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

Episode Date: January 17, 2025

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I'm Han Zhirong. I love beer. that was sent from Elizabeth Warren to none other than Sam Altman. It came on a beautiful, beautiful stationery from the United States Senate in 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 OpenAI, 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 13th, 2024, reporting confirmed your intention to personally donate $1 million to the inaugural fund.

So what's weird about this is that there's making it out to be like, oh, a million dollars is so much, but like that's not even enough to buy a single Koenigsegg. Yeah. And yet it's like, oh, a million bucks. It's like. And 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 koenigsegg yeah this is not this is not real real sway yeah so what's what's insane about what's insane about this is uh i mean elizabeth warren always uh from my experience uh likes to likes to kind of play dumb yeah right like she's clearly an intelligent woman yeah and she's clearly very shrewd politically and she likes to come out and make these like very uh emotional sort of um uh 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

it is to influence politicians yeah right like why it's not just out of uh nobody you know people uh don't don't make million dollar donations to uh you know just just purely for fun right yeah for sport 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 and it's interesting like how quickly the dems have turned on altman who i believe was historically generally pro you know he almost ran for governor of cal 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 workers, consumers and competition. Which is going to go out the window to some degree.

Oh, the antitrust? Yeah, the antitrust. Potentially, yeah. And so, yeah, if you're pro antitrust, I guess you're upset that big tech is cozying up to the new Trump administration. Although some of the Trump appointees have been somewhat pro antitrust in the sense that if their constituents are, you know, like small business owners, they might actually want to bring that Japanese steel company from acquiring. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That. And then so yeah, antitrust is a, is a lever, is like a hammer that can be used in multiple ways.

And what's interesting is that back when the antitrust against big tech started and there was a push against Google and 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. Explain who Josh Hawley is. Josh Hawley is a, I believe a Senator might be a Congressman. I'm pretty sure he was a Senator and he, uh, is a, is a Republican and was like loosely in the teal universe through JD. It was kind of like the people were thinking that like, there might be like a tech squad, like, uh, Rashida Tlaib and AOC, uh, and Ilhan omar there might be that if if if they got jd and um and uh who else uh arizona guy like masters like masters and also josh holly in you'd have

like a you have a little bit of like strength in numbers because those three guys collectively had the same sort of philosophy around tech but not uh same puppet master but but but but but and and and they they could kind of break from the mainstream ideology of the republican party and so uh elizabeth warren goes on to say we are concerned that your company and other big tech donors are using your massive contributions, again, not that massive, to the inaugural fund to cozy up to the incoming administration in an effort to avoid scrutiny, limit regulation, and buy favor. You have a clear and direct interest in obtaining favors from the incoming administration. Your company and 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 NLRB cases alleging unfair labor practices. Apple CEO Tim Cook donated $1 million to Trump's fund, while Apple is 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 $1 million, was found by federal court to have an illegal monopoly over the online search market. Meta donated $1 million 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 $1 million and is subject to multiple open investigations. The funny thing here is that Elizabeth Warren has taken more money from big finance than any politician in history. She is truly the most toxic politician of all time. We don't talk about politics on the show ever, but if I were to sort of extrapolate on Elizabeth Warren, I wouldn't have a lot of – my mother once told me, if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all.

And I don't have a single word to say. This is funny because it's like listing off like every big tech company donated and every big tech company is like under uh significant pressure from the government but there's a flip that you can flip this around and be like and be like well we're suing every single tech company like why aren't they donating to us yeah it's like it's uh 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. Like maybe we should spend $1 million.

Maybe we should spend $1 million. 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 alpha. I think they track. I think they track. Warren's doing well too.

Okay. Well, she closed been the beneficiary of big business for her entire career. Yep. It is critical that federal regulators continue to 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 there are good reasons for

many of the laws that are in place. The question is just like, has this been like a pattern of abuse? The toughest thing about the tech monopolies is that you can look at the Google search monopoly, which is very clearly true. But previously, the Sherman Antitrust Act was defined as consumer harm. So it needs to be two steps. One, you have a monopoly, which can be quantitatively measured by the HHI. Are you familiar with this? The Hirschman-Hirschfeld Index, something like that. The HHI is a mathematical calculation for economic concentration in a particular industry.

So you basically take the market size of each company, you square them, or something like that. And 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've got to break them 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 it's 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. And of course, ads buyers can move to other platforms. They can easily move over to that. So maybe, so I looked it up. And it's an auction. Yeah. So it's very hard for Google to- Supply and demand.

Yeah, to artificially raise prices of their ads. So I looked it up, and here's the thing. So I figured it out. So Elizabeth- Looked at the data. So we looked at the data. We've been preparing a TED Talk by looking at the data. Yeah. So I looked at the data. We've been preparing a TED Talk by looking at the data. So I looked at the data. Elizabeth Warren loves mutual funds. She's 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 herself has a lot of her net worth in some of these big tech companies. And she might be angry as a indirect shareholder that that money is being spent on her political opponents

when it could be profit for her, 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 centimillionaire. Really? Yeah, they've

no way yeah not sent you sorry uh so she she has some some somewhere between she has 10 plus million dollars of like known assets i'm sure she's taking some you know her hush we're just like i i just feel i just feel like uh she's trying to slander tech i'm gonna slander let it rip a little bit no but i think i think it's just this frustration of saying i 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 you look at the antitrust stuff against Google and one of the first people to kind of argue that Google had become this lethargic monopoly was Peter Thiel, of course.

Yeah. 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 sink that money to get a return. And this was like all stagnation theory, just arguing that you need to look no further than Google with the best engineers, the most agentic

founders at the helm. You have this incredible team. 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 like a lot of vigor like she seems a lot healthier than sort of some of these other even on the republican side so these guys that are just like what's the guy's name who's constantly just like um 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 you know retirement

home yeah uh just sort of like mpc-ing 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 writing like the constitution for them like with the quill like just oldest dudes are like oh yeah they're like 28 year old guy working on this. It would be so. All we want is the average out. It'd be so amazing to flip it instead of 35 plus, it's 35 or under. And we had Vivek.

So Vivek has been silenced. Vivek has been put. Maybe Vivek is prepping for the cage. Maybe he's like, he wants to go founder mode again. He's like, politics, I've had enough. 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 19 years old, chugs Red Bulls and Celsius all night,

and is just like, yeah, peace in the middle. Isn't there a minimum? Yeah, 35 is the minimum age. But I think it should be the maximum age. We need a gamer president, somebody who who's gonna just grind with the boys yeah we need we need a president who sorted out who insists that the white house press secretary does the the brain rot like what is it called what are those mpc yeah what are the videos called where like they have like we need the subway surfers the subway surfer videos where it's like the 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 who can get up. Yeah, I want the I want all that. I want the night. Yeah. The press secretary is doing the like tick tock 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 screams it's great uh well let's move on to our our real top story today tick tock before we jump we're going to talk about tick tock today but um i'd like to help our audience get a little bit more empathy with this story and so i'd like to uh just teach them a quick word of of mandarin that they can use throughout their day which is pijo which means beer so if you want to if you're trying to

find common ground uh between you know you and somebody uh i doubt any of our listeners are on red note but if you go on red note just comment on a bunch of posts which means i really enjoy beer and that will find like sort of some common ground because again the chinese people are not the enemy it's the ccp exactly the enemy so exactly it's important to um you know clarify that yeah so uh let's start with just setting the 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 the federal law will ban the app, unless the Supreme Court intervenes to block the ban. And we have an update there.

The Supreme Court ruled unanimously to uphold the ban. So, yeah, I think we need nine size dong bangs for nine Supreme Court justices. Sounds great. Is that nine? It's close enough. Close enough. Bravo to the Supreme Court. They do get it right over there sometimes.

Yeah, but should we take a moment of silence for the ByteDance shareholders? The Capitol shareholders. The Sassuahana and Jeff Yoss. What ad should we run? Bose again? Okay, a 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 uh so under the plan people attempting to open the

tiktok app will instead see a pop-up message directing them to a website with information about the ban one of the people said. TikTok plans to give users the option to download all their data so they can take a record of their personal information with them. Under a law passed last year, TikTok will be banned on January 19th in the United States unless it has cut ties with its Chinese parent ByteDance. 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 user data. And that's Project Texas, which we'll talk about later. The app had been expected to continue operating past the ban date for people who already had downloaded it. Because if you already downloaded it, you don't need it from the store until software updates by Apple or Google start to cause problems. In that scenario, the immediate impact of the ban would be limited to preventing new users from downloading the app. Proactively turning off the app, though, in contrast, ensures that all of TikTok's users will be affected immediately. TikTok plans to help explain comments by a lawyer representing TikTok, Noel Francisco, at the Supreme Court hearing on Friday when he said the app would go dark if the court didn't intervene. In an email to TikTok employees reported by The Verge, the company said it was planning for various scenarios. Your employment pay and benefits are secure and our offices will remain open even if the situation hasn't resolved before the January 19th deadline.

As the date of the ban approaches, speculation is increasing. 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 um and uh

and then also uh jeff yass from sesquihana 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 talked 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 plus 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 great for commercial activity, probably better than some of these other platforms. Yeah. it was it was great for commercial activity probably better

than some of these other platforms yeah they did have a lot of technical innovations most of them have been ported over already like i think even uh on on youtube you can have pinned products but it's usually just for merch it was usually like a teespring like a shirt integration 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 yeah so and then the actual like what makes creators that have built million plus you know anywhere from um uh that that sucks yeah like getting it taken away. But I think that the, uh, if you were taking content creation as a, you know, profession, you should understand that you need to be everywhere. You can't be reliant on a single platform. If X was getting banned right now, we would be, uh, 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 so i do understand why people are like almost traumatized by this whole thing but i but it's still necessary

yeah it's like it's it feels like telling like your kid who's having a tantrum like it's gonna be like you know they're they're they're you know anybody who has like a two-year-old understands like a kid can have a tantrum but but then time just passes and they 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 um the more support we have the better so uh with that we we wanted to give you the full history of tiktok go through the the story it's over a decade old at this point almost i guess uh 2015 musically uh started so let's go through uh the history of tiktok and then we'll break down some of the analysis about what's going on in the band. There's so much good stuff here. I'll hold this joke for a second because

you'll see it in a second. So why don't you start with 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? Why?

Is because SAP is our sworn enemy. Oh, really? As smart business owners that run on RAMP. Yeah. Many of these big companies have these complex integrations on sap they're wasting you know quite a lot of time and and you know you know really sort of um ruining the lives of their employees by forcing them to use this sort of legacy software instead of a checkoff's gun situation yeah it makes sense it makes sense that uh tiktok which is um uh you know our enemy social media company was started by a guy who worked for our

enemy finance automation interest company yeah i hadn't put that together uh so he's in his mid 30s working as a ui designer at sap uh 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 cicada education with Louis 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 pivot to what becomes Musical.ly.

He's on the train. I think he was going from, he was riding the Caltrain from Silicon Valley to SF. He was commuting to his job. And he sees these kids using their phones to create selfie videos with music and overlays, basically lip sync videos. 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 Musical.ly videos like being reposted to other platforms, 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 it

weirdly for me i really started noticing it around i feel like at this point maybe maybe maybe i just really noticed it late but it it felt like i started to really pay attention to it in 2020 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 you know, try to get attention in some other setting. So, and I mean, like for a while, for a while it was very cringe for people to go on music. Totally.

And people would do it sort of ironically and then the app. And then I even remember the first time I downloaded, I don't know if I downloaded musically or TikTok, but my first impression with TikTok was like, I opened the app and it served me a highly relevant video. And it probably was just fate or luck or chance, but I was like, I was impressed. I was like, and then. No, the algorithm really was like incredible.

Yeah. And still, still. And there was, there was, I heard, I heard, I have no idea if this is true um but fortunately we're not journalists so um we don't have to get the facts right all the time but um uh i heard that that their algorithm which was so was was was kind of like a scale ai sweatshop model where there was i the the rumor was like imagine just warehouses and warehouses in china where people are just sitting there being like you know is this is this funny like is this a dog like classifying the videos like very manually yeah um 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 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 i mean that's very real for the for the censorship of the chinese internet like they were able to just throw millions and millions of people at it yeah and now ai is kind of caught out and they can censor a lot of stuff automatically and for me the interesting thing here is is uh i studied abroad in Shanghai in 2016. You were one of those guys like Trump wins and you got to leave the country?

It was actually very weird because I was there in the fall. And so all of the chaos and turmoil of the election, I was watching unfold online while in in china but then from a from a tech from a technology standpoint i mean a lot of you know most of the people in china would use vpns to use instagram and google products and stuff like that um but uh so this was already happening like chinese china had banned all of these Western apps entirely. You could still get around it. And so I never understood from the very beginning why we would allow China...

You know, China has done some... The thing is that it wasn't a Chinese app to begin with. It was just an app made by a Chinese dude. Yes, yes, but the thing that... The ByteDance deal happened much later. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which we got to go into. But the honest truth is that anyone who is Chinese,

the government expects them to act on behalf of the state. It is an expectation. Maybe. I think it's different. I think it's different if somebody is like renounces their citizenship as here uh but but uh china from my experience on the ground everyone has 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 the uh like all the german dudes who lived in america like Germany was like, come back and fight for us.

Yeah. And people went. Yeah. 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. Shit 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 too i was like how do they have instagram at the time had no music yeah platform and so if you wanted to add music you would have to like download the video download, like steal the song by downloading it and then put it together.

And then it was really hard. I would have to like censor. Yeah. And then they take it down because it was like, oh, you don't have the rights to that. But but they figured out that they could that they could pull that in. Eventually, they did the deals to actually get the money to the record labels. But that was a huge, huge growth hack. And they also did this thing where they'd watermark the videos with Musical.ly.

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 steak.com thing. 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, and the U the u.s with the u.s audience picking it up globally uh quite show 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 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, and Near on Axe posted something that's like, we actually created the metaverse, but it's in the form of short form content. 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 uh during this time they they get the musically app up uh it launched as a as a broad short form video platform in 2014 this is all yeah and they did a ton of like app store uh optimization and keyword 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. Like they had a segment on the Jimmy Fallon show called lips, lip sync battles. And so that turned into its own TV show. People would see that, go to the app store, They had a segment on the Jimmy Fallon show called 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 keyword hijacking that. That's cool.

So, yeah, very smart there. They gained visibility through the App Store, Lipsync. 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. Who are like. And this was happening. This was already happening with the Kardashians. She ended up 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, Musical.ly focuses, like they find the product market fit around lip sync videos. They change the onboarding flow to as soon as you download the app, it's like, let's make your first lip sync videos. They changed the onboarding flow to as soon as you download the app, it's like, let's make your first lip sync video. It's not just like a blank canvas, pick a song with lip sync to it. And musical artists actually start flipping the model and growing on TikTok by promoting their music. And Old Town Road was the first example by Lil Nas X. Yeah. And then at this time it became suddenly every artist you could blow up over. What was cool here is American, any artist globally could become a star overnight by having the right song.

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 uh procter and gamble like procter

and gamble makes a bunch of great soaps everybody's you know i got that you know 500 views and we just won't get 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 and you're in an algo feed, like a TikToker, you could, you could fluctuate by two orders of magnitude.

Yeah. Yeah. And you have, you know, podcasts allow you to do things like, uh, Ricky Bobby and Talladega nights where he sold the windshield. Exactly.

And, it's harder to sell the windshield on Tik TOK. Yeah. Yeah. It's very hard to make the integrated content, even if you're doing stuff in the background i've seen i 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 uh mostly because it was very young audience and we don't want to advertise nicotine to kids so we we stayed away from it but

um but i don't 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 D'Amelio. 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, it can actually be explained in under 60 seconds. Like it needs to be very precise. And you remember this time Snapchat was also, they launched their whole creator fund.

They were paying out like a million dollars a day, which was to see that money um going to someone other than just uh the team yeah exactly well i mean that's a great bridge to uh have you have you listened to the i think it's a light speed or something what alex you did a a talk about how he sees building a social network and it's seen as like one of the defining moments in like social network thought leadership essentially yeah and he he compares building a social network to founding a country initially creators are attracted to the platform with the promise of fame and potential wealth creation the first step is to centralize the economy sounds familiar and ensure initial talented creators succeed uh 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 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.

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 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, Solana'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 uh 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 tikt 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 it's sort of elevating content that's pro-Russia. 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 the Chinese government has carried out. And so all this stuff is is it's not a conspiracy there's enough there's a body of proof that tiktok it became a very strategic asset the most it's a it's digital psychological warfare yep and 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, Musical.ly 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 Musical.ly, Alex Zhu, 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, Musical.ly 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. 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 um uh and so thank you for the banana ben yeah and so uh in late of 2017 bite dance uh which was already pretty huge they launched douyin tiktok's chinese version and that has to be the one the

really the one that got away because imagine if zack had another app with 100 million americans or just this perfect ad platform of that has this amazing social graph that has this amazing uh you know interest graph well you know that would be doing this is the flip side of the 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 monopoly over social networking but uh if if he had a little bit looser reign during this time he could have acquired tiktok and we wouldn't be in this mess of a situation well it's it's even i mean the deal fell fell through for unknown reasons and it's totally possible that that that alex wanted to do the deal yeah and there were certain players i don't think it was actually the american

ftc that blocked the deal no it's much more likely chinese mtc 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 pooh memes on the day of the acquisition it would have been a nightmare nightmare yeah uh and so bite dance had launched douyin chinese tiktok's version and so uh musically is facing like competition because they want to grow internationally but now they're getting pressure from bite dance so bite 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 stuff like you're going to face for you with reels, Snapchat's doing stuff. You're going to face a lot of pressure. Maybe the time to get out is now. And so eventually, Douyin is launched as TikTok in the US because they do the acquisition. Towards the end, ByteDance launches TikTok internationally

as a shot across the bow against Musical.ly. Musical.ly is struggling to enter the Chinese market and they entertain acquisition talks from two other chinese companies um tencent is a big investor and acquirer of content around the world while bite dance has never taken an investment from tencent alibaba or baidu um and uh ten cents should have gotten tiktok because that 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 $1 billion, which feels low now, honestly.

I mean, it's like a $100 billion company. But maybe worth nothing. We'll see. Although they probably made well over $1 billion in free cash flow. The other thing is I don't... ByteDance 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 officer, $5 million by chance. You could have gotten out of that position.

But for the big, for the big shareholders, there was actually a proposal at one point for like a one time repatriation of, of American money that's stuck in China and, and just kind of do some sort of trade deal that says like hey we're gonna like decouple a little bit and we're gonna let this happen and everyone's gonna and we're gonna figure out what the the terms of that trade are to get that done um but uh 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 combined the apps and there was just TikTok and then TikTok was the number one advertiser on Meta? Well, 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 a good version 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 uh they duped the back-end database and created a new and combined app putting in the app stores but you remember instead of when meta was like basically, it made sense for them to take because it was billions of dollars they spent. I think they advertise on Snapchat even more, which is really bad. And that was that sort of catch-22 where you're just kind of...

Yeah, you want the money, but 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 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 mess. CFIUS is supposed to review every international acquisition of American company,

and they got the TikTok call wrong because they're just like, that's something dumb like lip syncing app. Like who cares? Like this isn't US 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 Musical.ly in 2016.

And then they launched their own TikTok competitor, Lasso, in 2018 that I think flopped, but then eventually they figured it out with Reels. So in October of 2019, Zuck – Oh, I remember Lasso. I don't think I ever really used it, but I probably demoed it for a little bit. That's the thing. Zuck is not afraid to fail, which is cool. So in October of 2019, Zuck gives 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, as a national security threat and a threat to Western values and ways of life. Sivius' review was opened on the Musical.ly acquisition in 2019, potentially leading to a reversal of the acquisition,

but it was not reversed. Zuck. That's the... Yeah. what's the right analogy for zuck 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 uh it's always good when you can say that your number one competitor and threat to your your business model is a national security threat yeah we should say uh all-in podcast is a national security 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 algorithmic feeds 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 home page and see like the videos you subscribe to it was a huge deal when they flipped on that on youtube uh 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 some people benefited some people benefited and and and the the whole all the content became more algorithmically

driven you see 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're you cannot count on your uh fan base or your subscriber base like seeing every video so you have to win in the free market every single time which is yeah uh difficult but also gotta earn it and it just kind of depends on the yeah and your 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 oh it was flip it was flip so funny they were like very similar videos i think released within the same 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 the content creation is you just need to put a lot of stuff exactly so it's not like you're sitting there you're like yeah that my nike video is actually good i'm proud of it but at the same time it's kind of on you you that something could have been better thumbnail the title or whatever what that tells me is like is like i think the channel has like 500k subscribers probably about five percent of those are like true fans that watch everything regardless of the title yeah 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've just gone out in the algorithm and done well. Yeah. But yeah, it's, it's, it's a, it's a knockout drag out fight there.

And so, yeah, you either have to be really, really good at nailing the algorithm every single time. I was thinking consistency, consistency matters. The creators that sort of train their audience that we release every Friday at 9 a.m.

and people are kind of waiting for that. And at a certain point, you can also get to a place where you're averaging views out. So it's like, yeah, you might have a miss that gets 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 three million views every single month and i'm counting on that so i'm running ads against yeah and i and and somebody who's you know i bought tens of millions of dollars of youtube creator ads through branded native by my first company um creators would always tell me i get 5 million views a month. And I would tell them I do not care because I'm going to buy an ad on one of those videos. So I'm going to price the ad based on your least performing videos. Because if I can't go back to the advertiser and say, you paid thinking you were going to get 200 000 viewed and you got 20 000 views yep they're going to be pissed well there's there's another thing with

that where uh 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 uh 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 people that just randomly saw my viral video, they don't care about what I'm selling. And so they won't buy it. But sometimes impressions matter. 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 cover them down the line so but but there is like a very uh there's like a trade ratio there for for the true fans watching versus so there's always this question especially on tiktok it's like how many true fans these people have or are they just going viral in the yeah in the feed um so let's swap uh swap over to sir techery's analysis ben thompson uh has written about the tech talk ban many many times are we starting with his the yeah tech talk ban approaches generational implications sao hong shu which i guess the red book uh i wrote about the tech talk 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 tick to banning tick tock back in 2020. And his objection was less about user data than about giving a foreign adversary militarily, economically,

and ideologically access to the hearts and minds of americans this is the point of don't let the russians own nbc during the cold war 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 of the Chinese Communist Party. Got him. 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 and uh prominent supporters and the fact that trump has found great success on tiktok uh 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 that's true again that attention i don't believe so that if the average person is spending an hour a day in the app, that attention will shift back to other platforms where Trump also is. And the narrative of this election 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 are all things to be, it's crazy. I was just thinking, how is Alex Jones back operating under the Infowars? Is he? I thought he lost all the IP, but he's putting out new content under Infowars. Really? Oh, I didn't know. It's crazy.

These things are so odd. Well, yeah, and also- I don't know who bought it. It's how do you- Did Ian buy it? Wasn't that a joke or was that real? Who? I thought the Onion.

Oh. You never know. You never know with what that but i think he's 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 kind of 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 not clear that Trump can do anything about the deadline, which is one day before his inauguration. It's so funny how these political decisions get like, it's like, oh, let's hit 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,

here's the reality of being a foreign company trying to build technology in China. They will let you come and they will let you build, but they will stall you. 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, um, uh, 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, 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 be there for like four hours and be like, this is ridiculous.

So Ben goes on and says, and speaking of freedom, while I think TikTok's argument that the ban is a violation of the First Amendment doesn't hold up because there are other forms available for creators and there's a Supreme Court precedent in terms of deterrence on such matters to national security concerns. It's worth acknowledging that banning TikTok would destroy an immensely an immensely valuable asset for anyone with a following on the platform. Indeed, this is an underexplored angle of social media censorship debate. Banning users doesn't cost them money, but a following is a valuable asset nevertheless. That too is another reason why it would have been much wiser to deal with this issue in 2020 than in 2025 the value destruction for tiktok users would have been much smaller point good point ben goaded yeah goaded analyst yeah you don't find this guy in the truth zone very often yeah uh so he says now again all of this analysis may be moot if the supreme court rules in by dance's favor which they did not uh 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. The guy who bought Bench was trying to put together a coalition. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I got a deal with him about that. So it's just very obvious that there's a ton

of people that would... It's a great asset. Yeah, 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 uh 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 ByteDance is in control of 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 ByteDance and 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 from somebody saying uh from the Lone Ranger saying you should create tech talk by the technology brothers. That's just pure grade A American software and run this back. And like, that's funny, but I, I don't believe that a, I think a lot of people will try to compete and use this moment to drive new downloads. But to me,

someone like Snapchat, who has a very similar audience, they already have the distribution. Why are they not rolling out an algo feed and trying to... They have one. They have one? Yeah. Nobody seems to care about it.

They do vertical content and they have a huge creator fund and people can get crazy monetization by taking it into Snapchat. There was a whole game for a few years of people just taking YouTube content, repurposing it for vertical Snapchatchat and making a lot of money yeah my my my question though is historically uh evan and the snapchat team were quick and they would launch new features and like they very they're scrappy right they had to be against meta but there's so there's a list of um you know somebody was

replying to one of my posts being like, bad take. Here's like 10 features that TikTok has that none of the other platforms have. 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 is Snapchat not moving faster as a company? And also, why don't they have a culture they only have one b-boing business jet yeah and they're just like a lot of teams waiting like commercial flights yeah that could be a big they have their own private yeah like hangar but uh 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 Meta for the first, I mean, Facebook. He certainly broke the glass. I mean, he just straight up. Smacked it. Stories is, I use stories now more than the main feed. Exactly. straight up smack and it's stories is now it's culture stories now more than the main feed exactly and so uh i bet you in the first few years of of facebook the culture was very much like we are inventors we are pioneering new user interfaces and new user experiences we created the feed they created the feed like they created all sorts of different things. They created Sloth. 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. Well, 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, 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. 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 build, you should build features that your users are excited to use. Exactly. Threads 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. I don't have the app. Yeah. And so, and so something happened with metas culture where it was like hey look you know we're just out here to build the best experience possible get our poo 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 the big scale it's hurting them at this 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 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 and revenue potential if you have no users right Yeah, exactly. So yeah, it's interesting. I do think there's some cool, like if I 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 can figure out sort of hacks and mechanisms to try to port. I thought that I own, remember when I owned Bantock and I was trying to pitch you on like shit to do with it. Maybe, I mean, I really think like 99% of the TikTok time spent on that app will flow to meta, YouTube shorts, and then Snapchat, I do think will be a beneficiary. But maybe they capture 5%

of 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 a 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. It's kind of interesting how Facebook marketplace is still as relevant as ever seemingly with everyone, even though the main app you know nobody i know is posting on

there yeah but older people do yeah uh for sure uh and then so ben takes the the opposite tact and says uh 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 boomers. One potential beneficiary could actually be Snapchat, 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, not be real, but what was the app that you had to take a picture of? I don't know. No, he had, what was Alex Ma's app that you had to like take a picture every i don't know no he had what was what was alex ma's app where i don't like you know this benchmark led the series a front back no i was one he had a social audio app paparazzi oh paparazzi where you take pictures of your friends okay which was which was a cool yeah yeah 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 and then it goes on

your feed like that that so my my take on new social networks is that the the arrow of progress only moves in one direction and effectively you get sloppier as things, as time goes on. And so you, you really like, like the thing that will kill TikTok is not, oh, be real, take one picture per day. It's actually the thing that gets someone to lock in on TikTok for 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 iteration between Instagram 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 and 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 tab it's it's like rubber bandy sticky yeah 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 Then on X, they actually switched 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.

Do you remember being a kid on YouTube in the early days? I remember you'd have four or five of us around the one desktop computer, and everybody would be like, do this funny video. 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? Skateboard fall. 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 TikTok, you would have to have the camera always on the front facing camera, read the facial expressions of the person. and if you see that they're getting bored

you scroll to the next one that's and if you see them laughing if you see them laugh it 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 ultimate wirehook 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 or oh and then it's like oh that was shocking show them another shocking one and you're like oh i'm looking i'll show a different thing away or they're paying attention to know exactly and then maybe the viral loop could be the the camera is recording too and so if you like it you can post your response

and immediately do it it's like a reaction video so it's like, I'm watching the tip talk and it's like, I see something funny. I'm like, ha, that's funny. Oh yeah, that's good. Send,

send my reaction to my network of my friends. And so it's even more sloppy, even more brain rotty. Yeah. The, 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. But yeah, I do think that that's the idea. Instagram eventually, 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 don't like that. But you can effectively hands-free watch videos instead of just watching them 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 uh you get you get to be more viral i've noticed sometimes i'll 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 have if you leave your phone somewhere you walk away to do something else and then it's just replaying the video kind of annoying you want it to move the next one the addict the rat and you that's like exactly cocaine button yeah it wants it to just juice reward yeah the monkey juice reward um let's talk about little red book the little red book initially i posted you download Redbook, you're a trader that should be sent on the first boat to Beijing, or you should be forced to write the national anthem a thousand times. Yeah. You know, oh, say can you. Pledge of Allegiance.

Pledge of Allegiance. Yeah, yeah. Pledge of Alleg allegiance is better. Uh, but then I realized that American users are going on there posting and, uh, there's that, uh, senior partner at Andreessen, um, future GP, uh, woman, what, one of the venture twins, venture twins. Yeah. She was posting that, uh, there, uh, there was actually starting to, you know 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 five million dollars and your company doesn't work out they're going to take your house yeah 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. If your company doesn't work, like, you know, you don't lose your house. And all the Chinese founders were like, wait, what? Um, and, uh, and then I saw another thing that, uh, uh, creatine cycle, uh, uh, Atlas, he, um, he should really pick a name, Atlas or Creatine Cycle. I like both names. So Atlas posted.

Let's tighten up the brand, Atlas. So Atlas posted a screenshot. There was an American girl who posted a TikTok-style video, like an exercise gear. And he posted, China gave us COVID. We gave them gooning because all the comments, all the comments are just like, oh, wow.

I like these American girls. It's a real cultural exchange going on. Cultural exchange. Let's go. Let's give a little bit of background on Little Red Book. It's a Chinese video network that competes with Douyin by Dance's version of TikTok within China from a column on China Global Television Network's website, which is state-owned. The recent surge of foreign users flocking to a Chinese social media

app, Zahangshu, 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, ByteDance's claim, has been that the American government is banning TikTok because of free speech. And it's sort of this self-reinforcing thing where the people on TikTok are saying, I need TikTok. It's important to me. You're hurting businesses. it's a free speech outlet and then the chinese government is saying yeah look they just want to ban you because free speech they don't want you to it's so funny this idea that like the oh yeah 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, yeah. Meanwhile, the true American social media platforms are getting more racist, more homophobic. Oh yeah, like the R word. We can just say that now. Yeah, yeah. You have billion dollar executives. 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's bothered by the government in America. That's the most 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 was still calling it Twitter. When the entire point is that Americans can and will say whatever they want.

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

or two. In the meantime, all enjoy the memes and who knows, maybe there will be some sort of value that comes from this sort of cultural exchange. If anything, this little episode is a reminder of what was lost to the Great Firewall. And to take this full circle, that itself is a reminder that China started it. Ben is so good. 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 gotta man cook did tim cook he car is tim ben cooks who that piece it's great

ben thompson i mean he's also out there on the front lines living in taiwan so i forgot yeah i remember that and so all this stuff hits really hard a woman from taiwan i think so um but yeah i mean he's been deeply involved in analyzing this. I mean, he was writing about this back in 2020. If Taiwan is ever invaded. We're getting him an 8.37. We're going to land. We got to take the chopper into Taiwan.

Yeah, protect Ben Thompson for sure. TSMC, we can rebuild. We cannot rebuild. There's only one Ben Thompson. There's only one Ben Thompson. There are plenty of people that can do chip fab uh over the last week the this is from 2020 uh wait should we yeah let's flip over to solana i mean this is this is good this is a lot of older stuff i don't know that we need to go through a banger first line from solana all is fair in love and info war let's go

strong start you have the article too? No, no. Why don't you read this one? You want me to read this? Okay. Solana says, Last week following a classified hearing with officials from the FBI and Justice Department, which we still know nothing about and which for some reason almost nobody has covered,

a bipartisan group of lawmakers resurrected Trump's attempt at TikTok divestiture, which would force TikTok's Chinese parent ByteteDance, to sell the company. There's no forcing the CCP. They're strong in that regard. That'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. Well, that is actually like it's a smart move from them to be like yeah our our data centers are in texas yeah but this time around in a surprise political twist the democrats are relatively quiet on the issue while republicans the driving force behind divestiture under trump are loudly divided the other thing here we haven't even covered this we should hit dgi on on Monday because they're the next target. DGI this last week raised the,

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 geofencing system that you can't even fly it at like Yosemite because like that's national land they have a no drone warn no drone yeah yeah rule and so that gets baked into the madness and you just can't turn on yeah it's responsible like you know free speech is important and also they decided they decided this week i i'm guessing they were that i'm guessing their point of view

was we're gonna get banned let's get. Because DGI is actually insane, right? It is crazy. It is. If you could create, like, let's say you're 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 a spy that's a robot that sends all the data back to you, and it actually gets purchased by U.S. consumers who fly it on your behalf across the entire... Map everything. So they can map everything.

And so I think DGI is probably like, yeah, we're cooked here. Let's just take away the restrictions and capture kind of as much data. Because DJI, 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 DJI drone.

It's just a rational decision. Just like it's a rational decision for a lot of consumers to open TikTok. So they're next. I'm looking forward to that um and that one's gonna be rough because there are not a lot of great american drone companies and well and also your hardware device that u.s consumers have purchased that they're gonna say you what you bricked my dgi like basically i mean i think that i think that the main thing is stopping the flow of apple

bricks that brought us yearly so we can't be too mad 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 uh 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-kart some of our listeners do yeah but 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 the dji air is literally the wings fold down and you 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 after israel like yeah yeah yeah they could probably 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 the fourth 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 bad but if they took over all the drones that are flying right now you would have like a thousand drones in the air like there just aren't that many flying at a given time so i don't think it's that much of a threat but um it should still be yeah it's a beautiful beautiful like i i have to respect china's work on this like getting millions of drones that have cameras and microphones into American hands. The surveillance stuff is for sure real.

All islands. It's good. Yeah. You know that in China, you can't drive Teslas 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, 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, so Trump has had to change her heart around TikTok. 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 Solana to tell you. His name is Jeff Yass, a major GOP donor and an investor in ByteDance, therefore TikTok, presently sitting on a stake in the company worth over $30 billion. Insane.

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

Yeah. For years, for years, Yas has both supported Paul and lobbied hard against TikTok 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. DJ, you really best have a monopoly on drones. Write a letter.

Write a letter. Let's call out Jeff Yass come on Jeff you're welcome to come on the show you've got the AUM for it anyways this all yeah anyways

Solana calls it an incredible scandal and of course he's probably one of the very few people that's actually writing about this um and rand paul is posting trump helped solve tiktok data problem through project texas such a such a scam that they doesn't have a good overview of what project texas is in there i wanted to see that yeah so a brief history lesson on project texas so this was developed when people said hey tiktok is clearly, you know, storing all this data in China. So Project Texas was developed by TikTok, not the government 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's 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 I'm going to skip forward a little bit. It's worth noting every high-profile TikTok defender has felt the need to lie about the bill in order to make their critique even remotely palatable, right? But despite their insistence to the contrary, TikTok has not been quote unquote banned. There is no bill to ban TikTok. There is presently a bill in play to force a CCP controlled company to sell TikTok, which would remain in operation but free of the CCP. Politicians and public figures getting this wrong are doing so purposefully. And while the question

of TikTok's existence might be understandably controversial, why would it matter so greatly to any American that the CCP specifically maintain control of the spy app? This brings me to Vivek Ramaswamy, 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 in that I literally understand the motive. But to the best of my knowledge, Yass isn't paying Vivek, but Vivek's supposed to be a nationalist, naturally amenable to a more symmetric trade. So what gives? Then he provides an update here. I guess it was after they released.

While it was basically impossible to find on Google, a reader tipped me off. Turns out Jeff Yass has funneled millions of dollars into Vivek's pack. So Jeff, Jeff. Send us some money and then we can start promoting TikTok so I

I don't I don't know Jeff but he's acting a little bit like a traitor here I'm not gonna lie like I understand he's holding 30 billion of ByteDance stock but doesn't ByteDance have some value outside of

yeah wind down the position for sure. Yeah, wind down the position. It's not like it goes to zero. ByteDance has other business lines. The cost base for that investment was nothing compared to $30 billion. So you could have rotated out,

but at the same time, you have to imagine ByteDance wanted big American shareholders this whole time, and they probably told him, nope, you're not getting ByteDance wanted big American shareholders 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 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 uh you know getting involved in in uh geopolitical uh psychological warfare 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 new the now standard bit of band 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 TikTok that he himself popularized months before his first pivot in favor of the CCP. Then he drew a false equivalency between ByteDance's actual legal obligation, given it's a Chinese company, to share American data with the CCP and Airbnb's scandalous sale of U.S. user data, which led to a national uproar in high-profile firings. Vivek's position, yes, sending data to is 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 yeah i think we're actually in it

and it's because people like ben thompson people like mike solana are running their own this 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 debunked. The bill targets companies from China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea. But the second bit consists of a more cleverly constructed piece of rhetoric. Sure, a broad privacy bill targeting sloppy American companies in addition to literal Chinese spies sounds great. But Vivek knows how hard it is to pass legislation.

He knows a small handful of companies pose outside 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, 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 a regional bank. Back then, in the case of Silicon Valley banks collapse, he fell on standard libertarian rhetoric entirely out of step with this 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 at every other bank should be protected.

Odd behavior for a nationalist who presumably sees interest in the ongoing existence of an American business ecosystem. I mean, this is the 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 Townsend was debating this. The last thing I would say, divestiture is way too moderate to ban the app. That's Solana's position, which I agree with. And great Coogan's law coinage. Solana often refers to it just as the spy app, which I love.

Yeah. Yeah. It is the spy app. It's 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 this. Exactly. But when, 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 pro banning TikTok? And he quotes Ralph Waldo Emerson, his essay in self-reiance, 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 put the blinders on and just say, I believe in free speech at all costs 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 uh this is just it's just an

important thing whenever you're thinking about these like difficult tech and political issues to not get too focused on a specific uh consistency and actually and actually try and understand the whole picture which i think is what we try to do today yeah and vivek um he's had some hilarious moments and he's great it reminds me of of obama in many ways and and um and uh newsom in their ability to just yap like some of the greatest yappers of all time yeah totally um but it's so easy to point out the consistencies inconsistencies with his and and what you're saying is it's okay to be inconsistent in terms of application of these ideologies yes but in vivek's case, it's, okay, you were super, you know, you were ready to let the

startup economy just burn. Yep. Even though you're a populist. Yeah. And then now you're flip-flopping on something that, I don't know, I truly believe that anybody that's taking donations from a major ByteDanceholder yeah 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 um you know i i

believe that's like traitor behavior and i don't believe that vivek has a place in the u.s government after what i've seen here we'll see how it shakes out but maybe maybe that's it around you know one thing one thing our audience can rely on us for we do not get into politics yeah well let's uh let's go to something um completely 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 so yesterday yesterday we put out a

call to action uh if you leave us a review on spotify itunes or wherever you listen to podcasts please put an ad in it or your whatever it could be an ad for you personally it could be an ad for your business could be ad for your parents business for a different company that you just have an affiliate company like if you love ramp yeah do it put a ramp ad in there and we'll so every uh every review uh we will read out on the show and so this is just our little way of you know do a little for the show the show will do a little for you exactly one hand washes the other yeah here we go so the first one comes from uh varun ram ganesh over at warp he says need that bottle of dom now he says great podcast i am the hairdresser for jordy and

john together they've given me millions of dollars for my 40th birthday jordy gave me a shiny I bottle of Dom now. He says, great podcast. I am the hairdresser for Jordy and John together. They've given me millions of dollars for my 40th birthday. Jordy gave me a shiny red F40 and personally delivered by John on his 737. It is. Uh, and he's not wrong here. I mean, he's got out work and his,

his day, you know, his day job is shit posting and building, you know, one of the top payroll companies in the world. But then sort of nights and weekends, he's a celebrity hairdresser. We had to beg. We had to beg to get in.

He said, you guys aren't real celebrities. You're niche and internet micro celebrities. You don't actually. Mini cells. You can't afford the kind of cuts I give. And we worked out some in-kind trades and we made it happen and our hairs never look better john so it's been thank you to um bg yeah uh let's go to anthony barrett uh berardi berardi uh he says precede round is filling up fast get in early

while you can he says shout out to the brothers uh technology brothers i think that's illegal i don't think general i don't think you can generally solicit but but but nice try we're gonna take it as he did this as a joke yeah it's a joke and we're an entertainment show so we're gonna read it out and maybe so he says shout out to the brothers technology brothers has quickly become my go-to source for all things tech business politics, except they never discuss politics on the show. Thank you. From the size gong to low tan bangers to Jory's frequent ankle exposure, this podcast has it all. This Technology Brothers review is sponsored by my startup,

SitchRymer. SitchRymer is an early stage material science company manufacturing carbon negative high performance resins and plastics from citrus waste. Our resin cost and perform the same as petroleum based incumbents and remove 1.5 tons of CO2 from the atmosphere for every ton of material produced. Citrimer is actively raising a pre-seed to expand their engineering team, conducting manufacturing demos with customers and reach pilot production scale. Send a DM to a Badari,

a Badari Bar, Barardi, sorry, on X to learn about how SitchRimer can help you with your sustainable material needs. So thank you, Anthony. We appreciate you.

Yeah. Just to be clear, we don't give financial advice. We don't share investment opportunities. We take the full allocation ourselves typically, but honestly, super cool. If you want to do the deal, you're going to need some sharp elbows to keep us out

of that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. By the time you're listening to this, we'll have taken 200% of the allocation. With super parada. Keep it up. Yeah, keep it up. Thank you for the review. You might just buy the whole company and fire the CEO. Sorry, Anthony. It's a rather good job

really sharp elbows we're going to lever you up venture debt let's put some insane confidence in there it needs to be backed 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 over month growth

all the equity holders are wiped out yeah and you get taken over and your house gets taken too yeah yeah so um china's right reach out to baldo if you're looking for some financial engineer support i like the baldus like he studies he's bald to say his first name and people know on the show baldus studies finance at cornell and economics like he's an expert financial engineer there we go studied from the greats great okay so thomas disney i guess from the disney fortunes who made his money in entertainment great great uh so the air to the disney fortune uh says trying to load and unload missiles in ohio help with an andrel 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 Slip 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.

That's a great ad. Bringing it back to the show. One hand washes the other. Understood the mission. Delivered perfectly. We might have to read this one again. And it's great to see an heir to such a dynasty as the Disney fortune.

Right. Doing something in hard tech. He's also looking for help with an Anduril contact. Good luck. There's definitely some. Luke Metro, hit up Thomas Disney. Make some stuff happen. Love to see it.

So let's go to a fantastic thread by Eric Gleiman, CEO of Ramp. We were riffing about this idea a couple weeks ago, maybe months ago, talking about a lot of people are complaining about waste in the federal government. Doge is in the air. Everyone's talking about government efficiency.

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 told me- It's funny because we were joking about it, but it was not a joke at all. Exactly. We were 100 know clear that the the finance that the government the federal government yeah and every aspect of our

government should have better visibility into their spend no it started as a joke and then and then immediately i i was just wondering like wait so like when a dod employee employee goes on a trip like how do they actually categorize their receipts? Do they have a system? Probably not. Everything runs on paper and pencil. I've worked for the government. It's awful. Bringing in new technology makes a ton of sense. 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 businesses balance 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 prioritized growth over profits. That is, until the 2022 market crash forced them to do the reverse. The result improved cash flow margins from 3% to 16%. Meanwhile, in the public sector, government spending only went up while companies- I got to say, Gleiman's a very presidential CEO. Totally. When you listen to this, you just get this sense of confidence, right he's you know not talking down to you he's explaining some of

these sort of more complex issues he's uh illustrating them um so anyways uh one of the zoomers will say i'm no glazing but uh it's hard not it's it's hard not to glaze when you're talking about the most important financial well let's uh 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 it take a page out 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 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 drag holding organizations back. What does this look like for the government right now? $100 billion in Medicare and 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. I 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.contrary.com. Thank you to Contrary Research and the Ramp team for your hard work on this. Yeah.

Very interesting to kind of start with something that was kind of a joke, but then we realized there was a deeper meaning. And then that's like kind of the heart of comedy is like, there's usually, it's funny if there's like some sliver of truth and then to see the contrary people and the ramp team go and dig into what that would actually look like is, is pretty fascinating. I, I want to go a step further though. I want to see a much deeper dive. We were talking about this, like talking to the Andoril guys and some people who do government contracting, like how does the money

for a missile actually get transferred like like what rails are they using i want to know the full tech stack 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 you know the 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 into a physical box. That was back in the 80s.

It was 2010. 2011. Isn't that insane? That's crazy. One of the biggest sources of alpha at work was just using Google Maps and spreadsheets, which they were not procured by the US government. It was just using google maps and spreadsheets which were not they were not procured by the u.s government it was just it was just my personal account and there's so much of that even in military context there's stories about um uh soldiers using google maps and and satellite imagery from 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 uh yeah it's fascinating rough and of course like you can't do that on the payment side in the same way although the real thing here is by the time the u.s federal government does sign up for ramp because it really is only a matter of time you already have uh the kamala campaign was using it you're sort of one step you could imagine yeah you know if kamala had one she might have come in and said i love this ramp software 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 domino

effect of of converting the federal government to a to a customer yeah i would hate to see a situation where the u.s government resolves that 530 billion dollars in waste but we don't get credit yeah that would be a disaster crazy yeah 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 OpenAI trains their model, their next model on this episode, it'd 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 me tell you about the Technology Brothers podcast. Originally riffed out by Geordie 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. I think he had over a thousand likes. He says, genuine career advice. Hang this poster in your room or closet and it's a uh a picture of a 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, and I like this because, uh, obviously, you know, like we talk about feng shui, we talk about, um, astrology and, and mantras and like,

even like kind of silly inspirational stuff like this does actually work its way into your brain. And if you, if you surround yourself with these kind of like, was that in a closet? 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 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, Geordie. No, exactly. But if I call someone a fucking idiot, that hits just as hard as the R word for me. Freaking idiot. The freaking was very funny. I need that yeah i want that uh for for uh my son's room but just just replaced with freaking freaking just freaking you can just freaking do things

uh let's let's do one more uh banger post and then we'll move on to a promoted post in a bucket poll. 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 but i mean we gave nat friedman brother of the week you've heard these stories in the pod before but uh you can't give him enough credit for setting just a very different pace of play for the the tech elite and i i have a i have a know, evolved opinion on the scroll stuff. I, uh, I posted recently that, um, the only alpha left in 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 knowledge for himself. Okay. And he's consuming it and then just deleting it out of destroying the original scrolls. Because in the end end and he's probably going to be the last guy with a job yeah he's going to be the last man with just a good old-fashioned you know yeah what what should that's next project be it seems like he's kind of crushed the skulls i'd like him 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 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 takes applies some of this i think you can just go to the the louvre yeah. A lot of that's already been done. A lot of the hard work has already been done. 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, you know, let's send a landing force. Let's like take one

of their most nice like vacation towns, right? Like let's start 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 burning yeah i want to see someone build a car that's 200 feet long yeah Yeah, like kind of a tank. A tank. Sort of steamroller. Yeah, yeah. With the steamroller thing.

Exactly. Those huge dump trucks that move like mining equipment around. Yeah. And they're like 100 feet tall. Wasn't there something like that in The Incredibles? Yeah. You remember that it was a drill bit in the front so you could actually go through the earth too?

That's – If Elon had a yacht with a drill bit, an earth yacht that could just like 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 like let's look down right the ocean's a great mystery but the core is an even greater mystery you don't hear about people you know yeah people go deep in the ocean there does seem to be also people going in the mega alpha and submarines i mean there's all these yacht, but very few people build submarines correctly. That Rangai Ocean Gate was a disaster. I know, but that was just a psy-op

to get people to stop, to get people against these sort of amateur submarines. The reality is, if I look down your phone, you talk with a bunch of bean-ears 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 and

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 the new sun valley yeah going to atlantis yeah anyways we'll have to do a deep 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 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 it. This is a, this is a promoted post of a shill. Locky, Locky, uh, says, I almost never shill my investments, but after a week with Impulse Labs, it is very hard not to. Had high expectations, but it has consistently exceeded.

Speed to boil water is incredible. Temperature control, ease of use, all perfect. Love Impulse Labs. I don't know a ton about this company, but it's kind of seemingly like they timed, 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. Yeah, better than yeah the gas stove better than fire one of my first inventions as man so there's a little bit of hubris you're really trying to do the guys like yeah i'm actually it's promethean effort yeah promethean effort to reinvent the stove um and uh hopefully he won't be struck down for his hubris yeah but i think he's built different he's built different yeah yeah and he might even be better than the guys. The CEO of Impulse? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

He's certainly 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 we can just go back and forth finish the episode korean barbecue style yeah yeah sure so in bull's laps if you send us send us one of these we'll start doing korean barbecue episodes where we just yeah in between the dom episodes we'll do exotic barbecues on you know yeah yeah. You've been really – so John – this will 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. 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 uh just just from a from a physiological perspective you don't want to be eating lamb

exactly even though it's you know 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 yeah let's go to a uh bucket pool oh from none other than baldo congratulations baldo uh baldo says anyone else miss Decel Greta yapping about climate change on the TL? Let's go. I love that we printed this out with 28 Vs. So, we sniped this before, clearly, like, within seconds 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 scroll bar there on the screenshot i refer to this like being like a big game hunter on the timeline when you're when you see something you screenshot it so fast the scroll bar hasn't disappeared from your phone so it shows up in the screenshot this is like i had to screenshot that that's good it's great yeah i uh i gotta say did she fall off after the 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 plays a character.

She'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 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 so my 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 teal 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 nothing. Let's go to Nir. Nir says, we kind of created the matrix and all it took was infinite scroll plus short form video, yet billions are trapped in it. Techno optimist for everything except short form video.

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 referenced earlier on the show. Yeah, sometimes 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 Apple Vision Pros on and was just fully locked in.

That's almost like a secondary. how influential sci-fi is on human development and innovation that if you really wanted to influence the future now you would be making sci-fi movies that seems to be in the same way that you can have an impact through building technology companies if you created an angel studios just for new sci-fi concepts right now you could be influencing the world in 30 or 50 years and be thinking about okay what does the world look like with asi what does the world look like where every home has a nuclear reactor yeah we're talking to sham uh sham sankar about this at palantir and cto yeah he just started a new film studio and jim carmen's starting to do his first sci-fi film like no way yeah no way and so can we can we cameo in that jason yeah jason i think you need two

two guys that can yap yeah where are 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 and and but it also to have enough cultural impact and get into them and you have to do it ho style blockbuster. I think it. Yes. But I think that you only get that. You only earn the right to do the Dune style treatment. That's what I'm saying. Unless you have a brilliant idea first. And we are, we have a short,

we have a shortage of like great ideas about the future of sci-fi. People are very uncertain about what things will look like. We've already mapped out like flying cars, robots, LLMs, 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 beaners to travel deep in the earth's cross for you know and get and get to china in an hour but yeah i mean there aren't i i need to dig into it because there's the Hugo awards that do,

uh, the best sci-fi books of the year and the best sci-fi shorts of the year. And I bet if you dig through some of those award-winning sci-fi shorts, there's some interesting concepts that haven't really percolated into the zeitgeist yet, but it's always hard. It's like, you know,

it's, it's, it's hard to find like the next cutting edge music trend unless you're really in it and going to shows 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, Death and Rob love this stuff and it's really cool uh have you ever watched 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 uh where the the licensed short form uh short science fiction stories and then had uh cgi and animation studios go and create, uh, like film versions of these animated versions of these. Um, and it's great.

And you can watch them in some of them are three minutes and some of them are 10 minutes and some of them are funny. Some of them grapple with like really, so there's like a whole one that's like a horror story basically. Uh, and, and it's a cool way to kind of surface these, uh, these like famous sci-fi stories in like a lighter touch where 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 mirrors it's like yep you know talking you know basically demonstrating the horrors of technology but there could be a use 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 without tech journalists and tech journalists can't exist without us. Exactly. Yeah, you can't just do the journalists, 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. No one's going to watch that. It's just boring.

Yeah. You need conflict. You need the rocket to break. And Musk 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 a heads up. I got basically like... 20 minutes? Like 10 minutes. some heads up i got like basically like 20 minutes um like 10 okay uh 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 uh people were like screenshotting the next to elon's like most aggressive posts. But Aaron Slodov took the assignment literally and delivered.

He says, be me, human living in 2024. Ancestors crossed oceans in 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 mars missions we're testing rockets right now that feeling when born just in time to witness humanity becoming a multi-planetary civilization great post great post a lot of good stuff great poster yeah great poster great event thrower great great builder i feel like i feel like x has been pretty positive this week. Yeah, ever since Elon said, hey. Yeah, and also the fires 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 the rocket again. And it was like, 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 do it? Will they won't? Won't they do it?

And this time it was just like, oh, yeah, they caught it again. Like, okay, it's old news. And the crazy thing was the visual of everything they sent up. The breaking up? The breaking up. Yeah, because the actual Starship disintegrated. Yeah, yeah. Which I think was like a failure for that test. but still they caught the booster, which is cool.

Yeah. So kind of like some good, some bad, 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 sentiment.

Back to work. And then other SpaceX employees were showing, like, you missed. Here's what you missed. And it's, like, showing all the rubble and explosions and all the times it didn't work. And it really is, you know, incredible. 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 does it in a matter of minutes. It's not like it's up there for like days and then it comes back it comes back down yeah and and then they refuel it and it's ready to go and you can you can imagine you can see that at least structurally the 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 so amazing. But what's really amazing is the machinery for high-throughput rocketry that Elon's obsessed with. And this is the same thing with manufacturing Teslas at scale. The guy just loves scaling up 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, he's a mass monster. He's a mass monster, uh, mass to orbit getting big. Uh, 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. I, I, I went through this at, I think around 21, 22. And, uh, 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, if I'm up late sending emails, well, 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 um is that

is that how you interpreted the love section of that that would do that was the only thing that i that i didn't fully understand about the post was the healthy way to live a life like business i mean that's that was my interpretation of have if you have a love for business and love your craft and your life, which to me is family and friends. And I'm fortunate that we're not friends. We're strictly business partners. But I'm fortunate that I love the work and I love my life and I love that they intersect. So we have to have dinner. It's fine because we'll be able to do business the entire time.

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, was like yeah no actually 15 minutes of pleasant choosing in like two hours of like let's plan the next activation sarah was like hey just some feedback like if you're gonna get both families together and like you know we're gonna have like a nice dinner could you just like try to spend like it's fine if you spend like half the time 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 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. I went to dinner last night at Restoration Hardware. They have restaurants now. Yeah. All the food items are shaped like the cloud couch. 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 Montecito. 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 Herbert. That's great. I mean, I love getting a hot dog outside of a Home Depot. You can get them at Ikea Meatballs.

Yeah. Because it's great. It's a Costco model. Yeah. Chicken bake. You can get everything. I was like, so we're at Restoration Hardware restaurant. What's the equivalent of a chicken bake if I'm here?

Like, what's your specialty? What should I get? And they're just like, sir, please don't leave. We're going to have to escort you out. You've been away 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 up. No, no, no. We're going to do one more call to action. Okay. We want to advertise your companies. Unless you can afford a package in the six to seven figure range,

you're going to want to just skip the negotiation and just go straight to our review section, Spotify, Apple. Leave us reviews. Leave us a five-star review and mention something about the show but then uh 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