Why Crowder says online media shifted from truth to clicks

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 1:24:29

   make is that I've been here the longest. I've been in this space the longest. There were no conservatives on YouTube. You can go back and see with a blue bed sheet and a digital eight cam quarter. And it used to be the internet was a place where we could sort of bypass the gatekeepers. I used to watch Joe Rogan, his very first shows, it was, you know, webcam in his den. He's like, yeah, we don't. I watched him. He was on Tom Green Live, which was a show in his living room.

2. 1:24:54

   And Joe Rogan was like, this is, this is the future. You could see the wheels turning where he was inspired by it and saying, hey, we don't need, you know, these people, we don't need to have a big expensive studio, right? So the idea was, hey, we can reach people directly without the agents, without the managers. And we know that legacy media feeds slop and dishonesty. So that was kind of the first wave, right? And we were still figuring it out as far as making it professional, but not making it too slick. And then something changed at the same time that the legacy media realized, okay, cable news isn't the thing. So they just dump a bunch of advertising dollars into YouTube so they get favorable algorithmic treatment, people online just say, you know what? I'm going to just make stuff up. Because the truth, here's where we went.

3. 1:25:35

   The legacy media, I think we both agree, CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, right? Pretty dishonest. A lot of lies. The truth was more interesting than the lies. It was novel. It was like, actually, what you were told isn't really true. And like you mentioned, Thomas Sowell, right? Like you mentioned, talking about socialism. Some of my early videos in the Second Amendment, things like that. Okay? so that gained traction and now we're at the point where here's the truth that people have been used to well that's kind of old hat and the lies are more interesting than the truth jack reacher paternity test wife cheated on him with a black guy i added that but the point is you know they just have to make it as salacious as possible and that's a huge industry at this point so that's something where we're going to have to deal with and people are going to need

4. 1:26:16

   to have tools to be more discerning but we went from the truth more interesting than the lie and now the lie is more interesting than the truth. Well, how do you compete with a lie? How do you compete with a lie that if someone makes it up, you go, like in other words, I go, hey, no one ever in the history of the world has gained 40 pounds or 30 pounds of muscle in six months. It's not possible. So someone's saying that's a story.

5. 1:26:36

   You can talk about it and you can show some studies and go, this is what you expect. Okay, that's pretty interesting. It's not as interesting as Alan Richson gangbanging at a sex club, but that's not true. But that'll get more clicks. And if you apply that to the other folks that you mentioned, people in the media sphere like it's not as though this is something that we don't all see and uh you know community notes aren't cutting it because people see it they go well why would someone lie they have a quote attributed to this clip so clearly it's in the clip and you click the clip and it has nothing to do with it well there's two other things as well which is number one the the mainstream has destroyed fact checking as a thing because like we have bbc verify in the uk the like tells you whether a claim is and you're like well they keep lying in that number one the

6. 1:27:19

   other thing is is that what jubilee copied with their fact check i don't like fact check men are bad okay um and the other thing is actually responding to this stuff amplifies it which is what these people use to get more attention for the same yeah as well so it's a it's a challenging one to solve it is i mean we do have rules for libel slander like i don't again i think people are grown-ups yeah where some people yeah myself not included but uh i think people can delineate between for example doctors who are currently practicing during covid saying we're seeing promise with ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine you know combined with zinc and we're seeing patient outcomes better and they Give you a sample size of thousands of people. I think people can see the difference between that being removed at the behest of the government, and someone, you know, just saying, hey, Johnny Depp is turning into a woman. Right? Where you can go, well, that shouldn't be allowed. Not censoring speech, but like, like, if something is verifiably, like, immediately verifiably untrue. Okay, like, if YouTube can algorithmically suppress people who aren't monetized, you mean to tell me that someone is making something up knowingly, and they have a pattern of doing it?

7. 1:28:29

   those accounts shouldn't be there that's not anti-free speech at all and i'm a free speech absolutist people say you can't yell fire in a crowded theater well sure you can of course you can there's a fire where you think there's a fire you can't yell fire to cause a stampede people don't even understand that case that that statement's often based on but even before we get to that it's like people need to do a better job themselves and i have a few things that i advise people if you watch someone and they don't provide references on a regular basis for factual claims that they make uh you should probably move on to someone else i think that needs to be a standard we've been doing it for years it's a bibliography every single show we have an admonish button for us in show if we get something wrong um and if people don't have some i know you guys had the

8. 1:29:11

   fact check that you said uh if people don't even attempt that you can't trust them and then i think we people need to be more more discerning um we're in an era where this is really scary i definitely think for young people where everything's a short and a short and a short not only attention spans are they shorter but you have people who i don't even know if they assume everything they read is true i think they just don't care that's such a good point because what this is for those people