Adam Conover explains how YouTube ruined everything

Adam Conover is a familiar face to anyone who’s spent time on the internet. He got his start at CollegeHumor back in the day, before transitioning into cable TV with Adam Ruins Everything, then onto Netflix, and all the way back to YouTube again, where he posts videos and hosts a podcast. That is exactly the kind of career path that fascinates me, and it also happens to touch on basically every major Decoder theme there is. Read the full interview transcript on The Verge. Links: YouTube is making it harder to earn money on YouTube | The Verge Adam Conover regrets shilling Sam Altman’s World | The Verge Elon Musk is an idiot | Adam Conover How HBO’s creatives survived corporate chaos | Decoder YouTube’s Neal Mohan on the future for creators | Decoder (2021) Banning Trump was the right decision, says Instagram’s Mosseri | Decoder (2021) Ethics in journalism, with Ben Smith | Decoder Hank Green will gladly take billionaires’ money for education | Decoder Subscribe to The Verge to access the ad-free version of Decoder! Credits: Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Decoder’s producers are Greg Ott, Kate Cox, and Nick Statt. This episode was edited by Xander Adams. Our editorial director is Kevin McShane. The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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  Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Neelai Patel, editor in chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today, I'm joined by comedian, podcast host, and YouTuber Adam Conover. Adam is a familiar face to anyone who's spent time on the internet. He got his start, like so many successful comedy writers, at College Humor. That was before he transitioned to cable TV with Adam Ruins Everything, and onto Netflix, and now all the way back to YouTube again, where he posts videos and hosts a podcast called Factually. You'll hear right at the beginning that Adam does not like to be called a creator. He's got a pretty unique perspective on it that speaks to how he sees tech platforms and their leverage over entertainment. We got pretty deep right away about what Adam thinks really happened to the TV business, why Hollywood seeded entire categories of TV programming to YouTube in the chase to become Netflix and HBO.

• 2:15Speaker 00

  You'll hear him argue that YouTube is in fact a worse gatekeeper than the networks, because you can't actually argue or negotiate with a recommendation algorithm. There's a lot in this one, we're gonna get right into it. I think you're gonna enjoy this conversation. You'll see that I really did. Please remember to subscribe to our YouTube channel for new episodes every Monday and Thursday. Okay, comedian Adam Conover on YouTube, gatekeepers in the business of making entertainment online. Here we go. Adam Conover, you're a comedian, you're a podcaster, you're a YouTuber, you're a board member of the Writers Guild of America West. I'm sure you have additional titles. Welcome to Decoder.

• 2:48Speaker 03

  I'm also a stand-up comic. That's often how I describe myself. That's sort of my identity as a comedian. But yeah, thank you so much for having me. I'm a fan of the show.

• 2:56Speaker 00

  I have so many questions for you about this moment in media and entertainment. You have a view into all of it. Live comedy is a thing that is successful in America in 2026, and sitcoms don't exist, which is a video I just watched that you made. There's some disconnect in how we make this stuff, how we distribute this stuff, how we pay for this stuff. And like I said, you have a view into Hollywood, you have a view into television, a view into YouTube. Let's just start at the very beginning. I listed off a bunch of things, and you said you identify as a stand-up comic.

• 3:30Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:31Speaker 00

  How many roles do you have? How many things do you?

• 3:33Speaker 03

  Okay, so yeah, I'm a stand-up comic, I'm a comedy writer, I'm a television host, I'm a member leader in the Writers Guild of America. I also now basically run a small business as a YouTube podcaster, which is me. I recently hired my first full-time employee to help me do all the things I do, but beyond that, it's a bunch of freelancers. I'm one of many people trying to make my way in this new massively disrupted media landscape where, you know, the companies that used to make media seem intent on destroying themselves, destroying their own businesses, you know, giving up large swathes of the industry to the tech giants, which are, you know, trying to crush us under their heel.

• 4:18Speaker 03

  So it's, you know, it's an interesting time to be a comedian, to say the least.

• 4:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'm interested in all that. That dynamic between the tech giants and people who make content for those platforms and Hollywood, let's just call it Hollywood, the death star of Hollywood, seems as fraught as ever. And I want to start with a really basic question. You describe yourself as a YouTuber and a podcaster. Do you think you're a creator or an influencer?

• 4:46Speaker 03

  God, I mean, I don't like those words. I think a lot of people don't, but I do use them because that's the terminology that we've started to use. But I feel the word creator was created by the social media companies as a way of tricking people into entering into an extremely inequitable economic bargain, where basically they promise, "Oh, hey, you know, Mr. Beast makes a billion dollars. You could be Mr. Beast. Why don't you work for us for basically free for the rest of your life in the hopes of one day we'll break off a little chunk of ad revenue for you?"

• 5:28Speaker 03

  Like, that is what they mean by creator, you know? We used to be writers, performers, talent, Hollywood labor, or, you know, media labor, right? Creator is like, you know, it's like when Avon or Mary Kay calls you an entrepreneur, right? "Oh, you're an entrepreneur? You're starting your own business. Am I? Or is that an illusion that you want me to buy into because it obscures what you have done to the industry that I work in?"

• 6:01Speaker 00

  All right, we're just gonna get into it. This is why I wanted you here. So my thesis on Decoder, and now increasingly on anyone else's podcast who have me, is the entire entertainment complex, all of Hollywood, and to some extent now the music industry, could not acknowledge that their real competition is the army of teenagers who work for free on YouTube and TikTok and Instagram. And these platforms really do not pay any money. Instagram literally will pay you no money. TikTok may be a tiny fraction of a penny for every view that you get. YouTube used to be the gold standard. They just changed their rules. It is now harder than ever to get started in the YouTube Partner Program and get paid actual money from YouTube. But people cannot stop themselves from expressing themselves.

• 6:45Speaker 00

  They cannot stop themselves from wanting to be Mr. Beast. And so there they are, infinite free content for the tech giants, and Warner Brothers and Disney and everyone else have to pay Hollywood celebrities to desperately try to get people to come to a box office. And the economic disparity of that simply cannot be acknowledged. Because if you do that, and you're Josh Demaro or David Zaslove, you should just put all your money in the S&P 500 and shut it down.

• 7:11Speaker 03

  I think, I agree with most of that. I think that, you know, the competition is a little bit more fine-grained than that. Obviously, the movies compete with TikTok to the extent that there's a limited number of minutes in the day, but the movies are also competing with like literally every other human activity. The movies are, on that level, competing with playing soccer in the park with your friends. There will always be a market for the high end of entertainment, right? Because new media forms never completely replace old media forms. They compete with them and take some of their share, you know? So people still read novels, people still go to plays, people still listen to the radio, right? Old forms of media don't go away altogether. There's always still a market for them.

• 7:54Speaker 03

  The market just gets smaller and a little bit more specific. Now, the idea that like David Zaslove is competing with TikTok, I'm not entirely sure. However, he is very specifically competing with YouTube, because YouTube has really specifically gone into exactly the television space, and they were doing it for about 10 years before the TV industry noticed at all. In the last year, people have started to notice. Every single conversation I've had in Hollywood in the last two years, I have started with, "Did you know that YouTube is the largest streaming service on television sets?" Not on, forget laptops, forget phones, I know you know this, Neelai, but like, I blow people's minds with this in Hollywood.

• 8:36Speaker 03

  And what those companies haven't realized was, in their rush to chase Netflix, right? Netflix came in and disrupted them quite directly, and they said, "Okay, we all have to create our own little mini HBOs that everyone is gonna pay $15 a month for." Obviously, that's ludicrous, that was never gonna be a workable business model, but that's what they thought for about five years. In their rush to do that, they destroyed linear television, they destroyed the cable business, and you can argue, "People prefer to watch when they prefer," whatever, but what they never brought, what they never figured out how to work on streaming, was about like literally 60% of television. News, talk shows, comedy talk shows, lifestyle programming, The Drew Barrymore Show, travel

• 9:17Speaker 03

  shows, the weather, all of those things, they let go to YouTube specifically. And now when people are like, "You know, I just kind of want to watch somebody talk about home improvement for a little bit. I want to hear somebody talk about the Knicks. I want to hear a funny person talk about the news." They go to YouTube first, and it's all for free. And YouTube's entire business model is, we don't pay for content. We break off a chunk if we make a lot of money, you get 50%. You know, that's better than most of the other rev shares for ads. But that is the thing that I think they still haven't grappled with. A couple of years ago, I was pitching a game show. I had a huge piece of IP attached.

• 10:00Speaker 03

  It was, I thought, a good pitch. I went to a streaming service and pitched it and they said, you know, here's our problem with game shows. We can get people to watch one episode. We can't get people to watch a whole season in a weekend. And I was like, wait, your whole business model is if people don't watch a whole season on the weekend, it doesn't work. That's not how people watch game shows, right? And so if you are conceding all of game shows, along with all these other formats, you're conceding a huge swath of what used to be your business. And now you are only focused on the very high end. You know, you don't have all of that cheaper programming anymore. And people like me who used to make it, I'm in the writers, what we call a comedy variety writer. You know, I do nonfiction comedy. I would, you know, The Daily Show,

• 10:43Speaker 03

  etc., right? The networks literally don't make that kind of thing anymore. My old show, Adam Ruins Everything, ran for 65 episodes, hit for the network, second biggest show on True TV, could not sell a show anything close to that now. Because they're like, well, if it's not like a high-end prestige drama starring Adam Scott, we haven't figured out how to get people to watch that. Well, YouTube has. And so people like me have been driven to YouTube with, you know, disastrous effects on the media landscape, on the amount of money that we make, but also the kind of media that gets made. I make a good living. I make about as good a living as I did as a TV host. I'm very lucky to do so. But now I have a couple freelancers instead of a room full of writers, a room, you know, cinematographers, actors, all these

• 11:28Speaker 03

  funny people who made a really good comedy product, you know? Now, when you want to get the comedy news, you don't get to watch, you know, The Daily Show, Colbert Report, those shows are going away. Now you get to watch Adam Schultz riff on the news with his three dumbass friends in front of a curtain for $0, right? Those shows have $0 budgets. And the middle has like evaporated. And part of what I'm trying to do, like my whole thing in media right now is trying to figure out how to rebuild a little bit of the middle. How do I get a little bit of a budget so I can do something a little bit better than a podcast and a little bit closer to a television show? Because I think there's still a market for it, just nobody is serving it currently.

• 12:08Speaker 00

  And that's really what I want to dig into, because I'm very curious how that budget comes back. If I just take what you're describing, when you were on True TV, or if you made a show for another cable network back in the day, MTV, whatever it is, they had pretty good business models. Everyone in the country would pay their cable bill, and MTV would get a piece of that money no matter what. And that was really lucrative. And not only could they afford writers' rooms, and cinematographers, and people that hire the cameras, and all those people could be unionized and demand better wages every year, and all the stuff that unionized employees can do. They also could afford accountants, and healthcare professionals, and benefit service people, and highly paid CEOs. Like, the overhead of

• 12:50Speaker 00

  the cable channel was massive. And maybe it was always all wrong, right? Maybe that overhead should have always flowed back to the content in some other way. But it was, the business model was lucrative because the distribution was lucrative. Because we had convinced everyone in America to pay for television.

• 13:09Speaker 03

  And they sold ads against the shows, right? Like, literally, my show was just in the black. It cost this much to make the show. We sell this many ads. We get, here are the rates we get for the ads. Here's the money we get from the cable company. The show was in the black. That's why we ran for five years. Most other shows on television are currently in the black. The problem, we have two problems. One, the streamers don't know how to make a show in the black anymore. Like, they're like, okay, we have this many subscribers. How many people signed up for Apple TV to watch Widows Bank, right? Like, it's this weird math that they do. That's the first thing. The second thing is, they gave up, and this is a little bit my own theory, they gave up like decades of business development in the advertising business. Like, why was CBS able to get a certain rate for the Colbert,

• 13:54Speaker 03

  you know, for Colbert's show? Because CBS has literally been negotiating with Johnson and Johnson for a hundred years, saying, here's how much a spot on CBS is worth. When we deliver you 2 million viewers, here's what they deliver. That's like, you cannot, you cannot rebuild that in an instant. And when Netflix said, tricked the entire industry into thinking, there's not going to be any advertising again, ever again, and they all destroyed those businesses, and now they're trying to rebuild them on Peacock, right? It's like, they gave up a business model that actually made them money. Then, on the other hand, you've got YouTube, which is of course a massive advertising business, but it's completely scrambled, right? It's like, the advertisers that I'm able to get

• 14:37Speaker 03

  on my show are, you know, they're all the DTC brands, right? It's MeUndies or whatever, that's one of the joke, it's, you know, it's meal kits, stuff like that, subscription services. A lot of them are great, but like, where's Coke and Chevy? You know what I mean? Like, that is what used to pay for the media you watched was car commercials, was Don Draper shit. And that is the part that like, they didn't realize that they were throwing the baby out with the bathwater, and that all of us have to somehow figure out how to rebuild. And I do have a theory for like, how that might happen on the YouTube end that I'm currently trying to pursue as, unfortunately, a business person, because that's what I have to be now. I want, I literally just wanted the David Zavas of the world

• 15:22Speaker 03

  to just give me a couple hundred grand a year and a union contract to make funny stuff. I don't need to make millions, right? But now I have to be an entrepreneur, and so does everybody else. And like, fuck, that's what I'll do if I have to. But like, I was very happy being a laborer in the media industry, but I don't have that option anymore.

• 15:39Speaker 00

  I think a lot of people, their dream in life was to be a laborer in the media and entertainment industries. People who are good at cameras, wanted to operate cameras, costume designers want to design costumes, they want to specialize in the field that they're interested in. And now you end up being kind of a multi hyphenate entrepreneur. How has that been for you, that shift? Did it, you wake up one day and be like, screw it, I'm a business person now?

• 16:01Speaker 03

  It's devastating, you know? I mean, I do remember when I sort of shifted my business from, I'm trying to sell TV shows first, and second, I have a podcast to sort of keep me, you know, keep my audience hooked, and etc. to being, oh, the podcast like is the business now. And it was, it was disorienting, and it was disheartening, you know? At the same time, I felt lucky to do it, you know? I, nobody tells me what to, what to make, except for the YouTube algorithm, which honestly, literally does tell me what to make in ways that are pernicious and that I grapple with every day. But I don't have to convince, you know, somebody in a suit somewhere to let me do something. But I'm lucky, because I already had, you know, a show with my face on it, with my name in the title, that enabled

• 16:45Speaker 03

  me to sort of bring some audience along and build something. There are so many incredible writers, performers, technicians, you know, artists of all levels, who just don't have work now. I mean, my whole cohort that all moved to LA, you know, in our 30s to make television, we moved here because there was an industry here. It was a business, you know? And that's why people have moved to LA for 100 years. That's why fucking, I don't know, J.D. Salinger and F. Scott Fitzgerald and people like that would come to Hollywood to write a couple scripts, because this is where a writer could get paid. And now that doesn't appear to exist in the same way. And, you know, my friends are all going to grad school. People who are like incredibly funny comedians and writers and actors are, it's

• 17:26Speaker 03

  very sad what's happened. And that's part of why my whole, like, literally, my whole goal, what I'm trying to build over the next couple of years, is to get enough funding and to build a business model where I can employ a couple of comedy writers. Because that's what I used to do. I used to have funny people around me. We would come up with funny stuff together. We'd digest the news and give it back to you. And I just want to create that system again, like a little bit of it, so a couple people can have livings. I want to figure out how to get my YouTube channel under a union contract, you know, under a couple, couple different union contracts. And there's a ways to go until we get there, but, you know, we're in the rubble trying to rebuild what, anything close to the infrastructure that we had before. And you said, you know, cable channels were

• 18:11Speaker 03

  expensive, etc. There was a lot of waste. There was also infrastructure that does not exist. And infrastructure once demolished takes a long time to rebuild.

• 18:20Speaker 00

  We had the authors of a great book called It's Not TV, which was a history of HBO on the show.

• 18:24Speaker 03

  That's a fantastic book. I love that book. It'll make you cry with what we've lost.

• 18:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, there were entire executives at HBO, and their job was to just identify and produce good creative. Literally, their job was to know crazy people who made great art and keep them calm and productive. And that was their whole job. And I could not identify those people anywhere anymore.

• 18:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, I know a lot of those people. I know good executives at all the companies. And they either live in fear at a current streamer and are like clutching and hoping they don't get fired, or they're, or they're going into other businesses. Like, and, and, you know, good creative executives were a real thing that are, that are hard to find. And we treasured as writers. And those people are going, going the way of the dinosaur too, unfortunately.

• 19:10Speaker 00

  We need to take a quick break. We'll be right back.

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• 22:54Speaker 00

  We're back with Adam Conover, getting into the Decoder questions and what it actually looks like to structure a business and a career like his.

• 23:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, you have brought me to the Decoder questions because you're talking about a structure you want to build to achieve very specific goals. How is the business of Adam Conover structured today? You have one employee, but how is it organized?

• 23:14Speaker 03

  Great question. Um, I mean, it's, it's sort of like everything everywhere all at once, you know? I'm doing, I'm doing a million things. I have a, I have a live touring business. I tour as a stand-up comic. That is luckily a very durable business because, you know, no matter what happens in the tech industry, people are always gonna go wanna sit in the dark with a drink in their hand around other people. And maybe they'll wanna do it a little bit less because they'll be on TikTok, but they're gonna wanna do it. Then there's, you know, buildings that are set up to give them food and drinks that'll pay to bring me out, right? And so that's good. I also do a weekly podcast, which is funded through those sort of DTC ads with my podcast network HeadGum, which is a wonderful partner.

• 23:58Speaker 03

  They, they do really great work. And then I also do currently bi-weekly monologues, or what I call them, which are scripted. And I work with a couple freelance writers and researchers in order to, you know, we write them together, and then I deliver them straight to camera. And those are, you know, have a little bit more thought and work put into them. And we're able to currently sell those at a higher, you know, ad premium because, you know, when they pop, they get a couple hundred thousand on YouTube, they get millions at times on YouTube. The problem is if they underperform, you almost immediately are having to have hard conversations with your advertisers, and it's very hard to get anything pre-funded, right? So it's, you're constantly sort of trying to keep your head above water with that piece of it.

• 24:41Speaker 03

  Simultaneous with those two things, I'm trying to figure out, you know, the next piece. I just produced a stand-up comedy special for myself, entirely self-funded. I recorded at the Den Theater in Chicago. Cost me five figures to shoot because I wanted to do it properly and make it look good. And that will be coming out on my YouTube channel in October, hopefully with a sponsor so I don't like lose a bunch of money at it. If I do, hey, at least I got, you know, it was an hour of my creative work. I spent two years working on this material. It's very important to me. People will see it, and hopefully it'll fuel my touring business. You know, the, the sort of days of a, a large company buying your stand-up special.

• 25:24Speaker 03

  This is, YouTube is a, this is a really great example of YouTube creating a race to the bottom. Because Netflix, you know, in its destruction of cable, its destruction of Comedy Central, largely destruction of HBO, set itself up as we're the home of stand-up comedy, right? And they do, do, they do have a ton of stand-up comedy on their platform. But YouTube has even more. And when people are watching stand-up, they're, I just wanna watch a stand-up comedy special. They're more likely to go to YouTube first. And as a result, more and more comedians are saying, well, I'll just record it and I'll put it on YouTube because, hey, maybe I'll get lucky with the algorithm. There's been a couple examples of that, and, and, you know, I'll hit the jackpot. And honestly, the streamers don't pay enough unless you're the biggest, unless you're

• 26:07Speaker 03

  the very high-end, you know, if you're like someone incredible like Ali Wong, one of my favorite comics in the country. You know, she's able to, I'm sure, I'm sure she has a great deal, right? But if you're entry level, you're looking at it going, well, I, I, I might as well just do it on YouTube, right? Because I, I might lose some money either way, or I might not make that much. Why not just control it and put it on my own channel? And as a result, YouTube has like totally just undercut this sector of the market. And that's what I've experienced. I'm sure other people in, you know, music, other forms of media have, have experienced the same. The last piece of it is I am constantly trying to find my way in the new media ecosystem,

• 26:47Speaker 03

  which is to say, people are starting to have this intuition that the future of YouTube is television, that the ad dollars are eventually going to come, that, that we're gonna be able to figure out the business model. And so it's starting to look like you're gonna be able to get investments to create something that looks a little bit more similar to an old cable pitch process. You know, I literally, God forbid, I made a deck that I'm gonna be taking around, trying to say, hey, will someone-

• 27:19Speaker 00

  Did you do it by hand, or did you get, just let Claude do it for you? I've seen a lot of Claude decks lately, man. I'm just asking.

• 27:26Speaker 03

  Look, I do not work with AI for the creative stuff. I did, I did the first draft by hand. I have a graphic designer who has made my decks for years.

• 27:34Speaker 00

  You are committed to human labor, my friend.

• 27:36Speaker 03

  My God, look, the whole point of life is to be around other people.

• 27:41Speaker 00

  But is it, is the point of life to make decks? Come on.

• 27:45Speaker 03

  The deck is part of the creative process, man. Like, the, like, literally, I figure it out. I figure out what the show is by writing the pitch document, right? And, and you think about, if I'm gonna be able to sell this to a person to get them to put money into it, then I can sell it to an audience. That was part of how the TV pitch process worked. And so I'm, you know, I'm starting to try to figure out what that is in order to build what I hope will be the future of what we used to call it late-night or topical nonfiction comedy on television, sort of merging the monologues, the interviews that I do currently into, you know, something that feels more like a TV show. That's my project for the next couple of years. And that hopefully I can employ a couple people and give them health insurance. But that's a big leap to take, you know?

• 28:30Speaker 03

  It's not, it's not necessarily a, a slow gradation where you can just build it piece by piece. At some point, you, you're like, I kinda just need a couple hundred grand to do this. Or else I can just keep making, you know, the thing alone in my apartment, you know, which is not what I, not what I got in the business to do. I mean, it's great, but, you know, I, I would like to do more.

• 28:51Speaker 00

  I'm gonna ask you the other Decoder questions, and then I wanna push on some of this just a little bit.

• 28:55Speaker 03

  Please.

• 28:55Speaker 00

  How do you make decisions? What's your framework for making decisions? You obviously have a wide range to make.

• 29:01Speaker 03

  Wow, this is.

• 29:04Speaker 00

  Don't worry, some of the biggest CEOs in the world have just deer in headlights at this question, which I think is fascinating.

• 29:10Speaker 03

  You, you cut to like a deep therapy question for me, you know, decision.

• 29:13Speaker 00

  That's all the show is, is important people doing therapy with me.

• 29:17Speaker 03

  Decision making is really difficult, man. You know, I am trying to embrace more of the build in public ethos of the internet and saying, you know, I'll put it out there and we'll see how it does. And we'll learn from that. I think my best decision making works that way. That is how you build a stand up set is you go do jokes in front of an audience. Half of them don't work. You stop doing them after the third try when it doesn't work. And then you come up with something new and then the ones that, you know, lived are the ones that are the special. And I've been trying to apply that more to my scripted and my podcast interviews. But, you know, sometimes you gotta take a flying leap and say, let's, let's try to do this, you know? I mean, the hardest types of decisions to

• 29:59Speaker 03

  make are the ones about the business itself. So I'm like, okay, I have a limited amount of time in the day. Do I try to create a new piece of YouTube content for my sort of AVOD audience? Or do I try to create something special for my Patreon audience? That's a big chunk of my income as well as people who pay to subscribe. Do I, do I make a, a custom podcast just for them that only a few thousand people are gonna hear, rather than the hundred thousand that might hear it on YouTube, but those people are paying for it? And if I put good content there, maybe it'll grow. You, you end up doing, making those sort of decisions in a vacuum. And all you can really do is follow your intuition. And, and, and, you know, adjust when it doesn't go well. The last

• 30:43Speaker 03

  thing I'll say is, my oldest decision making rubric has always been, I try to imagine myself as the audience. When I was first making a cable show, I was very lucky that I grew up watching basic cable and I got to make a basic cable show. And I imagined, I'm 15 years old, I'm sitting on the floor watching the television set. What would get me excited? And I try to do that same thing with YouTube and podcasts. You know, if you're thinking about the audience's experience as someone who's creating things for an audience, you'll hopefully never be steered wrong.

• 31:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'm very curious about that dynamic in your decision making, because I, I personally am always, we should start with the audience. And then unfortunately, I keep getting older. And the young audience came up in a totally different media environment. Like, I started as a blogger and famous newspaper columnist would not give me the time of day at events. And now the TikTokers look at me like I'm Gandalf at the events. And they call me the mainstream media, which is deeply hilarious, right? And my calibration towards the audience has largely been, oh, they don't know. They don't know that there was another way. This is the only way that they've known. And if I don't participate in these specific ways,

• 32:00Speaker 00

  I'm actually so different, I'm not, I'm like incompatible. I'm trying to plug the old USB cable into the new USB port, you know, like, it just doesn't work. And the thing that really gets me at that, the pressure on all the platforms and all the creatives in the world to just go direct to the audience right away, for free, is at an all time high. And then the expectation that the way that you will monetize that is that you will get a brand sponsorship, right? You went viral twice on TikTok and some supplement company is gonna show up and you're gonna, you're gonna read the ads for the, for the green powder that makes you more viral, or whatever it is they're promising today.

• 32:38Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 32:38Speaker 00

  There's something about that that feels very dangerous to the creative process for me. And you're, you're scratching at it with, what creative thing am I gonna do today? And maybe the rubric is, the Patreon people are paying me this much money, but the audience might grow on YouTube in this way. And maybe I just want to make the most viral thing that the algorithm is telling me to in this way. I am, I have truly struggled to manage that dynamic. What is the most economically lucrative thing to do? What is the thing that will get me the most attention? And then what is the thing that lets me stay pure of heart?

• 33:12Speaker 03

  What is the thing you actually want to do? That is.

• 33:14Speaker 00

  There's that. There's that.

• 33:15Speaker 03

  What is, what is the thing that makes you, you're doing the thing that got you into the business in the first place, right? That made you wanna go to college for the thing or made you get that first job? That.

• 33:25Speaker 00

  Which is saying the iPod is better than the Zune. And if I could just make that video every single day for the rest of my life, that would be great.

• 33:32Speaker 03

  I just want to goof off with funny people and say something and come up with something new to say with them, you know? Um, yeah, it's really, really hard. Uh, so a couple, a couple answers there. First of all, in terms of what the audience expects now, it's true, I talk to people in their twenties and literally the way I, the way you or I would talk about MTV or Comedy Central is how they talk about like early YouTube. That is their culture that they grew up with. And you can't ignore that. And sometimes I'm like, all right, is my desire to go to do something that feels more like a television show, am I just being an old man about it? Should I just do the new thing? Should I just, you know, I look at people I really admire on YouTube, like Contra Points and

• 34:12Speaker 03

  H Bomber Guy are two, two YouTube video SAS I adore. And they have, they do this very specific internet native model where each of them makes one three hour long YouTube video once a year. That is so amazing that their Patreon, that they have a massive Patreon audience. And they take no brand deals, right? I'm like, do I need to do that? Well, they built that organically, you know, that they did, they started that when I was working in television. That's not who I am, right? That's hard for me to do. You don't wanna be, you know, the Steve Buscemi meme, right? And show up and try to, try to do the, try to do the thing.

• 34:46Speaker 00

  If you started making a Contra Points video, I think that'd be pretty good. I would, I would pay extra for that one.

• 34:50Speaker 03

  Okay. I mean, I, I, you know, and she does her videos by she, she writes and films and edits and set decorates every single piece of that herself. And that's not the way I've ever worked. And sometimes I go, do I, do I need to do that? Well, it's special when she does it. Is it gonna work when I do it? At the same time, you know, I do have this belief that, uh, look, I always wanted to make a late night show, right? That, that is still a goal of mine. I, there's other things I wanna do too. I'd love to do a travel documentary. I'd also love to do a late night show. Everyone says late night is dying, except that millions of people still fucking watch it on YouTube, right? Colbert was getting millions of views on every single thing he posted. The Daily Show still does, right?

• 35:35Speaker 03

  But no one has built the digital native business model. And, you know, YouTube videos are getting longer. I'm like, I still have an intuition at the end of the day, I think people still wanna sit on the couch with a drink in their hands and their partner's feet on their lap and like the dog next to them and watch something that's 45 minutes long. And watch a funny person, like give them some relief about the news of the day and have it be funnier than just a bunch of fucking riffs. Bringing those two sensibilities together is the job of what I'm trying to crack. Figuring out how to do the same thing on YouTube and, you know, that has a flavor of the, of the old style. I think the success of standup comedy on YouTube and on vertical video is a good example of this, where it's,

• 36:16Speaker 03

  it's such an old art form. And yet it really performs well. People do still want it. The piece of how do you do what is economically successful? That is the really difficult part. Because Hollywood at its best, obviously not all the time, but Hollywood at its best was, I have a good idea. There's someone working for the company who sees that it's good. They buy it because they know it's good. And it's so good, other people will watch it. And then they give you money to make it good. And on some level, you can go to them and say, they're like, ah, we don't wanna pay for this. And you could say, yeah, it's gonna be really good though. And if you convince them, you can get the money, you can make the thing. And this is literally how I made the last show. You know, my, my old show on, on, on True TV was, you know, it cost like $700,000 an episode to make,

• 37:01Speaker 03

  a million by the end. And that's because it was good, you know? And they made enough money off of it that they, that they kept it going. But when you are literally just chasing the algorithm for every single click, that is a lot harder. And so, you know, it disincentivizes experimentation and it disincentivizes, you know, putting the work in to make the thing good. So for instance, the stuff that I do the best at, that I get the best numbers at on YouTube are when I talk about AI and I'm critical of the tech giants. My top YouTube video ever from my recent run is like Elon Musk is just dumb. That's the name of the video.

• 37:38Speaker 00

  That's gonna be the title of this video. Can you do a type five on it right now?

• 37:42Speaker 03

  Absolutely. Oh, this is, it would, it would take an hour. But I also have other things that I wanna talk about. And I just made a video that, uh, went into, for instance, the history of leaf blowers. Why, even though gas powered leaf blowers are banned in California, why did I literally walk by one on the block today? There's a fascinating history behind it. Leaf blowers are horrible for the environment, blah, blah, blah. Really interesting story. I was like, oh, I heard about this. I wanna make a video about it. I spent three weeks making the video, got 50,000 views because it, it didn't, I don't know, maybe I could have had a better thumbnail, but like, it wasn't what the algo wanted from me today. And so I'm going, all right, do I just need to, do I only talk about AI now? You know,

• 38:23Speaker 03

  I, I would like to talk about other things. And, and that's, uh, you know, people click subscribe on my channel. I can try to grow my audience. But like, they click subscribe, they're not gonna see my video unless the algo shows it to them, you know? So.

• 38:39Speaker 00

  I wanna ask about this, because this dynamic is, is very real. Especially if you think about data driving every young creator. Cause they're just trying to get started. And so the data is gonna drive them. They're gonna, it's gonna have an outsized influence, no matter what. You have some history, you have some beliefs, what people might want, based on what people want in the past. You're gonna make a late night show, you're gonna take that risk. Young creator just looks at the view counts and says, well, this got me views, I should get more views. We've had basically every platform CEO on the show. We've had Neil from YouTube. We've had Adam from Instagram. And the argument they would make in response to this whole conversation, and I'm going to try to do justice, even though I mostly agree with you, but I'll try to do justice, is, look, what you're describing, the eighties and nineties and early 2000s,

• 39:20Speaker 00

  was a series of gatekeepers that were inaccessible to most of the people in the world. So I'm a kid who grew up in Wisconsin. If I wanted to make a late night cable TV show, that path was almost totally foreclosed unless I moved to New York or Los Angeles, got a job as a waiter, and then tried to hustle my way up through comedy clubs to meet one person who might decide that I was talented. And that meant mostly gatekeepers existed and mostly people were left out. And the economics of that might have been great. It might have created a large middle class, because there was enough overhead in that system to pay for a large middle class of creatives. But it mostly locked everybody out. The social platforms create instant marketing opportunities for everyone from their bedroom.

• 40:05Speaker 00

  So if you're a young comic in the middle of the country and you have no ability to get into the Comedy Cellar in New York, because you can't just work for free in that specific way, you can just film yourself talking on TikTok until you get a little bit of an audience. And then maybe you can drive an audience to come to a club near you or whatever it is that you're going to do. And that pathway to get the exposure, which is necessary at the beginning, exists in a totally democratizing way. And the economics of it might be bad, but many, many more people have the opportunity. And I think about that. I think about my own career. I started as a blogger working for AOL for $12 a post and the newspaper columnists, who are now very, very sweet to me. They have been very sweet to me over the years. But I got to compete with them in a way that previously I would have never gotten to compete with them.

• 40:50Speaker 00

  And I can't quite reconcile how badly I feel about the economics of the industry today and the amount of opportunity that it has created for so many other people.

• 41:02Speaker 03

  So I have a clear answer to this, which is that to the people from YouTube, I would say, well, you're the gatekeepers.

• 41:12Speaker 00

  Where the algorithm is the gatekeeper.

• 41:14Speaker 03

  Of course it is. Talk to somebody, like, literally, like, try to start something from scratch. Try. Try to build from getting 200 views that the algorithm gives you. And, and like, tell me that's not a gatekeeper. Like, yes, the bad old days, we had NBC, CBS, ABC, and that's all you get, right? Those were big gatekeepers. You had to please them. Now we have YouTube, Instagram, TikTok. That's all you get. And in fact, YouTube doesn't really compete with Instagram and TikTok directly, because it has a completely different business model. They do the horizontal thing. It's on streamers in the way those aren't. So really, it's like, it's literally just YouTube if you want to do broad swathes of content. That's a fucking gatekeeper.

• 41:58Speaker 03

  Like, I like, you think Mr. Beast is like, good at what he does? Like, he pleases the gatekeeper. That's literally, like, look at any interview with him. It's about like, him figuring out, okay, this got this many views. This got this many views. This got this many views, right? Now, the argument that you're making that the gatekeepers were gone and the internet was democratizing, that was good when it was people in charge of it, right? Do you remember back when we used to email memes to each other? Because like, you saw the video of the Numa Numa kid? And you were like, oh, that kid's funny. I'm going to send it to my friend, right? Because it was, it was like, large swathes of people in charge of like, the distribution. It is not anymore.

• 42:38Speaker 03

  Like, they are taking some very loose signal from our swiping and turning it into like, algorithmic control of what we see. And they have more power than anyone who ever worked for CBS or ABC ever did. And it's actually worse because people aren't in charge of it. Because if you went and talked to any of them and said, hey, you're in charge of this, they would say, no, we're not. It's just an algorithm. Well, that's actually worse. Because at least in the old days, there was someone I could go impress. There was a person I could go talk to, you know? If you go talk to a streamer now and you try to convince them, you know, Netflix, for instance, hey, this show is a good idea. They'd say, the algorithm said it's not.

• 43:22Speaker 03

  Like, that's, that's basically what it boils down to. They don't have the leeway to make decisions with rare exceptions. And, and the good shows are when the exception gets made, frankly. But it's ludicrous. Like, the media ecosystem now is more concentrated, more closed off than it ever was before. The only difference is now anybody can upload anything for free and YouTube will host it for you. And that's good from like, a user perspective. If you just like, literally want to upload a video of your baby and send it to your, you know, sister, like, that used to be a lot harder. YouTube like, solved that problem for a lot of people. But in terms of a broadcast medium,

• 44:05Speaker 03

  it's just grotesquely exploitative. Like, like, okay. Imagine if, driving for Uber, you didn't get paid. Instead, you got to try to drive for Uber for years. And if you, and they're like, oh, if the algorithm says you're really good at Uber, maybe we'll start to give you a little bit of money. Like, and everybody in the country was doing this simultaneously. That is what the media ecosystem is. And it's, it's bad.

• 44:35Speaker 00

  We need to take another quick break. We'll be back in a minute.

• 44:46Speaker 01

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• 48:12Speaker 00

  We're back with Adam Conover, discussing the new gatekeepers, the online recommendation algorithms, and how they concentrate power and create incentives for everyone who makes stuff on the internet. This is the other thing I wanted to ask you about. You mentioned you want to have a unionized talk show on YouTube. You're going to hire some people. That's a lot of cost, right? We run a union shop here. There's costs associated with all of that.

• 48:34Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 48:34Speaker 00

  And those are good costs. I think media companies should pay those costs. You need the economics to work, and you mentioned you needed a digitally native business model for that. I look at how that works today, and that mostly looks like big lucrative brand deals. You need a Coca-Cola, or a Chevy, or a Ford, or whoever to show up and pay you a bunch of money to be integrated into your show, and you, Adam Conover, eventually have to drive to every guest house in your Ford Fiesta, or like whatever it is, and then open it, and in the back, it's full of supplements, or whatever that money is going to look like. Because the advertising has to be integrated in the content, and then that helps to reach scale, and that is where that money comes from. Are you comfortable with this level of integrations?

• 49:15Speaker 00

  It's very different in me for news, but sort of on the YouTube entertainment side, that pendulum has swung and has been swung for a long time.

• 49:23Speaker 03

  I mean, I don't love it, and you're constantly being asked to make compromises and make deals that you'd rather not make. What we're doing is we're going back to the old days in so many ways of media, right? Like, again, YouTube is ABC, NBC, and CBS rolled into one. What were the earliest days of that broadcasting like? It was the Marlboro Comedy Hour, right? Where all the comedians would say, "Oh, I love smoking Marlboro cigarettes in between every single joke." That was how television as an industry began. We eventually separated those out, right? The commercials would run in between the shows, and it was never like, you know, it is at the New York Times where like the ad sales never talks to the creative, but like,

• 50:06Speaker 03

  generally, you know, I made a basic cable show for years that half of our episodes were taking apart advertisers and talking about, you know, diamond engagement rings, and razors, and how capitalism tries to scam you, and in between was ads. And we never got pushback. We got like, one time, they were like, "Hey, please don't do something about the NCAA, because we broadcast that every March." Like, it would be stuff like that, but it wasn't, you know, they had the separation. Why? Because the audience likes it better that way. It just took them a couple decades to figure that out. And right now, we are in the period of a couple decades where we're having to figure that out again.

• 50:47Speaker 03

  I see YouTube literally trying to rebuild that model very slowly. I think what YouTube, and this is a little bit my own theory, I think what they're trying to do is, they don't want to be the channel, they want to be the cable company, right? And they want the channel, like my channel, the Adam Conover channel, to be the cable channel, right? So they want me to make the brand deal, and me to do all the business development, and they're just the pipe that takes a bunch off the top. Great business model if they can make it happen, but they know that they want to level up the production value, right? And so what are they doing? They're not giving anybody money, but they are starting to promote shows more, right? They're like, doing their own up-fronts, they're trying to connect people with advertisers, they're trying to sort of like, I see them trying to sort of spark the pilot light of

• 51:31Speaker 03

  this a little bit, but without actually putting money, or infrastructure, or investment into it, they're just like, "Oh, can we just sort of like, boost you guys up a little bit?" At the same time where Netflix's model is the opposite, we'll sink the money into the production and try to make the thing at the high end. And that's a really interesting competition. Unfortunately, it's a competition between two giants. I think that like, we could get there by the time I'm like 60, and hopefully, at that point, I'm hosting a show, and you know, there's ad breaks in between, and it's not too bad of an integration. But you know, we're in the world that we're in. Yeah, the reality is, I would love to do a totally pure show where I'm just, you know, subscriber funded, you know?

• 52:13Speaker 03

  Like, I would love to be Contra Points or H-Bomber guy, right? But what that model pushes you towards is, I do it all by myself, my costs are zero, and so what do I have? Time. And I put in infinite amounts of time, and if I can put in infinite amounts of my own time, then I can like, get rewarded with subscriber money, and the subscribers will pay me, almost because they know that it's like, just me doing this, right? But I just don't want to work that way. I want to work with writers, I want to work with other comedians, I want camera people, I want like, a whole, I want a team, you know? Like, it's just the kind of, and to do that, I need to get advertisers, and that is, currently, yeah, that means like, dealing with a lot of bullshit that you would rather not have

• 52:56Speaker 03

  to, and having to get like, make compromises that you would rather not. And yeah, it sucks, I don't have a way around it.

• 53:03Speaker 00

  I certainly know a lot of creators who describe the lifestyle as being very lonely, and have taken to even calling other creators their colleagues, in order to create that sense of camaraderie, even though they are largely competing for the same minutes on the same platform, in terms of attention. I want to ask you about the advertiser thing, I basically have to ask you about crypto advertising now. You got in a lot of trouble, because you read a crypto ad, Sam Altman's, I think, World Coin.

• 53:25Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 53:26Speaker 00

  This is the hardest thing, right? Like, for all I know, the ads on our show are going to be a bunch of AI companies and crypto companies, and I, we do have the wall, right? We make journalism here, I get to say I have no idea what happens there, take it or leave it. The integrations are where people get in trouble, and you read the ad copy, you took the money, the audience was very unhappy with you.

• 53:45Speaker 03

  I actually didn't take the money, I turned down the money, I took the ad down, and yeah, I was not paid for all the trouble I got in.

• 53:53Speaker 00

  Walk me through all of that. Walk me through saying yes, walk me through then saying, "Actually, this is bad, I'm taking it down, I don't want your money."

• 54:00Speaker 03

  When you're in this business, like, you have to look for ROI, right? You have to look for, someone wants to pay me an outsized amount of money to do like, not that much work, and that's the way you make the entire business function, because like, the, for instance, the YouTube monologues I do are incredibly effortful, right? But I'm still trying to make a living, and so if someone's like, "Hey, we want you to", one example of this that I do in live performances, you know, I'll get hired to like, host a gala event, right? And that like, pays more than a normal stand-up gig, but it's actually less work, and so, you know, you sort of need some of that to pad out. So, you know, the Sam Altman's orb company comes along, and says, which you guys have

• 54:43Speaker 03

  covered quite well on your site, and says, "We want you to come to this event and just make a video at the event, and publish it, and we'll give you a bunch of money for it." And I was like, "Well, this product honestly looks like fucking garbage." Like, it looks like one of the worst products I had ever seen. And I was like, "They want to pay me a bunch of money to, my audience is going to hate this." Yeah, sure, whatever, like, that way I can like, literally, you know, use that to fund some of the stuff that I want to do. So I go and do it, and yeah, the, you know, it comes out, people are very unhappy with

• 55:21Speaker 03

  it, because it's a, the premise of the product is like, deeply unsettling, grotesque, surveillance-oriented, right? However, when I was there watching the keynote, I was like, "This is the most comical vaporware I have ever seen." This is never going to come out, no one is ever going to do this, this is so ill-conceived, it's the biggest turd I've ever seen in tech. So that was my evaluation, how could I expect my audience to see it that way, right? They only saw the horrible version of it. So what I eventually did was, I took the video down, I turned the money down, I was

• 56:02Speaker 03

  not paid for it, I instead made a YouTube video where I talked for about 25 minutes about how grotesque and stupid and bad the product was, and I was able to do, I think, a pretty funny and incisive piece of commentary about it, because I was at the keynote, and the only reason I went to the keynote, I was at the ad, part of the reason I went was, I just thought that this thing was going to be weird, and it was, and I wanted to go see, you know? Like, it's, there's a little bit of like, you know, looky-loo in around. So I ended up making a video that I was very proud of, as a result of, you know, this fiasco. I did not monetize that video, so I didn't earn any income off of it. I think a lot of creators go through this moment where, you know, you're constantly

• 56:47Speaker 03

  being sort of, like, led along and tempted, right? And, you know, sometimes you like, step over the line, and you don't even realize you've done it until after you've done it, right? Like, "Well, I thought I was behaving with integrity in the moment, but looking back, why would anybody think that I was? And does that mean I really did?" That's, I mean, that's the situation that we're in, right? And I'm happy to say that I fucked up by doing so. I also believe, you know, you make mistakes, and then you acknowledge it, and you, you know, do something corrective, which is what I did, did my best to do, and luckily, the

• 57:29Speaker 03

  lion's share of my audience, like, was like, "Oh, this video was really great, thank you for the thorough explanation, and, you know, for eviscerating the product."

• 57:40Speaker 00

  That thing is hilarious, by the way. I will encourage people to watch your video and all the other videos. Any coverage of the orb that isn't literal spawn con is like, what are we doing here? Let me ask you about this. You, you obviously learned a huge important lesson. If you had worked in a media company of any kind, entertainment company of any kind, that would become institutional knowledge.

• 58:01Speaker 03

  Right.

• 58:01Speaker 00

  Right. We screwed up. We're never going to do this again. Now a bunch of people have had this experience. And when the new people come in and they try to do this thing again, we're just going to say no. But you have to do that alone. Every creator has to do that alone. My joke on the show for ages is every YouTuber gets their wings when they make the video about how mad they are at YouTube.

• 58:19Speaker 03

  I'm about to make that video, actually. I'm, I've got it locked and loaded.

• 58:22Speaker 00

  Finally, you're going to, you're going to grow up.

• 58:25Speaker 03

  This actually might be it on it. This is the beginning of it. Yeah.

• 58:28Speaker 00

  Um, well, the reason I ask that is, you know, in the old way, there were unions. You are part of a union.

• 58:34Speaker 03

  Right.

• 58:35Speaker 00

  And the union and, you know, the big Hollywood studios would negotiate. They, these are repeat players. So the negotiations were, even if they were antagonistic, they were towards a common purpose because you were going to do it again in three years or whatever. And that created a kind of institutional knowledge, a set of shared goals, at the very least, if the tactics and specific negotiations got heated, at least the goals were the same.

• 58:57Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 58:58Speaker 00

  No one can do that with YouTube. Ben Smith from Semaphore was just on the show and he said, people are building real businesses, real careers on top of YouTube, but YouTube has probably to its own benefit and to the detriment of the media industry, built a system where it's for individuals and no one has any leverage except for YouTube.

• 59:16Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 59:16Speaker 00

  You and I cannot get together and go demand terms from YouTube. If we got a thousand YouTubers together to demand terms from YouTube, they would still laugh. They would never, they would even take the call. They'd say, there's another thousand teenagers who will work for free. Good luck. How do you change that? You have a very unique perspective as someone who is organized against Hollywood. Can you change that as to the platforms?

• 59:39Speaker 03

  Well, uh, the first thing I say is I actually don't think the organizing target, if I'm looking, if I'm putting my labor organizer hat on, I don't think the organizing target is YouTube itself. I think it's the channel, right? So I wouldn't try to organize YouTube. I'd try to organize Mr. Beast's staff, who, uh, you've probably done some reporting on it yourself, are horribly abused and underpaid. Um, and you know, that is like the reality of the, of the economy, right? So, um, it's actually not the case that the biggest YouTubers are all individuals. The biggest YouTubers are companies, right? Um, go look at, uh, you know, Adam Savage, right? Like that guy is basically doing a cable show every single day. Uh, I go look at Hank Green.

• 1:00:22Speaker 03

  I love Hank Green and I look at him, I go, how many, how many people are helping me make these videos? You know what I mean? Like who's, who's, et cetera. It is a large scale enterprise, you know? If you want to do something that's big and constant and brings in the money and et cetera, and it's YouTube, it's in YouTube's interest to encourage those big channels to get bigger. And so the world that I foresee is sort of, you know, monopolies or consolidation are sort of a law of economics unless you've got a strong antitrust to prevent them. I see YouTube getting even bigger, the bigger channels getting even bigger, right? And then, then getting, them getting big enough to organize. So I mean, like, you know, you said yourself, you're, you know, you're the verge.

• 1:01:05Speaker 03

  You are a YouTube channel and you have a unionized staff. Um, and, uh, we're starting to see that happen in the YouTube space. You're starting to see the staffs of specific channels unionizing. I also think that if you got, uh, you know, if, if those big channels do grow big enough, you know, could the top hundred channels go to YouTube and say, hey, we demand a better split? Yeah, they could. Is that going to benefit all the people who work for the channels? Probably not, but it becomes more of a B to B negotiation, right?

• 1:01:36Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:01:37Speaker 03

  It becomes more like, you know, it becomes more like is the, when the cable channels were arguing against, you know, spectrum and charter and all of those, right? They would have those, those carriage battles, you know, those kinds of wars. It, it becomes that kind of dispute. Um, and, uh, so like, you know, YouTube is creating itself as a cable monopoly on top of the internet. Um, and I, I think that's what the dynamic is. However, the original point of, the point of the creator economy was to like separate labor from each other and in fact, make, make the labor so invisible that even if you're not doing it professionally, you're kind of doing it all the time ambiently, you know?

• 1:02:19Speaker 03

  Like when you open, you know, YouTube or Instagram, how often are you watching someone doing it professionally versus how often are you watching someone do it for fun? Right? Or having one video go viral or, or making one video a week to promote their dentistry business or making one video a week because they hope to go pro, but they actually never will and Instagram hasn't told them, right? Um, that's a huge sort of dark matter, right? Of social media. None of those people will be paid. Those people are truly un-unionizable. Um, and what it'll eventually take is, uh, sorry, the government, like making some regulations around this, right? And, and where we're starting to see that is, uh, if you look how, at how different

• 1:03:04Speaker 03

  states are treating like gig workers, like rideshare drivers, you're starting to see that sort of like action happening. Uh, there've been battles in California, other states as well. They're slow. We're certainly not close to being all the way there. Um, and again, to me, this looks like we're doing the history of the labor movement again. Like the capitalists have consolidated, they figured out a new industrial revolution that has impoverished everybody and had us work for penny wages. And it's going to take, you know, a lot of people organizing, a lot of labor power, uh, government, you know, get it like figuring out that there's a problem and doing something about it. It's going to take decades. Hopefully it won't take violence in the streets, which is what it took, you know,

• 1:03:48Speaker 03

  during the late 19th and early 20th century, as the labor movement, you know, was, was finally working its way towards labor peace. But like so often, when I think about these things, everyone wants to say, oh, it's new, it's new, it's new. Actually, we've gone back to the beginning in so many areas.

• 1:04:04Speaker 00

  One of our great reporters, Mia Sato, has a line in a thesis she's working on, reporting out that influencers are the new gig workers. And there's just a lot of echoes in there.

• 1:04:13Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:04:14Speaker 00

  I want to end by asking about Hollywood. You're, you've come out very strongly against the Paramount Warner Brothers merger. There's an argument in everything you're describing that you should just let Hollywood kill itself. You should just let David Ellison spend all of his dad's money, buying a studio, running CBS News into the ground, that these things are doomed. And there's a version of this where the big fights to stop them from killing themselves so that the writing staff of whatever show on whatever network can persist for a little longer, just slows down the apocalypse. Like you can't fix it. Do you think it's fixable or are you just trying to slow down the apocalypse?

• 1:04:57Speaker 03

  Uh, first of all, I think all effort that you put into fighting this shit is good effort, right? So even if the Paramount Warner merger happens and it just costs them a lot more time and money, well, that'll make the next monopolist think a little bit longer about the next monopoly, right? And, and we are starting to see like a, an epical shift in antitrust. Um, I mean, even, you know, people like Lina Khan and Alvaro Badoya are doing amazing work out of office. You imagine if Democrats take power again, even the Republicans are starting to like do, do antitrust a little bit. So we are making progress there. The most pernicious lie the tech industry tells is about its own inevitability. Oh, oopsie.

• 1:05:42Speaker 03

  Uh, oh, it was just, oh, hey, we just invented something so good that everything you used to like has to die. Oh, sorry. You gotta get with the program. You left in the, no, these people like killed our businesses purposefully, uh, with malintent, right? The first time this ever happened to me was like, you know, the Facebook pivot to video era. When I used to work at College Humor, we had a great business making videos on the internet. Uh, Facebook lied about the traffic that their videos were getting. We pivoted a huge amount of the business to Facebook and it cratered a huge amount of College Humor's business. Um, College Humor later became dropout, which is a wonderful media success story that I'm really proud of. Uh, but you know, it's that kind of thing, right?

• 1:06:24Speaker 03

  It's like, when you look at this shit, half of it is just Mark Zuckerberg lying to people over and over again. So we don't need to accept it as some, as some law of the universe. Um, the last part of it though, is I don't just make this argument because, hey, I miss having union health insurance and I miss hanging out with funny people writing stuff. Of course I miss those things. Of course I'm sad, you know, about the death of the creative class in Hollywood. Um, but also like, I got into this because I like movies. I like television. People still do like movies, like talk to people. They're not like, oh, I never want to see a movie again. They're like, what happened to the good movies?

• 1:07:06Speaker 03

  Go watch, go watch Terminator two with anybody and they'll go, I wish I could see a movie like this now. Oh, why won't they make me this movie anymore? Uh, why, you know, and look at the, by the way, the box office is having a really good year because they made a couple of good fucking movies this year. Big movies and small movies, right? You got the, you got the obsession and the back rooms. You got, you got the Odyssey, even like the fucking Marvel bullshit had a pretty good year. We love this art form still. The movies are like America's, one of America's greatest cultural legacies. It's like the movies, jazz and, uh, soul food, right? Are like the, like three of, uh, America's three biggest contributions to, to world culture.

• 1:07:51Speaker 03

  Like we can't let it die. Uh, and the fact that like this entire art form is very effortful, takes a lot of money. Uh, it doesn't mean that we should never, we should accept a world in which it just doesn't exist because a couple of billionaires wanted to lie and steal from each other. Like we don't need to, we don't need to accept that world. We can, we can in fact have a world that has room for both YouTube and television and the movies. And by the way, plays and novels and all the other art forms that people love. We just have to not let these idiots and assholes destroy themselves, their own and each other's businesses.

• 1:08:36Speaker 00

  Well, I can't think of a better place to end it. Adam, you're going to have to come back soon. This was incredible. Thank you so much for being on Decoder.

• 1:08:41Speaker 03

  Oh, Neil, I thank you so much for having me, man. I had a blast.

• 1:08:46Speaker 00

  I'd like to thank Adam Conover for taking the time to join Decoder and thank you for listening. I hope you enjoyed it. If you'd like to let us know what you thought about this episode or really anything else at all, drop us a line. You can email us at [email protected]. We really do read all the emails. Or you can hit me up directly on threads or Blue Sky. We also have a TikTok and an Instagram, same handle at DecoderPod. They're a lot of fun. Decoder is production of The Verge and part of the boxing podcast network. We'll see you next time.

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