Why The Costco Guys And Hawk Tuah Took Over The Internet — With Ryan Broderick

0:00Let's talk about what the heck happened to the internet, which has gone through a major cultural shift of late. That conversation with reporter Ryan Broderick and our own Ronjan Roy is coming up right after this.

0:41Welcome to Big Technology Podcast, a show for cool-headed, nuanced conversation of the tech world and beyond. We have a great show for you today because we're going to talk about what's happening to the internet. We've talked about this a bit on the show in the past, but we're going to go into it in much greater depth today, looking at the changes in algorithms, the content that rises to the top, and what it's doing to our brains. And we have such a great group to do it with us today because joining us is Ryan Broderick. He is a reporter and writes a great newsletter called Garbage Day. You can find it at garbageday.email.

1:16He's also the host of the Panic World podcast. Ryan, great to see you. Welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. Excited to be here. And of course, we couldn't have this conversation without Ronjan Roy of Margins and our Friday show fame. Ronjan, welcome to a Wednesday show. How are you doing? I am so excited to learn what happened to the internet from Ryan. So I'm waiting. I'm ready. Let's get into it. Same here. All right, Ryan, let's talk a little bit about the genesis of this show. So a few months back, Ranjan and I were looking at some of the great phenomenons coming up on the internet. There was the Hawk to a meme where this woman, Hayley Welch, made, I would say, an X-rated comment on an interview, TikTok, and all of a sudden became an instant celebrity, which is something we'd never seen before.

2:04And then you have phenomenons like the Costco guys coming up, which are sort of like, I guess we would call them mass appeal internet celebrities, which to my mind hadn't happened at the same frequency and the power that they're hitting today. And so like our theory was basically that we've moved away from the follow model on social media. And now we have the for you everywhere, right? So the for you on TikTok, the for you on Twitter, everything is dominated by an algorithm that chooses what might be interesting to you and not what you follow. And it's shifting the diet of content that we consume and the stuff that rises to the top online, which is why you end up having so much interest in people like Hawk Tua and these Costco guys.

2:51Why don't you take that thesis on to start and let me know if you think that is accurate. I think you are right that we have definitely shifted to a world where 10 years ago, everyone could look at the internet and sort of see the same stuff. You know, I always call it like the Gangnam Style era, the peak Ellen show moments. And it did feel like there was some sort of digital monoculture, which sometimes interacted with real world monoculture. And we kind of lived like that for about a decade. I would say that the biggest difference now is yes, apps like TikTok are breaking that by showing you hyper personalized feeds of content specifically for you.

3:33So you and I don't have the same TikTok feed and never the two shall meet. But I look at Haktoa and the Costco guys and that kind of mainstream normie internet virality that we're seeing right now. And I put most of the blame on the pandemic, which I've recently been going back and kind of reassessing. And my view of it now is that essentially everyone that wasn't online before 2020, who would ever be online came online. And now we're getting enough distance from this moment where it feels like every month or so, very normal people do very normal people things online. Everyone's like, I can't believe this is viral.

4:20And then they just become famous. And that is a definite change from how things worked in the 2010s. Is part of that that the pandemic broke everyone's brain and they're online? Well, I mean, I think we can all agree that yes, we're all a little unwell from being online during the pandemic. But no, I would say it's internet culture became culture in 2020. This is like the moment where, you know, Stephen Colbert is wearing AirPods and doing his TV show on Zoom from his bathtub. You know, the barriers broke down. Every family got a group chat that didn't have one. Everyone's parents were suddenly on Facebook 24-7 if they weren't already.

4:57The internet stopped being a subcultural space is what I would argue. Can I follow up quickly on this? So it's interesting to me that you've talked about how like we all used to watch the same stuff on the internet like gangnam style and then it sort of spread into subcultures with the for you but then you have that that's that's crossed with this theory that you have that we all went online at the same time which is interesting because you then have these new normal people celebrities like we're talking about with hawk to and the costco guys so do they transcend this for you or are these you know memes the costco guys and hawk tua are they now dominant on a sub part of the of a very large subculture on the internet or are they the the thing or are they a niche that ronjan and i only end up in because we're normies so okay like let's think about grumpy cat shall we so grumpy cat is a weird looking cat that went viral on reddit because the cat looked weird and the initial kind of virality of an image like that 10 years ago was being driven by people who were super online, power users, bloggers, aggregators, young people who were super into Vine were sharing Logan Paul videos.

6:18It was not mainstream and most of what we sort of think about as internet culture, as meme culture, has never felt very mainstream but now because everyone is online and because they don't need aggregators, they don't need communities to surface things for them. It's kind of becoming, it feels counterintuitive, but essentially if you're a super normal person who likes really basic stuff like a blowjob joke or going to Costco, you can open up TikTok and TikTok's algorithm identifies that and shows it to you. And there's no arbiter there other than the machinery of the app. So that's why I think we're seeing what Max Reed kind of dubbed the Zinternet.

7:01Because if you're just like a normal basic guy and you open up TikTok, it's going to show you normal basic guy stuff. As opposed to 10 years ago where you might hear about something viral and that like weird Redditors were talking about, Pepe the Frog or something. Those days feel over to a degree. I am liking this. And again, the Zinternet, Max Reed had defined as the network adjacent into the sports internet of 40-something dads and the hustle internet of Miami crypto bullshit and the reactionary internet of trad influencers. And when I'm thinking about this as a 40-something dad myself and who has plenty of normie friends, in the early 2010s, I would have been the one surfacing what is going viral for them.

7:50And we all went on group chats that probably went from facebook messenger to even signal and whatsapp and then now they are just the the meme time to delivery is so much shorter if i'm sending it or they're actually informing me of what's going viral right like this morning my mom sent me an instagram reel making fun of the united healthcare shooter like that's that's crazy that's a crazy reversal i'm i'm the online you're the online guy I should be sending her dank memes, not the opposite. What happens to these smaller online subcultures then? Do they still exist? Are they bigger than before?

8:32Or is there a chance that they just end up getting subsumed into these broader, you know, Zinternet and Normie culture parts of the internet? Because I guess, like, imagine somebody who's, like, in one of, like, the online radicalization communities. Because, like, this is the thing with the internet. The internet is great for what's not normal because you can sort of find a place to dissent or, you know, object against the mainstream. So if you were a really online person, there is probably a chance that you gravitate towards some, you know, some dissenting community in some way. And sometimes that ends up being a radicalization or it could end up in all these different things, sort of.

9:14Maybe that was what made the internet fun in the beginning was it was just like, yeah, they would never air this or they would never talk about this on the mainstream airwaves. That's exactly right. But I guess like now that the normal is there, do you think that these subcultures are actually going to lose some of their appeal to like, let's say the normal people who were on the internet and just trying to find things they liked? Well, I think you're asking this question at a very interesting moment because Blue Sky is now north of 25 million users. And it's well on its way to let's say that by this time next year, maybe even sooner, Blue Sky will be around 100 million users, which I looked up this morning, was what Twitter was at 2011.

10:01So that's how fast this niche platform is growing. And Blue Sky to me is a total reaction to this internet. It is all of the remaining weird subcultures of the internet decamping to there and using the sites, you know, blocking and filtering and list organizational tools to carve out those spaces. The other thing here is that a lot of these internet communities were based on places like, you know, they were living in Reddit or Tumblr or communities like that, which were public. Now they're on Discord. And the only time you might ever see them is when a meme breaks containment from Discord. so they do exist it's just they're not nearly as visible i think as they used to be until something happens in one of those communities like there's like the drama around the muppet fan account that was doing like you know he's like creeping on followers oh my god asking for nudes asking for nudes oh you knew about this ron john of course yeah i'm just i'm clearly an inhabitor of this and like my internet is costco guys but you guys are seeing something else what happened with these okay so there's a guy who was running a muppet him and his wife were running a fan account for the Muppets and then a bunch of followers of this account uh put him on blast and was like this guy is going around saying he's polyamorous and he's using that as an excuse to hit on and like sexually harass his followers and then a bunch of other Muppet fan accounts like came out with statements being like we don't like this you know we condemn this guy and and I think that's like a really good model for thinking about this stuff which is like up until that point I did not realize how deep and vast the Muppet fan community was for adults.

11:39And apparently it's quite big. This happened on Discord or what social network? So it's a Twitter. It's an X account. Right. But all the malfeasance, if you will, was happening in DMs. So I think that is one way to think about this is that the Internet is probably as big and strange as it was from the very beginning but it's now deep hidden under layers of dark social in group chats and discords and dm groups and things like that so i want to push back quickly on the blue sky thing uh that it's going to hit 100 million users i don't think that's guaranteed at all you don't like blue sky guy it's not that i don't like it it's just that haven't we seen so many of these social networks get that initial spark and then fizzle i mean what makes us think that blue sky is going to be twitter and not clubhouse i think it was the point of the show but i want to just no no i think it's a fair question i think if it was already clubhouse the most embarrassing moment in social media history as far as i'm concerned internet history yeah acting like that was anything uh other than just like a conference call simulator for bored rich guys during the pandemic i hate that app um i think it would have already fizzled i i i think the the product is good and it's very malleable you can do things with it that we haven't been able to do with a social network in a long time you can code things for you can develop apps for it it's fairly open and i think the initial energy needed to grow to 100 million in let's say a year's time has are like the domino has already kind of fallen there i think i think it there could be you know history gets you know things get crazy uh but i do think if it continues at the pace it's at, it will hit it.

13:25And I also blue sky for me kind of captures the for you verse following dichotomy pretty well, because the following functionality works really well. When I go there, I don't get a heavy dopamine hit, I get a light dopamine hit. I get the Twitter used to be for me. And I actually think that could be the staying power that as more people go on, because remember, like going on to any social network now. And if you call TikTok a social network, Instagram, you can't just post and have something go viral. Like it has to be really specific content followed by really specific people. So blue sky to me, it is that kind of return to you have some kind of following follower relationship.

14:13People will see your content and you can have some kind of back and forth and engage in some interests. So I think they could be that space for everyone looking to go back to that, that other model. And everyone has gone towards the for you algorithmic model. So that's just getting saturated. Yeah, I actually had my first blue sky post my first skeet break 1000 reposts this week. And God, people on the internet are dumb. And like discourse is so stupid regardless of where you are. But it was interesting to sort of watch the how different virality is on blue sky to something like X or even TikTok, because it is just like you're generating discourse.

14:55And then if the discourse is interesting enough, people will just jump on and they'll share it and they'll talk and they'll fight with each other all day, every day, the way Twitter used to be, you know. One thing that's come to mind during this discussion and watching this rise of blue sky has been this question that I've had and wrestled with about whether social media is going to still be relevant. And Ryan, you brought up a great point, right? Which is that a lot of the action, a lot of the most interesting stuff on the internet now happens in group chats and happens in Discord and doesn't happen in the social media feeds.

15:24And another reason why I'm skeptical of Blue Sky's ability to grow is just because it's so exhausting to try to go and attack a new platform and build a new audience. And I know this is only speaking for content creators, but I also think that like Like with something like a blue sky, you have now have blue sky, you have threads, you have Instagram, you have Twitter. And instead of like one winning out, which there won't be an absolute winner, you're just going to have diluted experiences everywhere. And if there's so much interesting things happening within the group chats, why would you go to a sort of less relevant social network to sort of see what's going on?

16:00So I wonder if social media itself is in a process of becoming less relevant right now. That's interesting. Did you feel that way in like 2012? So 2000, I mean, 2012, I think Facebook was really the place that most people were hanging out on. So you might've seen, I don't think so actually, because yeah, 2012, you had Facebook. That was still a dominant platform. You had Instagram, which was interesting. And Twitter was maybe at its height. I would pick 2012 to compare our current moment to, because yes, you did have Facebook, which was huge. And it was slowly becoming sort of the way that most people use the internet, especially on mobile.

16:42You had Twitter, which was completely saturated with the media and was sort of becoming this centralized feed of American and, you know, international media and politics. But you also had fairly large competitors like Tumblr, like Reddit, like Pinterest. StumbleUpon, I think, was still in the mix at that point. Right. When you and I first started working together, StumbleUpon was the thing driving the most traffic, not Facebook, for most publishers. So there were a lot of websites. And I didn't feel at the time that the internet was being diluted by having so many fairly similar and overlapping social media platforms.

17:20I think it's kind of annoying right now that we have a million Twitter knockoffs and we have to kind of shuffle through them. But I think that's actually kind of clearing up pretty quickly. I mean, I was spending all year posting the same stuff to X, Blue Sky, Threads, and LinkedIn. And over the course of the last couple months, I've lost interest in kind of all of them except for Blue Sky. So, you know, LinkedIn is fine. It's good for traffic. I don't read the comments because they're bad. But I don't feel so pessimistic about having this many social media sites because it's kind of what everyone's been asking for for a decade anyways.

17:57It's like more websites to go on, more stuff to look at. So I think it's all right. I'm optimistic about it. I also, I think little competition is a good thing, but I think to push back a little, for me, Blue Sky, what's interesting around it is, to me, it's an actual social network in the sense that I'm posting on there. I am not getting any engagement. I'm getting minimal, middle engagement. I'm posting for the love of posting, Just pure love of posting. But when I do get engagement, it's from people that I've interacted with online for years. A lot of the people who I had not seen on X in a long time and people I kind of consider online friends, acquaintances or whatever.

18:41So it's only really from an actual network. And I think that's interesting to me because that's what the original promise of this was. there's distribution and then there's the actual kind of network and engagement side and blue sky is the latter which i think is good because there hasn't been that on any of the big platforms in a long time i would agree with that yeah so is blue sky sort of a counterbalance to this for you internet right now it is i think just wait until it grows though right because that's it i mean these things always evolve in strange directions but i think right now it is reinvigorating uh a muscle online that has atrophied over the last five years.

19:24So Ryan, I know we've talked broadly about why things like Oktoa go viral, but it's very interesting to me what goes viral on the normal person internet, as we're calling it, or this internet, so to speak. Let's just go through two quick ones that I'd love to get your perspective on why this is so appealing. If you have any thoughts, first of all, the Costco guys.

19:49We bring the phone to you This is a dad and a son that eat the double chocolate cookie And the chicken bake at Costco And they've turned this into a bit of a media empire They brought in the Rizzler Which is this very cute fat kid from New Jersey Who has this Rizz face where he puts his finger on his chin And he looks at you and you're like, oh God Wait, the Costco guys brought in the Rizzler? The Rizzler's not even a relative Oh, he was like a separate phenomenon. He's another viral kid that they teamed up with. See, I need to be explained this one. I got the Muppet fan account. He became famous because he was wearing a Black Panther costume and I think trying to convince his dad that he was famous, that he had superpowers, and his dad just kind of mercilessly mocked him.

20:40And it became super viral, and now he's joined forces with the Costco guys. Yeah. This is the internet history. I came here for today. I genuinely thought they were all related. It was a shock to me, truly a shock. So why the Costco guys? I would say that on the normie internet, the Zintirnet, however you want to describe it, there are essentially two kinds of things that are constantly going viral. Stuff that local radio stations would talk about 30 years ago and stuff that would be on America's Funniest Home Videos. And the Costco guys are essentially like a morning radio like shock jock kind of vibe like making funny songs and like talking about like relatable stuff and then they're making videos that are perfect for america's funniest film videos like it's just it's just the stuff that has always been popular i think um i like their videos because they have a haunting uncanny valley aspect to them where no one's really blinking and they're kind of doing all these weird things in like desolate suburban florida parking lots and shopping malls and stuff but uh i think most people just think it's funny well there was this one video where you saw like a behind the scenes of the dad coaching aj wait big justice big justice the dad coaching big justice into every single line that he was gonna say and it was quite haunting it is haunting although my read on it is like they're all having fun and i think the dad i mean i went deep into his like down in the rabbit hole with him he was like trying to become an influencer on Facebook for a while with like a talk show about beer or something.

22:15And I think he used to be a wrestler and now he's trying to go back into wrestling based off the fame of the TikToks, but he's like involving his family. And I don't know, like if you compare that to like the other stuff that's popular on the internet, like I think it's fairly harmless. Um, it's goofy, you know, but I think it's okay. Yeah. I kind of like that. Uh, America's funniest home videos Because to me, it's almost like everybody loves Raymond or some show from even the 90s that was the monoculture that was safe, but just a little interesting. I never actually watched it, but just a little fun.

22:53And maybe it's just the modern equivalent of that on whatever platforms exist now instead of network TV. I think that's right. it doesn't look exactly like network TV, but I think it's interesting that a lot of the aesthetics of what would be popular on the radio or on network TV is being recreated by people now on TikTok. And, and it doesn't, it's never going to be exactly the same because like you don't have this massive sort of budget or a writer's room or sort of like executives thinking about how to reach, you know, people in Springfield or whatever. But there's always, I think going to be an appetite for just like basic relationships.

23:31slop so is this a good thing instead of the suits on at rockefeller center choosing what's going to be good now uh i don't even know what the costco dad's name is but just just regular aj aj buffumo out there just doing doing the work doing the hard work understanding what people will like is that you ask yeah you're asking like is it better and i would say that like my major concern with anybody in their situation is are they being paid are they like getting compensated for what they're doing are the working hours like humane for the children like these are the and you know these are the fears i have with all of the people who turn virality into sort of a business you know because Hollywood has a lot of problems, a lot of bad stuff happening there, but you never know what an individual might do to try to keep up with the viral machine.

24:33One more thing I'm going to say about this family is I think they were about to go out of style, like the Costco guys were done, until they dropped the song, We Bring the Boom. Sometimes you've got to reinvent it. Sometimes you've got to shake things up. I listened to that. I was like, oh God, here we go. I can't not click with these Costco guys. And I clicked and I was like, oh, this song is good. You've seen the Christmas video where it's like the whole family. Grandma's in there too. Yeah, they got lights going on. That's terrible. I hate that. Every time they release a new video, I send it to everyone I know.

25:05And I'm like, we should make a video like this. Like, why not? As long as the Rizzlers in it, I'm watching. Who do you think are the biggest early 2010s virality moments who missed out on this boomer? Was it, you know, side-eyed Chloe, the little girl meme?

25:25I mean, because if the Rizzler can wear a Black Panther suit and go viral and join the Costco and collab with the Costco guys, who are all the people that missed out on this boom in Normie influencers? Which memes do you wish had made it? I was talking to someone this week who made the good point that Rebecca Black probably would have been able to catch this, right? Yeah, yeah. But to connect the two dots of like the, of Haktua and the Costco guys, what I do think is really interesting here is that when Haktua blew up, she was reached out to by Jake Paul's production company. And he has essentially created a company that captures viral stars and then figures out how to effectively franchise them.

26:08so there's clearly now these groups that exist that have been on the internet long enough that they realize that okay we can capitalize on this moment and and we also saw this during the pandemic with uh ben lashes the meme manager who was selling the rights to different famous memes as nfts for a while there's like a big interest right now around how do you turn a viral moment into a sustainable media business. It doesn't work totally all the time, but it does seem like there are people who are trying to solve that problem right now, which is curious to me. Yeah, Ryan, you even wondered in your post after the Hawk to a moment, whether her talk to a podcast would be popular.

26:52And it turned out to be like one of the top podcasts for a couple moments there right after it launched. Right up until the big Pookie reveal. And then I think people kind of lost interest. And people don't, the reviews aren't great. Do you know about Pookie? no kooky is the boyfriend right oh sorry okay is her boyfriend and it turned out that he's just some guy but people were like who's pooky because she hadn't said like his real name but he's just a guy he's just a guy oh you know yeah i mean it is like um people in relationships won't post their significant other because i think they get more likes that way i don't know is that a real thing uh it's a thing for like uh korean pop idols japanese pop idols you're not supposed to say you're in a relationship so that the fans can kind of pretend that they're dating you so i can see the psychology of that working on Instagram as well.

27:35Right. So one last one I want to talk about is this Lily Phillips. And we should talk about OnlyFans because she is an OnlyFans star that has been talking about sleeping with a thousand people. Yes. And she slept with like 100 men in a day at the end of 2024. And for some reason, I think the algorithms are pushing that very hard. So does she fit into that like kind of talk radio show type of thing? And it's not only the algorithms, by the way, she's been covered by like almost every, you know, entertainment news site from the Post Daily Mail. What do you think, Ryan? So Lily Phillips was getting a lot of pickup because she's part of a wave of OnlyFans creators that have smartly realized that if they go viral with their clothes on, they can drive subscriptions to their OnlyFans, right?

28:24So she started kind of experimenting with viral stunts. She then decides that she's going to try to break the world record for most people slept with in one day, which is currently 919. And it's held by the actress Lisa Sparks. I looked this up the other day. That's not even possible. Yeah. Anyway, I don't want to get into the logistics. No. It's best to think about it. Yeah. So Lily has said that she is now training for 1 ,000 men in one day. So she tried 100 men. the reason it went super viral is because josh peters the south african youtuber that once pranked katie hopkins by giving her a cunt award uh if you ever saw that video in the pandemic it's pretty good he went to london and filmed a behind the scenes of lily phillips sleeping with 100 guys and in that video which is absolutely brutal to watch like i i i watched some of it i I was like, this is the darkest thing I've ever seen.

29:18She breaks down and starts crying afterwards. And that moment has, I think, been politically weaponized by a lot of right wing and far right accounts on X who are sort of pointing at it like this is, you know, this is the end of Western civilization. I don't think what Lily Phillips is doing is particularly new though, because like, I would say every nine months since the internet was invented, we have all started screaming at each other about something a porn star was doing. Like remember like 10 years ago, there was like, Oh, this new porn parody is so messed up. Oh my God. I can't believe they would make this.

29:56Like, I don't remember that, but I'll take your word for it. I was on the porn parody beat for a while. I had a, yeah. And like, you know, I think there's just a kind of a natural fascination there. Um, Um, Lily Phillips though, because she's British, I think has smartly also figured out that she can kind of tap into the British tabloid culture to kind of generate interest. So I think, I think she's just pulling a bunch of levers at once here to kind of get attention and to, to tie it back to Hawk to a, and to Costco people and all the rest. Like she's trying to monetize this stuff. She's trying to figure out how to monetize it.

30:29And for her, it's much easier because she can be naked on only fans and then you can just go see that if you want to pay. So in a lot of ways, I think porn stars and sex workers online right now have a much easier way of directly making money off of going viral. Right. And it worked for her. It does. Yeah. This actually makes me in the question of is this better or worse than the days of people in suits at big media companies deciding what would be normie culture. now it's like the most extreme is the easiest road to it which is not a not the most heartening thing but i guess it's democratized a bit more so yeah i i it's funny i've been asked several times recently by like other reporters other publications you know the simple question of does any of this matter which is i think this question that a lot of people in the u.s particularly right now are asking after the election where we had, you know, nine months of insane memes that kind of ended up meaning nothing.