Panic World - BONUS: How the internet destroyed TV (and itself) [Part 1]

Episode Date: June 5, 2026

Why is everything online just clips now? We’ve reached a point with digital video that’s made it impossible even for a normal, non-sicko to ignore: we’re awash in slop (whether AI-created or not). Ryan works through his thinking with Grant about how everything on the internet became video: how the people who were first to figure that out made enough money that they’re now able to take on legacy media and big Hollywood players, but it doesn’t really seem like anyone knows what to do with that power, other than pump out garbage. And if short-form video as a format is fundamentally broken, if the internet is just TV now, and everyone hates it — who is this content actually for? Who is winning in the age of clipping, or are we all losing? This episode is an unlocked bonus from our Patreon. We’ll be sharing part two later today at https://www.patreon.com/PanicWorld — for just five bucks a month, you get exclusive content like this, extended and bonus episodes, Discord community access, and more. Join us so you don’t miss it! For Apple Podcast users, you can also find all of our bonus content — plus other great COURIER shows — with a subscription to COURIER+. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Friends, hello, my name is Mike Regneta. I'm the host of a podcast called NeverPost, which is about the internet. Or really, it's about the world and why the world is the way that it is because of the internet. We ask big questions like, why do disgraced politicians join Cameo? Why is it scary and satisfying to block someone? Would you ever create an AI voice clone of a deceased loved one in a show that you don't need to be terminally online to enjoy? But it doesn't hurt. NeverPost is at neverpo.st and wherever you find podcasts.

You have central air now, so you're not going to be sleeveless this summer, so we don't have to worry about matching for once. That's nice. That's right. And I have a sweat. I have great central. Oh, it's not central air. It's like those Japanese split units.

Super great. I look forward to losing all of my color and energy in water weight. Um, Ryan, rate your grumpiness over the past like two and a half months on a scale of one to ten. Like a two? We'll see. I'm Graham Irving. This is Panic Road, a show about how the internet warps our minds or culture and eventually reality. And I'm starting to think, Ryan, should the tagline actually be and reality instead of eventually reality?

Probably. Probably, yeah. I ask about your grumpiness because you say you delight in researching the freaks of the world, but I've been sensing some exasperation in Garbage Day of Late as you've been covering the endless pile of clicking. No, no, no, not you are wrong. I'm having like a lot of fun doing it. You're having a lot of fun.

This is like the most fun I've had in a while. This is like, this is the good stuff. What like I feel bad. I think for my readers because sometimes they don't understand why everyone is talking about something and especially now. But like this is this is my Super Bowl baby. This is like the stuff that I actually care about. Having to write about the right wing or all that like sure or whatever. But this is this is the good stuff for me.

I love this. I haven't had like a good like rabbit hole trend cycle sort of, you know, internet inflection point in a while. It feels like stuff's happening. This is awesome. Say more. What would you say is happening? Well, it's been hard to attack the whole thing because it is so massive. But we have basically reached a point with digital video that is becoming possible for the average

person to ignore. And there's like a million different directions that this is traveling in right now. But across the internet, everyone is sort of saying like enough is enough. I'm sick and tired of looking at garbage. But as that's happening, Hollywood is basically falling apart. And platforms like YouTube seem to think they can really take a genuine swing at replacing Hollywood. So it's sort of this incredible moment that has been building for a while where it's like everything

on the internet became video. People who noticed that early made a lot of money and they're using that money to control the way the internet works and functions and what we talk about. And journalism and just legacy media in general is completely outgunned. And we've now reached this moment where no one knows like what's going to happen. No one knows like is YouTube TV? Like is that is that just TV now? And if so, how do budgets work for that? Like if you're going to spend a lot of money to make a really nice show on YouTube, you have to make a lot of money. Right? Like, Like, or, or, okay, if everything's short form video, I feel like I'm still not explaining this right.

We are at this insane moment where the average person understands that like short form video is fundamentally broken. And I would argue like straight up fraudulent in a lot of cases. But it's the only thing that they're being served on their feeds. So you have, it's almost like a Mexican standoff. It's like you have the short form video apps that are saying like we're not going to deal with the fact that like we are just. dumping slop into people's feeds every day. Because if we deal with that, like we might stop existing. We might uncover some, we might uncover some problems. But then you also have Hollywood being like, we can't compete with this. But then you have the average person being like, I don't like this.

So like no one's happy and no one knows what's going on. And, you know, for most of my adult life, the thinking has been the internet will become TV. And the internet has become TV, but it's awful. and everyone hates it, but no one can look away and no one understands how it works. And so everything is just stuck at this very interesting moment. And there's all kinds of little stories that are sort of orbiting this mega story of the internet is TV now. What the hell does that mean? And so I've been having a blast because like there are a million ways you can tackle

this story. And I've been trying to do it, you know, I don't want to become like, like an entertainment reporter, I guess, or whatever the reporter you would have to be to cover this. But this has sort of become my beat over the last, you know, three or four months. And I'm loving it, but I feel bad for my audience because I don't know if they understand why I keep talking about it. But there's so much. I mean, like just last week, YouTube went to TV up front and basically announced that we're TV now. And then you have like YouTubers that are doing straight up like prestige level television shows now,

like Kareem from Subway takes. You also have Kerson Stewart at Khan saying, like, I'm going to be just making movies straight for YouTube. You have YouTubers like Jack Septic Eye and Markiplier making movies or producing movies. You also have clavicular and neon and all these live streamers that have revealed that they are, they're at least getting enough money to be spending millions a month on clipping. Then you also have the total destruction of the old MAGA movement with Ben Shapiro, who, you know, is laying people off and basically can't afford to do his like ad payola scheme anymore because

the Facebook traffic hose turned off for him and he can't like he can't evolve with the new video age so it's like all of these things that to me have felt very stuck since the pandemic are all kind of breaking and reforming right now and it's it's great because everyone's in everyone involved is a bad person and insane um so i'm having a great time a few weeks ago you wrote you've you're becoming less interested with the internet as a concept because this feels stuck. Is it that this is now coming to a head in a way that feels thrilling? It is. I mean, like, I am less interested in the internet as a concept. I am unfortunately being asked more and more lately for like different kinds of internet stories for like different things that we're working on. And I don't really care about any

of them because they're not real. So like I like nothing. Yeah. We are at a very interesting moment where there is less going on than ever in terms of like internet culture and usually in those moments stuff starts to happen again like you sort of kind of like go down and go up again so like we are on this weird cultural down swing but like it's all video again I feel bad for garbage day readers in particular because I keep ringing this bell and I'm trying to like make it interesting for them but every single day there is something completely insane in the digital video space that I have to talk about. Like I just, it's, it's too interesting to me.

I mean, I was just reading yesterday that Netflix had its worst two weeks of streaming since Nielsen started measuring. Like that's, and the only thing that's doing well on the platform as of April were reruns of Grey's Anatomy. That makes sense. That totally tracks. Like all of this shit is not working. The, the story that started in like 2014, 2015, 2015 with the,

tech industry deciding that they were going to take over Hollywood, it is coming to a head right now. And what is so interesting is that like it is very possible that it didn't work. Yeah, that no one's winning. Yeah. Like everything's sort of broken. One more thing here. Because I was talking to Joe Bernstein for the New York Times because everyone was saying that he got duped into covering clavicular because of clipping. And like I've known Joe for like 15 years.

And I know that's not true. He's been covering like that space for a long time. And he was talking to me about it. And the thing that we kept going back to was that this is a labor story. This is fundamentally a labor story, which is that Hollywood won't pay people enough to make stuff and the tech industry. And that's created a death spiral that has allowed the tech industry to swoop in. And they're paying people even less to make stuff.

So everything is just worse because no one makes enough money to make anything. So you know, you have these massive platforms saying, we want to replace television and we want to do it with an unpaid or a largely underpaid talent pool of hobbyists that have other jobs. Like what if you what if you Uberized television? Like it's and ends and the result is everything sucks all of the time now. It's awesome. Yeah. And and and then on the other end their jobs are like being threat like everything becomes a hobby becomes a or becomes a part-time job becomes a hobby is is being squeezed. I was listening to the Watch, the Ringer podcast, and they were talking about how, you know, like from the opposite end, how nothing can get its wheels turning because there's three years between seasons.

Everything is becoming more expensive to make and taking longer to make and you're getting less of it and then it has less juice. So like in all directions, it's costing more and then there's less steam to keep pushing it forward. Yeah. And like and this is why this topic is so complicated. Talk about another interesting factor here is right now, probably for the first time ever, every major platform will pay you in some way to post. TikTok, YouTube, X, Instagram, Facebook. They will pay you to post directly, which is a genuinely kind of new idea. Like the TikTok creator fund is not that old X.

You pay for a subscription and then they pay you, which is ridiculous, but like, sure. What, you never, you never got on shows where you just sell tickets to then maybe make some door money. Yeah, man. I've said it before. I was in a scovina. I know the deal. Actually, we would never, we only took that deal once to play the wood. Worcester Palladium.

And we had our friends, rich dad, buy all the tickets. And then we gave them away. That is very sweet. I played the weirder show in my life in Worcester. Worcester. Whatever. I'm never going back there. I don't think I can go back there.

Right. All of us as teenagers recognize that that was like a pathetic concept and was a grift being run by the venues and that you shouldn't do it. And now it is the ecosystem of the internet. Yeah. I mean, just yesterday, I finally got a hold of one of these Clipper accounts, but I say Clipper account. I shouldn't say it's like a video slop account.

Yeah. And this guy is based in Rwanda and like he was just like very open about the fact that like, yeah, like I got verified to look more legitimate and then I just share videos that people send me or pay me to share. And he's clearly part of like a network of other kind of like Mimi, nine gag world star style accounts, they're all verified, they all share each other's stuff. He wouldn't confirm that to me, but it's like very obvious. He wouldn't tell me how much he makes, but he's like, it's my full-time job. And like for someone in Rwanda, like he seems like a college student in Rwanda, like that's a

great deal probably. He's being paid in dollars. I don't know if X has like a, I think, do you know about Twitch's ad revenue thing? I don't think so. There's a really kind of, and this is based on what I had heard a few years ago. So if this has changed, you know, forgive me. But the biggest Twitch streamers in the world are still to this day in Spain. And when Adam and I, our researcher, Adam and I were trying to figure out why. Because like Spain, like, I don't want to get like too into like colonial history here, but like you are in a good mood. Spain and Portugal are not the coolness epicenters of their particular language. It is known that like the cooler stuff in Spanish is happening in Latin America and the cooler stuff in Portuguese is happening in Angola or Brazil.

And we couldn't figure out like, okay, why are all of these Latin American teenagers watching a Spanish Twitch streamers? And it's because the Spanish Twitch streamers get access to the European ad market. So they can speak in the language that Latin America speaks, but they get paid like real money. whereas the Latin American streamers are forced to use a Latin American ad market on Twitch that pays them less. Yeah, that makes sense. So it's sort of like a techno-capitalism, colonialism thing happening again. It's really interesting. And so I don't know if X is paying people in dollars, but I think the assumption is that for a lot of these places,

like the pittances that they're giving out are worth it if you're underemployed in the global south and you're already posting and you're already hanging out on the internet all day. And video has amplified this and accelerated this to such a degree that like, I think I wrote this yesterday, but the panic that everyone is feeling right now, particularly in America, is that the internet at some point in the last nine months became a giant awful version of TV run by people in the global South who don't speak English. Like it's all videos of like treat fights or like AI tooth extraction videos or movie clips from 2004 subtitled with like a blur over knives and stuff to get around like Indian or

South Asian like censorship laws and like it's like the internet's like just like emptied itself out onto our feeds and like no one understands why. Before we get that broad again, what I think we're have been trying to do it, but I'll put a put a bumper on it is everything we've been thinking about and you've been writing about is connected. And what I wanted to try to zoom out today and show how it's an ecosystem affecting it all instead of looking at it all specifically. But before we like get brought again, the Clipper you talk to, what was his number one client? What kind of stuff was he being asked to post most often? I found that really fascinating.

AI. So he is affiliated in some way. He wouldn't really explain this to me other than to say that like it's not like he works to the company. but he's affiliated with a AI company called RIN AI, which basically makes AI content that like tricks turn it in and like anti-AI detection software. Cool. I mean, it's very funny that they're hiring a human to post,

that they need to post this in the first place. But what kind of stuff do they make? So it's an AI humanizer. So basically I guess the idea would be, like you take your AI generated term paper and you feed it to this one and then it makes it looks less AI. Okay. They're going to put in some grammar mistakes and other shit.

Something like that. Yeah. So that college becomes more of a scam. Basically. The kid is also repping a company called the Yapper, which is sort of like runway. It's like a video generator. And he shares a decent amount of AI content. But like just to sort of like talk you through what's on his feed, I mean, he's got

tongue tongue so horror videos um yeah sure i'll share my screen this is him r w uh he's got a steak cutting video he's got a tongue tongue sehorre video this is a video filmed in some village of a cow on someone's roof um this is uh some meme video a video a video a video of a guy being attacked by a leopard, something about life in African boarding schools, I guess, a video of like two Chinese kids on motorbikes, like that isn't AI from what I can tell. It's the stuff that you would see if you scrolled to the bottom of Instagram or Facebook. It's like it's the sort of raw feed of human attention. This is something I don't know the answer to, though maybe you could tell me.

So like, I spent a lot of time, you know, living in Brazil. And when you do that, you start to get geo targeted as someone who's like outside of America and in a country like Brazil. So you start to see like sloppier and sloppier stuff. So like a few years ago, I like a lot of my feeds were just stuff like this. Like telegram groups like freebooting videos like from all over the world. It's all garbage and it doesn't make any sense. and whatever. It feels like in the last year or so, that has arrived for American feeds.

Yeah, I would say so. That's what it feels like. I kind of feel like in the past couple of weeks. So like I try to curate my ex feed to just be football and movies. And like it's not football season and they're like, oh, fuck. So now they're just kind of shooting anything at me to try to get my attention and like once the like I block or mute the like sexist slop that they first try that's like loosely related they're like other football guys really like this story about some big juicy jugs how diana russini is a whore and i'm like i don't i don't i don't know who that is oh you uh there is a uh NFL insider who is having an affair with the head coach of the patriots yeah yeah yeah And everyone is real mad and making fun of her.

And everyone's like, man, Raybro just showing up every day. He's so fucking brave. He's so brave, bro. Facing that team. Even though he was as much in the affair as she was. That's first Instagram, first, uh, X tried to just get me into that story where I could see where the pipeline of where that's. taking it and I don't find it funny and I don't want to see it. And now they're just like, here's a leopard attacking a child and here's, uh, yeah, and here's a video of like,

what food you thought were healthy that are actually hurting your body and causing you cancer. Yeah. And I want to be clear, like that stuff is fine. Like I actually don't care that it exists. Like I don't care that like chumboxes exist. I don't care that like lowest common denominator video content is being shared by people, you know, in rural areas around the world or whatever, as long as it doesn't turn into like tribal based violence, which tends to happen sometimes in like super unmoderated moments, right? Like in Myanmar, that happened. But like if that, if you want to share like just dumb videos all day, like that's totally fine. Like this guy in Rwanda, I assume guy in Rwanda, like, I don't care. It's that everyone else has stopped posting. Yeah. The better

layer or like the more valuable layer has been disappeared because there's no incentive to do that sort of stuff in video. Twizzlers keep the fun going. Yeah, I know. I just stopped whatever you were listening to to tell you that Twizzlers keep the fun going. Well, irony isn't my forte. But twisty, chewy, yummy Twizzler sure is. So think of Twizzlers as a little palette cleanser for whatever's queued up, which by the way should be

coming very soon. Like any second now. Okay, Twizzlers, time to keep the fun going. So another thing I had written about was a former co-worker mine, Jim Waterson. He started his own independent publication in London, and he has a TikTok channel, and he was sharing his stats the other day, and he made 140 pounds for two months worth of views on TikTok. So it was 1.5 million views across two months. He made 140 pounds.

And he was like, look, like there's no, there's no reason I should spend any time on this. And it's because the algorithms you become so aggressive about time on site, which is a thing I just did a video about for the garbage YouTube channel, which fucking got dinged by YouTube for being too sexual, even though the whole thing is about how like everything looks like porn now because of time on site metrics. So it's all very frustrating because like not only can you not even talk about this stuff, We get dinged by TikTok constantly for basically being like, here's what TikTok looks like. Like the amount of times that I've done a TikTok video being like, here's some awful shit I just found on TikTok and they block us for it.

So there's no discovery. There's no there's no conversation. There's no like meta level where you can like talk about this stuff. And so everything is just frozen. It's gotten to the point where like people are finally clearly fed up with the geese thing, the convicture thing. I need the conversation to go further than just clipping because it's like way beyond it. Yeah. It's it's the entire ecosystem of digital video is I think fundamentally broken. And I think people are finally ready to talk about it. Two questions for you and I'll just and then you decide which which direction is best to go in right now. One, why was this the week that legacy media

shined its light on this in when you know, you've been covering this for months? Are we, I remember it was probably a year ago when this was like when this was all much more nascent and we're talking about how everything feels stale and you said, this is where you think AI is going to come in and that like all media and formats when they're about to be replaced end up in a slop era and then something new comes along and breaks it. And you were saying that like AI is going to fill that container. I mean, the AI dimension here. So let's do the legacy media one first, because that's easy. So like a legacy media is like not people sort of tend to think it's like way more conspiratorial than it is. It's a lot of follow the leader. Okay, let's go all the way back. So you have, you have Joe Bernstein who writes about clavicular. This gets convicular a lot of attention. I don't think Joe was duped by clipping because like clificular wasn't really being clipped that way yet. But it was this moment where clavicular gets a lot of attention. And he starts. clipping and then you start to see accusations that clipping is happening and that this is all sort of fake dumped on top of that then comes wired.com which claims that the band geese is a sigh-up. I have gone on record saying I don't think that's true. I've even talked to people in the music industry who are like if we had that power we would use it for bands that are better than geese. Like we wouldn't be using that for much more evil purposes if we had that technology.

But that started to get people to talk about basically the authenticity of what was happening on their feeds. This was sort of a shock to me because I'm 36 years old. I have only known an internet basically that has been fake and inauthentic and a scam. And I've spent most of my life reporting about how that is true and trying to find, you know, moments of actual authentic human use and celebrating those. celebrating or being like you guys you guys over here people really like hitler it's it's one or the other no but like we have a we have a discord just for the team that did the worst things on the

internet post and in there a couple days ago uh someone uh i can't really explain this post but good good start i'll share it because it's it's more of a visual joke i suppose it's a screenshot from R. Canning and it says really proud of the grape jelly or grapes made. Oh my God. And the jar looks like it's, you know, dark yellow. And then the next picture is a picture of Rainbow Dash. And if you get that joke, then welcome to the club. So anyways, I want to find like genuinely fun, interesting things on the internet. And I spend a lot of my time writing about how the most of the internet is not that. And it has always sort of not been that. It seems like, you know, I don't want to get into a generational war about media

literacy, but it seems like for people under the age of like 28, they just assumed that if it was a video, it was real, which is actually something that I've written a lot about in Garbagey over the years of like this knee jerk reaction to TikToks being like they must be real because it's video. And so all of a sudden, we have this massive moral panic of people being like everything on the internet is fake. And it's like, yeah, but like that's kind of not like news. Like it's always been inauthentic to some degree. Let me let me just clarify by fake you don't mean necessarily.

an AI video or a deep fake video, but made as bait or or propped up or you're not just actually mean like like humans might have been filming that, but they're filming it dubiously. Well, okay. So like here's a great, like the guy from Rwanda is a great example. If you went to that page, I bet like nine out of 10 people would be like, this is a bot. And it's like, no, it's actually not a bot. Like it's a guy who's posting like a bot because he doesn't speak English or because he doesn't care or whatever. But like, yeah, the majority of the things that you see on the internet,

I don't really subscribe to the dead internet theory in the in the way that like people are like, like everything on the internet is run by bots now except for me. It's like, no, like people use the internet in bizarre and confusing ways and they always have. That's just true. So you have this like large conversation going on about authenticity on the internet. And you have this like real pearl clutching happening. And then you get the New York Times, who writes a story over the weekend, like, last weekend basically saying that like politicians have just opened the floodgates to semi illegal payments to creators to endorse them and they're like even paying extra if the like if the

influencer uses like breaking or like news or whatever like you know breaking news in their post and then you have new york mag doubling down on the the the thing that wired was writing about which is like yeah there are firms that you can pay money to to to hijack trending topics the one that they single out is Floodify, but there's also just the site Clipping, and Clipping seems to have a deal with Kik. There seems to be some sort of partnership there where you get like X amount of free credits on clipping to clip your kick streams. And there are Discord servers where you can go and you can see people buying and selling campaigns for everything from Justin Bieber's Coachella set to a new Netflix show to whatever. Yeah, those exist. And they have always existed. Like I wrote a story,

I wrote a story probably 10 years ago about a guy who was tweet decking, which is like a concept that like has sort of been lost to time, but it's what this is. Like tweet decking is where you basically create a network of accounts and you all retweet each other either for money or for shared promotion. And then you sort of like cycle the same content, the same videos, the same posts, the same whatever around this network. Dory, the like famous novelty account on Twitter was banned for tweet decking years ago. Like, that's what these places are doing.

They're tweet decking. And this is not new, but there are a couple of reasons why, like, everyone's talking about it. One, yeah, as I said, like, I think a lot of young people just, like, really assumed, like, this couldn't happen to video. Weirdly enough, I think the legacy. It's so strange because it's. Yeah. I mean, there's more incentive to lie in a video than anything. I mean, that was like literally taught to me in my media class in, like, college.

Like, video is like the least reliable medium, actually. Yeah. But the legacy media. I think is divided into genuine just outright jealousy and existential panic around this stuff. Like we can't, we cannot like the New York Times cannot spend the money that a random live streamer name Neon can spend to promote his trip to Takashi 6-9's gender reveal party. Like Ezra Klein can't do that. So that's a problem. Yeah, but Neon's doing it.

That's like a genuine world ending issue that like a guy that, like a guy. that you've never heard of named neon can go to Takashi 6-9's gender reveal party with clavicular and aides and they can spend a combined 10 million dollars a month to promote that one trip to Miami and the new york times cannot spend that kind of money to promote esra klein's new interview with punch the monkey or whatever like i mean it's just not going to work that's a that's a breakdown in society as far as i'm concerned do you do you think the world would be better if if Ezra Klein could spend that money. Yeah, I think Ezra Klein should be going to Takashi six-man's gender reveal party.

I would actually, I would read or watch that. I would actually watch the shit. It would be really funny. Yeah. I think the crooked media guys need to go with Aidan Ross to like a boxing match in Las Vegas between Jake Paul and Harambe's Ghost. Like that's what I want to see. I want to see them all on a couch just like hitting mango jewel pods.

Is that still a thing people do? Anyways, like, no, it's probably Galaxy Gat. I want to see the Crooked guys do Galaxy Gas with Aiden Ross in, like, a garage somewhere. Crooked hit us up. There's nitrous tanks at the, at the weed dispensaries by my house. Right. Let's do that with some baddies and like, and like, let's, let's capture Gen Z. Here's a good time.

Here's a good time if I've ever heard one. It's me, Martin Screlli, Jake Paul. Is he out of jail? Yeah. the crooked guys chud the builder when he's out on bail and we're all doing galaxy gas and reading the dnc autopsy i think that's i think that i think people would love to watch that uh we can bleep chud the builder every time he tries to say a racial slur but the other is just hovering over all of you no he's maniacly like this he just wishes he was invited to the party man you know yeah we could

have um he's in the cuck chair has the fucking he he guys or whatever h3 h3 guys the other like major reason legacy media is interested in this stuff is because for the last like six years as these platforms have moved to a largely video environment and that video has gotten worse and worse and less authentic media companies to become more desperate to understand what's going on and like use it to take the pulse of what people are talking about it's like wait a minute like if i can't believe that this live streamer is important because there's 300 videos of him on my ex feed, then what can we believe?

And it's like, yeah, man, it takes some work. Like I'll tell you, I spend a lot of time trying to figure out what's actually popular or what people actually care about. I don't get it right every time because it's really complicated and you can't just go like, beep, beep, beep, bip, okay, cool. It's, um, it's, it's, it's lily pad girl summer. It's not. Yeah, sorry.

It's not like, like you can just be like, I'm going to open my TikTok feed and like, If I see four videos about the same thing, I'm going to write up that story for fucking, I don't know, some chum site like, I won't badmouth any particular outlet. But it does, I do think from the media side that makes sense, I do think from like the consumer side, wanting to be able to look and know what is happening and it and it be a shared reality is, is a totally natural. Yeah, and it's not. It just isn't. Right, but like I think that that like desire from them of being like, oh, like this band is that is popular. Are you into this? Like that's a totally understandable desire. And it's like what our feeds more or less previously were giving us. But like, okay, think about it this way. There are complaints. I mean, like there are whole movies made about sort of the unreality of TV. We got to do video drone as a bonus episode, I think. for or network or both but like there are you know there have been complaints for the movie joker is about this in many ways fantastic movie of all the movies you just listed the joker joker

we should watch joker i love the dance sequences but there have been complaints for decades that like tv is not real and in fact like if you want to see like a really good version of how tv is definitely not real now watch any home improvement channel and then go to youtube and just like look up any random person like talking about what they think is cool in their house. It's like a totally different reality. But the problem with what has happened in the last six years with digital video is that at the beginning, people were like, oh, this is weird, but like actually it's worth talking about because it's like kind of interesting.

Stanley Cups and Water Talk and Dirty Sotas is a version of this where like Mormons were doing something kind of odd on TikTok and everyone was like, that's kind of interesting. Let's talk about it. Lubu Boo's do buy chocolate, like all this stuff. were like, oh, the feed is showing you this and I am interested in it. TV sort of operated, still operates in a similar sense where it's like, we might not reflect reality to you, but we might show you something that you're interested in, which then impacts reality.

You know, it, friends is not an accurate depiction of what it was like to live in Manhattan in the 90s, but it sort of created the desire to want to do that into, and to sort of, it showed you something that you were. interested in. Digital video as it has sort of hit the bottom of the barrel in the last year or two has stopped even showing people stuff that's interesting. And the problem with these apps is that there is no program director. There is no, you know, media Sven Gali like Barry Weiss, who has your finger on the pulse of what people want to see on television. You know, delivery. Oh, it seems like she's out, actually. She might be out of CBS by the time this episode is

aired. I'm reading this morning that she is being like pushed to like a lower she might be like taken off certain shows and stuff which is awesome. So anyways, short form video platforms in particular, but all of them, every video platform has an algorithm that cannot just be like tuned to be like we, like it can't be like, hey, we have a new thing. We should like show people it because it's good. And what's interesting is like streaming platforms, not live streaming, but like streaming platforms like Netflix, Disney Plus, they are sort of running into this same problem in a different. way where like they have a new show and they can put that new show at the top of the home page

but that's kind of the extent that they're willing to go they can't like they don't want to spend the money on traditional marketing campaigns or they also don't have a linear structure that allows them to like hey you're watching the simpsons and bob's burgers our new show comes on right after stick around and watch like yeah all of the mechanisms that tv had created to promote itself which were never perfect like i was a massive fan of uh of the Drew Carey show growing up. And like that show changed days it was on like every year and you could never find it. Like a lot of sitcoms sort of died off that way.

So it wasn't perfect. Drew Carey's how I learned about furries. The Drew Carey show fucking rocks is so hard. I was watching a YouTube essay about it the other day. I think it's a great show. The episodes where they did improv versions were so good and weird. It was a very experimental show. Do you think we can get Drew Carrey on the show?

I bet we could. Probably not because he's got like, He's on the price is right. So he's got like a regular prices right schedule. Yeah, maybe. We'll work around your schedule, Drew, if you want to come on and talk about the Drew Gary show for an episode. Because I have a lot of questions about the Drew Carey show, actually.

Also, a very early depiction of like cross-dressing on TV, like played for laughs. And then eventually kind of like not played for laughs. Sort of an interesting, the interesting gender dynamics of that show. Anyways, my point is beyond the Drew Carey show. My point is that TV had ways to promote itself. It had ways to sort of show, to figure out what you wanted to see and deliver it to you and had like a much more, I mean, frankly, human relationship to the humans that were consuming it. But with the algorithmic layer on every video platform needing to read things in terms of,

okay, it got this many comments early or we detected, you know, this many edits in the first 20 seconds, or they used this font, the YouTube video that we just posted, got flagged for adult content in the middle and we cut it out and appealed and we lost. And so now that video is stuck behind an 18 plus login gate every time you want to watch it. It's a bummer because like we can't, we can't push the boundaries. We can't sort of like do our jobs as journalists like talking frankly about stuff because we're trying to please an algorithm that doesn't think and doesn't feel and doesn't know

what humans want. It knows what it's told to sort of prioritize. And so the assumption from Silicon Valley has been that that is better. The assumption from Silicon Valley has been that we can use automation to moderate at a scale that TV can't and we can create an endless television and a television that has an endless personal television, which would be impossible if you paid human beings. It would just, it would be impossible. But what I think is slowly coming into focus and has been for me over the last few months is like that might be wrong and it might crash and burn in like an amazing way or just like it might create space for something new that is more interesting. Like we are at a moment where there are possibilities.

I got into a whole conversation the other day with a tech CEO who I will not name, but I'm on texting terms with who's nice and not like an evil one. And we were talking about like AT protocol, the technology that powers blue sky and like whether or not you could build a TikTok or a YouTube competitor that integrated with Blue Sky or if you want to do that with Activity Pub like could you like are there ways to build new versions of these things that aren't algorithmic and like those conversations are really exciting to me because if you look at any of these other apps you're like this fucking sucks like this shit sucks and I and I can't find people I can't reach people I can't make stuff that

I want to make and the thing I always come back to you and this is the end of my rant the that I come back to is that garbage day would not exist if I had to care about Facebook traffic or search traffic. It would be a fundamentally different thing. So like if garbage day cared about search traffic or social traffic, we would be formatted and written in a vastly different way. And that would have been true six years ago when we started doing it. Like it, you, everything on TikTok has to fit into the TikTok shaped box. that delivers it. Same with YouTube, same with Instagram. And that box is always changing in small, minute ways. And that is a problem because the people who know how to do that can spend a lot

of money doing it and flood your fee with garbage or just take advantage of you. And the people who don't want to do that aren't doing it. So it's like full scammer economy, basically. Yeah, yeah, you don't know that they exist or that they're making anything. In Toronto, every arrival is a statement, and nothing says it better than this. Cadillac Optic was the number one selling luxury EV in Canada for 2025. Find your rhythm across a seamless 33-inch display and an immersive 19-speaker AKG surround audio system. This city demands agility, and Optic delivers with precision to make every drive extraordinary. Let's take the Cadillac.

Find out more at Cadillac Canada.ca. Luxury sales claim based on S&P Global Mobility Canadian New Vehicle Total Registration for calendar year 2025 for the Cadillac definition of luxury. I want to talk about how this will, how you foresee this crashing and burning. But I think that ties into the AI part of the question. Okay. So nine times out of ten, if you like dig around these like shitty short form accounts that are sharing garbage, they're either sharing AI content like our cats video, like our cats episode, or they're promoting an AI company of some kind.

I don't think that is like the AI industry wants to like make you not trust what's on your feeds. Like I actually don't think that's what's happening. I think it's that AI companies have a lot of money and they've realized that the easiest way to get attention is to have an account that is in good standing with an algorithmic video platform. And the best way to do that is to share a bunch of freebooted videos of garbage all day long and then insert their own videos in there. So that's what's happening. It's like we need to reach people.

We have a ton of money. Let's just gain the system. Yeah. Sure. I think it was around a year ago you were suggesting. Oh, you were saying like that, that, that, I think AI is going to replace this. That could, that, right, AI is now just exasperating the problem. Have we given up on AI being a, a alternative?

I think there's certain things from AI that are just going to stick around, sadly. The amount of, what is it, commencement addresses or whatever, graduation ceremonies right now where people are just outwardly booing any reference to AI is very heartening. It makes me wonder about all those stories about AI cheating. like maybe they are not so accurate, but maybe it's actually... I don't know. It's totally plausible that someone's like, I hate the AI industry. I hate what it's doing. And also, I don't want to write this stupid paper. And like, you know, those two things can work simultaneously. But in terms of like, in terms of a, like the current AI platforms we have replacing

the way people use the internet, I don't think so. I don't think so. I don't think so. That's a change. Basically, every single person uses AI for a recommendation and that recommendation is wrong or doesn't exist, I have to imagine starts to use those platforms yet less. Like I was talking to a friend whose parents like drove an hour to go see a movie that didn't exist because his dad like found it on from an AI recommendation. What was the movie? There was some like obscure art film or like like.

Does the movie actually exist or just it wasn't? Yeah, it was but like AI, the Google AI summary was like, oh yeah, if you drive to this movie theater, it'll be playing. And then they went and it wasn't there. And this is like happened a bunch where like a bunch of people showed up in Dublin for a Halloween parade a couple years ago that didn't exist. I've bumped into people in New York who are like, where is this? And it's like an a is like a chat GPT direction. And I'm like that's not that's not anything.

It's not real just use Google apps straight there. Yeah, but like people don't want to think about this shit. So I, I think that there's going to be like a large chunk of the population that does use AI. And they are using AI and they don't really think about it and they don't really care. But AI's attempts to replace entertainment have largely failed. AI videos, people watch, but AI video feeds like SORA or meta AI have failed every time. Right. Your whole point about the container.

It's not just the container. It's this massive problem I have not written about because I don't know how to phrase this right. We have trained people over. the last 15 years to think about media as something that's interactive. So it's not just like I enjoyed this video, it's I'm going to share this video. And that has changed slightly in the age of TikTok and sort of just staring and scrolling. But everyone who wants to go viral now is making their videos with the assumption of like, what would someone do if they shared this video with somebody else?

It's like viral 101. And an AI feed, you would have to have other people on there to share those videos to, or then you would have to download them and send them to people. It's a total dead end. It's like a cul-de-sac. And so what AI companies like really haven't figured out and probably can't really ever do is replace that social aspect of social media. And you know, they've said like, oh yeah, well, you know, you can talk to the bot and

you can talk to your AI girlfriend or whatever. And like, yeah, some people will do that. very unwell people will do that. Richard Dawkins apparently is doing that right now. But that is something that is just sort of like embedded in the mind of the consumer now. It's like I'm going to share this stuff. I'm going to talk about the stuff with people. And AI is not good enough to create something like, you know, that you would find on Netflix where you could just watch it and it would feel satisfying. So it's stuck in that weird middle ground.

I mean, our relationship with like algorithmic recommendations are so different. than like curation by a brand. Yeah. And that's what this is running into. You cannot convince me and I think most people that like your AI generated video platform is going to have taste that record. Like you might be able to spam a video of like Trump getting punched by Jesus

and like whatever and like I might laugh. But like I'm not like, ooh, I want to see more of this vessel. So like everyone's running into dead ends because the recommendations mean less. And on the other side, people in TV land can't compete with the eyeballs of the sheer amount of it. I was watching a clip from Pablo Torre finds out about sort of the NFL and their showdown with big tech right now. And one of the guys on there, I don't know his name, but he was making this really interesting argument, which was that the NFL wants so much money that eventually the TV stations that carry the NFL have to say, we can't do that anymore. Yeah.

Like they can't afford, they don't make any money now on the NFL. So like we are increasingly in a world where like TV, as we understand it, is is dying. And there's no version of this story where like all of a sudden magically we all decide. we want to watch linear TV again. Like it's just not going to happen. So what's going to happen is eventually the TV stations will say we can't afford the NFL and the NFL will go to big tech and big tech will say, yeah, we can put it on YouTube, we can put it on Netflix, we can put it on Amazon Prime or whatever.

Sure. Apple. And then the NFL is going to discover. You might not know this. It is already all those places just in small doses besides Apple right now. Right, right. But I mean, exclusive. Yeah. Yeah. And then the NFL is going to find out what it's like to negotiate with a company that has more money than them.

And things are going to get really, really weird and bad. And this is the issue with like everything. This is the issue with movies. This is the issue with everything old world and everything new world. And that is also why everything is bad because the old world doesn't want to accept that like they're not ever going to make as much. much money as they once did again because the world has shifted. And that means that like people are just going to leave, which brings us back to like,

you know, Kristen Stewart at Khan being like, I'm just going to make movies directly to YouTube because I don't want to wait around for Hollywood or the TV writers that go and make like an Instagram channel and then turn that into a network of Instagram channels or whatever. Like people are just not going to wait around as these old guard institutions just like won't let go. And it creates a lot of new problems, like a random person you've never heard of with a $10 million a month budget to promote themselves. And you're going to be like, what is this?

Because, like, no, there are no tastemakers anymore for this stuff. There are no guardrails for it other than algorithmic ones. So, like, it's just going to be really confusing for a while. And I think interesting stuff will happen because of it. Yeah, you're right on both of those. And then in between, it's like when like nine inch nails and radiohead gave their album out for like pay what you want no labels a decade ago and that was supposed to upend the music industry also at a time where like pirating was really popular the labels were losing money like there was no middle there wasn't like a scene middle ground and it was a huge hit for a radio head or a nine inch nails but didn't radicalize the music industry in that way because those are bands that had a name brand by the

point that they were doing that. So it might work for Kristen Stewart to put a movie on YouTube and go without the system because she's an entity that the system has like told us about already. It is not going to work out for somebody who watches that video and goes, cool, I'm going to do what Kristen Stewart's going to do. Or it's not going to work in the same way. Like they say things get stuck in this weird interplay. I would compare it to the movie, a moment in time that was depicted in the movie Babylon, which I think is a great movie about our current era, actually, where Margot Robbie's character kind of goes viral in Nickelodeons,

silent film Nickelodeons as the crying girl because she can cry in command. And everyone's like, oh, my God, I love her videos where she cries on command. And then she's popular enough that she tries to transition into Top. Her and Brad Pitt are all kind of like moving into movies where they talk. And it doesn't work. They fail. They crash and burn. Meanwhile, some stars do.

Like some stars were able to make the jump from silent film to talkies or radio to TV or whatever it was at the turn of that century. We are going through a similar thing where like the legacy institutions are going to really feel it. The current big new institutions think that. that they're safe, but they might not be either. Because, like, you know, there were all kinds of crazy ideas for like, you know, how to deliver movies to people, you know, 100 years ago.

Like, things are not as permanent as you think they are. We're all going to watch a quibby. I just think, I think people, what is exciting about what's happening right now is that, like, there are kind of no rules. And, and everything is bad, but everyone, everyone can agree that it's bad. And so there's, there's space there. There's their room there, you know, there's interesting things. that can happen. Maybe it will discard this. It's a good note to end it on it, but I had this thought

related to Ben Shapiro and like the political sphere that this is happening in where it's kind of like a game stop pump where MAGA before had set up this ecosystem where they're paying their creators. They're like they were all in network with each other and they're able to get a message out and they're able to game the system themselves. And then the system that they were gaming they got teamed up on and the tools were used against them in the same in the in the same way to be clear like what's happening to ben Shapiro is like happening to ben Shapiro for like very specific reasons and it largely has to do with the fact that he's an orthodox Jew who can can't go anti-Israel or anti-Jew like that and that has always been a problem for him but like at some point

in it's at some point in his system money has run out somewhere whether it's because he was spending it on fucking stupid Hollywood streamer vanity projects like the legend of Arthur Pentracking or whatever the fuck that thing was called or it's just like yeah he can't do his like Facebook traffic to add revenue payola scheme anymore something broke down in his system and he can't adapt to the new one so like he can't like hunter Biden is on with kandis owens this afternoon the day that we're recording this he cannot go on kansas owens because well he fired kansas owns through being an anti-Semite. You can't go on Nick Fuentes, who is a major anti-Semite.

What is happening in the Magu world is an echo of what's happening across the sort of video world as a whole. But it is moving things in a much darker and much more like violently racist direction. Like Ben Shapiro failing is funny, but it's he's failing because he can't be as racist and is hateful and as nimble and is like, cool like cool for that community is like being so so nihilistically racist that you're basically a spree shooter you know chud the builder being arrested live streaming like shooting a black guy after you know calling him the n word or whatever like that's that's the new cool thing yeah or like you know

like bench bureau can't do that so that's why that's what's happening it's it is an echo of of hollywood but it's it's it's not a good one it's it shouldn't be it gets fucking but it's like not good totally but like the way that they usurped the the GOP by being like we're going to use they're being usurped by the Gros they're there they're like it is the same tactics so like they no one can put a container and being like okay this is the end of the usurping like yes yeah we we fed a lot of spam like this was a lot of like pay for play and now we're in charge, like there's always a new, that can just be continually used against people so no one can ever, like, create a box.

Like, I don't think there's any point in, like, trying to imagine what happens next. Like, that, that, the fun part is that we don't have to do that. Like, there's stuff happening. It's all really interesting. And, like, it's not like, it's probably, yeah, it's like broadly not great for everyone. But like for the, it feels like a dam has broken and we can finally say like, this shit. It sucks. And like that is actually interesting.

Like it doesn't mean that there would be a good ending to this. But to me, it's quite a relief to that the average person could be like, yeah, why is this video in my feed? Why are there nine angles of Takashi 6'9's gender reveal party in my Instagram explore page? Right. Like that's good. Like the average person should be asking that question. It's unfortunate that they were apparently believing every single thing in their feed up until

this moment, but at least we're here. Okay. Hey, are you thinking, what if there was more? I just got an hour of the two of you, but I have lots of errands this weekend. What if there was more? Well, Patreon.com slash panic world or courier plus on Apple things. There's a whole part two. We're instead of talking about how everything sucks in a chaotic way, we talk about what happens when this ends.

where might we be going? And have we seen a precedent for this before? Yes, we have. That's at patreon.com slash panic world or courier plus apple stuff. I hope you have fun doing your ends this weekend. I hope that like somebody gives you like a free cookie or like you run into a neighbor and you both like have a nice little chit chat and you tell them about how much you love the show Panic World. and then you tell them that they should subscribe. I was actually just trying to say a nice thing for you and make this personable,

but never stop advertising. Panic World is a production of Courier. It is written and produced by Grant Irving and hosted by me, Ryan Broderick. Josh Fielstead is our production coordinator, and our amazing researcher is Adam Bumis. From Courier is Shane Verkest, who edits our video episodes along with our producer, Devin Barone, and National Managing Director and Executive Producer Kevin Dreyfus.

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