Adam Conover explains how YouTube ruined everything

22:54Nilay Patel:We're back with Adam Conover, getting into the decoder questions and what it actually looks like to structure a business and a career like his. Yeah. You have brought me to the decoder questions because you're talking about a structure you want to build to achieve very specific goals. How is the business of Adam Conover structured today? You have one employee, but how is it organized? Great question. Um, I mean, it's, it's sort of like everything everywhere all at once, you know, I'm doing, I'm doing a million things. I have a live touring business. I tour as a standup comic. That is luckily a very durable business because no matter what happens in the tech industry, people are always gonna go wanna sit in the dark with a drink in their hand around other people.

23:36And maybe they'll wanna do it a little bit less because they'll be on TikTok, but they're gonna wanna do it. Then there's buildings that are set up to give them food and drinks that'll pay to bring me out, right? And so that's good. I also do a weekly podcast. which is funded through those sort of DTC ads with my podcast network, HeadGum, which is a wonderful partner. They do really great work. And then I also do currently biweekly monologues or what I call them, which are scripted. And I work with a couple of freelance writers and researchers in order to, you know, we write them together. And then I deliver them straight to camera.

24:12And those are, you know, have a little bit more thought and work put into them. And we're able to currently sell those at a higher, you know, ad premium because, you know, when they pop, they get a couple hundred thousand on YouTube. They get millions at times on YouTube. The problem is if they underperform, you almost immediately are having to have hard conversations with your advertisers. And it's very hard to get anything pre-funded. Right. So it's you're constantly sort of trying to keep your head above water with that piece of it. Simultaneous with those two things I'm trying to figure out, you know, the next piece I just produced a stand-up comedy special for myself Entirely self-funded I recorded at the Den Theater in Chicago Cost me five figures to shoot Because I wanted to do it properly and make it look good And that will be coming out on my YouTube channel in October Hopefully with a sponsor So I don't, like, lose a bunch of money at it If I do, hey, at least I got, you know It was an hour of my creative work.

25:12I spent two years working on this material. It's very important to me. People will see it. And hopefully it'll fuel my touring business. You know, the sort of days of a large company buying your stand-up special. YouTube is a really great example of YouTube creating a race to the bottom. Because Netflix, you know, in its destruction of cable, its destruction of Comedy Central, largely destruction of HBO, set itself up as we're the home of stand-up comedy, right? And they do have a ton of stand-up comedy on their platform. But YouTube has even more. And when people are watching stand-up, I just want to watch a stand-up comedy special.

25:48They're more likely to go to YouTube first. And as a result, more and more comedians are saying, well, I'll just record it and I'll put it on YouTube because, hey, maybe I'll get lucky with the algorithm. There's been a couple examples of that. And, you know, I'll hit the jackpot. And honestly, the streamers don't pay enough unless you're the biggest, unless you're the very high end. You know, if you're like someone incredible like Ali Wong, one of my favorite comics in the country, you know, she's able to I'm sure I'm sure she has a great deal. Right. But if you're entry level, you're looking at it going, well, I might as well just do it on YouTube.

26:21Right. Because I might lose some money either way or I might not make that much. Why not just control it and put it on my own channel? And as a result, YouTube has like totally just undercut this sector of the market. And that's what I've experienced. I'm sure other people in music, other forms of media have experienced the same. The last piece of it is I am constantly trying to find my way in the new media ecosystem, which is to say people are starting to have this intuition that the future of YouTube is television, that the ad dollars are eventually going to come, that we're going to be able to figure out the business model.

27:03And so it's starting to look like you're going to be able to get investment to create something that looks a little bit more similar to an old cable pitch process. I literally, God forbid, I made a deck that I'm going to be taking around trying to say, hey, will someone -

27:19Nilay Patel:Did you do it by hand or did you just let Claude do it for you? I've seen a lot of claw decks lately man I'm just asking Look I do not work with AI for the creative stuff I did the first draft by hand I have a graphic designer who has made my decks for years You are committed to human labor my friend Look the whole point of life is to be around other people It's the point of life to make decks Come on The deck is part of the creative process man Like literally I figure it out I figure out what the show is by writing the pitch document, right? And you think about if I'm gonna be able to sell this to a person to get them to put money into it, then I can sell it to an audience.

27:59That was part of how the TV pitch process worked. And so I'm starting to try to figure out what that is in order to build what I hope will be the future of what we used to call late night or topical nonfiction comedy on television, sort of merging the monologues, the interviews that I do currently into, you know, something that feels more like a TV show. That's my project for the next couple of years. And that hopefully I can employ a couple of people and give them health insurance. But that's a big leap to take, you know? It's not necessarily a slow gradation where you can just build it piece by piece.

28:35At some point, you're like, I kind of just need a couple hundred grand to do this. Or else I can just keep making, you know, the thing alone in my apartment, you know? Which is not what I got in the business to do. I mean, it's great, but, you know, I would like to do more.

28:51Nilay Patel:I'm going to ask you the other decoder questions, and then I want to push on some of this just a little bit. Please. How do you make decisions? What's your framework for making decisions? You obviously have a wide range to make. Wow. This is – Don't worry. Some of the biggest CEOs in the world have just deer in headlights at this question, which I think is fascinating. You cut to, like, a deep therapy question for me. You know, decision making – That's all this show is, is important people doing therapy with me. Decision making is really difficult, man. You know, I am trying to embrace more of the build in public ethos of the internet and saying, you know, I'll put it out there and we'll see how it does.

29:29And we'll learn from that. I think my best decision making works that way. That is how you build a stand up set is you go do jokes in front of an audience. Half of them don't work. You stop doing them after the third try when it doesn't work. And then you come up with something new. And then the ones that, you know, lived are the ones that are the special. And I've been trying to apply that more to my scripted and my podcast interviews. But, you know, sometimes you got to take a flying leap and say, let's let's try to do this. You know, I mean, the the hardest types of decisions to make are the ones about the business itself.

30:03So I'm like, OK, I have a limited amount of time in the day. Do I try to create a new piece of YouTube content for my sort of AVOD audience? or do I try to create something special for my Patreon audience? That's a big chunk of my income as well, is people who pay to subscribe. Do I make a custom podcast just for them that only a few thousand people are going to hear rather than the hundred thousand that might hear it on YouTube, but those people are paying for it and if I put good content there, maybe it'll grow. You end up making those sort of decisions in a vacuum and all you can really do is follow your intuition and adjust when it doesn't go well.

30:42The last thing I'll say is my oldest decision-making rubric has always been, I try to imagine myself as the audience. When I was first making a cable show, I was very lucky that I grew up watching basic cable and I got to make a basic cable show. And I imagined I'm 15 years old. I'm sitting on the floor watching the television set. What would get me excited? And I try to do that same thing with YouTube and podcast. You know, if you're thinking about the audience's experience as someone who's creating things for an audience, you'll hopefully never be steered wrong.

31:17Nilay Patel:Yeah. I'm very curious about that dynamic in your decision making because I personally am always we should start with the audience. And then unfortunately I keep getting older and the young audience came up in a totally different media environment. Like I started as a blogger and famous newspaper columnist would not give me the time of day at events. and now the TikTokers look at me like I'm Gandalf at the events and they call me the mainstream media, which is deeply hilarious, right? And my calibration towards the audience has largely been, oh, they don't know. They don't know that there was another way.

31:54Nilay Patel:This is the only way that they've known. And if I don't participate in these specific ways, I'm actually so different. I'm not, I'm like incompatible. I'm trying to plug the old USB cable into the new USB port. You know, Like it just doesn't work. And the thing that really gets me at that, the pressure on all the platforms and all the creatives in the world to just go direct to the audience right away for free is at an all time high. And then the expectation that the way that you will monetize that is that you will get a brand sponsorship. Right. You went viral twice on TikTok and some supplement company is going to show up and you're going to read the ads for the green powder that makes you more virile or whatever it is they're promising today.

32:38Nilay Patel:Yep. There's something about that that feels very dangerous to the creative process for me. And you're scratching at it with what creative thing am I going to do today? And maybe the rubric is the Patreon people are paying me this much money, but the audience might grow on YouTube in this way. and maybe I just want to make the most viral thing that the algorithm is telling me to in this way. I have truly struggled to manage that dynamic. What is the most economically lucrative thing to do? What is the thing that will get me the most attention? And then what is the thing that lets me stay pure of heart?

33:11What is the thing you actually want to do? There's that. What is the thing that makes you, you're doing the thing that got you into the business in the first place, right? That made you want to go to college for the thing or made you get that first job.

33:25Nilay Patel:Which is saying the iPod is better than the Zune. And if I could just make that video every single day for the rest of my life, that would be great. I just wanted to goof off with funny people and say something and come up with something new to say with them, you know? Yeah, it's really, really hard. So a couple answers there. First of all, in terms of what the audience expects now, it's true, I talk to people in their 20s and literally the way you or I would talk about MTV or Comedy Central is how they talk about like early YouTube. That is their culture that they grew up with. And you can't ignore that.

33:58And sometimes I'm like, all right, is my desire to go to do something that feels more like a television show, am I just being an old man about it? Should I just do the new thing? Should I just, you know, I look at people I really admire on YouTube, like ContraPoints and HBomberguy are two YouTube video essays I adore. and they have, they do this very specific internet native model where each of them makes one three hour long YouTube video once a year. That is so amazing that they're patron, that they have a massive Patreon audience and they take no brand deals. Right. I'm like, do I need to do that?

34:33Well, they built that organically, you know, that they did, they started that when I was working in television. That's not who I am. Right. So that's hard for me to do. You don't want to be, you know, the Steve Buscemi meme, right? And show up and try to do the thing. If you started making a ControPoints video, I think that'd be pretty good. I would pay extra for that one. Okay. I mean, you know, and she does her videos by, she writes and films and edits and set decorates every single piece of that herself. And that's not the way I've ever worked. And sometimes I go, do I need to do that? Well, it's special when she does it.

35:07It's gonna work when I do it. At the same time, you know, I do have this belief that, look, I always wanted to make a late night show, right? That is still a goal of mine. There's other things I want to do, too. I'd love to do a travel documentary. I'd also love to do a late night show. Everyone says late night is dying, except that millions of people still fucking watch it on YouTube, right? Colbert was getting millions of views on every single thing he posted. The Daily Show still does, right? But no one has built the digital native business model. and you know, YouTube videos are getting longer.

35:40I'm like, I still have an intuition that at the end of the day, I think people still wanna sit on the couch with a drink in their hands and their partner's feet on their lap and like the dog next to them and watch something that's 45 minutes long and watch a funny person, like give them some relief about the news of the day and have it be funnier than just a bunch of fucking riffs. Bringing those two sensibilities together is the job of what I'm trying to crack. Figuring out how to do the same thing on YouTube and that has a flavor of the old style. I think the success of standup comedy on YouTube and on vertical video is a good example of this, where it's such an old art form, and yet it really performs well.

36:20People do still want it. The piece of how do you do what is economically successful, that is the really difficult part, because Hollywood at its best, obviously not all the time, but Hollywood at its best was, I have a good idea. There's someone working for the company who sees that it's good, they buy it because they know it's good and it's so good other people will watch it. And then they give you money to make it good. And on some level, you can go to them and say, they're like, ah, we don't want to pay for this. And you could say, yeah, it's going to be really good though. And if you convince them, you can get the money, you can make the thing.

36:53And this is literally how I made the last show. You know, my old show on True TV was, you know, it cost like$700 ,000 an episode to make, a million by the end. And that's because it was good, you know? And they made enough money off of it that they kept it going. But when you are literally just chasing the algorithm for every single click, that is a lot harder. And so, you know, it disincentivizes experimentation and it disincentivizes, you know, putting the work in to make the thing good. So, for instance, the stuff that I do the best at, that I get the best numbers at on YouTube are when I talk about AI and I'm critical of the tech giants.

37:30My top YouTube video ever from my recent run is like, Elon Musk is just dumb. That's the name of the video. That's going to be the title of this video. Can you do a tight five on it right now? Absolutely. Oh, it would take an hour. But I also have other things that I want to talk about. And I just made a video that went into, for instance, the history of leaf blowers. Why, even though gas-powered leaf blowers are banned in California, why did I literally walk by one on the block today? there's a fascinating history behind it. Leaf blowers are horrible for the environment, blah, blah, blah. Really interesting story.

38:05I was like, oh, I heard about this. I want to make a video about it. I spent three weeks making the video, got 50 ,000 views because it didn't, I don't know, maybe I could have had a better thumbnail, but like it wasn't what the algo wanted from me today. And so I'm going, all right, do I just need to, do I only talk about AI now? You know, I would like to talk about other things. and that's you know people click subscribe on my channel I can try to grow my audience but like they click subscribe they're not going to see my video unless the algo shows it to them you know so

38:38Nilay Patel:I want to ask about this because this dynamic is very real especially if you think about data driving every young creator because they're just trying to get started and so the data is going to drive them it's going to have an outsized influence no matter what you have some history you have some beliefs about what people might want based on what people want in the past. You're going to make a late night show. You're going to take that risk. Young creator just looks at the view counts and says, well, this got me views. I should get more views. We've had basically every platform CEO on the show. We've had Neil from YouTube.

39:08Nilay Patel:We've had Adam from Instagram. And the argument they would make in response to this whole conversation, and I'm going to try to do it justice, even though I mostly agree with you, but I'll try to do it justice, is look, what you're describing in the 80s and 90s and early 2000s was a series of gatekeepers that were inaccessible to most of the people in the world. So I'm a kid who grew up in Wisconsin. If I wanted to make a late night cable TV show, that path was almost totally foreclosed unless I moved to New York or Los Angeles, got a job as a waiter, and then tried to hustle my way up through comedy clubs to meet one person who might decide that I was talented.

39:43Nilay Patel:And that meant mostly gatekeepers existed and mostly people were left out. And the economics of that might have been great and might have created a large middle class because there was enough overhead in that system to pay for a large middle class of creatives, but it mostly locked everybody out. The social platforms create instant marketing opportunities for everyone from their bedroom. So if you're a young comic in the middle of the country and you have no ability to get into the comedy cellar in New York because you can't just work for free in that specific way, you can just film yourself talking on TikTok until you get a little bit of an audience and Then maybe you can drive an audience to come to a club near you or whatever it is you're going to do.

40:22Nilay Patel:And that pathway to get the exposure, which is necessary at the beginning, exists in a totally democratizing way. And the economics of it might be bad, but many, many more people have the opportunity. And I think about that. I think about my own career. I started as a blogger working for AOL for$12 a post in the newspaper columnist who are now very, very sweet to me. They have been very sweet to me over the years. But I got to compete with them in a way that previously I would have never gotten to compete with them. And I can't quite reconcile how badly I feel about the economics of the industry today and the amount of opportunity that it has created for so many other people.

41:02So I have a clear answer to this, which is that to the people from YouTube, I would say, well, you're the gatekeepers. The algorithm is the gatekeeper. Of course it is. Talk to somebody like literally like try to start something from scratch. Try, try to build from getting 200 views that the algorithm gives you. And like, tell me that's not a gatekeeper. Like, yes, the bad old days, we had NBC, CBS, ABC, and that's all you get. Right. Those were big gatekeepers. You had to please them. Now we have YouTube, Instagram, TikTok. That's all you get. And in fact, YouTube doesn't really compete with Instagram and TikTok directly because it has a completely different business model.

41:46They do the horizontal thing. It's on streamers in the way those aren't. So really it's like, it's literally just YouTube. If you want to do broad swaths of content, that's a fucking gatekeeper. Like you think Mr. Beast is like good at what he does. Like he pleases the gatekeeper. that's literally like look at any interview with him it's about like him figuring out okay this got this many views this got this many views this got this many views right now the argument that you're making that the gatekeepers were gone and the internet was democratizing that was good when it was people in charge of it right do you remember back when we used to email memes to each other because like you saw the video the pneuma pneuma kid and you were like oh that kid's funny i'm gonna send it to my friend right because it was it was like large swaths of people in charge of like the distribution.

42:36It is not anymore. Like they are taking some very loose signal from our swiping and turning it into like algorithmic control of what we see. And they have more power than anyone who ever worked for CBS or ABC ever did. And it's actually worse because people aren't in charge of it. Because if you went and talked to any of them and said, hey, you're in charge, They would say, no, we're not. It's just an algorithm. Well, that's actually worse because at least in the old days, there was someone I could go impress. There was a person I could go talk to. You know, if you go talk to a streamer now and you try to convince them, you know, Netflix, for instance, hey, this show is a good idea.

43:20They'd say the algorithm said it's not like that's that's basically what it boils down to. They don't have the leeway to make decisions with with rare exceptions. And the good shows are when the exception gets made, frankly. But it's it's ludicrous. Like the media ecosystem now is more concentrated, more closed off than it ever was before. The only difference is now anybody can upload anything for free and YouTube will host it for you. And that's good from like a user perspective. If you just like literally want to upload a video of your baby and send it to your, you know, sister, like that used to be a lot harder.

44:00YouTube like solved that problem for a lot of people. but in terms of a broadcast medium, it's just grotesquely exploitative. Like, okay, imagine if driving for Uber, you didn't get paid. Instead, you got to try to drive for Uber for years and they're like, oh, if the algorithm says you're really good at Uber, maybe we'll start to give you a little bit of money. And everybody in the country was doing this simultaneously. That is what the media ecosystem is. And it's bad. It's bad. We need to take another quick break.

44:36Nilay Patel:We'll be back in a minute.

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48:11Nilay Patel:we're back with adam conover discussing the new gatekeepers the online recommendation algorithms and how they concentrate power and create incentives for everyone who makes stuff on the internet this is the other thing i wanted to ask you about you mentioned you know you want to have a unionized talk show on youtube you're going to hire some people that's a lot of cost We run a union shop here. There's costs associated with all that. And those are good costs. I think media companies should pay those costs. You need the economics to work. And you mentioned you needed a digitally native business model for that.

48:43Nilay Patel:I look at how that works today. And that mostly looks like big lucrative brand deals. You need a Coca-Cola or a Chevy or a Ford or whoever to show up and pay you a bunch of money to be integrated into your show. And you, Adam Conover, eventually have to drive to every guest house in your Ford Fiesta or like whatever it is and then open it. And in the back, it's full of supplements or whatever that money is going to look like because the advertising has to be integrated in the content. And then that all has to reach scale. And that is where that money comes from. Are you comfortable with those levels of integrations?

49:15Nilay Patel:It's very different in me for news, but sort of on the YouTube entertainment side, that pendulum has swung and has been swung for a long time. I mean, I don't love it. And, you know, you're constantly being asked to make compromises and make deals that you'd rather not make. What we're doing is we're going back to the old days in so many ways of media, right? Like, again, YouTube is ABC, NBC and CBS rolled into one. What were the earliest days of that broadcasting like? It was the Marlboro comedy hour, right? Where all the comedians would say, oh, I love smoking Marlboro cigarettes in between every single joke.

49:51That was how television as an industry began. We eventually separated those out, right? The commercials will run in between the shows. And it was never like, you know, it is at the New York Times where like the ad sales never talks to the creative, but like generally, you know, I made a basic cable show for years that half of our episodes were taking apart advertisers and talking about, you know, diamond engagement rings and, you know, razors and how capitalism tries to scam you. And in between was ads. And we never got pushback. We, like, one time they were like, hey, please don't do something about the NCAA because we broadcast that every March.

50:30Like, you know, it would be stuff like that. But it wasn't, you know, they had the separation. Why? Because the audience likes it better that way. It just took them a couple decades to figure that out. And right now we are in the period of a couple decades where we're having to figure that out again. I see YouTube literally trying to rebuild that model very slowly. I think what YouTube, and this is a little bit my own theory, I think what they're trying to do is they don't want to be the channel, they want to be the cable company, right? And they want the channel, like my channel, the Adam Conover channel, to be the cable channel.

51:06So they want me to make the brand deal and me to do all the business development. And they're just the pipe that takes a bunch off the top. Great business model if they can make it happen. But they know that they want to level up the production value. And so what are they doing? They're not giving anybody money, but they are starting to promote shows more. They're doing their own upfronts. They're trying to connect people with advertisers. is they're trying to sort of like, I see them trying to sort of spark the pilot light of this a little bit, but without actually putting money or infrastructure or investment into it, they're just like, can we just sort of like boost you guys up a little bit at the same time where Netflix's model is the opposite.

51:43We'll sink the money into the production and try to make the thing at the high end. And that's a really interesting competition. Unfortunately, it's a competition between two giants. I think that like we could get there by the time I'm like 60. And hopefully at that point, I'm hosting a show and, you know, there's ad breaks in between and it's not too bad of an integration. But, you know, we're in the world that we're in. Yeah. The reality is I would love to do a totally pure show where I'm just, you know, subscriber funded, you know, like I would, I would love to be ContraPoints or H-Bomber guy.

52:16Right. But what that model pushes you towards is I do it all by myself. My costs are zero. And so what do I have? Time. And I put in infinite amounts of time. And if I can put in infinite amounts of my own time, then I can like get rewarded with subscriber money and the subscribers will pay me almost because they know that it's like just me doing this. Right. But I just don't want to work that way. I want to work with a writers or I want to work with other comedians. I want, I want camera people. I want like a whole, I want a team, you know, like it's just the kind of, and to do that, I need to get advertisers.

52:49and that is, look, currently, yeah, that means like dealing with a lot of bullshit that you would rather not have to and having to get like, make compromises that you would rather not. And yeah, it sucks. I don't have a way around it.

53:03Nilay Patel:I certainly know a lot of creators who describe the lifestyle as being very lonely and have taken to even calling other creators their colleagues in order to create that sense of camaraderie, even though they are largely competing for the same minutes on the same platform in terms of attention. I want to ask you about the advertiser thing. I basically have to ask you about crypto advertising now. You got in a lot of trouble because you read a crypto ad, Sam Altman's, I think, WorldCoin. Yeah. This is the hardest thing, right? Like for all I know, the ads on our show are going to be a bunch of AI companies and crypto companies.

53:32Nilay Patel:And we do have the wall, right? We make journalism here. I get to say I have no idea what happens there. Take it or leave it. The integrations are where people get in trouble. And you read the ad copy. You took the money. The audience was very unhappy with you. I actually didn't take the money. I turned down the money. I took the ad down. And yeah, I was not paid for all the trouble I got in. Walk me through all of that. Walk me through saying yes. Walk me through then saying, actually, this is bad. I'm taking it down. I don't want your money. When you're in this business, like you have to look for ROI, right?

54:05You have to look for someone wants to pay me an outsized amount of money to do like not that much work. And that's the way you make the entire business function. because like the, the, the, for instance, the YouTube monologues I do are incredibly effortful. Right. Um, but I'm still trying to make a living. And so if someone's like, Hey, we want you to, one example of this that I do in live performances, you know, I'll get hired to like host a gala event. Right. And that like pays more than a normal standup gig, but it's actually less work. And so, you know, you sort of need some of that to pad out.

54:36Um, so, you know, the, uh, Sam Altman's orb company comes along and says, which you guys have covered quite well on your, on your site. Um, and says, we want you to come to this event and just make a video at the event and, uh, and publish it. And we'll give you a bunch of money for it. And I was like, well, this product honestly looks like fucking garbage. Like it's, it looks like one of the worst products I had, I had ever seen. And I was like, they want to pay me a bunch of money to my audience is going to hate this. Yeah, sure, whatever. Like that way I can like literally, you know, use that to fund some of the stuff that I want to do.

55:13So I go and do it. And yeah, the, you know, it comes out. People are very unhappy with it because it's a, the premise of the product is like deeply unsettling, grotesque, surveillance oriented, right? However, when I was there watching the keynote, I was like, this is the most comical vaporware I have ever seen. This is never going to come out. No one is ever going to do this. This is so ill-conceived. It's the biggest turd I've ever seen in tech. So that was my evaluation. How could I expect my audience to see it that way, right? They only saw the horrible version of it. So what I eventually did was I took the video down.

56:00I turned the money down. I was not paid for it. I instead made a YouTube video where I talked for about 25 minutes about how grotesque and stupid and bad the product was. And I was able to do, I think, a pretty funny and incisive piece of commentary about it because I was at the keynote. And the only reason I went to the keynote, I was left to add, part of the reason I went was I just thought that this thing was going to be weird. And it was. And I wanted to go see, you know, like it's there's a little bit of like, you know, looky looing around. So I ended up making a video that I was very proud of as a result of, you know, this fiasco.

56:37I did not monetize that video, so I didn't earn any income off of it. I think a lot of creators go through this moment where, you know, you're constantly being sort of like led along and tempted. Right. And, you know, sometimes you like step over the line. and you don't even realize you've done it until after you've done it, right? Like, well, I thought I was behaving with integrity in the moment, but looking back, why would anybody think that I was? And does that mean I really did? That's, I mean, that's the situation that we're in, right? And I'm happy to say that I fucked up by doing so. I also believe, you know, you make mistakes and then you acknowledge it and you, you know, do something corrective, which is what I did, did my best to do.

57:27And luckily the lion's share of my audience was like, oh, this video was really great. Thank you for the thorough explanation and for eviscerating the product.

57:40Nilay Patel:That thing is hilarious, by the way. I will encourage people to watch your video and all the other videos. Any coverage of the Orb that isn't literal SpawnCon is like, what are we doing here? Let me ask you about this. You obviously learned a huge important lesson. If you had worked in a media company of any kind, entertainment company of any kind, that would become institutional knowledge. Right. Right. We screwed up. We're never going to do this again. Now a bunch of people have had this experience. And when the new people come in and they try to do this thing again, we're just going to say no.

58:09Nilay Patel:But you have to do that alone. Every creator has to do that alone. My joke on the show for ages is every YouTuber gets their wings when they make the video about how mad they are at YouTube. I'm about to make that video actually. I've got it locked and loaded. Finally, you're going to grow up. This actually might be it on it. This is the beginning of it. Yeah. Well, the reason I ask that is, you know, in the old way, there were unions. You are part of a union. Right. And the union and, you know, the big Hollywood studios would negotiate. These were repeat players. So the negotiations were, even if they were antagonistic, they were towards a common purpose because you were going to do it again in three years or whatever.

58:48Nilay Patel:and that created a kind of institutional knowledge, a set of shared goals at the very least if the tactics and specific negotiations got heated, at least the goals were the same. No one can do that with YouTube. Ben Smith from Semaphore was just on the show and he said people are building real businesses, real careers on top of YouTube, but YouTube has probably to its own benefit and to the detriment of the meat industry built a system where it's for individuals and no one has any leverage except for YouTube. You and I cannot get together and go demand terms from YouTube. If we got a thousand YouTubers together to demand terms from YouTube, they would still laugh.

59:25Nilay Patel:They would never, they wouldn't even take the call. They'd say there's another thousand teenagers who will work for free. Good luck. How do you change that? You have a very unique perspective as someone who is organized against Hollywood. Can you change that as to the platforms? Well, the first thing I say is I actually don't think the organizing target, if I'm putting my labor organizer hat on, I don't think the organizing target is YouTube itself. I think it's the channel, right? So I wouldn't try to organize YouTube. I'd try to organize Mr. Beast's staff, who you've probably done some reporting on yourself, are horribly abused and underpaid.

1:00:00And that is the reality of the economy, right? So it's actually not the case that the biggest YouTubers are all individuals. the biggest YouTubers are companies, right? Go look at, you know, Adam Savage, right? Like that guy is basically doing a cable show every single day. I go look at Hank Green, I love Hank Green, and I look at him, I go, how many people are helping me make these videos? You know what I mean? Like who's, et cetera. It is a large scale enterprise, you know, if you wanna do something that's big and constant and brings in the money and et cetera. And it's YouTube, it's in YouTube's interest to encourage those big channels to get bigger.

1:00:43And so the world that I foresee is sort of, you know, monopolies or consolidation are sort of a law of economics unless you've got a strong antitrust to prevent them. I see YouTube getting even bigger, the bigger channels getting even bigger, right? And then getting big enough to organize. So, I mean, like, you know, you said yourself, you're the verge, you are a YouTube channel and you have a unionized staff. and we're starting to see that happen in the YouTube space. You're starting to see the staffs of specific channels unionizing. I also think that if you got, if those big channels do grow big enough, could the top 100 channels go to YouTube and say, hey, we demand a better split?

1:01:29Yeah, they could. Is that gonna benefit all the people who work for the channels? Probably not, but it becomes more of a B2B negotiation, right? It becomes more like when the cable channels were arguing against Spectrum and Charter and all of those. They would have those carriage battles, those kinds of wars. It becomes that kind of dispute. And so YouTube is creating itself as a cable monopoly on top of the internet. And I think that's what the dynamic is. However, the original point of the point of the creator economy was to like separate labor from each other and in fact make the labor so invisible that even if you're not doing it professionally, you're kind of doing it all the time ambiently, you know?

1:02:19like when you open, you know, YouTube or Instagram, how often are you watching someone doing it professionally versus how often are you watching someone do it for fun, right? Or having one video go viral or, or making one video a week to promote their dentistry business or making one video a week because they hope to go pro, but they actually never will. And Instagram hasn't told them, right? That's a huge sort of dark matter, right? Of social media. None of those people will be paid. Those people are truly ununionizable. And what it'll eventually take is, sorry, the government, like making some regulations around this.

1:02:58Right. And where we're starting to see that is if you look at how different states are treating like gig workers, like rideshare drivers, you're starting to see that sort of like action happening. There have been battles in California, other states as well. They're slow. We're certainly not close to being all the way there. And again, to me, this looks like we're doing the history of the labor movement again. Like the capitalists have consolidated. They figured out a new industrial revolution that has impoverished everybody and had us work for penny wages. And it's going to take, you know, a lot of people organizing, a lot of labor power, government, you know, get it like figuring out that there's a problem and doing something about it.

1:03:43It's going to take decades. Hopefully it won't take violence in the streets, which is what it took, you know, during the late 19th and early 20th century as the labor movement, you know, was finally working its way towards labor peace. But like so often when I think about these things, everyone wants to say, oh, it's new. It's new. It's new. Actually, we've gone back to the beginning in so many areas.

1:04:04Nilay Patel:One of our great reporters, Mia Sato, has a line and a thesis as she's working on reporting out that influencers are the new gig workers. And there's just a lot of echoes in there. Oh, yeah. I want to end by asking about Hollywood. You've come out very strongly against the Paramount-Warner Brothers merger. There's an argument in everything you're describing that you should just let Hollywood kill itself. You should just let David Ellison spend all of his dad's money buying a studio, running CBS News into the ground, that these things are doomed. and there's a version of this where the big fights to stop them from killing themselves so that the writing staff of whatever show on whatever network can persist for a little longer just slows down the apocalypse like you can't fix it do you think it's fixable or are you just trying to slow down the apocalypse uh first of all i think all effort that you put into fighting this shit is good effort, right?

1:05:04So even if the Paramount Warner merger happens and it just costs them a lot more time and money, well, that'll make the next monopolist think a little bit longer about the next monopoly, right? And we are starting to see like an epical shift in antitrust. I mean, even, you know, people like Lina Khan and Alvaro Bedoya are doing amazing work out of office. You imagine if Democrats take power again, even the Republicans are starting to like do, do antitrust a little bit. So we are making progress there. The most pernicious lie the tech industry tells is about its own inevitability. Oh, oopsie. Oh, it was just, oh, hey, we just invented something so good that everything you used to like has to die.

1:05:49Oh, sorry. You got to get with the program and be left in the, no, these people like killed our businesses purposefully with malintent, right? The first time this ever happened to me was like, you know, the Facebook pivot to video era. When I used to work at CollegeHumor, we had a great business making videos on the internet. Facebook lied about the traffic that their videos were getting. We pivoted a huge amount of the business to Facebook and it cratered a huge amount of CollegeHumor's business. CollegeHumor later became Dropout, which is a wonderful media a success story that I'm really proud of.

1:06:21But, you know, it's that kind of thing, right? It's like when you look at this shit, half of it is just Mark Zuckerberg lying to people over and over again. So we don't need to accept it as some law of the universe. The last part of it, though, is I don't just make this argument because, hey, I miss having union health insurance and I miss hanging out with funny people writing stuff. Of course, I miss those things. Of course, I'm sad, you know, about the death of the creative class in Hollywood. But also like, I got into this because I like movies. I like television. People still do like movies.

1:07:00Like talk to people. They're not like, oh, I never want to see a movie again. They're like, what happened to the good movies? Go watch Terminator 2 with anybody. And they'll go, I wish I could see a movie like this now. Oh, why won't they make me this movie anymore? uh why you know and look at the by the way the box office is having a really good year because they made a couple good fucking movies this year big movies and small movies right you got the you got the obsession and the back rooms you got you got the odyssey even like the fucking marvel bullshit had a pretty good year we love this art form still the movies are like america's one of America's greatest cultural legacies.

1:07:41It's like the movies, jazz, and soul food, right? Are like the, like three of America's three biggest contributions to world culture. Like we can't let it die. And the fact that like this entire art form is very effortful, takes a lot of money. It doesn't mean that we should never, we should accept a world in which it just doesn't exist because a couple of billionaires wanted to lie and steal from each other. Like, we don't need to accept that world. We can, in fact, have a world that has room for both YouTube and television and the movies and, by the way, plays and novels and all the other art forms that people love.

1:08:27We just have to not let these idiots and assholes destroy their own and each other's businesses.

1:08:36Nilay Patel:Well, I can't think of a better place to end it. Adam, you're gonna have to come back soon. This was incredible. Thank you so much for being on Decoder. Oh, Neil, I thank you so much for having me, man. I had a blast. I'd like to thank Adam Conover for taking the time to join Decoder, and thank you for listening. I hope you enjoyed it. If you'd like to let us know what you thought about this episode or really anything else at all, drop us a line. You can email us at decoderattheverge.com. We really do read all the emails. Or you can hit me up directly on Threads or Blue Sky. We also have a TikTok and an Instagram.

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