The family influencers who will do anything for views

Have you ever wanted to know what life is like in a McMansion somewhere in the suburbs all across America? Today we’re talking about family vloggers, the “parent influencers” who inflict psychic damage on their children in order to make content. From music videos extolling the virtues of “Xmas Jammies” to everyday chores, special vacations, birthday parties, pranks, and a whole lot of dancing, these parents create seemingly wholesome and maybe inspirational videos. But are they really? Katie Gassi Tassin of Diabolical Lies and Money with Katie joins us to trace the “Vine to vlogger” pipeline of the early 2010s, what the draw of watching parent influencers might be, and the impact having your whole childhood on camera has on the children in these families. Our guest Katie Gassi Tassin is an author and podcaster. She hosts Diabolical Lies and Money with Katie, which you can find everywhere you listen to podcasts. She also wrote Rich Girl Nation: Taking Charge of Our Financial Futures, available at your local bookstore or online. Buy tickets to Panic World’s FIRST-EVER LIVE SHOW on November 28 in NYC! Along with Katie Notopoulos, the Garbage Media team will inflict the worst things on the internet in 2026 upon an unsuspecting Grant. Get your tickets here, sickos: https://caveat.nyc/events/garbage-day-worst-things-on-the-internet-2026-2026-11-28 Want even more Panic World content? Like ad-free episodes, bonuses & exclusives, and access to our members-only Discord? Sign up for a membership for just $6.66 a month at https://www.patreon.com/PanicWorld. Credits - Host: Ryan Broderick - Producer: Grant Irving - Production Coordinator: Josh Fjelstad - Researcher: Adam Bumas 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

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• 0:45Ryan Broderick?

  Today, we are talking about family vloggers, the families that camp out on YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram, and psychologically torment their children for you, for views, and sponsorships. And we're going to be talking about how this whole world got started, and how it's probably just gonna keep happening. It's probably, it's probably just gonna keep happening. Yeah, there's, it's not getting better.

• 1:07Ryan Broderick?

  Okay, so to start things off, if you're gonna be a parent content creator, what kind of like content would you make? Like, if you're gonna be like a trad wife, or like, what, what, what direction would you go?

• 1:17Speaker 03

  Oh, I'd probably try, just knowing me and my like particular set of neuroses, I would probably try to turn it into like a, like a Dr. Becky, good inside, here's how to get the results that you want from your kid type of content creator. I don't think I have like the I.

• 1:41Speaker 03

  The sort of romanticization of motherhood content that does really well, where it kind of blurs the line between parenting content and like lifestyle. I don't think I'm an, I wouldn't be any good at that. So I think I'd have to go with the like tactical technique style parenthood content.

• 1:59Ryan Broderick?

  I would like to be like a food, like a food influencer, like a, I made this toothpaste from scratch kind of person. But I also think I would very quickly start to lean into like darker impulses, like talking about like colloidal silver or something, you know? Like, it'd be like the one ring from Lord of the Rings. I don't think I could resist.

• 2:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, the, the Nara Smith, but it's like, let's make a, let's poison my husband together.

• 2:26Ryan Broderick?

  That's exactly right. Yeah, I would make, I would make husband poisoning content. That's, that, although, now that I think about it, like combining those two worlds, like true crime and like trad wife.

• 2:39Speaker 03

  Very high concept. No one is doing it.

• 2:41Ryan Broderick?

  Huge. That would be huge.

• 2:43Speaker 03

  The TAM is just enormous.

• 2:46Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, wow. Um, I gotta go. I have to get out of here and work on that.

• 2:52Speaker 04

  What would be the like, the crossover product you would sell? Like homemade, like, like bulletproof vests?

• 2:58Speaker 03

  Not, not as a complete aside, but did you all see the, the New Yorker article on Caleb Hammer?

• 3:05Ryan Broderick?

  I did. I, I think his show is so gnarly, man. Um, that's, that's apparently as much as I can say without him trying to sue me.

• 3:11Speaker 03

  Oh, good. Okay, well.

• 3:12Ryan Broderick?

  He's mega litigious.

• 3:13Speaker 03

  Is he really? Okay, so I, I just, I found that so interesting because after I, kind of like operating in a similar milieu to Caleb Hammer and like the finance side of things, I went and I looked at his YouTube afterwards to be like, how else is he making money on this besides ad sense? Surely there's like some larger grift going on. And yeah, he sells like courses and like cookbooks and meal plans. And I was like, it's so funny to me to create this like, this weird red pill Jerry Springer personal finance content that is so outrageous. And then the end product is like this insipid little like budgeting course.

• 3:56Speaker 03

  I'm like, I, I don't understand how we get from A to B. So all that to say, I think if you wanna, if you wanna begin your foray into true crime, trad wife adjacent, like center of the Venn diagram there, I, I don't really think it matters what you sell. I, I think that's the lesson that we've learned is that as soon as you start monetizing attention, you can kind of sell anything.

• 4:21Ryan Broderick?

  I do not know this for a fact, but I wouldn't be surprised if Caleb Hammer was set up with some kind of creator company. Cause a lot of them have like, like I've been approached by them where they're like, we'll help you sell a digital guide and set up a Calendly for your subscribers and create like a membership program. And it's all very like out of the box. And it's, I don't think Andrew Tate invented it, but he sort of perfected it. And that's sort of, a lot of these companies just go and find anyone with 100,000 followers and be like, do you wanna run a multi-level marketing scheme? We can help you do that.

• 4:58Speaker 03

  Dude, that's wild. It's, it's so interesting, the ecosystem of commerce that has evolved and emerged like around the attention economy in that way.

• 5:10Speaker 03

  Oh, I don't know. I, you can become a billionaire if you are willing to be shameless. Like shamelessness is the currency on which all of this trades.

• 5:21Ryan Broderick?

  I think that's the only way to do it because like you're not like, I, I was, I got in like a minor TIF with like an old media world person about video people. And they were sort of saying like, why aren't these video channels better? Why don't they have like, you know, real support and infrastructure? And we were sort of discussing it. And I've been discussing this with other people too, kind of bring up the same point. And I keep saying like, none of these people are making money off of video. All of the video is a loss leader. Like if you dig deep enough in any of these big like social TV channel people, they are basically doing like marketing on the side. Or as you said, they're selling like scammy courses.

• 6:01Speaker 03

  When you say these video people, can you give me an example of what you're talking about?

• 6:05Ryan Broderick?

  So when the celebrities are eating chicken wings, or when, you know, you're doing man on the street content, or when you're interviewing random people about their finances, like any of these kind of like people creating a TV show on the internet, they are almost certainly not making enough money to support themselves off the video itself. And they have to find other ways to do it.

• 6:26Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 6:26Ryan Broderick?

  Um, they, they make it look, you know, like they're doing.

• 6:29Speaker 03

  And so your friend in old media was like, why aren't they like investing in the production value of this?

• 6:34Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah. And I had to be like, there's nothing to invest.

• 6:36Speaker 03

  Cause the production value doesn't matter. Cause we're little slop peggies rolling around in the algorithm, just.

• 6:42Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, they're, they're net negative every quarter. And they're trying, they're hoping to go long enough to be able to like get people to give them real money to get a Netflix deal or something. That's, that's what's happening.

• 6:54Speaker 04

  It was really cute to watch you try to say that without getting sued. I could see you really working on how to say that in a non-liable way when Katie asked for an example.

• 7:04Speaker 03

  Dude, I, I am waiting for the day where I receive a cease and desist.

• 7:08Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, I, I was told, I don't know how good, how good of advice this was, but I was told by a lawyer a couple of years ago that my stuff is largely okay because I'm so mean

• 7:20Ryan Broderick?

  that it, it reads as a joke.

• 7:22Speaker 03

  Being a dick is fair use.

• 7:23Ryan Broderick?

  And being a dick apparently does give you some protection. Um, but let me introduce myself and get things started, which is, my name is Ryan Broderick. With me as always is my producer, Grant Irving. And this is Panic World, a show about how the internet warps our minds, our culture, and eventually reality. And it is brought to you by Garbage Media. Joining us today from Money with Katie and Diabolical Lies, someone who might just have a future in podcasting. Let's see if you can handle the creator economy. Katie Tassin, welcome to the show. How you doing?

• 7:52Speaker 03

  Thank you. I'm good. I'm glad to be here.

• 7:54Ryan Broderick?

  Today, we're taking on a corner of the internet that I'm actually surprised we haven't covered yet in, in on this show. It is basically, we're gonna put everything under the umbrella today of parent influencers, mommy bloggers, daddy bloggers, family bloggers. Do you have any channels like this that you keep an eye on? Even maybe that you enjoy? Are there any sort of internet families that you're following?

• 8:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, I would say there are a couple. The, the big one, just through our coverage on Diabolical Lies is the Neilman family out in Utah, Ballerina Farm. That's one that I, I don't watch them closely, but I'm definitely, definitely like keyed into what they're doing. And I think that they're one to watch. I have my own like guilty pleasure roster of brain rot mommy influencers, you know, when I'm like kind of tired of seeing all the horrific political content on Instagram. I can just like swipe over to TikTok and go watch some of their feeds. But even there, there's some, there's some dark stuff going on, which we can get into. But I, I think for me as a critic, but also a consumer,

• 9:04Speaker 03

  I kind of find that, that mix to be very entertaining. Cause I think all of us are kind of, those, those of us who consume this content in any way, whether to make fun of it or out of like a guilty pleasure or enjoyment of it. There is something so fascinating about that mix of like enthrallment and disgust that I think this, there's really no other influencer niche online that I feel it captures that same combination so well.

• 9:35Ryan Broderick?

  I should probably say at the top here that our team has a personal connection to a famous internet family.

• 9:44Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 9:45Ryan Broderick?

  Um, so our managing editor, our beloved managing editor, Kate's is related to the Holderness family. Are you familiar with the Holderness family?

• 9:56Speaker 03

  Never heard of them. Holder, hold on Googling.

• 9:58Ryan Broderick?

  Uh, here, I'll pull up a clip for you because Kate's does not know I'm talking about this. And we'll cut it if she doesn't want us to say this. But you know, they have the same last name. So let's, so, so this is a video that they did in 2013, I think it is.

• 10:12Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 10:13Ryan Broderick?

  18 million views, and it went viral for all the wrong reasons.

• 10:17Speaker 05

  It's jammy.

• 10:18Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah. It's the Holder night. 2013 in review. Video Christmas part two. Dancing in the front yard night and day. And the neighbors walk by and this is what they say. Are this Christmas jammies? They are Christmas jammies. Check it out. We just bought a Prius fee and it matches these perfectly. Wearing Christmas jammies.

• 10:46Speaker 06

  Not for Lola.

• 10:49Ryan Broderick?

  So you get, you get an idea what's going on.

• 10:52Speaker 04

  What about Lola?

• 10:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, what's Lola got to say?

• 10:57Speaker 03

  You know what? Let's, can we call Lola right now? That was what 12 years ago?

• 11:01Ryan Broderick?

  She's not, Lola's not rapping this. He's rapping for Lola, it seems like. But yeah, so.

• 11:07Speaker 03

  Oh my god.

• 11:07Ryan Broderick?

  I was working with Kates at the time when this went viral. And this was kind of my first introduction to internet families. Like I, it hadn't really occurred to me that this could happen. Because the internet, you know, up until that point, in my opinion, was like, you know, I saw a very straight line between Facebook, MySpace, Tumblr, YouTube. That's kid world. And it hadn't really occurred to me that like you could put your family on the internet. In fact, like I remember the first times my own family started to use the internet and it, it like, it kind of broke my brain. I was like, what are you guys doing here? I also feel like around 2013, 2014 was when I started to see

• 11:48Ryan Broderick?

  this pipeline that I wanted to start with and I wanted to sort of see if you ever noticed this. So like.

• 11:53Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 11:54Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, in the early 2010s, there were these guys who started, the best way I could describe it was like pranking their girlfriends. Like on Vine, they would like open the door and like blow her in the face with a leaf blower when she's on the toilet.

• 12:08Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 12:09Ryan Broderick?

  Or like.

• 12:09Speaker 03

  Sinister.

• 12:10Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, like, and it was supposed to be like, ah, messing with my girlfriend content. And then around, yeah, 2013, 2014, I started to notice that a lot of these couples had gotten married and were continuing to make this content. And they had sort of turned their houses into like America's Funniest Home Video Sets. And on Facebook, they were just generating videos every week of them like pranking each other, basically.

• 12:36Speaker 03

  You know who immediately comes to mind in this like Vine to family blogger pipeline is Cole and Savannah LeBrant. Are they in your little?

• 12:47Ryan Broderick?

  Hold on, let's see, uh, cause I don't.

• 12:48Speaker 03

  History?

• 12:49Ryan Broderick?

  All of these people.

• 12:50Speaker 04

  They are not.

• 12:50Ryan Broderick?

  So I will say, all of these people that I'm thinking of, all of them are named Savannah.

• 13:00Speaker 03

  It's a natural law of the universe.

• 13:02Ryan Broderick?

  And they all look exactly like this. Uh, wow. Yeah. Okay. I have never come across these people, but this, uh, let me pull it up.

• 13:13Speaker 03

  But they look like every other, like YouTube family you've ever seen, right?

• 13:17Ryan Broderick?

  This is exactly the kind of stuff I'm talking about.

• 13:19Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 13:20Ryan Broderick?

  Um, oh man, Savannah's 30th birthday was ruined? Oh, that's terrible.

• 13:24Speaker 04

  Oh no.

• 13:24Ryan Broderick?

  The ones that I, I, I came across recently, uh, were the twins, like those two girls that got married.

• 13:32Speaker 03

  The conjoined ones?

• 13:33Ryan Broderick?

  No, no, no, they're not conjoined.

• 13:36Ryan Broderick?

  You know, I'm searching this and now I'm realizing that there are multiple twins.

• 13:42Speaker 03

  Brittany and Brianna.

• 13:44Ryan Broderick?

  Is it Brittany and Brianna?

• 13:46Speaker 03

  Those are different fonts of Savannah.

• 13:49Ryan Broderick?

  No, no, these women are brunette.

• 13:52Speaker 03

  The extent of the family vlogger verse, uh, diversity.

• 13:56Ryan Broderick?

  But yes, all these families kind of look the same. They're, you know, most of them are vaguely Aryan. They all go to Disney World a lot. They don't furnish their houses and their houses are gigantic, which I'm kind of obsessed with as well. I'm, I'm obsessed with the aesthetics.

• 14:10Speaker 03

  Yes, same. McMansion aesthetic. There is something comforting about it, I have to say. I don't know what it says about me and maybe that's like a, like a weird psychological quirk of like growing up in Kentucky where like no one had McMansions, but you show me a house that has the like 12 foot ceilings, the granite countertops, the extra fridge that's like only for neon beverages and like popping soda. I'm like, mainline all day.

• 14:39Ryan Broderick?

  Barely anything on the walls. They.

• 14:42Speaker 03

  Everything's beige.

• 14:43Ryan Broderick?

  Everything's beige. And the other thing is like, because they're trying to like hide the sun and the time of day, like there's no real windows. Like there's something, I think I've talked about this in the show before. I find them, find something just like deeply unsettling about.

• 14:59Speaker 03

  It's like going into a casino.

• 15:00Ryan Broderick?

  Yes. Influencer world is like a, it's like a Mormon casino. And you're just watching these people sort of pantomime life in these empty McMansions. I find it chilling, but I also, like you, I can't look away.

• 15:12Speaker 03

  It is chilling. And I'm like, why, but why do I find it comforting? You know what's so weird about it is like, there are times where when I'm like really, really in it and I'm like, you know what? I'm going to go take a break from reading about Marxist theories of whatever. And I'm going to go watch this, this 27 year old with three kids pat around her Arizona McMansion.

• 15:36Ryan Broderick?

  Sure.

• 15:36Speaker 03

  There is something about the life portrayed in these videos that feels realer than mine somehow. I, I don't know. It is, I, I spend a lot of time trying to assess like my own psychology when I watch these videos. Because like I said, it is like a mixture of disgust and fascination.

• 15:54Ryan Broderick?

  There's absolutely an aspirational quality to this, like, and I think this was, uh, felt especially during the pandemic where it's like, look at all these families with giant houses. And these people have been living in their houses basically non-stop already. So it was like, for an influencer family like COVID was kind of like a time to really lock in and grind. You know, it was a good time.

• 16:20Ryan Broderick?

  But let's, uh, let's go back in our timeline just a little bit.

• 16:23Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 16:24Ryan Broderick?

  Uh, let's talk about Ruby and Kevin Frankie. Um, so they were a vlogger family, uh, known as Eight Passengers. And, uh, they launched their channel in, uh, 2015. They had eight kids. And in 2020, they were investigated by CPS. And because they mentioned that their kid, one of their kids was going to lose bedroom privileges for months, which is nuts. And that they were punished by being denied food. The channel was suspended two years later. The couple separated. And then Ruby basically joined another mom content channel and still makes videos.

• 17:05Speaker 03

  Oh, does she really?

• 17:06Ryan Broderick?

  Well, she was, I'm sorry. She was making videos until she was.

• 17:08Speaker 03

  Isn't she in jail?

• 17:09Ryan Broderick?

  She was arrested in 2023 and convicted of child abuse.

• 17:14Speaker 04

  We gotta stop letting people being in jail stop them from making content.

• 17:17Ryan Broderick?

  You know, like I, I was reading actually the other day about, um, about iPads in jail and like how to, how to get that in and how to use them, which is kind of cool. Yeah. The, the reason we wanted to start here is because this sort of immediately kind of like, illustrates the problem with turning your house into a content factory. I mean, you are someone who is in the creator economy. Like, do you have kind of larger thoughts and feelings about like the border between your personal life and the internet? Like, how much are you willing to give to a parasocial audience? Like, do you, do you find yourself running up against that, that boundary a lot?

• 17:54Speaker 03

  Well, okay. So I think it's a little bit different when your product is your, your thoughts and your ideas versus your life or lifestyle. And so I don't.

• 18:07Ryan Broderick?

  Do you think that?

• 18:08Speaker 03

  I do. I think that like, there is a parasocial interest that I have been on the receiving end of, but I imagine it's much, much less intense than if my life itself was what we were talking about. Like if, if I was talking about what I was doing day to day versus like, I don't know, analyzing somebody like this. I mean, do you feel that way? Do you feel like there's a parasocial like slippage?

• 18:35Ryan Broderick?

  I mean, we are constantly receiving data from platforms that say that if I leaned further into the parasociality, we would make more money and get more views. And I have no desire to do that. And I.

• 18:49Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 18:49Ryan Broderick?

  In fact, like I, um, I was talking to another creator about this this week where I went to an event was sort of like a comedy night and there were internet people there performing. And their audiences were heavily parasocial. And I kind of felt embarrassed for them. Like it felt. Cause it wasn't, it, they weren't like super funny. They were just getting a lot of engagement from the room because the room was invested in their lives. And so it, it made me feel like I was in middle school again, you know, like looking at like the popular kids. But none of these people are popular in, in the world, but they are popular in like their world.

• 19:30Speaker 04

  Your fear there of being parasocial is that your laughs will not be genuine? Like if people are like too attached to Ryan the person, then like when you do a little joke.

• 19:39Ryan Broderick?

  My fear, uh, with any sort of parasociality is that it's wildly unpredictable. And I think like, like with the Frankies, like you start to apply, you know, I, I don't want to say like these people like wouldn't have been abusive monsters about the internet, but I will say the internet clearly played a part in this story. And, you know, I, I know a lot of people who will sort of turn their lives into a reality show for the internet to chase the feedback you get from leaning into parasociality.

• 20:11Speaker 03

  I think what's tough about it, and this is something that I haven't totally worked out, is the extent to which family vlogging,

• 20:21Speaker 03

  that there's a selection bias happening there where the people who are attracted to it are already kind of out there and are like more likely to be abusive monsters. Versus you go into it as a normal person, quote unquote, normal, to the extent that any of us are normal, thinking that it's just like going to be a fun wholesome experience. And then through the process, the incentive structure of the internet basically melts your brain. And it's probably somewhere in between, as most things are, like I would assume Occam's razor is that it's a little bit of both. But this is one of those things where I think 20, 30 years from now, like the Frankies are actually an interesting example

• 21:03Speaker 03

  because this is one of the first instances where we both have proof that abuse was happening.

• 21:09Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 21:09Speaker 03

  And the kids are now old enough to be writing memoirs about it. Because just of the timing of how all this played out, that like we're talking 10, 15 years ago. So I think we're going to see a lot more of it over the years to come. But I do think that this is the sort of thing that in a couple of decades from now, we're all going to look back on and be like, I cannot believe that that was ever kosher, like let alone monetizable. That you were not kind of shunned from society for doing this.

• 21:36Ryan Broderick?

  I wish I shared your optimism that we will think that this was unacceptable. I sort of think we're going in the opposite direction.

• 21:44Speaker 03

  Really? Okay nihilism. Let's go.

• 21:46Ryan Broderick?

  Okay. So, all right, we, we should go to a break, but before we go to a break, I will, I will sort of put this idea out there, which is like,

• 21:52Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 21:52Ryan Broderick?

  A big thing I've been covering this year is the sort of destruction or maybe transformation of Hollywood largely being eaten by the internet finally. It seems like we are actually at a moment where

• 22:04Ryan Broderick?

  most of the things that we're seeing on our feeds are kind of like taking precedence over larger, longer form production. So whether it's micro dramas or influencers or whatever, like that's where people are sort of getting their information, getting their entertainment from. And that requires a lot of people to live like this. These platforms do not pay enough for you to skate like the Frankie family, if they hadn't been abusive monsters, probably couldn't have made enough money from their channel to become Frankie Studios. Like, there's just no way.

• 22:34Speaker 03

  I see. Like, you're you're kind of being forced to up the ante.

• 22:37Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 22:38Speaker 03

  In order for it to become like a viable living.

• 22:40Ryan Broderick?

  Yes, like Caleb Hammer, like Caleb Hammer has a ceiling and he will never be able to break through that ceiling without outside investment and becoming a real like studio. So what he ends up settling for is what a lot of these people settle for, which is like, I am gonna be a Jerry Springer that lives inside your phone.

• 22:57Speaker 03

  Predator exposed!

• 22:58Ryan Broderick?

  Yes, exactly, exactly. And so my feeling is like, if that is the media landscape that we are hurtling towards, and Hollywood sort of becomes like a holding pen for like four or five celebrities, all of which are in Dune movies, and everyone else is just sort of making short-form TV shows, you know, some version, like, basically, the, you know, if Instagram is just what if Jerry Springer hosted Jimmy Fallon, I think the parasociality is only gonna increase. That's my theory.

• 23:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, I could see that.

• 23:34Speaker 04

  This is perfect. It's exactly as I was creating this outline where I was going back and forth on, because right now, there's laws that are in place in some states, and I feel like being, putting your kid on cameras, becoming more and more gauche and shamed. And I was vacillating between feeling optimistic that this is going to be a thing of the past, and then they're just gonna figure out a new avenue and a new way that, like, technology to work this out, as long as there's a demand for it, it will be made. I don't know where I land. And now, towards the end of the episode, I hope that wherever both of you land, I can make up my own mind. So, thank you. Okay, Ryan, you can go to the ad break.

• 24:16Ryan Broderick?

  So, not only are platforms trying to crack down on this, there are several states in the country that have sort of family vlogging laws in place, you know, whether that's trying to set aside a certain amount of money for the kids when they turn 18, or certain limitations on how often they can be on a screen or be working. But it is extremely patchwork, extremely piecemeal, and there's like no real consensus on like what this work should even look like if you were gonna do it correctly.

• 24:42Speaker 03

  Is this why they all keep moving to Nashville?

• 24:44Ryan Broderick?

  Oh, that's just because we're in a fascist dictatorship that is slowly working its way towards Nashville. That will be the new capital of America pretty soon. And we'll do the National Anthem, Choose in Texas, you know, every ballgame. I'll let you sit with that for a second while we go to a word from our sponsors, Toys R Us.

• 25:04Ryan Broderick?

  Hello, Panic World listeners. We are very excited to announce that we are doing our first ever Panic World Live on November 28th at Caveat. We will be doing a live taping of our annual Worst Things on the Internet. We did manage to get Katie Natopolis to agree to leave her posting station and come out of her gamer nest and record with us. Tickets are going fast. It is not a huge venue, so if you want to get those tickets, you should go to the description in today's episode and click on the link that says Caveat, and then buy a ticket.

• 25:48Speaker 04

  And you, for the first time ever, in the history of Worst Things on the Internet, which predates the show by a lot, can now vote on where things rank if you are there at Caveat.

• 25:58Ryan Broderick?

  Let's not, let's not, let's not agree to that one yet.

• 26:02Speaker 04

  You may be able to vote.

• 26:03Ryan Broderick?

  Uh, we're still figuring out exactly how we want to do this.

• 26:07Speaker 04

  You can heckle Ryan about voting.

• 26:09Ryan Broderick?

  That you can do. Come to Panic World Live at Caveat on November 28th. Click on the link in the description of today's episode. If you're looking for us on the Caveat website, which is a stupid thing to do, we're the one with the, with the special brony hole. Yeah, look for the brony, look for the, look for the brony fleshlight on Caveat's website and click that link.

• 26:32Speaker 01

  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, setup, required compatibility, and availability varies 18+. Stay cozy and look cool with up to 60% off cold weather gear at Nordstrom Rack. Save on cashmere, outerwear, boots, and more from brands like Ugg, Vince, Kohan, and Hunter. Join the Nordy Club for free to unlock exclusive discounts, shop clearance and new arrivals first, and more. Plus, buy

• 27:17Speaker 01

  online and pick up at your favorite Rack store for free. Great brands, great prices. That's why you Rack.

• 27:27Ryan Broderick?

  Our intrepid researcher Adam, every episode is tasked with basically figuring out when the thing we're talking about started. It's sort of my favorite part of these episodes.

• 27:36Speaker 03

  I wish I had an Adam.

• 27:37Ryan Broderick?

  He's the best.

• 27:38Speaker 03

  That sounds lovely.

• 27:39Ryan Broderick?

  He has actually spent the last few years trying to find everyone else's Adam. He's been like reaching out to other podcasts and newsletters, being like, who's the name of your researcher, and like meeting them and trying to find them. So there is like a network of Adams now, if you, if you want one.

• 27:53Speaker 03

  Let's connect offline.

• 27:54Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, you can get one, too. They're pretty great. So, in 2007, YouTube starts an ad revenue share, which is a lot earlier than I thought it was, actually. And in August of 2007, Shay Butler, who is a Mormon family creator, obviously, starts uploading comedy skits to YouTube as Shay Carl. And I will pull up an example of what one of these look like.

• 28:22Speaker 03

  Let's see Shay.

• 28:23Ryan Broderick?

  This is the future of entertainment right here. This is titled Fun with Helium and Passing Out.

• 28:27Speaker 05

  Don't ask me what they're doing, but they told me to record.

• 28:37Speaker 03

  This is not giving a Mormon aesthetic.

• 28:39Ryan Broderick?

  Honestly, just drink coffee, man. Like, don't, like, just, just have a beer at this point. That happened to my friend. He actually tried to unheal a bunch of helium as a joke, and then fell over and cracked his head on like the dining room table or something.

• 28:52Speaker 03

  It's like the Mormon Wives. Have you ever, have you ever seen that show?

• 28:55Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 28:56Speaker 03

  Where they're like, they're like doing nitrous and ketamine and shit to get Botox. And I'm like, the fact that this is allowed, but like, your friendly neighborhood Frappuccino is, is not.

• 29:06Ryan Broderick?

  I would be curious what John Smith thought about Botox even. But I won't go down that, oh, and then, let's see, I won't subject you to all these, because they're all kind of exactly what you'd imagine them to be.

• 29:19Speaker 04

  They're all so terrible. I like normally try to give Ryan one link, and I just like, I was overwhelmed by the content.

• 29:25Ryan Broderick?

  This is him dancing in a leotard, once again, in a totally unfurnished, white-walled house. I mean, is this just the way the country lives? Like, is everyone just living in a completely empty room? That's horrifying. Maybe that, maybe that's why everyone went crazy.

• 29:40Speaker 03

  There's not even a lampshade on that. It's just a bulb.

• 29:43Ryan Broderick?

  It's a bulb?

• 29:44Speaker 03

  A bulb on a stick.

• 29:45Ryan Broderick?

  Dude, that is like, yeah, like, is this why everyone went crazy during COVID? Is because like, they don't have any, like, there's nothing on their walls?

• 29:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, everyone's living in insane asylum.

• 29:54Ryan Broderick?

  They're just living in a, in a wall-to-wall carpeted insane asylum. And then, I'm not even gonna bother unmuting this one, but just so you can see the vibe, this is him talking about how much he loves Ron Paul.

• 30:04Speaker 03

  This feels like the beginning of like, like, the third Jackass movie.

• 30:08Ryan Broderick?

  His, his, his Smash Mouth hair is so awesome in this. Definitely, definitely show a clip of that, Grant, so our video audience can see how awesome that is.

• 30:17Speaker 04

  I will. He just knows, actually, at that point, that saying Ron Paul in the title will get him views, but then he spends eight minutes talking about how he can't say anything about Ron Paul to alienate anyone, so he gets likes. And then, like, seven minutes in, he's like, he's not gonna win the presidency. It's just like, it's just like, so rambly.

• 30:39Speaker 03

  What year was that?

• 30:40Ryan Broderick?

  2008. So this would have been the-

• 30:42Speaker 03

  Incredibly, incredibly prescient internet instincts there.

• 30:47Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah. Real, real early adopter vibes here. So, in 2008, also, he creates a second channel, which is worth pointing out, like, not a common tactic back then. People really didn't think that way yet. And this is just a vlog channel. So he says to Forbes, I was about to turn 29, and I thought this is going to be the last year of my 20s. I want to do something monumental. I started hatching this idea of doing a video vlog every day of my 29th year. By this time, I had worked up enough viewers that I was making almost 2K a month. See, this is what I mean by like, these people are not making-

• 31:25Speaker 03

  Get those numbers up, babe.

• 31:26Ryan Broderick?

  -a lot of money. What once helped me pay for groceries and utility bills had now turned into our main source of income. Yeah, because you're not spending any of that money on lampshades, dude. That 2K is going straight to helium or whatever.

• 31:42Ryan Broderick?

  So this is a sampling of what his vlogs looked like at the time. This is extremely, uh, this is an extremely 2008 video because it's titled Shaytards.

• 31:53Speaker 03

  Oh my god.

• 31:54Ryan Broderick?

  And, you know, okay, wait, so you know what's really funny? So this video opens with him like, sort of like looking in the fridge.

• 32:02Speaker 03

  You know what's so, but, but is so striking to me about this though, is how normal this fridge looks.

• 32:08Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, that's what my fridge looks like right now.

• 32:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's, this isn't aspirational content. And so I don't know if like, as we go through this timeline, we're going to be able to chart the rise of, or the transformation of this kind of content into becoming chiefly aspirational, which is what I would argue it is now. It's like wealth porn above all else. And, and so I just, yeah, I don't know. I, I think that there's just something interesting about the, the sort of striking normalcy of what we're seeing here.

• 32:39Ryan Broderick?

  I mean, this is 2008 and he's already had the instinct to start wearing his own merch on camera.

• 32:44Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 32:45Ryan Broderick?

  Like this.

• 32:45Speaker 03

  He's a real pioneer.

• 32:47Ryan Broderick?

  I, in a lot of ways, you know, it, it makes sense to me that, that the, the internet as we know it was invented by Mormons in the 2000s. That makes total sense to me. Man, can you unpack that a little?

• 32:58Speaker 03

  That would actually be such a good, you should pitch that to the cut. That is their beat.

• 33:03Ryan Broderick?

  So, uh, to unpack that just ever so slightly, yeah, Mormons have a lot of free time. They love the internet because they have a lot of free time and many of them are upper middle class. And they also like to evangelize, uh, they like to sort of, you know, get the word out about the community. You put that all together, you get a pretty strong legacy of using social media. And what I think is like, very uncomfortable about Mormon content is that increasingly, especially modern Mormon content, you know, these people are, uh, oftentimes attractive,

• 33:45Ryan Broderick?

  Aryan kind of ideals, white usually, usually blonde hair. There is kind of like an aspirational, uh, sense to this as well. I, it's, I find it icky and also boring.

• 33:57Speaker 03

  Yeah. The Mormons are like the hot theater kids of Christianity. Like they, they really do have like a preternatural ability for self-presentation. And I think that that's, that, I mean, I didn't know that there was this world of like male Mormon content creators. Like I'm, I've only ever been familiar with the women that have, have done this. And I think when you kind of like mush the, the religiosity with the internet incentives, with the, the just various, uh, narrow and presentation obsessed role for women in that community, it all, it all really makes sense. I don't know how

• 34:41Speaker 03

  to assimilate the fact that the men are doing it too.

• 34:44Ryan Broderick?

  I would actually see it in terms of waves, like wave one is men doing it and then very quickly it becomes like women's work. Um, and you're going to understand why there were problems with Mormon men doing this sort of thing in just a second. So he starts doing daily content, his income triples. So I guess he's making now six grand a month. Then starts making enough money to totally support the family by 2010. He claims that the name Shaytard is because he wore a unitard one time. But in 2014, he says that in hindsight, you know, it wasn't the best marketing decision because also everyone else in the family got a tard name. So Princess Tard, Rock Tard, Mommy Tard.

• 35:30Ryan Broderick?

  He said it was never meant to be offensive. And then his wife, Colette, said, we think we add a positive connotation to the word tard.

• 35:39Ryan Broderick?

  Okay.

• 35:42Ryan Broderick?

  Fun fact, grumpy, they are, Grumpy Cat's real name is Tartar Sauce.

• 35:47Speaker 03

  Oh, RIP.

• 35:49Ryan Broderick?

  So Grumpy Cat's real name was Tartar Sauce, but spelled with a D. And when I met their family, they all gave a similar apology.

• 35:56Speaker 03

  Was it kind of a wink wink?

• 35:58Ryan Broderick?

  Cause it's a disabled cat. Yeah.

• 36:01Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah. Uh, anyways, uh, naming all of his family tard didn't dissuade him from continuing on his influencer journey. Butler became a founding member of Maker Studios, which was one of the first YouTube production studios. The family moved to LA. And, uh, they basically just like turned their life into a reality show in 2015. They told a local media that the Shaytard vlogs now show the family playing, going on vacation and heading off to school. Viewers have seen Butler lose more than a hundred pounds. They've seen two daughters battle and defeat lice. The videos also reveal more intimate moments of their life. Their two youngest children were literally born on camera.

• 36:40Speaker 03

  Oh my god.

• 36:41Ryan Broderick?

  And then from this family, you get the, yeah, you get the blueprint for everything.

• 36:47Speaker 03

  How much of this though, do you think is, is itself siphoning off the blueprint of the Kardashians?

• 36:53Ryan Broderick?

  A hundred percent. Like I, um, I have a friend who has a PhD in memes essentially. And one of the big projects he worked on years ago was, he was, he was before that a reality show producer and he was like so disgusted by what he saw in that industry that he left. And he sort of spent most of his academic career writing about how reality TV basically infected all of our lives via social media and like, and, and that all of it is inherently fascist. His belief is that all of social media is inherently a fascist kind of evolution of reality TV, which is also fascist.

• 37:29Speaker 03

  Wait, can you, can you lay out that theory?

• 37:33Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah. So.

• 37:34Speaker 03

  In what way is it fascist?

• 37:35Ryan Broderick?

  It's inherently exploitative. It creates, inherently propagandistic. It's a way of creating like a hyper normal version of reality that is not real, that you can sort of project. There is sort of no.

• 37:48Speaker 03

  There's like no truth.

• 37:49Ryan Broderick?

  There's no, yeah, there's no ethical way to, to, to, to use reality TV or social media, according to him. Um, I don't, I don't know if I'd go that far, but by 2015, we have some non Mormons beginning to experiment with, uh, the, you know, the, the mommy and daddy vlogging in a big way. Uh, have you ever heard of Daddy of Five?

• 38:11Speaker 03

  I have not.

• 38:12Ryan Broderick?

  So Daddy of Five, um, is Michael Martin. It's a family content YouTube channel. It's him, his wife, and once again, five children. I don't think, I, I don't think it's an accident that a lot of these bigger channels are sort of following in the Octo Moms footsteps.

• 38:28Speaker 03

  Totally.

• 38:29Ryan Broderick?

  That kind of like social media, tabloid, reality show goop that they're all kind of existing in. And like I said, at the top of the show, Daddy of Five starts as a prank channel. It starts as pranks being done, like the kids are doing pranks on the parents, the parents are doing pranks on the kids.

• 38:48Speaker 03

  Interesting. It's not, okay. I mean, it feels to me like two steps removed from like basically all the programming on TLC, which I feel like to your point about Octo, I mean, it was, it was, that was very popular at the time, if I'm not mistaken, like the, the wife swap, the 19 kids and counting, these shows where the premise was really, um, dependent on sort of manufactured family drama.

• 39:19Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah. Uh, it's like voyeurism, it's sensational and, and, and actually as YouTube is sort of picking up and, and as these families are building themselves into like real businesses to some degree. I do think the TLC and then later the Discovery Channel stuff starts to get weirder and more niche. It's a lot of like spinoffs of, um, 90 Day Fiance, My, uh, Thousand Pound Life or whatever. I don't think a thousand pound, cause that person would be dead, but like whatever, 500 Pound Life or whatever it is.

• 39:51Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 39:51Ryan Broderick?

  Like a lot of those shows, I think, start to become less mainstream in a way, like more desperate.

• 39:58Speaker 03

  Do you think that the, that was like, it's like a dialectic with the YouTube vloggers where like they're getting more extreme because they have to.

• 40:06Ryan Broderick?

  Yes.

• 40:07Speaker 03

  Up the ante to, okay.

• 40:09Ryan Broderick?

  I, I think you see this a lot in like media trends where it's like, the old version is getting more intense and more extreme and kind of less relevant as the new version is able to become more popular, doing things that the old version was held back from doing.

• 40:24Speaker 03

  So this is, I was just listening this morning to y'all's episode about To Catch A Predator.

• 40:29Ryan Broderick?

  Same, same idea.

• 40:30Speaker 03

  And it's same dynamic. I also learned about the Bang Bus on that episode. I was not familiar with, with the Bang Bus. So I thank you for that.

• 40:37Ryan Broderick?

  I was shamed. I was shamed. I just thought everyone would know what the Bang Bus was. I walked out of that recording and my girlfriend was like, what the hell is the Bang Bus? And I was like, okay, well. My, our editor told us to cut it.

• 40:48Speaker 03

  Not, not all of us are that congenitally online. So I was not aware of the Bang Bus, but I am now.

• 40:54Ryan Broderick?

  I just thought everyone else was walking down the street, just like me waiting to get picked up by the Bang Bus, but I guess not.

• 41:01Ryan Broderick?

  Glossing over the Daddy of Five channel, because a lot of this stuff is going to sound very familiar to all the other channels that everyone thinks of when they think of this stuff, which is that they started to get really popular. They started to get hundreds of thousands of subscribers. By 2017, they were doing like a hundred and 50 million views. They also started to like basically abuse each other across the line. Youtuber Phil DeFranco, who was sort of like an early, not quite journalist Youtuber, but not quite gossip Youtuber, but somewhere in the middle. He would do like newscasts about YouTube from the foot of his bed. I think he still operates. I wonder if he has a set. I feel like this show has become like a larger conversation about like, how, how professional a production can a Youtuber actually get?

• 41:47Ryan Broderick?

  Okay. I'm watching his video right now about the Cornell seven, and he appears to be recording it from a room with an American flag in it. So, uh, he's, he's not, I should say, he's not right wing. He's just like a, he's just like a guy.

• 42:03Speaker 03

  Oh, oh, an American flag on a pole, not hanging on a wall.

• 42:06Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, yeah, no, no. This is like a professional.

• 42:08Speaker 03

  All right. That's, that's, that's fair.

• 42:10Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah. He looks like he's, he's found a professional room. Anyways, back in the day, he would just sort of like summarize everything on the YouTube trending page while sitting on his bed. But, um, he was very popular and when he covered Daddy of Five channel, the family ended up apologizing and that ends up generating, uh, headlines, which, you know, this is just not the kind of headline you want to generate.

• 42:30Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 42:31Ryan Broderick?

  No matter what, like it's the.

• 42:33Speaker 03

  Oh, is that Daddy of Five on the left?

• 42:35Ryan Broderick?

  Looks like the other guy, right?

• 42:36Speaker 03

  I really feel like the chin strap was all I needed to see.

• 42:40Ryan Broderick?

  Like a real Kyle vibe.

• 42:44Speaker 04

  Like a real guy named Kyle vibe. A leader of Mountain Dew pops up into my head when you say that.

• 42:50Ryan Broderick?

  I'd love to go to like, uh, like a disturbed concert with this guy, you know?

• 42:57Speaker 03

  But once again, we're still on the, on the trajectory of that it's not aspirational.

• 43:04Ryan Broderick?

  No.

• 43:04Speaker 03

  Like there is a real, like, there is a distinct aesthetic difference in class that like, I'm picking up on between the Mormon family bloggers of today and of back then.

• 43:15Ryan Broderick?

  I'm very glad you brought this up because I, I want to dedicate like basically the last act of this episode to talk about this because I think you're really on to something. Just to finish, Daddy, a five story, the Martin family did end up pleading guilty to neglecting their children after they were investigated by CPS.

• 43:30Speaker 03

  Jesus, dude.

• 43:32Speaker 04

  Like, all of this just has to escalate to stand out as like the, the seven years since the Shays started to pass. So like, these videos are awful. They're like breaking a kid's Xbox. Um, they're encouraging kids to hit each other. They really pick on like one kid.

• 43:53Speaker 03

  Oh, God.

• 43:54Speaker 04

  It's monetizing child abuse and like the rage from that.

• 43:58Ryan Broderick?

  YouTube took down, uh, their channels and it was sort of like a real moment for YouTube to kind of acknowledge, this was back in the, at the, probably the peak of YouTube as a platform, trying to take responsibility for what was on YouTube as a platform. And then it, yeah, kind of died down.

• 44:21Speaker 04

  To kind of support the fascist point, everything becomes content that folds in on itself. So to like, put a button in the Shea story, uh, Daddy Shea, uh, gets called out for, uh, speaking to a cam girl. He goes to rehab, then he makes content about rehab. And then Mommy Shea is making content about her self-help journey. And it all just folds in on itself where it's like, is there a real emotion underneath? Or like, if you automate, if you're filming your child's birth or do you witness your child's, and you share it? Do you witness your child's birth? Like, is it like, if you're just producing it all the time, like, does it actually happen? This like profound sense of unreality takes

• 45:03Speaker 04

  place and like, as we like, as we goes along, that just like has to escalate. Everything just escalates here.

• 45:10Ryan Broderick?

  And then, as you said, like by the second half of the 2010s, you start to see like a real class dynamic emerging between like the two kinds of family bloggers. And we're going to talk about that after a word from our sponsors.

• 45:25Speaker 04

  The Church of the Latter Day Saints?

• 45:27Ryan Broderick?

  Sure. Uh, no, no. Um, what's that dirty soda brand they all drink?

• 45:32Speaker 03

  Swig.

• 45:34Ryan Broderick?

  But first, a word from our sponsors, Swig Dirty Sodas.

• 45:41Speaker 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 blog, 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.

• 46:06Speaker 07

  So good, so good, so good.

• 46:08Speaker 01

  Stay cozy and look cool with up to 60% off cold weather gear at Nordstrom Rack. Save on cashmere, outerwear, boots, and more from brands like Ugg, Vince, Kohan, and Hunter. Join the Nordy Club for free to unlock exclusive discounts, shop clearance and new arrivals first, and more. Plus, buy online and pick up at your favorite Rack store for free. Great brands, great prices. That's why you Rack.

• 46:36Ryan Broderick?

  A dirty soda sounds like something I would order.

• 46:38Speaker 03

  They are delicious.

• 46:40Ryan Broderick?

  I think it's gross.

• 46:41Speaker 03

  I will vouch for the dirty soda. It's like a root beer float. Like, it's the same concept of like sweet cream with a, with a soda product.

• 46:50Ryan Broderick?

  I, if you're at a bar, you, and they're like, the dirty soda, you wouldn't be like, ooh, what's up with the dirty soda? Is there a shot of rum in that? I think a root beer float is great. I don't like all the sugary stuff in the dirty soda. But anyways, um, I want to talk about the class divide because I think this is really important. A lot of the, uh, names of these family bloggers that we have on our list today of people who've been investigated by CPS or had their stuff taken down are almost all in the lower income brackets.

• 47:21Speaker 03

  Then do I have a instance for you?

• 47:24Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 47:24Speaker 03

  Or a?

• 47:25Ryan Broderick?

  Is it the Ballerina Farm one?

• 47:27Speaker 03

  No, no. Although I, if those kids ever defect, I would be, I would love to know what is going on in that farmhouse. Are you familiar with a mommy blogger lifestyle influencer by the name of Emily Kaiser?

• 47:44Ryan Broderick?

  The name sounds super familiar.

• 47:47Speaker 03

  She's ex Mormon. She started making content when her son, her first child was probably about a year old, maybe not even. So she already had a kid when she started, got very popular. Um, a couple million followers, I think on TikTok. Um, and tragically, last year, her son drowned in their pool in the backyard.

• 48:13Ryan Broderick?

  Oh, that's how I knew the name.

• 48:16Speaker 03

  Husband was watching him.

• 48:17Ryan Broderick?

  Yes.

• 48:17Speaker 03

  And they, I believe the police recommended that the husband be charged based on the evidence that they had collected with felony child abuse because of the level of neglect that was assessed at the scene and, you know, kind of like what he claimed happened versus what their backyard security footage showed happened. Anyway, horrible, horrible, very dark, tragic situation. But he ultimately, I think the DA neglected to bring charges. And it was a big conversation around her at the time. Um, this is kind of your classic, like very wealthy, millions of dollars a year in income type influencer. Um, beautiful,

• 49:01Speaker 03

  beautiful home. Uh, it was, it was just remarked on pretty heavily at the time that like, were this a poor family, a family of color, like pretty much any one other than a rich white woman's family and husband, like they would have been charged. Someone would be in jail. Or really, if it were like a nanny watching the kid and it happened, they would have been in jail.

• 49:23Ryan Broderick?

  And I'm not saying this like facetiously, uh, but really just like, just to make sure I understand, because I think I agree. Is your argument that the upper crust of these family bloggers, they are probably just as abusive and neglectful as the lower crusts?

• 49:41Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 49:41Ryan Broderick?

  They're just, they're just insulated from the repercussions?

• 49:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think that they're, they're insulated in the legal system in the same way that like people who aren't broadcasting their lives online are insulated in the legal system. Um, I think it's, I just think there is a very distinct class disparity in, in the consequences in these types of situations and the, the, the interest from the public in like seeing justice be like meted out. And so I'm really just offering that as like a, an affirmation or like a further example of what you're describing of like the people that seem to be getting, um, nabbed for this type of behavior tend not to be the very

• 50:25Speaker 03

  kind of wealthy, shiny, aspirational folks. But I do think that if you are putting your kids online in this manner to the, to the monetized extent that these people are, I, I think that there's a lot of dark stuff happening in all of these homes. And some of it I'm sure is pure stupidity and accidental and just like true examples of, of negligence. Others probably skew more into the Ruby Frankie thing, but like even there, I think she was not all there. Like, I think she had some issues as well. And so there's probably some of that happening too, but I don't know. I, I, again, for me, it comes back to that

• 51:06Speaker 03

  question of like, how much of this is this community of family bloggers and people that are turning this into a career over index on those traits versus like, that kind of stuff is happening all the time, everywhere. And like, we are just now made aware of it because we are aware of these families' lives. Or like, how much of it is the internet rotting their brain and making it worse? Causality wise, I'm not really sure what's going on, but I guess my point is I think this type of stuff that would kind of turn your stomach is probably fairly universal.

• 51:39Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, I, I think the only thing I would sort of say is I think there are different, there are different incentives for, let's call it like, for lack of a better word, the abuse that's being like facilitated by these channels. Like, so the family vlogger that comes to mind when I think of these channels, the, probably the worst story I've ever read about this was the, uh, the Hackney family who had a channel called Fantastic Adventures.

• 52:08Ryan Broderick?

  And in 2019, um, the mother was based, was arrested and what they, they sort of had discovered was that she had built a windowless green screen room in their house and would lock her kids in the room and force them to make content all day, which I really sympathize.

• 52:24Speaker 03

  Oh, I remember this.

• 52:25Ryan Broderick?

  I really sympathize with that because that's what Grant does to me. And like, you know, but if I make him stay five minutes after the recording sets, he, he, he calls CPS and he's like, I am being abused by my same age producer.

• 52:39Speaker 03

  He's like, Grant, you're being fascist.

• 52:41Ryan Broderick?

  I, I told Grant two things, which is you got me for one hour a week and don't ever look me in the eyes. Those are the two rules.

• 52:48Speaker 03

  Oh yeah. And to be clear, when I say, when I say, I think it's universal, I mean, among the family vlogger contingent, not like in the population.

• 52:55Ryan Broderick?

  No, no, I get you. I mean, and yeah, but with, with the Hackney family, like they were, they created a sweatshop, essentially a content sweatshop for their children. They were motivated by a financial desperation that you don't see at the upper crust. And I think what the difference is like with the, with the, with the, with the richer, more sort of well off, especially the Mormon family vloggers, a lot of it is motivated either by status, by keeping, you know, it's, I think it's two pathways to toxic behavior and they sort of bring you to the same place. But I think you see behavior from the poorer family vloggers that you're not going to see with ballerina farm or something.

• 53:36Speaker 03

  It's possible, I mean, from some of these kids.

• 53:39Ryan Broderick?

  Let's talk about that for a second. So now we are at a point where there are enough kids who have gone through this life to be old enough to talk about it. Um, we have two accounts from former child influencers. I want to read a section of, because I think it's interesting. So this is a girl named Vanessa who wrote, "If it seemed like I wasn't trying hard enough to maintain that image, like my smile wasn't as bright as it should be, or I didn't say a line with enough enthusiasm, that would usually devolve into accusing me of not caring about our family. I was told by my mom, do you want us to starve? Do you want us to not be able to make our payment next month on the mortgage? She was around 10 years old, Vanessa, when she realized her life was different from that of other

• 54:21Ryan Broderick?

  children. When she went to other kids' houses, she was surprised by how they lived. I felt strange that I didn't have to work on social media or blog posts or constantly pose for pictures or videos, she says. When she reached puberty and began, and began menstruating, her mother had her do sponsored posts for sanitary pads. It was so mortifying, she says. I just felt like I wanted to crawl into a hole and never come out. And when she turned 18, she discovered that there was no money saved for her." And then Ruby Frankie's daughter, uh, spoke to ABC after the blow up with her family, uh, saying, "There's no such thing as a moral or ethical family vlogger," which is kind of how I, I feel about this. Um, yep. I, I, I may, uh, she says, "My mother, Ruby Frankie,

• 55:04Ryan Broderick?

  is a, the prominent family vlogger arrested last year for child abuse. I don't come today as a daughter of a felon, nor a victim of an abnormally abusive mother," she said in her opening remarks. "I come today as a victim of family vlogging. At the time, I'd tell you that I had a choice in what was filmed, but I've come to learn that every child influencer in a way suffers from Stockholm syndrome. Reality is that their parents bribe and shame them into posting their most vulnerable moments. We cannot give consent to our parents to post our lives. In any other context, it is understood that children cannot consent, but for some reason, people think family vlogging is different."

• 55:37Speaker 03

  Yeah. As you were reading that, I had written consent framework. I'm like, it does feel like that's kind of what this, what this boils down to, but it's interesting to apply a consent framework to something that is like so superficially wholesome? Like, I don't know. I just, I feel like typically the contexts in which we talk about things like consent are a little seedier. Um, but I mean, I don't know, maybe this is, maybe this is the seediest of them all.

• 56:05Ryan Broderick?

  I, I think this is one of those cases where it is useful to kind of think about how other countries handle it. And like, there are vastly different setups, but like one that I always come back to that I found really interesting from my time as, working as a reporter in Japan, is that you cannot own the, the copyright of someone else's image. You own your image in whatever it's used as. So this can make things very difficult. You, you can't use a file photo. Basically it's illegal.

• 56:35Speaker 03

  Interesting.

• 56:36Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah. And it also applies to social media. So that's why you see a lot of black bars. You see like blurring, you see vloggers in Japan, like never lifting the camera up above neck level because it is effectively against the law. They could, you could be sued. America is kind of a free for all with this stuff because not only are we talking about consent, you know, from parent to child, we're also talking about copyright, we're talking about privacy, we're talking about, you know, there's so many things that this kind of rat king rolls up in it.

• 57:05Speaker 03

  I don't, I don't know how this compares to other cultures. It's possible that America is actually like not as intense on this measure as others, but it does feel like there is a real view of children as property in America. Like, like I think you see that same framework used in like parental rights legislation, like shit like that in Florida. That's like what you should have control over what your kids are, uh, reading and being exposed to. And like, we don't really think of kids as like their own people, um, in that way.

• 57:38Ryan Broderick?

  No, I agree. That, that is sort of the, I also think social media, uh, you know, allowed a gray area with this stuff and the platforms have tried their hardest to continue that gray area. I mentioned that YouTube, you know, had to take down Daddy A5's channel. Just an update on that. Um, you know, as far as what the platforms were doing, there were a whole bunch of controversies, you know, in the back half of the 2010s that caused both YouTube and Instagram to become a little more strict on certain things. They changed a lot of their content in terms of how children receive it. Their concern was children accidentally

• 58:22Ryan Broderick?

  seeing something they shouldn't see on YouTube, which ended up making things a lot worse for the children in family vlogging networks, because now it's like children making content for other children.

• 58:36Speaker 03

  Interesting.

• 58:38Ryan Broderick?

  It kind of created also a massive cash grab because it's like now there's this, if basically, if you've, if someone listening has never uploaded YouTube in the last 15 years, you hit a check mark that says, is this YouTube suitable for children? It's a very confusing thing that I constantly have to Google to make sure I'm hitting it right. But if you say yes, that video appears on kid YouTube and kid YouTube is a almost entirely separate ecosystem, which means if you are a family vlogger and you want to make family content and you can make child friendly family content, you have a totally new platform that is like, it's yours for the taking, basically.

• 59:18Speaker 03

  Hmm. Okay. So when YouTube was making these changes, they were doing it with the viewers in mind, not with the, the children of these creators in mind.

• 59:26Ryan Broderick?

  And yeah, as the New York Times found in 2024, what this ended up creating was a YouTube for children by children, which is great for pedophiles. And then a lot of family vloggers started to notice that they were getting attention from pedophiles and making more content for them.

• 59:53Ryan Broderick?

  Because for our audio audience, Katie just hit her mic and put her hand over her mouth. And that's, uh, is, is the reaction that is not audible, but is right.

• 1:00:05Speaker 03

  When you say making them for them, they're like baiting, basically?

• 1:00:12Ryan Broderick?

  So you talked about the perverse incentives that these platforms provide. So this is a seg, uh, this is a segment from the New York Times investigation about this. Alyssa has been running her daughter's Instagram since 2020, when the girl was 11 and too young to have her own. This is, this is, I think another, let me pause here for a second. That's another way that this starts, which is as platforms have become stricter about age limits for users, that creates a scenario where the parent is now running the child's account. And then the parent starts to see that they could make some money and you start to see how this happens, right? So, "Photos show a bright bubbly girl modeling evening dresses, high-end workout gear and dance leotards. She has more than a hundred thousand

• 1:00:52Ryan Broderick?

  followers, some so enthusiastic about her posts that they pay $9.99 a month for more photos. Some parents are driving, are the driving, some, some parents are the driving force behind the sale of photos, exclusive chat sessions, and even the girls worn leotards and sheer outfits to mostly unknown followers." And then the Times was monitoring different chats on Instagram. And in one of the chats, a user wrote, It's like a candy store.

• 1:01:24Speaker 03

  Oh, my.

• 1:01:24Ryan Broderick?

  Heart eyes emoji, heart eyes emoji, heart eyes emoji. God bless Insta Moms raised hand praying hands emoji. And yeah, so basically you just to sort of outline that pipeline here for everybody.

• 1:01:40Speaker 03

  Holy shit.

• 1:01:41Ryan Broderick?

  The platforms try to do the bare minimum. They block children from starting their own accounts. The parents start running the accounts. The parents start noticing attention from child predators. The parents homebrew their own OnlyFans network of child predators and sell their daughters used clothes to those predators. That's what happened there in the last seven years or so.

• 1:02:01Speaker 03

  Oh, my God. And that feels like a different that, yeah, that feels like an evolution from the original family, because actually the Shaytard person there, I don't think I saw kids in the videos.

• 1:02:16Ryan Broderick?

  There were, I didn't show them, but yeah, he, he, he does videos with his kids, but no, it's a very different. It's a very different world because back then it was very hard to make money on the internet doing social media. And now every single platform has some version of a creator fund and they want to pay you to, to create their never ending infinite television.

• 1:02:36Speaker 03

  To keep people there.

• 1:02:38Ryan Broderick?

  Sort of what we're talking about at the top. So it's like, hey, we'll give you, you know, $2,000 a month in micro payments. If you keep filming your 11 year old daughter for 100,000 strangers on the internet, you know, like, and I think that's why I was talking about like, I do think there's a difference in the mechanics of the abuse happening for lower income families versus higher income families. Because I think if you are a lower income family and you are seeing these signals from these platforms, it is very easy to go from that to I'm going to set up a green screen prison in the closet and make my kids make content all day long until I'm arrested for child abuse. Versus, you know, an upper crust Mormon family being like, we're doing this because we want to look successful and popular and spread the Mormon word on the internet.

• 1:03:20Speaker 03

  There is a new book written by a former, I think mommy blogger of this nature, who basically talks about how there really isn't plausible deniability anymore for like what these Insta Moms are doing like she, she basically says outright, like, yeah, everyone knew, everyone, everyone knew who was on the other side of these transactions. Like it wasn't, it, people were not in the dark about that. And, and there were, she recounts conversations with some of these other people that were making content about their preteen, you know, daughters where they were kind of acknowledging outright that like that's, that was the intent and that they were trying to find new ways to like,

• 1:04:04Speaker 03

  I guess, maintain or like walk that razor's edge of like where it could be construed as innocent, but like very clearly it was not in its intent.

• 1:04:13Ryan Broderick?

  I, I think that gray area is the important thing here. Like I, I, you know, I said a second ago, the like, all of this stuff is inherently exploitative and family vlogging is inherently bad. I, I, I'm not sure I totally think that because like I, I've also seen sort of how this world works, which is like a lot of family vlogging channels have come across, clearly started as we uploaded to YouTube to share with our family back before video hosting was built into Google Drive or something. And that, I mean, that YouTube, that's what the earliest uses of YouTube were is like, I, we did an episode a couple of months ago, looking at how MySpace teenagers were using YouTube videos to talk to each other.

• 1:04:58Ryan Broderick?

  They were just sending YouTube videos back and forth, and then they inadvertently went viral by accident. They, they didn't know that that was going to happen. And I think for a lot of these families, they're like, we'll do something fun and cute for Christmas or whatever together. And then people like it and they can't, they can't let go, they can't turn away from that. And that's where the danger starts. And that's where the lines start getting blurry. And that's where I think the abuse happens because I think working on the internet is inherently abusive. I actually think like the life of a creator is inherently abusive. You're working in a system that you cannot really control for very low margins for platforms that do not care about you. And when you put children in that situation, like abuse will just happen, I think.

• 1:05:41Speaker 03

  Hmm. You think that's true even for the creators that make a lot of money online?

• 1:05:46Ryan Broderick?

  I mean, I've never met one that's mentally healthy.

• 1:05:50Ryan Broderick?

  You know, it's, it's, it's.

• 1:05:51Speaker 03

  Damn.

• 1:05:52Ryan Broderick?

  It's like in Squid Game where it's like, yeah, you win, but you're insane. You're, you're never going to be normal again. So let's say you are a Mr. Beast level operation. You then have to continue to stay that size. And you have to stay that size within a network and a framework that is going to try its hardest to make sure you don't become bigger than it. YouTube will never let you become bigger than YouTube. They don't, there's no incentive for that.

• 1:06:17Speaker 03

  How do I say this? It's, it's almost like you're, you're monetizing the thing that,

• 1:06:24Speaker 03

  not that it's like a, like a non renewable resource, but like you end up kind of destroying yourself in the process because, because of the extremes you have to go to, which isn't really like a novel, um, observation, but I kind of feel like you see the same thing with, um, with like Sydney Sweeney's career. Like she, she has kind of gone down that same path, not from a family blogging perspective, but like the monetization of like sexuality and rage. And it's like, I, I was reflecting on that recently, just how kind of sad it is when you think like even just five years ago, she was like a pretty well respected actress, had like Emmys and shit. And now I'm like, I, it feels like she kind of took the one thing that she could trade on and exploited it to the very hilt.

• 1:07:09Speaker 03

  And, and now the, the reputational damage that you sustain from that, it's a trick that only works so many times. And I, I just wonder if that's not the same kind of dynamic that we're talking about here. And so, yes, obviously anytime you bring children into that dynamic is the results are not going to be good.

• 1:07:27Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah. Sydney Sweeney is an interesting one to point to. I do feel like she is kind of going down that road. The thing that comes to mind when you said that, I had to look it up, was an interaction between Laverne Cox and Dylan Mulvaney from several years ago. When Laverne Cox said to Dylan, it's insane that you're documenting so much of your life. Everything cannot be for the public. They love it, but everything cannot be for them. And it's a quote that I think about a lot because I think it's, I think it's a really useful sort of way to think about this stuff. And I think that is especially true for family because like families are really weird. Um, like home life is weird and it should be weird.

• 1:08:12Ryan Broderick?

  Like you shouldn't, I always feel very weird about like posting photos or videos or doing like public facing projects with my parents or my sibling because I don't want other people to, to judge that. I don't want, I don't want prying eyes in my home. I don't want to take Instagram photos around my apartment with my girlfriend. Like I, I want that my life away from people, away from scrutiny. And in a weird way, it's like, these families have, have allowed constant public scrutiny in, and that has facilitated abuse.

• 1:08:51Ryan Broderick?

  It's, it's like, there's something weird where it's like you're, you're, you're sort of constantly forcing your home life to fit public consumption. And that creates abusive situations, whereas if you didn't and everyone got to chill out and not have to be online all the time, you probably wouldn't have those same abusive dynamics in theory. Let's, let's assume.

• 1:09:11Speaker 04

  There's, sorry, Kitty, you go for it.

• 1:09:13Speaker 03

  No, you, I, I, I'm still thinking about that.

• 1:09:16Speaker 04

  There's one story that from the research that I really was like, kind of struck by was a blogger who was not making video content, who was just making Instagram reels and other things. And she was talking about her kids growing up and realizing they resented what she was having them do, and it was so much less extreme. And I think she's somebody who like started with like, like she sounded more sane than these other people who have come across. Where she was like, they got free Halloween costumes. And then she thought that was awesome and she realized they want to pick out their own. She was like, even things like they get to go to a theme park for a day. They knew that they were being forced to work.

• 1:09:58Speaker 04

  So like things that she thought it was affording the family that are like, oh, a kid would love to have a day at a theme park where there's an extra $600 to spend. They were like, I'm resentful of my manager for making me, you know, do the thing. And it just creates that dynamic. And I think like, even in that situation where it like, you have a parent who is conscious of that, who is self-conscious of that, who is not trying to roll out video content. It's still fucked up and it still ends up like ruining, like we'd spent a day at a theme park together, isn't that fun? And turns it into like, your kid's going to remember that as a workday.

• 1:10:36Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 1:10:38Ryan Broderick?

  And we haven't even talked about the body image stuff.

• 1:10:42Speaker 03

  Yeah. What do you got?

• 1:10:44Ryan Broderick?

  I'm not, I'm not gonna go down that road. I think people can infer, but basically I think you get, you get really weird if you're constantly sort of trying to, especially a preteen or a teenager, trying to constantly look good on camera in videos. You know, it's.

• 1:10:59Speaker 03

  I mean, we talk about that with adults on Diabolical Lies sometimes, how the recent plastic surgery increase, that they, they think they can trace that back to people being on Zoom all the time after the pandemic and just having to, it's just not natural to look at yourself that much.

• 1:11:17Ryan Broderick?

  I think it's good for me. I really liked it. I, I found out recently you can turn off self-view on Zoom.

• 1:11:26Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, I have to do that or I'll just watch myself.

• 1:11:28Ryan Broderick?

  I've, I did it recently on a call and it was awesome.

• 1:11:31Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:11:32Ryan Broderick?

  And I think that's the lesson here. Don't look at yourself so much and don't put your family on the internet or let your family put you on the internet.

• 1:11:41Speaker 03

  Let your teenage daughter monetize herself.

• 1:11:44Ryan Broderick?

  If your teenage daughter wants to monetize her period and sell her clothes on the internet to weirdos, that has to be her decision, not yours.

• 1:11:52Speaker 04

  She's gonna hide that from you, you know?

• 1:11:53Ryan Broderick?

  That's a thing you should learn about 10 years after the fact.

• 1:11:56Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:11:56Ryan Broderick?

  You're still nihilistic about this. You don't think those laws are going to help anything. And Katie, are you still feeling optimistic that this is going to be a thing that passes as these kids grow up more?

• 1:12:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I guess as we've talked about it, I'm thinking like,

• 1:12:14Speaker 03

  there's probably, it is taboo. And I think the more we know about how fucked up it is, the more taboo it will become. And so there probably will continue to be some, some semblance of an audience for it. But I don't think I'm as nihilistic about like legislation being useless. I think that in many cases, I find myself

• 1:12:36Speaker 03

  advocating for like, we, we actually do need legislation around this thing, or like, we need to, you know, make XYZ problematic thing illegal or make it harder for people. And I, I, I think I feel some nihilism around doing it in this like patchwork states, states rights, federalist kind of way, as opposed to just like blanket, we're not doing this anymore. But I do think that ultimately legislation is the answer. I just don't know if it's the answer in the way that, because I, I don't think the platforms are gonna do anything about it.

• 1:13:10Ryan Broderick?

  I think.

• 1:13:11Speaker 03

  They have no incentive to.

• 1:13:12Ryan Broderick?

  I think chill, I think children, especially, but I think YouTubers need to unionize. You know, I joke, but this is actually an idea I've had for a while that I actually do think we need a creators' union. I think we need a.

• 1:13:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, Substackers are trying to do something like this right now.

• 1:13:26Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah. Oh, I was part of the first version of that, which is why I left Substack.

• 1:13:32Speaker 03

  Wait, really? When was the first version of this?

• 1:13:34Ryan Broderick?

  We all got together and tried to make them stop platforming neo-Nazis.

• 1:13:39Speaker 03

  Who was like, ringleading that?

• 1:13:40Ryan Broderick?

  And, and Helen Peterson.

• 1:13:43Speaker 03

  Oh, really? And now she's on Patreon?

• 1:13:44Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, we all left. Casey, it was me, Casey, Annie, a bunch of us. We did a letter to the two right-wing psychos that run that site. And they said no, and I left the next day. But a creators' union would be sick. It would help a lot. And the internet would cease to exist as we know it, because all the big tech platforms would pull out.

• 1:14:05Speaker 03

  As much as I love that idea, the immediate first question I have is like, but unions are, well, would it just kind of mirror the way it works in like film and television where like all the studios have to, okay?

• 1:14:17Ryan Broderick?

  It would mirror the way it works in film or television, or there, I mean, there are journalist unions.

• 1:14:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:14:22Ryan Broderick?

  You would go by texts or multimedia. You'd have creators' unions for both. And the big tech platforms would have to pay a certain amount per view. They would have to have an agreed upon definition of a view, which is a big issue right now with YouTube, changing their view counts. We're basically doubling everyone's traffic overnight, but not paying you for it. Data privacy rights, like the ability to sort of pick up your bag and leave if you want, like, all those predictions are very possible. But big tech would suddenly lose all interest in social media if there were unions involved. That's why social media exists, because there were unions in radio and TV and newspapers. So the whole thing is a union busting exercise.

• 1:15:05Speaker 03

  Wait, does anyone, did any of us have kids?

• 1:15:07Ryan Broderick?

  No.

• 1:15:08Speaker 03

  Okay, that's such, that's also an interesting layer of this.

• 1:15:10Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah. I guess maybe if I have, you know, you know, if I had a kid, fuck it. Yeah, he's gonna work.

• 1:15:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, check back in and, yeah.

• 1:15:18Ryan Broderick?

  She's going online. They're, they're, they're, they're doing something. Either they're gonna, they could do painting, or they could do like crowd work videos at nightclubs.

• 1:15:28Ryan Broderick?

  Or like food videos, you know, oh, Mukbang?

• 1:15:30Speaker 03

  Well, I'm not around.

• 1:15:31Ryan Broderick?

  Ooh, Mukbang.

• 1:15:33Speaker 03

  We have a couple nieces and nephews, and it's so funny because they all watch YouTube and they'll make YouTube videos, like they're not actually making them, but they, they will, they, they've picked up the parlance. Like, they will walk around being like, like, comment, subscribe. And it's, it's so dark. It's so eerie.

• 1:15:52Ryan Broderick?

  No way. No, no, no, no, thank you. No, thank you. If people want to follow you, Katie, on the internet, where can they do that?

• 1:15:58Speaker 03

  Oh, where to follow me on the internet? After we've just spent an hour and a half detailing all of its harms. Like, all right, folks, come on over to my parasocial universe. You can, if you like podcasts, you can listen to my podcast, Diabolical Lies, where we talk about culture and politics, things of this nature and more. Or on Instagram, at Katie Gaddy Tossin', or on Substack.

• 1:16:24Ryan Broderick?

  Awesome.

• 1:16:24Speaker 03

  At Katie Gaddy Tossin'.

• 1:16:26Ryan Broderick?

  Thank you so much. This was, this was as delightful as a conversation like this could be. So.

• 1:16:31Speaker 03

  Oh, I agree. Thanks for having me.

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