Big Tech Earnings, Elon’s SpaceX–xAI Merge, Genie 3 | Diet TBPN

In the news today, Apple said this morning that it has acquired Q AI, an Israeli startup working on AI technology for audio. Yeah, Apple didn't disclose the terms. The Financial Times reported it was worth nearly 2 billion. So pretty meaningful deal. Apple is not known for really paying up on a lot of different MA that they're kind of folding in to their roadmap. We had Mark Gurman on yesterday talking about how Apple uses M and A effectively to accelerate their roadmap. According to Reuters, Apple did not say how it will use qai's technology, but said the startup has worked on new applications of machine learning to help devices understand whispered speech and to enhance audio in challenging environments. QAI last year filed a patent to use facial skin micro movements to detect words mouthed or spoken.

0:02

We've seen a couple startups that are doing the whisper. It's like telepathy almost. It tracks your mouth movement so you can just. Then it like will track what really, really crazy.

0:54

So facial skin micro movements will be used to identify a person and assess their emotions, heart rate, respiration rate and other indicators. Very sci fi. The founders.

1:06

Yeah, you can read it.

1:15

Aviad Mizel founded three dimensional sensing firm Prime Sense and sold it to Apple in 2013.

1:15

Absolute dogs, they're doing it.

1:22

They call it double kill.

1:24

The Prime Sense deal eventually helped Apple move away from fingerprint sensors on its IPH and toward facial recognition technology.

1:25

Interesting pop quiz for Tyler. Why does Apple acquire companies?

1:31

I mean, why? Questions are usually pretty open.

1:36

Okay, good answer. But Mark Gurman told us, why does Apple acquire companies? To accelerate.

1:39

Accelerate the roadmap.

1:45

Accelerate the roadmap. Yes. And it's funny because I asked him, why are we gonna hear Tim Cook say that? And he was like, oh, because earning. But we're basically hearing him say it today with this surprise acquisition. That's obviously the line from Apple and it makes sense. This is something that is uniquely acceleratable because of the Apple hardware ecosystem. They can Deploy this through AirPods, they can deploy this through the phones, just like they did with Face id. If you have that technology and you're like, oh well, in order to log into your computer with your face, you're going to need a third party device that you plug into the usb. Like no one's gonna do that. But yes, I've been very bullish on this. I was thinking back then that, you know, people get their wisdom teeth out. This is very weird in cyberpunk, but if you got your wisdom teeth out, you could potentially like create, like add a, like a Port for storing a microphone.

1:46

Tyler Charge. Do you have any of these?

2:41

I should have got that.

2:43

Yeah, exactly, because a lot of people get them out. And then you could just put a port there and you could insert basically the tip of an AirPod. Very, very small device that you would charge. And then you put it in. When you're whispering, you can just hear it can only hear that. And it goes dictation straight to your phone. I was wondering about the quality of Whisper Transcription these days. Like, if I just open up whisper on the ChatGPT app, put my phone in my pocket and just talk, can it just hear through my pants pocket and just dictate perfectly now because, like, AI is so good at transcription that it can be really muffled. Like, you can have music playing in the background and talk to Whisper. It just won't mess up. So there is a world where you don't actually need, like a separate pin. You just have something anywhere on your body and it knows, okay, this is what John sounds like. Let's kill all the background noise. Let's kill all the other people talking. Let's isolate that with AI. It seems pretty.

2:44

Pretty good for that.

3:36

One more thing. On this QA acquisition they're using, going back to their patent, using facial skin micro movements to assess emotions, heart rate, respiration rate, and other indicators. You could imagine where a world in the future where you have Apple smart glasses that effectively have, like, health monitoring because it's tracking respiration, heart rate, all these different things, and just basically integrating the features you're getting from the Apple watch today.

3:37

I wonder what it's really unlocking that the watch can't do. There's always the question when you pitch a new device. It's like, well, your phone does have a camera on it, so you're not. This is like the smart glasses aren't the first.

4:01

Yeah, but it's a new device. But it's a Lindy form factor, right? True, true, true. Like this something we've talked about in the past. It's like the new hardware that's taken off is an existing form factor. It's like headphones, eyewear. You have watches, right. Creating these pendant things so far, hasn't hit right.

4:14

Yeah, it's fair. I just think, like, on the heart rate issue specifically, there was an app before the Apple watch existed where you could put your finger over the camera of the iPhone and it would use the light, the flashlight, which was right next to the camera, to light up your finger. So your finger would turn red and then it would Take the sensor data from the camera and measure the pulses of the red and give you your heart rate just from touching your camera. It's pretty cool. Like it was completely outside of the Apple ecosystem, just an app that you could download or pay for. And so the phone can take your heart rate, the watch can take your heart rate. If you give me glasses and you say those glasses can also take your heart rate, I'm like, I got enough heart rate measurement. I can also just go like this and estimate it. Like there's a bunch of ways to know that your heart rate's spiking, maybe tracking it some different. But it feels like they need to go farther and the real opportunity is something more around. Audio interfaces link it to Siri have more ways to triangulate what the person's trying to say, what they're saying in a noisy environment, whether they're trying to be quiet and you still want to isolate what they're saying. Having a back and forth, reducing latency. All of those things are very critical to success in that category.

4:30

Let's go into Microsoft earnings.

5:40

Microsoft. So Microsoft shares have taken a dive as data center spending overshadows earnings surge. Let's give some numbers here. Microsoft's Q4 revenue was $81.3 billion, which was higher than the consensus estimate of 80.23 billion. So they're making money. There's no, there's no lack of demand for Microsoft services. Q3 2025 revenue was 77.1 billion, up almost 5%. And year over year growth was 17%. But the stock sold off by 12%. And Microsoft is now just, just a tiny little $3.15 trillion company. Not bad. Yeah, I mean, people have been excited about the OpenAI investment, which did show up in earnings. So Microsoft owns 27% of OpenAI's new for profit entity. That value is actually reflected in Microsoft's earnings. And of course, more importantly, the GPT models are truly frontier. Like we've seen it again and again. There's like this horse race over this model's better at this thing, this model is better today. But it's just very clear that that OpenAI is on the frontier and in the conversation for pretty much every application possible. And so you can just imagine, you take GPT 5.2 Pro, you vend that into knowledge work pipelines for Microsoft users. That sounds really useful. They aren't behind on coding. We've heard great stories about how Codex is a great model. Maybe it's a little slow. Maybe they need to Speed it up. But people are having a lot of luck with Codex. And so you can imagine that Microsoft is capable of integrating Codex into all sorts of different pieces of the Microsoft empire to create agentic workflows. And then they also have a deal with Anthropic. They also made an investment. So they are multi model, multi platform. But the problem is is that Microsoft seems to be constrained on the data center side. Limited availability of artificial intelligence hardware is affecting how quickly Microsoft's cloud business can grow. And it's capping Azure's revenue potential. Not good. They need to take another trip to Abilene. They need to build more data centers. Maybe it's just a data center capacity issue. What's next? Is it going to be an energy bottleneck? Is it going to be a chip bottleneck? These are stories that we're tracking.

5:42

Obviously it's amazing that Microsoft owns such a big slug of OpenAI. That's great. But the challenge is so much of their backlog is OpenAI and they're actually getting less credit for that. Right. The same way that Oracle had gotten punished for it. Now it's Microsoft's chance to actually get punished. Microsoft, if you actually zoom out a little bit and just look at the last six months, down 17% in the last six months and down 4% over the last year. So it's funny, like in a year where it feels like the last year, Satya and Microsoft have just been on this insane run. They've fully round tripped totally.

7:53

Meta also reported earnings yesterday. 59.9 billion in revenue in Q4 of 2025, beating expectations of 58.5 revenues, up 16% from Q3 of last year, which was 51.24. The company's growing its revenue 21% year over year. That's higher than Microsoft's 17% top line growth market cap is now 1.84 trillion. Mark Zuckerberg told analysts on the earnings call. In 2025, we rebuilt the foundations of our AI program. That should be obvious. There's so many acquisitions, so many hires, so much, so many experiments, so many different, so many different strategies and discussions and changing of the guard and restructurings, layoffs and reality labs. It's the compute desk. There's been so many stories about Meta really rethinking their AI platform, re architecting the foundations of it. Over the coming months we're going to start shipping our new models and products. Very excited for that. He says he's I expect our first models will be good, but more importantly they will show the rapid trajectory we're on. And I think that we all have high expectations. I don't think anyone's expecting them to jump way, way out in front of everyone else, but they can just be in the conversation. With DeepMind, Anthropic, OpenAI, I think that will quell a lot of the that.

8:29

But also what are they doing with them? Yeah, I think that matters. I think that matters more. You look at Meta's business and the way in which Genai can accelerate everything from generating more content on the platform to having better ads, to better targeting. All these things. Right. And not to mention, like, where they can just vend it in at the product level. Right.

9:59

The product stuff is tricky. I mean, like, I've bumped into Meta AI in Instagram many times and you do get reasonable natural language responses, but it clearly still has the knowledge cut off. It's not searching the web as effectively, it's not pulling together. It doesn't feel completely native to the platform. If you go into Meta AI in Instagram and you ask it to go and hunt around in Instagram for a specific creator or reel based on some clues, it doesn't feel like it has the hooks to really go in and understand. Okay, based on what you've watched and what I've showed you in the past, this is probably what you're thinking of. That is sort of a superpower where there's so many times when you're on the timeline and you're like, I saw this post, I didn't bookmark it, didn't like it. What was it? And you want the search products to be empowered magically. What are we laughing at? What are you thinking? You're gonna flashbang me again?

10:18

Yeah. Close. Continue.

11:20

I think that there's the basic case of they gotta get an LLM. That's frontier, that's, you know, has the big model smell, fun to talk to, good vibes. Then they need video and audio models that are rock solid. And then they do need to vend those in. I think just having an API or just having a place where people can generate, you know, photo real videos or even things like Sora, where it has the aesthetics and pacing and cuts of an Instagram reel that. That doesn't feel like it's enough. It feels like to really empower the Instagram creator, it needs to be built into the platform, letting people still bring what's personal to them, their family, their experiences, their car. But take a couple photos of their car and turn it into a really, really awesome drone shot of Them driving their car. I've seen a lot of really sweet edits where people will fly a drone over a car, then they'll have an a first person GoPro on their chest while they're driving their car and then they'll use AI to interpolate between the drone shot and their first person view because they can't actually like if you have a multi million dollar Hollywood budget, you actually can fly the drone into the car, have someone sitting in the car, they grab the drone and then they hook it on a crane and the crane takes it out and does a different shot with it. But that's like a multimillion dollar app. Experts, tons of equipment and so even just like AI powered transitions would be a really, really cool thing to bring. Yeah.

11:23

Not to mention they, they own Manus now which is a fantastic product team. They've built some great agents. You can imagine them integrating like basically like prompt to short form video. Right. Where you can just describe the video that you want to make. Insert real like basically like generate B roll for this, pull footage from around the Internet, whatever. And so there's so many things that they can do. And again they've just been using Meta AI as a sandbox for the most part. But I'm just for them to start shipping across.

12:47

The remixing thing is so underrated because there's a lot of people, the number of people that have true inspiration for new formats is pretty low. People always do the same thing.

13:15

Yeah. Think about the remix functionality. If you see a funny video and you can just basically do a character swap in there.

13:25

Exactly.

13:33

And it's like that's a new content that's gonna be chaired and a bunch of people engage with.

13:34

Tyler, what's your take on Meta's new plans for 2026?

13:39

Yeah, I mean I definitely think the image and video models are much to get right than the LLM mainly just because like it's, it seems like very natural them to vent it into everything compared to OpenAI or Google who are like right now fighting it out in image or in video.

13:42

Yeah.

13:56

So it seems like if they can kind of do really well, you can get OpenAI and Google out of that race basically.

13:57

Yeah, yeah.

14:02

And then the lm, it's unclear what the actual like use case will be.

14:02

In the short term.

14:05

Eventually you want some cool like you know, cloudbot style agent somehow vent it in. But it's unclear how that's going to work out. So I think in the short term I'm very excited on the.

14:06

Yeah, I really, like that model of, like the LLM going around and just like seeping into the cracks of all the different product experiences, but in these, like, really subtle ways. Like, YouTube now has AI generated summaries on videos, and you can chat with a video. So if you're watching a someone build a PC, you can ask Gemini on YouTube, hey, just print out the exact list of parts that the person used to build the PC. And there might be a parts list at the end of the video. There might be a parts list that's, you know, randomly mentioned throughout. Sometimes a creator might actually link to a real parts list, but Gemini allows you to scrape the transcript and then just get that however you want and then transform it or add prices to all of it, or see, see if it's available in Japan, because I'm in Japan. All these, all these interesting things. I can imagine on Instagram being able to go to a post that has like thousands of comments and just say, hey, I want the LLM to kind of summarize the sentence. Like, what are the facts? Like, you know, people were debating whether or not this is AI. Is there a consensus? Or people were adding context. What was the key context that people were adding? There's a lot of posts that are basically like rage bait or clickbait, where it's unclear what's going on in the video. And so you go to the comments and people, I don't get it. Or like, they put up that sign, like, context needed, please.

14:14

Right.

15:26

And so you can kind of do that.

15:27

Yeah, but I feel like that stuff can just like, I'd rather just have that be in the, like, recommendation algorithm, like, sorted.

15:28

If it's like, comments.

15:33

If everyone in the comments is saying, this is clickbait, just don't put it in my recommendation algorithm.

15:34

Suspended Cap says I got to really respect Zuck willing to spend over 50% of revenue next year when they still haven't delivered a single compelling AI product. Hell yeah.

15:37

Yeah. I mean, the Capex is crazy.

15:47

So that's the whole thing, though.

15:49

It's $200 billion in revenue in 2025. That's founder. No. So much revenue. It's a lot of ads. Now they're going to plow 135 billion, according to the Wall Street Journal. New York Times said 115. But either way, it's like more than half of the revenue.

15:50

I think. I think posts like this are funny. And I think you can definitely agree that Meta has not shipped a super compelling AI product yet. Even though Meta Vibes has Traction, not necessarily in our world, but certainly has some traction. Like this is the guy that owns the world's largest trough or one of the world's largest troughs. Right. And so he has, he knows that it's working. He knows he can see the future. Right. He has all the data. He knows that people say they don't like AI content, but in reality they actually do. They cage with it, they watch it, they make it.

16:06

The engagement must be growing exponentially even though it's very small. It started at a base of zero and then you got Harry Potter, Balenciaga, and Now you have 10 videos a week that are going.

16:40

So, So I look at this different than some of the Metaverse bets just because Zuck is one of the biggest beneficiaries of Gen AI.

16:50

Yeah.

16:57

And so it's totally warranted to say, like, hey, we should invest an obscene amount of money in this. This is clearly the future.

16:58

Yeah, yeah.

17:03

Let's talk about Tesla.

17:04

Tesla reported revenue at 24.9 billion. And this beat the, the consensus estimate just slightly. Consensus was 24.78 billion, but down 11.4% from the year over year quarter when revenue was 28.1 and 3% down decline year over year. There's just no, there's no denying that the Model S and X sales have slowed and there's a whole bunch more competition at the high end EV market from Lucid Rivian. And, and so Elon is fully thinking about what's next. He broke out subscriptions for Autopilot Self driving for the first time. He's talking a huge amount about cyber cabs and Robo taxis. He's making that cash investment in xai. And of course he's really focused on Optimus humanoid robots and it seems like he could be scaling up production there very, very quickly.

17:06

Million subs of full self driving.

17:57

Yeah, not bad. How much is it?

17:59

I think it's 100.

18:01

100Amonth.

18:02

Yeah.

18:03

Yeah. So you know you got a billion dollars a year coming in from that. Analysts thought Tesla was going to be cash flow negative for the quarter, but they actually were positive. They generated $1.4 billion in free cash flow and this was down just 30%. So there's plenty of cash to keep the aggressive investments going, especially as Elon shifts the business towards autonomy.

18:03

Yeah, it's a little, I think it's a little jarring for some people just because historically car companies have thrived by creating the perfect car in each category for every different consumer. And Elon is basically saying actually I know, I know what you want and I'm going to give you it. Yeah, it's, you know, you don't need that many options where you're going to be able, like you said, to just leverage the different trim levels and spec out the car to satisfy probably, you.

18:22

Know, I do think over time, like less and less trim levels and then, and then eventually it's just cyber cabs and no one's buying cars anymore. Elon certainly thinking in decades and not afraid to cut a entire business line that is still popular with a lot of people. I mean, I was just talking to somebody yesterday who was singing the praises of his Tesla Model X and how much he loves that and how he would never get a Y because the X is so much more premium. Everything about it's better. It costs a lot of money when he bought it, still loves it. But you know, Elon's thinking to the future.

18:47

Pull up this video of Optimus learning it has to make up for S X sales after they were canceled.

19:19

Oh, this one's. This is such a crazy video. Taking off the VR headset and just smashing down.

19:27

I love it.

19:33

This is really a Tesla E Optimus, isn't it? The, the force with which the Optimus just smashes the water bottle open is crazy.

19:33

It's amazing. This thing is going to be super powerful.

19:40

The insurance business that will be built around having a humanoid in your home is going to be remarkable. Remarkable.

19:42

One of the standout moments of the earnings call for me, please. Elon and Tesla are transitioning their Fremont facility to make Optimus and they plan to scale that facility up to be able to make a million of these things a year on a relatively near term time horizon. And so very, very significant. He talked about how the robot would be able to basically learn on the job. It's going to be able to do a number of valuable tasks. And yeah, I think, I mean, the big question for me is like, what is.

19:49

That's a good question for me.

20:20

Well, they have an ad supporter.

20:20

You have the Tesla walking around your house and it sees you pull out some sort of random credit card and it's like, are you not on ramp? Like what's going on here?

20:21

Where it sees you like having like.

20:30

A smoothie from athletic greens.

20:33

Yeah, exactly. Is it valuable enough to actually replace a human? Optimus is going to be competing with jobs that are maybe like 40, 50, 60 a year, like somewhere in that range.

20:35

Yeah.

20:45

And so that's a pretty high bar to clear.

20:45

Totally.

20:47

So we'll see some Breaking news from Reuters 21 minutes ago. Exclusive. Musk's XAI and merger talks with XAI ahead of planned IPO. SpaceX and SpaceX and Xi had a planned IPO. Okay, so this was something that many people were talking about predicting months ago at this point. But so, so no, no huge surprise here. This always felt like it made sense. So they're in discussions ahead of a blockbuster IPO planned for later this year. The combination would bring Musk's rockets, Starlink satellites and X social media platform and the Grok AI chatbot under one roof. Imagine owning X, the Internet's dive bar and space in one ticker.

20:48

Flashing back to 2007, 2010 being like, yeah, Twitter and that space company that hasn't successfully launched anything. They're going to be part of the same company one day.

21:31

Expected this to happen. I think it builds a. Again, some people will be frustrated with the narrative, the data centers in space narrative. But no, it's real.

21:41

It's real.

21:52

And we saw this sort of organized narrative shift around SpaceX being the data centers in space play.

21:52

That was the bridge. Without that, it didn't make any sense. And then once, if you can get behind, okay, data's in centers in space is maybe possible, maybe, maybe you want.

22:01

Some on land too.

22:09

Then it starts to make sense that the merger fits a little bit more.

22:11

We have to talk about genie. Genie.

22:14

The Genie is out of the lamp.

22:17

Logan says, introducing Project Genie, a frontier world model product powered by Genie 3 and available to G1 Ultra users in the US starting today.

22:18

Are you a G1 Ultra user?

22:27

This morning we were playing around. We were playing around with this this morning. It is absolutely wild. You can basically prompt an entire world. It instantly turns into effectively a simple video game. And you can create some really funny scenarios. We will show you.

22:29

They added the jump button. They added the jump button. You get to pick if it's third person or I guess if you don't check that it's first person. But sometimes you. Even if you do check, even if you don't check that, you can still wind up in a third person game if it's obviously a third person request button. Look at this dog.

22:48

They need to add the crouch button.

23:03

Crouch button next, and then the flashbang button probably.

23:05

Whoa.

23:08

Yeah, you're jumping. This is so. It's so fast. I mean, the previous Genie launch was still called Genie 3, right?

23:09

Well, no, I mean, yes. This is not like a new product. This is just making it public.

23:17

Yes.

23:21

So I think it was In August when Genie 3 was originally released, but it was basically just the paper. There were some demos, but no one.

23:22

Got so, so cool. Yeah, I mean, it feels like more directable than VO3 in some ways, and it's certainly more stable as you move around.

23:28

Well, it's just way cooler too, because it's a world you can move around in. It's not like VO3 where you're just creating a video.

23:39

Yeah, the memory is really good, too.

23:47

Oh, you can upload an image. You can upload an image. I mean, get ready to play dinosaurs.

23:49

Do you have the clip of.

23:54

So we got access. We generated some. Now it's in such high demand that you might not be able to generate these worlds for yourself immediately. There might be some rate limits going on. I'm sure the GPUs are on fire. It is going to be Genie 3 day on the timeline, for sure.

23:56

Do you have John's first prom?

24:14

You can't access the videos? No, because, oh, no, we didn't download them.

24:17

Well, because I think the site is being overloaded so much.

24:20

Shane. Hey, Tyler, take some responsibility. Take some ownership. You're 21 years old now. Take some ownership. You could have downloaded the video.

24:23

As the show go out goes on, I'll try to make a new one.

24:33

We are going to move the goalposts. This is. This is AGI, but it's not sufficient AGI because my definition is not just the jump button. I want mechanics. I want. We generated a video of my Bach driving on the Nurburgring. It was remarkably high fidelity. It was a little sluggish, but that might just be the dynamics.

24:36

I think that's the driver.

24:56

I think that's just. Oh, you think it's the driver.

24:57

I thought it was a lot of body roll, this thing on the road, there was no body roll.

24:59

Yes.

25:02

I was like, just put it in a straight line, Tyler.

25:03

Yes, but. But I want, I want. I'm waiting. I'm moving the goalpost because I want Genie 3 or Genie 4 to be able to generate game mechanics. If I say I'm racing on the Nurburgring, I want a track timer. I want to be able to stop, change my tires. I want to be able to get a refuel overtakes. I want overlays, I want boost pedals, I want. I want drs. I want shifting. I want the whole Forza simulation.

25:05

Do you think this is bullish for platforms like Roblox and Fortnite that have the existing network and they can integrate world models so that the players can. That are already a part of these ecosystems. And these economies can generate new worlds, quickly, generate new games, new characters, et cetera. Or is it as these world models get better, do they become competitive, a bigger threat? Because anybody can just. I'm sure there's infrastructure providers that can say, like, yeah, we're going to handle everything from account creation to in game currency to things like that.

25:32

Definitely competitive in the long term, in the medium term, super good for prototyping and communication. And this is a key flow to, okay, you have an idea and you don't just want to generate a basic image of the game that you're trying to build. You generate a demo, a prototype, and then you go from here into, okay, let's wire it up in Unreal Engine or Roblox or Minecraft or whatever we want to do, and then you have the full gameplay.

26:02

I think Roblox and Fortnite will prove that they have real network effects and it's going to still make sense to create new games within these existing ecosystems.

26:32

Google DeepMind created this short film. AI is going to disrupt Hollywood sooner than most might expect. It's their short film, Dear Upstairs Neighbor. It's previewing at Sundance Festival. It's a story about noisy neighbors, but behind the scenes, it's about solving a huge challenge in generative AI control, developed by Pixar alumni, an Academy Award winner, researchers and engineers. Here's how it came together, says DeepMind. This is disruptive. Who knows if it's completely disrupting? There's certainly, I mean, there's demand for movies that are shot on film still. So how quickly will all this roll out? But if you have a vision these days for an animated movie, you should just go try and make it. At least you have to imagine that even if you want to use a more traditional process and go through the traditional Hollywood pipeline, showing up to a pitch meeting at an agency with a pretty much polished AI version of your film is going to resonate in a way that a script might just get sent back in the mailroom.

26:41

SEAN Frank says TikTok views are down. People are blaming the new owners. I think this is just proof that TikTok was botting views the whole time. Your hundred thousand view video was probably reaching 25,000 real people. No surprise here for me. I always felt like it was always obvious that there were very real people on TikTok. But TikTok had every incentive to just bought all the views because what happens if somebody's getting way more views on TikTok versus Instagram? They're going to lean in. They're going to say, like, I have more followers on TikTok. Yeah, I should be creating content there. And that created a flywheel.

27:47

Yeah.

28:21

And so you can imagine as things shifted over, who knows, right? Like basically the new, new product.

28:22

Yeah.

28:26

I mean, they had some system that was.

28:26

I like different formats. I liked vine back in the day, at one point I did set up a TikTok and I uploaded like two or three videos. I was just trying to see like, what felt like to use that platform. And I noticed even though I came to the platform with zero followers, the three or two or three videos that I uploaded immediately got 500 views each. And I thought that the model was you get more of an opportunity to like sort of audition your content in the algorithm and then if it works, it can blow up very quickly. And I think that that's somewhat true. Like, when I started my YouTube channel, the first videos that I put up got a hundred views. And for like a year, if I broke a thousand views a video, I was like, this is amazing. Like crazy.

28:29

You're really grinding it, really grindy.

29:11

But on TikTok, you post and you immediately get 500. And I've talked to some folks years ago who would set up a new TikTok account for a brand and they would launch one video that was so polished and so designed to be go viral. Like, they blow up a car and they'd spend all this money shooting this and it would actually just. They knew that it would go viral and it just immediately go out, even though it's a fresh account, because they just knew it was good content, it would get shared. TikTok would audition it to like 100 people launched.

29:13

It was a period where it was so difficult to grow on Instagram like that. There was a huge challenge. If you're a new creator, you go on Instagram and be really frustrated because your stuff just wasn't getting shared with people that didn't already follow you.

29:39

Totally.

29:51

Maybe they were views from Chinese users which are gone now. It's also could be international users. Remember, there's like, if you have a new US app under US ownership, is it getting shared with international users that are using other versions of TikTok? Unclear.

29:52

Anyway, leave us five stars on Apple, podcasts and Spotify. Thank you. Goodbye.

30:06