The New York Times is one of the most watched news organizations in the world, and yet it only gets a tiny fraction of the amount of traffic that other media outlets do. Simone and I discuss why this is a huge problem, and how to fix it.
00:29:08.380And, you know, we might be in one group of kids and then like contrapoints might be in another group of kids.
00:29:15.280And you modify what you're hearing from each of us within those individual biases.
00:29:20.380And yeah, that it does feel that way. Like the online space feels very much like a guy to play here, high school never ends.
00:29:28.980But it feels a bit like you're playing out these roles of the characters within a high school.
00:29:34.980And that's what the parasocial relationship means. And where it becomes dangerous is only the, you know, delusional individual who thinks that he's
00:29:43.580dating the cheerleader when the cheerleader doesn't know who he is. People act as if that's a unique thing to parasocial relationships.
00:29:50.580And it's like, no, it's not. That's a normal thing of our mind's high school is that sometimes that's in high school and
00:29:55.580sometimes that's a group of YouTubers.
00:29:58.180Oh, that makes a lot of sense. Yeah. That's a better way of putting it. And you can be just as liable to have a one way or unhealthy relationship in high school as you would in the digital realm. So totally get it. Yes.
00:30:14.180Yeah. Well, hold on. Let me see. Do I have any other stats here? Cause I have some other fun stats.
00:30:20.180Oh yeah. Here's some fun ones. As of 2022, only about 12% of us adults use newspapers as daily sources of news. In 2020, a survey found that 16% of Americans got their news from physical newspapers, among other sources. I do not believe either of those stats at all. I think those are like an American thinking, like, have I seen a newspaper recently? Yes.
00:30:41.300Well, I think you're forgetting how many much older people there are in the world.
00:30:46.420They're not, they're not going to the news. I mean, maybe they're picking up physical newspapers.
00:30:50.420Um, the wall street journal had the highest circulation of all us newspapers in 2020.
00:30:55.420That's going to be covering us soon with like a documentary. So that'll be fun. Only 3% of us adults cite print newspapers as their primary information source.
00:31:03.420Like, of course, who trusts newspapers anymore? Like they're so dishonest. And this is the thing you want to get how dishonest newspapers are if you've always been like, well, people say, if you know anything about a news source, and then you read a newspaper.
00:31:15.420And then you read a newspaper, you realize how frequently they lie. And you might think, well, I don't know anything about any particular news source.
00:31:22.420Well, if you're watching the podcast, you probably know us. Just read any article that's like ever been written about us. And you'll be like, wow, these are wildly off.
00:31:32.420And in every respect, it's clearly attempting to manipulate me. And this is something that you'll feel really quickly in the news because you get pissed pretty quickly if you do.
00:31:41.420And then the number of newspaper newsroom employees has dropped 50% since 2008.
00:31:48.420I'm surprised not more. So the question of how are they making...
00:31:50.420Well, since 2008, Malcolm, that was already like, this has been a long decline.
00:32:01.420So I was looking at another study, and while people spend a minute and 30 seconds on average when they click through to a news link, they're only spending 15 seconds per page, or at least according to one study.
00:32:12.420So the numbers might even be worse than this.
00:34:09.420Well, Lou, do you have any thoughts here?
00:34:14.420When I think about the future of news and media consumption, I just feel so confused as to how reality will be understood in the future.
00:34:26.420Because right now, at least in our childhood, we grew up in a society where there was a broadly shared understanding of reality and what was happening in the world.
00:34:37.420Even if we did not have an accurate perception of what was going on, we were all kind of on the same page.
00:34:45.420And it was really the media that largely determined what was going to be a big deal.
00:34:49.420You know, we're going to choose this international conflict as the thing du jour and this domestic thing.
00:34:55.420And that's kind of how news cycles worked.
00:34:58.420And now we live in this era where there isn't really any critical mass news media outlet that everyone reads that everyone's on the same page with.
00:35:10.420Which means that, like, aside from there being trends that people talk about online, and there definitely are trends like that, like, let's talk about trad wives, or let's talk about why all men are thinking about Rome, right?
00:35:25.420So they're short little, but they're not very substantive, right?
00:35:32.420I haven't thought about this before, but the people who actually are the people who everyone is listening to, right, to an extent, maybe not directly, but through their influence, those are the people who truly have the most influence online.
00:35:46.420And so it's who can create in this new ecosystem, those trends, the new thing everyone is talking about.
00:35:54.420Right, because they often are sparked by a viral piece.
00:35:57.420For example, a lot of people talking about trad wives.
00:35:59.420Well, that was actually sparked by traditional media when a story came out on Hannah from Ballerina Farms, right?
00:36:07.420Yeah, I'd say some traditional media can do this.
00:36:09.420An interesting person who I think specializes in doing this is Ayla, who we've had on the show before.
00:36:14.420She always is creating the main character of Twitter pretty frequently.
00:36:20.420Yeah, like her birthday gangbang story, amazing.
00:36:43.420But my larger point is that, aside from these non-substantive, ephemeral, everyone's talking about this things, we won't have a shared reality anymore.
00:36:55.420And people are going to be working from very different starting points and priors, which is going to make our country even harder to live in.
00:37:05.420One of the reasons why I love Japan so much is that, at least when I traveled there as a teen a lot, it felt so cohesive.
00:37:12.420And people would say things like, well, we Japanese do this and we Japanese do that.
00:37:15.420And everyone sort of knows what to do.
00:37:17.420If, you know, an umbrella is left on a train, well, someone will take it to this place and you'll recover, like it won't be lost.
00:37:23.420And there was just all these things where everyone's on the same page.
00:37:26.420And that's because, obviously, they shared one culture.
00:37:30.420But, you know, there's also, like, people sort of watched and consumed the same stuff as well.
00:37:35.420Now, not only do we have very different cultures in the United States, no one is, like, there's no simple source of truth or a couple of news channels that everyone's watching that allows us to at least have one shared reality.
00:37:59.420So an example of something that I'd say that pierced through, like a song that everyone was supposed to watch was, oh, God, what was the country guy?
00:38:26.420I would say Richmond, North of Richmond, it was very substantive.
00:38:30.420You're going to make an argument for Gundam style.
00:38:33.420But what's also been interesting is as we have moved to this new form of memeplex culture, a group that's really sort of progressively had less and less influence in American culture, it is very interesting to me, is American black culture.
00:38:49.420When I was growing up, American black culture was maybe 30 to 40% of all forwards facing American culture from the, you know, whether it's derivative raps and rock and, you know, all that, right.
00:39:04.420You know, and now you have black Twitter, right, which definitely has some degree of influence, but like viral memeplex level viral phenomenon don't come out of it at the rate of even coming out of something like 4chan.
00:39:20.420I watch a lot of YouTube videos by black cultural commentators, both male and female, but they're not generating the culture that I see them commenting on.
00:39:30.420What is really influential is drag culture, both from the lexicon standpoint, but also like women wear drag makeup now.
00:40:42.420They, they, or else, I mean, it, it just could, it could be maybe that black culture is becoming insulated to the point where mainstream culture, like at least we aren't hearing it because it's, it's just staying within the fold.
00:40:54.420You know, like that's, that's one guess I have.
00:40:58.420Like the past though, here's the thing is like the past two TV series that I've gotten addicted to have, well, at least, yeah, mostly majority black cast.
00:41:08.420So like, at least in mainstream TV, it seems to be doing fine.
00:41:13.420Well, no, and I think that's what elevated it.
00:41:17.420You could call it like the media elite who used to decide the musicians and the, and the actors that you were going to see had been artificially elevating it.
00:41:28.420Oh, and that's why I'm still seeing like plenty of black representation and traditional stuff, but you don't see it on YouTube or, or coming out of, and it's not that it's not there.
00:42:38.420That's, I was just thinking that when I was also thinking about how like Robin D'Angelo talks about having affinity groups.
00:42:43.420And kind of how like white people shouldn't encroach into black spaces because I don't know my white woman tears will mess it up or something like I won't get it and I'll make it awkward and I'll ruin it.
00:42:57.420And so maybe, yeah, like white people are less allowed to engage with black culture now than they were before because weirdly a lot of the super progressive extra woke messages have been around like, let's bring back apartheid without saying it.
00:43:13.420But they're, they, that's where the functionally they're going for, which is weird.
00:44:19.420Like, when white people kept messing it up, like, you can't pull it off.
00:44:22.420I actually think the opposite for what I see is black culture right now is in, like, death throes.
00:44:28.420For people who don't know, blacks out of all ethnic groups in the United States have the lowest fertility rate of an American ethnic group after you get above the 30% income.
00:44:38.420So in other words, you're saying that the isolation is not apparently having a positive effect.
00:44:58.420Well, but I also, maybe that's because, and gosh, we're like, this is turning into a totally separate episode.
00:45:04.420But one of the things that I found really notable is in the shows that I watch that do have at least, like, majority or almost wholly, like, majority black casts or something, you know, of, like, lead characters.
00:45:19.420I do this thing where I look up outfits when I watch shows because there are all these websites that, like, list the actual garments and how much they cost so that you can buy them.
00:45:27.420And the clothing that shows up on the people in these shows that have more black casts is consistently, by orders of magnitude, more expensive than the clothing that shows up on, quote unquote, billionaires and shows like Succession.
00:45:45.420So, like, Succession, like, outfit ranges from, like, you know, one garment will be maybe $300 to $500 on average.
00:45:55.420Some exceptions, you know, that maybe you're in the thousand range.
00:45:58.420Very consistently on, like, a show like The Equalizer, which has a pretty black cast, Queen Latifah and her other, you know, compatriots of the show are wearing outfits that are, like, one garment, $2,000.
00:46:15.420And so maybe this is, like, a very materialistic culture where, like, the culture that is being siloed off is very focused on inquisitiveness or, like, having the very, very best products.
00:46:28.420And in a culture like that, you definitely can't have a lot of kids.
00:47:40.420I mean, we're actually going to talk about why black fertility rates are so low among the wealthy blacks, just because we're already in this territory, right?
00:47:47.420The reason I believe is in Romania, when they tried to ban abortions, well, it led to a sharp spike in fertility rates.
00:47:57.420They quickly fell because having lots of kids became associated with low class decisions.
00:48:02.420In the American black community, what reaches the public, there are some, like, black super breeders.
00:48:09.420You know, like, when I say super breeders, I don't mean this in, like, a negative context.
00:48:33.420It's with like five or six different women in situations where it was either like ones like, well, it's an accident or like, you know, but I love all my kids and another stuff like this.
00:48:44.420So what's the first thing that comes to mind when you think of an NBA player with a lot of kids?
00:48:49.420Well, probably someone like Dwight Howard or Sean Kemp.
00:48:54.420Kemp reportedly has seven children with six different women, while Howard has somewhere between five to eight kids, according to different accounts.
00:49:20.420Like when I think of all the black influencers I know who have a lot of kids, it comes from a more Catholic or religious standpoint and from a position of wealth.
00:49:28.420But I guess, I mean, I get there could also be just baggage of historically, those who had a lot of kids, you know, we're having them as teens, we're having them in suboptimal situations that were associated with lower class and lower levels of education.
00:52:16.420But when I was thinking about the title for this video, I was thinking about the movie Amelie, that French film by Jean-Pierre Jeunet.
00:52:26.420Oh, it's well, you've seen the beginning of it.
00:52:29.420And the main character, Amelie, like when they describe the things that she likes to do.
00:52:34.420One thing she likes to just wonder is, you know, how many people are doing a thing simultaneously?
00:52:39.420Like how many people are having an orgasm this second?
00:52:42.420And it cuts to this scene of just everyone who's having an orgasm in that second in a humorous fashion.
00:52:48.420And I was just thinking, how many people are watching legacy news right now?
00:52:53.420And I just pictured this intersplicing scene of just an endless, endless shot of doctor's offices, hospitals, and homes of the very old and infirm.
00:53:28.420Because people like the in segments and stuff where we talk about off topic, small bites.
00:53:32.420I keep forgetting that you put these in because I don't always watch the videos and then I forget what I'm saying to you because I'm just talking to you for the first time since our morning chat.
00:53:43.420And I'm so excited to say things to you and then I forget you freaking put them in.
00:53:47.420I edit them if you're being spicy or something.
00:54:02.420But actually, I had a couple instances today where I've realized one just how much people in our society make like massive mistakes because they don't understand that there are multiple white cultural groups.
00:54:19.420Here's a great example of that in one of our episodes where we had a thought crime recently and we were talking about nature.
00:54:25.420You know under it obviously Google like tells us never do an episode like that again or your channels going down.
00:54:30.420But also I mean that's like basically the vibe I got from the instant ad restricted we're not explaining why and then the big UN warning underneath it.
00:54:41.420But you know people in the comments were like, oh, it got a UN warning.
00:54:46.420And it shows that in anyone should have been able to expect this for about half of Americans.
00:54:53.420The only cultural groups that are going to relate to a global authority attempting to decide what's true and what's not true are the hierarchically oriented cultural groups predominantly like Catholics and other sort of high church cultural groups.
00:55:10.420But your normal Americans are going to see this and immediately think the exact opposite of what the globally appointed bureaucracy, the global bureaucracy of elites is telling them must be true.
00:55:26.420And that they wouldn't immediately recognize that that they wouldn't immediately recognize that this is highly counterproductive to their aims and will probably lead more of the types of people who are already open to doubting these ideas to doubt them even more aggressively.
00:55:44.420Yeah, it doesn't doesn't do very well for the conspiracy theory.
00:55:47.420Well, to you, but then the other one I was having a conversation with a Mormon and we were talking about, you know, he was like he didn't understand why the backcountry people, the greater Appalachian cultural region slash backcountry people, depending on which book you're referencing, would kill Mormons so frequently.
00:56:04.420And, you know, whenever they tried to like settle in their territory and I was like, well, it's very obvious why they did that.
00:56:10.420And he and he it's almost like he didn't believe that they would genuinely see them as like Stepford wives, like pod people like the the that and the way that Mormons, you know, like dress up and generally look nice could come as a challenge, like looking down on these people.
00:56:30.420And they're already a very violent population, as we've talked about in some of what was the episode where we go over like just how violent they are?
00:56:38.420Yeah, I think it was the police episode where we're talking about crime rates in the United States, but I found that very interesting that he struggled to contextualize the level of like he thought that they thought of Mormons as just another Christian denomination.
00:56:54.260And I was like, yeah, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, not at all.
00:56:58.720Like you guys are not like different in the way like Jehovah's Witnesses are different or something like that.
00:57:05.480And to them, it seems like a derived satanic theology that that is like what I put it, you know, how like Mormonism borrows a bunch of stuff from the Freemasons and they already think the Freemasons are evil.
00:57:17.760Right, they're like past the Freemasons in that direction, in their conspiracy theories.
00:57:23.800And that's where the animosity comes from.
00:57:25.740And I'm not saying I endorse the animosity.
00:57:27.660I think it's misplaced and it's just two cultures that have different ways of relating to things and don't really understand each other.
00:57:33.420And we'll do a different episode on this.
00:57:34.900But another thing is that this culture typically uses vulgarity as a sign of authenticity.
00:57:39.660And I think that's why Mitt Romney did so bad at capturing them and Donald Trump did so good at capturing them.
00:57:44.700But anyway, we will get into the episode and I'm excited to be talking about this.