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

38:17Let'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 uh 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 spy app an influence channel and And it's not even, to be honest, it's not even about the fact that TikTok is putting a, you know, a CCP camera in the pocket of every American.

39:09The 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. And every single day 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, it's not a conspiracy. there's enough there's a body of proof that tiktok it became a very strategic asset yeah the most it's a it's digital psychological warfare yep and and just pulling the levers on what are we censoring what are we amplifying does have like an incredible impact on the the viewership which is like 100 million americans it's crazy um and so in 2016 musically had 10 million daily active of users and over 90 million users in total, up from 10 million the previous year.

40:21And 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 american social media app um in 2017 they decided to launch and grow in china having initially focused on the west and uh chinese business model for social app the chinese business model typically relies on direct monetization such as virtual goods gifting and tipping rather than advertising ice cream so good yeah content companies in china need to work closely with the ccp ensuring their content upholds the party's laws and wishes a different we really need to go live stop it stop it um uh and so thank you for the banana ben yeah and so uh in late of 2017 byte dance uh which was already pretty huge they launched doing tiktok's chinese version and then that's gonna be the one the really the one that got away because imagine if zuck 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 stuff this is the flip side of the elizabeth warren stuff of like yeah uh it like you know uh zuck might have a bit of a monopoly over social networking but uh if if he had a little bit looser reign during this time he could have acquired tiktok and we wouldn't be in this massive 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 it was the chinese ntc 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 byte dance had launched du yin 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 byte dance so byte dance kind of is like a carrot and stick situation going on hey we could buy your company pay you a bunch of money or we can compete with you internationally and close off this international market you know that Zuck is going to come for you with Reels.

43:03Snapchat's doing stuff. You're going to face a lot of pressure. Maybe the time to get out is now. And so eventually, Duyant has launched his TikTok in the US because they do the acquisition. Towards the end, By Dance launches TikTok internationally. There's 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. Tencent is a big investor and acquirer of content around the world while ByteDance has never taken an investment from Tencent, Alibaba, or Baidu. And Tencent should have gotten TikTok because that would have been on brand for them.

43:43But they kind of missed this. And so the acquisition goes through for between$800 million and a billion dollars, which feels low now honestly i mean it's like a hundred billion dollar company um but maybe worth nothing now we'll see although they probably made well over a billion dollars in free cash the other thing is is i don't bite dance has been a pretty liquid stock the secondary market i don't feel that bad for anybody who was any american that was in i disagree with that i i think that even though it's like a liquid stock it's actually very hard to repatriate dollars that are in china I think if you have like a 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 five million dollars you could have gotten out of that position yeah but for the big for the big shareholders there was actually a proposal at one point for like a one-time repatriation of yeah of American money that's stuck in China and and just kind of do some sort of trade deal that says like hey we're going to like decouple a little bit and we're going to let this happen and everyone's going to, and we're going to figure out what the terms of that trade are to get that done.

44:55Um, 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. Uh, and then people start worrying about TikTok's influence. I'm on 68. And do you remember when they, um, do you remember when they, they combined the apps and there was just tiktok and then tiktok was the number one advertiser on meta well they didn't they didn't combine the apps that's what's interesting what they did was they actually released a new app and then they drove downloads from one to the next yeah kind of a good version but i think they did they not allow you to port your followers yeah i think you did 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 store but you remember instead of when meta was like basically yeah they it made sense for them to take because it was billions of dollars being spent i think i think they advertise on snapchat even more which is really hard yeah you should but all and that that was that sort of catch 22 where you're just kind of yeah you want the money but you know you're also forking over your users to a different app it's rough um and so uh 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.

46:17The data for the version TikTok in Western countries is stored in the US, but legally it is owned by ByteDance, which may be forced to give the data to the Chinese government if requested. There are concerns about whether TikTok censors posts about the Hong Kong protest, and US politicians are calling for the Committee on Foreign Investment in the US to review TikTok. And this was like the huge mess. CFIUS is supposed to review every international acquisition of American company. And they, uh, and, uh, they, they got the TikTok call wrong because they're just like, ah, it's something like dumb, like lip syncing app.

46:50Like who cares? Like this isn't, 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 musically in 20, in 2016. And then they launched their own TikTok competitor lasso in 2018 that I flopped but then eventually they figured it out with reels so in october of 2019 i remember a lot so i never i don't think i really used it but i probably demoed it for a little bit that's the thing duck is not afraid to 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 civius review was opened on the musically the acquisition in 2019 potentially leading to a reversal of the acquisition um but it was not zuck first that's that the um 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 threat i think people have said that um that's true it's actually true um yeah so uh i mean a lot of a lot of seismic shifts in the social media landscape because of TikTok huge shift to uh algorithmic feeds and uh and 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 uh 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 I switched to a recommended feed as the primary feed.

49:23And all the views went crazy because if you had - Some people benefited. Some people suffered. And 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 cannot count on your fan base or your subscriber base seeing every video. So you have to win in the free market every single time, which is difficult, but also got to earn it. And it just kind of depends on the. Yeah. And your point of view, we were talking about this yesterday. You released a video recently about Nike that did almost a million views.

50:01Nike got like 20 ,000 and then Visa got 600 ,000. Oh, it was flipped. It was flipped. So funny. And they're like very similar videos. I think released within the same. 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 yeah 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 yeah but at the same time it's kind of on you you that something could have been better yeah i'm nail 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 thumb they basically have like the notifications turned on or the subscriber feed um but that visa one got more views than my subscriber base therefore it must have just gone out in the algorithm and done well yeah um 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 also think there's only consistency matters the creators that sort of train their audience that we release every Friday at 9am and people are kind of waiting for that.

51:12And 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 3 million views every single month and I'm counting on that. So I'm running ads against. Yeah, and as somebody who's, you know, I bought tens of millions of dollars of YouTube creator ads through Branded Native, my first company. 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.

51:52So I'm going to price the ad based on your least performing videos, right? because if I can't go back to the advertiser and say, you know, you paid thinking you were going to get 200 ,000 views and then you got 20 ,000 views, they're going to be pissed. Well, there's another thing with that where I talked to a creator that has like millions of subscribers and he said views don't matter for actually driving conversions. What he says is that like I have a million followers, a hundred thousand true fans. If a video goes viral and gets 5 million views those like the hundred thousand 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 yeah you won't buy but sometimes impressions as an advertiser impressions matter and you want to get in front of those people and maybe you run a facebook ad against them later and yeah i'm down the line so but but there is like a very uh There's like a trade ratio there for the true fans watching versus, so there's always this question, especially on TikTok.

53:00It's like, how many true fans do these people have or are they just going viral in the feed? So let's swap over to Stratechery's analysis. Ben Thompson has written about the TikTok ban many, many times. Are we starting with his? Yeah, TikTok ban approaches generational implications. Sao Hong Chu. Well, Heng Shi Wan, Pizhou. The red book. I wrote about the TikTok ban when Congress was considering it, but have mostly stayed away from the topic given the uncertainty of whether or not it would actually happen. Well, this is the last update before the deadline, so time to catch up. To refresh, Ben Thompson wrote in favor of banning TikTok back in 2020.

53:37And 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 ByteDance'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.

54:14The 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 uh prominent supporters and the fact that trump has found great success on tiktok uh even so it's not 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 yep that attention and we'll shift back to other platforms And the narrative of this election was not, it's the TikTok election.

54:52It's the podcast election. And where do those podcasts live? Spotify, YouTube, RSS feeds. 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 also needs to be a 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 don't know. It's crazy. These things are so odd.

55:34Well, yeah, and also. I don't know who bought it. It's how do you. Did the onion buy it? Was that a joke or was that real? Who? I thought the onion. Oh. Or the guys of the onion. You never know. You never know what that is. But I think he was upset. But it just goes to show like banning. At this point, Alex Jones doesn't need the InfoWars IP. People just know Alex Jones. Yeah, and he also could just slap InfoWars on a video and kind of stop him from doing that. But anyways. So it's not clear that Trump can do anything about the deadline, which is one day before his inauguration. It's so funny how these political decisions get like, it's like, let's hit the deadline the day before, like the last possible day.

56:12It'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 the 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 so here's here's the reality of being a foreign company trying to build technology in china yeah they will let you come and they will let you build but they will stall you yeah they'll kick you off banking rails they'll do all this stuff to just make it so that you cannot succeed over there until a chinese clone is able to copy and learn enough about your features that they just do what you're trying to do and i experienced this i was um i was uh working out of a place called china accelerator one one word and it's basically like the yc of china yeah 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 when 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.

58:04I'd be there for like four hours. I'd be like, this is ridiculous. So Ben goes on and says, and speaking of freedom, while I think TikTok's argument that the ban is a violation of the First Amendment doesn't hold up because there are other forums available for creators and there's a Supreme Court precedent in terms of deterrence on such matters to national security concerns, it's worth acknowledging that banning TikTok would destroy an immensely 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.

58:39That too is another reason why it would have been much wiser to deal with this issue in 2020 than in 2025. The value destruction for TikTok users would have been much smaller. Good point. Ben, goaded. Goaded analyst. Yeah. You don't find this guy in the truth zone very often. So he says, now again, all of this analysis may be moot if the Supreme Court rules in ByteDance's favor, which they did not. it is also possible that TikTok is sold at the last minute to an American company. 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.

59:16Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I got a DM to 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 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 have her 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.

59:58TikTok 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 in China to carry this process to the very last hour in the hope of a reprieve. Indeed, the fact that the service is planning on locking out existing users, which isn't required by law, suggests that the goal is to raise an outcry and a last minute change of heart. All that noted, the most interesting and uncertain outcome of the ban is if it actually proceeds as planned and TikTok just suddenly disappears.

1:00:37Trump 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 tick tock 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 yeah and run this back and like that's funny but i i don't believe that I think a lot of people will try to compete and use this moment to drive new downloads.

1:01:18But 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? I 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 Snapchat and making a lot of money. Yeah, my question, though, is historically Evan and the Snapchat team were quick and they would launch new features. They're scrappy, right?

1:01:57They had to be against meta. But there's a list of, 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 the top. Yeah. I mean, you're, you're like, if you abstract that question, it's really just like, why, why is Snapchat not moving faster as a company? And, and also why don't they have a culture? They only have one Boeing business jet. Yeah. So they're just like a lot of teams waiting commercial flights. Yeah. That could be a big, they have their own private, like hangar at Van Nuys.

1:02:40but uh i do think that there is a little bit of potentially a culture where at at meta zuck kind of broke the glass on like it's it's okay to copy things yeah because i bet that like the like meta for the first i mean facebook certainly broke the glass i mean he just straight up smacked and in stories is now i use stories now more than the main feed exactly and so uh i bet you in the first few years of Facebook, the culture was very much like we are inventors. We are pioneering new user interfaces and new user experiences. We created the feed. They created the feed. They created all sorts of different things.

1:03:21They created the poke. They created the Kava brain. But then at a certain point, Zuck saw that Instagram was taking off and was like, we need to add pictures to our, we need to add photos to our product. And they actually launched Instagram. 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 he, like there must have been internally pushback against like, I'm a product manager. I'm an engineer. I like working on the cool stuff that's innovative. Why are you putting me on this copycat product?

1:03:56But 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 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. And so something happened with Metis Culture where it was like, hey, look, you know, we're just out here to build the best experience possible.

1:04:30get our poo up drive value shareholder value create the best company we don't want someone just coming along and eating our lunch so copying is not a pejorative at this company yeah i don't know if that's happened at snapchat i think at snap they might have a culture of like no we actually focus on like the innovation stuff which is a lot more it's harder to do at a big scale it's hurting them at this and it's more random like you can't guarantee that you're going to be innovation and it's so i i i think that most of our listeners will understand that it's it's much cooler to just be a massive business and do something less innovative than be a tiny irrelevant company that's doing something super innovative exactly it doesn't matter if you're super innovative in terms of impact and scale yep and revenue potential if you have no users yeah right exactly um so yeah and it's interesting like do you think i do think there's some cool like if i if i you know enjoyed building consumer social apps there are some cool things where you could you know create an app today that's like sign in you know and we will port over you know you know you can figure out sort of hacks and mechanisms to try to port i i thought that um i own remember when I unbanned it and I was trying to pitch you on like shit to do with it maybe I wonder if I mean I really think like 99 % of the TikTok time spent on that app will flow to meta YouTube shorts and then Snapchat I do think will be a beneficiary but maybe they maybe they capture 5 % of like the bleed over so uh there's another interesting section in this Ben Thompson article I had an interesting conversation with someone who operates in the consumer market and he was casually refer referring to different generations by their dominant social network.

1:06:21There's the Facebook generation, the Instagram generation, and the youngest cohort is the TikTok generation. For Instagram to extend its reach downwards by a generation would be a huge deal that would reverberate for years because that generation, if they can really pull them over to Instagram fully, they're just going to be able to get ad revenue from them for, you know, it's perpetuity because once you get locked in, there are a lot of people that are still using Facebook because that's their dominant generation and 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 weirdly facebook it's kind of interesting how facebook marketplace is still as relevant as ever yeah seemingly with everyone totally even though the main app yeah 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.

1:07:14Younger 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 is also, but there might also be an opportunity for a new social network, rare and improbable as that. I would, I would love to see, remember, you know, Alex Ma, he did, um, not be real, but the, the what was the oh the app that you had to like take a picture every i don't know now he had what was what was alex ma's app or i don't like you know this benchmark led the series a front back no i was one he had a social audio uh paparazzi oh paparazzi where you take pictures of your friends okay which was which was a cool 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.

1:08:37And when I was thinking about like, if I wanted to kill TikTok, like what would I actually do from first principles? If the goal was not to heal brain rot and also kill TikTok and get out of the CCP relationship, you have to think about it just from beating TikTok and then deal with the brain rot stuff later. And my conclusion was that you needed a TikTok feed that didn't require any input whatsoever. So if you look at the, if you look at the iteration between Snapchat or Instagram and Reels, the difference is that on Instagram, you see a square and then it only takes up a half of the screen real estate.

1:09:14And then you have to scroll and you have to scroll precisely because if you scroll too much that you might see one photo halfway at the top of one photo halfway at the bottom. Right. And so Reels, the innovation there was that it takes up the full screen. And so even the tiniest little 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 the next they actually switch to the next one it reminds me of america's funniest home videos which was at the time some of the most entertaining content in the world because it was just one video at a time i remember do you remember being a kid on YouTube in the early days where like, I remember you'd have like four or five of us around like the one desktop computer and everybody would be like, dude, that's funny.

1:10:02And then you'd just be sitting there being like, what was that one video? Skateboard fall. 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 laugh 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 ultimate ultimate wire 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 shocking show them another shocking one and you're like oh i'm looking at show a different thing away or they're paying attention exactly and then maybe the viral loop could be the the camera is recording too and so if you like it you can post your response and immediately duet it's like a reaction video so it's like i'm watching the tiktok and it's like i see something funny 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 yeah and then every one of our listeners are just figuring out how to properly monetize exactly exactly but yeah i i do think that i want to i like it's totally you know the instagram eventually you know you see an ad and to just buy the product you just have to go yeah yeah you know you don't even have to i mean i mean i've seen this pattern this pattern developed somewhat on x where if you get in the the video feed you click on one video then you scroll up you'll see one video and when that video ends sometimes it'll play the video twice but sometimes it just scrolls to the next one so you can hand a lot of people a lot of people don't like that yeah but you can but you can effectively hands-free watch videos yeah instead of just watching them loop, which requires you to move your thumb, which seems so minor, but that actually is a friction point.

1:12:11If you remove the thumb entirely, you get to be more viral. I've noticed sometimes I'll have a video playing on like a Reels type product. So YouTube or Reels. And it's kind of funny because if you leave your phone somewhere, you walk away to do something else, and then it's just replaying the video. It's kind of annoying. You want it. Just move the next one. the attic the rat and you that's like exactly cocaine button yeah and 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 if you download red book you're a trader that should be sent on the first boat to beijing uh or you should be forced to write the national anthem a thousand times yeah uh you know Oh, say can you...

1:12:57No, Pledge of Allegiance. Pledge of Allegiance is better. But then I realized that American users are going on there and posting. And there's that senior partner at Andreessen, future GP woman. Venture twins. Venture twins. yeah she was posting that uh there uh there was actually starting to you know founders were going on there and having conversations with the chinese founders if you don't know in china a lot of the venture funds are state funded and the founders have to sign like a full personal guarantee oh yeah so if you raise 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 for american founders were like yeah it's like it's actually like risk capital yeah if your company doesn't work like you know you don't lose your house and all the chinese founders were like wait what um and uh and then i saw another thing that uh uh creatine cycle at uh atlas he um he should really pick a name atlas or creatine cycle it's kind of we i like both names but so atlas posted now let's tighten up the brand yeah so atlas posted a screenshot there was like an american girl who posted like a tiktok style video like an exercise gear and he posted uh uh you know china gave us covid we gave them gooning because all all 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 and and let's go let's give a little bit of background on little red book it's a chinese video network that competes with duyin by dance's version of tiktok within china from a from a column on china global television network's website website uh which is state-owned uh the recent surge of foreign users flocking to a chinese social media apps uh zhao hong shu uh 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.

1:15:13As 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 alerted. And TikTok's claim, Bydance's claim, has been that the American government is banning TikTok because of free speech. and it's sort of this self-reinforcing thing where the people the people on tiktok are saying i need tiktok it's important to me yeah 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 i mean while the true american social media platforms are getting more racist yeah more homo oh yeah like the r word we can just say that now yeah yeah you have billion dollar exactly 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.

1:16:30Specifically, the article frames the TikTok refugee phenomenon as public dissatisfaction with the government, which of course it is. But what is lacking is the contextual understanding to realize that US citizens are publicly dissatisfied with the government as a matter of birthright. 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 US 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.

1:17:10It is not a good sign in terms of understanding that the author of this column is relying on random Twitter user quotes to make a point. I'm still calling it Twitter. When 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.

1:17:48And 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 i'll enjoy the memes and who knows maybe there will be some sort of value that comes from uh 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 you gotta this 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 got 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 feel you do 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 taiwan has ever invaded we're getting him a bit an eight we're gonna land the we got to take the chopper into taiwan yeah protect ben thompson for sure tsmc we can rebuild we cannot rebuild there's no there's only one ben 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 Banger first line from Solana.

1:19:19All is fair in love and info war. Let's go. Strong start. You have the article too? No, no. Why don't I 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 ByteDance to sell the company. there's no forcing the ccp they're they're strong in that regard yeah it's my addition ostensibly the purpose of the bill is to mitigate ccp surveillance of u.s citizens which has persisted for years despite tiktok's project texas promises to the contrary of course we're putting the data in texas well that is actually like so funny it's a smart move from them to be like yeah our our data centers are in texas yeah but this time around in a surprise political twist the Democrats are relatively quiet on the issue while Republicans, the driving force behind divestiture under Trump, are loudly divided.

1:20:22The other thing here, we haven't even covered this. We should hit DGI 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 Yosemite because like that's national land they have a no drone warning no drone yeah yeah rule and so that that's baked into the matters 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 capture because dgi is actually insane right it is it is if you could create like let's say you're the the cia of china and you want to get as much, and you want millions of spies, right, that are 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.

1:21:32consumers who fly it on your behalf across the entire, so they can map everything. And so I think DGI is probably like, yeah we're cooked here uh let's just uh you know take away the restrictions capture kind of as much data because dgi again it's the same situation as tiktok they have a better product in the market it's cheaper and better than other drones at that price point and so of course people are saying i'm gonna get the dgi drone it's just a rational decision just like it's the rational decision for a lot of consumers to open tiktok right um so they're next i'm looking forward to that um and That one's going to be rough because there are not a lot of great American drone companies.

1:22:11Well, and also that hardware device that U.S. consumers have purchased that they're going to say, what, you bricked my DGI? Basically. I mean, I think that the main thing is stopping the flow of new... 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 probably really watching out for some sort of event that would cause everyone to put their drones in the sky at the same time. Because sure, you could look at like, okay, there's, I don't know, 5 million DJI drones in the US right now.

1:22:5399.9 % of those are collecting dust in closets right now. Because someone got on Christmas, they flew it around a few times, they realized, hey, actually, I don't do backflips off of ski mountains with a team of people that can fly drones and get sick video of me it's the go-to problem some of our listeners do yeah but a lot of these drones just collect dust and so like does the ccp have the ability to turn on your drone and fly it out of your closet no like they just cannot do that it's not possible it's not possible how is it not because i mean like the 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 and break through after it doesn't 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 four in 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 did that if you literally 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 right beautiful beautiful like i i have to respect china's work on this like getting millions of drones that are had cameras and microphones and do American hands.

1:24:27The surveillance stuff is for sure real. Like all islands is 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. Super cool things. So jumping forward with Solana, Trump has had to change a 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 ran 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 bike dance therefore tiktok presently sitting on a stake in the company worth over 30 billion dollars insane so jeff is jeff's jeff's cooking with that uh he's not super happy gonna 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 i'm for years for years yes 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 that changed just days before the tiktok drama bubbled over so where's elizabeth warren now when we need her to call this out i wish elizabeth warren do you really best have a monopoly on drones write a letter write a letter let's call out jeff yes like come on like let's uh uh jeff you're welcome to come on the show you've got the aum for it um anyways uh this all um yeah anyways uh solana calls it an incredible scandal uh and of course he's probably one of the very few people that's actually writing about this um and ran 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 storing you know by storing all this data in China.

1:26:49So Project Texas was developed by TikTok, not the government. It was not developed under Trump's tenure, but President Biden's. Three, following China's refusal to let go of TikTok, one account of, and I can't believe it needs repeating, we are obviously in a state of significant conflict with this country and their government's ability to spy on US citizens is a powerful tool at their disposal. Trump actually ordered the app to be sold or banned, a policy that number four biden reversed over the course of biden's tenure available evidence indicates tiktok repeatedly abetted the ccp spying on u.s citizens but that but the president's abrupt turn in favor of divestiture along with the entire house commerce committee seems more to do with the classified security revelations mentioned at the top of this piece yeah um these by the way didn't happen in a vacuum um so uh it's 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?

1:27:50But 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 maintained control of the spy app? This brings me to Vivek Ramaswamy, truly one of the worst losers in the bunch.

1:28:24The 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, yas isn't paying vivek but vivek's supposed to be a nationalist naturally amenable to a more symmetric symmetric trade so what gives then he provides an update here i guess it was after they released while it's basically impossible to find on google a reader tipped me off uh turns out jeff yas has funneled millions of dollars into the vex pack so there you go jeff jeff uh uh, I send us some money and then we can start promoting.

1:29:07So I, I, uh, I don't, I don't know Jeff, but he's acting a little bit like a trader here. I'm not going to lie. Like I understand he's holding 30 billion of bite dance stock, but doesn't bite dance have some value outside of the position for sure. Yeah. Wind down the position or just like, it's not like it goes to zero. No. like ByteDance has other business lines. And the cost base for that investment was like nothing compared to$30 billion. So you could have rotated out. But at the same time, you have to imagine ByteDance wanted big American shareholders this whole time. Totally. And they probably told him, nope, you're not getting out.

1:29:47Because they could block the sale, especially something that big. So famously, Vivek pivoted from the position TikTok should be banned because it is a uniquely powerful form of digital fentanyl. which he called it digital fentanyl to the position. TikTok should not be banned because I kid you not. He had dinner with Jake Paul who told him TikTok was important to the youth. Jake Paul, the Paul brothers, you know, getting involved in, in geopolitical psychological warfare. Lots 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?

1:30:27Immediately following the new, the now standard bit of ban propaganda, which he altered after i roasted him for it vivek debunked a string of arguments nobody in washington is making first he tackled the addictive social media critique of the tiktok that he himself popularized months before his first pivot in favor of the ccp then he drew a false equivalency between bite dance'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 and 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 gonna say what i want um 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 bavec knows how hard it is to pass legislation he knows a small handful of companies pose outside risks to the united states and he knows some broader privacy push will be mired in washington bullshit for years practically then it's clear he just wants the ccp to control the company which is insane how do we drive all the way from china virus quote he's putting this in quotes china virus which vivek has said to i will defend china's access to american data with my life uh it's a strange position for a america first politician as was vivek's position uh the entire u.s startup ecosystem should die following the collapse of a regional bank back that in the case of silicon valley banks collapse he fell on standard libertarian rhetoric entirely out of step with his otherwise populist campaign arguing every startup that made the grave sin of trusting their cash in a bank should go to zero for their ignorance while every other american 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.

1:32:48Which 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, 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.

1:33:22Exactly. But when Ben Thompson was debating the TikTok stuff last year, he had this great. So a lot of the debate centered around like free speech. Like, can you be, can you really say that you're pro free speech if you're pro banning TikTok? And he quotes Ralph Waldo Emerson, his essay in Self-Reliance, where Emerson says, consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. And I really like that. And it's basically this idea of you need to have some level of ideological flexibility. 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.

1:34:16And 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, 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 newsome 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 consistency 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 But in Vivek's case, it's, okay, you were super, you know, you were ready to let the startup economy just burn.

1:35:09Yep. 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 ByteDance shareholder and then going out and saying that they will, that TikTok should only stay in the control of ByteDance, which we've now determined through this entire last hour is ultimately, 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 that's it 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 uh 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 it 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 red f40 and personally delivered by John on his 737 it is uh and he's not wrong here so shout out war he in 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 uh 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 new cells uh you can't afford the kind of cuts i give and and we we we worked out some some some in-kind trades and we made it happen and our hairs never looked better john so it's been fantastic to um vg yeah uh let's go to anthony barrett uh berardi he says he says shout out to the brothers technology brothers I think that's illegal I don't think I don't think he can generally solicit it 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 and politics except they never discuss politics on the show thank you From the size gong to low-tam bangers to Jory's frequent ankle exposure.

1:38:30This podcast has it all. This Technology Brothers review is sponsored by my startup, Citreimer. Citreimer is an early-stage material science company manufacturing carbon-negative, high-performance resins and plastics from citrus waste. Our resins are 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-scene to expand their engineering team, conducting manufacturing demos with customers, and reach pilot production scale. Send a DM to a.badari on X to learn about how Citrimer can help you with your sustainable material needs.

1:39:16So thank you, Anthony. We appreciate you writing a review. 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. Yeah. 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 for hours. Yeah, keep it up. Thank you for the review. I just buy the whole company and fire the CEO. Sorry, Anthony. It's a right of the job. really sharp elbows we're gonna lever you up yeah yes last some leverage on it venture debt let's put some insane comments in there yeah 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 every month growth like you know whole 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 reach out to baldo if you're looking for some financial engineer support i like the baldness like he's that is he's bald to say his first name and people know on the show baldness studies finance at cornell and economics like he's an expert financial engineer there we go studied from the great okay so thomas disney i guess from the disney fortune who made us money in entertainment great great uh so he aired to the disney fortune uh says trying to load and unload missiles in Ohio help with an Andrel contract?

1:40:42He 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?

1:41:22It's as innovative as the tech we deliver. Thank you. That's a great integration. Bringing it back to the show. One hand washes the other. Understood the mission. Delivered perfectly. We might have to read this one again. Yeah. And it's And it's great to see an heir to such a dynasty as the Disney fortune. Right. Something in hard tech. He's also looking with a help, help with an Android context. Good luck. There's definitely some Luke Metro. Hit up Thomas Disney. Hit him up. Make some stuff happen. Love to see it. So let's go to a, a fantastic thread by Eric Lyman, CEO of ramp. We were riffing about this idea a couple weeks ago, maybe months ago, talking about, you know, A lot of people are complaining about waste in the federal government.

1:42:07Doge 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 - It's funny because we were joking about it, but it was not a joke at all. Exactly. We were 100 % clear that the federal government and every aspect of our government should have better visibility into their spend. No, it started as a joke. And then immediately I was just wondering, wait, so when a DOD employee goes on a trip, how do they actually categorize their receipts? Do they have a system? Probably not. Everything runs on paper and pencil.

1:42:49I've worked for the government. It's awful. And so, yeah, bringing in new technology makes a ton of sense. And so Eric says, imagine a company losing money for 20 years straight and failing seven audits. The CFO would get fired, right? That's our government, which spent half its budget deficit on interest. It doesn't have to be this way. Here's how 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.

1:43:25Because 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. He, when you listen to this, you just get this sense of confidence, right?

1:44:02Like he's, you know, not talking down to you. He's explaining some of these sort of more complex issues. He's illustrating them. So anyways, one of the Zoomers will say I'm glazing, but it's hard not to glaze when you're talking about the most important financial issues. Well, let's continue on here. He says, let me be clear. While companies must react to market conditions, the government operates without this pressure increasing spending regardless. Give us your George W. George W. And he says, the U.S. government has many priorities. Efficiency hasn't been one. Can it take a page of the private sector's playbook to improve its efficiency?

1:44:44Think 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.

1:45:27auto-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, 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.

1:46:06don'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 US cuts bureaucracy and ramps velocity, exceptional things happen. Research is funded. Infrastructure is restored. Meaningful service to the American people is provided. Our GDP is 2x the next largest nation. We don't have a revenue problem. We have a drag problem. Like how he just gave a subtle jab to our friends across the Pacific. Yeah. For much deeper and research on the problems as well as actionable ideas, see research.contrary.com.

1:46:51Thank 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 like 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 pretty fascinating i i want to go a step further though i want to see a a much deeper dive we were talking about this like uh talking to the andrel guys and some people who uh 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 yeah and carry it to the next building when it worked for the department of commerce timesheets were done on paper with pen and paper and turned in into like a physical box that then would get that was back in the 80s though right it's 2010 2011 so isn't that insane that's crazy Yeah.

1:48:17Like one of the biggest sources of alpha at work was just using Google maps and spreadsheets, which were not, they were not procured by the U S government. It was just, 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. Yeah, it's fascinating.

1:48:51Rough. And of course, like you can't do that on the payment side in the same way. Although I'm sure the real thing here is by the time the U.S. federal government does sign up for RAMP, it really is only a matter of time. You already have the Kamala campaign was using it. You're sort of one step. You could imagine, you know, if Kamala had one, she might have come in and said, I love this RAMP software. I love RAMP Business Corporation so much. We need to roll this out everywhere. So it's inevitable. The question is, are we going to get credit for the initial joke as starting the domino effect of converting the federal government to a customer?

1:49:29Yeah, I would hate to see a situation where the U.S. government resolves that$530 billion in waste, but we don't get credit. Yeah. That would be a disaster. That would be crazy. Yeah. 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. So I'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.

1:50:04Originally riffed out by Jordi Hayes, the transformation of America into a financial powerhouse started in late 2024. Started on a podcast, like many great things. Great. Well, let's stay with Eric. he has another post this was a banger today i think he had over a thousand likes um he says genuine career advice hang this poster in your room or closet and it's a 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 obviously, you know, like we talk about feng shui, we talk about astrology and mantras and like even like kind of silly inspirational stuff like this does actually work its way into your brain.

1:50:58And if you surround yourself with these kind of like was that in the closet? I couldn't. Yeah, it looked like it was in the closet. It looked like 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.

1:51:40And I think, you know, I draw the line at the R word. We don't need it. But the F word punches just at the right level sometimes. And it just adds a little bit of spice to whatever you're saying. And, you know, if I'm. Doesn't hit the same to say F that, Jordy. No, exactly. But if I call someone a fucking idiot, that hits just as hard as the R word for me. Freaking idiot. The freaking was very funny. I need that. Yeah, I want that for my son's room, but just replaced with freaking. Freaking. Freaking. Just freaking. You can just freaking do things. Let's do one more banger post, and then we'll move on to a promoted post and a bucket poll, we'll say.

1:52:28Garrett Todd says, there is a real, I think he's saying, there's one real Renaissance man left, and it is Nat Friedman. While most tech billionaires spend their time away on frivolities and psychedelics, he bankrolled the translation of the Herculaneum papyri and is now tackling the poison in our food supply. And I mean, we gave Nat Friedman brother of the week. You've heard these stories in the pod before, but you can't give him enough credit for setting just a very different pace of play for the tech elite. I have an evolved opinion on the scroll stuff. I posted recently that the only alpha left in life is finding these rare scrolls, manuscripts, books, PDFs that OpenAI hasn't had a chance to feed into 01 yet.

1:53:19and I think that it's very possible that Nat is only sharing 1 % of the scrolls that he's actually doing. It's just sort of like, look, I'm this sort of benevolent billionaire. I'm doing this public work. But really he's trying to get all of this like enteric knowledge for himself and he's consuming it and then just deleting it out of destroying the original scrolls because in the end, and he's probably going to be the last guy with a job. yeah he's gonna be the last man which is 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 a nice yacht and 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 i'd like to see uh more billionaires start to occupy spaces that they they don't actually have a right over yeah so like you know people you know talking about greenland all right let's let's you know let's uh you know send a landing force let's like take one of their most nicest like vacation towns right like let's start there and not have it purely just be a conversation you know what i'd like to see a sort of land yacht you know how yachts there's this big like competition for like the burning one yeah i want to see someone build a car that's 200 feet long yeah like kind of a tank so it's sort of steamrollers yeah yeah with the steamroller thing exactly those huge dump trucks that move like mining equipment around you know like 100 feet tall wasn't there something like that in the incredibles what remember that uh you remember that that uh it was a drill bit in the front so you could actually go through the earth too like you want if you want had a yacht with a drill bit yeah an earth yacht that could just like come up in an area and then like dive deep under the core and just like cruise around and then pop up yeah that'd be a great asset and earth yacht it's 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 oceans there does seem to be also going in the mega alpha and submarines i mean there's all these yachts but yeah very few people like submarines correctly half half that one guy ocean gate was a disaster i know but that was just that was that was a that was a psyop to get people to stop you know to to get people against these sort of amateur submarines yeah which in the reality is like if if i look down your phone you talk with a bunch of beaners all the time every other person in your techs 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 anyway 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 Lockie one.

1:56:55He'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 promoted post of a shill.

1:57:06Lockie 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. And yeah, I don't know a ton about this company, but it's kind of seemingly like the time, you know, everybody was coming out against gas stoves saying that, you know, they're toxic and wasteful and have a negative environmental impact. And Impulse seems like they perfectly timed it of not just creating an electric stove, but creating something better than the gas stove, better than fire.

1:57:44One of the first inventions is man. So there's a little bit of hubris. You're really trying to do the gas. Yeah, I'm actually. it's a Promethean effort yeah Promethean effort to reinvent the stove and hopefully he won't be struck down for his hubris yeah but I think he's built different he's built different yeah he might even be better than the gauze the CEO of Impulse yeah yeah yeah he's certainly he's certainly you know developing products in that way so anyways we got to get this one 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.

1:58:23And have it. And we can just go back and forth, finish the episode. Korean barbecue style. Yeah. Yeah. so in bull's labs if you 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 meats on. Yeah, yeah. Little packs like, 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, I - Well, there was a study. There was a study, a bunch of MIT, Harvard and Stanford researchers got together and they studied the food supply and they 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.

1:59:10And so if you eat a lion, you become more like a lion. If you eat a bull, you become more like a bull. Yep. And so just from a physiological perspective. So you don't want to be eating lamb. Exactly. Even though it's, you know, got it. And certainly never a plant because you just want to sit there. You want to be eating oysters so you develop a hard outer shell. Hard outer shell. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. let's go to a uh bucket poll oh from none other than baldo congratulations baldo uh baldo says anyone else miss diesel greta yapping about climate change on the tl let's go i love that we printed this out with 20 of these no we snipe this before yeah clearly like within seconds of it of it going out but um i mean you know you know it's a good one when you can still see the scroll bar there on the screenshot i refer to this like being like a big game hunter on the timeline when you're when 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 she plays a character she's a smart yeah young content creator and they kind of caught her out of character and they caught her like faking some of these arrests and and i think it just it all really caught up at once and and that's one of the issues if you're not being authentic and 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 all my take on greta was that there was a fork in the road which is clearly a very talented young person.

2:01:01She could have, if she'd just done a Teal Fellowship, she would have built five nuclear reactors by now and probably had a massive impact on climate change. Instead, she just became an annoying shit poster, which is very sad to see. Build, that's the answer to all this stuff. It's always so funny when the environmentalists are 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 i do worry about wireheading as being like the the bad outcome of all this um we created the matrix people are in the matrix looking at infinite yeah that was that was the I talked about this earlier on the show.

2:01:57The TikTok dive, yeah. 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. I just think it's interesting how sci-fi, how influential sci-fi is on human development and innovation. that if you really wanted to influence the future now, you would be making sci-fi movies. That seems to be in the same way that you can have an impact through building technology companies. If you created an Angel Studios just for new sci-fi concepts right now, you could be influencing the world in 30 or 50 years and be thinking about, okay, what does the world look like with ASI?

2:02:46What does the world look like where every home has a nuclear reactor in it? Yeah, we're talking to Sham Sankar about this at Palantir, the CTO. 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 so i think you need two two guys that can yap yeah we're those guys i mean the hard part about good sci-fi is that yeah it really does all come from like the seed of the idea yeah and and but it also to have enough cultural impact and get into them and you have to do it Hollywood style blockbuster.

2:03:23I think it's, yes, but I think that you only get that. You only earn the right to do the Dune style treatment. That's 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 to China in an hour.

2:04:01But yeah, I mean, there aren't, I need to dig into it because there's the Hugo Awards that do the best sci-fi books of the year and the best sci-fi shorts of the year. And I bet if you dig through some of those award-winning sci-fi shorts, there's some interesting concepts that haven't really percolated into the zeitgeist yet. but it's always hard. It's like, you know, it's hard to find like the next cutting edge music trend unless you're really in it and going to shows, 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.

2:04:35There'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 Robots? Netflix? It's really cool. i've seen like five films okay so love definitely 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 and 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 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 way i don't think it's as expensive as like shooting dune um but uh yeah yeah people have talked about doing a tech positive black mirror yeah which would be black mirrors just like yep you know talking you know basically demonstrating the horrors of technology but there could be very entertaining of that yeah but the problem is that i think a lot of people get lost because they say i i want to make a techno optimist black mirror but then they forget that every great story needs a villain yeah and you have to have conflict for the story to be engaging whatsoever it cannot just be why we can't exist without tech journalists and tech journalists can't 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.

2:06:11Like, no one's going to watch that. It's just boring. Yeah. You need conflict. You need the rocket to break. And Musk, you know, fighting, and then they get to a gridlock in their lawsuit, and then they just say, let's get in a MMA match while I 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. um okay just uh i have 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.

2:07:10He says, be me, human living in 2024. Ancestors crushed 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 missions. We're testing rockets right now.

2:07:44That 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. Yeah. Great builder. I feel like I feel like X has been pretty positive this week yeah ever ever since Elon said hey yeah and also the fires like brought out a lot of I mean some vitriol against the politicians but generally a lot of support and yeah I mean did you see the catch yesterday and it was like I didn't I didn't even hear the build up for the catch like last time they did it there was like oh I know some people that are going to watch it live and will they want will they do it well they won't won't they do it and this time it was just like oh yeah they caught it again okay it's old yeah and the crazy thing was the visual of all all everything they sent up the breaking up the breaking yeah because the actual starship disintegrated yeah which i think was like a failure for that test but still they caught the booster which is cool so kind of like a 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 yeah no that is the sets are back to work and then other other spacex employees were showing yeah like uh you miss here's what you missed and it's like showing all the rubble and explosions and all the times that didn't work and it really is um yeah uh you know the the catch is so interesting because uh i've seen some some spacex critics say like oh well like you know we we have rockets that land it's just called the space shuttle like the space shuttle would go up and was reusable it would land and then you'd put it back on a rocket but the time just to get the space shuttle back upright is like days and like you have to change everything out and stuff and so having that booster that can just go up and then come back down and it doesn't in a matter of minutes it's not like it's up there for like days and then it comes back it comes back down and then they refuel it and it's ready to go.

2:09:50And you can imagine, you can see that at least structurally the design will enable like dozens of flights per day, like pretty easily. And that throughput is going to be really, really important. And it's probably under discussed because just watching it is like so amazing. But what's really amazing is the machinery for high throughput rocketry that Elon's obsessed with. And this is the same thing with like manufacturing Teslas at scale. Like the guy just loves like scaling up, like, you know, mass manufacturing. Let's go to, he's a mass monster. He's a mass monster, mass to orbit getting big.

2:10:27Uh, 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. Yeah. 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 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.

2:11:16And so finding that balance and getting to a place where you love work, where if I'm up late sending emails, well, if I love the work, then that's not a negative experience. It's a negative experience if you hate what you're doing. 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 make a lot of like business i mean that's that was my interpretation of have if you have a love for business and love your life and and uh and your life which to me is family and friends yeah right like and that and i'm fortunate that um you know we're not friends we're strictly business partners yeah but um i'm fortunate that i love the work and i love my life and i love that they intersect so you have to have dinner it's fine because we'll be able to yeah this is the entire tonight you know we're gonna have dinner and our wives will be like can you guys just stop playing the character for literally two minutes so that we can order i mean literally at the last dinner it was like you know no actually 15 minutes of pleasantries even like two hours of like let's play on the next activation zero was like hey just some feedback like if you're gonna get both families together and like you know we're gonna have like a nice dinner could you just like try to spend like it's fine if you spend like half the time like talking about work but like you guys spend all days together could you at least like could you just like talk about something else 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 um the highs and the lows the bangers and the flops i went to dinner last night at restoration hardware they have restaurants now yeah and then all the food items are shaped like the cloud couch that's i couldn't help myself from making so many jokes i was like so is this like a pop-up or is this like permanent like oh well like yeah it's actually permanent like they're gonna have the restaurant in the store forever and i was like is that in the bar it's in montecito i was like oh so more like the ikea model than the home depot model we're like it was like i was like oh going to dinner at uh restoration hardware that's great i mean i love getting a hot dog outside of uh outside of a home depot oh you didn't ikea meatballs yes like this is great it's a costco model yeah it shouldn't bake you can get everything i was like so what so we're at restaurant what's the equivalent of a chicken bake if i get if i'm here like what's what's your specialty what should i get they're just like sir please don't leave we're gonna have to escort you out you've been in there for four hours i was polite i was polite but it was very funny being like i you walk into the restaurant there's just like a bed there because they like sell like furniture yeah anyway we should wrap up last uh yeah let's wrap let's wrap up No, no, no.

2:14:19We're going to do one more call to action. Okay. We want to advertise your companies. Unless you can afford, you know, 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 really spend the bulk of the reviews talking about your business, what you're working on and why it matters 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.