Far More Famous Influencers Are Fake Than You Realize
Episode Stats
Harmful content
Misogyny
6
sentences flagged
Toxicity
22
sentences flagged
Hate speech
9
sentences flagged
Summary
In this episode, we re talking about how much of what we perceive to be popular on the internet is a lie, and why we need to reevaluate the way that we browse the internet. We re also talking about the growing problem of "view botting" and the effect it has on our perception of what's going on online.
Transcript
00:00:00.000
Hello, Malcolm. I'm very excited to be talking with you today because I kind of feel like I need
00:00:05.420
to completely reevaluate the way that I browse the internet and that everything's a lie. And
00:00:08.960
that internet theory doesn't even begin to really describe what's going on. And I need help. I need
00:00:14.440
help. You're going to help me. So according to some analysts, for the first time in over a decade
00:00:20.180
now, bots generate the majority of internet activity, like 51% to 53%. This is according
00:00:26.560
to multiple reports and sources. I have in the show notes on Patreon and Substack, all the sources
00:00:31.960
I can link to them. Breakdowns sometimes separate the good bots, like search engine crawlers and SEO
00:00:37.120
from the bad. And the bad ones still control up to like 40% of internet traffic. Cloudflare's data
00:00:43.080
has it a little bit lower, like 31 to 32%, but that's insane. Anyway, there are literal view
00:00:49.380
farms of just like walls of phones of just people generating fake traffic very sophisticated fake
00:00:57.880
traffic a literal view form oh no i have seen this yeah no but it's it's worse than this
00:01:10.900
so yeah there was this brazilian one that was raided two months ago and and police go in and
00:01:16.420
it's just like these walls of just phones wired up it just looks like something fake like if i
00:01:22.020
saw it in an anime i'd be like yeah no like no one actually no no we just we're just gonna like
00:01:25.880
put grids of phones on a giant wall and like control them and for any platform you can imagine
00:01:31.020
you can buy view bots with varying degrees of sophistication this includes a few bots that have
00:01:37.160
widely varied ip addresses that have detailed histories that leave comments that mute and
00:01:42.380
unmute while watching streams like the extent to which it's hard to actually track whether or not
00:01:47.960
this is real too because i came into this being like oh yeah i've heard view botting is a problem
00:01:51.780
i guess i should just look at like engagement on a thing and then if there's a lot of you know
00:01:55.580
like what seems to be real human behavior it's gotta be real no no this is so what i want to
00:02:02.180
use this conversation to talk about like the meta of this conversation for me yes is how much of
00:02:07.560
what we perceive to be popular on the internet is a lie no this is so true of the left and the right
00:02:16.360
and this has been really evident in a lot of things like recent games that are still trying
00:02:23.920
to appeal to a woke audience and we haven't gotten as much a chance to go over these as i would like
00:02:29.200
we may do a whole episode on them if people really want to yeah one of the comments crashed out
00:02:33.800
recently after like every main person it's made by larry ellison's daughter in the industry talking
00:02:39.040
about how good it was it got like all perfect reviews like 10 10s um and it was called mixtape
00:02:43.760
and it had a high a player streaming high of 2000 um another one that came out recently called
00:02:52.300
euphoria right to to give you an idea of like how bad these things do so it had a developer team
00:03:00.460
of it looks like around 60 people um and it was in development for i think four years okay oh my
00:03:09.420
lord okay this game came out a month ago and if you look at the the peak player count on it okay
00:03:19.100
it had a peak player count this was 15 days ago so it only recently came out okay okay of 219 people
00:03:27.500
if you look at its current player count 21 people that's about a right now
00:03:36.660
that's about a third the people who are currently playing our fab ai that's like people riding a
00:03:42.760
bus it's bad this is really bad days ago from a team of 60 people who made it right it's just
00:03:51.140
like one public school classroom of children yeah for a year again all these people likely
00:03:57.520
had salaries of like 60 70 000 or something like that you know you're probably more than i think
00:04:02.780
yeah like okay say they paid them cheaply like 20 000 the game is estimated to have made i think
00:04:09.900
around 40 000 in total or like 45 000 in total like astonishingly low amounts of money how is
00:04:17.880
it's happening this is made by a major studio by the way right but it's not just it's not just game
00:04:22.300
studios either like fame in general is manufactured like major music labels and artists are are using
00:04:30.260
botting to look bigger than they are so even when you're like oh well of course like Beyonce is
00:04:34.460
famous like no there was this big in back in 2012 there was this really big basically like
00:04:40.200
view bot erasing and figures like Beyonce lost like billions of views just like oh by the way
00:04:45.920
those were fake like that even these these huge people their hugeness is to an extent it's and
00:04:52.620
it's impossible to say how much because so much of this is both very hard to measure and kept very
00:04:58.200
under wraps manufactured another example drake accused his own label of conspiring with third
00:05:04.520
parties including spotify to bot streams for kendrick lamar's not like us to harm him and
00:05:10.720
And while Yonji called it untrue and illogical, they dismissed defamation claims and the broader
00:05:16.380
case is still ongoing. And Drake has also faced separate accusations of using his stake partnership
00:05:21.640
to fund botting for his own catalog. Like it's just so pervasive that like everyone understands
00:05:26.180
it's happening, but most of it's just gone underground. And also it's the extent, and this
00:05:31.520
is another really good way of understanding how true this is. When major companies don't use
00:05:37.480
viewbotting you see extremely embarrassing situations like the pilot episode of star trek
00:05:42.760
starfleet academy yeah which oops someone forgot to pay the viewbotting company it came out at
00:05:48.600
lower than our episode count for that week and yeah they got 16 000 views in the first 11 hours
00:05:56.140
after release on youtube and a separate report also said the live premiere peaked at roughly
00:06:01.020
1 300 concurrent viewers now leaflet on one of her streams at like two in the morning we'll have
00:06:06.880
like a low of 1 000 viewers right yeah so i i do streaming it was leaflet on now every other friday
00:06:13.160
so we'll be doing it this friday early early in the morning so like 3 a.m on a sun what is saturday
00:06:18.420
saturday's what after friday saturday yeah saturday 3 a.m generally we're at around like a
00:06:23.140
thousand five hundred that's where we typically are so we will the stream tonight will start at
00:06:28.160
8 p.m est um and something i got wrong here is the thousand five hundred is just her concurrent
00:06:33.820
views on twitch i forgot that they're probably about equal or larger on kick so she's typically
00:06:39.100
doing about twice or i guess we are doing about twice as well welcome to starfleet academy
00:06:44.380
territory heavily marketed etc are beating starfleet academy which had hundreds of millions
00:06:52.140
of dollars go to it our episode that came out the day it came out and keep in mind we do episodes
00:06:58.620
every day okay and they had one premiere had well it checks out i've i've i've watched i've
00:07:07.300
watched so many hours i mean like days worth of leaflet and i love star trek i've not watched
00:07:12.840
admit it i've not even watched the preview of starfleet academy i don't i don't like
00:07:16.680
it's but anyway so that's just again to be clear it may you you can't obviously know how much
00:07:24.080
these like big media companies and and famous celebrities are investing in viewbotting and
00:07:29.280
fluffing up their own subscribers and views and engagements and likes and shares and comments
00:07:33.420
but you can see what happens in the absence of it and it's not just like professional like
00:07:39.440
mainstream media figures viral figures like caleb hammer and clavicular are manufactured to a great
00:07:46.180
extent and we're going to get into that too it's insane oh hold on i want to get into asthma gold's
00:07:50.180
take on this before we go any further so okay i thought it was very interesting so yeah he was
00:07:54.180
going over viewbotting on twitch and he's like almost every large player on twitch is viewbotting
00:07:58.520
and so he was saying you know you've got these people where they realistically have like a
00:08:04.060
thousand people watching and i'm just like dude should we just like get into viewbotting and then
00:08:07.320
start a twitch right and he's like but twitch doesn't want to shut it down because it makes
00:08:11.020
their numbers look higher he's like they say yeah they're very disincentivized from and there there
00:08:16.640
are twitch streamers who have been like publicly been like oh yeah if you bought like they're
00:08:20.780
probably like three people watching this right now but it looks like there are a thousand people
00:08:24.140
like so transparent and they're friends with twitch's like ceo like it is very what was more
00:08:30.860
interesting about asthma gold's take on this is somebody was like well these people who buy ads
00:08:34.680
on them right and they think that they're getting like thousands and thousands of views but it's
00:08:39.460
like less than a thousand concurrent viewers and asthma gold was like well actually they're not
00:08:44.900
really getting screwed and the guy was like but what do you mean by this and he's like well consider
00:08:49.660
who actually signed the contract to buy the ads it's not somebody with equity in the company
00:08:54.420
it's not the company's ceo it's the head of marketing or whatever right and he just needs
00:08:59.080
to show the next guy above him how many people watched it for x amount of money they don't know
00:09:03.780
but those who are savvy enough to be able to somewhat sophisticatedly track if they're getting
00:09:09.660
a bump to a product like um and they're not seeing it like there people are starting to realize that
00:09:14.960
and and people like devon nash who i'm going to reference multiple times because he's actually
00:09:18.580
really good at parsing out what's going on here being somewhat of an industry insider more than
00:09:23.240
someone some advertisers are discovering this and they're super not cool with it so there is a
00:09:28.880
tension there actually hold on this explains something i didn't fully understand um but our
00:09:35.000
discord is hugely bigger than other equivalently sized influencers and i've been very surprised by
00:09:43.480
this and now i'm realizing oh were we supposed to be viewbotting no like it's really good that we
00:09:51.920
weren't i'm really glad that we're not but i mean now i i get also maybe why a lot of people are
00:09:56.200
like why is your channel a lot bigger because i think they're used to seeing yeah they're used
00:10:00.600
content creators who are viewbotted and so like when you see that someone doesn't have like oh
00:10:05.220
where's your like you know hundreds of thousands of well you're seeing mostly people who are
00:10:10.100
paying for that because it's also incredibly affordable and i'll get into that too
00:10:14.000
but yeah to go over twitch around and we're talking just normal creators like small creators
00:10:20.060
around 10 of twitch streamers with at least 50 average viewers show clear persistent signs of
00:10:26.020
viewbotting according to the most comprehensive independent analysis and i again this is all
00:10:30.180
linked in the show notes. It's worse though, as you pointed out, as Asmongold says, for big
00:10:34.860
creators. So Devin Nash, again, he really knows what he's talking about. They analyzed the top
00:10:39.940
500 Twitch streamers and estimated that 400 to 430, that is roughly 80% of them show signs of
00:10:47.780
view botting or being bought it. Now keep in mind, many streamers do not know they're being
00:10:52.620
bought it. And I'll get into this. Okay. So 30 to 40% of viewers are blatant bots. And then another
00:10:58.900
5% to 15% via embeds. And this is based on chat activity, monitoring, user list sampling,
00:11:06.820
logged in and out ratios, and then known botnet cross-referencing. Creators argue that Twitch is
00:11:12.260
a platform where viewbotting is necessary for survival. Basically, if you're not doing it,
00:11:16.760
you're not competitive. And this is because unlike on YouTube and many, like probably most
00:11:21.500
other platforms, discoverability is basically just impossible on Twitch. The way they've designed it,
00:11:26.500
you will not, you will not be discovered on Twitch period. And that's why I feel like breaking into
00:11:31.000
it is really hard now, especially if you're not like already super famous. And basically I think
00:11:36.320
the way people get big on Twitch is they have huge audiences elsewhere to start now. And then
00:11:41.220
those audiences come over to Twitch. I don't even know how much viewbotting would really help to
00:11:45.720
jumpstart it, but Devin Nash went into the unit economics of this in a really fascinating way
00:11:51.800
and showed how basically it's a no-brainer smart decision for a streamer's agency to viewbot them
00:12:00.520
because they will put in like $1 and then get $1.50 back. Like it pays back. It would be stupid
00:12:09.660
to not do it. And he understands this because he's a professional on the brand marketing side
0.99
00:12:13.720
of the equation. I think he just left it, but he was at least former chief marketing officer at
00:12:17.720
Novo, which is an agency. And again, he represents not the streamer side, but the brand side. So
00:12:22.340
he's also keen on delivering actual results to brands so that they can trust him and keep working
00:12:26.740
with him. So he pointed out that viewbots cost approximately one to two cents per viewer hour,
00:12:33.400
and that translates to about 135 to 185 per week to add 500 to 750 viewers to a stream.
00:12:41.020
And then the weekly cost includes features like chatting and custom chat messages to make the
00:12:46.760
viewers appear authentic. And so for a full month of viewbotting, agencies spend less than $800 to
00:12:52.860
artificially inflate viewer counts. That's pretty reasonable. Now, Twitch sponsorship rates, and
00:12:57.840
again, he knows this, he's worked in the industry, they range from $1 to $3 per concurrent viewer,
00:13:04.080
with $150 to $2 being the standard rate for two-hour gaming sponsorship. So for a streamer with
00:13:10.980
a thousand viewers at a $2 per CCV, a single two-hour sponsorship generates $4,000 in total
00:13:17.680
revenue. The agency typically takes a 20% commission. So they earn 800 per deal while
00:13:23.500
the streamer gets 3,200. So Nash demonstrates how agencies can receive basically massive returns
00:13:31.560
by combining few botting with multiple sponsorship deals. So starting with a 300 viewer stream and
00:13:37.700
then adding 700 botted viewers creates an apparent 1000 viewer stream for approximately 150 to 180
00:13:45.060
per week and if the agency secures just two hour sponsorships for that inflated audience they earn
00:13:50.420
1600 in commission while spending less than 400 on view bots and so it's it's he calls it a money
00:13:58.460
printing machine it is i just i can't believe it and i think that this is an easy way to tell who's
00:14:04.960
viewbotting and who's not viewbotting is who's doing sponsorships people who aren't doing
00:14:09.320
sponsorships there's virtually no reason for them to viewbot and this is why i think when you're
00:14:14.200
looking at our communities you see individuals who are big enough easily to do lots of sponsorships
00:14:21.140
like say an asthma gold but you almost never get them or a leaflet and you almost never get them
00:14:25.620
and it's being right wing in the way that we're right wing like if you're right wing and like
00:14:30.100
the way ben shapiro it's your episode on him where i point out heavy evidence that his audience could
00:14:35.260
be as much as 90 percent botted there's a huge reason to view bot and the financial backing to
00:14:41.280
do it and no when people are like wait so his entire organization is just fraudulent and i'm
00:14:46.460
like i don't really think that's it i think what's going on with him is that the daily wire should be
00:14:53.080
thought of more the way we think of an organization like the heritage foundation where it's people
00:15:24.400
are arriving the day after they're released and then after that they get virtually no views
00:15:31.640
that makes no sense i could see almost like in our videos the majority of the views happening on
00:15:39.200
the day they're released for a daily episode but who's reliably watching daily episodes always
00:15:47.400
the day after they're released instead of the day that they're released and i'm not saying that it's
00:15:53.480
impossible that anyone would have this behavior i suspect you know maybe one tenth of our audience
00:15:59.160
would have a behavior like this if we're talking like on the larger side but two-thirds of your
00:16:05.120
audience or more than two-thirds it seems like often um or i could be like well maybe he's got
00:16:11.080
a really long tail and so that way you would see views trickling in for a long time after the video
00:16:15.860
which we also don't see views basically stop the moment a video hits around half a million views
00:16:23.260
which almost always happens on day two or day three but this indicates basically they're paying
00:16:29.860
someone to promote it in a linear fashion that doesn't make sense for daily episodes especially
00:16:36.200
if they're daily episodes that have a fanatical long-term following which is what we have to
00:16:41.220
assume because the longer form episodes are doing so much better than the shorter form episodes
00:16:46.240
which typically doesn't make sense in the youtube algorithm unless it's like a dedicated following
00:16:50.800
waiting for them oh side note here some people were looking up youtube statistics and they
00:16:55.000
thought that simone got the 85 decline in ben shapiro's numbers wrong even if you don't include
00:17:00.160
view botting and there was some debate about it on the discord and at first i thought that they
00:17:04.900
were right and that she had got it wrong and then she pointed out malcolm i upload all my notes to
00:17:08.660
the show notes go to it and so then they went to it and then they kept arguing for a while
00:17:12.140
and then they came to an understanding that simone wasn't wrong but it had to do with the
00:17:17.440
way that she worded it i don't get it exactly the point being is that if you think on a surface
00:17:21.760
level we've gotten something wrong especially if it's simone because she's the more diligent
00:17:25.780
researcher out of the two of us do check her show notes so another online conservative voice i had
00:17:32.120
heard was fake when i was doing research on the ben shapiro one where it seems pretty clear that
00:17:36.200
ben shapiro has a smaller real audience than we have was louder with crowder and i used to like
00:17:42.200
Crowder a lot. I watched the show regularly and then it just got boring. So I was like, okay,
00:17:47.540
that seems believable. Let's look into this. So here I pull up an episode. So this episode's from
00:17:54.680
10 days ago. I wanted to get one that looked like fairly representative for the channel.
00:17:59.300
It's got 104,000 views and it's got 529 comments. Okay. Let's look at one of our videos to get an
00:18:07.180
idea if that makes sense. All right. So we'll just go through one. So there's a video that
00:18:11.320
came out yesterday this one had 12 000 views it's already at 553 comments so more than a video with
00:18:21.000
over a hundred thousand views of his that came out 10 days ago okay maybe that's an anomaly let's go
00:18:26.940
before that the one from the day before that 16 000 views over a thousand comments 1077 okay the
00:18:33.700
day before that 16 000 views 443 comments like it's no it's not plausible it's not plausible
00:18:41.860
that he's 10x larger than we are and has less interaction than we have it shouldn't even be
00:18:48.660
close if it was three times our interaction i'd still find that suspicious and i think your
00:18:54.080
perception and my perception of who's big in certain culture war spaces is heavily warped
00:19:02.200
and heavily manipulated and often very not true and i think a lot of the sort of moldier more
00:19:09.280
boring more pearl clutchy conservative figures who previously i thought were like a giant political
00:19:15.700
battle that we're fighting against are not real their their base is not real their this ideology
00:19:24.040
is entirely astroturfed not that it didn't have support at one point i'm just talking about within
00:19:31.060
the current online environment and i was thinking about this recently in the context of because i
00:19:36.280
was talking with slay flit about this and like oh you know should we be worried when you know x y
00:19:42.540
and z people are mad at us for our views or whatever and i've just gotten to the point of
00:19:47.580
it's like it doesn't matter it doesn't matter i don't need to care about them they're not going
00:19:51.840
to have a place in space if their views lead them to disengage with technology or not actually find
00:19:57.440
partners and have kids it's not a political battle worth fighting because they're just
00:20:02.700
not long-term relevant i need to focus on groups that are thriving and do have a possibility of
00:20:10.560
building those spaceships with my descendants this is why when we look at like our cultural
00:20:16.460
movement right like this techie right-leaning cultural movement the impact it seems to have
00:20:24.120
was in online culture is so much bigger than you would expect from the right yes yes yes it's been
00:20:31.140
yeah i've been like wait why are like why have we been referenced here and there when like our
00:20:34.720
views are so low and yeah yeah and what i'm realizing is our culture like for example you
00:20:41.640
look at leaflet streams or something like that leaflet doesn't really do sponsorships and because
00:20:47.020
she doesn't do sponsorships she doesn't have a reason to view bot in the way that other people
00:20:51.520
yeah there isn't that same incentive although and we're going to get into it it is not always
00:20:57.500
even if you don't have an agency and even if you don't have sponsorships you might still be
00:21:02.880
viewvotted without your consent and go over it come on let's go yeah but first i want to talk
00:21:08.020
about so i just i also want to be clear that this is i think a lot of people that the discourse is
00:21:11.980
oh twitch viewbotting twitch viewbotting whereas i just want to reiterate and this is even older
00:21:17.260
discourse that Facebook full of viewbotting and also even more so Spotify and like just streaming
00:21:23.000
music viewbotting so huge but here's the one place where I was like oh well here's a place
00:21:28.120
where Substack couldn't you know like where viewbotting isn't a thing Substack I'm like well
00:21:32.140
Substack is too new and the way it works like with email platform delivery and all these other forms
00:21:36.860
of engagement like Substack has got to not have viewbotting but no it totally does so there are
00:21:43.000
websites that sell Substack subscribers for as low as two cents each. And sometimes they claim
00:21:48.640
that they use real people that they add in manually rather than pure bots. Whether they're
00:21:53.320
organic or farmed, it's still artificial information. And I found one, just like one
00:22:00.800
website where you and I just now, if we want to, can go to en.mrpopular.net to buy. But you can
00:22:08.220
choose low quality medium quality or high quality subscribers they don't really i haven't poked
00:22:14.040
around their site a lot but i told you like when we had a family member who all of a sudden had
00:22:18.480
like 80 000 followers on on subpack and i was like this is fake he had four articles and like
00:22:23.180
three comments on each i know i i didn't want to believe it and now i'm like oh my god because but
00:22:28.660
it's and it's not yeah it's not just subscribers you can buy comments you can buy likes views
00:22:35.140
shares, plays, restacks, searches, comment likes, comment restacks, comment shares.
00:22:42.240
You can buy messages. You can buy comment replies. You can buy save as image. You can buy a ton of
00:22:47.960
different ways to be like, yeah, look at all these, like, clearly this isn't fake. Who would
00:22:53.540
who would buy save as image? Like that is how sophisticated this is. I'm just really impressed.
00:22:58.840
And there are already high profile examples, recent ones, prominent ones of people totally
00:23:05.040
faking their sub stacks so in april the observer covered how andrew tate's sub stack saw its total
00:23:10.640
follower count drop from 1.1 million to 980 000 after analysis of a sample of 1 000 paying
00:23:17.020
subscribers paying subscribers found that 75 percent had no biography publications or visible
00:23:25.000
activity and half were created in a 16 day window so wait his paying subscribers 75 percent were
00:23:34.200
fake and you know and i believe this when i look at andrew tate's comment being as popular as it
00:23:40.120
doesn't make sense he's not that smart and like interesting it's not even that though it shouldn't
00:23:45.500
also be i mean because his whole thing is sort of like faking things you know pretending to be a
00:23:49.060
a thought and you know using like a girlfriend's images and then like chatting to men on only fans
00:23:56.080
or something you know what i mean like i was just checking out our our sub stack right now
00:24:00.960
um hey first of all do you know how many paid subscribers we have we have a lot and they're
00:24:05.960
cool dude every by the way every time we get a paid subscriber i will and some of them are a
00:24:11.840
little bit more secretive than others i totally stock them i find their instagrams i find they're
00:24:16.280
like you do yeah so we are at now 99 paid subscribers on subject you want to be number 100
00:24:22.420
uh i actually think our patreon is slightly better than subset i don't know like if we
00:24:26.520
i treat them i treat them equally i read every comment i uh i i add each new paid subscriber to
00:24:33.500
our personal like network like you know in our personal crm i email them personally from both
00:24:38.760
of us there's an open line of communication via email and you want to know what our what
00:24:42.360
our yearly income is just from sub stack what i was surprised by this ten thousand seven hundred
00:24:49.200
dollars oh i mean you can't live off of that but that's that's really meaningful guys i appreciate
00:24:57.280
it no like for real the support yeah we like and yeah and and i i these people have histories like
00:25:05.880
i wouldn't be able to stalk them if they weren't real uh so anyway i was just kind of shocked that
00:25:12.260
you could that you could fake sub stack as much as you can and this isn't it's not just entertain
00:25:16.980
where youtube tried to take us off for a bit oh yeah that was so mad at me that i made like an
00:25:24.120
arc about that and i was like no it's so fun come on yeah but we got a lot of subscribers and thank
00:25:29.840
you for everyone who did show support then because we really thought we were done on youtube we were
00:25:33.140
incredibly demoralized but we have one we have one of three strikes i'm just saying it's gone now
00:25:38.560
it's gone did it fall off it did not fall without strikes for long enough that the strike where we
00:25:45.300
said hitler was bad because he was progressive that's gone hold on it must have because i just
00:25:51.560
saw like three days ago it was still there no you're right it's gone oh our record has been
00:25:58.100
cleared okay well i hope that doesn't mean people are not going to consider i mean immediately as
00:26:02.560
soon as it's clear leaflet gets a strike for one of our videos but oh no i feel really bad about
00:26:07.660
she was clear um she oh right she was thank god yeah asthma gold got it cleared for her or
00:26:12.920
something i know but like yeah she had to cash social chips or that i don't i don't know i don't
00:26:17.960
think cash social chips i think a bunch of people on the right created content about it red says
00:26:22.500
desu nuts like everybody was creating content about it it's part of the site hopefully it was
00:26:27.000
good for her yeah yeah as long as it's good for her i never want anything bad to happen to her
00:26:30.860
she's the best okay so also there was this creator called rebecca jones who lost hundreds of
00:26:35.640
thousands of subscribers it when they did a bunch of purges and this was documented on x in 2025
00:26:41.260
like it's it's a thing i just didn't know it was a thing i was i was very surprised but so in terms
00:26:45.940
of view botting on youtube fake views have existed on youtube since around 2009 and they've been
00:26:51.060
getting media attention since 2011 but this major 2012 purge in which youtube removed billions of
00:26:57.480
fraudulent views including over 1 billion from universal music group artists like beyonce like
00:27:03.340
rihanna like justin bieber like nikki minaj it's so crazy to me that like i look at them and i i
00:27:10.080
never had a reason to question i'm like well of course it's like justin bieber people are crazy
00:27:14.280
but who listens to justin bieber anymore i watch justin bieber a and bs i don't watch justin bieber
00:27:20.360
that tickles me yeah anyway uh and then you have like literally these physical view farms that i
00:27:30.000
you i hope you can include the the brazilian recently right everywhere right yeah you know
00:27:36.480
what's interesting is is so i'll be i'll be transparent with people here we tried like a
00:27:42.620
version of boobotting with our books oh totally yeah we we've talked about this before yeah we've
00:27:49.280
never tried it with youtube it's called book laundering like that yeah this is a whole other
00:27:53.800
thing if like if you if like anything all the all the proof that we used to use to think like oh
00:27:58.980
this must be good it's a new york times bestseller it's a whatever bestseller no completely look up
00:28:04.060
the way we taught the wall street journal bestseller list was was this sort of stuff
00:28:08.640
right people are always confused as to why our wall street journal bestseller book is the lowest
00:28:13.760
reviewed of any of our books like clearly the selling of any of our books it's because we had
00:28:18.300
to launch it in a really stupid way like not on amazon because amazon didn't count yeah we had to
00:28:24.380
launch through barnes and noble and then dot dot dot well i think there's like a lot of offering
0.89
00:28:31.860
it for free but then i'm sure they have like a lot of fake purchases in there you know we paid
00:28:37.080
someone to help us with this so we're not but we're not above this i mean we're too lazy to do
00:28:42.660
it with you so people wondering why we don't do it with youtube the reason i also just want to
00:28:47.040
like actually engage with our our community on youtube no but there's like a reason it's really
00:28:52.200
bad for your long-term algo. So there was this one French study in 2024 where they analyzed nearly
00:29:03.640
100,000 YouTube videos from over a thousand French channels over 1.5 years to find fake
00:29:10.440
view removals. So corrections on 90% of channels and about 78.5% of videos. The corrections
00:29:17.340
occurred in daily batches around 5 p.m., and they frequently happened late in a video's life cycle
00:29:23.980
after most of the organic views had accumulated. And it appears that videos corrected later tended
00:29:30.860
to be more popular overall, which suggests that the fake views can temporarily boost
00:29:36.740
algorithmic recommendations and perceive popularity before you get stripped. So no,
00:29:42.840
actually in many cases getting that early social proof that tricks algorithms has been to the
00:29:50.720
benefit of the creators and this was again this was published in 2024 i would like to think that
00:29:55.300
youtube has gotten better at this i don't want to risk it i don't want to put our channel at risk
00:29:58.880
because one of the ways that youtube is fighting this and many other platforms fight this because
00:30:03.660
it is incredibly hard you know the the cat and mouse game has gotten so sophisticated
00:30:08.040
that what many platforms are doing is basically you're guilty until proven innocent
00:30:11.780
And I, I mean, like we're already at risk of being taken down. If something were to go suspiciously
00:30:18.580
viral, even naturally, just because platforms are trying so hard to fight against this. But yeah,
00:30:26.180
I mean, I'm just trying to say there is some, there's some, there are many instances. I mean,
00:30:30.840
look on Twitch and that with this example on YouTube where people are being rewarded for
00:30:35.560
doing this, this bad behavior. But now I want to get into a different version of manufactured
00:30:41.260
i was highly suspicious i was just because we were doing a video on ben shapiro recently and
00:30:45.060
so i was looking at his views i suspect he's heavily view butted because the pattern in his
00:30:49.840
videos didn't make any sense most of his videos were at around the view count of our videos
00:30:54.140
and then he would do these like and when they're him when his name is on them they're good a lot
00:31:00.160
they're good when they had his name they were like an hour long and it was like the podcast
00:31:03.660
he was like half a million views i was like this doesn't make any sense why are your videos that
00:31:08.780
should be doing better in the algorithm yeah the short form algo friendly videos i think that he's
00:31:14.400
entirely astroturfed if i'm gonna be honest at this point i mean who's still watching when have
00:31:19.480
you heard a human being say i am i i continually watch ben shapiro even today yeah like look at
00:31:30.400
our content i'd like i a lot of people we go to like a conservative convention or something like
00:31:35.680
that and a lot of like the staffers will run up to us and be like oh my god we love you guys
00:31:39.480
even though daily wire is trying to freeze us out of all of them see our video on that
00:31:43.620
uh but like like clearly people watch her and i can see why you would watch our stuff
00:31:48.740
like this is the thing with the people who i watch who don't appear to be viewed about it
00:31:53.360
you know like leaflet or asmigold or something or next to nowhere i can understand why people
00:31:57.100
watch their content right yes totally i just don't get it who's watching yeah i can't bring
00:32:03.800
myself to watch it i'll watch brett cooper not infrequently but no for example who's still
00:32:10.320
watching steven crowder no me and i used to like his stuff like tim pool i used to like his stuff
00:32:17.620
i cannot imagine who's still watching their stuff it's so formulaic now
00:32:21.500
yeah because like when i click on something i'm like i either want to have my views informed in
00:32:29.820
an interesting way which is like nox or asmogold right yeah or i want to learn something new which
00:32:36.360
i think is what we try to do as people like we try to have and people will like challenge us
00:32:40.580
they'll be like your new idea per minute in this video was low but i was like you
00:32:46.860
yeah i know i know we're trying guys like well then let me introduce this to you because this
00:32:52.400
is so interesting to me and i mentioned this to you one morning earlier but i didn't really get
00:32:55.860
into it is i'm calling it clip spamming it this isn't it's not like a term but again devon nash
00:33:02.700
and i gotta start watching more of his videos because i just as i was doing this research i
00:33:06.060
realized like all the best sources were coming from him and i'd seen like two of his videos
00:33:10.480
already he he totally changed the way like a week ago in how i view youtube discovery in in his
00:33:17.800
breakdown of how people including clivicular and caleb hammer are manufacturing virality by
00:33:22.300
spamming clips of their work on platforms like youtube and well not not exactly them i should say
00:33:27.860
you can see the video again i linked to it in the show notes it's called exposing the new
00:33:32.400
manufactured viral content industry the video explains how basically a paid clipping economy
00:33:38.340
is artificially hijacking short-form algorithms on youtube and tiktok and instagram and x to
00:33:43.300
manufacture viral influencers and promote the streaming platform kick rather than just like
00:33:48.640
surface it's a great platform i know well but and this is and and just you know like uh spoiler
00:33:54.800
alert kick is just doing this this is how kick is growing they're not necessarily asking caleb
00:34:00.940
hammer like hey dude are you cool with this they're just they're just taking these these
00:34:06.440
clips and like caleb hammer is benefiting but i think they sort of spot like who is the potential
00:34:10.960
and they use those as almost like non-consensual endorsers of kick that drive people to the
00:34:17.980
platform so here's how it works on kick i guess but you how it works is why do you watch caleb
00:34:24.700
hammer simone because you watched him before he became political fun yeah i you you build a
00:34:31.260
parasocial relationship with him you feel better about your own life and your own mistakes when
00:34:36.800
you see just how he makes me feel terrible about the u.s economy i'm like jesus yes i don't want
00:34:41.380
to pay yes but it after watching our finances and like i stress out about like oh have we saved
00:34:46.880
enough? Am I budgeting well? And then I see how these other people spend their money and I feel
00:34:50.600
a lot better about it. And I think a lot of people watch for that. You know, it's just like, well,
00:34:54.360
you know, inflation's bad, prices are going up, but like, at least I'm not this idiot who bought
0.99
00:34:59.740
like a car with a terrible loan, you know, that kind of thing. So, but here's how the clipping
0.97
00:35:04.680
system works. There are these campaigns that are run inside large discord servers. We're talking
00:35:10.220
20 to 30 000 people or invite only groups where each campaign corresponds with one streamer or
00:35:17.420
podcaster or brand and then the clippers who are in in like the people in these discord servers
00:35:23.820
they will pull what 30 to 120 second segments from the long form streams because you know like
00:35:29.420
a caleb hammer financial audit is like uh an hour plus and their streams are even longer
00:35:35.420
and then they'll upload them as shorts to tiktok and instagram reels and youtube shorts and
00:35:39.820
sometimes x under their own accounts so these are like widely dispersed accounts not affiliated with
00:35:45.740
anyone else just like some random person in pakistan and then they in turn through this
00:35:53.500
discord server community are paid on a flat cpm basis around 10 to 40 cents i think per per thousand
00:36:01.900
views but around two to three dollars or specific bounties like three thousand dollars per million
00:36:07.820
views for particular clips and then payment happens in the usdt and there's often like a
00:36:13.220
minimum they have to reach in terms of views before they reach that threshold like maybe they have to
00:36:17.300
have 100 000 total views across all clippers uploads and then that incentivizes people to
00:36:22.480
just spam like 50 to 100 views across or sorry 50 to 100 clips across multiple accounts and keep in
00:36:29.220
mind he he's hanging out in the discord servers to try to figure this out like he spent like two
00:36:34.320
plus weeks just watching what was happening here super fascinating and then so become the cpm
00:36:41.640
is on top of the platform's own ad revenue this can be really decent money for clippers in very
00:36:48.540
low-income countries which as we want to cover this not aldous huxley sent us this graph of like
00:36:54.140
the the internet users of today and like so much of the people are just huge chunk we need to go
00:37:01.180
brazil has like half the internet users of the u.s yeah and we just don't realize you know we
00:37:06.500
think you just think like oh like it's mostly like u.s and europeans or whatever because like
00:37:10.840
what we see is english but no there's like it's just like people in brazil and pakistan too and
00:37:14.940
like hi guys too i mean like a lot of the people watching base camp are in brazil and we love you
00:37:19.160
guys but like we just didn't realize how many of you were there and so but anyway like if you're in
00:37:23.580
a third world country where wages are really low not necessarily brazil but like pakistan or
00:37:27.680
something, you can make a decent income from uploading these clips and making them, especially
00:37:32.720
if you're leveraging AI and being smart about it. And so this is run in a professional, non-scammy
00:37:38.980
way. There are visible campaign caps. They're like, okay, well, this is a $20,000 budget campaign.
00:37:45.600
People are making careers out of this. And then Nash uses a case of a clavicular clip to show
00:37:52.960
the scale. In one recent month, Clivicular allegedly generated 2.2 billion views from about
00:38:00.680
69,000 clips posted across platforms with 1,600 plus paid clippers involved. And averaged out,
00:38:08.860
each clip might get around 31,700 views, but the real point is this volume. You've got tens of
00:38:15.100
thousands of separate uploads all about the same person in 30 days. What is that going to tell an
00:38:20.540
algorithm, right? Like the, the point is that algorithms are sort of the way he, he described
00:38:25.800
it in his video was like, you know, how's an algorithm going to know? Like if you're designing
00:38:29.760
an algorithm, like, well, if there's some earthquake or like a volcano explodes, like
00:38:33.820
how, how am I going to make sure my algorithm picks that up? Well, if suddenly a bunch of
00:38:38.280
separate people all at once start talking about like a volcano, I should probably like promote
00:38:45.420
that thing you know surface that content more yeah and so that's what they're gaming with these
00:38:50.720
really simple on the surface of it clip campaigns is they're tricking the algorithms into thinking
00:38:58.040
oh my god this clavicular guy like he must be the most relevant thing in the world
00:39:03.160
so just this sheer volume tricks the recommendation system and then algorithms that treat topics
00:39:10.140
with tons of uploads and engagement is globally relevant
00:39:38.020
some of which I don't know. Is this what you're saying? Yeah, I guess if you're going to start
00:39:42.100
streaming, stream on kick, they can require clippers to use a precise kick logo overlay
00:39:46.940
and then incorrect placement can get the clip rejected and unpaid, which ensures that the brand
00:39:53.540
of kick is visible on every short. So if you see a short and you see a kick logo on it, you know,
00:40:01.060
you're being subject to this new tactic and kick strategy, which is derived from its association
00:40:06.840
with Stake, which is a crypto gambling platform, is to pay to flood short form platforms with
00:40:14.560
Kick-branded clips. And then they grow selected streamers to funnel some fraction of the billions
00:40:21.000
of impressions back to Kick. And Nash, who is also, you know, at least my like go-to now expert
00:40:27.800
on like Twitch botting, he contrasts this with Twitch's older model of paying select streamers
00:40:33.460
big contracts and expecting them to bring their own audience with now this, I think, much more
00:40:38.560
smart and sufficient method. Yeah. Where Cake is just spending its marketing budget directly on
00:40:43.240
mass short-form distribution. And then streamers just benefit as a side effect, but streamers are
00:40:48.380
clearly benefiting. So what's happening though, is that algorithms that heavily weight volume and
00:40:54.300
multi-channel chatter are just completely getting one-shotted by the tactic. And so you've got this
00:40:59.940
sometimes even like really mediocre or unlikable personalities are suddenly dominating feeds and
00:41:06.160
getting all this paid volume while more interesting creators just aren't getting discovered and then
00:41:14.080
you get basically this this random weird like fake viral stuff like what i i find like some of
00:41:23.180
the talk about clivic earlers be interesting but then when i go and i watch his actual content i'm
00:41:26.960
like it's so boring like i find there's no charisma nothing's happening this is really
00:41:32.140
boring now caleb hammer is different i think he's actually fun he's he's good at like actually
00:41:37.100
trying to deliver whereas i think fundamentally clavicular is an introvert autist who's discovered
00:41:44.360
his special interest and kind of just wants to be left alone but it you know understands that
00:41:48.700
he's getting a lot of money and reinforcement and attention and is feeding into it like while he can
00:41:52.400
but i just want to be clear like this is not this is not some concerted thing like this isn't just
00:41:58.980
a story of like oh like all the celebrities you thought were real were manufactured i mean we all
00:42:04.660
kind of knew that like the kardashians manufactured themselves and like all the music labels are
00:42:08.640
they're faking it but i didn't know how bad it was but that's still a thing but then it's also
00:42:12.760
not like oh well all twitch streamers are just faking it by viewbotting because no often it's
00:42:17.100
their agencies without even telling them just trying to get more of their cut and then the
00:42:21.320
the streamers don't even know it and asthma gold has talked about this like it's not necessarily
00:42:25.400
and even sometimes it's fans who are like a big stand of some creator even if they're really small
00:42:30.820
and they're like well i want to make them look bigger so then they're going off and they're
00:42:33.560
buying bots so like people are so this isn't even content creators so sometimes it's the agency
00:42:39.180
sometimes it's fans sometimes it's a music label sometimes you're a fan of us how risky it is to
00:42:44.100
buy a show don't don't yeah don't don't bought us but sometimes it's a platform sometimes it's
00:42:50.580
like kick doing it right i'm up to running a bot experiment on kick or rumble or something but not
00:42:56.340
here not not here yeah don't no please don't yeah no no again we weren't above it for book laundering
00:43:03.180
but and again books right so just but but what i thought i was going to come away with this like
00:43:08.620
my moral of the story was like well if you see you know a youtube video that has a lot of views
00:43:13.560
and you're trying to decide whether or not it's worth watching like actually look at the comments
00:43:17.060
but that doesn't even work so i don't know like because i i do i i fall for it i will look when
00:43:24.400
i'm like go through my youtube feed and my recommended stuff like i will look at how many
00:43:28.960
views something has and if it has a lot of views i'm going to be more likely to choose it and
00:43:33.060
now i'm i know i can't do that and i don't know like what what would what do you do in light of
00:43:39.320
this information to try to to not be subject to that level of manipulation and to not get
00:43:45.140
caught in in the debtor than i knew internet what do i do well i think watch content that's
00:43:54.000
actually entertaining sure this is the no no no this matters more than you think right like
00:44:00.620
yeah i think discount content that when you go to it and you're like i've heard x person is really
00:44:07.560
big and they have a reputation for being really big and then i go to their channel and i'm just
00:44:12.600
like not this is kind of boring who's watching this yeah so basically even if people are talking
00:44:20.340
about i don't want to cast shade even if people say they're watching it like that doesn't you
00:44:24.820
have yeah use your own judgment so an example of this right okay i don't want to cast shade
00:44:29.560
because like smuggle on it is like on team or whatever do you see that smuggle on it and the
00:44:34.760
latest you know smuggle on it the vtuber right the fox girl conservative vtuber so the latest
00:44:40.780
what was it shoo on head stream yeah about commenting on hassan crashing out yeah it was
00:44:46.520
fun to see them together yeah but like i go i well i like her politics and everything and
00:44:53.180
some of her stuff the reality is she's just not that entertaining right and if i contrast her
00:44:59.240
views was how entertaining she is i'm like oh this is a little sus and i think that i need to
00:45:07.940
be more open to in my head calling out when i'm like who is watching this like what's the
00:45:16.980
entertainment value of this for people like at the very least was nick fuentes i'm like i get
00:45:22.860
the entertainment value and it does seem that he's heavily bought it but especially because
0.84
00:45:27.780
he's like cruel to his fans like live in the dream three daughters of what you're the gayest
0.99
00:45:34.000
guy ever you're gayer than gay guys that's crazy but i understand that like there's the thing
0.98
00:45:41.280
where there's like the hasan fans who are like women who like men demeaning them and there's
0.97
00:45:46.220
the nick pointes fans who are guys who like to be demeaned by people they look up to i don't
00:45:52.400
it's like not my thing speaking of smogalana the vtuber like the automated vtuber rig creation
00:45:59.620
system that you're creating for reality fabricator rfab.ai you should try it out malcolm's building
00:46:04.420
really cool stuff it should be working by the time so it's partially working right now right now it
00:46:10.320
will work for generating the vtube rig generating all the components here the v2 rib exporting it
00:46:16.260
in a file format that you can export to a v2 rigging platform but you're going to have to
00:46:21.420
manage the deformations yourself or i'm trying to automate that step right now but uh yeah i mean
00:46:27.820
you can get the basics with what we have right now well i wanted to ask because like when when
0.98
00:46:32.740
smuggalana on that collab tried to bow she just like just her just her her titties bounced is
00:46:41.400
are you eventually going to set up a rig that can do like full body tracking yeah i'll do titty
0.89
00:46:46.440
bouncing i just don't have it no not titty bouncing i just mean like she wanted i will have
0.95
00:46:51.460
you have ever well obviously you don't even understand my titties will be bouncing out of
0.95
00:46:58.460
control with this rig i hope the most luscious the titty simulations you've ever seen no look
0.98
00:47:06.060
they should never be luscious that makes them sound like they're hairy you want luscious you
0.98
00:47:11.560
hear hairy yeah you want buoyant titties well not buoyant buoyant i now think of like a woman
0.98
00:47:17.740
swimming and her titties are like bobbed up in front of her well they do there's this scene in
0.98
00:47:24.000
the original austin powers movie where there's like a woman in a hot tub and i like her titties
0.55
00:47:28.920
do seem to float in this like one scene and i just something like that's that scene sits with
00:47:34.080
me it was like do breasts float they have a lot of fat tissue in them so they probably do so they
00:47:39.400
would float yeah especially if you have like a jacuzzi bubbles but like i just remember being
00:47:43.040
like, huh. Your breasts aren't big enough to have experience. They really are. My poor,
1.00
00:47:49.140
my poor English muffins. I would be honest, I would find that disgusting. Like there are guys
00:47:53.920
who are confused by this. For me, like the big, I find it so gross, so disgusting. Well, it's for
00:48:01.360
someone and I hope that you build into that. But what my, my larger question is clearly with
00:48:06.520
feed trooper rigs titty bouncing is not something that hasn't been solved it exists however she
0.98
00:48:13.660
clearly wanted to do a full body gesture and was prevented from doing that will you make it possible
0.51
00:48:19.340
to like bow and dance eventually no that will take too much time never mind girl can dream
00:48:25.200
you've got to keep in mind what i would have to rig i mean i will eventually do this but right now
00:48:30.860
i'm just focused on the basics okay what we will have by the time this video goes to life is if you
00:48:36.020
handle the rigging yourself the image output is all going to be fine now what i'm working on now
00:48:43.420
is getting the auto rigging set up as well nice and just for context god yeah because no some of
00:48:52.600
our vtubers are people who use animated anime avatars of themselves or animated characters
00:48:58.980
one is like an orange i think like the biggest twitch streamer right it's just an orange potato
00:49:03.240
a potato a potato yeah angry orange was like an early youtube thing which is not popular anymore
00:49:09.080
oh you're right no okay fine he's he what he's a thing he's not but anyway where you use an
00:49:14.280
animated thing you you and like basically there's software that tracks your face and then uses that
00:49:20.220
to like puppet the the illustrated puppet and so typically what people do will have done up to this
00:49:26.300
point is you have to commission an artist to make every small part the eyes the nose the ears the
00:49:30.580
different variations. And then you upload it to the software. And then the software is what you
00:49:35.340
use to record your videos and streams and interviews, et cetera. What Malcolm is doing
00:49:39.400
with Reality Fabricator is making it possible to submit a prompt to AI to create your own
00:49:46.060
character, which you can then upload to that software and animate in all of your videos and
00:49:50.180
interviews and streams without having to commission art from someone. And even if you have an existing
00:49:55.340
vtuber setup you can use ai to generate outfits or accessories that you may not have had
00:50:00.980
to save you time to to speed up turnaround and it's really cool like hearing him go through
00:50:05.840
the creative process has been humbling and impressive bruno's working on this too it's
00:50:11.580
really cool stuff yeah let's see i didn't take down the site because i was doing an update right
00:50:15.100
now yeah it's working great okay anyway that's cool stuff but okay yeah i agree with you and
00:50:22.700
you know what i think that like younger people and younger generations are already really hip
00:50:27.680
to this something i've noticed with our six-year-old son octavian is so like we were we were trying to
00:50:35.220
find videos on youtube explaining the the the feather dongle on quail's heads that little
00:50:42.620
it's actually six feathers at least on the california quail but what's going on over here
00:50:46.920
you know and so we're trying to figure out like why those feathers are there there's not really
00:50:50.760
good explanation but we found all these videos about quails and a bunch of them were ai slop
00:50:54.660
and i thought well maybe kids wouldn't really know when a video is ai like generated like it's
00:51:01.100
obviously like a thing but not bad quality like they honestly weren't terrible they gave the
00:51:05.960
information they were better than many human created videos but it was still ai slop
00:51:09.240
and octavian 100 with that 100 accuracy was like oh this was made by ai and yeah this is why it's
00:51:25.000
Yesterday, he was just talking with Chat2PT all night.
00:51:30.660
So yeah, anyway, I do think that younger generations
00:51:33.980
are going to become much more sophisticated about this.
00:51:37.320
And not only will they know when something is AI sloth
00:51:45.180
but it's fake because it's it's not hitting and hopefully over time yeah things that don't hit
00:51:53.260
are fake yeah yeah like if you're not feeling it and but this is important because i think
00:51:58.920
what's happening with a lot of people is they're like well and because i do this all the time like
00:52:04.940
it's not hitting with me but i guess it's still true or the zeitgeist or important because it
00:52:12.560
has so many views or because it keeps getting served to me. Like it just keeps showing up in
00:52:17.680
my algo when I scroll. And one, this is just another argument, another point in favor of not
00:52:23.320
scroll-based content. Like if you are consuming content based on a feed, stop. You should be
00:52:29.680
searching proactively for stuff that you like and then leaning into channels and creators that
00:52:34.580
clearly do their homework and are good and real and trying. And by real, I don't mean doesn't use
00:52:41.420
ai whatever but like just per your judgment but yeah i don't know anyway it's it's there's going
00:52:48.980
to be a lot of great job by the way researching today's interview episode like i didn't know any
00:52:53.680
of this this is fantastic it changed my view on a lot of things i don't have been thinking about
00:52:56.820
it for a long time and that's what i come to conversation for oh and you know what i need
00:53:02.860
normally a you thing but i wanted you to work on the vtuber rigs i need a a shorter sword
00:53:09.020
that i can flail around on stream better oh because this is too large for your yeah so i
00:53:15.020
need something i can really hit our kids with if you know what i mean well what if you like
0.98
00:53:19.060
you need you need a butterfly knife and you need to look oh god you're gonna you're gonna
0.98
00:53:23.060
watch all my fingers like by the end of the stream i got no fingers left
0.97
00:53:28.620
this is your face is all bloody yeah that's how it's gonna go and then of course toasty's gonna
00:53:33.760
great ai thing to have in the background of a guy like playing with a knife and like as this room
00:53:39.060
goes on fingers start missing this is the face gets increasingly cut yeah honestly though i feel
00:53:45.100
like a lot of streamers are just watch a clavicular stream right at the end he's hospitalized
00:53:49.020
and yeah he's he's just his face is descending because he you know gets all cut up but it's
00:53:54.840
god it's just so strange all this is just so strange we're being manipulated and puppeted
00:54:00.740
but there is no they there is no man you know like illuminati doing this it is all these unique
00:54:08.380
systems that are just performing in a line with incentives i just realized my classmates who i
00:54:13.620
thought had like immediately started bigger sub stacks and like youtube channels than us
00:54:17.080
were they botting because i've watched some of their stuff and i'm like it's not very good
00:54:22.180
no call it no call it i know like one it may not hit with us but no per the the internet
00:54:33.840
revelation that we had thanks to not aldous huxley we know that the internet is to a great
00:54:41.720
extent less educated third worlders not to like okay no not to be mean for that but i'm talking
0.89
00:54:48.280
about my other classmates who are not they're all right who are trying to sell highbrow yeah
0.58
00:54:52.500
colin colin caters to the everyman the not even developed country everyman just the everyman
00:54:58.800
yeah and he's great and we love and he's very smart and he's amazing he's great but yeah the
00:55:03.500
ones who are like i'm selling highbrow content i'm selling interviews with founders i got mock
00:55:09.440
cuban on my stream it's like who fucking cares what cuban thinks in 2026 man grow up
0.82
00:55:15.100
um i bet it's all bought in now that i think about it i hadn't thought about it because i
0.94
00:55:20.860
hadn't when i saw my family member bought so callously i was like you don't think anybody
00:55:26.420
i don't know because they they were also successful in generating viral content in the past
00:55:33.020
like actually well i don't know let's see because it was 2009 when when you first saw
00:55:39.120
viewbotting on youtube i'm gonna have to look at the timelines i i don't know some stuff is
00:55:45.480
really viral some stuff is not i don't i don't i don't i'm just having such a crisis of but anyway
00:55:51.700
this episode is definitely dedicated to devon nash who's just i i have a lot of viewing to do
00:55:57.060
because he's done a lot of like per his unique position as someone making money in this ecosystem
00:56:04.180
and understanding like the the unit like as asmund gold understands it's happening
00:56:09.520
but he has no interest personally in like understanding the unit economics going into
00:56:14.580
discord servers like watching watching people work like that's that's a deep level i just
00:56:20.720
want to explore this more but i yeah i'm just i i'm never going to look at the internet the same
00:56:24.360
way again because i thought dead internet theory was mostly about content and now i realize it is
00:56:32.960
it is literally it is engagement it is restacks it is image downloads like
00:56:39.520
it's crazy uh but i love you very much i love you too you are an absolute princess and i uh i guess
00:56:49.140
i'll go down and talk with steven minka right after this yeah and work out work out some dinner
00:56:54.400
plans and i will try to wrangle the younglings maybe shovel some of the sand out of our house
1.00
00:57:01.080
that's the new thing are you going to kill even the younglings simone going after the video is
0.85
00:57:06.260
like her lightsaber like in that scene with anakin the younglings they have crossed every straw
0.53
00:57:13.760
oh they they crossed every straw yes they did they did they crossed this i'm not good with
00:57:21.840
the brain thing this is like one of my failure zones scenarios i mean i don't know if i'm gonna
00:57:28.700
to be able to get because texas look he's like totally crushed out on my oh you can't even move
00:57:33.880
of course i can't i'm immobilized based on his he's just all i can't i can't there this is red
00:57:41.400
yeah i love you too early tonight you should try to go about early tonight god i want to i've had
00:57:47.500
one long pounding headache all all day bye bye give us money for her headache subscribe to patreon
00:57:57.100
or subscribe to take away my headache but actually like our subscribers are awesome thank you so much
00:58:03.060
for those of you who do yeah i know for the ones who are subscribed like that's really cool like
00:58:06.640
it makes it feel like you know when people don't like us on youtube or whatever it's like well you
00:58:10.600
know at least some people like us i'm like we get so much of our episode content from them and
00:58:17.320
they're smart and like so we just farm you for everything content money we're the worst our few
00:58:23.560
our future children spouse it like yeah it's bad anyway bye bye for the leaflet stream me too
00:58:32.860
two days two days have you have you watched any of my long streams with her i've only seen clips
00:58:38.540
no i because i have my my view my view list is so freaking long you don't have time for 10 hour
00:58:45.960
crash out streams they make me want to do twitch streaming if i'm gonna be honest yeah i've learned
00:58:53.540
i'm really good at it like i'm gonna be i've like watched other church streamers
00:58:58.580
i'm astonishingly good at it well guess what you're gonna you're gonna discover quickly
00:59:02.900
why maybe you're not gonna want to do that but we'll go into it so i guess i might as well just
00:59:06.820
start oh it's all fake oh okay so you've got a store that you made here with like little huts
00:59:14.940
This, this is the, this, that, that is the person box line, and that is the person by
00:59:21.300
place, too. And that, that is the, that is the, that is the place where you can get furniture,
00:59:28.720
and you see the carpet, that is the carpet place. And you see the fridge, that is where
00:59:33.480
all of the food's on, and you see all of the fridge, that is the toy aisle.
00:59:52.300
And what would you do as the AI that you bought?
00:59:55.020
Oh, I'm going to make it help me do something to buy.