Adam Conover explains how YouTube ruined everything

Introducing Adam Conover

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0:57In the AI era, you have to stop cyber attacks where they start. So security has to be fused into the infrastructure itself. That's why the network that connects everything is also your best defense. Cisco, the critical infrastructure for the AI era. Hello, and welcome to Decoder. I'm Nealai Patel, editor-in-chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today I'm joined by comedian, podcast host, and YouTuber, Adam Conover.

1:40Adam is a familiar face to anyone who's spent time on the internet. He got his start, like so many successful comedy writers, at College Humor. That was before he transitioned to cable TV with Adam Ruins Everything, then onto Netflix, and now all the way back to YouTube again, where he posts videos and hosts a podcast called Factually. You'll hear right at the beginning that Adam does not like to be called a creator. He's got a pretty unique perspective on it that speaks to how he sees tech platforms and their leverage over entertainment. We got pretty deep right away about what Adam thinks really happened to the TV business, why Hollywood seeded entire categories of TV programming to YouTube in the chase to become Netflix and HBO.

2:15You'll hear him argue that YouTube is in fact a worse gatekeeper than the networks, because you can't actually argue or negotiate with a recommendation algorithm. There's a lot in this one. We're going to get right into it. I think you're going to enjoy this conversation. You'll see that I really did. Please remember to subscribe to our YouTube channel for new episodes every Monday and Thursday. Okay. Comedian Adam Conover on YouTube, Gatekeepers, and the business of making entertainment online. Here we go.

The disruptive media landscape

2:39Adam Conover, you're a comedian, you're a podcaster, you're a YouTuber, you're a board member of the Writers Guild of America West. I'm sure you have additional titles. Welcome to Decoder. I'm also a stand-up comic. That's often how I describe myself. That's sort of my identity as a comedian. But yeah, thank you so much for having me. I'm a fan of the show. I have so many questions for you about this moment in media, in entertainment. You have a view into all of it. Live comedy is a thing that is successful in America in 2026, and sitcoms don't exist, which is a video I just watched that you made.

3:14There's some disconnect in how we make this stuff, how we distribute this stuff, how we pay for this stuff. And like I said, you have a view into Hollywood, you have a view into television, you have a view into YouTube. Let's just start at the very beginning. I listed off a bunch of things, and you said you identify as a stand-up comic. How many roles do you have? How many things do you do? Okay, so yeah, I'm a stand-up comic. I'm a comedy writer. I'm a television host. I'm a member leader in the Writers Guild of America. I also now basically run a small business as a YouTube podcaster, which is me.

3:50I recently hired my first full-time employee to help me do all the things I do, but beyond that, it's a bunch of freelancers. I'm one of many people trying to make my way in this new massively disrupted media landscape where, you know, the companies that used to make media seem intent on destroying themselves, destroying their own businesses, you know, giving up large swaths of the industry to the tech giants, which are, you know, trying to crush us under their heel. So it's, you know, it's an interesting time to be a comedian, to say the least.

4:24Yeah, I'm interested in all that. That dynamic between the tech giants and people who make content for those platforms and Hollywood, we'll just call it Hollywood, the Death Star of Hollywood, seems as fraught as ever. And I want to start with a really basic question.

Creators versus media labor

4:39You describe yourself as a YouTuber and a podcaster. Do you think you're a creator or an influencer? God, I mean, I don't like those words. I think a lot of people don't, but I do use them because that's the terminology that we've started to use. But I feel the word creator was created by the social media companies as a way of tricking people into entering into an extremely inequitable economic bargain where basically they promise, oh, hey, you know, Mr. Beast makes a billion dollars.

5:18You could be Mr. Beast, why don't you work for us for basically free for the rest of your life in the hopes of one day we'll break off a little chunk of ad revenue for you. Like that, that is what they mean by creator. You know, we used to be writers, performers, talent, Hollywood labor or, you know, media labor, right? Creator is like, you know, it's like it's like when when Avon or Mary Kay calls you an entrepreneur, right?

5:49Oh, you're an entrepreneur. You're starting your own business. Am I or is that an illusion that you want me to buy into because it obscures what you have done to the industry that I work in? All right. We're just going to get into it. This is why I wanted you here. So my thesis on Decoder and now increasingly on anyone else's podcast who will have me is the entire entertainment complex, all of Hollywood and to some extent now the music industry, could not acknowledge that their real competition is the army of teenagers who work for free on YouTube and TikTok and Instagram.

6:23And these platforms really do not pay any money. Instagram literally will pay you no money. TikTok, maybe a tiny fraction of a penny for every view that you get. YouTube used to be the gold standard. They just changed their rules. It is now harder than ever to get started in the YouTube partner program and get paid actual money from YouTube. But people cannot stop themselves from expressing themselves. They cannot stop themselves from wanting to be Mr. Beast. And so there they are, infinite free content for the tech giants and Warner Brothers and Disney and everyone else have to pay Hollywood celebrities to desperately try to get people to come to a box office.

7:00And the economic disparity of that simply cannot be acknowledged because if you do that and you're Josh DeMauro or David Zaslav, you should just put all your money in the S&P 500 and shut it down. I think I agree with most of that.

How YouTube captured television

7:14I think that, you know, the competition is a little bit more fine grained than that. Obviously, the movies compete with TikTok to the extent that there's a limited number of minutes in the day. But the movies are also competing with like literally every other human activity. The movies are on that level competing with playing soccer in the park with your friends. There will always be a market for the high end of entertainment, right? Because new media forms never completely replace old media forms. They compete with them and take some of their share, you know.

7:45So people still read novels. People still go to plays. People still listen to the radio, right? Old forms of media don't go away altogether. There's always still a market for them. The market just gets smaller and a little bit more specific. Now, the idea that like David Zaslav is competing with TikTok, I'm not entirely sure. However, he is very specifically competing with YouTube because YouTube has really specifically gone into exactly the television space. And they were doing it for about 10 years before the TV industry noticed it all.

8:16In the last year, people have started to notice. Every single conversation I've had in Hollywood in the last two years, I have started with, did you know that YouTube is the largest streaming service on television sets? Not on, forget laptops, forget phones. I know you know this, Nilay, but like I blow people's minds with this in Hollywood. And what those companies haven't realized was in their rush to chase Netflix, right? Netflix came in and disrupted them quite directly. And they said, okay, we all have to create our own little mini HBOs that everyone is going to pay $15 a month for.

8:50Obviously, that's ludicrous. That was never going to be a workable business model, but that's what they thought for about five years. In their rush to do that, they destroyed linear television. They destroyed the cable business. And you can argue people prefer to watch when they prefer, whatever. But what they never brought, what they never figured out how to work on streaming was about like literally 60% of television. News, talk shows, comedy talk shows, lifestyle programming, their Drew Barrymore show, travel shows, the weather. All of those things, they let go to YouTube specifically.

9:24And now when people are like, you know, I just kind of want to watch somebody talk about home improvement for a little bit. I want to hear somebody talk about the Knicks. I want to hear a funny person talk about the news. They go to YouTube first and it's all for free. And YouTube's entire business model is we don't pay for content. We break off a chunk. If we make a lot of money, you get 50%, you know, that's better than most of the other rev shares for ads. But that is the thing that I think they still haven't grappled with.

9:55A couple of years ago, I was pitching a game show. I had a huge piece of IP attached. It was, I thought, a good pitch. I went to a streaming service and pitched it. And they said, you know, here's our problem with game shows. We can get people to watch one episode. We can't get people to watch a whole season in a weekend. And I was like, wait, your whole business model is if people don't watch a whole season on the weekend, it doesn't work. That's not how people watch game shows, right? And so if you are conceding all of game shows along with all these other formats, you're conceding a huge swath of what used to be your business.

10:28And now you are only focused on the very high end. You know, you don't have all of that cheaper programming anymore. And people like me who used to make it, I'm in the writer's guild, what we call a comedy variety writer. You know, I do nonfiction comedy. I would, you know, the Daily Show, et cetera, right? The networks literally don't make that kind of thing anymore. My old show, Adam Ruins Everything, ran for 65 episodes, hit for the network, second biggest show on True TV. Could not sell a show anything close to that now. Because they're like, well, if it's not like a high end prestige drama starring Adam Scott, we haven't figured out how to get people to watch that.

11:03Well, YouTube has. And so people like me have been driven to YouTube with, you know, disastrous effects on the media landscape, on the amount of money that we make, but also the kind of media that gets made. I make a good living. I make about as good a living as I did as a TV host. I'm very lucky to do so. But now I have a couple freelancers instead of a room full of writers, a room, you know, cinematographers, actors, all these funny people who made a really good comedy product, you know? Now when you want to get the comedy news, you don't get to watch, you know, the Daily Show, Colbert Report.

11:38Those shows are going away. Now you get to watch Adam Schultz riff on the news with his three dumbass friends in front of a curtain for zero dollars, right? Those shows have zero dollar budgets. And the middle has like evaporated. And part of what I'm trying to do, like my whole thing in media right now is trying to figure out how to rebuild a little bit of the middle. How do I get a little bit of a budget so I can do something a little bit better than a podcast and a little bit closer to a television show? Because I think there's still a market for it. Just nobody is serving it currently.

12:08And that's really what I want to dig into, because I'm very curious how that budget comes back.

The loss of cable economics

12:14If I just take what you're describing, when you were on TruTV or if you made a show for another cable network back in the day, MTV, whatever it is, they had pretty good business models. Everyone in the country would pay their cable bill and MTV would get a piece of that money no matter what. And that was really lucrative. And not only could they afford writers' rooms and cinematographers and people that hire the cameras and all those people could be unionized and demand better wages every year and all the stuff that unionized employees can do. They also could afford accountants and healthcare professionals and benefit service people and highly paid CEOs.

12:49Like the overhead of the cable channel was massive. And maybe it was always all wrong, right? Maybe that overhead should have always flowed back to the content in some other way. But the business model was lucrative because the distribution was lucrative. Because we had convinced everyone in America to pay for television. And they sold ads against the shows, right? Like literally, my show was just in the black. It cost this much to make the show. We sell this many ads. We get, here are the rates we get for the ads. Here's the money we get from the cable company.

13:21The show was in the black. That's why we ran for five years. Most other shows on television are currently in the black. The problem, we have two problems. One, the streamers don't know how to make a show in the black anymore. Like they're like, okay, we have this many subscribers. How many people signed up for Apple TV to watch Widow's Bay, right? Like it's this weird math that they do. That's the first thing. The second thing is they gave up, and this is a little bit my own theory. They gave up like decades of business development in the advertising business. Like why was CBS able to get a certain rate for the Colbert, you know, for Colbert's show?

13:55Because CBS has literally been negotiating with Johnson & Johnson for a hundred years. Saying, here's how much a spot on CBS is worth. When we deliver you two million viewers, here's what they deliver. That's like, you cannot, you cannot rebuild that in an instant. And when Netflix said, tricked the entire industry into thinking there's not going to be any advertising again, ever again. And they all destroyed those businesses. And now they're trying to rebuild them on Peacock, right? It's like they gave up a business model that actually made them money.

14:26Then on the other hand, you've got YouTube, which is of course a massive advertising business, but it's completely scrambled, right? It's like the advertisers that I'm able to get on my show are, you know, they're all the DTC brands, right? It's MeUndies or whatever. That's one of the jokes. It's, you know, it's Meal Kits, stuff like that. Yeah. Um, subscription services, a lot of them are great, but like, where's Coke and Chevy? You know what I mean? Like, that is what used to pay for the media you watched was car commercials, was Don Draper shit.

14:59And that is the part that like, they didn't realize that they were throwing the baby out with the bathwater and that all of us have to somehow figure out how to rebuild. And I do have a theory for like how that might happen on the YouTube end that I'm currently trying to pursue as unfortunately a business person, because that's where I have to be now. I want, I literally just wanted the David Zavala's of the world to just give me a couple hundred grand a year and a union contract to make funny stuff. I don't need to make millions, right? But now I have to be an entrepreneur and so does everybody else.

15:31And like, fuck, that's what I'll do if I have to. But like, I was very happy being a laborer in the media industry, but I don't have that option anymore. I think a lot of people, their dream in life was to be a laborer in the media and entertainment industries. People who are good at cameras wanted to operate cameras. Costume designers want to design costumes. They want to specialize in the field that they're interested in. And now you end up being kind of a multi-hyphenate entrepreneur. How has that been for you, that shift? Did it, did it, you wake up one day and be like, screw it, I'm a business person now?

Becoming an independent business

16:01It's devastating. You know, I mean, I do remember when I sort of shifted my business from I'm trying to sell TV shows first. And second, I have a podcast to sort of keep me, you know, keep my audience hooked and et cetera, to being, oh, the podcast like is the business now. And it was, it was disorienting and it was disheartening, you know, at the same time, I felt lucky to do it. You know, I, I, I, I, nobody tells me what to, what to make except for the YouTube algorithm, which honestly literally does tell me what to make in ways that are pernicious and that I grapple with every day.

16:34But I don't have to convince, you know, somebody in a suit somewhere to let me do something. But I'm lucky because I already had, you know, a show with my face on it, with my name in the title that enabled me to sort of bring some audience along and build something. There are so many incredible writers, performers, technicians, you know, artists of all levels who just don't have work now. I mean, my whole cohort that all moved to L.A., you know, in our 30s to make television, we moved here because there was an industry here. It was a business, you know, and that's why people have moved to L.A. for a hundred years.

17:05That's why fucking, I don't know, J.D. Salinger and F. Scott Fitzgerald and people like that would come to Hollywood to write a couple of scripts because this is where a writer could get paid. And now that doesn't appear to exist in the same way. And, you know, my friends are all going to grad school. People who are like incredibly funny comedians and writers and actors are, it's, it's very sad what's happened. And that's part of why my whole, like literally my whole goal of what I'm trying to build over the next couple of years is to get enough funding and to build a business model where I can employ a couple of comedy writers.

17:40Because that's what I used to do. I used to have funny people around me. We would come up with funny stuff together. We'd digest the news and give it back to you. And I just want to create that system again, like a little bit of it so a couple people can have livings. I want to figure out how to get my YouTube channel under a union contract, you know, under a couple, couple different union contracts. And there's a ways to go until we get there. But, you know, we're in the rubble trying to rebuild what anything close to the infrastructure that we had before.

18:10And you said, you know, cable channels were expensive, et cetera. There was a lot of waste. There was also infrastructure that does not exist. And infrastructure, once demolished, takes a long time to rebuild. We had the authors of a great book called It's Not TV, which was a history of HBO on the show. That's a fantastic book. I love that book. That book rules. It'll make you cry with what we've lost. Yeah, there were entire executives at HBO and their job was to just identify and produce good creative. Literally, their job was to know crazy people who made great art and keep them calm and productive.

18:41And that was their whole job. And I could not identify those people anywhere anymore. Yeah, I know a lot of those people. I know good executives at all the companies and they either live in fear at a current streamer and are, like, clutching and hoping they don't get fired or they're going into other businesses. Like, and, you know, good creative executives were a real thing that are hard to find. And we treasured as writers. And those people are going the way of the dinosaur, too, unfortunately.

19:10We need to take a quick break. We'll be right back.

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22:37You can join them today. Learn more at vanta.com slash decoder. That's spelled V-A-N-T-A dot com slash decoder. We're back with Adam Conover, getting into the decoder questions and what it actually looks like to structure a business and a career like his. Yeah. You have brought me to the decoder questions because you're talking about a structure you want to build to achieve very specific goals.

Structuring a modern comedy career

23:08How is the business of Adam Conover structured today? You have one employee, but how is it organized? Great question. I mean, it's sort of like everything, everywhere, all at once. You know, I'm doing a million things. I have a live touring business. I tour as a stand-up comic. That is luckily a very durable business because, you know, no matter what happens in the tech industry, people are always going to go want to sit in the dark with a drink in their hand around other people. And maybe they'll want to do it a little bit less because they'll be on TikTok, but they're going to want to do it.

23:40Then there's, you know, buildings that are set up to give them food and drinks that'll pay to bring me out, right? And so that's good. I also do a weekly podcast, which is funded through those sort of DTC ads with my podcast network, HeadGum, which is a wonderful partner. They do really great work. And then I also do currently biweekly monologues, or what I call them, which are scripted. And I work with a couple freelance writers and researchers in order to, you know, we write them together.

24:10And then I deliver them straight to camera. And those are, you know, have a little bit more thought and work put into them. And we're able to currently sell those at a higher, you know, ad premium because, you know, when they pop, they get a couple hundred thousand on YouTube. They get millions at times on YouTube. The problem is if they underperform, you almost immediately are having to have hard conversations with your advertisers. And it's very hard to get anything pre-funded, right? So it's, you're constantly sort of trying to keep your head above water with that piece of it.

24:41Simultaneous with those two things, I'm trying to figure out, you know, the next piece. I just produced a stand-up comedy special for myself, entirely self-funded. I recorded at the Den Theater in Chicago. Cost me five figures to shoot because I want to do it properly and make it look good. And that will be coming out on my YouTube channel in October, hopefully with a sponsor so I don't, like, lose a bunch of money at it. If I do, hey, at least I got, you know, it was an hour of my creative work.

25:12I spent two years working on this material. It's very important to me. People will see it. And hopefully it'll fuel my touring business. You know, the sort of days of a large company buying your stand-up special. This is a, YouTube is a, this is a really great example of YouTube creating a race to the bottom. Because Netflix, you know, in its destruction of cable, its destruction of Comedy Central, largely destruction of HBO, set itself up as we're the home of stand-up comedy. Right. And they do do, they do have a ton of stand-up comedy on their platform.

25:42But YouTube has even more. And when people are watching stand-up, I just want to watch a stand-up comedy special. They're more likely to go to YouTube first. And as a result, more and more comedians are saying, well, I'll just record it and I'll put it on YouTube because, hey, maybe I'll get lucky with the algorithm. There's been a couple examples of that. And, you know, I'll hit the jackpot. And honestly, the streamers don't pay enough unless you're the biggest, unless you're the very high end. You know, if you're like someone incredible like Ali Wong, one of my favorite comics in the country, you know, she's able to, I'm sure, I'm sure she has a great deal.

26:14Right. But if you're entry level, you're looking at it going, well, I might as well just do it on YouTube. Right. Because I might lose some money either way or I might not make that much. Why not just control it and put it on my own channel? And as a result, YouTube has like totally just undercut this sector of the market. And that's what I've experienced. I'm sure other people in, you know, music, other forms of media have experienced the same. The last piece of it is I am constantly trying to find my way in the new media ecosystem, which is to say people are starting to have this intuition that the future of YouTube is television.

26:56That, uh, the ad dollars are eventually going to come that, that we're going to be able to figure out the business model. And so it's starting to look like you're going to be able to get investments to create something that looks a little bit more similar to an old cable pitch process. You know, I literally, God forbid, I made a deck that I'm going to be taken around trying to say, Hey, well, did you do it by hand or did you get, did you just let Claude do it for you? I've seen a lot of Claude decks lately, man. I'm just asking.

27:26Look, I do not work with AI for the creative stuff. I did, I did the first draft by hand. I have a graphic designer who has made my decks for years. You are committed to human labor, my friend. My God. Look, the whole point of life is to be around other people. Like, is it, is the point of life to make decks? Come on. The deck is part of the creative process, man. Like, literally, I figure it out, I figure out what the show is by writing the pitch document, right? And you think about if I'm going to be able to sell this to a person to get them to put money into it, then I can sell it to an audience.

27:59That was part of how the TV pitch process worked. And so, you know, I'm starting to try to figure out what that is in order to build what I hope will be the future of what we used to call late night or topical nonfiction comedy on television. Sort of merging the monologues, the interviews that I do currently into, you know, something that feels more like a TV show. That's my project for the next couple of years. And that hopefully I can employ a couple people and give them health insurance. But that's a big leap to take, you know?

28:30It's not necessarily a slow gradation where you can just build it piece by piece. At some point, you're like, I kind of just need a couple hundred grand to do this. Or else I can just keep making, you know, the thing alone in my apartment, you know, which is not what I got in the business to do. I mean, it's great, but, you know, I would like to do more. I'm going to ask you the other decoder questions, and then I want to push on some of this just a little bit. Please. How do you make decisions? What's your framework for making decisions? You obviously have a wide range to make.

29:01Wow. This is... Don't worry. Some of the biggest CEOs in the world have just deer in headlights at this question, which I think is fascinating. You cut to, like, a deep therapy question for me, you know? Decision-making... That's all this show is, is important people doing therapy with me. Decision-making is really difficult, man. You know, I am trying to embrace more of the build-in-public ethos of the internet and saying, you know, I'll put it out there and we'll see how it does. And we'll learn from that. I think my best decision-making works that way.

29:33That is how you build a stand-up set, is you go do jokes in front of an audience. Half of them don't work. You stop doing them after the third try when it doesn't work. And then you come up with something new. And then the ones that, you know, lived are the ones that are the special. And I've been trying to apply that more to my scripted and my podcast interviews. But, you know, sometimes you've got to take a flying leap and say, let's try to do this, you know? I mean, the hardest types of decisions to make are the ones about the business itself. So I'm like, okay, I have a limited amount of time in the day.

30:06Do I try to create a new piece of YouTube content for my sort of AVOD audience? Or do I try to create something special for my Patreon audience? That's a big chunk of my income as well, is people who pay to subscribe. Do I make a custom podcast just for them that only a few thousand people are going to hear, rather than the hundred thousand that might hear it on YouTube? But those people are paying for it. And if I put good content there, maybe it'll grow. You end up doing, making those sort of decisions in a vacuum. And all you can really do is follow your intuition and, you know, adjust when it doesn't go well.

30:42The last thing I'll say is my oldest decision-making rubric has always been, I try to imagine myself as the audience. When I was first making a cable show, I was very lucky that I grew up watching basic cable and I got to make a basic cable show. And I imagined I'm 15 years old. I'm sitting on the floor watching the television set. What would get me excited? And I try to do that same thing with YouTube and podcast. You know, if you're thinking about the audience's experience as someone who's creating things for an audience, you'll hopefully never be steered wrong.

31:17Yeah. I'm very curious about that dynamic in your decision-making because I personally am always, we should start with the audience. And then, unfortunately, I keep getting older. And the young audience came up in a totally different media environment. Like I started as a blogger and famous newspaper columnist would not give me the time of day at events. And now the TikTokers look at me like I'm Gandalf at the events. And they call me the mainstream media, which is deeply hilarious, right? And my calibration towards the audience has largely been, oh, they don't know.

31:52They don't know that there was another way. This is the only way that they've known. And if I don't participate in these specific ways, I'm actually so different. I'm like incompatible. I'm trying to plug the old USB cable into the new USB port. You know, like it just doesn't work. And the thing that really gets me at that, the pressure on all the platforms and all the creatives in the world to just go direct to the audience right away for free is at an all-time high. And then the expectation that the way that you will monetize that is that you will get a brand sponsorship, right?

32:26You went viral twice on TikTok and some supplement company is going to show up and you're going to read the ads for the green powder that makes you more virile or whatever it is they're promising today. Yep. And there's something about that that feels very dangerous to the creative process for me. And you're scratching at it with what creative thing am I going to do today? And maybe the rubric is the Patreon people are paying me this much money, but the audience might grow on YouTube in this way. And maybe I just want to make the most viral thing that the algorithm is telling me to in this way.

32:59I am – I have truly struggled to manage that dynamic. Yeah. What is the most economically lucrative thing to do? What is the thing that will get me the most attention? And then what is the thing that lets me stay pure of heart? What is the thing you actually want to do? That is – There's that. There's that. That's important. What is the thing that makes you – you're doing the thing that got you into the business in the first place, right? That made you want to go to college for the thing or made you get that first job? Which is saying the iPod is better than the Zune. And if I could just make that video every single day for the rest of my life, that would be great.

33:32I just wanted to goof off with funny people and say something and come up with something new to say with them, you know? Yeah, it's really, really hard. So a couple answers there. First of all, in terms of what the audience expects now – it's true. I talk to people in their 20s and literally the way you or I would talk about MTV or Comedy Central is how they talk about, like, early YouTube. That is their culture that they grew up with. And you can't ignore that. And sometimes I'm like, all right, is my desire to go – to do something that feels more like a television show, am I just being an old man about it?

34:06Should I just do the new thing? Should I just – you know, I look at people I really admire on YouTube, like ContraPoints and HBomberguy are two YouTube video essays I adore. And they have – they do this very specific internet native model where each of them makes one three-hour long YouTube video once a year that is so amazing that they have a massive Patreon audience. And they take no brand deals, right? I'm like, do I need to do that? Well, they built that organically, you know? They started that when I was working in television.

34:38That's not who I am, right? So that's hard for me to do. You don't want to be, you know, the Steve Buscemi meme, right, and show up and try to do the thing. If you started making a ContraPoints video, I think that would be pretty good. I would pay extra for that one. Okay. I mean – you know, and she does her videos by – she writes and films and edits and set decorates every single piece of that herself. And that's not the way I've ever worked. And sometimes I go, do I need to do that? Well, it's special when she does it. It's going to work when I do it.

35:09At the same time, you know, I do have this belief that – look, I always wanted to make a late-night show, right? That is still a goal of mine. There's other things I want to do, too. I'd love to do a travel documentary. I'd also love to do a late-night show. Everyone says late-night is dying, except that millions of people still fucking watch it on YouTube, right? Like, Colbert was getting millions of views on every single thing he posted. The Daily Show still does, right? But no one has built the digital-native business model. And, you know, YouTube videos are getting longer.

35:40I'm like, I still have an intuition that at the end of the day, I think people still want to sit on the couch with a drink in their hands and their partner's feet on their lap and, like, the dog next to them and watch something that's 45 minutes long and watch a funny person, like, give them some relief about the news of the day and have it be funnier than just a bunch of fucking riffs. Bringing those two sensibilities together is the job of what I'm trying to crack, figuring out how to do the same thing on YouTube and, you know, that has a flavor of the old style.

36:11I think the success of stand-up comedy on YouTube and on Vertical Video is a good example of this, where it's such an old art form, and yet it really performs well. People do still want it. The piece of how do you do what is economically successful, that is the really difficult part. Because Hollywood at its best, obviously not all the time, but Hollywood at its best was, I have a good idea. There's someone working for the company who sees that it's good. They buy it because they know it's good, and it's so good other people will watch it.

36:43And then they give you money to make it good. And on some level, you can go to them and say, they're like, we don't want to pay for this. And you could say, yeah, it's going to be really good, though. And if you convince them, you can get the money, you can make the thing. And this is literally how I made the last show. You know, my old show on True TV was, you know, it cost like $700,000 an episode to make, a million by the end. And that's because it was good, you know. They made enough money off of it that they kept it going. But when you are literally just chasing the algorithm for every single click, that is a lot harder.

37:14And so, you know, it disincentivizes experimentation and it disincentivizes, you know, putting the work in to make the thing good. So, for instance, the stuff that I do the best at, that I get the best numbers at on YouTube, are when I talk about AI and I'm critical of the tech giants. My top YouTube video ever from my recent run is like, Elon Musk is just dumb. That's the name of the video. That's going to be the title of this video. Can you do a tight five on it right now? Absolutely. Oh, it would take an hour.

37:45But I also have other things that I want to talk about. And I just made a video that went into, for instance, the history of leaf blowers. Why, even though gas-powered leaf blowers are banned in California, why did I literally walk by one on the block today? There's a fascinating history behind it. Leaf blowers are horrible for the environment, blah, blah, blah. Really interesting story. I was like, oh, I heard about this. I want to make a video about it. I spent three weeks making the video, got 50,000 views because it didn't, I don't know, maybe I could have had a better thumbnail, but like it wasn't what the algo wanted from me today.

38:17And so I'm going, all right, do I just need to, do I only talk about AI now? You know, I would like to talk about other things. Um, and, and that's, uh, uh, you know, people click subscribe on my channel. I can try to grow my audience, but like they click subscribe. They're not going to see my video unless the algo shows it to them, you know? So I want to ask about this because this dynamic is, is very real, especially if you think about data driving every young creator, because they're just trying to get started.

38:48And so the data is going to drive them. They're going to, it's going to have an outsized influence. No matter what, you have some history, you have some beliefs about what people might want based on what people want in the past. You're going to make a late night show. You're going to take that risk. Young creator just looks at the view counts and says, well, this got me views. I should get more views. We've had basically every platform CEO on the show. We've had Neil from YouTube. We've had Adam from Instagram and the argument they would make in response to this whole conversation. And I'm going to try to do it justice, even though I mostly agree with you, but I'll try to do it justice is look what you're describing in the eighties and nineties

39:19and early two thousands was a series of gatekeepers that were inaccessible to most of the people in the world. So I'm a kid who grew up in Wisconsin. If I wanted to make a late night cable TV show, that path was almost totally foreclosed unless I moved to New York or Los Angeles, got a job as a waiter, and then tried to hustle my way up through comedy clubs to meet one person who might decide that I was talented. And that meant mostly gatekeepers existed and mostly people were left out. And the economics of that might've been great and might've created a large middle class because

39:53there was enough overhead in that system to pay for a large middle class of creatives, but it mostly locked everybody out. The social platforms create instant marketing opportunities for everyone from their bedroom. So if you're a young comic in the middle of the country and you have no ability to get into the comedy cellar in New York, because you're, you can't just work for free in that specific way. You can just film yourself talking on Tik TOK until you get a little bit of an audience. And then you, maybe you can drive an audience to come to a club near you or whatever it is you're going to do. And that pathway to get the exposure, which is necessary at the beginning exists in a

40:28totally democratizing way. And the economics of it might be bad, but many, many more people have the opportunity.

Algorithms as the new gatekeepers

40:34And I think about that. I think about my own career. I started as a blogger working for AOL for $12 a post and the newspaper columnists who are now very, very sweet to me. They have been very sweet to me over the years, but I got to compete with them in a way that previously I would have never gotten to compete with them. And I can't quite reconcile how badly I feel about the economics of the industry today and the amount of opportunity that it has created for so many other people. So I have a clear answer to this, which is that to, to the, the people from YouTube, I

41:08would say, well, you're the gatekeepers. The algorithm is the gatekeeper. Of course it is. Talk to somebody like literally, like try to start something from scratch. Try, try to build from getting 200 views that the algorithm gives you. And, and like, tell me that's not a gatekeeper. Like, yes, the bad old days, we had NBC, CBS, ABC, and that's all you get, right? Those were big gatekeepers. You had to please them. Now we have YouTube, Instagram, TikTok.

41:41That's all you get. And in fact, YouTube doesn't really compete with Instagram and TikTok directly because it is a completely different business model. They do the horizontal thing. It's on streamers and the way those aren't. So really it's like, it's literally just YouTube. If you want to do broad swaths of content, um, that's a fucking gatekeeper. Like, I don't like you, you think Mr. Beast is like good at what he does. Like he pleases the gatekeeper. That's literally like, look at any interview with him. It's about like him figuring out, okay, this got this many views, this got this many views,

42:12this got this many views, right? Now the argument that you're making that the gatekeepers were gone and the internet was democratizing, that was good when it was people in charge of it, right? Do you remember back when we used to email memes to each other because like you saw the video of the Numa Numa kid and you were like, oh, that kid's funny. I'm going to send it to my friend, right? Because it was, it was like large swaths of people in charge of like the distribution. It is not anymore. Like they are taking some very loose signal from our swiping and turning it into like

42:46algorithmic control of what we see. Uh, and they have more power than anyone who ever worked for CBS or ABC ever did. And it's actually worse because people aren't in charge of it. Cause if you went and talk to any of them and said, Hey, you're in charges, they would say, no, we're not just an algorithm. Well, that's actually worse because at least in the old days, there was someone I could go impress. There was a person I could go talk to, you know, um, if you go talk to a streamer now and you try to convince them, uh, you know, uh, Netflix, for instance, Hey, this show is

43:19a good idea. They'd say the algorithm said it's not like, that's, that's basically what it boils down to. Um, they, they don't have the leeway to make decisions, um, with, with rare exceptions. Um, and, and the good shows are when the exception gets made, frankly. Uh, but it, it's, it's ludicrous. Like the media ecosystem now is more concentrated, more closed off than it ever was before. The only difference is now anybody can upload anything for free and YouTube will host it

43:49for you. And that's good from like a user perspective. If you just like literally want to upload a video of your baby and send it to your, you know, sister, like that used to be a lot harder. YouTube like solved that problem for a lot of people. But in terms of a broadcast medium, it's just grotesquely exploitative. Like, like, okay.

44:11Imagine if driving for Uber, you didn't get paid. Instead, you got to try to drive for Uber for years. And if you, and they're like, Oh, if the algorithm says you're really good at Uber, maybe we'll start to give you a little bit of money. Like, and everybody in the country was doing this simultaneously. That is what the media ecosystem is. And it's, uh, it's bad. It's bad.

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47:55That's R-I-P-P-L-I-N-G dot AI slash decoder. Sign up for exclusive access today. We're back with Adam Conover discussing the new gatekeepers, the online recommendation algorithms, and how they concentrate power and create incentives for everyone who makes stuff on the internet. This is the other thing I wanted to ask you about. You mentioned you want to have a unionized talk show on YouTube.

48:29You're going to hire some people. That's a lot of cost, right? We run a union shop here. There's costs associated with all that. And those are good costs. I think media companies should pay those costs. You need the economics to work. And you mentioned you needed a digitally native business model for that. I look at how that works today. And that mostly looks like big lucrative brand deals. You need a Coca-Cola or a Chevy or a Ford or whoever to show up and pay you a bunch of money to be integrated into your show. And you, Adam Conover, eventually have to drive to every guest house

49:00in your Ford Fiesta or like whatever it is and then open it. And in the back, it's full of supplements or whatever that money is going to look like because the advertising has to be integrated in the content and then that all has to reach scale. And that is where that money comes from. Are you comfortable with this level of integrations? It's very different in me for news, but sort of on the YouTube entertainment side, that pendulum has swung and has been swung for a long time. I mean, I don't love it. And, you know, you're constantly being asked to make compromises and make deals that you'd rather not make.

49:31What we're doing is we're going back to the old days in so many ways of media, right? Like, again, YouTube is ABC, NBC, and CBS rolled into one. What were the earliest days of that broadcasting like? It was the Marlboro comedy hour, right? Where all the comedians would say, oh, I love smoking Marlboro cigarettes in between every single joke. That was how television as an industry began. We eventually separated those out, right? The commercials will run in between the shows. And it was never like, you know,

50:02it is at the New York Times where like the ad sales never talks to the creative, but like generally, you know, I made a basic cable show for years that half of our episodes were taking apart advertisers and talking about, you know, the diamond engagement rings and, you know, razors and how capitalism tries to scam you. And in between was ads. And we never got pushback. We like one time they were like, hey, please don't do something about the NCAA because we broadcast that every March. Like, you know, it would be stuff like that,

50:32but it wasn't, you know, they had the separation. Why? Because the audience likes it better that way. It just took them a couple decades to figure that out. And right now we are in the period of a couple decades where we're having to figure that out again. I see YouTube literally trying to rebuild that model very slowly. I think what YouTube, and this is a little bit my own theory. I think what they're trying to do is they don't want to be the channel. They want to be the cable company, right? And they want the channel, like my channel,

51:04the Adam Conover channel, to be the cable channel, right? So they want me to make the brand deal and me to do all the business development. And they're just the pipe that takes a bunch off the top. Great business model if they can make it happen. But they know that they want to level up the production value, right? And so what are they doing? They're not giving anybody money, but they are starting to promote shows more, right? They did, they're like doing their own upfronts. They're trying to connect people with advertisers. They're trying to sort of like, I see them trying to sort of spark the pilot light of this a little bit, but without actually putting money

The realities of brand deals

51:34or infrastructure or investment into it, they're just like, can we just sort of like boost you guys up a little bit at the same time where Netflix's model is the opposite. We'll sink the money into the production and try to make the thing at the high end. And that's a really interesting competition. Unfortunately, it's a competition between two giants. I think that like we could get there by the time I'm like 60. And hopefully at that point, I'm hosting a show and, you know, there's ad breaks in between and it's not too bad of an integration, but, you know, we're in the world that we're in.

52:06Yeah, the reality is I would love to do a totally pure show where I'm just, you know, subscriber funded, you know? Like I would love to be ContraPoints or H-Bomber guy, right? But what that model pushes you towards is I do it all by myself. My costs are zero. And so what do I have? Time. And I put in infinite amounts of time. And if I can put in infinite amounts of my own time, then I can like get rewarded with subscriber money and the subscribers will pay me almost because they know that it's like just me doing this, right? But I just don't want to work that way.

52:37I want to work with writers. I want to work with other comedians. I want camera people. I want like a whole, I want a team, you know? Like it's just the kind of, and to do that, I need to get advertisers. And that is, look, currently, yeah, that means like dealing with a lot of bullshit that you would rather not have to and having to get like, make compromises that you would rather not. And yeah, it sucks. I don't have a way around it. I certainly know a lot of creators who describe the lifestyle as being very lonely and have taken to even calling other creators

53:08their colleagues in order to create that sense of camaraderie, even though they are largely competing for the same minutes on the same platform in terms of attention. I want to ask you about the advertiser thing. I basically have to ask you about crypto advertising now. You got in a lot of trouble because you read a crypto ad, Sam Altman's, I think, WorldCoin. Yeah. This is the hardest thing, right? Like for all I know, the ads on our show are going to be a bunch of AI companies and crypto companies. And I, we do have the wall, right? We make journalism here. I get to say, I have no idea what happens there. Take it or leave it.

53:39The integrations are where people get in trouble. And you read the ad copy. You took the money. The audience was very unhappy with you. I actually didn't take the money. I turned down the money. I took the ad down and yeah, I was not paid for all the trouble I got in. Walk me through all of that. Walk me through saying yes. Walk me through then saying, actually, this is bad. I'm taking it down. I don't want your money. When you're in this business, like you have to look for ROI, right? You have to look for, someone wants to pay me an outsized amount of money to do like not that much work.

54:11And that's the way you make the entire business function. Because like the, for instance, the YouTube monologues I do are incredibly effortful, right? But I'm still trying to make a living. And so if someone's like, hey, we want you to, one example of this that I do in live performances, you know, I'll get hired to like host a gala event, right? And that like pays more than a normal standup gig, but it's actually less work. And so, you know, you sort of need some of that to pad out. So, you know, Sam Altman's Orb company comes along

54:41and says, which you guys have covered quite well on your site. And says, we want you to come to this event and just make a video at the event and publish it and we'll give you a bunch of money for it. And I was like, well, this product honestly looks like fucking garbage. Like it looks like one of the worst products I had ever seen. And I was like, they want to pay me a bunch of money to, my audience is going to hate this. Yeah, sure, whatever. Like that way I can like literally, you know, use that to fund

55:12some of the stuff that I want to do. So I go and do it and yeah, the, you know, it comes out. People are very unhappy with it because it's a, the premise of the product is like deeply unsettling, grotesque, surveillance oriented, right? However, when I was there watching the keynote, I was like, this is the most comical vaporware I have ever seen. This is never going to come out. No one is ever going to do this.

55:43This is so ill-conceived. It's a, it's the biggest turd I've ever seen in tech. So that was my evaluation. Um, uh, how could I expect my audience to see it that way? Right? They only saw the horrible version of it. So what I, what I eventually did was I took the video down. I turned the money down. I was not paid for it. I instead made a YouTube video where I talked for about 25 minutes about how grotesque grotesque and stupid and bad the product was. And I was able to do,

56:13I think a pretty funny and incisive piece of commentary about it because I was at the keynote and the only reason I went to the keynote, I always have to add, part of the reason I went was, um, I just thought that this thing was going to be weird and it was, and I wanted to go see, you know, like it's, there's a little bit of like, you know, looky-looing around. So I, I ended up making a video that I was very proud of, uh, as a result of, you know, this, uh, fiasco.

Learning from the WorldCoin fiasco

56:37I did not monetize that video, so I, I didn't earn any income off of it. I think a lot of creators go through this moment where, you know, you're constantly being sort of like, uh, led along and tempted, right? And, uh, you know, uh, sometimes you like step over the line and you don't even realize you've done it until after you've done it, right? Like, well, I thought I was behaving with integrity in the moment, but looking back, why would anybody think

57:08that I was? And does that mean I really did? That's, I mean, that's the situation that we're in, right? Um, and, uh, I, I'm happy to say that I, uh, fucked up by doing so. Um, I also believe, you know, you make mistakes and then you acknowledge it and you, you, you know, do something corrective, which is what I did, uh, did my best to do. And, and luckily the, you know, the lion's share of my audience like, was like, oh, this video was really great. Thank you for the thorough explanation and, uh, you know, and for eviscerating the prize.

57:38Um, that thing is, is hilarious, by the way. Uh, I will encourage people to watch your video and all the other video. Any coverage of the orb that isn't literal SpawnCon is like, what are we doing here? Let me ask you about this. You, you obviously learned a huge important lesson. If you had worked in a media company of any kind, entertainment company of any kind, that would become institutional knowledge. Right. Right. We screwed up. We're never going to do this again. Now, a bunch of people have had this experience and when the new people come in and they try to do this thing again, we're just going to say no.

58:09But you have to do that alone. Every creator has to do that alone. Yeah. My joke on the show for ages is every YouTuber gets their wings when they make the video about how mad they are at YouTube. I'm about to make that video I'm about to make that video actually. I've got it locked and loaded. Finally, you're going to grow up. This actually might be it on it. This is the beginning of it. Yeah. Well, the reason I ask that is, you know, in the old way, there were unions. You are part of a union. Right. And the union and, you know, the big Hollywood studios would negotiate.

58:39These were repeat players. So the negotiations were, even if they were antagonistic, they were towards a common purpose because you were going to do it again in three years or whatever. And that created a kind of institutional knowledge, a set of shared goals at the very least, if the tactics and specific negotiations got heated, at least the goals were the same. No one can do that with YouTube. Ben Smith from Semaphore was just on the show and he said, people are building real businesses, real careers on top of YouTube, but YouTube has probably to its own benefit and to the detriment

59:09of the meat industry built a system where it's for individuals and no one has any leverage except for YouTube. Yeah. You and I cannot get together and go demand terms from YouTube. If we got a thousand YouTubers together to demand terms from YouTube, they would still laugh. They would never, they wouldn't even take the call. They'd say there's another thousand teenagers who will work for free. Good luck. How do you change that? You have a very unique perspective as someone who is organized against Hollywood. Can you change that as to the platforms?

Organizing labor in the creator economy

59:39Well, the first thing I say is I actually don't think the organizing target, if I'm looking, if I'm putting my labor organizer hat on, I don't think the organizing target is YouTube itself. I think it's the channel, right? So I wouldn't try to organize YouTube. I'd try to organize Mr. Beast's staff who you've probably done some reporting on yourself are horribly abused and underpaid. And, you know, that is like the reality of the economy, right? So it's actually not the case that the biggest YouTubers are all individuals.

1:00:10The biggest YouTubers are companies, right? Go look at, you know, Adam Savage, right? Like that guy is basically doing a cable show every single day. I go look at Hank Green. I love Hank Green. And I look at him, I go, how many people are helping me make these videos? You know what I mean? Like who's, who's teaming, et cetera. It is a large scale enterprise. You know, if you want to do something that's big and constant and brings in the money and et cetera. And it's YouTube, it's in YouTube's interest to encourage those big channels

1:00:41to get bigger. And so the world that I foresee is sort of, you know, monopolies or consolidation are sort of a law of economics unless you've got a strong antitrust to prevent them. I see YouTube getting even bigger, the bigger channels getting even bigger, right? And then, then getting, them getting big enough to organize. So, I mean, like, you know, you said yourself, you're, you know, you're the verge, you are a YouTube channel and you have a unionized staff. And we're starting to see that happen in the YouTube space.

1:01:12You're starting to see the staffs of specific channels unionizing. I also think that if you got, you know, if those big channels do grow big enough, you know, could the top hundred channels go to YouTube and say, hey, we demand a better split? Yeah, they could. Is that going to benefit all the people who work for the channels? Probably not. But it becomes more of a B2B negotiation, right? Yeah. It becomes more like, you know, it becomes more like when the cable channels were arguing against,

1:01:42you know, Spectrum and Charter and all of those, right? They would have those carriage battles, you know, those kinds of wars. It becomes that kind of dispute. And so, like, you know, YouTube is creating itself as a cable monopoly on top of the internet. And I think that's what the dynamic is. However, the original point of the point of the creator economy was to, like, separate labor from each other and, in fact, make the labor so invisible

1:02:13that even if you're not doing it professionally, you're kind of doing it all the time ambiently, you know? Like, when you open, you know, YouTube or Instagram, how often are you watching someone doing it professionally versus how often are you watching someone do it for fun, right? Or having one video go viral. Or making one video a week to promote their dentistry business. Or making one video a week because they hope to go pro but they actually never will and Instagram hasn't told them, right? That's a huge sort of dark matter,

1:02:44right, of social media. None of those people will be paid. Those people are truly ununionizable. And what it'll eventually take is, sorry, the government, like, making some regulations around this, right? And where we're starting to see that is, if you look at how different states are treating like gig workers, like rideshare drivers, you're starting to see that sort of, like, action happening. There have been battles in California, other states as well.

1:03:15They're slow. We're certainly not close to being all the way there. And again, to me, this looks like we're doing the history of the labor movement again. Like, the capitalists have consolidated, they figured out a new industrial revolution that has impoverished everybody and had us work for penny wages. And it's going to take, you know, a lot of people organizing, a lot of labor power, government, you know, like, figuring out that there's a problem and doing something about it. It's going to take decades. Hopefully, it won't take violence

1:03:46in the streets, which is what it took, you know, during the late 19th and early 20th century as the labor movement, you know, was finally working its way towards labor peace. But like, so often when I think about these things, everyone wants to say, oh, it's new, it's new, it's new. Actually, we've gone back to the beginning in so many areas. One of our great reporters, Mia Sato, has a line and a thesis she's working on reporting out that influencers are the new gig workers. And there's just a lot of echoes in there. Oh, yeah. I want to end by asking about Hollywood.

1:04:17You've come out very strongly against the Paramount, Warner Brothers merger. There's an argument in everything you're describing that you should just let Hollywood kill itself. You should just let David Ellison spend all of his dad's money buying a studio, running CBS News into the ground, that these things are doomed. And there's a version of this where the big fights to stop them from killing themselves so that the writing staff of whatever show on whatever network can persist for a little longer

1:04:49just slows down the apocalypse. Like, you can't fix it. Do you think it's fixable or are you just trying to slow down the apocalypse?

Fighting for the future of movies

1:04:58First of all, I think all effort that you put into fighting this shit is good effort, right? So, even if the Paramount-Warner merger happens and it just costs them a lot more time and money, well, that'll make the next monopolist think a little bit longer about the next monopoly, right? And we are starting to see like an epical shift in antitrust. I mean, even, you know, people like Lina Khan and Alvaro Bedoya are doing amazing work out of office.

1:05:28You imagine if Democrats take power again. Even the Republicans are starting to like do antitrust a little bit. So, we are making progress there. The most pernicious lie the tech industry tells is about its own inevitability. Oh, oopsie! Oh, it was just, oh, hey, we just invented something so good that everything you used to like has to die. Oh, sorry, you gotta get with the program and be left in the... No, these people like killed our businesses purposefully with malintent, right? The first time this ever happened

1:05:59to me was like, you know, the Facebook pivot to video era. I used to work at College Humor. We had a great business making videos on the internet. Facebook lied about the traffic that their videos were getting. We pivoted a huge amount of the business to Facebook and it cratered a huge amount of College Humor's business. College Humor later became Dropout, which is a wonderful media success story that I'm really proud of. But, you know, it's that kind of thing, right? It's like, when you look at this shit, half of it is just Mark Zuckerberg lying to people over and over again.

1:06:31So we don't need to accept it as some law of the universe. The last part of it, though, is I don't just make this argument because, hey, I miss having union health insurance and I miss hanging out with funny people writing stuff. Of course, I miss those things. Of course, I'm sad, you know, about the death of the creative class in Hollywood. But also, like, I got into this because I like movies. I like television. People still do like movies. Like, talk to people. They're not like,

1:07:01oh, I never want to see a movie again. They're like, what happened to the good movies? Go watch Terminator 2 with anybody and they'll go, I wish I could see a movie like this now. Oh, why won't they make me this movie anymore? You know, and look at the, by the way, the box office is having a really good year because they made a couple good fucking movies this year. Big movies and small movies, right? You got the, you got the obsession in the back rooms. You got, you got the Odyssey. Even like, the fucking Marvel bullshit

1:07:32had a pretty good year. We love this art form still. The movies are like America's, one of America's greatest cultural legacies. It's like the movies, jazz, and soul food, right? Are like the, like three of America's three biggest contributions to world culture. Like, we can't let it die. And the fact that, like, this entire art form is very effortful, takes a lot of money, doesn't mean that

1:08:02we should never, we should accept a world in which it just doesn't exist because a couple of billionaires wanted to lie and steal from each other. Like, we don't need to, we don't need to accept that world. We can, we can, in fact, have a world that has room for both YouTube and television and the movies and, by the way, plays and novels and all the other art forms that people love. We just have to not let these idiots and assholes destroy themselves,

1:08:34sell their own and each other's businesses. Well, I can't think of a better place to end it. Adam, you're gonna have to come back soon. This was incredible. Thank you so much for being on Decoder. Oh, Neil, I thank you so much for having me, man. I had a blast.

1:08:46I'd like to thank Adam Conover for taking the time to join Decoder and thank you for listening. I hope you enjoyed it. If you'd like to let us know what you thought about this episode or really anything else at all, drop us a line. You can email us at decoderattheverge.com. We really do read all the emails or you can hit me up directly on Threads or blue sky. We also have a TikTok and an Instagram, same handle, at decoderpod. They're a lot of fun. Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Boxing Media Podcast Network. We'll see you next time.

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