TBPN - The End of TikTok, CCP Spies, Audience Ad Reads, Work Life Balance

Episode Date: January 17, 2025

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I call Hanjurong. I very like beer. Jordan, we're live. Welcome to Technology Brothers, the most profitable podcast in the world. Today, that was awkward. Today we are talking about...

Hopefully we can get that edited. Yeah, yeah, yeah, edit that out. Today we are talking about a sternly worded letter that was sent from Elizabeth Warren to none other than Sam Altman. It came on a beautiful, beautiful stationary from the United States Senate.

Washington, D.C. This broke just today, January 17th, addressed to Sam Altman, and it reads the following. Dear, Mr. Altman, in the two months since the election, big tech companies, including Open AI, have made million-dollar gifts to President-elect Donald Trump's inaugural fund in what appears to be an effort to influence and sway the actions and policies of the incoming administration, specifically on December 13, 24, reporting confirmed your intention to personally donate $1 million to. to the inaugural fund.

So what's weird about this is that there's making it out to be like, oh, million dollars is so much. But like that's not even enough to buy a single Konigseg. Yeah. And yet it's like, oh, a million bucks. It's like. And Sam, Sam wouldn't drive,

Sam wouldn't daily a car for less than a million dollars. No way. So think about however much your daily driver costs, that's the kind of political donation that we're talking about. This is the change that you find in the seats of the Konixigieg. Yeah. This is not, this is not real, real sway. Yeah, so what's insane about what's insane about this is, I mean, Elizabeth Warren always, from my experience, likes to, likes to kind of play dumb, right?

Like, she's clearly an intelligent woman. Yeah, yeah. And she's clearly very shrewd politically. And she likes to come out and make these like very emotional sort of statements and demands while clearly. just ignoring all the facts. And so the facts, you know, the reality is why do people make political donations? Yeah. It is to influence politicians. Yeah. Right. Like why it's not just out of nobody, you know, people don't don't make million dollar donations to, you know, just, just purely for fun, right? Yeah. And it's interesting because it's, it's like this is, this is breaking news because

it's targeting open AI and Sam Altman and AI is this huge topic and job displays. And it's interesting like how quickly the Dems have turned on Altman who I believe was historically generally pro. He was, I think he almost ran for governor of California as Democrat. I know he's donated before. And yeah, this is just like part of like the vibe shift that this time around in Trump 2.0, people are much less. sounding the alarm bells around like this is like the worst thing ever. And so it actually goes into this in the letter. Big tech companies have come under increased scrutiny from federal regulators for antitrust violations, violations of privacy and harms to work

with consumers and competition. Which is going to go out the window to some degree. Oh, the antitrust? Yeah, the anti-trust. Potentially. Yeah. And so yeah, if you're pro-antrust, I guess you're upset that big tech is cozying up to the new Trump administration, although some of the Trump appointees have been somewhat pro antitrust in the sense that if their constituents are, you know, like small business owners. Yeah. They might actually want to bring up big companies. Or blocking that is that Japanese steel company from acquiring. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That. And then so, yeah, antitrust is a lever, is like a hammer that can be used in multiple ways. And what's interesting is that back when the antitrust against big tech started and there was a push against Google and then Amazon very early on, Elizabeth Warren was one of the most outspoken voices, but Josh Hawley was also one of the most outspoken voices. And it was this weird moment where Josh Hawley... Josh Hawley is a, I believe a senator, might be a congressman. I'm pretty sure he was a Republican and was like loosely in the teal universe through JD. It was kind of like, people were thinking that like there might be like a tech squad like Rashida Talib and AOC.

and Ilhan Omar, there might be that if they got JD and, um, and, uh, who else, uh, Arizona guy? Lake Masters. Lake Masters and also Josh Hawley in, you'd have like, you have a little bit of like strength in numbers because those three guys collectively have the same sort of philosophy around tech, but not, uh, same puppet master. But, but, but, but, but, but, and and, and they, they, they could kind of. a break from the mainstream ideology of the Republican Party. And so Elizabeth Warren goes on to say,

we are concerned that your company and other big tech donors are using your massive contributions. Again, not that massive to the inaugural fund to cozy up to the incoming administration in an effort to avoid scrutiny, limit regulation, and by favor. You have a clear and direct interest in obtaining favors from the incoming administration. Your company and many other big tech company donors are already subject to ongoing federal investigations and regulatory actions. For example, Amazon, which donated a million dollars to Trump's inaugural fund, is the subject of multiple ongoing regulatory actions, including multiple FTC suits related to anti-consumer

and anti-competitive practices, a DOJ investigation into fraudulent schemes to obtain credit, and over 300 open national labor relations board and LRB cases, alleging unfair labor practices. Apple CEO Tim Cook donated $1 million to Trump's fund, while Apple is a lot. the subject of a DOJ antitrust suit as well as 20 NLRB cases. Google, which donated $1 million, was found by federal court to have an illegal monopoly over the online search market. Meta donated a million dollars and is the subject of an ongoing CFPB into the improper use of financial data and an FTC antitrust suit for monopolistic practices.

Microsoft donated a million and is subject of multiple open investments. You know, the funny thing here is that Elizabeth Warren, Warren has like taken more money from like big finance and like any politician in history. Like she is truly the most toxic politician of all time. And we don't we don't talk about politics ever. Ever. Yeah. But if but if I were to to, you know, sort of extrapolate on Elizabeth Horan, I wouldn't

have a lot of, my mother once told me if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all. and I don't have a single words this is funny because it's like listing off like you know every big tech company donated and every big tech company is like under significant pressure from the government but there's a flip that you can flip this around and be like

well we're suing every single tech company like why aren't they donating to us? Yeah yeah it's like it's um yeah maybe maybe they're kind of it's not like it's not like all these donations were made and then all the lawsuits started. Yeah. It's like clearly the company was like, well, we had to spend $500 million on legal bills.

Yeah, yeah. Like maybe we should spend one million. Maybe we should spend one million. And it's crazy because Elizabeth Warren's Robin Hood fluctuates millions of dollars every hour with the, you know, she's, you know, prominent investor herself. And so. Is that true at all? I thought it was all Nancy Pelosi was the... I think they track...

Warren's doing well to you. Okay. Well, she closed out the letter saying... By any... Like, to be clear, she... It's just so disingenuous to come after somebody for making political donations when she has been the beneficiary of big business for her entire career.

Yep. It is critical that federal regulators continue to evenly hand it even handedly apply competition, consumer protection, anti-discrimination laws, and any other rule of law that applies to your company, but the industry's efforts suggest that big tech companies are trying to curry favor and skirt the rules. This would be good for billionaire tech executives, but it is bad for America. If left unchecked, big tech monopolies will threaten consumers' rights, run roughshod over workers, and squash competition while stifling innovation. These donations raise the question about corruption and the influence of corporate money on the Trump administration

and Congress and the public deserve answers. Therefore, we ask that you provide responses by January 31st, 2025. And the question here is when and under what circumstances did your company decide to make these contributions to the Trump inaugural fund? And there's a couple other questions. But very interesting. I think there, I mean, obviously, like, you know, we're joking around, but there is something to, you know, antitrust laws exist for a reason.

The true extractive monopolies do destroy shareholder value and economic value. and economic value and there are good reasons for many of the laws that are in place. The question is just like, is this a, has this been like a pattern of abuse?

The toughest thing about the tech monopolies is that you can look at a, you know, the Google search monopoly which is very clearly true. But previously, like the Sherman Antitrust Act

was defined as consumer harm. So it needs to be, be two steps. One, you have a monopoly, which can be quantitatively measured by the HHHHHHHHHFI. Are you familiar with this? The Hirschman-Hersfeld Index, something like that. The HHHHHI is a mathematical calculation for economic concentration in a particular industry. So you basically take the market size and you, of each company, you square them or something like that. And so you get, so with search market, it's extremely high because Google has like 90%. It's very, obvious. But that's not enough to just say, hey, there's only one company in there. We got to break

him into two because sometimes a certain industry just might only have one player. The question is, are they abusing that monopoly power to raise prices on customers? Yeah. And with Google, it's hard to argue because you free product, a free product, you can get a lot of value from the Google ecosystem. And then on the back end, their real customer, where they get the money from are the ads buyers. Yeah. And of course, ads buyers can move to other platforms. They can easily move on. So maybe. So I looked it up.

And it's an auction. Yeah. So they're very, it's very hard for Google to, to supply demand. Yeah. To artificially raise prices of their ads. So I looked it up and here's the thing. So I've figured it out. So Elizabeth, I looked at the data.

We've been preparing a TED talk by looking at the data. Yeah. So I looked at the data. Elizabeth Warren loves mutual funds. She's, you know, an active investor in some of these funds. And I think some of the frustration from this letter might actually be that through all those funds. She's a, you know, she herself has a lot of her net worth in some of these big tech companies. And she might be angry as an indirect shareholder that that money is being spent on

her political opponents when it could be profit for her, right? So she's like, maybe it's more of like this long con of if you keep that money in the business, distribute it out, do some buybacks. My assets are going to go up because she's a, she's a cent, sent a millionaire. Really? Yeah, they've, no way. Yeah, not senti. Sorry. So she has somewhere between, she has 10 plus million dollars of like known assets. I'm sure she's taking some, you know, hush. We're just like I just feel, I just feel like she's trying to slander tech. I'm going to slander her.

Let it rip a little bit. No, but I think it's just this frustration of saying, you know, her being like, I want that to be, I want that money to be going to buybacks to help my bags instead of helping my political opponents. Yeah, yeah, yeah. She feels some sort of entitlement to some of that, you know. Well, it is funny because, like, you look at the antitrust stuff against Google and one of the first person, when the first people that kind of, like, argue that Google had become this, like, lethargic monopoly, it was Peter Thiel, of course, with this idea that, that famous debate between him and Eric Schmidt,

talking about Google has something, it was like $50 billion at the time. Now it's like maybe $150 billion of cash reserves. and they have all this money and they don't innovate and they don't actually deploy it. And it's a testament that they're out of ideas. They don't have a place to go sync that money to get a return. And so even though, and this was like all stagnation theory, just arguing that, you know, you need to look no further than Google with

best engineers, the most agentic founders at the helm. Like, you have this incredible thing. Yeah, Google could have done Starlink. They could have done so many different things. They could have done so many different things. And they had all the resources. and they couldn't justify any of those investments. Yeah, the one thing that's interesting with Warren is when you look at a lot of these senators

and politicians that are just really annoying, right? Like the sort of boomer generation, they clearly need to move on. They're sort of holding progress back in a bunch of different ways. The unfortunate thing, because Elizabeth Warren is quite annoying to me is, but good for her, is she has like a lot of vigor. Like she seems a lot healthier than sort of some of these other, even on the Republicans inside some of these guys that are just like what's a guy's name who's constantly just like Mitch McConnell Mitch McConnell poor guy like he clearly like his staff is just sort of like

shepherding him around like he should be in a retirement home yeah just sort of like mpcing out on um you know interviewed like on national television just being like yeah i would I mean I would you look back to the founding fathers and you read their ages and it's like oh yeah they had like a cracked 18 year old right? rating like the constitution for them like with the quills like this old this dudes is like oh yeah they're like 28 year old guy working on this yeah it would be so all we want is the average out it's so amazing we're flip it instead of 35 plus it's 35 or under and we had the vac's what the veck has been silenced the heck has been put the vet maybe the veck is prepping for the cage

maybe he's like he wants to go founder mode again he's like politics i've had enough i want to show all these jocks, like how to build a billion dollars of enterprise value in 90 days, PMF or die. I really just want a president who's, you know, 19 years old, chugs Red Bulls and Celsius all night and it's just like, yeah, piece in the... Isn't there a minimum? Yeah, yeah, 35 is the minimum age. Yeah.

But I think it should be the maximum age. We need a gamer president. Somebody who's going to just grind with the boys. Yeah, we need a president who sort it out. Who insists that the White House press secretary does the brain rot? What is it called? What are those videos? Yeah, what are the videos called where, like, they have, like, we need the subway surfer?

The subway surfer videos where it's like the person talking and then some, like, car, like, racing. Yeah, I would just love, I would just love a vigorous president, someone who can get up. Yeah, I want the, I want to, I want the, I want the, yeah, the press secretary is, is doing the, like, TikTok streaming, like, you know, midway. They're like, all right, so, you know, the president has made it clear that, you know, and they're like, ice cream, so good. It's great. Well, let's move on to our real top story today. TikTok. Before we dump, we're going to talk about TikTok today, but I'd like to help our audience get a little bit more empathy with this story.

And so I'd like to just teach them a quick word of Mandarin that they can use throughout their day, which is. Peugeot, which means beer. So if you want to, if you're trying to find common ground between, you know, you and somebody, I doubt any of our listeners are on red note. But if you go on red note, just comment on a bunch of post, Wohenshiwan, Peugeot, which means I really enjoy beer. And that will find like sort of some common ground. Because again, the Chinese people are not the enemy. It's the CCP. Exactly. Exactly. So it's important to, you know, clarify that. Yeah. So let's start with just setting the table a little bit with this article from the information, kind of giving an overview of the current status. So TikTok prepares for an immediate shutoff in the U.S. on Sunday. So they're going to shut down the app.

TikTok plans to shut off its app for U.S. users on Sunday. The day a federal law will ban the app unless the Supreme Court intervenes to block the ban. And we even update there, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously. to uphold the ban. So, yeah, I think we need nine, nine Sisedong bangs for nine Supreme Court justices. Sounds great. Is that nine? It's close enough. Close enough.

Bravo to the Supreme Court. That's, uh, they, they do get it right over there. Yeah, but should we take a moment of silence for the, the, the capital shareholders, the Jeff, Sasquahana. Okay. And Jeff Yoss. Okay. What ad should we run?

Bose again. Okay, moment of silence for everyone who lost money on TikTok. This moment of silence is brought to you by David Protein, the highest concentration of protein per calorie of any bar in the market. Okay, back to the show. So under the plan, people attempting to open the TikTok app will instead see a pop-up message directing them to a website with information about the ban.

One of the people said, TikTok plans to give users the option to download all their data so they can take a record of their personal information with them. Under a law passed last year, TikTok will be banned on January 19th in the United States unless it has cut ties with its Chinese parent bite dance. So that was the sale proposal. TikTok has appealed to the Supreme Court to overturn the law on First Amendment grounds and is awaiting a decision. But questions from Supreme Court justices at oral arguments of the case last Friday suggested the court would likely uphold the law, which they did. The law doesn't require TikTok to turn off the app.

Instead, the law requires app store operators like Apple and Google to stop making TikTok available for downloads. It also requires Oracle, TikTok's cloud provider, to stop hosting the app's U.S. user data. And that's Project Texas, which we'll talk about later. The app had been expected to continue operating past the band date for people who already had downloaded it. Because if you already download it, you don't need it from the store until software updates by Apple or Google start to cause problems. In that scenario, the immediate impact of the band would be limited to preventing new users from downloading the app. Proactively turning off the app, though, in contrast, ensures that all of TikTok's users will be affected immediately. TikTok plans to help explain comments by a lawyer representing TikTok, Noel Francisco, at the Supreme Court hearing on Friday,

when he said the app would go dark if the court didn't intervene. In an email to TikTok employees, reported by The Verge, the company said it was planning for various scenarios. your employment pay and benefits are secure and our offices will remain open, even if this situation hasn't been resolved before the January 19th deadline. As the date of the ban approaches, speculation is increasing about how the PCP is so generous. Yeah. I'm glad that they care about their employees even in the midst of all this turmoil. It's great.

What adds to the uncertainty is that Donald Trump will be inaugurated for his second term as president on Monday a day after the ban is due to go into effect. Trump said that he opposes a ban, partly because he doesn't want to see a strengthening of Instagram owner meta platforms. He may be more inclined than the current administration to take action to help restore TikTok if users start to complain. And Trump has also actually done quite well on TikTok. And then also Jeff Yass from Saskwana was a big Trump donor early on.

And so there were a lot of questions about where Trump would land on a TikTok ban. But we talk to Josh. Before we like, I guess, go into the rest because there's going to be. We'll give some backstory on TikTok, but we're also going to be dunking on TikTok quite a lot. But we're not heartless. There are going to be people that are affected by this. There's the zoomers, obviously, who are just wildly addicted to the app. And their argument is that TikTok is better in many ways than reels still.

Like, it has better search. They say it has better discoverability. There are also businesses that run their businesses on TikTok. And for those people, I basically think at this point they've had like a year pass of warning that like this is like shaky ground and could go away. And so I think for those people, the people running like TikTok shop agencies are going to not, you know, they're going to be like bummed out. But again, they can just pivot to focusing on these other channels. I do think it was it was great for commercial activity probably better than some of these other platforms. Yeah.

They did have a lot of technical innovation. most of them have been ported over already. Like I think even on YouTube, you can have pinned products, but it's usually just for merch. It was originally like a T-spring, like a shirt integration, but now you can actually pull in products

from any Shopify store because they've deepened that integration, and I'm sure meta will do the same. And then the actual, like, creators that have built million plus, you know, anywhere from, that sucks. Yeah, it sucks.

Like getting it taken away. Yeah. But I think that the, if you were taking content creation as a, you know, profession, you should understand that you need to be everywhere. Yep. You can't be reliant on a single platform. If X was getting banned right now, we would be, we would be in shambles. The lights would all be off. We'd be drinking.

Yeah. We'd probably just be like, you know, trying. So I do understand why people are like almost traumatized by this whole thing. but it's still necessary. Yeah. It's like it feels like telling like your kid who's having a tantrum. Like it's going to be like, you know, they're, you know, anybody who has like a two year old understands like a kid can have a tantrum,

but then time just passes and they like bounce back. I do have a little bit of a promoted post call to action. If you have created on TikTok, if you've solved the algorithm, if you've gone mega viral, if you're a TikTok editor, TikTok creator and you're looking for your next thing. Please contact us. We're trying to do more on YouTube shorts and more on Instagram reels. And so we'd love to talk to you about helping us on content strategy, editing, promotion,

anything that we can do to get the show more viral and do more clips. We do a lot of horizontal clips on X right now, but we definitely want to get on the vertical clips as well. We have some ideas that we're testing out. but the more support we have, the better. So with that, we wanted to give you the full history of TikTok, go through the story. It's over a decade old at this point almost.

I guess 2015 musically started. So let's go through the history of TikTok and then we'll break down some of the analysis about what's going on in the band. And it's, I mean, there's so much good stuff here. I'll hold this joke for a second because, it's it's you know you'll see it a second so why don't you start with the first the first bullet point that we have Alex Zhu 2012 2012 over a decade ago he was working as a UI designer at SAP and you know why I like this is because SAP is our sworn enemy oh really as as smart business

owners that run on ramp yeah many many of these big companies you know have these complex integrations on SAP, they're wasting, you know, quite a lot of time and, you know, really sort of ruining the lives of their employees by forcing them to use this sort of legacy software. It's kind of a check-offs gun situation. Yeah, it makes sense that it makes sense that TikTok, which is, you know, our enemy social media company was started by a guy who worked for our enemy finance automation. Interesting. Yeah, I hadn't put that together.

So he's in his mid-30s working as a UI designer at SAP. He gets this extremely fake job as the in-house futurist, focused on the future of education. He's working on massively online open courseware, which is actually very cool. And there's companies like Coursera and Udacity that we're launching around this time. He realized that video lectures were too long and hard to engage with for most people. You've got to go brain rot. So he starts saccata education with Lewis Yang, focusing on short form educational videos.

And that was the last time anyone learned anything from TikTok. But of course, that business fails. So they pivoted to what becomes musically. He's on the train. I think he was going from, he was riding the Cal train from Silicon Valley to SF. He was commuting to his job. And he sees these kids using their phones to create selfie videos with music and overlays,

basically lip sync videos, and they decided to create an app that focuses on making that super easy. And so this was just to contextualize it, when I first saw Musically videos like being reposted to other platform, it was the first time I felt old on the internet because I was like, why are these kids? Yep. Like, why are these people dancing and lip syncing? Yep. But it weirdly, for me, I really started noticing it around, I feel like at this point, maybe maybe maybe I just really noticed it late but it felt like I started to really pay attention to it in 2020

when it made sense where I was like okay nobody can leave their house and go dance or go to the bar or anything like teenagers can't go to house parties they can't go to football games because of COVID okay it actually makes sense that they want to just dance and like it's more efficient to just dance online than it is to like go and you know try to get attention in some other setting so And I mean, like For a while it was very cringe For people to go on musicically Totally.

And people would do it sort of ironically And then the app And then I even remember the first time I downloaded it I don't know if I downloaded musically or TikTok But my first impression with TikTok Was like I opened the app And it served me a highly relevant video

And it probably was just fate Or lock or chance But I was like I was impressed. I was like and then and the algorithm really was like incredible yeah and and still still and there was there was there was I heard I heard I have no idea if this is true but fortunately we're not journalists so we don't have to get the facts right all the time but um I heard that that their algorithm which was so was was was was kind of like a scale AI sweat shop model

where there was the the rumor was like imagine just warehouses and where houses in China where people are just sitting there being like, you know, is this, is this funny? Like, is this a dog? Like, classifying the videos like very manually. And I'm sure it got more and more automated over time. But it's the kind of thing China can do where they're like, oh, we want the best algorithm. Let's put 200,000 people on it. And they're just kind of like clicking buttons all I mean, that's very real for the censorship of the Chinese internet. Like they were able to just throw millions and millions of people at it. Yeah. And now AI is kind of caught out. And they're can censor a lot of stuff automatically.

And for me, the interesting thing here is I studied abroad in Shanghai in 2016. Yeah. And it, uh, well, you were one of those guys like Trump wins and you're going to leave the country. It was actually very weird because I was watching watching, I was there in the fall. Yeah. And so all of the chaos and turmoil of the election I was watching unfold online while in China. But then from a technology standpoint, I mean, a lot of, you know, most of the people in China would use VPNs to use Instagram and Google products and stuff like that. But so this was already happening.

Like China, China had banned all of these Western apps entirely. You could still get around it. And so I never understood from the very beginning why we would allow China, you know, China has done some. The thing is that it wasn't a Chinese app to. begin with. It was just an app made by a Chinese dude who... Yes, yes, but the thing that... The bike dance deal happened much later. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which we got to go into.

But, but, um, the honest truth is that anyone who is Chinese, the government expects them to act on behalf of the state. It is an expectation. Maybe. I think it's different. I think it's different if somebody is like, renounces their citizenship as here, uh, but But China, from my experience on the ground, everyone feels an obligation to serve the state in some way or another. Yeah, I mean, it kind of happened in World War II.

There was like all the German dudes who lived in America. Like Germany was like, come back and fight for us. Yeah. And people went. Yeah. But it's not. Or if you're going to stay, you're going to share information back and basically act as, you know, amateur espionage. But you can think of Alex Zhu as kind of like the Chinese Nikita Beer.

Yeah. He was like a growth hack master at the time. Chip poster. I don't know about that. But I mean, the growth hacks that they used to grow musically were really genius. So one of the first ones was there's an API on the iPhone for the iTunes store where you can pull in music previews. And you don't have to pay any licensing fees for those because they're just 15 second clips. Very cool.

And so you could have access to the entire iTunes music library, every single song. Yeah, so smart. Without needing to actually go to, you know. Yeah, that was my impression. I was like, how do they have Instagram at the time had no music on the platform? And so if you wanted to add music, you would have to like download the video, download the, like steal the song by downloading it and then put it together. And then it was really hard. And then it would have to like, yeah, and then they'd take it down because it was like, oh, you don't have the rights to that.

But they figured out that they could that they could. pull that in. Eventually they did the deals to actually get the money to the record labels. But that was a huge, huge growth hack. And they also did this thing where they'd watermark the videos with musically. And so when you downloaded the video and shared it on a different platform, it would have that watermark in there, kind of like the stake.com thing. Yeah. And so that drove a whole bunch of viral growth because you're like, oh, I'm seeing this thing. Yeah, yeah. That was super smart. Really, really smart. And so the app launched in China, Japan, Europe, in the U.S. with the U.S. audience picking it up globally. Quaishu, the Chinese app started in 2011

as a gift maker tool but later transformed into a short form video platform. So around this time, basically everyone who's doing content or social media is realizing two things. Like short form video is the future. And we're shifting from the social network ranking what's in your one degree of separation. Like what are your friends posting to just raw entertainment. Yeah, what is the best content across the entire platform, regardless of whether you follow that person or it's a huge account or a small account. And that's why if you set up for a long time, if you set up a new TikTok account, you could post literally anything and you get 500 views immediately. Yeah. With no followers.

Well, and they also. So, and near on X posed something that's like we actually created the metaverse, but it's in the form of short form content. Yep. One other thing with TikTok that they did well is very clearly they were using bots early on to drive engagement, drive views. And many, many creators would basically knew that a lot of their, you could go on TikTok and get a ton of followers and views quickly. And it was clear that they were just artificially inflating those numbers. But there was enough real people actually tuning in that it didn't matter, right? Yep.

Yeah, and so during this time, they get the Musically app up. It launched as a broad short form video platform in 2014. This is all, yeah, it's all. And they did a ton of, like, App Store optimization and keyword stuffing in the title. I think it said, like, musically, like, lip sync battle. And then on Thursday nights, the downloads would spike because there was a lip sync battle TV show, which was like national, like, primetime TV. and that had initiated from this Jimmy Fallon.

They had a segment on the Jimmy Fallon show called Lipsc Crioki and Lipsync Battles. And so that turned into its own TV show. People would see that, go to the app store and search, even though I don't think they had a legitimate deal. They were just kind of like keyword hijacking that. That's cool. So yeah, very smart there. They gain visibility through the app store, lip sync content. And this is also there's this transition happening from social media, which is suddenly

my friends are more entertaining than Jimmy Fallon. Yep. To my friends are entertaining, but random strangers online are actually more entertaining. And this was happening, this was already happening with the Kardashian. Like, well, it's much more interesting to follow what Kylie Jenner is doing because she's like

dating rappers and having babies than some random person from your hometown who just had like a super early pregnancy. So in 2015, musically focuses, like they find the product market fit around lip sync videos. They change the onboarding flow to as soon as you download the app. It's like, let's make your first lip sync video. It's not just like a blind canvas, pick a song with lip sync to it.

And musical artists actually start flipping the model and growing on TikTok by promoting their music. In Old Town Road was the first example by Lil Nas X. Yeah. And then at this time it became suddenly every artist you could blow up over What was cool here is American, you know, any artist globally could become a star overnight by having the right song. Yep. The other thing that was interesting about the change to Algo feeds is it became much harder for these creators to monetize.

Totally. Because if you run, and you could run an ad, let's say you have like a million followers on TikTok. If you're putting up a lip syncing video or dancing video, you'll get a lot of views. But then if you're like, this video is presented by. Procter and Gamble like Procter and Gamble makes a bunch of great soaps that everybody's

you know I got that you know 500 views you just won't get served as opposed to if you look at you know a podcaster who has an RSS feed

and someone listens to every single episode well the downloads are not we talked to David Center about this like his downloads might fluctuate by like 10% episode to episode

but it's always in the same band whereas you're in an Algo feed like a TikToker, you could, you could fluctuate by two orders of magnitude. Easily. Yeah. Yeah. And you have, you know, podcasts allow you to do things like Ricky Bobby and Talladega Nights where he sold the windshield.

Exactly. And it's harder to sell the windshield on TikTok. Yeah. Yeah. It's very hard to make the integrated content, even if you're doing stuff in the background. I've seen science around that. I ignore the platform as an advertiser because I was doing a ton of stuff on YouTube at the time. And I just didn't.

We never did it, mostly because it was a very young audience and we don't want to advertise nicotine to kids. we stayed away from it. But I don't know that there was ever like really good money there. I think for like very specific products it could work. Yeah, it was the big, it was the massive. What are those? The Emilio, they would get like a shoe deal or something like that. And there was way to do like product placement. If it's a very visual product, or company could actually explain it under 60 seconds. Like it needs to be very precise. And you remember this time Snapchat was also they launched

their whole creator fund and they were paying out like a million dollars a day, which was cool to see that money going to someone other than just the team. Yeah, exactly. Well, I mean, that's a great bridge to, have you listened to the, I think it's at light speed or something. Alex Yu did a talk about how he sees building a social network. And it's seen as like one of the defining moments in like social network thought leadership essentially.

Yeah. And he compares building a social network to founding a country. Initially, creators are attracted to the platform with the promise of fame and potential wealth creation. The first step is to centralize the economy, sounds familiar, and ensure initial talented creators succeed. They start paying content creators and connecting them with advertisers. The second step is to decentralize and create opportunities for new creators. Algorithmic feeds enables newcomers to be discovered and succeed on the platform. And so he had this whole idea of social and economic mobility within the platform and the viability

of a middle class on TikTok is crucial for the platform success. And so, yeah, the idea is like, you. You need this, like, when you switch to the Algo feed, it is not enough just to get likes from, like, your friends. You need professional content creators. Yeah. And so you have to be able to come on and discover, okay, this person has massive talent. Let's get them to a million followers. And let's make sure that the creator fund is flowing to them very quickly so that they're incentivized to make this their fun job.

Yeah. And to be clear, as much as we are dunking on, have dunked on TikTok, I've posted about it, I'm sure you have. Salana's posted for years about it. everything that Alex did with this app is genius. And the story is actually amazing. And the app is fundamentally, although there's a lot of brain rot, it's fundamentally like a very cool app. It's just that it's not appropriate for over time through the Bright Dance deal.

It's clear that it turned into an influence channel. And it's not even, to be honest, it's not even about the fact that TikTok is putting, a, you know, a CCP camera in the pocket of every American. The issue is more of going back to this analogy, which we've talked about before, it's you wouldn't have wanted, you know, during the Cold War to have Russia own the New York Times, right? And every single day, it's sort of elevating content that's pro-Russia, you know. And over time, this stuff was proven that people on TikTok had much more positive opinions of China.

they would stop any content associated with the Uyghurs, which is a genocide that Chinese government has carried out. And so all this stuff is, it's not a conspiracy. There's enough, there's a body of proof that TikTok became a very strategic asset. Yeah. The most, it's a, it's digital psychological warfare. Yep. And just pulling the levers on what are we censoring, what are we amplifying, does have

like an incredible impact on the viewership, which is like 100 million Americans. It's crazy. And so in 2016, Musically had 10 million daily active users and over 90 million users in total, up from 10 million the previous year. And in 2016, Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg were trying to enter the Chinese market. Zuck invites the co-founder of Musically Alex Yu to discuss a potential acquisition. I think they go for this walk in. the Silicon Valley Highlands and they're discussing this. Despite being a Chinese app, musically

had a significant presence in the U.S. with a team in Santa Monica and a perception of being an American social media app in 2017. They decided to launch and grow in China, having initially focused on the West. And Chinese business model for social app, the Chinese business model typically relies on direct monetization, such as virtual goods, gifting and tipping rather than advertising. Ice cream. So good. Yeah. Content. companies in China need to work closely with the CCP, ensuring their content upholds the party's laws and wishes a different... We really need to go live, so we can do this.

Stop it, stop it. Thank you for the banana, Ben. Yeah, and so in late of 2017, Bite Dance, which was already pretty huge. They launched Deweyan, TikTok's Chinese version. And then that's to be the one, really the one that got to. a way because imagine if zuck had another app with a hundred million americans or just this perfect ad platform of that has this amazing social graph that has this amazing uh you know interest graph we know that duck would be doing this is the flip side of 50 billion a year stuff this is the

flip side of the elizabeth warren stuff of like yeah uh it like you know uh zuck might have a bit of a monopoly over social networking but uh if if he had a little bit looser right? reign during this time, he could have acquired TikTok and we wouldn't be in this mess of a situation. Well, it's even, I mean, the deal fell through for unknown reasons. And it's totally possible that that Alex wanted to do the deal. Yeah. And there were certain players. I don't think it was actually the American FTC that blocked the deal. No, it's much more likely. The Chinese FTC. Yeah, yeah. Who said, no, you can't sell this to the Americans. Because it would have just turned into, imagine the number of Winnie the Poo memes on the day of the acquisition,

it would have been a nightmare. It would have been a nightmare. And so Bight Dance had launched Du Yin, Chinese TikTok's version. And so, musically is facing like competition because they want to grow internationally, but now they're getting pressure from BightDans.

So Bight Dance kind of has like a carrot and stick situation going on. Hey, we could buy your company, pay you a bunch of money, or we can compete with you internationally and close off this international market. You know that Zuck is going to come for you with Reels. Snapchat's doing this. stuff. Like, you're going to face a lot of pressure. Maybe the time to get out is now.

And so eventually, uh, Deion is launched as TikTok in the U.S. because they, they do the, they do the acquisition towards the end. Bight Dan's launched his TikTok internationally as a shot across the bow against musically. Musically is struggling to enter the Chinese market and they enter, uh, and they entertain acquisition talks from two other Chinese companies. Tencent is a big investor and acquirer of content around the world while Bight Dance has never taking an investment from Tencent, Alibaba, or Baidu. And Tencent should have gotten TikTok because that would have been on brand for them. But they kind of missed this.

And so the acquisition goes through for between $800 million and a billion, which feels low now, honestly. I mean, it's like a hundred billion dollar company. But maybe worth nothing now. We'll see. Although they probably made well over a billion dollars in free cash flow. The other thing is I don't. ByDance has been a pretty liquid stock in the secondary market. I don't feel that bad for anybody who was any American that was in.

I disagree with that. I think that even though it's like a liquid stock, it's actually very hard to repatriate dollars that are in China. I think if you have like a multi-billion dollar position, it is very difficult to get out and get that. Totally. I'm talking about the, you know, let's say you're a family option. Sure, sure.

$5 million of bite dance. You could have gotten out of that position. But for the big shareholders, there was actually a proposal at one point for like a one-time repatriation of American money that's stuck in China and just kind of do some sort of trade deal that says like, hey, we're going to decouple a little bit and we're going to let this happen and everyone's going to figure out what the terms of that trade are to get that done. But, you know, it's been, you know, hugely successful. Users spend an average of 52 minutes a day on the app, which is significantly higher

than any other social network. And then people start worrying about TikTok's influence. I'm on 68. And do you remember when they, um, do you remember when they, they combined the apps and there was just TikTok? And then TikTok was the number one advertiser on meta.

Well, they didn't, they didn't combine the apps. That's what's interesting. What they did was they actually released a new app and then they drove downloads from one to the next. Yeah. Kind of just a good version of Sonics. But I think they, did they not allow you to port your followers?

Yeah, I think you'd log in and port and they, and they, like, they duped the back end database and created a new and combined app putting in the app stores. But you remember, instead of support. You remember when Meadow was like basically, it made sense for them to take because it was billions of dollars we've spent. I think they advertise on Snapchat even more, which is really bad. Yeah, you should not allow. And that was that sort of catch 22 where you're just kind of. Yeah, you want the money, but, you know, you're also forking over your users to a different app. It's rough.

And so TikTok is a Huawei-sized problem and a potential national security threat to the U.S. As a U.S. military personnel use TikTok, and TikTok is gathering their location data, their facial data, and their biometric data. The data for the version TikTok in Western countries is stored in the U.S. But legally, it is owned by ByteDance, which may be forced to give the data to the Chinese government if requested. There are concerns about whether TikTok censors posts about the Hong Kong protest and U.S. politicians are calling for the committee on foreign investment in the U.S. to review TikTok. And this was like the huge mass. Scythias is supposed to review every international acquisition of American company.

And they got the TikTok call wrong because they're just like, some like dumb like lip syncing app. Like who cares? Like this isn't, this isn't U.S. steel. You know, this isn't like some weapons manufacturer. But in fact, it was an incredibly important company. And so Facebook attempted to buy musically in 2016. and then they launched their own TikTok competitor Lassow in 2018

that I think flopped, but then eventually they figured it out with reels. So in October of 2019, I remember Lassow. I never, I don't think I really used it, but I probably demoed it for a little bit. That's the thing.

Zuck is not, Zuck's not afraid to fail. Yeah. Which is cool. So in October of 2019, Zuck gives a speech at Georgetown calling out Chinese-owned social media, specifically TikTok is a national security threat and a threat to Western,

values and ways of life. Sivius review was opened on a musically acquisition in 2019, potentially leading to a reversal of the acquisition. But it was not reversed. That's that the, what's the right analogy for Zach? You know, screaming that TikTok is a national security threat. There's so many, there's so many good ones. I mean, just, yeah, just coming out. And it's always good when you can say that your number one competitor and threat to your business model is a national security threat. Yeah. We should say,

uh, all in podcast is a national security threat. I think people have said that. Um, that's true. It's actually true. Um, yeah.

So, uh, I mean, a lot of, a lot of seismic shifts in the social media landscape because of TikTok, huge shift to, uh,

algorithmic feeds and, uh, and, uh, and just viewing it as like a, it's almost, like a Netflix style app. And they really basically forced every other platform.

I don't know about Snapchat since I haven't used it in years, but they forced pretty much every platform to switch to more of even. Even YouTube is always algorithmically driven, but you could still like show up on your homepage and see like the videos you subscribe to. That was a huge deal when they flipped on that on YouTube. And every, every creator was. Yeah, the default feed used to be you would go and you would see your subscriptions feed. So it was if you subscribed, you know, it was, it's like, like, thanks for watching, subscribe to the

channel. People used to say that on YouTube. Because when you opened up the app, it would just show you, oh, the person that I subscribed to posted a new video. I'll watch it. So I watch every video. It was more like an RSS feed. Then they switched to a recommended feed as the primary feed. And all the views went crazy because if you had. Some people benefited. Some people benefited. And the whole, all the content became more algorithmically driven. You see the, the Mr. Beastification of YouTube where the thumbnails and titles and video concepts get more extreme because

you have to win in the algorithm you cannot count on your fan base or your subscriber base like seeing every video so you have to win in the free market every single time which is difficult but also got to earn it and it just kind of depends on the yeah and your point of view

we were talking about this yesterday you released a video recently about Nike that did almost a million views Nike got like 20,000 and then Visa got 600,000. Oh, it was flipped. It was flipped. So funny. And they were like very similar videos.

I think the title thumbnail. Yeah, like two weeks or something. And the Nike one, I kind of messed up the title thumbnail. The Visa one nailed it. And you're not like, you're kind of like, it doesn't actually, like the whole thing of content creation is you just need to put a lot of stuff. Exactly. So it's not like you're sitting there.

You're like, yeah, that my Nike video was actually good. I'm proud of it. Yeah. But at the same time, it's kind of on you. you, that something could have been better thumbnail, the title, or whatever. So what that tells me is like, is like, I think the channel has like 500K subscribers.

Probably we have 5% of those are like true fans that watch everything regardless of the title thumb. They basically have like the notifications turned on or the subscriber feed. But that visa one got more views than my subscriber base. Therefore, it must have just gone out in the algorithm and done well.

Yeah. But yeah, it's a, it's a knockout, dragout fight there. And so, yeah, You either have to be really, really good at nailing the algorithm every single time. I also think consistency matters. The creators that sort of train their audience that we release every Friday at 9am and people are kind of waiting for that. And in a certain point, you can also get to a place where you're averaging views out. So it's like, yeah, you might have a miss that gets 30K views and then a win that gets 500K views.

But if you get, you know, three of each of those every single month, you know, like, yeah, my channel gets 3 million views every single. every single month and I'm counting on that so I'm running ads against yeah and I and and as somebody who's you know I bought tens of millions of dollars of YouTube creator ads through branded native by my first company creators would always tell me I get five million views a month yeah and I would tell them I do not care yeah because I'm going to buy an ad on one of those videos yeah so I'm going to price the ad based on your least performing videos right because if I I I can can't go back to the advertiser and say, you know, you paid thinking you were going to get 200,000 viewed and then you got 20,000 views.

Yep. They're going to be pissed. Well, there's another thing with that where I talked to a creator that has like millions of millions of subscribers and he said, views don't matter for actually driving conversions. What he says is that like I have a million, million followers of 100,000 true fans. if a video goes viral and gets 5 million views, those like the 100,000 that watch the true fans, they are the ones who will convert because they trust me.

The 4.9 million of people that just randomly saw my viral video, they don't care about what I'm selling. And so they won't buy, but sometimes impressions are on. But as an advertiser, impressions matter. Totally. And you want to get in front of those people and maybe you run a Facebook ad against them later and convert them down the line.

But there is like a very, there's like a trade ratio. for for the true fans watching versus so there's always this question especially on TikTok it's like how many true fans these people have or are they just going viral in the in the feed so let's swap over to stu techery's analysis ben thompson has written about the ticot ban many many times are we starting with his the yeah tick talk ban approaches generational implications sa hong shu which i guess well heng shi wamp pizhou the red book uh i wrote about the TikTok ban when Congress was considering it, but have mostly stayed away from the topic, given the uncertainty of whether or not it would actually happen. Well, this is the last update

before the deadline, so time to catch up. To refresh, he wrote in, Ben Thompson wrote in favor of banning TikTok back in 2020, and his objection was less about user data than about giving a foreign adversary, militarily, economically, economically, access to the hearts and minds of Americans. This is the point of don't let the Russians own NBC during the Cold War. That remains my primary concern. And if anything, the fact that the Chinese government is clearly calling the shots in terms of bite dance's response to this ban confirms my contention that TikTok was ultimately under the control the Chinese Communist Party. Got them. What is clear is that it would have been far better to have acted in 2020, but at that point we were still in the President Trump supports this so it must be bad era of politics.

The great irony, of course, is that President-elect Trump is now opposed to the ban for some combination of not wanting to give meta more power, satisfying prominent reporters, prominent supporters, and the fact that Trump has found great success on TikTok. Even so, it's not clear. I don't buy the great success angle because that guy will get views anywhere from anyone at any time. Yeah. And again, that attention, I don't believe.

So if the average person is spending an hour a day in the app, that attention will shift back to other platforms for Trump all. And the narrative of this election was not, is the TikTok election. It's the podcast election. And where do those podcasts live? Spotify, YouTube, RSS feeds. Yeah. And so I think if any of those were at risk of banning.

Joe Rogan. Yeah. If there really was, it'd be weird. But if there was some situation where it's like Rogan is going to get banned, that would be much more of a lever for Trump than TikTok. So I agree with you on that. There all things to be, it's crazy. I was just thinking.

how is Alex Jones back operating under the Info Wars? Is he? I thought he lost the, I thought he lost all the IP, but he's putting out new content under InfoWor. Really? Oh, I don't know. It's crazy.

These things are so odd. Well, yeah, but also, I don't know who bought it. It's how do you can't stop? Wasn't that, wasn't that a joke or was that real? Who? I thought the onion. Oh,

they died of the onion. You never know. You never know. You never know what I thought. But I think he was upset. But it just goes to show. like banning. At this point, Alex Jones doesn't need the Info Wars IP. People just

know Alex Jones. Yeah, and he also could just slap Info Wars on a video and like to stop him from doing that. But anyways, that so it's not clear that Trump can do anything about the deadline, which is one day before his inauguration. It's so funny how these political decisions get like, it's like,

let's at the deadline the day before, like the last possible day. It's really like waiting to do your homework until the very last second. The other less discussed reason for the ban is the fact that basically every U.S. consumer tech product is banned in China. I am sympathetic to the argument that the U.S. is supposed to be a free market, but at some point, and Trump's rhetoric on trade would seem to agree, openness depends on a level playing field, which is certainly not the case when it comes to

a product like TikTok. Yeah, Facebook tried to go, got banned. Google tried to go and got banned. Uber got kicked out and couldn't deal with that. Even Airbnb had some weird structure there and that didn't work. Like just... No, so here's the reality of being. a foreign company trying to build technology in China. Yeah. They will let you come and they will let you build, but they will stall you. Yeah.

They'll kick you off banking rails. They'll do all this stuff to just make it so that you cannot succeed over there until a Chinese clone is able to copy and learn enough about your features that they just do what you're trying to do. And I experienced this. I was working out of a place called China Accelerator,

one word. and it's basically like the YC of China. I was like interning for this company that was a Israeli company who had taken money from China Accelerator to launch this sort of like retail marketplace for foreign designers to sell into China. And once a week they would kick us off like they would shut down the bank account. And by the end I felt like it was intentional to purely just disrupt the business because a bunch of other. Chinese companies had started copying what this company was doing. Wow. And I was like at the first couple times I was, I would be the intern.

So I'd get sent down to the bank to be like, hey guys, like, why is our account frozen? Yeah. And then they would be like, uh, like, they just like would stall and stall and stall. I'd be there for like four hours. I'd be like, this is ridiculous. So Ben goes on and says, and speaking of freedom, while I think Tick-Cock's argument that the ban is a violation of the First Amendment doesn't hold up because there are other forms available for creators and there's Supreme Court precedent in terms of deterrence on

such matters to national security concerns, it's worth acknowledging that banning TikTok would destroy an immensely, immensely valuable asset for anyone with a following on the platform. Indeed, this is an under explored angle of social media censorship debate. Banning users doesn't cost them money, but a following is a valuable asset, nevertheless. That too is another reason why it would have been much wiser to deal with this issue in 2020 than in 2025, the value destruction for TikTok users would have been much smaller. Good point. Ben, go to, go to analysts.

Yeah, you don't find this guy in the truth is done very often. Yeah. So he says, now again, all of this analysis may be moot if the Supreme Court rules in bite dance's favorite, which they did not. It is also possible that TikTok is sold at the last minute to an American company. Mr. Boost was saying he was going to buy it. There was a talk about maybe Elon's going to get it. about Bench was trying to put together

like a coalition. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, I got a deal with them. So it's just very obvious that there's a ton of people that would, it's a great asset. Yep, but they don't want to sell it. Yeah. Because that's not what it's about.

It's not about the money. They do it for the love of the game. They do it for a love of geopolitical war for it. Yeah, great power competition. I noted previously that the two most compelling acquirers from a business perspective are Amazon or Walmart, thanks to the potential tie-in to their e-commerce businesses. But there was a rumor earlier this week that Elon Musk slash X could be the buyer.

He's obviously palatable to Trump, but also could be to China as well, given Tesla's large presence in the country, which needless to say, presents plenty of its own complications. TikTok did deny the rumor, but one, it is unlikely that TikTok is in control of the process, given that, two, it is unlikely that bite dances to control the process, since three, the Chinese government is the entity that has the final. say. Even in that light, though, it makes total sense for Bight Dance in China to carry this process to the very last hour in the hope of a reprieve. Indeed, the fact that the service is planning on locking out existing users, which isn't required by law, suggests that the goal is to raise

an outcry and a last-minute change of heart. All that noted, the most interesting and uncertain outcome of the ban is if it actually proceeds as planned and TikTok just suddenly disappears. Trump is right that the most obvious potential beneficiary is meta and Instagram with its reels products. But I think he and observers broadly are underestimating what a massive deal it would be for meta to actually fill the TikTok void permanently. So why has Snapchat not made a run? Because there's a lot of people, you know, we just got a message in one of our group chats. You know somebody saying from the Lone Ranger saying you should create Tech Talk by the technology. others that's just pure grade A American software.

Yeah. And run this back. And like, that's funny. But I don't believe that a, I think a lot of people will try to compete and use this moment to drive new downloads. But to me, someone like Snapchat who has a very similar audience, uh, they already have the distribution. Why are they not rolling out an Algo feed and try?

They have one. Yeah. Yeah. And nobody seems to clear about it. They do vertical content and they have a huge, uh, creator fund and people can, get crazy monetization by taking into Snapchat. There was a whole game for a few years of people just taking

YouTube content, repurposing it for vertical Snapchat and making a lot of money. Yeah. My question though is historically Evan and the Snapchat team were quick and they would launch new features. They're scrappy, right? They had to be

against meta. But there's a list of somebody was replying to one of my posts being like bad take. Here's like 10 features that TikTok has that none of the other platforms have. Yep. And so if you want to win over these creators, you would, in theory, try to hit, you know, the top. Yeah.

I mean, you're, like, if you abstract that question, it's really just like, why, why is Snapchat not moving faster as a company? And, and also, why don't they have a culture of copying? They only have one Boeing business jet. Yeah. So they're just like a lot of the team is waiting, like, commercial flights or yeah, that could be a big. They have their own private, like hangar at Van Nuys.

But I do think that there is a little bit of potentially a culture where at Meta, Zuck kind of broke the glass on like it's okay to copy things. Yeah. Because I bet that like the meta for the first, I mean, Facebook. Certainly broke the glass. I mean, he just straight up. Smacked it. And it's like stories.

Now it's culture. I use stories now more than the main feat. Exactly. And so I bet you in the first few years of Facebook, the culture was very much like, we are inventors, we are pioneering new user interfaces and new user experiences. We created the feed. They created the feed. They created all sorts of different things.

They created the poke. They created the Kava brain. But then at a certain point, Zuck saw that Instagram was taking off and was like, we need to add pictures to our, we need to add photos to our. product and they actually launched Instagram. They had photos. They had photos, but they didn't have a dedicated Instagram clone. They actually launched a clone at one point. They launched a video clone.

Like he like there must have been internally pushback against like I'm a product manager. I'm an engineer. I like working on the cool stuff that's innovative. Yeah. Why are you putting me on this copycat product? But somehow culturally, Facebook got through that and it became like, yeah, we're just here to make money and we don't want to get our lunch eaten by some new startups.

And you should occasionally. You should build features that your users are excited to use. Exactly. Thread seemingly has created a new ecosystem for people that on, you know, and they have this amazing every I get notifications. It's like some thread that looks interesting. And if I want to see it, I got to download the app. Yeah.

I don't have the app download. And so something happened with Metis Culture where it was like, hey, look, you know, we're just out here to build the best experience possible. Get Arpoo up, drive value, shareholder value, create the best company. we don't want someone just coming along at eating our lunch. So copying is not a pejorative at this company. Yeah. I don't know if that's happened at Snapchat.

I think at Snap, they might have a culture of like, no, we actually focus on like the innovation stuff, which is a lot more, it's harder to do at a big scale. It's hurting them at this point. And it's more random.

Like you can't guarantee that you're going to be able to come out with some amazing new UI innovation. And so I think that most of our listeners will understand that it's it's much cooler to just be a massive business and do something less innovative than be a tiny irrelevant company that's doing something super innovative exactly it doesn't matter if you're super innovative in terms of impact scale yep and revenue potential if you have no users yeah exactly so yeah and it's a huge thing like i do think i do think there's some cool like if i if i you know enjoyed building consumer social apps there are some cool things where you could

you know create an app today that's like sign in you know and we will port over you know you know you can figure out sort of hacks and mechanisms to try to port i i thought that um i own remember when i own band talk i'm trying to pitch you on like yeah yeah yeah shit to do with it maybe i i mean i really think like 99% of the ticot time spent on the that app will flow to meta, YouTube shorts, and then Snapchat, I do think we'll be a beneficiary, but maybe they capture 5% of like the bleed over. So there's another interesting section in this Ben Thompson article. I had an interesting conversation with someone who operates in the consumer market and he was casually referring to different generations by their dominant social network.

There's the Facebook generation, the Instagram generation, and the youngest cohort is the TikTok generation. For Instagram to extend its reach downwards by a generation would be a huge deal that would reverberate for years because that generation, if they can really pull them over to Instagram fully, they're just going to be able to get ad revenue from them for, you know, it's perpetuity. Because once you get locked in, there are a lot of people that are still using Facebook because that's their dominant generation. And that's what they, and like a lot of millennials are still on Instagram and have just stayed with that. And we'll be on Facebook for decades. It's kind of interesting how Facebook marketplace is still as relevant as ever,

seemingly with everyone, even though the main app, nobody I know is posting on there. Yeah, but older people do. Yeah, for sure. And then so Ben takes the opposite tact and says, there's also a reason why it might not happen. Younger generations don't want to be on Boomer social networks.

And I'm sorry to announce Boomer is an adjective for anything that is older than you is here to stay, which is to say we are never getting rid of Boomer. one potential beneficiary could actually be Snapchat, but there is also, but there might also be an opportunity for a new social network, rare and improbable as that.

Yeah, I would love to see. Remember, you know Alex Ma, he did, um, oh, yeah. Not be real, but the, the, what was, the, the app that you had to, like, take a picture every,

I don't know. No, he had, what was Alex Ma's app? I don't know, like, you know, this benchmark, love the series A. Frontback? No. That was one. He had a social audio app.

Paparazzi. Oh, paparazzi. Where you take pictures of your friends. Okay. Which was a cool user experience because it became cringe on Instagram to post pictures of yourself. Yeah.

And like the candid moments of like, I'm taking a picture of you at the studio. Yep. And then it goes on your feet. Like that. So my take on new social networks is that the arrow of progress only moves in one direction. And effectively you get sloppier as things as time goes on. And so you really. like the thing that will kill TikTok

is not oh, be real take one picture per day. It's actually the thing that gets someone to lock in on TikTok for three hours instead of one hour. And when I was thinking about like, if I wanted to kill TikTok, like what would I actually do from first principles? If the goal was not to

heal brain rot and also kill TikTok and get out of the CCP relationship, you have to think about it just from beating TikTok and then deal with the brain rot stuff later. And my conclusion was that you needed a TikTok feed that didn't require any input whatsoever. So if you look at the, if you look at the iteration between Snapchat or Instagram and and Reels, the difference is that on Instagram you see a square

and then it only takes up a half of the screen real estate and then you have to scroll and you have to scroll precisely because if you scroll too much, you might see one photo halfway at the top of one photo halfway at the bottom, right? And so Reels, the innovation there was that it takes up the full screen. And so even the tiniest little tap, it's like rubber bandy, sticky. And so you're either on one TikTok or you're on the next TikTok. You're never halfway between them. And so one's always playing.

So it's very easy to just slip into like one more, one more, one more. And then on X, they actually switch to the next one. It reminds me of America's Funniest Home videos, which was at the time, some of the most entertaining content in the world because it was just one video at a time. And I remember, do you remember being a kid on YouTube in the early days where like I remember you'd have like four or five of us around like the one desktop computer and everybody would be like do this funny video and then you'd just be sitting there being like what did what was that you know like yeah yeah one video you know what was that one video you know what was that one video

and and everybody's kind of creating the feed exactly exactly you know at that moment yeah and so my my conclusion was that if you wanted to defeat ticot you would have to have the camera always on the front facing camera read the facial expressions of the person and if you see that they're getting bored you you scroll to the next one. And if you see them laugh, if you see them laugh, it's like, this is a positive signal for the algorithm.

If you see them engaged, you're like, oh, they're interested in this. This was an interesting TikTok. Let's show the next one. That's the ultimate wirehutting. Because you just sit there,

you don't even need to use your thumb to go like this. You can just watch it and you can just go, ha! And then it shows you another funny one. Yeah. Oh.

And then it's like, oh, that was shocking. Show them another shocking one. And you're like, oh, show a different thing away. Or they're paying attention to know if they can just a lot of it.

the viral loop could be the camera is recording too. And so if you like it, you can post your response and immediately duet, it's like a reaction video. So it's like, I'm watching the TikTok and it's like I see something funny. I'm like, ha, that's funny. Oh yeah, that's good. Send my reaction to my

network of my friends. And so it's even more sloppy, even more brain-rottie. Yeah, the end state is the metaverse where everyone is just just locked in, just looking at content for 24 hours a day or anything. And then you go to sleep and then you wake up and do it again. And then every one of our listeners are just figuring out how to properly monetize

exactly, exactly. But yeah, I do think that that's... I like that. It's totally, you know, the Instagram eventually, you know, you see an ad and to just buy the product, you just have to go, yeah, yeah.

You don't even have to. I mean, I've seen this pattern, this pattern developed somewhat on X where if you get in the video feed, you click on one video, then you scroll up, you'll see one video. And when that video ends,

sometimes it'll play the video twice, but sometimes it just scrolls to the next one. So you can hands-free watch. A lot of people, a lot of people don't like that. Yeah, but you can effectively hands-free watch videos instead of just watching them loop, which requires you to move your thumb, which seems so minor, but that actually is a friction point. If you remove the thumb entirely, you get to be more viral. I've noticed sometimes I'll have a video playing on like a Reels-type product, so YouTube or Reels. And it's kind of funny because if you leave your phone somewhere you walk away to do something else

and then it's just replaying the video. It's kind of annoying. You want it. Just move the next one. The attic, the rat and you that's like, the cocaine button, you know, wants it to just keep going. Juice reward. Yeah. The monkey. Juice reward. Let's talk about Little Red Book. The Little Red Book. Initially, I posted

if you download Red Book, you're a trader that should be sent on the first boat to Beijing or you should be forced to write the National Anthem. thousand times. Yeah. You know,

oh, say can you. Pledge of allegiance. Pledge of allegiance. Yeah, yeah. Um, pledge of allegiance is better. But then I realized that American users are going on there posting.

And, uh, there's that, uh, senior partner at Andreson, um, future GP, uh,

woman, what, one of the, Ventry twins. Venture twins. Yeah. She was posting that, uh,

there, uh, there was actually starting to, you know, founders were going on there and having conversations with the Chinese founders. If you don't know, in China, a lot of the venture funds are state funded. And the founders have to sign like a full personal guarantee. Oh, yeah. So if you raise $5 million and your company doesn't work out, they're going to take your house to like repay it. Yeah. And she posted a screenshot of an exchange where American founders were like, yeah, it's like, it's actually like risk

capital. Yeah. If your company doesn't work, like, you know, you don't lose your house and all the Chinese founders were like, wait, what? And then I saw another thing that Creatine Cycle, Atlas, he should really pick a name, Atlas or Creaturetic cycle. It's kind of, I like both names, but so Atlas posted. Now, let's tighten up the brand. Yeah, so Atlas posted a screenshot. There was like an American girl who posted like a TikTok style video, like an exercise gear. and he posted

you know China gave us COVID we gave them gooning because all all the comments are just like oh wow I like these American girls it's a real cultural exchange going on cultural exchange and let's go

let's give a little bit of background on a little red book it's a Chinese video network that competes with duyen by dance's version of of TikTok within China from a from a column on China global television network's website, which is state-owned. The recent surge of foreign users flocking to a Chinese social media apps, Zha Hong Shu, following the looming threat of TikTok's ban in the U.S.

has given rise to the term TikTok refugees. This mass migration to an alternative platform underscores the deeper divide between government policies and public sentiment. As Little Red Book climbed to the top of Apple's App Store Monday, it became evident that many members of the public remain unconvinced by the government rationale for targeting TikTok. At the heart of the issue lies the question of national security. The U.S. government has repeatedly asserted. And TikTok's claim, by dance's claim, has been that the American government is banning TikTok

because of free speech. And it's sort of this self-reinforcing thing where the people on TikTok are saying, I need TikTok, it's important to me. You're hurting businesses. It's a free speech outlet. it. And then the Chinese government is saying, yeah, look, they just want to ban you because free speech. It's so funny. This idea that like, oh, yeah, yeah, the Trump administration and Elon are definitely banning free speech while you can say whatever you want on X and it's like

pretty deranged. Yeah, yeah. Meanwhile, the true American social media platforms are getting more racist, more homo-frey. Oh, yeah, like the R word. We can just say that now. Yeah, yeah, you have billion dollar executive. Was that a TikTok thing? Did that come from TikTok? I don't think so. Crazy. There are already a lot of humorous interactions happening on Little Red Book, but I chose this specific article because it both includes some interesting and pertinent facts about the situation and is also a great explanation of how China is going to take the wrong lessons from this episode.

Specifically, the article frames the TikTok refugee phenomenon as public dissatisfaction with the government, which of course it is, but what is lacking is the contextual understanding to realize that U.S. citizens are publicly dissatisfied with the government as a matter of birthright. Yeah. Which is true. Everyone is, everyone's bothered by the government in America. That's an American thing you can be.

Indeed, you can make the case from a certain perspective that it is the TikTok refugees that are the real U.S. propaganda. They are giving a middle finger to the U.S. government by freely expressing themselves on Little Red Book, which is honestly kind of great and also will be very hard for the Chinese to grok. It is not a good sign in terms of understanding that the author of this column is relying on random Twitter user quotes to make a point. I'm still calling it Twitter.

When they, uh, when the entire point is that Americans can and will say whatever they want. The problem for Little Red Book and the reason I think this migration will be short-lived is that this contingent isn't really going to give a damn about Little Red Book's moderation slash censorship concerns. The reality is that one of the most important parts of censorship operating at scale is triggering self-censorship. Keep in mind the note above. Keep in mind the note above, about the loss of entailed in a ban. And that's just not going to happen with TikTok refugees. What is much more likely is that Little Red Book pulls itself from the U.S.

App Stores in a week or two. In the meantime, I'll enjoy the memes and who knows. Maybe there will be some sort of value that comes from this sort of cultural exchange. If anything, this little episode is a reminder of what was lost to the Great Firewall. And to take this full circle, that itself is a reminder that China. Ina started it. Ben is so good. Bodyed.

You got to, this show should just be us reacting to Ben Thompson. I mean, we got to cover him like every time. When there's good stuff. Like you got to, you know. The man cooked. Did Tim Cook? He caught. He is Tim Cook.

Ben Cooks. That piece. It's great. Ben Thompson. I mean, he's also out there on the front lines living in Taiwan. So. Oh, you do? Yeah.

I remember that. And so all this stuff hits really hard. A woman from Taiwan. I think so. But yeah, I mean, he's been deeply involved in analysis. in analyzing this. I mean, he was writing about this back in 2020. If Taiwan is ever invaded.

We're getting him a bet on 8th, no, no, we're going to land the, we got to take the chopper into Taiwan. Yeah, protect Ben Thompson for sure. TSM, we can't rebuild. We cannot rebuild. There's no, there's only one Ben Thompson. There's only one Ben Thompson. There are plenty of people that can do chip fab. Over the last week, this is from 2020. Wait, should we? Yeah, let's flip over to Solana. I mean, this is, this is good. This is, this is a lot of older stuff. I don't know that we need to go through. We'll have a banger first line from Salana. All is fair in love and info war.

Let's go. Strong start. You have the article too? No, no. You read this one. You want to read this? Okay. Salonah says last week following a classified hearing with officials from the FBI and Justice Department, which we still know nothing about and which for some reason almost nobody has covered. A bipartisan group of lawmakers resurrected Trump's attempt at TikTok divestature, which would force TikTok's

Chinese parent bite dance to sell the company. There's no forcing the CCP. They're strong in that regard. It's my addition. Ostensibly, the purpose of the bill is to mitigate CCP surveillance of U.S. citizens, which has persisted for years despite TikTok's Project Texas promises to the contrary. Of course, we're putting the data in Texas. It's actually like, it's a smart move from them to be like, our data centers are in Texas. But this time around in a surprise political twist. the Democrats are relatively quiet on the issue while Republicans, the driving force behind

divestiture under Trump are loudly divided. The other thing here, we haven't even covered this. We should hit DGI on Monday because they have the next target. DGII this last week. Yeah. It used to be you couldn't fly a DGI drone into restricted airspace, like near airports and things like that. And it was more than that. They have a whole geo fencing system that you can't even fly it at like Yosemite because like that's national land. They have. have a no drone worn, a no drone rule. And so that gets baked into the madness and you just can't turn it on the drone.

Yeah, it's responsible. They were like, you know, free speech is important and also flying a drone. They decided, they decided this week, I'm guessing they were, I'm guessing the, their point of view was we're going to get banned. Let's get capture it. Because DGI is actually insane, right? It is. It is.

If you could create like, let's say you're the, the CIA of China and you want to get as much. and you want millions of spies, right, that are, you know, collecting real-time information. Imagine you, a spy that's a robot that sends all the data back to you. Yeah. And it actually gets purchased by, by U.S. consumers who fly it on your behalf across the entire,

so they can map everything. And so I think DGI is probably like, yeah, we're cooked here. Let's just, you know, take away that a restraint. Yeah. Capture kind of as much data. Because DGI, again, it's the same situation as TikTok. They have a better product in the market.

It's cheaper and better than other drones at that price point. And so, of course, people are saying, I'm going to get the DGI drone. It's just the rational decision, just like it's the rational decision for a lot of consumers to open TikTok. So they're next. I'm looking forward to that. That one's going to be rough because there are not a lot of great American drone companies. Well, and also you're at that part of it's a hard of. a device that U.S. consumers have purchased that they're going to say, what, you bricked my DGI, like.

Basically. I mean, I think that the main thing is stopping the flow of move. Apple bricks that brought us yearly. So it can't be too many. Yeah. I mean, I think the main thing is just stopping the flow of new drones and then stopping the software updates so that they can't add new things that make it worse. And then also probably really watching out for some sort of event that would cause.

everyone to put their drones in the sky at the same time. Because sure, you could look at like, okay, there's, I don't know, five million DJI drones in the U.S. right now. 99.9% of those are collecting dust in closets right now. Yeah. Because someone got on Christmas. They flew it around a few times. They realize, hey, actually, I don't do backflips off of ski mountains with a team of

people that can fly drones and get sick video of me. It's the go-bler problem. Some of our listeners do that. Yeah, but a lot of these drones just collect dust. And so, like, does the CCP have the ability to turn on your drone and fly it out of your closet? No. Like, they just cannot do that. It's not possible.

It's not possible. How is it not? Because, I mean, like, the DJI air is literally the wings fold down and put it in a case. Like, it doesn't have the power. The motors are not strong enough to bust out of a case and, like, and then also bust out of your door and break through the plastic. After Israel, like, yeah, yeah, yeah. doing a decade long. They could melt the battery, cause a little fire.

It'd be a little bit disastrous. The bad thing that you don't want is there's a new generation of like DJI fours or fives or whatever and those have bombs on them. And then all of a sudden there's like, hey, it's a 4th of July and there's some meme where everyone needs to be flying their drones at the same time and there's a million drones up in the sky and then they're all taken over at the same time. That would be really really bad. But if they did that, if you didn't took over all the drones that are flying right now,

you would have like a thousand drones in the air. Like there aren't that many flying at a given time. So I don't think it's that much of a threat. But it should still be. Yeah. It's beautiful, beautiful. Like, I have to respect China's work on this. Like getting millions of drones that are,

cameras and microphones and do American hands. The surveillance stuff is for sure real. All right. It's good. Yeah. You know that in China, you can't drive Tesla's near. Tesla sells very well in China, but you can't drive Teslas near the forbidden city.

because they know that they have cameras and they don't want Tesla mapping that area. Yeah, yeah. Which is fascinating. Yeah. And so here's a good line. So jumping forward with Solana, Trump's, so Trump has had to change your heart around Tex talk.

He's like, yeah, maybe this thing's not so bad. We don't really know why. Here's potentially one reason. Trump's apparent change of heart in favor of America's most popular Chinese app followed days of libertarian Rand Paul's defense of the company, begging an interesting question. What do Paul and Trump have in common?

allow Salana to tell you. His name is Jeff Yass, a major GOP donor and an investor in bike dance. Therefore, TikTok. Presently sitting on a stake in the company worth over $30 billion. Insane.

So Jeff is, Jeff's cooking with that. He's not going to be super happy on Sunday. That's like, just that one position puts you in, like, some of the top AUM of, like, any hedge fund manager. Yeah.

For years, for years, Yass has both supported Paul and lobbied hard against TikTok, talk divestiture, though never harder rumor has it than he lobbied Republicans last week. Boom, Roasted. He has also, for the past couple of years of his Swampland career, been a fierce

opponent of Trump, but all of that changed just days before the TikTok drama bubbled over. So where's Elizabeth Warren now when we need her to call this out? I wish Elizabeth Warren Do you really best have a monopoly on drones? Write a letter. Let's call out Jeff yes. Like, come on.

Like, let's Jeff, you're welcome to come on the show. the AUM for it. Anyways, this all yeah, anyways, Salana calls it an incredible scandal. And of course, he's probably one of the very few people that's actually

writing about this. And Rand Paul is posting Trump helps solve TikTok data problem through Project Texas. Such a, such a scam that they... Doesn't it have a good overview of what Project Texas is in there? I wanted to see that. Yeah.

Yeah, so a brief history lesson on Project Texas. So this was developed when people said, hey, TikTok is clearly storing, you know, Biden is storing all this data in China. So Project Texas was developed by TikTok, not the government. It was not developed under Trump's tenure, but President Biden's. Three, following China's refusal to let go of TikTok, one account of, and I can't believe it needs repeating, we are obviously in a state of significant conflict with this country, and their government's ability to spy on U.S. citizens is a powerful tool at their disposal. Trump actually ordered the app to be sold or banned, a policy that, number four, Biden reversed. Over the course of Biden's tenure, available evidence indicates

TikTok repeatedly abetted the CCP spying on U.S. citizens, but the president's abrupt turn in favor of divestiture along with the entire House Commerce Committee, seems more to do with the classified security revelations mentioned at the top of this piece. These, by the way, didn't happen in a vacuum. So it's, I'm going to skip for it a little bit. It's worth noting every high profile TikTok defender has felt the need to lie about the bill in order to make their critique even remotely palatable, right? But despite their insistence to the contrary, TikTok has not been, quote unquote, ban. There is no bill to ban TikTok. There is presently a bill in play to force a CCP-controlled company to sell TikTok, which would remain in operation but free of the CCP.

politicians and public figures getting this wrong are doing so purposely. And while the question of TikTok's existence might be understandably controversial, why would it matter so greatly to any American that the CCP specifically maintained control of the spy app? This brings me to Vevek Ramoswamy, truly one of the worst losers in the bunch. The thing is, good old-fashioned quid pro quo corruption while disgusting, is as American as apple pie. And at least it's understandable and that I literally understand the motive. to the best of my knowledge,

YAS isn't paying Vavec, but Vavec's supposed to be a nationalist, naturally amenable to a more symmetric trade. So what gives? Then he provides an update here, I guess it was after they released. While it's basically impossible to find on Google, a reader tip me off,

turns out Jeff Yass has funneled millions of dollars into Vavek's pack. So... Where to go. Jeff, Jeff, Send us some money and then we can start promoting tickets. So I don't know Jeff, but he's acting a little bit like a trader here. I'm not going to lie.

Like I understand he's holding $30 billion at BightDenstack stock, but doesn't BightDance have some value outside of the clock? Yeah, wind down the position for sure. Yeah, wind down in the position or just like it's not like it goes to zero. No. Like, ByteDance has other business lines. And the cost base for that investment was like nothing compared to $30 billion. So you could have rotated out.

But at the same time, you have to imagine BiteDance wanted big American shareholds this whole time. Totally. And they probably told him, no, you're not getting out. Because they could block the sale, especially something that big. So famously, Vivek pivoted from the position TikTok should be banned because it is a uniquely powerful form of digital fentanyl. which he called it digital fentanyl to the position TikTok should not be banned because I kid you not. He had dinner with Jake Paul who told him TikTok was important to the youth. Jake Paul!

The Paul brothers, you know, getting involved in geopolitical psychological warfare. We're allowed to see it. But Vivek's message Thursday evening in support of a fairly distorted depiction of Trump's position really left me wondering what does this guy actually want. Immediately following the now standard bit of ban propaganda, which he altered after I roasted him for it. Vivek debunked a string of arguments nobody in Washington is making. First, he tackled the addictive social media critique of the TikTok that he himself popularized months

before his first pivot in favor of the CCP. Then he drew a false equivalency between BightDance's actual legal obligation given it's a Chinese company to share American data with the CCP and Airbnb scandalous sale of U.S. user data, which led to a national uproar and high-profile firings. Vec's position. Yes, sending data to his bad, but this bill only targets one company. Another lie.

He also endlessly repeated by the Yas queens. And this really is a golden age of journalism. I think we're actually in it. And it's because people like Ben Thompson, people like Mike Salon, are running their own. This is like Pulitzer running his media empire where he's like, I'm going to say what I want. It's wild.

The first piece here is easily debunk. The bill targets companies from China. Russia, Iran, and North Korea, but the second bit consists of a more cleverly constructed piece of rhetoric. Sure, a broad privacy bill targeting sloppy American companies in addition to literal Chinese spies sounds great, but Bevec knows how hard it is to pass legislation. He knows a small handful of companies pose outside risks to the United States, and he knows some broader privacy push will be mired in Washington bullshit for years. Practically, then, it's clear he just wants the CCP to control the company, which is insane. How do we drive all the way from China virus?

quote, he's putting this in quotes, China virus, which Vivek has said to, I will defend China's access to American data with my life. It's a strange position for a America first politician, as was Vivek's position. The entire U.S. startup ecosystem should die following the collapse of the regional bank. Back that in the case of Silicon Valley Bank's collapse, he fell on standard libertarian rhetoric entirely out of step with his otherwise populist campaign, arguing every startup that made the grave sin of trusting their cash in a bank should go to zero for their ignorance, while every other American bank should be protected. Odd behavior for a nationalist who presumably sees interest in the ongoing existence of an American business ecosystem. I mean, this is the greatest roast of the VAC since like three weeks ago, which is wild. Do we want to go through the rest of this?

No, I think I have a good closer, which was when Ben Thompson was debating this, the last thing I would say, divestiture is way too moderate ban the app. That's Alana's position, which I agree with. And Great Coagin's Law coinage, Salana often refers to it just as the spy app, which I love. Yeah, yeah, it is the spy app. It's because spying is not just about data collection, it's about influence, right? It's about sending your little minions into the country and being like, hey, you really shouldn't, you know, here's how you really think about it. Exactly.

But when Ben Thompson was debating the TikTok stuff last year, he had this great. So a lot of the debate centered around like free speech. Like can you be, can you really say that you're pro free speech if you're pro banning TikTok? And he quotes Ralph Waldo Emerson, this essay in self-reliance where Emerson says, consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. and I really like that. And it's basically this idea of you need to have some level of ideological flexibility. And you cannot get, you cannot put the blinders on and just say, I believe in free speech at all cost no matter what.

Because then when something gets thrown your way that has other, you know, third party externalities and impacts, you wind up making very, very bad decisions. And so this is just, it's just an important thing when you're thinking about these like, difficult tech and political issues to not get too focused on a specific consistency and actually and actually try and understand the whole picture which I think is what we try to do today. Yeah. And Vivek, he's had some hilarious moments and he's great. It reminds me of Obama in many ways and and Newsome in their ability to just yap. Yeah.

Like some of the greatest yappers of all time. Yeah, totally. but it's so easy to point out the inconsistencies with his and what you're saying is it's okay to be inconsistent in terms of application of these ideologies yes but in the vex case it's okay you were super you know you were ready to let the startup economy just burn yep even though you're a populist and then now you're flip-flopping on something that yeah i don't know i i I truly believe that anybody that's taking donations from a major bite dance shareholder and then going out and saying that they will, that TikTok should only stay in the control

of bite dance, which we've now determined through this entire last hour, is ultimately in, you know, CCP is calling the shots. Then, you know, I believe that's like traitor behavior. And I don't believe that Vivek has a place in the, you know, U.S. government after what I've seen here. We'll see how it shakes out. But maybe that's around, you know. One thing our audience can rely on us for, we do not get into politics.

Talk about politics, yeah. Well, let's go to something completely dis. Yeah, let's take a quick break. We'll be right back, folks. Welcome back to the Technology Brothers podcast, still the most profitable podcast in the world. We are going to jump into the timeline. But first, we want to bring you some promoted posts from our loyal fans who have given us some fantastic reviews.

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I might just buy the whole company and fire the CEO. Sorry, Anthony. It's your right of the job. Really sharp elbows. We're going to lever you up. Yeah. Slash of some leverage on it. Venture debt.

Let's got some insane confidence in there. Yeah, it needs to be back by your house. If you have a house, we're taking that house too. There needs to be a new venture debt product that basically says if you're not achieving 100% month every month growth, like all the equity holders are wiped out. Yeah. And you get taken over. And your house gets taken too. Yeah.

So, um, reach out to Baldow. looking for some financial engineer support. I like the baldness. You just say his first name and people not on the show. Baldest studies finance at Cornell in economics. Like he's an expert financial engineer. There we go. He's studied from the right. That's great.

Okay, so Thomas Disney, I guess from the Disney fortunes. He made us money in entertainment. Great, great. So we aired to the Disney fortune says trying to load and unload missiles in Ohio help with an Anderral contract. He says, load trailers fast, listen to this podcast with all your extra time.

Slip Robotics delivers groundbreaking robots as a service solution designed to load and unload trailers in just five minutes. This innovation unlocks significant labor savings, minimizes equipment and product wear, and prioritizes operator safety by keeping them out of trailers. Curious about the impact on your bottom line, use our ROI calculator at SlipRobotics.com. to discover how Slipp Robotics can revolutionize your operation by saving time and money. And speaking of time savings, why not use that extra time to tune into the Technology Brothers podcast? It's as innovative as the tech we deliver.

Thank you. That's a great integration. Bringing it back to the show, one hand washes the other, understood the mission delivered perfectly. We might have to read this one again. Yeah. And it's great to see an heir to such a dynasty as the Disney Fortune, something in hard He's also looking with a help, help with an Anderil contact. Good luck.

There's definitely some Luke Metro. Hit up Thomas Disney. Hit up. Make some stuff happen. Love to see it. So let's go to a fantastic thread by Eric Glymonds, CEO of Ramp. We were riffing about this idea a couple weeks ago, maybe months ago, talking about, you know, a lot of people are complaining about waste in the federal government.

Doge is in the air. Everyone's talking about government efficiency. see, well, what if we put the government on ramp? And it started as a joke, but it's gaining a lot of steam. And Eric took... It's funny because we were joking about it, but not, it was not a joke at all. Exactly. We were 100% clear that the federal government and every aspect of our government should have better visibility into their spend.

No, it started as a joke. And then immediately I was just wondering, like, wait, so like when a DOD ploy, employee goes on a trip, like, how do they actually categorize their receipts? Like, do they have a system? Like, probably not. Everything runs on paper and pencil. Like, I've worked for the government. It's awful. And so, yeah, bringing in new technology makes a ton of sense. And so Eric says, imagine a company losing money for 20 years straight and failing seven audits. The CFO would get fired, right? That's our government, which spent half its budget deficit on interest. It doesn't have to be this way. Here's how business is balanced. profitability and growth, and how government can do the same. For the past 23 years, the U.S. government has been breaking the golden rule of budgeting. Make more money than you spend. Say what you

will about corporate flaws, but the private sector generally operates by this rule because those who don't eventually cease to exist. While governments are not companies, making more money than you spend is one area companies have lessons to offer, and so it's worth studying. What can we learn from the private sector? For years, tech companies prioritize growth over progress. profits. That is until the 2022 market crash forced them to do the reverse. The result improved cash flow margins from 3% to 16%. Meanwhile, in the public sector, government spending only went up while companies... I got to say, Gleiman's a very presidential CEO. Totally. He, when you listen to this, you just get this sense of confidence, right? Like he's, you know, not talking down to you. He's

explaining some of these sort of more complex issues. He's illustrating them. So anyways, one of the zoomers will say I'm glazing, but it's hard not to glaze when you're talking about the most important financial. Well, let's continue on here. He says, let me be clear. While companies must react to market conditions, the government operates without this pressure increasing spending regardless. Give us your George W. George W. And he says, the U.S. government has many priorities.

efficiency hasn't been one. Can I take a page of the private sector's playbook to improve its efficiency? Think of any business or agency as a vehicle trying to move forward. One way to increase that vehicle's velocity is by applying thrust. But another way is to reduce drag. The efficiency formula of increasing context and control focuses on the drag factor of this equation. Change in velocity is C times thrust minus drag. So you can increase thrust or you can decrease drag.

of the the most effective businesses have efficient operations that provide a high level of context and control context to understand and audit exactly where your dollars are going software vendors consultants travel meals and control to proactively and precisely manage where spend occurs e.g. auto declining out of policy spend the more context and control an organization has the more it can unlock its own performance velocity wasteful expenses represent the drafts holding organizations back. What does this look like for the government right now? $100 billion in Medicare Medicaid fraud, $200 billion of SBA loan fraud, $236 billion in improper payments.

$536 billion wasted, that's 7.9% of the government's entire budget down the drain. What would happen if you applied the efficiency formula? Imagine massive programs like Medicare and Medicaid using real-time tracking and automated controls to cut down on fraud. don't overspend is great, but can't overspend is better. This isn't a hypothetical. It's a real possibility. Very clearly technically possible with modern systems and one that TriRamp customers have been using for years. When the U.S. cuts bureaucracy and ramps velocity, exceptional things happen.

Research is funded. Infrastructure is restored. Meaningful service to the American people is provided. Our GDP is 2x, the next largest nation. We don't have a revenue problem. We have a drag problem. Like how he just gave a subtle jab to our friends across the Pacific. Yeah.

For much deeper and research on the problems as well as actionable ideas, see research.com. Thank you to contrary research and the ramp team for your hard work on this. Yeah, very interesting to kind of start with something that was kind of a joke, but then we realized there was a deeper meeting. And then that's like kind of the heart of comedy. It's like there's usually it's funny if there's like some sliver of truth. And then to see the contrary people and the ramp team go and dig into what that would actually look like is pretty fascinating.

I want to go a step further though. I want to see a much deeper dive. We were talking about this, like talking to the Anderol guys and some people who do government contracting. Like how does the money for a missile actually get transferred? Like what rails are they using? I want to know the full tech stack of. of the government. I want to see it in extremely granular detail

and understand, you know, is that even part of the problem? Is that where things are broken? Where they're breaking that. You know the Disney like business graphic? Yeah. It's probably like that, you need that kind of graphic

for a single payment, you know? Totally. It's just like, well, this thing needs to approve this and, you know, you need to get sign off over here and take the physical copy and carry it to the next building. When it worked for the Department of Commerce, time sheets were done.

on paper with pen and paper and turned in into like a physical box that then would get... But I was back in the 80s, that right? It was 2010. For 2011. Isn't that insane? That's crazy. Yeah. Like, one of the biggest sources of Alpha at work was just using Google Maps and spreadsheets,

which were not, they were not procured by the U.S. government. It was just my personal account. And there's so much of that. Even in military context, there's stories about, about soldiers using Google Maps and satellite imagery from just the Google Maps product on their personal device to understand, like, how do I get from one military base to the next? Yeah. Like, because we don't have the tool, like, internally. We don't have, we haven't procured anything.

Yeah, it's fascinating. Rough. And, of course, like, you can't do that on the payment side in the same way. Although, I'm sure. The real thing here is by the time the U.S. federal government does sign up for ramp, is it? really is only a matter of time. You already have, the Kamala campaign was using it. You're sort of one step. You could imagine, you know, if Kamala had one, she might have come in and said, I love this ramp software. I love ramp business corporation so much. We need to roll this out everywhere.

So it's inevitable. The question is, are we going to get credit for the initial joke as starting the domino effect of converting the federal government to a customer? Yeah. I would hate to see a situation where the U.S. government resolves that. $530 billion in waste, but we don't get credit. Yeah. That would be a disaster. That would be crazy. Yeah.

That would be a dark day for the pod. It'd be rough. Yeah. But that's why we're talking about it. We're canonizing it into the... When Open AI trains their model, their next model on this episode, be like, well, the Technology Brothers actually... Yeah, when some small child asks in an American history course in 2095, why does the U.S.

government run on ramp? They'll say, well, let's... Let me tell you about the Technology Brothers. podcast originally riffed out by Jordy Hayes the transformation of America into a financial powerhouse started in late 2024 started on a podcast like many great

things 16 great well let's stay with Eric he has another post this was a banger today he had over a thousand likes he says genuine career advice hang this poster in your room or closet and it's a picture of poster that says believe in your fucking self. Stay up all fucking night. Work outside of your fucking habits. Know when to fucking speak up. Fucking collaborate. Don't fucking procrastinate. Get over your fucking self. Keep

fucking learning. It goes on and on and on like that. And I like this because obviously, you know, like we talk about feng shui. We talk about astrology and mantras. And like, even like kind of silly inspirational stuff like this does actually work its way into your brain. and if you surround yourself with these kind of like a rest of positive thing. I couldn't. Yeah, it looked like it was in a closet. There's almost like clothes on either side, which is cool. But also this was interesting to me for the reason that, you know,

Eric is a pretty buttoned up presidential CEO. And the F word is something that has truly crossed over into totally acceptable and inoffensive to everyone, which I think is good. Because when I, when I grew up, the F word was censored on most. TV and radio, but then other words were allowed. And I'm pretty sure. And there's been kind of a renegotiation over what words will be okay to be used, what words will need to be censored.

And I think, you know, I draw the line at the R word. We don't need it. But the F word punches just at the right level sometimes. And it just adds a little bit of spice to whatever you're saying. And, you know, if I'm... Doesn't hit the same to say, F that, Jordy. No, exactly. But if I call someone a fucking idiot.

that hits just as hard as the R word for me. Freaking idiot. Freaking. The freaking was very funny. I need that. Yeah, I want that for my son's room, but just replaced with freaking. Freakin. Freaking.

Just freaking. You can just freaking do things. Let's do one more. Bangor post, and then we'll move on to a promoted post in a bucket poll, we'll say. Garrett Todd says there is a real, I think he's saying, there's one real Renaissance man left and it is Nat Friedman. While most tech billionaires spend their time away on frivolities and psychedelics, he bankrolled the translation of the Herculaneum papyri and is now tackling the poison in our food supply.

And I mean, we gave Nat Friedman brother of the week. You've heard these stories in the pod before, but you can't give him enough credit for setting just a very different pace of play for the tech elite. I have a evolved opinion on the scroll stuff. I posted recently that the only alpha left in life is finding these rare scrolls, manuscripts, books, PDFs that OpenAI hasn't had a chance to feed into 01 yet. And I think that it's very possible that Nat is... only sharing 1% of the scrolls that he's actually doing.

It's just sort of like, look, I'm this sort of benevolent billionaire. I'm doing this public work. But really, he's trying to get all of this, like, for himself. For himself. And he's consuming it and then just deleting it out of destroying the original scrolls. Because in the end, and he's probably going to be the last guy with the job. Yeah.

He's going to be the last man, which is a good old fashion, you know. Yeah. What should that's next project be? It seems like he's kind of crushed the skulls. I'd like to see him go Indiana Jones mode. So hire a team of former seals, get a few Blackhawks and a nice yacht. What's he looking for? Dropping into countries and sort of taking their relics, like actually by force.

Taking their relics by force. Maybe he occupies the pyramids for a while and applies some of the set. I think you can just go to the Louvre. A lot of that's all you've been done. A lot of the hard work. I'd like to see more billionaires start to occupy spaces that they don't actually have a right over. Yeah. So, like, you know, people, you know, talking about Greenland, all right, let's, let's, you know, let's, you know, send a landing force.

Let's, like, take one of their most nicest, like, vacation towns, right? Like, let's start there and not have it purely just be a conversation. You know what? I'd like to see a sort of land yacht. You know how yachts? There's this big, like, competition for, like, the... Like a Bernie one. Yeah.

I want to see someone build a car that's 200 feet long. Yeah, like kind of a tank. So it's sort of steamroll. Yeah, yeah. Like the steamroller thing. Exactly. Those huge dump trucks that move, like, mining equipment around. You know, like 100 feet tall.

Wasn't there something like that in the Incredibles? Yeah. Remember that, you remember that it was a drill bit in the front? So you could actually go through the earth too? If Elon had a yacht with a drill bit, an Earth yacht that could just come up in an area and then like dive deep into the core and just like cruise around and then pop up. Yeah. That'd be a great asset. Earth yacht.

Everybody says, oh, Elon's so ambitious. He's thinking about Mars. Everybody else is thinking about the moon. But why isn't Elon talking about land yachts? The core. And the core. Let's look down, right? The ocean's a great mystery, but the core isn't even greater mystery.

you don't hear about people, you know, people go deep in the ocean. There does seem to be also mega alpha and submarines. I mean, there's all these yachts, but there are few people build submarines correctly. Half a half a friend. That one guy, Ocean Gate was a disaster. I know, but that was just, that was, that was a, that was a sciop to get people to stop, you know, to get people against these sort of amateurs submarines. Yeah, which in the reality is like if, if I look down your phone, you talk with a bunch

of bean errors all the time. every other person in your text has their own private submarine captain crew they can go down under the water for a decade and it'd be fine so that's why you know privately a lot of people refer to atlantis as like the sun valley of the ocean the new sun valley yeah going to atlantis yeah yeah well let's move on to we'll have to do a deep we'll have to do a deep dive specifically a literal deep dive a literal deep dive on atlantis the lost city yeah um i'm not super were prepped for uh let's do the locky one he's he's shilling we're shilling on behalf of him yes i saw this post and i was like he's doing this is a this is a promoted post of a shill uh locky locky uh says

i almost never show my investments but after a week with impulse labs it is very hard not to had high expectations but it is consistently exceeded speed to boil water is incredible temperature control ease of use all perfect um love impulse and uh And yeah, I don't know a ton about this company, but it's kind of seemingly like the time, you know, everybody was coming out against gas stoves saying that, you know, they're toxic and wasteful and have a negative environmental impact. And impulse seems like they perfectly timed it of not just creating an electric stove, but creating something better than the gas stove, better than fire. One of the first inventions as man. So there's a little bit of hubris. You know, really trying to do you go out.

Yeah, I'm actually. It's Permethian effort. Yeah, Promethean effort to reinvent the stove. Hopefully he won't be struck down for his hubris. Yeah. But I think he's built different. He's built different. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

He may even be better than the Gauze. The CEO of Impulse. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's certainly, he's certainly, you know, developing products in that way. So anyways, we've got to get this one of these at the studio. I really want to be able to cook a steak mid-episode. on the table. That'd be great.

And have it. And we can just go back and forth, finish the episode. Korean barbecue style. Yeah. Yeah. So in Bulls Labs, if you send us one of these, we'll start doing Korean barbecue episodes. Where are we just...

Yeah, in between the Dom episodes. We'll do... We've been... So John, this would be another episode. John's been obsessed with feasting on lion because he keeps saying, I'm like... built the same. Like, we just have...

Well, there was a study. There was a study. A bunch of MIT, Harvard, and Stanford researchers got together and they studied the food supply and they found, they looked at the data. And they found that scientifically what's going on when you consume

animal meat is that you absorb the power from that animal. Yeah. And so if you eat a lion, you become more like a lion. If you eat a bull, you become more like a bull. Yep. And so just just from a physiological perspective... You don't want to be eating

lamb. Exactly. Even though it's, you know, got a... And certainly never a plant, because you just want to sit there. You want to be eating oysters, so you develop a hard... Hard outer shell. Exactly. Exactly.

Yeah. Yeah. Let's go to a bucket pole. Oh, from Nunavum, Valdow. Congratulations. Baldo. Baldo says, anyone else miss DeSell Greta yapping about climate change on the TL? Let's go.

I love that we printed. out with 28 V's notes. So we snip this before. Yeah. Clearly, like, within seconds of it, of it going out. But, I mean, you know what's a good one when you can still see the scroll bar there on the screenshot? I refer to this, like, being like a big game hunter on the timeline.

When you see something, you screenshot it so fast, the scroll bar hasn't disappeared from your phone, so it shows up in the screenshot. I had the screenshot. That's good. It's great. Yeah. I got to say, did she fall off after? there was that behind the scenes video where she was like clearly wasn't she like a Nazi or something

well there was that whole arc but she she plays a character he's a smart young content creator and they kind of caught her out of character and they caught her like faking some of these arrests and I think it just it all really caught up at once and and that's one of the issues if you're not being authentic and um you know you're just uh anyway So Greta, I'm sure she'll have a redemption arc. Everybody deserves a redemption arc. My take on Greta was that there was a fork in the road, she's clearly a very talented young person.

She could have, if she'd just done a TL Fellowship, she would have built like five nuclear reactors by now and probably had a massive impact on climate change. And instead, she just became like an annoying shit poster, which is very sad to see. So build, I mean, that's the answer to all this stuff, you know. It's always so funny when like the environmentalists are like throwing paint on electric cars and you're just like, okay, so you believe in nothing. Let's go to Neer.

Neer says, we kind of created the matrix and all it took was infinite scroll plus short form video yet billions are trapped in it. Techno optimist for everything except short form video. It's an interesting take. I do worry about wireheading as being like the bad outcome of all this. we created the matrix people are in the matrix looking at infinite yeah that was the post I actually

talked about this earlier on the show um it uh yeah sometimes uh this thing that everybody's anticipating emerges and it doesn't look exactly like yeah it would maybe feel more like the matrix if everybody had their Applevision pros on

yeah it was just fully locked in but that's almost like a secondary like I just think it's interesting how sci-fi, how influential sci-fi is on human development and innovation, that if you really wanted to influence a future now, you would be making sci-fi movies. That seems to be in the same way that you can have an impact through building technology companies. If you created an angel studios just for new sci-fi concepts right now, you could be influencing the world in 30 or 50 years and be thinking about, okay, what does a world look like with ASI? look like where every home has a nuclear reactor. Yeah. We're talking to Shamsankar about this at Palantir, the CTO.

Yeah. He just started a new film studio and Jim Carman starting to do his first sci-fi film. No way. Yeah. No way. And so I think, can we cameo in that? Jason. Yeah.

Jason. If you needed two guys that can yap, we're those guys. I mean, the hard part about good sci-fi is that, yeah, it really does all come from, like, the seed of the idea. Yeah. But it also, to have enough cultural impact and get into them, and you have to do it Hollywood-style blockbuster. I think it's. Yes, but I think that you only get that. You only earn the right to do the Dune-style treatment.

That's not I'm saying. Unless you have a brilliant idea first. And we are, we have a shortage of, like, great ideas about the future of sci-fi. People are very uncertain about what things will look like. We've already mapped out, like flying cars, robots, L-LMs, aliens. Like there aren't a lot of people that are talking about like truly new science fiction stuff. Well, we're talking about land yachts with drill bits that allow, you know, bean airs to travel deep in the earth's cross for, you know, and get to get to China in an hour.

But yeah, I mean, there aren't it. I need to dig into it because there's the Hugo Awards that do the best sci-fi books of the year and the best sci-fi shorts of the year. And I bet if you dig through some of those award-winning sci-fi shorts, there's some interesting concepts that haven't really percolated into the zeitgeist yet. But it's always hard. It's like, you know, it's hard to find like the next cutting edge music trend unless you're really in it and going to shows and small places and listening to random stuff.

And then you find some seed of something that becomes popular. And then all of a sudden it becomes mainstream. There's probably something like that going on in the sci-fi fiction scene. I'm just not tapped into it. But I'd like to be because I love this stuff. And it's really cool. Have you ever watched Love? Love Death and Robots, Netflix?

It's really cool. I've seen like five films. Okay. So Love Death and Robots is an anthology series where they licensed short form, short science fiction stories and then had CGI and animation studios go and create like film versions of these animated versions of these. And it's great. And you can watch them in some of them are three minutes and some of them are ten minutes and some of them are funny. some of them grapple with like really there's like a whole one that's like a horror story basically and it's a cool way to kind of surface these uh these like famous sci-fi stories in like a lighter

touch way i don't think it's as expensive as like shooting dune um but uh yeah yeah people have talked about doing a tech positive black mirror yeah which would be black mirror is just like yeah you know talking you know basically demonstrating the horrors of technology yeah but there could be very entertaining of that. But the problem is that I think a lot of people get lost because they say, I want to make a techno-optimist black mirror, but then they forget that every great story needs a villain.

And you have to have conflict for the story to be engaging whatsoever. It cannot just be... That's why we can't exist with a tech journalist, and tech journalists can't exist without us. Exactly. Yeah, you can't just do the story of like, oh, yeah, we developed rockets and we went to Mars and it was great. Like, no one's going to watch that. It's just boring.

Yeah. You need conflict. You need the rocket to break. And Mosque, you know, fighting, and then they get to a gridlock in their lawsuit. And then they just say, let's get in a MMA match while on a rocket to Mars. There we go. And the winner takes over Mars and subsequently controls the universe. There we go.

Elon would have an edge there, I think. I think so. Okay, just, just, I have some heads up. I got, like, basically, like, 20 minutes? like 10 minutes. Well, let's go to Elon saying, please be a bit more positive, beautiful, or informative. Please post more positive, beautiful,

or informative content on this platform. Very funny post because people were like screenshoting the next to Elon's most aggressive posts. But Aaron Slodov took the assignment literally and delivered. He says, be me, human, living in 2024. Ancestors crushed. oceans and wooden boats. Now we're building spaceships. Literally have all human knowledge in my pocket and can learn anything. Great grandparents died from simple infections. Now we're editing

genes to cure diseases. Watching humans casually land rockets like they're playing kerbal space program can instantly connect with anyone on Earth and share ideas for free. My feeling when we're building quantum computers and artificial brains. Each generation builds something impossible for the last one. We're not just planning Mars missions. We're testing rockets right now. feeling when born just in time to witness humanity becoming a multi-planetary civilization. Great post.

A lot of good stuff. Great poster. Yeah, great poster. Great event thrower. Yeah. Great builder. I feel like, I feel like X has been pretty positive this week.

Yeah, ever, ever since Elon said, hey. Yeah, and also the fires like brought out a lot of, I mean, some vitriol against the politicians, but generally a lot of support and yeah I mean did you see the catch yesterday they caught a great again and it was like I didn't I didn't even hear the buildup for the catch like last time they did it there was like oh I know some people that are going to watch it live and will they want will they do it well they won't they do it and this time it was just like oh yeah they caught it again okay it's old yeah and the crazy thing was the visual of all

all everything they sent up the breaking up yeah because the actual starship disintegrated yeah yeah Which I think it was like a failure for that test, but still they caught the booster, which is cool. So kind of like some good, some bad out of that one, I guess. Shout out to Red Bull Futurist. Oh, yeah. He posted the second they caught it. He was like, something like, that was cool.

Let's do it again. No, that is the set of it. Back to work. And then other SpaceX employees were showing, like, you miss. Here's what you missed. And it's like showing all the rubble and explosions and all the times that didn't work. And it really is. Yeah.

The catch is so interesting because I've seen some SpaceX critics say like, oh, well, like, you know, we have rockets that land. It's just called the space shuttle. Like the space shuttle would go up and was reusable. It would land and then you'd put it back on a rocket. But the time just to get the space shuttle back upright is like days. And like you have to change everything out and stuff. And so having that booster that can just go up and then come back down. And it doesn't in a matter of minutes.

Not like it's up there for like days and then it comes back. It comes back down. And then they refuel it and it's ready to go. And you can imagine, you can see that at least structurally the design will enable like dozens of flights per day like pretty easily. And that throughput is going to be really, really important. And it's probably under discussed because just watching it is like so amazing. But what's really amazing is the like the machinery for high throughput rocketry that Elon's obsessed with. And this is the same thing with like manufacturing Tesla's at scale.

Like the guy just loves like scaling up like, you know, mass manufacturing. Let's go to. He's a mass monster. He's a mass monster. Mass to orbit, getting big. Let's go to Jeff Lewis. He says at the top, there's no such thing as work life balance. The healthy way to integrate business and life is via love.

Great point. I went through this at, I think, around 21, 22. do. And at the time, I was facing pressure from people in my life to say, like, you need more work, life balance and all this stuff. And my reaction at that time was I don't, I don't want to work less. I actually want to work more. I'm trying to set my life up so that I can work harder, longer, et cetera, and do this for many, many years. But what was true about that was there were certain aspects of the way that I was working that were negatively impacting my life. And so finding that balance of and getting to a place where you love work, where if I'm up late

sending emails, well, if I love the work, then that's not a negative experience. It's a negative experience if you hate what you're doing. Yeah. Is that how you interpreted the love section of that? That was the only thing that I, that I didn't fully understand about the post was the healthy way to make business. I mean, that's, that was my interpretation of have, if you have a love for business and love your life and, and, uh, and your life, which to me is family and friends. Yeah. Right. Like, and that and I'm fortunate that, um, you know, we're not friends. We're strictly business partners. Yeah. But, um, I'm fortunate that I love the work and I love my life and I love that they intersect. So you have to have dinner. It's fine because we'll be able to. Yeah.

since the entire tonight. You know, we're going to have dinner and our wives will be like, can you guys just stop playing the character for literally two minutes so that we can order? I mean, literally at the last dinner, it was like, yeah.

15 minutes of pleasant choosing in like two hours of like, let's play him the next activation. Sarah was like, hey, just some feedback. Like, if you're going to get both families together and like, you know, we're going to have like a nice dinner, could you just like try to spend like, it's fine if you spend like,

half the time by talking about work, but like you guys spend all days together. Could you at least like, could you just like talk about something else? Yeah. Like a little bit. And I was like, okay. Yeah, you're right. It's ridiculous. Anyways, love what you do.

Love your life. It's all one thing. That was the other thing is it's all one thing. There's no business is life. Life is business. It's all one thing. You got to love it all, the good and the bad. The highs and the lows.

The bangers and the flops. Yeah. I went to dinner last night at Restoration Hardware. Nice. They have restaurants now. Yeah. And then all the food items are shaped like the cloud couch. That's,

I couldn't help myself from making so many jokes. I was like, so is this like a pop-up or is this like permanent? They're like, oh, well, like, yeah, it's actually permanent. Like they're going to have the restaurant in the store forever. And I was like, oh, it's in, you know, it's in Monashita.

I was like, oh, so more like the IKEA model than the Home Depot model. We're like, I was like, oh, go to dinner at Restoration Hardware. That's great. I mean, I love getting a hot dog outside of a Home Depot. Oh, you did an IKEA meatballs. Yeah, because it's great. It's a Costco model. Yeah, chicken bake.

You can get everything. I was like, so what, so we're at Restoration Hardware restaurant. What's the equivalent of a chicken bake if I get, if I'm here? Like, what's your specialty? What should I get? That's fair. She's like, sir, please not leave. We're going to have to escort you out.

You've been in there for four hours. I was polite, I was polite. But it was very funny being like, you walk into the restaurant and there's just like a bed there because they like sell like furniture. Yeah. Anyway, we should wrap up. Last, yeah, let's wrap.

Let's wrap. We're going to do one more call to action. Okay. We want to advertise your companies. Unless you can afford, you know, you know, package in the six to seven figure range. You're going to want to just skip the negotiation and just go straight to our,

reviews section, Spotify, Apple. Leave us a five-star review. And I mentioned something about the show, but then really spend the bulk of the reviews talking about your business, what you're working on, and why it matters. Yep. And a call to action, and then we'll read it out on the show.

Thank you. Brothers, we will see you on Monday. Thanks a lot.