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Chapter 1: How has digital video transformed our media consumption?
You have central air now, so you're not going to be sleeveless this summer, so we don't have to worry about matching for once. That's nice. That's right.
And I get to sweat. I have great central. Oh, it's not central air. It's like those Japanese split units.
Super great. I look forward to losing all of my color and energy in water weights. Ryan, rate your grumpiness over the past like two and a half months on a scale of one to 10.
Like a two? We'll see.
I'm Grant Irving. This is Panic World, a show about how the internet warps our minds, our culture, and eventually reality. And I'm starting to think, Ryan, should that tagline actually be and reality instead of eventually reality?
Probably. Probably, yeah.
I ask about your grumpiness... Because you say you delight in researching the freaks of the world, but I've been sensing some exasperation in Garbage Day of late as you've been covering the endless pile of clicking.
No, no, no. You are wrong. I'm having a lot of fun doing it, actually. You're having a lot of fun. This is the most fun I've had in a while. This is the good stuff.
what like i i feel bad i think for my readers because sometimes they don't understand why everyone is talking about something and especially now but like this is this is my super bowl baby this is like the stuff that i actually care about having to write about the right wing or all that like sure whatever but this is this is the good stuff for me i love this
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Chapter 2: What challenges are faced by traditional media in the digital age?
Like no one's happy and no one knows what's going on. And for most of my adult life, the thinking has been the internet will become TV. And the internet has become TV, but it's awful and everyone hates it. But no one can look away and no one understands how it works.
and so everything is just stuck at this very interesting moment and there's all kinds of little stories that are sort of orbiting this mega story of the internet is tv now what the hell does that mean and so i've been having a blast because like there are a million ways you can tackle this story and i've been trying to do it you know i don't want to become
like an entertainment reporter i guess or whatever whatever the reporter you would have to be to cover this but this has sort of become my beat over the last you know three or four months and i'm i'm loving it but i feel bad for my audience because i don't know if they understand why i keep talking about it but there's so much i mean like just last week youtube went to tv up front
and basically announced that we're TV now. And then you have YouTubers that are doing straight up prestige level television shows now, like Kareem from Subway Takes. You also have Kirsten Stewart at Cannes saying, I'm going to be just making movies straight for YouTube. You have YouTubers like Jacksepticeye and Markiplier making movies or producing movies.
You also have Clavicular and Neon and all these live streamers that have revealed that they're at least getting enough money to be spending millions a month on clipping.
Then you also have the total destruction of the old MAGA movement with Ben Shapiro, who is laying people off and basically can't afford to do his ad payola scheme anymore because the Facebook traffic hose turned off for him and he can't evolve with the new video age. So it's like all of these things that to me have felt very stuck.
since the pandemic are all kind of breaking and reforming right now. And it's it's great because everyone's in everyone involved is a bad person and insane. So I'm having a great time.
A few weeks ago, you wrote you're becoming less interested in the Internet as a concept because this feels stuck. Is it that this is now coming to a head in a in a way that that feels thrilling?
It is. I mean, like, I am less interested in the Internet as a concept. I am unfortunately being asked more and more lately for like different kinds of internet stories for like different things that we're working on. And I don't really care about any of them because they're not real. So like, I like nothing. Yeah.
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Chapter 3: How does short-form video content impact audience engagement?
What if you Uberized television? And the result is everything sucks all of the time now. It's awesome. Yeah.
And then on the other end, their jobs are being threatened. Everything becomes a hobby, becomes a becomes a part-time job becomes a hobby is, is, is being squeezed. Um, I was listening to the watch, uh, the ringer podcast, and they were talking about how, you know, like from the opposite end, how, um, nothing can get its wheels turning because there's three years between seasons.
Everything is becoming more expensive to make and taking longer to make and you're getting less of it. And then it has less juice. So like in all directions, it's costing more and then there's less steam to keep pushing it forward.
Yeah, and this is why this topic is so complicated to talk about. Another interesting factor here is right now, probably for the first time ever, every major platform will pay you in some way to post. TikTok, YouTube, X, Instagram, Facebook. They will pay you to post directly, which is a genuinely kind of new idea. Like the TikTok creator fund is not that old.
X, you pay for a subscription and then they pay you, which is ridiculous, but like, sure.
What, you never got on shows where you had to sell tickets to then maybe make some door money?
Yeah, man, I've said it before. I was in Escabe. I know the deal. Actually, we only took that deal once to play the Worcester Palladium.
and we had our friends rich dad buy all the tickets and then we gave them away that's that is very sweet i played the weirder show in my life in worcester uh worcester whatever i'm never going back there uh i don't think i can go back there uh right all of us as teenagers recognized that that was like a pathetic concept and was a grift being run by the venues and that you shouldn't do it and now it is the ecosystem of the internet
yeah i mean just yesterday i finally got a hold of one of these clipper accounts but like i say clipper account i shouldn't say it's like a like a video slop account yeah and this guy is based in rwanda and like he was just like very open about the fact that like yeah like i got verified to look more legitimate and then i just share videos that people send me or pay me to share and he's clearly part of like a network of other
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Chapter 4: What role does AI play in the current media landscape?
But he's affiliated with a AI company called Rin AI, which basically makes AI
content that like tricks turn it in and like anti-ai detection software cool i mean it's very funny that they're hiring a human to post that they need to post this in in the first place but what kind of stuff do they make so it's a it's an ai humanizer so basically i guess the idea would be like you take your ai generated term paper and you feed it to this one and then it makes it look less ai okay
They're going to put in some grammar mistakes and other shit, something like that.
Yeah.
So that college becomes more of a scam.
Basically the kid is also repping a company called the yapper, which is sort of like runway. It's like an, it's like a video generator and he shares a decent amount of AI content, but like, just to sort of like talk you through what's on his feed. I mean, he's got tongue, tongue. So horror videos. Um, yeah, sure. I'll share my screen. This is him, RW. He's got a steak-cutting video.
He's got a tongue-tongue-so-whore video. This is a video filmed in some village of a cow on someone's roof. This is some meme video. A video of a guy being attacked by a leopard. Something about life in African boarding schools, I guess. a video of two Chinese kids on motorbikes that isn't AI from what I can tell.
It's the stuff that you would see if you scrolled to the bottom of Instagram or Facebook. It's the raw feed of human attention. This is something I don't know the answer to, though maybe you could tell me. I spent a lot of time living in Brazil. And when you do that, you start to get geo-targeted as someone who's outside of America and in a country like Brazil.
So you start to see sloppier and sloppier stuff. So a few years ago, a lot of my feeds were just stuff like this. like Telegram groups, like freebooting videos from all over the world. It's all garbage and it doesn't make any sense and whatever. It feels like in the last year or so, that has arrived for American feeds.
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Chapter 5: Why is there a shift towards YouTube and away from Hollywood?
In Myanmar, that happened. But if you want to share just dumb videos all day, that's totally fine. This guy in Rwanda, I assume guy in Rwanda, I don't care. It's that everyone else has stopped posting. The better layer or the more valuable layer has been disappeared because there's no incentive to do that sort of stuff in video.
So another thing I had written about was a former coworker of mine, Jim Watterson. He started his own independent publication in London, and he has a TikTok channel. And he was sharing his stats the other day, and he made 140 pounds for two months worth of views on TikTok. So it was 1.5 million views across two months. He made 140 pounds.
And he was like, look, there's no reason I should spend any time on this. And it's because the algorithms have become so aggressive about time on site, which is a thing I just did a video about for the Garbage Day YouTube channel, which fucking got dinged by YouTube for being too sexual, even though the whole thing is about how everything looks like porn now because of time on site metrics.
So it's all very frustrating because not only can you not even talk about this stuff, we get dinged by TikTok constantly for basically being like, here's what TikTok looks like. Like the amount of times that I've done a TikTok video being like, here's some awful shit I just found on TikTok and they block us for it. So there's no discovery. There's no conversation.
There's no like meta level where you can like talk about this stuff. And so everything is just frozen. It's gotten to the point where like people are finally clearly fed up with the geese thing, the clavicular thing. I need the conversation to go further than just clipping because it's like way beyond that. It's the entire ecosystem of digital video is I think fundamentally broken.
And I think people are finally ready to talk about it.
Two questions for you, and then you decide which direction is best to go in right now. One, why was this the week that legacy media shined its light on this when you've been covering this for months? Two, I remember it was probably a year ago when this was all much more nascent, and we were talking about how everything feels stale, and you said...
this is where you think AI is going to come in and that all media and formats, when they're about to be replaced, end up in a slop era and then something new comes along and breaks it. And you were saying that AI is going to fill that container.
I mean, the AI dimension here, so let's do the legacy media one first, because that's easy. So like legacy media is like not, people sort of tend to think it's like way more conspiratorial than it is. It's a lot of follow the leader. Okay, let's go all the way back. So you have Joe Bernstein who writes about Clavicular. This gets Clavicular a lot of attention.
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Chapter 6: How do algorithmic feeds affect content quality and viewer satisfaction?
And the jar looks like it's dark yellow. And then the next picture is a picture of Rainbow Dash. And if you get that joke, then welcome to the club. So anyways, I want to find genuinely fun, interesting things on the internet. And I spend a lot of my time writing about how the most of the internet is not that. And it has always sort of not been that. It seems like
You know, I don't want to get into a generational war about media literacy, but it seems like for people under the age of like 28, they just assumed that if it was a video, it was real, which is actually something that I've written a lot about in garbage over the years of like this knee jerk reaction to tick tocks being like they must be real because it's video.
And so all of a sudden we have this massive moral panic of people being like everything on the Internet is fake. And it's like, yeah, but like that's kind of not.
like news like it's always been inauthentic to some degree let me let me just clarify by fake you don't mean necessarily an ai video or a deep fake video but made as bait or or propped up or you're not just actually mean like like humans might have been filming that but they were filming it dubiously well okay so like here's a great like the guy from rwanda is a great example if you went to that page i bet like nine out of ten people would be like this is this is a bot
like no it's actually not a bot like it's a guy who's posting like a bot because he doesn't speak english or because he doesn't care or whatever but like yeah the majority of the things that you see on the internet i don't really subscribe to the dead internet theory in the in the way that like people are like everything on the internet is run by bots now except for me it's like no like people use the internet in bizarre and confusing ways and they always have that's just true
So you have this like large conversation going on about authenticity on the internet and you have this like real pearl clutching happening. And then you get the New York Times who writes a story over the weekend, like last weekend, basically saying that like politicians have just opened the floodgates to semi illegal payments to creators to endorse them.
And they're like even paying extra if the like if the influencer uses like breaking or like news or whatever, like, you know, breaking news in their post. And then you have New York Mag doubling down on the thing that Wired was writing about, which is like, yeah, there are firms that you can pay money to hijack trending topics. The one that they single out is Floodify.
But there's also just the site Clipping, and Clipping seems to have a deal with Kik. There seems to be some sort of partnership there where you get X amount of free credits on clipping to clip your kick streams. And there are Discord servers where you can go and you can see people buying and selling campaigns for everything from Justin Bieber's Coachella set to a new Netflix show to whatever.
Yeah, those exist. And they have always existed. I wrote a story... I wrote a story probably 10 years ago about a guy who was tweet decking, which is a concept that has been lost to time, but it's what this is. Tweet decking is where you basically create a network of accounts and you all retweet each other, either for money or for shared promotion.
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Chapter 7: What are the implications of the 'slop' content phenomenon?
That's what I want to see. I want to see them all on a couch just hitting mango jewel pods. Is that still a thing people do? Anyways, no, it's probably Galaxy Gas. I want to see the Crooked guys do Galaxy Gas. with Aiden Ross in a garage somewhere.
Crooked hit us up. There's nitrous tanks at the weed dispensaries by my house. Let's do that with some baddies and let's capture Gen Z. Here's a good time if I've ever heard one.
It's me, Martin Shkreli, Jake Paul. Is he out of jail? Yeah. The Crooked guys. chud the builder when he's out on bail and we're all doing galaxy gas and reading the dnc autopsy i think that's the i think that i think people would love to watch that uh we can bleep chud the builder every time he tries to say a racial slur but the other is just hovering over all of you no he's maniacally like this
He just wishes he was invited to the party, man. You know? Yeah, we could have. He's in the culture. Fucking the fucking he he guys or whatever. H3H3 guys.
The other major reason legacy media is interested in this stuff is because for the last six years, as these platforms have moved to a largely video environment and that video has gotten worse and worse and less authentic media companies to become more desperate. to understand what's going on and use it to take the pulse of what people are talking about.
It's like, wait a minute, if I can't believe that this live streamer is important because there's 300 videos of him on my X feed, then what can we believe? And it's like, yeah, man, it takes some work. Like, like I'll, I'll tell you, I spend a lot of time trying to figure out what's actually popular or what people actually care about.
I don't get it right every time because it's really complicated and you can't just go like, okay, cool. It's it's, it's lily pad girl summer. It's not. yeah sorry it's not like like you can't just be like i'm gonna open my tick tock feed and like if i see four videos about the same thing i'm gonna write up that story for i don't know um some chum site like uh
I won't badmouth any particular outlet, but it does.
I do think from the media side, that makes sense. I do think from like the consumer side, wanting to be able to look and know what is happening and it, and it be a shared reality is, is a totally natural. Yeah.
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Chapter 8: What does the future hold for media and content creators?
Stanley cups and water talk and dirty sodas is a version of this where like Mormons were doing something kind of odd on Tik TOK. And everyone was like, that's kind of interesting. Let's talk about it. La boo boos do buy chocolate, like all this stuff. People were like, Oh, the feed is showing you this. And I am interested in it. TV.
sort of operated still operates in a similar sense where it's like we might not reflect reality to you but we might show you something that you're interested in which then impacts reality you know it friends is not an accurate depiction of what it was like to live in manhattan in the 90s but it sort of created the desire to want to do that into into sort of it it showed you something that you were interested in
Digital video, as it has sort of hit the bottom of the barrel in the last year or two, has stopped even showing people stuff that's interesting. And the problem with these apps is that there is no program director. There is no media Svengali like Barry Weiss, who has your finger on the pulse of what people want to see on television.
know delivery great uh seems like she's out actually she might be out of cbs by the time this episode is aired i'm reading this morning that she is uh being like pushed to like a lower she might be like taking off certain shows and stuff which is awesome so anyways short form video platforms in particular but all of them every video platform has an algorithm that cannot just be like
tuned to be like we like it can't be like hey we have a new thing we should like show people it because it's good and what's interesting is like streaming platforms not live streaming but like streaming platforms like netflix disney plus they are sort of running into this same problem in a different way where like they have a new show and they can put that new show at the top of the homepage but that's kind of the extent that they're willing to go they can't like they don't want to spend the money on traditional marketing campaigns or
They also don't have a linear structure that allows them to like, Hey, you're watching the Simpsons and Bob's burgers. Our new show comes on right after stick around and watch like all of the mechanisms that TV had created to promote itself, which were never perfect. Like I was a massive fan of, uh, of the Drew Carey show growing up. And like that show changed days.
It was on like every year and you could never find it. Like a lot of sitcoms sort of died off that way. So it wasn't perfect. It carries how I learned about furries. The Drew Carey show fucking rocks is so hard. I was watching a YouTube essay about it the other day. I think it's a great show. The episodes where they did improv versions were so good and weird. It was a very experimental show.
Do you think we can get Drew Carey on the show? I bet we could.
probably not because he's got like um he's on the prices right so he's got like a regular prices right schedule yeah maybe uh we'll work around your schedule drew if you want to come on and talk about you did you care for an episode because i have a lot of questions about the drew carey show actually also very early um depiction of uh like cross-dressing on tv like played for laughs at uh and then eventually kind of like not played for laughs sort of an interesting the interesting gender dynamics of that show anyways
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