Taylor Lorenz’s Power User - Can MrBeast be canceled? + Tim Walz mania and minions on a cross

Episode Date: August 8, 2024

For years now, MrBeast has been the king of the internet. The 26-year-old creator has the most subscribed to channel on YouTube, millions of young fans, and a new streaming deal with Amazon. But now, after a string of controversies, his empire might be crumbling. How did all of this happen, and what does a potential MrBeast downfall mean for the internet? Taylor Lorenz talks to Steven Asarch, a freelance digital culture reporter who’s been covering MrBeast for Rolling Stone and Passionfruit. Later, Taylor breaks down the latest headlines including why everyone is posting about a minion nailed to a cross, Kick streamer Adin Ross gives Trump a cyber truck and potentially violates election laws, the Google antitrust suit, and Tim Walz mania. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This week, Trump teams up with notorious kickstreamer Aidan Ross. What a minion nailed to a cross says about the state of the internet. And our main topic is Mr. Beast's online empire finally starting to crumble. I'm Taylor Lorenz, and that's all coming up right now on Power User. For years, Mr. Beast has been king of the internet. The 26-year-old creator runs the most subscribed to YouTube channel. Anything you can fit in this circle, I'll pay for. Really?

Really. And this video, we're hearing a thousand people's blindness. He recently signed a massive Amazon streaming deal to host his own game show, and his rabid online fandom has made him a multi-millionaire. But now, his empire might be crumbling. Over the past few weeks, a series of controversies has arisen that threaten what he's built. How did all of this happen, and what does a potential Mr. Beast's downfall mean for the creator world? Stephen Aesarch is a freelance digital culture reporter.

he's been covering the Mr. Beast's controversies for Rolling Stone and Passion Fruit. Stephen, welcome to power user. Happy to be here. Okay, Stephen, I wanted to get you on the show because I would say you're one of the foremost Mr. Beast journalists. You've been covering this man for, correct me if I'm wrong, but almost seven or eight years. For the people that somehow don't still know, can you give me a very short 101 of who Mr. Beast is and how he initially got famous? Sure. Mr. Beast is, without a doubt, the most famous online influencer.

I had someone tell me that his subscriber count is about one-ninth of the world population. His content is simple yet easily enjoyable. He basically gives out large amounts of money, cars, tries to have these incredibly high production value YouTube videos that you would normally see on a reality show. and bring them over to the platform. He's become a massive brand within himself, selling his own line of chocolate. You recently launched his own line of action figures.

He's like the Mickey Mouse of today's internet. And it's very family-friendly content, right? The idea is like, I'm watching as part of this community. I might be the next one to win a million dollars and change my life. And this appeals to a lot of young people and children, right? I mean, who's Mr. Bee's primary audience? Oh, his audience is undoubtedly young children. They tune in. I have many times started up a YouTube channel just to see what it recommends. And out of the gate, it's puppy videos and Mr. Beast. His videos cater to a young demographic that wants to get that dopamine rush of feeling like they're part of something. A lot of children watch Mr. Beast content. He's super popular with today's youth because he is ubiquitous with YouTube, which is the platform they're watching. Yeah. And despite this reputation as sort of YouTube's number one do-gooder.

and this amazing guy, he is also relentlessly focused on virality. Beast's content has always focused on metrics and numbers. Even from the very beginning, when he realized that if he counted to 100,000 or said the same word over and over to YouTube live stream, the algorithm would essentially push it out to a larger audience, causing his channel to grow. He went from like thousands of subscribers to a million subscribers fairly quickly on YouTube. He sort of had a meteoric rise because he is so analytically full. focused. The people he employs right now are, there are a lot of analysts. There are a lot of people

who look at his YouTube metrics and look at the content he's producing to make sure it's exactly what you need. He also developed this really aggressive and intense fandom. I would say his rise was not without controversy. I mean, he was able to sort of cultivate this audience of young children that would defend him at all cost. I mean, I wrote about his history of using homophobic slurs and slurs in his channels, I mean, back in 2018 and about some of his really bad labor practices for the New York Times in 2021. And his fandom came out so hard. I would say they squash those stories really aggressively. But now things have changed. Something has cracked. And I feel like there is this tsunami of bad news for Mr. Beast. He's been admired in

controversy. And I want to kind of run through these controversies with you and talk about what's changed and why all of this is kind of coming to the forefront now. So tell me a little bit about when this started. When did the Mr. Beast backlash begin? I would say it's only been about a month since the Mr. Beast backlash really began. There have been smaller controversies over the past decade, but all of those were fairly nothing in the scheme of the internet. With these recent controversies, it came out that Ava Chris Tyson, who recently transitioned, as was Chris Tyson in the of Mr. Beast videos, basically had been talking inappropriately with a minor publicly on social media. Yeah, I saw this happen on Twitter, and I have to say it was a little disappointing to see. I mean, Ava is, as you mentioned, Mr. Beest's trans friend. After Mr. Beast had said all of these homophobic slurs back in the day, I will give him credit. He seems to have come to accept the LGBTQ community, and he actually spoke out in support of Ava when she came out as trans. But it seems like now that relationship has fractured and more controversy has grown out of this.

So tell me what happened next. The story kind of came out of a weird place. I wrote about it a bit for Rolling Stone where there was this Lava GS who was 13 when they started talking to Ava. And they had a fairly public conversation. Lava was a moderated. on their Discord. They used to chat all the time, but they, you know, sort of stopped talking in the public and it kind of disappeared. Until this small, I'm going to call him Alt-Right. I have no problem with that. A small alt-right YouTuber named Prism basically found those tweets on a 4chan thread was like, oh, no one's really talking about this, so I'm going to make a video.

You're talking to a guy that is 14, and you're in college, and the person. premise here is you guys are joking with each other about sending nudes. Then Prism's video got picked up by a larger YouTuber, which then got picked up by a larger YouTuber, which sort of snowballed the effect, and caused the story to kind of go mainstream and force Mr. Beast to release a statement distancing himself from Ava, and Ava quitting Mr. Beast and basically disappearing from the web afterwards, other people. people who had poor interactions with Ava started to come forward. A woman named Jess shared that she had been sexually assaulted by Tyson. Right. So then Jess posts on social media.

And then I started to see a bunch of other YouTubers coming out. I mean, there was this guy who sensibly worked for Mr. Beas for a short time. He released this video comparing a lot of Mr. Bees' giveaways to illegal lotteries. And he made a bunch of other allegations. So tell me how this all snowballed. Sure. So, a YouTuber named Dogpack claimed to work with Mr. Beast very briefly released a video claiming that Mr. Beast has illegal lotteries in his videos, that he is catering those lotteries to children, and that Mr. Beast fakes his videos.

And random bars are going to have a mystery ticket inside of them. And if you get this mystery ticket, he runs these sweepstakes to, like, bribe children with gambling to consume more sugar. Like, this is far worse than a lottery ticket because a lottery ticket doesn't give you diabetes and only pay out your rich and famous friends. Yeah, he said like a bunch of the people in the videos were actually Mr. Beast employees and plants and these games were all rigged. Did he substantiate any of these claims or what's the status? I mean, what did you think when you saw that video? Well, I thought the video made a lot of sense.

I think there was definitely some stuff that seemed a bit reaching, but definitely the fact that he caters his content to, young children and then markets lotteries to those children is kind of undeniable. I think when it comes to Dogpack's video, last I checked, it was around 10 million views. And Mr. Beast, according to Dogpack, Mr. Beast responded with a cease and distist, which is quite damning considering many of the claims in Dogpack's video do seem to hold merit. A current employee of Mr. Beast also responded. Yeah, he debunked. or he attempted to debunk some of the claims.

He said that none of the videos are faked, though there is some editing, that the video was kind of misleading, and people don't have the full picture. Yeah, I feel like a lot of the backlash was not quelled by their response. And then around the same time, a bunch of reports emerged that Mr. Beath's game show,

which he is filming currently with Amazon, was potentially putting contestants in danger. I actually spoke to some of these contestants. I spoke to a producer who worked for Mr. Beast. Some of the stuff sounded pretty bad. What went down with this game show? Because it seems like a complete disaster. So Amazon and Mr. Beast have a deal to create the Beast games.

And just for people that don't know, Beast Games is a reality show built around competitions. It's basically taking the stuff that Mr. Beast does on YouTube, like recreating the show Squid Games as a competition show, and doing that on Amazon Prime. Yeah. So the first week of filming happened in Vegas where 2,000 contestants were flown out to compete in what they thought was a fair competition to earn $5 million in a Mr. Beast style video. People claimed that they were hurt from having to do a challenge where they had to lift a 10,000 pound boulder with a rope. Their medications were withheld that their underwear was taken and wasn't given to them at proper times and that they were forced to sleep on the floor of the stadium.

How much of this is just normal reality show production problems? I mean, I've covered the reality TV industry for decades. And I mean, while things are more above the board now, reality shows are always produced in a certain way. And especially when you look at some of these more extreme competition shows, the conditions are not great, right? You're trying to survive on an island alone or, you know, you're going through sort of extreme physical challenges. So how unique is this stuff to Mr. Beast and Beast games? I think when reality shows reach a certain large scale, the problems just get so massive and untenable for the producers. We saw it with Netflix did their Squid Game show when there

were people coming out and claiming that they weren't, you know, being taken care of. And it seems like it's a lot of similarities. From my research, Mr. Beast was working with a new production company and people he had not worked with before in the past. So the confusion around trying to create the largest reality show in existence with new people who haven't really done this before sort of created just this concoffity of madness that nobody really knew how to handle and unfortunately led to people getting hurt. Yeah, it didn't help that a lot of people, including a bunch of big creators, also had a bone to pick with Mr. Beast for, a while. Mr. Beast produced these creator games in 2021. It was a competition between a bunch of big content creators. Rosanna Panzino, who's a big YouTuber in her own right, was really unhappy with the creator games and her participation in it. She didn't like the way that she was edited in the final

video. So once this Beast Games news comes out, I feel like a bunch of people started hopping on the like, okay, let's take down Mr. Beast bandwagon. As someone who has done three of these Beast collabs and had him tried to do business smithme twice off of YouTube. Let me tell you, it's a complete waste of time. But hey, I'm not going to go into that right now. I would just like to remind them the other big YouTubers in this community that dozens of people were injured and thousands of people were denied their basic human rights, all for a Mr. Beast YouTube video.

It's been like controversy after controversy after controversy. And when the internet sees a little bit of blood in the water, the sharks tend to swarm and find more fish to murder. And it feels like that's kind of what's happening with Beast. I think this controversy actually says a lot about the relationship between the traditional media and this new media ecosystem that Mr. Beasts lives in. Because you see Mr. Beast just lauded by the traditional media for his success online. And myself and people like you, you know, we've been doing the critical reporting on Mr. Beast for years and we're really shouted down. I mean, even when I was at the New York Times, there was no internal support for critical stories of this man, right?

It was very much like, well, we're explaining his success to people, right? That was sort of the way to do it. And we don't get into drama. We don't cover like niche YouTube drama. And that's kind of how it was often framed, I think, in these mainstream newsrooms. And it seems like the media wasn't really ready to report on Mr. Beast critically until the internet had turned against him. And same thing with a bunch of these content creators, right? I was looking at a bunch of content creators that came out and were chastising myself and other reporters, I'm sure you as well,

just a couple years ago, accusing us of trying to cancel Mr. Beast, a lot of them have just sort of quietly privated their videos. Do you think that this is going to make anybody's self-reflect, or is this just the nature of the internet where you need this sort of critical mass of people on the internet to turn against someone before you can actually do critical reporting on them? Unfortunately, I think when it comes to Mr. Beast, because he's hired so many people, and he's had so many controversial voices, like Sneco, very alt-right YouTuber, got one of his starts on Mr. Beast, like as a Mr. Beast employee, I guess it's fair to say. So when you have all of these people and a couple of them share their, you know, thoughts publicly on the subject, it is easy to dismiss that.

But over the years, more people have come forward, more former Mr. Beast employees, people like Jess, whose stories would kind of be brushed aside as just anecdotes. But when you look at that pattern of behavior of Mr. Beast, of needing to create the best and highest quality content, regardless of the human cost, it just sort of becomes more of a story that people are able to accept. I think that the reason people are able to accept it is because there is enough internet momentum against him. And I think that the only group online that seems to have been willing to really go up against the Mr. Bees fandom, is unfortunately the alt-right, like this far-right group that really wanted to generate controversy. Like they were very angry

at Mr. Bees' support of a trans colleague. And although the allegations are horrific and I would never condone it, I do think it's important to note where this cancellation originated and consider that, right? I mean, I think that when the cancellation, quote-unquote, comes from traditional media,

when you have the New York Times reporting something, it's very easy for these online communities to dismiss it as like, oh, the traditional media. You know, they just want to take content creators down. They're always trying to ruin YouTubers lives, right? But when you have these extremist content creators and corners of the internet, such as 4chan and other pockets that are really internet natives rally against a creator and launch one of these campaigns, I think it becomes harder for their fandoms to dismiss it. I think the Ava story, the reason it blew up harder, was definitely because of a time. trans moral panic. I think people were kind of focusing on the fact that Ava was trans as a way to, you know, take down Mr. Bees. Prism, the guy who launched the story to begin with,

openly said that he doesn't believe men can become women. He claimed that it had nothing to do with his reporting, but that's completely irrelevant. Like, the story itself, I think, has evolved past that into criticism that Ava actually deserves. But the way that it got as big as it was, because of a trans moral panic. I've heard that Ava was one of the most visible trans women online. And I think that's fair to say because she's being introduced to tens of millions of people each week. So when you take that, combine that with how toxic our system has become, it kind of makes sense that all of this has turned out the way it has. It kind of reminds me of another big YouTuber who got quote unquote canceled for, you know, past.

problematic behavior, and that's PewDiePie. PewDiePie at one point was the former biggest YouTuber in the world. Mr. Beast has spoken extensively about being inspired by him, being a PewDiePie fan when he grew up. PewDiePie's downfall happened after it came out that he had essentially made a bunch of racist videos and remarks, and this was reported in the Wall Street Journal and elsewhere that made Disney, his partner at through Maker Studios at the time, dropped him. And he kind of went off the map for a while. He's reemerged. He actually just launched a newsletter last week on Beehive. He still has millions of followers. He's a dad now. He's doing pretty harmless family content in Japan. But he never really was able to, I think, ascend higher. Like there was this ceiling above him always because of that cancellation, for lack of a better word. What do you think the long-term impacts on Mr. Bees' career will be? And do you see this as a putty pie moment for Mr. Beast? Or do you think that he has

become so big that he is fundamentally uncancellable. I think when it comes to PewDiePie, he was always an internet edge lord first and a mainstream celebrity second. Mr. Beast wants to swap that. He started as an edge lord, but he wants to be that household name. He wants to be on billboards. He wants to be as famous as you possibly can be. And when you want that level of access, when you want the Amazon shows, the action figures,

the chocolate bars, you cannot have these sort of controversies because the edge of the edge of edginess will come back and haunt you. And that's what's happening right now. I think if there was ever a chance for Mr. Beast to be knocked off his high horse and end up having to deal with some sort of repercussions for the people that he's employed and the edginess that he's had, this is that moment. Will that moment materialize into, you know, a full-blown cancellation? I highly doubt it.

Mr. Beast's audience is a lot of kids. kids are not paying attention to what's going on on Twitter and a 60-part thread from a former employee. That's just not what's going to happen. Yeah, I don't think that children are paying attention, but I do think their parents are. I also think you're 100% right that Mr. Beas has really prioritized becoming mainstream

in a way that PewDie Pye and creators before him didn't. I mean, I cannot tell you the amount of boardroom CEOs that know about Mr. Bees, that respect Mr. Beast. I mean, he is in with like Elon Musk and the entire Silicon Valley venture capital community. Like, he has friends in powerful places that are frankly sympathetic to a lot of more maybe anti-trans or, you know, extremist views and don't mind the edge lord stuff. So I don't think his business will collapse tomorrow. But I do think he'll have to answer some tough questions. And I think the next time he goes to get like a, you know, major brand deal, the CMOs of the companies are going to be asking him.

about this stuff. And that could cut him off from certain opportunities. Yeah. I think Mr. Beast right now is kind of on a PR blitz where he is, you know, working with outlets in ways that he really hasn't worked before. He released a statement to variety and to... I saw that. Yeah, I got the same statement. You know, I've been covering Mr. Beast for a long time and that's not something we've ever really seen before. I couldn't even get him to give a statement to the New York Times. I mean, I think he eventually got something. but I think now they're actually forced, as you said, to interact with traditional media the way that mainstream celebrities are. Yeah, I have been covering digital culture for almost a decade now, and YouTubers just have a distaste for traditional media. They don't trust us. They think we are problematic and we're, you know, not worth talking to.

But we do have a power that they don't and can reach an audience that they don't have access to. And it's an audience that genuinely cares about the edgy things that they do. So talking to us can be seen as a detriment because we may break stories that they don't want the world to know that are just sitting there on YouTube. And unless you know how to find that stuff, it's kind of just going to sit there. And it's why I think it's so important that we need more digital culture journalists out there. Yeah. I mean, undeniably, I think it shows the need to do more of this tough reporting. I also don't believe that just traditional media has to be the ones to report on these people, right?

I think that actually a lot of these really investigative videos have done a great job. So I'm wondering, I guess, what you think this will do to the creator economy as a whole? You know, how is this moment going to affect the next generation of YouTubers? And do you think other creators are looking around seeing what's happening to Mr. Beasts and taking any lessons? I think we're starting to see the Internet as a whole, understand that the emperor has no close, that Mr. Beast is not infallible, that even the largest creator in the world

with the largest legal team and the most backing can falter briefly to a controversy. So creators that are watching this, they're starting to notice that Mr. Beast can actually be hurt, which is terrifying in their eyes because if Mr. Beast can be hurt, then they can be hurt. Yeah, I guess we'll see kind of how it all plays out

and also what sort of business models can be used to support this type of critical journalism. I wish that a lot of these traditional media outlets had done the critical reporting a few years ago. And I think Mr. Beasts kind of probably would have built his platform in a more responsible way. Yeah, I have always been a big proponent of digital culture reporting needing to happen at mainstream outlets. Either when I went to Newsweek or Business Insider, I was always pushing for covering these. We're biased. these niche internet celebrities in their eyes, while I'm able to see that they have millions of fans

and people who will do anything for them. And they need to be covered and they need to be looked at because if you leave them alone, then you have Aidan Ross, who is an edgy kick streamer, who I have been covering for the past few years, interviewing Donald Trump, and nobody knows who Aidan Ross even is. But his audience does.

It's why we need to be looking at these creators and examining their stories because if we don't, then they're allowed to exist within their own echo chamber and build up power in ways we've never seen before. All right, Stephen. Well, thanks again for chatting with me today. Thanks for having me. We'll be right back with the biggest news stories this week.

I'm here with my show, Runner, Zach Mack. We are going to talk through some of the big stories this week. All right, let's do it. One of the biggest moments on the internet this week is when Kamala announced Waltz as her running. me. This was definitely the favored pick among young internet posters, I guess you could say. And almost immediately I started to see fan cams about this man on TikTok. It's kind of hilarious when you contrast the internet reaction to Waltz's announcement versus Trump's announcement

as Vance as his VP pick. Yeah, there were like worlds apart, right? Everybody immediately went into bashing Vance and then people seem to be in just a total love affair with Tim Waltz. I did not know who this man was like a week or two ago. Now I feel like I know. I know. I know. all about him and his cool takes and the laws that he's put in place and that he likes cats and like all this. So people just love him. I think people were so anti- Shapiro and you had like MSNBC pushing Shapiro really hard. You had a bunch of other kind of more traditional media types like Jonathan Chate and stuff really pushing for Shapiro. And then you had these young sort of progressive Bernie adjacent shit posters really gunning hard for Waltz. And I think that this is seen as a

victory for young progressive internet users and this younger base that has really come to embrace Kamala. Yeah, I've seen several things online about how he's technically younger than Brad Pitt. And then there's a side-by-side of them. And they look very different in age, but he is technically younger. Well, as he said, if you spend 20 years policing a school cafeteria, you know, you would lose some hair too. Yes, yes, for sure. Also in the political world, you had Trump live streaming with kickstreamer Aiden Ross. who don't know who Aiden Ross is. This man is one of the most toxic content creators on the internet. He's a big Andrew Tate fan. He was banned previously from Twitch for hateful content.

He encouraged a 19-year-old to drive his car into a body of water. He also streamed explicit content, which is against Twitch's rules. So he had Trump on kick. They did this hours-long live streams, which culminates in him doing TikTok dances with Trump outside Mar-a-Lago. And he gifts Trump this massive cyber truck with his face on it. That is beautiful. this rapper. Let me know your honest thoughts. I think it's incredible. There's that image of Trump after the shooting with his fist up.

Yes. And he gave Trump a Rolex. Both of these gifts potentially violate FEC gifting guidelines and Trump might now actually have to return them. Because there is this $3,300 limit on gifts. And I think you could argue this Rolex and Cybertruck are both far more expensive than the $3,300 limit. I watched part of this stream and I covered it for the Washington Post. The whole thing was just wild to watch.

Did you catch any of it, Zach? I caught the highlights. Like, I saw them dancing. I saw that he came out to mini men. I saw the whole cyber truck and Rolex reveal. So I, you know, I caught a lot of the highlights, but I never actually sat with the conversation. I do think it's wild that he went on kick, right? This is not happening on YouTube.

It's not happening on Twitch. It's happening on kick, which you made an episode about just a few weeks ago. It's really like this island for conservative lost toys, right? It's getting weird, right? He's talking to weird people on weird platforms. Yeah, I think it just shows that Republicans will continue to leverage this like alternative media universe, right? The Rumble creators, the content creators on these other alternative apps, whether they're live streaming apps or the more right-wing posting corners of the internet. I think it remains to be seen how valuable this interview will be.

Aidan's primary demographic is people I would describe as maybe 11 to 15-year-old. boys, which is not really a traditionally valuable voting block. I think it's more about just giving him credibility in some of these more far-right, in-cell, adjacent, like, men's rights universes online. I mean, Aiden is very adjacent to the Andrew Tate world of the internet. Honestly, it's only a matter of time before we see Trump sit down with someone like Andrew Tate. Yeah, would not surprise me at this point. I mean, he's definitely just on a world tour of the worst corners of the internet. And he, yeah, he's going on all these, like, alt platforms talking to alt creators. Trump's also doing an interview with Elon Musk, which was just announced. He's

going to sit down with Elon on Monday. It's kind of unclear where this is going to live. But I imagine that this will run as some sort of video on Twitter. I don't think it'll happen in Twitter spaces. It'll probably be a little bit more high production. What's interesting to me is the timing on all of this. The North Carolina Board of Elections just opened an investigation. into the America PAC, which is this political action committee that Musk said that he created. And the America PAC is essentially accused of collecting personal data from websites and failing to register people to vote as promised. This is now also being investigated by the North Carolina Attorney General's Office and Michigan's Secretary of State. So kind of interesting

timing for Elon to be waiting even further into this political race. It's weird that Elon is doing this interview, you know, when he first launched, relaunched X, he went and got Tucker and Don Lemon, and I guess those didn't work out. So now he's just going to do the political interviews himself. Like, I don't know what's happening. Elon Musk has shown that he likes to do interviews before. Obviously, he did that campaign rollout with Ron DeSantis disastrously on Twitter spaces. He also did what I would say was a pretty good interview, actually, back in 2021 on Clubhouse. He interviewed Robin Hood, that stock trading app's CEO, Vlad Tenev. At the time, it was sort of the height of the crypto and Wall Street

Betts boom. And at first, a bunch of VCs were trying to interview Vlad. And they were just asking him the most softball BS questions ever. And I thought Elon did a pretty good job of actually asking interesting questions. But that was a very antagonistic interview. I doubt that this Trump one will be the same. No, he's not going to ask him any hard questions, right? He's, he's totally in the bag for Trump. This is a desperate play to get him more attention and get him more audience and sort of of try to win people back as people are sort of migrating to Kamala. You look at the polls. I think it's also just trying to get Trump back on the platform. I mean, you know Elon is just thirsting to have Trump back on the platform posting again. And I wonder if this is sort of

the first step towards that. That's a good point. By the way, he's also threatening any advertisers. He's trying to sue advertisers for stopping to advertise on his platform. Like, it's a mess. Ellen must kind of puppet CEO Linda Yaccarino released this video on X this week towards advertisers where she's wearing these nameplate necklaces that read Mama and Free Speech as if she's like the free speech mama and in that video they sort of essentially

imply that they threaten advertisers again and say that they're going to try to penalize advertisers who pull their ads from them which is just their entire relationship with the advertising industry is so baffling to me. What's going on with the finances over there. We don't know because it's a private company.

I don't think that you can claim just because people are not advertising on your platform that they're illegally boycotting it. Right. I mean, you can claim whatever you want. It doesn't make it true, right? True. It's not going to change. Thanks.

Best of luck, guys. I think one of the biggest tech stories this week as well is this big Google antitrust news. The district court found that Google has violated U.S. antitrust law with its search business, which obviously has staggering. implications and could really reshape how millions of people get information and it could sort of upend Google's decades and decades of dominance. And also it's funny that it's coming at a time when people are kind of using Google less. We all agree that it's actually universally terrible. It's bad. It just shows me Reddit results now. That's all it does. It's like, here's what Reddit

says. And I'm like, great, now I have to dig through Reddit. I would say part of the reason Google is so bad is potentially because it's been a monopoly for so long. And yeah, that and AI. So I'm switching to Bing. I'm just, you heard it here first. I'm switching over. Bing? Is that still around? I have no idea. I thought Casey Newton made a really good point when he said, how do you fix this problem when Google's monopoly extends to all these other platforms like iOS and Mozilla Firefox that aren't parties to this case? I agree with you though, Zach. I don't, I use Google less and less. I hope that this type of ruling can force the company to be more competitive and deliver a better product. But at this point, I'm just on chat GPT more often. And then I'm just on chat GPT more often. And then I

I have to fact check, of course, everything CHPPC says. Yeah, I think we have two problems here, which is one, Google is a monopoly, and two, search is bad and probably and just bad everywhere and degrading because of AI in front of our eyes. Yeah. All right, Zach, I sent you a video this week that I can't stop thinking about because I think it's just such a good example of how the entire internet has devolved into brain rot. It's a bunch of TikTok and Instagram Reels, content creators, talking about the image of the minion nailed to a cross, kind of this iconic image that's become a meme in recent years. I think what's so weird is that all of these content creators are reading almost the exact same script.

If you scroll away from this video, then what are you doing? Look, look, look. One day an animator was messing around and he created this picture of a little minion. This may sound a little crazy, but you need to hear this about a minion. If you scroll away from this video, then what are you doing? You see an animator depicted a minion dying over a movie. You show me this? And I immediately, I just need to know what the hell is going on.

Like, are these people getting paid? Like, what's the angle? Why would all these people recreate the same video? They're not getting paid, but I can tell you what I think is happening. Please. Okay. I have not talked to all of these content creators, except I did reach out to a bunch of them last night. Just to be like, hey, like, what is happening?

I actually got served multiple versions of this video myself on my Reels feed before I even saw the main compilation. which somebody made, I think, off TikTok. But essentially, once there's a viral piece of content, you see tons and tons of creators replicating that exact script. There's also this increasing number of sort of like growth hacking type courses and accounts where people kind of all share and trade viral information and scripts. Like, you'll see these communities emerge on things like Discord,

where it's like, here's the top 10 chat GPT written scripts for viral videos. You know, take these and essentially tweak it and replicate it yourself for viral stardom. Sometimes people pay money. to be part of these Discord communities, to get these scripts. My best guess is that it's something like that, or that there was just one original creator that hit on viral gold and people started to see that and just started copying it organically. We're basically living in this, like, chum version of the internet

where every single piece of viral content is recycled and regurgitated a million times over across the internet. When I see this, I just feel confused and totally hopeless. And it's like everybody wants attention, but at the end of the day, they don't have anything to say. They don't have anything of value to put into the world. They're just ripping each other off for attention, but there's no they're there. They're talking about some minion AI.

It's so weird and I feel gross. I mean, I think you hit the nail on the head that everyone wants attention and not everyone has something to say. I think this just shows the importance of people that are out there creating the original content. But unfortunately, I've had this happen to me before where if a video does really well, you immediately have this network of other content creators that will rip off your video, almost word for word, and blast it out to their own audiences for attention and fame and cloud

and followers. I'm going to make one of these videos. I'm going to go viral. I'm going to finally retire. If you scroll away from this video, then what are you doing? One day this animator was messing around, and he created this minion that was nailed to a cross. I can almost say it word by word. You're so good at that. Good luck. Good luck. You're really good at it. it. So I wish you the best. All right. Well, thanks so much, Zach. And until next week. All right, that's the show. You can watch full episodes of Power User on my YouTube channel at Taylor Lorenz. Power User is produced by Travis Larcich and Jalani Carter.

Our executive producers are Zach Mack and Nashat Kerwa. Our video producer is Brandon Kiefer. Power User is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. If you like this show, give us a rating and a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. We'll be back next week with a new episode. See you then.