10 Things We Like (and Don’t Like) About ‘Euphoria’ This Season. Plus, “The Feed Is Fake” With Lane Brown.

29:38I think most notably, Andy and I more or less jokingly talked about the stuff that happened with Geese, the band Geese, a couple of weeks ago. Wired Magazine wrote an article about Geese's marketing company or the marketing company that works on behalf of Geese, that Geese is a client of. and John Semley wrote an article called The Fanfare Around the Band Geese is actually a psyop, actually was a psyop and the piece is largely about the unorthodox practices that Kaya had a good use, used on behalf of Geese but this is, like, Lane, I wanted to know that's like sort of my in on this article I saw this, there's a funny story I have to tell you like after we hear from you for a little bit but, you know, I think that that was sort of my in on your article, but what was the thing that kind of was like the kernel of the idea that got you to write this piece?

30:30It's sort of a two-parter, basically. I feel like I have been noticing things, just every story I try to write, just in my sort of daily intake of information. You know, I'm looking on Reddit, I'm seeing what the voice of the people is on the internet comments. And I've kind of noticed just sort of more and more things, I don't know, a little strange. And so I did a story in real estate a couple of years ago. It was all about how New York City rent prices were just sort of exploding at a time when basically people were leaving the city. And just in these New York City apartment reddits, there would be full of people saying like, you know, this is not happening.

31:14Nobody's leaving. People are moving in. People are flooding back. I was like, this is just totally not the case. So I sort of noted that. And I saw kind of the same thing over and over again as I was working on some other stories. And then I found this service. I'm not going to say the name of it because I maybe don't want to give them, I don't want to do any product placement here. But basically, there are services that will essentially advertise your product within Reddit comments. And I thought, oh, this is really, you know, they've really figured something out here and they've got me. And so I've kind of, you know, I've been begging my poor editors at New York Magazine to let me write a version of this for so long.

31:53And finally, the sort of, you know, the geese thing came up and suddenly this was a thing that was, you know, sort of in the conversation. And I was finally able to break them down. But after years of sort of twisting their arms and so they finally kind of let me let me take a couple of weeks and sort of dig into this. The other thing, too, also is I have no idea what's popular anymore. Yeah. And as somebody that cares a lot about culture, I was the culture editor at New York Magazine for a long time. And my job was kind of, all right, figure out who people are going to care about in six months so we can put this person on the cover.

32:26And it used to be kind of simple to do that. We had things like ratings back in the olden days. And so that was fairly easy to do. And it got harder and harder and harder. And now I just have absolutely no idea. I was thinking, do you have any idea what is more popular, the bear or the pit? I don't know. I think definitively in this case right now, the pit. But I think cumulatively, culturally, when you think about the footprint of the bear, people saying, yes, chef, the way people maybe started dressing because of the way Jeremy Allen White dresses on that show, it's a different kind of influence.

33:07It's maybe people saying things and not even knowing that, yes, Chef is from the bear, you know, but it goes hand in hand with there's different kinds of impact that shows can make. And I think, you know, over the course of our lives and, you know, especially working in music, there are bands that are important and there are bands that are big. And that's always been a tension in the media is to like, you know, are we making too big of a deal out of a band just because we personally like them? So we're going to fashion some narrative about why this is the only band that matters when there is objectively in sync or somebody who is like exponentially bigger than the White Stripes or something like that.

33:50And that kind of back and forth has always been really fascinating. And like you, dude, I don't think there's ever been a time where I've been less certain of not only how many people are watching something. And you get at this in your piece where you talk about when you really start to go in about like, you know, all of this stuff being made by companies that have no incentive to share how people are watching it, how deeply people are watching it, how much they're paying attention to it. it's so complicated now. I'm sure you've had this experience now when you're like, even talking with friends or if you go to a bar and TV or movies come up and the amount of siloing that's going on now where somebody is like, yeah, man, I am like a for all mankind, every scene completist, and then the next guy over is like, I don't even, I have no idea what you're talking about.

34:46And both are conversant in television. Right. Yeah. It's like every conversation about culture has to have that sidebar about like where you sort of justify how popular you think a thing is. And it's like, oh, I was talking to my niece about this. Or you always bring in like this, as your evidence, like a cooler young person that you know or something that is somehow more tapped in than you. Or, you know, yeah, I was at brunch and I overheard this and everything. And in theory, we should be able to track this stuff better than ever. Yes. But yes, there is no incentive on the part of these companies that are making this stuff to actually share that data with us.

35:21And so we are just trying to look for every sort of strange little signal that we can find about how big one thing is. And kind of unfortunately, in this vacuum that we have now, it's become really, really easy to sort of fake these signals of popularity. And so I feel like we do not have a very clear view of reality, which is kind of, yeah, kind of strange. And so I wrote mostly about, you know, TV, pop music, sort of celebrity gossip, like the frivolous stuff. But it's like you can obviously see the implications for everything here. It's like we're getting, you know, all of our information right now through the same, you know, sort of rectangle in our pockets through social media.

36:07And it's so easy to sort of get a distorted look at just reality with this. And so it's kind of terrifying. And what creates an ecosystem in which I think that I'm sure you find this challenging as a reporter and as a features writer, where I think in my romantic conception of what my dad used to do as a newspaper journalist, you know, even though he was a film critic. But like he would still have to gather a lot of information, especially when he was a crime reporter. The crime reporting happens in the courts, you know, like you would go down to the courthouse and sit there and wait for an interesting case and and then be like, oh, this is good.

36:45This was a rich kid got into a car accident and just trying to get out of it. This is a good article or this is a good hook for a piece. But we're deriving a lot of our concept of what is popular or what is unpopular or what is beloved or what is being said about all those things from online platforms that are very susceptible to the kind of manipulation, data inflation, and also narrative construction that in some ways I'm like the game is the game. And I think you've probably heard some pushback about this piece where it's like, how different is this from, say, Paola? How different is this from street teams plastering stickers all over a city for a band in the 90s?

37:33I was wondering if you could give our audience, without aggregating yourself, because I do want people to read the piece, just an idea of what clipping is and how it maybe is a little bit different from, say, a digital marketing campaign for a band, a TV show, a movie 10 years ago? Basically, if you've got a song or a movie trailer or a TV show, you take it and you cut it into social media friendly clips, like short 20 second clips. And then you find a bunch of dummy social media accounts that will post all of this online at huge volumes. And essentially, as you do that, you are tricking the social media platform algorithms into interpreting it as a basically a sign of organic interest in this thing.

38:17And so when that happens, the platform sort of pushed these videos far and wide to users who ordinarily wouldn't have seen it. And then sometimes they will kind of engage with it, and that will sort of add even more fuel to the fire, too. Yeah, it's a thing that started only not too long ago. It's probably at this point four, five years old, but really kind of in the last year, it's really sort of become a thing that everybody is doing. And, you know, it's like, yeah, it's from Geese, all the way up to Justin Bieber, to Bad Bunny. And so it's tiny artists and big artists and everybody in between are doing it.

38:54Do you feel like it grew out of something organic? So, like, obviously TikTok and Instagram Reels, one of those sort of pillars of how you make stuff on there is to soundtrack crack it or interpolate clips of things. Like I follow a thick of it memes account on Instagram where it's just scenes from the thick of it, you know, being posted all day long. And I'll just be like, Oh, that's a, that's a funny line. That's primarily how I've like rewatched that show in the last two years. I don't really know that there is a lot in it for the thick of it producers to have that still on my feed. But I'm curious whether you think that this has become a weaponization of organic fan interaction or if it's something different than that?

39:40That's a good question. It is really, really hard to tell and I feel like that's kind of the point. I think that the people doing this probably learned from things that actual, you know, fans were doing and they saw that it, you know, worked in one way. But now it's like the volume is different. It's, you know, it's not just a couple of fans making, you know, adding a song to a clip of Euphoria or something. This is like 50 ,000 videos of the same thing being sort of dumped into social media all at the same, you know, over the same weekend to basically kind of like overflow the toilet and sort of get this, sorry to be scantological.

40:19Obviously, as a watch listener, you should know that's fine. I think why it's different from, you know, sure, there are people that say that, you know, this is the pale of fine has always kind of existed. The fact that we don't have any trusted culture metrics at all anymore, uh, to tell us what's actually, you know, popular or not, uh, is, is sort of one thing. And so we, you know, in the olden days, you could check a street team, you know, people putting up stickers or something, uh, against like sound scan sales and, uh, you could kind of see the gulf, but now there's just nothing to, uh, sort of check, uh, this against.

40:51It is just trivially easy to do. It is like so simple. Uh, it's, uh, everybody's doing it. It's at a scale that I think is different. It's not just in one city. You're putting up posters. You're blasting this out to the entire universe of TikTok's user base really, really quickly. And so the scale of it is pretty different. So the clipping stuff happens obviously on video, but you were talking a little bit about the feeling you were getting reading Reddit threads. And I certainly agree that there seems to be over the last couple of years, I can't really pinpoint the moment but it reminds me a lot of like you know Twitter I think went from this thing that was sort of everybody's running like gag journal over the course of a day and was very much directed towards like a select group of followers and then like right when we started working at Grantland is when I think it became the primary promotional tool for journalism in the world and there was that had its benefits and obviously also I think made everybody slightly insane and then now it's kind of like a rage factory where you go and if you look on your For You page at least when I do there are people having these like insane arguments about things that I'm like why are you guys even fighting about like how my bloody Valentine isn't that good like who started this fight why is this now like crossed over to six different friend circles that I seem to have and or businesses, you know, and like some guy from Bloomberg is like, actually, my bloody Valentine is the best.

42:30And I'm like, why are you commenting on this? Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's this. So I digress just to say with Reddit, I noticed a real collapse of voice. Like everything started to sound exactly the same. And obviously on Reddit, you can comment anonymously. And if you click on someone's user profile, often they'll be like, this person is hidden like their activity. is how much of what interested you about this project was not only like the obfuscation of data, the inflation of the sense of popularity that people can have, but also the shaping of narrative around cultural objects. Clipping is sort of one technique.

43:09The other thing that they're doing now is this thing, Chaotic Good sort of put a name on it. I don't know if this is the name sort of used by everybody, but narrative campaigns, where they are basically, yeah, using internet comments, using dummy accounts to comment on things in a way that makes it seem like, you know, everybody is talking about a thing in kind of the same way. And so you'll see it on Reddit. You'll see it, you know, you'll see it happen on Twitter. A couple of people that I talked to, I thought this was sort of interesting. It's like clipping is something that you want to do at, you know, huge volumes because you want to push this out to everybody.

43:42Narrative campaigns are a subtler thing. You actually don't want that many people to notice this. You want kind of the right people to notice this. you want, you know, it's sort of a light sort of sprinkle of sort of like narrative juice on a story to kind of shape something. And then, you know, once you do that, you can then use these other accounts to like amplify certain arguments too. And so, yeah, it is really interesting because it's like, it seems like a lot of the pop culture fights that we've had over the past, you know, I don't know how many years have basically been seemingly the result of some of some of these techniques.

44:19And so in the story I talk about, one example is like Bad Bunny in the Super Bowl. For a month, this was the loudest argument in America. The NFL has hired this Spanish-speaking artist to perform and then people are upset about that and other people are sort of defending this. It turns out that basically these bot detection firms that that tracked this kind of thing found that basically the shape of the argument was exactly the same on both sides. Yes. And these accounts were basically posting at the same time, maybe in the same time zones, which is sort of suggestive of something coordinated.

45:03And so, yeah, when you think about that, it's like all of these things that we're just, you know, at each other's throats about all the time. It's like, you know, how much of it is real? We have no idea. I was talking to a friend of mine who's a lawyer in the music business about your piece and about the Wire piece about Chaotic Good and Geese. And he was like, I wonder if the guys who did Cambridge Analytica knew that the end point of this was to get a Geese song on a montage of Sixers highlights. That's what I mean. You know, it's like... Dreams come true, yeah. But the Bad Bunny thing is a really good segue into the thing that I wanted to ask you about.

45:41You know, I was talking with, I guess your former colleague in a sense at Grantland, Kirk Goldsberry, he works with us at The Ringer now and we were chatting about, for some reason he hit me up about why is everybody talking about the Kevin Hart roast? And I was like, yeah, me too, although I don't know who's talking about it because really what's happened is it has been atomized down to its 30 most important 30 second clips, completely decontextualized from like the fact that that was like a three hour show on netflix that i find roasts like super uncomfortable to watch honestly don't understand them at all and yet it is um i think kirk called it like my junk feed where there's all these things that everybody i talk to seems relatively conversant in but you can't find a single a person who's like, I absolutely made time to watch a three hour roast of Kevin Hart and have a concert, like an opinion about it.

46:46And there's tons of stories like that. Like I, I am a person who likes the bad bunny. I have heard does not give a shit who plays the Superbowl halftime show. And like, was very aware that that was like a weaponization that worked for both parties, like whether or not bad bunny or bad bunny's label or bad bunny's marketing company participated in that debate. I said, I think it's actually like important that he gets to play the, the halftime show, but it can't, you know, and I thought his performance was really good, but it's like that kind of thing where I'm like, how the fuck are we talking about this for a third week?

47:26Like, and, and who actually is like every day I wake up and go to bed thinking about the Superbowl halftime show. You really do have to wonder how many of these people actually exist. Who gives a shit about anything? People have enough on their plates, I would think, I don't know, I can't imagine being upset enough about anything to sort of long on and go off anymore. I talk about Justin Bieber using this for Coachella. At least we think so. Somebody paid to clip Justin Bieber's Coachella performance. And I really thought, you know, maybe I don't know if I have to go into witness protection after this.

48:03Like, am I going to be, I mean, is this going to be, you know, are people going to be after me this weekend? And, you know, I was out walking around. I didn't hear from one Belieber. Yeah. Yeah. And so it really it's like just how much of this is how much of this. How many paper tigers are there out there? You know, how much of this is real? It's like we hear about, you know, these fan armies that are supposedly just, you know, burning people's houses down every time you said negative word about whichever pop star. And it's like, how much of that is real? Or how much of that is just bots sort of bullying, you know, people into in the submission?

48:43Who knows? It's really, it's a strange, strange world out there. But there is like real world implications to it. I mean, obviously, like our political landscape is completely like shaped by this kind of online discussion. I mean, going through the Los Angeles mayoral race here now, and you can see a lot of the old positions being taken that the same ones that have been sort of people have been manning since 2016. there's like a sort of progressive spoiler candidate there is a far right wing reality TV like candidate like there are two people kind of in the middle trying to scrap to see who's going to get into the runoff and watching people talk about it online even sometimes people I personally know I'm like oh it kind of feels like you if you're going to actually take the indignity of posting you are still parroting one of like seven pre-agreed upon positions right and most of the time i think it's almost reflexive now that people say things i find this sometimes even talking to andy i'm like i don't know how to make my point without making it in an extreme way right like um i don't know how to say like i acknowledge this without saying i hated it or i loved it.

50:05And I think that that's something that I see a lot in criticism and in online discussion of culture now where it's like the idea of something being like a two and a half star, three star out of five star thing has completely vanished, you know, because even if you think that there's like a really vocal contingent of people somewhere online or quote unquote people who are like, this is actually the goat sci-fi show. This is, this is better than 2001. And you're like, uh god man i really really don't think so but that doesn't mean i think it's an unredeemable piece of crap i just don't want to spend 30 hours watching it maybe yeah the the negative engagement the stuff that starts arguments is the stuff that sort of goes goes further and so i think that's more kind of more of what you see well okay spencer pratt is obviously clipping it up uh like he's got he's got clipping events started going going full time uh although he is uh to uh to his credit at least he's, I think he's, because of election laws, he's got to disclose it.

51:04And so he's the rare, you know, sort of clipping event that actually you sort of know where it's coming from. Most of the journalism in the world now has sort of disappeared behind paywalls. And so we are getting the TLDR version of stuff for the, you know, the stories that we're not subscribers to from the, you know, the tweet about it, or the, you know, the quote tweet or the, you know, the comment in - Or the argument about it afterwards. Yes. Yeah, exactly. And so the terms of the debate are basically set by whatever that argument is, which is really easy to, you know, sort of amplify a real thing or just completely astroturf it from scratch.

51:39And so it's, yeah, so I think that's probably another reason why you're seeing, it's like everything is the most extreme kind of, you know, fight that it could possibly be because that's, you know, it's somebody benefits when that happens. Yeah. And you see, I mean, this has been going on since we were kids, but you see all the time on the left and the right, political candidates, television shows, pieces of music, movies, TV, you know, whatever, are essentially rejected from trying to occupy some sort of like middle ground. You know, like the stuff that really kind of at least drives conversation is the stuff that's going to be, and increasingly the more extreme kind of version of whatever we're talking about.

52:21You know, I always try on this show Andy and I always have this kind of running conversation about doing something because it's doing like covering a show because we think it's popular and there are shows that are hugely popular but not necessarily within the algorithm that we follow so something like say I think the Sheridan shows Taylor Sheridan shows are a good example of something I cannot honestly say that we would do as much Taylor Sheridan coverage if those shows weren't obviously very big. Right. Taylor Sheridan also would not have made 13 shows in four years if he wasn't big and if Paramount and hadn't decided this was what we're going to bet the farm on.

53:07By the same token, we cover Euphoria on a week-to-week basis. I think that's a very big show. Most of my friends have stopped watching it. So it's always this murky thing feeling around in the dark for a light switch. And the thing that's funny about what you were writing about, especially like, you know, when you're talking about Geese, which is a band that I like, and I kind of wonder if you don't based on your description of how Cameron Winters sings. I like a good, yeah, Catterwall. But I was like mildly offended by like, I'm not being manipulated, man. Like, I like Geese. I started liking Geese two years ago.

53:49Did you come across anything in your research or in looking online and seeing these Discord servers where people are, you know, begging someone to clip Apple TV shows or what have you, where you were like, oh, well, I like that thing though. Chaotic Goods roster has got some good stuff on it. And so it was kind of maybe a little bit, yeah, disappointing, I guess, to see that. But I also, you know, I also understand. It's, we are, this whole system is so broken that you kind of need to do this. You're either in or you're out. And so being in means sort of resorting to some of these sort of shady techniques.

54:32I was in these Discord servers for three or four weeks. And basically, I would ask the publicists of the people being clipped, is this something that was paid for by the artist or their team? And nobody wants to talk about this. everybody's doing it but I think you know for understandable reasons they don't uh uh they don't want to talk about it because it is just kind of uh lame I guess would be the the word like it's it's really sort of a bummer that that uh this is what we've come to but uh at the same time I totally understand why geese or uh you know mcgee or uh you know whoever uh has to do this because one of the things that this does it's not just you know the artists that that do it are are sort in the conversation.

55:16It's basically everybody who doesn't do this is sort of left out of the conversation. You can't hold it against too many of the artists themselves. It's, I feel like it's more of a information ecosystem problem that is complicated. I blame the platforms, I think, more than anybody. At one point, you mentioned like the chaotic, one of the chaotic goods narrative shaping tactics was if an artist has a performance on Saturday Night Live, at midnight, you're posting it and the narrative, the comments under the video should be, this is the greatest live performance I've ever seen. This is the best live show I've ever seen on Saturday Night Live.

55:55We have our new strokes. There's an obvious echo of, there's a sort of excellence or supremely amazing thing that's happening, rather than, cool, they played on SNL, or whatever geeky thing some fan would say if they saw their favorite band playing on SNL. I was wondering whether or not you felt like, you know, you kind of mentioned this with the paywall media, traditional media sites, but whether or not you felt like this had kind of filled this vacuum where I don't even know where I would go now to find out what someone thought of an SNL live performance anyway. I mean, when we were coming up, there were plenty of things that recapped Saturday Night Live on Monday.

56:37There were plenty of articles where it was like, it sure seems like this band is having a moment. That would kind of shape maybe a narrative around it. But that's not in the artist's hands. The artist is hoping that John Perales at the New York Times or somebody at Rolling Stone is like into them enough and is like, yeah, that was good. but you know it's easier maybe to say have like a lot of like a stan army of ashley padilla fans who are like this is the new kristin wig i don't know it is really hard for uh for culture journalists and i think just journalism in general to uh to know anything anymore i think that this is like i don't know where to go to find out uh you know what's what's actually popular i i used to think that i had my my finger on things but uh all of the advertising sort of moved to short video.

57:21Yeah. All of the websites that you would you'd sort of go to to, you know, find out what a writer sort of thought about this stuff. If, you know, some of them are still hanging on, but it's like quite a lot of them have disappeared. And so it's yeah, it is. I don't know. It's really tough. I don't think, you know, I am no better at anybody else than anybody else at figuring this out. I'm like just, you know, fumbling around in the dark air. Yeah. I mean, And it's also like there's a degree to which there's like, I would actually be curious to get feedback from this conversation from people who are not necessarily working with it within the media or are not handcuffed to their laptops 12 hours of a day and kind of working for seven of them, but also like ambiently looking online at stuff.

58:06because I do think that that phenomenon, while it gave us careers, it also is kind of why sometimes it's really hard to tell. Like, is there a whole world out there that doesn't give a shit about X, Y, or Z thing that we're writing about or arguing about? I know there is, but what do they care about? You know, because maybe they are not watching as much TV or listening to as much new music or care about whether Obsession made 15 or 16 million dollars this weekend, but they're engaged with culture on some level or else like we cannot be propping this entire thing up. So how do they get their information and how seriously do they take what they see on their feeds?

58:48It's an impossible question to answer, maybe. Sort of a culture emergency. But the people I worry about maybe the most, though, are the artists themselves, because nobody has any idea what's popular. Nobody knows what people are actually responding to anymore. This is like we talked about, okay, like in the old Grantland days, we covered a show like Mad Men, which 200, 300 ,000 people watched, but we understood that the people that watched that show would maybe come to our website and read about it. But now it's like the, and we knew it wasn't as popular as Big Bang Theory, for example. But I feel like that, yeah, it's, it's impossible to compare something like, uh, I don't know, beef to, uh, uh, you know, house of the dragon.

59:32I have no idea which is, uh, which is sort of more of an impact. You know, you just think of an artist trying to pitch, uh, something right now. And it's like, I don't know what, uh, you know, they don't know what kind of feedback they're, they're getting sort of their, their market research has just sort of been run through this, uh, this whole, you know, sort of distortion pedal of, uh, uh, of social media that, that really kind of warps everything. Yeah. So like, it's, it's just, it's hard to know. And so I feel like, uh, you know, I, I think about how the fact that, uh, you know, every show on TV lately seems to be a sort of derivative of like the, the white Lotus, or it's like we had a, I know a couple of years ago, like the agencies were telling, you know, uh, telling everybody it's like, all right, no more nice out, uh, riffs, uh, and anything.

1:00:16And it's, it's like, I kind of wonder were those like the last two shows or the last two like culture products that we sort of had hard, numbers for uh uh for the you know original things and now uh you know we're just sort of uh reinterpreting them into perpetuity because we we have nothing else that uh uh with like real data on it's uh it's so hard because like but back when you you and I were working together like something like homeland would come on it would be a sensation for two years I mean it was a very popular show for its entirety but like those first couple of seasons of homeland were like it felt like you would come in on Monday and people would be like let me know when you're ready to talk about homeland you know right and that's what this like literally this podcast is built off that premise that there are these five ten shows a year that yes we andy and i are happy to recommend 100 shows or 20 shows in a year but there are going to be five or six that like we feel confident like that mad men group of people are going to be like i want to talk about this or hear people talk about it that homeland thing that would then lead to 10 homeland ripoffs that would have varying levels of success or critical appreciation.

1:01:23And then they would kind of shed that and get out. But you're right. It's like, I don't even know what I would try to imitate now. Like, I don't even know what a show, like White Lotus is a good example. I think that there's a lot of reasons for that. One is, I think shows, TV networks maybe are like, this is great. Because this is like a very controlled environment. you can isolate people so that's essentially like we don't have to worry a lot about extras we don't have to do a lot of set pieces like it's just find a good location have a mystery and then have people portray one another and that's great for us um but i'm not sure what a show now the pit i think would be the best example of i think that max and other places will start to try to say how do we get a 16 episode procedural up yearly, but have it be stickier and more maybe long lasting in the psyche than say the Chicago Dick Wolf empire or a procedural on a network.

1:02:30Right. But I don't know. I don't know. I don't know if you can like recreate that magic and by the same token, if you clipped it enough and if you had like, And if you had the faction of pit fans who seem to be talking about these people like they're actual humans instead of fictional characters, maybe you could manufacture like an illusion that your pit ripoff police procedural or pit ripoff family drama was actually as big as the pit. I'm not sure. Talking to some of the people I've talked to, I believe you could. Obviously, shows fail all the time. Obviously, things get canceled all the time.

1:03:05Things just don't work. Things don't catch on. It feels like there's a way to sort of put your finger on the scale a little bit more than there once was, and you can sort of declare a hit by fiat a little bit. I don't know. I think you guys were having a conversation the other day about Apple shows, and it's like a hit on Apple is different from a hit on, obviously, Netflix or any other service with more subscribers. And so you're dealing with things at totally different scales. And so if a show without a lot of viewers, its survival prospects on Apple TV are probably better than they are on Netflix.

1:03:35There's something to Apple's volume play is still modest compared to Netflix. They seem to be way more willing to bring shows back. I don't know what their budget and model is and if it's different from show to show. I will routinely see renewal announcements or a new season of something that's in season four or five. Traditionally, a lot of these places, they wrap things up by season three, either because they see like an attrition in viewership or because that's when contract renegotiations come up with cast. And I don't understand the economics of what Apple is playing at. It's pretty much a write down for them in their larger business.

1:04:19So I'm not sure. And then you get into something like Netflix, like you're saying, where their data, to me, is incomprehensible. More people watched Bridgerton season three than watched the moon landing. It's like my favorite stat. Yeah, none of it makes any sense. Everything is incomprehensible. Who knows? But interestingly enough, one of the things that I mentioned in the piece, the night agent was something that was being clipped. And yet, if you look at the numbers they released, that show is massively popular. It's like every episode is watched more than the Super Bowl or something, at least in season one or two, I think.

1:04:55I guess. So then why do we need clippers at all? So it's, yeah, I think we have a, I don't think we have a clear view of any of this anymore. And it's getting, I don't know, it's getting a little scary. So yeah, I'm a single issue voter at this point. Real hard culture metrics. Bring back Nielsen ratings. Yeah, I think that would, exactly, that would fix a lot. Let's wrap it up by discussing like where you see this is going next. Because this piece begins and ends, if I remember correctly, with, was it Joe Lim, the guy from Floodify? Joe Lim, yeah. Who, your piece starts with an assertion from Joe that 90 % of what you're seeing on your feeds is essentially fake advertising or shadow advertising.

1:05:44It's essentially like there is some, hey, a dollar per every thousand views incentive for somebody to post it. And he, that statement kind of chilled me to my bone because if I kill 25 minutes looking at my phone, I'll have one part of my brain that's just smoothed out and is looking at cats and soccer highlights and whatever. And then there's the other part that's like, isn't it weird that I've just gotten 11 videos that are the same template or have the same similar prompt or something like Top Jaw will be popular and then 150 Top Jaw style shows will be in my phone all of a sudden of like guys getting interviewed on the street about what their favorite something is.

1:06:35But Joe seems to be suggesting at the end of this piece that this is all coming to an end. Can you tell us a little bit about that? So Joe thinks that basically he thinks eventually people are going to stop trusting what they see in their social media feeds. He thinks this has gotten so bad, and I think I sort of agree with him. It's so clear. I think people really are noticing this more than they used to, that there's just so much astroturf that he thinks eventually people will be turned off from this. But he thinks that the clippers, at least the people that are doing the clipping now, they're going to basically be sort of directing all of this content at AI.

1:07:17yeah so uh soon you know maybe we're not going to open social media apps maybe we're just going to have uh our airpods in and it's going to uh uh you know claude or chat gpt is going to tell us what what tv shows to watch or uh you know what music to stream and he thinks that if basically if they hit these uh uh llms with enough uh sort of volume of uh you know stealth marketing that that will basically sort of trick the LLMs instead of tricking... Yeah. Even now, if you... Okay, so the other day, I was like... Who was I thinking about listening to? It was some band that had 12 albums, and I was just kind of like, I'm not quite sure where to start, and I just did a usual Google search of X artist ranked, which gives you a Gemini summary of what the two or three peak albums are in terms of like critical appreciation, but also these are the cult records.

1:08:16And then obviously there are the Reddit threads where people are ranking them. There's like rate your music threads. There's all these things where you can kind of find that information. But I noticed, and I think everybody has this experience now, that they're very rarely going past that Gemini summary of the answer to your question now. And so that vision of the future, that idea of basically your Google result being a prompt you give uh your ai agent essentially where you're just like hey i want to listen to salem what's music like like what are the best like witch house songs and it creates a playlist for you or it tells you like people like this it's like well where are they getting that information like where is this where's the learning happening and i i would imagine that there is also worry that like AI agents probably already are operating multiple like social media feeds and just working from a prompt from an actual human owner are populating our feeds with this kind of stuff.

1:09:20This happened to search first. It's like search has just been completely sort of overtaken by spam. And that's, I think, where we're headed with social media. And so people, I think, are eventually going to escape. I do kind of wonder if it's like, uh, uh, you know, some of this is purposeful. It's like Google is, you know, they want you to use Gemini. They don't want you to use their, their, their search engine anymore. And so maybe they're tanking, uh, uh, you know, on purpose or in pushing you to, uh, to, to Gemini. And so, you know, then, uh, Gemini will then take in this, uh, uh, you know, huge amount of, uh, of, uh, undisclosed advertising and then sort of spit that back to you in the form of, uh, uh, you know, supposedly personalized recommendations.

1:10:01I find it too. I ask ChatGPD all the time. It's like, what are five albums that I've never heard before that sound a little like, I don't know, The Alligator by Echo and the Bunnymen or something? It's spitting me back. Incredible recommendations that I never would have found any other way. And yeah, I feel like this whole thing is coming for that. Somewhere a bald record store employee is like, I could have told you if you had just come to me i would still have a job oh man um lane thank you so much for joining me today uh this has been awesome and and this piece is incredible we'll link it in the show notes uh obviously and uh you can read lane's writing on new york magazine i would i would i'd tell you where to follow him on social media but you're probably just an open claw agent looking to blast him with geese propaganda.

1:10:57Lane, great seeing you, man. Thanks again to Lane Brown. You can read his piece in New York Magazine. We'll have that piece in the show notes for the pod on Spotify. As always, you can watch us on ringer-tv on YouTube. You can write us at thewatch at spotify.com. Follow us on Instagram at thewatchpod underscore. It's very funny to say these things after having this conversation with Lane. I wonder if Kai feels any extra pressure with clips this week after, you know, can you put up geese numbers, dude? Thanks to Kai and Sarah and Kaya for producing and we'll be back next on Thursday. Take care.