Tucker Carlson’s Twitter Show Destroys Mainstream Media Overnight

Primetime ratings last night. CNN 569,000. Fox News 1.73 million. MSNBC 1.86 million. The first episode of Tucker Carlson on Twitter 82 million in 20 hours so far. So basically an 80X increase over what would be considered traditional mainstream media. Yeah, off 40 30X over all three put together. Yeah. Well, um Where do you get your news from? Mostly the internet. How do you select your source and how do you bounce, you know, we're in an interesting time, a time where I think people have more access to information than in the history of humankind and it seems like every day we're through that envelope or threshold even more. I have seen it in myself, I've seen it in other people, I'm sure you have too. The pros of the internet is you can find anything you want to. The cons of the internet is you can find anything that you want to. If you go there pre-cocked or with some type of confirmation bias, let me just tell anybody what they're going to find on the internet, exactly what they're looking for. And you can get lost in fake news, literally like satire sites that sometimes are so ridiculously good they're hard to tell that they're satire. [ __ ] totally here for it. Um you'll come on to traditional media outlets like you know Fox News, the CNN and if and I'm sorry if this day and age of people don't realize that everybody and that message is bought and paid for, I don't know how to help you because it's right there in your face. You'd have to be blind to not see it. And I don't have a problem with people getting news from either one of those sources. Let's just recognize there's a slant on it and a bias and also they're in the business of selling ads just like TV. So it leads you to this place. Where do you get information? Do you go on to Substack? Do you go on to Twitter? Do you go on to traditional media outlets? How much do you have to bounce it against the other side to determine that the information that you're getting is actually legitimate or real. Did you see the debate between Malcolm Gladwell and Douglas Murray a couple of months ago? No. You know Malcolm the and and Douglas as well. And uh it was a discussion around mainstream media basically needs to it it's not something that you should be able to trust. And there were some really interesting arguments from both sides that there are constrictions and guidelines around what you can and can't do with traditional media that are unrestricted when it comes to the more new media. Uh but that also brings with it degrees of freedom that people can take advantage of. Yeah. It's really really interesting discussion. And I think the sort of terminally online world sees new media as this bastion of free speech which gets itself closer to the truth because it's no longer encumbered by any of the rules and procedures and the bought and paid for and so on. But I think if everybody took a really close look at it, the incentives are different but they're still not exactly pure. Free speech and truth are not always synonymous. And I think people have to be really cautious with that. I don't have a great answer for myself as to where you even bounce ideas or resources especially in a world where like I've just recently started playing around with chat GPT, holy [ __ ] Or image creators, holy [ __ ] And these are in the in like what will be viewed in the very near future as their infancy. Yeah. If they're that good right now and it can really fool intelligent people I feel like Skynet is just around the corner. We are mere inches away from just getting butt-fucked by robots. That's what it's going to look like. Dude, I I have a I have a friend who sells silk pillow cases and bamboo sheets on Amazon. And he has been Amazon funneling and building his business up and so on and so forth. It's very effortful to do. And he got Chat GPT to write his sales page for him, and then he used Midjourney to create the photos that he needed to do for the image listing. And the increase in his sales that he's had is absolutely absurd. And he showed me, "Look, these are the other top five competitors for bamboo sheets and and silk pillow cases in the United States. And look at how much better my images are." He said, "Well, cuz I wasn't constrained by reality or physics. I was able to just perfectly dial in exactly what I wanted through Midjourney, and I got Chat GPT to write the prompts for Midjourney. Yeah. So, you've got AIs telling AIs what to do. So, I literally the day before yesterday. This is the 7th of June, I think. On the 5th of June, I tried Midjourney for the first time cuz I kept seeing articles about it. And I was thinking, "How could I make I'm like, could I improve YouTube thumbnails for the podcast messing around with this?" Because oftentimes, as I'm sure you or your staff knows, I kind of want to have a certain feel, so I'll just Google image search. I'm not Google image searching [ __ ] I'm going to create it in a day and a half. And I'm going to be super up front on this. I'm an idiot. I am not an intelligent person. I can like I can wrecking ball my way through life. In a day and a half, I have already created some images that were beyond what I was even thinking was possible. And that's 1.5 days. I mean, with the least experienced user on the planet. Yeah. Yeah, it's terrifying, man. I think your point when it comes to talking about media, heterodox, new wave, whatever, uh is that you're going to be able to propagate a lot more news stories that are going to be automatically generated. Maybe this is the bulk of reporting, the boring stuff that just needs to to done, potentially will come from chat GPT or some other sort of automated system which has been trained on the biases that humans have. So, it perpetuates and propagates those existing biases. So, yeah, man, this this Tucker thing is is absolutely fascinating, you know, for I think uh Matt Walsh's What Is a Woman that the Daily Wire released over the weekend to celebrate the start of Pride Month. That's right. They released it that Twitter allowed them to put it up. Correct. Then Elon Musk retweeted it and pinned it. That is potentially the most viewed documentary in human history, now. Because it got hundreds of million, I think 100 million plays over the weekend. That's insane. On Twitter. The most viewed documentary in human history. I think that's a metric for how much people don't have faith anymore in traditional media sources. I I truly think that it is. My concern is with the AI, whether it's a good thing or bad thing, at some point my thoughts will always shift back to weaponization. And the volume of information that that AI can create and could get the snowball rolling downhill before people could actually backtrack and figure it out. For most people, it seems like their their deeply held beliefs are about one click deep, and it's usually the first search result. So, if you got a volume of information heading in the wrong direction that was legitimately untrue, and I think it's a very uh fair thing to say that the the Western world, however you would want to define that, has, you know, there's an axis to every belief system, and there's an axis to those belief systems, and those belief systems are also looking at AI and leveraging AI and weaponing weaponizing AI. I don't know if we're intelligent enough as a species to survive. Well, think about this way, right? You make content on the internet, as do I. What you're trying to do is find a balance somewhere between exactly what you want to talk about and what your interests are, and some degree of what's going to be at least partially interesting to the audience. You don't want to compromise yourself so much that you get audience captured, but you don't want to be so niche and completely narcissistic that all you do is indulge yourself over and over. It's a blend between the two, right? There is a third participant in every conversation that is the audience member that's listening. What you're trying to do is, in some regard on varying degrees, reverse engineer what the audience wants, right? That's at least you're you're conscious of what the audience wants. So, creators try to do that and then algorithms try to deliver content that people want to it. So, the creator predicts what the algorithm needs based on what the audience wants. Now, you can remove the creator altogether and just go algorithm direct to consumer, right? Because you have no restriction on how many different iterations of content and images. You remember the Cambridge Analytica thing, right? Where there was um custom-built memes around the exact pain point that these particular subgroups had around Hillary Clinton or whoever it was, and we're going to target them and create them and do all of them. But, there's still a guy somewhere sat working out what meme to make, what text to use, dragging the image in, creating it, putting it out there. You could have individual me I know Andy's profile, and we will make a meme or a series of memes just for him. So, I think yeah. But, wait until the AI can replace that individual, and then you have AI teaching other AI. Correct. Correct. And then we have to go beg a robot for our water ration every day. Yeah. Well, dude, I I think it's Yeah, it is. And when you think that within the space of probably 3 years, it wouldn't be surprising if most of the content created on the internet is no longer human-generated. If you think that the internet is a cesspool at the moment, at least you know the content that you're consuming was made by another person. Yeah. In the future, it very well might be the case that it's a rarity to not have an automated, "Oh my god, this is a post from a real person as opposed to an automated bot of some kind. There's already um uh social media where you need to upload images of your face. I think maybe even Instagram has this for verification now uh to ensure that it's not bots. So, you have to put a photo of your face up and maybe a photo of your ID up. And what this does is it ensures not only is it the same person, but if you try and duplicate it, you can't have more than one account as some of the some such which is trying to restrict bot activity and that's just now. I mean, in 1 and 1/2 days on Midjourney, I feel like I could create both of those things. A full universe. Give me a half an hour and I could create both of those things. And then you have a I mean, what is it What happens when it gets to the point, if we're not already edging towards it already, where people are questioning every piece of information that comes at them because they don't know. They don't know if it's biased. I think we're already there. I think we're already there, too, but I don't know if I don't think that we're trending for it to get better. I'm concerned that we're trending for it to get worse. And where does that land us? Where do people go at that point to actually get information about the world that they can trust? Well, you you mentioned at the beginning that the issue that people have is now uh an abundance, not scarcity, right? There's too much information, not too little information. And very quickly the over the last sort of 30 years, the skill set that was most advantageous to a human went from someone who is able to seek out information to somebody that is able to discern information, right? It's now all about can you work out how legitimate this is? Can you do your sources or your checks? Uh a video from a friend of mine went hyper viral as he was talking about um America is the third highest country out of 193 nations worldwide in gun crime. And if you were to remove the five largest cities for gun crime from that, we would move from third down to 190th or 189th or something like that. Took me one Google search to find out that's not true. That's not even remotely Sounds great. It sounds [ __ ] amazing. Yeah, like oh [ __ ] well let's just cut these cities out of the US. Problem solved. Oh and there was like a little bit of a they're mostly blue cities and blah blah blah. And don't get me wrong dude, if I'd heard it and I've propagated tons and tons of stuff like that. Oh I heard this like little zinger. Let me get it out there. That sounds cool. Uh but yeah, that's you with your human biases. Imagine if you had a custom purpose-built viral machine that knew exactly the way to deliver it, that knew exactly what was going to trigger you. But going back to the Tucker conversation, right? You are somebody that's been in this great nation longer than I have. How likely do you think it is that more and more of the news guys I think Trevor Noah recently left his show. I think he was released or maybe left. Uh Tucker Carlson obviously released by Fox and now doing his own thing. What do you think the future of these sorts of news organizations would be if people can go and make 40 times the entire primetime ratings by going and and yoloing it themselves with a couple of students and a nice garage setup in the house. Maybe we don't need mainstream media anymore. I think we're through the looking glass on that one. I I think that Tucker and just those numbers alone speak to how much people are looking to a traditional source. And the traditional models I mean I think they're mired in bureaucracy. I have uh been into the Fox News studio a few times. I've done a couple of written pieces for them and a couple of in-person stuff and it is a large building with a mass amount of people that is constrained. You know, they have they do have different journalistic thresholds and barriers that they're going to need to at least be able to clear to present information and ideas. But they're way slower and there are 100% soft and probably hard boundaries on what their hosts can say, what they can do. And I'm sure that the money is good. I have no idea what they what they make. But if somebody wants to go out and have complete flexibility and autonomy and probably actually make orders of magnitude more money by being on their own, Mhm. why would you mire yourself in bureaucracy when you can put together a small team and be, you know, the first person through the door and then reap the benefit of that. Are you on a network? Your show? Uh no, just the internet. No, you you know what you know what I mean, like an iHeart radio Uh no, just I put it up on the just the normal platforms. sponsors that you do you handle yourself I I go through an agency that's working like as a consultant for you. Uh I used to go through the agency route and then just due to my relationship with Evan at Black Rifle I just streamlined it and was like, "You know what? How about we just do this?" So my point being that even within our world, the new media thing, uh there are varying degrees of people being bought. Now, if it comes to uh networks and stuff like that, it the people that are listening that are concerned my favorite creators on iHeart radio, maybe they're part of a globalist conspiracy. The those guys they help with production, they help you get guests, and they sell ads, right? Like they're not they're not really stepping in yeah, it increases your reach it largely in the experience I do have with those things. They're other platforms. And maybe those platforms whatever they fall into whatever uh the globalist or whatever it might be. That doesn't mean you as somebody who has content on that platform is a part of that. Correct. Yeah. Uh my point being that even within that you found it easier to streamline even what is already quite a streamlined uh way of working. So for somebody like Tucker, I would be really interested to know why Twitter, apart from the fact that you can reach what will probably hit a 100 million plays in 24 hours, which there's no way even on YouTube that you could do that. If you did a whole 100 million plays on YouTube in 24 hours you would be the number one trending video worldwide on that site. Thank Mr. Beast. Mr. Beast's Squid Game video did somewhere in the region of 70 million, but that was a movie level production that was custom-built for virality. Tucker just I mean, it was a a well-crafted monologue. He was actually talking about this um dam explosion. Have you seen this? Mhm. So, uh Tucker points to Kyiv's uh possible role in the Kakhovka dam burst. Uh so, if it was intentional, it was not a military tactic, it was an act of terrorism, Tucker said commenting on the incident. Blowing up the dam may be bad for Ukraine, but it hurts Russia more, and for precisely that reason the Ukrainian government has considered destroying it. So, basically, he's saying maybe this is a false flaggy type thing. Yeah. The water level below this dam has risen by 12 m. Which That's going to change some neighborhood layouts. [ __ ] city. Um That's where it used to be a city. Yeah, correct. Correct. You're now your granny's now at the bottom of a lake. Totally. But my point being that he's able to talk about stuff that he wants without any restriction. I don't know how he's monetizing, and I would love to know why he chose Twitter apart from reach. Reach is self-evident. Is he being paid? There's no ads as far as I can see. I do pay for Twitter Blue, which means maybe I'm ad-free, so perhaps there would have been pre-roll ads running before it. Maybe people that have watched it that don't pay for Twitter Blue can tell us or whatever if they saw ads. But you didn't do a this episode is brought to you by Yeah. anything. There was no ads running partway through. It could lead to that. I mean, I don't I don't know a whole lot about Tucker in the world that he comes from. I'm going to assume he was well taken care of when he was at Fox. So, the move might actually be to drive awareness before the monetization. Can you imagine the hammer you could swing in negotiation? Like, "Hey, by the way, I do about 100 million plays in 24 hours. So, here's my rate. Oh, you don't like my rate? Next." Yeah, dude. So, again, for the people that don't know this world, I would guess you could probably charge between a 10 and a 20 dollar CPM on that. So, that's per thousand plays. Which is a [ __ ] ungodly Yeah. amount of money. Let's just multiply that by a number that has a lot of zeros. Yeah, correct. And I you know, it doesn't matter how much Tucker was being paid at Fox. Yeah. I can guarantee it wasn't that much. Nobody Nobody [ __ ] talks those sorts of numbers. But I don't think he's in a rush to monetize. No. No. I think his move is probably build accumulate build foundation cuz then you can take it. Then you're the you're the captain of your own ship. You have your hand on the wheel and people can get on board but you get to tell them what state room they're in as opposed to the other way around. Yes. And think about it this way, Tom Segura that does Your Mom's House, he pivoted from comedian comedian with podcast comedian with very well produced podcast comedian with podcast and other podcasts under it to now network. Yeah. So he is vertically integrating himself further and further back up the chain. Smart. Yeah. And you know, I don't know who runs who directs the editorial policy at Fox News. Something tells me that I've never seen them on TV and I don't respect them as a creator. Oh, they're not creator. I bet you it's a lawyer. Probably. Yeah. But I respect Tom Segura as a creator. I know that he understands the craft. So I go, "Oh yeah, that that network has legitimacy." And Tucker Carlson will be able to lend legitimacy to other people that can blow. It's the same with Ben Shapiro on the Daily Wire, right? You know, Shapiro, Jeremy Boring, Jeremy not necessarily front facing but you know, he he can he's done well crafted adverts and I've seen him on podcast and he can speak. Mhm. And you know, in a world of uh social media where people want that behind the scenes thing. They want to know Kim Kardashian's dog's name and they want to know where Zac Efron goes for coffee on blah blah on his Instagram stories. I think that that's I think that gives a a degree of sort of resonance. Yeah. I'll be curious to see what he does with it. I mean, what I guess the better metric will be how does the second video do? Honestly, well if the if the algorithm's anything to go by, that would be What's happening people? 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