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In this episode of Galaxy Brain, Charlie Warzel talks with the business writer Ed Elson about the rise of the “clip economy”—the idea that short video clips pulled from podcasts, livestreams, and other long-form content have become the dominant unit of online media, not just a promotional tool. Elson explains how figures like Andrew Tate pioneered armies of paid clippers to flood social platforms with content and how the viewership numbers on clips often perform better than the original shows. Warzel and Elson discuss what this means for legacy media organizations, as well as the broader societal costs of phone-driven attention erosion.
The following is a transcript of the episode:
Ed Elson: I think it’s incumbent on everyone who cares about their work in media to think quite deeply about this question and recognize that if they’re not watching you, they’re watching Nick Fuentes, they’re watching Hasan Piker, they’re watching Clavicular. They’re watching all of these guys. If you don’t get yourself out there on these social-media platforms, that’s who’s gonna fill the void.
(Music)
Charlie Warzel: I’m Charlie Warzel, and this is Galaxy Brain, a show where today we’re going to talk about clips.
There’s a good chance, if you spend a decent amount of time online, that a lot of the media you’re consuming is coming in the form of short-form video clips. Instagram Reels, videos on X, TikToks, YouTube shorts, and whatever is happening on Facebook. While writing this, I opened up my Instagram account, and here’s what I saw in order: a snippet of Kevin Hart talking about his tequila business on a popular tech podcast. A clip of pop singer Dua Lipa interviewing a playwright for her book-club podcast. A short video of my favorite band, Goose, shredding in St. Augustine, Florida. And a quick CBS Sports clip of two PGA Tour golfers talking before a sudden-death playoff in Hilton Head, South Carolina. Only two of those posts come from posts I follow. The rest were algorithmic recommendations.
Once you start looking, you realize that short video clips—not tweets, or posts, or static photos—have become the atomic unit of online content. Short-form video, of course, isn’t new, but the prevalence of the clips is.
Because clips are, in a way, distinct from short-form video. They’re supposed to be snippets of something bigger. In theory, they’re supposed to be the trailer or the teaser: something that will catch attention and, theoretically, get people to consume the larger thing.
Only, that may not be what is happening.
Clips have become a business unto themselves. Livestreamers and new-media influencers including video podcasters have enlisted professional clippers to capture the best moments from their videos and seed them across social media. Record labels are doing this too, getting clippers to pair compelling video snippets with artists’ songs on places like TikTok, all in the hopes that the song is going to blow up. Sometimes it works. But regardless, it’s clear: A lot of people are viewing, enjoying, or engaging with the clips, even if they never seek out the original work.
But clipping is a volume game. On dedicated Discord servers, clippers are standing by for the opportunity to make hundreds of clips: all with different edits, all of them geared toward finding what sticks with the algorithm.
Recently, Kick, the livestreaming platform, published clipping stats from the period of March 5 through April 5. The numbers are staggering. In total, 1,737 clippers made more than 309,000 videos. Clavicular—the edgelord looksmaxxing livestreamer infamous for hitting himself in the face with a hammer—published more than 69,000 video clips from his livestream across social-media platforms in one month.. He racked up more than 2.2 billion views.
And it’s not just the shock jocks. And this is leading to clipping becoming an economy unto itself. It’s changing not just what we see, but who we see. It’s scrambling the very definition of what it means to be popular online, and it very well may change what creators and even media organizations end up making.
To explain all of this, I’ve brought on Ed Elson. Ed is the co-host of the Prof G Markets podcast; the author of its tech, economics, and media newsletter; and I think, it’s fair to say, an extremely online person whose clips frequently show up in my feeds. Recently he wrote about this phenomenon, and he argues that clipping has taken over the internet, creating a situation where the teasers are more popular—and potentially more lucrative—than the original content itself. He joins me now to explain why.
(Music)
Warzel: Ed, welcome to Galaxy Brain.
Ed Elson: Thank you for having me. Good to be here.
Warzel: So you host a popular podcast and, from my vantage, you are someone who’s in a lot of places at once, right? Frequent episodes, frequent posting on all the platforms. And you’re somebody who is making things, like I am, to be consumed by other people online. And you gave this interview last year where you said: “In 2025, being extremely online is essential. You cannot succeed without clocking insane hours online.” And you reference your friend Adam Faze with this hiring rule, where I guess any prospective employee has to prove that they spend like eight hours a day or more on their phone.
Elson: At least eight hours; that’s the rule.
Warzel: And you were like, this is the correct way to do it. First of all, do you still agree with that? That was last year. Do you still agree with that in 2026?
Elson: Yeah, I do, but I’ll add a caveat. If you are in media, if your job is to get messages out there, certainly if you’re in social media—if your job is to communicate things to the world—you should 100 percent be spending at least … I mean, eight hours is a lot.
Warzel: It is.
Elson: That’s kind of crazy. That’s his rule. I won’t endorse that. But you should be spending extreme amounts of time online if that’s your job. If your job is something else—if, I don’t know, if you’re a trader, if you’re working in insurance—then maybe you don’t want to be doing that. I don’t know. But I’ll say from the position that I’m sitting in, in the world of media, if you’re trying to succeed in media, yes, you have to be extremely online. I stand by that.
Warzel: Is this part of your broad theory of media creation right now? Is it a volume game in your mind?
Elson: Yes; it is increasingly becoming a volume game. You could have an incredibly insightful, thoughtful article. I mean, this is what you guys do over at The Atlantic every day. Incredibly smart people with incredibly great ideas. If you’re not clipping that up and giving it to people in bite-size little shoots of information, the way that they are consuming information today—which is through their phones and online scrolling on social media, scrolling on TikTok, scrolling on Instagram, et cetera—if you’re not doing that, people aren’t going to read it.
And so what we’re going to see is that this trend is going to continue to get larger and larger, and some would argue worse and worse. Where if you’re not on these digitally native platforms—it’s a pretty simple premise—then people aren’t gonna consume the content. And I don’t like that. I don’t think that’s a good thing. I would prefer if young people read, but they increasingly don’t read. And so if you’re a content creator, you kind of have a choice. It’s like: Do I leave the world to be consumed and dominated by Andrew Tate and Clavicular and Nick Fuentes? The guys who have literally created their entire media empires around being online and around the clip ecosystem, livestreaming, et cetera? Do we just concede that, Oh, they win; they figured it out?
Or do we want to compete? Do we want to actually put our ideas out there? And so that’s what I try to do. We talk about, you know, intellectual ideas on our podcasts. We talk about investing. We talk about finance. We talk about the economy. These are not very clippable subjects. But we’re doing everything in our power to clip that content up as much as possible and to make sure that we are dominating social-media feeds. Because the way I see it, it’s a competition. It’s like: Either kids are gonna watch Clavicular, and they’re gonna smash hammers into their face to looksmaxx, or they’re gonna watch something else. And I wanna be the something else.
Warzel: So when you say you’re clipping this stuff up—just from a logistical standpoint, a standard podcast, how many things are you trying to pull out of it from there? Is it like five, 10 things like that? Is it 20? Is it two or three of the best ones? How broad does the volume game go with that on a podcast level?
Elson: So we’re just getting started with this. So I don’t think we figured this out. I just want to be very clear. My position is that I’m observing that this is where the media ecosystem is headed. And so I’m doing my best to make sure that we, as a media organization, keep up with the times. The system that we have in place is that we produce at least two clips for every podcast episode we record. I would love to create more. I would love to create three, four, five clips. Eventually, you know, it might get a little bit overwhelming and not that interesting. And so you want to make sure that you’re controlling for quality in some capacity. But for me, what is essential is that we have a system. And we have a cadence of taking the content that we’re producing on our main channel—which is our podcast—but then making sure that we actually put it out there to social media. Because, I mean, this is the thing that I write about in my article. I have been shocked by how many people come up to me on the street. They say, “Hey, Ed Elson, great to see you, big fan.” I say, “Oh, awesome; you listen to the podcast?” And they say, “No, I actually don’t listen to the podcast, but I watch your clips.” And the first time I heard that, I go, “What? You watch the clips?” I mean, the clips are supposed to be … I thought the clips was the advertisement for the podcast.
Warzel: Right. The gateway drug, yeah.
Elson: That’s why we were doing it to start. And then I realized: No, the clips are the content. That’s what people are consuming. That’s where they’re spending their time. So you can’t treat this stuff as promotional material anymore. You have to treat it as real content. You have to acknowledge the fact that young kids today, they’re not seeing the link that you put up on their social-media feeds. Like hey, click here to watch the podcast. They’re not even doing that. They’re only watching the clips. And that’s the way they see you. So that means investing a lot more time and having a lot more thoughtful conversation about: Okay, how do we make sure that our content really resonates on these platforms? Whereas recently, I think, especially legacy media, we’ve been kind of treating it as an afterthought.
Warzel: Is this a euphemism in your mind? Like: People don’t read anymore. People don’t watch, listen to the whole podcast anymore. Or is this in your mind much closer to the actual ground truth?yYou are not seeing people engage much or in the same order of magnitude at all with the original unit of content?
Elson: I think it’s 100 percent true, but let’s maybe be specific about what the phrase is. It’s that people increasingly don’t read anymore. So my position isn’t that no one reads. Of course people still read. And I think that there are some young people who read. But I do know that reading rates are on the decline. And I also know that the amount of time that we’re spending on social media, versus any other platform, is on the up. And we can also just see this in the incredible explosion of a platform like TikTok, which has … literally their revenues have 10x over the past few years. Meta, their revenues have tripled. That to me isn’t a euphemism. That’s just the truth. And I think the question is: To what extent do we want to take that seriously? Because, you know, there’s a question of, like, how long will this continue?
Is this line of reading rates just gonna go down and down and down to the point where no one reads? That might be overshooting it a little bit. But I don’t think that we can assume that the line’s gonna just not keep going down. I think we have to assume that, actually, the environment is really changing. And we’ve seen this reflected in the stock prices of a lot of these companies. Warner Brothers Discovery, down like 30 percent over the past few years. Same with Disney, Comcast; a lot of these companies are getting battered.
I view this as a “let’s just reckon with reality” moment and figure out what to do about it. And my belief is that there are things that we can do about it. I think that legacy media can keep up. I think that legacy media has the smartest minds in all of media. And I also think they produce the best content in all of media. It’s just that they haven’t spent enough time focusing on how to package the content and how to distribute it. And I think if we were to take that more seriously, I think that it might be a different story. And you’d see a generation of kids who are actually getting stupider—like we’re seeing literacy rates, math rates going down—I would hope that that might start to reverse that trend.
Warzel: To zoom out on the blog post, the reason that we’re here. About the clip economy: The argument is that these one-minute-style videos—the things that like, if you go online on any social-media platform—this is what you’re mostly engaging with. You’re saying that essentially this isn’t the promotional stuff. This is not just some sort of nugget. This is really where a lot of the media seems to be headed. And so I wanted to start small here. You talk about teasing out the difference between a short-form video and the clip industry and clips. What is the distinction in your mind, and why is that important?
Elson: Yeah, so the distinction between short-form content as a category versus clips as a category. My argument: I think a lot of people know that short-form content is on the rise. My argument is that we haven’t paid enough attention to this format of clips specifically. And my definition of a clip is: It is a snippet of something else, which is usually long form. And it’s usually a podcast, it’s usually a livestream. It might be, you know, even like a snippet from like a cable-news show, like a TV program. That’s a “clip” to me.
And what I have observed, over the past really one or two years, is that the algorithm is being largely dominated by that format. It’s that you have something like a podcast, and then you just see little moments of it on your social-media feed. And that’s your experience of those podcasts.
And so that to me was a very striking moment, because it made me realize that we were treating the TV shows and the podcasts and the livestreams as if that was where all the action was happening. Like, I need to make sure that this podcast is excellent, and it’s going to be 30 minutes long, and I’m going to make sure that it’s perfect. And then we have the great hook, and we have the intro, and then we have the music. All of this stuff. And I realized, like, Wait, that’s not how people are consuming this. They’re consuming it through the clips.
So why aren’t we paying attention to that? And then essentially what my article does is just prove how that is the case for a lot of the most successful new-media enterprises over the past few years. And I picked three of the most controversial new-media superstars who got famous off of clips. I chose Hasan Piker, this progressive, controversial livestreamer. Nick Fuentes, this white-nationalist livestreamer. And then Clavicular, who’s this guy who got famous for looksmaxxing, where he believes that the most important thing in the world is that your physical appearance is a 10 out of 10. This guy is huge, massive. I mean, we were just looking at his total number of clips on Kick. It came in at over 2 billion views on clips.
But when you look at their actual shows, the numbers are in a completely different world. So we looked at the average concurrent views across these livestreamers’ shows. For Hasan Piker, it was around 30,000. For Nick Fuentes, it was around 20,000. For Clavicular, it was even less than that. It was about 16,000. That is not a big number for a lot of these shows. And yet that is the average for their concurrent views.
And then you look at the clip viewership. And we just looked at a small sample size, because there have been a lot of clips. But for Hasan Piker, the average was above 700,000 views. For Nick Fuentes, the average was above half a million views. For Clavicular, it was a quarter of a million. I looked back at one of Nick Fuentes’s most recent clips. It reached 11 million people, which is more than the population of New York City. And so what I started to realize is: It’s not about the show. It’s about the clip. That’s how these guys are reaching people. And not only that, that is how the content is primarily being consumed. So it’s not just a medium to get the word out about who you are. It’s the entire medium.
And then I go on to talk about this company, which I realized actually just profited off of this trend. And that is this company TBPN. What is the average view count on their livestreams? 7,000. What is the average view count on their clips? 257,000. So this again is a company that figured out: It’s not about the show, it’s not about the podcast, it’s not about the news show or the TV program or the livestream. It is solely about the clips. This is where we’re headed. And an entire new economy is emerging out of this, which I think we must call the “clip economy.”
Warzel: Well, what’s interesting about all the people that you bring up—the thing they all have in common is the streaming practice that they have is long in duration, right? Like, Clavicular will do, you know, five, six, seven, eight hours. Obviously like Hasan is every day from multiple hours a day. I think it used to be more, but it was in the, you know, eight-hour-like range. So there’s this unbelievable amount of content from which to choose from. And in this sense too, it’s like, you know, so much of livestreaming is predicated on this idea of just like, “Come hang out.” Right? Like “Come, just stay here, have it in the background.” It’s sort of the AM talk-radio style of thing. And then the clipping thing seemed to be, to me, it seems to be almost this savior, right? Because after a certain amount of time, essentially what they’re doing is: They are packaging this greatest-hits thing and giving it this way to monetize. Do you think it’s sort of like an outgrowth of that? Was planned? Or do you think it’s kind of an unplanned, like, saving grace of this livestreaming, long-streaming format?
Elson: I think that it probably wasn’t planned. This livestreaming thing started to get popular. And I think they started to realize over time, What else am I going to do with this? How am I going to reach people on social media? How am I going to reach people on these video platforms? Oh, well, I have this bank of eight hours of content. I might as well clip a little bit of a video and then put it out there.
And then once in a while, those videos go completely viral. And this happens even with us. I mean, I had been saying some pretty strong words about OpenAI about a year or two ago. I was basically saying that I didn’t think that their financials made a whole lot of sense. And I’ve been saying that a lot on the podcast. And, you know, some people who listen to the podcast say, oh, that’s interesting. Then I put out a video—just a clip of me saying the same thing I’ve said over and over again—and it explodes. It goes viral. Ben Shapiro is talking about it. I see it; I start getting requests for interviews about it. And I suddenly realize, Oh, that’s where I should technically be investing my time if I want to get the word out.
So I think a lot of these guys realized that. But there’s one person who really pioneered this and who turned it into a real operation, and that is Andrew Tate.
Warzel: Yeah; walk me through that. How did he stumble upon this as a business model?
Elson: So I don’t purport to know how he figured it out. But he figured it out, and he was the first one to figure it out. And he did that in 2021. And that is—he created this community that he called Hustlers University. And he said that this was gonna be, “If you wanna escape the matrix”—which is his sort of tagline—“then join Hustlers University, and I’ll teach you how to do it.” And what happened when you join Hustlers University is he gave you instructions. And he said: Watch my livestream and use these clipping tools, and I want you to clip up as many segments of my livestream as you can possibly imagine. I want you to get up on social media, create a social-media account that is related to Andrew Tate and Hustlers University. And I want you to post as many clips as humanly possible from those accounts. And at the end of each clip, you’re going to add an affiliate link to Hustlers University. You’re going to get people to join the group, when you’ll pay a little subscription fee to join the group. And I will pay you a commission for getting people into the group. And eventually, he was getting billions and billions of views on TikTok—not from his own account, but from many different accounts.
Eventually, Andrew Tate gets banned because he’s racist, he’s sexist, he’s misogynistic. He says a ton of awful, awful things. TikTok decides to ban him. And yet his clips live on, because he has a clipping army that is out there on TikTok, out on the platform, that continues to post the clips for him. The same thing is true on Instagram.
You’ll notice a lot of these guys are actually banned from platforms. Nick Fuentes is banned from Instagram. He’s banned from YouTube. So then the question is: Why is Nick Fuentes all over Instagram? How is that possible? It’s because other people, clippers, are posting his content all over Instagram. And that’s how people who are on Instagram are finding Nick Fuentes, despite the fact that he is banned.
We’re seeing this with a lot of other streamers, too. Where they basically—I mean, we’re seeing this proliferation of clipping agencies. These agencies that just clip your content. And this guy, there’s a livestreamer, this guy called N3on. And I was looking at his livestream recently, and he revealed on his livestream how much he pays his clippers each month. He’s talking with someone, and this young woman asked him, “Wait, so how much do you pay them?” And he’s kind of playing a guessing game, and he finally reveals the answer. He pays his clippers $1 million a month to post clips of his content all throughout the internet. He says that one of the clippers that he thinks is really good, he paid them more than $100,000 in a single month.
So people are now making millions of dollars a year just to clip this stuff. It’s become its own ecosystem, its own economy, that only a few people have really figured out. And they have gamed it relentlessly. And Andrew Tate is the one who started it.
Warzel: Okay, I’ve been wanting to have this conversation. Because I think it speaks to this broader confusion that we’re all experiencing right now, with attention and virality. This story makes me think of another story that’s been making the rounds recently. This piece in Wired, I don’t know if you’ve seen it, about this agency called Chaotic Good—which creates networks of social-media pages, usually on TikTok, and uses them to drive music from a band that they’re getting paid by into a recommendation algorithm, right?
And this Wired article suggests—though there’s not like a ton of conclusive evidence—they were working with this indie band, Geese, which blew up over the last year. And basically the article talks about how there’s been all these accusations that Geese is an industry plant, right? That their success is a little bit artificial. And the thrust of the piece is that Chaotic Good, this marketing firm, is basically creating all these third-party posts, paying other people to do this work, to seed the algorithm. And that it’s basically saying, like … I mean, the Wired headline uses the word psyop.
What I think is really interesting about this is, the discourse around all of this has missed this idea. Like, it’s not about whether they’re good or bad, or whether you’re getting … it’s simply about discovery. It’s simply that this band, and every other band, they’re all competing. You can make stuff that’s good; you can make stuff that’s bad. It doesn’t matter. It’s so hard to break through, regardless of your talent level.
And so what is paramount in this—and this is why I think the clipping industry is so important—is that it’s not just a billboard, right? It’s just actually elbowing out other people from the conversation. It’s showing the algorithm, whether it’s true or false: Everyone’s talking about this band. Everyone’s talking about this influencer. Right? And that is the most crucial thing that you can have in this attention economy right now, just people talking about you.
Elson: That’s right. 100 percent. And I will give you an example. Last week, I walked by a coffee shop that’s in my neighborhood, in Williamsburg, that is fine. I’ve been there. The coffee’s okay. I see a line around the block that continues around the block, and then continues for two more blocks. Randomly. I asked them, “What happened? Like, why are you guys here?” And I learned it’s because they recently went viral on TikTok. That’s why they’re all there.
And I would bet that there is a significant percentage of your listeners right now who have had a similar experience where they walk by a shop. They walk by, especially if you live in New York City, and randomly, everyone is waiting in line for this thing. And you will find that every single time that happens, the reason their business explodes is simply because they randomly went viral on TikTok. And so what you have is that the algorithm is the most consequential force in the entire industry. And it’s not just media. It’s literally every single industry.
If you can go viral, if your clip works that one time, that can literally be the difference between you going out of business and becoming the greatest success story anyone’s ever seen. Is it because you guys were incredibly good at making coffee? Is it because you have an awesome vibe in the restaurant? No, not necessarily. It’s probably because you happened to stumble upon a good moment in the algorithm. Something worked in that little video, and then it went viral. Everyone’s talking about it. What should we do this weekend? Oh, why don’t we just randomly go to that coffee place that we talked about that I saw on TikTok recently? You show up, and then the line is literally like seven blocks long, at which point maybe rethink your decision. But that is what’s happening across most industries.
And I think the question—and this is where it gets really interesting for media—the question is: How do we convert that into dollars? And this is the conversation that I often have with legacy-media people. Where I’ll say, “Clips are everything. You have to be on clips.” And they say, “Yeah, but there’s no money in clips.” Like, okay, you got a quarter of a million views on your clip. Well, I’m not selling ads on that. What I am selling ads on is, I’m selling ads on my podcast and the ad break, and I’m also selling ads on my TV program, on cable news, et cetera. So here is the answer: Advertise on the clips. That’s what you have to do.
And so my suggestion for legacy media, if you want to keep up—if you’re Disney, if you’re Comcast, if you’re Warner Brothers Discovery—what they don’t realize is that they are sitting on the largest clip mine in the history of the world. Because they have decades’ worth of content that they have been producing, and it’s good content.
This is the thing people forget about legacy media. Legacy media is actually really good at creating original content. They create great movies, great TV shows. They’re awesome at it. But what they haven’t done is tapped into the clip economy. And so what they need to do is: They need to start clipping up their content, posting it on their social-media channels, and then advertising directly through the clip. Don’t even let tech touch it, because all that’s been happening is that all the money goes to Meta, and it goes to TikTok and all the tech platforms that are facilitating our addiction to these clips. So don’t even let them get a piece of the pie. It’s gonna be dystopian, and it’s gonna be kind of a shitty experience for consumers. I get it. I don’t necessarily want it. But if we’re talking about how to make money, and how to actually win the media ecosystem and stop getting beaten to death by big tech that continues to win, I think this is the only way out.
Warzel: On a previous episode of this podcast, I had Derek Thompson on to talk about this piece he wrote. It’s titled “Everything Is Television.” But there’s this idea, right, that we talked about this—not only are human beings not meant to all be broadcasting to everyone all the time, everywhere in this way. And to think, you know, not all of us should be thinking like TV producers, when we’re just trying to get people to pay attention to something that we like, or trying to get some attention online. There’s just a real attentional effect here. And probably we don’t know what that is long term, right?
But the clips are a medium that not only promote binging; they’re also this very lean-back experience, right? This idea of like, you are kind of flicking through, you can pay nominal amount of attention to it. You can log what you like, what you don’t like. Obviously TikTok has taken such advantage of this. You know, you’re basically sending it a signal every single time you swipe. When you think about that versus the engagement of something like reading—the deep thinking, the deep work—versus the enjoyable, I would say, experience of clips, right? Like, “the best of whatever thing.” That makes a lot of sense.
I don’t think we need to clutch our pearls about that, but I’m also curious where you think this is heading in that attentional capacity.
Elson: I mean, I’m pretty firm about this. I think it’s heading to an extremely bad place. And we don’t even need to theorize on this, because we know that it’s happening. We have seen a marked decline in—we talked about test scores, which I think is something that’s under-talked about, which is that young people are getting stupider because they have these extremely high rates of ADHD and attention-deficit disorders. They can’t pay attention to anything.
We saw a rise in depression and even suicidal ideation and even suicide itself after the introduction of the smartphone. I mean, if you look back from 2012 to now, all of those lines basically just go up and to the right. And then I think the most important thing, that I think is also underrated—although it’s now getting a lot more attention, which is a good thing—is the effect that it’s had on young people’s social lives. And I think the most important and damning stat about young people today is that nearly a fifth of Gen Z say they have zero close friends whatsoever.
We’ve never seen anything like that before. I mean, if you look back at like 1990 and you polled Americans: “How many of you have no close friends whatsoever?” The number was 3 percent. And it’s gone up and up and up and up. And now we’re seeing record levels of loneliness. And to me, I mean, it’s directly in line with the amount of time that we’re spending on our phones.
The question then becomes: What do we wanna do about it? To me, when we start to talk at this high level, this is a regulation problem. This is not on media creators and content creators to figure out how to not make young children, young individuals in America lonely. To me, that’s on government. And it’s government’s job to come up with creative solutions. For example, let’s ban social media for children. Done. That’s a simple one. Australia’s already done it. Spain is working on it. France is working on it. Denmark’s working on it. Practically all of Europe is working on this. They’re basically saying: Oh yeah, this was a bad thing for children. This was not good. Let’s get rid of it, and let’s just ban it for children.
So that’s something that we could do in the U.S. if we wanted to really get to the root cause of the problem here. We could start to retrain young people’s minds such that they are reading books and getting outside and socializing with people, such that they do learn how to actually establish relationships with people.
But when it comes to people like us—content creators, people in media—my view is we should be putting stuff out there. We should be competing with Clavicular. I would rather a young person watches my video where I talk about ways to establish economic security in America versus a young person watch a video of Clavicular smashing his face and doing meth off camera. And I think it’s incumbent on everyone who cares about their work in media to think quite deeply about this question and recognize that if they’re not watching you, they’re watching Nick Fuentes, they’re watching Hasan Piker, they’re watching Clavicular. They’re watching all of these guys. If you don’t get yourself out there on these social-media platforms, that’s who’s gonna fill the void.
Warzel: Do you think that the trend line has to just keep going this way? One thing that I was thinking about at the beginning of this year is an idea of—you can call it social media, but I think it’s more of like a phone backlash, culturally. This idea that just sitting with your face buried in your phone when you’re supposed to be in a social setting—that’s lame, right? Like, being identified culturally as This is loser behavior.
And it makes me wonder, thinking about the clip—to bring it to the clipping stuff—there’s an exhaustion that I think anyone feels with this. Like, yes, it is rad to be able to just watch the best of everything that anyone makes and has to give, in these short consumable bursts. But do you think that there’s the possibility for a coming sort of societal backlash on all this? Where we’re just like, “Hey, you know what. Waking up to the idea that there’s one precious life here.” Right? And there’s a lot of great stuff out there beyond the black mirror screen of our phones.
Elson: I think it would be similar to saying, “Why doesn’t the cocaine addict wake up one day and realize that cocaine isn’t good for them?” I think it’s something that—
Warzel: Some people hit rock bottom, though, and seek help.
Elson: Right. So I would add, some people do get rid of their addictions. And it’s a very, very painful and intentional process. It requires extensive rehabilitation. It requires resources and investment. Like the idea of shirking a deeply, deeply held addiction that is having a negative impact on your life—that is no small matter. And I think it is possible that we could get there. But that would mean treating the addiction with the level of gravity that you would for, say, a drug addiction or an alcohol addiction. It would mean taking the addiction very seriously and, more importantly, recognizing that it is an addiction.
And my view is that it is an addiction. I mean, the definition of an addiction—some people are addicted to a lot of things, but we call it an addiction once it is having negative impacts on our lives. There’s plenty of data out there to prove that that is what the phones have done to us. And that is what social media has done to us too.
But I agree with you. We should really just focus on the phones. That’s what they’ve done. And so to me, if it’s going to happen, it needs to be a very, very strong societal collective push against the phone.
Warzel: The clipping economy, what it seems to do, to me, is really scramble the traditional ideas of popularity, Clavicular, according to Kick and the clipping people: 2.2 billion views from a single creator in a one-month period. Is Clavicular popular, though? Right? Like, he’s bringing in all these views. They may be artificially seeded from these clipping companies: people getting paid to just take them and post them. Right? He is everywhere. You can’t deny that. Is that popularity? Does that matter? What is popularity now?
Elson: I think that’s popularity. And this is what I’m trying to reframe about these clips. A view is a view. My podcast, the way that we make money is someone listens to the podcast, and then I report it as a number. And then I send it to the advertiser, and then they pay me some money because there was a number on the screen.
And the same is true of a clip. And you could put whatever you want in that clip. I mean, this is an advertising-based system, and all that matters is that you get in front of the screen. The way that we’ve been treating clips and short-form content and content on social media is that we’ve kind of presented it as something lesser-than. Like, it’s not; it doesn’t matter if it’s a clip. Like “That’s not real popularity, because it’s just clips.” But in my view, a view is a view. A listen is a listen. An impression is an impression—
Warzel: And dollars are dollars.
Elson: And dollars are dollars.
Warzel: I think that’s a great place to leave it. Ed, thank you so much for coming on Galaxy Brain and breaking down the dystopian clip economy for us.
Elson: Thank you for having me. That was fun.
(Music)
Warzel: Thanks again to my guest, Ed Elson. Before we go, a few thoughts. I think that the world Ed is describing here is very much the one that we’re currently living in, and I think we’re gonna see a lot of people taking Ed’s advice and monetizing their clips. And the trends that he speaks to—about consumption, these shorter attention spans, the continued desire to engage with content as shallowly as possible—that’s all real.
What I’m not certain of, though, is whether this trend of clipping is sustainable. It’s so easy to binge clips, and trust me, I do a fair bit of it myself. And low-touch consumption isn’t going away. But for all of that, I also see a good bit of longing for depth.
Marathon video podcasts from the manosphere to political livestreamers got popular not just because of clippers, but because people could immerse themselves in a creator’s world and build parasocial relationships. The internet has long rewarded rabbit holes and obsessiveness, and I think it’s going to continue to do that. Even if a fraction of the clip audience watches or listens to the entirety of something, that audience tends to be very engaged and usually motivated to pay for that content.
Plus—and this is what I think is the bigger thing—reducing everything to the atomic unit of the clip is pretty soul sucking. As that whole Wired story about the band Geese and the pay for play, social clipping, shows people get mad when they feel they’ve been tricked. Or if they feel as if they’re liking something wasn’t their idea to begin with.
Like any binging behavior, mainlining clips on an infinite scroll feels really great up until the point where it doesn’t. Social platforms tend to turn us into the worst versions of ourself when it comes to consumption. But I’d like to think that there’s an end point to all of that. That maybe all of this frenetic social-media experimentation, all of this catering to the algorithm instead of the real human beings on the other side of it—I wonder if that will feel tacky and cloying. And that maybe, just maybe, people will yearn for a little bit of friction.
Now, if you’re still here, that’s it for the show. If you liked what you saw, new episodes of Galaxy Brain drop every Friday. You can subscribe on The Atlantic’s YouTube channel or on Apple or Spotify or wherever it is you get your podcasts. And if you’d like to support this work and the work of my colleagues, besides watching the clips on social media, you can subscribe to the publication at TheAtlantic.com/Listener. That’s TheAtlantic.com/Listener. Thanks so much, and I’ll see you on the internet.
This episode of Galaxy Brain was produced by Renee Klahr and engineered by Miguel Carrascal. Our theme is by Rob Smierciak. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.