Taylor Lorenz on Joe Rogan, Joe Biden and goodbye to big media.
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From the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is Channels with Peter Kafka. That is me. I'm the Chief Correspondent at Business Insider. And now a quick word about this show and what we're doing here. If you've heard it before, welcome back. You know that I'm interested in tech and media and where those two things intersect, which is just about everywhere. One of those places, obviously, is in politics and culture.

Always been interested in that stuff. This podcast has always been interested in that stuff. And we're going to be talking about a lot of that here. When it comes to politics specifically, we've been doing a bunch of that. We just had John Lovett on talking about the way the information ecosystem changed before the election. We're talking about that on today's show too. Spoiler alert, next week we're going to talk about it as well from a different point of view.

That doesn't mean this is going to be a politics show for the next four-ish years. And when we do talk about politics, I want to try hard to learn things about things I don't know and to push back or stress tests on ideas and assumptions I personally have. Maybe you're in the same boat. Great. Let's figure that stuff out together. On to today's show, which, as I said, is partly about the election. It's a conversation with Taylor Lorenz. She's one of the leading chroniclers of social media.

Someone who's done a really, really good job translating online culture to a broad audience. And now she's shifted a bit because she's still doing that same kind of work, but she's no longer working for big media or no longer mostly working for big media. She's doing it on her own. So this is a two-part chat. One is about how politics and online media intersect. And the second is about how an individual creator is trying to carve out a space and a living for herself.

I think you're going to like them both. Okay, here's me and Taylor Lorenz. Taylor Lorenz has done trailblazing work explaining internet culture at places like Business Insider, Daily Beast, The Atlantic, The New York Times, and The Washington Post. Now she's sub-stacking on her own at UserMag. She is also, like me, making a podcast at the Vox Media Podcast Network. That's a long intro. Welcome back, Taylor. Thanks for having me. I said, welcome back, Taylor. Welcome back, Taylor. You get it.

Thanks. I have wanted to talk to you for a while. I knew I wanted to talk to you when you left the post to start your own thing. And I specifically wanted to talk to you this week about something you posted on user mag. Great headline. Why Democrats won't build their own Joe Rogan. This is a

Your commentary on the commentary and discussion about why the election went the way it did and what the Democrats can do, if anything, to turn it around in the future. This is sort of an ongoing discussion with Democrats every time they lose an election. They point a lot to the media landscape. And I really liked your take. I was really interested in your take. Let's put it that way. So sum it up for me. Besides the headline, why won't Democrats build their own Joe Rogan?

For so many reasons. I mean, let's not forget, as I mentioned way down at the bottom, that they had Joe Rogan. Joe Rogan famously endorsed Bernie Sanders in 2020. He has expressed support for leftist policies. So if they don't have Joe Rogan, it's because they lost him. So I wrote this piece kind of getting triggered off a tweet at 1 a.m. That was the perfect kind of blogging. Why don't the Democrats build their own Joe Rogan? It's just such a misunderstanding of the entire media landscape and kind of how things function.

Like you can't just get a person like Joe Rogan to suddenly be like endorse the Democratic Party as soon as the election comes around. Like the entire YouTube landscape, content creator landscape, sort of feeder landscape that builds into the broader Joe Rogan universe is just radically different. And I use Joe Rogan as a little bit of clickbait because I'm really talking more about YouTube and sort of I consider him a YouTuber as much as a podcast.

Hey, I wrote a column about that this weekend. I thought your take was so good. So to catch people up who are not consuming all our stuff. So there's this ongoing discussion about, oh, this was the podcast election. This was the Joe Rogan election. Kamala Harris should have gone on Joe Rogan. Donald Trump went on a lot of these Joe Rogan and similar shows.

We still don't frankly know what influence that had on the election, but we can leave that for a second. And the thought was, oh, why? Why aren't there left versions of Joe Rogan? My point about that was this is also a YouTube thing, right? A lot of the consumption of these podcasts is actually happening on YouTube. So there's all the backstory.

there. Yes. But what I was arguing basically is that not only has Democrats just not invested at all in building this entire infrastructure on the right, like the right has this entire machine of online influence that they have literally spent decades building

and poured millions and millions, if not billions of dollars into collectively. I mean, not just through sort of like the RNC and their youth influencer stuff, but also through this network of funders and organizations and collaborations and things like the Daily Wire, which are these very influential

new, or barstool, right? There are sort of these like influencer driven media companies that serve the right. So let me stop you there. So this, the critique that the right and conservatives, Republicans, whatever word you want to use, have to have their own media ecosystem is something that would have been pretty familiar to people who had a passing interest in media for years and years and years, but it's always focused on television.

They have Fox News that became even more important during Trump. People would say, oh, well, there's MSNBC, but it didn't have anything like the influence that Fox News had. And there you could say, look, Rupert Murdoch, he's a Republican. He's also just really a practical businessman. So he's got ideology, but really he just has found a way to sort of get people to pay attention to an asset and make it valuable. But you could sort of paint through the right sort of

building their own media ecosystem, but it didn't spend a lot of time talking about online stuff. But you're saying, look, that same thing that happened on TV has been happening online for years as well. Yes, for literal decades. They invested very early in personality influencer-driven media and

And there's just a huge amount of money. I mean, as I wrote, and I talked to a bunch of people for this, for what I wrote sort of just over the days, I actually wrote a piece a couple days before the election on how Trump was leaning into this long form parasocial content and Kamala's strategy was really broken because she was only leaning on short form content, which doesn't allow users to develop any sort of bond. And it was very transactional, which ended up really being, I think,

how things played out. But, you know, there's, yeah, there's this like funding mechanism on the right. Also, you have to consider the fact that, you know, the Democrats aren't aligned with the progressive content creators. Yeah, yeah. Wait, wait, wait. I want to, before we get to the progressives versus the liberals, the idea that the Republicans and the right, so there's some stuff where there's obviously like common cause, right? Like Daily Wire, Ben Shapiro, they have received money from conservatives. Yeah.

There are examples like that. Then you have Russia trying to literally just sort of pay off people who were already in that space to do that. And that broke out. Turning Point USA, all of these like incubator type programs. But there's a lot of stuff that Trump spent time on on this campaign that was definitely not overtly conservative. And if it's been funded by Republicans, I've missed it. You know,

I don't think Joe Rogan took... No, I don't think the Republicans are, like, funding Theo Vaughn or something. Right, or Joe Rogan. You mentioned Barstool. They received money from Peter Chernin, who was Rupert Murdoch's number two, but is a classic Hollywood liberal, right? So what's the distinction in your mind between...

places that are funded and or working directly for Republican conservative causes versus the Theo Von Joe Rogan's bar stools where their audience might be interested in that, the hosts might be interested in that, but they're explicitly not political places. And you can see this, by the way, in lots of ones that are even less familiar to people that are bodybuilding or, you know, a car, all kinds of stuff that sort of trends male.

that you would say, oh, that's Trump supporting, but it's not because some network is supporting them that wants them to support Republicans or Trump. I know. That's what I was saying in my piece. You cannot look at these things individualistically. You cannot look at something and say, why don't we have the Joe Rogan? You have to consider where they are in the broader ecosystem. When you see Jack Mack at Barstool, who I love, by the way, but collaborating with Daily Wire content creators, there's all of this cross-pollination that happens on the right that doesn't happen on the left.

And so you have a lot of these voices. And in a lot of cases, by the way, especially with the UFC and bodybuilding community, a lot of those content creators are just organically they believe in Trump, right? They're just Trump supporters, but they're sort of welcomed in and amplified and ultimately part of this broader sort of ecosystem on the right that doesn't really exist on the left.

And I think that that is sort of why you don't have anything like that on the left. Like, yes, it's a question of money, but it's also a question of sort of collaboration and genuine ideology. I think a lot of these people are, or I mean, somebody said this, maybe it was like Max Tanney, someone on Twitter of like Joe Rogan. And a lot of these people are sort of useful idiots and they could be useful idiots for the left as well, but they're not for many reasons that we can get into. But yeah,

They're not overtly sort of, and what I'll say here too is like a lot of these people, a lot of these content creators, especially the up and coming YouTubers, the bodybuilder people,

okay, they're not overtly like getting paid by some right-wing cause, but they're invited in. The Trump campaign is inviting him on their plane. They're getting invited to right-wing events. They're getting courted by these people. There's this whole outreach among the right that doesn't happen on the left. So some of it can be overt and direct, and some of it is, and I think you're saying both things, and some of it is just we're just sort of, we see the world the same way,

You know, I don't think that when Donald Trump invited Dave Portnoy into the White House in his first term, it's like this is going to really pay off four years from now when I run for reelection and your network's going to support me. Right. They're just two dudes who kind of like the same stuff. And it's hard for me to imagine that some of that doesn't exist on the

left. I mean, that is it's a bit of a straw man argument, but that is the Republican argument. Like, well, we had to build this stuff because the liberal elites on both coasts were already aligned with the Democrats. So we had to create this place for ourselves. I mean, the mainstream media is aligned with Democrats in many ways, I would say. So there is you think that's a reasonably fair argument? I do think that's a reasonably fair argument. I mean, look at the coverage of someone like against someone like Trump or someone like Biden. And you can argue, of course, Trump deserves more scrutiny in certain areas. But

I think it's fair to say that a lot of these sort of the broader mainstream media leans Democrat. I mean, we're talking about New York and L.A. and, you know, people in these cities. Like, I think that's fair to say. Of course, it's not universally true. You know, the Wall Street Journal, like,

Like, of course, not everyone in the mainstream media is a Democrat, you know, but I do, I understand the sort of like frustration from those people. The thing is, is that on the left that you don't have, so you have sort of like the right wing media ecosystem, right? Then you have the centrist liberal ideology represented through the mainstream media. And then most of the people that have clout that are getting clout, at least on the internet, on the left are leftists. They're progressives. They don't,

identify with the Democratic Party directly. And so they're not really an asset to the Democratic Party and they're not welcomed in and they're not funded in the same way. And they're not they don't have they don't ultimately get built up in that way because they're not serving any sort of political interests. And they're also usually very anti-capitalist, anti-billionaire. So you don't have like billionaires rushing up to fund people.

that want to tax the shit out of them or that don't agree with them or that don't think they should exist. Right. You're seeing this. This is one of the, you know, go on Twitter or threads or anywhere else. You can see these discussions. Oh, the left should move farther to the left. They weren't really left enough. They should avoid billionaire owned stuff. And then the arguments look, if you go all the way down that platform, then the rich people who were funding Democrats and liberals, they're going to bail out as well.

Let's leave aside that kind of political prognostication. I don't know about all that stuff, but I do think that like the media ecosystem, there is a funding gap. Let's talk a bit about Rogan because you mentioned at the beginning, right? He wasn't a Trump supporter the first time around. He was a Bernie supporter.

And if you sort of trace his career, you can sort of see where his politics have evolved from. But it wasn't like he's been a right wing guy or a conservative guy. He would tell you he's not anyway. He just likes a lot of stuff that men do. If they had tried to work with him and get on his platform, would he have taken Democrats and liberals? Or he just said, I'm not interested in what you guys are doing. You're politicians. It's boring to me.

No, he would have happily taken them. I mean, it was a huge mistake. Let's not forget how the Democratic Party reacted to Bernie going on that show. Bernie was chastised. Bernie was raked across the coals on the internet. Obviously, Rogan has said transphobic stuff and that's bad, but we have to engage with people that we don't always agree with and that we don't necessarily share every viewpoint with, right? And recognize that

that tapping into their audience is politically expedient. And that's something that I think the Democrats have completely failed to realize. I mean, case in point, like they, they weren't even engaging with like they threw Hassan out of the DNC. Like they don't, they don't explain to explain to Hassan. Hassan Piker is arguably the biggest content creator on the left. He's a leftist Twitch streamer. He was able to finagle a pass to the DNC, not through the DNC, but actually through the young Turks, a progressive YouTube channel that his uncle is involved with.

got into the DNC. They gave him a room. And after he interviewed members of the uncommitted movement, he told that there was no more space for him and he had to leave.

So it's just, it's such a squandering of somebody that is, again, Hassan Piker is undeniably like probably the most relevant content creator on the left today in terms of cultural relevance, in terms of reaching young people. But he doesn't share an ideology with the Democratic Party and he's not going to toe the line. And Democrats are, I mean, you could see it throughout this election. They were never comfortable with engaging with any content creators who didn't completely toe the party line. And by the way, I wrote about this. This is Biden's legacy. I wrote about this with Biden. All of the,

entire ecosystem of content creators that helped turn out millions and millions of votes who Biden himself thanked for getting out the vote for the 2020 election. I'm talking about Gen Z for Change and TikTok, which was previously called TikTok for Biden, turned out over 700 of the biggest content creators on TikTok to encourage audiences to vote for their audiences to vote for Joe Biden.

Literally two years into his presidency, Biden is blacklisting those content creators. I mean, he completely blacklisted them. They're no longer invited at the White House. They're no longer welcome because they're

They didn't tow his policy lines. They started challenging him on climate change in Gaza and things like that. And that doesn't exist on the right, though, right? The people who have ideology on the right and who might disagree with Trump on all kinds of things sucked it up and don't challenge him, right? No, no, no, no, no, no, no. Not when they're talking to him, not when they're interviewing him. Sure, sure, sure. But by the way, these content creators weren't challenging when they were talking to him at all. They would have been happy to be included in, you know,

summits and things at the White House. That's not what they're doing. I'm saying if you wanted to go to them and if you wanted it, like, I can't imagine how a Hasan Piker, and I've had him on this show. You can go back and find that one. There's a great part where his mom comes in during the middle of the show. You know, had he sat down with Kamala Harris,

He's an argumentative, aggressive guy, right? He would have poked and challenged him. Sure. But Trump, again, is willing to engage. Trump has always been willing to engage with people that aren't 100% on board. That's how he wins people over. He goes on these shows. He buddies up. And yes, you could argue a lot of them are more favorable. But he's gone on... I mean, Rogan is like... Of course, Rogan is not Hassan level. Rogan's not going to ask...

the level of nuanced, thoughtful questions that someone like Hassan would. But I do think that Republicans generally have been more willing to engage with the fringes of their party or the further sort of more extreme to the right people of their party than Democrats have to the left. Right.

Right. I just think they would not be challenging them. You don't think they'd be challenging them? Donald Trump gets challenged by the mainstream media, not by... If you go back and look at those YouTube interviews... Right. No, no, no. It's not Theo Vaughn that's holding him accountable, for sure. Yeah. Theo Vaughn is not. And Joe Rogan asked him one or two questions that were not really even challenging, frankly. And he moved on by him. And that was that. And the rest of it was a hangout. One thing that really bothers me about that positioning is that the lesson should not be

oh, so that means the leftist content creators need to toe the line a little bit more and not be so hard on these politicians. No, you have to ask, why is this politician that ostensibly represents the interests of millions and millions of millions of young people uncomfortable talking to a creator that...

Like, why is their ideology so out of touch or so disparate or different, I guess? Or like, why is their ideology so incongruous with the audiences of these people that have actual influence on the internet? Do you know what I'm saying? I do. I don't know that we're going to get to the bottom of that here. I mean, I do think that, like, it's, when I, you know, the Harris should have gone on Rogan. I'm trying to imagine if she did the three hours. It would have been terrible. Well, but also, like...

but I think she should have, I get it. It's an impossible, I mean, regardless of her personality, no matter she wanted to do that sort of stuff anyway, like he's a, he's a vaccine denier, right? So he would, she would have to spend maybe the entire interview going into vac stuff. And like, that doesn't really help her at all. But look at someone like Kareem Rama and how they squandered that, right? Explain who Kareem Rama is. Kareem Rama is a content creator that has tons of hype right now. He does subway takes, uh,

which is this show in Manhattan where you go on the subway, you say your hot take, and then you move on. I have seen that show. I did not know that's who he was. Yeah. Kareem is an Arab content creator. He is extremely pro against everything that's happening in Gaza. He's been a critic of the administration, but he's

But he was willing to work with the Democrats to turn out the vote and ultimately thought, you know, I'll bite the bullet because we don't want Trump. So he goes to Pittsburgh because, of course, they don't want to film on the actual subway. They're going to film on the campaign bus, whatever.

You know, he does the hot take with Tim Walz and then he goes to do the hot take with Kamala. And he was hoping that Kamala would have a hot take where like maybe she would talk about her policies or talk about something interesting. Refused to do any of that. Kamala ends up bringing up some take about bacon, how people should put bacon on everything because it's a spice. Kareem has to explain that he's Muslim and that he doesn't even eat bacon or that, you know, Muslims generally don't eat bacon. And it ends up in this disaster where the episode got killed.

And it's just such a perfect example because here's this content creator that's really trying, really, really trying. And they squandered it. And I can tell you literally 50 more examples like that. I mean, I heard throughout this entire campaign, I was hearing this from content creators. Like, we're trying, but we're not getting anywhere. We'll be right back with Taylor Lorenz. But first, a word from a sponsor. Support for this podcast comes from Stripe.

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I remember talking to someone, I was sort of plugged in to DNC and campaign stuff, and he said, look, if they lose the election, it will not be because they don't have people who understand digital media and social media in and around the campaign.

First of all, did you think that they had people who understood that landscape working in and around the campaign? I think their strategy was way off. I generally really like Rob, the digital person. I think he knows what's going on. But I think their strategy, I mean, this is what I wrote before the election even took place. I think their strategy was completely misguided. And you could argue, okay, maybe they're doing the best with what they could because they had this fundamentally unpopular, they were just unpopular and they couldn't engage with the internet in the same way.

But again, then they should shift and talk about policies that are popular. You know, I just, I do, I don't think this is why they lost the election. I think so many reasons, right? But I don't, I think that there was a huge depression in turnout and we saw in 2020 the way that these creators can mobilize. And we saw on the right, the way these creators can mobilize their bases to turn out. And that did not happen in 2020 because these people with millions and millions of followers and a huge amount of cultural influence were

we're like, she doesn't give a fuck about us. You went to the Chicago Democratic National Convention this summer. As a content creator. As a content creator. We'll talk about that part of your career in a second. But you went there as a content creator. There was a bit written about how

the DNC was going all out to court creators and they were getting much more access to Kamala Harris and the rest of the Democrats than traditional journalists were. And there was a whole online offline debate about that. But it seemed like they certainly wanted the Taylor Lorenzes and everybody else of the world to be working with them. They set up, you know, they set up filming for them. They did all kinds of things to accommodate them. So what went wrong there? The policies.

I mean, ironically, my favorite piece of media that came out of the DNC was the Free Press, which I am not a supporter of generally. Barry Weiss's publication. Barry Weiss's publication. She did a video where she sent one of her young people, content creators out to go interview people at the DNC, young people, and said, what's your favorite Kamala Harris policy?

No one could name a single policy. I think that was a problem that so many content creators at the DNC had is they wanted to create this content, but they didn't really know what to say other than like, we're here. Here's the experience. The food is really great. We're in the meme room.

that doesn't motivate people at home to get excited, right? And then you had the uncommitted movement who many people were engaging with. And any content creators that really engaged with the uncommitted movement was basically not invited. That's like Gaza protest. Yeah, the Gaza protest. And so, again, it just goes back to these fundamental things where I think the media stuff is sort of downstream from these broader problems with their messaging, right? Yeah. And that's the last word I wanted to get to you, which is,

You know, we're still sifting through results and what the numbers mean, and we won't get real, real numbers for some time about sort of how demographic groups. But look, Trump won, made gains across across the country in every geography and every demography.

How much of it do you think is influenced by the Internet, period? You know, if the Internet was different, would that change results? It's hard for me to imagine that everyone who came out and voted for Trump and or switched to vote to Trump was influenced by the Internet. But maybe the Internet's just the same thing as saying air, right? Or like it's just everywhere. I think I know where you come down on it, but tell me.

I think the internet is just so ubiquitous, it's almost impossible to measure the actual impact of something. It's like, did the media play a role in the election this year? It's like, yeah, but it's so broad. I think that in terms of the internet, there is a big gap between sort of perception and reality. Jeff Stein, my former colleague and I, wrote a story recently

six or eight, maybe nine months ago about sort of the perception of, you know, the economy versus like how it's perceived online versus how, you know, the economic indicators sort of show the health of the economy versus people on TikTok making, you know, videos about grocery prices and things. So I do think that there is,

The Internet shapes perception. Also, you have to remember, Trump has always been sort of a candidate that's very of the Internet and of the media. And he is a media figure himself. And so I think he's very adept at pushing specific like the right is always very adept at sort of pushing specific narratives.

Yeah. And again, we can debate, you know, how much of this is manufactured or not. But the voters over and over on every poll said, what's the thing that concerns you the most? And they said cost of living across the board. They said that forever. And whether that whether they were imagining that things were too expensive or things were legitimately too expensive. And I have a hobby horse here. You should go listen to a daily episode from September where they talk about housing costs like that's real stuff for a lot of people.

That's not imagination. But regardless, that's what they believed to be the case. Yeah. And I think that that perception, whether it's true or not, I certainly believe it to be true in the sense that like my groceries are more expensive. Right. But like you see this reflected in these TikTok day in the lives in this like this is reinforced through discussion online. And I do not think that the Democrats ever.

meaningfully engaged in that way, right? They were just like, no, no, no, you're wrong. Look, the line is going up. Look, the stock market's going up, guys. The billionaires are getting richer. So don't shut up about your TikToks, you know? And that's, I think, not a good energy to have. We've talked about podcasts. We've talked about YouTube, Twitter. There's a lot of, oh, Twitter was important because Elon Musk on Twitter, he supported Trump.

To me, it looks like a right-wing ecosystem, echo chamber. So can it be both? Can it be both an echo chamber and something that helped persuade people to vote for Trump? Oh, undeniably. I mean, unfortunately, you have the entire political class in America still completely addicted to Twitter. And narratives that emerge on Twitter immediately make their way into the traditional media. And so I think now that Twitter is this right-wing platform, it is

shaped the narratives in the media because that is where the political people spend all of their time. They don't pay any attention to really, I don't even think they've been able to quit, honestly. There's no other platform that's rivaled Twitter in terms of its political influence. I am also still there. Same.

Same, same. But I just think like that Twitter's impact is more through its effect on the media than maybe directly. Although I just I think its user base is not big enough to impact. Which, by the way, that was the Twitter impact pre Elon as well. Totally. That was who used it. And and the old Twitter management finally said, all right, that's how we're going to sell it to advertisers is we're not very big, but the people who consume us and hang out here are influential. And that's who you can reach here.

That's not working for Elon now. But one last medium, TikTok. A year ago, there would have been a lot of what is TikTok going to mean for the election? And there was a lot of TikTok has changed people's perceptions towards Israel and Gaza. And that's why it must go. And then all that conversation stopped, hasn't picked up again.

Meanwhile, TikTok is still slated to be banned next year, according to a law, not an executive order or an idea. Like there's a law that says it will get banned unless something happens. There's a court case that could affect that. So two questions for you. Do you think TikTok was meaningfully important in the election? And two, what do you think happens if TikTok leaves? What fills that space?

So, yes, I think TikTok played a role, but a pretty minor one. I mean, this goes back to my broader thing of like, I think TikTok is a great place for like discussion. And in that sense, it's sort of like Twitter for normie people. It's like where people go to talk about pop culture and debate things. There's a huge Democratic base on TikTok, but there's also a bunch of right wingers on TikTok too. You know, there's Trump talk everywhere.

I think that it's intentionally suppressed its political influence because it is under so much scrutiny. You see the app pivoting away from politics. They refuse to hire a news media partnerships person. They really don't want to lean into that. They're like, hey, everybody just come here, shop, buy your ring lights. That's what we're for. Because they want to avoid that scrutiny from the government. And as you mentioned, they're in this really precarious case where they will be banned if they lose this court case, which...

They might. You know, when you look at a landscape post TikTok, I think it's concerning because Twitter X is really where I think obviously YouTube is going to be a huge beneficiary. Meta will never be relevant in the way. I mean, Meta is just a hellish platform. But why? It's got huge reach.

The content moderation stuff, they're really bad. YouTube has always been sort of pro-creator and built-in monetization for creators from the get. Meta has always had this really antagonistic relationship to content creators. And you see this with Mark Zuckerberg getting excited about all the content being AI now. He's really leaning into hoping that that will make it so that they're not dependent on content creators. They really like to maintain this balance of power with their users that just makes it not a very great place. Yeah.

My focus group is my two sons and they're 14 and 16. And one of them is an Instagram reels person and the other is a YouTube shorts person. And they both say we're just getting stuff that's on TikTok. We understand that. It's just how they prefer to get it.

Don't you think that both the TikTok audience and then people who were optimizing for TikTok just go, all right, all those eyeballs are over there. It's not as good as it was before. But I want to be there. Those platforms are nothing like that. The reason that that content is coming onto TikTok first is because of the entire community and culture on TikTok.

There is nothing like that community and culture on TikTok on YouTube and Reels. They're not similar products. They don't function the same. The platforms don't function the same. You can repost content on there, but you can't even create the same kind of content on those platforms. The tools aren't available. And if they ban CapCut, which sounds like they might along with TikTok because it would fall under that same sort of provision. CapCut is the editing software that people use to make TikToks. Yeah. Yeah.

I do think it's going to radically change the ecosystem. I also think, again, I mean, I've just been talking to content creators the past few days, but like a lot of them are open to Elon's ex in a way that is concerning, like because they know that Meta will fuck them over and not pay them. They have absolutely no qualms about it. Meta does not pay content creators at

At all. YouTube pays. Right. YouTube basically says you make a dollar selling ads. If we make a dollar selling ads, we'll give you half of it, roughly, if you qualify to get into our partnership program.

Right. But you do want to focus more on long form. Growth on short form is sort of hard to convert to long form subscribers. So whereas Elon is just throwing out money and saying a lot of things and people don't necessarily trust the platform, but they see these creators. I mean, I saw Tiffany Wong tweeting like her. She's a Bitcoin YouTuber, you know, crypto YouTuber or whatever. So obviously, of course, she's getting a lot of money from Elon. But like they see they're like, well, it's a platform. They're pivoting more to video and look at the checks that these people are getting. Yeah.

And so I do think that he could end up, I don't think people are taking it seriously. I don't think it's remotely on the level of, because the audience is ultimately not there. But I think that they're offering monetization in a way that meta products aren't. And ultimately, creators want to pay their bills. We'll be right back with Taylor Lorenz. First, a word from his sponsor.

Support for channels comes from Mint Mobile. You've heard about Mint Mobile before. You pay 15 bucks a month when you purchase a three-month plan, which is what I'd heard before I paid for Mint Mobile with my own money. And guess what? It works as advertised. It's easy to order, easy to set up, works on the phone you have, and if you want to adjust your plan once you're up and running, that's easy too. All plans come with high-speed data and unlimited talk and text delivered on the nation's largest 5G network.

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$45 upfront payment require equivalent to $15 per month. New customers on the first three month plan only. Try that again. Speed slower above 40 gigabytes on unlimited plan. Additional tax fees and restrictions apply. See Mint Mobile for details. And we're back. This is super useful. This is why I had you on. But I also wanted to hear about your career shift. You were a journalist for a long time. Rattled off all the publications, most recently at the Washington Post.

Now, do you call yourself a journalist or are you a creator? I'm a journalist and content creator, which is what I've always been. Yeah. And a blogger. I still sort of identify with the blogger. I don't want to spend a ton of time on history, but do walk us through how you decided and whose decision it was for you to leave The Washington Post and open up shop on your own. My decision, as I posted on threads in June, I wanted to leave because my editor, Mark Seibel, left.

Mark Seibel was the best editor I ever had in my entire career. I would literally die for this man. He was- At the Washington Post. At the Washington Post. Mark Seibel, best editor in the entire journalism business. I have never worked with somebody better. He is 71, 72. I don't want to age him, but completely changed my understanding of like, I used to say boomer. Oh, that's so boomer stuff. This man showed that you can be old and still get it. So he was my editor. Yeah, you old people. Yeah.

Well, he retired in June. And then when he retired, Drew Harwell and I, my reporting main reporting partner, and I were split into different teams. And I made the decision in June. That's why I posted about it publicly on threads. And that's why I relaunched my newsletter. So last June, your plan was I'm going to leave the Washington Post.

My plan was to go independent because, yeah, and I spent all summer. I mean, I spent all summer as literally anybody that knows me can tell you, developing the brand identity, figuring out what my sort of business plan would look like. I talked to Ryan Broderick, Casey Newton, like, you know, literally every single Andrew Katz, like every single like independent content person that you could think of.

to figure out how would I structure it? I also, in June and July, lined up all of these projects for October because I had this month-long vacation that I was going to Italy. And I didn't want to go. I didn't want to leave before I could take all of my

So I was like, all right, let me. So that's why I worked on the Hollywood Reporter's October content creators issue. I also did my first piece of sponsored content for Bloomberg the week after my first. I saw you making SponCon for Bloomberg at that event. I know I was dying that my first brand deal is just another media company. So your plan was always that basically by the end of the election in October.

I actually was first, I first was thinking I would go independent after the election. And then what everyone told me is that that's a bad idea because interest dips off and you should try to capture as much before. So I was like, okay, let me do it before the election then. I mean, I will say the post is amazing. Like the post is great in so many ways. The week that Mark retired is the same week that

the editor in chief left and like all of these changes happen. So it's a very different post. So I felt like, I mean, I have nothing but love for them. I really do. Like I will, I want all of these media companies to succeed, but Peter, as you know, like,

I was sort of like very hesitant to even take another. When I left the Times, like the Post was recruiting me hard. And the only way I went to the Post was as a columnist. I was surprised they recruited you. And I was surprised that you went, given your experience at other outlets. But just to set it up for everybody else.

At the Times, you frequently were in... You got into scrapes with your co-workers. I never got in trouble once at the Times, just to be clear, ever, for anything. I got doxxed and I got... My entire family was doxxed and I was under attack from Tucker Carlson, you know,

You chafed at the restrictions the Times put on you. Your colleagues criticized you. I wanted to own my work. I wanted to own my work. I got a book deal, and my audience popped off in a way that was frustrating to me because, again, the Times, which I think is a great place to work if you just want to work there for 40 years because it's impossible to, you know, it's a very strong union and you can work there forever. If you just want to be a journalist and write articles, that's never who I've been. Right.

Yeah, it's another way of saying it seemed like your interest would not eventually sync with a traditional big media news organization.

So that's why I was surprised they recruited you and that you went there knowing both of you knowing. But I only went there as a columnist because as a columnist, I could say whatever I wanted. And because columnists are not subject to the same restrictions as reporters. I felt like the struggle at the Times is

is that I was a reporter. And so it was, when you're a reporter, you know, you're very limited. And ultimately, they want their reporters to write news articles, not be making videos and doing all this multimedia stuff that I was doing. So I mean, they kind of go back and forth. Now they're putting Times journalists on the front page and these sort of fake TikTok videos too. They're going to come, they're going to learn the same lessons. I mean, look, this is a

I'm going to be vindicated. This is like when I got canceled a few years ago for saying journalists had to have brands and everyone was so mad. I'm just talking about these are the realities of the new media landscape. And I'm always going to put myself first. I'm never going to put a company's interests before my own. And my feeling, and I've said this to all journalists, is I'm a child of the recession. I graduated into a terrible media market. None of these companies will ever look out for you. And so you have to always make this...

sort of mental thing of like, what is the trade-off? What is the trade-off for me staying here? Am I getting more out of being here than they're getting out of me? And if that switches at all,

Then leave. It's no hard feelings. I have so many friends that work at the Times, so many friends that work at the Post. I think the Post has done a good job of giving people the ability to build brands a little bit more. I mean, look at someone like Bob Costa. They have all these people on TV. They do have people that have brands there. They do give a lot more liberties than the Times. I mean, I can think of a lot of Times people who have giant brands that they've built. But they're owned and controlled by the Times. Yeah.

The Times is not allowing them to do outside projects. Well, some of them do outside projects. I think the question that a lot of them have is, what happens when I leave the Times? Will I no longer be reporter X in the New York Times? What happens when I'm on my own? Yeah, that's also a difference, though, Peter, between how those people build their careers and how I build mine. Because I have always, from the beginning, made it so that...

Nobody even, I mean, I never had Washington Post in my bio. Your bio was subscribed to my YouTube. Yes, because I always look out for my own self-interest because I don't trust these companies. I want people to read my stories because they're a Taylor Loren story, not because they're a New York Times or Washington Post story.

Obviously, that is going to conflict with the interests of these media companies. And I totally respect that. And I get that. No hard feelings at all to that. I'm happy to work with any media company that wants to work with me if it's an equal partnership. I want to get to present tense and what you're doing in a second. But one last question about the post. So people can go and read all about it. But basically, you posted a meme, a photo of Joe Biden with the caption, war criminal. It was on your Instagram, close friends post.

It got out of the close friends circuit. And there was a lot of strum and drang about what the post was going to do, whether you'd be allowed to stay. How did that resolve in the end? Yeah, Biden is a war criminal. And I would say that and have said that 20 million times over. I think all...

I think all U.S. political leaders are war criminals. This is America. I mean, I have called like very famously other political leaders. I mean, I was extremely critical when I was a blogger of Obama's drone strikes. I protested. I was involved heavily in anti-war protests against Bush in college. I'm a very vocal person. And I think the way that.

The media manufacturers controversy, Peter, you have to understand how frustrating it is for me because every single thing I do, let's not forget when I left the New York times, let's not forget when I left the Atlantic, let's not forget when I quit, like just the hill. Remember that? Like every single thing that I do is framed. Well, I left the hill right after Charlottesville when I was assaulted on the job and it was this horrible thing.

thing. Then I quit. Then I went to Milo Yiannopoulos' free speech week and whatever. And all of these people made an entire controversy out of it. And this is the story of my career. Because I cover online influence, every single thing that I write about is sort of like

The people that I write about have big platforms, and I'm very much a fixture of sort of the right-wing internet's ire, Fox News's ire. Every single decision that I make is viewed through the lens of controversy. And I don't really know what to say other than I've learned that the more you feed that, like, and the more you engage with it, the worse it is. And so I just generally don't engage with it or talk about it. Because guess what? If I make a comment on something, that's going to be a Fox News headline the next day. And now you can do it all you like and not have

repercussions, at least in terms of your employer, because you're your own employer. Did you think, I mean, it seems like if you put it on Instagram close friends, you sort of knew, all right, this is something I'm going to say just between us. No, no, no, no, no. I've said, why don't you go back and see what I've said about Joe Biden? I have always been a star critic. So did you think that the post would have a problem with you posting that? That's my question.

My understanding, at least as far as I know, is that I can say whatever I want on digital platforms. I have no idea. You know, I really don't know. You'd have to ask them sort of like what their thoughts are. But I will say I am an open book on all of my platforms. I am an open book. My views, Peter, Peter, you have to listen to this. The frustrating thing is this whole sort of controversy is like, oh, does she really think Biden is a war criminal? I have said that publicly. I have said that publicly.

So here's my last question about this is what was their reaction to that? They said they were looking into it. Well, I'm asking you because you talk to them when you're an open book. I don't talk to them. I have not talked to them in a while. I mean, I talk to them if I need something from them. When after that happened and there was a Sturman drag and they said they were looking into it, what was the discussion you ended up having with them before you left?

You'll have to ask them. You really will. I'm sorry, Peter. I just don't know what they would want. I have no idea. But what I will say is that I have a great relationship with The Post. As everyone knows, my sister worked there for years. I have very close friends there. It is a place that I genuinely loved working at. When Mark left...

my reason, that was when I made the decision to go independent. And I've been very open about that, again, many times over. If people are confused or they want to make controversy over my views on the war or politics or whatever, again, I'm an open book. I'll happily talk about that all day. But if you want to know what the Washington Post thinks about something, you should ask the Washington Post. They have a comms person too that I'm sure they would talk to. First of all, they won't talk about it. But since

You were there. You were in the room. I figured I'd ask you. So it's your decision. It's their decision ultimately to comment on whatever they want to comment on. But it's my decision to go independent. It was my decision to go independent. And I will say a huge shout out to them because they were incredibly supportive and wonderful. That was really great. And Mark, by the way, my old editor, I still talk to him constantly and he's an amazing person. So let's talk about being independent. But you've been at it for a month. How's it going? Yeah, a little over a month. Or no. Yeah, November 11th today. Okay.

It's great. It's really fun. I will be honest, my life hasn't changed that much because now I can just post on my newsletter instead of posting on a different CMS. And I don't have any...

I guess what's different is I don't have anyone telling me no. So I don't have people shooting down my bad ideas, which maybe sometimes I wish I had. As I said, I've been in contact a lot with Mark, my old editor. He helped me edit a sort of contentious piece that I wrote recently. He's been helping me. I still talk to him a lot. You've been watching creators for a decade, right? And reporting on them. I'm sure imagining a version of this for yourself for a very long time.

Has anything surprised you now that you're actually doing it? I was independent before and I worked for most of my career. I've worked in social media. So I feel like I was pretty prepared. I will say, Peter, the frustrating thing has been people's obsession with legacy media. It's frustrating to go... And I'm sure you can understand this, but there

There's still a bias. There's still a bias in traditional media. There's still a bias where they still... I'm still introduced when I go on TV as... Or, you know, on my book cover, because by the way, my paperback is coming out. My book was a bestseller, Extremely Online. Name the book. It's called Extremely Online. It's about the history of the content creator industry. But like, you know, it's like they still want to put like...

written for the New York Times, Washington Post and the Atlantic. There's still that level. There's a certain type of person that is still obsessed with that legacy clout. And so that's fine with me. I'm still free. I just had a piece in The Hollywood Reporter. Again, I'm writing another piece for another outlet. I'm not anti all of legacy media, but I really want

to get to that media climate where legacy media is gone and we just focus on sort of like new media and not that it's gone rather, but putting it on a pedestal is gone and we recognize it all. I can understand the part about stuffy and credentialed and someone, you know, especially in the old days when lots of legacy media could get away with coming to a story a week late, two weeks late, and just saying, we're going to write about it now and no one knows any different. And

Much harder to pull that kind of stuff off in today's climate. I do think...

that legacy media does a lot of good stuff they employ a lot of people to go do a lot of news that is not getting covered by creators or anybody else um who is your audience who is who is reading your sub stack paying for your sub stack listening to your your podcasts and all the other stuff yeah i have such a disparate audience depending on the platform and this is something i've been thinking about um a lot and i talked to a lot of people about sort of over the summer when i was

talking to these other independent journalists or journalists that have sort of gone independent, like for instance, Casey Newton, right? Like he has somebody, he's a newsletter writer that writes about tech platformer, but he has a very like lucrative audience of tech workers that

make a lot of money. My audience skews younger. I realized this from when my book came out. It's a pretty young and digitally native audience. I also have a decent amount of Gen X parents reading. So I have like, I would say Gen Xers and under. It's most, the majority of my audience is under the age of 35 on all of my social platforms, except YouTube. I think YouTube, it's a mix. Maybe it's more like under 45-ish because YouTube skews a little older and it skews more male. Most of my audience is on other platforms too. It skews female. Yeah.

Actually, some people at the Washington Post bought the top tier. I have this $1,000 tier for really rich people that want to subscribe to me. And then most people pay $7 a month or $70 a year. And Substack is hard because they don't tell you a lot of demographic info on your audience. So I don't really know what those people are, but I've tried to look up and a lot of them have corporate email addresses. That's what I was getting at, or one of the things I wanted to get at, because I think

The way I see Substack from mostly outside the world is the successful Substackers are either have, like Casey Newton does, like something... Or Eric. Right, right. Or Eric Newcomer. Something where there's a business... Same reason Wall Street Journal had a subscription business, very successful subscription business for a long time, way before the internet was... Business people wanted it and or could expense it. They have deep pockets. Doesn't really matter what it costs. There's that.

land of sub stackers where people think they can make money from it and or expense it. And then there's a group that's ideologically interested in what the creator is saying or stands for. I think that's the Barry Weiss group. Maybe Matt Iglesias is in that group. Where do you think you're going to sit in that group? Yeah, I thought of that because I think it's like, I think to be like a multimillionaire sub stacker, you have to sort of like

be like the Eric newcomers, right? Or like target this sort of like lucrative audience. I find that I think that I view my sub stack as sort of like a written YouTube where it's like, it's commentary mostly. And it's some articles that I, you know, that I think are fun that like, it's maybe an article that I would traditionally write for publication, but I'm going to write it for my sub stack. But I do think it's more in the,

I don't know. It's a little bit of a mix of both. I don't know. I'm still kind of like finding my sea legs too and seeing what people like. People definitely prefer commentary to reporting, which is the way the internet is. But that doesn't mean that, but you sort of have to do the reporting so that you have legs to stand on when you do the commentary. Spoken like me. That's what I say about my work. All right, Taylor Lorenz, you have been a gracious guest. You get the last word. You get to describe yourself for the audience because I did it at the beginning.

You get to say who you are. I am a content creator and journalist and founder of UserMag, a sub stack about online culture and technology and host of the Power User podcast on Vox Media. You did it. Thank you, Taylor. Yeah, thanks. And buy my book. Buy her book. Thanks again to Taylor L. Renz. Subscribe to her sub stack. Listen to her podcast.

Thanks again to Jelani Carter, who produces and edits the show. Thanks to our advertisers who bring it to you guys for free. And thanks to you guys for listening. We'll see you next week. Support for this podcast comes from Stripe. Stripe is a payments and billing platform supporting millions of businesses around the world, including companies like Uber, BMW, and DoorDash. Stripe has helped countless startups and established companies alike reach their growth targets, make progress on their missions, and reach more customers globally.

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