Episode 212

The platform logic of entertainment

The industrial logic of media, premised on scarcity, has been replaced by a platform logic that is no less centralizing. Meet the new boss. Entertainment industry veteran Darren Cross breaks down what platform logic is, and how it dictates what's made, who has power and where our attention goes.

Transcript
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Brian:

Welcome to the Rebooting Show.

Brian:

I am Brian Morrissey.

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I am joined this week by Darren Cross.

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Darren is a longtime digital entertainment executive.

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he is the author of Nobody Planned This, how Platforms Rewired Entertainment.

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Darren Rand Strategy at Maker Studios.

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if you don't remember Maker, maker was, was one of the, one

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of the original, really MCNs

Darren:

it was the biggest.

Darren:

Yeah.

Brian:

Yeah, like, you know, and, and the MCN was, it was an interesting period

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of time and I think I wanna spin this forward into what's going on in the

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creator economy, because I know, Darren, you have an interesting viewpoint on that.

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So welcome, glad you, take the time.

Darren:

Oh, I'm happy to be here.

Darren:

Thanks for having me.

Darren:

Mm-hmm.

Brian:

All right.

Brian:

So w walk us through a little bit like, I mean, so you ran strategy at at Maker?

Brian:

I think at the time it had like 80,000 creators on the network.

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Now, the Creator economy at the time, I don't even think it was

Brian:

called the Creator Economy, was it.

Darren:

No, that is actually a phrase that's evolved since, right.

Darren:

It kind of, and, and I don't mean this negatively, but it kind of

Darren:

elevates the profession a bit, right.

Darren:

creator has a very, very nice tone to it.

Darren:

Right.

Darren:

biblical even, but, yeah, yeah, it wasn't as big and, and in

Darren:

certain ways that was a virtue.

Brian:

In in what ways

Darren:

it allowed more native niche content.

Darren:

It allowed more personality.

Darren:

It's back when, the label authentic really meant more authentic.

Darren:

It really was more personality driven.

Darren:

It really was exploring more.

Darren:

less mainstream themes than current creator economy does.

Darren:

Less replication, less copying than you see now in the, in the

Darren:

influencer

Brian:

was, it was less optimized, I think.

Brian:

Right?

Brian:

Like,

Darren:

I mean,

Darren:

I think of it like music, right?

Darren:

I think of it like before Chuck Berry, there wasn't a Chuck Berry.

Darren:

So Chuck Berry got to be Chuck Berry, right?

Darren:

And before punk rock.

Darren:

and before rap, a lot of these musics.

Darren:

They had to find an access where they could compete because they didn't

Darren:

have all the things that the previous access had, like resources and

Darren:

super skilled players and all that.

Darren:

You, you get in a different weapons race where it's more about ideas and

Darren:

difference and cultural relevance.

Brian:

And this is as, I mean, really YouTube this like

Brian:

zero it in on YouTube, right?

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Like, so, you know, YouTube now is, it's like tv it's, it's now like a

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meme to, to say YouTube is now tv.

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But at the time, you know, YouTube was, was much smaller.

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I remember, you know, as a reporter writing about YouTube

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in, its, in its earliest days and it was like a thrilling thing.

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And there was these, there were these people who were developing, they

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were messing around on, on YouTube this and it, it did have a feel.

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It was kind of exciting.

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There was written link and there was, you know, I, Justine, I remember

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smash, I did, I would do like roundups, like the YouTubers you need to know,

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like for, for brands and marketers.

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And it would be, yeah, Michelle, what is it?

Brian:

Michelle fam?

Brian:

The, the makeup, the

Darren:

yes.

Darren:

Absolutely.

Darren:

Ipsy.

Brian:

Yeah.

Brian:

I don't know.

Brian:

So, you know, there was like, it was a different, it was, it was definitely

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a different, different era and I feel like just as, as the platforms.

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Got bigger, you know, this, this field changed a lot.

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so what, what is, what, what is the current state of the sort of creator

Brian:

economy in centered on YouTube?

Darren:

well, I mean, that's a big question.

Darren:

so in the old system, traditional media, the locus of power stuck

Darren:

was with the studios, right?

Darren:

Because they had a. Scarcity always drives things.

Darren:

Scarcity determines power in my mind.

Darren:

So, the studios had scarcity.

Darren:

So they were the funds, they were the source of talent,

Darren:

they were the facilities.

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So they really, with that, they earned the role of gatekeeper and

Darren:

they also became the, the entity who placed the bets on what would be,

Darren:

what hit in, in mainstream culture.

Darren:

Right.

Darren:

and that was a very useful model, right up through mash, I think.

Darren:

Right.

Darren:

Beyond that cable started to, to fray that a bit.

Darren:

But the creator economy phrase it more, where the P locus of power really

Darren:

comes to the, it's not really purely distribution, but it's like distribution.

Darren:

It's the platforms.

Darren:

So the platforms have a different idea.

Darren:

They're not gating for letting only a few select people in

Darren:

and placing big bets on them.

Darren:

They're letting everybody in, placing no bets on them, and

Darren:

then optimizing iteratively

Brian:

Yeah.

Darren:

they don't care who wins.

Brian:

You know, and that's why they, they, the, the platforms love creators.

Darren:

They, they do to a

Brian:

I mean, they love the notion of creators because who wants to negotiate

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with a couple of people when you've got like millions, like nobody has leverage.

Darren:

bingo.

Darren:

Bingo, right to a, to a certain degree.

Darren:

Watch time is watch time.

Darren:

Now we can debate what quality entertainment gets, what premium for

Darren:

adver inventory, but basically they'd rather not negotiate with millions

Darren:

of creators and have the outliers show up regularly like they do.

Darren:

As opposed to negotiating with a hundred Mr.

Darren:

Beasts across 25 d different genres, right?

Darren:

Because they don't need to be having competitors bid for their time, for

Darren:

their attention, for exclusivity.

Darren:

they, they like the disproportionate bargaining power implicitly.

Brian:

and the way the sort of creator, I mean, there's obviously

Brian:

millions of creators, right?

Brian:

but it's developed into like being a power wall law, like to a large extent, right?

Darren:

Yeah.

Darren:

And it is a wall, right?

Darren:

I mean, so it used to be, talent and, and being earlier, being brave was

Darren:

a differentiator 10 years ago or so.

Darren:

and it still is to a certain degree, but now there's more brute force, right?

Darren:

So when somebody like Mr. Beats reaches his scale, he has a lot

Darren:

of more momentum behind him.

Darren:

He has investors, he has a team.

Darren:

He has.

Darren:

He has the ability to make, I'm not saying he's making subpar content,

Darren:

but he can make a lot of content that doesn't have to be a hit because it's

Darren:

gonna be a hit because it's gonna be in storefronts around the world and

Darren:

somebody's gonna walk by and gaw at it long enough to drive an ad impression.

Brian:

Right.

Brian:

I mean, once you have that distribution, you know, you can, you can make a lot

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of, you can make a lot of mistakes.

Brian:

Basically.

Brian:

You can go a lot of different directions.

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You have optionality and Mr. Beast is building an entertainment company,

Brian:

like, I'm not sure, like it's a different type of entertainment

Brian:

company because it, it has a quote unquote creator at, at, at the.

Brian:

At the front of it, but at the end of the day, it starts to look a lot like

Brian:

a regular entertainment company, right?

Darren:

Yeah.

Darren:

It is like, it's a bit of cosplay, right?

Darren:

It's it, he's a creator, but, but he's kind, he was a creator.

Darren:

He's still the creator, but he's really an organization now.

Darren:

Mr. Beast is an organization.

Darren:

And Mr. Beast is a brand, right?

Darren:

So, he's not coming at it in the old fashioned way where, established artist

Darren:

star would then create something like their own, you know, Desilu, right?

Darren:

he's coming from the other way where he came up from nothing.

Darren:

Reverse engineering how YouTube rewarded creators.

Darren:

Doing things like, you know, counting to a hundred and underwater and, you know,

Darren:

all the things he did early on were just very, very simple, but they were riveting

Darren:

in their own way and he's built from that.

Darren:

So he's come from a creator background to a place that's really,

Darren:

and he does television better than television in many ways now.

Brian:

Well, he did a, he did the Super Bowl ad for Salesforce.

Brian:

I'm not saying it was one of the best ads I've ever seen, but I don't think I'm

Brian:

like, in the, the, the Jimmy Donaldson,

Darren:

Well, yeah.

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target.

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So I don't know, but then again, I'm not sure Salesforce, I have no idea why it

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made sense for Salesforce to have, Mr.

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Beast who's like, I guess his core constituency is children.

Brian:

I don't know.

Brian:

Maybe children are using B2B software.

Brian:

I don't know.

Darren:

you know, and, and, and

Darren:

the

Brian:

everyone

Darren:

Yeah.

Darren:

Could be, right?

Darren:

I mean, I don't know.

Darren:

I mean, I, I think.

Darren:

It's not as bad as it was when I was at Maker, but there's still a little

Darren:

bit of, my son knows this creator.

Darren:

They're big in, in the, in the, in the suite that, that makes these big

Darren:

money decisions for advertising, right?

Darren:

They're not natives, they're visitors to this land.

Brian:

Right.

Brian:

But like, it seems like the, the, the middle class did not develop

Brian:

and won't necessarily develop.

Brian:

Is that fair?

Darren:

That's my thesis, right?

Darren:

I mean, in the same way that there's no real middle class and

Darren:

traditional entertainment, right?

Darren:

It's just not necessary for the most part, especially in front of the camera.

Darren:

Right.

Darren:

so what YouTube wants and needs is they need a few bright and shiny,

Darren:

Tent poles, that's Mr. Beast.

Darren:

And then they need an endless flow of content, which up till now has

Darren:

been provided for free, mostly by millions of creators around the world.

Darren:

And they just wait and see what pops and then pushes it.

Darren:

So they really become an optimization engine around routing, right?

Darren:

That's their play.

Darren:

and that works, but ultimately they don't.

Darren:

They don't not care if there's a bunch of stars.

Darren:

I mean, they kind of, in a perfect world, they kind of like fungibility.

Darren:

And at a certain level it does become a little bit of a price

Darren:

differentiator as a human.

Darren:

So they are kind of heading towards Spotify, which has a lot of AI

Darren:

driven stuff that pays no one right.

Darren:

but until then, they don't really need to.

Darren:

'cause there's so many creators creating quality content for free.

Darren:

So there, I mean, ultimate, ultimately it is a differentiator, but at we're

Darren:

not to that point yet for video.

Brian:

Yeah.

Brian:

I was just talking about this, AI generated, account out of, out of

Brian:

India, that has billions of views.

Brian:

I mean, and it costs like 60 bucks to produce these videos.

Brian:

It's like an AI monkey that's in various

Darren:

yeah.

Darren:

Uhhuh.

Brian:

great

Darren:

that's the irony, right?

Darren:

That's the irony because India, up until very recently, was the low

Darren:

cost production locus for people,

Brian:

Yeah.

Darren:

which were, you know, I mean going, I mean, I go back 20 years.

Darren:

I was at click star, which was an intel funded venture with Morgan Freeman

Darren:

and when, this is when encoding was like a black art and it was done

Darren:

literally in Burbank and you paid a lot to get video content and coded.

Darren:

Very shortly, it became something that was, that was price competitive done

Darren:

for pennies in a place far, far away.

Darren:

And now you don't even need to move it to a place far, far away.

Darren:

It's just a machine that does it.

Darren:

So it's, there's really no human advantage by putting it in India anymore really.

Darren:

It's just a,

Brian:

I mean, this

Brian:

account is, is, is, is Bondar Opta dosed.

Brian:

It has 3.13 million subscribers.

Brian:

all

Darren:

probably seen, we've probably all seen some.

Brian:

So is that like sort of where these platforms will end up going?

Brian:

I guess?

Brian:

I think the, the.

Brian:

The question I have as inevitably 99% of content is gonna be synthetic and the

Brian:

weight, usually the, you know, trying to separate what's human from, from what is

Brian:

ai, first of all, it's like, is that spam?

Brian:

Not necessarily.

Brian:

People obviously really like this, AI monkey from Bondar, APNA Dost.

Brian:

And, you know, so I don't think necessarily the platforms are going to

Brian:

just say AI content, bad human content.

Brian:

Good.

Brian:

You, you see, you know, like on Spotify, like, yeah, I

Brian:

don't know to, to go to sleep.

Brian:

There's lots of different, like there's lots of different

Brian:

things you can do with ai.

Brian:

Like, I don't, I don't necessarily think human, I think it should just

Brian:

probably be on the quality of the content as judged by, the audience.

Brian:

But is that the sort of direction you see?

Brian:

Platforms and particularly YouTube going and then the how are they

Brian:

gonna deal with the inevitable flood of limitless AI content or does it

Darren:

Yes.

Darren:

Well, I, I, yes, but let me qualify a little bit.

Darren:

First of all, I don't think 99% is probably the number.

Darren:

it's gonna be a lot, but I don't know what the number is.

Darren:

But, so right now we've got a very rich competitive floor for content

Darren:

creation that's all human, for the most part on video, right?

Darren:

And it's been very effective at keeping the, the incremental cost

Darren:

of a new video pretty much at zero.

Darren:

but.

Darren:

Eventually AI will set the new floor for cost, right?

Darren:

And it's also very quick to pick up trends and emulate, which YouTube,

Darren:

as it's matured, has become more of where it's an emulation factory, right?

Darren:

So a, a format hits, and all of a sudden everybody's doing it.

Darren:

So YouTube is already moving that way because they've seen the success of TikTok

Darren:

and Instagram at, at making creators.

Darren:

Personality and less important, they don't have followings as much.

Darren:

Right.

Darren:

the, the, the fungibility of creators is more prominent on those platforms,

Darren:

and it certainly is more prominent on YouTube with YouTube shorts.

Darren:

So they have no, if they're not.

Darren:

Longing for it.

Darren:

They at least have no aversion to it, right?

Darren:

So going forward there'll be more of that, and you start to weave

Darren:

AI generated content into the mix much to the way you see on Spotify.

Darren:

And if you're just somebody who wants something easy listening, that sounds

Darren:

like Kenny G, you can get two hours of it.

Darren:

And maybe some of it, it's Kenny G, some of it's people, some of it's

Darren:

just AI riffing on smooth jazz, right?

Darren:

Who knows?

Darren:

but so that is a future, but at the same time.

Darren:

I mean, I see this in my son and other kids.

Darren:

I had this conversation with a colleague the other day.

Darren:

My son has a visceral reaction to ai.

Darren:

We went and we went to see Avatar.

Darren:

I kind of pushed to see it and it was really kind of funny 'cause

Darren:

I, after it's a long film, right?

Darren:

And you're sitting in the theater after a while, the scenes that are filmed like

Darren:

in the lab where it's really people, unless AI generated stuff feel jarring.

Darren:

Like, like they're two different worlds really.

Darren:

You know what I mean?

Darren:

It doesn't feel the same.

Darren:

And I felt discomfort and my son started talking about it afterwards.

Darren:

How much AI was there and how much is it AI and, well, it's ai, it's machines.

Darren:

And we went through this discussion, but he has an ai, a visceral AI

Darren:

reaction where he connotes some ai, a lot of AI content similar to the

Darren:

way he jives at Facebook content.

Darren:

It's for the olds, right?

Brian:

What AI content is for old people.

Darren:

A lot of it.

Darren:

'cause he thinks it's, he, he proj, pejoratively talks about AI content is

Darren:

the stuff that old people mistakenly share because they think it's real.

Brian:

Oh, well that's reassuring then.

Darren:

Yeah.

Darren:

And it is nice.

Darren:

Right.

Darren:

And I have a, and I was saying this to another friend, a former colleague at

Darren:

Maker and he talked about his 19-year-old son and he said, yeah it's really funny

Darren:

'cause just last week my son, who's been a long time Orange Fanta drinker came to me

Darren:

and said, dad from now on by Orange Crush.

Darren:

And he is like, why?

Darren:

He goes that Coca-Cola AI commercial.

Brian:

Oh

Darren:

And that's a pretty strong reaction, right?

Darren:

And I, I, in my mind, I line that up with the resurgence of the adoption and

Darren:

interest in formal formalized religion in younger generations in the United

Darren:

States the last four or five years.

Darren:

there's, there's a need to belong of inclusiveness, especially younger

Darren:

people where content is identity, right?

Darren:

There's a lot of things tied up in that.

Darren:

So I think those pockets remain.

Darren:

That's why I think niches and genres will still matter, and

Darren:

that's where AI is weakest.

Darren:

Then ironically, I also think for traditional media,

Darren:

there's a lot of rights.

Darren:

There's a lot of stuff that people riff off of, right?

Darren:

So those things in a, in a weird way, will become even more valuable because you're

Darren:

gonna want to secure those rights to not get sued for the things you're riffing on.

Darren:

With ai,

Brian:

So what does YouTube look like then in like three years?

Brian:

Is it that different or is it, you know, fairly similar

Darren:

I think my gut is, it feels a lot like now.

Darren:

It's just you have less certainty about certainty about how

Darren:

something is made and by who.

Brian:

Right.

Darren:

Right?

Darren:

Was it really a creator or was it a company?

Darren:

Was it a company using a real person or was it ai?

Darren:

I mean, there's a, there's a bunch of different breadcrumbs

Darren:

along the way to figure

Brian:

I mean, I assume that they will label it right?

Brian:

Like, I mean, if, if, if like you, I

Darren:

if they have to.

Brian:

you while YouTube.

Brian:

Yeah.

Brian:

I mean I think, have to, have to is interesting like, I mean, because

Brian:

the, the, it's either they have to because of the market or they have

Brian:

to because of, of the, the government or regulations of some kind, right?

Brian:

Like,

Darren:

I think it'll be both.

Brian:

yeah, I think I can see pressure and, and they've

Brian:

been down this road before.

Brian:

Like they didn't, they would not have an advertising business if did, they did not

Brian:

figure out how to find copyrighted music.

Brian:

And if they weren't able to find nipples, like, I mean,

Brian:

nothing concentrates the mind.

Brian:

And they were able to do that.

Brian:

That's why anytime these companies say, oh, it would be impossible for

Brian:

us, I'm like, well, gee, when you had like, you know, billions on the

Brian:

line, you were able to figure out, you know, the, the nipple technology.

Brian:

So don't tell me you can't figure

Darren:

Yeah.

Darren:

You know, I talk about this in, yeah, I talk about this in

Brian:

Where they're like with ai, just like we can't figure

Brian:

out where the content came from.

Brian:

I'm like, trust me, you, you can figure this out.

Darren:

There's a structural schizophrenia with the platforms.

Darren:

It's a split personality.

Darren:

That's, it's kind of intentional.

Darren:

'cause they will, if you're an advertiser, they will tell you in

Darren:

great granularity and great confidence how they know your audience and

Darren:

how they can target your audience and how valuable that audience is.

Darren:

So they have great, great knowledge on behavior and activity and all

Darren:

this kind of exhaust trail that every user leaves when they watch.

Darren:

But if you go back to 'em and say like, you know.

Darren:

How many of those audience members you think are 12 or nine, and they're

Darren:

like, we have no way of knowing.

Darren:

How could we possibly know?

Darren:

And, and that's not true.

Darren:

But, but they're not gonna stand in front of that on inference, even

Darren:

if they could, because it's a lot of liability on inference, but also

Darren:

it kind of creators their business.

Darren:

And that's going back to your question about where YouTube

Darren:

looks like in three years.

Darren:

YouTube is a. Morphed quite a bit over 10 years when I said it was

Darren:

freer and more adventurous, more experimental 10 years ago, that's

Darren:

partly because of the audience.

Darren:

The audience was young and they were along for that ride.

Darren:

Now the audience now on average, is much older when you aggregate

Darren:

them all and they're watching on a, oftentimes a communal device

Darren:

and not a individual device.

Darren:

So those two dynamics make it very different kind of content

Darren:

that's coming out of it.

Darren:

And then when you raise the stakes that all the money's being put

Darren:

into this by brands and private equity and everybody else.

Darren:

All the decisions matter way more than they did when PewDiePie was

Darren:

posting his first 100 videos.

Brian:

Yeah.

Brian:

And so what determines now, like what, whether something takes

Brian:

off on, on YouTube, is it, is it almost like too late to establish?

Brian:

Because we always see people come too late to like every party.

Brian:

Right.

Brian:

And like, there were so many advantages to having built a, an audience, and

Brian:

having that distribution early on.

Brian:

And, with YouTube, It still.

Brian:

And I still see people like, there's like, oh, now we're, now we're

Brian:

going big into our YouTube strategy.

Brian:

is it still practical to be able to build, to be able to build like a, a really

Brian:

strong YouTube channel starting now?

Darren:

what I, you know, for a big, big company that wants to develop IP and

Darren:

produce content tra in a traditional way, I think that's a real tough bite to take.

Darren:

Right?

Darren:

But I mean.

Darren:

The other side of this coin is at, it's always been this way to get

Darren:

into music, to get into sports.

Darren:

There's a certain part of society that's young and ambitious and without resources.

Darren:

That takes a, takes a swing, right?

Darren:

And you, and the luxury here is you get millions of swings, so

Darren:

somebody's voice is gonna stand out.

Darren:

It's really an incredible experimentation layer at the

Darren:

bottom of the creator economy.

Darren:

As it is with any medium, like with punk, punk rock or rap music, there was,

Darren:

it was not being driven by labels, it was not being driven by the audience.

Darren:

Even it was somebody had a voice, couldn't see their way through

Darren:

the current system and had to find an audience a different way.

Darren:

And that's a lot of what YouTube is.

Darren:

And someone will, I don't know who, I don't know how, but

Brian:

but, and when you talk about punk rock, like, I mean, it,

Brian:

that runs, that runs completely counter to YouTube being so mass.

Brian:

And being where old people are, like, wouldn't, I mean, we're seeing

Brian:

new kinds of, I don't even know if these are creators or influencers.

Brian:

I, I have to bring up like the clavicular guy.

Brian:

Like, I wish I didn't know clavicular, but like I do know clavicular.

Brian:

but like, no, but streaming, like has become Kai Sinat and the, like

Brian:

streaming like slightly different.

Brian:

Like I, I think, I don't know, I think about it as, as slightly different than

Darren:

Yeah.

Darren:

Yeah, yeah.

Darren:

Well, I mean, if I, if I, for me, I, maybe I'm, and maybe this is peculiar

Darren:

to me, but I abstract back, so I, when I think about the music business, I

Darren:

think about selling records, and they're selling records to all kinds of people.

Darren:

So if you're an up and coming 18-year-old who has some musical talent, maybe you

Darren:

don't have access to formalized musical education, but you've got taste and

Darren:

you've got some, some native talent.

Darren:

So you don't have the hours or the resources to learn how to play the

Darren:

guitar at the level of Jeff Beck.

Darren:

But you know what?

Darren:

If you can sample and you can narrate and you can find a new

Darren:

medium to express yourself.

Darren:

You don't need those skills.

Darren:

You need a different set of skills.

Darren:

So you change the access on what competition and what good means.

Darren:

Right?

Darren:

And that's what YouTube did originally.

Darren:

They, they changed the access of what, what quality was.

Darren:

It was no longer production quality and writing and lighting and everything else.

Darren:

It was a metric that was more, kind of hard to put your finger on

Darren:

of, of authenticity, which, when, when that word really still meant

Darren:

something in the creator space.

Brian:

And so that is like fading, right?

Brian:

Like is is the authenticity bit fade?

Brian:

And because you start to, to me the, like, the, they, the

Brian:

middle's always meet, right?

Brian:

Like, I mean, we, we saw during the pandemic, like, you know, production

Brian:

quality go down on like broadcast.

Brian:

They were like just doing zooms.

Brian:

And I was like, oh, we can do video now if you're, if it's Zoom, But

Brian:

then, you know, you look at what a lot of, a lot of YouTubers are putting

Brian:

a lot of money into production.

Brian:

I mean, like, it's not like they're the selfie stick people anymore.

Brian:

I mean, it can be, depends on the content, but like that, that doesn't

Brian:

seem like, like much of a differentiator.

Darren:

Agreed.

Darren:

here's what I would say about that.

Darren:

so.

Darren:

For those people that are at that level now, they're very much television, right?

Darren:

And you'll see that they're distributing their content to numerous places.

Darren:

Netflix and Amazon and, you know, they have a, they're,

Darren:

they're basically television.

Darren:

I mean, that was, that Mr.

Darren:

Beast has, has transcended YouTube.

Darren:

but there are still tons of YouTubers and what will come next?

Darren:

New formats.

Darren:

New genres.

Darren:

New expression will not come from people emulating Mr. Beast.

Darren:

Right.

Brian:

Yeah.

Darren:

it's much bigger, so it's harder to find this needle in the haystack.

Darren:

But the beauty of it is, it, it is, is it will show up as it starts to get trends.

Darren:

And those trends are different than they were 10 years ago because

Darren:

inter YouTube is so much more international than it was 10 years ago.

Darren:

But I, maybe I'm naive, but I believe they will surface.

Darren:

And that is one of the virtues of YouTube is this vast r and

Darren:

d, this vast experimental layer.

Darren:

That it's low cost, low friction to get it up, and then if it somehow

Darren:

catches fire in the algorithm, then that becomes, once it becomes a

Darren:

hit, then everybody does it, right?

Darren:

I mean, and that's a, well, both a blessing and a curse for the space.

Darren:

But if a trend takes off, I mean, what, what Mr. Beast does now, or

Darren:

what he did five years ago wasn't what YouTubers did five years before that.

Brian:

Right.

Darren:

So there will be an evolution and something will

Darren:

work, something will change, and it could be a very small tweak.

Darren:

I mean, honestly, some of the stuff that Mr. Beast early on

Darren:

was kind of cringey for me.

Darren:

Some of the stuff was like, you know, like like the the Ed

Darren:

McMahon giveaway type stuff.

Darren:

You know what I mean?

Brian:

Yeah.

Brian:

Well, I find Mr. Beast a very difficult character.

Brian:

Maybe it's my, me as like a middle aged guy, but like, I don't find

Brian:

it really like an aspiring story.

Brian:

Like I don't, like, I mean he's like, it's, it's all this optimization

Brian:

and all of these, like these weird stunts and the, the stunts have to get

Brian:

bigger and I'm not sure what exactly.

Brian:

The value is of any of this stuff.

Brian:

And now I'm really sound sounding old.

Brian:

I, I personally, it doesn't like appeal to me.

Brian:

I'm like shocked that like, that this person is that, that successful.

Brian:

and I think it's just the, you know, I think it was when I saw like what

Brian:

he does with the thumbnails and I think one of my struggles with

Brian:

YouTube is how over-optimized it is.

Brian:

And I think about what people are doing with Open, with Open Claw and

Brian:

all this ag agentic ai, and I'm like, oh yeah, Mr. Beast was like testing

Brian:

like a thousand thumbnail, variations.

Brian:

Everyone's gonna be testing 10,000.

Brian:

The agents are gonna be doing that overnight and they're gonna

Brian:

be auto optimizing, and it, it just, it feels like it's going.

Brian:

And Mr. Beast has always had a little bit of dystopian vibes to me.

Brian:

I could be

Darren:

Yeah, Yeah, there's a, I

Brian:

Something, something.

Brian:

I can't put my finger on there, but like, you know, his success

Brian:

feels overly engineered.

Darren:

well said.

Darren:

So here's what I would.

Darren:

I'll be honest.

Darren:

He's not for me.

Darren:

Right.

Darren:

He's not my kind of stuff.

Darren:

But you know that, that said 99% of cable television wasn't for me.

Darren:

Right.

Darren:

So, I mean, I have never seen real Housewives of anything.

Darren:

I don't know.

Darren:

I can't even name all the cities that CCSI belongs to.

Darren:

Right.

Darren:

I don't know.

Darren:

Don't care.

Darren:

It's not me.

Darren:

yeah.

Darren:

And Mr. Beast does have this weird Stepford wife kind of

Darren:

vacancy in his eyes when he's.

Darren:

On screen for me at least.

Darren:

it does seem super manufactured.

Darren:

I wouldn't be surprised at all if he was actually just AI generated.

Brian:

He talked about going to, he is like, he is like, I don't like to go

Brian:

like expensive, you know, have expensive meals, like a $20,000 golden pizza.

Brian:

And I'm like.

Brian:

Do you think that that's like, like a really good restaurant.

Brian:

There's

Darren:

I don't, Yeah.

Darren:

Yeah.

Darren:

You know, it's all, he's, remember who he's speak, remember who he's

Brian:

I'm like, I was like, I didn't think he's like failing my capcha

Darren:

Well, you know, he, the mentioning the French laundry is not

Darren:

gonna resonate with nine year olds.

Darren:

So you gotta, you gotta speak to your audience, right?

Darren:

Um, especially if they live in Bangalore, right?

Darren:

So, you gotta keep the references.

Darren:

He's like a, he's, he's similar to big action movies for Hollywood, right?

Darren:

Keep the plot simple, keep the dialogue simple, and make it lots of, you

Darren:

know, pyrotechnics and that thing will go well around the world, right?

Brian:

But we're not gonna have like an array of Mr. Beasts.

Darren:

You are gonna, I mean, I think you're gonna have always that layer,

Darren:

because it used to be when you were able to afford a team like Mr. Beast did,

Darren:

first he got disciplined and he took it really serious like a business, which

Darren:

differentiated him from a lot of creators.

Darren:

But Mark Player and PewDiePie and a lot of others did that too.

Darren:

But then he started to build a real team, like a business.

Darren:

He and I, what I do admire about him is he spends like every

Darren:

dollar making the next thing.

Darren:

You know what I mean?

Darren:

He's not buying a yacht for himself.

Darren:

He's about like, I wanna up it.

Darren:

I wanna up it.

Darren:

So what I admire is his ambition, right?

Darren:

I may not like what he makes, but I do respect the game.

Darren:

Right?

Darren:

so there'll be more of that because now with AI and all this, this is kind

Darren:

of going back to my argument about different genres of music, because it

Darren:

used to be really hard to make an album.

Darren:

If you were, like in the 1960s, you had to get resources or seventies, even eighties,

Darren:

you had to get resources behind it.

Darren:

You had to convince somebody to bet on you so you could have access to a

Darren:

real studio, and then you could get the distribution channels and the marketing

Darren:

money and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Darren:

You don't need that anymore.

Darren:

You can make music in your bedroom with really high-end tools and become as big

Darren:

a hit as any of that, and that is coming.

Darren:

Already coming is already here with video to a certain degree,

Darren:

but it's coming even more with ai.

Darren:

So what it does is it raises the bar for what the middle tier is,

Darren:

what the middle class has to do.

Darren:

So if a old middle, I say old, a prior middle class YouTuber, the few that

Darren:

there are was gonna say, well, you know, now I'm gonna level up by getting

Darren:

myself a team for production, for back office, for marketing, da da, da, da.

Darren:

now a lot of that can be done with tools that are cheap, ai, like all

Darren:

those thumbnails you just discussed.

Darren:

So what's the next level?

Darren:

That require people, that's expensive.

Darren:

And that's where that layer of Mr. Beast type creators can afford and they keep

Darren:

elevating themselves above the rest.

Darren:

And that's why the, there's a, the, an ever-growing yawning gap between

Darren:

the very top and the huge bottom.

Darren:

It's not a pyramid, it's aspire.

Darren:

It looks a lot like traditional entertainment.

Darren:

Back when Tom Cruise was at the height of his powers.

Brian:

Right.

Brian:

you mentioned like PewDiePie.

Brian:

Is he like in like semi-retirement in Japan now?

Brian:

Do I have that

Darren:

Uh, I believe that's the case.

Darren:

I mean, he had

Brian:

this, this is like a young man's game.

Brian:

Like, I mean, he's like, he's like a retired YouTuber.

Darren:

well, I mean, part of the problem with, especially with PDI Pie because,

Darren:

and, and earlier YouTubers, a lot of it indexed more towards personality.

Darren:

Right.

Darren:

And the influencers have this problem a lot too.

Darren:

So, 'cause 'cause

Darren:

you

Brian:

he's got a big controversy section, that's for

Darren:

Yeah, he does.

Darren:

Well, he made some mistakes.

Darren:

He made

Brian:

you're an early YouTuber.

Brian:

Your controversy section's gonna be

Darren:

Shoot.

Darren:

you know, and let's be honest, these guys aren't trained professionally

Darren:

the way professional traditional media people are with coaches and pr

Darren:

people that help them avoid landmines.

Darren:

They're on their own, so they make mistakes.

Darren:

And he's a young guy, and I'm, I'm not here to defend him.

Darren:

He's done some weird stuff.

Darren:

But, when you're that leveraged to personality.

Darren:

It's hard to keep reinventing yourself, right?

Darren:

When a big part of your attraction is that you are novel, you were new

Darren:

and you were different, and then the next, and generations now are

Darren:

not as long as they used to be.

Darren:

I don't care what, what traditional, or, you know, studies say for me

Darren:

now, a generation is like five or six years because everything seems

Darren:

to flip within half a half a decade.

Brian:

yeah, it just seems like, I mean, like.

Brian:

For those that can like get to Mr. Beast level.

Brian:

And obviously there's very few of them, they can hire teams and whatnot.

Brian:

Like keeping up the pace as like a creator.

Brian:

And then, you know, I remember I would always like roll my eyes at like creator

Brian:

burnout and I'm like, that's like real, like to be able to always be on like that.

Brian:

Is, it's different than, than the, the analog entertainment world, I feel like.

Brian:

and having that kind of staying power when things come and

Brian:

go, is difficult for creators.

Darren:

yeah, even the feedback cycle is super, It wears on people.

Darren:

It's super hard to, to carry that burden.

Darren:

used to be in the old, old media, you release a movie on Friday and you'd

Darren:

find out numbers on Monday, right?

Darren:

So production logic was you put place bets, put a lot of effort into it, and

Darren:

then it would hit the market, and the market would tell you the truth, right?

Darren:

And, but you, it took time.

Darren:

but for platform logic, you're constantly iterating, creating,

Darren:

evolving in front of the public.

Darren:

And you're doing that with constant feedback.

Darren:

And it used to be on YouTube 10 years ago you had a dashboard and

Darren:

you watched it maybe daily, right?

Darren:

But with TikTok, Instagram and YouTube shorts and all these platforms,

Darren:

they've amped up all that granular data analysis into a, a very fast loop.

Darren:

So it's almost instantaneously.

Darren:

So you're constantly, it's like you're getting your box office every few minutes

Brian:

Mm-hmm.

Darren:

and that, and psychically, that's a huge toll.

Brian:

Yeah, for sure.

Brian:

And, and do you see any other platforms emerging to even

Brian:

compete with, with YouTube?

Brian:

like for the power as, as like creators like it, it seems like.

Brian:

YouTube is, has, has grown so massive as like an ecosystem that it's achieved

Brian:

some kind of like escape velocity.

Brian:

Velocity.

Darren:

Yeah.

Darren:

You know, I'm not really good at predicting the future.

Darren:

I'm, I'm kind of good at kind of reading where things are going.

Darren:

there will be another platform.

Darren:

I don't know what it is.

Brian:

No, I mean, like right now, do you see like anything like, I mean, if you're.

Brian:

Do you see creators no longer just using YouTube as a default?

Brian:

And that's why I asked about like other, like streaming platforms

Brian:

like live streaming platforms.

Darren:

you mean outside of TikTok and Instagram?

Brian:

Well, yeah, I mean like, I mean like for the type of YouTube content,

Brian:

like it seems like, like YouTube has, I don't wanna say monopolize the market,

Brian:

but it doesn't have a lot of competition.

Brian:

Like all

Brian:

roads lead to YouTube.

Darren:

Right now.

Darren:

That's true.

Darren:

Right.

Darren:

So what it used to be called 10 years ago or so, they used

Darren:

to call what YouTube produced, these eight and 10 minute things.

Darren:

They called it short form.

Darren:

Well, now that's not short form, that's long form in many ways, right?

Darren:

short form is the one to two minute things and TikTok dominates that.

Darren:

My son's 13 as I mentioned before, and his main go-to is TikTok.

Darren:

To be honest, it's not so much for the content, it's for, I don't

Darren:

wanna use the community so much.

Darren:

It's, it's the comments.

Darren:

So if I'm driving him to school, I'll hear the same loop of music from the

Darren:

same video for 10 minutes because he is rabbit holing down that comment thread.

Brian:

Oh, okay.

Darren:

reading it, he's commenting on it.

Darren:

So, and he does that all the time.

Darren:

And he's not, he's not alone.

Darren:

His friends do as well.

Darren:

So.

Darren:

TikTok is super powerful for the audience, and I think in many ways

Darren:

YouTube has had to had to counter that.

Darren:

With shorts, and part of that is mercenary on their part because that

Darren:

accelerates the fungibility trend that they'd like to encourage anyway.

Darren:

But part of it was existential because they're competing against Instagram

Darren:

and TikTok who've really elevated short form content to an art where

Darren:

it's very monetizable for them.

Darren:

It doesn't really monetize as well for the creators involved, but

Darren:

it does really monetize wealth for Meta and, and TikTok seller.

Darren:

so YouTube is in that game, but it.

Darren:

What comes next?

Darren:

I, I, I dunno.

Darren:

I have this hunch, I have this hope, I have this bet that,

Darren:

that, that more, real and more belonging, finds its way somewhere.

Darren:

Twitch has a very fervent following of real time kind of

Darren:

relationship building, right?

Darren:

their audience is very much, they're the closest thing right now that still exists.

Darren:

That reminds me of what YouTube was in the early 2000 tens.

Darren:

I remember going to my first, VidCon in 2000, I think it was 11 or 12.

Darren:

It was literally like a get together of friends and fans would walk up to

Darren:

big creators for that day and talk to them like they had just

Darren:

bumped into them at the lockers.

Darren:

At high school, there was no pedestal.

Darren:

What was nice is that the creators talked back to them.

Darren:

Like there was no, there was no condescension, either real or or imagined.

Darren:

It was very organic and it felt really cool, and that lasted

Darren:

until about the mid 2000 tens.

Darren:

And I've been to most of the day cons and including almost all, but one of

Darren:

them since COVID and that vibe isn't there, and it was very much not there

Darren:

the one year that TikTok took over

Darren:

and was

Brian:

But you see, you mentioned like a re a counter reaction

Brian:

and I think that's interesting.

Brian:

I mean, because again, I, you said something more real and I think

Brian:

that is what gives me pause of.

Brian:

Where YouTube has gone is it's become so optimized that it feels fake.

Brian:

And I think a lot of things in culture are so optimized to feel

Brian:

fake, like fights feel fake.

Brian:

A lot of the interactions online feel fake, whether they are or not.

Brian:

You know, the, the, the dramas of like, you know, right wing podcasters, fake,

Brian:

like, you know, a lot of stuff just

Brian:

feels fake and I feel like there, yes.

Brian:

And there will be some kind of counter reaction to that.

Darren:

Yeah.

Darren:

I think I'm a big believer in reversion to the means, so I think that in

Darren:

and of itself implies that, but I think there's a hunger for that.

Darren:

I mean, while going back to MASH and, and, and Lucy, the reason that those

Darren:

things were mass phenomenons because you only had like three choice.

Darren:

Right.

Darren:

It's not that people didn't have their own little niche preferences

Darren:

and interests back in 1957 or 1982.

Darren:

It's just that they were really hard to get to.

Darren:

I mean, being a person who really loved music that wasn't mainstream, it took a

Darren:

lot of work and a lot of experimentation.

Darren:

And half the stuff I bought I didn't like because I couldn't just hear it.

Darren:

You know what I mean?

Darren:

I had to go take a risk on it and then get rid of it, so, so this

Darren:

now, at this phase, we have a lot easier low cost experimentation.

Darren:

So I think there's a lot of opportunity I've, I mean, even on the platforms,

Darren:

even within YouTube, what I'm, if not advocating, at least seeing or hoping for,

Darren:

I don't know what I want to qualify it as.

Darren:

It has roots already, right?

Darren:

I mean like the, sorry girls is an example I like to talk about, and

Darren:

where they've really definitely consciously chosen to serve their

Darren:

community as opposed to monetizing every opportunity available to them.

Brian:

Yeah.

Brian:

it's funny how we, I, it just made me think about.

Brian:

You know, online video, pre YouTube.

Brian:

'cause we, we think of YouTube as like forever.

Brian:

But you know, the world existed before YouTube and online video existed.

Brian:

Before YouTube.

Brian:

It was called like web episodes.

Brian:

And, and it would be on, on like a OL and Yahoo, and MSN

Brian:

and at the time because everyone just thinks, uses the mental models of the

Brian:

past and they put it on, on, on fa really.

Brian:

Fast changing, new environments.

Brian:

It was always this idea of like, there needs to be an I Love Lucy moment.

Brian:

It's like what will be the I love Lucy moment of, of online video.

Brian:

And the idea was that it would have to like break through and

Brian:

have like a major moment, with a hi a, a hit that everyone knew.

Brian:

Right?

Brian:

And I think the way things have developed.

Brian:

It's been completely contrary to that, you know?

Brian:

And it's not like Mr. Beast is, is a massive, massive star.

Brian:

I've never seen one, a full video, but most like, I mean, and it's

Brian:

like never before have so many people been so famous that nobody

Brian:

has heard of, you know what I mean?

Brian:

Like, because we've just become so it's everything becomes niches.

Darren:

Well, nobody, if you say nobody's heard of, you mean like our age group.

Darren:

Uh, but

Brian:

that's what I mean.

Brian:

What I mean is like, you know what I mean?

Brian:

Like, you

Darren:

yeah, I do, I do know

Brian:

have a monoculture, everyone knew every, like, everyone knew

Brian:

about mash, like what you're saying.

Brian:

Like, you know, and now I remember, our mutual friend Jason Krebs got

Brian:

really mad at me for not, for not knowing PewDiePie so long ago.

Brian:

It was, I was like, dude, like what?

Brian:

You got really sensitive about it.

Brian:

He's, he keeps claiming that he never gets

Darren:

Well, you know, fun, fun fact, that 19-year-old I

Darren:

mentioned earlier belongs to Jason.

Darren:

So, that's a real life story.

Darren:

So, you know, it's, it's funny, right?

Darren:

I mean, it's kind of like when I was a kid and probably U2 as well.

Darren:

you have this version of America and American sports and how they're

Darren:

the biggest because that's all, you know, like football, like Super

Darren:

Bowl is the biggest thing ever.

Darren:

And then one day you realize, wait a minute, more people

Darren:

watch the World Cup, right?

Darren:

Soccer.

Darren:

so.

Darren:

Yes, Lucy was big and MASH was big in our fishbowl, right?

Darren:

But there were a lot of things that were, uh, possibly bigger.

Darren:

Worldwide.

Darren:

I mean, cricket is huge and I can't understand why, but that's me, right?

Darren:

If I knew cricket, if I grew up with cricket, I would understand implicitly.

Darren:

So, Mr. Beast and a bunch of folks like him are huge.

Darren:

They're huge worldwide.

Darren:

They probably have more, I mean, you see numbers for guys like Chris General,

Darren:

Ronaldo, and they have these vanity numbers for subscribers and all that, and

Darren:

YouTube, but they get no views, right?

Darren:

So they, they really don't have social media power the way that Mr.

Darren:

Beast does.

Darren:

If Mr. Beast wants to push something, he can push something.

Darren:

Now he doesn't have the gear ratio of more auth, more niche creators.

Darren:

And I'll give you an example.

Darren:

So going back to PewDiePie, PewDiePie, I think at the time when I was at Maker,

Darren:

he had a then unheard of number of subscribers of like 45 million ish, right?

Darren:

And we had another early OG creator named she Carl, who was actually

Darren:

one of the people behind Maker Studios when it was developed.

Darren:

and he had like.

Darren:

Maybe a 10th of that, maybe an eighth of that audience wise, right?

Darren:

But if you ask both of them to say, Hey, we're gonna sell widget A or

Darren:

T-shirt B, get your audience to buy not just in percentage, but in raw volume.

Darren:

Number of skews sold.

Darren:

She Carl right over and over again because this audience cared.

Darren:

His audience came for him.

Darren:

Whereas most of PewDiePie's audience, they find him in their feed.

Darren:

They kind of subscribe, just kind of reactively and it's not really, it's

Darren:

not, it's like that band you loved as a kid and you'd always love them

Darren:

forever and you're really passionate and you wear their t-shirt as an

Darren:

adult unironically versus bands you can't even recall from the same year.

Darren:

But still, they come to town, somebody's gonna go see 'em, right?

Brian:

Right.

Brian:

They're good at getting attention.

Brian:

Right.

Brian:

And, and, but converting attention is good for ad impressions.

Darren:

for YouTube.

Darren:

Yeah.

Brian:

yeah, but like that, because that's their business, right?

Brian:

But getting people to take actions and, and whatnot, you know, you need

Brian:

a, you need more of a tie, I think.

Brian:

more of a connection to an audience versus, just being able to get attention.

Brian:

A lot, a lot of people can get,

Darren:

In the book, I refer to it as, ritual in return.

Darren:

And it's really about habit.

Darren:

It's really about relationship building, right?

Darren:

So it's really about, how often does this person look you up, right?

Darren:

To come see what you've published recently, because YouTube's

Darren:

not gonna do that for you if

Brian:

but that's the thing.

Brian:

The platforms don't want that,

Darren:

you

Brian:

want, they want everyone feeding, feeding content into the, the slot machine

Brian:

and pulling the, pulling the handle.

Darren:

Well, if, if you've got a YouTube account and you're following 40 or 50

Darren:

channels, there's a good chance that you should be getting fresh content

Darren:

every day surfaced to you just from those 40 or 50, but you don't get that.

Darren:

No one gets that.

Darren:

And if you've overindexed in a bunch of news channels, and they might be

Darren:

kind of niche leaning one way or the other, I don't take a side on this.

Darren:

You might see the other side popping up in your feet all the

Darren:

time because let's say Fox News.

Darren:

Is a big partner and they drive a lot of views.

Darren:

So YouTube not pernicious, not pushing any agenda other than monetization.

Darren:

They think, Hey, you're looking for news.

Darren:

Here's some news.

Darren:

Right?

Darren:

And you get it.

Darren:

And, and, and then after a while, if you do watch that stuff, it

Darren:

starts to pollute your feed.

Darren:

Like the five-year-old watching cartoons on your Netflix, right?

Darren:

You're just gonna get a bunch of garbage suggested for you.

Darren:

It's just a self enforcing cycle.

Brian:

Right.

Brian:

So like I, that to me, like, and that's why like the optimization of

Brian:

thumbnails, like I'm obsessed with the fact that everyone does the same.

Brian:

Approach the thumbnails.

Brian:

I'm like,

Brian:

it's

Darren:

you know, it's, it's, it's so funny though,

Brian:

it's humiliating.

Brian:

Like the fact that you can be like this massive, like you're talking

Brian:

about being like a massive worldwide star and you have to literally do

Brian:

surprise guy face in in every thumbnail because of some algorithmic dynamics.

Brian:

That's not freedom.

Brian:

Like you are not a free person,

Darren:

Yeah.

Darren:

You know, I don't, you know, I, yeah.

Darren:

I, I don't, I, yeah.

Darren:

I don't think, maybe I'm wrong, I don't think of Mr. Bees as the guy that has

Darren:

a muse and he's expressing himself.

Darren:

I'd never thought of him that way.

Darren:

Right.

Darren:

I thought of him as a really smart guy who's gaming the system and

Darren:

really nakedly ambitious in a, in a, in a admirable way to a certain

Darren:

degree, in the same way I admire Jeff Bezos, I guess to a certain degree.

Darren:

I, I wouldn't wanna be him, but I, I get it.

Darren:

And Right.

Darren:

But, So there's, there is that to it, but look, I mean, remember the nineties

Brian:

I do.

Darren:

when you, you'd

Darren:

get a lot of

Brian:

I mean, not all of them, but

Darren:

I know, but you, you,

Brian:

some years are a little fuzzier than

Darren:

be so many trailers where I start, start out with in a world right?

Darren:

All the time.

Darren:

And there's one guy here in LA that was getting driven around from recording

Darren:

studio, recording studio with a chauffeur.

Darren:

Literally there's a book about this guy.

Darren:

And he would make bank.

Darren:

Because everybody wanted their movie to have his voiceover,

Darren:

because that was like, somehow that was the thumbnail of their day.

Darren:

So it's,

Darren:

it's

Brian:

And

Darren:

the same game.

Brian:

and now he,

Darren:

I don't think

Brian:

like Dreamforce.

Brian:

He just does Dreamforce and then he, that's the only gig he's got.

Darren:

You know, but, but you know what I'm saying.

Darren:

So with like, so, and, and then like there's a time, like in the

Darren:

early two thousands, like you have these commercials on railing.

Darren:

Monster.

Darren:

Monster.

Darren:

Monster like you, like with a reverberation, you know?

Darren:

So everybody finds something that works and they have the other 90

Darren:

people that have no imagination or they just want to succeed.

Darren:

They'll do anything.

Darren:

They just copy the person who broke the ground.

Darren:

And that's what happened on YouTube, but it happens on YouTube at such scale.

Darren:

You know what I mean?

Darren:

Next thing you know, if you like, dude, perfect.

Darren:

You can find 15 other people that kind of do this trick shot stuff, right?

Darren:

If you like Mr.

Darren:

Beast, you can find people like you, like if you like Preston

Darren:

plays, you can find people like him.

Darren:

There's, there's verticals, there's genres.

Darren:

It happened before in radio.

Darren:

It happened in television.

Darren:

It just happens at such more obvious scale on YouTube that

Darren:

it's so much harder to ignore.

Brian:

What kind of risk factors does YouTube have?

Brian:

I mean, it's, it's ubiquitous, right?

Brian:

Like, but, like, does it have any risk of, I mean, simply

Brian:

becoming uncool to young people?

Darren:

I think it's already there, right?

Darren:

It's already, it's already, it's already rubbing up against that risk.

Darren:

My son

Brian:

Like Facebook, Facebook quickly became uncool.

Darren:

it's hard for to me to remember that far back.

Darren:

I stopped thinking about Facebook before

Brian:

MySpace became uncool.

Darren:

the first Trump presidency.

Darren:

that, and that's not correlated, but it just, it became a

Darren:

place where I'd see people.

Darren:

It's kinda like, it's kinda like LinkedIn now, where I see people that

Darren:

are supposed to be in my connections, but I don't really know them.

Darren:

So I would

Darren:

see in,

Darren:

uh, okay, well there you go.

Darren:

Um, but maybe, I don't know.

Darren:

I love LinkedIn, but so YouTube is already up against that,

Darren:

and that is a natural problem.

Darren:

That anything that gets super successful gets So if you are an

Darren:

early fan of any band, whether it's the Ramones or whatever, right?

Darren:

And you're early, and especially when you're young and idealistic and you're

Darren:

part of the group that gets it, and now all of a sudden all the great unwashed

Darren:

likes it, it's hard to accept that they're either sellouts or whatever.

Darren:

So, and YouTube is in that phase now where they're putting up a lot of

Darren:

content and it's a very wide audience.

Darren:

So.

Darren:

Doesn't surprise me that my son finds the comments section to be

Darren:

pointless or sterile, which drives him to go spend his time on TikTok.

Darren:

And short form is the hyper short form is what he likes to consume.

Darren:

He's a soccer head, but he hasn't watched a 90 minute game all

Darren:

the way through In how long?

Darren:

I can't remember when.

Darren:

But he watches all the highlights.

Darren:

And the same for, and, and all these sports leagues have this problem

Darren:

with younger generation, right?

Darren:

They're consuming a lot of highlights.

Darren:

They're not consuming a lot of full game viewing.

Darren:

That's why the NFL's average age audience member is like 56 or 57 now.

Darren:

It's crazy.

Darren:

So it's hard to monetize clips.

Brian:

Yeah.

Brian:

That's interesting because like, I, I wonder like how with the shortened

Brian:

attention spans, like that would seem to be working against YouTube, and I

Brian:

know they have a shorts product, right?

Brian:

But like, the essence of YouTube was a longer quote, unquote, longer form.

Brian:

I don't know what the average length of it, but like, you know, so I, I wonder.

Brian:

You know, if the next generation of creators are, are, are gonna

Brian:

be either, it's funny, like things either go super long, like an always

Brian:

on stream or it's unbelievably fast.

Darren:

Yeah, the super longs.

Darren:

like the, my son used to watch a lot of these when he was early into gaming.

Darren:

He would spend a lot of time on YouTube and he'd watch really

Darren:

long right gameplay And that's what, that was his stage, right?

Darren:

And then after that, he got into shorter stuff and he started

Darren:

watching more of these game, these gamers for their memes and comedy

Darren:

stuff than their actual gameplay.

Darren:

And then he started watching a lot of other video.

Darren:

So my, my son's progression's been from watching animals pooping on YouTube kids

Darren:

when he is like little, little, to where he is now, where he is watching, you know,

Darren:

a, you know, a lot of TikTok, which is qualitatively at times not too different.

Darren:

there's a meme right now where, there's a correcting.

Darren:

Kind of format now where creators or influencers who feel they were the first

Darren:

to do a certain format or a certain thing will seek out another follow on creator

Darren:

slash influencer who's doing the same thing and then correct them on video.

Darren:

And the audience watches it in a weird way, the same way I think, like his

Darren:

mother might watch like, not that my wife does, but that generation

Darren:

would watch Housewives of, you know, Atlanta just for the cat fights, right?

Darren:

You

Brian:

Oh, it's like a clap back.

Brian:

It's kind

Darren:

Yeah.

Darren:

Yeah.

Darren:

You're, you know, or, or you're a NASCAR watcher and you're just

Darren:

waiting for the crashes, right?

Darren:

I mean, it's a weird thing, but I, I see him, I li I hear, I, I'm like, I'm like

Darren:

constantly auditory monitoring everything.

Darren:

He's listening to I, for professional purposes, but also just because he's 13.

Darren:

I'm like, what is that?

Darren:

But, uh, so that stuff's evolved and you, and no one would go

Darren:

this, there's nobody would say, Hey, you know what we should do?

Darren:

This is a format we should create and bank on it.

Darren:

Nobody would do that, but it, it, it arose on these platforms and now it's

Darren:

bigger and who knows where it'll go.

Darren:

I'm waiting for Mr. Beast to do it.

Darren:

That's what I want.

Brian:

It'll happen.

Brian:

All right, Darren.

Brian:

Well, thank you so much.

Brian:

Thanks for breaking this all down.

Darren:

my pleasure.

Darren:

Good to see you.

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