Firing Line

>> The brave new world of new media, this week on Firing Line.

>> People from traditional media and entertainment often see younger people.

And there's a presumption that we are pretending to be media players, but we are children.

We don't deserve a seat at the table.

>> Dave Wiskus is part of the movement to democratize content creation.

He's launched a new kind of streaming platform, Nebula, that puts creators, not media companies, in the driver's seat.

If you look at the map of the entertainment industry, there's a canyon running through it.

On one side of the canyon, you've got film, television, music.

And then on the other side of the canyon is the creator economy.

This box has $15,000 in it.

This economy includes creators like Jimmy Donaldson, whose YouTube channel, Mr.

Beast, has the world's largest audience on YouTube, earning him more than $85 million a year.

- You won $9,340.

- I think the big interesting shift is the lack of gatekeepers.

Now, a college student can wake up in the morning with an idea and make a video, and they could reach potentially millions of people.

- Should the gatekeepers be nervous?

- Extremely.

- What does media disruptor Dave Wiskus say now?

- Firing Line with Margaret Hoover is made possible in part by and by the following.

- Dave Wiskus, welcome to Firing Line.

- Thank you for having me.

- You are the founder of Nebula, which is an online streaming service and media company, which is a curated online destination for the creator economy, which is at the forefront of new media.

For the uninitiated, what is the creator economy?

The creator economy is a group of people who have gone on the internet, made things, published them for other people to see.

- Made videos or?

- Videos, blog posts, podcasts, anything that they can create and post to the internet.

And they found a way to make that their living.

You take one person doing that, then multiply that by millions and millions and millions of people, you have economic impact.

- Some of the individuals with the greatest followings on the internet are creators, like you've described.

The biggest is somebody named Mr.

Beast.

A guy named Jimmy Donaldson who has the number one YouTube following in the world.

He has more than 634 million followers on YouTube.

He has annual earnings of more than $85 million.

So this is not just a small economic impact.

There is major upside if you're a successful creator in the creator economy.

Yeah, there's a lot of money.

That's a yes.

There's a lot of money in this game.

Listen, so the reason I want to talk to you is because we are witnessing the collapse of traditional media.

Congress has cut the federal funds for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Many of America's public television affiliates will atrophy.

Meanwhile, we are facing a phenomenon of cord cutting, cable news atrophying, and streaming services coming online and being enormously successful, yours included, more people watch YouTube now than any other video platform.

How do you understand this shift in the media landscape?

It almost seems like a natural consequence of the evolution of technology.

Once upon a time it was print, and then radio came along, and then television came along, and then the Internet came along, and so it's just one medium to another.

I think the big interesting shift is not the medium, but rather the lack of gatekeepers.

It used to be that if you wanted to publish a newspaper, you had to have a whole publishing company.

If you wanted to launch a radio station, you needed a broadcast license, television broadcast license.

There's a huge barrier to entry, and if you wanted to put a show on any of these things, you had to work with gatekeepers.

Now, a college student can wake up in the morning with an idea and make a video, publish it on YouTube, a platform where they have relatively equal footing to anyone else on the platform, and they can find an audience.

The algorithm will help audiences discover that video, and they could reach potentially millions of people.

So the shift is less about the medium to me and more about the gatekeepers, or lack of gatekeepers.

Should the gatekeepers be nervous?

Extremely.

- What do you offer creators that YouTube doesn't?

Well, I think that the easiest answer to the question of what we offer is equity.

On YouTube, it's a flea market.

They don't care who the winners or losers are.

The YouTube algorithm is designed so that when you as a viewer, if I'm publishing a video and you are a viewer, when you come in, the algorithm is trying to find videos that you would like.

It is not trying to find an audience for me.

It is looking at you and your profile and trying to find things that it thinks that you would enjoy watching.

I often describe the YouTube algorithm as like a robot puppy.

It just wants to make you happy.

It's just like you're the viewer, you're a guest that's coming to the home and it just runs up, tail wagging, it just wants to make you happy.

So then how is your platform different?

We have no puppy.

Okay.

We're puppy free.

If my 12-year-old son were here, he would ask, "How is Nebula trying to influence the algorithm?"

That's a smart kid.

We're curated.

Our platform is not algorithmically driven.

We do benefit tremendously from the existing YouTube algorithm.

My personal feelings on this, we don't see YouTube as a competitive thing.

We are very friendly with executives there.

I'm friends with the guy who runs the YouTube algorithm.

He's very lovely.

What they want to build is a great system for finding you things that you would be interested in saying.

And the impact, the responsibility I feel for us as a community, for me personally, for our business and our platform is if we are taking people who are doing the most thoughtful work, making the best things, they have the most interesting ideas, ambition, if we are helping those people reach further and helping them build sustainable businesses, they stand a better chance of continuing to put things into the system that the algorithm can then go and put in front of an applicable audience.

And that means that we have a chance of being a contributor, a community-level contributor, not a corporate-level contributor, to what goes into that algorithm to begin with.

Because if the only things going into that system are junk food and nonsense, then that's what we're, that's what we collectively are putting out in the world.

How has the creator economy grown into an industry that Goldman Sachs estimates will be in 2027 worth half a trillion dollars?

Steve Jobs.

Explain.

- 2007, the iPhone came out.

Before that, phones were like Motorola razors, right?

Like you would-- maybe you could text, and there was some stuff like with a T-Mobile sidekick, maybe you could get internet on, I forget.

But like the idea of a smartphone wasn't really a thing.

It was a very niche kind of advice that didn't work very well.

The iPhone comes along, internet communication device in your pocket.

We could have access to real-time streaming video and audio and reading everyone's thoughts, however toxic they may be, on a device that we take with us to the bathroom.

That's a real shift in how we think, that's a real shift in how we consume things, and it's a real shift in the way we perceive the world around us.

Before, it was a bit more of a destination, a lean back experience.

You would intentionally choose something on television to watch.

Now you just press a button and it feeds things to you.

- What's your story?

How did you go from being homeless in and out of high school, a dropout, you've referred yourself to yourself as a dropout, to running a company on the new frontier of a media ecosystem?

- I have no idea how that happened.

- You're from Denver, my hometown.

- Yeah, from Denver.

I grew up mostly there and a little bit in Southern California.

My parents split up when I was very young.

I grew up with my mom.

Don't come from money, and we moved around a lot.

She struggled, and there were times when we especially struggled.

And then I think that if I had been born a few years later, I probably would have been classified as one form or another of neurodivergent, and I probably would have gotten a different level of attention.

From the moving around in that era of history, I was just kind of not great at school.

It wasn't that I was dumb.

I would, I love to learn on my own.

I love to read.

I love to, I grew up watching like Bill Nye the Science Guy, stuff like that.

But I didn't do great in school.

And it wasn't for me.

I failed out.

I dropped out when I was 16.

Spent all my time on a computer learning how those worked.

And just because I didn't have a strong education, I didn't have a degree to go in with, I didn't qualify for a lot of jobs.

So I think the first half of my 20s was bouncing between entry level call center jobs and delivering pizza.

And most of that time was spent like sleeping in my car or on friends' couches.

>> But you were also teaching yourself through videos.

>> Through videos, through watching, through reading websites, anything I could, anything I would find, I would pursue my own interests.

And the ability that the internet gave me to fall down rabbit holes of the things that I was intensely curious about, I gained an incredible amount of knowledge from all of these people who just put it online for free that enabled me to go and build a career in the tech industry.

I was able to learn enough to where at a certain point people stopped asking me about my education.

I had been in there just long enough that everyone assumed.

This year, streamers have surpassed the combined share of television usage of broadcast and cable for the first time.

Netflix and Apple are churning out content constantly.

Most major studios have ties to streaming services of their own, and a lot of the smaller services like Nebula, are really thriving.

I've heard you refer to yourself as one side of the canyon, and they're the other side of the canyon.

Yeah.

If you look at the map of the entertainment industry, on one side there's a canyon running through it, and on one side of the canyon you've got film, television, music, video games, theater, radio, everything.

Books.

And then on the other side of the canyon is the creator economy.

It is interesting to me that most of the time when the folks from that side of the canyon will interface with folks from our side of the canyon, it's to use us as a marketing system.

They want to pay creators to promote the things that they made.

They don't really want to bring creators in to help them make things.

And I think there's a few reasons for that.

Some are earned.

The creator economy is made up largely of younger people who became wildly successful at the first thing they ever tried, and they have a level of arrogance around their own abilities and their ability to work with larger teams or fit into a system may not be the same as somebody who came up through that system.

I think that it's also true that unfairly, people from traditional media and entertainment often see younger people who came up through internet platform channels and there's a presumption that we are dilettantes, that we are pretending to be media players, but we are children.

We don't deserve a seat at the table.

I think that that is changing, and the folks from the other side are starting to pay more attention, but it is still true that most of the time when they reach out, it's because they want us to promote what they're doing.

So if they're only reaching out for the purposes of promotion and marketing, what should they be doing, or what could they be doing instead?

I think the smartest play would be to acknowledge that there is this incredible collection, a very vast collection of people who have built large audiences, making things on very small budgets by being scrappy and being clever.

And the presumption that they couldn't do anything else might be holding traditional media back from treating it a bit more like a farm league where you can take some of the players who have really done interesting things here and help shape them into being ready to do things in this other system.

And that isn't to say that everyone over on this side of the canyon needs to move over.

I would just like to remove the canyon and treat all of it as the entertainment industry with the sort of crossover, cross-pollination, co-mingling that you see between television and film or it's not uncommon for rappers to become actors or whatever.

These things happen.

It should happen in all directions.

For the uninitiated, how does the influencer phenomenon relate to, you know, the phenomenon of influencers on social media, right?

How does that relate to the creator economy?

They count.

I think that the influencer has become kind of a dirty word.

People think influencer and they think obnoxious dilettante who just wants attention.

How would you define an influencer?

An obnoxious dilettante who wants attention.

I think with influencer, that word influence, a lot of it is about trading your ability to sell an idea to others, trading the influence you have on other people for money.

And I think that a lot of the way that manifests is people like doing big, ostentatious things, trying to sell a lifestyle or sell things that are maybe authentic but not very sincere, and things that don't necessarily have a lot of value.

And the sort of public perception and kind of the backlash to influencer culture, I think largely comes down to people who will behave poorly in exchange for attention which then gets them money.

I have heard you say that there is a trend that you think that the era of the influencer is waning and the era of creator IP is ascendant.

Can you explain what you mean by that?

I think that the window of time where being famous for being famous, I hope, is sort of coming to a close.

We're certainly still in a world where building a parasocial, an imbalanced relationship with your audience, where these are people who feel like they know you.

So you think about somebody like Tom Cruise.

People who are fans of Tom Cruise, they might know things about his personal life, but when they go and watch a movie he's in, Top Gun: Maverick, or whatever, they're looking at the characters he plays and their attachment to those characters.

And to a certain level, like on a on a the surface, there is, "Oh that's Tom Cruise, I like the things that he's in," or "I'm attached to this movie star," but you're not following his everyday life, feeling like you're a part of his story.

You don't feel like you and Tom are friends.

In internet world, it is fairly common for influencers, for social media world creators, to build an audience of people where part of what you're doing is you're telling your story.

You're talking about your journey.

They're following you, the things that you say.

And they do start to feel like they're part of your story and that you're part of their story.

- I just bought this entire grocery store, which includes enough food to literally feed an entire city.

And then I decided to trap this random guy inside.

And every day you live here, I will give you $10,000 in a grocery cart.

- Mr.

Beast is the most followed person on YouTube.

And growing faster than anybody else.

That's a stat that doesn't usually get shared.

He is gaining followers more than the number two creator.

Who is he and how did this happen?

He's just a dude from Greenville, North Carolina, who was hyper-obsessed with becoming a YouTuber and being the biggest.

And along the way, he made a little bit of money, and he put it all into doing big stunt stuff on YouTube, giving money away.

His brand is that he is philanthropic.

He wants to help people.

It's hotly debated.

It is hotly debated whether it's altruism that's fueling it.

Yeah, whether it is performative and toxic altruism, or if it's just true altruism, I'll leave that to the audience.

But he's a person, his entire internet identity for a long time was, he was there to help people.

He would go out and he would find poor people and give them $10,000 to do something and make a video, and that would get a lot of views because people wanted to see it.

And he keeps doing that, keeps doing that, keeps doing that, and he would go with bigger amounts of money, because the money was coming in from making these videos, he would give away more money and then more money, up until he just had his Amazon Prime video game show last year where he gave away, I think, $10 million.

- Okay, in 1988, Tipper Gore appeared on the original firing line with William F. Buckley Jr.

She was, of course, then the wife of Senator Al Gore, and she came on to defend her campaign to place warning labels on music with explicit lyrics.

Take a look at what Tipper Gore said to Buckley in '88.

Kids are vulnerable at 9, 10, 12, and 13, and if some of their favorite stars are singing about suicide, singing about rape, they're learning from that.

So according to a study on the Precise TV published recently, the average child between 2 and 12 watches 106 minutes of YouTube daily.

So then as one weighs parental restrictions and social media use by children, what can we learn from those efforts and the earlier efforts to restrict access to music and video games?

An honest answer?

Yeah, that's the point.

I'm not a parent.

I don't have kids and I don't want to present myself as, I don't want to presume to tell parents.

You're not giving advice.

Right.

But let me tell you what to do.

I think fundamentally if you're trusting the social media platform to decide what your kids should watch, you may not be taking an active enough role in your child's development.

And to simply ask Mark Zuckerberg to decide what's best for your kids is insane to me.

I think that people taking a little bit more responsibility and not necessarily letting their kids watch whatever they want to without any sort of oversight or filtering, there's good ways to handle this.

And there's a balance to be struck.

I think that the platforms do have a responsibility for the things that air on the platform.

If you have hard right influencers who are promoting anti-equality, anti-LGBTQ-- - Misogynist.

- Misogynist.

All of these toxic ideologies, and everyone is saying, "Well, they're not actively inciting violence, so that's fine."

I think that that is taking a backseat on a responsibility that you have.

How do you handle this on your platform?

We vet at the creator level, and if something comes up that is objectionable, if something comes up that becomes a larger problem, we have a conversation about it.

It's objectionable to who?

It could be objectionable to other people within the community, the creator community.

It could be objectionable to the audience.

But I think it is important to recognize that the things that... If we are creating a platform, we are not responsible for everything everyone says on the platform.

We are responsible for who we let on the platform.

And in our case, who we invite to the platform.

For Netflix, who they invite to the platform.

YouTube's a little bit different, but I think there's some responsibility.

- You still think that they should be responsible for the content that is held on the platform.

- Yeah, because to your question, if it is a concern of what is okay for children to see, I don't think that children are the only group that we should be thinking about what they're seeing and what they're not seeing.

And at the risk of playing both ends of the spectrum here, it is also true that much older people who don't have a strong understanding of technology, if you show them deep fake AI generated videos of a politician saying a thing, they may or may not have the technological context and savviness to understand what is or isn't real.

And so if all of these things can just be uploaded to platforms, you can see videos of your favorite politician acting as a hero and saying something amazing while your least favorite politician is being portrayed as a horrible person and you might now believe that that is fact.

And they can.

And they can.

I mean this does happen, right?

They can and as bad as it is to put that sort of thing in front of children, children can't vote.

Adults, thinking adults who may just not have a ton of understanding of social media and how these tools work, people can be tricked.

That doesn't mean that they're dumb or that they're bad, it just means we have a lot of new technologies and I don't think it's just children that we need to think about if we're thinking about what is or is not okay to publish.

Reports show that political campaigns are pouring millions of dollars into social media influencers to carry their message.

The Trump campaign successfully leaned on male podcasters to appeal to young men during the 2024 campaign.

What role does the creator economy play in politics?

Oh boy.

I do think that social media plays much more of a role today than it has in the past.

The role that influencers play, somebody had made a bubble graph of the size of all of the social media influencers who are the right-wing appeal to young men like the Joe Rogans and Andrew Tates and folks like that, and then compared it to the size of the folks on the the left side of the political spectrum who were big-name influencers, and it's like comparing a super massive black hole to our moon.

It was just crazy -- how much more influential the Republican side of the equation was in this election.

- Not even necessarily influential, just how, well I guess you could, this would be measured, but just how many more followers they have.

So many more people are following the right-wing influencers than the left.

When President Trump went on Joe Rogan's podcast, CNN identified at least 32 false claims that Trump made, most of which went completely unchallenged by Joe Rogan.

Is there a danger in this creator economy promulgating fake news, falsehoods?

Yeah, I think that's one of the biggest things lost with the defunding of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the impact it's going to have on PBS, the impact it's going to have on NPR is so much great journalism coming out of those organizations.

There's a real vetting system.

There are people who came up with an understanding of what journalism really means.

Journalism doesn't mean reporting things they heard, which is a lot of how social media works.

Journalism is about vetting and finding secondary sources to confirm what you heard and talking to people, boots on the ground, there's a whole process.

And as much as I think it's a fair criticism sometimes for traditional media to look at influencer culture and the creator economy and see us as people who don't have the same kind of experience, and as much as I feel that our fresh perspective on process is a good thing, I will stand by, I think that the loss of journalistic standards on this side of the canyon is a real concern.

And that's not one that comes because of the shift of eyeballs and attention over to here directly.

It's also that as eyeballs and attention shift, there's fewer advertising dollars in traditional media and news.

Also, I don't know, the billionaire oligarchs keep buying up all of the news outlets.

And that's having an impact on what journalism means and how people are approaching things.

How do you expect the creator economy will mature in the next five years to 10 years?

I love this question because I think that we're already seeing the tools have gotten better, the ability to make things.

Like most of us carry around 4K production studios in our pockets now and this is why you see TikTok exploding.

It's why you see Instagram Reels and YouTube and Snapchats coming back now.

You can make things and you can share them with other people and the friction, the bar is basically the floor.

Anyone can make this stuff and that's great.

It's also a bit of a problem, but it's mostly great.

And I think that as the industry matures and as the people who are responsible for creating these things, mature as creators and as thoughtful adults, sometimes ambitions exceed the boundaries of the phone screen.

And we want to make more and more things, and we will learn how to do that, and we will find a path to doing that.

I think you're going to see an explosion over the next few years of interesting, sophisticated storytellers trying things that we haven't seen before.

Dave Wiskus, thank you for joining me on Firing Line.

>> Thank you for explaining the creator economy, and thank you for joining me on Firing Line.

>> Thank you for having me.

Firing Line with Margaret Hoover is made possible in part by... And by the following.

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