The Incredible Decline of Traditional Media: Our YouTube Channel is Worth 14 NY Times Journalists???

In this episode, we dive into the surprising statistics that reveal the shocking comparative decline of traditional media outlets like The New York Times and Fox News. We analyze how new media platforms such as YouTube and podcasts are gaining ground in terms of viewership and cultural impact. From measuring the influence of legacy newspapers to discussing content creation dynamics on YouTube, this conversation covers a wide range of fascinating topics. Additionally, we touch upon the influence of culture on media consumption, the evolution of news, and how modern trends affect societal perceptions. Don't miss this compelling dialogue that sheds light on the future of media consumption.

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] HEllo, Simone. I am so excited to be talking to you today. We're going to have some stats here that I think are going to shock you and our listeners because they shocked me. And I'll just jump into, I think one of the most surprising to me. So the average American when they click through to a newspaper

is on that link for 1.

5 minutes actually a little less than that. So I'm inflating the numbers a bit. Okay. If you look at the New York Times,

the New York Times gets around 385. 7 million clicks per month. That comes down to around 9, 642, 000 K hours on the New York Times. Okay? Now, consider that they have 1, 700 journalists working there, and there are two of us.

That means That the content we produce is consumed by

Seven times

As much time. As the content produced [00:01:00] by an average New York Times journalist. That means that the entire New York Times is only 121x more watched than our podcast just on YouTube. Right. And we are not a big channel.

Would you like to know more?

Simone Collins: So, there's just no way that This can be financially justified going forward.

I mean, how can advertisers continue? Well, now the New York times is a subscriber based. So maybe this is more of the sub stack thing is New York times invented the sub stack model before the sub stack. Well, I mean, I guess they went back to the original magazine. So the original, before they were newspapers, there were magazines and magazines were the original sub stack.

They were specialized information. That people paid for because it was useful to them in their careers and in their social lives. And then things sort of went on to newspapers and they went mass. And now we've gone back to niche with sub stack. And I think the New York Times is becoming that too. So [00:02:00] somehow the New York Times is able to pay for it.

I think a lot of its legacy reputation. But for these other publications, like general newspapers, non

Malcolm Collins: broadcast. All sorts of other publications go over their actual, like how much they're consumed. And then compare that with popular YouTube channels. Okay. Popular YouTube channels.

Just in case, you're wondering the math here. Typically an individual who has a subject subscriber is making like 500% more. Well, I think more than that, maybe like. A thousand percent more from that viewer than they would be. If that viewer was on YouTube or something like that. Uh, I mean, just consider you, you're watching this episode. And you are paying me to watch this episode may be. , a fraction of a cent. But if you were on subject and you were paying like, I don't know. $5 a month to me or something like that. You'd be paying significantly more. I'd also point out here. How much of the ad spend within traditional media is sentiment driven [00:03:00] by the advertisers as evidence of this.

We see how many advertisers were able to pull off of. X slash Twitter. The moment it was bought by Elan. If they were advertising with the goal of reaching a consumer, this would not have been something they would've done it. Would've been like, obviously he didn't change the math of advertising on X. , he, all it changed was the sentiment of the advertising class.

So in a big way, traditional media is something that is just being subsidized by the, I guess what I call it, the Karens who run marketing departments. So the core thesis that I'm going to be getting across here is when you look to legacy media and you are thinking about the impact it has on our culture, you shouldn't think about it as a thing that is separate from the other online influencers of our day.

You should just think of it as a specific category. What's the word I'm looking for [00:04:00] here? Crowdsourced like community. So I, I, I'll, I'll word it this way, right. People can be like, well, the New York Times is quite different from something like a, a YouTube personality, because, you know, the New York Times has thousands of reporters, right?

And YouTube Oh no.

Simone Collins: But it has a sizable staff. Yes.

Malcolm Collins: None of the thousand seven hundred.

Simone Collins: Okay, almost two thousand, but that's not thousands, that's hundreds.

Malcolm Collins: Okay, anyway, point being The New York Times is a sizable staff, therefore, you know, in YouTubers they're just like you and me, but that's also not true.

If you look at large YouTubers, like, God, I've absolutely loved, Watching the Illuma Hottie fall.

Speaker: When something as horrible as this happens, people always come out and admit fault and tell the horrifying truth of their continued negligence and malpractice, right? Yeah, you're right, that never happens. What am I thinking? Instead, they usually do their best to hide everything and blame anyone but themselves, and wouldn't you know it, that's exactly what happened here today.

Malcolm Collins: That has been very, very fun, but you know, she was just the [00:05:00] talking head, but she had like five writers. She wrote almost nothing herself from my understanding or nothing herself. Yeah. And this is true for a lot of the big YouTubers you watch, you know, game theory, for example, for ages, MatPat hasn't been doing anything other than presenting.

They

Simone Collins: treat it, they treat it like a professional business as they should. And yeah, most. Well, okay, not most, but it's many, many, many of the YouTube channels that I regularly watch. And that's because they are constantly turning out content are absolutely teams. And I respect that. And that's good. And they work well.

Malcolm Collins: The point I'm making here is they are teams and traditional media is a team. Okay. Yeah. Yes. And sometimes the teams are bigger. Sometimes the teams are smaller, but then people will be like, well, yeah, but people trust traditional media more. And I'm like, that's also just. untrue at this point.

At the statistics and see

These easiest only 32% of Americans have quote unquote, eight fair amount of trust in the media. And in the 1970s, [00:06:00] this was 70%. These days, the amount of Americans, you have a fair amount of trust in the medium. Is lower than the amount who totally distrust it.

then to, you know, I was about this and she was sa really interesting that t to frame itself as like,

Um, And it has completely abandoned that pretext and you were going over, you know, where NPR had had on they, at least it had on the Republican to give his defense. Well,

Simone Collins: specifically the, there's a podcast associated with NPR called the indicator from planet money. That's part of their planet money economics podcast series, which I love listening to the indicator recently ran two episodes, one on Kamala Harris's economic policy.

One on Trump's economic policy per journalistic tradition. They, they tried, I think, to play both sides in, in that they are present both sides and that they [00:07:00] interviewed Trump, friendly, economic. Organizations when talking about Trump policy and interviewed Kamala Harry, the friendly policy organizations when talking about Kamala's, it's just that the way that they framed them was very different.

They included a very awkward pause when interviewing one of the Trump stands essentially, and, and really made the Kamala stands look very intelligent. So there's still a lot of skew, but they're sort of performatively trying to do this.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. So, and then I pointed out to you when you were trying to make this claim, I was like, yeah, but consider the big, you know, personality driven, non mainstream media like Joe Rogan or something like, yeah, Joe Rogan is known as having a conservative bias, but it's not like a mainstream conservative bias.

It's like, you know, it's slightly anti Trump, you know, pro Kennedy. Like it was, it wasn't the party platform.

Simone Collins: Well, that's, what's really interesting is it definitely feels as though [00:08:00] most of the legacy traditional media platforms have become operatives, unpaid operatives of either the Democrat or Republican party.

What I hear on Fox news definitely feels like. The official Republican party press wing. And I feel the same about many liberal

Malcolm Collins: where we know of collusion that happened recently around this with the

Simone Collins: debate and ABC, is that correct?

Malcolm Collins: No, no. Well, okay. So there was the case of the debate and ABC who was doing the beta has been found they provided Camilla the questions first and we're colluding to give her specific, according

Simone Collins: to an anonymous sworn affidavit from someone on that news team.

Yes.

Malcolm Collins: Okay.

Simone Collins: But allegedly at this point, I think we saw the debate. I mean, I think what is proven is that the person who signs the payroll checks of the people, the journalists who led the debate is an open and active Kamala Harris supporter. So there is that.

Malcolm Collins: Okay. So, [00:09:00] the, but I'm, I'm not talking about that.

We were actually talking with the guy who wrote the abortion section for project 2025 which doesn't say what Kamala's team said that says it's not for a national abortion project. Monitoring. It's just saying that states have to report the number of abortions that happen within the states. And this is a perfectly reasonable thing to do, given that, like, even Tim waltz state reports, a number of miscarriages.

Like, why wouldn't you report the number of abortions? Like, why do you hide babies that are terminated accidentally naturally, but not babies that are terminated intentionally just for statistics reasons. And the only reason you would do that is, is politically speaking. But anyway and they've tried to twist this into all sorts of crazy conspiracy theories.

But anyway, he pointed out that he gave a press announcement when Project 25 came out. He said only one journalist came to it. And this is Right, they, they,

Simone Collins: they host, well, I don't, I can't remember how many people showed up, but It was a year

Malcolm Collins: before

Simone Collins: Yes, this was months in advance. They hosted a luncheon, they, to launch the event, to have also active Q and [00:10:00] A, they invited every major publication.

They were very, very open and transparent about this and they wanted people to talk about it and cover it. There was no secrecy around this.

Malcolm Collins: But then what ended up happening is before any of the modern stories that were like exaggerating, it went live. He started to all of a sudden from multiple news outlets, simultaneously get inbound in reach about it.

Yeah. Basically they launched

Simone Collins: to crickets. Nobody responded, nobody engaged in no one covered them. And then one week out of nowhere, he started receiving a ton of inbound requests from pretty much every major news publication. And it was clear that at that point, Probably the Democratic party decided that, okay, now in terms of our communication policy, we are going to do everything we can to connect candidate Donald Trump to Heritage Foundation's Project 2025, even though there's no affiliation and Donald Trump hasn't talked about it, endorsed it, or even said he's read it.

And that is going to be an effective tactic. We need to make [00:11:00] sure that every operative we have brings it up at every meeting. Opportunity, et cetera. And then suddenly he hears about it from everyone. And

Malcolm Collins: well, I'd also, but I note here that when we're talking about the new non legacy media, not being a voice of the party, I mean, this on the left as well.

It's not just on the right where this is true. Yes, there is more coordination among left wing influencers. However, you know, you look at you or you're talking about like how the young whatever his name is Cenk

Simone Collins: Uyghur?

Malcolm Collins: Whatever. Yeah, C E N

Simone Collins: K.

Malcolm Collins: He comes off as very like libertarian ish in his beliefs.

Simone Collins: Yeah, yeah, yeah, like he, he, he's definitely, he, He doesn't, he's in favor of capitalism and against corporatism. So he's not a Marxist like most Democrats in terms of like Democrat operatives these days. He, yeah, he definitely comes across as very libertarian. When I heard him on an interview with Lex Friedman recently, I was [00:12:00] like, well, yeah, I largely agree with a lot of the things you were saying, which I didn't expect because I'm so used to most progressive media operatives being super Marxist.

Or, or communist. And so it's, it's weird, but so I hear you and I really like the fact that we'll say new media figures, podcasters, YouTubers, bloggers, sub stackers, whatever we want to call them. Do. Have much more independent thought and don't follow these party lines. What they don't have is some of the original trappings of journalism, legacy journalism, that I did really like, were things like protecting sources.

You know, people have been jailed. Journalists have been jailed for refusing to say who their sources were, for there being very clear rules of what's on the record or off the record for having a strong policy about publishing corrections when they're wrong. Bloggers don't typically do things like that.

We certainly don't go back and publish a [00:13:00] retraction if we realized we were wrong about something.

Malcolm Collins: Well, and I'd also note well, cause YouTube doesn't let us. YouTube, the way that the YouTube upload system works is horrible and they need to change it. They should allow you to post like edits to your videos.

And they don't really, you can cut little bits out, but you can't add anything or correct anything, which would be a very important feature to have. Yeah, as well,

Simone Collins: as, as we start replacing journalists, which are continue to actually, but what's interesting though, is that many content creators don't even like being associated with journalists.

One, I was just listening to a podcast this morning where the podcaster said it at some dinner, someone was saying, you know, well, as you're a journalist, I want to be clear, this is strictly off the record. And they took great umbrage upon being called a journalist and having someone tell them that they were off the record, not because he necessarily really wanted to.

Say what he was saying or quote him. It's interesting

Malcolm Collins: that they didn't want to be like, I didn't sign up for this set of rules. I didn't take the Hippocratic oath. You know, you can't tell me, you can't tell [00:14:00] me I'm a street, I'm a street knifer. I'm not a surgeon. Okay. I stabbed people in the street, sir.

That is my profession. That is my life. But this is something that like I had begun to intuit, not from looking at the statistics, but from you guys, we get covered in mainstream media. All the time these days. You know, whether it's the Guardian or the Telegraph, we have a piece coming out on us in the Wall Street Journal the Philadelphia Inquirer just a couple months ago, just all the time we're in media.

And we've been able to gauge based on media, how much media ends up converting to actual, like, Online stuff. So I can say, how many new Twitter followers am I going to get from going on an episode of side scrollers versus how many new Twitter followers am I going to get from like a front page wall street journal?

Simone Collins: Yeah. Or how many letters or emails or whatever will we receive?

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And generally my read is that a mainstream newspaper putting you on their front page is probably the same as being in a [00:15:00] YouTube video with maybe 60K watches. Which is just not a lot and this is for us and I would note here that it changes if you have no virality, but you're on the front page because it's happened for the third top paper in Canada for us, right?

That was equivalent to a YouTube video with maybe 8k to 15k views.

Simone Collins: Well, and with other, other exception is if something goes viral online. Then that changed everything. This

Malcolm Collins: is what I would note. So the traditional media does not really have the capability to sway the mainstream discussion in the way it did historically.

Because the true power it holds is on its stories that go viral.

Baby: And it

Malcolm Collins: doesn't have the power. Absolute control over what stories go viral. And that's where you and I have been incredibly good at manipulating mainstream media and people can watch our media baiting story for specifically how these strategies work.

We have a podcast on this topic, [00:16:00] but the point being is that we often attempt to bait media into creating a story that the progressive media will guffaw at and think is insane and can go viral in progressive circles. But your average American is going to agree with because that's the easiest way to and and I would note that mainstream media pieces do go viral more easily than any other type of media because they are seen as having an air of like credentials.

to them. In terms of their virality, especially when people are like, can you believe, can you believe? But what's interesting is they're actually better at going viral around conservative causes than around progressive causes because they're not as likely like When the media loves the thing, it's very unlikely to go viral.

Things only go viral when the media hates the thing. And so the question is, is, is that virality good for progressive causes or bad for progressive causes? The core question is, were they smart enough to write about the thing they were mad about in a [00:17:00] way that your average conservative and centrist would also be mad, or are they writing about that thing in a way where your average conservative and centrist would be like, wow, you sound like a crazy person.

And. Was somebody able to bait them into that? That's, that's really where that is. Did you want to note anything here before I go further with stats?

Simone Collins: No onward my husband.

Malcolm Collins: Oh my goodness. Okay. Here we are. So the New York times just for some more stats on the New York times. Now I 700 full time journalists employed by the New York times.

The New York times actually has 5, 900 full time employees.

Simone Collins: Right. That means

Malcolm Collins: that for, we reach a mainstream audience as much, you know, doing this part time. So I'm pretending we're doing this full time. And I'm dividing it by two because I'm saying there's two of us on the team. All right. You're being

Simone Collins: extremely generous there.

Cause I just show up to talk with you sometimes.

Malcolm Collins: You, you reach people 25 times more than the average New York [00:18:00] times employee, seven times more. And keep in mind, we're still growing. Right. Right. Right.

And, and we're growing pretty quickly. Like we've doubled our like watch time probably in the last three and a half months or so.

So, and if you, in fact, to, to beat an NY Times journalist, you only need to get 469 watch hours a month.

Simone Collins: That's. Can that

Malcolm Collins: be right? Yeah, we're going to go into how it's right in a second. But yeah, it does work out. So next, it has to do with subscribers being so much more valuable. And many of the New York Times subscribers not actually reading the New York Times.

Simone Collins: So they buy their New York Times just kind of like how you used to buy it.

A New Yorker subscription to look sophisticated and they very conspicuously leave it on your desk or something is someone walked in so they would see that. Of course, you read the New Yorker, but you would never actually read it.

Malcolm Collins: Yep. [00:19:00] Okay, so let's keep going here

for Fox News. They get 336. 7 million. Visitors to their news site a month and that translates to around eight thousand four hundred and seventeen thousand

K

watch hours Keep in mind for the New York Times. It was nine thousand six hundred and forty two

K

watch hours

To give you an idea of just how few people actually read the New York times.

Remember that per Natalus book that we mentioned that was being pushed by the New York times, specifically the author of the book. Did opinion pieces in the New York times they were written about in the New York times. , and the book was called, what are children for on ambivalence and choice? Well, if you go to Amazon right now, this book has only six reviews.

I remember thinking when we wrote our perinatal, this book, the pragmatist guide to crafting religion, we were like, oh my gosh.

If only something like the New York times would shill our book gave only we could get any mainstream media to, to care about what we're doing. , and, , I guess [00:20:00] now we see that, , It wouldn't have really mattered.

If you go to you know down like now, I'm gonna go through the ones that are more like Like mainstream progressive stuff.

So daily costs is only around a thousand and nine K watch hours per month. If you go to the Huffington post and so people don't know the Huffington post, like a lot of people thought of it as real journalism, but it never really was. It was more like a distributed blogging platform. Like we've written for the Huffington post.

The Huffington post just basically goes to individual bloggers and is like, Hey, are you willing to write something random for us for basically free? And maybe we'll pay you. And you're like, yeah, okay. Did we ever

Simone Collins: get, we never got paid for anything that we put there.

Malcolm Collins: I think they might have paid us some token amount.

I don't

Simone Collins: think so.

Malcolm Collins: But yeah, so, and people are like, oh, look, the Huffington Post is contradicting itself. And I'm like, that's like saying two people on Facebook are contradicting themselves. But the Huffington Post. Only has about 565

K

watch hours [00:21:00] per month or, or just sort of a view hours per month, which, which translates to 22.

6 million views. And then if you go down to Kotaku, the, the, you know, cause I've got like a whole subreddit deemed to fighting it and everything like that. Right. That's at 247. Thousand watch hours per month. So just not very big at all.

Insignificantly smaller than something like side scrollers, which is at 350,000. Watch hours per month, as we had mentioned earlier.

Now down at the bottom here, we have the 9. 5 million visitors to salon which is 237, 000 per month.

So salon is like, a magazine that you've heard of, right? Simone, like, you know, salon. So salon is only three times bigger than our channel. In terms of how much time people spend on it.

Simone Collins: Okay. Oh, wow.

Malcolm Collins: And so now let's contrast these numbers with some like big online YouTube tubers. Well, and I

Simone Collins: do want to say the [00:22:00] salon numbers are sobering, but I don't really consider the Fox numbers.

Of interest because most people are watching this on legacy TV and there were old folks, homes and hospitals and whatnot.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. So, you, you can go to individuals like, so for our channel, just because it's hard for me to get the actual watch time of other channels. I can look at our channel and know that we're at 452, 000 views per month.

And then I can use that to try to calculate out how long people are probably watching these other sources. Yeah. I had, I didn't do that for asthma gold, but he did 34 34, 000, 000 per month. 34, 404, 000 per month. Now for side scrollers, it's 1. 715 million per month, which if they are getting around the same view time as us is.

at 302.

Nope. I actually reached out to centering Craig to get his actual numbers and he is [00:23:00] significantly above what I expected. 360,000 watch hours per every 28 days. , and all the stats here were calculated with the assumption that it would . Around 300 for every 28 days.

I guess people just watch the side.

Scrollers much longer per click than they watch our channel. But I guess that makes sense. Cause he does some streams that are like three or four hours long. 5, 000 watch hours per month, which means the New York Times is only 30 times larger in terms of cultural impact when contrasted with side scrollers. In terms of like the number of people watching it. Well, and I'm trying Sidescrollers is like the Craig that we were on, Simone, together.

Yeah, no, Sidescrollers is, they're great. ClownfishTV, by the way, 4. 8 million watchers per month. And this is another

Simone Collins: married couple that often talks about Disney and also pop culture and

Malcolm Collins: media in general. And then you can get to something like Joe Rogan, which is 42 million viewers per month. Now he was a bit harder to suss out, but I'm sort of judging that he's probably [00:24:00] around 7, 405, 000 watch time hours there.

Let's put it this way. 7405 K watch time. And so that would make him you know, almost as big as the entire new york times.

Simone Collins: Well, let's look at the Nielsen readings. I just sent you on what's up the traditional top 10. Page for Nielsen's data center. They do basically TV watching and they even do streaming stats now in the U S Indy.

And I'm looking at their traditional TV top 10. I'm looking at prime broadcast network TV. And it's giving me a better understanding of more like, you know, what people are watching, watching There were 18 and a half million viewers of the summer Olympics andy.

Malcolm Collins: She's goobering.

Can you hear me? I mean, I'm trying.

Simone Collins: [00:25:00] So I feel like that's, that's more. Impressive, you know, on YouTube people really

Malcolm Collins: To give you an idea of how it not really. That's impressive. That means that the number of people who watched the Olympics was only 40 X, more than the number of people who watched our little bitty podcast in the last month. That's insane. This is the AA eighty-nine. Nothing of a YouTube channel.

But what I'm looking at is online written publications. And I think one of the big problems that the right has is they go around to these small websites like, you know, Mary Sue or like, you know, the, the Kotaku and they think because these websites are quote unquote real journalists that they are in a fight with somebody who anyone is listening to other than the people who are listening to them because of the fight itself.

And I think this solves some of the questions we were asking. Where is [00:26:00] the woke consumer base when we were asking this question? Like, where are the people who are supposed to buy Concord? Concord, they might just be astronomically smaller than anyone is anticipating.

Simone Collins: Yeah, well, and that should have big implications for the 2024 presidential election, but we'll see.

I feel like that's going to be a better gauge. For this than many other measures because I

Malcolm Collins: think it shows that we need to focus if you want to keep media free on the medium platforms like YouTube and influencing organizations like Google, like I almost had a job at YouTube, by the way, that was one of the departments that was thinking about hiring me at Google.

And so anyone like. I think that's how you make a difference at these organizations is get jobs at them and advocate on the inside was in the organization. Because I think that they are the last source of freedom that we're going to have access to. And it's interesting as well, how, you know, I think [00:27:00] well, this new format of media works with conservative American institutions and I, ideas I E I am, you know, you mentioned this about early America where you would go and you would see like a group of churches in a town and you were like, it was the early social media influencers.

They were all right next to each other. And they were all like various Protestant churches. And you would go to the one who had the best influencer, the one who you'd like. To listen to the most or you've had the, you know, the best takes.

Baby: Right.

Malcolm Collins: And that's sort of where we are right now is individuals are choosing who they want to listen to.

Mm-Hmm. . And I think one of the heartening things is that the, the independent people went super partisan later than the institutions. They have been more resistant to partisanism than the institutions. Where, you know, I take somebody like Destiny. He's like a big, you know, leftist. He'll still like debate righties.

Right? Like you're not going to see that really within the mainstream news [00:28:00] organizations anymore. And I think that that's really fascinating as well. And it also shows the way that people relate to their sources of information is changing. And that I believe that there is an expectation of some form of now when I say people, I think often frame parasocial relationships incorrectly, they frame it as being like a friendship or something like that, when instead I think a better way to think about it is we are characters within your mind's high school.

And they, hate us or think certain things about us. But we are part of the, the, the brain space that you have used to build your, your high school.

Speaker 2: That's all you've got to endure All the total dicks, all the stuck up chicks And then when you graduate You take a look around and you say Hey, wait! This is the same as where I [00:29:00] just came from Nothing changes but the faces, the names, and the dreams High school never ends.

Malcolm Collins: And you know, we might be in one group of kids and then like ContraPoints might be in another group of kids and you modify what you're hearing from each of us within those individual biases.

And you know, It does feel that way. Like, the online space feels very much like, I got a play here, High School Never Ends. But it feels a bit like you're playing out these roles of the characters within a high school. And that's what the parasocial relationship means and where it becomes dangerous.

is only the, you know, delusional individual who thinks that he's dating the cheerleader, but the cheerleader doesn't know who he is. People act as if that's a unique thing to parasocial relationships. And if they feel it's not, that's a normal thing of our minds high school. Sometimes that's in high school and sometimes that's a group of YouTubers.

Simone Collins: That makes a lot of [00:30:00] sense. Yeah. That's a better way of putting it. And you can, Be just as liable to have a one way or unhealthy relationship in high school as you would in the digital realm. So totally get it. Yes. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Well, hold on. Let's see. Do I have any other stats here? Because I have some other fun stats.

Oh yeah, here are some fun ones. As of 2022, only about 12 percent of U. S. adults use newspapers as daily sources of news. In 2020, a survey found that 16 percent of Americans got their news from physical newspapers, among other sources. I do not believe either of those stats. at all. I think those are like an American thinking like, have I seen a newspaper recently?

Yes. Well, I think you're forgetting

Simone Collins: how many much older people there are in the world. They're not

Malcolm Collins: going to the news. I mean, maybe they're picking up physical newspapers. The Wall Street Journal had the highest circulation of all U. S. newspapers in 2020. That's gonna be covering us soon with like a documentary, so that'll be fun.

Only 3 [00:31:00] percent of U. S. adults cite print newspapers as their primary information source. Like, of course, who trusts newspapers anymore? Like, they're so dishonest! And this is the thing, you wanna get how dishonest newspapers are? If you've always been like, Well, people say, if you know anything about a news source, and then you read a newspaper, you realize how frequently they lie.

And you might think, well, I don't know anything about any particular news source. Well, if you're watching the podcast, you probably know us. Just read any article that's, like, ever been written about us. And, and you'll be like, wow, these are wildly off. In, in every respect, it's clearly attempting to manipulate me.

And this is something that you'll feel really good when you have friends that are frequently in the news, because you get pissed pretty quickly if you do. And then the number of newspaper, newspaper newsroom employees has dropped 50 percent since 2008. I'm surprised not more. So, to the question of how are they making Well,

Simone Collins: since 2008, Malcolm, that was already, like, this is, this has been a long decline.

Malcolm Collins: This has been a long decline. Yeah, so, [00:32:00] oh, interesting. Interesting. So I was looking at another study and while people spend a minute and 30 seconds on average when they click through to a news link, they're only spending 15 seconds per page or at least according to one study. So the numbers might even be worse.

Simone Collins: Wow. Brutal.

Malcolm Collins: For 60 seconds that people spend.

For long form articles, it's an average of 148 seconds.

Simone Collins: I, I'm sure that's similar with the Essays and videos of modern content creators as well. Yeah. Our

Malcolm Collins: videos typically have like about a 17 minute average watch time. But actually that's pretty long. Cause like if you refresh a page that counts as restarting the watch timer, if you leave and then come back to it, that restarts the watch time.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Oh, Simone, do you love our daughter?

Simone Collins: No, never. No.

Malcolm Collins: All right. Well, make sure she doesn't grow up. Remember the,

Simone Collins: [00:33:00] the, the media says that we, we actually hate children.

Malcolm Collins: We do. The guardian. I hate children. I have a passion. For prenatalists,

Simone Collins: we, we seem to just. Well, I mean, the thing that

Malcolm Collins: I make clear to them that is always so perplexing to someone in the urban monoculture is they're like, well, do you, do you like love being around your kids and spending time with your kids?

And I'm like, well, that's not why you have kids. You is like, well, I'm not having kids because it doesn't seem like a lot of fun.

Speaker 14: I don't want kids. Yeah.

Speaker 15: It doesn't seem that fun.

Malcolm Collins: It's like, well, yep. I mean, obviously you're not having kids for how they make you feel about yourself. You're having kids so that they get to exist. You're having kids for what they're going to feel about them.

Doing

Simone Collins: it for them. Not for you. Yeah,

Malcolm Collins: for somebody else. No, no, no, no, no. Sorry. I must have misunderstood what you were saying. What you mean is you get happy when you see them happy. And that's why you have them just like, [00:34:00] no, my emotions don't matter at all. I just am doing it for somebody else. Oh my gosh.

Well, do you have any, any thoughts here?

Simone Collins: When I think about the future of news and media consumption, I just feel so confused as to how reality will be understood in the future. Because right now, at least in our childhood, we grew up in a society where there was a broadly shared understanding of reality and what was happening in the world.

Even if we did not have an accurate perception of what was going on, we were all kind of on the same page. You know, this thing was happening, this thing mattered. And it was really the media that largely determined what was going to be a big deal. You know, we're going to choose this international conflict as thing du jour, and this domestic thing, and that's kind of how news cycles worked.

And now we live in this [00:35:00] era where there isn't really any critical mass News media outlet that everyone reads that everyone's on the same page with, which means that like, aside from there being trends that people talk about online and there definitely are trends like that, like, let's talk about trad wives or let's talk about the, the, why, why all men are thinking about Rome.

Right. So they're, they're short little, but they're always, they're not very substantive. Right. So

Malcolm Collins: what's funny. I thought about this before. But the people who actually are the people who everyone is listening to,

Baby: right,

Malcolm Collins: to an extent, maybe not directly, but through their influence, those are the people who truly have the most influence online.

And so it's who can create in this new ecosystem, Those trends, the new thing everyone is talking about.

Simone Collins: Right. Because they often are sparked by a viral piece. For example, a lot of people talking about trad wives. Well, [00:36:00] that was actually sparked by traditional media when a story came out on Hannah from ballerina farms.

Right. So

Malcolm Collins: some traditional media can do this. An interesting person who I think specializes in doing this is Ayla who we've had on the show before. She always is creating like some, the. The main discussion of Twitter pretty frequently. Like her

Simone Collins: birthday gangbang story. Amazing. That was an

Malcolm Collins: incredible story.

I was like, this is the wildest thing I've ever read. The birthday party

Simone Collins: that shot through the internet. The time

Malcolm Collins: when it turned out that she slept was more people a year than she had showers. Or she had no, she had sex more times than she showered per year.

Simone Collins: And

Malcolm Collins: everyone was like, Oh my God.

Simone Collins: No, she was, she was very good at that.

But my larger point is that. Aside from these non substantive, ephemeral, everyone's talking about this things, we don't, we won't have a shared reality anymore. And people are going to be working from very different starting points and [00:37:00] priors, which is going to make our country even harder to live in.

One of the reasons why I love Japan so much is that at least when, when I traveled there as a teen, a lot, it felt so cohesive and people would say things like, well, we Japanese do this and we Japanese do that. And everyone sort of knows what to do. If you know, an umbrella is left on a train, well, someone will take it to this place and you'll recover it.

Like it won't be lost. And there was just all these things where everyone's on the same page. And that's because obviously they shared one culture, but you know, there's also like, people sort of watched and consumed the same stuff as well. Now, not only do we have very different cultures in the United States, no one is like, there's no simple source of truth or a couple of, of news channels that everyone's watching that allows us to at least have one shared.

reality. I

Malcolm Collins: push back. I say that there is a shared meme plex. But it's not

Simone Collins: substantive again. It's like Brad summer. It's that's not substantive. No, Brad

Malcolm Collins: summer didn't really pierce through. [00:38:00] So an example of something that I say that pierced through like a song that everyone was supposed to watch was Oh God, what was the country guy?

Oh, Richmond, North

Simone Collins: of Richmond. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And that was like, everybody just had, it was like your homework assignment for the week. Everybody has to watch this. If you want to be part of any office room conversation, if you want, and you know, the first time this happened was Gundam style. This is not something that really happened.

Not substantive. I would say Richmond, north of Richmond, it was very substantive.

But what's also been interesting is as we have moved to this new form of memeplex culture, a group that's really sort of, progressively had less and less influence in American culture. It was very interesting to me. is American black culture. When I was growing up, American black culture was maybe 30 to 40 percent of all forwards facing American culture.

[00:39:00] From the, you know, whether it's derivative raps and, and, and rock and, you know, all that. Right. You know, and now you have black Twitter, right. Which definitely has some degree of influence, but like viral meme flex level, viral phenomenon don't come out of it at the rate of even coming out of something like 4chan.

Simone Collins: Huh? Yeah. I watch a lot of YouTube videos by black cultural commentators, both male and female. Yeah. But they're not generating the culture that I see them commenting on. What is really influential is drag culture, both from the lexicon standpoint, but also like women wear drag makeup. Now it's so weird to me.

I just, it's hard for me to like go anywhere and not be like, why are you in drag? This is drag and

Malcolm Collins: trans. So trans culture definitely hits the mean plexus. Pretty regularly, I guess only in

Simone Collins: the form of pronouns to me. I'm not really seeing it anywhere else for me. Well, no, no, no,

Malcolm Collins: what I'm talking about is, is, is [00:40:00] people within their culture end up hitting the mean plex.

So, Contra points used to hit the mean plex all the time. For example, who's that philosophy tuber? Who's a. Trans woman

Simone Collins: I think she just calls herself philosophy to philosophy

Malcolm Collins: to you know, like trans people make up almost none of the population and yet they probably make up about 3 percent or 4 percent of the viral phenomenal moments.

Yeah. Contrapoints

Simone Collins: needs to publish more. I want more.

Malcolm Collins: They definitely make up a more of them than black individuals do, which is What

Simone Collins: is up with that?

Malcolm Collins: I trans is the new black.

Simone Collins: No, I called

Malcolm Collins: it here on base camp. Trans is the new black. They, they, or else, I mean, it just

Simone Collins: could, it could be maybe that black culture is becoming insulated to the point where mainstream culture, like at least we aren't hearing it because it's, it's just staying within the fold.

You know, like that's, that's one guess I have.

Malcolm Collins: Well, Yeah, like the past. [00:41:00]

Simone Collins: So here's the thing is like the past two TV series that I've gotten addicted to have, well, at least Yeah, mostly majority black cast. So like, at least in mainstream TV, it seems to be doing well. No, I think

Malcolm Collins: that's what elevated it.

I think it was mainstream Hollywood. You could call it like the media elite who used to decide the musicians and the, and the actors that you were going to see had been artificially elevating it. Inflating it. Oh, and that's why I'm still

Simone Collins: seeing. That's why you still see Netflix and stuff, but you don't see

Malcolm Collins: it on YouTube or, or coming out of, of, and it's not that it's not there.

Like black Twitter is a thing. It just doesn't leak in the same way that black culture used to leak. I don't go to a campus today, like an American high school and see white kids trying to emulate black Twitter. Well, you're right. And that was

Simone Collins: so bad. Yeah, that was a really like the, the people that you wanted to emulate and the memes you wanted to talk about was, yeah, I did [00:42:00] the

Malcolm Collins: sagging pants.

I did what happened.

Simone Collins: That's you're right. That's so weird. Well, and also song references. That's interesting. Okay. What happened?

Malcolm Collins: I don't, I don't know what happened. I I'm actually kind of like, maybe we need to dig on this harder. Cause this is an interesting question to me. Why? And I, and again, I don't think it's that black culture has shrunk in size or distinctiveness.

I think it's that it has shrunk in permeability.

Simone Collins: Oh, well, well, but okay. Maybe, maybe

Malcolm Collins: here's an idea of what could have destroyed it.

Simone Collins: What?

Malcolm Collins: The concept.

Simone Collins: Appropriation.

Malcolm Collins: Appropriation.

Simone Collins: That's, I was just thinking that when I was also thinking about how like Rob and D'Angelo talks about having affinity groups and kind of how like white people shouldn't encroach into black spaces because I don't know.

My white woman tears will mess it up or something like, I won't get it and I'll make it awkward and I'll ruin it. And so maybe, yeah, like white [00:43:00] people are less allowed to engage with black culture now than they were before because weirdly a lot of the super progressive extra woke messages have been around like, let's bring back apartheid without saying it.

But they're, they, that's where the functionally they're going for, which is,

Malcolm Collins: Segregation! Yay!

Speaker 5: When me and Brad first met, I didn't think we'd get along, but turns out we kind of agree on everything. We both think minorities are a united group who think the same and act the same. And vote the same. You don't want to lose your black card. Sorry, I don't know, I just think we should Roll back discrimination law so we can hire Basie and race against Jinx!

Now you owe me a Coke. Hey, tell him what you told me yesterday. White actors should only do voices for white cartoon characters. I've been saying that for years. Stick to your own. Us white people, we have so much privilege. I agree, it is a privilege to be white. Ask him about interracial dating. All I said is that black men wh