Good Morning. Hello. How are you? #1463
A crazy dream, Sleep Token, the last Galaxie 500 show in Boston, Tariffs, TikTok and Uli Behringer and how a financial journalist needs to interview him RIGHT NOW about Tariffs. A terrible lawyer and FISH for the ponds.
Good morning! It is cold and rainy in Somerville, MA today. Which is sad but also kinda a relief cuz it was supposed to be rainy this whole trip and the last few days have been very pretty. So I guess I’ll take it. Jane is in the other room doing her DuoLingo. It is 9:36 AM because I slept gloriously and do not have a meeting this morning and we went to Dunkin this morning. Three different women came in at three different times with furry hoods with indeterminate animal ears. Porter Square Cambridge a hotbed of furrydom. Call the morality police.
Happy birthday to my Ex-Girlfriend Jamie, and happy thirty-fourth birthday of the last Galaxie 500 show in Boston, their second-to-last ever. They played BU’s Walter Brown arena, opening for the Cocteau Twins on the second leg of the Heaven or Las Vegas tour and it was awesome. Except I hooked up with a girl and then wrote about it in my journal and my girlfriend read it and not unreasonably dumped me. Young people are so dumb.
Had a crazy dream last night that I was transported to an island that had been a Survivor-style reality TV show that the world abandoned and forgot about, about five years earlier. There were good guys and bad guys on the island before, during the show, but after five years of abandonment they’d all settled into a makeshift society, with some dropouts still hiding in the woods of the island. One thing that was interesting is that during the show, the producers had made a sort-of Ptomkin village fake modern town with a Main Street and everything. And you’d think that they would have all settled there. But instead they saw it is a totem of their opressors, and mostly ignored it, except for occasional foraging raids. It was not entirely clear what I was doing there — I arrived through the cardboard Zoom tube used at the end of the Lego Movie. A sort of portal. And I had been involved, somehow, in the old days. But i was unaware of the situation: I was not involved in their abandonment. I feel it is important for you, the reader, to know that
We are listening to the new Sleep Token single. It is bad. Wait didn’t this band used to be good? Like in the 90’s? Am I remembering that wrong? I am probably remembering that wrong. Do I need to go listen to a bunch of old Sleep Token now?? Crap.
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Tariffs! Absolute insanity. And I believe the only authority the president has to do these tariffs is he is operating under his previously-declared national emergency regarding fentanyl? Or did he make up a new national emergency? Because, you know. Presidents do not actually have tariff authority, that resides with congress. Fantastic. The markets… oo they just opened let’s go look.
Lol. The Dow is 2%. Nasdaq down 4%, Tesla down 3% hate to see it, Applovin down another 8% boo hoo. Apple down 8%. All the tech stocks I keep an eye on down. Which is interesting, because most tech companies are services, and services are exempt from tariffs, but of course that’s just a made-up rule that any country could change and start charging a tariff on our tech services. Seems inevitable, really.
Everyone is suggesting that these tariffs are going to break the economy. Or, of course, that Trump will undo a bunch of them in the next few days. Maybe these things are right. But I think the real answer is: no one fucking knows. This tariff experiment lays bare the absolute inadequacy of the entire academic class, left and right, government, and media. Trump doesn’t have any idea what these tariffs will do. No pundit does. Things have changed so radically on this planet – in terms of globalization and politics and technology and economy — since the last trade war, that none of us can really know. We can guess! I guess it will be bad! But I could be wrong? I mean, I doubt “bad” is wrong but I strongly suspect there will be some fresh hells, utterly unanticipated, some random absolutely vital item runs out, and the rapid “adjustment” by Trump trying to undo, like, a man-made toilet paper or catalytic converter crisis will… just not work. No one fucking knows.
This, to me, is the key of this: no one knows what decimating the government will do. No one knows what a massive global trade war will do. But these people: they are too stupid and too meglomaniacal to accept this. Elon has no idea what repercussions his actions will cause. He doesn’t care, but he also is stupid, so he thinks he knows a thing that is fundamentally unknowable.
While we’re at it, something else that no one fucking knows: what’s going to happen to TikTok. It has never mattered that this American company or that American company wants to buy TikTok. ByteDance, it’s owner, and the government of China, their master, have given no indication whatsoever that they want to sell it. The Tik Tok law does not make them sell it. They have to sell it or shut it down in America (Trump’s breather that “saved TikTok” is expiring on Saturday). There is zero indication ByteDance and China are going to sell TikTok to any of these fuckers.
And we just tossed a 100%+ tariff on China in a slap on the face as they have to make the final decision.
Tariffs ignored, were I ByteDance and China, I would not sell TikTok. Selling TikTok means selling a usable copy of my amazing Algorithm that no one else has (I, Rick Webb, do not fully buy this but everyone else sure does so I guess it is the reality of the situation). I, TikTok, would just leave America.
There is zero incentive for me to sell. I do not need the money and also fuck Blackstone and Applovin and Amazon and every single company that has offered to pick over my carcass, they would now be my eternal enemies (until business reality deems otherwise). For now. I am rich, I own the brand, it is popular and making money in the rest of the world, and this ban will not last forever. Bytedance is going to live longer than Donald Trump or even, probably, Democracy!
Wise people think that the tariff issue may lead to a resolution: China will let TikTok be sold in order to have its tariffs eased. This might happen. But I can see a million reasons why tariffs might not factor into it: America is my premiere geopolitical foe and they are in the middle of shooting themselves in the face, why would I stop that. I still have the rest of the world as a market and while that is small compared to America, I can dominate it in a way America cannot since they are, well, busy shooting themselves in the face.
I mean, sure, things might be worse for me, China, at this moment, but an entire planet where I am the unfettered, indisputable king of global trade and the economy? Not a terrible consolation prize!
There is also an uneven value proposition: let’s be generous and say TikTok is worth $200 billion. It isn’t, but it doesn’t matter because the tariffs are worth, oh, six trillion. They are not equal.
But the biggest problem is that Trump cannot be trusted, I could do the deal, and then he could (and probably would!) just turn the tariffs back on, and then I won’t have TikTok to bargain with anymore. There’s no way for China to “undo” the deal when he inevitably betrays me.
Now, maybe China takes the deal anyway. I wouldn’t, but maybe they decide the two trillion is bigger than the two hundred billion, some trade bro lackey of Trump’s talks like a grown-up and convinces them that he won’t renege. Maybe. But, man. It sure seems unlikely to me.
China has not been talking to anyone in America about selling TikTok. There is no negotiating going on. It’s just a bunch of people showily saying “I want to buy TikTok” so they have content for their press releases and linkedIns and to massage their stock. It is all theater.
Saying you want to buy TikTok right now is like when Herman Cain said he was running for president. No buddy you’re running for a Fox News job.
All right all right moving on.
Thank you to everyone who donated to Breadline in my mom’s honor. They dropped Val a line and said they had received numerous donations on behalf of Kathy Webb in the last day. It means the world. If you would like to support an organization that bas been fighting hunger in Alaska since I was a kid, here is the donation link.
I met just the dumbest lawyer in the world yesterday. That’s not entirely true, I had talked to them once before. But both times it has been utterly insufferable. I swear to god they are perpetually stoned, and not in a fun way. They have zero interest in their client’s actual needs, just assume they know what’s best. They wanted me to pay on the spot, tacky. There were substantial documents to review, but they had not reviewed them in advance, told us so, told us they could not recall the documents, but then five minutes later were authoritatively telling me what was in the documents. I had fun with that one, I was like “oh cool so you got the documents’ and they had to say no, they did not, right after they had talked about what’s in them, and I just let them stew in that obvious contradiction for a spell. Then they eventually did get them and just… silently started reading them on the call, expecting us to pay their $600/hr fee while we sat there in silence. And sure I suspect I gotta pay their fee for them to refresh their memory, but it doesn’t need to happen while you’re wasting our time as well.
I have probably talked to 10 laywers this week from like four different firms and literally no one else came close. Just utterly useless.
BUT, in some good news, we bought about $2,000 of fish for the new ponds on the storage facility farm. Rocky and Ricrdo and Michelle drove to some awesome looking farm and garden supply store and bought a bunch of giant bags of fish and drove em to Red’s and set em free in the ponds and geez boss, wish I coulda been there for that one. Fish! Swim free little fishies!
I’m gonna go there with Jane and we are going to name every one. Okay we’re not gonna do that.
Watched this pretty amazing interview on YouTube yesterday. Uli Behringer, the founder of Behringer audio. Man. So much to unpack.
First: I did not realize there was a dude named Behringer behind Behringer, so even that was moderately interesting. But beyond that, his origin story was fascinating: his dad purchased a pipe organ and spent most of his life automating the thing, earning several patents. He went to a synth store when he was a kid and they kicked him out because he was never going to have enough money to buy a synth. His dad said “why buy one you could make one” and away he went. He was dating this girl whose dad sounds like he was a sort of proto VC/ad guy in Germany who loved what he did, made hm the Behringer logo for free, and acted as his first mentor. He is still friends with the ex girlfriend.
There is a lot of angst and anger in the music industry about Behringer. They make a lot of cool shit, but they have done two things that piss a lot of people off: 1) they have bought a lot of struggling but beloved audio brands that people love (TC Electronic, Midas) and did not continue all the old products and all the old support, and some people accuse them of making the new products more cheaply. And 2) Behringer is one of the many companies in the audio world that “rips off” old audio designs — primarily, though not limited to synths. This means that you can buy Berhinger versions of dozens of popular synths. Some of these are old and out of production and the used ones cost tens of thousands of dollars now. But some of them are far less old, and Behringer is routinely accused of “taking money from these companies while they don’t make their own stuff.” They do, in fact, make some pretty solid synths of their own, but there is some truth to this. It is all perfectly legal, and Behringer is by no means alone in this regard, though they are the 200 pound gorilla in the “inspired by” audio world.
So I knew all this, but I did not know three things that I think are relevant. And look, yes, this Sweetwater interview was not 60 Minutes. It was laudatory and they did not ask a single difficult question. But I doubt he was outright lying? Anyway, the first two things I learned are anecdotal and indicative but not conclusive:
Uli Behringer has lived and breathed audio engineering and manufacture his entire life.
He seems to still be friends with his exes and all of his earlier mentors and does not seem to be a bridge burner.
And the third — and I think this by far the most interesting — is that Uli Behringer now lives in China, right next door to his factory. He is absolutely obsessed with manufacturing and is spending his life perfecting the manufacturing lines for Behringer. He is obsessed with the idea of having a fully robotic manufacturing line, no humans.
This is, of course, ethically both good and bad. It’s in China. This, of course, leads to interesting interplay with the new tariffs, I would wager that Behringer is fucked in the US, its largest market, in the short term. And of course, China is kinda evil. And as a labor fan I do not particularly see anything noble about a factory with no humans in it.
But it’s also super interesting in several ways! First, in theory, if these tariffs are going to last, Berhinger is the perfect test case. The actual owner of the company is the possessor of the manufacturing knowledge, and he does not need Chinese special tiny-handed, shall we generously and ambigously call them, workers. It is probably not easy — he would still need Chinese equipment and presumably the temporary assistance of Chinese engineers to install it — but in theory Behringer is a company almost perfectly positioned for onshoring to America or any country that has friendly trade relations with America oh wait there aren’t any.
So, I doubt any financial reporters are putting two and two together, but on this day, April 3, 2025, in theory Uli Behringer should be one of the most sought after interview subjects in the world because I would absolutely 100% trade on information in that dude’s brain.
ALSO, I mean, the idea of a major electronics corporation, the fucking owner sitting there, in China, 100% focused on manufacturing innovation? I mean, how in god’s name does any other company even stand a chance? You gonna buy a Roland keyboard, of suposedly better quality? What the fuck is Roland’s CEO doing these days? Sure doesn’t look like he’s living in Shenzhen.
ANYWAY, I was already thinking I would shamelessly fill out a ton of my studio with Behringer knockoffs of SSL and Neve modules, and I do feel kinda bad about it and I will buy the real ones as I can, but also, I will buy the real ones used? But also I am gonna buy a shit ton of Behringer sorry.
Oh he also says he gave all his money away to a foundation in honor of his mom or momlike figure that gave him his first $20k to start the company so. Maybe that’s a lie, of course: rich people love to pretend they gave their money away. But in this day and age, shit, I’ll still take a plutocrat who at least pretends.
Tesla down 6% now and Applovin down 12%. You hate to see it.
Jane story Jane story do I have a Jane story today? She stole my hat at breakfast. She refused to wear a coat out in the rain. oh! She is now aware of her bad breath in the morning and insists on brushing her teeth before snuggling. This is brand new! She hates brushing her teeth in the morning. So, I mean, kinda great in that regard. But also kinda sad? Second “body image” indicator after that day of being sad about being short (that has not returned, by the way). But also… yes. Feel bad about your bad breath and brush your teeth. That one is probably fine?
Justa mix for you today. Filled it out with some old stuff that’s been going through my head lately. Single Gun Theory, man. They were so good. I would Stan a Single Gun Theory reunion. This new Avalon Emerson song is so good. She has two new tunes out and they are both amazing.
Important news I just listened to the first Sleep Token album and it is still pretty good.
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Thanks for reading.
And hey! Maybe buy one of my books!
Good Morning, Hello, How Are You vol 1.