Speaker 1: Also media, we could happen. So wow, Okay, we're just
Speaker 1: both doing the intro, all right.
Speaker 2: I wanted to be the intro. I was saying that
Speaker 2: wokness has won the Super Bowl.
Speaker 1: Ah because yeah, okay, okay, hold on, this is my
Speaker 1: this is this is my moment. I've got the soapbox.
Speaker 1: This is it could happen here. Everyone has the Taylor
Speaker 1: Swift conspiracy wrong. Taylor Swift is completely uninvolved in the
Speaker 1: NFL's conspiracy to make sure Patrick Mahomes wins every fucking game.
Speaker 1: All of these fucking all these fucking bogged chuns or
Speaker 1: fucking Johnny come Late doesn't care about football fans. Real
Speaker 1: fans know that if you look at every fourth quarter
Speaker 1: of every fucking Chiefs game before Taylor Shift got involved,
Speaker 1: it looks exactly the same. All right, this is been
Speaker 1: It could happen here. We may or may not cut that.
Speaker 2: I can't believe that the liberal Taylor Swift, Joe Joe
Speaker 2: Biden's puppet Taylor Swift and Travis Peiser Kelsey stole the
Speaker 2: Super Bowl from the Christian people of San Francisco, the
Speaker 2: only bashtate of conservatism left in this country.
Speaker 1: It is so incredibly funny, Like, okay, so it's so
Speaker 1: credibly funny to me A that they're not mad at
Speaker 1: Patrick Mahomes and b that somehow, okay the Chiefs, like,
Speaker 1: imagine you're a Chiefs fan, right, you have been for
Speaker 1: like thirty years racist, you have been doing its called
Speaker 1: and I quote the tomahawk chop, like you are the
Speaker 1: most racist person in your entire small town. And then
Speaker 1: all of these fucking dip shits online, all these fucking
Speaker 1: right wing dipshits immediately like all of you guys are
Speaker 1: like fucking pussy woke libs. And it's just like, like,
Speaker 1: imagine being that racist for that long only to be
Speaker 1: immediately tossed aside.
Speaker 2: It is kind of baffling that, in like the country's
Speaker 2: national divorce overwokeness, somehow the liberals get to keep football
Speaker 2: like this that is that's so busy? Are that that
Speaker 2: now football is seen as like a liberal cuck thing
Speaker 2: to enjoy among the largest swaths of of Republicans, at
Speaker 2: least at least online Republicans.
Speaker 1: It's really funny, fascinating this this is how we're going
Speaker 1: to beat them in the fucking civil war, because we're
Speaker 1: going to take the college campuses, which means that we're
Speaker 1: going to have the only watchable footballs. These bastards are
Speaker 1: going to be reduced to watching fucking high school games.
Speaker 2: Like speaking speaking of watching football.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so the thing this episode is actually about is
Speaker 1: if you watch the Super Bowl or like, God help you,
Speaker 1: you've tried to use YouTube without an AD blocker, a
Speaker 1: thing I do not recommend at all. You have seen
Speaker 1: ads for Temu. W it's Timu or Temu Temu temo. Okay, yeah,
Speaker 1: it has the absolute, the absolute Oh good god, yeah,
Speaker 1: this this app this one. This one's bad, folks, This
Speaker 1: one's I I went insane and have been spiraling for
Speaker 1: like two weeks now writing this, so you know. So
Speaker 1: it has the absolutely dogshit tagline shop like a Billionaire.
Speaker 2: Wait that's its tagline. Yeah, Oh that's weird.
Speaker 1: It's funny. The everything is they only have one ad, righty,
Speaker 1: it's not just super Bowl like it's It's been on
Speaker 1: YouTube for like ages. But yeah, so this begs the
Speaker 1: obvious question, what on earth is this thing? And the
Speaker 1: answer is that Temu is the American version of a
Speaker 1: Chinese shopping gap called Pindadu. You will hear people pronouncing
Speaker 1: it pin Duo duo. That's because they're hacks and frauds.
Speaker 1: So but I'm just gonna call it so. The the company,
Speaker 1: the parent company for both Temu and Pinda Doua, changed
Speaker 1: their name to PDD, so I'm just gonna call it that.
Speaker 3: So.
Speaker 1: Yeah, PDD is China's worst tech giant. They have worked
Speaker 1: multiple of their employees to death. They probably also use
Speaker 1: slave labor. Those are unrelated stories. So today, welcome to
Speaker 1: the abyss. This is the story of Tamu. I have
Speaker 1: stared into it, and now you motherfuckers are coming with
Speaker 1: me and staring into it some more.
Speaker 2: Well, it's more like we're listening into it because it
Speaker 2: doesn't really.
Speaker 1: Have a visual No, no, you're staring into it. Okay,
Speaker 1: you will get visuals. I will say to this bullshit.
Speaker 3: I will.
Speaker 2: I will start hallucinating in my office.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So, Timoo is the American version of PDD. PDD
Speaker 1: it roughly translates to together more savings.
Speaker 2: Together, so it's like a co op.
Speaker 1: Actually, it probably sells stuff from co ops.
Speaker 2: Okay, huh.
Speaker 1: So PDD is the second largest shopping app in China
Speaker 1: behind Ali Baba. Ali Baba is is like version of Amazon. Basically,
Speaker 1: they're the second largest app. Ali Baba reportedly has eight
Speaker 1: hundred and sixty sixty three million users per year.
Speaker 2: That's a lot of users.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's that's multiple us is. PDD has been claiming
Speaker 1: that they have seven hundred and forty million monthly users.
Speaker 1: It's unclear if that's exactly true, but it's probably around there,
Speaker 1: which again, that is twice the entire population of the US.
Speaker 1: So this is a fucking unbelievably massive company. And to
Speaker 1: understand what this what this company is, and how it
Speaker 1: became probably the worst of the Chinese tech giants, we
Speaker 1: have to go back to the very beginning. And the
Speaker 1: very beginning is this guy named Colin Huang. Huang is
Speaker 1: a weird guy. I don't know, he's he's he's he's
Speaker 1: the Chinese version of the American tech bro. So he's
Speaker 1: you know, he's he's a recognizable like asshole who started
Speaker 1: a giant company, but he's not zactly the same. So
Speaker 1: he he So he graduates from like college and China
Speaker 1: and in the early two thousands he goes to the
Speaker 1: University of Wisconsin to get a master's degree in computer science,
Speaker 1: which it like it should be illegal for anyone to
Speaker 1: get degrees in computer science. Uh, terrible stuff, zero out
Speaker 1: of time. I should know how to use computers.
Speaker 2: I can't believe you'd be believe in the status legal
Speaker 2: system to prevent people from learning fin social sanctions.
Speaker 1: We're going to make it morally illegal. We're going to
Speaker 1: get chased out by people with the rocks on the
Speaker 1: street if you try to type something, get do a computer.
Speaker 1: So okay. So he's at the University of Wisconsin, and
Speaker 1: while he's there, he basically like posts his way into
Speaker 1: becoming the pro basically the protege of Chinese tech billionaire
Speaker 1: Duan Youngping. This is an interesting relationship. Duan is like
Speaker 1: a very very influential Chinese tech tech billionaire. He gets
Speaker 1: every single article calls him the Warren Buffett of China.
Speaker 1: I don't fucking know, but like, you know, for like foreacta,
Speaker 1: like how big this guy is. Like Vivo and like
Speaker 1: the one plus company of the mixed phones those are both
Speaker 1: like spin offs of like things that he built. But yeah,
Speaker 1: so you know, so this is this is an interesting
Speaker 1: relationship for Huang because and it's also interesting because like
Speaker 1: the narrative around Huang and PDDs that they're like these
Speaker 1: like hungry upstarts like clunging their way up from nothing,
Speaker 1: and they can like go after Ali Baba and the
Speaker 1: Chinese like tech market wars because they're like they're ferocious,
Speaker 1: they have like nothing to lose. I'm like they're rich
Speaker 1: and fat Alibaba and like nah, Like this guy has
Speaker 1: had the backing of like a bunch of really powerful
Speaker 1: Chinese tech guys, like from the absolute beginning. Another part
Speaker 1: of like the Huang lore is that Duan like took
Speaker 1: him to this really famous dinner where Warren Buffett was
Speaker 1: offering if if you donated like six hundred and twenty
Speaker 1: thousand dollars to charity, he would like eat dinner with
Speaker 1: you and like talk with you about like finance stuff.
Speaker 1: And so Dwan like buys this thing to go to
Speaker 1: dinner with Warren Buffett and brings Huang with him, and
Speaker 1: he Huang who's who's Huang's the founder of PDD Again,
Speaker 1: so he gives him credit for like this this like
Speaker 1: financial wisdom that he got here. Here's just from an
Speaker 1: interview with Side Jim. This is a Chinese outlet. What
Speaker 1: Buffett said is actually very simple and can be understood
Speaker 1: by my mother. Perhaps what this meal meant most to
Speaker 1: me was that I realized the power of simplicity and
Speaker 1: common sense. Human thoughts are easily polluted. When you make
Speaker 1: a judgment on something, you need to understand the backgrounds
Speaker 1: and facts after understanding it. What you need is not wisdom,
Speaker 1: but whether you have the courage to use reason when
Speaker 1: facing facts, use common sense to judge. Common Sense is
Speaker 1: obvious and easy to understand, but our various biases and
Speaker 1: personal interests form due to growth and learning blind us.
Speaker 1: So this is like entrepreneurial bullshit. But you know this
Speaker 1: is apparently this is like a big formative like things
Speaker 1: like ah, he like got the wisdom of word Buffett
Speaker 1: and he listened to it. It's just like what. There's
Speaker 1: the thing I think is more interesting is that he
Speaker 1: talks about what in the same interview what Dwan taught him.
Speaker 1: Swan also taught me a common sense thing. In business,
Speaker 1: price fluctuates around value. The price will definitely fluctuate, but
Speaker 1: as long as your value increases, the final price will
Speaker 1: be close to the value. This common sense allows you
Speaker 1: to focus on increasing the intrinsic value of the company
Speaker 1: and not be overly concerned about price fluctuations in the
Speaker 1: capital market. And this, to me is fascinating because the
Speaker 1: first half of that is like orthodox Marxist price theory,
Speaker 1: like in like in Marxist price theory. Right, The whole
Speaker 1: thing about it is that price is determined by value.
Speaker 1: The value of a commodity is determined by like the
Speaker 1: number of the amount of labor hour is socially necessary
Speaker 1: to produce it, and eventually, like price sort of like fluctuate,
Speaker 1: the price can change. It's not price isn't like identical
Speaker 1: to like socially necessarily like labor time, but it like
Speaker 1: fluctuates around it. And so that's like the first part
Speaker 1: of it, which is the Marxist thing, except this is
Speaker 1: like China, like modern like twenty twenties China. So Marx's
Speaker 1: value theory has been degraded to like make your company
Speaker 1: valuable and don't worry about stock prices and market fluctuations.
Speaker 1: It will work out in the end.
Speaker 2: So true, so true based based.
Speaker 1: I mean, the funny thing is this is actually better,
Speaker 1: like you get the advice than like most of the
Speaker 1: shit that like American CEOs use. But it's also, oh god,
Speaker 1: what has happened to my poor value theory, my beloved,
Speaker 1: my beloved theory of how capitalism works has been turned
Speaker 1: into this weird tech bullshit tragedy. So meanwhile, back in
Speaker 1: two thousand and four, Duan convinces Hwang to turn down
Speaker 1: a bunch of these jobs. So he's he's like a
Speaker 1: computer science graduate, right, and he's being headhunted by like
Speaker 1: a bunch of the sort of like mainstream tech companies
Speaker 1: at the time, like Oracle, Microsoft, and they're giving they
Speaker 1: want to give him like an enormous amount of money,
Speaker 1: but his mentors like, no, no, no, don't take this
Speaker 1: tech job. Take the Silicon Valley tech job. Joined Google.
Speaker 1: And so he joins Google, and this is this is
Speaker 1: another like very famous thing. It's like, ah, he wanted
Speaker 1: to join the like up and coming, hungry tech startup.
Speaker 1: But here's the thing. So Google. He joins Google in
Speaker 1: two thousand and four, which is kind of early, but
Speaker 1: Google also goes public that year, so you know, this
Speaker 1: is up working really well for him because he gets
Speaker 1: a bunch of stock options that those stock options are
Speaker 1: worth millions of dollars. That's a lot of Also some
Speaker 1: of the startup capital for like the later companies he
Speaker 1: founds comes from that, and Huang really quickly like works
Speaker 1: his way up the ranks. But he so he gets
Speaker 1: put in charge of like launching Google in China, and
Speaker 1: this is a fiasco, does not work at all. Huong
Speaker 1: blames like too much oversight from people at the senior
Speaker 1: leadership at Google, which I can get, but I mean
Speaker 1: it just doesn't work at all. Like he starts as
Speaker 1: at two thousand and six, by twenty ten, Google has
Speaker 1: pulled out of trying to entirely like they're not they're
Speaker 1: not trying to push the fucking search edge because nobody
Speaker 1: uses it. So okay, Having having like unbelievably bombed out
Speaker 1: of his first tech job, he he does the like
Speaker 1: entrepreneur thing. He starts like a couple of these like
Speaker 1: shopping like online shopping companies. They do like fine, and
Speaker 1: he sells them, but they don't like do incredible and
Speaker 1: so okay. So this is the part that a lot
Speaker 1: of the accounts of him leave out, like the sort
Speaker 1: of like fawning accounts leave out. Is the next thing
Speaker 1: that he does, which is he sets up this like
Speaker 1: really shitty game studio and they make like a bunch
Speaker 1: of like absolutely unbelievably weird and horny mobile games. So
Speaker 1: they make like Mafia City, Joy Spade, Texas, Hold'm Poker.
Speaker 1: They have this game called Girl ex Battle that is
Speaker 1: like you you assemble a harem of girlfriends and then
Speaker 1: have them fight other people stuff Like absolutely.
Speaker 2: Have you played any of these?
Speaker 1: Oh no, absolutely not, I refuse. I think I've actually
Speaker 1: seen Mafia City ads before, but it's like, like it's
Speaker 1: the absolute most dog shit like bargain basement. I guess
Speaker 1: they're kind of pre gotcha games.
Speaker 2: I was just wondering how far your dedication to research
Speaker 2: went here, but.
Speaker 1: Not far enough. Look here's the thing. My dedication of
Speaker 1: research went exactly far enough that I refuse to install
Speaker 1: any of these apps for reasons that we'll get into
Speaker 1: next episode. I was like, absolutely not. In fact, this
Speaker 1: doing this research actually caused me to uninstall chaw Bus,
Speaker 1: which is like a Chinese food delivery app, because I
Speaker 1: realized that it was constantly running in the background to
Speaker 1: like to drive up. It's like user engagement metrics.
Speaker 2: That is completely fair, Although if you were even more dedicated,
Speaker 2: you could have bought a burner phone to download all
Speaker 2: these apps onto and tested on that.
Speaker 1: So that's true, but I no, I refuse to let
Speaker 1: that shit connect my internet. Like, under no circumstances.
Speaker 2: You can go to a Starbucks, you can go to
Speaker 2: his See I've just thrown out options here.
Speaker 1: I probably could have done this, but no, absolutely not. Actually, well,
Speaker 1: it's actually really hard to download the Chinese version of this,
Speaker 1: for reasons that we'll get into the next episode. All right,
Speaker 1: all right, but okay, So, like he's running this shitty
Speaker 1: game company and he has a genuinely brilliant and terrible insight,
Speaker 1: which is that she sees how addictive like mobile gaming
Speaker 1: and how addictive like micro transactions are, and he goes,
Speaker 1: oh shit, what if I put this in a shopping gap?
Speaker 1: Except that okay, so that's the reasonable way to explain it.
Speaker 1: But like, the thing he actually did was like why
Speaker 1: are Okay, his thought his actual thought process was why
Speaker 1: are we not selling game? Games are all like advertised
Speaker 1: in men, right, like these the apps that he's making
Speaker 1: are like weird, horny stuff for guys. Why are we
Speaker 1: not making games with women? Which is reasonable, But then
Speaker 1: his follow up was U, effectively women be shopping, and
Speaker 1: he was like, so trying it will make a shopping
Speaker 1: thing it's just like, we'll make we'll make we'll make
Speaker 1: an app to make shopping into a game. And so
Speaker 1: one of the things he's he's also been doing one
Speaker 1: of the like the kind of like search engine optimization scams,
Speaker 1: where like he just keeps making different shopping like shopping
Speaker 1: websites and hoping that one of them will like climb
Speaker 1: in the search rankings. But eventually he hits on a
Speaker 1: like a combination of using the like dog shit like
Speaker 1: addictive mobile gamification stuff from his mobile games in a
Speaker 1: like in an online shopping app, and he hits on
Speaker 1: that as the idea for a new shopping app. And
Speaker 1: this is what turns into PDD. Now do you know
Speaker 1: what didn't turn into PDD and is in fact better
Speaker 1: Hopefully these ads that are.
Speaker 2: Not for tebou we better not get a fucking temo ad. Hopefully, I.
Speaker 1: It's actually possible. It's oh god, well, careful what you
Speaker 1: wish for. And we're back. So PDD doesn't start in
Speaker 1: the way that normal tech app things do, which is
Speaker 1: to say that PDD starts as an online fruit vendor. Now, okay,
Speaker 1: if you know anything like a.
Speaker 2: Like a farmer's market online like what what yeah, okay,
Speaker 2: So if you know anything about how like Amazon worked, right,
Speaker 2: So Amazon goes from books to a bunch of stuff
Speaker 2: to food.
Speaker 1: PDD does this backwards. They start in food. Now, this
Speaker 1: is very weird. And the reason this works, and the
Speaker 1: reason that PDD starts as a marketplace for rural farmers
Speaker 1: and self roofs and vegetables like directly to consumers is
Speaker 1: because unfortunately of the structure of the Chinese agricultural mark,
Speaker 1: which we have to talk about a little bit. So
Speaker 1: something I talked about. God, I don't know how many
Speaker 1: years ago this was now, but like a while back
Speaker 1: I did an episode about this company that poisons like
Speaker 1: three hundred thousand babies by making poisoned milk in China,
Speaker 1: and one of the things, though that was a Bastard's episode.
Speaker 1: Of the things I talked about in that episode was
Speaker 1: how the Chinese agricultural market is incredibly fragmented. We don't
Speaker 1: have time to do a full history of rural decollectivization here,
Speaker 1: but the upshot of it is that it results in
Speaker 1: a lot of farmers working really small plots of land
Speaker 1: who are forced to sell their goods to a series
Speaker 1: of middlemen who make the actual profits. And because these
Speaker 1: farmers have like a tiny amount of land and grow
Speaker 1: stuff on or they have like two cows, right, they
Speaker 1: don't have the financial leverage to negotiate with like the middleman.
Speaker 1: The middle bank can just set prices on them. And
Speaker 1: the product of this is you have a really really
Speaker 1: fragmented market where there's just like all of these like
Speaker 1: unbelievably large numbers of these really small sellers and part
Speaker 1: of and you know, and and and this and this,
Speaker 1: this locks all of these people into the middlemen. The
Speaker 1: middle man can set the prices. The middlemen set the
Speaker 1: prices incredibly low, and they're locked in because they don't
Speaker 1: have another distribution method because the only thing they can
Speaker 1: do is sell to these like agricultural middleman companies. The
Speaker 1: companies like above them, like your grocery companies are like
Speaker 1: actual milk company who packages the milk. They love this
Speaker 1: stuff because it means that they don't have to like
Speaker 1: pay the farmers. They can just buy like the goods directly.
Speaker 1: They don't have to deal with like employment stuff, and
Speaker 1: they don't have to deal with quality control too, because
Speaker 1: they can pass that on to the middlemen. Now, something
Speaker 1: else we talked about in our anti work Lying Flat
Speaker 1: episodes like three years ago, is that China has these
Speaker 1: like far like rural influencers. That was it was like
Speaker 1: a huge wave of these people that sort of like emerge.
Speaker 1: You might actually have seen you've seen the videos of
Speaker 1: just like someone in rural China like cutting wood or something.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, totally, totally yeah.
Speaker 1: So those those things were We're like, Okay, the US
Speaker 1: catches up the stuff on the Chinese internet like usually
Speaker 1: several years after like happened there and that makes sense. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And the next thing in line after the original sort
Speaker 1: of rural influencer waves was these like was this wave
Speaker 1: of like farmer influencers and these people they're using like
Speaker 1: a different Chinese like it's like another it's like another
Speaker 1: tick dot clone basically, and they're doing the thing that
Speaker 1: they're doing is okay. So you you know, you have
Speaker 1: your regular influencer who's trying to sell you like the
Speaker 1: image of rural life, right, and then you have the
Speaker 1: farmer influencers who are trying to sell you the image
Speaker 1: of rural life and also their potatoes. And this is
Speaker 1: this is like the marketing strategy. This is this is
Speaker 1: this is this is how you can skip the middlemen
Speaker 1: and like actually sell your fruit is by becoming an influencer.
Speaker 1: Which it's so cursed. It's so cursed. I hate it
Speaker 1: so much.
Speaker 2: That is kind of dystopian, and it's just the constant,
Speaker 2: the constant performance.
Speaker 1: Yeah. But the problem is that the alternative to it
Speaker 1: is even worse because PDD really is this. They're looking
Speaker 1: at these markets and they're like, hold on, these farmers
Speaker 1: are already selling their goods for like next to nothing.
Speaker 1: If we come in, pay them a bit better, use
Speaker 1: our text or like our tech money to ourex startup money.
Speaker 1: They have an enormous amount of tex startup money. If
Speaker 1: we use that tech startup money to give them rebates,
Speaker 1: we can do things that like you know, we can
Speaker 1: not charge them commission, right, And if we can do this,
Speaker 1: we can turn around and sell these fruits for like
Speaker 1: zero dollars a zero dollars is this l like exaggeration,
Speaker 1: but when I like, they're selling these fruits for an
Speaker 1: are unbelievably cheap, Like we are talking ten mangos for
Speaker 1: a dollar and thirty nine cents, which is like a steal, outrageous, right,
Speaker 1: And you know this is this is incredibly successful. What
Speaker 1: they're doing basically is a giant version of the Amazon gambit. Right,
Speaker 1: they're eating shit and taking losses to sell all of
Speaker 1: this stuff, although they're losing less money than you'd think,
Speaker 1: like the actual price of these goods is already so low,
Speaker 1: and we're gonna come back to that too, because that
Speaker 1: that's an aspect of what's so messed up about this
Speaker 1: whole thing. But you know, so they eat shit, it
Speaker 1: takes some losses, but they really really quickly build market share.
Speaker 1: So this is a very very short smart strategy because
Speaker 1: it's not just in the sort of real market. China
Speaker 1: has a shit ton of like small and medium sized
Speaker 1: producers that make a whole bunch of things, or like
Speaker 1: guy with one factory person doing like craft production stuff.
Speaker 1: And pdd's plan is to pull together all of these
Speaker 1: sellers like this, this whole all all of these people
Speaker 1: from different markets into just one giant, like one giant
Speaker 1: like market that they control now importantly unlike Amazon, And
Speaker 1: this is unlike ali Baba too, because Ali Baba works
Speaker 1: on a fairly similar model to well, okay, in a
Speaker 1: lot of ways, is a similar model to Amazon. It's identical,
Speaker 1: but Unlike those two companies, PDD doesn't run their own
Speaker 1: logistics network. It's all it's all third party. Like the
Speaker 1: shipping and all that shit is done by is done
Speaker 1: through third party logistics stuff. So like their shipping companies,
Speaker 1: they don't own warehouses like that stuff, you know, what
Speaker 1: they're What they do instead is they use the shipping
Speaker 1: companies and warehouses that were developed in like the earlier
Speaker 1: parts of the Chinese tech boom, and they're able to
Speaker 1: just use that infrastructure to you know, to to ship
Speaker 1: all their stuff around. And this means that the company
Speaker 1: is extremely lean in the sense that like they don't
Speaker 1: have a lot of physical assets like they know, and
Speaker 1: this means they don't have to deal with labor costs
Speaker 1: or like the logistics problems of actually having to like
Speaker 1: you know, of actually having employees packing boxes and making things.
Speaker 1: They're just an app. It's it's it's well, they're they're
Speaker 1: like the original model of Uber in some sense, right
Speaker 1: where like you don't like Uber doesn't fucking own or
Speaker 1: wasn't supposed to be owning cars. I mean, I guess
Speaker 1: Uber's a bad example because they were trying to do
Speaker 1: the automated car thing. But that was a fiasco. But
Speaker 1: you know, the thing that PDD makes is just an app,
Speaker 1: but it's it's an incredibly addictive app, like it's it's
Speaker 1: it's a shopping gotcha game, which is like maybe the
Speaker 1: worst sentence in the history of the human language.
Speaker 2: And this was like this was around the time, like
Speaker 2: I want to say, like tennish years ago, give or
Speaker 2: take a few years, where like micro transactions were becoming massive,
Speaker 2: like all, like it took over gaming, It took over
Speaker 2: so many parts of just being online, It took over apps,
Speaker 2: like it just it just infected everything, and we luckily
Speaker 2: kind of pushed back on some some of that. We're
Speaker 2: still not all of it, but like there was definitely
Speaker 2: some some degree of like, oh, well, we are simply
Speaker 2: not going to be buying all of these games if
Speaker 2: it's just full of micro micro transaction bullshit. And then
Speaker 2: Fortnite took over and we're back and how again, but whatever.
Speaker 1: Actually it's it's pretty funny. China kind of recently the
Speaker 1: Chinese government like did a crackdown on like loop boxes
Speaker 1: and stuff because they were some of some of the
Speaker 1: some of the regulations they put in place are nuts,
Speaker 1: but some of it was like, you can't sell loop,
Speaker 1: you can't sell gambling the children. Yeah, and this caused
Speaker 1: like it's funny because they're kind of walking it back
Speaker 1: now because it hurt their gaming market so much. They're like, well, shit, okay,
Speaker 1: we have to we need those yeah, like that's the
Speaker 1: only way to make money. Yeah. But you know, but
Speaker 1: PDDs like brilliant. They're sort of like the the the
Speaker 1: absolutely evil shit that they realized is like, we can
Speaker 1: just we can just do this for shopping. And so
Speaker 1: like the moment you log in, right, there's like these
Speaker 1: flash deals, and there's these group deals, and this is
Speaker 1: the thing that the group deals are, the thing that
Speaker 1: that PDD is based around. So the way it works
Speaker 1: is you get these group deals, and so you get
Speaker 1: a link and you send it to people, and the
Speaker 1: more people click on the link to buy the thing,
Speaker 1: the cheaper it becomes. So and then you send the
Speaker 1: links over we chat, which is the curve of like
Speaker 1: catch all Chinese messenger or like social media app that
Speaker 1: everyone uses to like talk to their boomer parents. And
Speaker 1: so the thing that your boomer parents are doing is
Speaker 1: they're sending these shopping links to each other, and you know,
Speaker 1: and the the the more like the more people click
Speaker 1: on these links, the cheaper the good becomes. So when
Speaker 1: the more people are buying it, the more people you
Speaker 1: rope into buying stuff from this app, the cheaper it is,
Speaker 1: and the more deals you get you get things like
Speaker 1: they'll just like give you like quote unquote free money
Speaker 1: if you spend enough money, basically like in the same
Speaker 1: way that like micro transaction works right, where it's like,
Speaker 1: you know, in a game, it's like if you play
Speaker 1: the x number of games, will give you like in
Speaker 1: game currency, whereas this is just like will literally give
Speaker 1: you money. We're like send things to you.
Speaker 2: God, that sounds like hell, it's awful.
Speaker 1: It's so bad and very importantly right, It's this giant
Speaker 1: loop that it not only gets people to spend money,
Speaker 1: but it gets people to bring their friends in because
Speaker 1: you have to bring your friends in to get the
Speaker 1: group deals, so everything gets cheaper and cheaper, and the
Speaker 1: tactics they use are absolutely wild. They get in trouble
Speaker 1: in twenty twenty one for this promotion called Bargain for
Speaker 1: Free Goods, where you'd get a link and the claim
Speaker 1: was that if enough people clicked it, you would get
Speaker 1: the good for free, and so this guy tried to
Speaker 1: do it, but he could can only get it two
Speaker 1: point nine percent of the cost. So we sued them
Speaker 1: for false advertising, and the claim got thrown out, but
Speaker 1: the company had to pay him like money, So like
Speaker 1: this is the kind of shit that they're doing. Rechat
Speaker 1: actually like blocked their links for a while because, you know,
Speaker 1: because like some enormous portion of messages suddenly we're just
Speaker 1: like these people sending these spam links to like every
Speaker 1: single person they know, trying to get them to buy
Speaker 1: like a fucking toothbrush so that your toothbrushes can be cheaper. Right,
Speaker 1: But eventually we Chat kind of like you know, WeChat
Speaker 1: gives up and they start like allying more with PDD.
Speaker 1: I mean, there's a whole there's a whole complicated story
Speaker 1: I'm not going to get into here about like the
Speaker 1: like China's really really ferocious like tech company wars because
Speaker 1: like in the US, you know, like our tech monopolies
Speaker 1: are relatively stable, right, Like they've sort of portioned up
Speaker 1: the Internet into and like distribution and stuff into just
Speaker 1: like basically like local monopolies. Right, Like like Google is
Speaker 1: like the only search engine company there's there's basically no
Speaker 1: competition there, right, Like there's some competition in terms of
Speaker 1: social media, but even then it's like and it's not
Speaker 1: like the Chinese version words like unbelievably ferocious competition and
Speaker 1: sometimes they cooperate, but yeah, you know, it's it's really fierce.
Speaker 1: And PDD. You know the thing that they do, right
Speaker 1: is they pair this app stuff with direct to consumer sales,
Speaker 1: and PDT is really the pioneers of this. She In
Speaker 1: and okay, so i I she In is that fucking
Speaker 1: fast fashioned clothing company. I learned today that it is
Speaker 1: actually pronounced she In because the name of the thing
Speaker 1: is she In, like s a she she and then
Speaker 1: she's like she's in. Yeah, I hate it so much.
Speaker 1: I'm so sad. I I mean, I feel slightly better because,
Speaker 1: like I kept trying to read it in Chinese. It's
Speaker 1: like this doesn't make any sense, Like it's just baffling.
Speaker 1: It doesn't and it's like, oh no, it's because it's
Speaker 1: in English. Yeah, but PDD is the precursor of Shean's
Speaker 1: like strategy, right, like they're they're the originators of this,
Speaker 1: except they're you know, they're what they're doing basically, it's
Speaker 1: it's a fact. It's kind of like drop shipping. But
Speaker 1: you know, the sales are being pushed by these these
Speaker 1: sort of gamified app stuff, and this means that they
Speaker 1: have this like real time supply management system that tells
Speaker 1: producers like like they can like they go down and
Speaker 1: like tell their sellers like what to produce more of
Speaker 1: based on like app sales. So you know the way
Speaker 1: it works is you start off with a small it's
Speaker 1: like a small number of things, and then you get
Speaker 1: ads to push that those like fucking toothbrushes or whatever.
Speaker 1: And then as like sales ramp up, you ramp up productions.
Speaker 1: You can ship people more toothbrushes. Now do you know
Speaker 1: who else will ship you toothbrushes that will probably be
Speaker 1: better quality than the PDD tooth pressure. No, we can.
Speaker 2: We can guarantee all of our sponsors have only the
Speaker 2: top quality toothbrushes. That is, that is what we call
Speaker 2: the cool Zone Guarantee. Go do toothbrush dot com and
Speaker 2: put in the keyword MIA for a ten percent off
Speaker 2: on your top of the lines.
Speaker 1: Please don't do this, so all right, D and D
Speaker 1: just it takes rural China by storm.
Speaker 2: Sure it sounds convenient, Like yeah, yeah for some.
Speaker 1: Pan and it's really really cheap, is the thing, right,
Speaker 1: And the thing about rural China is you're dealing with
Speaker 1: a level of poverty that like is like almost like
Speaker 1: it's not unimaginable in the US, but it's like unbelievable,
Speaker 1: Like it's something.
Speaker 4: That like like we don't really have it in the
Speaker 4: same way because Okay, so like an example of the
Speaker 4: kind of stuff we're dealing with, right, Like, so, China's
Speaker 4: GDP per capita in like the sixties was lower than hades, Right,
Speaker 4: this is an unbelievably poor country.
Speaker 1: And there are there are places in real China that
Speaker 1: are still like basically not quite that poor, but are
Speaker 1: like unbelievably poor in ways that like, you know, we're
Speaker 1: talking about people who are like people who are doing
Speaker 1: kind of well in these regions are making seven hundred
Speaker 1: dollars a month. Like that's like on a good month, right,
Speaker 1: they're making seven hundred dollars a month, which is that's
Speaker 1: eight four hundred dollars a year, and that's that's that's
Speaker 1: if you have twelve good months, right, if you have
Speaker 1: normal months, it's more like six thousand dollars a year,
Speaker 1: and so you know, and when when when when you're
Speaker 1: in a place where people are using stuff like this,
Speaker 1: And again that's someone who like has a job full time,
Speaker 1: is making like six thousand dollars a year, and so
Speaker 1: people use PDD to shop because it's incredibly cheap and
Speaker 1: it's also addictive. And when I say cheap, like we're
Speaker 1: talking like two dollars for a pair of genes cheap, right,
Speaker 1: and like that's that's also like cheap and you on too.
Speaker 1: It's like unbelievably low prices.
Speaker 2: I mean this, this kind of this kind of reminds
Speaker 2: me a little bit of that recent Tucker Carlson Russia
Speaker 2: is great actually media stunt. Oh yeah, look, all of
Speaker 2: these groceries only cost one hundred dollars in American currency.
Speaker 2: And it's like yeah, because they're getting paid like two
Speaker 2: hundred dollars like a week, Like they're not they're not
Speaker 2: taking home very much money, so all of the costs
Speaker 2: like slide very differently, Like you can't just compare this
Speaker 2: one to one.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Altho, The thing I will say about about PDD
Speaker 1: is that their prices are unbelievably low by Chinese standards,
Speaker 1: Like this is a This is also why they look
Speaker 1: so low by America standards too, is that these are
Speaker 1: these are low by Chinese standards, and because they're so
Speaker 1: low by Chinese standards, like people, people buy stuff from it.
Speaker 1: The cost of this is that the stuff they're selling
Speaker 1: is really cheap. I mean, the other is the unbelievable
Speaker 1: exploitation of the Chinese working class. But you know, we'll
Speaker 1: get to that. We'll get to that next episode. The
Speaker 1: main cost of the stuff being cheap is that the
Speaker 1: stuff they buy like sucks ass like literally literally this
Speaker 1: only the CEO talks about is that their gambit is that, Okay,
Speaker 1: we'll ship you ten mangos for for like a dollar
Speaker 1: thirty nine. Two of them will be rotten, but that
Speaker 1: means you still get eight mangos.
Speaker 2: That we're still an unbelievable like.
Speaker 1: That's the thing, and like, you know, the stuff that
Speaker 1: they get like sucks. Here's from the Chinese media outlet
Speaker 1: sixth Tone, which has done a lot of good coverage
Speaker 1: of PDD. They they used to be better. They're like
Speaker 1: the kind of like left e like say media outlet.
Speaker 1: They used to be better and then their staff got
Speaker 1: run out because they they went they walked too close
Speaker 1: to the line. So but here's here, here's what. Here's
Speaker 1: they They've done a lot of they because the most
Speaker 1: of the PDD coverage came from before their people got
Speaker 1: run out, so quote following the IPO, a number of
Speaker 1: purchase series is allegedly bought from PDD. We're shared online,
Speaker 1: including a hair dryer that broke out in flames after
Speaker 1: it was switched on and a part bake.
Speaker 2: Hey, that also happens in America. Don't worry, you know,
Speaker 2: you're like, I know, you're like, oh, I'm missing out
Speaker 2: on all these great deals, all these great products. Not true.
Speaker 2: This could also happen in the States.
Speaker 3: Yep.
Speaker 1: There's another one where they had a power bank and
Speaker 1: someone ordered it and they came and it was just
Speaker 1: four triple A batteries and a container.
Speaker 2: That's funny. That's good. That's a good bit. That's yeah,
Speaker 2: that's pretty good.
Speaker 5: You know.
Speaker 1: There's stuff like like one of one, like sixth time
Speaker 1: was interviewing people in real areas you bought off and
Speaker 1: they were like, yeah, I brought it. I bought a
Speaker 1: fishing rod for like two bucks and it was broken.
Speaker 1: I bought a pair of shoes and it literally fell
Speaker 1: apart after three days.
Speaker 2: So I have complicated feelings on this because I think
Speaker 2: there is a place for gambling in purchases. If if,
Speaker 2: for example, on Amazon, if every fourth product you bought
Speaker 2: there was a completely like defective, like purposely like lower
Speaker 2: quality version, I think that would be a good for
Speaker 2: the world. We would have problem, we would have less
Speaker 2: people using Amazon, and you would kind of get slightly punished.
Speaker 2: So I think this actually could be a good thing
Speaker 2: if used correctly, where we where we purposely sabotage every
Speaker 2: like fourth person who buys anything online.
Speaker 1: But the problem is that people fucking love gambling. Like
Speaker 1: that's that's just gonna make people do more because now
Speaker 1: there's more of a downside if we're trying to get
Speaker 1: your fucking deal. So I mean, and this is the thing, right,
Speaker 1: Like you're rolling the dice every time every time you
Speaker 1: take a.
Speaker 2: You order like an election generator online and they send
Speaker 2: you a double a Oh my god, it'd be so
Speaker 2: funny funny.
Speaker 1: Well, I mean, now, hey, you too can now shop
Speaker 1: on Temu, you too can experience getting shipped just fucking bullshit.
Speaker 2: You order some nice Hawaiian coffee and they send you
Speaker 2: some like camameal, Oh god devastating.
Speaker 1: So this this whole thing of you buy stuff that
Speaker 1: sucks or doesn't work. And the fact that PDD starts
Speaker 1: in rural China means that like initially there's this like
Speaker 1: real class element about how who uses PDD. It's seen
Speaker 1: as like the site for poor and gulibal people who
Speaker 1: don't care about quality.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's like it's the place where lower class people shop.
Speaker 1: Yeah sure, yeah, And well that stops being true kind
Speaker 1: of because everyone starts using it. But Comma, the other
Speaker 1: problem they have is that it is absolutely rife with
Speaker 1: Kinterfit products. Right after they go public in twenty eighteen,
Speaker 1: there's like a Chinese state investigation into the sale of
Speaker 1: their Kinterfit products. And pdd's response is like, well, we're
Speaker 1: just a marketplace. Anyone can sell on it. How are
Speaker 1: we supposed to control who makes counterfeit stuff? But this
Speaker 1: is this is actually like it gets to a kind
Speaker 1: of like cultural thing where you know, what is one
Speaker 1: of the things that happens in world trying This happens
Speaker 1: in a lot of places where like almost everyone is
Speaker 1: wearing like clothes that are like knockoff brand stuff because
Speaker 1: it's just the cheapest clothes and like that's that's the
Speaker 1: kind of clothes that's being made that you can afford
Speaker 1: if you're you know, like you're you're trying to sort
Speaker 1: of make it like in World China, so you get like,
Speaker 1: you know, you have like entire villages where you walk
Speaker 1: in and everyone's wearing like like niaky and like a
Speaker 1: dietis or something like it's like nice. This stuff gets
Speaker 1: really wild, really fast. So here's from that that sedging
Speaker 1: interview with Colin Huang. Again, so here's here's a catching.
Speaker 1: It's a Chinese media outlet, so they're their interviewer. One
Speaker 1: of the best selling products on PDD is a bottle
Speaker 1: of affidisi at priced at twenty seven point eighty on
Speaker 1: that is like three almost four dollars, with a total
Speaker 1: of four point seven million orders sold. Do you think
Speaker 1: this medicine might be real? Here's the CEO. First of all,
Speaker 1: medicines are healthcare products sold on pdd's platform must have
Speaker 1: national certification marks. Secondly, the gross profit margin of healthcare
Speaker 1: products is already extremely high. Just like facial mass. Do
Speaker 1: you think the two hundred yond facial max is useful?
Speaker 1: So again, again, what is happening here is that like
Speaker 1: they have sold like one point four point seven million
Speaker 1: orders of of like a fake afrodisiac, And when the
Speaker 1: CEO is asked about his response, it's like, well, but
Speaker 1: who could really say if any health products work?
Speaker 2: Like wooo, that is a pretty funny bit. I mean,
Speaker 2: it sucks that people, the poor people are losing money,
Speaker 2: but well, I to be fair, to be fair, pretty
Speaker 2: fine bit.
Speaker 1: If you are trying to like buy an afrodisiac, I
Speaker 1: don't really care. Sure, sure yeah, but like you know,
Speaker 1: so part of it, like they're selling like fake hack medicines.
Speaker 1: This is like the Chinese version of the American like grift,
Speaker 1: like right wing grift like supplement market.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, yeah, it's the brain pills to help libido
Speaker 2: or whatever.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but this also gets a lot darker. One of
Speaker 1: the there's one of the stories that kind of like
Speaker 1: made the rounds Chinese social media that six Tone reports
Speaker 1: on is that people found PDD like advertising like sleep
Speaker 1: medicine as date rate drugs. Ah yeah, fucking bleak. There's
Speaker 1: like fuck And that's the thing. There's like no fucking
Speaker 1: content moderation on this, right, so people just do that
Speaker 1: shit and it really sucks. But on their hand, none
Speaker 1: of the constant bad press like stop pdd's rise, right,
Speaker 1: and now it is time to leave Colin Huang behind soil.
Speaker 1: Until about phil twenty twenty, pdd's rise was synonymous with
Speaker 1: its CEO, Colin Huang. But in mid twenty twenty, Huang
Speaker 1: resigned as the CEO and kind of like exited public
Speaker 1: life effectively, like not entirely, we kind of like he
Speaker 1: like took he like he resigned as CEO, and then
Speaker 1: twenty twenty one he resigns as like a chairman of
Speaker 1: the board and he's like, you know, he's doing this
Speaker 1: like philanthropic stuff instead, and he's you know, he's doing
Speaker 1: his like post CEO life thing, right, And we've never
Speaker 1: gotten a good answer as to why he stepped down.
Speaker 1: But I have a theory, and I think my theory's
Speaker 1: pretty good. And also it goes into have I Garrison,
Speaker 1: have I explained to you the thing about I don't
Speaker 1: remember if I've done it on this show, I talked
Speaker 1: about the Chinese payday loan app thing.
Speaker 2: H I don't think.
Speaker 1: So okay, So all right, we are now going to
Speaker 1: do We're going to close this episode out on one
Speaker 1: of the most absolutely insane moments of Chinese internet history.
Speaker 1: So okay, one of the things that happens in the
Speaker 1: Chinese tech market in the late twenty tens and early
Speaker 1: twenty twenties is this mass proliferation of app base payday loans.
Speaker 1: This is one of the worst things I have ever seen.
Speaker 1: What effectively happens is at around like twenty fourteen twenty fifteen,
Speaker 1: a bunch of Chinese tech companies, especially like delivery companies
Speaker 1: like sort of like China's version of grub, Public Door,
Speaker 1: Dash and Ali Baba, they're like Amazon equivalent gets in
Speaker 1: it too, and these people realize that they can start
Speaker 1: their own payment platforms. So basically like all these companies
Speaker 1: are making their own version of PayPal. But then they
Speaker 1: realize that they can use these platforms to give out
Speaker 1: payday loans, so that you can in one app take
Speaker 1: out a paid a loan to order delivery, or you
Speaker 1: can in one app take out a payday loan to
Speaker 1: buyshit from Amazon with the payday loan. Ten Cent gets
Speaker 1: in on it, so you can buy Mitro transactions with
Speaker 1: your payday loans. This, as you might expect, Spiral's out
Speaker 1: of control. Immediately on. The interest rates on these loans
Speaker 1: are enormous, and this means that they make an unbelievable
Speaker 1: amount of money, and so apps just start like shoveling
Speaker 1: these loans in people's faces the momently long onto apps.
Speaker 1: But the thing is, like this doesn't stop with just
Speaker 1: like the big shopping apps right by twenty nineteen. It's
Speaker 1: not just you know, like when I say this is
Speaker 1: going to apps right like you're fucking Like imagine if
Speaker 1: Twitter was trying to offer you payd A loans.
Speaker 5: Like that's the main point of that that might happen,
Speaker 5: but that might actually maybe based on the plans for
Speaker 5: the Twitter to become the banking app.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well that's actually the funny thing. So so Elon
Speaker 1: Musk really really likes China. And part of the reason
Speaker 1: for this is that, you know, a bunch of Tesla
Speaker 1: factories are in shing John. Part of the reason for this,
Speaker 1: like he's trying to like recreate the like weed chat environments,
Speaker 1: but everyone doesn't right, Like people don't actually like it.
Speaker 1: But the thing is the other thing that he really
Speaker 1: loves is the number of hours that you can get
Speaker 1: people to work in China that you can't really in
Speaker 1: the US, So we'll get to that fucking next episode.
Speaker 1: But you know, okay, so like like your your fucking
Speaker 1: Twitter is trying to see you paid a apps. But
Speaker 1: then it gets the point where your fucking flashlight app
Speaker 1: is trying to sell you, trying to get you to
Speaker 1: take out payday loans, like your like photo app, like
Speaker 1: every fucking app on your phone is trying to sell
Speaker 1: you pay loans. That sounds incredibly at this and this
Speaker 1: is one of these things, right that like, okay, like
Speaker 1: as bad as like American apps are, right, like it
Speaker 1: is as bad as like the version of capitalism that
Speaker 1: we have in the American app ecosystem, Like the wildest
Speaker 1: shit is always going on in the Chinese tech market,
Speaker 1: which is like even more insane than the American tech market.
Speaker 1: And this is the thing, like we don't actually have
Speaker 1: this here, and I've I've been trying to figure out
Speaker 1: why it never happened here. I think it has to
Speaker 1: do it partially with banking regulation and partially with like
Speaker 1: the fact that like the actual American payd A loan
Speaker 1: companies don't want other companies to like cut in on
Speaker 1: their business. So I think that's what's happening, but like
Speaker 1: in China, it's literally like and this is happening in
Speaker 1: like like like twenty nineteen, twenty twenty, twenty twenty one,
Speaker 1: that this stuff is happening, so you know, and it's
Speaker 1: an all and this this gets I mean, it turns
Speaker 1: into just a fucking nightmare because you know, obviously, like
Speaker 1: this turns into this giant wave of people who got
Speaker 1: it in over their heads and can't pay their loans
Speaker 1: back because they took out a payday loan with thirty
Speaker 1: percent interest. And also, and this is one of the
Speaker 1: fun things, companies just straight up lie about their interest rates.
Speaker 1: Like there's a lot of examples of the companies saying
Speaker 1: we have a nine percent interest rate, and then you know,
Speaker 1: in the contract it says nine percent interest rate, and
Speaker 1: then when they try to get you to pay it back,
Speaker 1: it's like thirty percents, right, Like this is like you know,
Speaker 1: and sometimes they're they're even they're you know, you're getting
Speaker 1: up to like one hundred two hundre percent interest. Like
Speaker 1: he's like organized crime levels of interest. And you know,
Speaker 1: like Alli, like the tech giants are all into it,
Speaker 1: Ali Baba isn't quite as big into it. As like
Speaker 1: some of the other companies, but like they're doing it,
Speaker 1: like they absolutely are doing the payday loan shit. And
Speaker 1: I mentioned Alibaba here because in late twenty twenty, Jack
Speaker 1: mob who's the founder of Alli Baba, just like disappears.
Speaker 1: He's just gone for like several months, nobody, nobody knows
Speaker 1: where he is, and then he reappears in like twenty
Speaker 1: twenty one, but he's not doing tech ceo stuff anymore.
Speaker 1: He's doing like weird public education tours and like rural China.
Speaker 1: And this causes like a huge, a huge like kind
Speaker 1: of thing in the American press because what they're reading
Speaker 1: it as, and they're kind of right, is that there's
Speaker 1: this in twenty twenty one, there's this enormous raft of
Speaker 1: financial regulations on tech companies, and this GUS interpreted is
Speaker 1: like a crackdown on chech companies, Like the CCP is
Speaker 1: trying to bring the tech giants in line, like they
Speaker 1: disappear Jackmaw and you know, one of them. This is
Speaker 1: something something that a story that gets lost in this
Speaker 1: in the American press is that like one of the
Speaker 1: big things they're trying to do is stop is stop
Speaker 1: all of these fucking companies, I'm turning their apps to
Speaker 1: THEO ped alone factories. And you know, like I'm I'm
Speaker 1: not like a CCP fan, Like it is well known.
Speaker 1: Like it's like my dislike of the CCP is so
Speaker 1: large that like a non insignificant number of people in
Speaker 1: the US think I work for the CIA, right, But
Speaker 1: like this is like those fucking companies they were like
Speaker 1: they were like like on the edge of completely annihilating
Speaker 1: the Chinese economy. They were very they got very very
Speaker 1: close to just like reducing like enormous swaths of the
Speaker 1: entire Chinese population and to like peer at based debt pionage.
Speaker 1: It was a fucking disaster. And this is part this
Speaker 1: is a big part of why this like tech crackdown
Speaker 1: came in because the CCP was like, holy shit, if
Speaker 1: you guys do this, like you're actually going to like
Speaker 1: like you're you're gonna you're gonna fucking nuke the Chinese economy,
Speaker 1: Like we cannot allow every single fucking app to be
Speaker 1: a paid a loan like service and things. I mean,
Speaker 1: it's still not great now, but it things have gotten
Speaker 1: a lot less bad in the in the pay a
Speaker 1: loan like thing since then. But you know again, like
Speaker 1: it it. It had to get bad enough that your
Speaker 1: flashlight were trying to get your take out of payd
Speaker 1: a loan for the CCP to actually like go after
Speaker 1: their like tech giant darlings. And I think what happened
Speaker 1: is that I I think what happened is that Colin
Speaker 1: Huang like saw which way the wind was blowing and
Speaker 1: he was like, Okay, there's gonna be a giant crackdown
Speaker 1: now now two wits credit. This is the only time
Speaker 1: I will give PDD credit for anything. PDD actually didn't
Speaker 1: do the payday loan shit, I think because Colin Huang
Speaker 1: was just like was like smart enough to be like,
Speaker 1: this is a fucking terrible idea. Like if we try
Speaker 1: to get our like rural customer base hooked on payday loans,
Speaker 1: all these people are gonna just be completely broke in
Speaker 1: like nine months. So PDD doesn't do it. But he
Speaker 1: takes this moment like he picks twenty like July twenty twenty,
Speaker 1: which is like a couple months before Jack modest speers,
Speaker 1: and he just fucking nopes and he's like I'm out
Speaker 1: and yeah, like things, you know, and he picked a
Speaker 1: good time and this meant that, like, you know, he
Speaker 1: never really faced any consequences for you know, he wasn't
Speaker 1: really caught up in the crackdown. He got out fine,
Speaker 1: and you know, he he picked, he picked the time
Speaker 1: to do it, and pdd's future in America was still
Speaker 1: ahead of it. But when the Chinese media began to
Speaker 1: uncover the dark side of PDD in twenty twenty one,
Speaker 1: Colin Kwang was nowhere to be found. And that is
Speaker 1: what we're covering tomorrow. We haven't even gotten to the
Speaker 1: bad stuff yet.
Speaker 2: I haven't even got to Temu proper.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well the thing about Temu, and we will get
Speaker 1: to ten me next episode. But Temu's like a twenty
Speaker 1: twenty two thing, right, so it's really recent. It's only
Speaker 1: been around for like two years, which means that if
Speaker 1: we're going to talk about this, ninety percent of it
Speaker 1: is going to be PDD because PDD is like nine
Speaker 1: years old. But yeah, tune in tomorrow for a bunch
Speaker 1: of absolutely harrowing shit. Yeah, this is this is, this
Speaker 1: is it could happen here.
Speaker 2: We love dude, so exciting. I love learning about new
Speaker 2: harrowing shit. It could happen years.
Speaker 3: A production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from
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Speaker 3: It could happen here, updated monthly at coolzonemedia dot com
Speaker 3: slash sources. Thanks for listening.