PREVIEW BONUS: Clavicular's crash out and the death of clipping

Are we watching the collapse of short-form video and on the cusp of yet another pivot to (a different kind of) video? Today we’re talking about the rise of livestreaming and what makes it different than the Vines and YouTube Shorts that you know. From Clavicular’s overdose to “nuisance streamers” like Vitaly (better known as “VitalyzdTv”) and banned-from-pretty-much-every-streaming platform Johnny Somali, why do people like to watch this stuff? And how do we adapt to this new era of video content that is maybe also helping cause the downfall of society? Ryan & Grant discuss, as well as how Panic World and Garbage Day will be experimenting with video ourselves. Sponsors This episode is sponsored by Surfshark. If you want to make your online life feel just a little less exposed, go to ⁠https://surfshark.com/panic⁠ and use code PANIC at checkout to get 4 extra months of Surfshark VPN. 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.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:29Speaker 01

  Which would you rather consume for an hour? One, listen to Geese? Two, clavicular livestreams? Three, Iran AI propaganda? Or, uh, yeah, let's, let's leave it at those three.

• 0:47Ryan Broderick?

  When you asked me about what I wanted to talk about today, I threw a bunch of things at you, but did not explain in any way, I think, how they are connected. So we should probably start there. But in terms of your question, if I had to rank them, I would say clavicular clips, then Iran war propaganda, and then listen to Geese. I don't enjoy, uh, like Gen Z burnout music. Uh, I think it's very boring.

• 1:15Speaker 01

  I, I've become a Geese fan.

• 1:17Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, that's not surprising.

• 1:36Ryan Broderick?

  Like you're chasing, you're, you're, you're well into some sort of midlife crisis territory. That makes sense. I, Geese to me, it sounds like a dishwasher that broke or like they're the musical equivalent of when you try on your dad's clothes as a kid, you know, and you like walk around in his big shoes.

• 1:52Speaker 01

  I don't disagree with anything you're saying. I just, it falls on our spectrum. Like there's a lot of, we have a lot of overlap and then you go more pop punk Scotty than I do. And then I'm on like the indie sad boy train. And they're from a lot of those inferences.

• 2:10Ryan Broderick?

  To call them sad, I think is ridiculous. Um, I find nothing emotional about their music. Uh, and I have felt this way about. Every Brooklyn hipster band du jour going back since I can remember. I don't find anything interesting about the kind of like.

• 2:25Speaker 01

  What about Big Thief?

• 2:26Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, I mean, whatever, man.

• 2:27Speaker 01

  Okay, yeah, say.

• 2:28Ryan Broderick?

  What about the Black Keys? Like, all of this stuff is just like very boring to me. They're just, yeah, Geese is fine. I like their, I like their instrumentation. I don't, I don't love the vocals.

• 2:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, I wouldn't expect you to get it. It's all right. I, uh, I have a bonus question for you.

• 2:42Ryan Broderick?

  Uh huh.

• 2:43Speaker 01

  Would you rather listen to an hour of Geese? Or an hour of Lena Dunham's audiobook?

• 2:51Ryan Broderick?

  Lena Dunham's audiobook, absolutely. For the, the stuff that I've been reading from, it is wild. I think she's, look, one of the greatest jump scares of my pop cultural life was finishing the first episode of Industry. And seeing Lena Dunham directed it. And I was like, yeah, Lena Dunham can throw heaters. Like, people forget that, like, she is good. Like, I am, I am a, Lena Dunham is annoying. But that's fine. But she makes really good stuff, I think. I fell off of Girls, though. I should probably finish it.

• 3:22Speaker 01

  I'm Grant Irving. This is Panic World, a show about how the internet warps our minds or culture and eventually reality. And joining me, a man who is not Geese Maxing, a man that is not, uh, sad swaying mogging at the club, Ryan Broderick.

• 3:38Ryan Broderick?

  Who says Geese is sad? I don't understand. What are you talking about? I don't get it.

• 3:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, that is how you probably would think about it. It's all right, though. Like.

• 3:47Ryan Broderick?

  We don't see the emotion there.

• 3:48Speaker 01

  We can just move on.

• 3:49Ryan Broderick?

  The reason I brought up these three things to you and you're like, we should do a bonus, is because I have a theory I've been cooking on. And it is related to much of this. But first, I wanna, I wanna, I wanna take control.

• 4:01Speaker 01

  Shocking.

• 4:02Ryan Broderick?

  Shocking. I'm gonna be showing you things. So first, I wanna show you this incredible document that I've discovered. Can you see what this is?

• 4:10Speaker 01

  If I, if I move real close to my screen.

• 4:12Ryan Broderick?

  So basically, this is Kik users ranked by clips in a month, the amount of clips produced. Uh, Clavicular is 2.2 billion views, 69,000 videos, 1,600 clippers. Nina Drama is 880,000, no, 80, 880 million. Wow, these view counts are insane. These view counts are aggregate across all of the clips, by the way.

• 4:37Speaker 01

  So they're just our contemporaries? That's what you're saying?

• 4:40Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, um, Asmongold is in here, Aiden Ross is in here. We should probably do a video on, uh, we should probably do an episode on him at some point. A lot of these people I've never heard of. I have no idea who Nidordrama is. Oh, Neon, I'm familiar with. He's, he's a scumbag. We should probably talk, do an episode about him. Uh, and, and this is, this is a chart that Clavicular shared himself. And I wanted to start there because I think this is probably the most accurate way to think about popularity on the internet right now. And it's in line with my personal belief that the minute something on the internet has a name, it is effectively already over. So the minute a meme has a name,

• 5:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:26Ryan Broderick?

  the meme is probably dead. The minute there's some sort of strategy or growth hack or like meta that people are doing, I would like to talk about the end. Well, I guess we could talk about the beginning first, but the, but this is, I think the short form video economy is about to collapse. And, uh, I think, I think it is happening as we speak. I think, I think this is all shifting because everyone has figured it out, which is that the key to virality is to pay thousands of people typically in the global south that you find on Discord to make clips of your content and flood video platforms with them. And it's not working anymore. I, I think it's gonna start not working more.

• 6:07Speaker 01

  That does make sense. We should discuss that. We should also discuss Clavicular's crash out and, and I'm curious if this, if those two things are related and, and the state of, of streamers. But my first question is, the idea that like once something has a name, once something is memified, it's already dead? Is that new?

• 6:30Ryan Broderick?

  No, I think it goes back all the way.

• 6:32Speaker 01

  Yeah. Um, I, I, I think it's just like how fast it died is what's changed. The speed at which from meme to, to living thing.

• 6:43Speaker 01

  It's like, it's just getting shorter and shorter. This is, this is actually what I wanted to talk to you so they feed into each other, but we'll save that.

• 6:49Ryan Broderick?

  So Adam and I, our intrepid researcher, were trying to put a date. We like, we become obsessed with figuring out periods of time. Like, when was the first thing that would count as the thing we're talking about? Andrew Tate is probably the first Clipper. In 2022, he creates a moral panic in the UK. Because he has this fan club called Hustlers University, and he's like, making the fan club pay him for the privilege to share his clips on TikTok. And what that does is like very specific to TikTok. So TikTok is obsessed with like trends, or it used to be. I don't, we don't really have enough data yet on US TikTok to know if it's operating the same way.

• 7:31Ryan Broderick?

  But TikTok classic, it wasn't really concerned with like massive viral videos. Like, it wasn't really trying to create like a gangnam style. What it was trying to do was create a trend where everyone would participate in a gangnam style. So Andrew Tate's Clippers accidentally caused Andrew Tate to be recognized by the algorithm as a trend. It sort of recognized like, oh, Andrew Tate is some sort of thing that people are participating in. Cause this algorithm doesn't have any thoughts or feel, it doesn't understand. So.

• 8:02Speaker 01

  Like Andrew Tate was a dance.

• 8:04Ryan Broderick?

  I think that's exactly the right way to think about it. Yeah. And so.

• 8:07Speaker 01

  What would the Tate dance be, Ryan?

• 8:09Ryan Broderick?

  Smoking a hookah while counting money, I guess. Yeah.

• 8:12Speaker 01

  That's common. There's, we come up with an Andrew Tate dance.

• 8:15Ryan Broderick?

  Don't do that. Don't come up with, don't come up with a legend sex trafficker dance. So, yeah, like Andrew Tate gets turned into what is effectively a TikTok dance on a platform level. Meanwhile, X has like no safeguards for this stuff. So, and Instagram seems to prioritize like different, different things. Like, it's not really as trend focused. But this has basically created a landscape where.

• 8:42Ryan Broderick?

  Between 2022 and now, so about four years, clipping has been running the internet and controlling everything we sort of see and think about as whether it's popular or not. It has only been in the last six to nine months that people have finally figured it out, come to a consensus and named it. I don't think that's a short time at all, actually. I think that's like, it took a while. Whereas something like planking, you know, people are doing it, it gets a name and it dies pretty quick. Like, or, um, oh, another video trend like this would have been like during the pandemic when people were like eating food out of toilet bowls and stuff and like pissing people off on Facebook. Like, these trends come around and the really successful ones get a name. And so, yeah, we are in the midst of a clipping apocalypse.

• 9:26Ryan Broderick?

  And I think, once everyone figures out that's the game,

• 9:32Ryan Broderick?

  platforms usually have to step in because if enough people are doing the same trick, it starts to basically be a form of spam.

• 9:40Speaker 01

  What I meant by that was like, by the time everyone is gestr maxing at the club, like by the time it's taken from the real clip and it has reached people, it feels saturated and exhausted. You're saying the clicking phenomena took forever. I'm saying that like, the culture that the clips were creating felt dead upon arrival.

• 10:01Ryan Broderick?

  Oh.

• 10:01Speaker 01

  The, the, the distance between like, oh, did you hear about this new thing? And that thing is already so old, I can't believe you're even talking about that thing still. That feels shorter and shorter in late-stage clipping is, is, is how I, is how I meant it.

• 10:18Ryan Broderick?

  I think that's right. I mean, I definitely think part of the problem is the gamified, like, payola structure of clipping has meant that a lot of things that have no real interest for people, no real juice, are being talked about to a disproportionate degree. So it's creating a lot of moments where everyone's talking about something, but they're like confused as to why. So like you're getting a lot of like incendiary, like offensive, very polarizing content rising to the top right now. It's also making people very paranoid, which is what caused the whole Geese thing this month, um, which sort of culminated in a, I thought a fairly boneheaded take from Wired

• 11:03Ryan Broderick?

  this week about it.

• 11:04Speaker 01

  For, for those who didn't read Garbage Day.

• 11:06Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, basically Wired picked up a story from this musician on Substack who had discovered that this like shadowy digital marketing company called Chaotic Project, Chaotic Good Projects was using bots and, well, maybe not bots, but like fake user-generated content to promote bands. Alex Warren, Sombra, Geese were all listed as artists they'd worked with. My major problem with any company like this is, okay, so you've manipulated the algorithm. Show me how you did it. Show me proof that you did it. There is no proof they did it. This is why I don't believe Cambridge Analytica caused Brexit. I don't believe that any of these companies that claim they can manipulate what you see

• 11:49Ryan Broderick?

  are doing it, because if they were doing it, the platforms themselves have problems doing it. Like the platforms that own the algorithms can't get you to watch Tony Shalhoub's home improvement show on Facebook Watch. So I doubt that like two guys in, in like lower Manhattan are going to figure out how to make Geese sell out stadiums via TikTok clips that come from random accounts. And I also-

• 12:12Speaker 01

  Isn't that also just marketing? Like, like, like in a modern day, like, isn't that being like, they made this commercial on purpose?

• 12:19Ryan Broderick?

  So I think it's a fine take that like, oh, this is just how marketing works. But I, I, I have friends in the ad world and sort of the marketing world and like, I get in fights with them all the time where I'm like, you're describing fraud. And they're like, yes, we know. They're like, the entire industry runs on fraud. And so whenever moments like this happen, I would like to take some time to be like, you're all committing fraud.

• 12:41Speaker 01

  You could say this about every 824 movie. You know, there, there's like a system in place, like, and, and it's to create buzz and to create conversation. It felt weird for, I guess maybe it's because they're actually, they're like a rock band that the idea of selling out came back for, for one brief moment.

• 12:59Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, there are all kinds of weird digital marketing campaigns running around the internet all the time. And sometimes people discover that they exist and they're like, that's funny, that's cool, you tricked us. And sometimes they're pissed about it. And sometimes these digital marketing campaigns can work, like- The Grimace Shake on TikTok, which from what I understand was like pretty organic, actually. And I think nine times out of 10, these marketing campaigns sort of have to rely on the organic feedback of the audience actually playing along.

• 13:30Speaker 01

  So like the idea or the product has to actually be good. That's the, that's the real trick.

• 13:34Ryan Broderick?

  I would refrain. So Adam used that term too. I would refrain from saying good. Because I just don't think.

• 13:40Speaker 01

  I don't, I don't, I don't want to be actually, now that I'm thinking about it, I don't want to be like, oh great, so you think this is good? There has to be juice. There has to be.

• 13:47Ryan Broderick?

  There has to be something there. There has to be something there. That's true. And so, yeah, like, also like Geese is a nepo baby band that was getting write-ups in the Rolling Stone and New York Times, like when they were in high school. They're a very New York hipster band. Like their parents are rich. Like this, that's the secret.

• 14:05Speaker 01

  Do you know the funniest part about this, about your digs that you didn't know you were taking at me about Geese? It's only because on a previous bonus, I was like, you know, because my first reaction was like eye roll, Geese and same with Turnstile. And you made fun of me for being like, oh, of course you don't. And I was like, you know what? I don't want to be somebody who just because something is new and it reminds me of other things, I immediately dismiss it. So for both Turnstile and Geese, I was like, let me try to have an open mind and actually sit with this. Because you know, I'd rather be a person who likes more things and likes less things. So it was actually your bullying the first time that got that, that put me on the stress.

• 14:43Ryan Broderick?

  I think you should engage with culture. I think, I think everyone who has that thing of like, oh, there's too much. No, I can't like.

• 14:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. I just didn't want to be that.

• 14:52Ryan Broderick?

  Engage with it. But I have engaged with Geese. I, I find them lacking. In terms of Turnstile, I find them a little boring.

• 14:59Speaker 01

  I like the first album.

• 15:00Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, I think it's a little boring. If you, if you like Turnstile, sort of like, I've been trying to think of a word for this, this like, these like, kind of like Rage Against the Machines without the distortion kind of bands.

• 15:13Speaker 01

  Maybe this is indicting of Turnstile. Turnstile's first album is actually really good for me to write our Panic World scripts to. It's not music I'm like jamming out to, but.

• 15:25Speaker 01

  It gives me a lot of energy when I'm thinking about how many times Ayla has showered.

• 15:33Ryan Broderick?

  You know, and like, that's fine.

• 15:38Ryan Broderick?

  Taco Bell. Like, they're fine. If you, if you want like a band that I think is a little more interesting doing some of our things is Eka Vandal. A big, big fan of Eka Vandal.

• 15:47Speaker 01

  Do they wear stupid pants? It seems to be a-

• 15:49Ryan Broderick?

  No, she is very cool. So it's a, it's a woman-fronted kind of turnstile-like band. I, I like them. Alright, I'll edit that out. So the point is, like, these marketing campaigns, they can work, but there has to be something there for them to work. But there's not even proof that I can find that Chaotic Good Projects, like, did any successful marketing for Geese. And Rachel Carton, who's great, she's a social media analyst, writes a great newsletter. She found a bunch of accounts that were associated with Geese, and they're awful. Like, no one's watching them. And once you like, this, this is the thing that like, all of these kind of journalistic institutions, when they write about this stuff, like, they don't ask what, to me, would be the most important question, which is, "May I see it?"

• 16:34Ryan Broderick?

  It's not, "Are you doing this?" It's, "What impact is this having?" Or just, "Let me see it." Like, okay, so like, you're making- Especially if you're gonna call something a psyop. Yeah, if, "Can I look at the numbers and see if this has done anything?" And, and I think the funnier story is that like, you know, Partisan Records or whoever's management for Geese or whatever, was like, "We're gonna pay for this." That's so lame. Like, that to me is like, disqualifyingly lame. I would sue my label if I found out that they were doing that. If I was a band like Geese. And the fact that like, everyone involved thought it would work, is, I think, a tremendous indictment of the, of what you called "late-stage clipping," with this idea that short-form video is both so important and so meaningless, that we're just gonna Astro-Terfit.

• 17:20Speaker 01

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• 18:02Speaker 01

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• 18:43Speaker 01

  Again, that's surfshark.com/panic, you know, like the show. It also comes with a risk-free 30-day money-back guarantee, and the link and code are in the show description. Now, back to the story, because unfortunately, the internet is only getting weirder. I feel seen.

• 19:01Speaker 01

  We've been having this conversation internally. We have. I mean, endlessly, where it's like, does this make us money?

• 19:10Speaker 01

  Probably not. Does this convert to actual people listening to the thing? Meh, probably not. But does it like show that you exist?

• 19:22Ryan Broderick?

  Okay, let's talk about this because we, yeah, we, you and I have been talking about this probably for six to nine months now, which is that like-

• 19:28Speaker 01

  It's been awesome. I've been loving every moment of it.

• 19:30Ryan Broderick?

  Panic World and Garbage Day do not have a, an aggressive short form video presence. We have a YouTube channel that is worked on by Courier and us. Uh, do I have seven? No, okay. Uh, I noticed the other day that we did an entire episode and you didn't tell me I had a giant black thing on my tooth the whole time. So I looked like asthma gold. Um, so we have that and there's an Instagram account, but the Instagram account doesn't really get a lot of traction because Instagram is a nightmare. And over the last like, uh, two or three months, I started an experiment with Garbage Day where I was like, we're gonna just shotgun blast short form videos on every major platform. And I learned a lot.

• 20:14Ryan Broderick?

  And it was partly to see if we could get any traction on them. And it was partly to write about it and sort of understand the state of short form video right now. And just to put things in perspective, I have gone very, very viral on video platforms in the past. My top video of all time is 15 million views. And it's where I went to a store and I bought the Supreme brick. You remember that? The brick?

• 20:34Speaker 01

  No, not at all.

• 20:35Ryan Broderick?

  They sold a brick and I-

• 20:36Speaker 01

  You started talking about going viral and I honestly started thinking about something different, but keep going.

• 20:40Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah. So anyway, this is all to say that like I have done, I have done this dance before in a different era. So I was like, what is this era like? We had one big hit across like the couple, like the month or two that we were trying it, which was a TikTok. It did 129,000 views and it was about, um, a laboratory that put like a brain inside of a computer and then taught the brain to play Doom. And we got a bunch of strikes from different platforms. Like TikTok is, was very aggressive to us and kept like blocking our videos. Um, and we also realized pretty quickly that we got penalized for any breaks we were taking. So I believe in a normal work week,

• 21:20Ryan Broderick?

  platforms do not. So we didn't have, we didn't have content ready to go on the weekend and we were penalized pretty heavily. And we noticed that when you started posting more, it would start, you would start getting more views again. And I don't think it's an accident that the brain video that did, you know, the best of the batch. Was after like a consistent run of videos and they will also penalize you for underperforming videos. If you deviate from your niche, or you experiment, or you do anything other than just like make fucking consistent level slop, it will punish you. And so the other problem, as you talked about, is that these don't make any money.

• 21:59Ryan Broderick?

  They require a lot of work. They don't have any downstream effects in terms of our owned audiences. So like, I, you know, Garbage Day and Panic World are both projects where we own the ability to directly talk to our audience. That is important to me and you, and I think it's important to our business. These platforms do not want that to exist. And so you're not going to get a massive influx of readers from your TikTok to your newsletter. You have these two completely inhospitable worlds, and one of them is extremely time consuming and extremely expensive and makes no money, and the other does. So-

• 22:38Speaker 01

  But it's like, as was written in GQ, you matter if your clips are seen. Like, there's not a way to express to larger media apparatuses now and, and like culture in general being like, people really love the thing that we're doing. We have people who actually give a shit about, about the, about the product. Thank you. And I, and, and if you're neutral on it, also thank you. But like, the currency that translates is this no money and actually like, no actual audience gives a shit about you thing, which is short form views. It's kind of like, like, uh, like going to a Chuck E. Cheese and being like, I'm so rich in Chuck E. Cheese two tokens, but you can't translate it outside of there.

• 23:22Ryan Broderick?

  Yes, but I think there's a specific reason that is maybe not totally evident to the average person why that's happening. I watched the first steps to how we got here happen, which is, okay, it went like this. In the early 2010s, every journalist was being told that they should make a Twitter account because it was perfect for journalists. Quick, easy, runs on your phone, hurricanes- Sandy was sort of the moment where New York media realized that like Twitter was really useful because they could report directly to the app. Especially in that moment when a lot of newsrooms lost their servers to flooding. Or people couldn't get into the office or whatever. So you had this, you had this moment at some point between Occupy Wall Street and Hurricane Sandy where like New York media was like, we're on Twitter.

• 24:08Ryan Broderick?

  And then over the course of the early first half of the 2010s. LA started to get onto Twitter because writers could write there and that's when you started to get like the Twitter accounts to become like TV show deals. Which was sort of a replacement for the Tumblr blogs that got book deals. For a brief moment, basically leading up to the Trump candidacy, you get. Not just the new writers, the new artists, the new creatives on Twitter, you get their bosses on Twitter.

• 24:39Ryan Broderick?

  This starts to have a really bad, bad social impact in the later half of the decade because. The newer writers, younger creatives, they were able to say, oh, like, yeah, whatever. I'm like pretty platform literate. I can like figure out TikTok. I can figure out Instagram. I can use Reddit and bounce around and sort of understand the internet and in its complexity. The bosses could not. Cause you're never gonna get a website as easy and simple to use as Twitter. Sure. And so I spent the majority of my career. In newsrooms, either explaining something that was happening on Twitter to a boss.

• 25:18Ryan Broderick?

  Or having a boss assign me something to do based on what they saw on Twitter. I no longer work in newsrooms, but from what I've heard. Is that after Elon Musk bought Twitter. Those bosses have stayed. They might not be posting, but the number one complaint I'm hearing from, from creatives, but specifically journalists. Working in newsrooms right now is that their bosses are radicalized to a, their Gen X bosses have had their brains completely melted. And once you understand that like the arbiter, the, the few remaining gatekeepers and arbiters of how culture works. Are watching clavicular clips on X all day and have no fucking idea what they're looking at or what it means or what it doesn't mean.

• 26:03Ryan Broderick?

  Everything makes sense. Everything.

• 26:06Speaker 01

  So it's like, these clips are hollow. Short form video is crashing and burning. It is reached an exhausting place. And it is yielding very little return for 99.9% of people. But if you are a clavicular who is able to get into the imagination of the few gatekeepers who are, don't realize that they are radicalized and still on, because they're still on Twitter. And they then think that this has cultural relevance. That's how someone like him gets like extremely propped up. Would you argue that it's like, he's the only person that short form video is like still working for?

• 26:50Speaker 01

  Or a clavicular like figure?

• 26:52Ryan Broderick?

  So like, for instance, like I had, I had questions asked about, um, like by, like a media industry kind of person about I Show Speed. Cause they had seen I Show Speed's clips of him like in China and Africa, which are awesome. And I love I Show Speed, especially, I think I've talked about how funny I think white speed is. The, his villain that shows up in random places and chases him around. The whole clipping industry.

• 27:17Speaker 01

  Do you think that's kayfabe?

• 27:18Ryan Broderick?

  Oh, you think this random white guy just like appeared in rural Africa out of nowhere?

• 27:23Speaker 01

  I want to believe, Ryan.

• 27:24Ryan Broderick?

  I do want to believe it.

• 27:25Speaker 01

  I want to believe that he is, that he is like, like, there's like, like he keeps like infiltrating I Show Speed's assistants. And they're like, and he still gets the tips broken to him.

• 27:35Ryan Broderick?

  I mean, we, after, after the jump to the paywall, we can talk about how short form videos turned the entire world into WWE. And that's having some, some pretty severe consequences to society. If you ask people like Vitali or Johnny Somali this week, but we'll get there. The, the last point I want to make here on the free side of things is the views that you're seeing on these short form clips do not have to reflect anything. Because the point is to legitimize whoever is putting them out. And the fact that they are not being put out by themselves anymore is both a platform hack. Like as in like, it's not like the clavicular account is where you're watching clavicular.

• 28:16Ryan Broderick?

  You're watching it via 19 Nigerian guys chopping it up and putting it on every platform for like cents on the dollar. Uh, you know, in their little Discord chat. That is. A reflection of how the platforms are penalizing the follower metric. Like platforms do not want followers anymore. They want, they want a Netflix style experience where you just refresh the feed and you don't follow any accounts. And so they're killing big follower accounts and they're freezing large follower accounts out because they're too powerful. It's classic, classic platform behavior.

• 28:49Speaker 01

  So then you need 19 accounts that are not that big, but are all spamming the different clips versus one hub.

• 28:56Ryan Broderick?

  You need the hub, but you need the hub off algorithm. So like, I mean, that's why the podcast, that's why podcasting was so early to clipping, was because the podcast is the hub, the live stream is the hub. In the, in the music industry, the album is the hub, the Spotify streams are the hub. Like you need a place to start because then, let's do this. You and I are a band and we put out a, a stream for our new album. We play all the music and we invite some Instagram baddies over and the, and things get a little spicy with the Instagram baddies. And everyone's like, oh man, I can't believe Grant threw up on the Instagram baddie. Crazy moment.

• 29:40Ryan Broderick?

  And then I pay 15 guys in Nigeria that I found on Discord to clip the moment of you throwing up on the Instagram baddie. You need that initial stream though, because the hope is that with those 15 guys posting clips, people go and find the stream and then make their own clips out of it and watch other streams.

• 29:58Speaker 01

  Right. It's like, there was only a hundred people at the show, but all of them are talking about it. This is, we've talked a lot about like, how cool doesn't exist anymore, right? And like, by your stream being the new CBGBs, that's the gatekeep. I was there first. I was there before it was a clip.

• 30:17Ryan Broderick?

  I don't know if our audience knows about the big spreadsheet. Our researcher Adam's big spreadsheet of all of his research, which is so useful. Hassan did a stream a month ago on YouTube that has 596,000 views. That would place him at sort of like the top of Twitch's streamers.

• 30:36Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 30:36Ryan Broderick?

  Uh, for comparison, Ebi, a Spanish streamer in March, was the most watched stream on Twitch with 593,000 views. Clavicular is doing around 100 to 120,000 views, with the exception of his stream last night after his overdose, where he went to a Miami nightclub to open it up immediately after getting out of the hospital, and that has close to 300,000 views. So he is like, so the point is that Clavicular is like, got probably about one-fifth the audience of Hassan. And Hassan has actually, up until recently, been one of the smaller streamers on Twitch.

• 31:11Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 31:12Ryan Broderick?

  These audiences, though, don't really matter because like Hassan is everywhere.

• 31:16Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 31:16Ryan Broderick?

  People have full-on Hassan derangement syndrome because short-form clips create this feeling that whatever's happening over there that you're not watching must be a big deal. That's the point.

• 31:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, especially with X being broken, where if you watch one video for 10 seconds, it assumes that is all that you want, as long as it has an endless pile of that shit.

• 31:40Ryan Broderick?

  Exactly.

• 31:40Speaker 01

  We should, we should, we should talk about what kind of behavior this has incentivized.

• 31:44Ryan Broderick?

  Last night after his overdose, Clavicular assembled all the different jesters to dance at the club with him.

• 31:51Speaker 01

  As like a one last for Vahala, like, because didn't he announce that he's no longer streaming? I downloaded Kalshi to see if we could place a bet about his return to streaming, and it is not yet up.

• 32:02Ryan Broderick?

  We should probably update our editorial guidelines about that, huh? Probably time to have a-

• 32:07Speaker 01

  I downloaded it for the show.

• 32:09Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, I mean, that's fine.

• 32:10Speaker 01

  This was, I figured like, you know, maybe the, maybe the Patreon members could get in on it, and like, we could all like, place one big bet on like, when we think that, that Clavicular will come back.

• 32:19Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, he danced with Blueface and Baby Alien and all the other jesters at the club last night.

• 32:24Speaker 01

  So should we get a paywall?

• 32:26Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, we're gonna be talking about Clavicular, Johnny Tsunami, uh, Clavicular, Johnny Somali, not Johnny Tsunami.

• 32:33Speaker 01

  That's a better name.

• 32:34Ryan Broderick?

  Well, Johnny Tsunami is a Disney Channel original movie about a kid who serves.

• 32:39Speaker 01

  That makes sense.

• 32:40Ryan Broderick?

  Johnny Somali is a sex offender who's going to a hard labor prison camp in South Korea.

• 32:45Speaker 01

  I was more of a So Weird fan.

• 32:47Ryan Broderick?

  So Weird?

• 32:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, you don't remember that show?

• 32:50Ryan Broderick?

  Uh-uh.

• 32:50Speaker 01

  It's like a-

• 32:51Ryan Broderick?

  It may have been after my time watching-

• 32:53Speaker 01

  We're the same age. Uh, it is-

• 32:55Ryan Broderick?

  I thought you were younger.

• 32:56Speaker 01

  I'm seven months younger than you. Uh-

• 32:59Ryan Broderick?

  Oh, I didn't have cable till I was 12, so I missed so weird. This is before my time.

• 33:03Speaker 01

  I saw the TV glow was kind of like nodding to it at times.

• 33:06Ryan Broderick?

  Uh, okay. Uh, yeah, so we're talking about Johnny Somali, Levicular's overdose, Vitale's whole To Catch a Predator thing, and the sort of like general downfall of society that is being caused by live streaming, but also possibly we'll be talking, I might make the argument that I've been sitting on for a little bit, that live streaming is actually the future, and we have to figure out like what that means.

• 33:31Speaker 01

  So wait, wait, short form is over and live streaming is the future?

• 33:35Ryan Broderick?

  Uh, we'll get there. I have very conflicting thoughts about this.

• 33:40Speaker 01

  Patreon.com/panicworld, and now for you Apple heads on Courier Plus's network. If you go to Courier Plus, you will get, uh, all the bonus material, uh, from us and from other, and from their other stuff. Patreon.com/panicworld, Courier Plus, Apple. Bye.

• 33:58Ryan Broderick?

  Thank you. I love you.