TikTok

“This is TikTok's business model, to be clear. This is what show thinks will take it to the moon. It's huge in China with Doyen, and-”

“The problem is that I think it's a very hard argument for us to make doing that and then defending our internet platforms everywhere else, right? Because the second we do that, Europe is going to say very rightfully, do we really want the American internet pla…”

“Look, I am not in favor of a flat-out TikTok ban, but I am in favor of, like, a more, like, domiciled domestic, like, data regime, right?”

“I'm more, more for TikTok ban. I think that there's a lot of data and facial recognition and all kinds of technologies that China's potentially building upon without, you know, real knowledge and consent. And I also just think it's terrible for mental health”

“Right now, there's no way to know the identity of who's behind anything that's going on. And so, that could already be happening, and we wouldn't know it.”

“I have to believe that forget AGI, the very, very dirty version of AI that we have with TikTok will defeat the California public schools education program on what is real and what is not.”

“People are like, well, do you think the Chinese are manipulating it? And my general answer is no, because I think they're too smart to do that. Like, why waste the tool, right?”

“Sequoia's an enormous investor. It's like, Reid Hoffman, who's a huge Democratic donor and would have a lot of sway in Washington as a huge investor. Like, they're all investors.”

“But the second they want to go invade Taiwan, which they've said they want to do, you better believe that they will use their for-profit company, right, with, given their ulterior motives at a higher level, right, to soften the beaches by using AI to just kind…”

“Apple's not gonna kick them out. Apple's China exposure is enormous, right? Like, you know, even if they should, they won't, right?”

“I think we should have if not banned, like severely you know reduced TikTok's ability to influence the American audience a long time ago.”

“If America cannot get its act together to ban TikTok from a national security standpoint, we deserve to be crushed because, and we're going to be.”

“As the internet has kind of become like, I think we can safely say in 20, 24, the internet has become culture worldwide. Like you have this, Splintering of cultures, right? Where every person in an organization pays attention to a different sub graph of some c…”

“No, TikTok won't be banned, but it should be.”

“We absolutely should ban TikTok. It's completely insane that we would allow, like, a foreign.”

“I don't think it's a platform for creativity. I think it's a platform for sensationalism all the way through and through.”

“I think that what they've done that no one talks about is they've created the single greatest video creation tool tool set that anyone's ever done.”

“What you do is you, like, look, you just subtly, you think about bot farms and control, it's like, you're like, ah, I'm gonna let these people that are, like, pro this issue, I'm not gonna, like, limit them quite as much, or these other people, you can be so s…”

“And so Sam's analogy earlier that like if China decides to invade Taiwan and they want the American youth on their side, they've already laid the groundwork. Like we've seen it time and time again.”

“The regulatory pressure, you could either put the regulatory pressure on TikTok, right, which is what people are trying to direct, and then you have this whack-a-mole problem because companies are faster than regulators, so you regulate TikTok, but by the time…”

“Day 623 of the U.S. Letting a huge national security threat sit inside our borders, which is insane, right? Like, it's like ridiculous that TikTok is allowed to be in the U.S. Given its current control structure. And kind of the geopolitical situation.”

“I think saying ban TikTok, that's a thing that like candidly might be marginally better, but you'll never get done.”

“There's just no chance that in that environment they're gonna, like, risk any youth vote, even if they're terrible, woke people, for the sake of banning TikTok right now. And I think that sucks, because I think it is a huge national security risk, But I think …”

“And I noticed a few weeks ago that they've also now moved the TikTok feed into CapCut.”

“Apple could cut TikTok's business if that's our concern. In the US down to nothing, very easily, just with defaults.”

“One of the things that's interesting now is actually a lot of the investors in ByteDance and TikTok are actually staying pretty silent on the lobbying front, which is a huge shift from a year or two years ago.”

“It's all, they'll just go to Instagram. They'll just spend more time on Instagram. That's not, it's not, like, it's really not gonna change their lives.”

“And then the court, you know, inevitable court challenge of that, because you have to believe that will happen.”

“They've actually banned TikTok usage longer than a certain number of minutes per day. They've also Banned the algorithm. They've like changed the algorithms that only pumps, you know, science and engineering and STEM related content to their kids. And yet they…”

“This is probably going to have some pretty wild and potentially bad knock-on effects globally. Just slight ones, because I think a lot of countries are like, wait a minute. All the social media is American. How do we feel about, if America doesn't like TikTok …”

“If this happens, I think most people in the country are going to have no idea why it happened. And it will kind of cause a lot of havoc, which is unclear politically what effect that will have, at least inside the United States.”

“I think the Senate's gonna pick it up. I think it's happening.”

“That tells me this thing was rushed, rushed, rushed through, because if you can't even get, you know, a pro-American acronym on top of your bill, that's like the definition of the 11th hour.”

“They won't let them. It will be in violation of their rules against exporting algorithms.”

“This is, like, such an obvious national security threat.”

“So, you know, I don't think it's going away. I'm more confident in that by the day.”

“Oh, they're pretty smart guys. They know exactly what's up. They, they're trading between what is obviously true to any American versus their enormous financial incentive, and empathy is a great word for that.”

“And the scale of it also, I mean, it's, it has to be a multi-party deal, like many private equity firms plus Saudi, I don't even know, like the scale of it is enormous.”

“They're going to sell, you know, they're going to sell it to the Saudis.”

“We'll see Walmart and Oracle and maybe Microsoft and who knows, try to form potential consortiums to buy it or spin it off.”

“I think Mubadal is going to end up owning TikTok.”

“So what's gonna happen after Biden signs this is ByteDance or TikTok is gonna sue to block it on the grounds that it's infringing on the First Amendment.”

“If you told me there was a TikTok phone or a real phone, it did nothing except for that, that would sell.”

“What I'm arguing for is that people do not build only for Instagram. I think you've got a lot of people that are out there building only for Instagram, only for TikTok, only for YouTube, whatever. Just like an investor would never invest in a single stock. You…”

“TikTok has shown us what the true north is of engagement. I think that is like refined sugar and you can just keep refining it.”

“To get rid of TikTok is to point out the fact that its presence in the U.S. Is actually a net positive for Meta.”

“I read in the information that TikTok is paying Microsoft Twenty million dollars a month to access open AI through Azure.”

“I mean, my personal view on this is the same reason why I think we should ban TikTok, right? Which is, like, free speech is meant to, like, it's not, like, a right for the sake of being a right, right? It's a right to make our country stronger, right? And to m…”

“Well, there's even longer stuff, like the Game of Thrones serialized, goes on forever type shit, which is like a thousand hours, and then there's like the TikTok, but the middle drops out, right? And movies as a format is the middle”

“Actually, most people, I still don't think associate tech talk with being one of the first AI, you know products at scale that did this first. Now it's just much more direct. It's like, you're talking to the algorithm rather than the algorithm serving up conte…”

“If we ban tick tock, which by the way, I've been on record for 18 months saying is a completely obvious thing to do. The one on one version is that's good for same. Dave Morin: Couldn't agree more. Sam Lessin: The one on one version is good for Facebook becaus…”

“The information reported last night that TikTok will pull it for US users if that day comes.”

“I think it's pretty reasonable that some countries turn around and say, well, wait a minute. You guys don't want TikTok. We don't want Facebook. That's an American thing, right?”

“I've said for years that this is like the number one unforced national security history issue, probably in history.”

“I'm still not convinced that it's actually good for Meta long term for this to happen, but short term, you clearly remove a lot of ad dollars.”

“And I mean, could spur like a legit M and A. Feast. I bet private equity is, like, already figuring this out. Like, which things to salvage and buy for, like, 10 cents on the dollar. Do, like, various roll-ups of these brands that were popular on TikTok. Reboo…”

“Oh, I was short that. There's a zero percent chance.”

“I think the state of play is that, in particular, JD Vance. Vance has been deputized to do this. Is trying to figure out what group of investors broadly, including strategics, can own what parts of TikTok and satisfy you know, the law.”

“Yeah, but I don't think it'll be a straight sale. I think it will be something that kind of resembles this Project Texas data deal they did with Oracle, but more than that”

“Look, my opinion is, I think I've said it on the pod already, which is that the, what we are actually talking about topically right now, the reels, the TikTok, the video feed, I believe crossed over in the last three months to being net health negative.”

“Meta is considering launching a standalone reels app, so that would be taking video only out of Instagram to go a little more head to head with TikTok.”

“The thing that the social media does is it monetizes like waiting in lines. It monetizes like, people are less angry at the airport because of TikTok. Right? Because they just sit in their fucking seats and, like, doom scroll, and then they're, like, not angry…”

“No, I anchored you guys in a way that made you go too high, but 20 of 50, right, are older than five years, and a lot of them are super old because there's this whole super cycle around nostalgia going on, even in TikTok short videos.”

“My prediction is that whatever ends up transacting here is going to look like a services company. It's going to have the data. Maybe it'll have a little bit of revenue ops or eng, but I think this is the needle that now everyone's trying to thread.”

“Newsflash, there's really one serious player in this, which is Oracle.”

“Meta's algorithms have basically become tech talks algorithms. So tech talk has accomplished the mission and it doesn't matter if it exists anymore.”

“TikTok should be banned. Like from first principles.”

“But Amazon just put in a last minute bid.”

“There's one little detail in there, which is that here we are at the very end of this very long, very arduous news story, and China will still retain control of the algorithm, right? Like, so they did win the war of attrition at the end of the day. Like, it so…”

“There's also video shorts that you can click on to sort of watch trail. It's not trailers. They're like shorts. They're clips from the shows that are in like a TikTok like feed that then you can click in and watch the show.”

“One is like, it's now across like a hundred million views on TikTok, and it's like becoming popular and known.”

“According to measurement company Mondo Metrics, Taylor Swift and New Heights reached half a billion views across all of the podcast episode across social media in under 24 hours. Three hundred and seventy nine million on Instagram, sixty one million on X, fift…”

“From a national security and, like, identity standpoint, all this type of stuff, I think it's still, like, structurally a ridiculous risk, right? Like, you know, basically, like, it's never made, it's, it is a huge national security hole.”

“Because for all of its rocket ship growth, TikTok is way under monetized, especially in the U.S.”

“Like, it doesn't matter if the data is on his servers. What matters is what algorithm is choosing what to show you next.”

“They kept Chrome and Google, they saved TikTok. There's, like, six things that because there's, like, this wave of anticipation and hope and excitement around this stuff, These other conversations just get people just move on.”

“TikTok and Instagram now are absolutely unequivocally optimized for addiction. Like they will show you the next best thing to keep the dopamine level in your brain at the same level.”

“There's like one badge Which is where if you complete your sleep hours mission by avoiding using TikTok at night, you get, then you get that one, or you can use a meditation tools feature to get a badge. So you're meditating more.”

“For that two hour time limit, it will be reduced to a one hour daily limit if TikTok, Snap, and YouTube also agree.”