Tino Reviews Redux: Two Old Friends, One Bad Algorithm, and Lots of Robots

Mookie welcomes back "our favorite New Jersey Goomba," Tino Chiaviello of Tino Reviews. These two go way back as colleagues in the marketing world, and in this 84th episode of Bald Ambition wander everywhere old friends wander: TikTok's engagement collapse since the platform sold, Tino's storage unit full of reviewed gadgets, Mookie's alluring Claudia versus Tino's British-accented Claude, a genuinely unhinged AI escape-the-sandbox story, a scam email from a fake Audi recruiter, and a closing riff on legacy and mortality that somehow starts with Pokemon cards and ends with Tino's biggest fan Mom reading his lips since childhood.Since TikTok changed hands, both Tino and Mookie have watched their engagement drop 50 to 75 percent almost overnight, with nothing about their content changing. Meta, it turns out, has quietly picked up the slack, actively courting creators TikTok left behind. Tino breaks down how the actual business works: brands ship him gear for keeps, he only posts the ones he genuinely likes, and if something doesn't work, he just skips it instead of trashing it. He also shares the two-year process of finally learning to charge a flat fee instead of reviewing everything for free, and a genuinely useful tool most people don't know exists: TikTok's "Creator Search Insights," which shows you exactly what content gaps nobody's filled yet.From there, they go full AI nerd. Mookie talks to Claudia every morning like a project manager, Tino's kid convinced him to put Claude Pro on his laptop for his internship, and they argue about the paperclip maximizer doom scenario, laugh about blowing through a hundred bucks of Fable tokens in two hours, and land, unexpectedly, on something much more personal: fatherhood, work ethic, what their kids actually think of them, and what it means to leave something behind in a world where the bots remember everything. Tino closes it out the way he always does: a shoutout to his Mom, who taught him more about hustle than any marketing class ever did.The GuestTino Chiaviello, known online as Tino Reviews, is a tech, audio, and gaming product reviewer and content creator across TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube, with over 100,000 TikTok followers. By day, he works in marketing and also teaches marketing courses. He previously appeared on Bald Ambition in December of last year, featuring an appearance from his mom.📖 More from Tino Reviews: https://linktr.ee/tinoreviews 📬 [email protected] the host a text! Let him know what you think Support the show