← Mixed Signals from Semafor Media
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- [00:00]
A
Foreign. Welcome to another episode of the Mixed Signals podcast from us here at Semaphore where we are talking to the most interesting people shaping our new media age. I'm Max Tawny. I'm the media editor here at Semaphore. I'm the co host of the show and with me, as always, is the other co host of the show, it's Ben Smith. Ben, you're a little bit under the weather, but you made it and you were of course got your energy and excitement up for our guests today. You would never miss these guys.
- [00:39]
B
I am excited to be here. I'm ready to learn.
- [00:41]
A
We both have a lot to learn on this episode. Sometimes we come in and we've got like a 1 million questions about a guest who we know incredibly well. Sometimes they're friends of ours. David Remnick, the editor in chief of the New Yorker was on here talking about Ben's parents and their personal politics and other times we are completely in the dark about this new corner of media which is always exciting and honestly a little bit terrifying. I think we consider ourselves to be expert ball knowers when it comes to media. So it's always really shocking and honestly kind of terrifying when there's just this massive, huge corner of the business that we don't know. In this case Twitch. Our guests on the show this week are two of the three hosts of the popular podcast from Vox Media Lemonade Stand. One of those guests is Diana Doug Reeden, who's better known as Doug Doug. He has millions of followers on Twitch, Instagram, YouTube and the other is his co host, Aidan McCraig. Both of these guys are really big gamers on Twitch. They host other podcasts. They're kind of like these new media kind of do it all figures who have kind of evolved from being gamers on Twitch and streaming there to having an actual interesting, widely listened to podcast about business and news and politics. Ben, are you as confused as I am by the pivot from like gaming and streaming yourself playing League of Legends to talking about like Fed Mortgage Data, which is what they do on their podcast.
- [02:11]
B
Yeah, I mean I do feel the last time I really checked in on Twitch it was kids streaming and voicing over their streams of, you know, of video games. And I do have the sense that things have changed a lot, but I'm very eager to learn from these guys what is happening over there at the moment.
- [02:27]
A
We have a lot of questions to ask the Lemonade Stand guys, so let's jump in. I was explaining to Ben kind of the idea for, you know, for us having you guys on the show. And I was trying to describe who you all are. I was struggling because I was like, okay, do I describe these guys as Twitch streamers? Do I say that they're podcasters? And how do I describe the podcast? Is it a business podcast? But they talk about politics also on it and they talk about technology and I think that our audience probably also is kind of wondering some of the same things. So. So can you describe what Lemonade Stand is to people and kind of start there and also kind of talk about like the genesis of the podcast? How did it kind of come together?
- [03:07]
C
Aiden is the genesis, so I will let him kick it off.
- [03:10]
D
I think the way it really happened was Atrioc, our third co host, who isn't here, AKA Brandon. You know, take your pick. He was making more content that focused around these topics of business, politics and tech on his own YouTube channel. Like his work that had primarily focused around fun gaming stuff for a while he worked at Nvidia, had slowly transformed into this channel that focused on more serious topics like that. And then his kind of ability to navigate, parse them and show it to this younger audience that he had, like primarily in their 20s. And I've known Brandon for a really long time. I've been friends with him for around 10 years now. And we, you know, we just chat about politics and business stuff because we're one of the only people in each other's lives where we could talk about that stuff with like, our other friends aren't very excited to talk about it. So naturally we'd just come together and like, you see this thing, you see this thing and, and had fun with it. And I started to have the idea of like, what if we did a show together? Because I think his content was starting to find this nice, I would say, non reactionary niche on the Internet that I really liked. And I think it fit the way I wanted to go about things and explore these topics in the world. And I asked him, I was like, hey, what do you think about doing a podcast together, like the two of us? So that evening, after we had chatted about this, we have a weekly basketball pickup game that Doug also goes to. And after we had talked about this at the basketball game, Brandon was streaming alone on his phone at a Chili's. And at the end of the stream drops, this idea that, you know, Aiden came up to me today and we're thinking about doing a podcast. And that's all I really know about it. Doug, who doesn't normally watch Brandon's stream happens to be tuned in for this little thing, like, happens to be watching for this five minute space and time, sees that we're doing that and then came to us and was like, hey, I think this sounds really cool. I think I can kind of complete this triangle of like business, politics and tech and like really show my interest in that area specifically, as well as my mutual interest in these other things. What if we all did the show together and we all got dinner and discussed it? Like, what could this show look like? We're really happy with what we came up with. And that was the genesis of the show was that was Brandon choosing to talk about it publicly in Chili's, basically.
- [05:41]
A
So, Doug, you were watching, you're watching the Chili's live stream. So, yeah, you're like, okay, you know, Brendan Atrioc is streaming from Chili's. I gotta see what's up. Also, like, how do the people in Chili's feel about that?
- [05:56]
C
Do you think that's a great question? I. It was the instant I saw that a friend of mine was streaming himself, eating it at Chili's. I knew it would be a cultural touchstone moment that I simply could not pass up on. Me and how many other people are watching? 2,000 other people. We all realized and really had been an exclusive kind of club ever since. For me, the way I came across it was largely at this point, I don't, you know, as a pretty busy person, I do not have the time to sit around watching 10 hours of Twitch a day. There are plenty of people who do that. Streaming is a platform that requires an enormous amount of time investment as a viewer. Right. Kind of by definition. And so I'll often do what I call scrolling, flipping through channels. You know, you open it up at night, kind of check in, see what everybody's doing. So I have 30 channels and I'd be like, oh, this person's doing something. I open it for a couple minutes, check it out, and then close it. So that happened. Here I am in the type of, what I would say is a normal human being who has no interest in streaming myself, eating at a Chili's. Brandon has the ability to just be confident and do that. To be fair to him, though, there are, I'm sure you've all heard stories of very disrespectful or controversial people who are just, you know, streaming themselves out in the world. That is not Brandon. That was a one off thing where he was at a table by himself in the corner, not bothering anybody. But yes, it is quite ridiculous.
- [07:10]
B
So much of what we talk about on this show, what we were talking about with the Instagram CEO, was this sense that there's kind of a convergence on something that starts to look like television. Guys talking about news and politics, news of the day, things like that, on a screen that increasingly is the big screen, not. Not the phone or the laptop. I'm curious how you think about that.
- [07:28]
C
I would disagree. I mean, I think to me the hallmark of television was it's, you know, a curated number, a limited number of curated channels. And I think the big distinction between that and user generated content now is you get funneled into your niches. You know, I am in a niche for a specific video game that came out 23 years ago for this specific guy in this specific competitive scene. And then I'm really into a specific type of Japanese cooking channels. Not all of them, specifically Ramen. Right. You know, it's like you get into all these very niche channels and we've actually discussed this on the show, and the sort of worry that people are having a harder time culturally connecting over a single moment. Because with TV there was so few options that everybody would see the Seinfeld finale. But I actually, I would disagree in the sense that I think most people are now in their tiny little silos and maybe there's 10 of those silos, but they're increasingly become, you know, microscopic relative. I mean, that's the only reason we are successful. Right. Nobody would have approved what I do on Twitch or YouTube for television in the past. But the only reason it works is because there is, let's say, a million people who are really passionate about this particularly strange thing that I do. I think more so people are really getting into these specific niches and following individuals rather than allowing, let's say, a Netflix to curate it for them.
- [08:46]
B
And just, you know, I mean, the story you're telling is sort of the story of Twitch as I understand it over the last several years, which is in some sense, like the last time I really checked in on it, it was really a gaming platform and now it seems it's broadened so much and so much of the conversation isn't about gaming. I'm curious, like, if you could, I mean, your own story. And then also as you see how you've seen Twitch evolve in that way, not necessarily away from gaming because obvious gaming is still this kind of huge cultural pillar, but it does feel like the platform has broadened really dramatically.
- [09:16]
A
Right till like now you're watching your friend livestream From Chili's.
- [09:20]
C
Yes. Yeah. It's interesting how it has evolved because, you know, I first became interested in it a decade ago when it was 100% gaming. Like, that's what drew me in. And then over the years, particularly in say 2016 17, Twitch opened up this category that they called IRL, which is short for in real life, the sort of know gamer acronym for not playing a video game. Literally anything else. Actually it was called just chatting for a while, but it's kind of alternated between the two. And that quickly started to kind of surpass everything else with gaming because gaming is a particular hobby that people do and going out into the world could include literally anything. So all of these different creative fields started kind of flooding into it in the mid 2010s, like musicians, like programmers, like people talking about stocks, people talking about news. That's when you started to see the like, you know, news and politics streamers start to pop up when there was actually an allowed category for it. You weren't even able to stream on the website without playing video games in the first few years. So it just kind of started to take off.
- [10:17]
D
Yeah, well, there was, I think there's actually an interesting cycle. So before Twitch was Twitch, it was a site called Justin tv. And the founder of it, and forgive me, his name was Justin, I forget his last name. But him and his friends founded the live streaming company to stream their life 24 hours a day. And that was the idea, like sharing their life very directly. And then I think after a year or so, they launched Twitch as like this secondary section of the site to stream video games. And Twitch became way more popular than just in tv. I think gaming was sort of the vehicle that brought the site and live streaming like into the semi mainstream at the time. And then it kind of curved back the other way, which is interesting to see. It's like a lot it was formed with the idea of what it's servicing now, but I think culturally people weren't really ready for that. Like these constant 24. 7 in real life live streams. And then now it's the way to like gain viewership on the channel. Like you're kind of trapping yourself in a box a lot of the time. If you're a person who streams only games on the platform.
- [11:26]
B
Yeah. Did you feel like in your kind of in your own experience that you were getting bored of just talking about gaming and branching out, or that your audience was getting bored of gaming and pulling you toward other topics?
- [11:34]
C
I mean, for me, my interest shifted. I think with A platform like Twitch, there's platforms that are, let's say, more about viral moments or cultural moments like TikTok, where you really need to kind of stay in the cultural zeitgeist. Twitch is a little bit different, which is that you're getting an extraordinarily dedicated, smaller audience. A little more similar to, I would say, New York Times versus Substack. You know, with Substack you just have that audience that's going to show up
- [11:57]
A
and there's a comparison. We understand.
- [12:00]
C
Yeah. And so I think it's somewhat similar there where your audience is pretty dedicated. Once you get them on Twitch, it's extraordinarily hard to convince somebody, hey, come watch me for eight hours a day, do whatever I feel like. But once people are there, they're bought in. Right. And so at that point you do actually have flexibility to sort of explore what you want. For me personally, because I came from a programing and software background, I just kind of naturally started to explore that and realize it was quite interesting and unique compared to what other people are doing. So I just sort of followed my interests at the same time that I started getting too addicted to Twitter, which got me interested in business and politics and whatnot. So my interest just naturally kind of expanded beyond gaming. But part of the reason I did then message Brandon after that chili stream was because I was feeling like there wasn't an avenue on Twitch to talk about these things. You know, I was really, I'm doing silly comedy gaming type things and it was not a natural transition to suddenly talk about the policy consequences of AI data centers. Right. And so for me it was like, okay, this will be a distinct project where that is really definitively what we are trying to do. And I actually keep that separate from my personal Twitch channel, which is still, it's still me being wacky and making phallic jokes. But yeah, whereas for. And you can do either for Brendan, like he. He slowly morphed his main brand and content to be about and technology and business. For me, I've sort of kept my own brand, let's say light hearted, open ended, non political, and then started this podcast specifically as a way to channel that interest.
- [13:30]
A
What's the differences between the audiences for Lemonade Stand and for, you know, your Twitch stream and Aiden, for your other podcasts, like, what's the Venn diagram look like? Are these completely different audiences? Are they a lot of the same people? Is it easy to kind of keep them separate or are they starting to bleed?
- [13:47]
C
So it's hard to know for certain, but from the, you know, the little bit of data we do have, for example, you know, YouTube will tell you, oh, these channels, you have a lot of overlap with the viewers in this channel's and that will include our podcast channel and it will include Brandon Atrioc's channel as well. My conclusion is that the reason the show works at all is because we basically, the three of us all had a large kind of young gamer audience that wasn't directly watching us for anything serious at all. But then once we proposed to this project and say, hey, we're really passionate about this, it was a natural kind of flow into that. So I would argue the Venn diagram is nearly a circle. I think there's very few folks who, you know, from the traditional media world would like, you know, I'd like three young white guys to talk about these issues in an uninformed way. You know, like we put in certain effort.
- [14:35]
B
I don't like cable news.
- [14:37]
C
Yeah, but you know, we certainly are not, we are not journalists and we do not claim to be journalists. We're really pitching, as we're three friends who are interested in this stuff. This is what we like talking about off of Twitch. Anyways, if you person who already likes us for the type of creative voice we have or personality we have is interested in either starting to learn about this stuff or you, like us, have wanted to chat about it, but you're not seeing that very commonly in the normal YouTube Twitch ecosystem. Here's a place to do it.
- [15:05]
A
Is the audience, I assume the audience is largely Gen Z, maybe some Gen Alpha men. Is that kind of like what the target is or is it, is it kind of broader than that? Is that reductive of me to assume
- [15:15]
D
it leans a bit more millennial, to be honest, like the higher end of Gen Z and lower end of millennials. Like our biggest pocket is people who are age, I think 25 to 32. That's like our largest portion of our audience. And then I think like 18 to 24 is the second biggest and then like 33 to 40 ish is the third. So it sits around there. We don't have, I think as many young people as I think outside parties would expect. Like there aren't a lot of like 16 year olds watching this show. It's definitely, I would say the face of our viewership is the 24 to 5 year old who graduated within the past couple years and is trying to figure out their career.
- [16:05]
A
Because the show is broad. There is a lot of politics, news of the day, as well as business tech, you know, some kind of evergreen roundup type stuff. How are you guys deciding what makes an episode of Lemonade Stand?
- [16:16]
D
I think week to week we have a meeting where we either pick some sort of ongoing current event we think is particularly interesting that could be at the forefront of everything, or we'll try to create some sort of evergreen concept that will be interesting for a much longer period of time than an episode that focuses on a current event. And maybe some weeks we have a guest and we kind of balance between these three things, trying not to get too caught up in one or the other, because I think all of these directions are interesting to us personally. And also we want to perform well in the YouTube algorithm. We want to have something that draws your attention with the title and the thumbnail that makes it like a reason to click on it and be invested in it.
- [17:06]
A
And is the reason why you guys do, like, evergreen content? Is it because you are thinking about YouTube and what does. Well, they are like, are you thinking, like, we don't want this to be disposable and, like, not relevant in a day? Like, we want this to be something that can live on for a long time and kind of get picked up by, you know, whatever magic is going on with YouTube?
- [17:23]
D
Yeah, absolutely. Like, it's. So if I were to compare this to the other podcasts I do, that's a comedy show. There's almost nothing about each episode that depends on current events. Not a lot would, like, date each episode. So when you look at the backlog over time, a lot of people that became fans of the show, like, maybe two years in, will go and listen to the entire backlog. And when you create a show that's primarily built around current events, you just do not have that same appeal. But when you look at some of our strongest episodes, I think like one of our personal favorites is the conspiracy episode we did where we cover a bunch of different historically prevalent conspiracy theories, at least in the US and we go through them and what the. Like what the origin of the conspiracy is. Break them down. We have like costumes aboard behind us. We're having a lot of fun with it. And that episode, if you look at its performance over time, is dominating the other episodes around it that performed way better in a 24 hour or 48 hour period. And we want to have episodes that fans can access, either get, you know, directly recommended later, or if they're just sifting through the backlog of the show because they like it, there's more of a Reason to click on that.
- [18:34]
A
Do you feel pressure to have your entire life as a part of these streams and, like, benefits for your viewers and subscribers? And, like, have you felt, like, your private life, you know, becoming almost synonymous with the types of content that you're putting out on one of your two podcasts and all of the extras and bonuses and whatnot?
- [18:53]
C
Yes is the answer. It's hard.
- [18:55]
A
It's hard.
- [18:55]
C
There's no separation of work and personal life, really, in this business. And that can mean that you are literally putting a camera on yourself as you're walking around your day, as some people do. But even just for the average content creator like myself, you know, essentially we've all monetized our hobbies. I enjoyed video games and so I made it my job. And now when I play video games, I'm thinking about my job. Same with YouTube, same with Twitch. Like, you know, engaging with any of the things I normally enjoy. And then the. My getaway was reading about technology and business, and now I've turned that into a job. And now that also is really. So it is extraordinarily hard, I think, to set a balance. And that's any YouTuber and Twitch streamer you talk to will basically complain about that. Same thing. When we're all in a room together, we talk about this and we say, I'm stressed out. It feels like there's too much going on. It feels like there's endless pressure to do this. And that's just true of any kind of gig work, I think. But certainly the ecosystem is encouraging. You do more all the time, monetize everything, or at least make content out of it in some way, go forever.
- [19:57]
D
I think you have to pick and choose where you kind of draw the lines. Because if you just. I think if you ride the wave of this type of work, you wind up losing a lot of that privacy or separation between your work life and your personal life.
- [20:15]
A
I guess this is maybe mostly a question for Doug, but I'm curious as well what you think about this, Aiden. Like, who is the oldest Twitch streamer who's popular? And, like, can you age out of Twitch? Because you mentioned it before, like, you've got to be doing this, like, all the time, all the time. And the people who have time to watch this stuff all the time, it tends to be people who have more time on their hands. A lot of, like, younger people, like, is there a point at which you age out, or are you going to be like 55, 60 year old? Like, you're going to be on Social Security eligible, and you'll still be on there streaming.
- [20:44]
C
I mean, obviously every individual handles things differently, but I would say broadly, the trend is that people, as they get closer to 40, even mid-30s or early-30s, start to kind of taper off. That being said, I'm about to turn 35, and I have a very hard time seeing myself doing this consistently for five more, six, seven, eight more years. That being said, with Hollywood, for example, you've had entire generations go through that industry. Right. The first generation is people around my age. Right. Maybe early 40s. Mid-40s is kind of the oldest. And those are the folks who got in 2010 when this stuff was brand new and they were, you know, 20 or whatnot. They were 25. And so you have that kind of old guard, some of whom are still around, generally not as influential. And then every 5ish years, you kind of have a new cohort who comes in. So I was in that sort of second or third cohort. Nowadays, you know, the names you hear about Kai Senat or Ishowspeed, like, these are names that, to any kid in high school, like, they, they are celebrities. And also they're so large at this. They're literally on super bowl commercials. Right? So it's getting to this kind of crazy level, but they're in a different world. Like, that is a. Not only is it bigger, it's completely different than what I did, what I grew up with. And so I feel like I'm solidly kind of retiring out of that phase. But really the answer is it's extraordinarily young. We just don't know. There was, you know, nobody really was doing this at age 40 in the 2000 and tens when this started. And so it's to be determined, really.
- [22:09]
D
Yeah. I think the main thing looking at the people who have been successful for long periods of time is they've managed to age well alongside their audience. So there's some, like, timeless appeal to them or the way they approach content, or they changed to match the trends of their viewers as they got older. Like some way to make sure that your content stays relevant, which is a really difficult tightrope to walk. And that's why a lot of people fall off of it. And then some people also just don't want to do it anymore. Like, they just get over being a streamer or don't want to put the, I would say the insane hours that you have to put in as a streamer as well. Like the amount of time you need to be online streaming for that specific career is very, I would say, very disproportionate compared to doing a podcast where maybe you're recording once or twice a week and you're doing prep for one episode or. But a lot of streaming demands you to be, like, maybe live five days a week for six to 10 hours. And that's just the time you're live and not the time that you're prepping and things like that.
- [23:16]
A
So, last question, because it's five o' clock here on the east coast, you guys have been really generous with your time. Where is this going? You guys have had this show for a year. Where do you see it? Where do you see it all going? And you know, you guys were joking about bidding on the Mozambique tuna boats that were up for sale at auction. Is there like a. Is there a world where you guys do, like, where the show is, like, successful enough, where you could do some kind of, like, stunt type of things like that? And where do you see it? Where do you see it all going?
- [23:43]
D
I think that we already have a trip planned in March of this year to go to China together for a couple weeks and go to a bunch of cities, maybe record some videos while we're there, but record episodes while we're traveling around, hopefully scheduling some tours of some, like, Chinese businesses and factories, meeting a lot of people and having just conversations with people on the street.
- [24:05]
B
How did that come about? Did the Chinese government. I know they're very eager to have streamers. Did they reach out?
- [24:10]
D
They didn't. I think we're all interested in China and we set it as like a Patreon goal. Like, if we hit this amount of paid subscribers, like, we'll plan this trip together. And in general, like, that's one idea for this year. We want to do more stuff like that. We want to go to. I think we all share a very strong.
- [24:29]
B
What do you think your audience wants to know about China? Sorry, it's preoccupied.
- [24:32]
D
Oh, no problem. I think China is a place that is so segmented from the news because of their separation on the Internet. Like, they have the firewall and they have all these equivalent sites to ours that they only use in that space. So the way news is disseminated out of China is very strange. And it's difficult for people to get what they feel like is a very accurate picture of the place. And I think on paper, China has made a ton of progress in the last 20 years that, like, I went to China when I was younger and I've heard Beijing is like, totally transformed. Since then. And I really want to go back and see it. And there's this idea of, like, this country that's able to create so much development in such a period of time and increase standard of living in such a short period of time. Like, what does that actually look for? Real people who are there? Because that doesn't really feel represented to me when I read an article in English on the Other side of the World. Right.
- [25:26]
A
Ben is actually kind of trying to build a whole business around this. Like, we've kind of. This is, like, what you're talking about, the kind of, like, news silos kind of within China. Something actually what Ben has thought, like, very deeply about.
- [25:37]
B
Yes, definitely something. So we're trying to think a lot about at Semaphore because it is so much of China news in the US Comes through this kind of, like, keyhole of national security and of Washington. And the reality there is that most days of the week, most of the folks building businesses there, like, aren't even really thinking about the US at all.
- [25:54]
D
The headline version of anything is going to be drastically different from actually showing up to the place and talking to people. And I think that's a spirit that I think fuels a lot of exciting things.
- [26:04]
A
Showing up to a place and talking to people is something we used to call journalism. But I know you guys aren't journalists.
- [26:08]
B
I know that's offensive. Max, don't call them that.
- [26:11]
A
Well, it's funny. We had Colin and Samir on, and they also were, like, you know, they were offended by. They did not want to be branded journalists, and yet they were also doing these, like, really interesting interviews.
- [26:19]
B
Wait, how are you not journalists? That's, like, very basic journalism. Going to China and talking to people about what? It's like.
- [26:25]
A
I just don't.
- [26:26]
D
It's like. I just don't see it that way. I don't see myself. There's some aspect of, like.
- [26:30]
B
Do you feel like that's a negative term that you're trying to, like, distance yourself from?
- [26:33]
D
No, I. I think it's a turn that I have to earn, actually. I think there's a lack of professionalism and experience that I don't have yet. That it would be stolen valor to call myself a journalist.
- [26:45]
B
You overestimate the profession greatly.
- [26:47]
C
I mean, the reason we call the show Lemonade Stand and we landed on that is because the joke is we're smart enough to run a lemonade stand, but not like a real business. And I think that undersells all three of us. But I don't Think any of us want to market ourselves as like, hey, we are really going through all due diligence now. We do in practice. We really try to thoroughly think through things and be responsible with what we're saying. I mean, I think we all treat it very seriously. But you know, we don't have an editor who is fact checking everything. We don't have a way to update. If I say a number completely wrong when talking about the budget, you know, that's a hard thing to go and correct on the record in the future. So it's. Yeah, it's more cautionary of setting a realistic standard of ultimately it's three friends, we're talking about what they're interested in and we just don't have that same degree of accountability as much as we try to self apply it.
- [27:33]
A
I think you guys are definitely qualified enough to run a lemonade stand and then some given what you guys have all built with your respective media businesses. So, Doug, Aiden, thank you guys so much for coming on and talking about, you know, explaining Twitch to us, spoon feeding this information to some people who should probably know better. But this was a really fun conversation and thanks a lot for doing it. Thank you for.
- [27:52]
C
Thanks for having us.
- [27:57]
B
So Max, do you leave feeling like you have your arms around what those guys do and how that world works?
- [28:03]
A
So there is this kind of interesting category of people on the creator side and I was thinking about this while we were speaking to them. I was reminded of the conversation that you and Naima had with Colin and Samir, I guess, at the end of last year and how similar what they're doing is to what Colin and Samir are doing, which is like these are guys who come from the kind of world of video streaming who are now, because of their huge audiences and their curiosity, are essentially doing, you know, something that is very close to what we used to call like regular journalism where they are like taking questions that they have and big problems that exist in the world and explaining, you know, the facts and maybe their views to people. And yet it's obviously very much a different thing because they're not constricted by the types of things that we are constricted by in the media, which is like beats and places where like we have this narrow lane that we're focused on. They are doing, you know, live streams of, you know, themselves, gaming for hours and hours, going to live streaming, talking about their lives from Chili's and then they're also talking about like the future of AI and they were in Japan talking with a Japanese political expert about the situation there and why the new rising young generation was so conservative and the role of YouTube in that. And so it is really all over the place. And so it is hard to grasp. But I understand what it is, which is three individuals who are interesting and compelling, conducting themselves and being curious. And I think that that's like really the thing that unites it. I don't know, I want to flip it on you.
- [29:40]
B
Like, it felt very natural to me, honestly, that. I mean, there is this old line that in the. What is it? In college you study the eternities and then you graduate and you read the Times. But like really young people don't care about the news. That's not. Then you get older and you care about the news and it feels like they're sort of evolution from streamers who. I do think you develop this incredibly astute feel for your audience and what your audience wants when you are in this, when you're sort of like up against this wall of text that is the live stream. And so it's an incredible feedback loop for just understanding how to relate to an audience on a screen. And obviously you can kind of feel how good they are at that maybe
- [30:18]
A
particularly Doug, it was really interesting to me to also to hear the way that they distinguish between Twitch and YouTube. And you know, one of the things that made us want to bring them on the show in the first place is the fact that they just have these massive YouTube audiences and you look at the numbers and you're just like, holy shit. There are hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people watching these guys from a comedy podcast and, you know, who have set some records in online gaming, talking to Lina Khan, you know, about antitrust.
- [30:46]
B
Yeah, it is also like they're sucking, you know, YouTube continuing just to, you know, you could sort of hear like Twitch is a cool platform and they get a lot of, you know, a lot of concurrence there. But the. But YouTube is the summit of the mountain, right?
- [30:58]
A
Yeah, absolutely. No, absolutely. And that wasn't something that I really understood before. Clearly Twitch is the place where they can use some of the tools that they like interacting with some of the audience. They're die hard fans, you know, and like some of the chat features and some of like the member features are really good. But ultimately, at the end of the day, if they want to reach a broad number of people, it's on YouTube. And you know, for what it's worth, Spotify and Apple as well, where they've got these, they've got pretty. Pretty huge audiences. And Patreon, which wants to be not just a payment platform, but a creator platform. They're all becoming the same. Ben, what are we going to do about this?
- [31:30]
B
This is like everything competing with everything else. Yeah.
- [31:33]
A
Yes, exactly. And here we are in every episode.
- [31:36]
B
Kind of converging on itself, too. Yeah. We need this thing to splinter and fragment again. The Pendulums. Yeah, we're getting too far into rebundling. Stop.
- [31:48]
A
Well, that feels like a great place for us to leave it. That is it for us this week on Mixed Signals. Thank you for listening to yet another episode. Our show is produced by Manny Fadal and Josh Billenson with special thanks to all the people we usually give special thanks to. Rachel Oppenheim, Anna Pizzino, Garrett Wiley, Jules Zorn, and Tori Kaur. Our engineer is Rick Kwan and our theme music is by Steve Bone. I'm still loving the new theme music. I got some comments on it.
- [32:12]
B
It's great.
- [32:13]
A
Our public editor this week is the chat. Let us know. We don't have the big block of text that's keeping scrolling telling us that we're ugly or to ask about something. You'll have to email us and tell us that face to face. But that's our public editor this week.
- [32:26]
B
If you're too shy to do that, please do. Follow us wherever you get your podcasts and subscribe on YouTube.
- [32:32]
A
And if you still want more, you can always subscribe to Semaphore's media newsletter, which is out every Sunday night.
- [32:39]
C
Ra.