The Copy and Paste Culture of YouTube (ft. Austin Kleon)

0:00The Colin and Samir Show is supported by Microsoft Copilot. This is something I thought I would never say, but can I share with you my favorite prompt? I mean, like when you say something like that, I have to say yes. Were you going to say no? No, but okay. Just let me hear it. So when I'm researching for a guest or I need to know a lot about a subject matter, I say, make me a podcast about. And when you do that, you're going to get a short blurb about that subject. And then in like two minutes, you're going to get a podcast. So check this out. Welcome to Co-Pilot Podcasts. Picture this, a guy working the front desk at a hotel, making lacrosse videos in his spare time, completely unaware that he's about to become one of the most influential voices in the creator economy.

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1:10Try it for your research. Try it for getting variations of your titles, your ideas. It's one of my favorite tools on the internet right now for our creativity. And now back to the show. What's up, everyone? Welcome back to the Colin and Samir show. On today's episode, we're talking about plagiarism. This is something that we've noticed has been increasing on YouTube. Creators are stealing titles, stealing video concepts, thumbnails, and even ripping the scripts word for word. All right, so let's play an example. This is the intro for a video by a creator named Matthew Beam. For the next 24 hours, the biggest YouTubers in the world will be controlling my life, starting with Mr.

1:48Beast. And this is the intro from a video that was uploaded after Matthews. Next 24 hours, the biggest YouTubers in the world will be controlling my life, starting with Mr. Beast. Now, this is something that happened to our friend Ryan Trahan, And he reached out to us to ask us like how he should feel about it and what can be done about plagiarism. Someone has tweeted me a guy who made a short, basically copying my short word for word. And also the plot that genuinely happened in my real life. No one has actual originality. I understand that. But there's definitely a thing of plagiarism that feels like those are actually my thoughts in my head that you just took ownership of.

2:24And it just felt so weird. And I was kind of just like bummed out by it. How do we stop this? This experience isn't unique to Ryan. Honestly, I've been feeling kind of frustrated when I open up YouTube and I see titles and thumbnails that are exact replicas of other videos that I've seen. It seems like we're entering a space where stealing and plagiarism is an accepted reality of the platform. So in an effort to actually get some answers, we reached out to the guy who wrote the book on plagiarism. His name is Austin Kleon, and the book is titled Steal Like an Artist. We ask him in this episode why he thinks this is happening, how creators can be original when it seems like everything has already been done.

3:03And lastly, we get into what's at stake as a community if we continue copying and stealing without any repercussions. Now, if you've been listening to the show for a while, you've definitely heard us talk about steal like an artist before. So this is a really cool experience to get to speak to Austin. This episode is also up on our main YouTube channel and it has some really cool graphics that our editor Chris made. So I definitely think you should go check those out. Even if you listen here, Go check those out. All right. Now for our conversation with Austin Kleon.

3:35Well, yeah, we wanted to dig in specifically with you on the topic of plagiarism and some stuff that's going on, you know, on YouTube. What was the concept behind Steal Like an Artist? Sure. The big idea of the book for me was that there's honor amongst thieves, that if you're going to steal, you need to steal. There's a right way to steal and there's a wrong way to steal. The great artist steals in this very particular way. Yeah, I think that's a good start for asking what are some of the right ways to steal? What are the elements of stealing like an artist where it is on that side of the line that is okay and honorable?

4:17So I'm a visual guy. I have the visual right here from the book, the good theft versus bad theft. So you hear all the time, you hear that phrase like, oh, imitation is the most sincerest form of flattery. It's like, no, it's not. Anyone who's ever been imitated knows that is not how it feels when you're being imitated, right? It does not feel flattering whatsoever. What's flattering is transformation. When somebody takes something and they expand upon it or they use it as just a little building block to further things. So there's a kind of way that people can think about this, whether you're transforming versus like imitating.

4:58The easiest way to not be an imitator really is to not just steal from one person, but to steal from a dozen, you know, people. Billy Collins, the poet, he says, you know, people are always being told to find your voice. Well, the way you find your voice is that you imitate about a dozen voices and then something comes out of that that's uniquely your own. It's an ethos thing of where you're trying with your work not to just bring yourself forward, but you're trying to bring everybody in your whole scene or your craft or your audience. You're trying to bring everything forward, right? Like Jimi Hendrix.

5:37He's an alien from another planet, right? He just lands and plays guitar and blows everyone's minds and he's out of here. Then you find out that, you know, he has this, you know, he's taking in every blues record he can. He's playing the Chitlin circuit. He's playing with all these different musicians. He's working up all this stuff. And that what looks, you know, what what looks like total originality is actually this kind of mashup of all these influences that he's kind of letting into his work. And so that was the real light bulb is that the way towards originality is by actually, you know, borrowing from all these different things and mashing it up into your own thing.

6:18I think what we're seeing today, especially across YouTube, is that there is a formula for success and there's actually basically no consequence for plagiarizing or like exactly replicating someone's video. And the example that we emailed over to you, I don't know if you checked it out, but it's like a word for word exact replica of someone else's video. Yeah. And it's something that we're seeing a lot across thumbnails, titles, videos. And I'm curious from your perspective, like, you know, in your book, you talk about reverse engineering a car, right? Like taking it apart, taking apart the car to like see how it works.

7:00Do you think like what we're seeing online right now with people, you know, word for word copying other people's videos is part of that process of finding your voice or is that something else? well you know i think part of the problem is is that people used to be able to practice in private you know like if you were a painter a couple hundred years ago if you were gonna copy a master's painting to try to figure out how it worked you do that in your studio nowadays uh you know it's really easy to just do that and do it in public and see if you know and see if it you along somehow. The easiness of sharing, I think is a big thing that we're up against.

7:44Making and sharing used to be really like far apart, you know, I mean, you'd have to spend so much time making the thing and then you'd have to figure out how to distribute it. And now, you know, with your iPhone, it's like instantaneous, you know, like you can, the making and the sharing is like that. For me, that's part of it is that it used to be that you could kind of work on your craft and kind of work on things in private before you kind of shared it now with youtube videos it's like well you know you don't really know if they work unless they're online right and i think that you know you're also dealing with a medium where people are judging the quality of something based on metrics that really have nothing to do with what i would consider real value or art or anything really i mean whether a video goes viral or not really has nothing to do with its um you know what it does for the world yeah i can spend five weeks on something and post it online and crickets chirp and then i can do the most half-assed lame thing i can think of and it gets 2 000 likes yeah what does that mean you know what i mean like what does that mean when you make things based on quantified results it changes the kind of work you do and it changes the way you do work um and it's just something that's that's that i think our culture is trying to work out right now yeah i think the viewership is an extra validation point an external validation point that can tip people over the edge of oh i want to imitate that because before social media you had to like Jimi Hendrix or Kurt Cobain and you had to see the validation in Rolling Stone magazine or maybe later on in MTV and then you go, okay, that's something I want, I will copy elements of that.

9:43Today, you don't even have to be famous to put out something that has a metric next to it that people want to copy. But the other thing about all of this is it's so completely subjective. I mean, it's really, you know, one man's plagiarism is another man's, you know, art. And so it really is, it is a tricky thing. I personally, I think it's the elevator test. And what I mean by this is if you meet someone who's ripped you off, do you pat them on the back and say, you know, that was pretty cool what you did with my stuff? Or do you punch them in the face? You know, I mean, it's that kind of thing.

10:20Like, are you going to get punched in the face if you meet these people ever? In an elevator. And that is something kind of interesting. um i befriended a guy named ali abdahl do you know him yeah of course yeah he's great so ali i was like i mean he reached out to me and was like he read show your work and he said this book changed my life like this is why i do this it was an example of how like i wrote this book he read it and now he does it better than i do it you know what i mean right yeah yeah i think I've started to think about why it makes me uncomfortable or why I'm angry to talk about the elevator test.

11:01Why sometimes do I see someone's work and want to punch them in the face? Yeah, yeah. In that scenario. And I think I've realized that part of it is because I want to be singular. Like I want to be an individual, the identity that I'm building, I want to protect. And even in business, it's important to be singular. You know, you don't want just any soda. You want Coca-Cola. You want this brand versus that. And what I've realized is that that's actually what makes me uncomfortable. And maybe it's a little bit of ego in that. But when I see someone copy me, I say, no, I'm me. I'm working hard to be me.

11:36You can't be me just like that. Does that resonate with you as a creator? Do you think about that element of how individual you are or being singular? Oh, absolutely. Right now I have this collage technique that I'm using that is very simple. but it looks very complex and people are very interested in everyone keeps asking me how to do it and I won't show them I know myself well enough that if other people do it it's gonna make it not fun for me I'm not gonna want to do it anymore now that's the kind of small part of myself it's something I'm just keeping for myself because I do believe that like as we could become people with audiences I think it's really important to find like find little things that you could do like to hold on to for yourself, you know?

12:24Super cool. I like that a lot. One thing I think about with ego is there is a deep need in all of us to be an individual, but to also be part of something, right? It's like to be special, to be an individual, to be known for something, but you also want to be part of something. And those two desires create like a really interesting tension for creative work. It's like this very tricky thing as an artist because you do. You want to be the guy on stage, but you also want to be part of something. You want to have what I call a genius. You want to be a genius, but you also want a genius. Genius is the word that Brian Eno uses to describe the kind of collective form of genius.

13:10This idea that if you look at some of the great scenes like New York in the 70s, a lot of these bands, they arose out of a genius, not just out of their own genius. It was because they were connected to the scene of people that like great work came out. And that's true online too. You know, I mean, your work comes out of being connected to all these different creators and stuff like that. I think what's really interesting about some of the examples that you've brought up is that they are pre-internet, pre-social media. Yeah. Anyone who's creative is doing something that's very ancient. Like this idea, looking at the world and saying, there's something that's not here that needs to be here.

13:50that's like a very ancient you know thing yeah it is really the thing and that and that is really that is why i don't like that's another way to come at the imitation thing because the really great creative work comes from i read all these books but the book i really want to read i can't find it i should write that book so like on youtube it's like i've watched all these youtube videos but I haven't seen this one YouTube video. Someone should do this and then you do it. That is real. That is the real creative impulse. Something should be here that's not here. Or these two things should be together.

14:33Someone should put these two things together. And that's going to be me. The imitation thing is this thing's already here. I like this. Maybe I'll do this too, right? That's imitation. And so once you could get past, You know, look, in the early days, you have to imitate. But once you can get to that spot where you're like, there's something missing here. Maybe I can do the thing that's missing. That's when you find your work. This is a real good story about Bronx and his dad, Ryan, real United Airlines customers. We were returning home and one of the flight attendants asked Bronx if he wanted to see the flight deck and meet Captain Andrew.

15:11I got to sit in the driver's seat. I grew up in an aviation family, and seeing Bronx kind of reminded me of myself when I was that age. That's Andrew, a real United pilot. These small interactions can shape a kid's future. It felt like I was the captain. Allowing my son to see the flight deck will stick with us forever. That's how good leads the way. With how fast everything's moving on the internet right now, the amount of output that's, you know, out there creatively, is there any such thing as an original idea, or are there any original ideas left? i think yes i mean i think that you know that nothing is completely original um but there are ideas that take us places we haven't been before and there are sounds we haven't heard um i think that the culture right now this is really funny because i'm the steel icon artist sky.

16:08But the thing I wrote about in the 10th anniversary, afterward, is I said, I think we've taken it a little too far. You know, we're really good at taking things. We're not great at thinking about where we're taking things to. That was Jean-Luc Godard's thing. He's like, it doesn't matter where you take things, it's where you take them to. And look at every Hollywood remake, comic book whatever there is how interchangeable everything feels um one of the things i think is really interesting about ai is that the reason ai images look so sort of uncannily good to people is that everything's so mediocre right now i mean that's how i feel is that you know on the whole like we're kind of a culture of mediocrity right now i mean we you know there's a kind of a sameness to you know like you look at CGI and movies and like a lot of it looks all the same it's very rare to come across something that looks new and interesting and exciting and so I think it's really interesting how AI is really good at like doing something middlingly great and it's like well yeah because that's what kind of that's what everyone else kind of does too you know yeah we're also at this cultural moment where people are really limiting what they'll take in.

17:33I mean, I don't want to get too deep into this because it really makes people upset these days. But there's this kind of culture right now where, oh, you can't separate the artist from the art, from the art. And you don't want to, you know, take in things that aren't have the seal of approval from whoever is giving out the seal of approval these days. I think one thing that's going to happen in the future is that I see this kind of future in which there's some kid who starts watching what everyone says they can't watch anymore or goes back in time and picks up really good tips from things that, you know, that are supposedly out of date or are supposedly out of style or aren't, you know, correct anymore.

18:18And I think they're going to do something really interesting with them. Because I think one of the things that's really true about the artists that I like is they go deep into the past. And I mean, not like 50 years, I mean, like 1000 years into the past, you know, I mean, like, there's a deep, rich tradition of art and culture and ideas that, you know, most people don't read a book that's more than 10 years old, you know, and so I think immediately the way to be original is to go back further than anyone's willing to go. You know, instead of ripping off the people you really admire, you should figure out who they're ripping off and who they admire.

19:04And then you rip off the people that those people admired. And pretty soon you have a whole family tree of creativity from what you can draw on. And your work becomes really, really deep that way. That's actually something that is happening on YouTube. There's a group of younger creators that refer to themselves as the YouTube new wave. And they're going back in time, not a thousand years, but perhaps a thousand in internet seconds, in internet years. And they're going back maybe five, six years to a slower paced era of YouTube. And so it's funny that - Oh, how interesting. It is kind of happening.

19:40Yeah. Yeah. It reminds me like when we first started uploading YouTube videos, we were very much, you know, enamored and infatuated with Casey Neistat and, you know, basically made replicas of his vlogs, but with our life, which wasn't as interesting. And I think you mentioned that of like, it's the content that matters. We were, we were ripping off the style, but our content wasn't as interesting as him. And then I recall when, you know, really diving into his world and learning that he used to work with an artist named Tom Sachs. And then looking at Tom Sachs' YouTube videos and going, oh, he was inspired by Tom Sachs.

20:20And then going down that pipeline and seeing some of the other editors he was working with, like Max Joseph and Oscar Boyson and being like, there's a whole world. And that term you use, seniors, it's like he emerged from this amalgamation of all these different people he was around to develop the style that was uniquely his. But if you go back to what he was inspired by, you can actually draw more inspiration. And I feel like we were able to then work out of that by understanding what scene was he a part of. Bingo. As you said that, I'm recognizing that's something that happened in our world.

20:56Now, my friend Alan Jacobs calls that swimming upstream. You kind of swim upstream and figure out where this stuff is coming from. And to me, it's about being a student. It's about researching. It's about finding out where this stuff comes from. I always tell people, I said, look, if you can do one more Google search than everybody else, it puts you so much further ahead. You know? Yeah. I think this comes from my first job at college was as a reference librarian. So I learned very early on how to research and find stuff really quickly. And I think a lot of what I offer people is I just kind of go just a little bit deeper than, you know, most most people like somebody will see a quote on the Internet and be like, this is nice.

21:47I'm going to put it on my Pinterest. And I'm like, where does this come from? Who is this writer? What was the book it's from? And I read the book and then it connects to this other book. You know what I mean? It's just it's just like going one little step and looking up the thing. So when the reward for straight up plagiarism can be millions of views and thousands of dollars. How do you pitch the reward for originality? This is a long standing tradition in our culture, which is, are you going to do the easy thing for money? Or are you going to do the hard thing that's rewarding, that's infinitely rewarding?

22:33I do wonder what people are chasing after. It really comes down to if you're chasing after numbers, okay. But if you're chasing after something else, and that includes a lifelong journey of being a creative person, bringing creative people into your life, then you kind of have to get more serious than just ripping off other people's stuff. You don't really have to be a religious person to find a lot of inspiration in, you know, the Bible, which says, for what good is it for the man to gain the whole world and to lose his soul? I mean, this is just really basic old stuff, you know, I mean, like it this it's what are you going to do with your time on this planet?

23:25You know, are you going to create videos that mimic other people and get a million hits? Are you going to try to advance yourself and advance the culture? It's really a personal choice. But that's always been true of everything on Earth, is that you have to make that decision. Are you going to try to do the easy thing that is rewarding? Or are you going to go after the big rewards, which is becoming, you know, a real human being? That's a good way of putting it. That's a great way of putting it. I love that. But it'll mess you up. It's real easy to just do the easy thing. So don't read too much Thoreau or deep philosophy.

24:11It'll ruin your earning potential. Wow, man. That was awesome, man. That's great. That's super interesting. Yeah, that's exactly what I wanted to chat with you about. That was spot on. I You