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

Diet TBPN delivers the best of today’s TBPN episode in 30 minutes. TBPN is a live tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming weekdays 11–2 PT on X and YouTube, with each episode posted to podcast platforms right after. Described by The New York Times as “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession,” the show has recently featured Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, and Satya Nadella. TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://Ramp.com https://ramp.com/ AppLovin - https://axon.ai https://axon.ai/ Cognition - https://cognition.ai https://cognition.ai/ Console -https://console.com https://console.com/ CrowdStrike - https://crowdstrike.com https://crowdstrike.com/ ElevenLabs - https://elevenlabs.io https://elevenlabs.io/ Figma - https://figma.com https://figma.com/ Fin - https://fin.ai https://fin.ai/ Gemini - https://gemini.google.com https://gemini.google.com/ Graphite - https://graphite.com https://graphite.com/ Gusto - https://gusto.com/tbpn https://graphite.com/ Labelbox - https://labelbox.com https://labelbox.com/ Lambda - https://lambda.ai https://lambda.ai/ Linear - https://linear.app https://linear.app/ MongoDB - https://mongodb.com https://mongodb.com/ NYSE - https://nyse.com https://nyse.com/ Okta - https://www.okta.com https://www.okta.com/ Phantom - https://phantom.com/cash Plaid -https://plaid.com https://plaid.com/ Public - https://public.com https://public.com/ Railway - https://railway.com https://railway.com/ Ramp -https://ramp.com https://ramp.com/ Restream - https://restream.io https://restream.io/ Sentry - https://sentry.io https://sentry.io/welcome/ Shopify - https://shopify.com https://shopify.com/ Turbopuffer - https://turbopuffer.com https://turbopuffer.com/ Vanta - https://vanta.com https://vanta.com/ Vibe - https://vibe.co https://vibe.co/ Sentry - https://sentry.io https://sentry.io/ Cisco - https://www.ciscoaisummit.com/ai-virtual-summit.html Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://tbpn.com/ https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Jordi Hays?

  What did you write about today, John?

• 0:03John Coogan?

  I wanted to dig into the question that we had with Joe Weisenthal yesterday. What does China actually import? Obviously, this was off the back of Davos. Vice Premier Haile Fang highlighted China's determination to become the world's market. They say, hey, we're the world's factory, but we also can buy stuff. Send us your stuff, we'll buy it. But what are they gonna buy? So he said boosting domestic demand was now on top of their economic agenda. This is in their 15th five-year plan, something like that. And we were going back and forth, like, what are they actually importing? We were saying semiconductors, but, you know, obviously, there's chip deals and GPU bans. Now, interestingly, China, like, the number one trade deficit for China is semiconductors. And it has been since 2005. So they want to buy semiconductors.

• 0:48John Coogan?

  Obviously, US trade policy oscillates. But semiconductors are the single biggest deficit for China. In 2020, even before the AI boom, China imported 350 billion worth of semiconductors, which was more than the value of the crude oil it imported that year. And it's been the largest importer, the largest importer of chips since 2005, and accounts for huge chunks of revenue for Qualcomm. It's over 50% of Qualcomm's revenue, I think, and over 25% for Intel. So everything that you get from China, if it's an electronics product, it's some gadget, it has a chip in there, that's probably gonna be made in the West, sent over to China, assembled, and then-

• 1:23Jordi Hays?

  But then sent back out.

• 1:24John Coogan?

  And then sent back out, exactly. Energy is a big driver of the trade deficit with China. China imports 74% of its oil supply and 42% of its gas supply. Soybeans, which you mentioned, and iron ore are also big categories. The iron ore, obviously, goes into a lot of, again, the factory, the world's factory.

• 1:41Jordi Hays?

  Why can't China make enough soybeans in China?

• 1:45John Coogan?

  I don't know.

• 1:46Jordi Hays?

  It must be climate-related? They love making stuff.

• 1:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, I don't know. That's a good question. We should dig into that. Luxury is a clear net import category for China. Estimates are around 100 billion annually. Now, it's not the, it's not the biggest driver of their trade deficit or trade surplus, but it is, and it's also not critically important in the way chips or oil- Or soybeans or iron or are but it is but it is an important story and almost all of Chinese luxury good imports are from European conglomerates. You got to think LVMH and Kering. It's not strategically important really and the the foreign luxury market in China, so European conglomerates sending their goods to China. It actually completely fell off a cliff in 2024. Imports went down about 20%.

• 2:34John Coogan?

  Domestic Chinese luxury brands are on the rise. Lao Pu Gold is now drawing the from the same customer base as Louis Vuitton, Hermes, Cartier, Bulgari and Tiffany. Gucci is closing stores, I think around 18 stores are closing. While the local champion Song Mont is seeing significant growth in their handbag business. So China does want to be the world's market, but they're also buying domestic a lot. The the basic trend is like China excels at developing efficient supply chains, streamlined manufacturing operations. And it doesn't stop with cars, they're doing it with TVs now. So on Tuesday, Sony announced that they would be spinning off its home entertainment business, which includes the TV brand Bravia to their Chinese rival TCL Electronics Holdings.

• 3:16John Coogan?

  Sony is selling a 51% stake to TCL while the brand will remain Sony. The display technology will be TCL. Sony's been falling behind Samsung, TCL, LG, Xiaomi in terms of TV shipments for a while, but the brand still holds a ton of value. Like Sony TVs were the best a decade ago and still today people like the the software a little bit more. And the Sony brand, it still has the aura of the the Walkman, the the PlayStation like it's just beloved electronics. And you see the Sony logo and it's just way more familiar than.

• 3:46Jordi Hays?

  You think Japanese excellence?

• 3:48John Coogan?

  Yes, you do. And and so Sony has been, you know, falling behind on the manufacturing front. TCL has been basically delivering a much stronger value prop on a price to quality basis. And the panel technology is is is is loved and and very competitive. But there's just more faith in Sony name. So the Chinese manufacturer is effectively pulling forward heritage and brand legacy by buying the name. And this feels like a trend that will continue for a while. China's fantastic at quickly grinding down manufacturing learning curves, developing high quality products at affordable. Prices, but creating an iconic brand, it just takes decades. And so it's better to buy than build.

• 4:26Jordi Hays?

  So smart.

• 4:26John Coogan?

  This is the one thing you buy instead of build. I don't know if Chinese manufacturers will ever make money, but I came away not wanting to invest in any manufacturing business in the rest of the world. And Ian Roundtree says, I'm going to keep investing in American manufacturing. So people are still, still pushing it. There's also big news. Andorol is bringing a 1 million square foot union built campus, along with 5,500 jobs to the city of Long Beach. The, the, the office of Mayor Rex Richardson, the Long Beach mayor, posted this. Over the next three years, Andorol will be building this. This is the largest private investment in Long Beach history. And it's a major vote of confidence in Long Beach's leadership in aerospace and advanced manufacturing.

• 5:08Jordi Hays?

  China unveils EV that can violently eject its battery.

• 5:12John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 5:13Jordi Hays?

  In case of a fire. And we can see this in action and see what kind of situation.

• 5:18John Coogan?

  This is so wild. I remember when this video went viral, it's like, what is the point? Oh, it's because if it crashes and it's going to burn, it'll shoot it out. But oh, that just seems like so, so dangerous. But at the same time, people, people, you know, watch these videos and they, and they think like, oh, this is like widespread Chinese best practice. When really like, this is probably like their gundo equivalent, you know, just like a couple dudes.

• 5:45Jordi Hays?

  It is interesting that they're like, we don't just need to get it 10 feet away. We need to get it 30 feet.

• 5:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Cause you could just like, like gracefully drop it out or something or like, or like slide it out sort of slowly with a little pusher. But they have to like shoot it out like a cannon. I think we got to watch the video about AI industry news. Every two weeks, one of these models is destroying someone else's model.

• 6:09Speaker 02

  Destroyed Pinterest and chat GPT. Chat GPT destroyed Perplexity and Google AI. Linting AI just ruined WhatsApp.

• 6:22Speaker 02

  Meta AI. Ooh, IRCTC AI just destroyed Uberola AI. Wow.

• 6:29John Coogan?

  Wow. It's so good. What is that last one? IRCTC AI?

• 6:37Jordi Hays?

  He's just making stuff up.

• 6:38John Coogan?

  He's just making up acronyms at this point. But it really is so true that like, there's just a time honored clickbait title of like, destroyed in all caps. I used to do it on my YouTube videos, always went viral. It's, it's, it's been proven.

• 6:50Jordi Hays?

  What's going on with TikTok?

• 6:52John Coogan?

  TikTok is, it's sort of the reverse, honestly. It's very interesting. You have this dynamic of like, the American companies or the Western companies, MG and Sony selling to Chinese because they have great manufacturing. And then TikTok, you know, we want, America wants control over the algorithm, over the data, security. And so you have a Chinese company that's now going to be operating in the US. And the Wall Street Journal has a piece here on it. The agreement was negotiated to comply with a 2024 law requiring the company to do a deal to address US national security concerns. Rome wasn't built in a day and TikTok was not divested in a day. TikTok officially established a joint venture that would allow it to keep operating in the United States, the company said Thursday, resolving a years

• 7:36John Coogan?

  long fight to address Washington's national security concerns. Under the terms of the deal negotiated by the Trump administration, the popular video sharing app will be operated by a new US entity controlled by investors seen as friendly to the US. Its data management and algorithm training on American users will be overseen by Oracle, the cloud computing giant that has safeguarded its data for the US for years and has close ties to the Trump administration. The deal was negotiated to comply with a law passed in 2024. President Trump delayed the implementation of the law a year ago after starting his second term to keep TikTok operating in the United States. He signed a series of executive orders to extend the deadline for completing a deal until it was met Thursday. Trump said in a social media post, "I'm so happy to have helped in saving TikTok." He sang, he thanked

• 8:21John Coogan?

  Chinese leader Xi Jinping for working with us. Trump and TikTok's investors and allies pushed the deal through despite lingering concerns among lawmakers and security hawks that China could still influence the new entity through TikTok's parent ByteDance.

• 8:35Jordi Hays?

  It makes sense that this took so long. It sounds really simple, just divest. But in reality, you have to effectively rebuild an entire app. Right?

• 8:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 8:43Jordi Hays?

  It's gotta be, it's gotta be, it's gonna be like a new app, figuring out the logistics of that.

• 8:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 8:48Jordi Hays?

  Uh, there's also just a ton of hair on the deal, right? There's a huge revenue share that's going back to ByteDance in perpetuity. That is obviously reflected in the valuation. The other factor is like, if you have a US TikTok now and then you have normal TikTok. If I'm on the US TikTok, am I sharing content to international TikTok? If I'm on the international TikTok, is it sharing my content back into the US app?

• 9:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 9:13Jordi Hays?

  How does that all work out?

• 9:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 9:15Jordi Hays?

  And so there's a lot of stuff that still needs to be handled. Most of the social media app, pretty much every social media app that you use, if you just cut off all international content creators, the experience on the app would get worse.

• 9:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 9:25Jordi Hays?

  So there needs to be like some content still flowing back and forth.

• 9:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 9:29Jordi Hays?

  But figuring out how exactly that works is still in process.

• 9:33John Coogan?

  The majority American owned joint venture will operate under defined safeguards that protect national security through comprehensive data protections, algorithm security, content moderation, and software assurances for US users. The whole TikTok debate really erupted when TikTok CEO Shou Chu was in front of Congress and was not really acting like he was the boss, basically. That was the main criticism. It felt like he didn't have full control over the entity because of course it's a subsidiary of ByteDance. And some of the US lawmakers were pressing him on how much control he actually has. Did they send the right person to the congressional hearing? So who's in the deal?

• 10:15John Coogan?

  You got Oracle, you got private equity firm Silver Lake, you got Abu Dhabi based MGX. They will each own 15% of the new entity while TikTok investors will own about 30%. Other notable investors include JD Vance's former revolution, uh, former firm Revolution and tech executive Michael Dell's family investment office. Dell's getting in the deal. Vance spent a brief stint at the firm founded by AOL co-founder Steve Case during his time as a venture investor, which preceded his 2022 Senate campaign. Vance has said previously that the deal values the new entity at about 14 billion. A lot of people thought that that was really, really low, given TikTok's immense growth.

• 10:58John Coogan?

  But there is another side of this, which is that TikTok, I don't believe was ever monetizing or as profitable as the, its competitors, YouTube. Mark Zuckerberg and, uh, and the, and the Google team were not. Like exactly slow to move and launch competitive products. And so a lot of the, you see this continuously where Snapchat comes out, Stories is on a tear, and you're looking at the Snapchat growth curve and you're like, this is going to kill Facebook. It's going to be the next Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg needs to acquire it. He puts in an offer, gets declined, and it looks like it's over. But then the Instagram team moved really quickly. They launched Stories and that effectively, you can see in the chart, Stories launches on Instagram and people stop moving on to Snapchat.

• 11:42John Coogan?

  And so a lot of people went back who were on Snapchat, they went back to Instagram and Instagram continued to grow and Snapchat, it didn't flatline, but it like definitely put a dent in their growth. And I think the same thing is true for TikTok. A lot of people who just want that format, vertical video, endless scrolling slop, they can get that. We got, we got American-made troughs all over the place, everywhere the eyes can see. So the investors are paying the US government a multi-billion dollar fee for arranging the deal, a concept Trump previously called a tremendous fee plus. TikTok said it had 200 million users in the US, up from its 2024 estimate of about 170 million users. So decent growth, but I don't know. I mean, 200 million in the US is a lot.

• 12:27John Coogan?

  Like that's pretty much everyone.

• 12:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I guess the question is, will they ever get the rest of the US? In the, in the way that YouTube, you could assume has like effectively.

• 12:35John Coogan?

  You think they have like 300 mil?

• 12:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I would assume that, that.

• 12:39John Coogan?

  I don't know, there's a lot of Philistines out there. There's a lot of Luddites who are just like, nah, I want DVDs, I want VHS tapes. Trump touted his popularity on TikTok earlier Thursday, posting on Truth Social that his posts on the platform, TikTok, get more engagement than posts on TikTok competitor Instagram, which is owned by Meta Platforms.

• 12:59Jordi Hays?

  For what it's worth, that's always been the case, right? Like TikTok has always had allegations that they were botting.

• 13:05John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 13:05Jordi Hays?

  Like as a platform, effectively. People would go on there and they'd be like getting a tremendous amount of followers, tremendous amount of just engagement broadly.

• 13:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:15Jordi Hays?

  Far more than, than they would have on Instagram with the same content. And, you know, some people would say, oh, that's because the TikTok algorithm is so good. But, and there certainly are a bunch of very real people on TikTok. I don't, I don't mean to say that it's all bought it, but the experience of using TikTok, a lot of creators will just naturally have. Six times as many TikTok followers as they do Instagram followers.

• 13:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, it does seem like the algorithm is set up to serve you more content in a 10 minute session because you're more quickly scrolling. And then there's also accounting issues like on some platforms, if you just scroll past something for even one second, that counts as a view. On other platforms, it might take three seconds. On other views, other, you know, platforms might be 10 seconds, a minute. Gen Z are arriving to college unable to even read a sentence, says Fortune, reposted by Unusual Wales.

• 14:08Jordi Hays?

  See if you can read this. See if you can read this. See if you can read this.

• 14:12John Coogan?

  Try and read this. Wow, he can't. He can't. He can't do it. Slopped.

• 14:17Jordi Hays?

  I just, I need like some Subway Surfers or something.

• 14:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I'm gonna need some Subway Surfers.

• 14:23John Coogan?

  We have some drama that's continuing to unfold in the, in the payroll space. The Justice Department opens a criminal probe into Silicon Valley spy allegations. Subpoenas seek information on allegations that Deal valued around $17 billion, recruited a spy inside a rival company. This was a huge story last year, and then it's been pretty quiet and both companies have just kind of been chugging along. Yeah, so the Justice Department opened a criminal investigation. Grand jury subpoenas were sent out in recent weeks. Keith O'Brien alleged in an affidavit filed in April that Deal CEO Alex recruited him and gave him instructions for what information to take from Rippling. O'Brien alleged that other executives were involved in the spying plot,

• 15:07John Coogan?

  including his father, who is Deal's executive chairman and chief strategy officer. The spokeswoman for Deal said the company isn't aware of a criminal investigation, but is willing to cooperate with authorities. That's an interesting statement. The Wall Street Journal is reporting this and you find out from a Wall Street Journal reporter. That's, that's wild. So the company has previously said, we deny any legal wrongdoing and look forward to asserting our counterclaims. So Deal says, we didn't do anything wrong. Of course, the affidavit from Keith O'Brien is extremely dramatic. There's that whole like, you know, oh, send that watch to London. We're gonna be like James Bond. Like, it's a, it's a really dramatic read. And you can go back and watch some old TVP episodes if you want to hear a full take on that.

• 15:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's interesting. Yeah, I wonder, I wonder what, what information is actually available kind of publicly on this. Cause like, obviously in a situation like this, you have both sides that are kind of like feeding the media. Their side of the story.

• 16:01John Coogan?

  But I mean, like, the facts of the facts here, like, the Justice Department did open this because the Wall Street Journal confirmed that the Justice Department opened the investigation, so.

• 16:12John Coogan?

  Anyway.

• 16:12Jordi Hays?

  Anyway, yeah, wasn't it, wasn't it? I think a lot of people weren't expecting this to

• 16:16John Coogan?

  Last October.

• 16:16Jordi Hays?

  Actually have any type of, like, criminal component.

• 16:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, I think a lot of people were just expecting, like, a lot of drama, a lot of, you know,

• 16:23Jordi Hays?

  And they would eventually just like settle.

• 16:25John Coogan?

  Exactly, settle. And like, the worst case was like, okay, maybe it's like a, like a series D size payment for rippling, but they're both gonna just keep grinding. But it seems like it's going to the courts, so we will see. Maybe there will be, uh, maybe there will be, you know, courtroom sketches of these folks. OpenAI Chair Brad Taylor says AI is, quote, "probably a bubble," expects a corruption in the coming years. And Nick is, he, his camera roll is truly just filled to the brim with images of Sam Altman in various, like, like, you know.

• 16:55Jordi Hays?

  The guy has probably the largest collection of Sam Altman.

• 16:59John Coogan?

  Rare Altman's, for sure. He has every photo that's ever been taken of Sam.

• 17:02Jordi Hays?

  Nowhere, of course, would Brad Taylor be like, oh, yeah, I think, I think LLM usage is gonna fall off a cliff.

• 17:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 17:09Jordi Hays?

  It's like, yeah, yeah, there's a variety of different companies and kind of subcategories that could be overheated.

• 17:15John Coogan?

  You could easily dig into that. And he's like, there's a bubble in, like, seed stage valuations. Like, I can't get an angel check in at less than 50 pre. Like, you know, the bubble can take a lot of different shapes and stuff. Who knows what he was actually commenting on. Another clip from Demis from the Big Technology Podcast. He's taking shots at OpenAI, according to Yuchin Jin.

• 17:36Speaker 03

  Action speaks louder than words, going back to the original conversation we were having with, you know, Sam and others claiming AGI is around the corner. Why would you bother with ads then? So that is, I think, a reasonable question to ask. But I, I, I think, look, from our point of view, we have no plans at the moment to, to do ads, if you're talking about the Gemini app, right, specifically. I think we are going, obviously, we're going to watch very carefully what, you know, the outcome of what ChatGPT is saying they're going to do. I think it has to be handled very carefully, but I think action speaks louder than.

• 18:11John Coogan?

  There's a reason, post AGI, the clankers need to advertise to each other. You gotta do ads for the clankers.

• 18:17Jordi Hays?

  The thing here is like OpenAI has to not only like figure out how to actually implement ads within the product, but they have to build out all the advertising like infrastructure, the platform infrastructure, in order for people to run campaigns successfully and at scale.

• 18:32John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 18:32Jordi Hays?

  So, Google already has all of that. It is far eas- like, it is, what, do you think it's like 100 times easier for Google to turn on ads in Gemini?

• 18:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 18:40Jordi Hays?

  Right? They already have all the customer relationship, literally, any company that advertises online.

• 18:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 18:45Jordi Hays?

  It's already working with Google. And so, it's really just like, you can just flip the switch.

• 18:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 18:50Jordi Hays?

  And so, I could easily, you know, don't have any inside knowledge, but I could easily see Google just like having it all basically ready to go.

• 18:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 18:57Jordi Hays?

  And it literally just being like, okay.

• 18:58John Coogan?

  There, there is, yeah.

• 19:00Jordi Hays?

  We can launch this whenever we want.

• 19:01John Coogan?

  There is an interesting steel man here. Let me try and do it. The steel man on Sam Altman claiming that AGI is in the cor- around the corner, but we still gotta do ads. Well, around the corner, even if that means six months, like, if you have incredible capital expenditure to get over that hump to create AGI, it's only six months away, but you gotta do that last data center, and you gotta raise that last 50 billion, and all of the investors are like,

• 19:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's eas- it's easy to say like, we don't wanna do ads when you have hundreds of billions of dollars in existing ad revenue coming in, funding everything that you're doing. So, anyways, I think this is, you know,

• 19:37John Coogan?

  I mean, we can also debate whether or not ads will exist post AGI. I would argue that they would, but, uh, what do you think, Tyler?

• 19:43Speaker 04

  There was that headline about how OpenAI, maybe they're thinking about like taking a percentage of the, of the share of like the discoveries. I don't know how they would actually do that, or if it's like they're being serious at all, but that's like much more AGI-pilled, right, than ads?

• 19:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Oh, that, yeah, that's a good point. So, they're doing both. They're doing both.

• 19:58Jordi Hays?

  Almost everyone at Vimeo was laid off.

• 20:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:00Jordi Hays?

  Including the entire video team. I would assume that most of their team.

• 20:05John Coogan?

  Other than video?

• 20:06Jordi Hays?

  So, unfortunate. I have some fond memories of being a teenager when Vimeo was like really,

• 20:12John Coogan?

  Vimeo was so differentiated.

• 20:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 20:14John Coogan?

  It was where, You, there was like a level of quality that it wasn't just like some random person.

• 20:19Jordi Hays?

  I would go there to watch short films. In my case, it was like surf.

• 20:21John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes, yes.

• 20:22Jordi Hays?

  It was like if somebody was putting a ton of effort into making like a surf movie or, you know, some snowboarding movie, it would be on Vimeo.

• 20:29John Coogan?

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

• 21:08Jordi Hays?

  High-Yield Harry has the meme for the moment. He says, "But now we shall both surely drown," said the frog. "LOL," said the scorpion.

• 21:17John Coogan?

  I don't think, I don't, I don't think this is exactly right. Like, if, if you buy, if you're a private equity firm and you buy an asset like this and you, and you lay off the team, like, you're likely, there are still people that are going to be trying to extract the value from that asset. It just might be a team on a different, in a different section of the firm, or an outsourcing agency, or something else. I would be surprised if this means that Vimeo is shutting down. I would imagine that they're trying to continue whatever business relationships they have and whatever subscriber base they have.

• 21:47Jordi Hays?

  Vimeo was cool, but if you know about Vimeo, it probably means you're old.

• 21:51John Coogan?

  Hmm, that's true.

• 21:52Jordi Hays?

  That's certainly true.

• 21:54John Coogan?

  You know about Vimeo?

• 21:55Speaker 04

  Yeah, I know what Vimeo is.

• 21:56John Coogan?

  What's the last thing you watched on Vimeo?

• 21:58Speaker 04

  I have no idea. But, you know, but I remember, yeah, it was like, like artsy films would be on there or something.

• 22:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's good. So Coinbase established an independent advisory board on quantum computing and blockchain. Quantum computing, if, if built at scale, have the potential to reshape entire industries. We were talking to Kathy Wood about this a little bit yesterday. From finance to healthcare to material science and national security. For blockchain, the stakes are especially high. The cryptographic foundation that secures digital assets today could be challenged by the advances of the coming years. At Coinbase, security is our highest priority, and preparing for future threats, even those many years away, is crucial for our industry. Most people, I think, handicapped the quantum thing at like... 2030, 2032, 2040, I think Kathy Wood's estimate was 2040 for serious quantum adoption, even if you get on a Moore's Law type adoption curve.

• 22:46Speaker 04

  If you can crack like whatever the Bitcoin or any like blockchain with quantum, like surely you can also just get into like banks or like tons of like actual like things that are like probably way more important than than crypto. Like it's like i- if we have a world where you have like these incredibly powerful quantum computers, like is crypto actually the most important thing that you need to be worrying about? Or is it like the nuclear codes that are, surely those are stored.

• 23:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, you're probably right with the nuclear codes, but in terms of just like fiat stored in a bank, there are a series of backups that are offline. There's even paper backups at certain points. And so like the financial system, although they probably don't want to talk about it, does have the ability to like effectively roll back. So if there was like some massive quantum hack and like all the Morgan Stanley or JP Morgan accounts or Goldman Sachs accounts were like drained, they would just be like, let's revert. But you can't do that on a blockchain necessarily, so.

• 23:40Jordi Hays?

  More importantly.

• 23:41John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 23:42Jordi Hays?

  Buzz balls.

• 23:43John Coogan?

  Incredibly important, thank you.

• 23:45Jordi Hays?

  Is selling a $35,000 diamond engagement ring shaped like its drinks. The ring will be auctioned on eBay starting February 3rd.

• 23:53John Coogan?

  Maybe it's it's $35,000 worth of diamonds. It costs them $35,000 to make it and they're going to put it on eBay, starting price 100 bucks and then it'll get bid up, I guess. I don't know.

• 24:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 24:03John Coogan?

  Proceeds will from the sale will benefit a heart-related charitable cause. It's kind of odd for an alcohol brand to be like, we're, we're.

• 24:11Jordi Hays?

  I don't know. That's cool. I mean, if anyone out in the audience is wanting to propose and like doesn't really know how to, is struggling to figure out like the right kind of like moment or way to propose, this is like.

• 24:22John Coogan?

  Toss a buzz ball.

• 24:23Jordi Hays?

  Out of the box.

• 24:24John Coogan?

  That's a woman in your life.

• 24:25Jordi Hays?

  Toss a buzz ball at the.

• 24:27John Coogan?

  If she catches it, she has to marry you.

• 24:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 24:29John Coogan?

  Uh, is this rage bait? Is this good marketing? Do you think this is good for buzz ball strategically? What do you think?

• 24:34Jordi Hays?

  Uh, I don't know if it's, I mean, I, I, I find plenty of moments to talk about buzz ball already.

• 24:40John Coogan?

  Okay, unnecessary.

• 24:41Jordi Hays?

  Did you know?

• 24:42John Coogan?

  What?

• 24:42Jordi Hays?

  Do you know who came up with the idea? For Buzz Balls.

• 24:45John Coogan?

  Absolutely not. I have no idea.

• 24:46Jordi Hays?

  A public high school teacher.

• 24:48John Coogan?

  What?

• 24:49Jordi Hays?

  Uh, Mary Lee Kick, a former public high school teacher, has become one of America's richest self-made women after selling her ready-to-drink cocktail business Buzz Balls for at least 500 million.

• 24:58John Coogan?

  500 million?

• 24:59Jordi Hays?

  What started as a side hustle has now transformed into one of the biggest brands of the industry. Kick founded Buzz Balls in 2009, inspired by a simple idea while grading papers by her pool. I thought, I shouldn't have this glass container out here. I should have a plastic, cool, safe type of cocktail. From this spark of inspiration, Buzz Balls was born. Fun, high-proof cocktails served in colorful, plastic, spherical containers. Buzz Balls quickly gained popularity and now sold at supermarkets, liquor stores, and convenience stores. She says, I've been living the American dream. We've built a legacy. We've become a contender in a space where women never went.

• 25:37John Coogan?

  Brutal.

• 25:38Jordi Hays?

  Kick says.

• 25:38John Coogan?

  That's really.

• 25:39Jordi Hays?

  The brand has grown intentionally, distributing 29 countries with an estimated annual revenue of 500 million dollars.

• 25:45John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 25:46Jordi Hays?

  This is incredible story.

• 25:47John Coogan?

  Monster company.

• 25:48Jordi Hays?

  In April of 2024, the drinks firm, uh, Sazarak,

• 25:52John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 25:52Jordi Hays?

  uh, acquired Buzz Balls in an all-cash deal.

• 25:54John Coogan?

  No way.

• 25:55Jordi Hays?

  500 million. Though Kick suggests the figure is much higher.

• 25:59John Coogan?

  No way.

• 26:01Jordi Hays?

  She's an absolute dog. It has also cemented her place among America's richest self-made women, with Forbes estimating her net worth at 400 million after taxes. So yeah, of course.

• 26:11John Coogan?

  She's got to 10x that.

• 26:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 26:12John Coogan?

  Just get it in the market.

• 26:13Jordi Hays?

  I'm sure she is.

• 26:13John Coogan?

  Rich, some max 700.

• 26:15Jordi Hays?

  On her next idea.

• 26:16John Coogan?

  Run it up, run it up.

• 26:17Jordi Hays?

  Kick's journey is remarkable because she never raised money from investors. She bootstrapped her business.

• 26:22John Coogan?

  You gotta get her on the show.

• 26:23Jordi Hays?

  She used a small inheritance, maxed out her credit cards.

• 26:25John Coogan?

  Larry's the founder's podcast episode about her.

• 26:27Jordi Hays?

  And took out a loan from a local community bank to get started. I scraped and scrambled, she says. I took every bit of every penny I could find and poured it into the business.

• 26:36John Coogan?

  That's incredible.

• 26:37Jordi Hays?

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

• 26:51John Coogan?

  Get her on the David Center.

• 26:52Jordi Hays?

  Wow, she, I mean, she's elite. Akita Buzzball's success was owning its supply chain.

• 26:56John Coogan?

  What? She vertically integrated on day one?

• 26:58Jordi Hays?

  It's just like.

• 26:59John Coogan?

  Like, most, like, D2C founders in, in, in California, like, can't figure out how to get off a co-packer.

• 27:05Jordi Hays?

  She moved production of the patented plastic spheres and the spirits used in buzzballs in-house to ensure the brand's quality and reliability.

• 27:12John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 27:13Jordi Hays?

  Despite many investor offers over the years, Kick held on to her company until she found the right partner.

• 27:17John Coogan?

  Elite.

• 27:17Jordi Hays?

  I wanted somebody that was gonna come in and have big guns.

• 27:20John Coogan?

  Big guns.

• 27:21Jordi Hays?

  Kick and her family are still part of the business. "I didn't sell because I didn't like what I was doing or wanted to leave," she explains. "I sold for the exponential growth and because it's selfish to hold it, it back. It really has legs." From a teacher grading paper by the pool to a multi-centimillionaire, Merrily Kick's story shows the power of a good idea and the determination to make it happen.

• 27:41John Coogan?

  We had some breaking news yesterday. Caroline Ellison has been released from federal custody. She, of course, was involved in the FTX drama that erupted a few years ago. She's out. And Martin Shkreli quote tweeted us into the oblivion.

• 27:56Jordi Hays?

  Ratio.

• 27:57John Coogan?

  He ratioed us by changing our, changing, he didn't even use Nano Banana Pro. He just scribbled all over our trading card and said, "snatched."

• 28:06Jordi Hays?

  Honestly, it worked. Yeah, I did, I was thinking, like, that felt very fast.

• 28:11John Coogan?

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

• 28:30Jordi Hays?

  I heard she wrote a book.

• 28:32John Coogan?

  Really?

• 28:32Jordi Hays?

  I think there were some leaks. I don't know how true it is, but currently, she, she was writing.

• 28:36John Coogan?

  Okay. For sure.

• 28:37Jordi Hays?

  Substack.

• 28:38John Coogan?

  What's going on with Substack?

• 28:39Jordi Hays?

  They're going into television.

• 28:41John Coogan?

  They're going into television.

• 28:42Jordi Hays?

  They're taking on big TV.

• 28:44John Coogan?

  Big TV.

• 28:45Jordi Hays?

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

• 28:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 28:59Jordi Hays?

  And is like not operating, you know, as like a pure play standalone company.

• 29:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 29:05Jordi Hays?

  And so, yeah.

• 29:06John Coogan?

  Substack has been, has been definitely ramping up the video functionality. We've done some live streams there. There's a lot of opportunity and it's a very interesting community. I think that's the strongest thing about Substack is just that it's a very high signal place. Like if you were, I'm, I'm, you know, the Substack experience is not scrolling random posts, random creators. But I feel very confident about if Substack were to serve me a random piece of content that was doing well across the Substack network, I would enjoy it because the creators that choose to be on Substack, there are just so few like.

• 29:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you could see, you could see a new kind of like, we were talking about Vimeo earlier, the, the dynamic that you used to have between Vimeo and YouTube where Vimeo was like a super intentional place. You can see something emerging again where Substack TV is like a somewhat more intentional version of, of YouTube.

• 29:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 29:56Jordi Hays?

  Just because it is like based on like your actual audience, less around just like raw discoverability now.

• 30:02John Coogan?

  And also with Substack, if you're trying to create like a signal on a piece of content, the fact that people pay is really, really high signals. Like, yes, this person isn't just good at clickbait. They're not just good at driving traffic. They're not just good at thumbnails and titles and hooks. Like they are good at, at creating such a response from their community that the community puts down their credit cards. And in the case of like Emily Sundberg at Feed Me, maybe they pay more than they have to.

• 30:30Jordi Hays?

  Pull up this video here.

• 30:31John Coogan?

  They're really jumping on this. This is a new one because Waymo's have been.

• 30:34Jordi Hays?

  It's getting stomped out.

• 30:36John Coogan?

  This is a new.

• 30:37Jordi Hays?

  Two words I haven't said, put together before.

• 30:39John Coogan?

  They're really breaking the windshield. Wow. What is this? Did the Waymo drive through a particular protest? Did these people just, um, did these people just descend upon a random Waymo? This is a crime? This is property destruction?

• 30:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, what would your mother say?

• 30:53John Coogan?

  Also, I'm just thinking about like, the Waymos aren't cheap. Like, you're gonna be hit with like a $500,000 bill, even if you just have to pay for repairing the Waymo. Very, very odd. But of course, people are calling to give the Waymo's weapons and people. That is the rallying cry of tech. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for the TVPN newsletter, tppn.com. We will see you on Monday.

• 31:17Jordi Hays?

  Cheers, folks.

• 31:17John Coogan?

  Goodbye.