This week’s podcast is about TikTok vs. Netflix. And how consumer behavior combines with digital tools in the video space.
You can listen to this podcast here, which has the slides and graphics mentioned. Also available at iTunes and Google Podcasts.
Here is the link to the TechMoat Consulting.
Here is the link to the Tech Tour.
Here is the interview with Jonathan Haidt. And his book the Righteous Mind
Here are the 5 lessons:
Lesson 1: High Frequency Video MTV Was More Powerful Than Long-Form TV Stories
Lesson 2: Digital-First Netflix Crushed Cable TV with Selection, Price, and Convenience
Lesson 3: Interactive YouTube and Streaming Was More Powerful than Passive Videos
Lesson 4: TikTok Trumped Netflix Using “Endless Dopamine”
Lesson 5: Machine Learning-Centric Video TikTok Was Also Superior for Consumers and Creators
Here are the 5 mentioned content types
- Education
- Story telling
- Mindless entertainment. Including things like comedy.
- News / Politics
- Sports
——
Related articles:
- How to Think About Web 3.0 Business Models (1 of 2) (Asia Tech Strategy – Daily Article)
- Platform-Protocol Hybrids and Why DeFi is the Center of Web 3.0 (2 of 2) (Asia Tech Strategy – Daily Article)
From the Concept Library, concepts for this article are:
- Share of the consumer mind
- Video: 5 Content Types
- Video
- B2C Customer View: Endless Dopamine
From the Company Library, companies for this article are:
- Netflix
- YouTube
- TikTok
- Jonathan Haidt
——transcription below
Episode 224 – TikTok Haidt.1
Jeffrey Towson: [00:00:00] Welcome, everybody. My name is Jeff Towson, and this is the Tech Strategy Podcast from TechMoat Consulting. And the topic for today, why TikTok is more powerful than Netflix. Or five lessons from consumer video. And this is something I’ve been thinking about a lot over the last couple months, is how consumer behavior can be so strange in so many situations, and how that combines with new digital tools.
often quite rapidly to get surprising behaviors. I’ve been trying to chart these out a lot, which is why I talked about fan behavior before gambling behavior, the behavior of people who collect things, gifting behavior, things like that. But the epicenter of this question of consumer behavior meets digital is arguably video.
The tech changes faster than anywhere. Behavior changes faster. It’s inherently just a digital [00:01:00] product to begin with, so that’s the center of all this. So, I thought I would talk a little bit about how I’m thinking about that. And for those of you who are subscribers, I’m going to send you two articles that basically lay out my frameworks.
Which is, it’s a work in progress, but this is literally what I do when I go through companies. These are my lists. I’ll let you know how I’m thinking about it. I’m still working on it though, and yeah, so I thought a good example, I’ll give you five lessons today, but they’re all from past stories.
One of which is like why TikTok is so much more powerful than Netflix, even though they’re both in the video business. So, I’ll give you a basically five lessons. I’ve, I don’t know, I’ve sketched at some point. And that will be the topic for today. Housekeeping stuff. We do have I don’t know what to call it.
A small tech tour coming up near in November. Going to Shanghai, going to Hangzhou, a very small group actually. I don’t, I need a better word than tour. I think it’s more a handful of people just [00:02:00] hanging out and traveling. That’s really what it is. We’ve done the big tours and we’ve got a couple of those scheduled for next year, like 60, 70 people stuff.
This is just going to be a couple people. If you’re interested in doing that, let me know. If you have a good name for what to call that, a tour is not really the right word. Anyways, let me know. You can go over to TechMoat Consulting.com. You’ll see the tour tab there. We have the details, price, dates, and all that there.
Anyways, okay standard disclaimer. Nothing in this podcast or my writing or website is investment advice. The numbers and information for me and any guests may be incorrect. The views and opinions expressed may no longer be relevant or accurate. Overall, investing is risky. This is not investment, legal, or tax advice.
Do your own research. And with that, let’s get into the topic. Now the concept for today, there’s probably two, but I don’t have a name for one of them. The main concept would be share of the consumer mind. And this is something like you’ll see it in all my frameworks. This is a Warren Buffett term.
It’s a competitive advantage [00:03:00] and it’s on, my list of competitive advantages. What is this thing when a business, a company, a brand, a product has such a hold on people’s that we start to describe it as a competitive advantage on the demand side. Now, the phrase Buffett uses is share of the consumer mind.
We don’t really see this on the B2B side. We don’t see this sort of hold on businesses where they just, you know, when you really like a product, you buy it all the time. There’s soft versions of this, like Coca Cola, where people just keep buying Coke all the time. Even if you offer them a competing soda that tastes just as good and it’s cheaper, they still buy Coke.
Now, when you see numbers like that, it’s a competitive advantage. When we can see it play out in market share, profits okay, that’s real. But it’s a soft definition. And. There’s a lot of things you can or you can really like, or you can absolutely love them. At what point do we consider that [00:04:00] a competitive advantage?
And it’s a fuzzy bucket. It’s hard to explain how it’s achieved, but it’s usually easy to spot once it exists, like Harley Davidson definitely had a competitive advantage on the demand side for a long time. overpriced motorcycles, right? They’re dramatically more expensive than they should be compared to Yamaha, Kawasaki, and all of that.
I like motorcycles, right? These are just normal motorcycles that are highly priced. Cost structure is no different. The design’s not different. Motorcycles are pretty simple things. They’re like refrigerators or lawnmowers. They’re really not simple. Complicated tech, but Harley for the longest time had this tremendous hold by tapping into a sense of heritage in Americana.
That was very powerful in a certain demographic of Americans, basically middle-aged men, actually middle-aged white men, and to a lesser [00:05:00] degree, middle aged Hispanic men, and some women, but overwhelmingly middle-aged white dudes. That was their, so it was purely a consumer facing power. a competitive advantage.
Now, for those of you following the news, Harley kind of went woke recently. And unfortunately, if there’s a, if there’s a demographic you don’t want to go woke with, it’s this demographic and their customers didn’t like it and they’re really getting hit hard. It’s Bud Light too. Bud Light did some stuff in that regards and it was a, their particular demographic didn’t like it.
So anyways, that’s an interesting story of how you create a competitive advantage share of the consumer mind and how you can lose it. So, there’s a lot going on in that space, and when you combine that sort of behavior, COLA, motorcycles, with digital, we get lots of interesting things. And in your own life, you can see this all the time.
How often do you check your email? [00:06:00] How many minutes from when you wake up do you check your WhatsApp or Line or Messenger? I it’s minutes. So, there is something very powerful going on at the intersection of consumer behavior and digital. We see it all the time. TikTok is known for being super addictive.
Gaming is very addictive. So that intersection is what I’ve been trying to take apart for the last really six months. That’s why I’ve been looking at these companies, Bilibili, Kuaishou, Xiaohongshu, Popmart, Fan Behavior, Collectibles, Gambling. There’s a lot. I’m trying to basically flesh out my frameworks.
Anyways, so based on that, I was listening to a podcast the All-In podcast from the All In, group. They interviewed this professor I really like, Jonathan Haidt, who is the NYU Stern professor who looks at psychology and why people act the way they do. He has really good writings about this.
The book I always mention is [00:07:00] The Righteous Mind. Which I think about all the time. That’s a really interesting book. But he’s written about woke behavior and why people when, here’s one way to think about it. There’s a certain set of subjects where as soon as people get into those subjects, they start behaving very differently.
Politics, religion, community, tribal behavior, that you can definitely see when news, politics, you can, and I can see it myself. If I’m reading the newspaper, I’m very rational reading the weather section or the business section, but as soon as it goes on to the news and politics, I feel my blood pressure going up.
Like, why does that happen? So, he writes about what’s going on in the brain when you step from your rational or your emotional mind over to what he calls the righteous mind. It’s a very interesting guy. He interviewed the podcast and they talked a lot about Tik Tok and addicted behavior and dopamine and social media.
And that’s why [00:08:00] a lot of what I’m saying today is summarized from that talk. I’ll put the link in the show notes if you want to listen to that interview. It’s really pretty good. Okay. That said, let me jump into the content here. Cause we can talk lots of examples, motorcycles, soda, beauty products.
We see strange consumer behavior everywhere, but it tends to be more powerful when it combines with digital in video actually really any digital content, we could say podcasting, we could say a lot of things, we’d say articles, that’s all-digital content. Video is definitely the most powerful. Video is just very captivating to people.
So, let’s just start with first pass is I don’t even know where I got this. I usually look at content, whether it’s video, books, whatever. I usually break it into five buckets of content types. I’m not sure where I got this. This might have been Ben Thompson years ago. I don’t know. First thing is, okay, before we get into the [00:09:00] psychology, let’s just talk about different types of content.
And the five I think about are storytelling, that’s easy to understand. TV, movies, books. Clearly that has a powerful effect on the human brain. Mindless entertainment. Now this would be similar to storytelling, but different. Like for me, if I watch HBO, they have high quality shows. I don’t know or shows let’s say Breaking Bad or whatever you want to call it.
House of Cards, things like that. This is really sophisticated storytelling where you’re paying attention. There’s another bucket, which is just mindless, just put it on and watch it and clean the apartment or whatever you’re doing. But your brain’s not really, it’s definitely not storytelling, but it could be video.
TikTok is obviously a lot, you’re not watching stories on TikTok, and you’re not watching stories on [00:10:00] YouTube. But you can do a lot of mindless video entertainment on both of those. So anyways, we can put first two buckets, storytelling versus mindless entertainment. Education number three.
Okay, that’s YouTube. If you want to know how to fix anything, if your sink is leaking in this world, go to YouTube. How to stop a leak, leaky sink, how to make a Cappuccino. How, like how many times have I typed in how to, into YouTube? YouTube is tremendous for education and learning. I can learn a little bit on TikTok, but I’m not learning stuff usually on Netflix.
generally speaking, sometimes. So, storytelling, mindless entertainment, education, those are three buckets. News and politics, I put that in another bucket because it’s its own category. Current events, whatever you want to call that. YouTube is pretty good for that. Netflix, [00:11:00] much less. And then fifth bucket would be sports.
Live sports is pretty powerful. People don’t usually watch old sports. We don’t usually watch that on TikTok. You don’t usually Netflix has no sports, but cable TV has lots of sports ESPN. So, it is those five buckets. I find pretty helpful. I’ve remembered that for years, although I’m not totally sure.
It’s not my thinking. That’s somebody else. I just don’t remember where I got it. Okay, so we start with content type and let’s talk about video. Now let’s combine that with digital. And you can see that digital tools are just impacting this all the time in different ways. Production costs. The cost of making video keeps dropping.
I the cost of any content is dropping. Writing articles, doing podcasts, but making videos, it used to be you had to have a TV studio, big cameras, a film crew. [00:12:00] Now you can do it on your smartphone. Now generative AI is doing it really without even phones. So, it’s changing the production costs dramatically.
That’s had a huge impact on video. It’s democratizing production. Used to be, you had to go to school. You had to work in Hollywood. Used to be a very rare skill set to make a TV show or even to have a talk show. Now anyone can have a talk show. Anyone can do podcasts. Anyone can do most video.
In fact, the last holdout. of video production has been high quality movies and television. But even that is getting democratized now where pretty soon any two dudes sitting in a warehouse anywhere in the world are going to be able to make movies as good as quality wise as like the avengers or house of cards or whatever.
We’re almost there. Anyone can do it. The supply explodes. Platform business models were a big deal. That’s not about making the content. That’s [00:13:00] about connecting the creators of the content with the people viewing the content, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram. Entertainment videos went from one direction, where it’s very passive, you watch the video on your television, to becoming interactive.
It’s becoming a form of two-way communication, where you can communicate with the content creator, you can communicate with other people watching the video. YouTube. I like watching live videos on YouTube and then chatting with the other people watching in the comments. I think that’s really fun.
Bilibili, which I talked about, has its bullet chat. So, it’s become more interactive and then of course gaming, it’s totally interactive content is no longer about top down Programming. Here’s the 10 shows CBS is releasing this year. Suddenly. It’s based on interest graphs and social graphs Facebook was historically based on a social graph.
Who do you know? Twitter was [00:14:00] always based more about interests What do you like? Who do you follow? That was pretty powerful for about 10 years but then that got hit by machine learning which is no longer using interest graphs. They’re just matching you in real time to what they think you want to watch next on TikTok or YouTube.
And then there’s a whole idea of dopamine, which I’ll talk about, which watching television in the 1970s and 1980s, was not a dopamine rich experience. You were watching a show. It was fine. TikTok, social media. You’re getting dopamine hits all the time, which I’ll talk about. So anyways, you can see them.
We can get into things like gamification and multiplayer and all of that, but you can see that, like there is just one digital tool, one digital advancement after the other, just hitting entertainment and particularly video all the time. I always say I love this space. I think it’s the coolest space.
It is so hard to predict what’s going to [00:15:00] happen next. Virtual reality? Augmented reality? I don’t know. But it really does change pretty quick in surprising ways. Okay, so that’s teeing up for this discussion. Let me just jump to five lessons and answer the question. Why is TikTok more powerful than Netflix?
Lesson number one. And again, most of this is not my thinking. It comes from Jonathan Haidt and other people. I’m, this is just kind of stuff I’ve jotted down recently and over the years. So, lesson number one, high frequency videos, let’s say MTV, we’re just a step up in terms of power versus long form television, seventies, eighties, sixties.
Your average TV show was 30 minutes to an hour, could be comedy, could be drama, whatever. And then MTV comes along in the eighties and suddenly it’s four-minute videos. And man, the power of frequency. [00:16:00] It’s a big deal. It, there’s a lot of reasons it’s powerful. One is it’s more exciting.
It gets you more engaged when you’re doing stuff online like TikTok, which is an even shorter form of video than let’s say MTV. It gets you a lot of feedback in terms of data of what people like. As will be mentioned, it gets you more frequent dopamine hits. But I mean if you look at the there’s two trend lines that are hard to miss which is like Every year they keep adding more sugar to foods like everything just keeps getting more and more sugar It’s very hard to find anything in the supermarket without sugar and every year like the energy drinks just get more caffeine Like it used to be that Coca Cola was your caffeine and sugar drink, but there is actually isn’t that much caffeine in Coca Cola.
Then they went to Starbucks, then they went to Red Bull, then they go to 5 Hour Energy. They just keep upping [00:17:00] the levels, right? It’s the same with frequency as far as I can tell. Videos just keep getting shorter and shorter. Now you can break it up into, lots and lots of it strung together. If you’re going to binge watch on Netflix, it goes from one hour to half hour shows down to five-to-ten-minute videos That’s YouTube and most things on YouTube are 10 to 20 minutes and then you get tick tock suddenly you’re down to 30 seconds one to two minutes.
You know Frequently there’s a limit to this obviously, but yeah That was lesson number one that MTV was the switch that showed that if you make things shorter and higher frequency they have more power. Now, truly great storytelling takes longer time, but I think that’s a pretty decent rule.
So that’s lesson number one, frequency and MTV is what I remember. That’s how I remember that one. Lesson number two digital first Netflix [00:18:00] basically crushed traditional cable TV with improved selection, price and convenience. Netflix was a digital first business from the get-go. a reimagined business model based on digital economics that was a direct contrast to traditional cable television.
And the levers they pulled using digital tech. Now it started with DVDs, which is a tech, then it went to streaming, was really three things. We’re going to give you more selection, which Netflix, you have 30, 40, 000 videos you can watch at any one time. That was all, cable had 200 TV channels, fine.
But you could only watch, they were on a schedule. So, there were basically 200 different shows you could watch at any one time. Okay. Netflix just crushed that with whatever they’re at tens of thousands. They dropped the price dramatically. [00:19:00] Cable TV in the U S just cost about a hundred, 110 per month for a cable package.
Suddenly Netflix is 9, 12. If you’re in Bogota, it’s four to five. So, they crushed them on price. Again, that’s leveraging in digital economics and then really the lever they used was convenience. You don’t have to stick to our schedule anymore. If here’s our programming, here’s what’s on tonight at 8 PM.
No, you can watch whatever you want, wherever you want on any device you want. You can watch the whole season at once. You can watch it on your iPad, your phone, your TV. They just maximized against convenience and actually they still do that today. If you ever want to cancel subscriptions, it’s often difficult, people make it hard, but you can cancel Netflix.
You just send them an email or you just click it off under the app and you can turn it off and on anytime you want. They make it very easy. to turn it off. They’ve done [00:20:00] convenience as much as possible. And then selection and price. And we could put Netflix in the same bucket as cable TV in terms of content types.
It’s a lot of storytelling and it’s a lot of mindless entertainment. For me the breakdown in my head when I think about Netflix is about 80 20. About 20 percent of Netflix for me is quality content with good stories and about 80 percent of it is just junk that you put on when you’re cleaning the apartment or doing something else.
But yeah, and I mean storytelling is not a small thing people really love Characters, they really you know, this gets into fan behavior. They’re really loyal to certain types of stories and characters There’s an aspect of escapism when you can leave your world and go into their world. It can have an emotional impact I’m not storytelling is pretty powerful Anyway, so that’s lesson number [00:21:00] two, that Netflix as a digital first business model really crushed cable by basically increasing selection, decreasing price and increasing convenience.
Those were the three levers I think they still pull today. Okay. Lesson number three, interactive YouTube and live streaming is much more powerful than passive video libraries. YouTube has a massive library. Impressive. Pretty good. So does Netflix. Not as big as YouTube, but good. That’s all kind of passive.
It’s one way. And I can share, I can like, I can leave a comment. It’s not nearly as powerful as when it’s interactive. Live streaming, which I really live streaming. I think it, if you ever watch, if you, let’s say you have a YouTuber you like and you watch one of their videos, fine. When they do a live session, you do [00:22:00] feel that it’s more vibrant and people commenting and you make fun in the comments it’s a definitely a more powerful experience and sporting is like that as well.
Like live sports is more powerful but once you move to interactive video and live video, I think you really do take it up a notch now the weakness of that if you’re building something like YouTube or Instagram or tick tock is the supply that’s available is usually dramatically less. So, you have a more powerful product, but you have a.
Much smaller supply of content available. So there’s a bit of a tradeoff there I like how Billy and these companies have done it like quite show Where they have a short video app and then they have a live streaming app, which is pretty much what we chat is doing, too So I think those two together are pretty powerful And yeah, I think that’s a I think YouTube tick tock live streaming We’re definitely a big step up from let’s say cable [00:23:00] TV and Netflix Which isn’t which is barely passive one way viewing So that would be lesson number three, that the more interactive and live you are, the more powerful you are, although you take a hit on supply.
Lesson four, and this is the so what of this podcast, how did TikTok, why is TikTok more powerful than Netflix? And my answer to that, which is not really my thinking, is what I call endless dopamine. Now.
Netflix does not get you a dopamine hit. What is dopamine for one? And this is Jonathan Haidt’s explanation, which I think is right on. But I have a medical background. I actually know what dopamine is. Dopamine is pleasure. It’s the pleasure hormone. It feels good. And we seek it out.
Your body is going to give you dopamine when This is Jonathan’s explanation. Your body is going to [00:24:00] give you dopamine hits when you are moving towards something or doing something that is evolutionarily advantaged. Sex. If you’re a heterosexual guy, they’re going to, if you see lots of women on Instagram and TikTok, which it’s full of, or at least mine is, you’re gonna get dopamine hits because it is driving you towards basically reproducing, which is evolutionarily advantaged.
beneficial. So, you’ll get that. But there’s a lot of other types of what we call evolution, evolutionary imperatives. Getting food tends to be one. Gossip is actually an interesting one. There’s, if you’re in a, most humans for most of human history, and these are my explanations, so they’re not a hundred percent great, but I think they’re basically accurate.
For most of human history, there was. humans living in relatively small villages, not big towns. And gossiping gave you a real [00:25:00] advantage about knowing what was going on in the village and what was happening and, who was doing what gives you a greater likelihood of survival. So, we were evolved to gossip and that’s a lot of social media.
It’s a lot of, Ooh, he did this. Let’s talk about whatever. And what’s the leader doing? Let’s follow celebrities. There’s all, There’s reasons for all of that. Why these things are so popular in every society. We see lots of gossiping online We see lots of celebrity behavior. We sort of leader worship all of that stuff So there’s lots of things you can do that are going to get you dopamine hits Those are just the most obvious one’s food gossip sex.
There’s a bunch of them now So let’s say you get a dopamine hit because you know they show you a video of an attractive person or whatever you hit Dopamine hits are like potato chips. It’s [00:26:00] not like you get the dopamine hit, you feel good, and then it’s over, and you’re done, and you don’t want anymore.
Potato chips are, you eat one potato chip, it was good, now I want another one. It makes you want another one. And then you eat another potato chip, ooh, that was good too, I want another one. It’s like it’s an exponential curve. The more you get of it, the more you want. So, it’s like an exponential now what Jonathan was talking about in this podcast, which I think was really cool Was that’s true, but in most of society and in most of these effects There is an external limitation to this need for endless Dopamine or whatever if you are let’s say it’s in the area of sex.
Okay, you get a dopamine hit It’s intriguing whatever then you it’s like potatoes if you want more one more eventually you’re either going to, sleep with someone or the whole village is going to stop you from whatever you, [00:27:00] there are natural limits. That’s going to end that cycle. It doesn’t keep increasing forever.
It’s like food. You want food. You’re going to eat some more. Eventually you’re going to have enough potato chips. You’re like, I’m full. I don’t want any more potato chips. There’s a limit to this sort of induced behavior. Okay. Now Tik TOK. Tik TOK, unlike Netflix, doesn’t tell you stories. It doesn’t have an interest graph.
It is looking for basically. whatever you respond to. It’s basically playing off dopamine. So, you see a video you like, it shows you another one. You see another one, it shows you another one and so on. And the topic tends to gravitate to things like sex or gossip or outrage or any of these sorts of evolutionary imperatives.
It’s a dopamine machine. And you could say Facebook is the same. People are showing off. There’s a lot of envy. There’s a lot of that there. [00:28:00] So TikTok is using dopamine in a way that Netflix doesn’t. I’d say Facebook does as well. The difference is there’s no external limitation. There’s nothing that stops the process that says you’ve had enough potato chips.
You’re full. You don’t want any more. You can endlessly scroll TikTok for hours. That’s why I call it the endless dopamine machine. There’s no limit. Imagine eating potato chips and you never get full. That’s TikTok. So that’s lesson number four. Look, TikTok took this idea of video, which Netflix I think is very good at, and then just boosted it to the next level by combining it with endless dopamine hits, which Netflix really doesn’t do.
Neither did TV. Neither did TV in the 80s. Neither did MTV. YouTube does it. Facebook does it. But [00:29:00] Netflix, I’m sorry, TikTok is really good about it. You TikTok for hours and hours. I find myself doing that. I’ll sit and I’ll look up. It’s been an hour and a half. I’ve been on TikTok.
It’s crazy. Anyways, that’s lesson number four, which is the endless dopamine machine. All right, last lesson then I’ll finish up. This is more about TikTok. Okay, lesson number five. Last one machine learning centric videos. Which is TikTok has proven to be superior for both consumers and creators.
Now, this is also from the interview on the podcast. Okay. Dopamine is a big deal. Definitely. It’s a big deal. That’s not everything that’s going on with TikTok. The other thing that’s going on with TikTok is it was a machine learning company, an AI company from the get-go. They never used a social graph.
They’ve never asked who your friends are. There’s no search bar. Here’s what I want to watch videos for. It’s always been [00:30:00] machine learning centric and it turns when you, turns out when you do machine learning based matching of videos between content creators and content watchers it is superior.
It’s superior as a service for the consumers. It’s superior as a service for the creators. In the podcast, one of the I forget who it was, one of the four all in besties, he basically said, don’t underestimate how awesome it is that you can go on TikTok right now and see what the funniest joke in the world is right now.
Cause whatever the funniest joke that was just told in the last 24 hours, anywhere in the world is probably trending on TikTok. That’s pretty awesome. Like you want to see the funniest meme in the world. You can see that on TikTok right now. You want to see the funniest joke? It’s on TikTok. You want to see the coolest dance video that’s going on?
It’s on. The fact that you can see the best of the world in this massive, long tail of content, that’s a pretty amazing service for consumers [00:31:00] and viewers. I don’t get that on Netflix. I don’t get the funniest thing that’s happened in the world today. I don’t get the best video. I don’t get the most inspiring speech anywhere in the world on a, all of those things.
I can get the best of everything, every day on TikTok. That’s a phenomenal consumer offering. So, it is better than Netflix as an offering and YouTube is pretty similar. They have pretty similar offering. And then the other thing is it’s probably better on the content creator side as well, because.
One of the things Tik Tok did was it made it very easy for anyone to create content. All you do is use your camera or your phone. Very easy. The content tends to be stuff that anyone can do lip syncing, dance videos. You didn’t have to build a big studio in your basement and launch a podcast like you do on YouTube.
You can pretty much, anyone can do it. You can make funny little stuff on Tik Tok any day of the week. [00:32:00] It’s very easy to do. So, I think they made it much easier. for the content creators. And they gave them the ability to, they basically gave everybody the ability to seek status, and there’s the saying that human beings are basically status seeking monkeys.
We are very driven by our sense of status versus everybody else. If your neighbor gets a nicer house than you, you immediately feel that as a guy. We are very sensitive to little differences in status. How do you get status? You create videos, you get followers, you get likes. All of those things are status markers.
So, it’s tapped into that. So that’s how I see TikTok. I see it as an endless dopamine machine that does increasingly smart AI matching of content creation and viewing. Those two levers to me are the most powerful thing going on. [00:33:00] It’s pretty awesome. Anyways, that’s my five lessons.
Those of you subscribers, I’ll send you two articles on this because I’ve actually got a lot of checklists I use for all of this. But I’m still digging into it. I’m still trying to, there’s no master framework for any of this. Human beings are too strange. They like weird things. Half the time I don’t know why people like the things they like.
I can just see the numbers. Okay, people are watching these types of videos. Why are they watching these videos? I don’t know. They are, but I have no idea why this one trends and the other one doesn’t. I have no idea why certain types of media like video are so powerful and other types of videos, of content like text.
People don’t read that many books. People are watching far few, or sorry, reading far fewer articles than they used to. But it turns out video is powerful. It turns out short video is particularly powerful and it turns out short video with text [00:34:00] on the screen That you can read the text while you’re listening is really powerful.
Why is that the case? I have no idea. Why don’t people like virtual reality? Nobody likes those headsets on their face. I don’t know why. So, there’s a lot of unpredictable behavior in this whole sector. I’m still trying to build out lots of frameworks. If you have any suggestions, please send them my way.
And that intersection of consumer behavior and digital tools is pretty awesome. There was one other topic I’m not going to talk about. But someone brought it up in the podcast, and I thought that was interesting. There’s the French philosopher, psychologist René Girard who wrote about the nature of human desire.
That’s an interesting way to think about all of this. Like, why do human beings desire certain things? And how does that change? And his answer, which I don’t know his work very well, but a little bit, [00:35:00] was imitation. We want what other people want. He argued that was the main thing. I don’t know. But that’s another way to think about all of this is what is the nature of human desire?
And why does it change? And how does it evolve? And how much is it socially created? and how much of it is hardwired and how much of it is chemistry and how much of it is biology and evolution. I don’t know. I’m thinking about that. Okay. That is basically the content for today. I’ll put the five lessons I have in the show notes.
I’ll also put the five content types. And what I’m trying to get to is a more crystallized version of when this reaches the level of share of the consumer mind. At what point does any of this create such a hold on the human brain that we can call it a competitive advantage? Usually, I look at gross profit and I look at market share over [00:36:00] time.
That’s how I conclude that it exists. But the mechanisms and trying to take that apart. I don’t know. I’m still working on it. Okay, that is it for the content for today. As for me, it’s been a pretty good week. Just a lot of work, which is great. That’s satisfying. I always feel good at the end of the week when I’m tired.
Fun stuff. I’ve been I’ve been watching a TV show called Outlast, which is on Netflix. Really interesting. It’s a survival show. They put people up in the Alaskan wilderness, at the end of fall and as winter starts to arrive. And yeah, it’s about survival. So, getting food, getting water getting fire going as the temperature drops night after night.
And what was really fast, you should watch it, watch season two is better than season one. But if you watch the first episode of season two, I think you’ll get hooked out last. It’s What really jumped out at me watching this was watching the [00:37:00] four different teams over time and How much the dynamics of the people on there’s usually four people to a team watching how much the dynamics and personalities of the team members matter and Some teams like they argue and fight and they can’t get to a point The team to function and as a result of not functioning terribly they struggle to get food and water and survive and people start losing weight and, going into having medical issues.
And eventually, if you don’t eat enough, you have to call and get taken out and other teams. The team clicks wonderfully, and they’re just high performance as a group of four people, and you can see them advancing versus the other teams. Day after day where their camp is great and suddenly for at least one of the teams, Three weeks into this when sir, you’re basically starving at this point You know The functional team is doing great and they’re just [00:38:00] relaxing and they’ve got the whole systems for everything they need in life and it’s really interesting to see how like The team dynamics matter and the personality, it gets me thinking of a lot about business.
And I remember us talking with this was a senior guy at McKinsey at the time. And I asked him, he was their head semiconductor guy. And I asked him like, what is your most interesting aspect of AI? And he said, I want to know why certain groups of people. are so high performance and others are a disaster.
Why does that happen? Because we can see it, but we don’t know why. And yeah, you could really see it in this survival game. The teams that had the right personality types and team dynamics and culture, plus the requisite skills thrived. And the others, they basically had to be taken out by chopper because it was too cold to survive, and they were freezing and starving.
Really interesting. Anyways Take a look at it. It’s a pretty good show. I’m watching season one right now. I started with season two, which was better, but I’m going through season one. [00:39:00] And then you get into questions like, are you going to attack the other teams and steal their stuff? And what happens when there’s not enough resources for everybody?
There’s not enough fish. There’s not enough whatever. Yeah, it’s pretty cool. It also makes me grateful I don’t live a hundred years ago. Thank God. The world used to be such a cruel place. It’s a lot more comfortable now. I’m really grateful for that. Anyways, that’s what I was watching. Worth checking out.
Anyways, that is it for me. I hope everyone is doing well and I’ll talk to you next week. Bye bye.
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I write, speak and consult about how to win (and not lose) in digital strategy and transformation.
I am the founder of TechMoat Consulting, a boutique consulting firm that helps retailers, brands, and technology companies exploit digital change to grow faster, innovate better and build digital moats. Get in touch here.
My book series Moats and Marathons is one-of-a-kind framework for building and measuring competitive advantages in digital businesses.
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