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Social Media Influencers · Why We Do What We Do

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  You're listening to why we do what we do. Hey, guys, welcome
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  to our podcast. I am your persuasive host Abraham and I'm your smash that
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  subscribing like button host Shane. We're a psychology podcast. We talking about all
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  the things that in psychology and the things that people do, and oftentimes we
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  look at our culture, we look at the pop zeitgeist, if you will,
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  and what people are doing in it, and we say, but why
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  that's what we're doing today, is we're taking on you know, we're probably
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  making enemies with the wrong people, is what we're doing. I mean,
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  maybe maybe we'll see how this episode goes. We are talking about influencers and
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  why we influence what we influence, and we do ask the important question towards
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  as we go through this are we are we? And I don't know that's
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  I don't know that's a question we're ready to answer yet. So it is
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  a question worth asking. But we can enjoy better. So if you forget
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  the fact that we're talking about influencers so that the setup sounds more appealing to
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  you. What if I told you you could have a job doing your favorite
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  hobby, being creative, having fun and getting paid upward of six figures.
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  You'd only have to work when you wanted to. You got free or frequent
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  vacations, free new merch from your favorite bands, and pretty much anyone that
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  you wanted to. Would you like that? Yeah, that sounds great.
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  I mean that sounds I would absolutely love that. Yeah. That is the
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  dream for some people, and a dream that they get to realize for even
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  fewer. But that is what we're talking about, as you said, we're
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  talking about influencers. We want to ask the question, as you said,
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  why do people want to do this, Why do they do this? Why
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  does it work? And one of the implications for taking on something like this,
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  and I think actually will land probably in a much softer place than we
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  sort of buildboard it. Sure, but we need to unpack this term here
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  what is going on with influencing and social media world. Well, and before
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  we do that, we have to celebrate today. Today is the day that
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  the episode comes out, obviously, November twenty ninth, twenty twenty three,
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  and so we've got some holidays to celebrate, and the first one is Chadwick
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  Boseman Day, which is one of the greatest days to celebrate. I don't
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  know how I almost forgot our holidays. And more importantly, Yes, Chadwick
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  Boseman Day very important. Yeah. So also National Lemon cream Pie Day.
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  Delicious, great, go have one of those. Yes, It's International Day
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  of Solidarity with the Palestinian People Day. Everybody has a right to be not
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  oppressed, so stand with folks that are being oppressed. Did you make that
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  one up? Or is that real? That's real? Okay? It is
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  Square Dancing Day. It's Square Dancing Day. It's throughout your leftover's day.
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  Makes space in that fridge. Yeah, support that one. It's Chocolate's Day,
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  yum. It's also Customer's Wrong Day also yum. It's Electric Greeting Cards
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  Day. If you remember you used to get those emails with like e greeting
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  cards. Yeah, that was a big deal. There's something wonderful about that
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  because I'm one of those people who like when all these birthday and various cards
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  are sort of piling up on the fridge and on the desks and sort of
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  like, when is it okay for me to throw these away? And the
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  electronic grating cards, It's great for me to just be like, oh great,
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  thanks, archive or delete or we don't even need that anymore. It's
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  also Rockefeller Center Christmas tree lighting Day, which is always a big spectacle.
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  Yeah, for sure. For all of our cat fans out there, it's
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  International Jaguar Day. Jaguar such a cool cat. Sometimes they get eaten by
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  anacondas and that's strange. Hmmm interesting. Also cool car maybe I think it's
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  type of car. Yeah, it is, that's what I hear. I
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  hear it's cool. I feel like the hood ornament is a little bit delicate
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  though. Okay, well, if that is a car, and if it's
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  something that's still in the market, that an influencer might try and sell it
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  to you, because that's kind of one of the things that they do.
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  So let's talk about what an influencer is. Yes, an influencer is somebody
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  who is paid to influence an audience, usually by creating online content, often
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  specifically pushing products or services, kind of like the door of advertising. Yeah,
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  it's kind of almost gigwork in that way. So it's kind of curious
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  about the timeline on this. When did influencing start. Well, there seems
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  to be this explosion of influencers, with more and more of them starting various
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  social media accounts, every day. But honestly, the idea of using popular
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  characters or some celebrity or some famous person in some respects to promote a brand
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  or a product or service has been around, honestly forever. I think I
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  said the word honestly three times, so I'm going to stop that now say
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  it more. Even, you know, I should have started with tying all
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  the things together the way that you do when you start your episodes and when
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  you write notes for these like what do these things have in common? Because
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  that would be a wild span in the world of influencing. Yeah, going,
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  you know, even including Santa Claus who was pushing Coca Cola in the
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  nineteen thirties. If you see the ads of gigantic, jolly Saint Nick holding
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  a Coca Cola and you're looking like that doesn't see this suspicious at all?
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  No, Nope, And apparently that's it. I mean, that's part of
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  the reason why we have like I know, we talked about Sandel in one
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  of our episodes, and that's part of the reason why we have the modern
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  image and what we understand of what sand looks like today is because of Coca
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  Cola and how he helped brand that yeah, really important talk about influencers.
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  Yeah, totally. But the form of social media influencing that we are seeing
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  now largely started around two and eight, twenty ten ish, with brands hiring
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  online personalities to promote their product. And so this is a fairly new phenomenon.
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  It's less than twenty years old, and we're kind of seeing that the
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  way that we're talking about it today is a fairly new phenomenon, is what
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  I should say. Yeah, and the business of how social media looks as
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  an online individual sort of cultivating this persona type thing that currently exists is so
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  new that we don't even really know how this business model or market is going
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  to evolve, but we can talk about how it got started, and there
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  were kind of a confluence of factors that led to the rise of the sort
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  of homebrew individual based marketing. One of the things to consider is that around
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  this time, and this is true as now as it was then, but
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  around when this was starting, there was this market of eighteen to twenty five
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  year olds who are consumers, but they're not watching as much TV, they're
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  not listening to as much radio, and so as making it really difficult to
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  reach them through sort of traditional marketing outlets. They couldn't just put it in
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  a newspaper or in an advertisement between commercial breaks because people were streaming things.
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  They're using so much social media to get their entertainment because they don't need to
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  get their entertainment from things like television and from radio and stuff like that.
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  They get it a different way. However, there's the consideration that they're like,
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  well, they're not spending that much money, so they're not that valuable
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  of a market. And while it's true they don't have that much money,
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  they also tended to be spending it a little more compulsively. And as they
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  are only going to be getting older, they are eventually going to be moving
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  into the larger market, and so brands can build some amount of brand awareness
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  and loyalty early on. They want to do that whenever they possibly can.
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  So they did really see this as being an important demographic to target, and
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  they were having trouble targeting that demographic. With that being said, they started
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  looking at social media personalities because social media personalities were personable, they're fun,
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  they're funny, they're engaging, and had a quantifiable built in audience, which
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  was their followers of the exact demographic that companies wanted to target. So basically
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  they said, hey, we've got these folks that are uniquely positioned to do
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  this, why not pay them to do this exactly? And so on top
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  of that, they were dirt cheap compared to traditional advertising. Just as an
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  example, one company could pay millions of dollars for an advertising campaign or spend
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  one hundred thousand dollars to have an influencer promote their product. It's really a
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  no brainer. I mean, you're talking about savings of hundreds of thousands of
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  dollars just to get your product out there through an outlet at least at least
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  that much. Yeah, and then likely to be reaching the audience that's so
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  coveted that you're having trouble reaching. So it's like, I get to reach
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  the audience I want four cheaper, more easily, right, and all I
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  have to like, I don't have to be worried about producing. I just
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  have to tie. You know, I have this one person push it on
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  their site and they've already got these people who are sort of subscribed to them,
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  they follow them. That's the right thing. The other thing about this
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  is that really small companies with a very small budget could actually see there could
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  just see career launching success almost immediately if they got a good influencer to market
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  their product. So they don't have millions of dollars to spend on advertising,
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  but they can throw one hundred thousand, maybe fifty thousand dollars and maybe little
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  twenty five thousand dollars at some online YouTube personality or I mean at this day
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  and age at TikTok personality, and that person's going to then promote their product.
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  They they're happy to take twenty five thousand dollars to do some content creation
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  around it, and then this company that's really really small could actually see enormous
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  success very rapidly because of that reaching out to the audience that they're able to
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  reach out to through just a small investment in their marketing strategy, right especially
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  compared to what was being done traditionally. As companies rushed in to take advantage
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  of this cheap advertising marketplace, influencers could now choose how much money they made,
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  and influencing became more expensive for companies. So some influencers have charged up
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  to five hundred thousand dollars for an ad on a single video just to be
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  clear, a single video one yeah, one video, and there's probably some
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  rules around it, like how long it stays up, what you know,
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  so on and so forth. But that's one video. That's not multiple commercials,
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  that's not a campaign. That is a single video, and it's not
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  much less than the company would be paying for traditional advertising. They just were
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  accessing a different demographic. Right, So curiously, you know, we wanted
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  to know how much money is being thrown at this. So the influencer market
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  is valued currently at two point one billion dollars and the top influences in here
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  can be making up to and over two million dollars per post, right,
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  so there could be a lot of money in this, but we're talking like
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  the Kylie Jenners, the you know, those type of people of the world.
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  Yeah. However, in twenty twenty two, the median income for influencers
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  was just forty five thousand dollars per year, and in November twenty twenty three,
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  the average was reported at around fifty seven thousand dollars, which is obviously
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  more in a way significantly more. But when's the media and one's the average,
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  and fifty seven thousand dollars a year, like that's obviously comfortable enough for
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  some people, but is it worth it and how sustainable is it to maintain
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  that as sort of your your income level. Yes, so we want you
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  to keep that fifty seven thousand dollars in mind as we go forward and talk
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  about this. So, with an industry that's around, that's been around for
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  the last thirteen ish years, it is interesting to note that the average age
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  of influencers is twenty seven years old, and the average amount of time people
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  spend being an influencer is around eight years, So it's it's a kind of
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  a short lived market. Yeah. Yeah, So that means that like people
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  who are doing it now probably started it in the early twenties, probably are
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  getting it out of it by the time they're in their thirties, or sometimes
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  they started a little earlier, but they also end a little earlier. So
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  that's kind of how it tends to shake out. And just think about this,
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  like, imagine your dad, anyone you, Shane, anyone who's listening.
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  Imagine your dad sitting down to record YouTube and TikTok content. Who is
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  he trying to reach? Right, Influencers like that will be you one day,
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  right as people are getting older, they just find it harder and harder
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  to connect to and relate with their audience. Depending on their audience, Like,
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  there are plenty of people who they do find u for a long time
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  and that's great. And meanwhile, as they're getting older and like their audience
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  is sort of going out into the world doing their own thing, there's these
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  new influencers who are popping up and trying to seize the spotlight. So we
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  have this enormous flooding of people who are trying to create content on top of
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  people who have already been doing it for a long time. And while they
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  may be established, they're also oftentimes struggling to find relevance in their little niche
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  whatever it is they're doing. And I think it's important to note too when
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  we put this in the context when you have a world where new trends,
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  new fads, new things are kind of shaping up and coming and going really
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  rapidly. It's become this kind of ingrained thing where influencers are involved in kind
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  of the cultural zite guys. The cultural zite guys is rapidly shifting, So
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  you need to have new people that are in the know or who are creating
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  those cultural phenomenon. It's a rapid, a fast paced industry kind of like
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  the music industry. The music industry is also very much so like that,
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  where there's constant change, constant growth, constant innovation in this space, and
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  it's really really difficult to keep up with, which is why usually older folks
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  tend to not be involved in these industries. That's actually a really really good
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  comparison, because you're right, like a lot of people. I think back
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  when we were at the age at which like modern influencers are now, and
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  they were getting started. You know, we were thinking will be the next
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  big band? You know, everyone's sort of out trying to start a band
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  and do that sort of thing, and that's not that different and also had
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  a very similar shelf life. A lot of bands would get out that sort
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  of average of eight years before they are ready to sort of hang up their
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  instruments and go, you know, work their nine to five, right,
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  And I definitely have seen some of those who they last a lot longer than
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  that. They made it the fifteen twenty years and then they've sort of said,
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  we don't know how to do anything about band, Yeah, so we
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  better be really good at at doing that, right, which in a way
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  is kind of sad for you know, the at least I've seen them express
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  some amount of lament over that situation, and yeah, and I get it,
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  but you know, and I also love those bands, Like I'm glad
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  they're still around, so like I want to listen to them, so I
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  hope that they are continue to be successful. But I also understand I'm one
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  of a you know, I'm a small part of a dwindling audience, right
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  right, right, it's a finite audience. So as you take a second
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  to think about all the MySpace bands that got really famous from having their song
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  on your page. We're gonna play some ads, all right, So you
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  know we're old because we talked about MySpace. But let's talk about how the
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  influencing game sort of works from a couple of ways. One, I think
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  we're going to start with why influencers are able to be influencers. We'll start
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  there, and honestly, like a it's a really old practice to use charismatic
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  figures to boost awareness and sale of a particular brand of product or service.
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  But long before social media advertisers leverage existing popularity of celebrities and iconic characters to
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  increase their sales. We already mentioned Santa Claus. People would create their own
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  like Joe the Camel or the Marlborough Man, or they would otherwise hire popular
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  celebrities. They would pay them money to carry a product that the product placement
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  is a very common thing and movies and has been for a very long time.
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  So like that thing has been going on for about as long as there's
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  been a market for people to try and push that thing. So it kind
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  of works like this, right, So, we as human beings are social
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  creatures. We engage in social reciprocity. We like having friends, We like
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  supporting our friends. We tend to want to support our friends and have them
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  support us, and so we take these endorsements from our friends. We weigh
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  them more highly than strangers or non charismatic characters. So our friends, the
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  people that we're connected with, we go, okay, I trust them more
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  than I trust celebrity a about this thing. If my friend recommends this,
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  I like this, or I will more likely kind of get buy into this
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  product. Yeah. Yeah, the celebrities and those characters are not our friends,
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  but we do like them, right. We tend to feel good about
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  them that they're popular, or they sort of fit with our worldview or whatever,
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  and so we kind of as consumers of the content that those people are
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  creating, the celebrities usually movies and TV shows, et cetera, we have
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  sort of a pseudo relationship with them. Many people who listen to us feel
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  like they have some kind of a relationship with us, and that's great.
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  I feel like we have relationship with you too. We just we don't know
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  anything about you. You kind of know a lot of stuff. You know
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  a lot about us, we know about you. Yeah. I believe the
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  term they're using now for that is parasocial relationships, where it's like people feel
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  like they have a relationship with a celebrity or with some kind of on air
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  personality. Yeah. That's better than soudo, Yeah, because it is like
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  it is a relationship. It's not a non relationship. It's just a para
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  relationship because it's not the one you tend to you might have with an like
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  someone that you're friends with you get to talk to every day and have them
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  talk talk back to you, etc. So as human beings, we tend
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  to go with the herd. So when we see other people doing it,
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  we assume that it is correct or at least worth trying. There's plenty of
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  experiments that show that, like kind of pro social behavior where some like a
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  large majority of people in a group will do something and then other people that
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  were not kind of bought into it will do that. Like there's that experiment
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  where it's the alarm in the room, and whenever the alarm goes off,
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  like a small group of people will stand up and then sit back down with
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  no explanation, and then as the alarm keeps going off over time, everybody
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  in the room starts standing up and sitting down because they start seeing other people
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  doing it. Love that. That's amazing, It's so fun. Yeah.
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  Yeah. And so social media use that's been growing at breakneck speed. They're
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  like, even though they're sort of the well established social media platforms, several
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  have tried to sort of continue to rise up and make it in the social
• 16:48
  media world. And as we said, the traditional advertising roots are somewhat less
• 16:53
  lucrative for a lot of the companies who are trying to advertise their product.
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  A social media post, however, can reach a lot more people than something
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  like a billboard, for example, Like a lot of companies relied on that
• 17:04
  sort of style of marketing. They put up a billboard and there's going to
• 17:07
  be thousands of people driving past our billboard every day. You put it on
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  social media and everyone on the planet could potentially see it if you write,
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  if it's out in the algorithm that way, right, you can reach a
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  lot more people for a pretty reasonable price tag given what your reach then becomes.
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  So it's actually cheaper for the company to do those other routes, something
• 17:27
  like social media postsing than it is to do traditional advertising routes like TV ads,
• 17:32
  commercials and billboards and radios and that sort of thing. And so influencers
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  are more approachable, they feel more personable, they feel like our friends,
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  and they are often much more effective at selling a product than even those other
• 17:44
  routes might be. That would then cost a lot of money. And when
• 17:47
  you're watching commercial, it doesn't feel like that person is talking to you,
• 17:51
  like you can tell it's kind of a pre packaged thing. But when you
• 17:52
  watch like a social media person like who is like, you know, making
• 17:56
  this customizable content that is coming from a very specific personality, like they're not
• 18:00
  like an actor quote unquote, it feels a little bit more authentic, So
• 18:03
  it makes sense that people would go, oh, this person is advertising this
• 18:07
  now, that's why I'm going to buy herbal life when you know it doesn't
• 18:11
  actually work. That's how you end up in an MLM. That's all I'm
• 18:15
  saying. It's like you end up in an MLM because some influencer has told
• 18:18
  your friend to do it. Now you're stuck in a pyramid scheme. Isn't
• 18:21
  the fun how social media works? Indeed, that's not how always how it
• 18:23
  goes, but you know, that is the thing that kind of happens sometimes
• 18:26
  as part of this kind of this ad campaign thing that they do these posts,
• 18:30
  they actually create an authoritative position on something. They are quote the expert
• 18:37
  on using some product or some service, So that in itself means that because
• 18:40
  they're using that service or that product a lot, their recommendations carry weight in
• 18:45
  the mind of their audience. So the audience sees them and goes, oh,
• 18:47
  this person uses this, they love this thing. I gotta go use
• 18:49
  this thing, and they might feel sort of like, I feel like I
• 18:52
  have a relationship with this person. I feel like I trust them, And
• 18:56
  so because they can carry that sort of relationship and then level that persona that
• 19:00
  they have, then they're more influential in actually getting someone to make that purchase
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  than if, as you said, if you're watching it on like a commercial
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  or some kind of ad that plays on YouTube or something where it doesn't feel
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  like they're talking to you right. Another reason that this works is that decision
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  making is hard. The wrong choice can mean lost opportunities. There are so
• 19:18
  many choices for all the various products that are out there, So if you
• 19:22
  have someone who's going to point you toward a product that can help alleviate the
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  sort of have to like, all right, now I have to sift through
• 19:29
  what's out there, try and raise the pros and cons read their reviews.
• 19:32
  Instead of doing all of that extra work just to get this one thing that
• 19:36
  I wanted. I can have my favorite person come on the screen and say
• 19:40
  you should buy this one, and I'd be like, great's I need one
• 19:41
  of those. Now I'm going to go buy the one you told me to
• 19:44
  buy. Although we do recommendations on this show, we don't get paid for
• 19:48
  those as much as we would like to, so you can at least continue
• 19:51
  to trust that our recommendations are authentic. Anything that makes a decision easier.
• 19:55
  People tend to like, right, Yeah, especially in a world where all
• 19:57
  of us are making decisions on a cost the basis, like we're figuring out
• 20:00
  what we're making for dinner, We're figuring out where kids are going to go
• 20:03
  to school. We figure out all these different things that we have to make
• 20:06
  decisions on. It's nice to not have to, Like it's nice to go
• 20:08
  into like brand recognition and go, I know that this product is there,
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  I've seen it, I've seen people describe what it does. I'm just going
• 20:15
  to go with that product instead of like maybe doing consumer research. So and
• 20:18
  a lot of people don't like doing consumer research. It's a lot to figure
• 20:22
  out. I think of a lot. Chris Cathert specifically talks about being vegan
• 20:25
  and like the struggle of being vegan and how people beat themselves up for being
• 20:27
  vegan because you have to research every little thing and you're going to mess up.
• 20:32
  But the amount of work and effort that might go into researching whether a
• 20:34
  product is vegan, not just from animal products, but like whether it was
• 20:38
  tested, whether it's ethically sourced. When you start doing that, that is
• 20:41
  a unique challenge. But if you have somebody coming out and saying like this
• 20:45
  is vegan. You're like okay, Like they made that argument, I don't
• 20:48
  have to do the research anymore. This is nice, right exactly, So
• 20:52
  just to recap all of that, essentially, what we have going on and
• 20:56
  why is this the influencing thing works is that it feels more personable. People
• 21:00
  are who we tend to trust telling us things to help guide our decision making.
• 21:04
  That makes decision making easier even if we weren't already looking for one of
• 21:07
  those things to buy. We tend to trust their opinion because we have these
• 21:11
  sort of relationships with them, And it works well for companies because they can
• 21:15
  leverage this framework that is cheaper for them and has a wider reach than some
• 21:18
  of the other traditional advertising routes. So that's part of why the whole social
• 21:22
  media market works is it basically made advertising easier for companies and it made it
• 21:27
  a career, a very lucrative career in some cases for people who are sort
• 21:33
  of doing a free lance of I would say avant gard, but not exactly
• 21:37
  a vant guard, more of like this sort of on your own independent employment
• 21:41
  thing. So like I think you can see all of their elements were there
• 21:45
  for them to make perfect sense that an industry like this would spring into existence
• 21:49
  follow the money. There was money, there are people who wanted that money.
• 21:52
  There was a market, and they filled that niche and then they filled
• 21:56
  it some more and then it overflowed. And it's working. I mean,
• 22:00
  that's the thing about it, is like it's ultimately working, and it's working.
• 22:02
  Part of the reason that we're talking about this is it's working, and
• 22:04
  people find it to be quite influential for younger folks. Yes, hence the
• 22:11
  word influencer. So one of the things that got me curious about this though,
• 22:15
  is why someone won't want to do this and wrapped up in that as
• 22:18
  the house. So here's the sort of house and whys of being an influencer.
• 22:23
  One of the things I found is interesting is in a survey in twenty
• 22:26
  twenty two, twenty five percent of young Americans said they wanted to be an
• 22:32
  influencer, and in twenty twenty three it was eighty six percent. So that
• 22:36
  was a rapid climb. To me, that indicates sampling bias, sure,
• 22:40
  because I'm like, you wouldn't expect numbers to jump like that, But if
• 22:42
  you've got eighty six percent of young Americans saying that they want to be an
• 22:47
  influencer, that for those of you who are not super mauth savvy, is
• 22:49
  most of them. That's quite a few, It's quite a few. Sixteen
• 22:55
  percent said they would even pay money to be an influencer, which is wild
• 23:00
  to me that like this is like I would pay money to do this job,
• 23:04
  a job, by the way, which by definition is a thing for
• 23:07
  which you get paid money. Right. There is a high demand for people
• 23:11
  who want to join this sort of market field, as it were. It's
• 23:18
  really fascinating. I mean, I know I've got kids that are at that
• 23:21
  age where that has been a topic of discussion, but it's never been like
• 23:25
  I want to do this and like be this person. Yeah, I wonder
• 23:26
  how much of it has to do with like celebrity, like just being a
• 23:30
  celebrity and having that like fame and fortune and stuff like that, or thinking
• 23:33
  like or maybe even misinterpreting what that looks like. But sure, I think
• 23:37
  it's important to ask how you become an influencer. And the first thing is
• 23:41
  you have to post on whatever social media you're using, and you have to
• 23:44
  post a lot a lot. Now, it doesn't necessarily mean that you have
• 23:48
  to post multiple times an hour or anything like that. What it means is
• 23:52
  you have to kind of follow the algorithm and make the algorithm work for you.
• 23:55
  Right, so you're posting enough, you're posting it at peak times,
• 23:57
  you're posting a different places says, you're engaging a lot too. And that's
• 24:00
  the second part of this is high enough engagement. You can't just post and
• 24:04
  ignore people. You have to engage with people. You have to tag people,
• 24:08
  you have to discuss with people, you have to get into discussions with
• 24:11
  people in your comment sections and stuff like that. There's this piece where you
• 24:15
  have to engage with your audience and show that you will and that's going to
• 24:18
  kind of keep your posts up in the algorithm in the view of people on
• 24:22
  those platforms. If you do this, that might attract businesses to the influencer
• 24:27
  that they'll want to partner with and promote their brand or products. That's sort
• 24:30
  of one of the ways that this works is that people just get an online
• 24:34
  presence and make it very, very popular, and that will bring companies to
• 24:40
  them. Another is that a lot of the platforms on which you might be
• 24:42
  posting content will automatically generate ad revenue. That is, essentially you get a
• 24:48
  proportion of that relative to how many followers you have, and so you don't
• 24:52
  actually have to do any additional work. They'll just pay you just by being
• 24:55
  popular. You can get even more money if you're getting directly paid by sponsors
• 25:00
  to promote their product, whatever it might be. And there are actually lots
• 25:03
  of different types of influencers, and incomplete list includes brand influencers, beauty bloggers,
• 25:10
  celebrities who go on to like do influencing work, parenting influencers, micro
• 25:15
  influencers where mostly those who have sort of smaller audiences but are very tailored to
• 25:18
  a specific niche. Photography collectors people who collect like sets or types of things,
• 25:23
  people who do debate type things, or essentially they're just really trying to
• 25:27
  get people talking about a particular thing. And then science communicators is a type
• 25:32
  of influencer. And that is, as I said, an incomplete list.
• 25:34
  There are many many more, right, There are so so many influencers and
• 25:38
  different ways to go about it. I mean, but you've probably come across
• 25:41
  these. You've probably seen people who are beauty bloggers who are doing makeup tutorials
• 25:45
  and they're using specific makeup. You've probably seen parenting bloggers and parenting influencers that
• 25:52
  are promoting some type of product or some book or something some kind of parenting
• 25:56
  technique. I spend a lot of time in the science communicator world looking at
• 26:00
  how people discuss and share information about new sciences. Some of my favorites are
• 26:03
  following folks that work at NASA and like the information that they share from,
• 26:07
  like different discoveries and stuff. I love all that stuff, so like I
• 26:11
  will study celestial bodies forever, and so I think that's so much fun.
• 26:15
  There are also, sometimes when you listen to podcasts, adds that pop up
• 26:19
  that are going to influence what you buy and what you purchase. And so
• 26:23
  here's an example. Now, Okay, so we started this segment by talking
• 26:33
  about how many people want to be influencers, particularly among younger people, and
• 26:40
  why why is it that so many of them want to We sort of billboarded
• 26:42
  at the front. You could choose your own hours, flexible, you can
• 26:45
  make a lot of money potentially, you can work whenever you want. And
• 26:48
  this is opposed to difficult, stressful jobs of the mean boss and the job
• 26:52
  doesn't pay well and they have terrible hours. Like the sort of stereotypical teenage
• 26:57
  job where teenagers have to do crap work for a mean boss and they don't
• 27:03
  get paid very much and their hours suck like and they hate their job.
• 27:06
  Like, Instead, you could do this thing where you get to have fun,
• 27:10
  be creative and work when you want to get paid a lot of money.
• 27:14
  Like it seems like, yeah, who wouldn't make that choice? Right?
• 27:17
  It sort of is pretty easy to see why that's driving people toward that,
• 27:22
  particularly when they're young and they don't have a lot of super lucrative job
• 27:25
  prospects anyway. Right, they could be doing this thing that makes them a
• 27:30
  decent amount of money where they get to make their own hours, or they
• 27:33
  could be doing this other crappy job that doesn't pay them well where they don't
• 27:36
  like what they're doing and they don't make very much money. Right, And
• 27:40
  then on top of that, influencers appear to be loved, they appear to
• 27:42
  be happy, they appear to be working only as much as they want and
• 27:45
  have a lot of free time, and they tend to be independently employed,
• 27:49
  which is really nice. And actually this worked out for some folks that were
• 27:52
  in lockdowns. They didn't have to that they had to create content inside a
• 27:56
  space where they were stuck in a space, and that was I think really
• 28:00
  important to kind of note as a maybe a boom of this particular industry as
• 28:04
  well. There are people with a lot of time on their hands and then
• 28:07
  a captive audience, people who couldn't go anywhere, you know, right,
• 28:11
  all people had to do was like scroll around YouTube and like scroll around TikTok
• 28:15
  and scroll around whatever social media thing that we're using. I think TikTok was
• 28:18
  a thing in twenty twenty. It also sort of created a bit of a
• 28:22
  bubble. We'll talk about more, and we're talking about the cost of all
• 28:23
  of this because there are so many people who sprung up onto the scene suddenly
• 28:29
  to capitalize on this time of like, hey maybe I could make a little
• 28:32
  money doing a content creation for social media sot not doing anything else right exactly,
• 28:37
  And so there's this kind of unique world. I heard somebody describe it
• 28:41
  as like your social media pages are like a place where you can post your
• 28:45
  art, like you are, like that is your space to be creative and
• 28:48
  do what you want with it, whether you're good at it or not.
• 28:51
  It's a different story but like being able to do that is like kind of
• 28:55
  nice. There's like so so much ownership. But also it gives you a
• 28:57
  space to support important causes that you're passionate about. I follow a lot of
• 29:00
  social justice pages and see kind of the discussions around that and fundraising around that,
• 29:04
  and yeah, get some information and you can actually get paid pretty well.
• 29:07
  I mean, we talked about the mean income, like kind of the
• 29:11
  average income as being around fifty seven thousand dollars a year, which is pretty
• 29:15
  good for not having any degrees if you don't go and get a degree,
• 29:18
  Like it's it's not like, you know, some teachers make less than that.
• 29:22
  Yeah. And then, as we mentioned, it can be fun and
• 29:25
  creative. You got people who do acting, photography, video editing, music
• 29:30
  writing, and performing is really common fashion. I followed some YouTubers who all
• 29:33
  they do is post how to use various features of Excel because I'm a nerd
• 29:37
  and I love that stuff. Yeah, and like that's what they do.
• 29:41
  It's clear that they've like invested their time and money and doing excelatorials and they're
• 29:45
  really good, so good on them. Yeah, And in addition to that,
• 29:48
  of course, we've sort of mentioned this there's the aspect of the sort
• 29:51
  of fame and adoration. You get fans, right, you can potentially get
• 29:55
  paid to travel and go on vacations, you get free merch and you get
• 29:57
  people just telling you constant how much they love you and how much they like
• 30:00
  what you're doing, and a lot of sort of validation from people that I
• 30:04
  think also makes it a very enticing sort of place to be. Right.
• 30:08
  You know, on the surface, it looks like it's a cushy job.
• 30:12
  Yeah, And I want to be clear about this as we kind of start
• 30:15
  to get into the next part of this, the cost of this, because
• 30:18
  on the surface it looks like it's a lot of fun, and for maybe
• 30:21
  some people it really is. I mean, some people are living the life.
• 30:23
  It's maybe an easy gig for them, but it's not as easy as
• 30:26
  people think. So there is when we talk about the cost of being an
• 30:32
  influencer. There is an incredible amount of work and a huge gamble that could
• 30:37
  pay off. Not always, but for some folks it eventually pays off.
• 30:41
  Yes, there was this this horror movie called Spree with the actor Joe Keery
• 30:45
  who's famous from Stranger Things. A thing of this stuff without spoiling too much
• 30:52
  of this. He is a social media influencer who goes into very dark territory
• 30:57
  to try and get people following him because he's essentially, you know, one
• 31:03
  upsmanship of the sort of world of like I need to do the most extreme
• 31:07
  thing to get people paying attention. Yeah, and you can see how that
• 31:10
  might spiral out of control really quickly. But yeah, as you said,
• 31:12
  I think there's something really important to be understood about the influencer world and social
• 31:17
  media is just how much work it is. And we'll talk about this more,
• 31:21
  but I mean it is all day. Basically, these are people who,
• 31:25
  if you look at their social media content creation is work, which it
• 31:30
  is they're doing like over one hundred hours a week in many cases just putting
• 31:33
  together the few pieces of content that actually make it out into the world.
• 31:37
  And they might even end up having to hire a team of people to help
• 31:41
  them because it becomes it's so much work to do to do the job that
• 31:45
  they're trying to do. So for people who think this is an easy buck,
• 31:48
  it's probably not right. You might be able to start low budget,
• 31:52
  but you probably won't be able to stay there again, it just comes to
• 31:56
  the cost of pretty much all your time. Another thing to consider, he
• 32:00
  is at the cost of this is where are the markets going? Because is
• 32:02
  watching some sort of people who are financial analysts and things like that looking at
• 32:07
  this market, and they said, you know, we're probably reaching the cap
• 32:12
  of what's going to be possible for social media influencers. Not that it's ever
• 32:15
  going to go away, but it's starting to reach the sort of breaking point
• 32:19
  for a lot of reasons. One thing is that ad revenue is useless if
• 32:22
  people aren't buying the product right, Advertisers are not going to pay everyone and
• 32:25
  give them free stuff to push their brands. So you saturate the market with
• 32:30
  influencers. Like there was the reverse problem of like as more and more companies
• 32:35
  were trying to use influencers. Influencers that were out there had a choice between
• 32:38
  which companies we're going to pay them the best. Now the reverse is happening
• 32:42
  where there's so many influencers. The companies get to choose which influencers they're going
• 32:45
  to use to try and sell their product, and again that drives the price
• 32:47
  back down again the supply and demand aspect of it, so it would be
• 32:52
  pointless for them to advertise if people aren't going to buy their product and they're
• 32:54
  not going to keep giving everything away for free by hiring every single influencer who
• 32:59
  wants to get a job. So with the saturated market, advertising dollars will
• 33:02
  just go to the lowest bidder and drive down the overall lucrativeness of relying on
• 33:07
  ads that people have. And again, because they're charging also so much for
• 33:13
  some of these content, the people who are who have a well enough established
• 33:15
  brand that they can charge more and are charging more, that means that it's
• 33:20
  not that much of a savings for companies anymore. Right, They now are
• 33:22
  looking back toward other forms of advertising to try and get their awareness of their
• 33:29
  product out because they're not really saving money by hiring influencers. It's costing them
• 33:32
  about as much as it would to do something else exactly. So it's getting
• 33:36
  to a point where it's kind of like, uh, maybe like it seems
• 33:38
  like it's starting to stabilize, yes, stabilize and start to mimic other practices
• 33:44
  around at Like, I mean there's now there's systems, there's policies, there's
• 33:46
  even laws and rules, and we'll talk about some legal risks in a second,
• 33:51
  but I think it's important to kind of see that it's starting to stabilize
• 33:52
  a little bit now. Another issue that we see a lot is that you'll
• 33:57
  have an issue of somebody who becomes an influencer confuses fame for infamy, and
• 34:01
  this is an unfortunate thing where somebody will be an influencer and they'll say a
• 34:06
  bunch of stuff and they will it's inflammatory and it's just problematic, and they're
• 34:10
  just kind of getting into a space where they think that they're popular because they
• 34:14
  have some small echo chamber and the dark corners of the Internet that are like
• 34:17
  supporting them. But for the most part, society's general rule has gone like
• 34:22
  nah, like we don't like what you're saying, and it's kind of bad.
• 34:25
  I mean, I feel like I won't mention them by name just because
• 34:28
  I don't want to. I don't want to do the Voldemort thing with them
• 34:30
  and like be like you should go check them out. But there are just
• 34:32
  some influencers that are out there that are just terrible humans, and they're putting
• 34:37
  out stuff and they're paying, they're doing ads, and they are getting followers
• 34:40
  for a lot of really problematic reasons. But mostly it's not because they're famous.
• 34:44
  It's because they're just kind of infamous for being like jerks, Yeah,
• 34:47
  discriminate about conspiracy theory, is misogyny, racism and overall hatred, xenophobia and
• 34:52
  in the like, and they oftentimes like behind closed doors, the perfectly reasonable,
• 34:59
  normal humans, right. But they what got shaped up in their language
• 35:04
  is the more extreme they were, the louder and angrier they were, the
• 35:07
  more people listened, and so they got this this infamous like brand of fueling
• 35:15
  hate speech, and they kind of got stuck in the cycle and like there
• 35:19
  was really no way out, Like there was where their money was coming from.
• 35:21
  So is really all that they had and whether or not that's even something
• 35:23
  that they believe anymore, you know, they they are like, well,
• 35:27
  you know, it pays the bills, so got to do it right exactly.
• 35:30
  There's another part in here that is relevant to that actually is an important
• 35:34
  piece because we're talking about why there's this cost associated with influencing. Is the
• 35:38
  fact that influencing is a little bit dangerous for companies for a couple of reasons.
• 35:44
  One is that when they invest in an influencer, when they're spending money
• 35:47
  on them, if that person does something because they're like, they're just a
• 35:51
  person. They're not an actor, they don't have a PR team, they
• 35:52
  don't have a manager. Sometimes they do. They're not employed at the company,
• 35:55
  Yeah, they're not. They're actually not employee of the company. So
• 35:58
  they do something that hurt it's that company's brand that companies like sort of stuck
• 36:02
  to that person's reputation, and so it may not even be something that's related
• 36:07
  to their brand at all, it's something else that person said outside of that.
• 36:09
  And then again that person, that person, that company's reputation is on
• 36:13
  the line. Or for example, one of the things is earlier influencers that
• 36:16
  were starting this whole thing, they were often marketing products they already liked and
• 36:22
  knew and anymore, and probably very quickly morphed into being paid to market products
• 36:27
  they didn't know or didn't understand, but they were getting paid to talk about
• 36:30
  anyway. And what can happen then is like, first of all, like
• 36:35
  people start to see through the inauthenticity of someone who's saying something just because they're
• 36:39
  getting paid to say it, and so that starts to lose their appeal and
• 36:43
  their ability to be a successful influencer. But even beyond that if someone starts
• 36:46
  pushing a product that they don't actually know or understand, it turns out to
• 36:51
  be a fraudulent product another company that's tied to that influencer and now looks like
• 36:54
  that person pushes fraudulent things and makes that company look bad. And so the
• 37:00
  volatility of being in the influencer market makes it kind of like a somewhat gambly
• 37:07
  dangerous sort of place for other companies to try and hit their wagon too much
• 37:12
  to any one particular person. But let's take for example, this situation that
• 37:15
  happens earlier this year, I think maybe it was last year, where a
• 37:20
  trans person was pushing some brand of beers, bud Light. It was about
• 37:22
  like, okay, all they did was like talk about this particular beer,
• 37:27
  and the people, the conservatives, the anti humanist lunatics, went crazy destroying
• 37:36
  packages of bud Light, and all they did was like hire an influencer to
• 37:40
  try and push their brand that was it. Yeah, And they were like,
• 37:44
  how dare you hire someone to do this when that someone doesn't look like
• 37:49
  the conservative people over here who are consuming your thing, right, And arguably
• 37:52
  all they were trying to do was like reach a part a wider audience.
• 37:57
  They weren't even talking about trans anything. It's literally a person who happens to
• 38:01
  be trans, right, who's mentioning this product. It was insane, absolutely
• 38:07
  insane, That's how those people reacted. Insane's too nice a way to put
• 38:10
  it. It was some bullshit, absolute bullshit. What's so funny is like
• 38:15
  that goes into consumer research, right, that's a problem of consumer research.
• 38:17
  When if any of those folks that were mad about that did any research on
• 38:21
  bud Light, they would know that bud Light sponsors many, many, many,
• 38:23
  many many pride events across the United States and across the world. So
• 38:30
  like, this is not a new move for bud Light. They just decided
• 38:32
  to pull in this person to promote They've been doing it for ten years or
• 38:37
  so. Yeah, going and sponsoring pride events, and so it's just one
• 38:40
  of those things where consumer research is not not in everybody's skill set. So,
• 38:45
  yeah, that's ridiculous, so ridiculous. Anyway, there are also some
• 38:49
  legal risks to worry about for people who are influencers, even though influencers are
• 38:53
  functioning as personal advertisers and they still have to comply with STT regulations around average
• 39:00
  because advertisement falls into consumerism and like kind of the laws and regulations around that,
• 39:05
  which means that they must be truthful, they cannot be misleading, they
• 39:09
  may not be deceptive, They must validate claims, and they must disclose their
• 39:14
  relationship to the brand. So endorsing products that they haven't used can get them
• 39:17
  into trouble, and failure in compliance with this can result in fines and posts
• 39:22
  being blocked, which is for an influencer the worst thing. Like if you
• 39:27
  get a post blocked or removed or taken down that is outside of your control,
• 39:31
  that alters how you can get to your audience on those platforms. One
• 39:35
  of the better examples though, of the punishment fitting the crime, because like
• 39:39
  that's like the exact thing to do in that particular case. Again, not
• 39:44
  saying that was necessarily right, but just saying like that is a thing.
• 39:46
  Another thing here is that posting an opinion about anything or construing things in a
• 39:51
  particular way may be considered an actionable wrong, which means litigation can be brought
• 39:55
  against that influencer. Right, so they can't even necessarily share their honest opinion
• 40:00
  about things, particularly if it's about something that they've been paid to say nice
• 40:04
  things about but even then they might they probably can't say anything about a competing
• 40:08
  product either, lest it be held as sort of this actionable offense against that
• 40:14
  competition been treated with some of the libel and slander laws that exist. Isn't
• 40:20
  that fun? It is so fun. I'm so glad we don't to do
• 40:22
  that. We just let we just let the advertisers just kind of drop in
• 40:24
  whenever they want and share whatever they want, and we have no idea when
• 40:28
  we're recording kind of like right now, all right, violating copyright laws.
• 40:38
  This is something we've had to deal with as a podcast. Actually simply playing
• 40:43
  music in the background that is copyright protected can be something that can Someone can
• 40:47
  get trouble for playing clips of videos without permission, using logos or photos without
• 40:52
  permission, and this is up to seventy five thousand dollars per case that this
• 40:59
  happened. So they have to be really really careful about what kind of content
• 41:02
  they use just in the background of pushing their other content. Why this becomes
• 41:07
  an even bigger problem is that sometimes influencers on their pages will have ads that
• 41:13
  kind of run and this will influence monetization. So some platforms have this monetization
• 41:16
  piece. If you are caught violating a copywriter law, your modernization can be
• 41:22
  blocked, which is like, so why are you posting at this point in
• 41:24
  time because your page is not generating money anymore. And essentially what could happen
• 41:30
  is it can get so far as that that influencer might have to delete their
• 41:35
  entire platform, they might have to delete their entire page, they might have
• 41:37
  to relinquish their accounts. There's a lot of things that happen. So you
• 41:40
  don't want to risk if you're an influencer, you don't want to risk getting
• 41:44
  into trouble for this stuff or with this stuff because it affects your livelihood exactly.
• 41:49
  And as we said, like always being careful about like how they portray
• 41:52
  anything else that they talk about on whatever content creation that they do, because
• 41:55
  that can be treated as as actionable in the eyes of the law. Right.
• 42:00
  So that's just one of the the considerations around being an influencer, one
• 42:04
  of the things that they have to deal with. There are others as well.
• 42:07
  One of them is, as we said, the sort of average age
• 42:09
  is twenty six twenty seven, and that means that most people start in their
• 42:14
  sort of early ish twenties, but many of them actually do start as teenagers
• 42:16
  before they've ever held a job before. Right, And so there I've ran
• 42:21
  across this news story where they were talking about the future of influencers when they
• 42:25
  eventually do get out of the game. There is a shelf life on this
• 42:29
  and that they might enter the job market having never had any actual experience working
• 42:36
  in a workplace, you know, And so they try and move on to
• 42:37
  this normal life once the social media gig is worn out, because they started
• 42:40
  as a teenager in the early twenties and they're usually out by the early twenties
• 42:45
  or or thirties, most of them are. And again they are they're not
• 42:47
  very competitive as candidates in the job market, and they don't really have a
• 42:51
  lot of training doing anything. They don't have any history of showing that they
• 42:53
  know that they've even shown up to work on time, right, Like,
• 42:58
  you know, Businesses are looking at like, well, what have you done?
• 43:00
  And they're like, oh, I create YouTube content and they're like okay,
• 43:01
  So now what I see is this impulsive person who thinks that they should
• 43:06
  get a free ride doing next to nothing, who possibly has even advertised a
• 43:09
  brand that competes with the job they're trying to get. Now. Yeah,
• 43:12
  and I'm actually I'm not trying to criticize influencers right now. I'm just trying
• 43:15
  to say, like this was sort of the thing on this news story they
• 43:17
  were reporting that some of these businesses saw when they were seeing influencers come into
• 43:23
  the sort of standard nine to five job market. We're not even disparaging influencers
• 43:30
  here, Like, there are a whole lot of skills that influencers have that
• 43:32
  I certainly don't have. Yeah, it's the equivalent of like, I've worked
• 43:36
  this, I've only known this job, so when I enter the work market,
• 43:39
  I enter the workforce in a different capacity. I am lacking in every
• 43:44
  skill that makes it so that I can be successful. And that's really all
• 43:47
  it is. The difference is that since they were seventeen, eighteen, nineteen
• 43:52
  years old, they have worked on their own schedule and they've never had the
• 43:54
  structure that they would have at a regular job, and that's what makes them
• 43:59
  less competitive. Also, the perception of influencers being terrible is another problem that
• 44:02
  people have when they go in which is not like that's not our position,
• 44:06
  but that is the position of many people saying, oh, influencers are just
• 44:08
  snobby, you know, spoiled brats. It's true, Yeah, they don't
• 44:13
  have a great reputation. And again like really not trying to make enemies of
• 44:16
  you right now, no, and not just because it would be bad for
• 44:20
  us to do so, and legitially like that's what people have said, Like
• 44:22
  that's that's where the concern the criticism has come from on the outside, right.
• 44:29
  And so another cost of being an influencer, though, is that there's
• 44:31
  this issue of no privacy. Your entire life, your entire world is on
• 44:35
  the internet, and the more you share, the more you stand to make,
• 44:37
  which means that you leave privacy behind everything that you do, everything that
• 44:42
  you engage with, everybody will know. And you may be constantly bombarded by
• 44:46
  people everywhere you go because they think that maybe you've got a camera on you
• 44:50
  and they're going to be on your channel. Like there's also that piece,
• 44:52
  but also you're a famous personality walking around and being around the people, right,
• 44:57
  so people try to take your picture and talk to you. People or
• 45:00
  passing judgment on you. People are threatening you, hacking into your accounts,
• 45:02
  dealing your money, breaking into your house, following you. Those are all
• 45:05
  real examples of things that have happened to influencers that are popular influencers. Yes.
• 45:10
  Another one is how people have sort of used their kids for influencing.
• 45:15
  One parent who posted videos of her and her family, including her five year
• 45:17
  old daughter, suddenly found herself with a ton of followers out of nowhere,
• 45:22
  Like it was just meant to be harmless content, but she started getting when
• 45:25
  she got really popular, all of a sudden, she started getting all these
• 45:29
  sexualized comments about her daughter. Some of them I heard in this news story
• 45:32
  were really gross. I'm not going to repeat them here. Yeah, but
• 45:36
  it became really difficult for her to scrub all of the online content that contained
• 45:39
  her daughter when one post that she had went viral and had just a ton
• 45:44
  of reshares and whatevers, and so she had a really hard time trying to
• 45:47
  take her daughter off of social media. When it was meant to just be
• 45:51
  sort of fun, playful, harmless, didn't have a lot of followers,
• 45:53
  one post got really famous, and now everybody's looking at her family, including
• 45:58
  her five year old, and some of the those people on the internet are
• 46:00
  making really disgusting comments about this young girl. So it became a safety issue
• 46:06
  for them well, and that opens a discussion on like what is a parent's
• 46:09
  responsibility or obligation to their kids when it comes to social media and stuff like
• 46:14
  that too, because you know that child didn't really have any say and whether
• 46:17
  or not they could be it's a there's a lot of there's a lot of
• 46:20
  really complicated discussions in this, and I don't think it's for us to unpack
• 46:23
  right now. I think we're just kind of talking about, like really the
• 46:27
  challenges of being an influencer and some of the things that people might not consider
• 46:30
  when they start getting into it. People post about their kids before they're old
• 46:34
  enough to understand, and when they do become old enough to understand, their
• 46:37
  whole lives, and even extremely personal information such as health information. Private health
• 46:40
  information has been made freely available to everybody, so nobody they can't hide that
• 46:45
  they when they go to date somebody, that person already knows so much more
• 46:49
  about them than they might know about the other person. And so there's like
• 46:51
  a lot of really complicated social interactions that come out of this too. I
• 46:54
  found a story of a child who was so famous that she had her face
• 46:59
  on merchandise. She was all over YouTube from the time that she was a
• 47:01
  toddler. For her family's use of her image for their YouTube content made them
• 47:07
  so much money on YouTube that they actually quit their full time They quit their
• 47:10
  jobs and went full time on YouTube, and they made so much money doing
• 47:14
  that. They got a nicer house, they got a new car with all
• 47:16
  of this with their increased earnings from their YouTube content. But when their daughter
• 47:20
  sort of got as she got older and got wise to the situation, she
• 47:22
  didn't want to participate anymore. Then her parents were sort of threatening her because
• 47:27
  that was their whole livelihood. Her dad told her they'd have to move out
• 47:30
  of their house, go back to their jobs, and they wouldn't have nice
• 47:31
  things anymore. So this coercive, like you can't quit because we need you
• 47:37
  to do this. She's like, I didn't want to do this. You
• 47:39
  didn't ask me to do this. I didn't have an option, and like,
• 47:43
  now my whole life is online. I can't do anything without people knowing
• 47:46
  about it. Right. That sucks for her. She didn't have that choice
• 47:50
  and she is. That is not a one off instance. There is a
• 47:52
  lot of families who post about their kids. Yeah, it's entirely unfair.
• 47:57
  There's another story about this that a lot of people may have heard. One
• 48:00
  of these parenting influencers, and I think they did this like side parenting consult
• 48:05
  business as part of what they're influencing. Was this is an LDS family in
• 48:10
  Salt Lake City in Utah, and her name was Ruby Frank and so she
• 48:14
  was constantly posting about her kids and all this parenting things. And then one
• 48:17
  day the police get a distressed phone call from this emaciated, starved twelve year
• 48:23
  old who had escaped from the house. There was eight six kids, I
• 48:29
  think n eight. It's this family of eight, so six kids and the
• 48:30
  two parents. And turns out, like they found out that the kids had
• 48:36
  been severely abused and neglected. When the cameras were on, they had them
• 48:40
  acting in a particular way, but as soon as they were off, they
• 48:44
  were, you know, sort of locked up and they were, as we
• 48:46
  said, starved. One of the kids apparently was forced to sleep on a
• 48:50
  bean bag for months as a punishment for something. And so yeah, they
• 48:53
  were just horribly horribly mistreated. And again it was a lot of the like
• 48:58
  she was trying to maintain this sort of image for social media and the kids
• 49:02
  were of course taken away by child protective services because of the abuse. Right,
• 49:07
  it's unfortunate, you know, people don't realize that like there is and
• 49:12
  I think this is kind of maybe one of the important takeaways is that whatever
• 49:15
  an influencer or whatever somebody on social media decides to post, they are making
• 49:20
  a concerted effort to post that, and that's what they're letting you see.
• 49:23
  Like they are ultimately in control of whatever narrative is going on in their own
• 49:27
  homes or in their own lives. So they're letting you see that. But
• 49:30
  there is a degree where it's like, okay, well, they start kind
• 49:32
  of getting influenced by their audience and the data, so like, oh,
• 49:37
  I posted this, so people like this, so I'm going to post more
• 49:39
  of this, and then all of a sudden it becomes kind of this a
• 49:42
  mesh thing that's really difficult to get out of. So one thing you do
• 49:45
  is if you are an influencer and you are trying to get into that world,
• 49:47
  you should probably set up some different ways to protect your privacy. One
• 49:51
  of them is to get a virtual po box. You can do that,
• 49:53
  set that up so that you don't have to worry about, like your personal
• 49:55
  information, getting docks and getting out there. You'd hire a pr to handle
• 50:00
  posts and packages for you so you don't have to do any of that stuff.
• 50:02
  You don't have to kind of rifle through packaging or like decisions and stuff
• 50:07
  like that. You can use password management software and change your passwords frequently because
• 50:09
  people do try to hack your stuff. Only give personal information to people you
• 50:14
  trust, and never use public Wi fi if you want to get into that
• 50:19
  world. I mean, these are just good general recommendations for a living life
• 50:22
  too. I think, yeah, I don't know that I need a pr
• 50:23
  REP, but yes, I think most of the other ones. Sagri,
• 50:28
  we should. We're going to get you one, Okay, thanks, Yeah
• 50:31
  I need one of the podcast. I keep running my mouth on the podcast.
• 50:35
  I probably should get one. I know, Yeah, you're the troublemaker
• 50:37
  of the podcast, not me. Another consideration here was sort of in the
• 50:40
  cost like what's the cost of being an influencer in this section, and one
• 50:45
  of them is the mental health issues of being an influencer. First of all,
• 50:49
  as this industry is fairly new, it's not really entirely known what this
• 50:52
  is going to mean for people who do this for a sort of a living
• 50:55
  as their job. But there are some things that we do know. One
• 50:59
  is that they're can be a lot of anxiety, depression, and even suicide.
• 51:02
  There is an excessive amount of judgment and interaction way beyond what humans sort
• 51:08
  of have evolved to deal with in their normal day to day right, And
• 51:12
  then that can also mean that because they're spending so much time reading through comments
• 51:16
  and watching other content, like you have to participate in it and engage to
• 51:21
  be successful, they then procrastinate on other really important things that they need to
• 51:24
  be doing. And then there's also this element of just constantly comparing yourself to
• 51:29
  others who are better looking, or more successful, or are smarter, or
• 51:32
  who have other content that also is really popular. But there is this element
• 51:37
  of anxiety and burnout that happens from just constant, constant, constant engagement from
• 51:45
  trying to maintain this world in this level of interaction that is required to be
• 51:50
  as successful as a lot of people are hoping that they can be. You're
• 51:52
  right, because part of this conversation is also that creating content is consuming content
• 51:58
  and knowing what else is out there, so that you are not only just
• 52:00
  creating things, you're also consuming things. It's an endless kind of cycle of
• 52:06
  engagement and paying attention and learning and doing all these things, so you really
• 52:10
  don't have any breaks. I think Bo Burnham says it best when he talks
• 52:15
  about being an entertainer, and he says that my job is to compete for
• 52:17
  your attention. And we've had that conversation too, where like you can only
• 52:22
  listen to so many podcasts, we are competing for real estate in your auditory
• 52:24
  cavities, right, So like we are trying that take up the space in
• 52:29
  the real estate. There's only so much real estate in that in that kind
• 52:30
  of situation. So thank you for being here, and I'm just I'm so
• 52:34
  glad to be here, and we love you all so much. But the
• 52:36
  point is is that as an influencer, as somebody who's a content creator,
• 52:39
  if you're in that space and you are constantly competing with the dirge of information
• 52:44
  that's out there, the deluge of stuff that's there's so much stuff, So
• 52:49
  to be a really successful influencer, you don't get to take a break.
• 52:52
  Right. There's sort of one more philosophical topic to sort of unpack that's related
• 52:59
  to all of this and in a slightly different way that I think is worth
• 53:00
  actually spending more time on. But we'll come right back to that after we
• 53:05
  do the influencer thing and insert some ads here. Okay, we're back.
• 53:16
  We're going to ask the question are we influencers? But there's another discussion I
• 53:20
  want to have really quickly, which is unpacking the idea of what this rise
• 53:23
  of influencers sort of means and the future of work in our world. Again,
• 53:29
  this probably requires a much larger discussion, but I'll try and wrap it
• 53:32
  up in a quick little summary, which is that one, the kind of
• 53:37
  jobs that people have been doing have moved toward automation more and more with the
• 53:39
  rise of AI. That's only going to be happening in an increasing speed.
• 53:44
  We're moving away from people doing as much labor as they used to be doing,
• 53:46
  which means that there's a very small job market. And to that point,
• 53:51
  there's actually some benefit of having a society where we primarily rely on robots
• 53:54
  to do our jobs. If if we can also serve without being employed,
• 54:00
  or where our employment is, our survival is not contingent on us having labor
• 54:05
  type jobs, right, And so there's people have made the argument that the
• 54:08
  future of the economy in the world is where everybody just does entertainment because or
• 54:15
  they do some form of art and creativity and influencing is kind of like that,
• 54:19
  and the rationale there being that like at some point robots will do our
• 54:22
  medicine, they'll make our food, they'll build our houses, and like they'll
• 54:25
  clean up our messes, and like people will just kind of be doing things
• 54:29
  where all they do is entertain And there's a beautiful thing about that, which
• 54:30
  is that entertainment has one of these smallest carbon footprints in the world. Right,
• 54:35
  you don't need to manufacture anything out of raw goods, you're not shipping
• 54:38
  anything anywhere. All you have to do is like sit in front of a
• 54:42
  camera in a microphone and be funny or be insightful or get people's attention in
• 54:46
  some way, and so like there's a certain benefits to having entertainment be the
• 54:52
  job of the future. And social media is kind of like that, or
• 54:54
  social media influencing is kind of like that because they again all they have to
• 54:59
  do is sit there and creative. We have people writing songs, they're doing
• 55:01
  photography, they're doing paintings, they're maybe writing code for software and all of
• 55:07
  that stuff that just doesn't require and it's nearly as much overhead and as many
• 55:10
  raw resources and is as much fuel as it takes to ship their product around
• 55:15
  the world because it can just all be communicated via the Internet pretty effectively and
• 55:19
  pretty easily, right, And so I do see the benefit of that.
• 55:22
  I think there's always going to be humans and sectors of labor through. You
• 55:25
  know, we just can't take humans out of the equation, but it could
• 55:29
  move to where a huge market that way, and that means a fairly saturated
• 55:35
  market where a lot of niche things are kind of the only thing that survives
• 55:38
  in any capacity. So who knows where it's actually going. But Shane,
• 55:43
  are we influencers? I think that that's a fair question, and I would
• 55:45
  say yes, we probably are when you really break it down, like we
• 55:50
  are as public figures generating content for free, because I mean the podcast is
• 55:54
  free for patrons. You get bonus stuff, but like, yeah, the
• 55:59
  podcast itself is free, right, it's accessible to people. We are science
• 56:01
  communicators. We are funny, I think, you know, do we do
• 56:06
  we go to the level that some other people are going though, you know,
• 56:09
  we haven't taken any sponsors though we would. We would absolutely take sponsors
• 56:14
  for products that we like. We would we would absolutely do that. I
• 56:15
  have no problem doing that. It would help. It would help fund the
• 56:17
  podcast to keep doing cool. So, like I think that, you know,
• 56:21
  at the end of the day, like we're not opposed to any of
• 56:23
  that stuff, we just don't do the one hundred hours. The privacy thing
• 56:27
  is different. We're not quite famous, but we are. I think that
• 56:30
  in that space where what we're doing is akin to influencer like behavior, Yeah,
• 56:36
  I think that's fair. Yeah, just as you said, it's you
• 56:37
  know, if if an influencer is being paid to like promote a product,
• 56:40
  that's not really us. But there are other influencers who essentially they just rely
• 56:45
  on the ad money that they make and then they create a lot of content
• 56:47
  and they get followers from doing that, and we would be in the room.
• 56:51
  The realm of micro influencer or whatever is much smaller than that. But
• 56:54
  you know, I think you could call what we do sort of it's all
• 56:59
  exactly atomic influencers. I love that. Oh I want that to be like
• 57:04
  a band name or something. Yeah, that'd be really fun. But like,
• 57:07
  like a really cool, like proto garage band that sounds like mind Spiders
• 57:12
  or the Hives or something. I hear a lot of electronica in the name
• 57:15
  of Atomic Influencers. Yeah, like craft work. So anyway, I think
• 57:22
  that's the way I have to say about influencers. Influencers. Please don't hate
• 57:24
  us. We're not hating on you. Just this is a complicated world and
• 57:27
  I think a lot of people don't understand it. We want to try and
• 57:30
  to We wanted to try and unpack it a little bit in the way that
• 57:34
  we do that sort of thing. Yeah, anything we need to add or
• 57:37
  anything you'd like to comment on before we move on to the next segment of
• 57:39
  what we do. No, I don't think so. I think that covers
• 57:43
  it. Okay, if you liked what you heard today and you're an influencer,
• 57:46
  you should definitely post about us that people here and they go check out
• 57:50
  a podcast. That'd be great. Otherwise, you can join us on Patreon.
• 57:52
  We have a lovely group of humans there who are the best. And
• 57:54
  they're the best because they support us and they like what we do and we
• 57:58
  like them and it's all mutually been official sort of relationship here at least I
• 58:01
  like to think. So we give them all kinds of bonus content so hopefully
• 58:04
  it's worth it to them. And that includes a list of wonderful people.
• 58:07
  I already said wonderful people, though they get double wonderful because they're that good.
• 58:09
  Mike m Megan, Leyla, Mike T, Justin, Kim, Joshua,
• 58:14
  Brad, Stephanie, Olivia, Brian and Ashley. Thank you all so
• 58:17
  much for continued generosity and support. And of course I could not do this
• 58:21
  without my team. Justin does our audio production and engineering and all that sort
• 58:23
  of thing. Justin and I do fact checking and writing, and our social
• 58:28
  media coordinator coordinator is Ema Wilson said. Coordinator. Wait, Justin does audio
• 58:36
  and Justin does fact checking and writing. What do I do? Did I
• 58:37
  say Justin's fact checking and writing? You did? Oh? That's okay.
• 58:40
  Justin cannedy wants to And Shane is just the beautiful face that we put on
• 58:44
  everything. That's it, the face of the podcast, the eye candy die
• 58:47
  candy for the audio medium. As I say, woops, sorry, you
• 58:55
  know you know what I mean. I feel valued. I feel valued.
• 58:59
  Don't worry. You're okay good, I'm glad I'm glad. If you would
• 59:01
  like to talk to us about anything that we've said here today, you should
• 59:04
  reach out to us. You can email us directly info at WWDWWD podcast dot
• 59:07
  com, and and because we are kind of in the influencer world, you
• 59:09
  can also find us on the social media platforms. We also look forward to
• 59:14
  comments in the section of the podcast where you get those nice things preferably.
• 59:17
  I mean, if you don't like those things, you can tell us.
• 59:20
  But we we really prefer constructive criticism as opposed to just you know, like
• 59:23
  racist rants about why we should support Nazis or something that happens sometimes, yeah,
• 59:29
  which we're not gonna do. So that's happened more than once, which
• 59:30
  is weird. Yeah, it happened, unfortunately more than once. Anyway,
• 59:35
  the fact that those people listen to podcasts, I don't even understand. We
• 59:37
  like, if yeah, if we're influencers, we don't want you as an
• 59:39
  audience if you're that person, yeah, or you know, like listen to
• 59:44
  us and learn to be better because you're wrong. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
• 59:46
  Anyway, I think we have recommendations. We do recommendations. I am
• 59:59
  recom in a board game. I recommend board game. Sometimes this is if
• 1:00:02
  you're familiar with the mechanic, it's called worker placement. But the general idea
• 1:00:07
  of this game, the theme of it, if you will, as you
• 1:00:08
  are essentially these animal tribes that are cooking food. That's pretty much it.
• 1:00:14
  It's a game about cooking food, gathering food resources and prossing them into food
• 1:00:17
  delicacies, and you use those feast to throw parties for your little people.
• 1:00:22
  And that's that's the game. It's just a It's a really cute, relatively
• 1:00:25
  simple little four player two to four player game. It's by Hexty Studios as
• 1:00:30
  the publisher. I put a link in the description of this, but yeah,
• 1:00:32
  if you're looking for a cute little food cooking game themed around animals,
• 1:00:36
  go check out. It's called Uluk. I think it's how you pronounce that
• 1:00:38
  ul uk uluk or uluk. I love that. Look. Ooh look,
• 1:00:45
  maybe that's what it is. Ooh look, I like that. Yeah,
• 1:00:46
  it sounds like a lot of fun. Yeah, it's cool. All right,
• 1:00:49
  I'm gonna recommend a movie. I recently got to see The Marvels.
• 1:00:52
  As you all know, Abraham and I are both absolutely huge fans of the
• 1:00:57
  Marvel World. Totally in those movies. Marvel's is the newest movie entry.
• 1:01:01
  It brings Captain Marvel to present day because her movie was, you know,
• 1:01:06
  it was set back in a little bit in the MCU to kind of introduce
• 1:01:08
  her, and so the story is really great. One of my favorite things
• 1:01:12
  is the interplay between the three main characters, which is Captain Marvel miss Marvel
• 1:01:15
  from the TV show, and she goes by either Spectrum or Photon in the
• 1:01:21
  comics. She's had a couple different names. Okay, she came out in
• 1:01:23
  Wana Vision, right right, And so the three of them interacting one another
• 1:01:28
  with one another and having kind of like the interactions with Nick Fury and some
• 1:01:31
  of the alien species inside of the Galaxy are really fun. So I thought
• 1:01:37
  it was really great. I thought it was an entertaining movie, and I'm
• 1:01:39
  really glad I got to see it. So I recommend everybody going to see
• 1:01:42
  it. Awesome. I would like to see that. All right, look
• 1:01:45
  the Board Game from Hexy Studios or the Marvel's the movie that's probably in theaters
• 1:01:51
  the time you listen to this, or maybe coming to streaming near you in
• 1:01:53
  like February or something. Yeah, all right, great, that's it,
• 1:01:57
  then anything else to add before you rep up. Nothing today. All right,
• 1:02:00
  This is Abraham and this is Shane. We're out. See ya.
• 1:02:02
  You've been listening to Why We Do What We Do. You can learn more
• 1:02:07
  about this and other episodes by going to WWDWWD podcast dot com. Thanks for
• 1:02:13
  listening, and we hope you have an awesome day.