In this video, we are going to talk about the new rules of the internet, the internet codes, if you will, and break down what is happening in social media, internet culture, and the zeitgeist in general. Specifically, if you are creative, you work in marketing, you have a brand, or you're just interested, and you've heard a lot of these terms, you can think about their implications for culture, jobs you may have, projects you're working on, and where the future is going. We're going to hit on streaming and clipping and actually define it if you're unfamiliar. We're going to go through how fast everything trends and why it feels like nothing is cool anymore. We're going to discuss TikTok's meltdown under its new ownership, Substack and X, and the splintering of social media, the complete loss of journalistic media, and what it means when they're significantly behind the curve, how 15 minutes of fame has shifted very considerably, real-life events turning into gimmicks, why prediction markets is about more than just money, the business of information, and why monoculture and the events we still pay attention to are more important than ever. It is my job to be on top of this. I work with brands, big and small, to help them strategize through that future on what they want to act on now or in three years. This involves a lot of research, a team of people that works with me that's terminally online, and I'm excited to practically and tactically share these things with you and have an open discussion about it. Let's lock in.
First, our next community call is March 24th, where I'm going to be discussing brands as media companies, what that means, how you construct them, how you hire, what the teams look like, and what the formulas are, and we're going to Q&A on it. So if any of this is interesting to you professionally, the community call is free, and there's a link down below for it.
First, I want to get started by talking about streaming and clipping. For many of you that are YouTube native, if you're Gen Alpha, younger Gen Z, you already know what a lot of this looks like, but I think you'll be interested to learn a bit about the clipping infrastructure. For those that don't, let me just give you the basic 101 on streaming here. Media over the last few weeks has been dominated, but it's already falling off, by the looksmaxing trend by this streamer, Clavicular. Most people who are learning about streaming have seen it through Kai Sanat and his prominence rising to fame, or iShowSpeed. But what actually is it? What's going on here?
When you look at this, you will see he is online for six hours and 52 minutes, three hours here, and everything is live. They are following this guy around as he goes to dinner, whether he's in a studio. You are participating in someone's life completely live and watching it. For those of you that are thinking, I'm not going to watch a six-hour and 52-minute thing, you have to think about how people consume this type of media. A lot of people are either sitting at work or younger persons sitting after school doing homework or sitting in their room gaming. Streaming is a companionship social media piece for this. It's really important for brands to think about. If you looked at my video from a prior week, I had a chart about the fringe-to-normie sales-to-awareness scale of what brands can do to get in front of people. On the fringe, which is things that you would have to commit to that your average brand wouldn't, that are a risk, would have a high upside. On the awareness side, there was streaming, and on the sales side, there was live selling. These are two different things. I'll talk about live selling when we get to the TikTok section.
What you have here is a massive amount, a disordinate amount, of attention. You know, 200,000 people tuning into a three-hour live on a very niche streamer. 267,000 people turning into a more prolific one like we see here with Kaisenat. And then thousands of smaller streamers with various levels of engagement, from everything from gaming to lifestyle to travel. That attention has not been monetized or used to showcase brands to any level near the robustness of how that's treated in the TV or standard social media ecosystem.
But quick, some tactics here. How do they do this? There's software like StreamYard, OBS, and connect multiple channels and things to something like Twitch. When I do lives where we are on YouTube and X simultaneously with multiple people, we are using StreamYard. Sometimes we are using Riverside. There's software that solves this. DJI's Osmo has direct streaming outputs from the camera. They made it very simple. But the big strength here is that while people are consuming it relatively passively, they can interact. They can comment. People refer to the comments on screen. They can interact with each other. Instead of watching a video and commenting after the fact, you're participating in the action live.
Many people have looked at this and gone, oh, this is a thing for kids. But perhaps the best monetized podcast of our time is TVPN, who don't even put up massive views. Again, 4,000, 4,500 on YouTube. Maybe they're doing the same on X. But they are streaming technology news during the day for Silicon Valley employees, VCs, people interested in the business of technology. They are doing this, and they are selling six- to seven-figure yearly sponsorship slots to some of the biggest, most prolific tech companies that we have. So for anyone that's thinking this was a kid's thing I don't need to worry about, this is actually a standard to which you can obviously see media shifting. And if you want to be ahead of media, a lot of the reason I'm here today is because I was relatively early to TikTok. This is something to think about.
But there's two key points I want to make before we move on to nothing being cool anymore. First, you need to look at these things on a three-year horizon, especially if you're a brand. One of the scenarios I love to use is if you are trying to appeal to young men right now and you sell a core product, you sell deodorant, you sell something you know that they're going to consume, they probably do not have the brand recognition of your brand you'd expect from being someone that's a household name. If you are Right Guard, your Axe body spray, or if that's still a thing, you might think you are entrenched forever. But this generation does not know who you are. They do not pay attention to your media sources. They don't care about the marketing. They don't listen to their parents. What they have is a singular world revolving mostly around streamers and the ecosystem on YouTube and other social media that splinters that apart. Your brand is not present. And so if you are trying to say we need to have a stake in the ground for a three-year horizon, three-year horizon is, I think, the longest you can think about media right now, you should be putting a flag in the ground of how do we have a presence in streaming. A lot of the biggest brands in the world are relying on their agencies to think about that, who don't understand it at all. That's where people like me have come in handy, where I can at least have the conversation with those companies about shifting that, because only a handful of people operate in between those worlds.
But to really understand streaming, you have to understand clipping. Many people have heard this word. Let's break down what it actually means. It means that people take pieces of these streams, the most interesting points in them, and they put them on other social media: TikTok, YouTube Shorts, Instagram, X, Snapchat Spotlight. Now, how does this work? They are incentivized to do this. There are places, WAP being one of them, where if you are a clipper for a specific streamer, you can get paid for your views. So if you put up a thousand views, you get, let's say, a dollar. Now, if you're putting up millions of views on Snapchat, clipping these, that becomes very lucrative very quick. People are clipping lots of those pieces. Sometimes the person themselves is paying for it. So for instance, when you saw the meteoric rise of personalities who were at the fringe of this, like TJR, Brez, they had clipping campaigns in WAP where they would offer those bounties for someone to go chop up their streams, post them on social media, report back the results, and get a payout from them.
But now the platforms themselves do it. So Kik, a competitor to Twitch, pays for clavicular clippers. He's said that on streaming and other places. They are incentivizing people to build stars on their platform. It happens at the highest level. Some people also have their own internal teams or they retain a service. I started recently testing clipping myself for cutouts from my YouTube because I don't make edits from these, and retained a service who have started doing that a bit on IG and TikTok. Results
pieces. Now, sometimes the person themselves is paying for it. So, for instance, when you saw the meteoric rise of personalities who were at the fringe of this, like TJR, Brez, they had clipping campaigns in WAP where they would offer those bounties for someone to go chop up their streams, post them on social media, report back the results, and get a payout from them. But now the platforms themselves do it. So Kik, a competitor to Twitch, pays for clavicular clippers. He's said that on streaming and other places. They are incentivizing people to build stars on their platform.
It happens at the highest level. Some people also have their own internal teams, or they retain a service. I started recently testing clipping myself for cutouts from my YouTube because I don't make edits from these, and retained a service who have started doing that a bit on IG and TikTok. Results are still unclear, but I'm committing to making that a part of how my media moves online.
So why is this so effective? Because of the way algorithms work, where different types of media, different lengths, different styles of editing, all play into how someone consumes. We all do not consume the same things. But if someone is popular and notable, the things that are going on, the algorithms will find things related to them. They know what they look like. They know the words associated with them, and they will begin to show it to them. You can begin to build a one plus one equals three scenario of how your media is pushed on the algorithm.
And the other thing is there's also reaching new markets to get traditional media. So I want to call it X for a second because the only reason to clip on there is to reach two markets, right? The first market is elder men, like Gen X, boomer men, late millennial, and to reach journalists who comb that for a new space. So there are people, I would call out Fear Buck for being one of the biggest ones, where he is consistently posting this clipping. And there are a lot of accounts that do this, so I'll just spotlight this one, but they're being incentivized for this and it's not disclosed, right? I and many others understand how this economy works, but most people who are consuming it don't. They think they're just following a highlight reel. But this is a monetization ecosystem that is doing this, where he is being rewarded for showing this. You do this to build up enough credibility that you get written about and talked about by mainstream media, because they're not in any of these other platforms. X is one of the only boomer platforms left where people who are actually resonant enough to then talk about something or make it move still exist. So it's worth understanding. This is a core internet code. This is not going to change. This is a significant look at where media is going and worth having in your idea of what the future looks like.
Now I want to move on to trends and how fast they move and nothing being cool. The first conversation I want to have there is about the McDonald's CEO eating the burger. You guys saw this. There's been so much content made about this. You don't even want to make more content about it. But there's an awkward video where the McDonald's CEO tries their new burger, and he is awkward about it. He obviously doesn't seem to enjoy it. And then a hundred other companies hop onto the trend of doing the same exact thing. So every burger company within, let's say, 72 hours had done their version. Probably my favorite being Freddy's. You can tell this guy actually likes the product and probably eats it all the time. It has a very different, way more organic feel than what's happening in McDonald's. But this is washed, right? Every media team was like, we need to get our CEO to eat the product or use the product on camera. There was a huge trending thing on Threads where it was like, I'd love to see the Talenti gelato CEO try to open a tub with his hands, where people are going through the obvious user experience issues that people have. I'd love to see the Microsoft CEO try to find an email in Outlook while on Teams, where they're talking about the user experience problems. This huge trend emerges, which is an interesting, useful trend for brands to participate in, but it's just cooked so fast, right? It is now. I'm recording this on Saturday, March 7th. I think we're three days into this trend. Maybe all these CEOs have posted. Next week, we're going to see a hundred more, and it's done. It's cooked.
And people have gotten so good at trends, right? So I think maybe 18 months ago, I put out a video where I was talking about how brands should respond to trends or how brand social teams should do that, and how creators can think about it too, where it's like, okay, you need to have a framework. What is on brand or not on brand for us? Do we have the bandwidth to do it or not? Who does it? And do they have a preset allocated budget they can act on if we need to do something short term? And you need a system where you can run through that. It's a Slack channel. It's a whatever. We know we can spend this much. We have these criteria, and it allows you to quickly respond to trends. I've talked to now dozens of brands who adopted that. I'm sure with the reach of the videos, it's probably more like hundreds. And there's plenty of other people who are thinking about it in their own world, but everyone has an ability to do this. Now they understand how media moves. This is no longer unique, to be able to spit on this quickly. And it's led to this feeling that nothing is interesting.
And I want to call that out because I'm going to Japan. I go to Japan next week, and I'm looking at making content there. And I just feel like it's washed. I don't want to make content. The content's not going to be intrinsically cool because everyone's making so much content there. I love Drew's content. Drew's been out in Japan making a bunch of decent content. It's doing all right. Same thing with Noel and Daniel White, another creator I follow who's making similar content. They're all denim shopping out there. And I say this to say, I've now seen hundreds of videos because you know how the algorithms work. You go to Japan, you watch some Japan content, it shows you more. Everyone's doing the same stuff. They're going to the same stores. They're shopping for the same things. It is repetitive, and it's just not cool. And I'm not saying when these guys did it, that wasn't cool or that doesn't make them interesting creators. But this is the time we're functioning in, where everything that's not intrinsically new and interesting is just getting rinsed. And it gives you this feeling in the back of your head that, can I enjoy anything if I have to create from it? In responding to this trend, if I don't do it immediately, it's cooked. And then once I do it, if everyone else does it, then what I did all of a sudden becomes cooked. You get this feeling, this perpetual feeling that everything is just not quite right unless you are operating on a completely unique path, unlike anyone else, that when you go to these places, you do something so indecipherable that people couldn't comprehend it and they would have to copy it. And if they do copy it, it won't be as good.
This is the principle I've operated on in content for a long time. Even when we went to China, I'm not just going to the fabric market. We're explaining how everything works. We're tactically giving advice. We have this layers deeper than anyone else can go, or they can go repeat a big bit of the virality, but not the same value that comes with it. And I have ideas on how we're going to do Japan differently, but it leads to this overarching feeling among the creator populace and among the tastemaker populace that nothing is interesting. That's a worthwhile thing to call out because it basically dulls the resonance of anything actually interesting.
And so, David, I want to talk about TikTok and specifically what's happened now that it's moved into more of a US control. So in the weeks since we've seen new ownership on TikTok, we've had two breaks where views have stopped showing, people can't post, CapCut's down, and views plummet. And then existing large creators, when they come back from that, they're getting videos with a thousand views or 10,000 views. Numbers are now all over the place. There's no consistency. What was great about TikTok before is if you got real resonance, if you had a real fan base and had a real cultural set around you, that you basically had this built-in movement through the algorithm around your personality. And now, for even the biggest creators, all that is disintegrating. It is a pure free-for-all every single post. And it was for most of us,
anything actually interesting. And so David, I want to talk about TikTok and specifically what's happened now that it's moved into more of a US control. So in the weeks since we've seen new ownership on TikTok, we've had two breaks where views have stopped showing, people can't post, CapCut's down, and views plummet. And then existing large creators, when they come back from that, they're getting videos with a thousand views or 10,000 views. Numbers are now all over the place. There's no consistency. What was great about TikTok before is if you got real resonance, if you had a real fan base and had a real cultural set around you, that you had this built-in movement through the algorithm around your personality. And now, for even the biggest creators, all that is disintegrating. It is a pure free-for-all every single post. And it was for most of us, even my content. I've never resonated on there the way I have on Instagram or YouTube. It was always a fight, but now everyone's in that. All the people I knew that were TikTok first, I'm TikTok third in terms of my network importance, they're battling against that. And that changes things significantly because so much culture was birthed on TikTok. The last 36 months, more culture was birthed on TikTok than any other social network. And that is not the case in the last 60 days. Things are happening elsewhere. Streaming is birthing culture in a way more interesting way. The conversations are happening in these splintering social networks.
But what is still strong there is TikTok Shop is a real mover for real brands, especially in consumer packaged goods, is a truly arc-changing, established way now to bring real volume and awareness into what you do. It's no longer a fringe thing. It is fully arrived as an e-commerce opportunity brands can take advantage of. And then the live selling. TikTok live selling still works. It's still impactful. People are doing it. They don't understand it. There is alpha in being at the edge there, and in using those same personalities that are live selling to be on the main feed and begin to establish a world around this. And Whatnot's seen this too. The parents of a kid my son went to school, goes to school with, started their Whatnot business the other week and crushed it from the start. There's a live selling opportunity that is growing there. It's a shift of where some of that impact is going to be.
Now at the same time, while TikTok is beginning to melt, Substack is a social network. I want to call this out because it's important, because there used to be a lot of people on X. X used to be the primary written network, right? Threads has come out. Threads is okay. But the user on there is more immature to social media and to text-based platform and the value ecosystem around it, and ideas that come out of it is non-existent. It's just a place to scroll and interact, and it has potential, but it's not a zeitgeist builder yet. But the female users aren't on X. I know a handful of women on X, nothing like the amount of men, and way less than it was five years ago. And to the point, I can't name a single one of my wife's friends that were on there, where that'd be very different even two years ago. But where they are is on Substack. There is a huge interactive user base because Substack is a social media feed. You see me scrolling here. I'm logged in. These are all posts with a lot of interaction and views and conversation, and it's video posts. I post all my videos on there. I posted a Carousel that went viral on here the other week, and the text posts and the promotion of the email newsletters. And when you interact with them, you get email subscribers from them. So the stakes are higher, but it needs to be treated like a social network.
But really, it's important to note that the splintering is interesting. The X user base, a big chunk of that female user base, didn't end up on Blue Sky. They ended up on Substack, where they're either writing or engaging or participating or reading. And there's male and female audiences on X and Substack too. Some of them, from a zeitgeist-forward, trend-related perspective, this is where they are consuming media and enjoying it and where ideas are being birthed to have legs bigger than just what their interaction is. And that splintering is interesting because it means less resonant, big cultural things that can happen than ever in any world that's really not streaming. Instagram has a power, but TikTok doesn't. It's a very different social network. And there's all these little places that are coming out underneath it. That's a lot different than that when you think of the big three of the Meta, Google, TikTok advertising ecosystems.
And this relates to a trend I want to talk about called the complete loss of media. So all traditional media, GQ, Highsnobiety, ID, Vogue, The Cut, they're all behind the curve now. Now journalism always used to be reporting on things that are happening, but you'd probably hear about things bubbling. Now they are behind what's being talked about on TikTok, what's being talked about on Substack. They are rewriting what's happening on social media for the most part. So the conversation has already happened. They are late to it, and their resonance is less than ever. It doesn't travel. People don't click it. People don't read it. You have New York has resonance. The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, NY Mag, The Cut have an outsized, disproportionate impact of people of New York who actually read it and engage with it and still participate in media, and then those people's belief that that media still has impact elsewhere, which it really doesn't. It's gone everywhere else in the world, except for there. If you look at what they're doing and where they're promoting it, GQ wrote about the streaming, clicking, and collab, and they were late. And they're just rewriting a bunch of stuff that's already happening on TikTok. But they're reporting on stuff that there's already been hundreds of TikToks and Substacks out about this, that most of their reader base, of what little is left, and there's not a significant reader base there anymore, has already had the conversation and participated in it. This is an afterthought that just happens to be in print that you may have the luxury to read. It is no longer a thing that has any ability to showcase culture.
Same thing here on The Cut. Again, this is a big problem of why these will never work and why every one of these will die, is because of these interstitials like this. There's no way. There's just no way anyone's ever going to pay for this, right? No new user is adopting this. To read why celebrity GoFundMes make people so angry, which again is recapping a TikTok. And I've seen this now. In addition to people, I want to call it Neil Patel stole one of my YouTubes the other day. And that's, look, there are a hundred people that take YouTubes, right? But it just recounts word for word how brands need to think of their social media like a TV show and a TV network and characters. I'm like, oh, they're just taking my exact YouTube. That happens all the time. YouTube, it's known. He probably doesn't even know. His writing team just took it. Short form, this happens all the time. Traditional media are doing it, but they act like that's, they're having the idea, or that it's noble in some capacity, when it's just purely behind. And so that lack of importance is an important thing to think about, because if you see it being written about there, you have to realize this is already behind the curve.
And what I want to call out here is that this Highsnobiety insights report, where they're talking about populous products, optimized objects, cultural classics, status symbols, they're writing about, they're putting in this big report with Jesus with BCG. It's dark, a bunch of washed ideas. These are all just big TikToks from last year they're trying to recap into something. It's too late for that. This is not where this is at. They're making stuff about the videos that were being made again in 2025. Now the status symbols have already shifted. The objects already shifted. Everything they're talking about here is cooked. And so we're in this really interesting time where they still have some resonance for one reason, which is people still, when they think of, oh, I need to go to a news site or I'm going to browse something, they think of all these names they already have association with. You might still go to Highsnobiety. You might see it in the feed and stop because you know it. ID is doing well with carousels. You're stopping because it's ID, not because the carousel itself is good. There's some merit to stopping the scroll with familiarity. That's the only thing that these have left. It's really this precarious
something. It's too late for that. This is not where this is at. They're making stuff about the videos that were being made again in 2025. Now the status symbols have already shifted. The objects already shifted. Everything they're talking about here is cooked. And so we're in this really interesting time where they still have some resonance for one reason, which is people still, when they think of, oh, I need to go to a news site or I'm going to browse something, they think of all these names they already have association with. You might still go to high stop. You might see it in the feed and stop because you know it. ID is doing well with carousels. You're stopping
because it's ID, not because the carousel itself is good. There's some merit to stopping the scroll with familiarity. That's the only thing that these have left. It's really this precarious position where that still has some relevance, and all these new interesting properties haven't built out above that. But at the same time, whenever I read puck, I'm shocked by the lack of editorial oversight. People aren't reading it. It's not researched. It's not double-checked. You can tell people don't know the culture that they're talking about. That's going to be a hard reality for people to work around and for us to function in, in terms of what is the importance
of media going forward. And so related to this, I want to talk about probably the most selfish placement that I've had inside of a YouTube video because I get to show off my website. I want to talk about the ease with which you can design and publish and work through some of the things now that a lot of that media used to have. There used to be a gate to having beautiful-looking media websites, opt-ins, et cetera. And I want to talk about Framer, who I partnered with on this video. I'm about to do a series with on portfolios and web building and show you a bit of just how great and easy it is to build these online experiences now.
So I have been redoing all of my online media to look and feel akin to some of the things that I've done with my brand on social media. And this is an example just to see in the back end of Framer of what that looks like. So if you've never edited a website, you want something to look good. This is how easy it is to go in and be able to say, hey, I can just adjust text like this. And not only does it adjust that, I actually adjust the breakpoints of mobile and tabs as well. I can have persistent elements, so components that are in here, where I'm able to edit this navigation, and it sits on all of the different sites that I have
with different variants. And there are so many abilities to position and build a cool-looking experience in such an easy way, it's almost shocking as someone who had to work through WordPress and stuff my whole life. So look at what we have here. This is the webinar signup. What we're able to do really quickly on Framer, this cloud animation that goes up over the form. And so a bit on the flow that I used to put that together: I hired the developer that worked on this from Contra. It's a great place to find professionals. You want to build a website and something like this. I have my brand kit. You'll see a lot of these visuals match the look
and feel of the things you see inside my carousels, a bunch of those existing elements that tie together. And then once something is made, it's not like, okay, cool, I got to go to a developer to make changes each time. We're able to duplicate the webinar page out and change the copy. And so, for instance, this is the next one we have coming where I've swapped out some of the graphics. I swapped out some of the text, but I'm using the same format and formula, just with a new setup, right? And there are tons and tons of really interesting themes that work with this. There's all that motion animation,
which you can use or not use depending on what you want to do. And there are forms. These forms connect direct to a Google sheet, or they'll connect to services like kit. But I say all this to say that if you want to have a beautiful website, you want to be able to edit the majority of it yourself. And you'll see this little icon right here. This is, I can edit the content of anything on the live page as well. It's one of the beauties of Framer, to the point where interacting like this is like interacting with your favorite design software, even easier to be able to make changes that are live on the internet. But anything where you thought it required
some huge budget to work through stuff like that, that era is now completely done and empowered by stuff like Framer. So you can learn more about Framer at the link in the description here. And I'm actually going to be doing a series with them coming up about creative portfolios and thinking through the web where we're going to get pretty in-depth on it. Some more on that soon. And so now I want to hit this idea of the 15 minutes of fame. There has been more coverage of this girl as a staples baddie by marketing influencers and creative influencers that, again, when everything is back to the idea of nothing being cool, it is so torched to talk about
this now. So every single marketing creator, I can't touch stuff like that here. When I'm on short form, I'll talk about it a bit. Here, what I want to call out about why this exists used to be, okay, 15 minutes of fame, everyone can get on the news for a second or have their moment in the sun. We're no longer in the 15 minutes of fame era. It is 150 posts to escape the permanent underclass. That is what the trend looks like, where it's not like, cool, I'm going to go viral once. If you post 150 times, you have some degree of charisma or something interesting to go on, you have an ability
to project your life into a completely different scenario. Her life will be different forever because she posted at her job of being at staples with her vibe and her characteristic. Now, there are plenty of people that aren't interesting enough to be able to cross that boundary. But there are tons and tons of interesting people who are 150 posts in their lives away from, again, not just 15 minutes of fame, oh, she's famous here. This will change her life forever. It will change how she's able to interact with the media landscape, what jobs she gets in the future, her compensation. It's not like she just got shown on CNN once or she's on an episode of
ridiculousness. This is a fiscal life change, the likes of which are almost impossible to navigate for people prior. It's an important concept to understand. Let's zip through a few more of these to wrap up this video. I want to talk about the gimmicks of real life as another one. People really want to go to in-real-life events. And you saw things like the Timothee Chalamet lookalike contests and everybody there. A lot have a gimmick or an idea. And I've seen some media write about how that's a bad thing. How can things not just be normal now? But honestly, people want to be excited and want to participate in things that are fun. And I leaned into this
trend here this last week. So Expo West is a snack convention here in Orange County. It's a natural foods expo. I go every year. And so I was with some people I know. So the air team, Andrea from Snackshot, Taylor Lorenz, we put together and judged a pretty popping contest for America's next top stack. So we modeled it after Shark Tank, America's Next Top Model, where 50 brands submitted. We selected six. They came and presented on stage their brand to a big crowd of people, including the Kroger buying team in the front, with legitimate people in the industry, plus a lot of people excited about the niche. People from my social media,
that kind of thing. And then one of them won. They won a photo shoot. They won a pop-up store space in New York. I invested money into them along with air. This brand, Bezzy, who makes an amazing labna snack, won. But people came because it's interesting. It's fun. There's something completely different. Oh, we're going to see six brands basically do a three-minute pitch on their product. And then people are going to be screaming or yelling, or they're getting asked hard questions. And that's all happening live. And this experience era, that's why I call out that. We rented a Bubba Gump Shrimp. We had a step and repeat, a table, an extremely
mediocre AV system, and that is the extent of the event production, right? To turn something from your average party to something interesting. And still in and around the core hour of the actual activity, there's tons of hangout and tons of whatever. But that is where the, whether it's a brand event or a personal event, people are so attached to having something be more than just a
labna snack won. But people came because it's interesting. It's fun. There's something completely different. Oh, we're going to see six brands do a three-minute pitch on their product. And then people are going to be screaming or yelling, or they're getting asked hard questions. And that's all happening live. In this experience era, that's why I call out that. It's like we rented a Bubba Gump Shrimp, that we had a step and repeat, a table, an extremely mediocre AV system. And that is the extent of the event production, right? To turn something from your average party to just something interesting. And still, in and around the core hour of the actual activity, there's tons of hangout and tons of whatever. But that is where, whether it's a brand event or a personal event, people are so attached to having something be more than just a hang. That's an interesting thing to think about if you're building any experience.
Moving on, I want to talk about the AI fight. And I want people to understand this in the context of the future. So obviously, you'll see a backlash about AI-generated imagery and video online. Totally get it. There's a conversation to have, but you have to understand where it is in terms of what the generations look like and what's coming in the future. So you can be as mad as you want at that or think that it can be avoided or stopped now. But if you look at what the adoption looks like for the previous generations, it's a completely different thing. So I was with a group of college designers the other week, and one of them was working on his clothing line. So they had designed this entire thing in Freepik. They'd taken their iconography. They had generated that into flats. They had brought those flats into mock-ups. They were bringing it into materials. There's an entire collection design, even starting to go into what patterns and grading look like, completely prompted by AI. And I'm not saying it was perfect, but I looked at it, and you're like, oh, this is actually good. And this is just built in. This is how they are interacting with the future. This is the next generation of those people. You cannot stop the momentum of that. And to take that a step further, I look at my son's school. He's nine. He used Canva. Canva's built into their curriculum. And inside that, we got him the pro version or whatever it is. He's spending a lot of time working in it and creating stuff. They're generating images. The images that are showing up inside there, it's not even a question. It's not even like, oh, I'm using AI to do this or X or Y. Generating is just a thing that they can do. And they type in the stuff, and it's just built into the workflow. It's second nature. It's inherent. And I just want to call out those two things, as any conversation or battle that we're having around this now is lost. In a generational shift, they're growing up with it in a way that's not even decipherable from reality. And that's when you know that there is no turning point. I just want that to be understood when you look at what the difference is going to be generationally. That's already gone.
Now I want to have a quick conversation about the legacy media trying to understand the new media landscape. So Netflix recently added podcasts. This is a good example of this. So you can get podcasts from The Ringer. You can get Barstool podcasts, a few others. You can get Breakfast Club on Netflix. But what's interesting to me about that is you can't find them. I went, and I want to see what this looked like. I'm thinking about what my media looks like in a streaming and TV world. So I'm just looking for examples. You can't navigate to them. There's no podcast tab. You can't find them. You have to search. So for instance, if I want to actually go engage with that podcast, you'd have to search down to get to Bill Simmons or something like that. Now this kind of defeats the point, right? Because what podcasts are going to want to promote themselves so hard that they're on Netflix that enough people search to watch them that it actually becomes relevant? Even the biggest ones aren't going to be able to do numbers like that that would matter in any way, shape, or form. Without discovery, there is inherently no use of those platforms. But then when you actually get to them, these podcasts are unwatchable. There's never been a darker moment than actually seeing what some of these people look like, right? I'm sure many of you consume podcasts on YouTube. If you go watch, I looked at the Russillo podcast or some of the Barstool stuff, you're like, once you start looking at these people, you realize you would never want to listen to them. There's a dissonance there. And the production value is terrible. At least the Bill Simmons one kind of looks all right. But again, it's not compelling enough that you'd want to watch it on TV versus even what we're able to do with overlays, et cetera, inside a bunch of these YouTube videos. And we saw this when Amazon Prime has been giving some shows to YouTubers that are quasi working out, they're getting there. But this navigation is going to be a huge thing because there is no longer the needed Hollywood infrastructure to push this. Production is significantly easier than it was. People want to consume the type of media they're consuming on YouTube. It's going to be hard for those streaming networks to compete without IP and promotion. And a lot of this, it's going to come out of social media. But the way that they started to solve it is not right. It was rushed. And I think there's just a huge opportunity in Delta to understand that and go back to what I've mentioned before about clipping, about all the infrastructure we have around media today, and build something unique. And the second gen of this, the second gen of what these companies look like to end up on there, are going to likely be huge cultural moments. And I know I'm a little far back to be able to participate in that. Maybe I get to gen three, but we're going to get there, even on the tail end.
And the last three points I want to have here, I want to talk briefly about Polymarket, Kalshi, and the conversations there. I don't support or condone these, but I want people to understand their implications. So I learned a lot about this when I was going through this with some friends around the Super Bowl, because there were odds on if certain brands were going to run ads on the Super Bowl. And I had, I won't say insider information, I'm not betting on it, but I had information. I know some people who are running Super Bowl ads. I know for sure. And there are odds on this. Let's look at this Anthropic. Anthropic had 50-50 odds you could bet on and return real money. And people are able to bet and put context on it, and they have that information. And the odds kind of adjust based on this. And the fact that this exists, and there's this legality and morality that we're struggling with, okay, well, can I use, what information is usable or not? Where is the legality line? Obviously, someone in Mr. Beast's camp was arrested for working inside of this. The people know more than anything traditional, and they're able to participate in that online. And I don't think this is the final incarnation of this, is the point. This idea of prediction itself, this idea of the knowledge of the crowd, of the usage of insider knowledge, how monetizable that is, this is like stage one. So I wouldn't just ignore this purely because it's like a casino. I don't think of it from that regard. And I would really look at what those implications mean for the future of how we interact. Something to think about.
And then next, I want to call it monoculture. You would think in this social media era, all the things we've talked about, we would lose resonance on so many of these cultural items that were institutions. But the few things that we have left that people actually care enough about are massively important. And I'll call this out, even in my own content, I talked about the Olympic uniforms for the winter games. It's a really successful video of mine. Same thing with the Super Bowl ads. I recapped that, did a bunch of coverage on X that went really viral, and then did the same thing on TikTok and Instagram that also did really well. We have so little to talk about that everyone does, that those exact moments become more influential than ever. And they basically give them their own algorithms. What I noticed about that Olympic video is there's all these people in the Olympic Village that are going viral, posting all their stuff. And then my video would be shown right after a bunch of that, right? The algorithms know what to do with a moment in time. And there's only so many moments in time to
have left that people actually care enough about are massively important. And I'll call this out, even in my own content, I talked about the Olympic uniforms for the winter games. It's a really successful video of mine. Same thing with the Super Bowl ads. I recapped that, did a bunch of coverage on X that went really viral, and then did the same thing on TikTok and Instagram that also did really well.
We have so little to talk about that everyone does, that those exact moments become more influential than ever. And they give them their own algorithms. What I noticed about that Olympic video is there's all these people in the Olympic village that are going viral, posting all their stuff. And then my video would be shown right after a bunch of that, right? The algorithms know what to do with a moment in time. And there's only so many moments in time to do it. And so we have Black Friday, stuff like that. You have Valentine's Day, you have your standard events, but you have stuff like the World Cup or the Super Bowl or any of those. That is worthwhile looking at when you're where your media spin goes, what the impact is.
I have gone now from thinking that traditional media wouldn't be as useful to saying the highest end of it, your Super Bowl TV ad, is probably one of the most impactful things you can buy if you build around it. And so it's worth thinking about, whether it's for you or for your brand, what you interact with, what those remaining monoculture moments are, because I actually think they have more leverage than ever.
And the last thing I want to end on here is the monetization of information. I made a video. It didn't do super well because it's niche. I made a video about how so many businesses are also selling workshops and courses now. I look at it as the post-Masterclass era. Masterclass normalized the selling of information to your average people to be able to gain a level of knowledge. But now we're also seeing monetized businesses in retail or with growing costs. Your bouquet flower company is selling how to make a luxury flower arrangement. Your Japanese gardening store is doing actual lessons online via Zoom.
There is this idea of the value of information that people would have thought would have been bad. With Chachi Bt, I can answer anything now. I can learn anything on YouTube. I think what people are missing is how disserved the world's population is by their educational institutions, their desire for learning and actually learning it with a group where they can participate, and the dollars around that, and the trend, and the replacement of enough of the traditional educational infrastructure with the ability to get exactly what you want online. But that monetization of information has not hit the middle of the bell curve yet. There's a significant amount of alpha there to think about for any business of any kind.
So I know this was a long video, but I think it's important to understand all these repercussions of the things happening on the internet for your life, for the brand you work at, or for the brand you own. Like I mentioned, we're going to have a discussion about this in the next community call. Info on that is down below, specifically in terms of how do you build brand and marketing teams around it, because obviously that's my specialty. I'm headed off to Japan, so a bunch of that content is going to be coming out here in the coming weeks. We're going to talk a bit about that. It's an interesting cultural moment that we have. I'd love to have a conversation about any of these things that you see or disagree with down below, with these same pieces of media. Thank you all so much for watching.
It's cooked. And people have gotten so good at trends, right? So I think maybe 18 months ago, I put out a video where I was talking about how brands should respond to trends or how brand social teams should do that and how creators can think about it too, where it's like, okay, you need to have a framework. What is on brand or not on brand for us? Do we have the bandwidth to do it or not? Who does it? And do they have a preset allocated budget they can act on if we need to do something short term? And you need a system where you can run through that. It's a Slack channel. It's a whatever.
We know we can spend this much. We have these criteria and allows you to quickly respond to trends. I've talked to now dozens of brands who adopted that. I'm sure with the reach of the videos, it's probably more like hundreds. And there's plenty of other people who are thinking about it in their own world, but everyone has an ability to do this. Now they understand how media moves. This is no longer unique to be able to spit on this quickly. And it's led to this feeling that nothing is interesting. And I want to call that out because I'm going to Japan. I go to Japan next week
and I'm looking at making content there. And I just feel like it's, it's washed. I don't want to make content. The content's not going to be intrinsically cool because everyone's making so much content there. I have a, I love Drew's content. Drew's been out in Japan making a bunch of decent content. It's doing all right. Same thing with Noel and Daniel White. Another creator I follow who's making similar content. They're all selfish denim shopping out there. And I say this to say, I've now seen hundreds of videos because you know how the algorithms work. You go to Japan, you watch some
Japan content, it shows you more. Everyone's doing the same stuff. They're going to the same stores. They're shopping for the same things. It is repetitive and it's just not cool. And I'm not saying when these guys did it, that wasn't cool or that doesn't make them interesting creators. But this is the time we're functioning in where everything that's not intrinsically new and interesting is just getting rinsed. And it gives you this feeling in the back of your head that like, can I enjoy anything if I have to create from it? In responding to this trend, if I don't do it immediately, it's kind of cooked.
And then once I do it, if everyone else does it, then what I did all of a sudden becomes cooked. You get this feeling, this perpetual feeling that everything is just not quite right. Unless, unless, this is where I want to call out, you are operating on a completely unique path, unlike anyone else, that when you go to these places, you do something so indecipherable that people couldn't comprehend it and they would have to copy it. And if they do copy it, it won't be as good. This is the principle I've operated on on content for a long time. Even when we went to China, I'm not just going to the fabric
market. We're explaining how everything works. We're tactically giving advice. We have this layers deeper than anyone else can go, or they can go repeat a big bit of the virality, but not the same value that comes with it. And I have ideas on how we're going to do Japan differently, but it leads to this overarching feeling among the creator populace and among the tastemaker populace that nothing is interesting. That's a worthwhile thing to call out because it basically dulls the resonance of anything actually interesting. And so David, I want to talk about TikTok and specifically what's
happened now that it's moved into more of a US control. So in the weeks since we've seen new ownership on TikTok, we've had two basically breaks where views have stopped showing, people can't post, cap cuts down and views plummet. And then existing large creators, when they come back from that, they're getting videos with a thousand views or 10,000 views. Numbers are now all over the place. There's no consistency. What was great about TikTok before is if you got real resonance, if you had a real fan base and had a real cultural set around you, that you basically had this built-in
movement through the algorithm around your personality. And now for even the biggest creators, like all that is disintegrating. It is a pure free-for-all every single post. And it was for most of us, even my content. I've never resonated on there the way I have on Instagram or YouTube. It was always a fight, but now everyone's in that. All the people I knew that were TikTok first, I'm TikTok third in terms of my network importance. They're battling against that. And that changes things significantly because so much culture was birthed on TikTok. The last 36 months, more culture was
birthed on TikTok than any other social network. And that is not the case in the last 60 days. Things are happening elsewhere. Streaming is birthing culture in a way more interesting way. The conversations are happening in these splintering social networks. But what is still strong there is TikTok shop is a real mover for real brands, especially in consumer packaged goods, is a truly arc-changing, established way now to bring real volume and awareness into what you do. It's no longer like a fringe thing. It is fully arrived as a e-commerce opportunity brands can take advantage of. And then the live selling. TikTok live selling still works.
It's still impactful. People are doing it. They don't understand it. There is alpha in being at the edge there. And in using those same personalities that are live selling to be on the main feed and begin to establish a world around this. And Whatnot's seen this too. I have a, the parents of a kid my son went to school, goes to school with, started their Whatnot business the other week and crushed it from the start. There's a live selling opportunity that is growing there. It's kind of a shift of where some of that impact is going to be. Now at the same time, while TikTok is beginning to melt, Substack is a social network. I want to call this out because
it's important because there used to be a lot of people on X. X used to be the primary written network, right? Threads has come out. Threads is okay. But the user on there is more immature to social media and to text-based platform and the value ecosystem around it and ideas that come out of it is kind of non-existent. It's just a place to scroll and interact and it has potential, but it's not like a zeitgeist builder yet. But basically the female users, right? Aren't on X. I know a handful of women on X, nothing like the amount of men and way less than it was five years ago. And to the point, you know, I can't name a single of my wife's friends that were on
there where that'd be very different even two years ago. But where they are is on Substack. There is a huge interactive user base because Substack is a social media feed. You see me scrolling here. I'm logged in. These are all posts with a lot of interaction and views and conversation and it's video posts. I post all my videos on there. I post out of Carousel go viral on here the other week and the text posts and the promotion of the email newsletters. And when you interact with them, you get email subscribers from them. So the stakes are higher, but it needs to be treated like a social network. But really it's important to note that the splintering is interesting.
The X user base, a big chunk of that female user base didn't end up on Blue Sky. They ended up on Substack where they're either writing or engaging or participating or reading. And there's male and female audiences on X and Substack too. Some of them from a zeitgeist forward trend related perspective. This is where they are consuming media and enjoying it and where ideas are being birthed to have legs bigger than just what their interaction is. And that splintering is interesting because it basically means less resonant, big cultural things that can happen than ever in any world that's
really not streaming. Instagram has a power, but TikTok doesn't. It's a very different social network. And there's all these little places that are coming out underneath it. That's a lot different than that when you think of kind of like the big three of the meta Google TikTok advertising ecosystems. And this relates to a trend I want to talk about called basically the complete loss of media. So all traditional media, GQ, high synobity, ID, Vogue, The Cut, they're all behind the curve now. Now journalism always used to be reporting on things that are happening, but you'd probably hear about
things bubbling. Now they are behind what's being talked about on TikTok, what's being talked about on Substack. They are rewriting what's happening on social media for the most part. So the conversation has already happened. They are late to it and their resonance is less than ever. It doesn't travel. People don't click it. People don't read it. You basically have New York has resonance. The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, NY Mag, The Cut have an outsized disproportionate impact of people of New York who actually read it and engage with it and still participate in media. And then those
people's belief that that media still has impact elsewhere, which it really doesn't. It's basically gone everywhere else in the world, except for there. If you look at what they're doing and where they're promoting it, like GQ wrote about the streaming, clicking, and collab, and they were late. And they're just rewriting a bunch of stuff that's already happening on TikTok. But they're reporting on stuff that there's already been hundreds of TikToks and Substacks that were out about this, that most of their reader base of what little is left, and there's not a significant reader base there anymore, has already had the conversation and participated in it. This is an
afterthought that just happens to be in print that you may have the luxury to read. It is no longer a thing that has any ability to showcase culture. Same thing here on The Cut. Again, this is a big problem of why these will never work and why every one of these will die is because of these interstitials like this. There's no way. There's just no way anyone's ever going to pay for this, right? No new user is adopting this. To read why celebrity GoFundMes make people so angry, which again is recapping a TikTok. And I've seen this now. Like in addition to people like, I want to call it Neil Patel stole one of my YouTubes the other day. And that's, look,
there's a hundred people that take YouTubes, right? But basically just recounts word for word how like how brands need to think of their social media like a TV show and a TV network and characters. I'm like, oh, they're just taking my exact YouTube. That happens all the time. YouTube, it's known. He probably doesn't even know. His writing team just took it. Short form, this happens all the time. Traditional media are doing it, but they act like, you know, that's a, like they're having the idea or that it's noble in some capacity when it's just purely behind. And so that lack of importance is an important thing to think about because if you see it
being written about there, you have to realize this is already behind the curve. And what I want to call out here is that this high snobiety insights report where they're talking about like populous products, optimized objects, cultural classics, status symbols. They're writing about, you know, they're putting in this big report with Jesus with BCG. It's dark, a bunch of washed ideas. There were big tech. These are all just big tech talks from last year. They're trying to recap into something. It's too late for that. This is not where this is at. They're making stuff about the
videos that were being made again in 2025. Now the status symbols have already shifted. The objects already shifted. Everything they're talking about here is cooked. And so we're in this really interesting time where they still have some resonance for one reason, which is people still when they think of, oh, I need to go to a news site or I'm going to browse something. They think of all these names they already have association with. You might still go to high stop. You might see it in the feed and stop because you know it. ID is doing well with carousels. You're stopping because it's ID. Not because the carousel itself is good. There's some merit to stopping the scroll
with familiarity. That's the only thing that these have left. It's really this kind of precarious position where that still has some relevance. And all these new interesting properties haven't built out above that. But at the same time, like whenever I read puck, I'm just kind of shocked the lack of editorial oversight. People aren't reading it. It's not researched. It's not double checked. You can tell people don't know the culture that they're talking about. That's going to be a hard reality for people to work around and for us to function in, in terms of what is the importance
of media going forward. And so related to this, I want to talk about probably the most selfish placement that I've had inside of a YouTube video because I get to show off my website. I want to talk about the ease with which you can design and publish and work through some of the things now that a lot of that media used to have. There used to be a gate to having beautiful looking media websites, opt-ins, et cetera. And I want to talk about Framer, who I partnered with on this video. I'm about to do a series with on portfolios and web building and show you a bit of just how great and easy it is to build these online experiences now.
So I have been redoing all of my online media to look and feel akin to some of the things that I've done with my brand on social media. And this is an example just to see in the back end of Framer of what that looks like. So if you've never edited a website, you want something to look something good. This is how easy it is to go in and be able to say, Hey, I can just adjust text like this. And not only is it adjust that, I actually adjust the break points of mobile and tabs as well. I can have persistent elements. So like components that are in here, where I'm able to edit this navigation and it sits on all of the different sites that I have
with different variants. And there's so many abilities to position and build a cool looking experience that in such an easy way, it's almost shocking as someone who had to work through WordPress and stuff my whole life. But like, so look at what we have here. It's just, this is the webinar signup. What we're able to do really quickly on Framer, this cloud animation that goes up over the form. And so a bit on the flow that I used to put that together. So I hired the developer that worked on this from Contra. It's a great place to find professionals. You want to build a website and something like this. I have my brand kit. You'll see a lot of these visuals match the look
and feel of the things you see inside my carousels, a bunch of those existing elements that tie together. And then once something is made, it's not like, okay, cool. I got to go to a developer to make changes each time. We're able to duplicate the webinar page out and change the copy. And so for instance, this is the next one we have coming where I've swapped out some of the graphics. I swapped out some of the text, but I'm using the same format and formula just with a new setup, right? And there are tons and tons of really interesting themes that work with this. There's all that motion animation,
which you can use or not use depending on what you want to do. And there's forms. These forms connect direct to a Google sheet or they'll connect to services like kit. But I say all this to say that if you want to have a beautiful website, you want to be able to edit the majority of it yourself. And you'll see, or you see this little icon right here. This is, I can edit the content of anything on the live page as well. It's one of the beauties of Framer. To the point, basically, where interacting like this is like interacting with your favorite design software, even easier to be able to make changes that are live on the internet. But anything where you thought it required
some huge budget to work through stuff like that, that era is now completely done and empowered by stuff like Framer. So you can learn more about Framer at the link in the description here. And I'm actually gonna be doing a series with them coming up about creative portfolios and thinking through kind of the web where we're going to get into pretty in depth on it. Some more on that soon. And so now I want to hit this idea of the 15 minutes of fame. There has been more coverage of this girl as a staples baddie by marketing influencers and creative influencers that again, when everything is back to the idea of nothing being cool, it is not is so torch to talk about
this now. So like every single marketing creators, I can't touch stuff like that here. Like when I'm on short form, I'll talk about it a bit here. What I want to call out about why this exists used to be okay, 15 minutes of fame, everyone can get on the news for a second or have their moment in the sun. We're no longer in the 15 minutes of fame era, it is 150 posts to escape the permanent underclass. That is what the trend looks like, where it's not like cool, I'm gonna go viral once. If you post 150 times, you have some degree of charisma or something interesting to go on, you have an ability
to project your life into a completely different scenario, her life will be different forever, because she posted at her job of being at staples with her vibe and her characteristic. Now, there are plenty of people that aren't interesting enough to be able to cross that boundary. But there are tons and tons of interesting people who are 150 posts in their lives away from again, not just 15 minutes of fame, oh, she's famous here, this will change her life forever, it will change how she's able to interact with the media landscape, what jobs she gets in the future, her compensation, it's not like she just got shown on CNN once or she's on an episode of
ridiculousness. This is a fiscal life change, the likes of which are almost impossible to navigate for people prior. It's important concept to understand. Let's zip through a few more of these to wrap up this video. I want to talk about the gimmicks of real life is another one. People really want to go to in real life events. And you saw things like the Timothee Chalamet lookalike contests and everybody there. A lot of have a gimmick or an idea. And I've seen some media write about how that's like a bad thing. How can things not just be normal now. But honestly, people want to be excited and want to participate in things that are fun. And I leaned into this
trend here this last week. So Expo West is a snack convention here in Orange County. It's a natural foods expo. I go every year. And so I was with some people I know. So the air team, Andrea from Snackshot, Taylor Lorenz, we put together and judged a pretty popping contest for America's next top stack. So we modeled it after Shark Tank, America's next top model, where we selected 50 brands submitted. We selected six. They came and presented on stage their brand to a big crowd of people, including like the Kroger buying team, like in the front, like with legitimate people in the industry. Plus just a lot of people are excited about the niche. People from my social media,
that kind of thing. And then one of them won. They won a photo shoot. They won a pop-up store space in New York. I invested money into them along with air. This brand, Bezzy, who makes an amazing labna snack, won. But people came because it's interesting. It's fun. There's something completely different. Oh, we're going to see six brands basically do a three-minute pitch on their product. And then people are going to be like screaming or yelling, or they're getting asked hard questions. And that's all happening live. And this experience era, that's why I call out that. It's like we rented a Bubba Gump shrimp that we had a step and repeat, a table, like a extremely
mediocre AV system. And that is the extent of the event production, right? To turn something from your average party to just something interesting. And still in and around the core hour of the actual activity, there's tons of hangout and tons of whatever. But that is where the, whether it's a brand event or a personal event, people are so attached as having something be more than just a hang. That's an interesting thing to think about if you're building any experience. Moving on, I want to talk about the AI fight. And I want people to understand this in context of the future. So obviously you'll see a
backlash about AI generated imagery and video online. Totally get it. There's a conversation to have, but you have to understand where it is in terms of what the generations look like and what's coming in the future. So you can be as mad as you want at that or think that it can be avoided or stopped now. But if you look at what the adoption looks like for the previous generations, it's a completely different thing. So I was with a group of college designers the other week, and one of them was working on his clothing line. So basically they had designed this entire thing in free pick.
They'd taken their iconography. They had generated that into flats. They had brought those flats into mock-ups. They were bringing into materials. There's an entire collection design, even starting to go into what patterns and grading look like, completely prompted by AI. And I'm not saying it was perfect, but I looked at it and you're like, oh, this is actually good. And this is just built in. This is how they are interacting with the future. This is the next generation of those people. You cannot stop the momentum of that. And to take that a step further, I look at in my son's school,
he's nine, he used Canva. Canva's built into their curriculum. And inside that, we got him the pro version or whatever it is. He's spending a lot of time working in it and creating stuff. They're generating images. The images that are showing up inside there, it's not even a question. It's not even like, oh, I'm using AI to do this or X or Y. Generating is just a thing that they can do. And they type in the stuff and it's just built into the workflow. It's second nature. It's inherent. And I just want to call out those two things as any conversation or battle that we're having around
this now is lost. In a generational shift, they're growing up with it in a way that's not even decipherable from reality. And that's when you know that there is no turning point. I just want that to be kind of understood when you look at what the difference is going to be generationally. That's already gone. Now I want to have a quick conversation about the legacy media trying to understand the new media landscape. So Netflix recently added podcasts. This is a good example of this. So you can get a lot of, you can get podcasts from the ringer. You can get barstool podcasts, a few others. You can get like breakfast club on Netflix. But what's interesting to me about
that is you can't find them. I went and I want to see what this looked like. I'm thinking about what my media looks like in a streaming and TV world. So I'm just looking for examples. You can't navigate to them. There's no podcast tab. You can't find them. You have to search. So for instance, if I want to actually go engage with that podcast, you'd have to be searched down to get to Bill Simmons or something like that. Now this kind of defeats the point, right? Because what podcasts are going to want to promote themselves so hard that they're on Netflix that enough people search
to watch them that it actually becomes relevant. Even the biggest ones aren't going to be able to do numbers like that that would matter in any way, shape or form. Without discovery, there is inherently no use of those platforms. But then when you actually get to them, these podcasts are unwatchable. There's never been a darker moment than actually seeing what some of these people look like, right? I'm sure many of you consume podcasts on YouTube. If you go watch, like I looked at the Russillo podcast or some of the Barstool stuff, you're like, you would, once you start looking
at these people, you realize you would never want to listen to them. There's a dissonance there. And the production value is terrible. At least the Bill Simmons one, at least it kind of like looks all right. But again, it's not compelling enough that you'd want to watch it on TV versus even what we're able to do with overlays, et cetera, inside a bunch of these YouTube videos. And we saw this when Amazon has been, Prime has been basically giving some shows to YouTubers that are like, they're quasi working out, they're getting there. But this navigation is going to be a huge thing because there is no longer the
needed Hollywood infrastructure to push this production is significantly easier than it was people want to consume the type of media they're consuming on YouTube, it's going to be hard for those streaming networks to compete without IP and promotion. And a lot of this, it's going to come out of social media. But the way that they started to solve it is not right. It was kind of rushed. And I think there's just a huge opportunity in Delta to understand that and go back to what I've mentioned before about clipping, about all the infrastructure we have around media today, and build something unique. And the second gen of this, the second gen of what these companies
look like to end up on there are going to likely be huge cultural moments. And I know I'm a little far back to be able to participate in that. Maybe I get to gen three, but we're going to get there, even on the tail end. And the last three points I want to have here, I want to talk briefly about polymarket, kalshi and the conversations there. I don't support or condone these, but I want people to understand their implications. So I learned a lot about this when I was going through this with some friends around the Super Bowl, because there were odds on if certain brands were going to run ads
on the Super Bowl. And I had, I won't say insider information, I'm not betting on it, but I had information. I know some people who are running Super Bowl ads, I know for sure. And there are odds on this. Let's look at this Anthropic. Anthropic had 50-50 odds you could bet on and return real money. And people are able to bet and put context on it, and they have that information. And the odds kind of adjust based on this. And the fact that this exists, and there's like this legality and morality that we're sort of struggling with, okay, well, can I use, what information is usable or not? Where is the
legality line? Obviously, someone in Mr. Beast Camp was like arrested for working inside of this. The people know more than anything traditional, and they're able to participate in that online. And I don't think this is the final incarnation of this is the point. This idea of prediction itself, this idea of the knowledge of the crowd, of the usage of the insider knowledge, how monetizable that is, this is like stage one. So I wouldn't just ignore this purely because it's like a casino. I don't even, I don't think of it from that regard. And I would really look at what does those implications
mean for the future of how we interact? Something to think about. And then next, I want to call it monoculture. You would think in this social media era, all the things we've talked about, we would lose resonance on so many of these cultural items that were institutions. But the few things that we have left that people actually care enough about are massively important. And I'll call this out, even in my own content, I talked about the Olympic uniforms for the winter games. It's a really successful video of mine. Same thing with the Super Bowl ads. I recapped that, did a bunch of
coverage on X that went really viral, and then did same thing on TikTok and Instagram that also did really well. We have so little to talk about that everyone does, that those exact moments become more influential than ever. And they basically give them their own algorithms. What I noticed about that Olympic video is there's all these people in the Olympic village that are going viral, posting all their stuff. And then my video would be shown right after a bunch of that, right? The algorithms know what to do with a moment in time. And there's only so many moments in time to do it. And so we have Black Friday, stuff like that. You have Valentine's Day, you have your kind
of standard events, but you have stuff like the World Cup or the Super Bowl or any of those. That is a worthwhile looking at when you're where your media spin goes, what the impact is. I have gone now from thinking that traditional media wouldn't be as useful to saying the highest end of it, your Super Bowl TV ad, is probably one of the most impactful things you can buy if you build around it. And so it's worth thinking about, whether it's for you or for your brand, what you interact with, what those remaining monoculture moments are, because I actually think they have more leverage than ever. And the last thing I want to end on here is the
monetization of information. I made a video. It didn't do super well because it's niche. I made a video about how basically so many businesses are also selling workshops and courses now. Basically, I look at it as like the post-Masterclass era. Masterclass normalized the selling of information to your average people to be able to gain a level of knowledge. But now we're also seeing two monetized businesses in retail or with growing costs. Your bouquet flower company is selling how to make a luxury flower arrangement. Your Japanese gardening store is doing actually lessons online via Zoom. There is this idea of the value of information that people would have
thought would have been bad. With Chachi Bt, I can answer anything now. I can learn anything on YouTube. I think what people are missing is how disserved the world's population is by their educational institutions, their desire for learning and actually learning it like with a group where they can participate and the kind of dollars around that and the trend and basically the replacement of enough of the traditional educational infrastructure with the ability to get exactly what you want online. But that monetization of information has not hit the middle of the bell curve yet. There's a significant amount of alpha there to think about for any business of any kind.
So I know this was a long video, but I think it's important to understand all these repercussions of the things happening on the internet for your life, for the brand you work at, or for the brand you own. Like I mentioned, we're going to have a discussion about this in the next community call. Info on that is down below, specifically in terms of how do you build brand and marketing teams around it, because obviously that's my specialty. I'm headed off to Japan, so a bunch of that content is going to be coming out here in the coming weeks. We're going to talk a bit about that. It's an interesting cultural moment that we have.
I'd love to have a conversation about any of these things that you see or disagree with down below. with these same pieces of media. Thank you all so much for watching.