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

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

• 0:00Jordi Hays?

  我叫韩志荣，我我很喜欢啤酒。

• 0:05John Coogan?

  Jordan, we're live. Welcome to Technology Brothers, the most profitable podcast in the world. Uh, today, that was awkward. Today, we are talking about.

• 0:13Jordi Hays?

  Hopefully, we can get that edited out.

• 0:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Edit that out. Um, uh, today, we are talking about a sternly worded letter that was sent from Elizabeth Warren to none other than Sam Altman. Um, it came on a beautiful, beautiful stationery, uh, from the United States Senate in Washington, DC. This broke, uh, just today, January 17th, uh, addressed to Sam Altman. And it reads the following, Dear Mr. Altman. In the two months since the election, big tech companies, including OpenAI, have made million dollar gifts to President-elect Donald Trump's inaugural fund in what appears to be an effort to influence and sway the actions and policies of the incoming administration.

• 0:52John Coogan?

  Specifically, on December 13th, 2024, reporting confirmed your intention to personally donate $1 million to the inaugural fund. So what's weird about this is that they're making it out to be like, oh, a million dollars is so much, but like, that's not even enough to buy a single Koenigsegg.

• 1:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:10John Coogan?

  And yet, it's like, oh, a million bucks. It's like.

• 1:13Jordi Hays?

  And Sam, Sam wouldn't drive, Sam wouldn't daily a car for less than a million dollars.

• 1:18John Coogan?

  No way.

• 1:18Jordi Hays?

  So think about however much your daily driver costs. That's the kind of political donation that we're talking about.

• 1:23John Coogan?

  This is the change that you find in the seats of the Koenigsegg.

• 1:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:26John Coogan?

  This is not, this is not real, real sway.

• 1:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So what's, what's insane about, what's insane about this is, uh, I mean, Elizabeth Warren always, uh, from my experience, uh, likes to, likes to kind of play dumb, right? Like she's clearly an intelligent woman.

• 1:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:44Jordi Hays?

  And she's clearly very shrewd politically. And she likes to come out and make these like very, uh, emotional sort of, um,

• 1:56Jordi Hays?

  uh, statements and demands while clearly just ignoring all the facts. And so the facts, you know, the reality is, why do people make political donations?

• 2:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:05Jordi Hays?

  It is to influence politicians.

• 2:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:08Jordi Hays?

  Right? Like why, it's not just out of, uh, nobody, you know. People don't, don't make million dollar donations to, you know, just, just purely for fun, right?

• 2:21John Coogan?

  Yeah. And it's interesting because it's, it's like, this is, this is breaking news because it's targeting OpenAI and Sam Altman and AI is this huge topic and job displaced.

• 2:31Jordi Hays?

  And it's interesting like how quickly the Dems have turned on Altman, who I believe was historically generally pro.

• 2:39John Coogan?

  I think he was, I think he almost ran for governor of California as Democrat. I know he's donated before. And yeah, this is just like part of like the vibe shift that this time around in Trump 2.0, people are much less sounding the alarm bells around like this is like the worst thing ever. And so it actually goes into this in the letter. Big tech companies have come under increased scrutiny from federal regulators for antitrust violations, violations of privacy and harms to workers, consumers and competition.

• 3:10Jordi Hays?

  Which is gonna go out the window to some degree like with.

• 3:14John Coogan?

  Oh, the antitrust?

• 3:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the antitrust.

• 3:15John Coogan?

  Potentially, yeah. And so, yeah, if you're pro antitrust, I guess you're upset that big tech is cozying up to the new Trump administration, although some of the Trump appointees have been somewhat pro antitrust in the sense that if their constituents are, you know, like small business owners.

• 3:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:33John Coogan?

  They might actually want to break up big companies.

• 3:36Jordi Hays?

  Or blocking that, that Japanese steel company from acquiring.

• 3:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, that. And then, so yeah, antitrust is a, is a lever, is like a hammer that can be used in multiple ways. And what's interesting is that back when the antitrust against big tech started and there was a push against Google and then Amazon very early on, Elizabeth Warren was one of the most outspoken voices, but Josh Hawley was also one of the most outspoken voices. And it was this weird moment where Josh Hawley.

• 4:04Jordi Hays?

  Explain who Josh Hawley is.

• 4:05John Coogan?

  Josh Hawley is a, I believe a senator, might be a congressman, I'm pretty sure he was a senator, and he is a Republican and was like loosely in the teal universe through JD. It was kind of like, people were thinking that like there might be like a tech squad, like Rashida Tlaib and AOC and Ilhan Omar, there might be that if, if, if they got JD and, and.

• 4:32John Coogan?

  Who else? Arizona guy?

• 4:34Jordi Hays?

  Blake Masters.

• 4:35John Coogan?

  Blake Masters and also Josh Hawley in. You'd have like, you have a little bit of like strength in numbers because those three guys collectively have the same sort of philosophy around tech, but not.

• 4:48Jordi Hays?

  The same puppet master.

• 4:50John Coogan?

  But, but, but, but, and, and, and they, they could kind of break from the mainstream ideology of the Republican Party. And so Elizabeth Warren goes on to say, "We are concerned that your company and other big tech donors are using your massive contributions," again, not that massive, "to the inaugural fund to cozy up to the incoming administration in an effort to avoid scrutiny, limit regulation, and buy favor. You have a clear and direct interest in obtaining favors from the incoming administration. Your company and many other big tech company donors are already subject to ongoing federal investigations and regulatory actions. For example, Amazon, which donated a million dollars to Trump's inaugural fund, is the

• 5:30John Coogan?

  subject of multiple ongoing regulatory actions, including multiple FTC suits related to anti-consumer and anti-competitive practices, a DOJ investigation into fraudulent schemes to obtain credit, and over 300 open National Labor Relations Board, NLRB, cases alleging unfair labor practices. Apple CEO Tim Cook donated $1 million to Trump's fund, while Apple is the subject of a DOJ antitrust suit, as well as 20 NLRB cases. Google, which donated $1 million, was found by federal court to have an illegal monopoly over the online search market. Meta donated $1 million and is the subject of an ongoing CFB, PBB, into the improper use

• 6:14John Coogan?

  of financial data and an FTC antitrust suit for monopolistic practices. Microsoft donated $1 million and is subject of multiple open investigations.

• 6:22Jordi Hays?

  The funny thing here is that Elizabeth Warren has like taken more money from like big finance than like any politician in history. Like she is truly the most toxic politician of all time. And we don't, we don't talk about politics on this show ever. But if, but if I were to, to, you know, sort of. Extrapolate on Elizabeth Warren. I wouldn't have a lot of, uh, my mother once told me, if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all. And I don't have a single word.

• 6:56John Coogan?

  This is funny because it's like listing off like, you know, every big tech company donated and every big tech company is like under significant pressure from the government. But there's a flip that you can flip this around and be like, and be like, well, we're suing every single tech company. Like, why aren't they donating to us?

• 7:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 7:13John Coogan?

  It's like, uh, yeah, maybe, maybe.

• 7:17Jordi Hays?

  Maybe they're, they're kind of.

• 7:18John Coogan?

  It's not like, it's not like all these donations were made and then all the lawsuits started.

• 7:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 7:24John Coogan?

  It's like, clearly the company was like, well, we had to spend $500 million on legal bills.

• 7:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 7:31John Coogan?

  Like, maybe we should.

• 7:33Jordi Hays?

  Spend one million.

• 7:34John Coogan?

  Maybe we should spend.

• 7:34Jordi Hays?

  And it's crazy because Elizabeth Warren's Robin Hood fluctuates millions of dollars every hour with, with the, with the, uh, you know, she's, she's, you know, prominent investor herself. And so.

• 7:50John Coogan?

  Is that true at all? I thought it was all Nancy Pelosi was the.

• 7:52Jordi Hays?

  I, I think, I think they track, I think they track.

• 7:55John Coogan?

  Warren's doing well too. Okay. Well, she closed out the letter saying.

• 8:01Jordi Hays?

  Like, to be clear, she, it's, it's just so disingenuous to come after somebody for making political donations when she has been the beneficiary of big business for her entire career.

• 8:16John Coogan?

  Yep. Uh, it is critical that federal regulators continue to evenly handed, even handedly apply competition, consumer protection, anti discrimination laws, and any other rule of law that applies to your company. But the industry's efforts suggest that big tech companies are trying to curry favor and skirt the rules. This would be good for billionaire tech executives, but it is bad for America. If left unchecked, big tech monopolies will threaten consumers' rights, run roughshod over workers, and squash competition while stifling innovation. These donations raise the question about corruption and the influence of corporate money on the Trump administration and Congress and the public to serve answers. Therefore, we ask that you provide responses by January 31st, 2025. And the question here is, when, uh, when and under what circumstances

• 8:59John Coogan?

  did your company decide to make these contributions to the Trump inaugural fund? Um, and there's a couple of other questions, but, uh, very interesting. I think, uh. There, I mean, obviously, like, you know, we're joking around, but there is something to, you know, antitrust laws exist for a reason. The true extractive monopolies do destroy shareholder value and economic value. And there are good reasons for many of the laws that are in place. The question is just like, is this a, has this been like a pattern of abuse? The toughest thing about the tech monopolies is that you can look at a, you know, the Google search monopoly, which is very clearly true, but previously,

• 9:41John Coogan?

  like, the Sherman Antitrust Act was defined as consumer harm. So it needs to be two steps. One, you have a monopoly, which can be quantitatively measured by the HHI. Are you familiar with this? The Hirschman Hirschfeld Index, something like that.

• 9:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 9:58John Coogan?

  The HHI is a mathematical calculation for economic concentration in a particular industry. So you basically take the market size and you, of each company, you square them. Or something like that. And so you get, so with search market, it's extremely high because Google has like 90%. It's very obvious. But that's not enough to just say, hey, there's only one company in there. We got to break them into two because sometimes a certain industry just might only have one player.

• 10:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 10:27John Coogan?

  The question is, are they abusing that monopoly power to raise prices on customers?

• 10:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 10:33John Coogan?

  And-

• 10:33Jordi Hays?

  With Google, it's hard to argue because you-

• 10:35John Coogan?

  Free product.

• 10:36Jordi Hays?

  Free product, you can get a lot of value from the Google ecosystem.

• 10:39John Coogan?

  And then on the backend, the real customer where they get the money from are the ads buyers.

• 10:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 10:44John Coogan?

  And of course, ads buyers can move to other platforms. They can easily move on to data.

• 10:49Jordi Hays?

  So I looked it up.

• 10:49John Coogan?

  And it's an auction.

• 10:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 10:50John Coogan?

  So they're very, it's very hard for Google to-

• 10:54Jordi Hays?

  Supply and demand.

• 10:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, to artificially raise prices of their ads.

• 10:57Jordi Hays?

  So I looked it up and here's the thing, so I figured it out.

• 11:00John Coogan?

  So we looked at the data.

• 11:01Jordi Hays?

  I looked at the, so we looked at the data. We've been preparing a TED Talk by looking at the data.

• 11:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:07Jordi Hays?

  So I looked at the data. Elizabeth Warren loves mutual funds. She's, you know, an active investor in some of these funds. And I think some of the frustration from this latter- Might actually be that through all those funds, she's a, you know, she herself has a lot of her net worth in some of these big tech companies. And she might be angry as a indirect shareholder that that money is being spent on her political opponents when it could be profit for her. Right? So she's like, maybe it's more of like this long con of if you keep that money in the business, distribute it out, do some buybacks. My assets are going to go up because she's a, she's a sent to millionaire.

• 11:44John Coogan?

  Really?

• 11:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, they've, they've.

• 11:45John Coogan?

  No way.

• 11:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, not sent to, sorry. So she, she has some, somewhere between, she has 10 plus million dollars of like known assets. Sure, she's taking some, you know, hush.

• 11:57Jordi Hays?

  We're just like, I, I, I just feel, I just feel like she's trying to slander tech. I'm going to slander her a little bit. Let it rip a little bit. No, but I think, I think it's just this frustration of saying, you know, her being like, I want that to be, I want that money to be going to buybacks. To help my bags instead of helping my political opponents.

• 12:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 12:17Jordi Hays?

  She feels some sort of entitlement to some of that, you know?

• 12:19John Coogan?

  Well, it is funny because like you, you look at the antitrust stuff against Google and one of the first person, one of the first people to kind of like argue that. Google had become this like lethargic monopoly was Peter Thiel, of course.

• 12:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 12:33John Coogan?

  With this idea that, that famous debate between him and Eric Schmidt, talking about.

• 12:41John Coogan?

  Google has something, it was like 50 billion at the time. Now it's like maybe 150 billion of cash reserves. And they have all this money and they don't innovate and they don't actually deploy it. And it, and it's a testament that they're out of ideas.

• 12:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 12:53John Coogan?

  They don't have a place to go sink that money to get a return. And, and so even though, and this was like all stagnation theory, just arguing that. You know, you need to look no further than Google with best engineers, the, the, the, the most agentic founders at the helm, like you have this incredible.

• 13:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Google could have done Starlink.

• 13:13John Coogan?

  They could have done so many different things.

• 13:14Jordi Hays?

  They could have done so many different things.

• 13:15John Coogan?

  And they had all the resources and they couldn't justify any of those investments.

• 13:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the one, the one thing that's interesting with, with Warren is when you look at a lot of these senators and politicians that are just really annoying, right? Like the sort of boomer generation, they clearly need to move on. They're sort of holding progress back in a bunch of different ways. The unfortunate thing is Elizabeth Warren is quite annoying to me is, but good for her is she has like a lot of vigor. Like she seems a lot healthier than sort of some of these other, even on the Republican side, some of these guys that are just like, what's the guy's name who's constantly just like,

• 13:52John Coogan?

  Mitch McConnell?

• 13:53Jordi Hays?

  Mitch McConnell, poor guy. Like he clearly, like his staff is just sort of like shepherding him around like he should be in a retirement home. Uh, just sort of like NPCing out on, um, you know, interviewed like on national television, just being like,

• 14:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, I would, I mean, I would, you look back to the founding fathers and you read their ages and it's like, oh yeah, they had like a cracked 18 year old writing like the constitution for them like,

• 14:19Jordi Hays?

  With the quills.

• 14:20John Coogan?

  Like just oldest dudes are like, oh yeah, they're like 28 year old guy working on this. It would be so,

• 14:25Jordi Hays?

  All we want is to average out.

• 14:27John Coogan?

  It'd be so amazing if we flip it instead of 35 plus, it's 35 or under.

• 14:31Jordi Hays?

  And we had Vivek, so Vivek has been silenced. Vivek has been put, Vivek, maybe Vivek is prepping for the cage. Maybe he's like, he wants to go founder mode again. He's like, politics, I've had enough. I want to show all these jocks like how to, how to build a billion dollars of enterprise value in 90 days, a PMF or die.

• 14:50John Coogan?

  I really just want a president who's, you know, 19 years old, chugs Red Bulls and Celsius all night and is just like, yeah, peace in the,

• 14:58Jordi Hays?

  Well, isn't there a minimum, 35?

• 15:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. 35 is the minimum age, but I think it should be the maximum age. We need a gamer president, somebody who's gonna just grind with the boys.

• 15:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we need, we need a president who's, who insists that the White House press secretary does the, the brain rot. What is it called? What are those? Yeah. What are the videos called where like they have, like we need the,

• 15:20John Coogan?

  Subway surfer stuff?

• 15:21Jordi Hays?

  Subway surfer videos where it's like the, the person talking and then some like car like racing.

• 15:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, I would just love, I would just love a vigorous president, someone who can, who can get up,

• 15:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I want the,

• 15:32John Coogan?

  Fly, solve it, stay up all night.

• 15:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the, the press secretary is, is doing the like TikTok streaming, like, you know, midway they're like, all right, so, you know, the president has made it clear that, you know, and they're like, ice cream's so good, ice creams.

• 15:48John Coogan?

  It's great. Well, let's move on to our real top story today. TikTok.

• 15:53Jordi Hays?

  And before we dump, we're gonna talk about TikTok today, but I'd like to help our audience get a little bit more empathy with this story. And so I'd like to just teach them a quick word of Mandarin that they can use throughout their day, which is pijo, which means beer. So if you want to, if you're trying to find common ground between, you know, you and somebody, I doubt any of our listeners are on Red Note. If you go on Red Note, just comment on a bunch of posts, "我很喜欢啤酒", which means "I really enjoy beer." And that will find like sort of some common ground because again, the Chinese

• 16:33Jordi Hays?

  people are not the enemy. It's the CCP that's the enemy. So it's important to, you know, clarify that.

• 16:39John Coogan?

  Yeah. So let's start with just setting the table a little bit with this article from the information, kind of giving an overview of the current status. So TikTok prepares for an immediate shut off in the US on Sunday. So they're gonna shut down the app. TikTok plans to shut off its app for US users on Sunday, the day a federal law will ban the app unless the Supreme Court intervenes to block the ban. And we have an update there. The Supreme Court ruled unanimously to uphold the ban. So I think we need nine, nine size dong bangs for nine Supreme Court justices.

• 17:20John Coogan?

  Sounds great.

• 17:23Jordi Hays?

  Set nine?

• 17:24John Coogan?

  It's close enough.

• 17:25Jordi Hays?

  Close enough. Bravo to the Supreme Court. That's, they do get it right over there.

• 17:30John Coogan?

  Yeah. But should we take a moment of silence for the Biden shareholders, Saskuana and Jeff Yash?

• 17:38Jordi Hays?

  Okay. What ad should we run?

• 17:43John Coogan?

  And bows again. Again, moment of silence for everyone who lost money on TikTok.

• 17:47Jordi Hays?

  This moment of silence is brought to you by David Protein, the highest concentration of protein per calorie of any bar in the market.

• 17:54John Coogan?

  Okay, back to the show. So, "Under the plan, people attempting to open the TikTok app will instead see a pop-up message directing them to a website with information about the ban," one of the people said. TikTok plans to give users the option to download all their data so they can take a record of their personal information with them. Under a law passed last year, TikTok will be banned on January 19th in the United States unless it has cut ties with its Chinese parent ByteDance. So that was the sale proposal. TikTok has appealed to the Supreme Court to overturn the law on First Amendment grounds and is waiting a decision, but questions from Supreme Court justices at oral arguments of the case last Friday suggested the court would likely uphold the law, which they did. The law doesn't require TikTok to turn off the app.

• 18:37John Coogan?

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

• 19:21John Coogan?

  at the Supreme Court hearing on Friday, when he said the app would go dark if the court didn't intervene. In an email to TikTok employees, reported by The Verge, the company said it was planning for various scenarios. "Your employment, pay, and benefits are secure, and our offices will remain open even if this situation hasn't resolved before the January 19th deadline." As the date of the ban approaches, speculation is increasing about how-

• 19:42Jordi Hays?

  Oh, the PCP is so generous.

• 19:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 19:45Jordi Hays?

  I'm glad that they care about their employees, even in the midst of all this turmoil.

• 19:49John Coogan?

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

• 20:28Jordi Hays?

  Before we, before we like, I guess, go into the rest, because there's going to be, we'll give some backstory on TikTok, but we're also going to be dunking on TikTok quite a lot. But we're not heartless. There are going to be people that are affected by this. There's the Zoomers, obviously, who are just wildly addicted to the app. And their argument is that TikTok is better in many ways than Reels still. Like it has better search. They say it has better discoverability. There are also businesses that run their businesses on TikTok. And for those people, I basically think at this point, they've had like a year plus of warning that like this is like shaky ground and could go away.

• 21:10Jordi Hays?

  And so I think for those people, the people running like TikTok shop agencies are going to not, you know, they're going to be like bummed out, but again, they can just pivot to focusing on these other channels. I do think it was, it was great for commercial activity, probably better than some of these other platforms.

• 21:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, they did have a lot of technical innovations. Most of them have been ported over already. Like I think even on YouTube, you can have pinned products, but it's usually just for merch. It was originally like a teespring, like a shirt integration, but now you can actually pull in products from any Shopify store because they deepened that integration. And I'm sure Meta will do the same.

• 21:49Jordi Hays?

  And then the, and then the actual like creators that have built million plus, you know, anywhere from.

• 21:57Jordi Hays?

  That sucks.

• 21:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, sucks.

• 22:00Jordi Hays?

  Like getting it taken away.

• 22:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 22:01Jordi Hays?

  But I think that the, if you were taking content creation as a, you know, profession, you should understand that you need to be everywhere.

• 22:11John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 22:12Jordi Hays?

  You can't be reliant on a single platform. If X was getting banned right now, we would be, we would be in shambles. The lights would all be off. We'd be drinking. Yeah, we'd probably just be like, you know, trying. So, so I do understand why people are like almost traumatized by this whole thing.

• 22:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 22:30Jordi Hays?

  But it's still necessary.

• 22:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 22:31Jordi Hays?

  It's like, it's, it feels like telling like.

• 22:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 22:34Jordi Hays?

  Your kid who's having a tantrum, like it's gonna be like.

• 22:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 22:38Jordi Hays?

  You know, they're, they're, you know, anybody who has like a two-year-old understands like a kid can have a tantrum, but then time just passes and they like bounce back.

• 22:48John Coogan?

  I do have a little bit of a promoted post call to action. If you have created on TikTok, if you've solved the algorithm, if you've gone mega viral, if you're a TikTok editor, TikTok creator, and you're looking for your next thing, please contact us. We're trying to do more on YouTube Shorts and more on Instagram Reels. And so we'd love to talk to you about helping us on content strategy, editing, promotion, anything that we can do to get the show more viral and do more clips. We do a lot of horizontal clips on X right now, but we definitely want to get on the vertical clips as well. We have some ideas that we're testing out, but the more support we have, the better. So with that, we, we wanted to give you the full history of TikTok.

• 23:32John Coogan?

  Go through the, the story. It's over a decade old at this point, almost. I guess 2015 musically started. So let's go through the history of TikTok and then we'll break down some of the analysis about what's going on in the ban.

• 23:47Jordi Hays?

  It's, and it's, I mean, there's so much good stuff here. I'll, I'll hold this joke for a second because it's, it's, you know, you'll, you'll see it in a second. So why don't you start with.

• 23:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 23:58Jordi Hays?

  First, the first bullet point that we have.

• 24:00John Coogan?

  Alex Zhu.

• 24:01Jordi Hays?

  2012.

• 24:02John Coogan?

  2012.

• 24:03Jordi Hays?

  Over a decade ago.

• 24:05John Coogan?

  He was working as a UI designer at SAP.

• 24:08Jordi Hays?

  And you know why I like this?

• 24:09John Coogan?

  Why?

• 24:09Jordi Hays?

  Is because SAP is our sworn enemy.

• 24:13John Coogan?

  Oh, really?

• 24:13Jordi Hays?

  As, as smart business owners that run on ramp.

• 24:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 24:18Jordi Hays?

  Many, many of these big companies, you know, have these complex integrations on SAP. They're wasting, you know, quite a lot of time and, and, you know, you know, really sort of ruining the lives of their employees by forcing them to use this sort of legacy software.

• 24:34John Coogan?

  Kind of a Chekhov's gun situation.

• 24:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it makes sense that, it makes sense that TikTok, which is, you know, our enemy social media company was started by a guy who worked for our enemy finance automation.

• 24:49John Coogan?

  Interesting. Yeah, I hadn't put that together. So he's in his mid 30s, working as a UI designer at SAP. He gets this extremely fake job as the in-house futurist focused on the future of education. He's working on massively online open courseware, which is actually very cool. And there's companies like Coursera and Udacity that were launching around this time. He realized that video lectures were too long and hard to engage with for most people. You gotta go blame brain rot. This was, so he starts Cakata Education with Louis Yang, focusing on short form educational videos. And that was the last time anyone learned anything from TikTok.

• 25:31John Coogan?

  But of course that business fails, so they pivot to what becomes Musically. He's on the train. I think he was going from, he was riding the Caltrain from Silicon Valley to SF. He was commuting to his job and he sees these kids using their phones to create selfie videos with music and overlays, basically lip sync videos. And they decide to create an app that focuses on making that super easy.

• 25:54Jordi Hays?

  And so this was, just to contextualize it, when I first saw Musically videos like being reposted to other platforms.

• 26:02John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 26:03Jordi Hays?

  It was the first time I felt old on the internet.

• 26:06John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 26:06Jordi Hays?

  Because I was like, why are these kids?

• 26:08John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 26:08Jordi Hays?

  Like, why are these people dancing and lip syncing?

• 26:11John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 26:12Jordi Hays?

  But it weirdly, for me, I really started noticing it around.

• 26:17Jordi Hays?

  I feel like at this point, maybe, maybe, maybe I just really noticed it late, but it, it felt like I started to really pay attention to it in 2020.

• 26:25John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 26:25Jordi Hays?

  When it made sense where I was like, okay, nobody can leave their house and go dance or go to the bar or anything like teenagers can't go to house parties. They can't go to football games because of COVID. Okay. It actually makes sense that they want to just dance and like it's, it's more efficient to just dance online than it is to like go and,

• 26:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 26:44Jordi Hays?

  you know, try to get attention in, in some other setting. So.

• 26:48John Coogan?

  And I mean, like.

• 26:49Jordi Hays?

  And for a while, for a while it was very cringe.

• 26:53John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 26:53Jordi Hays?

  For people to go on Musically.

• 26:55John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 26:55Jordi Hays?

  Do it. And people would do it sort of ironically.

• 26:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 26:58Jordi Hays?

  And then the app. And then I even remember the first time I downloaded, I, I don't know if I downloaded Musically or TikTok, but my first impression with TikTok was like, I opened the app and it served me a highly relevant video and it probably was just fate or luck or chance, but I was like, I was impressed. I was like, and then.

• 27:19John Coogan?

  The algorithm really was like incredible.

• 27:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 27:21John Coogan?

  And, and, and still, still.

• 27:22Jordi Hays?

  And there was, there was, I heard, I heard, I have no idea if this is true, but fortunately we're not journalists. So we don't have to get the facts right all the time. But I heard that, that their algorithm, which was so, was, was, was kind of like a scale AI sweatshop model where there was, the, the rumor was like, imagine just warehouses and warehouses in China where people are just sitting there being like, you know, is this, is this funny? Like, is this a dog? Like classifying the videos like very manually.

• 27:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 27:56Jordi Hays?

  And I'm sure it got more and more automated over time, but it's the kind of thing China can do where they're like, oh, we want the best algorithm. Let's put 200,000 people on it and they're just kind of like clicking buttons.

• 28:07John Coogan?

  I mean, that's very real for the, for the censorship of the Chinese internet. Like they were able to just throw millions and millions of people at it.

• 28:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 28:14John Coogan?

  And now AI is kind of caught up and they can censor a lot of stuff automatically.

• 28:17Jordi Hays?

  And for me, the interesting thing here is, is I studied abroad in, in, in Shanghai in 2016.

• 28:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 28:26Jordi Hays?

  And.

• 28:28Jordi Hays?

  It uh.

• 28:29John Coogan?

  Oh, you were one of those guys like Trump wins and you gotta leave the country?

• 28:32Jordi Hays?

  It was actually very weird cuz I was watching, watching, I was there in the fall.

• 28:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 28:37Jordi Hays?

  And so all of the chaos and terminal turmoil of the election, I was watching unfold online while in China. But then from a, from a tech, from a technology standpoint, I mean, a lot of, you know, most of the people in China would use VPNs to use Instagram and Google products and stuff like that. But uh, so this was already happening, like Chinese, China had banned all of these Western apps entirely. You could still get around it. And so I never understood from the very beginning why we would allow China. You know, China uh, has done some.

• 29:14John Coogan?

  The thing is, is that it wasn't a Chinese app to begin with. It was just an app made by a Chinese dude who.

• 29:19Jordi Hays?

  Yes, yes, but the thing, but the thing that, the thing that.

• 29:22John Coogan?

  The ByteDance deal happened much later.

• 29:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 29:24John Coogan?

  Which we gotta go into.

• 29:25Jordi Hays?

  But, but, but um, the honest truth is that anyone who is Chinese.

• 29:32Jordi Hays?

  The government expects them to act on behalf of the state.

• 29:37Jordi Hays?

  It is an expectation.

• 29:39John Coogan?

  Maybe.

• 29:39Jordi Hays?

  I think it's different. I think it's different if somebody is like renounces their citizenship as here. But, but uh, China, from my experience on the ground, everyone has, feels an obligation to serve the state in some way or another.

• 29:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, it kinda happened in World War II. There was like the, uh, like all the German dudes who lived in America, like Germany was like, come back and fight for us.

• 30:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 30:05John Coogan?

  And people went.

• 30:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 30:06John Coogan?

  But it's not.

• 30:07Jordi Hays?

  Or, or if you're gonna stay, you're gonna share information back and basically act as, you know.

• 30:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 30:15Jordi Hays?

  Amateur espionage.

• 30:16John Coogan?

  But you can think of Alex Zhu as kind of like the Chinese Nikita Beer.

• 30:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 30:21John Coogan?

  He was like a growth hack master at the time.

• 30:24Jordi Hays?

  Ship poster.

• 30:26John Coogan?

  Answer now about that. But I mean, the, the, the growth hacks that they used to grow Musically were really genius. So one of the first ones was, um, there's an API on the iPhone for the iTunes Store where you can pull in music previews and you don't have to pay any licensing fees for those because they're just 15 second clips.

• 30:45Jordi Hays?

  Very cool.

• 30:45John Coogan?

  And so you could have access to the entire iTunes Music Library, every single song.

• 30:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so smart.

• 30:51John Coogan?

  Without needing to actually go to, you know.

• 30:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that was my impression too. I was like, how do they have Instagram at the time had no music platform?

• 31:00John Coogan?

  And so if you wanted to add music, you would have to like, download the video, download this, like steal the song by downloading it and then put it together.

• 31:07Jordi Hays?

  And then.

• 31:08John Coogan?

  It was really hard.

• 31:08Jordi Hays?

  Meta would have to like censor some of that stuff.

• 31:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, and then they'd take it down because it was like, oh, you don't have the rights to that. But, but they figured out that they could, that they could pull that in. Eventually they did the deals to actually get the money to the record labels. But that was, that was a huge, huge, uh, growth hack. And then they also did this thing where they'd, they'd watermark the videos with Musically. And so when you downloaded the video and shared it on a different platform, it would have that watermark in there, kind of like the steak.com thing.

• 31:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 31:37John Coogan?

  And so that drove a whole bunch of viral growth because you're like, oh, I'm seeing this thing.

• 31:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. That was super smart.

• 31:42John Coogan?

  Really, really smart. And so the app launched in China, Japan, Europe, and the US with the US audience picking it up globally. Kuixiao, the Chinese app started in 2011 as a gif maker tool, but later transformed into a short form video platform. So around this time, basically everyone who's doing content or social media is realizing two things, like short form video is the future. And, and we're shifting from the social network ranking what's in your, uh, one degree of separation. Like what are your friends posting to just.

• 32:13Jordi Hays?

  Raw entertainment.

• 32:14John Coogan?

  Yeah. What is the best content across the entire platform, regardless of whether you follow that person or it's a huge account or a small account. And that's why when, if you set up for a long time, if you set up a new TikTok account, you could post literally anything and you get 500 views immediately.

• 32:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 32:29John Coogan?

  With no followers.

• 32:30Jordi Hays?

  Well, and they also, so, and, and, uh, Nir on X posted something that's like, we actually created the metaverse, but it's, it's in the form of short form.

• 32:39John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 32:39Jordi Hays?

  Content.

• 32:39John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 32:40Jordi Hays?

  Uh, one other thing with TikTok that they, they did well is very clearly they were using bots early on to drive engagement, drive views. And, and many, many creators would, would. Basically knew that a lot of their, you could go on TikTok and get a ton of followers and views quickly. And it was clear that they were just artificially inflating those numbers. But there was enough real people actually tuning in that it didn't matter, right?

• 33:06John Coogan?

  Yep. Yeah. And so during this time, they get the Musically app up.

• 33:15John Coogan?

  It launched as a broad short form video platform in 2014.

• 33:18Jordi Hays?

  This is all, yeah, this is all.

• 33:19John Coogan?

  And they did a ton of like App Store optimization and keyword stuffing in the title. I think it said like Musically, like lip sync battle. And then on Thursday nights, the downloads would spike because there was a lip sync battle TV show, which was like national, like prime time TV. And that had initiated from this Jimmy Fallon, like they had a segment on the Jimmy Fallon show called Lips.

• 33:43Jordi Hays?

  Lip sync battle.

• 33:45John Coogan?

  Lip sync battles. And so that turned into its own TV show. People would see that, go to the App Store and search, even though I don't think they had a legitimate deal. They were just kind of like keyword hijacking that.

• 33:54Jordi Hays?

  That's cool.

• 33:55John Coogan?

  So yeah, very smart there. They gained visibility through the App Store, lip sync.

• 34:00Jordi Hays?

  And this is also, there's this transition happening from social media, which is suddenly my, my friends are more entertaining than Jimmy Fallon.

• 34:09John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 34:10Jordi Hays?

  To my friends are entertaining, but random strangers online are actually more entertaining.

• 34:17John Coogan?

  Who are like.

• 34:17Jordi Hays?

  And this was happening, this was already happening with the Kardashians. Like, well, it's much more interesting to follow what Kylie Jenner is doing because she's like dating rappers and having babies than it, than some random person from your hometown. Who just had like a super early pregnancy.

• 34:34John Coogan?

  So in 2015, Musically focuses, like they find their product market fit around lip sync videos. They changed the onboarding flow to as soon as you download the app, it's like, let's make your first lip sync video. It's not just like a blank canvas, pick a song, let's lip sync to it. And musical artists actually start flipping the model and growing on TikTok by promoting their music. And Old Town Road was the first example by Lil Nas X.

• 35:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And then at this time, it became suddenly every artist you could blow up over. It was, what was cool here is American, you know, any artist globally could become a star overnight by having the right song.

• 35:13John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 35:13Jordi Hays?

  The other thing that was interesting about the change to algo feeds is it became. Much harder for these creators to monetize.

• 35:21John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 35:21Jordi Hays?

  Because if you run, you could run an ad, let's say you have like a million followers on TikTok. If you're putting up a lip syncing video or dancing video, you'll get a lot of views. But then if you're like, this video is presented by Procter and Gamble. Like Procter and Gamble makes a bunch of great soaps. Everybody's like, you know, I got that, you know, 500 views.

• 35:44John Coogan?

  It just won't get used. As opposed to if you look at, you know, a podcaster who has an RSS feed and someone listens to every single episode. Well, the downloads are not, we talked to David Sandler about this, like his downloads might fluctuate by like 10% episode to episode, but it's always in the same band. Whereas if you're in an algo feed, like a TikToker, you could, you could fluctuate by two orders of magnitude, easily.

• 36:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And you have, you know, podcasts allow you to do things like Ricky Bobby and Talladega Nights where he sold the windshield. That's right. And it's harder to sell the windshield on TikTok.

• 36:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. It's very hard to make the integrated content, even if you're doing stuff in the background.

• 36:25Jordi Hays?

  I ignored the platform as an advertiser because I was doing a ton of stuff on YouTube at the time and I just didn't.

• 36:31John Coogan?

  We never did it, mostly because it was a very young audience and we don't want to advertise nicotine to kids. So we stayed away from it, but, but I don't, I don't know that there was ever like really good money there. I think for like very specific products, it could work.

• 36:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it was the big, it was the massive, what are those, the D'Amelio? They would get like a shoe deal or something like that. And there was way to do, to do like product placement.

• 36:52John Coogan?

  If it's a very visual product, it can actually be explained in under 60 seconds. Like it needs to be very precise.

• 36:57Jordi Hays?

  And you remember this time Snapchat was also, they launched their whole creator fund and they were paying out like a million dollars a day. Which was cool to see that money going to someone other than just the team, the executive.

• 37:10John Coogan?

  Well, I mean, that's a great bridge to, have you, have you listened to the, I think it's Light Speed or something? Alex Yu did a talk about how he sees building a social network. And it's seen as like one of the defining moments in like social network thought leadership essentially.

• 37:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 37:27John Coogan?

  And he. He compares building a social network to founding a country. Initially, creators are attracted to the platform with the promise of fame and potential wealth creation. The first step is to centralize the economy. Sounds familiar? And ensure initial talented creators succeed. They start paying content creators and connecting them with advertisers. The second step is to decentralize and create opportunities for new creators. Algorithmic feeds enables newcomers to be discovered and succeed on the platform. And so he had this whole idea of of social and economic mobility within the platform and the viability of a middle class on TikTok is crucial for the platform's success. And so, yeah, the idea is like, you need this, like, when you switch to the algo feed, it is not enough just to get likes from like your friends.

• 38:11John Coogan?

  You need professional content creators. And so you have to be able to come on and discover, okay, this person has massive talent. Let's get them to a million followers. And let's make sure that the that the creator fund is flowing to them very quickly so that they're incentivized to make this their first job.

• 38:25Jordi Hays?

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

• 38:56John Coogan?

  Spy app.

• 38:57Jordi Hays?

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

• 39:34John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 39:35Jordi Hays?

  They would stop any content associated with the Uyghurs, which is a genocide that that Chinese government has carried out. And so all this stuff is, is, it's not a conspiracy. There's enough, there's a body of proof that TikTok, it became a very strategic asset.

• 39:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 39:55Jordi Hays?

  The most, it's a, it's digital psychological warfare.

• 39:59John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 39:59Jordi Hays?

  And.

• 40:00John Coogan?

  And just pulling the levers on what are we censoring, what are we amplifying, does have like an incredible impact on the viewership, which is like a hundred million Americans.

• 40:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 40:09John Coogan?

  Crazy.

• 40:11John Coogan?

  And so in 2016, Musically had 10 million daily active users and over 90 million users in total, up from 10 million the previous year.

• 40:21John Coogan?

  And in 2016, Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg were trying to enter the Chinese market. Zuck invites the co-founder of Musically, Alex Yu, to discuss a potential acquisition. I think they go for this walk in the Silicon Valley Highlands and they're discussing this. Despite being a Chinese app, Musically had a significant presence in the US with a team in Santa Monica and a perception of being an American social media app. In 2017, they decided to launch and grow in China, having initially focused on the West. And Chinese business model for a social app, the Chinese business model typically relies on direct monetization such as virtual goods, gifting and tipping rather than advertising.

• 41:02Jordi Hays?

  Ice cream, so good.

• 41:03John Coogan?

  Yeah. Content companies in China need to work closely with the CCP, ensuring their content upholds the party's laws and wishes. A different, you really need to go live.

• 41:15John Coogan?

  Stop it, stop it.

• 41:20Jordi Hays?

  Thank you, thank you for the banana, Ben.

• 41:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, and so in late of 2017, ByteDance, which was already pretty huge, they launched Douyin, TikTok's Chinese version.

• 41:31Jordi Hays?

  And that has to be the one, the really the one that got away. Because imagine if Zuck had another app with a hundred million Americans, they're just this perfect ad platform of, that has this amazing social graph, that has this amazing, you know, interest graph.

• 41:47John Coogan?

  Well, you know that.

• 41:48Jordi Hays?

  Zuck would be doing.

• 41:49John Coogan?

  This is the flip side of the FTC stuff. This is the flip side of the Elizabeth Warren stuff of like, yeah, like, you know, Zuck might have a bit of a monopoly over social networking, but if he had a little bit looser reign during this time, he could have acquired TikTok and we wouldn't be in this mess of a situation.

• 42:08Jordi Hays?

  Well, it's even, I mean, the deal fell through for unknown reasons. And it's totally possible that Alex wanted to do the deal.

• 42:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 42:20Jordi Hays?

  And there were certain players that-

• 42:22John Coogan?

  I don't think it was actually the American FTC that blocked the deal.

• 42:25Jordi Hays?

  No, it's much more likely-

• 42:26John Coogan?

  I think it was the Chinese FTC.

• 42:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 42:28John Coogan?

  Who said, no, you can't sell this to the Americans.

• 42:31Jordi Hays?

  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.

• 42:37John Coogan?

  It would have been a nightmare.

• 42:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 42:40John Coogan?

  And so ByteDance had launched Douyin, Chinese TikTok's version. And so Musically is facing like competition because they want to grow internationally, but now they're getting pressure from ByteDance. So ByteDance kind of has like a carrot and stick situation going on. Hey, we could buy your company, pay you a bunch of money, or we can compete with you internationally and close off this international market. You know that Zuck is going to come for you with Reels, Snapchat's doing stuff. Like, you're going to face a lot of pressure. Maybe the time to get out is now. And so eventually, Douyin has launched its TikTok in the US because they do the acquisition. Towards the end, ByteDance launches TikTok internationally as a shot across the bow against Musically.

• 43:22John Coogan?

  Musically is struggling to enter the Chinese market and they enter, 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. But they, but they kind of missed, like 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. But maybe worth nothing now, we'll see. Although they probably made well over a billion dollars in free cash flow.

• 44:02Jordi Hays?

  The other thing is, is I don't, ByteDance has been a pretty liquid stock in the secondary market. I don't feel that- Bad for anybody who was any American that was in.

• 44:13John Coogan?

  I disagree with that. I, 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.

• 44:26Jordi Hays?

  Totally. I'm talking about the, you know, let's say you're a family office.

• 44:30John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 44:31Jordi Hays?

  Five million dollars is by dance. You could have gotten out of that position.

• 44:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, but for the big, for the big shareholders, there was actually a proposal at one point for like a one-time repatriation of,

• 44:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 44:41John Coogan?

  of American money that's stuck in China and, and just kind of do some sort of trade deal that says like, hey, we're gonna like decouple a little bit. And we're gonna let this happen and everyone's gonna, and we're gonna figure out what the, the terms of that trade are to get that done. 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.

• 45:11Jordi Hays?

  And do you remember when they, um,

• 45:15Jordi Hays?

  you remember when they, they combined the apps and there was just TikTok and then TikTok was the number one advertiser on Meta?

• 45:21John Coogan?

  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.

• 45:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 45:29John Coogan?

  Kind of a good version.

• 45:30Jordi Hays?

  But I think they, did they, did they not allow you to port your followers?

• 45:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, I think you'd log in and port and they, and they like, uh, they duped the backend database and created a new and combined app, putting it in the app stores.

• 45:40Jordi Hays?

  But you remember, you remember when Meta was like basically.

• 45:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 45:45Jordi Hays?

  They, it made sense for them to take, cause it was billions of dollars being spent.

• 45:49John Coogan?

  I think, I think they advertised on Snapchat even more, which is.

• 45:54Jordi Hays?

  But all, and that, that was that sort of catch 22 where you're just kind of.

• 45:58John Coogan?

  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 US as US military personnel use TikTok and TikTok is gathering their location data, their facial data and their biometric data. The data for the version TikTok in Western countries is stored in the 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.

• 46:37John Coogan?

  CFIUS is supposed to review every international acquisition of American company and they they they got the TikTok call wrong because they're just like, ah, something dumb like lip syncing app, like who cares? Like this isn't this isn't US steel, you know, this isn't like

• 46:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 46:54John Coogan?

  Some weapons manufacturer, but in fact, it was an incredibly important company. And so Facebook attempted to buy Musically in 2016 and then they launched their own TikTok competitor Lasso in 2018 that I think flopped, but then eventually they figured it out with Reels. So in October of 2019

• 47:12Jordi Hays?

  I remember Lasso.

• 47:14John Coogan?

  I never, I don't think I ever really used it, but I probably downloaded it for a little bit.

• 47:18Jordi Hays?

  That's the thing, Zuck is We tried it. Zuck's not afraid to to fail.

• 47:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 47:22Jordi Hays?

  Which is cool.

• 47:23John Coogan?

  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. CFIUS review was opened on the Musically acquisition in 2019, potentially leading to a reversal of the acquisition, but it was not

• 47:42Jordi Hays?

  Zuck. That's that the 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 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.

• 48:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 48:06Jordi Hays?

  We should say, uh, All In Podcast is a national security threat.

• 48:13John Coogan?

  I think people have said that.

• 48:15Jordi Hays?

  That's true.

• 48:16John Coogan?

  This is actually true.

• 48:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, so I mean, a lot of seismic shifts in the social media landscape because of TikTok, huge shift to algorithmic feeds and just viewing it as like a, it's almost like a Netflix-style app.

• 48:33Jordi Hays?

  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 it. Even YouTube is always algorithmically driven, but you could still like show up on your homepage and see like the videos you subscribe to.

• 48:52John Coogan?

  That was a huge deal when they flipped on that, on YouTube.

• 48:55Jordi Hays?

  And every creator was.

• 48:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, the default feed used to be, you would go and you would see your subscriptions feed. So it was if you subscribed, you know, it was, it's like, like, thanks for watching, subscribe to the channel. People used to say that on YouTube. Because when you opened up the app, it would just show you, oh, the person that I subscribed to posted a new video. I'll watch it. So I watch every video. It was more like an RSS feed. Then they switched to a recommended feed as the primary feed and all the views went crazy because if you.

• 49:25Jordi Hays?

  Some people benefited.

• 49:26John Coogan?

  Some people benefited. And the whole, all the content became more algorithmically driven. You see the Mr. Beast-ification of YouTube where the thumbnails and titles and video concepts get more extreme because you have to win in the algorithm. You cannot count on your fan base or your subscriber base like seeing every video. So you have to win in the free market every single time, which is difficult, but also.

• 49:50Jordi Hays?

  You gotta earn it.

• 49:51John Coogan?

  And it just kind of depends on the.

• 49:53Jordi Hays?

  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.

• 50:01John Coogan?

  Nike got like 20,000 and then Visa got 600,000.

• 50:04Jordi Hays?

  Oh, it was flipped.

• 50:05John Coogan?

  It was flipped.

• 50:05Jordi Hays?

  It's so funny.

• 50:06John Coogan?

  And there were like very similar videos, I think.

• 50:07Jordi Hays?

  Released within the same.

• 50:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, like two weeks or something. And the Nike one, I kind of messed up the title thumbnail. The Visa one nailed it.

• 50:14Jordi Hays?

  And you're not like, you're kind of like, it doesn't actually, like the whole thing of the content creation, you just need to put a lot of stuff.

• 50:21John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 50:22Jordi Hays?

  So it's not like you're sitting there, you're like, yeah, my Nike video is actually good. I'm proud of it, but at the same time. It's kind of on you. Something could have been better thumbnail, the title or whatever.

• 50:32John Coogan?

  So what that tells me is like, is like, I think the channel has like 500K subscribers. Probably about 5% of those are like true fans that watch everything regardless of the title. Yeah. They basically have like the notifications turned on or the subscriber feed. But that Visa one got more views than my subscriber base, therefore it must have just gone out in the algorithm and done well.

• 50:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 50:54John Coogan?

  But yeah, it's a, 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.

• 51:03Jordi Hays?

  I also think consistency, 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.

• 51:12John Coogan?

  And at a certain point, you can also get to a place where you're averaging views out. So it's like, yeah, you might have a miss that gets 30K views and then a win that gets 500K views. But if you get, you know, three of each of those every single month, you know, like, yeah, my channel gets 3M views every single month. And I'm counting on that. So I'm running ads against that.

• 51:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And I, and as somebody who's, you know, I bought tens of millions of dollars of YouTube creator ads through branded native. My, the, my first company. Creators would always tell me, I get 5M views a month.

• 51:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 51:47Jordi Hays?

  And I would tell them, I do not care.

• 51:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 51:49Jordi Hays?

  Because I'm going to buy an ad on one of those videos.

• 51:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 51:52Jordi Hays?

  So I'm going to price the ad based on your least performing.

• 51:57John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 51:57Jordi Hays?

  Videos.

• 51:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 51:58Jordi Hays?

  Cause if I, I can't go back to the advertiser and say, you know, you, you, you paid thinking you were going to get 200,000 views. Then you got 20,000 views.

• 52:06John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 52:07Jordi Hays?

  They're going to be pissed.

• 52:07John Coogan?

  Well, there's, there's another thing with that where I talked to a creator that has like millions of, millions of subscribers. And he said, views don't matter for actually driving conversions. What he says is that, uh, like I have a million, million followers, a hundred thousand true fans. If a video goes viral and gets 5M views, those.

• 52:31John Coogan?

  Like the 100,000 that watch the true fans, they are the ones who will convert because they trust me. The 4.9 million people that just randomly saw my viral video, they don't care about what I'm selling and so they won't buy.

• 52:42Jordi Hays?

  But 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 convert them down the line.

• 52:50John Coogan?

  But there is like a very, there's like a trade ratio there for, for the true fans watching versus, so there's always this question, especially on TikTok, it's like, how many true fans these people have or are they just going viral in the, in the feed? So let's swap, swap over to Stratechery's analysis. Ben Thompson has written about the TikTok ban many, many times.

• 53:11Jordi Hays?

  Are we starting with his?

• 53:12John Coogan?

  The, yeah, TikTok ban approaches generational implications, Sahuangchu.

• 53:17Jordi Hays?

  Well, Hengxiwangpijiu.

• 53:21John Coogan?

  The, 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, he wrote in, Ben Thompson wrote in favor of TikTok banning TikTok back in 2020 and his objection was less about user data than about giving a foreign adversary militarily, economically and ideologically access to the hearts and minds of Americans. This is the point of don't let the Russians own NBC during the Cold War. That remains my primary concern and if anything, the, 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.

• 54:03Jordi Hays?

  Got him.

• 54:05John Coogan?

  What is clear is that it would have been far better to have acted in 2020, but at that point, we were still in the President Trump supports this, so it must be bad era of politics. The great irony, of course, is that President-elect Trump is now opposed to the ban for some combination of not wanting to give Meta more power, satisfying prominent reporters, prominent supporters, and the fact that Trump has found great success on TikTok. Even so, it's not clear that-

• 54:30Jordi Hays?

  I don't think that, I don't buy the great success angle because that guy will get views anywhere, from anyone, at any time.

• 54:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 54:38Jordi Hays?

  And-

• 54:39John Coogan?

  That's true.

• 54:39Jordi Hays?

  Again, that attention, I don't believe, so that if the average person is spending an hour a day in the app-

• 54:45John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 54:45Jordi Hays?

  That attention will shift back to other platforms-

• 54:48John Coogan?

  Totally, totally.

• 54:48Jordi Hays?

  Where Trump also is dominant.

• 54:50John Coogan?

  And the narrative of this election was not, it's the TikTok election. It was, it's the podcast election. And where do those podcasts live? Spotify, YouTube, RSS feeds.

• 54:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 54:58John Coogan?

  And so, I think if any of those were at risk of banning-

• 55:02Jordi Hays?

  Joe Rogan.

• 55:03John Coogan?

  Yeah. If, if, if there really was, it'd be weird, but if there was some situation where it's like Rogan is gonna get banned, that would be much more of a lever for Trump-

• 55:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 55:12John Coogan?

  Than, than TikTok. So I agree with you on that.

• 55:15Jordi Hays?

  There also needs to be, it's crazy, I was just thinking, Alex, how is Alex Jones back operating under the Infowars?

• 55:24John Coogan?

  Is he?

• 55:24Jordi Hays?

  He's-

• 55:25John Coogan?

  I thought he lost the, I thought he lost-

• 55:26Jordi Hays?

  I thought he lost all the IP, but he's putting out new content under Infowars.

• 55:30John Coogan?

  Really? Oh, I don't know.

• 55:31Jordi Hays?

  Which is crazy. And it just seems like-

• 55:33John Coogan?

  These things are so odd.

• 55:34Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, but, and also-

• 55:36John Coogan?

  I don't know who bought it.

• 55:37Jordi Hays?

  It's how do you, you can't stop-

• 55:40John Coogan?

  Wasn't that, wasn't that, was that a joke or was that real?

• 55:42Jordi Hays?

  Who?

• 55:42John Coogan?

  I thought the onion. Or the guys at the onion.

• 55:44Jordi Hays?

  You never know. You never know at that.

• 55:46John Coogan?

  But I think he was upset.

• 55:47Jordi Hays?

  But it just goes to show, like, banning-

• 55:50John Coogan?

  At this point, Alex Jones doesn't need the Infowars IP. People just know Alex Jones.

• 55:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and he also could just slap Infowars on a video and like, kind of stop him from doing that. But anyways.

• 56:00John Coogan?

  And 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, oh, the, the, let's set the deadline the day before, like, the last possible day. It's really like, waiting to do your homework until the very last second. The other less discussed reason for the ban is the fact that basically every US consumer tech product is banned in China. I am sympathetic to the argument that the US is supposed to be a free market, but at some point, and Trump's rhetoric on trade would seem to agree, openness depends on a level playing field, which is certainly not the case when it comes to a product like TikTok. Yeah. Facebook tried to go, got banned. Google tried to go and got banned. Uber got kicked out and couldn't deal with that. Even Airbnb had some weird structure there and that didn't work. Like, just-

• 56:45Jordi Hays?

  No, so, so here's, here's, here's the, the reality of being a foreign company trying to build technology in China.

• 56:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 56:52Jordi Hays?

  They will let you come. And they will let you build, but they will stall you.

• 56:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 56:58Jordi Hays?

  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 Y C of China.

• 57:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 57:21Jordi Hays?

  Um, 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. Hmm. And, and by the end, I felt like it was intentional to purely just disrupt the business because a bunch of other Chinese companies had started copying what, what this company was doing.

• 57:51John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 57:51Jordi Hays?

  And I was like, at the first couple of times I was, I, 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?

• 57:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 57:59Jordi Hays?

  And then they would be like, uh, like they just like would stall and stall and stall. I'd be there for like four hours. I'd be like, this is ridiculous. So.

• 58:07John Coogan?

  Uh, 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, immensely valuable asset for anyone with a following on the platform. Indeed, this is an underexplored angle of social media censorship debate. Banning users doesn't cost them money, but a following is a valuable asset. Nevertheless, that too is another reason why it would have been much wiser to deal with this issue in 2020 than in 2025. The value destruction for TikTok users would have been much smaller.

• 58:47Jordi Hays?

  Good point.

• 58:48John Coogan?

  Good point.

• 58:48Jordi Hays?

  Ben, goaded.

• 58:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 58:50Jordi Hays?

  Goaded analyst.

• 58:51John Coogan?

  Yeah. You don't find this guy in the truth zone very often.

• 58:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 58:56John Coogan?

  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. Beus was saying he was gonna buy it. There was a talk about maybe Elon's gonna get it.

• 59:12Jordi Hays?

  The guy who bought Bench was trying to put together like a coalition.

• 59:16John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I gotta DM him about that.

• 59:18Jordi Hays?

  So it's just very obvious that there's a ton of people that would. It's a great asset.

• 59:24John Coogan?

  Yep, but they don't want to sell it.

• 59:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 59:25John Coogan?

  Because that's not what it's about. It's not about the money. They do it for the love of the game.

• 59:30Jordi Hays?

  They do it for a lot of geopolitical war for it.

• 59:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, great power competition. I noted previously that the two most compelling acquirers from a business perspective are Amazon or Walmart, thanks to the potential tie into their e-commerce businesses. But there was a rumor earlier this week that Elon Musk slash X could be the buyer. He's obviously palatable to Trump, but also could be to China as well, given Tesla's large presence in the country, which needless to say, presents plenty of its own complications. TikTok did deny the rumor, but one, it is unlikely that TikTok is in control of the process, given that, two, it is unlikely that ByteDance is in control of the process, since, three, the Chinese government is the entity that has the final say. Even in that light, though, it makes total sense for ByteDance in China to carry

• 1:00:14John Coogan?

  this process to the very last hour in the hope of a reprieve. Indeed, the fact that the service is planning on locking out existing users, which isn't required by law, suggests that the goal is to raise an outcry and a last-minute change of heart. All that noted, the most interesting and uncertain outcome of the ban is if it actually proceeds as planned and TikTok just suddenly disappears. Trump is right that the most obvious potential beneficiary is Meta and Instagram with its Reels products, but I think he and observers broadly are underestimating what a massive deal it would be for Meta to actually fill the TikTok void permanently.

• 1:00:50Jordi Hays?

  So why has Snapchat not made a run?

• 1:00:55Jordi Hays?

  Because there's a lot of people, you know, we just got a message in one of our group chats

• 1:00:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:59Jordi Hays?

  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.

• 1:01:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:10Jordi Hays?

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

• 1:01:28John Coogan?

  I have one.

• 1:01:29Jordi Hays?

  They have one?

• 1:01:29John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah. And, and they.

• 1:01:31Jordi Hays?

  Nobody seems to care about it.

• 1:01:32John Coogan?

  They do vertical content and they have a huge creator fund and people can get crazy monetization by taking.

• 1:01:38Jordi Hays?

  So.

• 1:01:39John Coogan?

  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.

• 1:01:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. My, my, my question though, is historically Evan and the Snapchat team were quick and they would launch new features and like they're very, they're scrappy, right?

• 1:01:58John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:01:58Jordi Hays?

  They had to be against Meta. But there's so, there's a list of, um, you know, somebody was replying to one of my posts being like, bad take. Here's like 10 features that TikTok has that none of the other platforms have.

• 1:02:09John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:02:09Jordi Hays?

  And so if you want to win over these creators, you would in theory try to hit, you know, the top.

• 1:02:14John Coogan?

  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? Uh, and, and also why don't they have a culture?

• 1:02:25Jordi Hays?

  Evan only had, they only have one Boeing business jet.

• 1:02:29John Coogan?

  Yeah. So they're just like a lot of teams waiting for flights or.

• 1:02:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that could be a big, they have their own private.

• 1:02:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:37Jordi Hays?

  Like hangar at, uh, Van Nuys, but.

• 1:02:41John Coogan?

  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.

• 1:02:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:54John Coogan?

  Because I bet that like the like Meta for the first, I mean, Facebook.

• 1:02:58Jordi Hays?

  Certainly broke the glass. I mean, he just straight up.

• 1:03:00John Coogan?

  Smacked it.

• 1:03:01Jordi Hays?

  Stories is, I use stories now more than the main feed.

• 1:03:05John Coogan?

  Exactly. And so I bet you in the first few years of of Facebook, the culture was very much like, we are inventors. We are pioneering new user interfaces, new user experiences. We created the feed. They created the feed. Like, they created all sorts of different things.

• 1:03:21Jordi Hays?

  They created the.

• 1:03:21John Coogan?

  The poke.

• 1:03:22Jordi Hays?

  They created the.

• 1:03:23John Coogan?

  All these different things.

• 1:03:24Jordi Hays?

  They created the Kava brain. Grain bowl of.

• 1:03:27John Coogan?

  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, and they actually launched.

• 1:03:37Jordi Hays?

  Well, they had photos.

• 1:03:38John Coogan?

  They, 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.

• 1:03:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:53John Coogan?

  Why are you putting me on this copycat product? But somehow culturally, Facebook got through that and it became like, yeah, we're just here to make money and we don't want to get our lunch eaten by some new startups.

• 1:04:04Jordi Hays?

  And you should build.

• 1:04:05John Coogan?

  We're gonna do it.

• 1:04:06Jordi Hays?

  You should build features that your users are excited to use.

• 1:04:08John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 1:04:09Jordi Hays?

  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 gotta download the app. I don't have the app.

• 1:04:23John Coogan?

  Yeah. And so, and so something happened with Meta's culture where it was like, hey, look, you know, we're just out here to build the best experience possible. Get ARPU 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.

• 1:04:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:41John Coogan?

  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.

• 1:04:51Jordi Hays?

  It's hurting them at this.

• 1:04:52John Coogan?

  And it's more random. Like, you can't guarantee that you're going to be able to come out with some amazing new UI innovation.

• 1:04:57Jordi Hays?

  And it's so, I, 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.

• 1:05:15John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 1:05:15Jordi Hays?

  It doesn't matter if you're super innovative. In terms of impact, scale and revenue potential, if you have no users, right?

• 1:05:22John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 1:05:23Jordi Hays?

  So yeah, and it's a interesting like, I do think, I do think there's some cool, like, if I, if I, you know, enjoyed building consumer social apps, there are some cool things where you could, you know, create an app today that's like, sign in, you know, and we will port over, you know, you can figure out sort of hacks and mechanisms to try to port. I thought that, um, I own, remember when I owned Bantalk, I was trying to pitch you on like, shit to do with it.

• 1:05:52John Coogan?

  Maybe.

• 1:05:53Jordi Hays?

  I wonder if anybody's.

• 1:05:54John Coogan?

  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 we'll 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 referring to different generations by their dominant social network. There's the Facebook generation, the Instagram generation, and the youngest cohort is the TikTok generation. For Instagram to extend its reach downwards by a generation would be a huge deal that would reverberate for years, because that generation, if they can really pull them over to Instagram fully,

• 1:06:37John Coogan?

  they're just going to be able to get, add revenue from them for, you know, it's perpetuity. Because once you get locked in, there are a lot of people that are still using Facebook, because that's their dominant generation. And that's what they, and like a lot of millennials are still on Instagram and have just stayed with that.

• 1:06:52Jordi Hays?

  And weirdly, Facebook, it's kind of interesting how Facebook marketplace is still as relevant as ever, seemingly with everyone.

• 1:07:01John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 1:07:02Jordi Hays?

  Even though the main app, you know, nobody I know is posting on there.

• 1:07:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, but older people do.

• 1:07:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:08John Coogan?

  For sure. And then, so Ben takes the opposite tact and says, uh, there's also a reason why it might not happen. Younger generations don't want to be on boomer social networks, and I'm sorry to announce boomer is an adjective for anything that is older than you is here to stay, which is to say we are never getting rid of boomers. Uh, 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.

• 1:07:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I would, I would love to see, remember, you know Alex Ma, he did, um,

• 1:07:38John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:07:38Jordi Hays?

  Not Be Real, but the, the, what was?

• 1:07:41John Coogan?

  Oh.

• 1:07:42Jordi Hays?

  The app that you had to like, take a picture every.

• 1:07:45John Coogan?

  I don't know.

• 1:07:46Jordi Hays?

  No, he had, what was, what was Alex Mazat?

• 1:07:48John Coogan?

  I don't know.

• 1:07:49Jordi Hays?

  I can't get this. Benchmark led the series.

• 1:07:51John Coogan?

  Front back?

• 1:07:52Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 1:07:53John Coogan?

  That was one.

• 1:07:54Jordi Hays?

  He had a social audio at paparazzi.

• 1:07:56John Coogan?

  Oh, paparazzi.

• 1:07:57Jordi Hays?

  Where you take pictures of your friends.

• 1:07:58John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:07:58Jordi Hays?

  Which was, which was a cool.

• 1:08:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:08:01Jordi Hays?

  User experience because it became cringe on Instagram to post pictures of yourself.

• 1:08:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:06Jordi Hays?

  And like the candid moments of like, I'm taking a picture of you at the studio.

• 1:08:10John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:08:10Jordi Hays?

  And then it goes on your feed.

• 1:08:11John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:08:11Jordi Hays?

  Like that, that.

• 1:08:12John Coogan?

  So my, my, my take on new social networks is that the, the arrow of progress only moves in one direction. And effectively you get sloppier as things, as time goes on. And so you, you really like, like the thing that will kill TikTok is not, oh, be real. Take one picture per day. It's actually the thing that gets someone to lock in on TikTok for three hours instead of one hour. And when I was thinking about like, if I wanted to kill TikTok, like what would I actually do from first principles? If the goal was not to heal brain rot and also kill TikTok and get out of the CCP relationship? You have to think about it just from beating TikTok and, and then deal with the brain rot stuff later.

• 1:08:53John Coogan?

  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, or Instagram and, and reels, the difference is that on Instagram you see a square and then it only takes up a half of the, the screen real estate. And then you have to scroll and you have to scroll precisely. Because if you scroll too much, that it, you might see one photo halfway at the top and one photo halfway at the bottom. Right? And so reels, the innovation there was that it takes up the full screen. And so even the tiniest little tab, it's, it's like rubber bandy sticky.

• 1:09:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:30John Coogan?

  And so you're either on one TikTok or you're on the next TikTok. You're never halfway between them.

• 1:09:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:35John Coogan?

  And so one's always playing. So it's very easy to just slip into like one more, one more, one more. And then on X, they actually switch to the next one.

• 1:09:42Jordi Hays?

  It reminds me of America's Funniest Home Videos.

• 1:09:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:45Jordi Hays?

  Which was at the time, some of the most entertaining content in the world because it was just one video at a time. And I remember, do you remember being a kid on YouTube?

• 1:09:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:54Jordi Hays?

  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, this funny video.

• 1:10:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:10:02Jordi Hays?

  And then you'd just be sitting there being like. What did, what was, you know, like, yeah, that one video, you know, what was that one video?

• 1:10:08John Coogan?

  Skateboard fall, like.

• 1:10:09Jordi Hays?

  And, and everybody's kind of creating the feed.

• 1:10:11John Coogan?

  Exactly, exactly.

• 1:10:12Jordi Hays?

  You know, at that moment.

• 1:10:13John Coogan?

  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.

• 1:10:26Jordi Hays?

  That's.

• 1:10:26John Coogan?

  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.

• 1:10:38Jordi Hays?

  That's the ultimate.

• 1:10:39John Coogan?

  Wire, because you would 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.

• 1:10:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:47John Coogan?

  Or, oh, and then it's like, oh, that was shocking. Show them another shocking one. And you're like, oh, I'm looking at, show, show different things.

• 1:10:52Jordi Hays?

  Away, or they're paying attention to the.

• 1:10:54John Coogan?

  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.

• 1:11:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. The, the end state is the metaverse where everyone is just.

• 1:11:19John Coogan?

  Just locked in, just looking at content for 24 hours a day. And then you go to sleep and then you wake up and do it again.

• 1:11:23Jordi Hays?

  And then every one of our listeners are just figuring out how to properly monetize.

• 1:11:27John Coogan?

  Exactly, exactly. But yeah, I, I do think that.

• 1:11:30Jordi Hays?

  I wanna, I like, you know, the Instagram eventually, you know, you see an ad and to just buy the product, you just have to go.

• 1:11:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:11:41Jordi Hays?

  You know, you don't even have to.

• 1:11:43John Coogan?

  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 hands free.

• 1:11:59Jordi Hays?

  A lot of people don't like that, but.

• 1:12:01John Coogan?

  But you can, but you can effectively hands free watch videos.

• 1:12:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:04John Coogan?

  Instead of just watching them loop, which requires you to move your thumb, which seems so minor, but that actually is a friction point. If you remove the thumb entirely, uh, you get, you get to be more viral.

• 1:12:14Jordi Hays?

  I've noticed sometimes I'll, I'll have a video playing on like a reels type product. So YouTube or reels, and it's kind of funny because if you, 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.

• 1:12:30John Coogan?

  Just move to the next one.

• 1:12:31Jordi Hays?

  The addict, the rat in you that's like pressing cocaine button and wants it to just keep going.

• 1:12:35John Coogan?

  Juice reward, the monkey, juice reward.

• 1:12:38Jordi Hays?

  Let's talk about Little Red Book.

• 1:12:40John Coogan?

  The Little Red Book.

• 1:12:41Jordi Hays?

  Initially, I posted, if you download Red Book, you're a trader that should be sent on the first boat to Beijing. Or you should be forced to write the National Anthem a thousand times. You know, oh, say can you.

• 1:12:57John Coogan?

  Pledge of Allegiance.

• 1:12:58Jordi Hays?

  Pledge of Allegiance, yeah, yeah. Pledge of Allegiance is better, but then I realized that American users are going on there posting. And there's that senior partner at Andreessen. Future GP woman, one of the.

• 1:13:16John Coogan?

  Venture Twins?

• 1:13:16Jordi Hays?

  Venture Twins?

• 1:13:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:17Jordi Hays?

  She was posting that there.

• 1:13:22Jordi Hays?

  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.

• 1:13:35John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:13:36Jordi Hays?

  So if you raise $5 million and your company doesn't work out, they're going to take your house to like repay it.

• 1:13:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:42Jordi Hays?

  And she posted a screenshot of an exchange where American founders were like, yeah, it's like, it's actually like risk capital.

• 1:13:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:49Jordi Hays?

  If your company doesn't work, like, you know, you don't lose your house. And all the Chinese founders were like, wait, what?

• 1:13:56Jordi Hays?

  And then I saw another thing that Creatine Cycle, Atlas. He, he should really pick a name, Atlas or Creatine Cycle. It's kind of, I like both names, but so Atlas posted.

• 1:14:10John Coogan?

  Now let's tighten up the brand, Atlas.

• 1:14:12Jordi Hays?

  So Atlas posted a screenshot, there was like an American girl who posted like a TikTok style video, like exercise gear. And he posted, 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.

• 1:14:35John Coogan?

  It's a real cultural exchange going on over there.

• 1:14:37Jordi Hays?

  Cultural exchange and.

• 1:14:38John Coogan?

  Let's go, let's give a little bit of background on Little Red Book. It's a Chinese video network that competes with Douyin by dance's version of TikTok within China. From a, from a column on China Global Television Network's website, website, uh, which is state owned. The recent surge of foreign users flocking to a Chinese social media apps, uh, Zhaohongshu, uh, following the looming threat of TikTok's ban in the US has given rise to the term TikTok refugees. This mass migration to an alternative platform underscores the deeper divide between government policies and public sentiment. As Little Red Book climbed to the top of Apple's App Store Monday, it became evident that many members of the public remain unconvinced by the government rationale for targeting TikTok.

• 1:15:23John Coogan?

  At the heart of the issue lies the question of national security. The US government has repeatedly asserted.

• 1:15:28Jordi Hays?

  And TikTok's claim, ByteDance's claim, has been that the American government is banning TikTok because of free speech. And it's sort of this self reinforcing thing where the people, the people on TikTok are, are saying, I need TikTok. It's important to me.

• 1:15:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:43Jordi Hays?

  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 they don't want you to.

• 1:15:51John Coogan?

  It's so funny, this idea that like, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, the Trump administration and Elon are definitely banning free speech. Well, you can say whatever you want on X and it's like pretty deranged.

• 1:16:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:16:02John Coogan?

  Ninety percent of the time.

• 1:16:03Jordi Hays?

  Meanwhile, the, the true American social media platforms are getting more racist, more homophobic.

• 1:16:08John Coogan?

  Oh yeah, like the R word, we can just say that now.

• 1:16:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. You have billion dollar executives.

• 1:16:12John Coogan?

  Was that a TikTok thing? Did that come from TikTok? I don't think so.

• 1:16:17Jordi Hays?

  Crazy.

• 1:16:17John Coogan?

  There are already a lot of humorous interactions happening on Little Red Book, but I chose this specific article because it both includes some interesting and pertinent facts about the situation. And is also a great explanation of how China is going to take the wrong lessons from this episode. Specifically, the article frames the TikTok refugee phenomenon as public dissatisfaction with the government, which of course it is. But what is lacking is the contextual understanding to realize that US citizens are publicly dissatisfied with the government as a matter of birthright.

• 1:16:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:47John Coogan?

  Which is true. Everyone, everyone is, 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 US government by freely expressing themselves on Little Red Book, which is honestly kind of great and also will be very hard for the Chinese to grok. It is not a good sign in terms of understanding that the author of this column is relying on random Twitter user quotes to make a point.

• 1:17:18Jordi Hays?

  I was still calling it Twitter.

• 1:17:20John Coogan?

  When they, 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 entailed in a ban. And that's not, just not going to happen with TikTok refugees. What is much more likely is that Little Red Book pulls itself from the US app stores in a week or two. In the meantime, all enjoy the memes and who knows?

• 1:18:00John Coogan?

  Maybe there will be some sort of value that comes from this sort of cultural exchange. If anything, this little episode is a reminder of what was lost to the great firewall. And to take this full circle, that itself is a reminder that China started it.

• 1:18:16Jordi Hays?

  Ben is so good. You gotta, this, this show should just be us reacting to Ben Thompson.

• 1:18:22John Coogan?

  I mean, we gotta cover him like every, every time. When, when there's good stuff, like you gotta.

• 1:18:26Jordi Hays?

  The man Cook. Did Tim Cook or is Tim Cook?

• 1:18:30John Coogan?

  Ben Cook's, that piece, it's great. Ben Thompson, I mean, he's also out there on the front lines, living in Taiwan. So.

• 1:18:37Jordi Hays?

  I forgot about that.

• 1:18:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:18:39Jordi Hays?

  Remember that.

• 1:18:40John Coogan?

  And so all this stuff hits really hard.

• 1:18:41Jordi Hays?

  He married a woman from Taiwan?

• 1:18:42John Coogan?

  I think so. But yeah, I mean, he's been deeply involved in analyzing this. I mean, he was writing about this back in 2020.

• 1:18:48Jordi Hays?

  If Taiwan is ever invaded.

• 1:18:49John Coogan?

  We're getting him an agent for seven.

• 1:18:51Jordi Hays?

  We're gonna land the, we gotta take the chopper into Taiwan.

• 1:18:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, protect Ben Thompson for sure. TSMC, we can rebuild. We cannot rebuild.

• 1:19:00Jordi Hays?

  There's no, there's only one Ben.

• 1:19:01John Coogan?

  There's only one Ben Thompson. There are plenty of people that can do chip fab.

• 1:19:07John Coogan?

  Over the last week, this is from 2020.

• 1:19:11Jordi Hays?

  Wait, should we?

• 1:19:12John Coogan?

  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 all of this.

• 1:19:17Jordi Hays?

  Banger first line from Solana. All is fair in love and info war.

• 1:19:22John Coogan?

  Let's go.

• 1:19:23Jordi Hays?

  Strong start. You have the article too?

• 1:19:25John Coogan?

  No, no.

• 1:19:26Jordi Hays?

  Why don't I read this one?

• 1:19:27John Coogan?

  You want me to read this?

• 1:19:28Jordi Hays?

  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.

• 1:19:47Jordi Hays?

  There's no forcing the CCP. They're, they're strong in that regard. That's my addition. Ostensibly, the purpose of the bill is to mitigate CCP surveillance of US 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, it's actually, Mike, it's a smart move from them to be like, our, our data centers are in Texas. But this time around, in a surprise political twist, the Democrats are relatively quiet on the issue, while Republicans, the driving force behind divestiture under Trump, are loudly divided. The other thing here, we, we haven't even covered this. We should hit DGI on Monday because they're the next target.

• 1:20:27Jordi Hays?

  DGI, DGI this last week raised the, the, it used to be you couldn't fly a DGI drone into, into.

• 1:20:34John Coogan?

  Restricted airspace.

• 1:20:35Jordi Hays?

  Restricted airspace, like near airports and things like that.

• 1:20:38John Coogan?

  And it was more than that. They have a whole geo fencing system that you can't even fly it at like Yosemite. Because like that's national land. They have a no drone warrant, a no drone rule. And so that gets baked into the masses and you just can't turn on the drone.

• 1:20:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's responsible.

• 1:20:52John Coogan?

  They were like, you know, free speech is important and also flying a drone.

• 1:20:54Jordi Hays?

  They decided, they decided this week, I'm guessing they were, I'm guessing their point of view was, we're going to get banned. Let's get, capture, because DGI is actually insane, right?

• 1:21:03John Coogan?

  It is crazy.

• 1:21:04Jordi Hays?

  It is, if you could create, like, let's say you're the, the CIA of China, and you want to get as much, and you want millions of spies, right? That are, you know, collecting real time information. Imagine you a spy that's a robot.

• 1:21:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:26Jordi Hays?

  That sends all the data back to you.

• 1:21:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:28Jordi Hays?

  And it actually gets purchased by by US consumers who fly it on your behalf.

• 1:21:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:34Jordi Hays?

  Across the entire so.

• 1:21:35John Coogan?

  Map everything.

• 1:21:36Jordi Hays?

  So they can map everything. And so I think DJI is probably like, yeah, we're cooked here. Let's just, you know, take away the restrictions.

• 1:21:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:44Jordi Hays?

  Capture kind of as much data because DJI, again, it's the same situation as TikTok. They have a better product in the market. It's cheaper and better than other drones at that price point. And so, of course, people are saying, I'm going to get the DJI drone. It's the rational decision, just like it's the rational decision for a lot of consumers to open TikTok.

• 1:22:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:03Jordi Hays?

  So they're next. I'm looking forward to that. And.

• 1:22:07John Coogan?

  That one's going to be rough because there are not a lot of great American drone companies and.

• 1:22:12Jordi Hays?

  Well, and also your hardware device that US consumers have purchased.

• 1:22:16John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:22:16Jordi Hays?

  That they're going to say, you what? You bricked my DJI like.

• 1:22:21John Coogan?

  Basically, I mean, I think that I think that the main thing is.

• 1:22:24Jordi Hays?

  Apple bricks, Apple bricks that brought us yearly. So it can't be too bad.

• 1:22:28John Coogan?

  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, OK, there's, I don't know, 5 million DJI drones in the US right now. 99.9% of those are collecting dust in closets right now.

• 1:22:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:57John Coogan?

  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.

• 1:23:07Jordi Hays?

  Some of our listeners, some of our listeners do.

• 1:23:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, but but a lot of these drones just collect dust. And so. Like, does the CCP have the ability to turn on your drone and fly it out of your closet? No, like, they just cannot do that. It's not possible. It's not possible.

• 1:23:23Jordi Hays?

  How is it not?

• 1:23:24John Coogan?

  Because, I mean, like, 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.

• 1:23:37Jordi Hays?

  I don't trust after, after. After Israel, like, you know, doing.

• 1:23:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, they probably 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 4th of July, and there's some meme where everyone needs to be flying their drones at the same time, and there's a million drones up in the sky, and then they're all taken over at the same time. That would be really, really bad. But if they did, 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.

• 1:24:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it is a beautiful, beautiful, like, I have to respect China's work on this. Like, getting millions of drones that are, that have cameras and microphones into American hands.

• 1:24:27John Coogan?

  The surveillance stuff is for sure real, like, all of a sudden, it's good.

• 1:24:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so.

• 1:24:31John Coogan?

  You know that in China, uh, 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.

• 1:24:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:24:45John Coogan?

  Which is fascinating.

• 1:24:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So here's a good line. So jumping forward to Solana, Trump's, so Trump, uh, has had to change his heart around TikTok. He's like, eh, maybe this thing's not so bad. We don't really know why. Here's potentially one reason Trump's apparent change of heart in favor of America's most popular Chinese app, followed days of. Libertarian Rand Paul's defense of the company begging an interesting question. What do Paul and Trump have in common? Allow Solana to tell you. His name is Jeff Yass, a major GOP donor and an investor in ByteDance. Therefore TikTok presently sitting on a stake in the company worth over $30 billion.

• 1:25:22John Coogan?

  Insane.

• 1:25:22Jordi Hays?

  So Jeff is Jeff's Jeff's cooking with that. He's not super gonna be super happy on Sunday.

• 1:25:29John Coogan?

  That's like just that one position puts you in like the some of the top AUM of like any hedge fund manager.

• 1:25:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. I'm pretty sure. For years, for years, Yass 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.

• 1:26:00John Coogan?

  Do you two really best have a monopoly on drones?

• 1:26:02Jordi Hays?

  Write a letter, write a letter. Let's call out Jeff Yass like, come on, like, that's a Jeff, you're welcome to come on the show. You've got the AUM for it.

• 1:26:13Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, this all.

• 1:26:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, anyways, Solana calls it an incredible scandal. And of course, he's probably one of the very few people that's actually writing about this. And Rand Paul is posting Trump helps solve TikTok data problem through Project Texas. Such a such a scam that they.

• 1:26:35John Coogan?

  Doesn't he have a good overview of what Project Texas is in there? I wanted to see that.

• 1:26:39Jordi Hays?

  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. So Project Texas was developed by TikTok, not the government. It was not developed under Trump's tenure, but President Biden's. Three, following China's refusal to let go 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 a bet of the CCP spying on US citizens.

• 1:27:23Jordi Hays?

  But the 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.

• 1:27:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:34Jordi Hays?

  These, by the way, didn't happen in a vacuum.

• 1:27:38Jordi Hays?

  So it's, I'm gonna skip forward a little bit. It's worth noting, every high-profile TikTok defender has felt the need to lie about the bill in order to make their critique even remotely palatable, right? But despite their insistence to the contrary, TikTok has not been quote-unquote banned. There is no bill to ban TikTok. There is presently a bill in play to force a CCP-controlled company to sell TikTok, which would remain in operation but free of the CCP. Politicians and public figures getting this wrong are doing so purposefully. And while the question of TikTok's existence might be understandably controversial, why would it matter so greatly to any American that the CCP specifically maintained control of the spy app?

• 1:28:20Jordi Hays?

  This brings me to Vivek Ramaswamy, truly one of the worst losers in the bunch. The thing is, good old-fashioned quid pro quo corruption, while disgusting, is as American as apple pie. And at least it's understandable in that I literally understand the motive. But to the best of my knowledge, Yass isn't paying Vivek, but Vivek's supposed to be a nationalist, naturally amenable to a more symmetric trade. So what gives?

• 1:28:47Jordi Hays?

  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. Turns out Jeff Yass has funneled millions of dollars into Vivek's PAC. So.

• 1:28:59John Coogan?

  Way to go.

• 1:29:00Jordi Hays?

  Jeff, Jeff.

• 1:29:04John Coogan?

  Send us some money and then we can start promoting TikTok.

• 1:29:08Jordi Hays?

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

• 1:29:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, wind down the position, for sure.

• 1:29:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, wind down the position or just like, it's not like it goes to zero.

• 1:29:30John Coogan?

  No.

• 1:29:30Jordi Hays?

  Like ByteDance has other.

• 1:29:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:32Jordi Hays?

  Business lines.

• 1:29:33John Coogan?

  And the cost base for that investment was like, nothing.

• 1:29:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:37John Coogan?

  Compared to 30 billion.

• 1:29:38Jordi Hays?

  So you could have rotated out, but at the same time, you have to imagine ByteDance wanted big American shareholders this whole time.

• 1:29:44John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 1:29:45Jordi Hays?

  And they probably told him, no, you're not getting out.

• 1:29:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:48Jordi Hays?

  Because they could block the sale, especially if it's been that big. So.

• 1:29:53Jordi Hays?

  Famously Vivek pivoted from the position TikTok should be banned because it is a uniquely powerful form of digital fentanyl, which he called it digital fentanyl to the position TikTok should not be banned because I kid you not, he had dinner with Jake Paul, who told him TikTok was important to the youth. Jake Paul, the Paul brothers, you know, getting involved in geopolitical psychological warfare. 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? Immediately following the now standard bit of banned propaganda, which he altered after I roasted him for it, Vivek debunked a string of arguments nobody in Washington is making.

• 1:30:36Jordi Hays?

  First, he tackled the addictive social media critique of TikTok that he himself popularized months before his first pivot in favor of the CCP. Then he drew a false equivalency between ByteDance's actual legal obligation, given it's a Chinese company, to share American data with the CCP, and Airbnb's scandalous sale of US 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 yes queens. And this really is a golden age of journalism. I think we're actually in it, and it's because people like Ben Thompson, people like Mike

• 1:31:17Jordi Hays?

  Solana are running their own, this is like Pulitzer running his media empire, where he's like, I'm gonna say what I want. The first piece here is easily debunked. The bill targets companies from China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea, but the second bit consists of a more cleverly constructed piece of rhetoric. Sure, a broad privacy bill targeting sloppy American companies in addition to literal Chinese spies sounds great, but Vivek knows how hard it is to pass legislation. He knows a small handful of companies pose outside risks to the United States, and he knows some broader privacy push will be mired in Washington bullshit for years. Practically then, it's clear he just wants the CCP to control the company, which is insane. How do we drive all the way from China virus, he's putting this in quotes, China virus,

• 1:32:01Jordi Hays?

  which Vivek has said, to, I will defend China's access to American data with my life? It's a strange position for a America first politician, as was Vivek's position. The entire US startup ecosystem should die following the collapse of a regional bank. Back then, in the case of Silicon Valley Bank's collapse, he fell in 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 at every other bank should be protected. Odd behavior for a nationalist who presumably sees interest in the ongoing existence of an American business ecosystem.

• 1:32:39Jordi Hays?

  I mean, this is the greatest roast of Vivek since like three weeks ago, which is wild. Do we want to go through the rest of this?

• 1:32:52John Coogan?

  No, I think I have a good closer, which was when Ben Thompson was debating this.

• 1:32:56Jordi Hays?

  The last thing I would say, divestiture is way too moderate. Ban the app. That's the longest position, which I agree with.

• 1:33:02John Coogan?

  And great Coogan's law, coinage. Solana often refers to it just as the spy app, which I love.

• 1:33:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, it is the spy app.

• 1:33:12John Coogan?

  It's the spy app.

• 1:33:13Jordi Hays?

  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.

• 1:33:22John Coogan?

  Exactly. But when Ben Thompson was debating the TikTok stuff last year, he had this great, so a lot of the debate centered around like free speech, like can you be, can you really say that you're pro free speech if you're pro banning TikTok? And he quotes Ralph Waldo Emerson, 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 get, you cannot put the blinders on and just say, I believe in free speech

• 1:34:03John Coogan?

  at all costs, no matter what, because then when something gets thrown your way that has other, you know, third party externalities and impacts, you wind up making very, very bad decisions. And so 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 consistency and actually, and actually try and understand the whole picture, which I think is what we try to do today.

• 1:34:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and Vivek, he's had some hilarious moments and he's great. It reminds me of Obama in many ways and Newsom and their ability to just yap.

• 1:34:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:47Jordi Hays?

  Some of the greatest yappers of all time.

• 1:34:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, totally.

• 1:34:50Jordi Hays?

  But it's so easy to point out the inconsistencies with his. And what you're saying is it's okay to be inconsistent in terms of application of these ideologies.

• 1:35:01John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:35:02Jordi Hays?

  But in Vivek's case, it's, okay, you were super, you know, you were ready to let the startup economy just burn.

• 1:35:09John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:35:10Jordi Hays?

  Even though you're a populist.

• 1:35:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:12Jordi Hays?

  And then now you're flip flopping on something that.

• 1:35:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:16Jordi Hays?

  I don't know. I truly believe that anybody that's taking donations.

• 1:35:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:21Jordi Hays?

  From a major ByteDance shareholder.

• 1:35:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:24Jordi Hays?

  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,

• 1:35:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:39Jordi Hays?

  CCP is calling the shots, then, you know, I believe that's like traitor behavior. And I don't believe that Vivek has a place in the US government after what I've seen here.

• 1:35:49John Coogan?

  We'll see how it shakes out.

• 1:35:50Jordi Hays?

  But.

• 1:35:51John Coogan?

  Maybe that's it.

• 1:35:51Jordi Hays?

  Around, you know. One thing, one thing our audience can rely on us for, we do not get into politics.

• 1:35:57John Coogan?

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

• 1:36:18Jordi Hays?

  So yesterday, yesterday we put out a call to action. 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 an ad for your parents' business.

• 1:36:35John Coogan?

  For a different company that you just have an affiliate.

• 1:36:37Jordi Hays?

  Company, like if you love Ramp.

• 1:36:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:39Jordi Hays?

  Do it, put a Ramp ad in there and we'll, so every, every review 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.

• 1:36:51John Coogan?

  Exactly. One hand washes the other.

• 1:36:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:53John Coogan?

  Here we go. So the first one comes from 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."

• 1:37:15Jordi Hays?

  It is, and he's not wrong here.

• 1:37:17John Coogan?

  So shout out Warp.

• 1:37:18Jordi Hays?

  And his day job is shitposting and building one of the top payroll companies in the world. Then nights and weekends, he's a celebrity hairdresser. We had to beg, we had to beg to get in. He said, "You guys aren't real celebrities. You're niche internet micro-celebrities. You don't actually..."

• 1:37:37John Coogan?

  Mini cells.

• 1:37:38Jordi Hays?

  "You can't afford the kind of cuts I give." And we worked out some in-kind trades and we made it happen. And our hairs never look better, John.

• 1:37:48John Coogan?

  It's been fantastic.

• 1:37:49Jordi Hays?

  So thank you to BG.

• 1:37:51John Coogan?

  Yeah. Let's go to Anthony Barardi. He says, "Pre-seed round is filling up fast. Get in early while you can." He says, "Shout out to the brothers. Technology Brothers." I think that's illegal. I don't think you can generally solicit it. But nice try.

• 1:38:08Jordi Hays?

  We're gonna take it as he did this as a joke.

• 1:38:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's a joke.

• 1:38:12Jordi Hays?

  And we're an entertainment show, so we're gonna read it out. And maybe these people...

• 1:38:16John Coogan?

  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 tan bangers to Jordy's frequent ankle exposure. This 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 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. Citreimer is actively raising a pre-seed to expand their engineering team,

• 1:39:00John Coogan?

  conducting manufacturing demos with customers and reach pilot production scale. Send a DM to a Badari Barardi." Sorry. On X to learn about how Sitchreimer can help you with your sustainable material needs. So, thank you, Anthony. We appreciate you writing your review.

• 1:39:19Jordi Hays?

  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.

• 1:39:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, whoever, if you want to, if you want to do the deal, you're going to need some sharp elbows to keep us out of that.

• 1:39:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. By the time you're listening to this, we'll have taken 200% of the allocation.

• 1:39:37John Coogan?

  With super parrot.

• 1:39:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, keep it up. Thank you. Thank you for the review.

• 1:39:42John Coogan?

  You might just buy the whole company and fire the CEO. Sorry, Anthony. It's a bad job.

• 1:39:48Jordi Hays?

  Really sharp elbows.

• 1:39:49John Coogan?

  We're going to lever you up.

• 1:39:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Slash of leverage on it. Venture debt. Let's get some insane covenants in there.

• 1:39:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, it needs to be back by your house. If you have a house, we're taking that house too.

• 1:39:59Jordi Hays?

  There needs to be a new venture debt product that basically says if you're not achieving 100% month-over-month growth, like the whole equity holders are wiped out, and you get taken over.

• 1:40:08John Coogan?

  And your house gets taken too.

• 1:40:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yes. So, reach out to Balda if you're looking for some financial engineer support.

• 1:40:16John Coogan?

  I like Balda. It's like, you can just say his first name and people know on the show.

• 1:40:21Jordi Hays?

  Balda studies finance at Cornell and economics. Like, he's an expert financial engineer.

• 1:40:26John Coogan?

  There we go.

• 1:40:26Jordi Hays?

  He's studied from the right.

• 1:40:27John Coogan?

  That's great. Okay, so Thomas Disney, I guess from the Disney fortune, who made his money in entertainment?

• 1:40:34Jordi Hays?

  Great, great.

• 1:40:35John Coogan?

  So, Eric to the Disney fortune, says, "Trying to load and unload missiles in Ohio? Help with an andro contract?" He says, "Load trailers fast. Listen to this podcast with all your extra time. Slip Robotics delivers groundbreaking robots as a service solution designed to load and unload trailers in just five minutes. This innovation unlocks magnificent or 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 in?

• 1:41:20John Coogan?

  The Technology Brothers podcast. It's as innovative as the tech we deliver. Thank you. That's a great integration.

• 1:41:25Jordi Hays?

  That's a great app.

• 1:41:26John Coogan?

  Bringing it back to the show. One hand washes the other. Understood the mission, delivered perfectly.

• 1:41:32Jordi Hays?

  We might have to read this one again.

• 1:41:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, and it's and it's great to see an heir to such a dynasty as the Disney fortune.

• 1:41:39Jordi Hays?

  Right.

• 1:41:39John Coogan?

  Something in hard tech.

• 1:41:41Jordi Hays?

  He's also looking with a help, uh, help with an androal context.

• 1:41:45John Coogan?

  Good luck.

• 1:41:46Jordi Hays?

  There's definitely some Luke Metro. Hit up Thomas Disney.

• 1:41:50John Coogan?

  Hit him up.

• 1:41:50Jordi Hays?

  Make some stuff happen.

• 1:41:52John Coogan?

  Love to see it. Uh, so let's go to a, uh, a fantastic thread by Eric Glenn and CEO of Ramp. We were riffing about this idea a couple of weeks ago, maybe months ago, talking about, you know, a lot of people are complaining about waste in the federal government. Doge is in the air. Everyone's talking about government efficiency. Well, what if we put the government on ramp? And it started as a joke, but it's getting, gaining a lot of steam and Eric, uh,

• 1:42:18Jordi Hays?

  It's funny because we were joking about it, but not, it was not a joke at all.

• 1:42:22John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 1:42:22Jordi Hays?

  We were a hundred percent.

• 1:42:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:24Jordi Hays?

  You know, clear that the, the finance, the, the government, the federal government.

• 1:42:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:29Jordi Hays?

  And every aspect of our government should have better visibility into their spend.

• 1:42:34John Coogan?

  No, it started as a joke and then, and then immediately I, I was just wondering like, wait, so like when a DOD employee, employee goes on a trip, like, how do they actually categorize their receipts? Like, do they have a system? Like, probably not. Everything runs on paper and pencil. Like, I've worked for the government. It's awful. And so, uh, 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 US government has been breaking the golden rule of budgeting.

• 1:43:18John Coogan?

  Make more money than you spend. Say what you will about corporate flaws, but the private sector generally operates by this rule because those who don't eventually cease to exist. Well, 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-

• 1:43:52Jordi Hays?

  I gotta say, Glyman's a very presidential CEO.

• 1:43:56John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 1:43:57Jordi Hays?

  He, when you listen to this, you just get this sense of confidence, right? Like, he's, you know, not talking down to you.

• 1:44:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:05Jordi Hays?

  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, it's hard not to glaze when you're talking about the most important financial-

• 1:44:21John Coogan?

  Well, let's, uh, let's continue on here. He says, "Let me be clear. While companies must react to market conditions, the government operates without this pressure increasing spending regardless."

• 1:44:31Jordi Hays?

  Give us your George W.

• 1:44:35John Coogan?

  George W. And he says, "The US government has many priorities. Efficiency hasn't been one. Can it take a page out of the private sector's playbook to improve its efficiency? Think of any business or agency as a vehicle trying to move forward. One way to increase that vehicle's velocity is by applying thrust, but another way is to reduce drag. The efficiency formula of increasing context and control focuses on the drag factor of this equation. Change in velocity is C times thrust minus drag." So you can increase thrust or you can decrease drag. "Of the, uh, the most effective businesses have efficient operations that control, that provide a high level of context and control. Context to understand and audit exactly where

• 1:45:18John Coogan?

  your dollars are going, software, vendors, consultants, travel, meals, and control to proactively and precisely manage where spend occurs, e.g. auto declining out of policy spend. The more context and control an organization has, the more it can unlock its own performance velocity. Wasteful expenses represent the drag holding organizations back." What does this look like for the government right now? $100 billion in Medicare or Medicaid fraud, $200 billion of SBA loan fraud, $236 billion in improper payments. Five hundred and thirty-six billion dollars wasted. That's seven point nine percent of the government's entire budget down the drain. What would happen if you implied, if you applied the efficiency formula?

• 1:46:00John Coogan?

  Imagine massive programs like Medicare and Medicaid using real-time tracking and automated controls to cut down on fraud. Don't overspend is great, but can't overspend is better. This is a, this isn't a hypothetical. It's a real possibility. Very clearly technical, very clearly technically possible with modern systems and one that Tri-Ramp 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 two X the next largest nation. We don't have a revenue problem. We have a drag problem.

• 1:46:38Jordi Hays?

  Like how he, he just gave a subtle jab to, to our friends across the Pacific.

• 1:46:44John Coogan?

  Yeah. For much deeper and research on the problems as well as actionable ideas, see research. Contrary.com. Thank you to Contrary Research and the Ramp team for your hard work on this. Yeah. Very interesting to kind of start with something that was kind of, you know, 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, 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 talking to the annual guys and some people who do government contracting, like how does the money for a missile actually get transferred?

• 1:47:29John Coogan?

  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?

• 1:47:42Jordi Hays?

  Do you know the, the Disney like business graphic? It's probably like that, you need that kind of graphic for a single payment, you know?

• 1:47:51John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 1:47:51Jordi Hays?

  It's just like, well, this thing needs to approve this and, you know, you need to get sign off over here and take the physical copy and carry it to the next building.

• 1:48:00John Coogan?

  When I 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.

• 1:48:09Jordi Hays?

  But that was back in the eighties, right?

• 1:48:12John Coogan?

  It's 2010.

• 1:48:13Jordi Hays?

  Fuck.

• 1:48:14John Coogan?

  2011, so that's insane. That's crazy. Yeah. Like, one of the biggest sources of alpha at work was just using Google Maps and Spreadsheets, which were not, they were not procured by the US 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 soldiers using Google Maps and satellite imagery from just the Google Maps product on their personal device to understand like, how do I get from one military base to the next?

• 1:48:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:44John Coogan?

  Like, because we don't have the tool, like internally, we don't have, we haven't procured anything. Yeah, it's fascinating. Rough. And of course, like, you can't do that on the payment side in the same way.

• 1:48:56Jordi Hays?

  The real thing here is by the time the US 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 can 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 that initial joke as starting the domino effect of converting the federal government to a customer?

• 1:49:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, I would hate to see a situation where the US government resolves that $530 billion in waste, but we don't get credit.

• 1:49:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:37John Coogan?

  That would be a disaster.

• 1:49:38Jordi Hays?

  Crazy. Yeah.

• 1:49:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:39Jordi Hays?

  That would be a dark day for the pod.

• 1:49:41John Coogan?

  It'd be rough.

• 1:49:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:42John Coogan?

  But that's why we're talking about it. We're canonizing it into the.

• 1:49:46Jordi Hays?

  When OpenAI trains their model, their next model on this episode, you're like, well, the technology brothers actually.

• 1:49:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, when some small child asks in an American history course in 2095, why does the US government run on Ramp? They'll say, well, let's, let me tell you about the technology brothers.

• 1:50:04John Coogan?

  Originally riffed out by Jordy Hayes. The the transformation of America into a financial powerhouse started in late 2024.

• 1:50:13Jordi Hays?

  Started on a podcast, like many great things.

• 1:50:16John Coogan?

  Sixteen. Great. Well, let's stay with Eric. He has another post. This was a banger today. I think he had over a thousand likes. He says, genuine career advice, hang this poster in your room or closet. And it's a 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 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.

• 1:50:58John Coogan?

  And if you if you surround yourself with these kind of like positive things.

• 1:51:03Jordi Hays?

  Closet? I couldn't.

• 1:51:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, it looked like it was a closet.

• 1:51:05Jordi Hays?

  Looks like there's almost like clothes on either side, which is cool.

• 1:51:08John Coogan?

  But also, this was interesting to me for the reason that, you know, Eric is a pretty buttoned up presidential CEO. And and the F word is something that has has truly crossed over into totally acceptable and inoffensive to everyone, which I think is good. Because when I when I grew up, the F word was censored on most TV and radio. But then other words were allowed and I'm pretty sure. And there's been kind of a renegotiation over what words will be okay to be used, what words will need to be censored. And I think, you know, I draw the line at the R word. We don't need it, but the F word punches just at the right level sometimes. And it just adds a little bit of spice to whatever you're saying. And, you know, if I'm.

• 1:51:52Jordi Hays?

  Doesn't hit the same as say, F that, Jordy.

• 1:51:55John Coogan?

  No, exactly. But if I if I call someone a fucking idiot, that hits just as hard as the R word for me.

• 1:52:01Jordi Hays?

  Freaking idiot.

• 1:52:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, the freaking was very funny.

• 1:52:04Jordi Hays?

  I need that. Yeah, I want that for for

• 1:52:09Jordi Hays?

  my son's room, but just just replace with freaking.

• 1:52:12John Coogan?

  Freaking.

• 1:52:15Jordi Hays?

  Just freaking, you can just freaking do things.

• 1:52:20John Coogan?

  Uh, let's, let's do one more, uh, banger post and then we'll move on to a promoted post in a bucket poll. We'll say, uh, uh, Garrett Todd says, there is a real, there's, 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, uh, you can't give him enough credit for setting just a very different pace of play for the, the tech elite.

• 1:53:00Jordi Hays?

  I, I have a, I have a, you know, evolved opinion on the scrolls stuff. I, uh, I posted recently that, um, the only alpha left in life is finding these rare scrolls, manuscripts, books, PDFs that, that OpenAI hasn't had a chance to feed into, uh, O1 yet. And I think that, uh, it's very possible that, that, uh, Nat is, uh, 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

• 1:53:36John Coogan?

  For himself.

• 1:53:36Jordi Hays?

  ... 科学知识 for himself.

• 1:53:38John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:53:38Jordi Hays?

  And he's consuming it and then just deleting it out of destroying the original scrolls. Like, uh, because, uh, in the end, and he's probably going to be the last guy with the job.

• 1:53:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:48Jordi Hays?

  He's going to be the last man with a good old fashioned, you know?

• 1:53:51John Coogan?

  Yeah. What, what should Nat's next project be? It seems like he's kind of crushed the scrolls.

• 1:53:57Jordi Hays?

  I'd like him, I'd like to see him go Indiana Jones mode. So hire a team of former SEALs, get a few Blackhawks and nice yacht.

• 1:54:05John Coogan?

  What's he looking for?

• 1:54:06Jordi Hays?

  And just start dropping into, dropping into countries and, and sort of taking their relics, like act by force.

• 1:54:14Jordi Hays?

  Taking their relics by force, maybe he occupies the pyramids for a while and takes, applies some of this.

• 1:54:19John Coogan?

  I think you can just go to the Louvre.

• 1:54:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:23John Coogan?

  A lot of that's already been done. A lot of the hard work.

• 1:54:25Jordi Hays?

  I'd like to see more billionaires start to occupy spaces that they, they don't actually have a right over.

• 1:54:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:33Jordi Hays?

  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 nice, like vacation towns, right? Like, let's start there and not have it purely just be a conversation.

• 1:54:48John Coogan?

  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.

• 1:54:55Jordi Hays?

  Like a burning one?

• 1:54:57John Coogan?

  Yeah. I want to see someone build a car that's 200 feet long.

• 1:55:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, like kind of a tank. So it's sort of steamroller.

• 1:55:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:55:06Jordi Hays?

  Like with a steamroller thing.

• 1:55:08John Coogan?

  Exactly. Those huge dump trucks that move like mining equipment around and they're like 100 feet tall.

• 1:55:14Jordi Hays?

  Wasn't there something like that in The Incredibles? What, remember that, uh, you remember that, uh, it was a drill bit in the front? So you could actually go through the earth too.

• 1:55:23John Coogan?

  That, that's.

• 1:55:24Jordi Hays?

  If Elon had a yacht with a drill bit.

• 1:55:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:27Jordi Hays?

  An earth yacht that could just like come up in an area and then like dive deep into the core and just like cruise around and then pop up.

• 1:55:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:35Jordi Hays?

  That'd be a great asset and.

• 1:55:37John Coogan?

  Earth yacht.

• 1:55:38Jordi Hays?

  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?

• 1:55:47John Coogan?

  The core.

• 1:55:48Jordi Hays?

  And the core. Like, well, 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.

• 1:55:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:56Jordi Hays?

  People go deep in the ocean.

• 1:55:58John Coogan?

  There does seem to be also mega alpha in submarines. I mean, there's all these yachts, but very few people build submarines correctly.

• 1:56:04Jordi Hays?

  Half, half.

• 1:56:05John Coogan?

  That friend guy Ocean Gate was a disaster.

• 1:56:08Jordi Hays?

  I know, but that was just, that was, that was a, that was a psy op 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 billionaires all the time.

• 1:56:23John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:56:24Jordi Hays?

  Every other person in your texts has their own private submarine captain, crew. They can go down under the water for a decade and, and, and be fine. So.

• 1:56:33John Coogan?

  Well, that's why, you know, privately, a lot of people refer to Atlantis as like the sun valley of the ocean.

• 1:56:39Jordi Hays?

  The new sun valley.

• 1:56:39John Coogan?

  The new sun valley.

• 1:56:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:41John Coogan?

  Going to Atlantis.

• 1:56:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:43John Coogan?

  Well, let's move on to a promoted post.

• 1:56:45Jordi Hays?

  We'll have to do a deep dive specifically on.

• 1:56:47John Coogan?

  A literal deep dive.

• 1:56:48Jordi Hays?

  A literal deep dive.

• 1:56:49John Coogan?

  On Atlantis, the lost city.

• 1:56:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I'm not super prepped for.

• 1:56:54John Coogan?

  Let's do the Locky one. He's shilling. We're shilling on behalf of him.

• 1:56:58Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 1:56:58John Coogan?

  I saw this post and I was like, he's doing a promoted post.

• 1:57:01Jordi Hays?

  This is a promoted post of a show. Locky says, I almost never show my investments, but after a week with Impulse Labs, it is very hard not to. Had high expectations, but it has consistently exceeded. Speed to boil water is incredible. Temperature control, ease of use, all perfect.

• 1:57:21John Coogan?

  Love Impulse Labs.

• 1:57:22Jordi Hays?

  And yeah, I don't know a ton about this company, but it's kind of seemingly like the time, you know, everybody was coming out against gas stoves, saying that, you know, they're toxic and wasteful and have a negative environmental impact. And Impulse seems like they perfectly timed it of not just creating an electric stove, but creating something better than the gas stove, better than fire. One of the first inventions is man. So there's a little bit of hubris.

• 1:57:48John Coogan?

  You're really trying to do the gods.

• 1:57:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I'm actually.

• 1:57:51John Coogan?

  It's a Promethean effort, really.

• 1:57:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Promethean effort to reinvent the stove. And.

• 1:57:57John Coogan?

  Hopefully he won't be struck down for his hubris.

• 1:57:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:00John Coogan?

  But I think he's built different.

• 1:58:01Jordi Hays?

  He's built different. Yeah.

• 1:58:03John Coogan?

  He might even be better than the gods.

• 1:58:05Jordi Hays?

  The CEO of Impulse? Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's certainly.

• 1:58:08John Coogan?

  I would throw Locky in the.

• 1:58:10Jordi Hays?

  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.

• 1:58:22John Coogan?

  That'd be great.

• 1:58:23Jordi Hays?

  And have it, and we can just go back and forth, finish the episode.

• 1:58:26John Coogan?

  Kind of Korean barbecue style.

• 1:58:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:30Jordi Hays?

  So Impulse Labs, if you send us one of these, we'll start doing Korean barbecue episodes. Or are we just?

• 1:58:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, in between the Dom episodes, we'll do barbecue. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:58:42Jordi Hays?

  Little packs. 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, felt the same. Like, we just have.

• 1:58:53John Coogan?

  Well, there was a study, there was a study, a bunch of MIT, Harvard and Stanford researchers got together and they studied the food supply and they found, they looked at the data and they found that scientifically what's going on when you consume animal meat is that you absorb the power from that animal.

• 1:59:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:11John Coogan?

  And so if you eat a lion, you become more like a lion. If you eat a bull, you become more like a bull.

• 1:59:16Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:59:16John Coogan?

  And so, just, just from a, from a physiological perspective.

• 1:59:20Jordi Hays?

  You don't want to be eating lamb.

• 1:59:21John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 1:59:22Jordi Hays?

  Even though it's, you know, it's got to.

• 1:59:24John Coogan?

  And certainly never a plant, because you just want to sit there.

• 1:59:26Jordi Hays?

  You want to be eating oysters, you develop a hard, outer shell.

• 1:59:30John Coogan?

  Exactly, exactly.

• 1:59:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:33John Coogan?

  Yeah. Let's go to a bucket poll. Oh, from Nana Vindbaldo. Congratulations.

• 1:59:39Jordi Hays?

  Baldo.

• 1:59:40John Coogan?

  Baldo says, anyone else miss D. Selgretta yapping about climate change on the TL?

• 1:59:47Jordi Hays?

  Let's go.

• 1:59:49John Coogan?

  I love that we printed this out with 20 of these nuggets.

• 1:59:52Jordi Hays?

  So we sniped this before.

• 1:59:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:54Jordi Hays?

  Clearly, like, within seconds of it, of it going out, but, um.

• 1:59:58John Coogan?

  I mean, you know what's a good one? When you can still see the scroll bar there on the screenshot. I refer to this like being like a big game hunter on the timeline. When you're, when you see something and you screenshot it so fast, the scroll bar hasn't disappeared from your phone, so it shows up in the screenshot. It's like, I had to screenshot it.

• 2:00:15Jordi Hays?

  That's good.

• 2:00:16John Coogan?

  It's great.

• 2:00:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I, uh, I gotta say, did she fall off after the, there was that behind the scenes video where she was like clearly.

• 2:00:25John Coogan?

  Wasn't she like a Nazi or something?

• 2:00:27Jordi Hays?

  Well, there was that whole arc, but she, she plays a character. She's a smart, young content creator. And they kind of caught her out of character and they caught her like faking some of these arrests. And I think it just, it all really caught up at once. And, and that's one of the issues of 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.

• 2:00:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:53Jordi Hays?

  Everybody deserves a redemption arc, so.

• 2:00:55John Coogan?

  My all my take on Greta was that there was a fork in the road. She's clearly a very talented young person. She could have, if she'd just done a TL fellowship, she would have built like five nuclear reactors by now.

• 2:01:07Jordi Hays?

  So.

• 2:01:07John Coogan?

  And probably had a massive impact on climate change. And instead, she just became like an annoying shit poster, uh, which is very sad to see. So build, I mean, that's the, that's the answer to all this stuff, you know? It's always so funny when like the environmentalists are like throwing paint on electric cars and you're just like, okay, so you believe nothing. Let's go to, uh, 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. We created the matrix.

• 2:01:51John Coogan?

  People are in the matrix looking at infinite.

• 2:01:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that was, that was a post actually reference earlier on the show. It, uh, yeah, sometimes, uh, this thing that everybody's anticipating emerges and it doesn't look exactly like.

• 2:02:08John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:02:08Jordi Hays?

  It would maybe feel more like the matrix if everybody had their Apple Vision Pros on.

• 2:02:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:12Jordi Hays?

  Which is fully locked in, but.

• 2:02:14John Coogan?

  That's almost like a secondary, like.

• 2:02:17Jordi Hays?

  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, what does the world look like where every home has a nuclear reactor in it?

• 2:02:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, we're talking to Shyam, uh, Shyam Senkar about this at Palantir, the CTO.

• 2:02:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:53John Coogan?

  He just started a new film studio and Jim Carman's starting to do his first sci-fi film, like.

• 2:02:59Jordi Hays?

  No way.

• 2:03:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:00Jordi Hays?

  No way.

• 2:03:00John Coogan?

  And so.

• 2:03:01Jordi Hays?

  Can we, can we cameo in that?

• 2:03:03John Coogan?

  Jason, yeah.

• 2:03:04Jordi Hays?

  Jason.

• 2:03:05John Coogan?

  I think.

• 2:03:05Jordi Hays?

  If you needed to. Two guys that can yap.

• 2:03:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:09Jordi Hays?

  Where are those guys?

• 2:03:10John Coogan?

  I mean, the hard part about good sci fi is that, yeah, it really does all come from like the seed of the idea.

• 2:03:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. But it also to have enough cultural impact and get into them and you have to do it Hollywood style blockbuster. I think it's.

• 2:03:24John Coogan?

  Yes, but I think that you only get that, you only earn the right to do the Dune style treatment.

• 2:03:30Jordi Hays?

  That's what I'm saying.

• 2:03:31John Coogan?

  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, L L Ms, aliens. Like there aren't a lot of people that are talking about like truly new science fiction stuff.

• 2:03:49Jordi Hays?

  Well, we're talking about land yachts with drill bits that allow, you know, beaners to travel deep in the earth's crust for, you know, and get.

• 2:03:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, maybe we're set in there.

• 2:03:59Jordi Hays?

  Get to China in an hour.

• 2:04:00John Coogan?

  But yeah, I mean, there aren't, I, I, 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, it's, 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, and then all of a sudden it becomes, it becomes mainstream. There's probably something like that going on in the sci fi fiction scene.

• 2:04:39Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 2:04:39John Coogan?

  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.

• 2:04:47Jordi Hays?

  I've seen like five films and five TV shows.

• 2:04:50John Coogan?

  So Love, Death and Robots is an anthology series where they, they licensed short form, short science fiction stories. And then had CGI and animation studios go and create like film versions of these animated versions of these.

• 2:05:09John Coogan?

  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, there's like a one that's like a horror story, basically. And it's a cool way to kind of surface these, these like famous sci fi stories in like a lighter touch way. I don't think it's as expensive as like shooting Dune. But yeah.

• 2:05:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but people have talked about doing a tech positive Black Mirror.

• 2:05:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:34Jordi Hays?

  Which would be, Black Mirror is just like.

• 2:05:36John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:05:37Jordi Hays?

  You know, talking, you know, basically demonstrating the horrors of technology, but there could be.

• 2:05:42John Coogan?

  Very entertaining. 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.

• 2:05:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:55John Coogan?

  And you have to have conflict for the story to be engaging whatsoever. It cannot just be.

• 2:06:00Jordi Hays?

  That's why we can't exist without tech journalists and tech journalists can't exist without us.

• 2:06:04John Coogan?

  Exactly. Yeah, you, you can't just do the story of like, oh yeah, we developed rockets and we went to Mars and it was great. Like, no one's gonna watch that. It's just boring.

• 2:06:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:13John Coogan?

  Uh, you need conflict. You need the rocket to break.

• 2:06:17Jordi Hays?

  And Musk.

• 2:06:18John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:06:19Jordi Hays?

  You know, fighting and then they, they, they get to a gridlock in their lawsuit and then they just say, let's get in a MMA match while on a rocket to Mars.

• 2:06:28John Coogan?

  There we go.

• 2:06:28Jordi Hays?

  And the winner takes over Mars and subsequently controls the universe.

• 2:06:32John Coogan?

  There we go.

• 2:06:34Jordi Hays?

  Elon would have an edge there, I think.

• 2:06:36John Coogan?

  I think so.

• 2:06:38Jordi Hays?

  Okay, just, just.

• 2:06:39John Coogan?

  I have some.

• 2:06:40Jordi Hays?

  Heads up, I got like basically like.

• 2:06:42John Coogan?

  20 minutes?

• 2:06:47Jordi Hays?

  Like 10 minutes.

• 2:06:48John Coogan?

  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 people were like screenshotting the next Elon's like most aggressive posts, but Aaron Slodov took the assignment, uh, literally and delivered. He says, be me, human, living in 2024. Ancestors crossed oceans in wooden boats. Now we're building spaceships. Literally have all human knowledge in my pocket and can learn anything. Great grandparents died from simple infections. Now we're editing genes to cure diseases. Watching humans casually land rockets like they're playing Kerbal Space Program.

• 2:07:31John Coogan?

  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. That feeling when born just in time to witness humanity becoming a multi-planetary civilization. Great post.

• 2:07:52Jordi Hays?

  Great post.

• 2:07:52John Coogan?

  A lot of good stuff.

• 2:07:55Jordi Hays?

  Great poster.

• 2:07:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, great poster.

• 2:07:57Jordi Hays?

  Great event thrower.

• 2:07:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:00Jordi Hays?

  Great builder.

• 2:08:02John Coogan?

  I feel like, I feel like X has been pretty positive this, this week.

• 2:08:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, ever, ever since Elon said, "Hey."

• 2:08:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, and also the fires like brought out a lot of, I mean, some vitriol against the politicians, but generally a lot of support. And yeah, I mean, did you see the catch yesterday? They caught the rocket again. And it was like, I didn't, I didn't even hear the buildup for the catch. Like, last time they did it, there was like, "Oh, I know some people that are going to watch it live and will they, will they do it? Will they, won't they do it?" And this time it was just like, "Oh yeah, they caught it again." Okay, it's old news.

• 2:08:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and the crazy thing was the visual of all, all, everything they sent up.

• 2:08:41John Coogan?

  The breaking up?

• 2:08:41Jordi Hays?

  The breaking up.

• 2:08:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, because the actual starship disintegrated.

• 2:08:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:44John Coogan?

  Which I think was like a failure for that test, but still they caught the booster, which is cool.

• 2:08:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:49John Coogan?

  So, kind of like a, some good, some bad, I guess.

• 2:08:52Jordi Hays?

  Shout out to Red Bull Futurist.

• 2:08:55John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:08:55Jordi Hays?

  He posted the second they caught it, he was like, something like, "That was cool, let's do it again."

• 2:09:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, no, that is the sentiment.

• 2:09:02Jordi Hays?

  Back to work, and then other SpaceX employees were showing, like, "You missed, here's what you missed." And it's like showing all the rubble and explosions and all the times that it didn't work and... It really is.

• 2:09:14John Coogan?

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

• 2:09:55John Coogan?

  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-

• 2:10:22Jordi Hays?

  He's a mass monster.

• 2:10:23John Coogan?

  He's a mass monster. Mast orbit, getting big. Let's go to Jeff Lewis. He says, "At the top, there's no such thing as work-life balance. The healthy way to integrate business and life is via love."

• 2:10:37Jordi Hays?

  Great point. I went through this at, I think, around 21, 22.

• 2:10:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:44Jordi Hays?

  And at the time, I was facing pressure from people in my life to say, like, you need more work-life balance and all this stuff. And my reaction at that time was, I don't, I don't want to work less. I actually want to work more. I'm trying to set my life up so that I can work harder, longer, et cetera. And do this for many, many years.

• 2:11:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:09Jordi Hays?

  But what was true about that was there were certain aspects of the way that I was working that were negatively impacting my life. And so finding that balance of and getting to a place where you love work.

• 2:11:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:21Jordi Hays?

  Where if I'm up late sending emails, well, if I love the work, then that's not a negative experience.

• 2:11:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:29Jordi Hays?

  It's a negative experience if you hate what you're doing.

• 2:11:32John Coogan?

  Yeah. Is that, is that how you interpreted the love section of that? That would do, that was the only thing that I, that I didn't fully understand about the post was the healthy way to live your life and business.

• 2:11:42Jordi Hays?

  I mean, that's, that was my interpretation of have, if you have a love for business.

• 2:11:47John Coogan?

  And love your life.

• 2:11:47Jordi Hays?

  Craft and, and, uh, and your life, which to me is family and friends.

• 2:11:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:52Jordi Hays?

  Right? Like, and that, and I'm fortunate that, um, you know, we're not friends, we're strictly business partners.

• 2:11:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:59Jordi Hays?

  But, um, I'm fortunate that I love the work and I love.

• 2:12:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:04Jordi Hays?

  My life and I love that they intersect.

• 2:12:07John Coogan?

  So you have to have dinner, it's fine because we'll be able to.

• 2:12:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:09John Coogan?

  This is the entire tonight.

• 2:12:10Jordi Hays?

  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?

• 2:12:20John Coogan?

  I mean, literally at the, at the last dinner, it was like, you know.

• 2:12:24Jordi Hays?

  No, actually.

• 2:12:25John Coogan?

  Fifteen minutes of pleasant choosing and like two hours of like, let's plan the next activation.

• 2:12:28Jordi Hays?

  Sarah was like, hey, just some feedback. Like, if you're gonna get both families together and like, you know, we're gonna have like a nice dinner, could you just like, try to spend like, it's fine if you spend like half the time 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?

• 2:12:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:48Jordi Hays?

  Like a little bit? And I was like, okay, yeah, you're right.

• 2:12:50John Coogan?

  It's ridiculous.

• 2:12:51Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, love what you do, love your life.

• 2:12:55John Coogan?

  I wish.

• 2:12:55Jordi Hays?

  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 gotta love it all, the good and the bad. The highs and the lows, the bangers and the flops.

• 2:13:09John Coogan?

  Yeah. I went to dinner last night at Restoration Hardware.

• 2:13:12Jordi Hays?

  Nice.

• 2:13:12John Coogan?

  They have, they have restaurants now?

• 2:13:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:15John Coogan?

  And they're like.

• 2:13:15Jordi Hays?

  All the food items are shaped like the cloud couch.

• 2:13:18John Coogan?

  That's.

• 2:13:20John Coogan?

  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,

• 2:13:30Jordi Hays?

  Is that in Santa Barbara?

• 2:13:31John Coogan?

  It's in

• 2:13:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's added in. I need to

• 2:13:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's in Montecito. I was like, oh, so more like the Ikea model than the Home Depot model. Where like, I was like, I was like, oh, going to dinner at Restoration Hardware. That's great. I mean, I love getting a hot dog outside of, outside of a Home Depot. You get them to Ikea meatballs.

• 2:13:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:48John Coogan?

  Like, this is great. It's a Costco model. Yeah, chicken bake.

• 2:13:50Jordi Hays?

  You can get everything.

• 2:13:51John Coogan?

  I was like, so what, so we're at Restoration Hardware Restaurant. What's the equivalent of a chicken bake? If I get, if I'm here, like, what's your specialty? What should I get?

• 2:14:00Jordi Hays?

  And they're just like,

• 2:14:01John Coogan?

  They're just like,

• 2:14:02Jordi Hays?

  Sir, please not leave. We're gonna have to escort you out. You've been in there for four hours.

• 2:14:07John Coogan?

  I was polite. I was polite. But it was very funny being like, you walk into the restaurant, there's just like a bed there. Cause they like sell like furniture.

• 2:14:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:15John Coogan?

  Anyway, we should wrap up.

• 2:14:16Jordi Hays?

  Last, yeah, let's wrap, let's wrap up. We're gonna do one more call to action.

• 2:14:21John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:14:22Jordi Hays?

  Uh, we want to advertise your companies unless you can afford, uh, you know, uh, you know, package in the six to seven figure range, you're gonna wanna, uh, just skip the negotiation and just go straight to our review section, Spotify, Apple.

• 2:14:40John Coogan?

  Leave us reviews.

• 2:14:41Jordi Hays?

  Leave us a five star review and

• 2:14:43John Coogan?

  Take a screenshot.

• 2:14:43Jordi Hays?

  Mention something about the show, but then, uh, really spend the bulk of the reviews talking about your business, what you're working on and why it matters.

• 2:14:52John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:14:52Jordi Hays?

  And a call to action, and then we'll read it out on the show. Thank you, brothers. We will see you on Monday.

• 2:14:59John Coogan?

  Thanks a lot.