Everybody wants to be Ellie Ellis

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0:30No bouncing between tabs. And best of all, no spreadsheets. Stop managing software and start managing your business with one unified system. Try for free today at odoo.com. That's O-D-O-O dot com. Ever wonder why we make the choices we do? And how to make smarter ones? Introducing Choiceology, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Join Wharton Professor Katie Milkman, an award-winning behavioral scientist and author of the best-selling book, How to Change, as she shares true stories from Nobel laureates, authors, athletes, and everyday people about why we do the things we do and how to make better choices to help avoid costly mistakes.

1:14Each episode covers the latest research in behavioral science and dives into themes like the power of self-control, shaping your mindset for success, navigating new beginnings, and why starting over can feel so hard. Listen to choiceology at schwab.com slash podcast or wherever you listen.

1:37Are you going to be annoyed if we start another episode talking about clavicular? No, but I do think we might need a jingle to be honest because that's such a good idea. Can we get one of those please, producers? What do I call you? That's my first question. You could go with clav. Damn, you're like by yourself matching. I feel bad. Like, I'm not even trying to be like egotistical, but I'm literally that guy. Oh, there's actually f***ing penguins? Yeah. Let's go down here. Like, dude, my spawn point mogged you. It's like, what are we talking about? Yeah, yeah, he can mog me real quick, bro. Let me just make a stupid-ass face.

2:13Bonjour. I'm American, so I don't really speak... Do you speak English? I was gonna be an OBGYN if I wasn't a streamer. If you're trying to be natural and listen to these wellness guys, the shit that they're saying is so fucking absurd. You don't have to like add max everything. Alive maxing? I'm chilling. I'm chilling, man. Don't worry about me, boys.

2:39He's the gift that keeps on giving. If you ever go on Mastermind, by the way, Clavicular has to be your like specialist subject. Oh yeah. Or Andrew Tabor. That's so depressing. You're right. So he went viral this time for during his live stream. He jumped in a nightclub to prove that he could touch the ceiling to impress some girls there. Was he wearing his little heels? One would presume that he was wearing his inserts. If you were at the club, Mariana, and a guy jumped to touch the ceiling, would you be like, wow, that's hot? It might surprise you, no. Really? Yeah. I'm also five foot one and I can't go anywhere near any ceiling, so it really doesn't impress me at all.

3:17So when people kind of rinse clavicular for this, saying that's not a way to impress girls above the age of like nine. Logan Paul, I kind of jokingly defended him. And then there's even a video of him explaining to another group of women, like why it's not an ick that he can touch the ceiling. The reason that the NFL uses the vertical jump as like a metric of measuring a player's athletic ability is you can't fake it. So that probably turned you on when you saw that, right? That's one word for it, I guess. The ultimate. Yeah. Anyway, you've probably seen in your algorithm over the past few weeks, content of influencers and digital nomads in Bali getting cracked down on by the Indonesian immigration authorities.

3:58But how did Bali get like that? Where did this world of macho raves, silent disco runs, obnoxious lifestyle influencers come from? And is it all selling a dream that isn't real? So we're going to talk about that. And that actually connects to another story we're going to talk about, an influencer called Ellie Ellis. She's 16 years old from the UK. She has absolutely blown up overnight and people are questioning you know the mystery of this kind of virality and essentially her virality is also selling a kind of aspirational dream that anyone can go viral just for doing really normal stuff but actually just like with the Bali influencers it's not all as it seems.

4:42Over the past couple of weeks a lot of people have been seeing on their algorithms lots of videos of influencers in Bali who are reporting that the government is cracking down on them and sending them home. But before that, you will have seen these Bali influencers, digital nomads on your feed constantly. They always have seemed to be there. It's this kind of aspirational lifestyle that's associated with macho raves, silent disco runs. Your favorite kind of raves. Going to restaurants shirtless in what is essentially a highly religious area, working out of co-working villas. I live in this house with 20 people in Bali.

5:17Let's see how they make money while they're traveling. Welcome to a day in my life living in Bali. I wake up so hungry, the first thing I did was have breakfast, which was raw steak with olive oil, and then I went outside to get natural sunlight and moisturized with radiance face oil. Up first on a to-do list was obviously the gym. This is what I like about having your own freedom. You can train when you want and work when you want. I'm not a coffee drinker, but I always make an exception for their Fairy Latte, which has coffee, rose water, raw honey, collagen, and sea salt. I got it with their homemade pumpkin seed milk and then got the Venus plate, which was so tasty.

5:47A few hours on the laptop before I had my nails done. Some sponsored content filming, dinner, and then the dreaded hair wash task. If you're into business, if you're into growth, if you're into any of that level-minded energy, then I'm trying to build a team out here in Bali. Yeah, I've seen loads of these videos popping up, basically being like everyone has a serious problem with the influences in Bali. Sometimes they're just talking about the fact that they are working there, but do they actually have a visa, a permit to be working there, which we can get into? And then I've seen quite a lot of conversation about like, is this equivalent to colonialism?

6:20Like people arriving in a place and essentially kind of taking over and not being respectful of or even inclusive of some of the local people, right? The audacity of these people from coloniser countries coming to our countries and then say, our money builds your country. Excuse me? You think because you spend$5 on an avocado toast at a cafe that's not even locally owned in Bali, you're helping building our economy? One thing that I'm noticing is that a specific demographic is obsessed with Bali, with moving to Bali. And that's basically because they wield an economic power here that they can use to realize the dreams that they couldn't back home.

6:54But also downloading cultural relevancy by appropriating the spirituality, the way of life, the culture. Yes. So a lot of this centered around the viral story of a run club. So it was basically a group called Entourage Bali, and they were organizing these 5.30 a.m. silent disco run clubs for people who refer to themselves as digital nomads or travel influencers. Essentially, these are people who are mainly from Western countries who've come to Bali to live this dream of like, I can just spend a couple hours on my laptop on the beach and live this amazing lifestyle. But when it came out that the organizers of this silent disco run appeared to be restricting it for locals, because some people with local Indonesian numbers tried to join the run club and were rejected, the two Dutch men who organized it were banned by immigration authorities.

7:47And this led to a kind of wider awareness within Indonesian society of like, wait, why have we let all of these influencers come here, affect our local economy, price us out of housing and essentially not pay tax for what is basically working without a visa? that arguably led to a crackdown on foreign influencers and a task force which exists specifically to crack down on kind of people who've overstayed their immigration visas or who are working illegally has now been targeting kind of co-working villas and influencer hotspots in Bali. And over 300 foreigners have been sent home this year already because of it.

8:29Does this feel part of this wider trend where people are not loving influencers and that's not just people in Bali right it's also kind of all over the world this sort of hostility to the way that influencers operate obviously there are quite a lot of people for whom being an influencer will be a part-time or even their full-time job right like they're getting sponsorship they can make money from the social media platforms themselves and they can deliberately promote or direct people to certain products I feel like my feed is increasingly dominated by people who are very critical of influencers and actually a lot of the videos i've seen about bali haven't been coming from people who are from bali or live in bali it's actually been from influencers here in the uk or in the states taking aim at the people who have gone to bali exactly so this is part of a kind of global backlash it seems against what used to be called digital nomads now are kind of increasingly just influencers uh locals are pushing back on them it even extends to places like mexico city which is one of the biggest kind of digital nomad hot spots for north americans to go to the government is less is more in a position in Mexico of trying to attract these people.

9:33But locals are again, you know, frustrated that they're being priced out. And also in places like Barcelona, where there's this huge movement against kind of tourists taking over the city, digital nomads taking over the city, influencers taking over the city. It's led to people, you know, protesting Airbnb, firing squirt guns at foreigners, even like there was one instance where people kind of spread dog feces all over Airbnbs. So there is this kind of global backlash. And I think one of the reasons that people don't like this content, right? We've all seen like a silent run club in Bali and be like, oh, this is so cringe and so annoying is because this kind of escaping the nine to five pitch that is the basis of a lot of what these people do.

10:14It kind of reads as class blind, right? Because the idea is like, oh, if you just figure out this life hack, you can just spend a couple hours on a beach on a laptop. But it requires, you know, capital, a passport visa privilege it's not something that's available to local people i mean it seems like the places themselves have distinct attitudes towards influences and we've chatted about dubai before and they seem to love influencers they sort of want them there but then we're talking about bali say that don't seem to want them so much yeah well i mean a lot of countries court uh influencers and digital nomads there's been digital nomad visa programs dubai courts influencers lisbon and brazil court digital nomads with these specific visas um even indonesia had one initially.

10:56But what they're saying now is people are overstaying that visa and essentially working untaxed illegally. You know, this is a country of 4 million residents and they've had 7 million visitors a year now. There's been, I think, over 130 % rise in people who refer to themselves as digital nomads. And essentially, the lifestyle they're selling, it has this history. It started in 2007 with this book, which coined the phrase digital nomad. And it was by Tim Ferris. and arguably this set off the whole ecosystem of like bro centered podcasts that teach you if you if you kind of hack your life you can get by with working very little living in a beautiful villa getting all the perks and getting all the perks um and that was the four hour work week that book people were like wow this guy's working four hours traveling the world living this amazing lifestyle i can do that too now in reality he was doing that by outsourcing a lot of his work to virtual assistants in third world countries, which is a lot of what these digital nomads are doing.

11:54He also eventually had to sell nutritional supplements like every podcaster in the world because that's kind of one of the few ways you can make money living this lifestyle. What do people end up doing? They end up selling courses on how to be an influencer or how to be a digital nomad. So there are courses in Bali where they cost like 3 ,000 pounds a month and they promise you like influencer crash courses and stuff where you live in a villa with a supposed like influencer guru and they teach you how to become an influencer and you'll be earning 30 000 pounds even though often the gurus themselves the gurus themselves are not even actually that viral right it's like that's the reason why you're having the course in the first place because you're not making enough money from your own social media exactly and look some people do make it and they end up living this dream lifestyle but it's hard but like the vast majority of people don't and so what you end up having is this kind of like matcha flavored Russian doll of nothingness, where it's like influencers selling courses to influencers on how to become influencers selling courses to influencers and so forth and so forth.

12:54And no one's actually doing any real work, basically. And that is where matcha raves come from. Because what is a matcha rave? But just like an empty, vacuous chance for like cross-pollination between a matcha shop, an influencer, and another influencer, and a DJ to all like promote each other's Instagram. It's like so social media coded. And is anyone having a good time? Probably not. I just finished my first class in Indonesia. Everyone say hi. Hi! We're off to our matcha rave. Apparently the matcha is really good, so we're going to see, because I've never really had a good, good, good matcha.

13:27But it comes back to that thing we chatted about when we did one of our top comment episodes where we were talking about influences and observations about how they interact with one another and the slightly sort of abnormal, disingenuous lives they live, which feels so at odds with what is supposed to make an influencer good at being an influencer which is they are very genuine they are very authentic they seem like the average person it's like the lifestyles these people are leading are so different to the average person's life they become almost unrelatable and like quite almost like dehumanized right they don't really seem like human beings it's sort of like little robots so the dream is this the dream that they're all selling both these people selling influencer courses digital nomad courses tim ferris all these people are selling is you create a revenue stream from your lifestyle here you work little and you and you kind of live this amazing life but really it only works because you are coming to a country where you are coming with capital maybe you've had a job like a real job the economic situation is that you are pricing locals out because these globally marketed co-working villas that now dominate bali are much more expensive than like local accommodation right according to locals they're often not paying locals well when they are employed or not at all.

14:38And this money isn't really helping the local economy because it's going back to businesses abroad. But one of the reasons that this content is so successful is because algorithmically, like contempt content often outperforms admiration content. So when we look at these influencers and these digital nomads in Bali, and we see them kind of fail in like the run club saga, for example, there's a little bit of schadenfreude and also it's because the macho raves the the runs all that stuff it speaks to this kind of curated self which feels disingenuous right and when the the illusion is shattered a little bit and you realize these people aren't living a paradise on the beach really they're going there signing up to an influencer course not making any money and having to go back home and get a another job it's actually when you when you talk about it like this quite sad like it feels quite like lonely and and you often notice this i mean aside from bali really but when i'm looking at influencers content i saw a video recently where um an influencer was essentially saying my days are incredibly this was someone in the uk but they were like my days are incredibly lonely because i don't really see anyone i post on social media to a bunch of followers and so the the highlights of my day are like talking to the person in the coffee shop or talking to people at the gym because actually my life is otherwise quite empty because it's filled by this like dopamine chasing social media content and no like real world interaction that provides that fulfillment.

16:03Exactly. And also, like so many things on social media, in many ways, similar to your Suda story, although much less dark, much less tragic. It's an illusion, a mirage being sold to people where it's a bunch of like attractive young people living in a villa, like bouncing ideas off of each other. But really, like, what are these people actually doing? Do you ever wonder, like, what, how are they making money? Well, it turns out a lot of them actually aren't. And they're struggling. And there's a lot of overlap, by the way, between this world and the male grievance industry and the manosphere in that a lot of these villas are advertised specifically to like men where it's like lock in if you improve your life and lock in with your boys and like you do like you know brazilian jiu-jitsu every morning and everyone's your cameraman filming you yeah but all you're filming each other they're doing nothing you're filming each other working out and like doing nothing it's a whole big pile of nothing just to give you an idea of the kind of content these people are posting look at this post from kelly wick rx she says today so far i facetimed my bestie meditated journaled facetimed my mama watched two podcasts filmed a tiktok facetimed my babes ordered lunch off delivery will probably work for one to two hours now and then head back to the mall to buy an outfit i tried on yesterday and i regret not getting so essentially she could actually just be at home with these people chatting to them yeah she's not doing anything that is unique to the place she's in it's also the thing i take from that is like how are you supporting yourself as well you're working for one to two hours a day and like what are you actually doing?

17:29And what do we know about, so you mentioned before about this task force and the authorities, Indonesian authorities and how they've been responding. What do we know about how the people in Bali are reacting to these kinds of influences? Okay, so for many people in Indonesia, especially with this whole run club story, it hit a nerve and kind of crystallizing this feeling that parts of Bali are becoming other countries, which reflects kind of what the government said, a state within a state where they're economically inaccessible to locals because they're being priced out by all these nomad villas.

18:03They're not respecting the local culture. I've actually been speaking to an Indonesian content creator called Alita. She's not from Bali, but she's from Jakarta, but she has lived in Bali. And she even told one anecdote of seeing like someone doing an OnlyFans shoot inside a sacred cave. I was shooting a contact with my friend and flying the drone like to shoot kind of like a hidden beach. And this cave is a very sacred cave. so it says on the outside of the cave it says like do not come in this is only for prayer and for ceremonies and stuff like that basically when we got home to edit all of our content we noticed that there was actually two tourists inside the cave and this particular girl was inside the cave like completely topless and I don't know who was filming that that was like her boyfriend or maybe her manager I don't know it was a guy and when I saw that I was like this is absolutely disgusting.

18:56It's very disrespectful because you can tell that obviously that's a sacred place to pray in. She noted, and a lot of locals and the government have said the same thing frequently, which is that they're not opposed to tourism in Indonesia. And actually, Indonesia has kind of welcomed tourism and it's been very good for the economy. But she is herself an influencer and feels kind of excluded from her own economy by these Western immigrants who are doing the same thing. Yeah, so first of all, Indonesians love tourists. We get super excited whenever there's somebody from abroad that wants to learn the culture and the language.

19:31We absolutely get excited. But at the moment, we tend to feel like we're the foreigners in our own country. and personally like from my own experience I've witnessed where I spoke to a lot of locals in Bali where they the whole entire family are being forced to move out into the village because they want to create luxurious you know new villas I've had experiences where tourists are being prioritized a lot by business owners in terms of like you know the salaries and everything I have a degree I've got experience I speak fluent English but because I'm Indonesian they pay me less you know and where I was more qualified than my colleagues and isn't the issue here that you know if these were influencers that were posting about what it's like to visit Bali like what it's like to enjoy like the local culture enjoy the local cuisine go to you know really beautiful places and to show that I think that that would be welcomed or appreciated more so than people posting a kind of strange hybrid lifestyle that is actually nothing to do with the local culture and all to do with how you can make this aspirational like you say this kind of mirage aspirational content that's like here's how you can live somewhere where the weather's really nice and it doesn't really matter where it is and it's that doesn't really matter where it is it's like not good from a tourism point of view because like okay sure you might show a beach that looks nice or you might show that you know the weather's great or your apartment's great but that could be literally anywhere and that almost seems to be the problem because then if you're if you're the authorities in these different countries or the tourist board or whatever you're thinking well this isn't actually that helpful to us because what you're advertising is a lifestyle rather than a location yeah and it like the lens of social media has kind of eroded this culture to just the beach right whereas i've never been to indonesia but i'm willing to bet that their culture wasn't like silent disco runs mocha raves and paddle clubs i'm sure like there's lots of i'll I'll have you know that in 100 BC, there was a paddle club in Bali.

21:32It's difficult to figure out how much of this story is just hype on social media, right? Because like we said, contempt content does really well. So it feels, if you go on social media, like there's a huge crackdown on foreign influencers and digital nomads in Bali, that their social media is being rifled through by the government. many they're having their visas canceled etc and that's what the content is saying but according to Alita I mean she's she's skeptical this crackdown will actually work it does seem that there are still a lot of digital nomads and influencers in Bali I think as this kind of global backlash around this this lifestyle continues we don't know whether this is like the end of the influencer or whether it's just going to keep going get bigger and bigger

22:47So to stick on this topic of influences, there is this 16 year old girl who has gone uber viral in the space of about a week who everyone on my tiktok feed is talking about her name is ellie ellis she gained something like more than 700 000 followers in the space of a week which is wild but also some of her videos like her first video now has more than 16 million views and her videos are like what you would consider sort of influencer core content right like get ready with me doing my makeup going through a drive-through and ordering a coffee that people have been wanting to try that's really viral and her content perhaps stands out because she seems very genuine so when she filmed her very first get ready with me there's this bit where she's like oh my god i can't believe i'm doing this this is my get ready with me channel hope you guys all enjoy it oh my god i can't believe i'm doing this hello this is gonna be my get ready me account i guess i just i need to get more confidence and i need to stop being shy i mean to be fair i'm not expecting anyone to see this because i have six followers And like there is something about her way of delivering what she's saying that is quite gripping and you want to watch all the way through.

23:56But lots of people are very surprised at how obscenely viral she has gone. It's way beyond even some of the most viral accounts on TikTok when they blew up during COVID, during the pandemic, when everyone was starting to use TikTok. It's quicker than like Charlie D 'Amelio. It's quicker than even like people like Alex Earle. And everyone's a bit like, whoa. Anyone else find this Ellie Ellis thing absolutely crazy? How has she got nearly half a million followers and like it's just happened out of nowhere? I've just woken up to Ellie Ellis, right? Like Slay, fair play to you. But like, oh my God, as if it's that easy.

24:33Everyone is saying that Ellie Ellis has blown up across our FYP pages because of her sweet, innocent vulnerability and personality. I hate to be the one that does this, but I understand on the opposite side of the fence. Guys, I think we need to stop trying to overanalyze why Ellie Ellis blew up. And we all just need to accept that she just got lucky. Ellie Ellis is going to become the next Charli D 'Amelio. And she didn't even have to dance. Oh my gosh. I can't lie. I've been locked into the video still. So it was especially that first get ready with me video that she did, where there's nothing too special about it.

25:08No, it's really, really normal. It's really normal. that has made people go, what's going on here? Is she a plant? Is there a conspiracy? Like, why has she got so famous so quickly? What do you think? Well, she is like your average teenager in her bedroom doing her Get Ready With Me's, talking about her life. And we know that this kind of content performs well. It's the kind of content that people tend to watch through. And if we think about how the algorithms, the recommendation systems work, and what we know from insiders at the companies, like this kind of content is very safe when it comes to the algorithms.

25:37It tends to be quite popular. it's pretty good when it comes to advertising products and so I think part of that could explain why it's performed well but obviously there are loads of British teenagers doing get ready with me's in their bedrooms that go a bit viral but nothing like this there's been quite a lot of hate like there's a lot of influences often teenagers often teenage girls who are the same age being like why is my stuff not going viral like I think I'm as interesting as this girl if not more interesting and obviously we're talking about a 16 year old here so that can't be a particularly easy experience to endure i also i'm also kind of enjoying the take that she's fallen off now because what she's been yeah because she was on like millions and millions she's on 60 million now she's only getting like 600 000 yeah and people are starting to say like i mean what what made her kind of appeal to people initially was she did seem like just a normal girl doing a get ready with me and then being genuinely shocked and scared of doing it and then generally shocked when it got so big now she kind of seems famous people are a bit like well also that that won't last right it's like even when i was watching a video of her opening her first pr package and she was unboxing this makeup and she was like very shocked by it she sort of jokingly like falls on her side it's like that only works once you can't do that every time you open a package right because everyone will be like that's disingenuous whereas it's the being genuine thing that seems to have worked there's a lot of discussion about her profile itself because it has in the caption that the account is run by her parents and so that led to a load of speculation about whether like what does that mean right like is it that she's just not seeing the views and the likes and the comments is it that um her parents have encouraged her to set up the account is it that she's paying for her videos to be boosted like we know on tiktok you can pay for your content to perform better on the algorithm and it doesn't necessarily have to be labeled it's not the same as like a paid for advert so it could be the case in theory that you know one or two of those videos they did pay to have it boosted and there are some creators who are now pointing out well hang on a sec the fact she's gone so uber mega viral she can't have paid for all of those views or likes or followers um she can't have paid for it to have been boosted as much as like you know getting 16 million views because that would be incredibly expensive to boost your video to that extent which points to the fact that it could obviously still be like a hybrid thing like even if you know her parents had paid for her profile to be boosted initially because people then saw it and liked it it then performed really well with the algorithms and then now everyone's talking about her obviously her content is performing really well it's creating a compound effect now people are talking about how did this person become so famous so they're looking her up and that's making her more famous yeah and so actually that's it's all just like a constant feedback loop and then there's influencers who are trying to themselves boost their influence and reach and views by talking about her because everyone's talking about her there is often with these hyper viral stories a kind of meta humor or meta story around the virality itself, like a meta virality, for example, people like the Hawk Tour girl, right?

28:32Like, it was kind of funny. But then what was funny was how famous she became. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then it became funny that she has a podcast. Oh, you got to give him that Hawk Tour and spit on that thing. You get me? We know that the different metrics that the recommendation systems use to decide whether to boost a video are things like retention. So if people are, it's got a really grippy hook at the start, and then people are watching all the way through and then other people are you know sending it to their friends or then talking about this girl like oh she seems to be going really viral and then they're watching it all the way through right because like i watched all the content all the way through because i wanted to know why is she going so viral and then you end up with the content actually going more viral because we're all going and watching it see that that is potentially one of the reasons right because one of the main metrics that tiktok analyzes is viewer retention do they if they watch the whole video all the way through tiktok's algorithms like ding ding ding yeah and that's so unusual right like that's why you get all those annoying videos on social media of like it looks like something's about to happen like last night i watched something for like five minutes which was a guy it looked like he was about to shoot a slingshot at a bird and he never did but then i realized like i've just been duped into your home life exactly it's like because i was waiting for that moment but that means that the that's why that video hit me because everyone's watching waiting for that moment which never comes so that could be why because people are like why is this woman viral and then and then they can take yeah they keep watching and nothing happens and also there's something about it in quite a funny way like the fact that she is almost like normal maxing i know we've spoken quite a lot about maxing but it's like it's so hyper normal it's in your bed oh my god it's norm core isn't it it's like so norm core that it's it's like there are people who are like is she ai because it's so like you know she's she's uh like 16 year old doing normal 16 year old things she's doing things that we can kind of all relate to like she's proper norm maxing And in a weird way, it's like it's the antidote to the other forms of mapping we're seeing.

30:23Like when you talk about the Bali influencers and it feels like they're presenting this kind of idealistic lifestyle. Like she's doing the opposite. She's not actually presenting. Well, initially she wasn't presenting a kind of American dream, influencer dream. But now she kind of is because you're seeing and I was having a bit of a dig into this yesterday. There are loads of teenage girls who are a similar age, even younger, like 15 year olds, 14 year olds, posting now their own Get Ready With Me's, like almost entirely copying her intro. like can't believe I'm doing this but not using her audio they're just copying what she's done because this idea that you could sit in your bedroom and then suddenly like she's being sent makeup packages there are people commenting being like oh my god you're gonna go to Coachella yeah it's I mean what you've hit on is the most interesting thing about this I think which is like with other things that go viral like there's a reason why they go viral it's funny it's it's shocking whatever with her it points to the great mystery of virality and the truth is no one really knows.

31:15Even TikTok knows why things like this go viral. I mean, we can analyze it, right? We can talk about how virality works, right? So the rapid tiered testing that a video will go through, a video will be shown to a small batch. If it performs more better than average than the other videos in that batch, it will then get shown to a thousand people, then a hundred thousand, then a million. And that kind of rapid tier testing, each bigger group is a gate that it has to pass this video appears to have passed all of those gates what there isn't a gate for on tiktok is follower count so that's why someone like her with no followers can become famous overnight because the because the video becomes famous overnight it passes it's like an interest based algorithm but none of that explains why she sitting in a room being like oh my god i'm so nervous get ready with me has got 60 million views in a week this great mystery of rally people are pointing things like does it do we know what doesn't become viral can we ask questions like would she have become viral if she was ugly if she wasn't white like these are questions people are asking right so it it's a mystery though no one really knows and that's one of the interesting things about social media one thing i think is really interesting here and i actually think it really connects back to the barley influencer selling a lifestyle type thing in that case you've got influencers who they themselves benefit from selling that lifestyle whether it's because they're actually living it whether it's because people are hate watching whatever it is here the ultimate winner really is tiktok because there are loads of teenagers british or otherwise in their bedrooms posting loads more content that's great you can sell more adverts that's how the platforms make their money and it's great for them when something randomly goes viral like this because tiktok itself is almost selling a dream right it's like you could win the tiktok lottery maybe it'll be tomorrow maybe it'll be next week and that's not to say that tiktok are consciously doing that like there's no evidence to suggest that they have just one day gone and searched up ellie ellis and going like great let's just boost this random british teenager although we do know they used to have this heat button there were insiders from the company in some documentation that suggested they could decide to sort of press the heat button and randomly that is such a weird image so you've got like a bunch of like men in the yeah just like i like that get ready to me press the heat button yeah and so there was a suggestion when you know that bit of um the pandemic when people like charlie d 'amelio um or some of the other influencers who went really viral in the content creation houses it was alluded to that maybe tiktok had somehow artificially boosted their content but recently because of the way things go viral and how it works it doesn't seem like that's a function that's being used and used but this this sort of feels like that yeah it i mean look it's not totally unheard of right like i mean if you think of the m to the b girl that video got 300 million views i know she had done some videos before but nothing anywhere close to that.

33:57She just sung along to that M to the B drum and bass song and 300 million views, right? So stuff like this does happen. The question is, does it say more about these algorithms or does it say more about our own psychology? And I think we often talk about different types of content that go viral. There's inauthentic aspirational content, which I think is like, you know, the Bali influencers, for example. There is authentic banality, right? Which is why Andy Burnham does so well, because it's like, look at me eating some twiglets. Initially, I thought this was authentic banality because it's like someone just giving you a real slice of like a girl next door in her bedroom kind of vibe and that's what people like it but the more you're talking about i'm starting to think this is kind of aspirational content right because she lives this perfect life in a perfect bedroom and now she's rich and famous or could become rich and is famous through just like doing videos of her getting ready in her bedroom and that is what people want that's aspirational and actually most of the teenagers copying what she does will not go viral like that.

34:52No. They might get like 100 views, 200 views. Almost none of them will. No, almost none of them will. But it feels like buying a lottery ticket. It's like, maybe it could be me this time. It's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Yeah. And, you know, there are other examples in the past as well. Like, there was this YouTuber, I don't know if you've ever heard of her, Janelle Eliana. And she went uber, uber viral in two weeks. She'd only posted two videos on YouTube and she had something like a million subscribers. And everyone at the time was like, is she a plant? Again, like, is this YouTube's way of encouraging people to post content because this could be you?

35:20and her content was very aesthetic like it was camper van travel you know it's the kind of stuff that actually performs really well on youtube and across social media and remember this is back in 2019 so this is sort of pre-influencer era that we're talking about like this is when it was first influencerism was first becoming a thing and so there are examples this isn't entirely unprecedented but there's something about it that just in and of itself doesn't feel is like unbelievable and i think it really taps into a growing disbelief we have in what's happening on our own social media feeds and you actually see that around the barley influencers you see it around someone like ellie ellis people are like these big very rich companies that are entirely not transparent with us i've got some questions for you why did that happen how did that happen why are you not telling me what's going on and you wonder at what point there might be a total kind of rebellion against the influencer right like for now you've still got people who themselves believe the dream that maybe they too could go viral but as this increasingly happens and people find that the majority of them do not go viral do people actually turn off from it and are like this is this is bullshit this makes me think quite deep things about like how our society today the primary aspirational kind of metric is fame and that's happened over time right i mean we first saw this discussion with musicians right a lot of the kind of older rock stars and producers have often complained that like musical virtuosity and talent has become replaced with star quality right and you see this in like American Idol Britain's Got Talent and all that kind of stuff but also the notion of is this person good looking do they have the ability to go famous and viral and a lot of people would say that modern pop stars have that more than they have kind of talent and virtuosity in this case it's not even that it's just the fame itself fame for fame's sake it's like she's viral because she's viral and I think that just shows that we've become obsessed with fame for fame's sake on its own like we want to follow someone because they are famous and the the getting to that point of being famous is a journey we want to follow and are interested in but also there's the influence of sell by date right like take for example alex earl who went super viral doing like you know i'm going out to this bar in jersey wearing a tiny top love a tiny top no judgment on that but like you know does all these get ready with me felt really authentic and then has become a bit of a superstar had a podcast is now got a docu-series following her family that's coming out and it's really interesting seeing the backlash against that in the comments because it's almost like oh you were this authentic relatable person and now you're actually like so super famous that you're not really authentic or relatable anymore like you're on dancing with the stars and and when they bring those influencers into the kind of traditional media world it turns people off them because they're like oh well you're not what i thought you were and so actually there's a very short period of time where an influencer can be genuinely normal or authentic before then the money and the brand deals and everything else come in.

38:11And like someone like Ellie Ellis, if her whole thing is being normal and authentic, then like how does it work when, you know, she's at Coachella in a year? Because that's not a normal, authentic thing that most British teenagers get to do, right? So have you spoken to her? So I messaged the contact details on the account and I specifically asked Ellie Ellis and the team, whether that's her parents or whoever that is. I mean, she does have an email that's like a management email as well. I asked essentially why she'd gone so viral so quickly if she was willing to answer some questions about it and I also said that there's a lot of speculation about why she has suddenly kind of boomed overnight I think it's quite interesting so they didn't they didn't reply to me they haven't got back to me I think it's quite interesting that she hasn't herself addressed any of this so where she's posting she hasn't said oh by the way guys I kind of also don't know why I haven't why I've gone so viral she just hasn't addressed it at all she's just continuing to post almost like no one's talking about her which could be explained by the fact that maybe she's not seeing the speculation about her if her parents are running the account although you would imagine that she is herself scrolling that's why people keep being like is this ai because you're like she's not really reacting in a human normal way which is good because i wouldn't like her to see some of the speculation about about her some of it's quite offensive yeah but it's just quite unusual that she's not posted and maybe she will about what's going on here and why which is i think further fueling a lot of the speculation.