We found ourselves in a barbershop love triangle and like all such complications it did not end well. We go to Johnny’s Barbershop where Hassan clips our hair. But Hassan hails from Morocco and each year travels back there to see his family. During those absences we see other barbers at Johnny’s. During Hassan’s most recent absence, which stretched longer than usual, we ended up seeing Zaya for many months in a row. Her haircuts were okay but she was, we admit, easier to do business with. Johnny’s is an old school joint, a cash-only place. But with Zaya you could pay by credit card or use your phone. You could even book her online whereas with Johnny and his old school crew you had to call to make an appointment and even that was hit or miss. Before we knew it we were seeing Zaya regularly. Oh we blush at the newness of it all.
But one morning we walked in for our appointment with Zaya and there was Hassan standing outside, finishing a cigarette and assuming I was walking in to get a haircut with him since often I was a walk-in given that appointments weren’t easy to make. I stammered that I was, er, uh, um, there to see Zaya. I asked if he was back from Morocco, which was kind of a dumb question since he was standing there in front of me. I said I would give him a call next time. Zaya cut my hair and she said she was looking forward to seeing me the next month. But I went back to Hassan, trapped a bit in our barber relationship, and in truth his haircuts were somewhat better than Zaya’s. But oh, oh the convenience of Zaya. I only wished I could have it all.
At any rate I saw Hassan for a few months but then he again traveled back to Morocco and so we texted Zaya, but she had moved on, no longer barbering at Johnny’s, and she made clear in her texts that she was not interested in cutting our hair at her new place. It seemed our returning to Hassan might have offended her. Now we had neither Hassan nor Zaya. And so we walked into Johnny’s and took the luck of the draw for our barber. Our haircut from the new guy? We look not unlike the Muppet, Beaker. As we rue our bad barber relationship luck we quantify TikTok, inform you who loves baseball and explain China’s complicated AI story. It’s this week’s International Need to Know, the buzzcut of international data, the bouffant of international information.
Without further ado, here’s what you need to know.
Quantifying TikTok
The U.S. is scrutinizing TikTok like a teenager trying to learn a dance move from a, er, TikTok video. But just how popular is TikTok around the world? Putting aside the China version of TikTok, Douyin, the country with the most TikTok users is the U.S., as you can see in the first chart below. But Indonesia is just behind, followed by Brazil and Mexico. But as you see in the second chart below, TikTok is behind Facebook and YouTube in overall number of users globally. In terms of time spent on social media TikTok comes in first with users spending 23.5 hours per month on the app, just barely ahead of Youtube’s 23.1 hours. And, of course, most people use more than one social media platform. In TikTok’s case, 82.5 percent of TikTok users also use Facebook, 76.9 percent of them also use YouTube and 80.5 percent of TikTokers also use Instagram. What percentage of these users actually read a book the data doesn’t tell us. Regardless of what the U.S. does or doesn’t do with TikTok, how different will these numbers be in five years due to AI? That’s perhaps the bigger question.
Who Loves Baseball?
Today is a national holiday in the International Need to Know household—it’s opening day of the Seattle Mariners baseball team season. We will be there, of course, and given it’s late March in Seattle, we’ll be bundled up like the kid in A Christmas Story. People often think of baseball as an American sport, but as evidenced last week by the World Baseball Classic, in which the great Shohei Ohtani* helped the Japanese team win the championship, baseball is increasingly global. But where is it the most popular? The folks at Five Thirty Eight decided to try to figure this out. By total attendance, the U.S. is number one but that’s because the U.S. has a larger population and its league plays more games than other countries that play baseball. By attendance by game, the U.S. narrowly edges out Japan. By attendance per game per one million people, Puerto Rico is by far the leader followed by Japan, South Korea and Venezuela. If you look at polls of which countries are most interested in Major League Baseball, Mexico is number one followed by—wait, what?—Nigeria. However, Cuba, Japan and the Dominican Republic Google baseball the most. So where is baseball most popular? Like most things in life, it’s difficult to say. However you count it, baseball is not nearly as popular globally as football/soccer or basketball. But if it keeps attracting athletes like Shohei that might change.
*We argue he is currently the greatest athlete in the world. He combines strength and speed in a large body that is also incredibly skilled with amazing hand-eye coordination. We defy you to name a better current athlete anywhere in the world
China Corner: Complicated AI
We asserted last week that because of rapid advances in AI we are now in a new era. But what this new age will look like is impossible to know other than that our world will be transformed. For example, how will it shape the ongoing battle between authoritarianism and liberalism that Xi and Putin are so amped to pursue? We noted last month that China may have troubles with Large Language Models because the data sets in China they will be trained on will be so censored. And via a friend and China expert, we read Jeffrey Ding’s ChinaAI Substack about China’s “diffusion deficit in scientific and technological power,” including in AI. Ding asserts that while in certain areas China might have become innovative and creative, it is still not good at spreading technological applications. He writes, “Everyone is focused on which lab will produce China’s version of ChatGPT; I’m more interested in Chinese organizations that are trying to ‘make large models cost-effective to enable use by small businesses, students, and governments’” On the censorship front, however, our large companies, which are quickly applying AI, such as Microsoft, are like Hollywood, very conscious of not offending the large Chinese market. And so we end up with Bing refusing to discuss China’s policy of sterilizing Uyghur women (see portion of chat in image below). One commonality of AI and the Competition of Competence between China and the liberalized world is that it’s hard to understand what will happen next month, next year and next decade.
