Panic World - lonelygirl15 and when lies could be fun

Episode Date: February 4, 2026

One of the first “internet things” that reached beyond a bunch of inevitably really cool people who hung out in chatrooms, was YouTube. Today, we’re going back in time to look back at a potential progenitor of our current era: lonelygirl15. Willa Paskin joins us from Decoder Ring to reminisce about the earliest vloggers and how they have continued to influence us across all other platforms, ever since the first video on YouTube hit a million views in 2005. Our guest Willa Paskin is a writer and the host of Decoder Ring. You can listen to that podcast here or anywhere you find them. Want even more Panic World content? Like ad-free episodes, bonus episodes, and access to the Garbage Day Discord? Sign up for a membership at: https://www.patreon.com/PanicWorld. And if you want to see this conversation on video, ⁠Panic World is now posting episodes to YouTube! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Let's kick things off with a simple question for you, Willa. How much better has the internet made society? Like, you know, on a scale, like, one being pretty good to 10 being great, you know? I have to tell you, like, my honest gut reaction is like zero, but I know that's not true, you know? Like, I know that's not true. But that is, like, that's my instinct, like, my feel is, like, I'm kind of ready to be full light night. Yeah, I don't know. It's like 50-50.

I actually have the same feeling where like my knee-jerk millennial reaction is like, let's all burn it down. But then I'm like, I did order dinner on my phone last night and it like came. No, but it's that shit that makes me be like it's really bad because it's like that is so we could. Sorry, you could order dinner on your phone last night. Like you could have ordered dinner to your home by picking up the telephone like any time in the last 50 years. It's not that big a deal. But I paid over the phone too. It's true. Oh, right. Like all these things that, like, the internet did make a bunch of things that weren't very hard before even easier.

That are kind of about how humans relate to each other. I'm really skeptical about a lot of them. Yeah. Thinking about it last night, I had like a very online evening that like wouldn't have been possible 30 years ago where I decided I wanted to watch all of the new girl from the start. Yes, one does. And then order food and I didn't have any cash. And like all of that was just doable from my couch, which is maybe not a good thing. now they think about it. But the reason I ask is because today we are going back in time. We're going to possibly, one could argue, the birth of our current era. We're going to be looking back at like one of the earliest YouTube sensations. It's a subject that we have touched on very briefly in one of our very early episodes.

I'm very excited to kind of circle back around. But first, my name is Ryan Broderick. This is Panic World to show about how the internet warps our minds or culture and eventually reality. my personal kidnapped camgirl, our producer Grant Irving, will sometimes jump in from time to time to say hello, ask a few questions. And our guest today is Willa Paskin from Dakota Ring. Welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. I'm really actually excited and interested to be here.

I'm excited to hear about this. I am too. I feel like it's one of those things that was so overly covered in the 2010s that it actually didn't, it hasn't gotten the attention. I think it deserves in the 2020s in a way. So we're going to be talking today about Lonely Girl 15. What do you know about Lonely Girl 15, Willa? Okay. So I've actually tried really hard not to be spoiled about this.

Okay. Knowing we're having this conversation. And I'm genuinely no very little. I remember like the name Lonely Girl 15. And I like, are we trying not to spoil listeners too? Like should I say? Yeah. You know, not a hard and fast rule.

You know, look, listeners, you've had 20. years to understand what happened here. But yeah, I guess we should I'll sidest up the thing that is. So basically, like, I knew it was an internet phenomenon, like, in the 2000s. I was blogging like at Vulture. I was on the internet a lot then. I read BuzzFeed.

So, like, I was, like, aware of what that was. And an image of a woman flashed into my mind, like, on a YouTube video. But that honestly was like almost it. Do you know what I mean? Like early viral phenomenon having to do with, like, Like a vlogger. Great. Kind of like that was like what I really called to mind.

So I asked this of our guests sometimes just to kind of orient them in the space here. So like what would you say is like the first internet thing that you came across. We were like, wow. That's like that's wild. Like what's your sort of earliest memories of? I honestly don't know that like I can do that. Like I used like I remember like being in AOL chat rooms like in. Sure.

in the 90s, like as a in middle school and high school and being like, that's crazy. I remember honestly, I remember not being understand, like I had AOL, like not being able to understand like how you got to the internet. Do you remember that? Like it was like, because like there weren't web sites. Like there weren't like web crawlers. I mean, it was called a web crawler, but there wasn't like a browser. There was no internet browser.

So like you had to go through the portal of AOL. I was like there's a whole. I just literally like didn't understand. I mean, I didn't care. I wasn't. I wasn't that old. None of my friends weren't there. But I just remember being like, oh, everyone says there's all this cool stuff on it,

but I literally don't know how to find it. That seems fine right now, you know? You just unlocked, like, a memory of mine that I think I totally forgot about, which was like, I want to say the very early 2000s, I don't think I totally understood that the internet, like what it was. I thought it was something that just, like, lived at school, I think. And then by the time, like, AOL and some messages, came around, I didn't understand that that was also the internet that I was using on like Google or my

browser or what. Well, it all seemed very different, you know, honestly. You know, and I'm a little older than you. So I graduated high school in 1999. So like, honestly, so the thing that I was like, oh, it was Napster. Like I spent my entire freshman year like running up and down the hallway because I would burn people CDs, load them into Napster and then go back to my computer to find. Do you know what I mean?

Like just file share? with access to their full CD collection. And I, like, that was incredible. I loved that. That was amazing. I had a really big breakthrough moment with music piracy and the internet where, like, for years, I, I didn't totally understand that human beings were putting stuff on Kazaa or Khaza. Yeah.

And then I feel like in like the late 2000s, I met a guy, just happened to meet a guy at a Comic-Con. And I was working as like a little, as a young reporter. And I was interviewing him. And he mentioned a video he made and uploaded to Kazah. And I was like, I've seen that video. And it was like this thing where I was like, whoa, like, imagine meeting the guy who like mislabeled your favorite song on LimeWire like years later. Like, my boy.

No, no, can I still like in a true like one day if I bet to be a millionaire, like I'm going to do this, which is that my computer in college just died like when I was a junior. It just completely conked out. I sent it to tech serve and they were like, this is going to cost thousands of dollars. And we're not sure we can get anything back. But on it was like all the Napster files, you know, like including like a couple songs that were just like exactly like mislabeled or like some random like just songs that aren't kind of everywhere only because they were like a bootleg of some concert thing. You know what I mean? And I'm like I miss them. And also because I don't even remember them.

And then sometimes the song comes on, you know like when you have a mixes and like the song cues the next song. So sometimes I'll be like that song. I haven't heard that other song that came after this in like years. Yeah. Everyone's in a world of Spotify like seems to re like reverse engineer my music taste from 20 years ago in the order it would have been on my iPod and it's kind of spooky or it's like how did you like it kind of knew right. So this is this is great. This is the this is the era that we're talking about today. This is this is where this all takes place and just to orient us even further.

We are talking about basically one year after YouTube launches. YouTube launches in 2005. The first video is of course me at the zoo, which is a guy in front of a, I think, it's an elephant going the bathroom, and it becomes the, you know, the largest entertainment platform in human history. Roughly a year later, 2006, the YouTube account Lonely Girl 15 uploads its first video. And what's really clever about this is that the first video, which I didn't realize, is a response video. Do you remember, like, the age of response? Like, people would, like, make a YouTube video to talk to another YouTube user. Don't they still do that? Kind of, less and less.

I feel like wasn't there like a huge makeup world scandal like in the last couple years that was just like everyone just responding. Yes. It was in fact literally the week that we're recording this, the month we're recording this is really fascinating to talk about this. The YouTube got rid of the trending page this month, December 20, 25. So that's how that used to work is that basically all the makeup artists and like drama channels figured out that if they talked to each other and about each other, they could game the trending page. And the trending page is now gone. Why is the trending page gone, Ryan? My theory is that YouTube does not want you to follow accounts anymore. They want to be more like Netflix. So, because that's who their main competitor is. Such bullshit for all of us who

make stuff. In fact, the newest redesign of YouTube has made it like, especially on TV, is almost impossible to like click to a person's channel. It's like two or three clicks when it used to be one. So that's my, it's also more like TikTok then in a way. I think the future of TikTok is no follower accounts either. I think all of these platforms know that like users becoming powerful is bad for them. So it's like they want you to make content but not reap the benefits from it. But I go to Netflix to watch a show I want to watch. I've been watching this guy named Jude renovated his house in the north of Scotland all winter.

And I don't follow Jude, but Jude's videos pop up and I watch them every night. So, you know. Sidebar, Ryan says these things all the time. And my thought is, like, what you guys don't know is on Discord, he's always like, I'm so busy, I'm so busy watching Jude, make his house in Scotland. Sorry, sorry, I'm so busy during the day so that I can enjoy my time. I don't want to be involved in New York media ratlies. One of those people he doesn't sleep. He just watches new girl.

Grant's the one where, like, Grant gets two days of vacation and he's like, hey, I've been thinking about work. And I'm like, I'm going to call the police if you call my phone. Okay, so wired rights of lonely. Those too many takes from me. I gotta just let it go. Wired rights of Lonely Girl 15 at the time. One of the most popular vloggers on YouTube at the time was a teenager named Emily, who had tired of all the attention.

After some users posted disparaging remarks, one called her an attention whore. The other called her a video slut. She decided to quit vlogging. But a few weeks later, she uploaded a new video, quipping that she'd taken a break because dinosaurs had attacked her house. A day or two after that, a new user named Lonely Girl 15 posted an animated scene of a dinosaur stomping on a house, intercut with Emily's original videos. Emily's fans loved it and offered a deluge of comments giving Lonely Girl 15 instant cred.

I had totally forgotten this entire dimension of the store, or maybe even never knew it, that like even back then you needed the network effect of another popular user to jumpstart a channel. But what's also kind of incredible is that they knew that already. Right. It's wild that's the case, but that like a Lonely Girl 15 was so savvy. Very savvy. And that's like the savviness. that promoting people did not come for years.

I mean, there are companies around the world that are still like doing like, you know, powerpoint presentations about like, here's how you go viral kind of thing. Yeah. So teen girls on YouTube go nuts for this.

June 16 of that year. Can I just ask a question right? Yeah, yeah. So it's 2006. Like how many teen girls are on YouTube? Like, like how big is YouTube in 2006? So YouTube obviously is much smaller, but I can pull that up.

While you're looking it up, we'll see from a lot of the articles that I pulled for this. They make an assumption about the, about Lonely Girl 15's audience and I think is fundamentally wrong. Yeah, it's like it's probably. Okay. Yeah, yeah. Like maybe it's men as ever. I would assume now it was all teenage girls. They do not think so.

They think it's all like creepy men. If you look at the content and you're talking about basically a lofi CW show. That is like more teenage girls. I also just know anecdotally, I've spoken to a, lot of women my age who were watching YouTube and they were watching other young girls on YouTube. So, okay, to put this in perspective, YouTube hits a million views on a video for the first time in 2005 at the very end.

And so it's a Nike ad featuring Ronald Gino. And that like wasn't, okay, okay. So the whole idea for Lonely Girl 15 is that she's vlogging about her life, 16 year old named Bree. She got her help from her friend Daniel. and they're vlogging about their life. The channel basically responds to every single comment they get, which is like another really cool network effect hack.

And it gets popular very, very quickly. And then Grant is going to pull up two videos to kind of show you what they're doing here. Hi, guys. So this is my first video blog. My name is Brie. I'm 16. I don't really want to tell you where I live because you could stalk me. What you need to know about my talent is that it's really boring.

Like, really boring. That's probably why I spend so much time on my computer. I'm a dork. So I want to compare that video to this other video, which comes out about three years later from another user, one we've talked about on the show before. Are you familiar with Boxy, Willa? No. Maybe.

Okay, hi. So, my name is Boxy, and it's been a while since I made a new. video so I decided that because of recent events that I could make a new video. Yeah, so this video is a six minutes of this. And so both of these videos are very indicative of a style at the end of 2000s that was very popular, particularly with teenage girls on YouTube. And what they would do, they would link to them on MySpace. So like what you would do is you'd make a video, you know, introducing yourself,

people would leave you comments and then you would answer those comments and then spit them back out into MySpace. And I think that, like, very importantly made Lonely Girl 15 feel very authentic because she was just sort of copying the same style of video that, like, a lot of other girls seemingly her age were doing online. Weirdly, she wasn't even copying them. Like, she was before them. Well, sort of.

I mean, I'm not saying, I'm not saying there wasn't examples of it. But, like, it would become more and more popular after her. So, like, I mean, to the point about, like, you know, knowing to see the video on some, as a response video. It's like she's the people doing it like understood something about what it was supposed to look like that was right other people would like they tapped into that very quickly. Yeah. It's it's like very impressive actually how fast sort of like these formats popped up and how once again authentically lonely girl 15s felt. And throughout all of the video.

I mean, I would just say. So like I have an eight and a 10 year old and I think if you gave my 10 year old a camera like she would do that. Like I just like it's not like I mean not you know like less makeup made but like that is that is like it's sort of like what you would do totally if you were just so in that way you know yeah no I think exactly right and as she's doing these videos there's like the beginning hints of a larger story at play largely focusing around the romantic tension between her and this guy Daniel that's helping her with the channel and so people latch on to. that and it all seems authentic because it's on multiple platforms along with the videos they're commenting on they're also commenting on each other's my spaces but early on we learned they can't be more than friends because brey's parents are very religious all of this is happening in the span of like a month and like how popular are like how many videos is she making like how popular are they like before anyone anyone starting to suspect it was getting to around 50k downloads and then once she

started talking about like how our parents are like over controlling because of their religion she started getting a 100k followers so like they were able to sort of like tailor make the count like as they were seeing what was working that people liked more the religious stuff versus the like the goofy stuff and the like the forlorn love stuff they just sort of fed into that but also to answer your question like we're talking the span of like five or six videos across a month oh really yeah people are just like all in on five or six videos they don't need much yeah so like she Her first one is pay to the order of, which is that Emily girl. And she responds, that launches the channel.

And then she does like another response video to Emily. And then she starts her first vlog, which she's calling blogs at the time. She talks about like the stuff around her room. She's like doing kind of like teen girl stuff. The idea about like her parents like being awful. That appears around episode, like that's called episode or video. video eight. By the time we get to like the dozenth video, we're in July, which is when people start speculating that this is all fake. So she's done barely a dozen videos before people

start calling bullshit on it. And how long are they? Like, five minutes at the most. But like, most of them are under two minutes. Just like up to before. So 12 videos in. Like, and there's all this other stuff going on on MySpace or like how much other stuff is going on MySpace and Live Journal? Like, is it a lot? Like, are people like? In terms of. chatter? Yeah. Like, is it, like, is it a bit or is it like people are really doing it? People are like invested in it because you have to figure like there aren't a lot of people on YouTube and there's not a lot of people consistently talking to YouTube's audience. At this point, it's still the website that you would like upload what would have been America's funniest one video to. So the fact that she's like

on there talking directly to the audience and then seating it on MySpace or Live journal wherever else, that is very powerful. Okay. Okay. Yeah. And it stands out. Okay. So our researcher Adam tried to find the earliest accusation of the channel being fake.

Uh, and it seems like obviously there, there may have been more of this lost to time, but July 20th of 2000 and, uh, what is it? 2006, uh, I can show it to you right here. So this is, obviously we go. this far back in the internet stuff starts to degrade. But it reads, Lonely Girl, 15, a fake. The video itself doesn't

really work anymore. But the comments read, Lonely Girl is my life. How dare you insult my life? She is real, real, real. Ha ha, just joking. You make good points. So do a few others. I believe she's fake. Possibly a way to make money. I think it's an opening to a TV sitcom that's being tested online. I kind of hope it is. It'd be a good show.

They referenced the fact that Channel 5 news in the UK has covered it. So they think like it's some sort of sci-op. But yeah, this is basically like these are the comments on a call-out video that has unfortunately been the last time. And we can see here that that call-out video had around 36,000 views, which is pretty considerable, actually, for the time. Yeah. That's like, 500 comments. I mean, I know that's like, like, who knows, how long those went over, but it was like 448 comments or something. It's a lot. And it's also interesting that A lot of people here are saying things like, whatever it is, I'm hooked and I'm old.

But you can also tell, you can kind of tell by the way some of these users are writing and especially their usernames, kind of the different sort of internet demographics they would be coming from at the time. And it's kind of all over, which I think is interesting. This is a genuine phenomenon. People also don't seem like that mad. They're like, oh, good points. Like, maybe I hadn't thought about it, but you could be.

Or maybe I had thought. Like, there's don't seem that pissed off. Well, this is something that I think has been seriously. lost the time, which is most people in the internet assumed everything on the internet was fake until like 2010. But wait, Ryan, what's so amazing is, we're going back there. Yes, we are. So it's like, I keep being like, oh, AI is going to have like this version.

I'm like, but it can never work because everyone is just going to be like, obviously it's fake. You just expect everything to not be real, not the other way around. There's basically like a time period between from Occupy Wall Street to Hurricane Sandy is basically this one weird moment where we all believe that we're all operating good faith and like reporting from the ground from reality correctly and then you get the shark on the highway during hurricane sandy and everyone realizes you can mess with major news organizations that like want to outsource reporting to user generated content platforms and then the whole thing goes off the rails that that's my big theory why do you think that that change happened so rapidly

is it just that boomers got online no i think it's the uh i think it was the embrace of mobile phones, like smartphones. Sure, sure, sure. We could push on it a little bit, but I take your point. Yeah. So back to Lonely Girl 15 by July 28 of this year. The channel starts getting media attention.

It's written up in screens. Virginia Heffernan's New York Times column about the internet. She thinks it's real. Fun fact. She writes Brie perfectly, oh boy, okay, wow. Bree perfects the emo. She's not emo.

Virginia. She's a different subculture entirely. Bree perfects the emo girl in her room phase. Balancing, playful, and moody as she muses about her life and times. She has huge online fame, repressive religious parents who probably know nothing about YouTube. What could be more 2006? Obviously, the implication from the stills that promote her videos is that she's going to strip, but she never does, and she controls that shell game by being sweetly deaf to innuendo. It's time to get Lonely Girl 15, the full-on series going, invite the parodists and critics to round the cast, give some play to the idea that she's a fake and create a perfect my so-called life for the Myspace Hordes.

So yeah. I mean, the girl is good. Like, she's pretty good. I think so. I think so, too. That's actually interesting about the sex part, though. Yes. This is a weird one.

I think is worth discussing, yeah. where it's not so much, I think, that Lonely Girl 15 is aping the aesthetics of like a Camgirl or like porn. So much is that at the same time that she's appearing, porn is beginning to ape the aesthetics of other user generated content. That's my theory. It's not even, I think that just like the timeline bears that out. Like all these things are happening at the same time. It's not like Camgirl is an aesthetic that's established. Like, these things don't, like video is just going online in a major.

That's why YouTube happens. Like, it's actually still hard to do it. It's all like takes a lot of bandwidth. So, right. I mean, I think, but that said, there is like this long history of sort of early internet experiments with people broadcasting their life where often a part of their fan base is men who are very interested in the possibility it will be sexual. Like, that's just always hanging over it.

I'm blanking on the name of, I mean, there's a couple of, I mean, there's a couple of, of them but like this American life is there's like who's the first person you know what I'm talking about it's like the er what I was just thinking about her working on this outline it wasn't Heather Jenny cam yeah that is Jenny cam that's right yeah so like there's I mean that like she was I mean that like she was I mean I think she did right like she did occasionally like she had sex in her like she hooked up with people but it wasn't that like that's not what it was for if anyone's not listening to the episode which is a lot of you because it was one of her first episode episodes. She just set up 24-7 surveillance in her house as like an anthropological project and that

anything she was doing was going to be recorded, including changing or having sex. And people were really into her feet, shockingly. And her folding laundry. No, and I think a lot of like the people giving much, like she had to have had a tip jar even, right? Like, I mean, not they didn't call it that then. and it wasn't like, but I think it was a lot of men. Like, I think that that's, and then also I have a colleague who just, who did an entire episode about this early online experiment called The Spot where like it was similar to this. Oh, yes. You know, like a lot of like text, a lot, not video because like you couldn't do video,

but a lot of text about like almost Melrose Place, but like, were they real? Were they not? And the people that are super invested in these still photographs of like these beautiful people and then they're like live journals or whatever are, it's a lot of men. So, I mean, which isn't to say, I'm not, it's not to disagree that Lonely Girl 15 didn't have like a female fan base, but like this idea that like there's leering happening. It's sort of like built in to the whole experiment because there just has been leering happening. The Lonely Girl 15 account is clearly targeting a specific demo of like this Myspace teenager. But obviously, as the New York Times gets involved, more people find out creep show up.

And that does happen. Who else shows up, though, is, I assume not a creep. Brian Fleming, an indie filmmaker who works on split screen, which has also come up in a previous episode of Panic World. They were the IFC channel show that launched Blair Witch. So another kind of- Oh, Blair Witch is like also right in this exact thing. It's about 10 years. Like this uncanny Valley or whatever.

Yeah, it's about like five years before this. But they're playing with the same idea. 10? 10 years? Yeah. 90-96, right? Yeah. So Blair Witch is like 10 years before this.

She has like a video that has like an argument breakout. He claims it's a fake. And we're going to show you the video that sort of leads Fleming to this conclusion. I probably shouldn't post this. Excellent. Excellent curiosity gap headline right there. So I invited Daniel over to talk about a few things. Basically, I think that the video that he posted was really mean and the video that I posted was really mean.

And we just need to figure some things out. that we can still be friends. Why are you being weird like that? Not being weird like anything. Yes you are, you're being... Seriously, what's going on? You just posted a video and basically saying that what I believe in is really weird. I didn't put... I mean, I did post a video, but I mean, does this have to be on?

Yes, we are talking, but we're talking with a stupid camera on. So can you guess why people started calling fake on this video? It's the cuts. Firstly, it's like... It's too much drugs. Like, it's actually kind of good. It's, like, sort of all done again. But, like, just as the storyline gets more intricate, you're just, like, the camera angles, like, there's just, like, too much.

It's starting to be, like, too smart in a, like, fake stupid way. But also the cuts, like, the cuts, which are both seamless but happening. Yes. Don't actually make sense. The camera is cutting. We're seeing the cutting, like, as we do. But then it's like they're just picking up seamlessly in a way that's like, no. Like, someone's that there's someone.

there, tell it. Like, that's, that's directed. Like, you can't do that. Like, you have to either be sitting face it. You can, you can stop the camera and, like, be facing the camera and, like, have a relationship to the camera, but you can't two people be doing what they're doing without somebody else doing it. Well, I mean, in post. Yes, no, no, I know. You could do, but, like, wire, it just, there's, it's got too fancy, like, just, just, sort of like home, style fancy, but it did. That's what Fleming argues. He writes, uh, on August 15th, the Bree and Daniel show jumped the shark. the producers just tried too hard to get across exposition and weren't clever enough about presenting

it with veracity now i wonder why i ever believed he also does a summary about like this whole will they won't they brie and daniel subplot that is like actually nuts um so so like he's all in even though he's like debunking yes and and basically in an august sixth upload they reveal what it is like why they can't be together. And, and it's basically, Brie has a shrine to Alistor Crowley, who's like an occultist or not a saint.

Oh, that's so fun. Yeah. That's so good. They didn't even have Wikipedia. Did you have Wikipedia? Like, that's so cute. I like that for everybody. Yeah.

That's so good. But parents are Satanous. That's their crazy religion. Yeah, they're not, they're not Christian. They're Satanus. Guys, that sounds good. And then Fleming concludes,

Why are Bree and Daniel recording their fight on the webcam? Daniel actually expresses opposition to recording it, then allows it to happen anyway. Bree makes a lame excuse for it. The whole world is seen everything anyway. That I disagree with him completely, saying I want to be off camera. Continuing to be off camera, that part I have no, like, I'm like authentic. Plausible.

Unfortunately, so the internet has all basically kind of at this point, but like this whole thing is nuts and not real. The New York Times doubles down. Yeah. So Virginia Heffernan basically argues again that it's real and talks to Brie about it. Wow. Okay. We're going to talk to her about it.

Yeah. Like, okay. We're just like doing this. Okay, I'm impressed with everybody. Let's tell me how this goes. So Heffernan writes, I asked her how she came to create her vlog. Tell me this doesn't ring true. Here's Bree's response.

I started watching video. a couple months ago after Daniel sent me a video by pay you to the order of of of he knows so much about tech stuff. I'm really bad at it. And so one day we started playing around with this camera and it was so much fun. I normally don't do a lot of creative stuff. I'm usually stuck studying the theory of relativity or the Yalta conference or something. And this was so much more fun. It's so overwhelming the good and bad.

There are some really lame people on YouTube who like to make really mean comments about us. But the personal messages I've gotten have made it all. all worth it. And then one of the commenters on this article that our researcher Adam found says, right. So this is a girl who spends her time studying relativity theory, but makes numerous typos errors and doesn't run a spell checker when she emails someone to the New York Times. Also, the I'm really bad about it seemed a little too stereotypical cutesy girl. But the truth was just about to come out because, well, we're going to get to that. Right after a break from our sponsors. Let's see. YouTube premium.

You should get it. You should get it for Grant, actually. One of our listeners, please buy Grant YouTube premium. Please. Okay. Did Bree speak to Virginia Heffernan via email or? Via email. That's JV.

That's really, that's really, is that not really 2006 to you? Like, you're like, I want to check if someone's real. We're going to exchange emails. Yeah, I'm trying to like. That's just, like, that's just 2006 to me. Like, that doesn't make sense. I mean, like I said, like, mainstream media didn't really sort of, like, get used to the idea of, like, online misinformation until, like, the early 2010s. I mean, we weren't real about it probably till 2016.

Yeah, I kind of get how this could happen. No, I think it's, I think it's like a throwback to just, like, a simpler time in the sense of, like, just not, which is hard to imagine. 2006 isn't that long ago. But, like, just the idea that you could. exchange emails with someone and they would have to be themselves. Like, that's so preposterous. Yeah. Like, you would have to speak to that person on the phone.

I actually, I don't, I actually don't understand that. I'm going to have to ask her about it. I have to be like, why? Why did you do that? That's very weird. I mean, that's also just like, why would you double down? I don't understand anything about that, actually. Would you double down?

I would never double down. I'm, that's not my, I always back off. And I just want to be right later. What I like about it is that it, It becomes part of the story. Like, this is going to be, like, it's like, I kind of wonder if it's like, well, if I, like, throw cold water on this, I can't just, like, watch this cool video for my job. Like, it's like, she gets to keep recapping this YouTube channel that she's enjoying. But why can't you keep recapping if it is actually television?

Like, it's still interesting. I mean, the issue is that the problem with all this real fake stuff is it's sort of like a will they won't they situation, which is when all the attention gets. put on this one question when that question is resolved, people are bored or not interested anymore. So it's like you can make a show like they did that like this wasn't really the pressing

matter of it. Like people were watching the vlog and they might have continued to do so. But like you start to ramp up the tension towards resolution and then once it's resolved people leave and so you can make it like are they going to hook up or you can make it like is bullshit or not? Right. And even though people was like

people might have been And if you had been like, this is bullshit, they might have watched it. It's just like after you find out that that's one of the possibilities, then you don't. I mean, all those people being like, yeah, maybe you have some good points. Like, I still think it's a great show. It's like they're not mad yet. It's like, yeah. For the most part, I don't think early internet users would have been that mad because

like everything on the internet, as I said, was like kind of bullshit. Like you kind of knew going in like, I'm looking at bullshit. As the year progresses into like, you know, early fall, more people than ever are watching, specifically, as you said, to see if it's bullshit or not, and because that's part of the entertainment factor. So, like, she basically keeps the storylines going, all of these different ones. So, like, it's essentially, like, people are like, this is fake. The Times is like, this is real and it, like, snowballs.

Like, it's more and more people are hearing about it. So it's getting bigger. Exactly. So this, at this point, by, like, September, the debate is so contentious that the lonely girl 15.com forums get a spin-off forum. Like people get so mad at each other that they leave and create, which is classic. A schism. Yeah, classic.

Yeah. And then we finally get the grand unraveling about this, which is awesome. So there is a undeniable lead on the reality of this or lack of reality of this that surfaces on the forum, three members of the Lonely Girl 15 forum collaborate to install. collaborate to install tracking software in the emails to Bree's address. The messages bounce back. And they come from the IP address of CAA's offices in Los Angeles. Sorry, like Reddit wishes.

Like, that's very good. Yeah. The foreign members go to the press with the LA Times. The LA Times swoops in because the New York Times is like, no, this is still very real. So you definitely get that. And then on September 11th of that year, a prominent blogger's teenage son finds headshots for Jessica Rose,

an actress in L.A. who looks exactly like Brie. The next day, the creators of the web show Lonely Girl 15 then have to officially go public to the New York and the L.A. Times. They reveal the entire thing was fiction from the beginning, and they're an aspiring film industry team who wants to basically make a show and they're piloting it with CIA

via the internet. So how do you think people reacted to all this? I thought they were like really mad. So I'm going to let that hang there for a sec because I want to read this piece from Wired. This comes out in 2006, so this is just a couple months after it all kind of fell apart. And Wired writes,

the room behind her could be anywhere in America. There's a pink floral print, bed spread, a half a dozen stuffed animals and a framed picture of a row of, on the wall. But this isn't what it appears to be. Almost everything in the room was bought from Target on the same day and the price tags are still hanging from some of her stuff. What nearly a million people thought was the room of a sweet charismatic teen named Bree is actually the Beverly Hills bedroom of Lonely Grill 15's co-creator mesh Flinders. What a name. Wow. So basically they

describe that it's supposed to be like a soap opera but also considered they kind of consider it an ARG mystery like lost. Yeah. And so they're trying to like see that's probably explain some of the Satanist stuff. Like maybe they wanted to kind of move in that direction. And so they were getting around 50,000 views in their first week. You're asking my views. As they ramp up the melodrama, they start getting around 100,000 views, which is for this time period, tremendous.

And then we, of course, we get Bree, the character of Bree. So her character is, this is wired again. Her character is also deliberately crafted to target the way. Webb's most active demographics. Nerds geek out on the idea that this beautiful girl lists physicists. Oh, I hadn't even considered how fucking stupid this is. Wow. Nerds geek out on the idea that this beautiful girl list physicist, Richard Feynman and

Poet E. E. Cummings as heroes. Horny guys respond to the tame but tantalizing glimpses of her cleavage. Teenage girls sympathize with her boy troubles and her sometimes stormed relationship with her strict parents. I hadn't even considered like peak Reddit atheist like, hey, I'm a smart girl who's pretty kind of stuff like peak 2010's there, peak 2000s misogyny, right. Rose was about to start a waitressing jab at TGI Fridays. So the co-creator got a loan from his parents and said, I don't want, I said this to Grant when I heard him for this show. I don't want you to ever set foot in another TGI Fridays, he said, explaining that he'd pay her $500 a week to play brief full time in return.

She had to stay home as much as possible and wear sunglasses and a hat when she went out. For Rose, it was a dream come true. She was a working actress. She just couldn't tell anyone. And then, of course, we get the fan reaction. So, again, how do you think people feel about all of this? Mad. I think they feel a little played.

The web, according to Wired again, seemed to take the revelation in stride. Oh, good for everybody. See, they knew. I feel like you would be mad now. Well, I have a... I have a point here to make right after about that because we had a previous guest on this show who brought this up and it's sort of been spinning around in my head ever since. So the web seemed to take the revelation in stride, Wired Road at the time. One guy who had corresponded regularly with Bree wrote to ask if he'd been conversing with Jessica Rose.

No, you've been talking to Bree, came to reply. If you want to talk to Jessica Rose, you can go to her MySpace page. If you want to keep talking to Bree, use this email. Fair enough, the fan wrote back and then went on to tell Bree the latest news in his life. To many, it didn't seem to matter whether she was real or not. A number of posts appeared on YouTube denouncing the series, but many more responded with variations of this simple statement. If you don't like it, don't watch.

Now, here's what's really fascinating. We were doing an interview for an episode the other day, and they were talking about this top only fans model this year, who was exposed for using like a Filipino, like basically like bot farm to run her DMs. So you pay to DM this only fans model, and then she DMs back and she got, Cobb because they started using Filipino slang for the bathroom, which I think is like CR.

Apparently when this happened, a lot of the users were like, hey, are you a guy in the Philippines? And the user was like, yes. And then they just kept DMing with her, quote unquote. Like they were paying for the illusion. Like they didn't really care who was answered. Yeah, I mean, they were just DMing. Like, it didn't matter at all. I think this is a very similar psychology to Lonely Girl 15, though, which is like these people, they are sort of,

Because in this exact instance, it's a user who's been emailing with Bree and then continues to choose to email. Like, it's the same thought process as like chatbots where it's like you know it's not real. But like it feels real. So who cares? But also you or an aim chat room. Right. Like this was the era of like everyone was living was, you know, making a fiction. Brother, let me tell you, I had a years long on again, off again, AOL instant messenger based relationship with a girl I met at a Green Day concert.

when I was 15 years old. And we met once in real life, and it was totally fine to just have that be an AOL its messenger experience, you know, just type it into the void. I'm glad you wasn't a 46-year-old man. Said she was. Yeah. Yeah. But also, I mean, the thing you can layer onto it is it's just television.

Everyone has a relationship with fiction. Like, you watch your shows, you know? So. Yes. Dali. It's like Blair Witch. Like, we're playing with this line between fiction and reality in a way that might be like custom free zombie, be fruitful and interesting.

But also like, yeah, you are watching something. You know what the deal was there. I mean, it's like reality television or something, too. It's like, is it fake? Is it real? Like, it's kind of fun that it inhabits that middle ground. But like, it doesn't ultimately really matter which side of it is. The fact that the creators sort of saw themselves as making something like Lost is really fascinating to me.

Because it's one of these things that I had totally forgotten about this story until we went back and looked at it, which is that she is talking. to her audience directly from the video. So there is this interactivity. And I think that interactivity was what loss was experimenting with as well, like sort of playing into the ARG idea, the idea that you could like discover clues yourself and you can interact with this media. Cloverfield comes out at the same time, similar idea. I think that is very powerful.

When the illusion cracks, but you're still able to interact with it, a lot of people just continue to, I think. Especially like, like, because you can, why not? But people were really mad about Blair Witch. I think it was too early. And I also don't think it was interactive. I think that's exactly the problem. It's like Blair Witch, you couldn't talk to the Blair Witch.

People might have been mad because they were tricked more. Do you know what I mean? Like the feeling of being duped is a hard feeling to like get over. But it sounds like this was sort of in a middle ground, a gray area where like people had considered the possibility that they had been duped now for months. and we're like, well, this is still working for me or had thoughts about, you know what I mean? Like, I think having the rug pulled out from you immediately,

like to really confront your own naivete is an uncomfortable feeling for lots of people. And it's possible that by the time this was revealed, everybody in the chats had been like, yeah, duh, it's fake. Like, you know what I mean? Like, they could have been way warm with it. Damien Lindeloff of Lost says that, like, there's like a trap door, there's like a secret vault.

The best thing behind there is a person. his answer to like what he learned about mystery box shows is that like you have to make people care about the characters so that it's not just the mystery that matters to them I think that's maybe what lonely like you were invested in brie and daniel right as characters where the Blair witch was like you're trying to figure out if it's real and like fucking rips but everyone in that movie's really unlikable was just a different thing the the bravo verse the sort of real housewives universe like you know that a lot of that stuff is fake wrestling Same idea. Like all of these things, I think, are what you're arguing, Grant, is like, if you care enough about the fake thing because it has character development or whatever, it's fine, which is going to be really unfortunate for the show that you and I are watching together from because there's no way that the characters are good enough to sustain that mystery box. But actually, I don't even know that it's just about characterizations with those things. Like, I think with wrestling, with Real Housewives, like, part of it is people are interested in thinking about what's real and what's fake. but it doesn't resolve it for you. Like, when you people watch reality TV, you're like,

I know this is scripted, but also you're like, but no, that person is authentically showing me something about their personality, or they must really hate each other. Like, I talked to a reality TV producer once who is like, people think they're knowing and they are so naive about it. Like, they're like, oh, it's all fake, and then they buy all the shit. People say, oh, I know it's fake,

and then they're like fully think they know those people and something real about them, which they really may, because that's sort of like the pleasure of all those things, is that it's kind of both. We're recording the week that I'm not a wrestling guy, but I've seen clips. The entire wrestling world is pissed off at Triple H for defeating John Sina in his final match. And it's half people being like, this is fake.

And then a bunch of people responding to them going, I know it's fake, but what it symbolizes about WWE is fucking bullshit. Yeah, exactly. Like it's fake, but the politics of this, like the internal wrangling and machinations and like the personal dislike or animosity or the, bought, like what that's trying to tell us about what's really happening is fascinating. And we're all able to do that so much, even if it's really like, actually, it's all just bullshit fake. I hate that I have, uh, you have a take about wrestling. An altruism is that, like, you have to lose your last match.

It's the only way for there to be closure is like, if you were this undefeatable person or like you'd always go back for vengeance, there was like a thing that like you have to always go out on your back. And what they, I've not watched wrestling in 15 years. I don't know why, but like it was the first thing I studied as a child, you know? And like when John Sino tapped out, there was a moment of acceptance that I was like, oh, people are not going to be able. Like he smiled being like, I've accepted defeat.

I'm moving on. And I was like, that is way too of a highbrow concept for this to possibly work. But like what they were going for was there like was him being like, I've accepted my mortality. And like that was a symbolic message. I'm like, people are going to freak the fuck out. And they have. And we're going to talk about how people process Lonely Girl 15 right after a word from our sponsors, not the WWE because they're fucking evil. True.

Mr. Beast, a non-eval. You know how hard it is to be one of the most evil things in Connecticut? So, Willa, how would you guess this whole story ends? I would guess that there was like a bunch of like pilots and like shopping deals and like maybe we can try to like make this into a real thing and like it didn't quite work out. That's that's about right. Yeah. So here's here's the here's the data that our researcher Adam was able to pull. The YouTube views didn't really fall off the way you would think.

It stayed pretty consistent in the mid 100,000s per video for at least another year. By like 2007, it was still basically doing as well as it had been doing. So sorry. So like we're like exposed. This is actors. And everyone's like, I love my story. I'm still into it. I'm still watching like every day or every day.

That's so impressive, honestly. I'm trying to imagine like if this whole thing played out a year ago on TikTok, which it kind of does all the time, there's one of these, like one of these setups being exposed constantly. Some of them do stick around. Some of them don't. I think it really depends on like how, like you said, like how well you seed it, what people are sort of invested in if you can if you can maintain that but another thing that helps here is that by the time they're exposed they are the number one most subscribed channel on

youtube back at the time when youtube was a glorified rssssfid of videos so like they've already got the audience capture there and of course people are engaged with the plot because there's a whole universe of brie and her friends and they're on the run from a mysterious society called the order that are the Satanists that raised her, you know? They turn it into a real TV show. Like now it just has like storylines. A TV show like still being filmed like a vlog. Yeah, yeah.

A thing that we bring up a lot from this era, we in fact, Grant and I did a screening in Brooklyn of this, which is the Marble Hornets Slender Man YouTube series, which you've ever seen it is a similar idea where it's almost like a meta, Lonely Girl 15, where it's like a student film project that goes out of control because they get haunted by Slender Man. And it's filmed similarly where like it gets really silly as it goes on. But the early episodes are really creepy because it's, it feels real, you know. This is later.

But did you guys ever watch that show, Quarter Life? It was like Marshall Herschwick, like the people who made my so-called life got a bunch of money. It must have been about 2014, 2015, to essentially air the show called Quarter Life. But it was like wanting, it was like scripted, but bare bones, like sort of supposed to have a video aesthetic. It's really interesting document. It's an interesting document because basically what is it going to happen is like for essentially, this is like 2006, probably for like the next 10 years, right? People keep being like, oh, we should just be able to make TV like in the class. Like so TV as it was historically understood as like a film just like not as what it's becoming.

Like and just do it on YouTube, right? Like people kept trying to like get that brassering. And obviously now we're sort of like through the looking glass and it's like, oh like YouTube's going to take over TV. you don't have to have, like we don't have to do the scripted thing on YouTube. We could do something else. But really, like, for many, many years, that was like the sort of Hollywood people's idea was like, why can't we do it there? And it's interesting because you're telling me basically sort of like the first example

of that, like really kind of succeeded beyond any other version of that. Like, going running for a year as the most, like, watched show on YouTube as like obviously scripted, even at a time when there wasn't that many people on YouTube or whatever. Like, that's why people keep. thinking they could try this experiment that doesn't ever work. The cultural impact of Lonely Girl 15 is kind of wild. About a year after all, this is exposed, law and order criminal intent does an episode in which Michelle Trakenberg plays a Brie lookalike.

And her collaborator, they end up accidentally murdering someone played by Pedro Pescal. Ooh, early Pedro Pescal credit. Yeah, that's a fun little. by March 2007, LG15, Lonely Girl 15, as the insiders are calling it, has product placement. They ended up polling their fans on whether they'd be okay with it. And 180 out of the 200 said yes. So Hershey's brand manager was a fan. And so there's like a bunch of like ads for food and stuff that start popping up.

And they're now integrating like full on energy content. So people are like finding things in real. life and it's impacting the storyline. The big product placement of that year in the show in June of 2007 is in. Neutrigina announces the show will feature a prominent character who works the company and helps the heroes by creating a skin cream that protects them from evil. Whoa. Yeah.

That's so sick. Advertising used to be so good. And so the season, the first season of Lonely Girl 15 ends in August 2007 with Bree submitting to be sacrificed to her family's order to bring. protect her friends. And then Jessica, basically, the actress wants to be written off the show so she could do other things. Because she's been working for a year. Yeah, a hundred percent non-sap. And for, and for like a chunk of that year, like living, like, in a COVID bubble. Right, right, right. So I imagine she wants to get out of there. She goes for bigger Hollywood roles.

Two weeks before the finale, she has a role in I Know Who Killed Me, which is like that Lindsay Lohan horror movie that I don't want to remember. familiar. And then by August 2008, Lonely Girl 15 officially ends. There are a bunch of spinoffs, including one in Polish. There's another spinoff that ends up going on to a streaming service called Hulu. Sorry, wait just about the spinoffs. Like, do you mean actual spinoffs or like they retry to like start from the beginning?

No, no. Other characters. Yeah. So basically there's a whole bunch of characters that they're trying to turn into like other properties. One of them, as I said, is in Polish completely. completely for some reason. I guess they were like, we have a Polish audience

that's tap into it. And one is like an early Hulu show. Yeah. So this is, I got it right here. So, um, uh,

this article. Wow. Okay. It reads, Lonely Girl 15 creators unveil new web show, The Resistance. Miles Beckett and Greg Goodfried

site geek hero, Joss Whedon, as a major inspiration behind their resistance. Set in the same universe as their groundbreaking lonely girl 15. It was a Weinstein Brothers. first attempt at TV instead of just movies. Yeah. For real?

And no. I'm just listing awful, man. So it could be. I believe it. And yeah, and so the resistance ends up getting syndicated on MySpace TV, V-O, Hulu, YouTube, and I-meam. There was a lot of this. I remember, I talked to a lot of people in this world at the time of, like, social video.

Like, the idea of, like, we're going to make TV to be distributed on social video platforms. rather than the opposite, which is now kind of what everything is. And so there was a big interest in that. There's a bunch of localizations. And then everyone kind of forgot about it. That's basically where it is. Yeah. Do you think that there was a strategic misstep along the way?

Or do you think that like everything, like Ryan, too, the shorthand that you use is everything's distilled to porn? Like everything just becomes the like, oh, this is a thing. Willa, this is a theory I have that like... I know this theory and I love it. I think it's very interesting. Because the way he phrased it sounds way weird. No, no, you mean like sensation. Yeah, everything sort of breaks down into visual.

No, I think your theory is very compelling. I'm compelled by it. I also actually, Grant knows this, but I do want to talk to you sometime about cool. I'm very interested in your theory about the youngs having no idea what cool is and being sort of like fascinated by it. But I'm also interested in it because cool does continue to exist. So it's like it is difficult. Yeah. No, but I guess to your question, I have another question, which is I guess I'm curious what the people making this, what they wanted to happen, what the plan with the rollout was.

Like if they were like, oh, we're hoping to keep this a secret forever. That seems unlikely they were signed with CIA. Like, are we hoping to keep this a secret for how? Like, we want to build to some reveal that we control. Like, what was the? That's a great question. it's my sense from research was that it just the dog chasing the car that doesn't know what to do when they got the car

like like I don't think that they didn't expect it to work I don't know like well I think I think we could reveal this year like you're planning on like yeah talking to people today from the story yeah we're hoping my question I guess for you for them yeah is do they think that they made a misstep right that took us in the direction where everything's just the sloppiest thing or what were they just like do they think that they just like read the tide wrong like is there something they could have done that meant like lonely girl would have run for like 10 years and we'd also be talking about or that or that like it would have led to like YouTube being a channel where people do pilot ARG shows and then we have like this more interactive version of TV and it

actually becomes this like high budget role play if they were going to do a Jaws Sweden thing and then this was viral marketing for that the project is a failure because that is so it would have been so much easier to just like bake that in from the very beginning and not do this whole thing or like do it very differently in fact i was trying to remember the name of the uh like norwegian i think it is show yeah norwegian show that like launched in the mid 2010's scam uh scom or whatever where like it was like very optimized to like fit on social platforms in like small bite-sized quibby chunks or whatever or whatever. Like, you can do teen programming on the internet. I mean, hell, like, at the time period that Lonely Girl 15 was happening, I was watching Homestar Runner and, like, having no problem consuming entertainment on a website. So, like, if they wanted to make a Buffy the Vampire Slayer thing, I think it's a failure. If they wanted to, like, get attention on the internet and then figure out what they do with it later,

I'd say, like, they did a decent job. That's sort of how I would look at it. I also feel like there's nothing they could have done to change, like, the outcome of and how entertainment is consumed on the internet or TV. No. They just, it's just like people don't want it. They were just like,

they got closer than you'd think they might have. Like, I wonder if they had a vision for using the internet in a way that led to. Honestly, you know what they could have done to like save the thing? And it would have like probably like rolled into the future of entertainment way easier. Is if they got caught. And then can you?

continued to post about the real actress's life at the center of the Lonely Girl 15 explosion and just turned her into like an influencer, which is kind of what happened. They just turned it into reality television. They just turned into a reality into vlogs about her and they just made her. Like that's how you would do it, I think, if you wanted to survive. But even then, you know, that only lasts probably like another year or two before you got to figure out something else. Yeah. Well, then you just do an alt-ray pivot. Yeah, you would go on Foxx.

It was a little early for that. It was like, you know, Obama year. No, you could become a tea party or like a birther. You could be like a maybe. Yeah, she has some real strong opinions about Ron Paul. That's right. No, I mean, it's like interesting though because like we just keep doing this, right? Over and over.

It's like a sort of like polished version of it. What I think is so interesting about Lonely Girl 15 is that it in many ways burst the way the internet works. now everywhere all the time, which is like, is it real? Is it not real? Is it a bit? Is it a scam? What is it? But it also got the trajectory of entertainment completely and totally wrong.

The assumption 20 years ago was you will eventually have TV level productions on the internet. And the reality more and more is that we are actually having internet level productions as the only version of TV that exists, especially as sort of as like Hollywood breaks down. And so on one end, like, all of social media kind of feels like, especially if you go on like x.com right now and you have like a paid verified user telling you what's that going on, that could be all kinds of different scams. You know, AI content fits in here easily as well. But at the same time, like Hollywood kind of totally misunderstood the way things were going by doing this. Like they both invented kind of the idea and didn't know how to deal with it.

Well, it's like it's such an honest mistake because it's coming out of like a hundred years of history of thinking that people actually prefer things that are good. Yeah. That's the end of the episode. Honestly, I have nothing more to say than that. Yeah, no, you're right. And it just turns out not to be the case. No, I. But I mean, I think, I actually think it may turn out to be the case.

It's just going to take a long time to sort it out. Like, what's about to happen is, like, we're, they're all going to get destroyed. Like, all, Holly, it's all going to, everything's going to go to shit as it is. And we'll just have internet content on our televisions or whatever, our bigger screens. But then someone will be like, ooh, maybe there's some people who wanted to be a little better, you know? And there will be some people who wanted to be a little better. And like, it'll get built back up, but in a totally different way because there'll be all the other tools and AI and whatever the fuck. We don't know.

But like, it's not somebody might want it to be better. I had this exact thought. actually watching that movie Babylon. Say more. Yeah, say more. So Babylon to me is like, in my opinion, a movie about TikTok. And that all of Margo Robbie's character development is like, she found like this one thing. She's like the crying girl.

And she makes like short form video content of like her crying on command. And then she meets like all these other like basically like TikTok level influencers who do like, you know, silent films in which they're like they play like the. stoic guy or like, you know, the fatty R buckle characters like the fat guy in the silent film. And then none of them can transition to what comes after an era like that. I think in a lot of ways at this exact moment in entertainment history, in the middle of like a second vaudevillian era where we have all these people and we have no idea what to do with them. And the assumption, I think a lot is that it will just be like this. Like, you know, YouTube becomes the future of TV and that's the end of it. But what you said, well, I think is

actually more accurate, which is like you break it all down. You have your vaudevillian era. And then obviously you get the Mr. Beast has already emerged as this like large scale big budget YouTube producer. That is clearly the trend. So like from the ashes of whatever, you have your vaudevillian moment of redefining what people like and finding the formats that people kind of gravitate towards. And then you build your entertainment industry on top of that. And I think that's where we're headed right now. Yeah. And also not to do like a Marxist. by which I just mean like an economic view. Like there is a lot of consolidation is real because it has like all these economic benefits

to the people consolidate. So like we can see it happening among the streamers, right? But like there was a huge fracturing. There was a huge number of streamers. There's only going to be a couple. And it's like that kind of thing is going to keep happening. It's like a huge, like there's a total disintegration of all media outlets that like print media outlets.

So now everyone's a substacker. But the truth is like there's lots of shit you can't do if you're a person. personally just a substacker. Like, it makes sense at some point for a bunch of substactors to be like, oh, we pool our resources and we can send a reporter somewhere. You know, like, those, those economic and, like, things are real and they're also real for people who make, I mean, this is why there's hype houses and, like, you know what I mean? Like, you can do more if you're a collective.

And so even though we don't know quite what it's going to look like, it's like, it's not going to just be, it doesn't really make a ton of sense that forever everyone's just going to, like, max out at, like, their own TikTok feed. Also, additionally, like, when it's just your own TikTok feed, as with Lonely Girl in the Cave, like, it's a lot of work and you never get to go on vacation. Like, you know, you need someone to spell you. So, like, there will be other conglomerations of like content, like of more elaborate content. It's just like it's sort of hard to know what's going to look like, I think for quite a number of reasons. To loop back to kind of what you were saying at the very top of today's episode, the knee-jerk assumption.

is that everything that's bad right now is bad forever and it will all be bad. And I agree with you that it just historically doesn't really work that way. And so the creators that are making slop will not make slop forever. The platforms that incentivize slop cannot incentivize slop forever. It just doesn't really work that way because people get bored of the same formats over and over again, the same way that once Lonely Girl 15 happened, you have a bunch of copycats. None of them do as well. And now she's like a footnote in history.

like these things don't last i would say like i feel like that everything i said is true but i really like the ai part of it like really throws a wrench and like what i actually can't see what's like i mean no one can see i i'm not but i'm like i actually cannot foresee i mean i agree with redi noir with micky mouse as the detective that's i think i mean i've talked to a bunch of different people in a bunch of different directions about this and like i don't know the Gray and I try not to bring up AI because our listeners become violently enraged by the very thought of it. But my sort of like very human death threats. They do.

But I mean, I understand. I'm with them. I get it. But my sort of centrist, I don't know, my, my, my, my try to be reasonable middle of the road take is that like some AI tech will just sort of integrate into the way, you know, CGI functions and whatever, different apps that kind of work with it. And then a lot of AI will make that particular. mat of user generated content so tacky and awful that no one ever does it again. I'm hopeful. Yeah.

Yeah. But I think to some things up, I think what you said is sort of the best way to go with this, which is that sometimes you make the incorrect assumption that people like stuff that's good. And that's really the story of Lonely Girl 15. I want to thank you for coming on the show. This was fantastic. This is delightful.

I probably don't need to do this, but I do this with all of our guests. If people want to follow you on the internet, if people want to watch vlogs about your secret Satanist family, where can they do that? I make a show called Decoder Ring. You can find Decoder Ring everywhere you listen to podcasts. 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 Moroni, and National Managing Director and Executive Producer Kevin Dreyfus.

R.C. DeMezzo is their VP of Brand and Social. Charlotte Robinson is their Deputy Director of Brand and Social. Marianne Couga is their Director of Marketing. And Tracy Kaplan is the Senior Vice President of Sales and Distribution. If you want to sponsor the show or give us products to sell, she's the one to talk to. You can email her at Tracy at Courier Newsroom.com. Lastly, here's my advice for you. Chill out and touch grass.

while you still can.