. Can look at the problems you have and come up with different solutions that humans haven't devise themselves. Or find the problems on its own and just go and fix them, right? Yeah. And so the, and it's interesting because that is in some respects like very compelling. It's also maybe a little more approachable than this idea of like this godlike Oracle that is like solving the world's problems. But I do think both of these definitions have the benefit of being fairly testable. Like, like, can it do sort of X, Y, Z or can it not? And of course, the actual

approach and achievement of them will be on a spectrum, will be, you know, it will be sort of a gradient, you know, in terms of whether it achieves or not. But I was going to say, because like artificial superintelligence, for instance, you can give AI, like an LLL You can give them a list of symptoms. And there are cases where the LLM can identify what's wrong with a patient and a doctor can miss it. So like I don't know whether that qualifies as artificial super intelligence. No, to me, to me, that that's still just the assistant. Like your, it's sort of doing, it's just returning an answer.

It's a, you know, I don't want to call it a glorified search engine that that diminishes what it is. It's, it's, but it's processing a lot of information. Just speaking in the abstract, it's processing a lot of information and identifying what needs to be done to help a patient heal. So it's sort of like what you're describing on a micro level. But on a macro level, I understand that we're talking about sort of broader solutions and broader abilities than exist now. More of an ASI would be like it's just sort of like working over all the patient data and unilaterally goes and schedules an appointment with someone and says, you know, there's sort of symptoms showing up. you need to come in. And then it's like, in this case, it's directing humans.

It's a, oh, I, go do this scan on this person. And then it sort of has a solution and it writes the prescription and sort of X, Y, Z. That is ASI. It's the flip. It's where the AI is starting to tell humans what to do instead of humans telling the AI what to do. And that is sort of the line. Whereas AGI, and I actually, I do like, I think it's been a very productive to add ASI

as opposed to AGI, because these are two different things. Whereas, you know, maybe with AGI, the doctor is telling the AI to go and do X, Y, Z, and it has to do a number of different steps to figure out the solution and do X, Y, Z, but it's still sort of under control. The human is still telling the AI what to do. Anyhow, all these are going to be fuzzy in implementation,

but I do like this framework as terms of, you know, giving us a vocabulary to sort of talk about different steps. So right now, we're in the assistant age. And that's just LLMs, you know, what we're calling AI. The next step is the agent age, which I would call AGI, where it will accomplish tasks that you tell it to do. And then ASI is, it tells humans what to do because it already hasn't figured out that that's, that's the both more promising and also more scary, sort of a leap, you know, for our very obvious reasons. Right. And I actually didn't realize that ASI was a recent addition to the lexicon because

I saw people dropping that a couple months ago and I was like, what the hell is ASI? So I appreciated your digression in the article and I appreciate your digression on the pod. Take me back to your conclusion, though, about the sorts of companies that could benefit from AI in the long term. Well, there's lots of different pieces here, including. including the sort of this whole world of SaaS and software that is all predicated on organizing by people. Like we've talked about the business model of per seat licensing and how that's a problem in a world where AI is removing jobs. But I think there's a broader principle here, which is what is a company and this idea that we think about a company and the units of work being humans.

but that's actually always been a proxy. It's a proxy for actually accomplishing a task, actually producing an economic output. And it's almost like the, this is a similar thing when art generation, image generation models came out. I wrote an article talking about all like, for all of history,

we've just sort of assumed that the ideation and the manifestation is two peas in a pod. And AI is like, no, actually, they're two different things. The actual coming up with the idea and the actual implementation of the idea can be separated. Like, you can write a prompt and then the AI can do the actual creation and sort of what it is. And you think about it like, well, yeah, that actually is true. You could go hire an artist and try to get them to make what you want. And of course, we've been doing that for a long time.

But it never sort of like, you don't think about that there actually is a very clear. division here. And I think it's a similar aspect here. We think about when we think about things to get done, we think about the humans that do them, but those humans are just a proxy that is actually independent from getting the job done. And so in that world, what are we actually paying for? What's the actual goal? If you're a company, it makes a lot of sense that you pay per job completion, right? And again, this is where the art angles also interesting. thing. There is a bit of this with the sort of freelance world or the the upwork world or whatever where you hire someone to make a logo for you and you're paying for the job. You're not necessarily paying for their work. And so it's not like this is a completely foreign concept, but it's going to become like the defining concept in terms of how you think about paying for stuff and paying for work. And that's where I came to sort of the advertising analogy. The thing with like Facebook and meta and direct. response advertising.

And actually, you go back to Google, really. I probably should have given Google more credit in this regard. What made Google's business model such a big deal is that until then, you paid for ads based on how many people saw them. And that was a hangover from newspapers, right? Like, you paid more to put an ad in a newspaper with a lot of circulation. You paid less for one with fewer, right? Like, how many people are going to see this?

But people seeing an ad is a proxious. for the actual goal, which is people making a purchase decision, actually buying the item in question. And so what I was trying to get at with this article is it's very easy to think about this stuff from a theoretical perspective, which is, of course it's better to pay for the actual purchase. That's the goal. You're trying to sell stuff. but it turns out there's entire ecosystems and businesses that are built around the assumption that that's not possible

that you have to focus on the proxy and this is where the CPG analogy I think is super interesting this whole CPG model you have lots of different brands that are all the same thing I've used this analogy before but Axe Body Spray

and like dove like beauty products are made by the same company. And it's pretty much the same stuff. And yet they're not thought about the same thing because that's how branding, like the product managers and CPG companies are not called product managers. They're called brand managers because that's the, and actually the current, it's interesting, the current CEO of P&G is the first CEO, I think, in their history that didn't come up through the marketing organization, which sort of speaks to a lot of the shifts that have happened here. But these are marketing companies.

They build brands. They run commercials. They have coupon things that, and you have an affinity for a brand so that you go into the store and it's almost the goal is to have a subconscious selection. You see, you need deodorant. You bought like we talked about this. You're an old style man. Like right, which is very much.

Of course. Old spice, old style, whatever. Yeah. I mean, like your penny loafers, like it all sort of goes together is being on sailboats in Nantucket or whatever might be. That's right. That's me. My penny loafers.

But there's an entire apparatus behind that business model that wasn't suited to playing on Facebook and Google for the last 20 years. That's right. That's right. And especially you go back a decade,

Facebook and Google weren't nearly as good of doing what they do as they sort of are now. It really was the case you had to sort of be much more selective in your targeting. I'm targeting X, Y, Z. And if you paid to say, I want to reach the millennial man on the East Coast in his penny loafers. You paid a lot of money for that and you better have been pretty sure you were right.

And it turned out actually, no, just running advertisements on ESPN works better. Like the actual cost to reach people is lower, even though the overall cost is. So the overall cost is high. So there's a high barrier to entry. But the cost to reach an individual consumer is actually lower. And the actual point of decision isn't when they're watching TV anyway. It's when they're in the supermarket, when they're, when they're walking down the aisle and they grab the deodorant. And so this, and so there's an entire edifice that was built up around this model.

And what was so interesting is particularly you go back like a decade, all these companies realized, yeah, in theory, this Facebook advertising stuff's amazing. It doesn't work that well for us because we're not selling bespoke products. Like, yes, we're trying to be, we have market categorization, and we're trying to reach this particular demographic. But the reality is that demographic's fairly large because we operate at scale and our manufacturing is at scale. And we have to buy shelf space at scale, scale, scale, scale, scale, scale, scale, scale. And the fact I can reach people on an individual basis is actually not that useful for me. It just costs too much. So we should actually double down on TV.

This is why TV kept making money so much longer than people thought it would. Even as the viewers are bleeding away, it's like, why are advertisers still on TV? Because they're built around TV. Their entire business is organized around this paradigm. Now, again, as I noted, TV has finally collapsed. The user's got too small. Everyone had to adjust. P&G has had to shift their approach, all the CPG companies.

and also, by the way, Facebook's gotten way better at like efficiently finding customers that you want. And also, COVID drove a lot of purchases online, which tightens this loop in a way that makes these ads sort of more productive. And you can track conversions more effectively. So there's lots of factors that mean it's not, but that's interesting in its own right. It's not that digital advertising didn't end up being important to companies like P&G and UDLiver. but it took a lot longer than you might have thought. And that is the analogy. I'm not saying this is a perfect one-to-one match between AI and digital advertising.

Rather, you can have a product that is obviously better. That's obviously more productive. And yeah, sure, 0-103 inference costs a lot. That's a lot less than paying someone $100,000 or $200,000 or whatever it might be for these, you know, white-collar workers that are the proxy for getting the job done. But there's an enormous amount of inertia in the current system because there's so many systems and processes built around humans as the proxy for getting work done. And so it's right to be long term. Someone wrote like, oh, I can't believe you're optimistic about SaaS companies on Twitter. I'm like, I'm not optimistic about SaaS companies. They're clearly in trouble. This whole

business model is is kind of screwed up. But just like to go back to 2015, you are right to be long-term pessimistic about TV and the entire ecosystem around it, but it still took many years longer than people thought for it to sort of collapse and fall down. And you needed COVID, again, I think it has a forcing function for some of this stuff, is also underrated. That probably pulled forward some of the collapse for these things a fair bit. And I think it's going to be similar with AI. Now, sorry if I'm monologuing here. No, no, no.

Go for it. I do have a question, but I'll let you keep rolling here. The other key thing about digital advertising and the power of Facebook and why you could have the situation in 2020 where all those CPG companies, a bunch of other big companies boycotted them and had no impact on their business, that's because these new formats create their own customers. There's entire swaths of companies, particularly in e-commerce and apps and all this sort of thing, that were created in response to the Facebook product being available.

And so Facebook basically created their own customer base. And the funny thing is you have like these CPG companies that we're going to be super narrow. We're going to focus just on very specific customers because Facebook lets us do it. Guess what? If CPG or P&G and Unilever want to pull their ads, oh, now we can buy ads on a more inexpensive basis because there's less competition and actually start hurting them, taking market share from them, which Facebook wins either way. That is anti-fragility.

Like the sort of like the concept of anti-fragile is even things that hurt you actually make you stronger. And so like CPG companies boycotting Facebook makes Facebook stronger in the long run. You saw this with Apple. The whole ATT thing proved Facebook's anti-fragility. Like, yeah, it was devastating to Facebook, but it actually really. reinforce their overall competitive position. Deep in their moat.

Yeah. Yeah. And so the, and so the, and so, but those were new companies. And you, the whole Shopify ecosystem is downstream from Facebook ads. Like, like, like, so Facebook created their own market. And I think, and I think that is what you're going to see happening is, AI is going to create entirely new industries. It's going to create entirely new companies that are going to be chipping away at these

large companies that can't fully adjust. and it's going to create its own ecosystem that will in the long run force these larger companies to cram this stuff down, particularly once it gets better and they can figure out how to adjust. So it's not, this isn't a,

this isn't a forecast about the next 50 years that AI is not going to, not going to, you know, go into these companies and change them. It's just saying it's not going to happen in 2025. It's going to be this longer process where companies lean into it and embrace it because it's this new opportunity,

I think primarily new companies, and they're going to come up from the bottom, start chipping away at these existing companies. And then it's a sort of almost more of a classic disruption story. And at some point, these other companies, one more point. I made this point in the context of Enterprise AI, the Enterprise AI article,

but there is a generational aspect to a lot of this. I think that SaaS is in many respects a demographic story. You had this host of millennial, coming into companies that were familiar with working online. It wasn't weird to them to log into a random website and sort of do your work. They've been doing, they've been working in Google Docs in college for ages. They were used to the sort of whole concept. And so that created a workforce that was receptive to this.

It wasn't the 80s. We were saying, like, go use this computer person who's been using a pencil and paper or a typewriter for the last 30 years. Like, there's a generational shift that is sort of necessary. And that will be a simple. more thing with AI. You fast forward to 2035. You're going to have more and more portions of the workforce that have grown up with chat GPT. They've grown up with the assumption of AI. It's not that the people have, right now the arbitrage opportunity is people who have agency

can go use AI and they can be more efficient than their colleagues and it's a big advantage. In 15 years, everyone will use it as a matter of default. It will change from being an advantage to being table stakes. And once it's table stakes, the opportunity to, to, to, to, you, to push it and increase it, it will actually start to reacrue to the corporation as opposed to the individual employee. So employees enjoy it while you can. Don't think about being newspapers in 2010. Right. Well, and as far as the way companies are built, I mean, it's not an apples to apples comparison. But when I was reading and thinking about big companies incorporating AI into their existing workflows and their existing employee bases and potentially deriving benefits, but maybe

not as many benefits as people expect. I was thinking back to your piece on Tesla and Tesla's approach to self-driving technology and the bitter lesson, which stuck with me, I will refresh people's memory in case they forgot the bitter lesson from the fall. But this was Rich Sutton. He wrote, the biggest lesson that could be read from 70 years of AI research is that general methods that leverage computation are ultimately the most effective and by a large margin. And then continuing on, he says, seeking an improvement that makes a difference in the shorter term, researchers seek to leverage their human knowledge of the domain, but the only thing that matters in the long run is the leveraging of computation. And the human knowledge approach tends to complicate methods

in ways that make them less suited to taking advantage of general methods leveraging computation. And so big picture stepping back, it would make sense that all the friction associated with trying to incorporate AI into human workflows becomes its own sort of gating function for some of the big incumbent companies that are trying to take advantage of this technology. And companies that get to just start with a blank slate ultimately will be able to capitalize on all these capabilities more as we head into the future here. and that might take more like four or five years as opposed to four or five months as we all project ahead in 2025. Is that sort of what you're saying? I think, yeah. I think if you zoom out the broad analogy is correct. I just would sort of distinguish that the bitter lesson is about sort of the development of the fundamental capability.

But there is a separate discussion about actually productizing this, which is, there is, I don't think there's a bitter lesson for product development. Right. That's more iteration and sort of XYZ. I do think this reminds me of another point. We did discuss a little bit on the first podcast of the year about aggregation theory and these models and things along those lines. One thing to keep in mind is there is a tendency just in analysis generally to jump to

the new thing and say the old thing's done and gone, right? When in reality stuff layers on top. The old stuff continues to be relevant. And I do think that just overall LMs that just sort of give you an answer and they don't really think about it, they just generate it. Number one, these new models are going to make those models better because they can sort of one of the problems in developing the sort of core models is we're running out of data. These new models can generate actually interesting and useful synthetic data more effectively that can go back into training these new models so we can get more of the data that we need. So they're going to get better. Number two, they're going to always be cheaper and they're going to always be faster. And cheap and fast still matters for things like aggregation, like doing things at scale.

So I don't think aggregation is necessarily dead. When you talk about Facebook and the opportunities of AI generated content within the Facebook feed or every single item on Facebook becoming an ad, right? Because you can do image, you can recognize the image. You can see the bag in the picture and you can click on it. Sounds like an awesome future. Here we go. Yeah. The cost of mistakes there is low.

Right? Whatever. You mislabel the bag. Not a big deal. Like doing it at scale and cheaply is going to be available. So I would actually, I would push back on aggregation theory is dead, which by the way, as only ever, that was never about business and SaaS. That's about the consumer internet by and large. And, you know, I think just the, the base LOMs that are serial just generating an answer are right a lot of the time, but make mistakes, are still going to have real utility. and there's still a huge product overhang in leveraging them. This new capability of paying for a result, and the more you pay, the more right it is, that is going to be, that's a different category.

I was going to say, that's just a completely different business. That's right. And this is where the other point to digital advertising, right? You pay for results with digital advertising. You don't pay for, now there's still digital advertising, you pay for display, but you pay for results. And you base your payment to Facebook, and this is why Facebook is baddening.

and also inescapable, they will, they'll take margin because the more you trust Facebook, the better the, like, the better the results will be. You just give in to the AI buying algorithm. And you know they're showing enough ads to enough people they know will convert to get it. And they're showing the ads to a bunch of people that don't know and don't care and you're paying for it anyway. But you don't know who they are. You're getting customers.

You never would have otherwise. And so you set your price target. This is my lifetime value of a customer. I'll pay up to XYZ. And Facebook will fill that. And that's why, like, the COVID, when COVID dropped in March, Facebook had a dip for like a week and then zoomed right back up because all these companies that need Facebook, that's their whole lifeblood. They need to be acquiring new customers all the time. Guess what?

If all the brand evidence run to leave, cheaper ads for us, we'll buy more ads. And it zooms right back up to that line of whatever their sort of LTV calculation is. AI, I think, will be similar. You will, what is the worth of this job to me to get it right? What level of accuracy do I need? Given that what is the amount of compute necessary? What's the cost of the compute? And it's really interesting.

It gets, again, this is why I wanted to make this analysis. It's right now humans are the old advertising. Half of them work, and I don't know which half, right? There's a bit about, you know, like the, when you're evaluating your workforce, it's kind of like you just know there's some employees that seem really lazy and don't do anything. And the whole company would fall apart without them. And then there's other ones that it's like they're really busy. They're all around and they're always present.

And actually they're not getting anything done. Not doing all that much. Right. It's all a proxy right now. AI is going to be much more direct. You're going to know if it works or if it doesn't. And you're going to be able to price it accordingly. There's more transparency in the pricing of the value of a job, which also is going to

be hard to implement. If you're a company with its existing processes, you have no process. You have no conception about how to price a job. You know how to price an employee and what they ought to accomplish, but there's a lot of fuzziness in there, and there's going to be a level of precision necessary to price this appropriately, which, by the way, we saw it with Facebook with ATT. The dip wasn't that the Facebook ads stopped working.

It's that you couldn't know which ones were working. And so it was the uncertainty of knowing that, introduce the dip. And what they had to solve was giving you a believable number that was close enough to reality about what percentage of the ads worked and which ones didn't. So you could buy with confidence. Because if you're buying and your ads aren't working, you could boom, go out of business real quickly.

And so it's this level of precision and measurement that is going to be, and all this needs to be built. Like new companies are going to build it. It's a huge opportunity to be queer. And it's easier for new companies to build it, is the, key point here. Well, it's easy for new companies to incorporate it. So I think there's two opportunities. Number one is new companies that do stuff existing companies do, but they do it all with AI. And so they're just, and they're going to be very disruptive from the low end. Then number two, there's the framework companies,

like the measurement companies, the ones that actually give you the tools to know what's working and what isn't. And those companies will benefit to some extent from the new companies, but they're the ones that will help carry existing companies over the AI finish line, which I don't think will be in 2025, but we'll be down the road. Okay. Well, I just want to clarify for the record that I do not wear penny loafers, and I will not be embracing that bit in the future on this podcast. That's what you think.

I don't know where that came from, but I'm not a penny loafers guy. Any final thoughts, or should we move to TikTok here? Penny loafers is is an all-spice sort of whatever they're called all-spice. I think it is old spice, not all-spice, not old style. This is a fun little variation on the mispronunciations here on the podcast. Well, to keep it moving, Ben, we can turn to the news of the week, which is TikTok. There are several threads to the TikTok story that are just totally unresolved at the time of this recording, including, but not limited to the Supreme Court. and it's ruling on the case that's challenging the constitutionality of the law that would impose a ban on TikTok as of Sunday.

There are several reports that PRC officials are looking into Elon Musk either as a buyer of TikTok or someone who could potentially broker a solution with the U.S. government. Donald Trump, the soon-to-be head of the U.S. government, is reportedly considering some kind of executive order that would attempt to stay enforcement of the U.S. government. the laws provision that bans app stores from hosting TikTok. And then TikTok itself is reportedly planning to shut down the app on Sunday, January 19th if it receives an adverse ruling from the Supreme Court later this week. And by the way, I'm pretty sure that I don't think Trump can issue an executive order directly on doing a congressional action. So whatever one.

He can try. He can try. There'd be a delay until a court ruled. But I think that would probably happen pretty quickly. I think people are getting too caught up in the legalese here. The law does not ban TikTok. It bans the app stores from hosting it and from Oracle from sort of hosting the data. What I think could potentially happen is TikTok is trying to force the issue by saying,

we're just going to end the service. They don't have to end the service. It could continue working for existing customers. And so some sort of action, even it got struck down by the courts, could be more a function of TikTok deciding to wait. And there could be some sort of injunction. in this regard to that lets Oracle continue hosting the data, whatever they're doing, XYZ.

So I would say with this specific point, with a lot of these things, it's easy to get hung up on specific details when there's a lot of moving pieces and like decision making that that could be that could be at play. Yes. Well, and in lieu of bald speculation in terms of what may or may not happen over the next week on any of those fronts, we can talk in broad strokes about some of the lot here and we got a two-part question from Said. He says, with the U.S. quote unquote ban of TikTok fast approaching, can Ben quickly go over the arguments for the ban and why he supports it?

What do you think? Well, I mean, I made my case back in 2020 and I haven't really revisited it. I mean, it's like I'm sympathetic to the general idea. The U.S. is a free market. Like, we're not China. There is a free speech. I don't buy the free speech component from a constitutional perspective just because you can go to other forums. And also there is Supreme Court precedent about sort of a deference in terms of national security concerns on these sorts of issues. Particularly if you're not directly muting Americans. You're you're taking one of their many platforms that they could use. I do think it's worth acknowledging like, yes, you can tell somebody to another platform.

If you have a million followers on TikTok, it's not the same thing. which by the way it goes back to our moderation discussion I think an underappreciated bit of oh just start a new account well if you there's real damage that comes from you getting banned and losing a huge following and having this sort of sort of rebuild it I mean I have a friend of mine on Buck's Twitter you know got investigated by the police for you know being mad at the refs one time and like he's still like thousands of followers below

when he had to make a new account I follow his new account I'm one of like 800 people who follow him now. Great follow. But yes, it's a good point. I mean, it's not literally an economic taking, but in effect, it sort of is because you spend a lot of time on accruing a following that has value. It is an economic taking. It's just not priced. So we kind of ignore it, right? Which, by the way, if you want to zoom out to like our overall like spreadsheet critique, what can be measured, is actually a really compelling example. Right. If you have 10,000 followers, 100,000 followers, your account gets banned.

There's, because it's not priced, it's underrated in the discussion, even though the value is actually exceptionally high. Like having a $100,000, 100,000 followers is you're, you have a huge opportunity in real leverage, like that you can manifest into other things. But because it's not priced, it gets ignored, which is a great example of how spreadsheet thinking can sort of lead you astray. Anyhow, that's a digression. To me, the TikTok thing is very straightforward.

The data thing, yeah, I'm not, I'm generally less worried about data than most people in general. I, you know, okay, what are you to blackmail someone by showing they watch, you know, they watch a lot of, you know, uh, uh, league pass? Yeah, league pass. I don't think that's where you're going. But the, you know, is their location tracking sort of things. Um, you know, there are concerns. I'm not just missing them. My very concern is it's a, it's a, you're giving a foreign power that is an adversarial foreign power in multiple.

respects economically, militarily, potentially, and ideologically, a direct sort of pass to the hearts and minds of the American people. To me, that's insane. We want to let the Soviet Union control a television network in the Cold War. And this is a lot more powerful than a television network, which is part of the issue here. Especially with the targeting and the lack of tracking, right? Yeah. Could China put its thumb on the scale for some little congressional race, no way to know. You would never, you would never sort of know. And I documented years ago in the context of the Hong Kong protests and when the whole Darry-Mory NBA thing happened,

China was clearly controlling the algorithm. Well, you could search for, in my evidence in that case was you could search for every single NBA team and get NBA highlights except for the Houston Rockets. There was zero. And like, again, maybe in the grand scheme of things, not that important of an example, but a blatant, clear, there is a thumb on the scale here

about something that is important to China. And it's just nuts to allow this. And what the problem is and the frustration is, it would have been painful in 2020 to do this. It's going to be a gazillion times more painful now, as it's become larger and larger. And you're harming more and more. I'm very sympathetic to people on TikTok and the users and the creators.

I am too. I mean, it circles back to part one of the podcast because it's this new platform and there have been businesses and careers basically built around this platform that will now cease to exist. and you're just punishing a much bigger group of people five years later. And the competition stuff really bothers me. Like TikTok has been phenomenal competition for Facebook. It's put their rear end in gear.

And by the way, Facebook's much better position to capitalize on it because of the competition than they would have been in 2020. The likelihood, you know, it's a bit tautological, but like China refusing to let bite dance sell TikTok, which has tremendous economic value. It does kind of make the point that like, I mean, it's kind of unfair, but it does sort of make the point. It's hard to say exactly what's happening, but it does seem like CCP officials are the ones who are now entertaining some sort of deal. That's why I don't want to say that categorically, because the logical way to play this for bite dance is to insist you're not selling and to push it to the last minute and only sell at the very last minute. So I don't want to categorically say that this. proves the Chinese government used it as a unique asset until we're like a few months

down the road and it's well and truly gone. Well, that, but also alongside that, the idea that the people who are deciding and the people who are potentially brokering some sort of deal are not bite dance executives, but are in fact party officials in Beijing, that would be proof if in fact that is happening or would lend credence to the concerns that people have had for several years now. I mean, if you want to go against the concerns, I wouldn't say that it's not that I don't believe American people can be propagandized. It's that I think the Chinese are, you would be uniquely terrible at trying to propaganda as the U.S. population. It takes Americans to propagandize Americans.

And so maybe there's a bit where just there's an aspect where the concern is maybe somewhat overstated in that regard. And maybe that is manifesting in how they're playing this. Bite dance maybe sees value and says, hey, the Chinese government's saying we can't do it. Wrong play, right? We saw this when they try to put up that message last summer when this is being, or last spring was being debated in Congress. They popped up a pop up to everyone on TikTok saying, call your representative, do X, Y, Z. Totally the wrong way to play it. Send Congress into a panic.

That's right. 17-year-olds besiege both chambers. You cannot overstate the level of lack of cultural understanding between China and the U.S. And it affects everything. Like there's there is this um uh you know this comes up in the the sort of uh little little red but why don't people go read notebook it's literally little red book uh shao hong shu uh this the app that all the ticot refugees are going to i think the whole thing number one is hilarious um you know let's a ban ticot by going to a literal chinese app but number two you know

i linked to this story from you know chinese state run media saying oh this shows the american people are opposed to their government. They don't like their policies. And you have to read between the lines. And I've been on this side of the world for a long time, to appreciate the depth of misunderstanding that undergirds that piece. The problem with these cultural misunderstandings is there's baseline assumptions that don't even occur to one side or the other.

And believe me, I learn this all the time in terms of like, you know, interfacing with my family and things along those lines, right? It's just a completely sort of different view of the world. And you have things like, what are the real challenges in foreign relations between China and the U.S. is the Chinese are in these sort of discussions. Everything is implied and you can't believe the actual words. And so, you know, I've talked about like my favorite,

one of my favorite things about the Chinese language is there's these things called Chung ies, which are like groups of four characters that are like common sayings. The best way to insult someone is to use a Chungie and drop one of the characters. And the character that you dropped is what you're saying they lack. So if there's like a Chungie that says, oh, he's handsome and trustworthy and where's penny loafers and XYZ, you drop the honest one. And it sounds like you're giving a compliment. And it's actually like this massive insult because you're implying that they're very dishonest person.

Right. So there's this all that. That is like a stand in for the communication generally. And so the U.S. does not get that. So they actually like take the Chinese at their word about different stuff and completely miss the subtext of what's going on. Meanwhile, the Chinese assume that the Americans are lying because why wouldn't they be? And they're saying all this stuff, oh, we care about human rights and the climate and XYZ.

And they're like, we get it. That's all a lever to get your actual priority concerns. And sometimes the U.S. like, no, we actually do care about this. The U.S. is very black and white. That's one of the problems with the whole Taiwan sort of thing is that Taiwan is a situation that exists in gray and the U.S. mindset can't stand it. It wants to make it black and white and it wants clarity. And it's not a situation that you want clear because there's no good outcome.

There's no clear resolution on Taiwan. There's no question about that. So you push for a resolution. You're going to get a resolution good and hard. It's not going to be necessarily the one that you want. So this undergirds sort of everything. So you see the so they're like, oh, the sort of telltale sign, the laziest media story is when you search. You go to Twitter, you search, you find someone saying something that supports your story.

You're like, Twitter user XYZ said this. You use that as evidence of like his old wrong. The Chinese state media is searching on Twitter, finding someone who's like, yeah, the U.S. government, they think it's propaganda. We don't believe that. We want to go to China. It's like, okay, are all these users giving a middle finger to the U.S. government about TikTok? Yes, they are. They sure are.

What is hard to grok if you're not in the U.S. is that is the U.S. Freedom and action, baby, here we are. Our whole birthright is about giving the middle finger to the government and they can't do anything about it. This goes back to the, like the whole ban, part of the whole context of the whole ban, Trump from social media in 2020, that actually I think even hard for Europeans to understand is this idea that in Europe the government is always on top. And so the government determines what speech is allowed or not.

and corporations operate in that context underneath the government. In the U.S., corporations are an equivalent institution to the government. The government can't tell them what to do. They can't, in the First Amendment context, it's not just that they can't say what they can't say. They can't say you can't moderate because it's their own platform. They can do what they want. The idea is that the freedom of speech is above both. And the government operates under it and the companies operate.

under it. And that can go in either direction. They can allow free speech. They can disallow free speech. And the government can't tell them to do one or the other. And it's this, it's like where in the stack are they? In the U.S. they're on equivalent things. And so part of the case was, well, there's a tradition of corporations acting as one of these institutions as a power broker. As like when you talk about the balance of powers in the U.S. Constitution between the executive branch and the judicial branch and the legislative branch, Actually, the U.S. as a whole is a balance of powers. Like the, like the, and, well, and look, I mean, you made the point on, on the Shou thing.

Like, I was actually jealous that I didn't think of that before Bill and I recorded Sharp China earlier this week. The surge of young people going to Shao Hong Shoe and crapping all over the American government is such a great testament to the American system. Like, it is, they're like, oh, look at these people don't listen to American propaganda. This proves it's all failing. It's like you are getting, you're getting propagandized so hard right now and you don't even realize it, right? That's effective propaganda.

Well, and that's the concern. That's going to be a concern for this company. Oh, no. Shao Hong Shu is screwed. Like, like, all these citizens going online and bitching about the U.S. government is this incredibly powerful testament to the American system that is like it's precisely because. because the Chinese don't even see it is how effective it is. People going on and like you and me making it explicit, that's not effective. And everyone sees that's propaganda.

This is real propaganda. It's in the water. It's not like it's not a billboard. It's in the water. And all these people going on Shaoong Shui and saying, hi, you know, nice to meet you, nihow, blah, blah, blah. It is one of the most effective American propaganda actions in ages. It's amazing.

Right. Well, and the juxtaposition is really powerful because obviously on one hand you have Americans who are now free to curse out our government and publicly pledge their allegiance to China and they'll suffer no consequences. But a Chinese digital media outlet earlier this week, I think it's PC online. They were talking about the implications for Xiaohong Shu and the influx of Americans, because just for people who don't know, mainland apps in China, if they are marketing a they'll typically develop an entirely separate platform for international audiences. Xiaohangshu did not do that. It did not intend to. They have no desire to expand internationally. And so the influx of Americans was described as a Damocles sword hanging over the company. And the outlet said the risks here far outweigh the opportunities because there's just going to be immense pressure and possibly consequences from the government if they're not

censoring all these Americans sufficiently. No, this is why he's going to end very soon. My prediction is within a week. Maybe it'll take a little bit longer. Because the risk to Shaoong Shu are astronomical. They might try to moderate. Their moderation is going to be overwhelmed. This is an underappreciated aspect of censorship, by the way, and this actually

ties back to our discussion last week. Censorship is at its most effective when people self-censor. That is how you get scale from censorship. Yeah, you can have the great firewall. Yes, you can force all these social media companies to take people's accounts offline, but you add an, I don't want to be banned. I don't want to have that worry. Like, am I going to get trouble from the police or am I going to lose my thousand followers, right? And so people self-police. And that is how you actually get censorship at scale is by activating people's self-preservation instinct and you get self-censorship. Guess who is not going to self-censor? Americans. The people giving the middle finger to the government by using Xiaohong-su. And so there's a bit where even if they try to have some sort of moderation apparatus, it's like it's going to go sideways.

They're like, and so yeah, they're probably institute. They might withdraw from the US app stores or the thing I didn't mention, which they'll probably do is institute you need a Chinese phone number to register. And they'll force everyone to put in the phone number. And that will cut everyone off and. Or test the dedication of the TikTok refugees,

you know, maybe you find a way to get a Shanghai phone number. number. It's not easy. And I would, I would advise against that for, for lots of reasons. Well, and to the point on, on Shao Hong Shue, I mean, the creator of Bight Dance no longer runs that company and disappeared for a while because Bight Dance was censoring insufficiently. No, they got called to the carpet. No, this is the TikTok War.

Yeah, they got called to the carpet for, and in this case, it was mostly because there were people looking at too many pictures of, what did we call it? Scantily. Scantily clad league pass highlights, absolutely. Yeah. So I think the whole thing's very, I think the whole thing's very funny. I think, you know, I think the this is like you don't want to get in a propaganda war with the U.S. Again, because the problem with so much communist propaganda is it's way too literal.

And U.S. soft power is this is U.S. soft power. It is our citizens giving the middle finger to the U.S. government, going on a Chinese app, colonizing it, and in the process being received, oh, it's so great. Yeah, the U.S. government's bad, blah, blah, blah. And the entire subtext here is look at us exercising our freedoms. Wouldn't it be nice if we and Beijing could do that, yeah. And, hey, the more exposure for U.S. people to clean streets and functioning infrastructure, the better. So maybe it could be a two-way win, at least as long as it lasts. No, absolutely. And I actually think it's a really cool example of cultural exchange that China has systematically prevented for the last 25 years.

Well, this is the last thing about the TikTok thing that I didn't get to. China started this. Like, this is a window into what we lost with the Great Wall or the Great Firewall. I call it the Great Wall through. Great Firewall is obviously what I'm referring to. And by the way, there is a very strong leave aside the persuasion issues, the data, issues. They block all our consumer internet companies. We should block theirs. Like, you can't have a, this is a whole problem with our old trading regime is, yeah, we're pro free trade, but you have, like, if you don't have a tit for tat retaliation system and one side blatantly violates all their parts of it, you're going to end up in a bad place. This is the part

that, and so like, just from a pure sort of, uh, trading perspective, It's very, this is why it should have been done years ago. Like, like, you just made it way more difficult by waiting until now. Well, and speaking of borders, there was a part two to Said's email. He writes, to the extent TikTok is considered problematic because of a security, political, or cultural impact by a foreign country, large amounts of data accessible to a foreign country, and a vital communication channel being owned by a foreign country. Can't these same reasons be used against U.S. tech companies?

operating in foreign countries. Based on the reasons given for this ban, does the ban of U.S. tech companies in China require reassessment? I have some thoughts there, Ben, but do you have any reaction to that question? I mean, I don't understand the part two of the question. I think, you know, China's banning of U.S. tech companies has been tremendously successful. I mean, number one, they limit, like, they control the discourse. They can institute the censorship sort of apparatus,

maintain political stability, have people self-censoring. and they also developed this entire software ecosystem that rivals the U.S. because they were protected. Like it's one of them, you know, setting aside just from a purely analytical perspective, setting aside the morality of the whole question, it's one of the smartest things that any country did. China is the only entity that stands a potential competition and opposition to the U.S. from a tech perspective because of the great firewall.

And every single person in the U.S. that didn't see that back then, including myself, it should be a reminder. There's really important stuff that you can miss as it's happening as you're so sure it's going to fail. Bill Clinton, they're trying to nail jail to a wall.

Yeah, guess what? Totally wrong. Totally wrong. We need to work on your Clinton impersonation going forward. Oh, I wasn't trying to deposition but I can keep with it. And so, yeah, so the answer to,

so my assessment of the Great Firewall is it was brilliant. Again, from an analytical perspective, setting aside the moral sort of issues. Yeah. So I don't, I'm not reassessing anything. And by extension, the fact that no one else did it to date is why, you know, is this a long-term risk that you're setting this precedent? Sure. Are any other companies going to have it in them to block U.S. services and develop their own?

No, it's too late. They missed the boat. And like there's there's this. Yeah. It is analogous to the chip sort of stuff. Like the, you know, the is all the chip ban sort of issues? Is there a bit where in the long run you're really risking the industry and not just China developing its own industry, but then selling abroad? Yes.

Do I have real problems with the new controls announced this week? Absolutely. I think they go too far. It changes the paradigm from trying to stop China to instituting a permission structure on a all of tech, which I think is a very, very bad and problematic shift. And is much is going to be more destructive in the long run because now you're treating everyone as an enemy by default. I don't think that is a wise choice at all.

But at the end of the day, the U.S. does still control the entire chip industry, right? Like, I think that there's, that there's, that is the analogy in this case to U.S. tech companies. Well, yeah. And I also think that like a threshold issue is just the nature. of the Chinese government and the difference between the U.S. government and the Chinese Communist Party in terms of their ability and intent on controlling American tech companies. I mean, the CCP owns a 1% stake in a BightDance subsidiary, but has a golden share on

BightDance's board. Which, by the way, this was all known, and I wrote about it in 2020. Like, all this, that's the, whatever, this is all the US works. We wait until the last minute, like, when it's much more difficult and costly. But like there is an aspect of in 2020. It was still Trump supports this. So it must be wrong. You know that I think drove a lot of decision making.

No, but you made the case in 2020. And it was eye opening to me because I was one of the people who was like, what the hell is Trump talking about here? There was a rally that was poorly attended. Now we're banning TikTok. And it was eye opening back then for me to read the case and read sort of what TikTok can do. And also, again, the CCP. He has voting mechanisms that allow the party to override majority stakeholders.

And the voting mechanism is required by law to comply with state intelligence work. Yeah, exactly. And by the way, you can make the case, Said, that the U.S. can just tell at the end of the day, and this goes back to the censorship thing, right? We're all parsing did they actually force them to do X, Y, Z. A very valid takeaway is that actually the U.S. does tell tech companies what to do, and it doesn't matter what laws are there. It's still the case that it happens.

and you go back to things like the Snowden revelations and all these sorts of pieces that, yeah, the U.S. has just as much control over its tech companies as China does to theirs. And my response to that is, I'm U.S. citizen, so I'd rather we be in charge than them. Like, there is that, you can't escape that sort of reality. That, but also the CCP and PLA affiliated hacker groups, they have hacked not only American companies, but also the U.S. government itself over the past couple of years. the hacking problem, I think, is far more extensive than the general public realizes. But the CCP has also been actively working to undermine U.S. interests abroad for years now. And so,

like, given that, it would be unbelievably naive to think that the CCP wouldn't eventually try to use TikTok to similar ends. And those concerns don't exist for a company like meta operating in the EU. So, like, I just don't think it really is an apples-to-apples situation. as far as Saeed's email is concerned. But there are certainly areas where the government has tried to exercise control. Met is not obligated under U.S. law to comply with those attempts. Yeah. But I mean, I would, my addition would be, even if it happens in fact, at some point you have to pick sides.

That's fair. And that actually is a really solid place to land on all this because I think there's people who want to go back. and forth, and it's just like, well, in principle, this is a matter of national security. And sometimes that wins out at the end of the day. Yeah. No, I think that's right. I mean, I think this Joseph, this Joseph email actually gets to one extra point. That is a good way to wrap this up.

Okay. So Joseph says, I love you guys and agree with 99% of your takes. So I feel bad writing in only to challenge points, but I can't resist. I'm a bit surprised. Don't feel bad. Do you? 99% is too high. You need to lower that.

Yeah, and I always appreciate some feisty emails. I am a bit surprised by Ben's consistent support of the TikTok ban. Doesn't this violate his you're not going to out China, China rule? Especially now that he's trying to be more consistently on the free speech side of things. That's unfair. I've been extremely consistent with that one very narrowly carved out exception. I don't think this more consistent is like I was wishy-washy to date. I was writing articles and getting a lot of flacky.

for them going back the entire run of trajectory very consistently about free speech as the top priority. So it's not newfound. So let's not yeah, let's not let's not overstate like and if you go back and read what I wrote with the Trump off social media, it was in the context of this is pro free speech. Corporations have free speech rights also.

And so like I just want that's that's a little bit of an unfair characterization. I'm going to put my record. forward on this point. Okay. So do you have an answer for Joseph beyond needling him on his word choice there? What do you think in general? It's a, it's a complete, this is absolutely a fair point of pushback. I think, I think it is correct. Number one, I would say, I don't think this is a free speech case per se because people can go elsewhere, to which Joseph ought to say, well, when people get kicked off social network, they can also go elsewhere. So like, There is a hoisting myself on my own partard on this bit.

There is a, like, the reality is everything is a tradeoff. This is, sounds like a cop out answer, but it's true. But this whole, this is to support this ban in 2020. And honestly, the reason why I didn't write more about it, I'm like, look, I made my case. It's 51.49. So I'm not going to like spend a ton of political capital going down with the ship on this. But it is, it is sort of what I think. It was very carefully considered.

59 for you, that is. It's a close call for you. For me, just because, yeah, like, free markets matter. And, like, the free speech is not just a legalistic thing. It is all these people on this platform and it being a meaningful way to communicate. This is an area. And maybe you want to say, you were wrong to say it was always number one. Well, no, it's not always number one.

Free speech jurors prudence in general. It's not always absolute. There are exceptions that are carved out by the Supreme Court. One of those exceptions that's carved out by the Supreme Court, is national security. And this is one where I would align with Supreme Court precedent in this regard, which is, I regret this, I don't like it, I acknowledge it's a violation of these principles. I just articulated last podcast, but I have looked at all sides, weighed all the issues, considered not just the issues today, but in the long run, and come down very narrowly on this.

I've given it strict. This is a sort of a strict scrutiny. Here we go. I've given it strict scrutiny and come down on the fact that the national security concerns do Trump. No pun intended. My principles. If you want to say, oh, you just gave this whole thing. You're not wishy-washy.

Well, okay, that's fine. I will accept that. The reality is that's part of being an adult is balancing competing priorities and principles. Yeah. So Joseph, you child. No, we love you, Joseph. Thank you for agreeing with us 99% of the time. Yeah, look, here's the thing.

Just in broad strokes, TikTok is where an entire generation of Americans gets their news. And the nature of social media platforms is such that control over the algorithm and the ability to either amplify or suppress certain viewpoints is an unbelievably powerful tool. Right. And again, which, by the way, has been manifested. It's not just I showed it back then. There's been studies since then.

that search on various terms. And the reality is there is a significant thumb on the scale about anything China related right now, just by default. And that's even before we get into some sort of potential conflict or things along those. Exactly. It's the hypothetical ability to wield this weapon that is just insane. Right. And by the way, well, that's why I want to emphasize it is happening now.

Because there is a danger, and I'm going to like contradict myself, where we do policies based on hypotheticals, which is generally a very bad place to be, right? You get to go back to the COVID example, you can hypothesize all potential of these bad outcomes and then make policy in response to the hypothetical, which are bad policies, and you should have actually waited for more proof points and better understanding to make very strident sort of decisions

and policies that you're stuck with for a very long time. So I don't like legislating against hypotheticals. That's why I do think it matters. There is evidence. There is some degree of thumb on the scale already. And then that gives more meat to, to the hypothetical. And again, it is, it is a very close. And lots of other vectors where the CCP has been actively maligned to U.S. interests

across the last several years. There is a bit about U.S. needs to take China more seriously. Right? Like, that's part of it. I take China very seriously. And maybe you want to say I'm biased because of where I live. I acknowledge that every time I write about this because that might be the case. And you listening to it and your 99% acceptance rate should, that's why you should decrease it because there is an inherent sort of, I think it gives me better perspectives. And it also gives me a bias perspective, which is, which is for for you to sort of figure out and me to acknowledge. Yeah. Well, and as far as taking China seriously, I think to Joseph's point,

the impulse to be uncomfortable with this law is natural and very American consistent with the U.S. tradition. But the reality is there. Not liking, yeah, not liking ambiguity. And I, by the way, I'm very uncomfortable with the law. So that's why I did. No, exactly. Well, and it's also the American system can tolerate a lot of different dissent. But you look at like with Twitter even, if you go back to COVID and the way Twitter handled some of the censorship issues there and certain things that were suppressed, like that distorted the conversation a couple years ago. And I wonder if Elon was running Twitter a couple years ago, whether certain policies would have been different because there just would have been more open discourse around that. And I offer that strictly as an example of where algorithmic control is really, really powerful and can have real world consequences on the democratic process and our policies. And then obviously, this is a good example of like, you know, you could take the hypothetical bit and say, well, your concerns about free speech.

This is, you know, people would push back on this in the, in the 2016, 2017 era. Your, your concerns about free speech are hypothetical, right? And it turned out that's why we go back to the COVID example because the hypotheses became reality and that should influence your thinking and your changes. And by the way, to go back to Joseph's email, am I demonstrating inconsistency? Absolutely. Like what you know, consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds or whatever what it is. We're the big mind podcast here. We're adults here.

Yeah. Well, and there's going to be more inconsistency. It's fair to call me out. It's absolutely fair to. I'm giving Joseph our time totally valid email, totally valid points. I podcast about this every week on Sharp China. China has done a great job at taking advantage of the U.S. freedoms and the U.S. led system to create and exploit a variety of vulnerabilities across private industry.

And banning TikTok will not be the last time that we have to make tradeouts between pure freedom and security, pure free market principles and the general welfare of society. But we should keep getting called out for the inconsistency because it is, you can say people that are concerned about people are about misinformation online. Yeah, it's like, look, no, we care about free speech. We're just, we're thinking about all the details and thinking it through. And that's actually totally valid. I, on that one, fall on a different spot and I've fallen in an even more extreme spot than I did even four years ago for the reasons I articulated last time. But that's why I am respect and I'm open to the argument because.

this stuff's not easy. One more bid on is not out-China-China. That applies not just to the U.S. that applies to other countries as well. They're not going to ban the U.S. companies because they're not going to out-China-China. Right? And so there is a certain amount of...

You got to want it to ban U.S. countries. That's right. U.S. companies. Well, Ben, I've enjoyed the ride here. And whether TikTok is around or not by next week, we will be back. We will have an episode up Monday afternoon. Getting back to regular schedules around here. Until then, enjoy the weekend.

And I will talk to you soon. Talk to you later.