 Hi, good evening, good morning, good afternoon, whenever you are joining us from my name is Abhijit Bhaduri. I'm the author of the book Dreamers and Unicorns and I also work as a leadership coach and I work with people to craft their social media strategy. But today I have as a guest somebody who's going to talk to us about this whole process of gathering and keeping somebody's attention because you know what there's so much of content everywhere that we live in what can be truly called an attention economy because so many people post something on every social platform possible whether it's Facebook, whether it's LinkedIn, whether it's Twitter, Instagram, whichever and of course not to mention TikTok knowing fully well that this is one of those many apps which got banned but they may not give away the entire story because we are going to do the launch of a book called the attention factory and I'm actually going to read out what the book has to say about Matt Brennan is an author and internationally recognized speaker who specializes in Chinese mobile internet technology and innovation. So he's been quoted in a number of places you know whether it's the Economist Forbes you know Wall Street Journal all of that and so you know he's one of the people who organized the largest annual WeChat digital marketing conference in China for international brands and he's done you know presentations for every possible you know company that you can think of from Tencent, Google, Visa, LinkedIn, etc. etc. all of that but let me get the man himself with this little piece of introduction. Wow what an introduction. That's the man himself and I've got your book here I was just reading it off this lovely book so congratulations. This is actually the official launch of the book attention factory you know day before yesterday I was you know walking through Delhi airport and I was delighted to see this book there already in the chart so Matthew I must say that I felt very jealous you know it's just so you know nice to see something like this out there and here I am talking to the author. Yeah and I got my copy here as well yeah it's great it's out there it's it's out in bookstores all across India and that's so that's so great to see because we did have a delay because the situation we covered but now we're ready to go and it and it's out then it's doing well so yeah I couldn't be couldn't be more happy really. So this side you know and and let me just put out a little bit of a caveat as to what why I sort of really found this book very interesting what is that you know when you think about the fact that we live in an attention economy we need to hold the attention of people in multiple ways you know whatever you are saying or doing leaders have to do it inside the organization and outside teachers have to do that for that matter even parents you know when you tell the kid can you look up from the phone and just look at me as we talk you know so that's also an attention economy and really one company which seems to have captured it has been TikTok but I want to sort of know a little bit about your background in terms of writing and your career as a journalist tell me a little about that before we get into the TikTok story. Yeah sure I've been based in mainland China for most of my adult working life basically straight out of university I came to mainland China and there I was originally involved in education industry and worked my way up through the ranks in an American multinational company to eventually head up their edtech division at the time we called e-learning and built curriculum online curriculum for tens of thousands maybe hundreds of thousands of students across China learning English and doing all these sort of software for that and then I got really inspired around what was happening on WeChat in 2016 around that for people who don't know WeChat is like China's famous super app and it was around the time that digital payments were taking off WeChat pay Ali pay and China was transitioning very very fast from a cash economy into a purely mobile payment QR code based system and that was happening kind of organically right in front of me and I could see that it was transforming society and so I decided to go in and start my own company leave my old job and start to focus on the digital space full time with digital marketing and also with everything that's happening in the Tencent ecosystem which is the parent company of WeChat around 2018 was when the Chinese version of TikTok really took off which was earlier than the international version so the original version of TikTok is called Douyin it's a Chinese sister app we could say and so I saw firsthand how that was transforming Chinese society suddenly you see everyone was taking short videos around you and watching and you could hear the same music and the same songs I'm sure you know some some of the listeners might this might resonate with them of what happened in India a little bit later that it really became a phenomenon and you could suddenly you know you could see people in the street filming themselves right on these platforms on these platforms and it became certain people became famous very quickly and so that was that was in 2018 and I actually have people who old friends who work at Bite Dance who were some of the early employees at TikTok and so I said this sort of like first-hand early experience of power of the platform and also inside of the information from my old friends and as I saw its progression globally I felt that this was definitely something worth writing about definitely worthy of a book I felt it's going to change the world in the same way that it changed China and that did take place eventually you know as a journey I didn't expect Donald Trump to get involved last year but was that was quite something that was just as I was finished writing that happened but it seems to be and I didn't expect the ban in India either I had to be honest that was totally out the blue but it's it's definitely I feel in overtaken Facebook now globally as the sort of number one zeitgeist of the moment in terms of its popularity and impact culturally across the world so I was early into that and fortunately the timing was good for this book brilliant you know this is this something look we've got a bunch of people who are here and so we have Sagar who says that it's a recommendation by me you know so maybe that's me so you might as well read it and I said that caught my attention to be here now and that's the attention factory and of course he also says that it's a mad menace in India with mad roadside talent you know they are also stars so like many other platforms you know so I tend to think that every platform creates its own set of grammar its own rules and therefore the people who crack it early become the influencers and stars so yes I mean but that's what it is what did TikTok do you know that what was the trend that it caught on before somebody else and how did it sort of modify itself talk to me about that yeah so I think the predecessor for TikTok was a was an app called musically which musically was mostly successful in North America and Western Europe with teenagers it was a app with very young use base teens and pre-teens yeah and so if we go back to 2016 2017 that was the what was in the market was this very similar user experience different name different brand different user base and different team but essentially the core core experience very very similar almost identical in terms of the full screen vertical video with swipe up motion and content driven music discovery discovery of content through music but everyone thought that this experience was something that'd be successful with teenagers but was not suitable for adults if you go back that far most adults globally were very unconfident in filming themselves people were okay to take pictures but actually there weren't too many people who were that comfortable actually recording themselves using their phone I can't speak to the Indian market there as much as other you know China and Europe and and North America but certainly that's the case in many markets that it worked people weren't ready for it and I think also there was the technology wasn't there there was also the recommendation technology that we have in TikTok today wasn't wasn't as mature so there's a couple of factors that weren't ready that's where we were what did TikTok do to change that is they in China they started to they studied a fresh with a clone a clone version of musically and started targeting older users they originally started looking at art students in universities across China they went out hit the ground and signed up lots of creative art students and that was the start the key user group that they started from and and then they already had a technology a recommendation engine for a bite dance is famous for this technology in China already before before tiktok before doyen and they combined that back end technology with the musically experience and when they put those two things together it really took off in China in a big way they sort of solved the user age problem by starting fresh with a different group and they had the technology advantage as well and then once it started working the company was very aggressive in promoting it and spending on advertising to acquire new users and then very very aggressive in the international expansion which started from most of the Asian markets the first markets for tiktok were places like Vietnam Thailand South Korea Japan and then also India a little bit later and then late and then finally they they acquired musically and went into western markets as well so quite a journey but you can't really pinpoint one thing that they did well actually as many things some matter I mean I think if I were to just do a quick recap of what you described it seems to be that you know it starts off as the clone of musically then you know sort of really gets people to be comfortable with the vertical video format you know swipe up usage ease of creation and then buys musically in some sense kills the competition integrates the best of that experience and then you sort of launch tiktok which then in the international market becomes a rage so is it called tiktok in China or is it tiktok only in the international market in China it's called Douyin and Douyin is actually a separate app it's completely separate in the user base and the content base so you cannot search for Douyin content on tiktok because it's it's not there it's on a completely different servers but they are sister apps so they they share many of the same features and functionality and typically new features on tiktok have already been tested on Douyin so Douyin is kind of like a window into the future of tiktok and that's that's been my advantage in covering this company for many years because i'm you know i cover the chinese ecosystem very closely so i you know i almost know exactly what's going to happen and i know people on the team as well so it's like i know where tiktok is going to go and the direction of the application is very clear to people who are familiar with Douyin so right now they're moving into e-commerce for example and doing lots of live stream and that's something that's been very successful on Douyin for a while now we we have one of our viewers you know Sagar says it's ease of creation you know which is also ease of view that makes it so addictive in some sense completely agree but you know i want to draw a parallel in some sense we've had you know many of the bollywood music directors who've migrated from let's say the regional language cinema you know whether it was Bengali or Tamil or Malayalam etc all of the regional language music they would very often create the base music you know in the regional language test marketed if it works well they would sort of bring it into the larger market of bollywood and then sort of it would really take off so i can think of three midget examples you know whether it's adi barman or sd barman or you know many of these people really did that it seems that that's what is happening with tiktok that you're kind of Douyin is doing the you know the china market you get a preview it works well you sort of take it global and scale it up so in some sense there's a scale market which is already available and you're sort of trying out the features in that little market and trying that out so give us a view of what's happening in Douyin which we should expect to see going forward um on on Douyin as the key thing as i mentioned just now is e-commerce and and live stream e-commerce in particular but also short video e-commerce i think the format the length of the videos is increasing over time so we see that actually it's not 15 second videos anymore it's like 30 seconds 60 second two minutes five minutes up to you know a full length sort of even even once they even did a full length movie on on tiktok i'm sorry on Douyin rather that for spring festival last year they launched a a full length feature film was available to watch through through the platform so two hours but that's quite extreme usually it's you know it's gone up to the typical videos you're going to see there now are actually more like one minute to two minute long is actually very common but still it's still with you know the 15 second format occasionally in there so it's becoming a bit more like youtube in that respect the video formats are becoming longer and i think you're going to see that youtube becomes more like tiktok they've launched their version of tiktok youtube shorts and so the two platforms will look a little bit more similar over time and that's you know that's to be expected we've seen that in china with the competition for for Douyin they've sort of become more and more similar over time and as one expands into longer form content and the others expand into shorter form so there's that i think those are two trends i think also you're going to see that the actual content ecosystem over time develops and it's still very early and immature actually for tiktok there's still lots of you know content like we're doing right now for this audience right this is for a LinkedIn audience you wouldn't expect tiktok to be an appropriate platform for this kind of content but in china it is on Douyin we could do something like this and it would you know for a mature serious audience a business audience talking about topics that you know would not be of no interest to teenagers this would be totally normal content to see on Douyin i believe that's the future of tiktok you're going to see that the demographics get older and older and the content formats divers continue to diversify and you find more types of content that you would expect on maybe LinkedIn on YouTube and just for numbers you know how large is the user base you know on tiktok you know what are some of the numbers if you do a comparison just so globally it's over a billion users on tiktok now which is not including china and not including india of course and the downloads are about three i've just surpassed three billion globally in china Douyin has 600 million daily active users we don't know how many monthly active users because they didn't announce that just daily yeah so that's that's quite a lot i mean that's like i'm from the uk so that's like 10 times the population of uk daily active users so and a daily active user consumes about 45 minutes of content typically something in that region so that's that's a lot of attention that's a lot of attention a lot of time spent in the app and it's in in many markets it's still growing very fast in we just saw there's some data published a few days ago showing how the time spent in tiktok has surpassed the time spent in youtube in america now and in markets like the uk where i'm from it's already far surpassed people are spending much more time on tiktok than on youtube so and and it's still increasing it's still a rocket ship going going up so the impact it had in the china market was very severe on the competitors everybody tried to copy it because it was suddenly the big thing and it really took away a lot of advertising revenue from their companies like Tencent and Baidu i expect it will eventually have a similar impact on the financials of facebook and google i think all companies can still grow but you know it will slow down their their ad revenue growth there will be some shift of of corporate spend on global advertising moving from facebook and google to to bite dance you know in the next over the next three to five years for sure thank you that's great for advertisers as well because global advertisers always complain that online advertising is essentially a duopoly and you have to give money either to facebook or google these days well now there's a third player in town as well which is which is a bite dance it will become a you know probably the number three name in global online ad spend i expect and and what is the size of bite dancers overall revenue i mean just uh yeah so i think it was something if i remember correctly oh 36 billion uh for for last year growing over 100 year on year um with uh valuation of the company is you know it's not public listed company so it's um there's different estimates on the private market i think the more accurate ones would replace the valuation at roughly 400 billion dollars that could be as high as half half a trillion dollars now given that how it's continuing to grow and grow and half a trillion would put it at you know half of facebook's valuation essentially which i think is very reasonable given what what the assets that they have i think that's you know probably even underpricing given that potential and so those who joined us late you know we are really talking about the book the attention factory and you know you have the author right here matt brevin who's talking to us about what makes tiktok you know the attention factory what makes them so popular that's what we are trying to discuss one of the things uh you know he talks about was you know he says that it's a combination of many factors yeah it's not just one but you know they they introduced formats the also the content one of the pieces i wanted to focus on was you know the content part of it isn't that you know when you do things like you know cat videos etc way more popular than say Ted Ted talks does it tell us something about the fact that you know there are more frivolous people than serious people is that we you know the reason why some of these things grow what's your thing it does that's exactly what it says uh it's the sad fact of the matter is most people want to be entertained and they want to be entertained with often very mindless content and that is actually on on most platforms the most popular forms of content and definitely serious forms of content educational forms of content are still popular but much less so most people you know do not strive to better themselves on these platforms they strive to kill time in enjoyable fashion and that is their choice you know entertainment is a need for everybody but it would you know especially in its early days tiktok and and musically became in for a lot of criticism for mindless content and people dancing silly comedy skits and lip sync and things like this and these forms of content before the the platform was only about this it was only for for these kinds of content you know that that's misleading i think certainly in the early stages those were the predominant forms of of content today that doesn't you know it doesn't actually describe the tiktok experience today if you want to find educational content there's plenty and the the beauty of the platform is it discovers your content preferences without you expressing them so that's the that's the recommendation aspect you don't need to search on on tiktok to find content content finds you and that's one of the things we talk about in the book it's a you know a recommendation engine is the opposite of a search engine you know a search engine is you searching for content people looking for information and a recommendation is information looking for people that's that's brilliant which is why you know one of the things that in behavioral science they say the opposite of a good idea can also be a good idea that you know search engine is a good idea but then you know when you have something like tiktok that's also a good idea but i think you know much as i when you talk about the fact that there are more people interested in cat videos than TED talks i think you know there is there is something which is a broader phenomenon of our obsession or need for entertainment has gone up dramatically higher you know i think we moved out of the you know the industrial economy where you kind of work hard for like six days perhaps and then you kind of take a little break and then go back to the grinding wheel now it's this whole question that why do i need to be doing this i mean why and why it's not bad to be entertained the only catch is that you do see a lot of the lowest common denominator kind of content coming up you've been an edtech does that worry you i mean you're not in edtech right now i think it platforms our reflection of society to be honest the in what happens offline is essentially brought online and so we must accept that the needs of most people are quite quite low the the preferences of content and maybe you don't realize that until you go on the platforms like this and you can see it for yourself but i don't think those needs would be any different in in other mediums such as television you know or even older you know radio newspaper before you know like most of people want fairly simple entertainment and they don't want to you know they're using it to pass time so you know this is just a reflection of of society and i wish you know people would personally you know for my family and the people that i can influence you know i would encourage them to consume more stimulating intellectually stimulating forms of content but you know at the end of the day it's everyone's choice and i think it's also you know reflection of society and and it's place the value of education is placed in society if we look in you know i'm very familiar with china in china there's a very strong value placed on education and and and so children study extremely hard and i hear the same things for for for india but you know in in the uk you know there's not that you know there's there's not that same emphasis on education so a lot of people just do want you know fairly simple forms of content and uh when growing up watching the british television i found most of it very you know very mindless as well what was on television but it was appealing to the masses you know a lot of people did like that so i can't judge um and and you may you may have a very strong insight out there uh you know and the reason is uh i was looking at this book called by payal alora she wrote this book called the next billion you know which is really talking about the media habits of the next billion users and she was talking about this experiment where you know when people are given uh opportunity to view content you know so they gave people uh mobile phones and you know with data loaded onto that um and made it available you know oh i can't hear you now uh the the sounds gone and i'm sorry you know one of the things that happened was that um payal alora's book the next billion talks about the fact that there is actually a time where um when they gave mobile phones to users you know in the sort of the marginalized societies uh with people from the lower economic background they were given this and the content was the data cards were loaded and they could look for whatever they wanted to and when they sort of came back and sort of studied their media watching habits they were actually shocked to see that um practically very very few of them and negligible amount of people actually looked at using educational content most of them were either surfing for you know either just entertainment per se you know these little short videos funny laughter and one of the pieces that payal alora's conclusion was that why should we believe that entertainment is the privilege of the rich uh you know the the poor also have an equal right to look at entertainment and why should we think that well they need to first worry about education you know so i think uh you know what do you have to say about that perspective there's a great quote in the book uh from one of the founders of of musically and a former ceo of tiktok alex jew he said you know uh education kind of goes against human nature to some degree uh and uh entertainment goes with the human nature uh so it's better if you're starting a new content platform to go with the human nature not go against uh so originally uh this is the point i should have brought up earlier perhaps originally the very earliest version of musically the idea they had as a startup team was to do a short videos for education uh to create mini lessons and so that's that was their original idea it didn't work it failed very very quickly uh and they one of the lessons there was that you know education is is tough it's really tough it's much easier to go with something like like entertainment that has a very large uh total total adjustable market right the tam of entertainment is basically everybody um everybody's in the market for entertainment only certain people are in the market for education and actually if you look at things like uh MOOCs right massive open online courses which were a huge buzzword in education um a few years ago the idea that oh we could take all of the educational courses and put them online and then people open that up to everyone and it can democratize education around the world what they actually found out was MOOCs the completion rate of MOOCs is is tiny and most people start them they never finish them uh it's very difficult to actually maintain that uh you know without the social uh camaraderie of doing that offline with others uh without committing to it or being forced to do it you know as you as all children are forced to go to school by law um if you don't have something like that it's very difficult to maintain the discipline as an individual uh to keep with you know what consuming educational content uh for for an extended period of time um whereas entertainment uh has none of those problems and and uh you know I always thought that when you look at you know India has one of the highest rates of people signing up for the MOOCs and one of the lowest rates of completion and this is and and when you look at why the corporate you know learning and development teams they are always puzzled that you know we are giving them access to all kinds of three right yeah three you know why aren't people doing it and I think that's one part of the problem is I think people learn with others so education is a social experience you know which is why today when people are doing the classes online uh they're saying why am I paying you know so in so particular college uh uh is is like why am I paying them because I'm really doing it on Zoom so you know how is that different from an online course or a TED talk which I could watch with free so I think that's fundamentally a piece that education is social b it needs somebody who's an expert who walks with you this whole business of do it yourself uh you know education is different from hanging a picture on the wall so you know it's not going to be really super successful if it's done like that for a few people yes but that's true for anything that that you do in the world for a few people it'll work but if you are really looking at you know I think that was the uh to me a big takeaway because for me when you say that entertainment goes with human nature and education goes against human nature uh that I think was a very powerful takeaway for me I mean I've always grappled with this entire thing um conversations you're not a great way for people to learn but then it needs another person it needs you know an expert to say well what you said is right and what Abhijit said is wrong I mean so you need that kind of a moderation so it's a complex equation I want to sort of you know look at there are three questions that I liked about your book and you know for those who came in late this is the book that we are talking about Matt Brennan's book called attention factory I kind of thought that are these short videos just simply um there as a me way to kill boredom I mean is it that we are you know at one level I see that the value of education as a guarantee for jobs has gone down so I think to some extent people are saying what do I do with all the stuff that I learned because it doesn't help me either get promoted or find a job so there's a utilitarian view and very few people actually will say is learning for the sake of learning so I think that's one part of it it sort of reduces the audience size but I had my question is um you know you raise these three things why tick tock why bite dance why short video these are the three questions I wanted to explore what what do you what do you have to say about this why tick tock you know is it timing is it so yeah I mean there's not one answer to that timing definitely uh you know the technology had to be mature for something like this to happen uh in the indian market for tick tock to really explode uh you know you had to have ubiquitous low cost uh 4g right you had to have geo essentially right you could without geo you can't have uh tick tock being popular in villages across india so that infrastructure needs to be there smartphones need to be there and smartphones with big screens uh that and good cameras right uh it's very easy for us to take it for granted you know they would you think back to iphone one uh how how bad that phone was uh the the camera in it was terrible uh you know even iphone two iphone three uh the screen was tiny you know these phones tick tock's not going to work on that that phone you need to wait for the screen to get much bigger uh you need to wait for uh technology like facial recognition uh you can't do filters right so the big part of the tick tock experience and these other tick tock you know reels on instagram or or shorts on youtube which you are still in the indian market and listeners might might be still users of today um they the filters on those require you know technology to recognize a face and be able to track that as it moves around uh and overlay things over over that over that face typically is how most of the filters work so you need facial recognition technology for that to work uh that needs to become ubiquitous and easy to develop for uh you need to classify uh the content one of the big big problems was automation of of and classification of content now this is a problem that's been on youtube for many many years right so i'll just explain briefly what that is it's quite an interesting thing is that um if we go back 10 years um on youtube uh there was no back end infrastructure to automate tagging of content so you can upload a video it could be the best video in the world but if you don't give it a title and if you don't tag it and say tell youtube with the metadata that you add to the video if you just say hey watch this it's amazing and upload it to youtube 10 years ago uh youtube can't classify it right they doesn't know what's in the video it can't see in the video right now they can when you upload something to tick tock when you upload something to um all of the image major platforms um including linkedin uh they are actually they can actually see what's in the video right the the technology is there today that they can break it down frame by frame and through neural networks they can analyze and say oh this video is a dog on a beach and with 99 accuracy right it's never 100 but like the algorithms can say okay and we're 99 sure that this and that's how they stop things like pornography being uploaded to the platform that's how they automate that so um for short videos in particular that's a very important technology that needs to be there if it's not there they can't accurately match content with users uh without knowing what because most people don't tag that videos very well is the reality of how it works on a platform like tick tock so um and sometimes they tag they write titles are the misleading so they have to the technology has to be in place uh many many things actually for something like this to take off so it's actually relatively late um in the sort of mobile um the mobile era i think that tick tocker is a late mover right um it took many of the competitors by surprise that people thought oh you know basically content is done and uh the you know youtube's one video content right globally and that's that's going to be the platform and then we got netflix which is you know longer form content again that's it and people will sort of thought well that's done there's musically there but it's only for teenagers that's how people thought about video content you know four years ago uh and so it was only because all of these the combination of all of these technologies came together with this one company bite dance why bite dance because they specialize in recommendation engine that's their famous technology in china and they had that ready before tiktok before doyen uh their original uh flagship product was called totiao which is a household name in china uh it's it's it's not outside china you can't you can't use totiao but totiao is essentially a news feed it's like the facebook news feed but with no friends and that's powered by recommendation engine technology so already before tiktok bite dance had the best recommendation content recommendation engine in china so that's why bite dance they already um had the team in place to make this happen uh but nobody really understood how powerful it could be to combine that recommendation engine with short video when they put them together finally uh it just exploded globally and took everyone by surprise so um that's the you know part of the story of tiktok uh and why it's coming from china and not coming from silicon valley because that's the you know when you think about it all of the other platforms the big content platforms globally including linkedin are all american um predominantly so and in this is the first big global content platform that's not american uh you could say Spotify and as others some other examples but when we talk about like really big ones the biggest like like facebook um you know tiktok's in that league and in fact it's it's i would argue it's it's number one now it's ahead of the facebook products like instagram you know tiktok's been the number one most downloaded app in the world now for a couple of years ahead of of youtube and and facebook etc so um it's definitely in the same league uh but definitely very much a late mover and one that took everybody by surprise and i think you know uh what what you are saying is the classic definition of disruption which is that there's an underserved market you know so you kind of looked at teens uh you know that's where musically came in it you know and people said that's for teenagers to upload silly videos and then suddenly like you know it moves up and then you know the adults are using it as well you talk about two elements one is content which i believe one of the reasons for its popularity i would say is the ease of copying you know tiktok actually encourages you to copy which is again i think going with human nature because doing original content is too much of hard work but if you say you take this stuff and simply add replace you know take a book like this replace the name and say abhijit bhadiri and that'd be so easy right then you could sort of say that again so the one of the big breakthroughs of the musically and tiktok is what they say lower the barrier to content creation and so this is something we talk about in the book quite a bit um is that what's the barrier to content creation on on on youtube right it's actually quite high when you think about it to create your own youtube channel typically you need to master some editing software you may need to buy a camera you're lighting you will have to think of original content all the time because you know it's your channel you can't copy other people you need to be original you need to be heavily motivated to create that content what's the barrier to content creation on on tiktok you don't need any special equipment the editing software is built into the application itself it's very easy to learn so the technical requirements very low um the expiration and the creativity requirements also very low because there's always challenges always new filters coming out and you all you need to do as you said is copy so you see something's popular on the platform a song is popular a filter is popular or a challenge is popular okay i copy it and you can do exactly the same you don't need don't need to think right i do the same dance i do the same joke i do the same filter okay and then put it out and then the motivational barrier is also reduced because these things are trending now the challenge is trending today um you need you need you need to jump on the bandwagon now tomorrow and it will go down right so everything is going so fast on the platform that the you you can't wait till tomorrow to make content as too late something's trending now and you and literally everybody has a chance you see that uh my there's so many accounts where you see the videos uh engagement very low very low very very low and then one video you know 10 million 100 million views or whatever and so this gives you this feeling that everyone has a chance and uh you know the next video could be the one that makes you famous so i think uh you know i remember the ice bucket challenge and various things that happened you know there and people were doing all kinds of silly things but then as you said it's a very short window for opportunity so it's scarce you gotta say that that's an easy one i could do that if you don't do it today tomorrow it could be gone and so you've lost your chance to become this huge celebrity um and i think that's also another thing that tiktok really has worked very well that it sort of just makes content creation very easy and i think that's a major piece of what most other software or you know apps uh kind of say that no that content is not yours because like you put up a youtube video of where you put a clip of a song instagram or something but they will flag it off and say that i'm sorry this is a content violation copyright violation and now you're worried about getting sued in this particular case go for it you know you like it copy it and distribute it all over the place so i think that's a very significant piece of um how do you get that going which is why exactly exactly there's two sides of it you can think there's the technology side which in the book i call sort of a data flywheel right and then there's a content flywheel as well and so that's that's the other side the ecosystem of creators on the platform and fostering that ecosystem because on tiktok well on all major user generated content platforms users become creators right you were on tiktok as sorry you were on linkedin as a user consuming content before you became a creator and at some point you decided i'm going to be a creator on on linkedin not just a consumer not just a normal user but the jump there how many people who are consuming content on linkedin also create content on linkedin i don't know what that ratio is but i guarantee you tiktok's ratio is much higher because it's it's it's yeah it's about as low because the barrier to do it is so is so low it's really just so easy and if you there's no there's no pressure as well right to to think about something or to make something that's very special you just follow the trend that's all you need to do yeah and and many of the other platforms i think you know there's also a sort of implicit judgment that you know there's a certain kind of content which when people post on linkedin there are people who are making fun of that they're okay all right indias won the cricket match next you'll see next 200 posts which are all going to be about three leadership lessons from virat koli or five leadership lessons from indias victory uh two leadership lessons from my cat three leadership lessons from my neighbor i you know and when people do that i mean those are the memes that get floated around and people get ripped for those whereas in tiktok there is no judgment i mean that's it i mean you know you have three leadership lessons from the cat go for it and because i'll also add my own version to it so i think it's also that um i think which is not spoken about as much i think there's no it's a fairly judgment-free content you know because everybody's doing relatively relatively yes but which brings me to which brings me to this entire element that you know we've got a couple of questions here in terms of regulation etc for this medium and uh you know there is a whole and it's one of the battles in every content company is going to grapple with how do you moderate content because you know it is how does the video automatically make out that it is you know content which is let's say for a cooking show you're showing certain kind of meat the other could be you know something which is not so pleasant uh or it could be that you know content is the content is there let's say it's not adult content being served up to the miners which is one of the you know pieces that's been often said about all the content creators what do you think is the answer to that how does one deal with this yeah so on a platform imagine how many videos are uploaded to tiktok every day it's not in the millions it's you know there's a billion users probably something close to a billion videos are uploaded on the yeah you know because you actually are with with linked sorry with uh with musically it used to be that um there's roughly one video day per user uploaded it's incredibly high um yeah I know that that was for teenagers but um it's it's it's in the hundred let's say it's in the tens and hundreds of millions of of fresh pieces of content original pieces of content every day so how you know it's an incredibly huge task to manage that first I just want to get I don't think it's very difficult for us to imagine that number and and think about what that actually means in terms of like how would you do that it's just impossible to have humans do every watch every single video in that way without hiring just any you know incredible number of people they having said that bite dance does hire an incredible number of people to do exactly that something like 10 to 20 of their entire staff are content moderation staff who are whose job is to monitor content on the platform both within China where the regulations are very strict and and globally as well and that content moderation tends to happen more locally these days so they let you know the company likes to keep that localized because it's not just yes there's clear cut examples okay this is pornography great okay that's simple we know we need to take that down um but if there's a most a lot of it is also sort of edge use cases and local things that are sensitive in the market maybe something that requires you to understand the local language and understand the local laws and regulations to know that this this content's an issue this is a problem and we need to we need to do something so they do hire all over globally over the world they have teams as well it's not not all centralized but most of the moderation is automated right so essentially it first goes through an automated system every single video that's uploaded on the platform is broken down frame by frame and analyzed through neural network algorithms to a judge what is it what is actually in this video right like what is there anything sensitive here is there violence etc and also for IP issues right is this content that is you know from a disney movie right that obviously we don't have the rights to show this or is it from the you know from the Olympics where the rights for this Olympic show is is given to uh you know CNBC or whoever um or is it copying another creator very very common problem where um if what what people do unscrupulous marketers typically will say okay this account's popular i take i download their videos remove the watermark and then upload them again on my account right um see that's a big problem for TikTok they can get messed up and they before they know it they don't know which account created the first video right like does it from this one or this one uh so they're going to solve all these problems and they they do have most of that automated but once a video hits a certain limit of views right so it's been through um it's reached a certain level of engagement on the platform uh and it's been and it's been flagged somehow as perhaps being an issue then it goes for a human review right so that reduces i think and then any video that hits um a certain high level of engagement right will go for a manual review no matter what so it once you get into the millions of views that all of that stuff is is seen by human at some stage uh if it's flagged or it's not flagged if it's from reliable account or wherever um simply because of the sheer amount of exposure it's getting um and so in this way they make it manageable to have a hybrid system of human plus machine automation of content moderation it's not perfect there's still ways to game it and it's a constant game of cat and mouse always you know people find out new ways to trick what's going on and they improve it over time um but it broadly works okay um but we have to remember that you know there's bad people in the real world and when they come online they take all the bad things with them and uh there's nothing that any company uh or government really can do that we just have to find create systems create processes to try and make it better and better our ways to manage these and that's different for every country because every country has different laws regulations and so the localization yeah and yeah different understanding of freedom personal freedom personal rights uh you know these aren't universal every country has their version so uh it's definitely something that I feel um as the internet penetrates more and more of our lives and especially with COVID it's become really a realization that the internet industry is so large now so important and it's not something where if we go back 10 years you know people have this idea that you know cyberspace where it's kind of like this virtual world where it didn't affect the real economy uh and that you know that that that time's gone it's it's long gone now uh every business relies on internet in some way and so um we need to start regulating this as the same way that we regulate any essential service such as electricity or gas or water uh internet is is the same and content platforms are the same as television or radio or newspapers uh you know they need to be regulate have a similar approach to regulation and I think all over the world everyone is struggling with this and I think there's a lot happening around around these issues globally of what is the right approach given that internet is very very different in how it operates and continually evolving and and I think one of the one of the pieces that you mentioned Matt is what makes it complicated because in one country you may have religious freedom but not political freedom in some place you may not have the freedom to criticize an a powerful individual but you can criticize the government in some places not the other way around I mean there are all kinds of variations in some places okay to show something as food you know cooking something I mean I've heard that comment about a number of cooking videos you know because when somebody's cooking non-vegetarian food or you know stuff that you don't eat personally you find it repulsive because food is cultural you know so you find it repulsive for somebody else that's a delicacy so you know when people do this it's very hard to say that you know don't show this because you know for that person that person eats it every day or whatever it's you know so exactly very yeah and and before we used to think that internet was this sort of layer on top of the other daily world that didn't really interact with with other businesses but now that's totally not true I expect there to be more regulation I expect the internet to fragment globally further and further in terms of how it's operating especially there's another big question which is data and you know the reality is that most of our personal data that is unavoidable to create when we consume and on these platforms you know you're just spewing out data by by actually just using the platforms no matter what and that is being stored where is that being stored how is that being used what is your rights to delete that if you ask if you want it to be deleted again this will fragment globally and and every country will have to make some tough choices over how they do this now India is a fantastic example here because I think the India market's so big and I think it's it's a market where you have the local talent in order to create your own services of scale that could be competitive globally perhaps even and and so there's a question but right now a lot of the certainly the early infrastructure is mostly as I mentioned before American how could you create foster an ecosystem where more of that infrastructure is local I'm sure that's something that local government in India must be thinking about for a long time now how do we build our Silicon Valley how do we build our own digital infrastructure and make that you know of a similar you know bring bring everyone to use to build our own not only build our own local companies but I have you know everything low more localized in terms of the digital infrastructure the data being within the country and under under our control and then China obviously is an example there of how they approached it you know quite aggressively early on and have built up local infrastructure and have built up their local companies which are you know TikTok is and Bite Dance is a prime example yeah but I think more and more markets are going to be you know looking towards these examples and asking these questions of why do we need you know to have American companies in charge of this stuff you know it could be local local companies totally and with that we come to the hour and you know just once again we were in conversation with Matt Brennan the author of this book Attention Factory the real story about TikTok and what makes it so addictive is it short form is it video is it timing is it the ease of content creation is it the encouragement of copying what is it and you have to read the book to figure that out and Matt it was lovely to be able to have this conversation with you thank you so much for being there all the very best for your book