Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
TBPN is a live tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming weekdays from 11–2 PT on X and YouTube, with full episodes posted to Spotify immediately after airing.
Described by The New York Times as “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession,” TBPN has interviewed Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, and Satya Nadella. Diet TBPN delivers the best moments from each episode in under 30 minutes.
What did you write about today, John?
Speaker 2:I wanted to dig into the question that we had with Joe Wiesenthal yesterday. What does China actually import? Obviously, this was off the back of Davos. Vice Premier Healy Fang highlighted China's determination to become the world's market. They say, hey.
Speaker 2:We we're the world's factory, but we also can buy stuff. Send us your stuff. We'll buy it. But what are they gonna buy? So he said boosting domestic demand was now on top of their economic agenda.
Speaker 2:This is in their their fifteenth five year plan, something like that. And we were going back and forth. Like, what are they actually importing? We were saying semiconductors, but, know, obviously, there's there's chip deals and and GPU bands. Now, interestingly, China like, the number one trade deficit for China is semiconductors, and it has been since 2005.
Speaker 2:So they wanna buy semiconductors. Obviously, US trade policy oscillates, but semiconductors are the single biggest deficit for China. In 2020, even before the AI boom, China imported 350,000,000,000 worth of semiconductors, which was more than the value of the crude oil it it imported that year. And it's been the largest of importer the largest importer of chips since 2005 and accounts for huge chunks of revenue for Qualcomm. It's over 50% of Qualcomm's revenue, I think, and over 25% for Intel.
Speaker 2:So everything that you get from China, if it's an electronics product, it's some gadget, it has a chip in there, that's probably gonna be made in the West, sent over to China, assembled, and
Speaker 1:then
Speaker 2:But
Speaker 1:then sent back out.
Speaker 2:And then sent back out. Exactly. Energy is a big driver of the trade deficit with China. China imports 74% of its oil supply and 42% of its gas supply. Soybeans, which you mentioned, and iron ore are also big categories.
Speaker 2:The iron ore, goes into a lot of, again, the factory, the world's factory. Why can't
Speaker 1:China make enough soybeans in China?
Speaker 2:I don't know.
Speaker 1:It must be climate related. They love making stuff.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I don't know. That's a good question. We should dig into that. Luxury is a clear net import category for China.
Speaker 2:Estimates are around 100,000,000,000 annually. Now it's not the it's not the biggest driver of their trade deficit or trade surplus, but it is and it's also not critically important in the way chips or oil or soybeans or iron ore are, but it is but it is an important story. And almost all of Chinese luxury good imports are from European conglomerates. You've got to think LVMH and Kering. It's not strategically important, really.
Speaker 2:And the foreign luxury market in China, so European conglomerates sending their goods to China, it actually completely fell off a cliff in 2024. Imports went down about 20%. Domestic Chinese luxury brands are on the rise. Laopo Gold is now drawing this from the same customer base as Louis Vuitton, Hermes, Cartier, Bvlgari and Tiffany. Gucci is closing stores, I think around 18 stores are closing, while the local champion, Songmont, is seeing significant growth in their handbag business.
Speaker 2:So China does want to be the world's market, but they're also buying domestic a lot. The basic trend is like China excels at developing efficient supply chains, streamlined manufacturing operations. And it doesn't stop with cars. They're doing it with TVs now. So on Tuesday, Sony announced that they would be spinning off its home entertainment business, which includes the TV brand Bravia, to their Chinese rival TCL Electronics Holdings.
Speaker 2:Sony is selling a 51% stake to TCL. While the brand will remain Sony. The display technology will be TCL. Sony has been falling behind Samsung, TCL, LG, Xiaomi in terms of TV shipments for a while, but the brand still holds a ton of value. Sony TVs were the best a decade ago.
Speaker 2:And still today, people like software a little bit more. And the Sony brand, it still has the aura of the Walkman, the PlayStation. It's just beloved electronics. And you see the Sony logo, and it's just way more familiar than TCL.
Speaker 3:Do you
Speaker 1:think Japanese excellence?
Speaker 2:Yes, you do. And so Sony has been falling behind on the manufacturing front. TCL has been basically delivering a much stronger value prop on a price to quality basis, and the panel technology is loved and very competitive. But there's just more faith in the Sony name, so the Chinese manufacturers pulling forward heritage and brand legacy by buying the name. And this feels like a trend that will continue for a while.
Speaker 2:China's fantastic at quickly grinding down manufacturing learning curves, developing high quality products at affordable prices. But creating an iconic brand, it just takes decades. And so it's better to buy than build. Like, this is one thing you buy instead of build. Don't know if Chinese manufacturers will ever make money, but I came away not wanting to invest in any manufacturing business in the rest of the world.
Speaker 2:And Ian Rountree says, I'm gonna keep investing in American manufacturing. So people are still still pushing it. There's also big news. Anderle is bringing a 1,000,000 square foot union built campus, along with 5,500 jobs, to the city of Long Beach. The the the office of mayor Rex Richardson, the Long Beach mayor, posted this.
Speaker 2:Over the next three years, Andrew will be building this. This is the largest private investment in Long Beach history, and it's a major vote of confidence in Long Beach's leadership in aerospace and advanced manufacturing.
Speaker 1:China unveils EV that can violently eject its battery in case of a fire. We can see this in action and see what kind of situation.
Speaker 2:Yeah, this is so wild. I remember when this video went viral. It's like, what is the point? Oh, it's because if it crashes, it's going to burn. It'll shoot it out.
Speaker 2:But that just seems like so, so dangerous. But at the same time, people watch these videos and they think like, oh, this is like widespread Chinese best practice when really like, this is probably like their gundo equivalent. You know, just like a couple of dudes
Speaker 1:It is interesting that they're like, we don't just need to get it 10 feet away. We need to get it 30 feet away.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Because you could just like like gracefully drop it out or something or like or like slide it out sort of slowly with a little pusher. But they have to like shoot it out like a cannon. I think we gotta watch the video about AI industry news.
Speaker 2:Every two weeks one of these models is destroying someone else's model. Destroyed Pinterest and ChatGPT. ChatGPT destroyed Perplexity and Google AI. LinkedIn AI just ruined WhatsApp We met AI. No.
Speaker 2:IRCTC AI just destroyed UberOla AI. Wow. Wow. It's so good. What what is that last one?
Speaker 2:IRCTC I? He's
Speaker 1:just making stuff up.
Speaker 2:He's just making up acronyms at this point. But it really is so true that there's just a time honored clickbait title of destroyed in all caps. I used to do it on my YouTube videos, always went viral. It's been proven.
Speaker 1:What's going on with TikTok?
Speaker 2:TikTok is it's sort of the reverse, honestly. It's very interesting. You have this dynamic of the American companies or the Western companies, MG and Sony selling to Chinese because they have great manufacturing. And then TikTok, you know, we want America wants, control over the algorithm, over the data, security. And so you have a Chinese company that's now going to be operating in The US, and The Wall Street Journal has a piece here on it.
Speaker 2:Agreement was negotiated to comply with a 2024 law requiring the company to do a deal to address US national security concerns. Rome wasn't built in a day, and TikTok was not divested in a day. TikTok officially established a joint venture that would allow it to keep operating in The United States. The company said Thursday resolving a years long fight to address Washington's national security concerns. Under the terms of the deal negotiated by the Trump administration, the popular video sharing app will be operated by a new US entity controlled by investors seen as friendly to The US.
Speaker 2:Its data management and algorithm training on American users will be overseen by Oracle, the cloud computing giant that has safeguarded its data for The US for years and has close ties to the Trump administration. The deal was negotiated to comply with a law passed in 2024. President Trump delayed the implementation of the law a year ago after starting his second term to keep TikTok operating in The United States. He signed a series of executive orders to extend the deadline for completing a deal until it was met Thursday. Trump said in a social media post, I'm so happy to have helped in saving TikTok.
Speaker 2:He sang he thanked Chinese leader Xi Jinping for working with us. Trump and TikTok's investors and allies, pushed the deal through despite lingering concerns among lawmakers and security hawks that China could still influence the new entity through TikTok's parent ByteDance.
Speaker 1:It makes sense that this took so long. It sounds really simple. Just divest. But in reality, you have to effectively rebuild an entire app. Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's gonna be a new app Yeah. Figuring out the logistics of that. Yeah. There's also just a ton of hair on the deal. Right?
Speaker 1:There's a huge revenue share that's going back to ByteDance in perpetuity that is obviously reflected in the valuation. The other factor is, like, if you have a US TikTok now and then you have normal TikTok.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:If I'm on The US TikTok, am I sharing content to international TikTok? If I'm on the international TikTok, is it sharing my content back into The US app? Yeah. How does that all work out? Yeah.
Speaker 1:And so there's a lot of stuff that still needs to be handled. Most of the social media app pretty much every social media app that you use, if you just cut off all international content creators, the experience on the app would get worse. Yeah. So there needs to be some content still flowing back and forth. But figuring out how exactly that works is still in process.
Speaker 2:The majority American owned joint venture will operate under defined safeguards that protect national security through comprehensive data protections, algorithm security, content moderation, and software assurances for US users. The whole TikTok debate really erupted when TikTok CEO, Xochu, was in front of Congress and was not really acting like he was the boss, basically. That was the main criticism. It felt like he didn't have full control over the entity because, of course, it's a subsidiary of ByteDance. And some of The US lawmakers were pressing him on how much control he actually has.
Speaker 2:Did they send the right person to the congressional hearing? So who's in the deal? You got Oracle. You got private equity firm Silver Lake. You got Abu Dhabi based MGX.
Speaker 2:They will each own 15% of the new entity, while TikTok investors will own about 30%. Other notable investors include JD Vance's former revolution former firm Revolution and tech executive Michael Dell's Family Investment Office. Dell's getting in the deal. Vance spent a brief stint at the firm founded by AOL cofounder Steve Case during his time as a venture investor, which preceded his twenty twenty two senate campaign. Vance has said previously that the deal values the new entity at about 14,000,000,000.
Speaker 2:A lot of people thought that was really, really low given TikTok's immense growth. But there is another side of this, which is that TikTok, I don't believe, was ever monetizing or as profitable as the its competitors, YouTube, Mark Zuckerberg, and the Google team were not exactly slow to move and launch competitive products. And so a lot of the you see this continuously where Snapchat comes out, Stories is on a tear, and you're looking at the Snapchat growth curve, and you're like, this is gonna kill Facebook. It's gonna be the next Facebook, and Mark Zuckerberg needs to acquire it. He puts in an offer, gets declined.
Speaker 2:And it looks like it's over, but then the Instagram team moved really quickly. They launched Stories. And that effectively you can see in the chart Stories launches on Instagram, and people stopped moving on to Snapchat. And so a lot of people went back had who were on Snapchat, they went back to Instagram, and Instagram continued to grow in Snapchat. It didn't flatline, but it, like, definitely put a dent in their growth.
Speaker 2:And I think the same thing is true for TikTok. A lot of people who just want that format, vertical video, endless scrolling slop, they can get that. We got we got American made troughs all over the place, everywhere the eyes can see. So the investors are paying the US government a multibillion dollar fee for arranging the deal, a concept Trump previously called a tremendous fee plus. TikTok said it had 200,000,000 users in The US, up from its 2024 estimate of about a 170,000,000 users.
Speaker 2:So decent growth, but I don't know. I mean, 200,000,000 in The US is a lot. That's pretty much everyone.
Speaker 1:Yeah, guess the question is, will they ever get the rest of The US in
Speaker 2:a
Speaker 1:way that YouTube, you could assume, has effectively You
Speaker 2:think they have like 300 mil?
Speaker 1:I would assume that
Speaker 2:I don't know. There's a lot of Philistines out there. There's a lot of the Luddites who are just like, no. I want DVDs. I want VHS tapes.
Speaker 2:Trump touted his popularity on TikTok earlier Thursday posting on Truth Social that his posts on the platform TikTok get more engagement than posts on TikTok competitor Instagram, which is owned by Meta Platform.
Speaker 1:For what it's worth, that's always been the case. Right? Like TikTok has always had allegations that they were botting Yes. Like as a platform Yes. Effectively.
Speaker 1:Yes. People would go on there and they'd be like getting a tremendous amount of followers, tremendous amount of just engagement broadly Yeah. Far more than than they would have on Instagram with the same content. Mhmm. You know, some people would say, that's because the TikTok algorithm is so good.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. But and there certainly are a bunch of very real people on TikTok. I don't I don't mean to say that it's all bought it. But Mhmm. The experience of using TikTok, a lot of creators will just naturally have six times as many TikTok followers as they do Instagram followers.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. It does seem like the algorithm is set up to serve you more content in a ten minute session because you're more quickly scrolling. And then there's also accounting issues. Like on some platforms, if you just scroll past something for even one second, that counts as a view.
Speaker 2:On other platforms, it might take three seconds. On other views, other, you know, platforms, it might take ten seconds, a minute. Gen z are arriving to college unable to even read a sentence, says Fortune, reposted by Tyler.
Speaker 1:If you can read this. See if you can read this.
Speaker 2:Try and read this. Wow. He can't he can't can't do it.
Speaker 3:He slothed. Slothed. I I just I need like some subway surfers or something.
Speaker 1:Yeah. For sure. I'm gonna need some subway surfers. We
Speaker 2:have some drama that's continuing to unfold in the in the payroll space. The Justice Department opens a criminal probe into Silicon Valley spy allegations. Subpoenas seek information on allegations that deal valued around $17,000,000,000 recruited a spy inside a rival company. This is a huge story last year, and then it's been pretty quiet, and both companies have just kind of been chug chugging along. Yeah.
Speaker 2:So the Justice Department opened a criminal investigation. Grand jury subpoenas were sent out in recent weeks. Keith O'Brien alleged in an affidavit filed in April that Deal CEO Alex recruited him and gave him instructions for what information to take from Rippling. O'Brien alleged that other executives were involved in the spying plot, including his father, who is Deal's executive chairman and chief strategy officer. A spokeswoman for Deal said the company isn't aware of a criminal investigation but is willing to cooperate with authorities.
Speaker 2:That's an interesting statement. The The Wall Street Journal is reporting this and and and you find out from a Wall Street Journal reporter. That's, that's wild. So the company has previously said, we deny any legal wrongdoing and look forward to asserting our counterclaims. So deal says we didn't do anything wrong.
Speaker 2:Of course, the affidavit from Keith O'Brien is extremely dramatic. There's that whole, like, oh, send that watch to London. We're gonna be like James Bond. Like, it's a it's a really dramatic read. And you can go back and watch some old TVPN episodes if you want to hear a full take on that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's interesting. Yeah, I what information is actually available publicly on this. Because obviously in a situation like this, you have both sides that are feeding the media their side of the story. I mean What we do know
Speaker 2:facts are the facts here. Like the Justice Department did open this because the Wall Street Journal confirmed that the Justice Department opened the investigation. Yeah. Anyway Yeah. Wouldn't stop until they I think
Speaker 1:a lot of people weren't expecting this to Last October. Actually have any type of like criminal component.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think a lot of people were just expecting like a lot of drama, a lot of
Speaker 1:And they would eventually just settle.
Speaker 2:Settle. And like the worst case was like, Okay, maybe it's like a series D size payment for rippling, but they're both gonna just keep grinding. But it seems like it's going to the court, so we will see. Maybe there will be maybe there will be, you know, courtroom sketches of these folks. Open AI chair, Brad Taylor says AI is quote, probably a bubble, expects a corruption in the coming years.
Speaker 2:Nick is he his camera roll is truly just filled to the brim with images of Sam Altman in various, like like, you know
Speaker 1:guy has probably the largest collection of sale
Speaker 2:Rare Altman's.
Speaker 1:Rare Altman's.
Speaker 2:Has photo that's ever been taken of Sam.
Speaker 1:Nowhere, of course, would Bret Taylor be like, oh yeah, I think I think LLM usage is gonna fall off a cliff. Yeah. It's like Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:There's variety of different companies and kind of subcategories that could be overheated.
Speaker 2:You could easily dig into that. And he's like, there's a bubble in like seed stage valuations. Like I can't get an angel check-in at less than 50 pre. Like, you know, like, bubble can take a lot of different shapes and stuff. Who knows if he was actually commenting on it?
Speaker 2:Another clip from Dennis from the Big Technology podcast. He's taking shots at open air according to Yuchen Jin.
Speaker 4:Actions speak louder than words, going back to the original conversation we were having with, you know, Sam and others claiming AGI is around the corner. Why would you bother with ads then? So that is I think a reasonable question to ask. But I think, look, from our point of view, we have no plans at the moment to do ads if you're talking about the Gemini app, right, specifically. I think we are going obviously, we're going to watch very carefully what you know, the outcome of what Chachi PT is saying they're going to do.
Speaker 4:I think it has to be handled very carefully. Think actions speak louder.
Speaker 1:He's a dog.
Speaker 2:Post AGI, the clankers need to advertise to each other. You gotta do ads for the clankers.
Speaker 1:The thing here is like OpenAI has to not only like figure out how to actually implement ads within the product, but they have to build out all the advertising like infrastructure, the platform infrastructure in order for people to run campaigns
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Successfully and at scale. Yeah. So Google already has all of that. It is far ease like it it is what do you think it's like a 100 times easier for Google to turn on ads in Gemini? Yeah.
Speaker 1:Right? They already have all the customer relationship. Literally any company that advertises online is already working with Google. And so it's really just like you can just flip the switch. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And so I could easily, know, don't have any inside knowledge but I could easily see Google just having it all basically ready to go Yeah. And it literally just being like, okay.
Speaker 2:There there is We we launch this whenever we want. There there is an interesting steel man here. Let me try and do it. The steel man on Sam Altman claiming that AGI is in the corn around the corner, but we still gotta do ads. Well, around the corner, even if that means six months, like, if you have an incredible capital expenditure to get over that hump to create AGI, it's only six months away, but you gotta do that last data center, and you gotta raise that last 50,000,000,000 and all of the investors
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's easy to say, like, we don't want to do ads when you have hundreds of billions in of existing ad revenue coming in funding everything that you're doing. So anyways, I think this is, you
Speaker 2:know mean, we can
Speaker 1:also debate
Speaker 2:whether or not ads will exist post AGI. I would argue that they would. But what do There think,
Speaker 3:was that headline about how OpenAI maybe they're thinking about taking a percentage of the share of discoveries. I don't know how they would actually do that or if it's like they're being serious at all. But that's much more AGI appealed than ads.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah. Oh, that's a good point. So they're doing both. They're doing both.
Speaker 1:Almost everyone at Vimeo was laid off, including the entire video team. I would assume that else most of do their team other than Vimeo? So unfortunate. I have some fond memories of being a teenager when Vimeo was really
Speaker 2:Vimeo was so differentiated. It was where there was a level of quality that it wasn't just
Speaker 1:like a random short films. In my case, it was like surf. Yes. Yes. It was like if somebody was putting a ton of effort into making like a surf movie or some snowboarding movie, it would be on Vimeo.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And they wanted higher quality footage. You could get higher bit rates, four ks, HD. Like they they were really on the frontier of that. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Remember watching a lot of ski videos there. There were some great ones. And also just like it was a place where people would put their their short films. They had the Vimeo, like, you know, awards with the little wreath
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Laurels that you could rest on. Eventually, YouTube just went everywhere, all places. The ads went away for the people that care about that because they had premium subscriptions. And ultimately, the quality on YouTube just got better and better and better. And now you can get four k, really high bit rate on on YouTube and it's indistinguishable from Vimeo.
Speaker 1:I yield Harry has the meme for the He says, but now we shall both surely drown, said the frog. LOL, said the scorpion.
Speaker 2:Don't this is exactly right. If you're a private equity firm and you buy an asset like this and you lay off the team, you're likely there are still people that are going to be trying to extract the value from that asset. It just might be a team in a different section of the firm or an outsourcing agency or something else. I would be surprised if this means that Vimeo is shutting down. I would imagine that they're trying to continue whatever business relationships they have and whatever subscriber base they have.
Speaker 1:Vimeo was cool, but if you know about Vimeo, it probably means you're old.
Speaker 2:And
Speaker 1:That's true. That's certainly true.
Speaker 2:You know about Vimeo?
Speaker 3:Yeah. I know what Vimeo is.
Speaker 2:What's the last thing you watched on Vimeo?
Speaker 3:I have no idea. Yeah. But, you know, but I remember, yeah, was like artsy films would be on there or something. Yeah, it was good.
Speaker 2:So Coinbase established an independent advisory board on quantum computing and blockchain. Quantum computing, if built at scale, have the potential to reshape entire industries. We were talking to Kathy Wood about this a little bit yesterday. From finance to health care to material science and national security, for blockchain, the stakes are especially high. The cryptographic foundation that secures digital assets today could be challenged by the advances of the coming years.
Speaker 2:At Coinbase, security is our highest priority, and preparing for future threats, even those many years away, is crucial for our industry. Most people, I think, handicap the quantum thing at, like, 2030, 2032, 2040. I think Kathy Wood's estimate was 2040 for serious quantum adoption, even if you get on Moore's Law type adoption If
Speaker 3:you can crack, like, whatever the the Bitcoin or or any, like, blockchain with quantum Yeah. Like, surely you can also just get into, like, banks or, like, tons of, like, actual like, things that are, like, probably way more important than than crypto. Yeah. It's like if we have a world where you have like these incredibly powerful quantum computers, like is crypto actually the most important thing that you need be worrying about? Or is it like the nuclear codes that are
Speaker 2:So
Speaker 3:Surely those are stored
Speaker 2:physically Yeah. You're probably right with the nuclear codes. But in terms of just like fiat stored in a bank, there are a series of backups that are offline. Even cheaper backups at certain points. So the financial system, although they probably don't want to talk about it, does have the ability to effectively roll back.
Speaker 2:So if there was some massive quantum hack and all the Morgan Stanley or JP Morgan accounts or Goldman Sachs accounts were drained, they would just be like, let's revert. But you can't do that on a blockchain necessarily.
Speaker 1:More importantly
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:Buzz balls is Incredibly important.
Speaker 2:Thank you.
Speaker 1:Is selling a $35,000 diamond engagement ring shaped like its drinks. The ring will be auctioned on eBay starting February 3.
Speaker 2:Maybe it's it's $35,000 worth of diamonds. It costs them $35,000 to make it. And they're gonna put it on eBay starting price, a $100. And then it'll get bid up, I guess. I don't know.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Proceeds will from the sale will benefit a heart related charitable cause. It's kind of odd for an alcohol brand to be like, we're
Speaker 1:I don't know. That's cool. I mean, if anyone out in the audience is wanting to propose and doesn't really know how to is struggling to figure out the right kind of moment or way to propose, this is like Toss a buzz out of the box. That's the woman in your life. Toss
Speaker 2:a buzz ball
Speaker 3:at the she catches
Speaker 1:it, she has to
Speaker 2:marry you. This rage bait? Is this good marketing? Do you think this is good for buzz ball strategically? What do you think?
Speaker 1:I don't know if it's I mean, I I find plenty of moments to talk about Buzzball Yeah. Already.
Speaker 2:Okay. So Unnecessary.
Speaker 1:Did you know? What? Do you know who came up with the idea for Buzzball?
Speaker 2:Absolutely not. I have no idea.
Speaker 1:A public high school teacher.
Speaker 2:What?
Speaker 1:Marilee Kick, a former public high school teacher has become one of America's richest self made women after selling her ready to drink cocktail business, Buzzballs, for at least 500,000,000.
Speaker 2:500,000,000?
Speaker 1:What started as a side hustle has now transformed into one of the biggest brands of the ready to drink cocktail industry. Kick founded Buzzballs in 2009, inspired by a simple idea while grading papers by her pool. I thought, I shouldn't have this glass container out here. I should have a plastic pool safe type of cocktail. From this spark of inspiration, Buzzballs was born.
Speaker 1:Fun, high proof cocktails served in colorful plastic spherical containers. Buzzballs quickly gained popularity as an asshole at supermarkets, liquor convenience stores. She says, I've been living the American dream. We've built a legacy. We've become a contender in a space where women never went.
Speaker 1:Brutal. Kick says.
Speaker 2:That's brutal.
Speaker 1:The brand has grown intentionally distributing 29 countries with an estimated annual revenue of $500,000,000. Wow. This is an incredible story.
Speaker 2:Monster company.
Speaker 1:In April 2024, the drinks firm Sazerac Okay. Acquired Buzzballs in an all cash deal No estimated $500,000,000 Though Kick suggests the figure is much higher.
Speaker 2:No way.
Speaker 1:Kix is an absolute dog. It has also cemented her place among America's richest self made women, with Forbes estimating her net worth at $400,000,000 after taxes. So yeah, course.
Speaker 2:She's going to 10x that. Just get it the market. Raise some max seven.
Speaker 1:On her next idea.
Speaker 2:Run it up. Run
Speaker 1:it up. Kick's journey is remarkable because she never raised money from investors. She bootstrapped her business.
Speaker 2:I got to get her on the show.
Speaker 1:She used a small inheritance, maxed out Where
Speaker 2:is the founder's podcast episode about
Speaker 3:her?
Speaker 1:Took out a loan from a local community bank to get started. I scraped and scrambled, I she took every bit of every penny I could find and That's poured it into the incredible. Her unique company started making a profit in the second year with $1,000,000 in sales and 100 ks in profit. Not bad. By 2014, the brand was expanding quickly, the drinks were sold at major retailers.
Speaker 1:By 2019, annual sales were over 100,000,000
Speaker 2:Get her on the Davidson. Wow.
Speaker 1:I mean, she's elite. A key to BuzzBall's success was owning its supply chain.
Speaker 3:What? She vertically integrated on KY? Just
Speaker 2:Most D2C founders in California can't figure out how to get off a co packer.
Speaker 1:She moved production of the patented plastic spheres and the spirits used in BuzzBalls Patents in house to ensure the brand's quality and reliability.
Speaker 2:Wow.
Speaker 1:Despite many investor offers over the years, Kick held onto her company until she found the right partner. Elite. I wanted somebody that was gonna come in and have big guns.
Speaker 2:Big guns.
Speaker 1:Kick and her family are still part of the business. I didn't sell because I didn't like what I was doing or wanted to leave, she explains. I sold for the exponential growth and because it's selfish to hold it it back. It really has legs. From a teacher grading paper by the pool to a multi centimillionaire, Merrily Kick's story shows the power of a good idea and the determination to make it happen.
Speaker 2:We had some breaking news yesterday. Caroline Ellison has been released from federal custody. She, of course, was involved in the FTX drama that erupted a few years ago. She's out. And Martin Screlli quote tweeted us into the oblivious Ratio.
Speaker 2:Ratioed us by changing our changing he didn't even use nano banana pro. He just scribbled all over our trading card and said snitch.
Speaker 1:Honestly, it worked. It I was thinking like that felt very fast.
Speaker 2:It does feel fast. It does feel fast. But I'm excited to see what she does next. Will she build something? You know, we've seen some other folks get out and go on to redemption, and we will see.
Speaker 2:Hopefully, at some point, tells her story. It'll be interesting to see her side of it. Maybe she has convincing arguments.
Speaker 3:I heard she wrote a book. Really? Think there were some leaks. I don't know how true it is, but apparently she she was writing.
Speaker 2:Okay. For sure. Substack. What's going on with Substack?
Speaker 1:They're going into television.
Speaker 2:They're going into television.
Speaker 1:They're taking on big TV. Big TV. They say according to Max, they're launching Substack TV app on Apple TV and Google TV. Users will be able to watch video posts and Substack live streams. So much of Substack's opportunity right now
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Is just that X is rolled into XAI. Yeah. Yeah. And it's like not operating, you know That's totally as like a pure play stand alone company. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And so, yeah.
Speaker 2:I think has been Making the most. Has been definitely ramping up the video functionality. We've done some live streams there. There's a lot of opportunity, and it's a very interesting community. I think that's the strongest thing about Substack is just that it's a very high signal place.
Speaker 2:Like, you were I'm I'm I'm you know, the Substack experience is not scrolling random posts, random creators, but I feel very confident about if Substack were to serve me a random piece of content that was doing well across the Substack network, I would enjoy it because the creators that choose to be on Substack, there are just so few we
Speaker 1:were talking about Vimeo earlier, the the dynamic that you saw between Vimeo and YouTube where Vimeo was like a super intentional place. Yeah. You can see something emerging again where Substack TV is like a somewhat more intent intentional version of of YouTube Yeah. Just because it is like based on like your actual audience less around just like raw discoverability now.
Speaker 2:And also with Substack, if you're trying to create like, a signal on a piece of content, the fact that people pay is really, really high signals. Like, yes, this person isn't just good at clickbait. They're not just good at driving traffic. They're not just good at thumbnails and titles and hooks. Like, they are good at creating such a response from their community that their community puts down their credit cards.
Speaker 2:And in the case of, like, Emily Sundberg at Feed Me, maybe they pay more than they have to.
Speaker 1:Pull up this video here.
Speaker 2:You're really jumping on this. This is a new one because Waymo's have been Getting
Speaker 1:stomped out.
Speaker 2:This is a
Speaker 1:new Two words I haven't said They're put together
Speaker 2:really breaking the windshield. Wow. What is this did the Waymo drive through a particular protest? Did these people just did these people just descend upon a random WAMO? This is a crime.
Speaker 2:This is property destruction.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What would your mother say?
Speaker 2:Also, I'm just thinking about like the WAMOs aren't cheap. You're gonna be hit with like a $500,000 bill even if you just have to pay for repairing the WAMO. Very, very odd. But, of course, people are calling to give the Waymo's weapons and people that is the rallying crime tag. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Speaker 2:Sign up for the TBPN newsletter, tbpn.com. We will see you on Monday. Cheers, folks. Goodbye.