YouTube doesn't wanna be AM radio anymore

Trying to measure relevance has become something of an obsession for me since Trump re-entered office last year. It’s the driving force behind my recent probing into the clipping economy, all the various right-wing moral panics that zoom across our feeds, and my oftentimes fruitless quest to compare different pockets of internet discourse. How many Labubus is one Sydney Sweeney’s jeans worth?

But there is a reason for the madness here. President Donald Trump and his cronies have spent a decade unearthing new and innovative ways to hijack America’s attention span. The perfect cover for their continued ransack of the country. In the 2010s, it was all about the Twitter-to-cable-news pipeline. Trump would tweet, cable news would pick it up, the other engines of culture would react, Trump would tweet again, and on and on it went.

After Trump was booted off Twitter, he installed himself on Truth Social and adapted quite well to the fractured post-COVID internet landscape. Elon Musk bought Twitter and turned into X, a slightly-better version of 4chan with native video support. And for most of the Biden era, even if Trump was both out of office and sequestered to his own dark corner of the web, he and his followers still defined the national conversation with ease. There was Libs of TikTok’s one-woman crusade against random queer teenagers, the endless whining about trans women in sports, and, of course, Hunter Biden’s laptop.

This all came to a head in the summer of 2024, when MAGA influencers pounced on the conspiracy theory that Haitian immigrants were eating cats and dogs in Springfield, Ohio. It clogged up the airwaves and feeds at a pivotal moment in the election and, by all accounts, “worked.” So much so that it has remained the blueprint ever since: Find a story, typically localized in a small community, and swarm it with misleading videos, blasted across every platform, organized on X. Right-wing influencer Nick Shirley’s 2025 Minneapolis campaign was easily the most successful version of this. His largely disproven “investigation” into Somali-run daycares committing fraud in the Twin Cities was the match that lit the fire that led directly to the death of Renée Good and Alex Pretti and Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s occupation of the state back in January. But that also seems to have been the end of it.

For the last six months, Trump World has continued to launch different moral panics to no avail. Not only have they been unable to recreate what happened in Minneapolis — a media blitz backed by the full might of the US government — they’ve also been completely unable to hijack competing news cycles. They haven’t figured out a way to piss on New York’s magical summer (I see them trying on X every day) or counter-program it with Trump’s birthday UFC fight. They, also, have very little to say about the rising anti-data center anger popping up in rural communities across the US. They have, quite quickly, started to feel as if they’re completely trapped inside their own alternate reality. And you can see this by looking at what Shirley’s been up to lately.

Shirley’s spent the last six months harassing Orthodox Jews in Brooklyn, investigating “hospice fraud” and voter fraud in California, hanging out with British far-right influencer Tommy Robinson in the UK, and had a little side quest in Cuba, trying to latch on to left-wing streamer Hasan Piker’s streams from the island. Have any of these videos — or discourse about them — shown up on your feeds? I’m going to guess they haven’t. The question is why and, also, why now.

Well, the money flowing into more traditional right-wing digital media operations has clearly shifted or possibly dried up entirely. And this seems to be finally affecting reach. I haven’t seen anything meaningful break through from Tim Pool and the former Info Wars cohort, Joe Rogan seems like he’s on autopilot, RFK is content to post directly to his diehard woo-woo maniacs on Meta platforms, and right-wing YouTube is clearly suffering worst of all. Ben Shapiro’s media empire went through another round of layoffs back in May. Why has right-wing YouTube — Shirley’s home base — seemingly vanished from the cultural conversation? I have a theory.

YouTube doesn’t want to be AM radio anymore and it, also, doesn’t want to be cable news. It has its sights set on both working with and, assumedly, totally replacing Hollywood. In 2029, it’ll be broadcasting the Oscars. It knows it’s sitting on a massive amount of talented young filmmakers. And many its established creators are already launching full-blown TV productions on the platform now. In other words, if YouTube wants a real shot at conquering movie theaters and TV screens, it needs star power and, for the most part, those stars are not coming out of Prager University.

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Far-right millionaire Abelardo de la Espriella just won Colombia’s election, beating left-wing Senator Ivan Cepeda. This should start to sound very familiar, the election results are already being constested, de la Espriella is reportedly in a ton of debt, and most of his businesses are failing. He also styles himself a lot like El Salvador’s hustle bro president, Nayib Bukele, and is promising to carryout the same kind of military crackdown to go after narco gangs.

I think this comes close to answering a question that I’ve had since 2020. The “what’s comes next,” question. If the elections of the 2010s were defined by the far-right populist versus the establishment liberal, then it seems like the 2020s will be defined by the psychotic millionaire vanity campaign and the economic reformer. The Bukele or the Zohran, as it were. What is less clear to me, however, is what this means for the populists already in play. Could an Italian billionaire unseat someone like Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni? Well, she’s already beefing with Trump this month. So it’s possible these allegiances break further apart the deeper into the decade we get.

So this is a fascinating little surprise. A Japanese AI startup announced a new “multi-agent orchestration system” this weekend called Sakana Fugu. I’ve seen some panicked posts on X claiming that this is “on par with Claude Mythos,” the Anthropic AI model that was recently taken offline due to national security concerns. What Fugu actually is, however, is a little more interesting.

Fugu is, as its marketing claims, what’s called an orchestration model. Think of it like an AI model that can power and be powered by multiple AI models or agents. Fugu isn’t a competitor to something like ChatGPT or Claude, but a routing system for any and all models you would want to use. Which is really where I think the wind is blowing right now. And what I, personally, think is really neat about Fugu is also a large language model, unlike say OpenClaw, the finicky open source AI agent that took the internet by storm this winter. If this is too in the weeds for you, basically, OpenClaw was able to switch between different models, but you had to set that up manually. Fugu can, it seems, do this in natural language.

Fugu is not open source, however, which makes me think it’ll end up suffering from the same issues as every other big corporate AI model. Speaking of AI…

If you’re looking for more stuff on impending AI (economic) apocalypse, we’ve got a new video all about it on the Garbage Day YouTube channel.

Perhaps, like me, you’ve recently come across one of these truly cursed gambling livestreams. My assumption is there is some kind of covert clipping campaign responsible for all of this. I assume that with everything right now. (Which is a sentiment that, if I owned a social media platform, I’d be pretty worried about spreading!!!) But no matter how it happened, I am now suddenly aware of an incident involving someone named King Twink III and an e-girl that goes by 0xfascistx0. I think I’ve been doing this job for too long.

Anyways, I finally figured out where all these clips are coming from.

Duel is a crypto casino that has partnered in the past with folks like Andrew Tate. It’s owned by a company called Immortal Snail LLC and is run out of the West Indies. It was built by Finnish poker player named Ossi Ketola, who goes by Monarch, who, before Duel, was running CSGOEmpire, an online casino for Counter-Strike skins. I can actually, physically, feel readers understanding less and less of what I’m writing here.

They have a new beta casino stream where real-life dealers are running games of blackjack and, I guess, Duel has been sending random freaks into the streams to mess with the dealers to generate viral moments. Which is, again, I guess, how a dealer named King Twink III was disrupted by a crypto-trading e-girl named 0xfascistx0. In another stream, King Twink III was tackled by a guy in a Spongebob costume that, apparently, is known as FreakBob.

Alright then.

P.S. here’s some real good Widow’s Bay content.

***Any typos in this email are on purpose actually***