TBPN - China’s acquisition spree, TikTok reaches U.S survival deal, Tech Giants hit by spying | Diet TBPN

Episode Date: January 24, 2026

Diet TBPN delivers the best of today’s TBPN episode in 30 minutes. TBPN is a live tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming weekdays 11–2 PT on X and YouTube, with each episode posted to podcast platforms right after.Described by The New York Times as “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession,” the show has recently featured Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, and Satya Nadella.TBPN.com is made possible by:Ramp - https://Ramp.comAppLovin - https://axon.aiCognition - https://cognition.aiConsole - https://console.comCrowdStrike - https://crowdstrike.comElevenLabs - https://elevenlabs.ioFigma - https://figma.comFin - https://fin.aiGemini - https://gemini.google.comGraphite - https://graphite.comGusto - https://gusto.com/tbpnLabelbox - https://labelbox.comLambda - https://lambda.aiLinear - https://linear.appMongoDB - https://mongodb.comNYSE - https://nyse.comOkta - https://www.okta.comPhantom - https://phantom.com/cashPlaid - https://plaid.comPublic - https://public.comRailway - https://railway.comRamp - https://ramp.comRestream - https://restream.ioSentry - https://sentry.ioShopify - https://shopify.comTurbopuffer - https://turbopuffer.comVanta - https://vanta.comVibe - https://vibe.coSentry - https://sentry.ioCisco - https://www.ciscoaisummit.com/ai-virtual-summit.htmlFollow TBPN:https://TBPN.comhttps://x.com/tbpnhttps://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

What did you write about today, John? I wanted to dig into the question that we had with Joe Wisenthal yesterday. What does China actually import? Obviously, this was off the back of Davos, Vice Premier Haley Fang, highlighted China's determination to become the world's market. They said, hey, we're the world's factory, but we also can buy stuff. Send us your stuff, we'll buy it. But what are they going to buy? So he said boosting domestic demand was now on top of their economic agenda.

This is in their 15th, five-year plan, something like that. And we were going back and forth. I'm like, what are they actually importing? We were saying semiconductors, but, you know, obviously there's chip deals and GPU bans. Now, interestingly, China, like the number one trade deficit for China is semiconductors. And it has been since 2005. So they want to buy semiconductors. Obviously, U.S. trade policy oscillates.

But semiconductors are the single biggest deficit for China. In 2020, even before the AI boom, China imported 350 billion worth of semiconductors, which was more than the value of the crude oil. It imported that year. And it's been the largest importer of chip since 2005, and accounts for huge chunks of revenue for Qualcomm. It's over 50% of Qualcomm's revenue, I think, and over 25% for Intel. So everything that you get from China,

if it's an electronics product, it's some gadget, it has a chip in there, that's probably going to be made in the West, sent over to China, assembled. But then sent back out. And then sent back out. Energy is a big driver of the trade deficit with China. China imports 74% of its oil.

oil supply and 42% of its gas supply. Soybeans, which you mentioned, and iron ore are also big categories. The iron ore obviously goes into a lot of, again, the factory, the world's factory. Why can't China make enough soybeans in China? I don't know. It must be climate-related. They love making stuff. Yeah, I don't know. That's a good question. We should dig into that. Luxury is a clear net import category for China. Estimates are around $100 billion annually. Now, it's not the biggest driver of their trade deficit or trade surplus, but it is, and it's also not critically important in the way chips or oil or soybeans or iron or are, but it is an important story. And almost all of Chinese luxury good imports are from European conglomerates. You've got to think LVMH and caring.

It's not strategically important, really. and the foreign luxury market in China, so European conglomerates sending their goods to China, it actually completely fell off a cliff in 2024. Imports went down about 20%. Domestic Chinese luxury brands are on the rise. Lau Pu Gold is now drawing from the same customer base as Louis Vuitton, Hermes, Cardier, Bulgaria, and Tiffany.

Gucci is closing stores, I think around 18 stores are closing, while the local champion Songmont is seeing significant growth in their handbag business. So China does want to be the world's market, but they're also buying domestic a lot. The basic trend is like China excels at developing efficient supply chains, streamlined manufacturing operations. And it doesn't stop with cars. They're doing it with TVs now. So on Tuesday, Sony announced that they would be spinning off its home entertainment business,

which includes the TV brand Bravia, to their Chinese rival TCL electronics holdings. Sony is selling a 51% stake to TCL while the brand will remain Sony. the display technology will be TCL. Sony's been falling behind Samsung, TCL, LG, Xiaomi in terms of TV shipments for a while. But the brand still holds a ton of value. Like Sony TVs were the best a decade ago. And still today people like the software a little bit more.

And the Sony brand, it still has the aura of the Walkman, the PlayStation. It's just beloved electronics. And you see the Sony logo, and it's just way more familiar than TCL. Do you think Japanese excellence? Yes, you do. And so Sony has been falling behind on the manufacturing front.

TCL has been basically delivering a much stronger value prop on a price to quality basis. And the panel technology is loved and very competitive. But there's just more faith in Sony name. So the Chinese manufacturer is effectively pulling forward heritage and brand legacy by buying the name. And this feels like a trend that will continue for a while. China's fantastic and quickly grinding down

manufacturing learning curves, developing high quality products at affordable prices. But creating an iconic brand, it just takes decades. And so it's better to buy than built. So smart. This is the one thing you buy instead of built. I don't know if Chinese manufacturers will ever make money, but I came away not wanting to invest in any manufacturing business in the rest of the world.

And Ian Roundtree says, I'm going to keep investing in American manufacturing. So people are still pushing it. There's also big news. Anderrol is bringing a one million square foot union built campus, along with 5,000 500 jobs to the city of Long Beach. The office of Mayor Rex Richardson, the Long Beach mayor, posted this. Over the next three years, Andrew will be building this. This is the largest private investment in Long Beach history, and it's a major vote of confidence in Long Beach's leadership in aerospace and advanced manufacturing. China unveils EV that can violently eject its battery

in case of a fire. We can see this in action and see what kind of situation. This is so wild. I remember when this video went viral. It's like, what is the point? Oh, it's because if it crashes and it's going to burn, it'll shoot it out. But, oh, that just sees like so, so dangerous. But at the same time, people, people, you know, watch these videos and they think, like, oh, this is, like, widespread Chinese best practice when really, like, this is probably,

like, their gundo equivalent, you know, just like a couple dudes. It is interesting that they're like, we don't just need to get it 10. feet away. We need to get it 30 feet away. Yeah, yeah. Because you could just like gracefully drop it out or something or like slide it out sort of slowly with a little pusher. But they have to like shoot it out like a cannon. I think we got to watch the video about AI industry news. Every two weeks, one of these models is destroying someone else's model.

Destroyed been dressed in Chad GPD. Chad GPD destroyed perplexity and Google AI. A.I. LinkedIn AI just ruined WhatsApp AI. Meta. AI. R-C-T-C-A-I just destroyed. Uber-Ola AI. Wow. Wow. It's so good. What is that last one? I R-C-T-C-A-I. I've never even... He's just making stuff up. He's just making up acronyms at this point. But it really is so true that like there's just a time-honored clickbait title of like destroyed in all caps. I used to do it on my

YouTube videos always went viral. It's been proven. What's going on with TikTok? TikTok is, it's sort of the reverse, honestly. It's very interesting. You have this dynamic of like the American companies or the Western companies, MG and Sony selling to Chinese because they have great manufacturing. And then TikTok, you know, we want, America wants control over the algorithm, over the data, security. And so you have a Chinese company that's now going to be operating in the US. and the Wall Street Journal has a piece here on it. The agreement was negotiated to comply with a 2024 law requiring the company to do a deal to address U.S. national security concerns.

Rome wasn't built in a day, and TikTok was not divested in a day. TikTok officially established a joint venture that would allow it to keep operating in the United States. The company said Thursday, resolving a years-long fight to address Washington's national security concerns under the terms of the deal negotiated by the Trump administration, the popular video-sharing app will be operated by a new, U.S. entity controlled by investors seen as friendly to the U.S. Its data management and algorithm training on American users will be overseen by Oracle, the cloud computing giant that has safeguarded its data for the U.S. for years and has close ties to the Trump administration.

The deal was negotiated to comply with a law passed in 2024. President Trump delayed the implementation of the law a year ago after starting his second term to keep TikTok operating the United States. He signed a series of executive orders to extend the deadline for completing a deal until it was met Thursday. Trump said in a social media post, I'm so happy to have helped in saving TikTok. He thanked Chinese leader, Xi Jinping, for working with us. Trump and TikTok's investors and allies pushed the deal through despite lingering concerns among lawmakers and security hawks that China could still influence the new entity through TikTok's parent bite dance. It makes sense that this took so long. It sounds really simple. Just divest. But in reality,

you have to effectively rebuild an entire app, right? it's going to be like a new app figuring out the logistics of that. There's also just a ton of hair on the deal, right? There's a huge revenue share that's going back to bite dance in perpetuity that is obviously reflected in the valuation. The other factor is like if you have a U.S. TikTok now and then you have normal TikTok, if I'm on the U.S. TikTok, am I sharing content to international TikTok? If I'm on the international TikTok, is it sharing my content back into the U.S. app?

How does that all work out? And so there's a lot of stuff that still needs to be handled. Most of the social media app, pretty much every social media app that you use, if you just cut off all international content creators, the experience on the app would get worse. So there needs to be like some content still flowing back and forth, but figuring out how exactly that works is still in process. The majority American-owned joint venture will operate under defined safeguards

that protect national security through comprehensive data protections, algorithm security, content moderation, and software assurances for U.S. users. The whole TikTok debate really erupted when TikTok CEO Shochew was in front of Congress and was not really acting like he was the boss, basically. That was the main criticism. It felt like he didn't have full control over the entity because, of course, it's a subsidiary of Bightance. And some of the U.S. lawmakers were pressing him on how much control he actually has. did they send the right person to the congressional hearing.

So who's in the deal? You got Oracle, you got private equity firm Silver Lake, you got Abu Dhabi-based MGX. They will each own 15% of the new entity, while TikTok investors will own about 30%. Other notable investors include J.D. Vance's, former firm Revolution, and tech executive Michael Dell's family investment office.

Dells getting in the deal. Vance spent a brief stint at the first. firm founded by AOL co-founder Steve Case during his time as a venture investor, which preceded his 22 Senate campaign. Vance has said previously that the deal values the new entity at about $14 billion. A lot of people thought that that was really, really low given TikTok's immense growth. But there is another side of this, which is that TikTok, I don't believe was ever monetizing or as profitable as its competitors, YouTube. Mark Zuckerberg and the Google team were not like exactly slow to move and launch competitive products.

And so a lot of the, you see this continuously where Snapchat comes out, Stories is on a tear, and you're looking at the Snapchat growth curve, and you're like, this is going to kill Facebook. It's going to be the next Facebook, and Mark Zuckerberg needs to acquire it. He puts in an offer, gets declined. And it looks like it's over, but then the Instagram team moved really quickly. They launch Stories, and that effectively, you can see in the chart, Stories launches on Instagram, and people stop.

moving on to Snapchat. And so a lot of people went back who were on Snapchat, they went back to Instagram, and Instagram continued to grow and Snapchat. It didn't a flatline, but it definitely put a dent in their growth. And I think the same thing is true for TikTok. A lot of people who just want that format, vertical video, endless scrolling slop, they can get that. We got American-made troughs all over the place, everywhere the eyes can see.

So the investors are paying the U.S. government a multi-billion-dollar fee for arranging the deal, a concept Trump previously called a tremendous fee plus. TikTok said it had 200 million users in the U.S. up from its 2024 estimate of about 170 million users. So decent growth, but I don't know. I mean, 200 million in the U.S. is a lot. Like, that's pretty much everyone. Yeah, I guess the question is,

will they ever get the rest of the U.S.? In the way that YouTube you could assume has, like, effectively? You think they have like 300 mil? Yeah, I would assume that that... I don't know. There's a lot of Philistines out there. There's a lot of Luddites who are just like, no, I want DVDs. I want VHS tapes.

Trump touted his popularity on TikTok earlier Thursday, posting on truth social that his posts on the platform, TikTok, get more engagement than posts on TikTok competitor, Instagram, which is owned by meta platform. For what it's worth, that's always been the case, right? Like, TikTok has always had allegations that they were boughting, like, as a platform effectively. people would go on there and they'd be like getting a tremendous amount of followers, tremendous amount of just engagement broadly far more than than they would have on Instagram with the same content. And some people would say, oh, that's because the TikTok algorithm is so good. And there certainly are a bunch of very real people on TikTok.

I don't mean to say that it's all bought it. But the experience of using TikTok, a lot of creators, will just naturally have six times as many TikTok followers as they do Instagram followers. Yeah, yeah. It does seem like the algorithm is set up to serve you more content in a 10-minute session because you're more quickly scrolling. And then there's also accounting issues, like on some platforms, if you just scroll past something for even one second, that counts as a view on other platforms.

It might take three seconds. On other views, you know, platforms, maybe 10 seconds a minute. Gen Z are arriving to college unable to even read a sentence, says Fortune, reposted by Unusual Wales See if you can read this See if you can read this See if you can read this Try and read this

Wow he can't He can't do it Slothed I just I need like some subway surfers or something Yeah I'm gonna need some subway surfers We have some drama that's continuing to unfold In the payroll space The Justice Department opens a criminal

probe into Silicon Valley spy Allegations Subpoenas seek information on allegations the deal valued around $17 billion, recruited a spy inside a rival company. This is a huge story last year, and then it's been pretty quiet, and both companies have just kind of been chugging along.

Yeah, so the Justice Department opened a criminal investigation. Grand jury subpoenas were sent out in recent weeks. Keith O'Brien alleged in an affidavit filed in April that deal CEO Alex recruited him and gave him instructions for what information to take from Rippling. O'Brien alleged that other executives were involved in the spying plot, including his father, who is Deals' executive chairman and chief strategy officer. A spokeswoman for Deal said the company isn't aware of a criminal investigation but is willing to cooperate with authorities.

That's an interesting statement. The Wall Street Journal is reporting this and you find out from a Wall Street Journal reporter. That's wild. So the company has previously said, we deny any legal wrongdoing and look forward to asserting our counterclaim. So Deal says we didn't do anything wrong. Of course, the affidavit from Keith O'Brien is extremely dramatic. There's that whole, like, you know, oh, send that watch to London. We're going to be like James Bond.

It's a really dramatic read. And you can go back and watch some old TVPN episodes if you want to hear a full take on that. Yeah, it's interesting. Yeah, I wonder what information is actually available kind of publicly on this. Because, like, obviously in a situation like this, you have both sides that are kind of like feeding the media their side of the story. but what we do know the facts of the facts here like the justice department did open this

because the Walser Journal confirmed that the Justice Department opened the investigation so yeah anyway it didn't stop deal I think a lot of people weren't expecting this to actually have any type of like criminal

component yeah I think a lot of people were just expecting like a lot of drama a lot of you know and they would eventually just like settle exactly settle and like the worst case was like okay maybe it's like a series D size payment for Rippling, but they're both going to just keep grinding. But it seems like it's going to the court, so we will see. Maybe there will be, maybe there will be, you know, courtroom sketches of these folks. Opening eye chair, Brad Taylor says AI is, quote, probably a bubble, expects a corruption in the coming years.

Nick is, his camera role is truly just filled to the brim with images of Sam Altman in various, like, you know, the guy has probably the largest collection of Rare Altman's, we're sure. He has every photo that's ever been taken of Sam. Nowhere, of course, would Brett Taylor be like, oh, yeah, I think, I think LLM usage is going to fall off a cliff. Yeah, it's like, yeah, yeah, there's a variety of different companies and kind of subcategories that could be overheated. You could easily dig into that, and he's like, there's a bubble in like seed stage valuations. Like, I can't get an angel check in at less than 50 pre. Like, you know, like, the bubble can take a lot of different shapes.

So who knows what he was actually commenting on. Another clip from Demis from the big technology podcast. He's taking shots at open air, according to Yuchin Jin. Action speaks louder than words, going back to the original conversation we're having with, you know, Sam and others claiming AGIs around the corner. Why would you bother with ads then? So that is, I think, a reasonable question to ask. But I think, look, from our point of view, we have no plans at the moment to do ads. I think if you're talking about the Gemini app, right, specifically.

I think we are going, obviously, we're going to watch very carefully what, you know, the outcome of what Chachupitia is saying they're going to do. I think it has to be handled very carefully, but I think actions be glad of them. He's an absolute dog. Post-AGI, the clankers need to advertise to each other. You've got to do ads for the clankers. The thing here is like OpenAI has to not only like figure out how to actually implement ads within the product, but they have to build out all the advertising, like infrastructure, the platform. performance infrastructure in order for people to run campaigns successfully and at scale.

So Google already has all of that. It is far easy. Like, it is, what do you think it's like a hundred times easier for Google to turn on ads in Gemini? Right? They already have all the customer relationship. Literally any company that advertises online, it's already working with Google. And so it's really just like you can just flip the switch. And so I could easily, you know, don't have any inside knowledge, but I could easily see Google just like having it all basically ready to go.

and it literally just being like, okay, we can launch this whenever we want. There is an interesting steel man here. Let me try and do it. The steel man on Sam Alton and claiming that AGI is around the corner, but we still got to do ads. Well, around the corner, even if that means six months, like if you have an incredible capital expenditure to get over that hump, to create AGI, it's only six months away,

but you've got to do that last data center, and you've got to raise that last 50 billion, and all of the investors. It's easy to say, like, we don't want to do ads when you have hundreds of billions of dollars in existing ad revenue coming in, funding everything that you're doing. So, anyways, I think this is, you know, I mean, we can also debate whether or not ads will exist post-AGI. I would argue that they would, but what do you think, Tyler? There was that headline about how opening I, maybe they're thinking about, like, taking a percentage of the share of, like, the discoveries. I don't know how they would actually do that, or if it's, like, they're being serious at all.

But that's, like, much more AGI-I-pealed, right, than ads. Yeah, yeah. Oh, that's a good point. So they're doing both. They're doing both. Almost everyone at Vimeo was laid off, including the entire video team. I would assume that most of their team.

So unfortunate, I have some fond memories of being a teenager when Vimeo was like really. Vimeo was so differentiated. Yeah. It was where there was like a level of quality that it wasn't just like some random person. In my case, it was like surf. Yes, yes, yes. It was like if somebody was putting a ton of effort into making like a surf movie, or you know some snowboarding movie it would be on vimeo yeah and they wanted higher quality

footage you could get higher bit rates 4k HD like they they were really on the front tier of that yeah I remember watching a lot of ski videos there there were some great ones and also just like it was a place where people would put their their short films they had the vimeo like you know awards with the little wreath laurels that you could rest on eventually you know YouTube just went everywhere all places the ads went away for the people that care about that because they had premium subscriptions, and ultimately the quality on YouTube just got better and better and better, and now you can get 4K really high bit rate on YouTube, and it's indistinguishable from Vimeo.

High yield, Harry has the meme for the moment. He says, but now we shall both surely drown, said the frog. All right, said the scorpion. I don't think this is exactly right. If you buy, if you're a private equity firm and you buy an asset like this and you lay off the team. Like you're likely, there are still people that are going to be trying to extract the value from that asset. It just might be a team in a different section of the firm or an outsourcing agency or something else. I would be surprised if this means that Vimeo is shutting down.

I would imagine that they're trying to continue whatever business relationships they have and whatever subscriber base they have. Vimeo was cool, but if you know about Vimeo, it probably means you're old. That's true. That's certainly true. You know about Vimeo? Yeah, I know what Vimeo is. What's last thing you watched on Vimeo? I have no idea. No, but I remember, yeah, it was like artsy films were on there or something.

Yeah, that was good. So Coinbase established an independent advisory board on quantum computing and blockchain, quantum computing, if built at scale, have the potential to reshape entire industries. We were talking to Kathy Wood about this a little bit yesterday. From finance to healthcare to material science and national security. For blockchain, the stakes are especially high.

The cryptographic foundation that secures digital assets today. could be challenged by the advances of the coming years. At Coinbase, security is our highest priority and preparing for future threats, even those many years away is crucial for our industry. Most people, I think, handicapped the quantum thing at like 2030, 2030, 2032, 2040. I think Kathy Woods' estimate was 2040

for serious quantum adoption, even if you get on a Moore's Law-type adoption curve. If you can crack, like, whatever, the Bitcoin or any, like, blockchain with quantum, like, surely you can also just get into, like, banks or, like, of things that are like probably way more important than crypto. Yeah.

It's like if we have a world where you have like these incredibly powerful quantum computers, like is crypto actually the most important thing that you need to be worrying about? Or is it like the nuclear codes that are? So surely those that are stored. Yeah, you're probably right with the nuclear codes. But in terms of just like fiat stored in a bank, there are a series of backups that are offline. There's even deeper backups at certain points.

And so like the financial system, although they probably don't want to talk about it, it does have the ability to effectively roll back. So if there was some massive quantum hack and all the Morgan Stanley or JPMorgan accounts or Goldman Sachs accounts were drained, they would just be like, let's revert. But you can't do that on a blockchain necessarily.

More importantly, buzzballs. Incredibly important, thank you. Is selling a $35,000 diamond engagement ring shaped like its drinks. The ring will be auctioned on eBay starting February 3rd. Maybe it's, it's, $35,000 worth of diamonds. It cost them $35,000 to make it,

and they're going to put it on eBay starting price, $100,000, and then it'll get bid up, I guess. I don't know. Proceeds from the sale will benefit a heart-related charitable cause. It's kind of odd for an alcohol brand to be like, we're... I don't know. That's cool. I mean, if anyone out in the audience is wanting to propose and, like, doesn't really know how to...

It's struggling to figure out, like, the right kind of, like, moment or way to propose. This is, like, kind of easy, out of the box. A woman in your life. Toss the buzz ball at the woman in the dream. Yeah. Is this rage bait? Is this good marketing? Do you think this is good for buzzball strategically?

What do you think? I don't know if it's, I mean, I find plenty of moments to talk about buzzball already. Okay. Unnecessary. Did you know? What? Do you know who came up with the idea for Buzzball? Absolutely not.

I have no idea. A public high school teacher. What? Mery Lee Kick, a former public high school teacher, has become one of America's richest self-made women after selling her. ready to drink cocktail business, Buzzballs, for at least 500 million. 500 million? What started as a side hustle has now transformed into one of the biggest brands of the

Ready to Drink Cocktail Industry. Kick founded Buzzballs in 2009, inspired by a simple idea while grading papers by her pool. I thought, I shouldn't have this glass container out here. I should have a plastic, pool safe type of cocktail. From this spark of inspiration, Buzzballs was born. Fun, high-proof cocktails served in colorful. plastic spherical containers. Buzzballs quickly gained popularity is an asshole

at supermarkets, liquor stores, and convenience stores. She says, I've been living the American dream. We've built a legacy. We've become a contender in a space where women never went. Hicks says. The brand has grown intentionally distributing 29 countries with an estimated annual revenue of $500 million.

This is an incredible story. Monster company. In April of 2024, the drinks firm Sazirac acquired buzzballs in an all-cash deal. No way. Five hundred million. Though Kicks suggests a figure

is much higher. No way. She's an absolute dog. It is also cemented to replace among America's richest self-made women with Forbes estimating her net worth at 400 million after taxes.

So yeah, of course. She's got a 10x that. Just get it in the market. I'm sure she's cooking on her next on her next idea. Run it up. Kick's journey is remarkable because she never raised money

from investors. She bootstrapped her business. She used the small inheritance, maxed out her credit cards. Where is the Founders' podcast episode about her? And took out a loan from a local community bank to get started. I scraped and scrambled, she says. I took every bit of every penny I could find and poured it into the

business. That's incredible. Her unique company started making a profit in the second year with $1 million in sales and $100,000 in profit. Not bad. By 2014, the brand was expanding quickly and the drinks were sold at major retailers. By 2019, annual sales were over 100 million.

Get her on the David Center. Wow. I mean, she's elite. A key to Buzzball success was owning its supply chain. She vertically integrated on KY. It's just like, most like D to C founders in California. I can't figure out how to get off a copaccacker. She moved production of the patented plastic spheres and the spirits used in Buzzball

in-house to ensure the brand's quality and reliability. Wow. Despite many investor offers over the years, Kik held on to her company until she found the right partner. Elite. I wanted somebody that was going to come in and have big guns. Big guns. Big guns.

Kik and her family are still part of the business. I didn't sell because I didn't like what I was doing or wanted to leave, she explains. I sold for the exponential growth and because it's selfish to hold it back. It really has legs. From a teacher grading paper by the pool to a multi-sentimillionaire. Mary Lee Kicks' story shows the power of a good idea and the determination to make it happen. We had some breaking news yesterday. Caroline Ellison has been released from federal custody.

She of course was involved in the FTX drama. that erupted a few years ago. She's out, and Martin Screlli, quote, tweeted us into the oblivion. Ratioed us by changing our... You didn't even use nanobanana pro. He just scribbled all over our trading card and said, snatched. Honestly, it worked. Yeah, I was thinking, like, that felt very fast.

It does feel fast. It does feel fast. But I'm excited to see what she does next. Will she build something? You know, we've seen some other folks get out and go on to redemption, and we will see. Hopefully at some point she tells her story. It'll be interesting to see her side of it. Maybe she has convincing arguments.

I heard she wrote a book. Really? I think there were some leaks. I don't know how true it is, but currently she was writing. Okay. For sure. Substack. What's going on with Substack?

They're going into television. They're going into television. They're taking on big TV. Big TV. They say, according to Max, they're launching. Substack TV app on Apple TV and Google TV. Users will be able to watch video posts and Substack live streams. So much of Substack's opportunity right now is just that X is rolled into XAI.

It is not operating as like a pure play standalone company. And so, yeah. Substack has been making the most. It has been definitely ramping up the video functionality. We've done some live streams there. There's a lot of opportunity. And it's a very interesting community. I think that's the strongest thing about substack is just that,

it's a very high signal place. Like if you were, I'm, you know, the Substack experience is not scrolling random posts, random creators, but I feel very confident about if Substack were to serve me a random piece of content that was doing well across the Substack network, I would enjoy it because the creators

that choose to be on Substack, there are just so few, like, slot bar. Yeah, you could see a new kind of like, we were talking about Vimeo earlier, the dynamic that you sat between Vimeo and YouTube where Vimea was like a super intentional place. You can see something emerging again

where Substack TV is like a somewhat more intentional version of YouTube. Just because it is like based on like your actual audience less around just like raw discoverability now. And also with Substack, if you're trying to create like a signal on a piece of content, the fact that people pay is really, really high signals. Like, yes, this person isn't just good at clickbait.

They're not just good at driving traffic. They're not just good at thumbnails and titles and hooks. Like, they are good at creating such a response from their community that their community puts down their credit cards. And in the case of, like, Emily Sundberg would feed me. Maybe they pay more than they have to. Pull up this video here. They're really jumping on this.

This is a new one because Waymos have been in the past. That's a new. Two words I haven't said put together before. They're really breaking the windshield. Wow. What is this? Did the Waymo drive through a particular protest? did these people just, do these people just descend upon a random Waymo?

This is a crime. This is property destruction. Yeah, what would your mother say? Also, I'm just thinking about, like, the Waymos aren't cheap. You're going to be hit with like a $500,000 bill, even if you just have to pay for repairing the Waymo. Very, very odd. But, of course, people are calling to give the Waymo's weapons and people.

That is the rallying crime tag. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for the TBPN newsletter, TBPN.com. you on Monday. Cheers, folks. Goodbye.