Why The Costco Guys And Hawk Tuah Took Over The Internet — With Ryan Broderick

Ryan Broderick writes the Garbage Day newsletter and hosts the Panic World podcast. He joins Big Technology Podcast to discuss how the internet has fundamentally changed since the pandemic, in a special episode with Ranjan Roy and Alex Kantrowitz. Tune in to hear Broderick's insights about the rise of viral normie culture which includes Hawk Tuah and the Costco Guys, why sites like BuzzFeed are struggling to adapt, and how platforms are shifting from follow models to algorithmic feeds. We also cover shifting online political movements, the massive growth of OnlyFans, and why BlueSky might actually succeed where other Twitter alternatives failed. Hit play for a fascinating analysis of how internet culture is evolving and what it means for society. --- Enjoying Big Technology Podcast? Please rate us five stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ in your podcast app of choice. For weekly updates on the show, sign up for the pod newsletter on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/6901970121829801984/ Want a discount for Big Technology on Substack? Here’s 40% off for the first year: https://tinyurl.com/bigtechnology Questions? Feedback? Write to: [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Alex Kantrowitz?

  Let's talk about what the heck happened to the Internet, which has gone through a major cultural shift of late. That conversation with reporter Ryan Broderick and our own Ron John Roy is coming up right after this. This episode is brought to you by Genesis. What does it actually take to put a Gentic AI to work across an entire enterprise? I recently spoke with Genesis Chairman and CEO Tony Bates about why orchestration is emerging as a competitive advantage in customer experience and what companies need to get right in the AI era. Then I sat down with Adam Mitchell, Head of Enterprise Business Solutions at Voya Financial, to go inside a large-scale agentic CX transformation, including the business decisions, trade-offs, and lessons along the way.

• 0:43Alex Kantrowitz?

  You can watch both conversations now on my YouTube channel today. It's never been more challenging to get Frontier Compute. How do you know where to look, who to trust, or how much to pay? Akash is an open cloud that provides easy access, flexibility, and peace of mind. That's how companies like Razer were able to cut their inference cost by 15 times. Visit akash.network/alex for a free consultation. That's akash.network/alex for a free consultation. Welcome to Big Technology Podcast, a show for cool, nuanced conversation of the tech world and beyond. We have a great show for you today because we're going to talk about what's happening to the Internet.

• 1:24Alex Kantrowitz?

  We've talked about this a bit on the show in the past, but we're going to go into it in much greater depth today, looking at the changes in algorithms, the content that rises to the top, and what it's doing to our brains. And we have such a great group to do it with us today because joining us is Ryan Broderick. He is a reporter and writes a great newsletter called Garbage Day. You can find it at garbage day dot email. He's also the host of the Panic World Podcast. Ryan, great to see you. Welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. Excited to be here. And of course, we couldn't have this conversation without Ron John Roy of Margins and our Friday show fame. Ron John, welcome to a Wednesday show. How you doing?

• 2:06Speaker 01

  I am so excited to learn what happened to the Internet. From Ryan. So I'm waiting. I'm ready.

• 2:12Speaker 02

  Let's get into it.

• 2:14Alex Kantrowitz?

  Same here. All right, Ryan, let's talk a little bit about the genesis of this show. So a few months back, Ron John and I were looking at some of the great phenomenons coming up on the internet. There was the Hawk two meme where this woman Haley Welch made, I would say, an X rated comment on an interview Tik Tok. And all of a sudden became an instant celebrity, which is something we'd never seen before. And then you have phenomenons like the Costco guys coming up, which are sort of like, I guess we would call them mass appeal internet celebrities, which to my mind hadn't happened at the same frequency. And the power that they're hitting today.

• 2:55Alex Kantrowitz?

  And so like, our theory was basically that we've moved away from the follow model on social media. And now we have the for you everywhere, right? So the for you on Tik Tok, the for you on Twitter. Everything is dominated by an algorithm that chooses what might be interesting to you and not what you follow. And it's shifting the diet of content that we consume and the stuff that rises to the top online, which is why you end up having so much interest in people like Hawk two and these Costco guys. Why don't you take that thesis on to start and let me know if you think that is accurate?

• 3:30Speaker 02

  I, I think you are right that we have definitely shifted to a world where 10 years ago, everyone could look at the internet and sort of see the same stuff, you know? I always call it like the Gangnam Style era, the peak Ellen show moments. And it did feel like there was some sort of digital monoculture, which sometimes interacted with real world monoculture. And we kind of lived like that for about a decade. I would say that the biggest difference now is yes, apps like Tik Tok are breaking that by showing you hyper personalized feeds of content specifically for you. So you and I don't have the same Tik Tok feed and never the two shall meet, but.

• 4:13Speaker 02

  I look at Haktua and the Costco guys and that kind of mainstream normie internet virality that we're seeing right now, and I put most of the blame on the pandemic, which I've recently been going back and kind of reassessing. And my view of it now is that essentially, everyone that wasn't online before 2020, who would ever be online, came online. And now we're getting enough distance from this moment where it feels like every month or so, very normal people do very normal people things online. Everyone's like, I can't believe this is viral. And then they just become famous. And that is a definite change

• 4:57Speaker 02

  from how things worked in the 2010s.

• 5:01Speaker 01

  Is part of that, that the pandemic broke everyone's brain and they're online?

• 5:05Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, I think we can all agree that yes, we're all a little unwell from being online during the pandemic. But no, I would say it's internet culture became culture in 2020. This is like the moment where Stephen Colbert is wearing AirPods and doing his TV show on Zoom from his bathtub. The barriers broke down. Every family got a group chat that didn't have one. Everyone's parents were suddenly on Facebook 24/7 if they weren't already. The internet stopped being a subcultural space, is what I would argue.

• 5:36Alex Kantrowitz?

  Can I follow up quickly on this? So it's interesting to me that you've talked about how like, we all used to watch the same stuff on the internet, like Gangnam Style. And then it sort of spread into subcultures with the for you. But then you have that that's crossed with this theory that you have, that we all went online at the same time, which is interesting, because you then have these new normal people celebrities, like we're talking about with Haktua and the Costco guys. So do they transcend this for you-ification? Or are these memes, the Costco guys and Haktua, are they now dominant

• 6:14Alex Kantrowitz?

  on a subpart of a very large subculture on the internet? Or are they the thing? Or are they a niche that Raja and I only end up in because we're normies?

• 6:27Speaker 02

  So, okay, like, let's think about Grumpy Cat, shall we? So, Grumpy Cat is a weird-looking cat that went viral on Reddit because the cat looked weird. And the initial kind of virality of, you know, an image like that 10 years ago was being driven by people who were super online, power users, bloggers, aggregators. You know, young people who were super into Vine were sharing Logan Paul videos. Like, it was not mainstream. And most of what we sort of think about as internet culture, as meme culture, has never felt very mainstream. But now, because everyone is online and because they don't need aggregators, they don't need communities to surface things for them.

• 7:08Speaker 02

  It's, it's kind of becoming, it feels counterintuitive, but essentially, if you're a supernormal person who likes really basic stuff, like a blowjob joke or going to Costco, you can open up TikTok and TikTok's algorithm identifies that and shows it to you. And there's no, there's no arbiter there, other than the machinery of the app. So that's why I think we're seeing what Max Reed kind of dubbed the Zinternet. Because if you're just like a normal, basic guy and you open up TikTok, it's going to show you normal, basic guy stuff. As opposed to 10 years ago where you might hear about something viral and that like, you know, weird redditors were talking about, you know, Pepe the Frog or something. That, those days feel over to a degree.

• 7:54Speaker 01

  Oh, I am liking this. And again, the Zinternet, Max Reed had defined as the network adjacent to the sports internet of 40-something dads and the hustle internet of Miami crypto bullshit and the reactionary internet of trad influencers. And when I'm thinking about this as a 40-something dad, myself, and who has plenty of normie friends, in the early 2010s, I would have been the one surfacing what is going viral for them. And we all went on group chats that probably went from Facebook Messenger to even Signal and WhatsApp. And then now they are just, the meme time to delivery is so much shorter

• 8:36Speaker 01

  if I'm sending it or they're actually informing me of what's going viral.

• 8:41Speaker 02

  Right. Like, this morning, my mom sent me an Instagram reel making fun of the United Healthcare Shooter. Like, that's, that's crazy. That's a crazy reversal. I'm, I'm the online one. You're the online guy. I should be sending her dank memes, not the opposite.

• 9:00Alex Kantrowitz?

  What happens to these smaller online subcultures then? Do they still exist? Are they bigger than before? Or is there a chance that they just end up getting subsumed into these broader, you know, Zinternet and normie culture parts of the internet? Because I guess like, imagine somebody who's like in one of like the online radicalization communities, because like, this is, this is the thing with the internet. The internet is great for what's not normal, because you can sort of find a place to dissent or, you know, object against the mainstream. So if you were a really online person, there is probably a chance that you gravitate towards some, you know, some dissenting community in some way.

• 9:41Alex Kantrowitz?

  And sometimes that ends up being a radicalization, or it could end up in all these different things, sort of. Maybe that was what made the internet fun in the beginning, was it was just like, yeah, they would never air this, or they would never talk about this on the mainstream airwaves.

• 9:54Speaker 02

  That's exactly right.

• 9:55Alex Kantrowitz?

  But I guess like, now that the normal is there, do you think that these subcultures are actually going to lose some of their appeal to like, let's say, the normal people who are on the internet and just trying to find things they liked?

• 10:09Speaker 02

  Well, I think you're asking this question at a very interesting moment, because Blue Sky is now north of 25 million users. And it's well on its way to, let's, let's say that by this time next year, maybe even sooner, Blue Sky is gonna be around 100 thou, uh, Blue Sky will be around 100 million users, which I looked up this morning, was what Twitter was at 2011. So like, that's how fast this niche platform is growing. And Blue Sky to me is a total reaction to this internet. It is a, all of the, the, the remaining weird subcultures of the internet decamping to

• 10:49Speaker 02

  there, and using the sites, you know, blocking and filtering and list organizational tools to carve out those spaces. The other thing here is that a lot of these internet communities... Were based on places like, you know, they were living in Reddit or Tumblr or communities like that which were public. Now they're on Discord. And the only time you might ever see them is when a meme breaks containment from Discord. So they do exist. It's just they're not nearly as visible, I think, as they used to be until something happens in one of those communities. Like there's, like the drama around the Muppet fan account that was doing like, you know, he was like creeping on followers.

• 11:25Alex Kantrowitz?

  Oh, my God.

• 11:26Speaker 02

  Asking for nudes. Asking for nudes.

• 11:28Alex Kantrowitz?

  Oh, you knew about this, Rajan?

• 11:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, of course.

• 11:30Alex Kantrowitz?

  So I'm clearly an inhabitant of this. Like, my internet is Costco, guys, but you guys are seeing something else. What happened with these Muppets?

• 11:38Speaker 02

  Okay, so there's a guy who was running a Muppet, uh, him and his wife were running a fan account for the Muppets. And then a bunch of followers of this account, uh, put him on blast and was like, this guy is going around saying he's polyamorous and he's using that as an excuse to hit on and like sexually harass his followers. And then a bunch of other Muppet fan accounts like came out with statements being like, we don't like this, you know, we condemn this guy. And, and I think that's like a really good model for thinking about this stuff, which is like, up until that point, I did not realize how deep and vast the Muppet fan community was for adults. And apparently it's quite big.

• 12:14Alex Kantrowitz?

  This happened on Discord or where, what social network does that happen?

• 12:18Speaker 02

  So it's a Twitter, it's an X account.

• 12:20Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right.

• 12:21Speaker 02

  But he was, uh, all the, all the malfeasance, if you will, was happening in DMs. So I, I, I think that is one way to think about this is that the internet is probably as big and strange as it was from the very beginning, but it's now deep hidden under layers of dark social in group chats and discords and DM groups and things like that.

• 12:43Alex Kantrowitz?

  So I want to push back quickly on the blue sky thing, uh, that it's going to hit 100 million users. I don't think that's guaranteed at all.

• 12:51Speaker 02

  You don't like blue sky?

• 12:52Alex Kantrowitz?

  It's not that I don't like it, it's just that, haven't we seen so many of these social networks get that initial spark and then fizzle? I mean, what makes us think that blue sky is going to be Twitter and not Clubhouse?

• 13:05Speaker 02

  I think if it was

• 13:05Alex Kantrowitz?

  The point of the show, but I want to just

• 13:07Speaker 02

  No, no, I think it's a fair question. I think if it was already Clubhouse, the most embarrassing moment in social media history, as far as I'm concerned.

• 13:15Speaker 01

  Internet history.

• 13:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, acting like that was anything other than just like a conference call simulator for bored rich guys during the pandemic. Hate that app. Um, I think it would have already fizzled. I, I, I think the, the product is good and it's very malleable. You can do things with it that we haven't been able to do with a social network in a long time. You can code things for it. You can develop apps for it. It's fairly open. And I think the initial energy needed to grow to a hundred million in let's say a year's time has our, like, the domino has already kind of fallen there. I think, I think it, there, there could be, you know, history gets, you know, things get crazy. But I do think if it continues at the pace it's at, it, it will hit it.

• 13:58Speaker 01

  And I also, Blue Sky for me kind of captures the for you verse following dichotomy pretty well. Cause the following functionality works really well. When I go there, I don't get a heavy dopamine hit. I get a light dopamine hit. I get the, that the Twitter used to be for me. And I actually think that could be the staying power that as more people go on. Cause remember like going on to any social network now, and if you call Tik Tok a social network, Instagram, you can't just post and have something go viral. Like it, it has to be really specific content followed by really specific people.

• 14:38Speaker 01

  So Blue Sky to me, it is that kind of return to you have some kind of following follower relationship. People will see your content and you can have some kind of back and forth and engage in some interests. So I think they, they could be that space for everyone looking to go back to that, that other model. And everyone has gone towards a for you algorithmic model. So that's just getting saturated.

• 15:04Speaker 02

  Yeah. I actually had my first Blue Sky post, my first skeet break a thousand reposts this week. And God, people on the internet are dumb and like discourse is so stupid regardless of where you are. But it was interesting to sort of watch the. How different virality is on Blue Sky to something like X or even TikTok? Because it is just like you're generating discourse. And then if the discourse is interesting enough, people will just jump on and they'll share it and they'll talk and they'll fight with each other all day, every day, the way Twitter used to be, you know?

• 15:35Alex Kantrowitz?

  One thing that's come to mind during this discussion and watching this rise of Blue Sky has been this question that I've had and wrestled with about whether social media is going to still be relevant. And Ryan, you brought up a great point, right? Which is that a lot of the action, a lot of the most interesting stuff on the internet now happens in group chats and happens in Discord and doesn't happen in the social media feeds. And another reason why I'm skeptical of Blue Sky's ability to grow is just because it's so exhausting to try to go and, you know, attack a new platform and build a new audience. And I know this is only speaking for content creators, but I also think that like with something like a Blue Sky, you have now have Blue Sky, you have Threads, you have Instagram, you have Twitter.

• 16:17Alex Kantrowitz?

  And instead of like one winning out, which there won't be an absolute winner, you're just gonna have diluted experiences everywhere. And if there's so much interesting things happening within the group chats, why would you go to a sort of less relevant social network to sort of see what's going on? So I wonder if social media itself is in the process of becoming less relevant right now.

• 16:40Speaker 02

  That's interesting. Did you feel that way in like 2012?

• 16:46Alex Kantrowitz?

  So 2000, I mean, 2012, I think Facebook was really the place that most people were hanging out on. So you might have seen, I don't think so actually, because yeah, 2012, you had Facebook, that was still a dominant platform. You had Instagram, which was interesting, and Twitter was maybe at its height.

• 17:04Speaker 02

  I would pick 2012 to compare our current moment to because yes, you did have Facebook, which was huge. And it was slowly becoming sort of the, the way that most people use the internet, especially on mobile. You had Twitter, which was completely saturated with the media and was sort of becoming this centralized feed of American and... You know, international media and politics. But you also had fairly large competitors like Tumblr, like Reddit, like Pinterest. StumbleUpon, I think, was still in the mix at that point. Right.

• 17:36Speaker 02

  When you and I first started working together, you know, StumbleUpon was the thing driving the most traffic, not Facebook for most publishers. So there weren't a lot of websites. And I didn't feel at the time that the internet was being diluted by having so many fairly similar and overlapping social media platforms. I think it's kind of annoying right now that we have a million Twitter knockoffs and we have to like kind of shuffle through them. But I think that's actually kind of clearing up pretty quickly. I mean, you're, I was spending all year posting the same stuff to X, Blue Sky Threads and LinkedIn. And over the course of the last couple of months, I've lost interest in kind of all of them except for Blue Sky. So, you know, I, LinkedIn is fine. Yeah, it's good for traffic. I don't read the comments because they're bad.

• 18:21Speaker 02

  But I don't, I don't feel so pessimistic about having this many social media sites because it's kind of what everyone's been asking for for a decade anyways, like more websites to go on, more stuff to look at. So I think it's, I think it's all right. I, I'm optimistic about it.

• 18:37Speaker 01

  I also, I think little competition is a good thing. But I think to push back a little, for me, Blue Sky, what's interesting around it is, to me, it's an actual social network in the sense that I'm posting on there, I am not getting any engagement. I'm getting minimal, minimal engagement. I'm posting for the love of posting, just pure love of posting. But when I do get engagement, it's from people that I've interacted with online for years. A lot of the people who I had not seen on X in a long time and people I kind of consider online friends, acquaintances or whatever. So it's only really from an actual network. And I think that's interesting to me because that's what the original promise of this was.

• 19:22Speaker 01

  There's, there's distribution and then there's the actual kind of network and engagement side. And Blue Sky is the latter, which I think is good because there hasn't been that on any of the big platforms in a long time.

• 19:36Speaker 02

  I would agree with that, yeah.

• 19:37Alex Kantrowitz?

  So is Blue Sky sort of a counterbalance to this for you internet?

• 19:41Speaker 02

  Right now it is, I think.

• 19:43Alex Kantrowitz?

  Just wait until it grows though, right? Cause.

• 19:45Speaker 02

  That's it. I mean, these things always evolve in strange directions, but I think right now it is reinvigorating

• 19:53Speaker 02

  a muscle online that has atrophied over the last five years.

• 19:57Alex Kantrowitz?

  So Ryan, I know we've talked broadly about why things like Hoc2a go viral, but it's very interesting to me what goes viral on the normal person internet, as we're calling it, or this internet, so to speak. Let's just go through two quick ones that I'd love to get your perspective on why this is so appealing, if you have any thoughts. First of all, the Costco guys.

• 20:23Alex Kantrowitz?

  This is a dad and a son that eat the double choc- Double choc-chocolate cookie. And their chicken bake at Costco and they've turned this into a bit of a media empire. They brought in the Rizler, which is this very cute fat kid from New Jersey who has this Riz face where he like puts his finger on his chin and he looks at you and you're like, oh God.

• 20:47Speaker 01

  Wait, the Costco guys brought in the Rizler?

• 20:49Speaker 02

  The Rizler's not related.

• 20:51Alex Kantrowitz?

  Not even a relative.

• 20:51Speaker 01

  Oh, he was like a separate phenomenon?

• 20:54Speaker 02

  He's another viral kid that they teamed up with.

• 20:57Speaker 01

  See, I need to be explained this one. I got the Muppet fan account.

• 21:01Alex Kantrowitz?

  Because he was wearing a Black Panther costume and trying to, I think, trying to convince his dad that he was famous, that he was, that he had superpowers and his dad just kind of mercilessly mocked him. And it became super viral and now he's joined forces with the Costco guys.

• 21:18Speaker 01

  Yeah. This is the internet history I came here for today.

• 21:22Speaker 02

  I genuinely thought they were all related. It was a shock to me, truly a shock.

• 21:27Alex Kantrowitz?

  So why the Costco guys?

• 21:30Speaker 02

  I would say that on the normie internet, the Z internet, you know, however you want to describe it, there are essentially two kinds of things that are constantly going viral. Stuff that local radio stations would talk about 30 years ago and stuff that would be on America's Funniest Home Videos. And the Costco guys are essentially like a morning radio, like shock jock kind of vibe, like making funny songs and like talking about like relatable stuff. And then they're making videos that are perfect for America's Funniest Home Videos. Like it's just, it's just the stuff that has always been popular, I think. I like their videos because they have a haunting uncanny valley aspect to them where no one's

• 22:11Speaker 02

  really blinking. And they're kind of doing all these weird things in like desolate suburban Florida parking lots and shopping malls and stuff. But I think most people just think it's funny.

• 22:22Alex Kantrowitz?

  Well, there was this one video where you saw like a behind the scenes of the dad coaching AJ. Wait, Big Justice is the son. The dad coaching Big Justice into every single line that he was going to say. And it was quite haunting.

• 22:35Speaker 02

  It is haunting, although my read on it is like they're all having fun. And I think the dad, I mean, I went deep into his like down in the rabbit hole with him. He was like trying to become an influencer on Facebook for a while with like a talk show about beer or something. And I think he used to be a wrestler and now he's trying to go back into wrestling based off the fame of the TikToks. But he's like involving his family. And I don't know, like, if you compare that to like, the other stuff that's popular on the internet, like, I think it's fairly harmless. It's goofy, you know, but I think it's okay.

• 23:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, I kind of like that the America's Funniest Home Videos, because it to me, it's almost like, or Everybody Loves Raymond, or some show from even the 90s that was the monoculture that was safe, but just a little interesting. I never actually watched it, but uh, but ju- just a little fun and maybe it's just the modern equivalent of that on like whatever platforms exist now instead of network TV.

• 23:33Speaker 02

  I think that's right. It doesn't look exactly like network TV, but I think it's interesting that a lot of the aesthetics of what would be popular on the radio or on network TV is being recreated by people now on Tik Tok and, and it doesn't, it's never going to be exactly the same because like you don't have this massive sort of budget or a writer's room or sort of like executives thinking about how to reach, you know, people in Springfield or whatever, but there's always, I think, going to be an appetite for just like basic relatable slop.

• 24:06Speaker 01

  So is this a good thing instead of the suits on Rockefeller Center choosing what's going to be good now? Uh, I don't even know what the Costco dad's name is, but just, just regular AJ, AJ Buffumo out there. Out there just doing, doing the work, doing the hard work, understanding what people will like. Is that better?

• 24:30Speaker 02

  You add, yeah, you're asking like, is it better? And I would say that like my major concern with anybody in their situation is are they being paid? Are they like getting compensated for what they're doing? Are the working hours like humane for the children? Like these are the, and you know, these are the fears I have with all of the people who turn virality into sort of a business, you know, because yeah, Hollywood has a lot of problems, a lot, a lot of, a lot of bad stuff happening there, but you never know what an individual might do to try to keep up with the, the viral machine.

• 25:06Alex Kantrowitz?

  One more thing I'm going to say about this family is I think they were about to go out of style. Like the Costco guys were done until they dropped the song.

• 25:14Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 25:15Alex Kantrowitz?

  We bring the boom.

• 25:15Speaker 02

  Sometimes you've got to reinvent it, you know? Sometimes you just gotta, you gotta shake things up.

• 25:20Alex Kantrowitz?

  I listened to that. I was like, oh God, here we go. I can't not click with these Costco guys. And I clicked and I was like, oh, this song is good.

• 25:27Speaker 02

  You seen the Christmas video where it's like the whole family, grandma's in there?

• 25:30Alex Kantrowitz?

  They got lights going on. That, that's terrible.

• 25:33Speaker 02

  It's, I love it. Every time they do, they release a new video, I send it to everyone I know. And I'm like, we should make a video like this. Like, why not?

• 25:42Alex Kantrowitz?

  As long as Bruce is in it, I'm watching.

• 25:45Speaker 01

  Who do you think are the biggest like early 2010s virality moments who missed out on this boomer? Was it, you know, side-eyed Chloe, the little girl like, uh, the little girl meme? Uh, I mean, uh, cause if the Rizler can wear a Black Panther suit and go viral and join the Costco and collab with the Costco guys, who are all the people that missed out on this, this boom in, uh, normie influencers? Which memes do you wish had made it?

• 26:15Speaker 02

  I was talking to someone this week who made the good point that like Rebecca Black probably would have been able to catch this, right?

• 26:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 26:22Speaker 02

  But to connect the two dots of like the, of Hawk Tuah and the Costco guys, what I do think is really interesting here is that when Hawk Tuah blew up, she was reached out to by Jake Paul's production company. And he has essentially created a company that captures viral stars and then figures out how to effectively franchise them. So there's clearly now these groups that exist that have been on the internet long enough that they realize that, okay, we can capitalize on this moment. And, and we also saw this during the pandemic with, uh, Ben Lashes, the meme manager, who was selling the rights to different famous memes as NFTs for a while. There's like a big

• 27:02Speaker 02

  interest right now around how do you turn a viral moment into a sustainable media business? It doesn't work totally all the time, but it does seem like there are people who are trying to solve that problem right now, which is, is curious to me.

• 27:16Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, Ron, Ryan, you even wondered in your post after the, uh, Hawk to a moment, whether her Talk2a podcast would be popular. And it turned out to be like one of the top podcasts for a couple of moments there, right after it launched.

• 27:30Speaker 02

  Right, right up until the big Pookie reveal. And then I think people kind of lost interest.

• 27:33Alex Kantrowitz?

  And people don't, the reviews aren't great.

• 27:35Speaker 02

  Do you know about Pookie?

• 27:37Alex Kantrowitz?

  Pookie's the boyfriend, right?

• 27:38Speaker 02

  Oh, sorry. Pookie is her boyfriend. And it turned out that he's just some guy. But people were like, who's Pookie? Cause she hadn't said like his real name, but he's just a guy.

• 27:46Alex Kantrowitz?

  He's just a guy. Oh, you know, yeah. I mean, it is like, um, people in relationships won't post their significant other because I think they get more likes that way. I don't know. Is that a real thing?

• 27:56Speaker 02

  Uh, it's a thing for like, Korean pop idols, Japanese pop idols, you're not supposed to say you're in a relationship so that the fans can kind of pretend that they're dating you. So I can see the psychology of that working on Instagram as well.

• 28:09Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. So one last one I want to talk about is this Lily Phillips. And we should talk about OnlyFans because she is an OnlyFans star that has been talking about sleeping with a thousand people. And she slept with like 100 men in a day at the end of 2024. And for some reason, I think the algorithms are pushing that very hard. So does she fit into that like kind of talk radio show type of thing? And it's not only the algorithms, by the way, she's been covered by like, almost every, you know, entertainment news site from the Post to Daily Mail. What do you think, Ryan?

• 28:43Speaker 02

  So Lily Phillips was getting a lot of pickup because she's part of a wave of OnlyFans creators that have smartly realized that if they go viral with their clothes on, they can drive subscriptions to their OnlyFans, right? So she started kind of experimenting with viral stunts. She then decides that she's going to try to break the world record for most people slept with in one day, which is currently 919 and it's held by the actress Lisa Sparks. I looked this up the other day.

• 29:12Alex Kantrowitz?

  Is that even possible?

• 29:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 29:13Alex Kantrowitz?

  Anyway, I don't want to get into logistics.

• 29:15Speaker 02

  No, it's best not to think about it. So Lily has said that she is now training for a thousand men in one day. So she tried 100 men. The reason it went super viral is because Josh Peters, the South African YouTuber that once pranked Katie Hopkins by giving her a CUNT award. If you ever saw that video in the pandemic, it's pretty good. He went to London and filmed a behind the scenes of Lily Phillips sleeping with 100 guys. And in that video, which is absolutely brutal to watch, like I watched some of it and I was like, this is the darkest thing I've ever seen. She breaks down and starts crying

• 29:54Speaker 02

  afterwards. And that moment has, I think, been politically weaponized by a lot of right wing and far right accounts on X who are sort of pointing at it like, this is, you know, this is the end of Western civilization. I don't think what Lily Phillips is doing is particularly new, though, because like, I would say every nine months since the internet was invented, we have all started screaming at each other about something a porn star was doing. Like, remember like 10 years ago, there was like, oh, this new porn parody is so messed up. Oh, my God, I can't believe they would make this. Like, I don't remember that, but I'll take your word for it. I was on the porn parody beat for a while. I had a, yeah. And like, you know, I think

• 30:35Speaker 02

  there's just a kind of a natural fascination there. Lily Phillips, though, because she's British, I think, has smartly also figured out that she can kind of tap into the British tabloid culture to kind of generate interest. So I think, I think she's just pulling a bunch of levers at once here to kind of get attention and to, to tie it back to Hocktua and the Costco people and all the rest. Like, she's trying to monetize this stuff. She's trying to figure out how to monetize it. And for her, it's much easier because she can be naked on OnlyFans. And then you can just go see that if you want to pay. So in a lot of ways, I think porn stars and sex workers online right now have a much easier way of directly making money off of going viral. Right. And it worked, it worked for her.

• 31:20Speaker 02

  It does. Yeah.

• 31:21Speaker 01

  This actually makes me in the question of, is this better or worse than the days of people in suits at big media companies deciding what would be normie culture? Now it's like, the most extreme is the easiest road to it, which is not a, not the most heartening thing, but I guess it's democratized a bit more. So.

• 31:42Speaker 02

  Yeah. I, I, it's funny. I've been asked several times recently by like other reporters, other publications, you know, the simple question of, does any of this matter? Which is, I think, this question that a lot of people in the US particularly right now are asking after the election where we had, you know, nine months of insane memes that kind of ended up meaning nothing. Like Brat Summer meant nothing. And so I think a lot of people right now are saying, okay, well, this thing that's going viral, like, should I care about it? Which I think is the wrong question because it doesn't really matter if you care about it or not. It's just happening. And in a lot of ways, I think now more so than ever, it is just simply a reflection of the national id, the sort of collective unconsciousness

• 32:23Speaker 02

  kind of idea. And, and, and I think it's very basic and, and kind of dumb. Like, I just think it's, like, it's just like a rolling cascade of dumb stuff, you know?

• 32:33Alex Kantrowitz?

  Ryan, I don't want to spend too much time on this, but I have to ask you, how big is OnlyFans? And how did it get that big?

• 32:38Speaker 02

  How big is OnlyFans?

• 32:40Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yes.

• 32:40Speaker 02

  Very big. Um, a recent report in Newsweek estimates that 1.4 million American women are using OnlyFans.

• 32:50Alex Kantrowitz?

  That's, I mean, we have only 300 million people, so they're, they're using it, they're, they're using it as creators.

• 32:58Speaker 02

  As creators, correct.

• 33:00Speaker 01

  I think one other note on that, as the, on the business side of it, it was reported they made $1.3 billion in revenue, $658 million in profit. Like that level of profit margin, you just don't see in any kind of business, basically, other than software, I guess. But, I mean, they're basically just raking in pure profit from all of this as well, so.

• 33:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, and you should take what OnlyFans models say with a bit, with a grain of salt, because they are.

• 33:32Speaker 01

  No, that's, that's the company, though.

• 33:34Speaker 02

  No, no, no, but for, for what I'm about to say, because they're, they, they, they can be provocative on purpose to get your attention. But one OnlyFans model recently, Sophie Rain, claimed that she made $43 million on OnlyFans in a year.

• 33:53Speaker 02

  You know?

• 33:54Alex Kantrowitz?

  That's a lot of money.

• 33:54Speaker 02

  That's a lot of money. Um, my foot photos on there are not doing nearly as well, unfortunately, but, uh, it is, and the, and the thing is like,

• 34:05Speaker 02

  it has really changed the, like, the nature of what we're seeing online, because

• 34:11Speaker 02

  I think many young people, especially women on OnlyFans who are using it to make a living, have realized that a, a site like Instagram will never reward you for a million, for 10 million views. Not really. It's, it's not, it's not sustainable. So I think another factor for why viral content is getting stupider is because people just aren't spending a lot of time and effort on it, because they want you to go click and pay to go look at their real stuff. So as paywalls have filled up the web, I think that has also changed the nature of what we're all seeing, which is that it's all getting lazier and sillier, because, and more provocative, because it's trying to get you to go behind the paywall.

• 34:52Speaker 01

  I guess the public content is just lead gen for the paid stuff.

• 34:56Alex Kantrowitz?

  That's

• 34:56Speaker 01

  So you're all you're all seeing the entry level appetizer at best.

• 35:01Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay, so there's, there's a lot more that I want to speak about, including the hot ones. BuzzFeed has recently sold hot ones and whether the future of media is eating, eating hot wings. Also, all these crypto coins that are part of the internet right now. And some of the online discussion around the U H C shooter and why it seemed to create a bit of a realignment among groups online. So we're going to do that right after this. This episode is brought to you by Avpoint. Everyone's racing to roll out AI right now. Co-pilots, chatbots, agents doing real work. But here's the part nobody loves talking about. All that AI runs on your data and most teams have no single way to see it, secure it and prove it's under control. That's exactly what Avpoint does.

• 35:46Alex Kantrowitz?

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• 36:29Alex Kantrowitz?

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• 37:11Alex Kantrowitz?

  and how to lock it down before a threat reaches their front door that's ironwall.com slash big technology learn how to stop online threats before they become real world attacks the links in the show notes and we're back here on big technology podcast with Ryan Broderick he writes the newsletter garbage day it's garbage day email you can go sign up for today he's also the host of the panic world podcast and we're also here with Ron John Roy of margins but right before this Ron John told me all right Alex if we're gonna talk with Ryan about internet culture we have to talk about effectively what's happened to BuzzFeed and what it's done with its assets Ryan and I were both at BuzzFeed so I'll turn it over to Ron John you can fire away with

• 37:56Alex Kantrowitz?

  any questions

• 37:57Speaker 01

  Well so they sold off first we feast which is the like a parent company of the hot ones hot wings TV show or YouTube show for eighty two point five million dollars or 2x what Sophie Rain makes and then it was also it's interesting because like from the pure like almost corporate finance standpoint basically BuzzFeed took out a ton of debt even to go public to buy up complex networks they had to shed that asset this is the next big asset that they're trying to shed to make their debt payment so BuzzFeed as a business is in a lot of trouble and is just trying to clean up their balance sheet but in the press release the most ridiculous part of

• 38:41Speaker 01

  this was Jonah Peretti said that basically this is part of the media company BuzzFeed Inc. strategic transformation into a media company positioned to fully benefit from the ongoing AI revolution so somehow hot eating chicken wings on TV gets you eighty three million dollars and also BuzzFeed is going full AI and proudly so so I think this is probably one of the weirdest but most important media stories going on right now

• 39:12Speaker 02

  I think it's important to point out that for people who don't know, Hot Ones was created by Complex. So it is not like, it did not come out of the same world that Alex and I were in. It was purchased by Buzzfeed and they're selling it. And I, I am a Hot Ones defender. I think that show is great and I think, I think it deserves honestly, like what it gets. It's very popular and I think it's very clever.

• 39:42Speaker 02

  I think it's also fascinating that a digital media company doesn't know what to do with it. Because it's very, like the, the First We Feast company, as I understand it, was created after the show started to get bigger. Not the other way around. And I, I think that to me is the major takeaway here is that the media companies of, of the 2010s are not equipped to even maintain the successful internet properties of the 2020s. It just, I think it's just a totally different philosophy and mindset.

• 40:12Speaker 01

  Actually, do you think the, the Logan and Jake Paul media management company would be better equipped to handle something like First We Feast at scale than a, than a Buzzfeed?

• 40:24Speaker 02

  I think so. I, I, I would guarantee they have far less overhead because like they probably have like four employees working 14 hour days or something. Hey, if you work, by the way, for the Paul brothers, you should unionize. If you hear this, you should unionize and that'd be really funny. No, I, I think that like, I view the, the digital media companies of the 2010s, you know, the Buzzfeeds, the Gockers, the Vices, the Mashables, whatever, as a weird, uh, like, like Cro-Magnon man, missing link, uh, between two very different eras of how media is made. So they kind of appeared and they're like, okay, we're going to act like a newsroom. We're going to act like a media company, but we're going to make content that is essentially just like.

• 41:05Speaker 02

  Worthless garbage that goes online that like can go viral for ad traffic. Right. And the problem with that is that you have a lot of people with a lot of jobs that like you don't really need if you're making a YouTube channel. And I think that is essentially what the transition that we've just seen is that you can just do it much cheaper and much easier and much more nimbly. If you create a company that's meant for making content, not for making articles and investigations and all the rest of it.

• 41:35Alex Kantrowitz?

  And Ryan, it's very interesting because some of the things that we started talking about at the very beginning of this show, the transformation of social networks from follow models to for you is sort of partially responsible for the diminishment of a site like BuzzFeed, which was basically predicated at being effectively a website that was a for you site. Right. It was going out and finding out what was interesting and then surfacing it to you. And then you would share it online, whereas like the algorithms became so good for the social media companies that you didn't really need like the core purpose of BuzzFeed anymore. That's my diagnosis at least.

• 42:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, I had heard some behind the scenes chatter after the dress that sites like Facebook.

• 42:16Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, this internet meme that people are like, is it blue and black or black or blue and gold? White and gold. Yeah.

• 42:21Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 42:21Alex Kantrowitz?

  Everyone saw something different.

• 42:23Speaker 02

  Yes. And I had, I had heard some background chatter at different social platforms, you know, places like Facebook that were so horrified by the spread and sort of complete domination of one thing on their site that it was almost like, uh, like a phishing attack. It was almost like a, like a worm. And, and I, I do also think that when you're thinking about why the internet has changed, that was also part of it, which was that all these platforms were so inundated by one thing to such a degree that they're like, this can never happen again. It, it breaks our site.

• 42:56Alex Kantrowitz?

  Oh my God, I love this conversation right now.

• 43:00Speaker 01

  No, but hold on. I like if the dress was this critical inflection point where at first, and again, you're right, because at that point, when was that, 2015? Six, so right around mid 2010s, let's say.

• 43:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 43:14Speaker 01

  That was when Facebook shifted from distribution to actually like for news companies and media companies to actually wanting to be the ones to own and host the content.

• 43:27Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 43:27Speaker 01

  And post your videos here, post your memes directly here, and you can get more traffic by sharing it. So maybe the dress was the critical inflection point where the platforms took over.

• 43:39Speaker 02

  It was the Oppenheimer's bomb. Yeah, it changed everything.

• 43:44Speaker 01

  For digital media.

• 43:45Speaker 02

  Yep, that's my theory.

• 43:47Alex Kantrowitz?

  And then we exploded that watermelon on Facebook Live and they're like, all right, that's it. Enough of BuzzFeed.

• 43:51Speaker 02

  You know, like, you know, you can't, you can't force it, you know, you can't, you can't force it like that. Um, yeah, it's just a totally different landscape now and you don't need a company of 700 to 1,000 people to make videos on YouTube, like.

• 44:08Speaker 01

  Oh, wait, sorry, the watermelon, to remind myself and listeners, it was BuzzFeed. What exactly happened again?

• 44:17Speaker 02

  The Try Guys. And the Try Guys wrapped a watermelon with rubber bands until it exploded on Facebook Live.

• 44:24Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, put it on Facebook Live. So everybody was tuning in to see when the watermelon would blow up. And it had just obscene numbers of concurrent viewers, like probably beat out almost all of television viewership that week.

• 44:38Speaker 02

  Right.

• 44:39Speaker 01

  And you don't need a company with $300 million in capital and 1,000 employees to put rubber bands around a watermelon.

• 44:48Alex Kantrowitz?

  I don't know. The Try Guys, they were great. They tried lots of stuff. They're still trying things.

• 44:51Speaker 02

  They're still trying stuff. To this day, they say they're out there trying things, you know, good for them. Yeah, you just, you just don't. And I also think that I mean, we're seeing this massive shift, speaking of the Try Guys, but like there's another former BuzzFeed crew, the watcher team who got in hot water with their users this year for trying to launch a subscription service because they couldn't afford to grow their company anymore off of YouTube revenue. And I think that is a massive trend that's happening everywhere right now. You just can't run a proper company with viral traffic anymore. It doesn't, it doesn't, doesn't translate.

• 45:27Alex Kantrowitz?

  Ryan, can we talk a little bit before we go about this sort of the political side of things? Or yeah, I would still call it a political side of things. So there was this shifting of a lot of these comedy and mainstream podcasts that supported Donald Trump in the run up to the 2024 election. And it's been interesting to watch what's happened in the past couple of months as like they gain these audiences and even some of the political channels and then sort of were almost boxed into views and then are starting to lose some of those audiences. Just, you know, one example, I think that when this U8, the

• 46:07Alex Kantrowitz?

  United Healthcare shooter was revealed, or even after, you know, right immediately after the shooting, a lot of their audiences became pretty pro shooter and they became uncomfortable with that. And so talk a little bit about like what happened there and, you know, whether we're going to see a further realignment with these audiences and these online entertainers.

• 46:30Speaker 02

  So the shooter's age is 26, right? So that means 10 years ago, right when Donald Trump is sort of gearing up, you know, that's the year of Gamergate, that's the start of the Breitbart kind of led culture war era. That guy was 16. So he has essentially only lived in a world of culture, of online culture war. And I think it's very telling that the minute he, you know, allegedly carried out this attack, a lot of people in that same age cohort were like, does the culture war not matter? Like, should we just like go

• 47:10Speaker 02

  after CEOs instead? And in fact, I was, I have written about this where you see on Reddit all these posts about like, we're going to give up the culture war for a class war now. And to me, that speaks to the, I think the hollowness and the, and the sort of loss of energy around culture war topics, because I think people are just really bored of it. It can't really stay, you know, it doesn't, it doesn't hold. And so I do think we're seeing a realignment. I don't know if it'll last, you know, the, the online right is very good at reinvention. But right now, I do think a certain era of this stuff is ending in a, in a very violent and, and strange way.

• 47:55Alex Kantrowitz?

  Sorry, can you explain that? Like, why, why, I mean, the culture war not mattering and ending? It seems like the culture war has just been present in American life from the, from the beginning.

• 48:05Speaker 02

  The popu- the online popularity of the, uh, the United Healthcare Shooter, to me, speaks to a desire among young internet users for a better, I don't want to say target, but like a better, a better focus of their anger. Like, they are angry. We know that there are, is an internet full of angry young men. And Steve Bannon identified how to get these guys on his side 10 years ago. He's been very open about using Milo Yiannopoulos to weaponize Gamergate to activate this online army. I think that a lot of that stuff is beginning to feel kind of silly. And I think that this is an inflection point for a lot of these guys who are realizing that, you know,

• 48:49Speaker 02

  spending all day moaning about how women don't like them on, on X, like, isn't really satisfying them anymore. And this happens all the time. Like, the, the, the Gamergate era came directly after the new atheism movement, which was a similar attempt at sort of engaging with a new kind of young man archetype. So I think we are seeing it yet again. And, and, and I don't know where it's headed, but it does feel like a change is currently happening.

• 49:16Alex Kantrowitz?

  I mean, that's, it's kind of, if that's what's happening, where like the, where people who feel disenfranchised and hurt by the system, uh, begin taking their anger out and, well, obviously, we don't really know much about this alleged shooter, why he did it, uh, but we do know about the celebration of it. And if they start taking their, their anger out and sort of channeling it in these ways, it could sort of, and it's like, kind of scary to even say this, but like, it could sort of presage a, a, you know, pretty violent, uh, and dark era of American life, if that's the case.

• 49:51Speaker 01

  I think, though, at least, uh, let me know if I am reading this or understanding this correctly, like, It's not that necessarily it's this very specific thing is the future. Like, uh, shooting CEOs and powerful people is what it is. It's just that the things that we've been talking about for the last eight years are no longer interesting. And I kind of do think that because, I mean, one thing I'll say even in terms of Trump in this last political campaign, I found to be less interesting on a kind of day-to-day basis. And I thought maybe that actually would not be a good thing for him. I mean, he obviously ended up doing very well, but, but the way he was interesting,

• 50:36Speaker 01

  it almost felt like a band, an old-school rock band, playing the same songs 20 years down the road. You might even go see them and it's fun, but it's just not that exciting. Like, it felt like the issues and the, the, it was all the same thing. And then we're moving to something else. I don't know what that is, but it's not going to be able to be defined traditional right-left.

• 50:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, there, there was a really interesting moment on a recent episode of Pierce Morgan, where he's interviewing Peter Thiel and the United Healthcare Shooter is a big fan of Peter Thiel. He was, he's a big avid reader of Elon Musk and Peter Thiel and a lot of what you would call like the radical, centrist reactionary, um, you know, online tech guy kind of thing, right? And you can kind of see Peter Thiel begin to realize that this internet hate machine that has been taking its anger out on women and children and minorities for the last 10 to 15 years, could be pointed at people like him. And, and you can see, I mean, he's always sweating because he's just like, he's very moist. He's like a very moist man, but you can kind of see the fear in his eyes as he realizes that like,

• 51:42Speaker 02

  the, the Pandora's box that has been opened is now very unpredictable. And I do think it's shifting and evolving and we just don't know which direction it's headed in.

• 51:51Alex Kantrowitz?

  Is it possible that the culture war is less interesting basically because the Republicans won? I mean, I'm like throwing this out there, but like,

• 51:57Speaker 02

  It is possible.

• 51:58Alex Kantrowitz?

  You know, the left said whatever they could about how, you know, Trump was a racist misogynist. And he ended up, you know, pulling in a majority of Hispanic men and probably more minority voters than, um, than recent Republicans have. And so like, if that didn't stick, it's like, okay, it's almost like, all right, move on from the culture war.

• 52:21Speaker 02

  A big prediction I have for this next Trump administration is that Trump starts to feel like the establishment because he won the popular vote and he so authoritatively dominated this election. So he can't really, he can't really sort of continue as this like renegade because this is like, this is his second round anyways. And so I suspect we will start to see the beginnings of a, if not anti-Trump reactionary movement on the right or sort of within young men, at least a, an attempt to kind of redefine being an angry young man that is not downstream of Trump. I, I, I think that is definitely a real possibility.

• 52:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think also, as you said, it could be both that the right one. And in, I mean, in many ways, a lot of the issues that three, four years ago seemed to be completely dominant in another direction and now completely aligned in the other. But I think it's just, I mean, going back, the For You feed demands new content, demands new topics. The algorithm does not favor the same old tired stuff. We never would have guessed Hawk Tuah would be a thing. Like, and I mean, it still builds on a classic, the blowjob joke, but on top, but other than that, it's, it's new and the, the algorithm demands something new and

• 53:40Speaker 01

  you can't just keep saying the same thing over and over again. So it'll be different. And that's kind of scary in some ways, but it's, it's been scary for a while. So.

• 53:51Speaker 02

  And to try to connect the dots with everything we've talked about today, I think I can do this. Are you guys familiar with like Jonah Peretti's master thesis that gets passed around sometimes?

• 54:01Speaker 01

  I am unfortunately.

• 54:02Speaker 02

  Share it for the audience. So he essentially theorized that in late-stage capitalism on algorithm, on sort of algorithmic social platforms, identity would become very important because that's how you would essentially link with other users. The internet is a very frictionless, identityless place. And so people create these structures to find each other. And that was true for 10 years. And I think that really informed our politics. I think that the culture war is a direct result of sort of reconfiguring society to be based on like busty girl problems and like 16 things that only short guys would know. You know, it's, it's, it's an outgrowth of that.

• 54:41Alex Kantrowitz?

  You know, you're from this neighborhood of

• 54:43Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 54:43Alex Kantrowitz?

  Kansas City, when?

• 54:44Speaker 02

  Exactly. But that stuff doesn't work anymore. That stuff doesn't work in terms of how people, uh, in terms of what people care about. It doesn't really go viral. Identity has become so fractured and I think so boring for people that I am waiting to see what replaces it. And, you know, it could be, it could be class consciousness. Sure. I don't know. But I, I think it is changing and I think young people are clearly desperate for something new, some new way of interfacing with each other online and thus everywhere else. And I think we are right now in the process of watching them discover what that is and figure out what that is. But I think it will be different and it will inform our politics.

• 55:25Alex Kantrowitz?

  Ryan, before we go, I just want to ask you one thing that's kind of been bugging me through this conversation. And I'm sure you're gonna have a smart answer to it. But this idea that we started off with, um, with people all using the internet once COVID started, uh, weren't they already on the internet? Like that's to me, is it just like a matter of usage? Or I see Ron John's also shaking his head, but I want to turn this over to you just to sort of highlight the magnitude of the change that's led us to where we are.

• 55:54Speaker 02

  I think before COVID, yes, everyone probably had a smartphone. Everyone was, you know, familiar with a couple of sites like Facebook and Instagram and they were on there and they'd check them, you know, every couple of hours and that'd be it. Because of COVID and specifically lockdown in the early months of the pandemic, there was not really any new TV being made. There was not really any new movies coming out. There was not really much else. You couldn't really go, you couldn't go outside. There was really not much else to do other than stare at the internet. And for about three to four months, all of the world was being run by Twitter. Like, just like tweets were running the whole planet. And I think it created an effect where many normal people who maybe would sit down at the end of the day

• 56:38Speaker 02

  and watch NCIS or like wake up in the morning and drive to work, listen to the radio. A lot of those people went down internet rabbit holes and they developed new hobbies and they discovered new interests and they started using social media in a way they never used before. So maybe it's wrong to say that like more people came online. But I do think an overwhelming amount of people for maybe the first time ever actively engaged with the internet. And thus were shaped by it. And now we're living in that, in the aftermath of what that did to people's brains. That's, that's, that's how I would describe it.

• 57:17Alex Kantrowitz?

  Wild. Ranjan, any final thoughts or final questions?

• 57:21Speaker 01

  I think my takeaway here is we're definitely, I think we're definitely at a really interesting inflection point. I think where you'd said, uh, this is basically 2012 ish in a digital, in digital consumption years, which I think like that was the arrow is pivotable, pivotal. People were on Facebook. People are starting to experiment with other social networks. People were online more increasingly, but we had no idea what the next couple of years would look like, much less decade. So I think we're definitely at the beginning of something new. Hopefully it's not too scary, but starting out so.

• 58:03Speaker 02

  Yeah. Hopefully it gets a little, little more fun.

• 58:06Alex Kantrowitz?

  The newsletter is garbage day dot email. The podcast is Panic World. You can find it in your podcast app of choice. You could also find Ranjan's email at readmargins.com. And you can listen to Ranjan and I every Friday here on Big Technology Podcast. Ryan, Ranjan, thanks so much for coming on. Great speaking with you guys. This was fascinating.

• 58:25Speaker 02

  Thanks for having me.

• 58:27Alex Kantrowitz?

  See you soon. All right, Ron, John, all right, Ryan. We'll have to have you both back on to do this again next year to see how big Blue Sky is. All right, everybody, thanks so much for listening and we'll see you next time on Big Technology Podcast.

• 58:39Speaker 03

  Now, more than ever, we need someone on our side. But Rob Whitman? Whitman's votes drove up costs, cut Medicaid and risked 350,000 Virginians' health care to pay for tax breaks for himself and his donors. He's not on our side. Shannon Taylor will fight corruption, cut taxes and bring down costs. This November, vote for Shannon Taylor. She's for us. Paid for by HMP, the House Majority PAC dot com. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.