We'll get through a lot here. I wanna start with a brief news reaction. As usual, I'm less interested in the details of the news as much as using this as a hook to get into a, maybe a slightly larger discussion of some bigger points going on with tech and culture.

But I wanted to start with an article that a listener sent me that came from Pew Research. All right, so it's an article, this is from June 27, so quite recent for those who are watching on YouTube, youtube.com/CaliforniaReportMedia. You can see the article, those who are listening at home, I'll narrate it.

The title of this article is "Twitter is the Go-To Social Media Site for US Journalists, "but Not for the Public." And if we look at it, it's based off of a survey. So a recent Pew Research Center survey of people from the news industry. So we have reporters, editors, and others working in the news industry.

I wanna hone in on one particular chart, which you should be seeing, I'm gonna scroll this up now. There we go. So you should be seeing this chart if you're watching online. Basically, if you're listening, here's what it is. It's two bar graphs. On the left, it shows for each of these common social media style sites, what percentage of US journalists say they use that most or second most in their job.

And then on the right, it is what percentage of US adults say they use that platform, particular platform regularly to get news. So we're comparing the platforms that journalists use regularly, when their top two sites they use in their job versus the websites that the average US adult uses to get news.

That's the comparison being shown here. Left is journalist, right is adults. The big thing you'll notice, and this is from the headline, is that for the journalist, Twitter dominates. 69% of the journalists surveyed say Twitter is their top one or two platforms they use for their job. You look next to it, you look at US adults, and you see Twitter is 13%.

13% regularly use that to get news. So there is a major difference between the digital world in which journalists live versus the digital world in which most US adults live. Journalists are very Twitter focused. That is where they find news. That is where news is discussed. The average American adult is not.

Now this matters for a couple of reasons. One, as we've covered numerous times on this show, there is a real effect, a real filter effect of what you see and how it is portrayed based on the particular platform you look at. So Twitter creates its own ecosystem of what's important and what's not important.

How we should feel about this, how we shouldn't feel about this. And it's a very emotionally salient ecosystem. So it not only pushes things to the forefront as being important, but it does so with great emotional gusto. So if you're a journalist who lives in this world, you are being exposed to these huge, seemingly huge upswellings of emotion and commitment and engagement and activism, which may actually be largely artifice or at the very least, largely separate from what the population as a whole believes.

This is why, as we covered in previous shows, we're beginning to see some of the major news companies pushing their staff away from Twitter because of this effect. New York Times being the most prominent example of them telling their reporters, please stop using Twitter. This is not helping the quality of our reporting.

The other issue with Twitter, it's not captured directly, but it's implied by this graph, is that the reaction to what you do as an individual who posts on Twitter can be quite strong. We talked about this in a previous episode. Feedback is something we're wired to take seriously. So if you're a journalist who uses Twitter as your primary tool, like 69% of US journalists do, you're constantly working with this digital sword of Damocles hanging over your head.

What if I say the wrong thing and really upset the crowd on Twitter? What if I miss out a particular caveat or don't mention this other factor that could be happening and I really get swarmed on by other people? This is anxiety producing. This is nerve wracking, and it really can push coverage in certain directions.

Certain issues are never talked about or other issues are drowned in all sorts of defensive maneuvering. So there is all of these negative side effects, both what you see and how you worry about people seeing you if Twitter is the main thing you use. Most people don't use it.

Journalists do, so it's an interesting separation. There is, however, something new I wanna remark about, new to this show, that I think is significant. And I don't quite understand this well, but I wanna put a preliminary stake in the ground here. Let's look at the right side of this chart.

So the sites that US adults in general use to get news. Look at number two. YouTube. It's the second most used site by US adults to obtain news. So what's going on with that? Well, I think what this might be reflecting is generational. There is, I think, for the younger adult generations, what I guess you might call Gen Z and the younger millennials, a shift towards YouTube being a replacement for what my generation would have used cable for.

That YouTube has become your source of television style entertainment. And so why are you getting a lot of news from YouTube? Because that's where I watch shows, putting quotation marks around them, 'cause they look very different than they did before. But if I want news, maybe I'm looking at breaking points or Kyle Kalinske, or if I'm on the other side of the political spectrum, Ben Shapiro or what have you.

But this is actually where I think a whole generation is going for relatively reasonably produced video content. Now, I think this is really significant. I think it's really significant because it is a different game than is being played by the real flashy players in the online digital attention economy.

We're looking now at the war between TikTok and Facebook, and there's Instagram and there's Twitter. And these are the platforms that are getting a lot of attention now. But they're playing a different game. Those platforms are playing what I think of as being the more short-term game of how do we get maximum engagement from people today?

How do we get you to put your eyeballs on this app as long as possible? And so Facebook adds this feature and then TikTok tries something different and then Instagram tries to pivot and let's try to use reels here to be more TikTok like. And it's just fighting short-term to get people to glue their eyes to these screens.

And they're using user generated content. Most of it's not super high quality, fine. YouTube, I think, is playing a longer game. It is looking at what happened when the web came along and it completely disrupted and democratized the production and publication of text. You used to have to be a newspaper or a magazine or a book publisher to have any sort of mass audience for text.

The web said anyone could do this now. YouTube is doing this with video. And I think it's a really important shift. It's going to change long-term how we consume and produce video content away from the TV and towards these new sort of mediums that YouTube is experimenting with. And I don't think the game is, how do I do this addictive TikTok style experience that's going to get you glued to this as much as possible?

I mean, maybe they care about that in the short term, but the long-term impact, I think, of democratizing video is going to be a complete change of that landscape. So we see hints of that in 22% of US adults getting their news from YouTube. That's because YouTube is their TV.

That is their cable TV. They don't go to CNN. They go to a YouTube channel of someone they trust. They want to know about, let's say, the latest COVID news. Instead of going to Fox News or MSNBC, they will switch to something like John Campbell's YouTube page. A former nurse, an instructor of nurse who has a YouTube page where every other day, or maybe even every day, he literally just takes the statistics of what's going on in UK in particular with COVID numbers, and he goes through them, and the camera shows him the paper, and he just ticks things off with his pen, and just let's go through the numbers and see what's happening, 2.5 million subscribers.

You get more people watching those videos than are watching the morning show on CNN. So this, I think, is interesting. And where is this all going to lead? Well, I honestly think the red herring in this conversation, the red herring is the highly engaging, addictive TikTok style, user-generated, go straight into my brainstem type, quick, quick, 15-second content.

What I think is going to emerge from the YouTube world is this medium-level production value. Like, I think this is what's gonna be important. This is what is gonna disrupt the television, in particular, the cable television landscape, which is hundreds of billions of dollars of economy. What's gonna disrupt this is people creating videos, but not creating videos quickly with their phone to go to TikTok, but people who have some production value.

That they have a set, they have some good lights, they have some people working on it. It's still a fraction of the cost of producing a half hour of standard terrestrial linear cable programming, but it's good enough production values. We saw that happen in the blogging revolution. It was individual bloggers that gave way towards content sites.

You get the, like, BuzzFeeds and the Slates and the Vox that actually were replicating newspaper magazine quality, but at a fraction of the production cost. We're seeing that in audio. What's happening in podcast? We're seeing this large industry eating into and about the Conquer radio, but what are the shows that are doing this?

Well, they have radio-style production values. I mean, there's a reason why we're in this studio, why we have all this equipment over here. It's a lot cheaper than running an NPR affiliate, but it's when you cross that uncanny valley into production values that are close enough to professional. That's when these democratized channels for media production become important, and that, I think, is the important thing happening in YouTube.

It's not my picture I took with my smartphone, but the breaking point set where they have a pretty good lighting grid, and they're using a $60,000 4K camera, three-camera system with a TriCaster so that you can actually display their show on a 4K large-screen television, and it looks the same resolution style as what's coming out of the TV studios.

$60,000 is a lot, but it's a fraction of what it pays to do, costs to do a traditional cable show. So anyways, there's this underlying trend I think is important. YouTube is becoming the new TV for a bigger generation. This is driving a crossing of the uncanny valley. More and more democratically distributedly produced video content is beginning to approximate the production values of low-end television.

That, I think, those are the moves I think that really disrupt the media landscape. So there's the whole engagement war happening with social media platforms. Let's put that aside for now. This, I think, is a trend that is also, it's also worth keeping an eye on. I mean, Jesse, that's why we're doing video.

I don't really know, we don't really know what exactly we're trying to accomplish by having the reasonably lit studio, a pretty good camera system, you know, some good audio. But as you heard me say all along, is I just had this instinct, I think we should be there. I think things are happening.

I can't tell you, I can't point to, oh, we're trying to do X, what this person's doing, and we can be there in six months. But I think a couple years from now, there's some importance to being early on this. - It's the same deal that you talked about originally when you provided the justification for the YouTube channel and having your core ideas, those types of, like your reading lists, like you can get specific content where you went to the podcast and go to minute 32, whatever, to see Cal talk about books, whereas now you can just send him the video.

It's like easy, they can watch it on their phone. - You can share, yeah, and there's something about visual. Like why do people watch video of podcasts? I had this conversation with a friend of mine, we went out to lunch, and he's my age. So he's like, I don't understand why anyone would have a video of a podcast.

He's like, when are people, when are they listening to it? And I was like, no, people like to watch it. - It's funny, I actually figured out when they do, one of my buddies, Eitan, who I hadn't seen in a while, he watches it in the gym. So he has it on the gym and then he, like on a big TV, and then, 'cause he sent me a picture, he's like, is that you?

And I was like, it is me. So then he watches it when he works out. I think a lot of people do that. - Which is like people used to put TV on, so why not? I think the sports radio people figured that out, right? Especially like the early, like Dan Patrick, Colin Coward, like they figured out people like to see you, even if it's just they're in their studio with their fancy mic and they're just sitting there talking, something about it is just, that was really compelling.

There's the, you know, the sports junkies is a morning sports show here in DC. They have, they're now televised on the NBC sports network, right? It's just four guys around the table talking, but that is like compelling television. There's something, don't underestimate, you know, our attraction to the visual.

So I don't think the model's there yet. Like the, obviously the monetization model is coming there for podcasts. I mean, the ad rates are good. Really good shows are getting bought up in the networks for real money. You know, people are making more on podcasts than they would have made in low end TV.

So like the model is there for podcasting. YouTube, not really. I mean, there's like the super like professional YouTubers trying to do the Mr. B style. I have millions and millions of viewers and trying to, that game. But I think there's another video game that hasn't emerged yet. Where like high quality video, approximating cable, where the revenue is not from some incredibly low CPM automated YouTube ad, but from something else.

And maybe that's nothing to do with YouTube. It's on private apps or networks. I don't know, but I mean, I think there's something. - Well, even on Tyler Cohen's podcast recently, he was talking to Horowitz and what's the partner's name? He was talking to the partner and they were talking about how- - Andreessen.

- Yeah, Andreessen. - Mark Andreessen. - And he was talking about how the economic model for podcasts actually isn't there yet. - Oh, interesting. - He's like, it's starting to get there, but it's still, he was explaining, he does a much better job of explaining it than I did, but it was pretty cool to listen to.

- Yeah, 'cause I know two people, not well, but just like I've crossed paths with them or talked with them who in the last year or two have done seven figure deals for podcasting. I mean, the interesting thing about that is, like in writing, for example, which has been around forever, seven figure deals are very, very hard and they're very, very rare, right?

I mean, the level of success you have to have in the world of writing in terms of where you rank among other writers to do seven figure deals is like really at the tippy top. These guys doing seven figure deals for podcast are not at that super elite level.

It's not like, okay, these are the names. I mean, if you're doing a seven figure deal for a book, people know who you are. These are not podcasters who people are like, oh yeah, I know that show, right? So there's something interesting going on. I think it's a highly monetizable world.

It's the, I don't know, Jordan Harbinger and I talked about this when we did, I guess last summer, I don't know, I had him on the show a while ago and we got deep into the economics of podcasting and we tried to get into this and I was kind of arguing that the peak of, you know, you can make a good living is actually way broader on that than in other things.

He kind of disagreed, but it was like something's interesting going on. When I know two people who's like, if I grab someone on the street and said their name, they don't know who they are, but are doing these seven figure deals, something's interesting going on because in almost every other media, if you're doing seven figure deals, at the very least you're a popular host of a radio show.

You're like, you have a pretty good prime time, maybe early prime time cable news show. Your book is at the front of the bookstore at the airport and podcasting is bringing people to that level. - It's similar to like internet marketing, how people kill it on the internet, you know?

And like you can compare that to like a brick and mortar business and some of these internet marketers or you would see this simple website and it generates millions and millions of dollars a month. It's kind of similar. - Yeah, you've told me about some of that world. Like the numbers are crazy.

- Yeah, they're insane. - Yeah, yeah. - Forget seven, talk eight figures or more, right? - Some of them, I mean, it's really hard to figure out, but if you figure it out, I mean, but even like the seven figure ones or whatever, I mean, that's doable, you know?

- Yeah, so it's interesting. I love those trends. So I think video, like, so audio is getting there. Text never got there. It was very, the upper limit for monetizing democratized text after the World Wide Web came along, the upper limit there was the ceiling was relatively low. Like Andrew Sullivan could get high six figures for the Daily Dish, but it was a huge pain.

You know, it was a huge pain technically. You know, I think some people now with Substack can do like high six figures, but it's like, that's a ceiling for people who are at the very top of the game, the very top of their pyramid. Audio seems to be, you know, better.

Like I could replace my Georgetown salary with what we're doing right now, which is a half day a week. So that's like, something's happening there. And we see these people doing seven figure stuff and video I think is gonna maybe have an even bigger ceiling. I just don't think it's figured it out yet.

Obviously YouTube ads is not what is going to monetize video in a meaningful way. It's just the numbers aren't there. It only rewards virality and certain types of like content that serves to the algorithm. But I think there's gonna be monetization that gets free from the algorithm. - So we'll see.

- That's kind of what Mark was talking about. - Right, so that's what he was. - I can't really explain it well, but I'd have to listen to it again. But he was talking about some stuff. - This was, so this was on Tyler Cowen's podcast kind of recently.

- Yeah, I just listened to it last week. - Andreessen and Horowitz were both. - It was just Mark. - Just Mark Andreessen, yeah. - On the show, interesting. - He reads a lot too. You probably get along with him. - Never met him. - You guys, I could tell you guys would be able to talk about a lot of stuff.

- Yeah. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)