lonelygirl15 and when lies could be fun

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

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

• 0:01Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome? That's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required. Compatibility and availability varies 18 plus.

• 0:26Ryan Broderick?

  Let's kick things off with a simple question for you, Willa. How much better has the internet made society? Like, you know, on a scale like one being pretty good to 10 being great, you know?

• 0:41Speaker 02

  I have to tell you, like, my honest gut reaction is like zero, but I know that's not true. You know, like, I know that's not true. But that is, like, that's my instinct, like, my feel is like I'm kind of ready to be full of it. Yeah, I don't know. It's like 50/50.

• 0:58Ryan Broderick?

  I actually have the same feeling where like my knee-jerk millennial reaction is like, "Let's all burn it down." But then I'm like, I did order dinner on my phone last night and it like came.

• 1:12Speaker 02

  No, but it's that shit that makes me be like, "It's really bad." Because it's like, that is so, we could, sorry, you could order dinner on your phone last night. Like, you could have ordered dinner to your home by picking up the telephone, like, anytime in the last 50 years. It's not that big a deal.

• 1:24Ryan Broderick?

  But I paid over the phone, too.

• 1:26Speaker 02

  It's true. Oh, right, like, all these things that, like, the internet did make a bunch of things that weren't very hard before even easier.

• 1:49Speaker 02

  All the things that are kind about how humans relate to each other, but I'm really skeptical about a lot of them.

• 1:54Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, thinking about it, last night I had like a very online evening that like wouldn't have been possible 30 years ago, where I decided I wanted to watch. All of the new girl from the start.

• 2:04Speaker 02

  Yes, one does.

• 2:04Ryan Broderick?

  And then order food and I didn't have any cash. And like, all of that was just doable from my couch, which is maybe not a good thing now that I think about it. But the reason I ask is because today we are going back in time. We're going to possibly, one could argue, the birth of our current era. We're going to be looking back at like, one of the earliest YouTube sensations. It's a subject that we have touched on very briefly in one of our very early episodes. I'm very excited to kind of circle back around. But first, my name is Ryan Broderick. This is Panic World, a show about how the internet works our minds, our culture, and eventually, reality. My personal kidnapped cam girl, our producer, Grant Irving, will sometimes jump in from time to time to say hello, ask a few questions.

• 2:46Ryan Broderick?

  And our guest today is Willa Paskin from Decoder Ring. Welcome to the show.

• 2:51Speaker 02

  Thank you for having me. I'm really actually excited and interested to be here. I'm excited to hear about this.

• 2:56Ryan Broderick?

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

• 3:17Speaker 02

  Okay, so I've actually tried really hard not to be spoiled about this.

• 3:21Ryan Broderick?

  Okay.

• 3:22Speaker 02

  Knowing we're having this conversation, and I'm genuinely know very little. I remember like, the name Lonely Girl 15, and I like, are we trying not to spoil listeners too? Like, should I say?

• 3:32Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, you know, not a hard and fast rule. You know, look, listeners, you've had 20 years to understand what happened here. But yeah, I guess we should tease it.

• 3:42Speaker 02

  I'll sidestep the thing that is, so basically, like, I knew it was an internet phenomenon, like, in the 2000s. I was blogging, like, at Vulture. I was on the internet a lot then. I read BuzzFeed. So like, I was like, aware of what that was, and an image of a woman flashed into my mind, like, on a YouTube video. But that honestly was like...

• 4:02Speaker 02

  Almost it? Do you know what I mean? Like, early viral phenomenon having to do with, like, a vlogger.

• 4:10Ryan Broderick?

  Great.

• 4:10Speaker 02

  Kind of like, that was like, what I, what I really called to mind.

• 4:15Ryan Broderick?

  So I ask this of our guests sometimes, just to kind of orient them in the space here. So like, what would you say is like, the first internet thing that you came across where you're like, "Wow, that's like, that's wild." Like, what's your sort of earliest memories of?

• 4:28Speaker 02

  I honestly don't know that like, I can do that. Like, I used like, I remember like, being in AOL chatrooms, like in-

• 4:36Ryan Broderick?

  Sure.

• 4:37Speaker 02

  In the 90s, like as a, in middle school and high school, and being like, "That's crazy." I remember, honestly, I remember not being understa- like, I had AOL. Like, not being able to understand like, how you got to the internet? Do you remember that? Like, it was like, because, because like, there weren't websites? Like, there weren't, um, like, web crawlers? There, there, I mean, it was called a web crawler, but there wasn't like, a browser? There was no internet browser? So like, you had to go through the portal of AOL? I was like, there's a whole, I just literally like, didn't understand. I mean, I didn't care, I wasn't, I wasn't that old, none of my friends weren't there. But I, I just remember being like, "Oh, everyone says there's all this cool stuff on it, but I literally don't know how to find it." That seems fine right now, you know?

• 5:16Ryan Broderick?

  You just unlocked like, a memory of mine that I think I totally forgot about, which was like, I want to say the very early 2000s. I don't think I totally understood that the internet, like, what it was. I thought it was something that just like, lived at school. I think. And then by the time like AOL and Semesher came around, I, I didn't understand that that was also the internet that I was using on like, Google or my browser.

• 5:43Speaker 02

  Well, they all seem very different, you know, honestly. You know, and I'm a little older than you, so I graduated high school in 1999. So like, I honestly, so the thing that I was like, was Napster. Like, I spent my entire freshman year like, running up and down the hallway because I would burn people's CDs, load them into Napster, and then go back to my computer to find, do you know what I mean? Like, just file share, like, with access to their full CD collection? And I, like, that was incre- I, that, I loved that. That was amazing.

• 6:12Ryan Broderick?

  I had a really big breakthrough moment with music piracy and the internet where, like, for years, I, I didn't totally understand that human beings were putting stuff on Kazaa or Kazaa. And then I feel like in like the late 2000s, I met a guy, just happened to meet a guy at a Comic Con. And I was working as like a little, as a young reporter and I was interviewing him and he mentioned a video he made and uploaded to Kazaa and I was like, I've seen that video. And it was like this thing where I was like, whoa, like, imagine meeting the guy who like mislabeled your favorite song on LimeWire like years later, like mind blowing.

• 6:51Speaker 02

  No, can I, so like in a true, like, one day if I bet to be a millionaire, like I'm gonna do this, which is that my computer in college just died, like when I was a junior, it just completely conked out. I sent it to TechServe and they were like, this is gonna cost thousands of dollars and we're not sure we can get anything back. But on it was like all the Napster files. You know, like, including like a couple songs that were just like exactly like mislabeled or like some random like, just songs that aren't kind of everywhere, only because they were like a bootleg of some concert thing, you know what I mean? And I'm like, I miss them. And also because I don't even remember them. And then sometimes a song comes on, you know, like when you have mixes and like the song cues the next song. So sometimes I'll be like, that song, I haven't heard that other song that came after this in like years.

• 7:33Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, every once in a while Spotify like seems to re, like reverse engineer my music taste from 20 years ago in the order it would have been on my iPod and it's kind of spooky. Where it's like, how did you, like, it kind of knew, right? So this is, this is great. This is the, this is the era that we're talking about today. This is, this is where this all takes place. And just to orient us even further, we are talking about basically one year after YouTube launches. YouTube launches in 2005. The first video is of course, me at the zoo, which is a guy in front of a, I think it's an elephant going to the bathroom. And it becomes the, you know, the largest entertainment platform in human history. Roughly a year later, 2006, the YouTube account LonelyGirl15 uploads its first video.

• 8:16Ryan Broderick?

  And what's really clever about this is that the first video, which I didn't realize, is a response video. Do you remember like the age of response, like people would like make a YouTube video to talk to another YouTube user?

• 8:28Speaker 02

  Don't they still do that?

• 8:29Ryan Broderick?

  Kind of, less and less.

• 8:31Speaker 02

  I feel like, wasn't there like a huge makeup world scandal, like in the last couple years, that was just like, everyone just responding?

• 8:40Ryan Broderick?

  Yes, it was, in fact, literally, the week that we're recording this, or the month we're recording this is really fascinating to talk about this. The YouTube got rid of the trending page this month, December 2025. So that's how that used to work, is that basically all the makeup artists and like drama channels figured out that if they talked to each other and about each other, they could game the trending page. And the trending page is now gone. So

• 9:04Speaker 02

  Why is the trending page gone, Ryan?

• 9:06Ryan Broderick?

  My theory is that YouTube does not want you to follow accounts anymore. They want to be more like Netflix. So, because that's who their main competitor is.

• 9:16Speaker 02

  Such bullshit for all of us who make stuff. What?

• 9:18Ryan Broderick?

  In fact, the newest redesign of YouTube has made it like, especially on TVs, almost impossible to like click to a person's channel. It's like two or three clicks when it used to be one. So that's my

• 9:28Speaker 02

  Well, so it's also more like TikTok then in a way.

• 9:30Ryan Broderick?

  Well, I think the future of TikTok is no follower account, follower counts either. I think all of these platforms know that like users becoming powerful is bad for them. So it's like, they want you to make content but not reap the benefits from it.

• 9:43Speaker 03

  But I, I go to Netflix to watch a show I want to watch.

• 9:47Ryan Broderick?

  I've been watching this guy named Jude renovate his house in the north of Scotland all winter. And I don't follow Jude, but Jude's videos pop up and I watch them every night. So, you know.

• 9:57Speaker 03

  Sidebar, Ryan says these things all the time. And my thought is, like, what you guys don't know is that on Discord, he's always like, I'm so busy, I'm so busy.

• 10:05Speaker 02

  I'm so busy watching Jude make his house in northern Scotland.

• 10:08Ryan Broderick?

  Sorry, sorry. I'm so busy during the day so that I can enjoy my time. I don't want to be involved in New York media rat race, Grant.

• 10:15Speaker 02

  He doesn't sleep. He just watches New Girl.

• 10:18Ryan Broderick?

  No, Grant's the one where like Grant gets two days of vacation and then he's like, hey, I've been thinking about work. And I'm like, I'm gonna call the police if you call my phone. Okay, so Wired writes of

• 10:27Speaker 02

  Too many, there was too many takes. I gotta just let it go.

• 10:30Ryan Broderick?

  Wired writes of LonelyGirl15 at the time, "One of the most popular vloggers on YouTube at the time was a teen user named Emily, who had tired of all the attention after some users posted disparaging remarks. One called her an attention whore, the other called her a video slut. She decided to quit vlogging, but a few weeks later, she uploaded a new video quipping that she'd taken a break because dinosaurs had a Attacked her house. A day or two after that, a new user named LonelyGirl15 posted an animated scene of a dinosaur stomping on a house, intercut with Emily's original videos. Emily's fans loved it and offered a deluge of comments giving LonelyGirl15 instant cred. I had totally forgotten this entire dimension of the story, or maybe even never knew it, that like, even back then, you needed the network effect of another popular user to jumpstart a channel.

• 11:14Speaker 02

  But what's also kind of incredible is that they knew that already.

• 11:17Ryan Broderick?

  Right.

• 11:18Speaker 02

  It's wild that's the case, but that like, LonelyGirl15 was so savvy that they're like, this will help, like, and that's like the savviness that promoting people did not come for years. I mean,

• 11:29Ryan Broderick?

  There are companies around the world that are still like doing like, you know, PowerPoint presentations about like, here's how you go viral kind of thing. Yeah. So teen girls on YouTube go nuts for this. June 16 of that year.

• 11:41Speaker 02

  Can I just ask a question, Ryan?

• 11:42Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 11:43Speaker 02

  So it's 2006. Like, how many teen girls are on YouTube? Do you like, like, how big is YouTube in 2006?

• 11:52Ryan Broderick?

  So YouTube obviously is much smaller, but I can pull that up.

• 11:57Speaker 03

  While you're looking it up, we'll see from a lot of the articles that I pulled for this, they make an assumption about the, about LonelyGirl15's audience, and I think is fundamentally wrong.

• 12:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's like, it's probably, okay. Yeah, yeah. Like, maybe it's men.

• 12:10Speaker 03

  But like, but like, I would, I would assume now it was all teenage girls. They do not think so.

• 12:16Speaker 02

  They think it's all like creepy men.

• 12:18Speaker 03

  If you look at the content and you're talking about basically a lo-fi CW show, that is like, more teenage girls.

• 12:24Ryan Broderick?

  I also just know anecdotally, I've spoken to a lot of women my age who were watching YouTube and they're watching other young girls on YouTube. So, okay, to put this in perspective, YouTube hits a million views on a video for the first time in 2005, at the very end. And so that, so it's a Nike ad featuring Ronaldinho.

• 12:47Speaker 02

  And that like wasn't, okay, okay.

• 12:49Ryan Broderick?

  So the whole idea for LonelyGirl15 is that she's vlogging about her life. 16-year-old named Bree. She got her help from her friend, Daniel, and they're vlogging about their life. The channel basically responds to every single comment they get, which is like another really cool network effect hack. And it gets popular very, very quickly. And then Grant is gonna pull up two videos to kind of show you what they're doing here.

• 13:11Speaker 04

  Hi, guys. Um, so this is my first video blog. My name is Bree. I'm 16. Um, I don't really want to tell you where I live because you could stalk me.

• 13:29Speaker 04

  Yeah. Um, well, what you need to know about my town is that it's really boring. Like, really boring. That's probably why I spend so much time on my computer. I'm a dork.

• 13:40Ryan Broderick?

  So I want to compare that video to this other video, which comes out about three years later from another user, one we've talked about on the show before. Are you familiar with Boxi, Willa?

• 13:53Speaker 02

  No. Maybe?

• 13:54Speaker 05

  Okay, hi. So my name is Boxi and, um, it's been a while since I made a new video. So I decided that because of recent events that I could make a new video.

• 14:07Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, so this video is a six minutes of this. Um, and so both of these videos are very indicative of a style at the end of 2000s that was very popular, particularly with teenage girls on YouTube. And what they would do, they would link to them on MySpace. So like what you, what you would do is you'd make a video, you know, introducing yourself. People would leave you comments and then you would answer those comments and then spit them back out into MySpace. And I think that like very importantly made LonelyGirl15 feel very authentic because she was just sort of copying the same style of video that like a lot of other girls seemingly her age were doing online.

• 14:43Speaker 02

  Well, weirdly, she wasn't even copying them. Like, she was before them.

• 14:47Ryan Broderick?

  Well, sort of.

• 14:48Speaker 02

  I mean, I'm not saying, I'm not saying there wasn't examples of it, but like it would become more and more popular after her. So like, I mean, to the point about like... You know, knowing to see the video on some, as a response video. It's like she's, the people doing it, like understood something about what it was supposed to look like. That was

• 15:07Ryan Broderick?

  Right.

• 15:08Speaker 02

  Other people would like, they tapped into that very quickly.

• 15:11Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, it's, it's like very impressive actually, how fast sort of like these formats popped up and, and how, once again authentically Lonely Girl 15's felt, uh, and throughout all the video.

• 15:20Speaker 02

  I would just say, so like I have an eight and a 10 year old, and I think if you gave my 10 year old a camera, like she would do that. Just like, it's not, like, I mean, not, you know, like less makeup maybe, but like, that is, that is like, it's sort of like what you would do.

• 15:38Ryan Broderick?

  Totally.

• 15:39Speaker 02

  If you were just so, in that way, you know?

• 15:42Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, no, I think you're exactly right. And as she's doing these videos, there's like the beginning hints of a larger story at play, largely focusing around the romantic tension between her and this guy Daniel that's helping her with the channel. And so people latch on to that, and it all seems authentic because it's on multiple platforms. Along with the videos they are commenting on, they're also commenting on each other's MySpaces. But early on, we learn they can't be more than friends because Bree's parents are very religious. All of this is happening in the span of like, uh, a month.

• 16:17Speaker 02

  And like, how popular are, like, how many videos is she making? Like, how popular are they, like, before anyone, anyone's starting to suspect?

• 16:26Speaker 03

  It was getting to around 50k downloads, and then once she started talking about like, how her parents are like overcontrolling because of their religion, she started getting 100k followers. So like, they were able to sort of like tailor make the content, like as they were seeing what was working, that people liked more the religious stuff versus the, like, the goofy stuff and the like, the forlorn love stuff, they just sort of fed into that.

• 16:48Ryan Broderick?

  But also to answer your question, like, we're talking the span of like, five or six videos across a month.

• 16:53Speaker 02

  Oh, really?

• 16:54Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 16:54Speaker 02

  Like, people are just like all in on five or six videos, they don't need much.

• 16:58Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, so like she, her first one is, uh, Pay to the Order of, of, of, of, which is that Emily girl.

• 17:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 17:03Ryan Broderick?

  Um, and she responds, that launches the channel. And then she does like another response video to Emily. And then she starts her first vlog, which she's calling blogs at the time. She talks about, uh, like the stuff around her room, she's like doing kind of like teen girl stuff.

• 17:20Ryan Broderick?

  The idea about like her parents like being awful, that appears around like, let's call it episode or video eight. By the time we get to like the dozenth video, we're in July, which is when people start speculating that this is all fake. So she's, she's done barely a dozen videos before people start calling bullshit on it.

• 17:41Speaker 02

  And how long are they? Like?

• 17:42Ryan Broderick?

  Five minutes at the most, but like, uh, most of them are under two minutes.

• 17:48Speaker 02

  Just like up to before, so 12 videos in, like, and you, and there's all this other stuff going on on MySpace or like, how much other stuff is going on on MySpace and Live Journal? Like, is it a lot?

• 17:57Ryan Broderick?

  Like in terms of chatter?

• 17:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, like, is it, like, is it a bit? Or is it like, people are really?

• 18:04Ryan Broderick?

  Well, no, it, people are like invested in, because you have to figure like, there aren't a lot of people on YouTube and there are not a lot of people consistently

• 18:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 18:13Ryan Broderick?

  Talking to YouTube's audience. It's, at this point, it's still the website that you would like, upload what would have been America's Funniest Home Video 2. So the fact that she's like, on there, talking directly to the audience, and then seeding it on MySpace or Live Journal, wherever else, that is very powerful.

• 18:30Speaker 02

  Okay, okay.

• 18:31Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, and it stands out.

• 18:33Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 18:33Ryan Broderick?

  So our researcher, Adam, tried to find the earliest accusation of the channel being fake. Uh, and it seems like, obviously, there, there may have been more of this lost to time, but July 20th of 2000 and, uh, what is it? 2006? Uh, I can show it to you right here. So this is, obviously, we go this far back in the internet, stuff starts to degrade. But it reads, LonelyGirl15 afake. Uh, the video itself doesn't really work anymore. But the comments read, it's LonelyGirl's my life, how dare you insult my life, she is real, real, real. Haha, just joking, you make good points, so do a few others, I believe

• 19:15Ryan Broderick?

  she's fake, possibly a way to make money. I think it's an opening to a TV sitcom that's being tested online. I kinda hope it is, it'd be a good show. They reference the fact that Channel 5 News in the UK has covered it. So they think like, it's some sort of psy-op. But yeah, this is basically like, the, these are the comments on a call-out video that has unfortunately been lost to time. And we can see here that that call-out video had around 36,000 views, which is pretty considerable, actually, for the time. That's like, kind of massive.

• 19:45Speaker 02

  Also, it's like 500 comments. I mean, I know that's like- Who knows how long those went over, but that was like 448 comments or something it said?

• 19:51Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 19:52Speaker 02

  It's a lot of engagement.

• 19:54Ryan Broderick?

  It's also interesting that a lot of people here are saying things like, whatever it is, I'm hooked and I'm old. But you can, you can also tell, you can kind of tell by the way some of these users are writing and especially their usernames, kind of the different sort of internet demographics they would be coming from at the time. And it's, it's kind of all over, which I think is, is interesting. This, this is a genuine phenomenon.

• 20:14Speaker 02

  People also don't seem like that mad. They're like, oh, good points. Like, maybe I hadn't thought about it, but you could be, or maybe I had thought, like, there's don't seem that pissed off.

• 20:23Ryan Broderick?

  Well, this is something that I think has been seriously lost to time, which is, most people on the internet assumed everything on the internet was fake until like 2010.

• 20:33Speaker 02

  But wait, Ryan, what's so amazing is we're going back there.

• 20:37Ryan Broderick?

  Yes, we are.

• 20:37Speaker 02

  So it's like, I keep being like, oh, AI is gonna have like this version of like, but it can never work because everyone is just gonna be like, obviously it's fake. You just expect everything to not be real, not the other way around.

• 20:48Ryan Broderick?

  There's basically like a time period between, from Occupy Wall Street to Hurricane Sandy. It's basically this one weird moment where we all believe that we're all operating in good faith and like reporting from the ground, from reality correctly. And then you get the shark on the highway during Hurricane Sandy. And everyone realizes you can mess with major news organizations that like, want to outsource reporting to user generated content platforms. And then the whole thing goes off the rails. That, that's my big theory.

• 21:15Speaker 03

  Why do you think that that change happened so rapidly? Is it just that boomers got online?

• 21:19Ryan Broderick?

  No, I think it's the, I think it was the embrace of mobile phones, like smartphones.

• 21:24Speaker 03

  Sure, sure, sure, sure.

• 21:25Speaker 02

  We could push on it a little bit, but I, I take your point.

• 21:27Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah. So back to LonelyGirl15, by July 28th of this year, the channel starts getting media attention. It's written up in Screens, Virginia Heffernan's New York Times column about the internet. She thinks it's real, fun fact. She writes, "Bree perfectly," oh, boy, okay, wow. "Bree perfects the emo," she's not emo, Virginia, she's a different subculture entirely. "Bree perfects the emo girl in her room phase." Balancing playful and moody as she muses about her life and times. She has huge online fame, repressive religious parents who probably know nothing about YouTube. What could be more 2006?

• 22:11Ryan Broderick?

  Obviously, the implication from the stills that promote her videos is that she's going to strip, but she never does, and she controls that shell game by being sweetly deaf to innuendo. It's time to get Lonely Girl 15, the full-on series, going. Invite the parodists and critics to round out the cast. Give some play to the idea that she's a fake and create a perfect My So-Called Life for the MySpace hordes.

• 22:35Ryan Broderick?

  So, yeah.

• 22:36Speaker 02

  I mean, the girl is good. Like, she's pretty good.

• 22:38Ryan Broderick?

  I think so. I think so, too.

• 22:40Speaker 02

  That's actually interesting about the sex part, though.

• 22:43Ryan Broderick?

  Yes, this is a weird one. I think is worth discussing, yeah. Where it's not so much, I think that Lonely Girl 15 is aping the aesthetics of like a cam girl or like porn, so much is that at the same time that she's appearing, porn is beginning to ape the aesthetics of other user-generated content.

• 23:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, I mean.

• 23:07Ryan Broderick?

  That's my theory.

• 23:08Speaker 02

  It's not even, I think that just like the timeline bears that out. Like, all these things are happening at the same time. It's not like cam girl is an aesthetic that's established. Like, these things don't, like, video is just going online in a major, that's why YouTube happens. Like, it's actually still hard to do it. It's all like, takes a lot of bandwidth. So, right, I mean, I think, but that said, there is like this long history of sort of early internet experiments with people broadcasting their life, where often a part of their fanbase is men who are very interested in the possibility it will be sexual. Like, that's just always hanging over it. I'm blanking on the name of, I mean, there's a couple of them, but like This American Life is, there's like, who's the first person that, you know what I'm talking about? It's like the, er.

• 23:51Ryan Broderick?

  What, I was just thinking about her working on the soundline. It wasn't Heather. Jenny Cam.

• 23:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, that is Jenny Cam. That's right.

• 23:59Ryan Broderick?

  Jenny Cam.

• 23:59Speaker 02

  Yes, so like, there's, I mean, that, like, she was, I mean, I think she did write, like, she did occasionally. Like she had sex in her room? Like she hooked up with people, but it wasn't that? Like, that's not what it was.

• 24:13Ryan Broderick?

  For if anyone's not listened to the episode, which is a lot of you, because it was one of her first episodes, uh, she just set up 24/7 surveillance in her house as like a anthropological project. And that anything she was doing was going to be recorded, including changing or having sex. And, uh, people were really into her feet, shockingly, and her folding laundry.

• 24:37Speaker 02

  No, and I think a lot of like the people giving, like she had to have had a tip jar even, right? Like, I mean, not, they didn't call it that then, and it wasn't like, but I think it was a lot of men. Like, I think that that's, um, and then also I have a colleague who just, who did an entire episode, um, about this early online experiment called The Spot, where like it was similar to this.

• 24:58Ryan Broderick?

  Oh, yes.

• 24:59Speaker 02

  You know, like a lot of like text, a lot, not, not video, because like you couldn't do video, but a lot of text about like almost Melrose Place, but like, were they real? Were they not? And the people that are super invested in these still photographs of like these beautiful people, and then they're like live journals or whatever, are, it's a lot of men. So, I mean, which isn't to say, I'm not, it's not to disagree that LonelyGirl15 didn't have like a female fan base, but like this idea that like the, there's leering happening. It's sort of like built in to the whole experiment, because there just has been leering happening.

• 25:32Ryan Broderick?

  The LonelyGirl15 account is clearly targeting a specific demo of like this MySpace teenager, but obviously as the New York Times gets involved, more people find out, creeps show up, and that does happen. Who else shows up, though, is, I assume, not a creep, uh, Brian Fleming, an indie filmmaker who works on split screen, which has also come up in a previous episode of Panic World. They were the IFC channel show that launched Blair Witch. So another-

• 25:56Speaker 02

  Blair Witch is like also right in this exact-

• 26:00Ryan Broderick?

  It's about 10 years-

• 26:01Speaker 02

  This uncanny valley or whatever.

• 26:02Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, it's about like five years before this, but they're playing with the same idea.

• 26:07Speaker 03

  10.

• 26:07Ryan Broderick?

  10? 10 year-

• 26:08Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 26:09Ryan Broderick?

  96, right, yeah. So, so Blair Witch is like 10 years before this. She has like a video that has like an argument breakout. He claims it's a fake. Um, and we're going to show you the video that sort of leads Fleming to this conclusion. I probably shouldn't post this. Excellent, excellent curiosity gap headline right there.

• 26:28Speaker 04

  So I invited Daniel over to talk about a few things. Um- Basically, I think that the video that he posted was really mean and the video that I posted was really mean. And we just need to figure some things out so that we can still be friends. Why are you being weird like that?

• 26:44Speaker 06

  I'm not being weird like anything.

• 26:45Speaker 04

  Yes, you are. You're being, you know.

• 26:48Speaker 06

  Seriously, what's going on?

• 26:49Speaker 04

  You just posted a video basically saying that what I believe in is really weird.

• 26:54Speaker 06

  I didn't pu- I mean, I did post a video, but I mean, does this have to be on? Yes, we are talking, but we're, uh, we're talking with a stupid camera on.

• 27:02Ryan Broderick?

  So can you guess why people started calling fake on this video?

• 27:07Speaker 02

  It's the cuts. Firstly, it's like, it's too much drama. Like, and it's actually kind of good. It's like, sort of all done again. But like, just as the storyline gets more intricate, you're just like, the camera angles, like, there's just like too mu- it's starting to be like too smart. In a like fake stupid way, but also the cuts, like, um, the cuts which are both seamless but happening.

• 27:29Ryan Broderick?

  Yes.

• 27:30Speaker 02

  Don't actually make sense. The camera's cutting, we're seeing the cutting, like, as we do, but then it's like they're just picking up seamlessly. Uh, in a way that's like, no, like, someone's, that, there's someone there tell it, like, that's, that's directed. Like, you can't do that. Like, you have to either be sitting face, you can, you can stop the camera and like be facing the camera and like have a relationship to the camera. But you can't two people be doing what they're doing without somebody else doing it.

• 27:53Ryan Broderick?

  Well, I mean, imposed.

• 27:56Speaker 02

  Yes, no, no, I know. You could do, but like, why are, it just, there's some, it's got too fancy, like, just, just. That's sort of like home, homestyle fancy, but it did.

• 28:04Ryan Broderick?

  That's what Fleming argues. He writes, uh, "On August fifteenth, the Brie and Daniel show jumped the shark. The producers just tried too hard to get a cross exposition and weren't clever enough about presenting it with veracity. Now I wonder why I ever believed." He also does a summary about like this whole will they, won't they, Brie and Daniel subplot that is like actually nuts. Um, so.

• 28:28Speaker 02

  So like he's all in, even though he's like debunking.

• 28:30Ryan Broderick?

  Yes. And, and basically in an August 6th upload, they reveal what it like, why they can't be together. And, and it's basically Bree has a shrine to Aleister Crowley, who's like an occultist or not a saint.

• 28:47Speaker 02

  That's so fun.

• 28:48Ryan Broderick?

  Hell yeah.

• 28:49Speaker 02

  That's so good. They didn't even have Wikipedia. Did she have Wikipedia? Like, that's so cute. I like that for everybody. So good.

• 28:57Ryan Broderick?

  Her parents are Satanists. That's their crazy religion. Yeah, they're not, they're not Christian. They're Satanists.

• 29:02Speaker 02

  Guys, that's so good.

• 29:05Ryan Broderick?

  And then Fleming concludes, why are Bree and Daniel recording their fight on the webcam? Daniel actually expresses opposition to recording it, then allows it to happen anyway. Bree makes a lame excuse for it. The whole world has seen everything anyway.

• 29:18Speaker 02

  That I disagree with him completely, saying, I want to be off camera and continuing to be off camera. He was very, that part I have no, like, I'm like authentic.

• 29:27Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 29:27Speaker 02

  Plausible.

• 29:28Ryan Broderick?

  Exactly. Unfortunately, so the internet has all basically kind of at this point been like, this whole thing is nuts and not real. The New York Times doubles down.

• 29:39Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah. So Virginia Heffron basically argues again that it's real and talks to Bree about it.

• 29:47Speaker 02

  Wow. Okay, Bree's gonna talk to her about it.

• 29:50Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 29:50Speaker 02

  Like, okay, we're just like doing this. Okay, I'm impressed with everybody. Let's see. Tell me how this goes.

• 29:55Ryan Broderick?

  So Heffron writes, I asked her how she came to create her vlog. Tell me this doesn't ring true. Here's Bree's response. I started watching videos a couple of months ago after Daniel sent me a video by, pay you to the order of, of, of, he knows so much about tech stuff. I'm really bad at it. And so one day we started playing around with this camera and it was so much fun. I normally don't do a lot of creative stuff. I'm usually stuck studying the theory of relativity or the Yalta conference or something. And this was so much more fun. It's so overwhelming, the good and bad. There are some really lame people on YouTube who like to make really mean comments about us, but the personal messages I've gotten have made it all worth it. And then one of the commenters on this article that our researcher Adam found says,

• 30:41Ryan Broderick?

  Right, so this is a girl who spends her time studying relativity theory, but makes numerous typos errors and doesn't run a spell checker when she emails someone to the New York Times. Also, the "I'm really bad about it" seemed a little too stereotypical cutesy girl, but the truth was just about to come out because, well, we're gonna get to that right after a break from our sponsors. Uh, let's see, YouTube Premium, you should get it. You should get it for Grant, actually. One of our listeners, please buy Grant YouTube Premium.

• 31:10Speaker 03

  Please.

• 31:11Ryan Broderick?

  Okay.

• 31:15Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up require compatibility and availability varies 18 plus.

• 31:41Speaker 07

  This episode is brought to you by Indeed. You're ready to level up your business, but the pressure to find the right person to make that happen is intense. Indeed sponsored jobs can help carry the load. It boosts your job post to help it reach quality talent fast. Cut through the chaos with Indeed sponsored jobs. Get a $75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now? Then this is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs.

• 32:12Speaker 02

  Did Bree speak to Virginia Heffernan via email, or?

• 32:17Ryan Broderick?

  Via email.

• 32:19Speaker 02

  That's JV. That's really, that's really, is that not really 2006 to you? Like, you're like, I wanna check if someone's real. We're gonna exchange emails?

• 32:29Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, I'm trying to like-

• 32:30Speaker 02

  That's just like, that's just 2006 to me. Like, that doesn't make sense.

• 32:34Ryan Broderick?

  I mean, like I said, like mainstream media didn't really sort of like get used to the idea of like online misinformation until like the early 2010s.

• 32:44Speaker 02

  I mean, we weren't real about it probably till 2016.

• 32:47Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, I kind of get how this could happen.

• 32:49Speaker 02

  No, I think it's, I think it's like a throwback to just like a simpler time in the sense of like, just not, which is hard to imagine, 2006 isn't that long ago, but like, just-

• 33:01Speaker 02

  The idea that you could exchange emails with someone and they would have to be themselves. Like, that's so preposterous.

• 33:08Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 33:10Speaker 02

  Like, you would have to speak to that person on the phone. I actually, I don't, I actually don't understand that. I'm gonna have to ask her about it. I have to be like, what, why? Why'd you do that? That's very weird. I mean, that's also just like, why would you double down? I don't understand anything about that, actually. Would you double down? I would never double down. I'm, that's not my, I always back off. And then I just wanna be right later.

• 33:31Speaker 03

  What I like about it is that it, it becomes part of the story. Like, this is gonna be, like, it's like, I kinda wonder if it's like, well, if I like, throw cold water on this, I can't just, well, like, watch this cool video for my job. Like, it's like, she gets to keep recapping this YouTube channel that she's enjoying.

• 33:49Speaker 02

  But why can't you keep recapping if it is actually television? Like, it's still interesting. I mean, the issue is, the problem with all this real fake stuff is it's sort of like a will they, won't they situation? Which is when all the attention gets put on this one question, when that question is resolved, people are bored or not interested anymore. So it's like, you can make a show, like they did, that like, this wasn't really the pressing matter of it. Like, people were watching the vlog and they might have continued to do so. But like, you start to ramp up the tension towards resolution. And then, once it's resolved, people leave. And so you can make it like, are they gonna hook up? Or you can make it like, is this bullshit or not?

• 34:29Ryan Broderick?

  Right.

• 34:30Speaker 02

  And, and even though people, it was like, people might have been, if you'd been like, this is bullshit, they might have watched it. It's just like, after you find out that that's one of the possibilities, then you don't. I mean, all those people being like, yeah, maybe you have some good points. Like, I still think it's a great show. It's like, they're not mad yet. It's like, yeah.

• 34:49Ryan Broderick?

  For the most part, I don't think early internet users would have been that mad. Because like, everything on the internet, as I said, was like, kinda bullshit. Like, you kind of knew going in, like, I'm looking at bullshit. As the year progresses into like, you know, early fall... People, more people than ever are watching specifically, as you said, to see if it's bullshit or not, and because that's part of the entertainment factor. So like, she basically keeps the storylines going, all of these different ones.

• 35:14Speaker 02

  Essentially, like, people are like, "This is fake." The Times is like, "This is real," and it like, snowballs. Like, it's more and more people are hearing about it, so it's getting bigger.

• 35:22Ryan Broderick?

  Exactly. So, at this point, by like, September, the debate is so contentious, um, that the lonelygirl15.com forums get a spinoff forum. Like, people get so mad at each other that they leave and create, which is classic.

• 35:38Speaker 02

  A schism.

• 35:39Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 35:39Speaker 02

  Like, a little bit of schism.

• 35:40Ryan Broderick?

  Classic. Yeah. And then, we finally get the, the grand unraveling about this, which is awesome. So, there is a undeniable lead on the reality of this, or lack of reality of this, that surfaces on the forum. Three members of the LonelyGirl15 forum collaborate to install... (laughter) Uh, collaborate to install tracking software in the emails to Bree's address. The messages bounce back, uh, and they come from the IP address of CAA's offices in Los Angeles.

• 36:19Speaker 02

  Sorry, like Reddit wishes. Like, that's very good.

• 36:21Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah. Uh, the forum members go to the press with the LA, the LA Times swoops in, because the New York Times is like, "No, this is still very real." Uh, so you definitely get that. Uh, and then, on September 11th of that year, a prominent blogger's teenage son finds headshots for Jessica Rose, an actress in LA who looks exactly like Bree. The next day, the creators of the web show LonelyGirl15 then have to officially go public to the New York and the LA Times. They reveal the entire thing was fiction from the beginning, and they're an aspiring film industry, uh, team who wants to basically make a show, and they're, they're piloting it with CAA via the internet.

• 37:06Ryan Broderick?

  So how do you think people reacted to all this?

• 37:08Speaker 02

  I thought they were like, really mad.

• 37:13Ryan Broderick?

  So I'm gonna let that hang there for a sec because I want to read this piece from Wired. This comes out in 2006, so this is just a couple of months after it all kind of fell apart. And Wired writes, "The room behind her could be anywhere in America. There's a pink floral print bedspread, a half a dozen stuffed animals, and a framed picture of a rose on the wall. But this isn't what it appears to be. Almost everything in the room was bought from Target on the same day, and the price tags are still hanging from some of her stuff. What nearly a million people thought was the room of a sweet, charismatic teen named Bree is actually the Beverly Hills bedroom of Lonely Girl 15's co-creator, Mesh Flinders." What a name. Wow.

• 37:55Ryan Broderick?

  So basically, they described that it's supposed to be like a soap opera, but also considered, they kind of consider it an ARG mystery, like Lost?

• 38:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 38:04Ryan Broderick?

  And so they're trying to like, see, that's probably explains some of the Satanist stuff, like, maybe they wanted to kind of move in that direction. And so they were getting around 50,000 views in their first week, you're asking about views. As they ramp up the melodrama, they start getting around 100,000 views, which is, for this time period, tremendous. And then we, of course, we get Bree, the character of Bree. So her character is, oh, this is Wired again. "Her character is also deliberately crafted to target the web's most active demographics. Nerds geek out on the idea that this beautiful girl lists physicist..." Oh, I hadn't even considered how fucking stupid this is. Wow. Nerds geek out on the idea that this beautiful girl lists physicist Richard Feynman and poet E. E. Cummings as heroes.

• 38:49Ryan Broderick?

  Horny guys respond to the tame but tantalizing glimpses of her cleavage. Teenage girls sympathize with her boy troubles and her sometimes stormy relationship with her strict parents. I hadn't even considered, like, peak Reddit atheist, like, "Hey, I'm a smart girl who's pretty" kind of stuff, like, peak 2010s, or peak 2000s misogyny, right? Rose was about to start a waitressing job at TGF Fridays. So the co-creator got a loan from his parents and said, "I don't want..." I said this to Grant when I heard him for this show, "I don't want you to ever set foot in another TGI Fridays", he said, explaining that he'd pay her $500 a week to play Bree full-time. In return, she had to stay home as much as possible and wear sunglasses and a hat when she went out.

• 39:31Ryan Broderick?

  For Rose, it was a dream come true. She was a working actress. She just couldn't tell anyone." And then, of course, we get the fan reaction. So again, how do you, how do you think people feel about all of this?

• 39:41Speaker 02

  Mad. I think they feel a little played.

• 39:45Ryan Broderick?

  The web, according to Wired again, seemed to take the revelation in stride.

• 39:50Speaker 02

  Oh, good for everybody. They knew. I feel like you would be mad now.

• 39:56Ryan Broderick?

  Well, I have, I have a point here to make right after about that because we had a previous guest on this show who, who, who brought this up and it's sort of been spinning around in my head ever since. So the web seemed to take it, the revelation in stride, Wired wrote at the time, one guy who had corresponded regularly with Bree wrote to ask if he'd been conversing with Jessica Rose. "No, you've been talking to Bree," came the reply. "If you want to talk to Jessica Rose, you can go to her MySpace page. If you want to keep talking to Bree, use this email." "Fair enough," the fan wrote back, and then went on to tell Bree the latest news in his life. To many, it didn't seem to matter whether she was real or not. A number of posts appeared on YouTube denouncing the series, but many more responded with variations of this simple statement, "If you don't like it, don't watch." Now, here's what's really fascinating.

• 40:37Ryan Broderick?

  We were doing an interview for an episode the other day and they were talking about this like top OnlyFans model this year who was exposed for using like a Filipino, like basically like a bot farm to run her DMs. So you pay to DM this OnlyFans model and then she DMs back and she got caught because they started using Filipino slang for the bathroom, which I think is like CR. Apparently, when this happened, a lot of the users were like, "Hey, are you a guy in the Philippines?" And the user was like, "Yes." And then they just kept DMing with her, quote unquote. Like, they were paying for the illusion. Like, they didn't really care who was answering.

• 41:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, they were just DMing. Like, it didn't matter at all.

• 41:19Ryan Broderick?

  I think this is a very similar psychology to Lonely Girl 15, though, which is like, these people, they are sort of, because in this exact instance, it's a user who's been emailing with Bree and then continues to choose to e- like, it's the same thought process as like chatbots, where it's like, you know it's not real, but like, it feels real, so who cares?

• 41:40Speaker 03

  But also, you, or an AIM chatroom, which, like, this was the era of, like, everyone was, was, you know, making a fiction.

• 41:48Ryan Broderick?

  Brother, let me tell you, I had a years-long, on-again, off-again AOL Instant Messenger-based relationship with a girl I met at a Green Day concert when I was 15 years old. And we met once in real life and it was totally fine to just have that be an AOL Instant Messenger experience. You know, just type it into the void.

• 42:05Speaker 03

  I'm glad she wasn't a 46-year-old man.

• 42:07Speaker 02

  Said she was, yeah. But also, I mean, the thing you can layer on to it is it's just television. Everyone has a relationship with fiction, like you watch your shows, you know? So.

• 42:17Ryan Broderick?

  Yes.

• 42:18Speaker 02

  Dallie, it's like Blair Witch, like we're playing with this line between fiction and reality in a way that might be like, cause some freeze on, be fruitful and interesting, but also like, yeah, you are watching something. You know what the deal was there? I mean, it's like reality television or something too. It's like, is it fake? Is it real? Like, it's kind of fun that it inhabits that middle ground, but like, it doesn't ultimately really matter which side of it it is.

• 42:42Ryan Broderick?

  The fact that the creators sort of saw themselves as making something like Lost is really fascinating to me because, and it's one of these things that I had totally forgotten about this story until we went back and looked at it, which is that she is talking to her audience directly from the video. So there is this interactivity, and I think that interactivity was what Lost was experimenting with as well, like sort of playing into the ARG idea, the idea that you could like, discover clues yourself and you can interact with this media. Cloverfield comes out at the same time, similar idea. I think that is very powerful. When the illusion cracks, but you're still able to interact with it, a lot of people just continue to, I think, especially like, like, because you can, why not?

• 43:27Speaker 03

  But people were really mad about Blair Witch.

• 43:30Ryan Broderick?

  I think it was too early, and I also don't think it was interactive. I think that's exactly the problem is like Blair Witch, you couldn't talk to the Blair Witch.

• 43:36Speaker 02

  People might have been mad because they were tricked more. Do you know what I mean? Like, the feeling of being duped is a hard feeling to like, get over, but it sounds like this was sort of in a middle ground, a gray area where like, people had considered the possibility that they had been duped now for months and were like, well, this is still working for me, or had thoughts about, you know what I mean? Like, I think having the rug pulled out from you immediately, like, to really confront your own naivete is an uncomfortable feeling for lots of people. And it's possible that by the time this was revealed, everybody on the, in the chats had been like, yeah, duh, it's fake. Like, you know what I mean? Like, they could have been way warmer with it.

• 44:18Speaker 03

  Damian Lindelof of Lost says that like, there's like a trap door, there's like a secret vault, the best thing behind there is a person. His answer to like, what he learned about mystery box shows is that like, you have to make people care about the characters so that it's not just the mystery that matters to them. I think that's maybe what Lonely, like you were invested in Brie and Daniel.

• 44:39Ryan Broderick?

  Right.

• 44:40Speaker 03

  As characters where the Blair Witch was like, you're trying to figure out if it's real and like, it fucking rips, but everyone in that movie is really unlikable, which is a different thing.

• 44:48Ryan Broderick?

  The Bravo verse, the sort of Real Housewives universe, like you know that a lot of that stuff is fake. Wrestling, same idea, like all of these things I think are what you're arguing, Grant, is like, if you care enough about the fake thing because it has character development or whatever, it's fine, which is gonna be really unfortunate for the show that you and I are watching together from, because there's no way that the characters are good enough to sustain that mystery box.

• 45:12Speaker 02

  But actually, I don't even know that it's just about characterizations of those things. Like, I think with wrestling, with Real Housewives, like, part of it is people are interested in thinking about what's real and what's fake. But it doesn't, it doesn't resolve it for you. Like, when you people watch reality TV, you're like, I know this is scripted, but also you're like, but no, that person is authentically showing me something about their personality, or they must really hate each other. Like, I talked to a reality TV producer once who was like, people think they're knowing and they are so naive about it. Like, they're like, oh, it's all fake, and then they buy all the shit. People say, oh, I know it's fake, and then they're like, fully think they know those people and something real about them, which they really may, because that's sort of like the pleasure of all those things, is that it's kind of both.

• 45:56Ryan Broderick?

  We're recording the week that, I'm not a wrestling guy, but I've seen clips, the entire wrestling world is pissed off at Triple H for defeating John Cena in his finer, final match. And it's half people being like, this is fake, and then a bunch of people respond to them going, I know it's fake, but what it symbolizes about WWE is fucking bullshit.

• 46:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. Like, it's fake, but the politics of this, like, the internal wrangling and machinations, and like, the personal dislike or animosity, or the, like, what that's trying to tell us about what's really happening is fascinating. And we're all able to do that so much, even if it's really like, actually, it's all just bullshit fake.

• 46:34Speaker 03

  I hate that I have a...

• 46:35Speaker 02

  You have a take about wrestling?

• 46:37Speaker 03

  An altruism is that, like, you have to lose your last match. It's the only way for there to be closure, is like, if you were this undefeatable person, or like, you'd always go back for vengeance, there was like, a thing that, like, you have to always go out on your back. And what they, I've not watched wrestling and... 15 years. I don't know why, but I, but like, it was the first thing I studied as a child, you know? And like, when John Cena tapped out, there was a moment of acceptance that I was like, oh, people are not going to be able. Like, he smiled, being like, I've accepted defeat. I'm moving on. And that, and I was like, that is way too of a highbrow concept for this to possibly work. But like, what they're going for was they're like, was, was him being like, I've accepted my mortality.

• 47:22Ryan Broderick?

  Right.

• 47:22Speaker 03

  And like, that was a symbolic message. And I'm like, people are gonna freak the fuck out.

• 47:26Ryan Broderick?

  And they have. And we're gonna talk about how people process Lonely Girl 15, right after a word from our sponsors. Not the WWE, cuz they're fucking evil.

• 47:39Speaker 03

  True. Mr. Beast, a non-

• 47:42Ryan Broderick?

  You know how hard it is to be one of the most evil things in Connecticut?

• 47:51Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required. Compatibility and availability varies 18 plus.

• 48:16Speaker 07

  This episode is brought to you by Indeed. You're ready to level up your business, but the pressure to find the right person to make that happen is intense. Indeed Sponsored Jobs can help carry the load. It boosts your job post to help it reach quality talent fast. Cut through the chaos with Indeed Sponsored Jobs. Get a $75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now? Then this is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs.

• 48:47Ryan Broderick?

  So Willa, how would you guess this whole story ends?

• 48:52Speaker 02

  I would guess that there was like a bunch of like pilots and like shopping deals and like, maybe we can try to like make this into a real thing and like it didn't quite work out.

• 49:02Ryan Broderick?

  That's about right. Yeah. So here's the, here's the data that our researcher Adam was able to pull. The YouTube views didn't really fall off the way you would think. It stayed pretty consistent in the mid 100,000s per video for at least another year. By like 2007, it was still basically doing as well as it had been doing.

• 49:25Speaker 02

  So sorry. So like, we're like exposed. This is actors and everyone's like, I love my story. I'm still into it.

• 49:31Ryan Broderick?

  I'm still watching like every day or every year.

• 49:33Speaker 02

  That's so impressive, honestly.

• 49:35Ryan Broderick?

  I'm trying to imagine like if this whole thing played out a year ago on TikTok, which it kind of does all the time. There's one of these like, one of these setups being exposed constantly. Some of them do stick around. Some of them don't. I think it really depends on like how, like you said, like how well you seed it, what people are sort of invested in, if you could, if you can maintain that. But another thing that helps here is that by the time they're exposed, they are the number one most subscribed channel on YouTube. Back at the time when YouTube was a glorified RSS feed of videos. So like they've already got the audience capture there. And of course people are engaged with the plot because there's a whole universe of Bree and her friends. And they're on the run from a mysterious society called the Order that are the Satanists that raised her.

• 50:20Speaker 02

  You know, like they turn it into a real TV show. Like now it just has like storylines.

• 50:24Ryan Broderick?

  A TV show like still being filmed like a vlog. Yeah. A thing that we bring up a lot from this era, we in fact, Grant and I did a screening in Brooklyn of this, which was the, uh, the Marvel Hornets, Slenderman YouTube series, which if you've ever seen it, is similar idea where it's almost like a meta Lonely Girl 15, where it's like a student film project that goes out of control because they get haunted by Slenderman. And it's filmed similarly where like, it gets really silly as it goes on, but the early episodes are really creepy because it's, it's, it feels real, you know?

• 50:54Speaker 02

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

• 51:37Speaker 02

  Like people kept trying to like get that brass ring. And obviously now we're sort of like through the looking glass and it's like, oh, like YouTube's going to take over TV, you don't have to, like, we don't have to do the scripted thing on YouTube. We could do something else. But really, like for many, many years, that was like the sort of Hollywood people's idea. It was like, why can't we do it there? And it's interesting because you're telling me basically sort of like the first example of that, like really kind of succeeded beyond any other version of that. Like going running for a year as the most like watched show on YouTube as like obviously scripted, even at a time when there wasn't that many people on YouTube or whatever. Like that's why people keep thinking they could try this experiment. It doesn't ever work.

• 52:17Ryan Broderick?

  The cultural impact of Wonder Girl 15 is kind of wild. About a year after all this is exposed, Law & Order Criminal Intent does an episode in which Michelle Trachtenberg plays a Brie look-alike and her collaborator, they end up accidentally murdering someone played by Pedro Pascal.

• 52:37Speaker 02

  Ooh, early Pedro Pascal credit.

• 52:38Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, it's a fun little. By March 2007, LG 15, Wonder Girl 15 as the insiders are calling it, has product placement. They ended up polling their fans on whether they'd be OK with it. And 180 out of the 200 said yes. So Hershey's brand manager was a fan. And so there's like a bunch of like ads for food and stuff to start popping up. And they're now integrating like full on. On ARG content. So people are like finding things in real life and it's impacting the storyline. The big product placement of that year in the show in June of 2007 is in

• 53:18Ryan Broderick?

  Nutrigena announces the show will feature a prominent character who works for the company and helps the heroes by creating a skin cream that protects them from evil.

• 53:26Speaker 02

  Whoa.

• 53:26Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, that's so sick. Advertising used to be so good. And so the season, the first season of Lonely Girl 15 ends in August 2007 with Bree submitting to be sacrificed to her family's order to protect her friends. And then Jessica, basically the actress, wants to be written off the show so she could do other things.

• 53:47Speaker 02

  Cause she's been working for a year.

• 53:49Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 53:49Speaker 02

  A hundred percent on sap.

• 53:50Ryan Broderick?

  And for, and for like a chunk of that year, like living like in a COVID bubble.

• 53:56Speaker 02

  Right, right, right.

• 53:57Ryan Broderick?

  So I imagine she wants to get out of there. She goes for bigger Hollywood roles. Two weeks before the finale, she has a role in I Know Who Killed Me, which is like that Lindsay Lohan horror movie. That.

• 54:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 54:09Ryan Broderick?

  I don't want to remember. And then by August 2008, Lonely Girl 15 officially ends. There are a bunch of spin offs, including one in Polish.

• 54:19Ryan Broderick?

  There's another spin off that ends up going on to a streaming service called Hulu.

• 54:26Speaker 02

  Sorry, wait, just about the spin offs? Like, do you mean actual spin offs or like they read, try to like start from the beginning?

• 54:32Speaker 03

  Spit, no, no, other characters.

• 54:34Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah. So basically there's a whole bunch of characters that they're trying to turn into like other properties. One of them, as I said, is in Polish completely for some reason. I guess they were like, we have a Polish audience. Let's tap into it.

• 54:43Speaker 02

  And one is like an early Hulu show.

• 54:44Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah. So this is, I got it right here. So

• 54:50Ryan Broderick?

  this article. Wow. Okay. It's, it reads Lonely Girl 15 creators unveil new web show, The Resistance. Miles Beckett and Greg Goodfried cite geek hero Joss Whedon as a major inspiration behind their resistance. Set in the same universe as their groundbreaking Lonely Girl 15.

• 55:08Speaker 03

  It was the Weinstein Brothers' first attempt at TV instead of just movies.

• 55:12Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 55:13Speaker 02

  For real.

• 55:13Speaker 03

  And no. Just listing awful men.

• 55:17Speaker 02

  So it could be. I believe it.

• 55:20Ryan Broderick?

  And yeah, so the resistance ends up getting syndicated on MySpace TV, Vio, Hulu, YouTube, and iMeme. There is a lot of this. I remember I've I talked to a lot of people in this world at the time of like, social video, like, the idea of like, we're gonna make TV to be distributed on social video platforms, rather than the opposite, which is now kind of what everything is. And so there's a big interest in that. There's a bunch of localizations. And then everyone kind of forgot about it. That's that's basically where it ends.

• 55:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 55:54Speaker 03

  Do you think that there was a strategic misstep along the way? Or do you think that, like, everything, Ryan, to the shorthand that you use is everything's distilled to porn? Like, everything just becomes the, like,

• 56:09Ryan Broderick?

  Oh, this is a theory. Well, this is a theory I have that, like,

• 56:11Speaker 02

  I know this theory and I love it. I think it's very interesting.

• 56:14Ryan Broderick?

  Just because the way he phrased it sounds way weirder.

• 56:17Speaker 02

  No, no, you mean like sensation.

• 56:18Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, everything sort of breaks down into visual.

• 56:20Speaker 02

  No, I think your theory is very compelling. I'm compelled by it. I also actually, Grant knows this, but I do want to talk to you sometime about cool. I'm very interested in your theory about the youngs having no idea what cool is and being sort of like fascinated by it. But I'm also interested in it because cool does continue to exist. So it's like, it is difficult.

• 56:40Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 56:41Speaker 02

  No, but I guess to your question, I have another question, which is, I guess I'm curious what the people making this, what they wanted to happen, what the plan with the rollout was. Like, if they were like, oh, we're hoping to keep this a secret forever. That seems unlikely. They were signed with CIA. Like, are we hoping to keep this a secret for how like, we want to build to some reveal that we control? Like, what was the?

• 57:06Speaker 03

  That's a great question. It's my sense from research was that it just the dog chasing the car that doesn't know what to do when they got the car. Like, I don't think that

• 57:16Speaker 02

  They didn't expect it to work.

• 57:17Speaker 03

  I don't know. Like, well, I think I think we could reveal this year, like, you're planning on like,

• 57:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 57:23Speaker 03

  Talking to people today from the story.

• 57:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, we're hoping to.

• 57:26Speaker 03

  My question, I guess, for you, for them.

• 57:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 57:29Speaker 03

  Is, do they think that they made a misstep?

• 57:32Speaker 02

  Right.

• 57:33Speaker 03

  That took us in the direction where everything's just the sloppiest thing? Or?

• 57:39Speaker 03

  What were they just like, do they think that they just like read the tide wrong?

• 57:43Speaker 02

  Like, is there something they could have done that meant like Lonely Girl would have run for like 10 years? And we'd also be talking about it?

• 57:49Speaker 03

  Or that like it would have led to like YouTube being a channel where people do pilot ARG shows? And then we have like this more interactive version of TV and it actually becomes this like high budget roleplay.

• 58:01Ryan Broderick?

  If they were gonna do a Joss Whedon thing and then this was viral marketing for that, the project is a failure because that is so, it would have been so much easier to just like bake that in from the very beginning and not do this whole thing. Or like do it very differently. In fact, I was trying to remember the name of the like Norwegian, I think it is show. Yeah, Norwegian show that like launched in the mid 2010s, SCAM? Uh, SCOM or whatever, where like it was like very optimized to like fit on social platforms in like small bite sized quibi chunks or whatever. Like you can do teen programming on the internet. I mean, hell, like at the time period that Lonely Girl 15 was happening, I was watching Homestar Runner

• 58:44Ryan Broderick?

  and like having no problem consuming entertainment on a website. So like if they wanted to make a Buffy the Vampire Slayer thing, I think it's a failure. If they wanted to like get attention on the internet and then figure out what to do with it later, I'd say like they did, they did a decent job. That's sort of how I would look at it.

• 59:00Speaker 02

  I also feel like there's nothing they could have done to change like the outcome of and how entertainment is consumed on the internet or TV.

• 59:08Ryan Broderick?

  Oh, no.

• 59:08Speaker 02

  Like they just, it's just like people don't want it. They were just like, they got, they got closer than you'd think they might have.

• 59:15Speaker 03

  Like, I wonder if they had a vision for using the internet in a way that led to...

• 59:20Ryan Broderick?

  Honestly, you know what they, you know what they could have done to like save the thing? And it would have like probably like rolled into the future of entertainment way easier? Is if they got caught and then continued to post about the real actress's life at the center of the Lonely Girl 15 explosion and just turned her into like an influencer, which is kind of what happened.

• 59:44Speaker 02

  Turned it into reality television.

• 59:45Ryan Broderick?

  They just turned it into a reality, into vlogs about her and they just made her like that. That's how you would do it, I think, to, if you wanted to survive. But even then, you know, you're gonna, that only lasts probably like another year or two before you gotta figure out something else.

• 59:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 59:59Speaker 03

  Well, then you just do an alt-right pivot.

• 1:00:01Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, you would go on Fox.

• 1:00:03Speaker 02

  It was a little early for that. It was like, you know, Obama year.

• 1:00:06Ryan Broderick?

  No, you could become a Tea Party or like a birther. You could be like a... Yeah, maybe.

• 1:00:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, she has some real strong opinions about Ron Paul.

• 1:00:13Ryan Broderick?

  That's right.

• 1:00:15Speaker 02

  No, I mean, it's like interesting, though, because like we just keep doing this, right?

• 1:00:20Ryan Broderick?

  Over and over.

• 1:00:20Speaker 02

  Like a sort of like polished version of it.

• 1:00:22Ryan Broderick?

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

• 1:00:43Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:00:44Ryan Broderick?

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

• 1:01:30Speaker 02

  Well, it's like it's such an honest mistake because it's coming out of like 100 years of history of thinking that people actually prefer things that are good.

• 1:01:44Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:44Speaker 03

  That's the end of the episode.

• 1:01:45Ryan Broderick?

  Honestly, I have nothing more to say than that. Yeah, no, you're right.

• 1:01:49Speaker 02

  And it just turns out not to be the case.

• 1:01:51Ryan Broderick?

  No, I...

• 1:01:52Speaker 02

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

• 1:02:25Ryan Broderick?

  I had this exact thought actually watching that movie Babylon. Say more.

• 1:02:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, say more.

• 1:02:31Ryan Broderick?

  So Babylon to me is like, in my opinion, a movie about TikTok. And that all of Margot Robbie's character development is like, she found like this one thing, she's like the crying girl, and she makes like short form video content of like her crying on command. And then she meets like all these other like basically like TikTok level influencers who do like, you know, silent films in which they're like, they play like the stoic guy or like, you know, the fatty Arbuckle characters like the fat guy in the silent film. And then none of them can transition to what comes after an era like that. I think in a lot of ways, at this exact moment in entertainment history, in the middle of like a second vaudevillian era where we have all these people and we have no idea what to do with them.

• 1:03:16Ryan Broderick?

  And the assumption, I think, a lot is that it will just be like this, like, you know, YouTube becomes the future of TV and that's the end of it. But what you said, Will, I think is actually more accurate, which is like, you break it all down, you have your vaudevillian era, and then obviously you get the, Mr. Beast has already emerged as this like large scale, big budget YouTube producer. That is clearly the trend. So like, from the ashes of whatever, you have your vaudevillian moment of redefining what people like and finding the formats that people kind of gravitate towards, and then you build your entertainment industry on top of that. And I think that's where we're headed right now.

• 1:03:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, and also not to do like a Marxist, by which I just mean like an economic view. Like, there is a lot of consolidation is real because it has like all these economic benefits to the people that consolidate. So like, we can see it happening among the streamers, right? But like, there was a huge fracturing, there was a huge number of streamers, there's only going to be a couple. And it's just like, that kind of thing is going to keep happening. It's like, a huge, like, there's a total disintegration of all media outlets that like print media outlets, and now everyone's a substacker. But the truth is like, there's lots of shit you can't do if you're personally just a substacker. Like, it makes sense at some point for a bunch of substackers to be like, oh, we pooled our resources and we can send a reporter somewhere. You know, like, those, those like economic and like, things are real and they're also

• 1:04:36Speaker 02

  real for people who make, I mean, this is why there's hype houses and like, you know what I mean? Like, you can do more if you're a collective. And so even though we don't know quite what it's going to look like, it's like, it's not going to just be, it doesn't really make a ton of sense. That forever, everyone's just gonna like max out at like their own TikTok feed. Also additionally, like when it's just your own TikTok feed, as with Lonely Girl and the Cape, like it's a lot of work and you never get to go on vacation. Like, you know, you need someone to spell you. So like, there will be other conglomerations of like, of more elaborate content. It's just like, it's sort of hard to know what it's gonna look like. I think for quite a number of reasons.

• 1:05:16Ryan Broderick?

  To loop back to kind of what you were saying at the very top of today's episode.

• 1:05:22Ryan Broderick?

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

• 1:05:57Speaker 02

  I would say like, I feel like that everything I said is true, but I really like the AI part of it, like really throws a wrench in like what, I actually can't see what's, like, I mean, no one can see, I'm not. But I'm like, I actually cannot foresee.

• 1:06:10Ryan Broderick?

  I mean, I'm working on a gritty noir with Mickey Mouse as the detective. That's, I think, I mean, I've talked to a bunch of different people in a bunch of different directions about this and like, I don't know, the, Grant and I try not to bring up AI because our listeners become violently enraged by the very thought of it. But my, my sort of like-

• 1:06:31Speaker 03

  It's very human death threats.

• 1:06:32Ryan Broderick?

  They do, but our-

• 1:06:33Speaker 02

  I mean, I understa- I'm with them, I get it.

• 1:06:35Ryan Broderick?

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

• 1:06:58Speaker 02

  I'm hopeful.

• 1:06:59Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:07:01Ryan Broderick?

  But I think to sum things up, I think what you said is sort of the best way to go with this, which is that sometimes you make the incorrect assumption that people like stuff that's good. And that's really the story of Lonely Girl 15. Will, I want to thank you for coming on the show. This was fantastic. This is delightful. I probably don't need to do this, but I do this with all of our guests. If people want to follow you on the internet, if people want to watch vlogs about your secret Satanist family, where can they do that?

• 1:07:28Speaker 02

  I make a show called Decoder Ring. You can find Decoder Ring everywhere you listen to podcasts.

• 1:07:35Ryan Broderick?

  Panic World is a production of Courier. It is written and produced by Grant Irving and hosted by me, Ryan Broderick. Josh Fielstedt is our production coordinator and our amazing researcher is Adam Bumis. From Courier is Shane Verkest, who edits our video episodes, along with our producer, Devin Maroney, and National Managing Director and Executive Producer, Kevin Dreyfus. R.C. DeMezzo is their VP of Brand and Social. Charlotte Robinson is their Deputy Director of Brand and Social. Mary Ann Kuga is their Director of Marketing, and Tracy Kaplan is the Senior Vice President of Sales and Distribution. If you want to sponsor the show or give us products to sell, she's the one to talk to. You can email her at [email protected]. Lastly, here's my advice for you. Chill out and touch grass

• 1:08:20Ryan Broderick?

  while you still can.

• 1:08:22Speaker 06

  When you're building a company, you learn that trust is what closes deals. You may have the best product, but buyers won't sign without proof that your product is secure, especially if it has AI. Vanta gets you compliant fast with SOC 2, ISO 27001, and more, and keeps you secure with continuous monitoring. Hyperbound, a YC-backed startup, used Vanta to unlock the Fortune 100 in under a year. Snowfire got audit-ready in a month and closed a multimillion-dollar deal. Trust matters. Get started at vanta.com.