David Bloomberg and Spencer Watson explore audience capture—how influencers like Howard Beale (from Network) or conspiracy theorists get trapped by fame, forced into extremism to retain engagement, often for financial gain. Ronna McDaniel’s NBC shift and Bill Maher’s vaccine flip-flops reveal strategic inauthenticity, while a Survivor conspiracy theory doubled down despite evidence. Algorithms and viral success pressure creators into replicating attention-grabbing tactics, even if irrational, proving fame distorts authenticity more than ideology ever could. [Automatically generated summary]
The podcast would have a better name if they weren't all taken.
I'm Spencer, your host, and back again today with David Bloomberg.
How are you doing, David?
Good.
How are you?
Yeah, pretty good.
Just at the top, before I forget, if anyone has any comments, questions, concerns, or anything else they'd like to add to any of the topics, you can send that email to truthunrestricted at gmail.com.
And with that, we'll get straight into what we're talking about today.
We did an episode a little while ago, a couple months ago, maybe almost, where we talked about a concept called audience capture.
So today's episode is an addendum to that episode because every time I've heard that term, it made perfect sense to interpret it the way we talked about in the episode where we talked about audience capture,
where you have one influencer or talking head or grifter that is attempting to capture the audience of another similarly themed influencer or grifter and is imitating them.
Turns out there's also another definition, which is the opposite way.
Instead of having an influencer attempt to capture the audience, it's the influencer who is captured by the audience.
So this is what is sort of meant by that is that you get a person who becomes famous for doing a certain thing.
And then they feel like they feel pressure from their newfound fame to continue doing things along those same lines, even if maybe they seem like sometimes they aren't fully on board with that.
They feel like they still have to do that.
Like, I don't know if you ever saw a fairly old movie now called Network.
It's one of the greatest movies ever made, in my opinion.
But there was a guy that's been parodied many, many times.
It was a news guy that kind of goes off the rails and he says live on the news that he's mad as hell.
He's not going to take it anymore.
And everyone should stick their head out their window right now and yell, I'm mad as hell.
I'm not going to take it anymore.
And, you know, it becomes a phenomenon.
People actually do that in cities and other people hear them and they start doing it too.
And, and, and then he is then captured by his audience.
He's then on a new show where he's not on the news anymore.
He's on a sideshow where he has to rant all the time.
And he really wants to be a serious news guy.
He just kind of had a little bit of a like a moment, a breakdown.
But he's now in this new thing and he has to do it night after night.
And it's a really interesting look at the idea that what we see sometimes with some people online where they become famous for doing a certain thing and then they feel like they have to, you know, rub that rock that exact same way in order to get the glow just right the way it was before.
Right.
So what's your first take on this audience captured?
Well, my first take is more on the network thing than the audience capture.
Locally, we had a guy, a friend of mine, actually, his son played on the same high school baseball team as mine, and he was the very popular, most popular, I would say, local weather person.
And his station that he worked for was owned by Sinclair, and who, you know, people may know, very conservative and not necessarily concerned with facts organization.
And they instituted this new thing that the meteorologists had to give out red alerts and it would, you know, come up and it would be very eye-catching.
And they were doing it for everything.
And finally, he had had enough.
He was tired of it because he, like many of us who complained about it, and when I say us, I worked, I oversaw several meteorologists in my job, even though I was not one, but I oversaw some for other things.
And so we would talk about that and other people would talk about it.
And finally, one time something happened.
He just snapped on camera and he said, I'm not doing this anymore.
This is not a red alert situation.
This is, you know, this is oversimplifying the situation.
It's causing false warnings.
And I don't remember his exact words, but he basically told off his bosses on live TV, which was his last time on the station.
And so even though he was, like I said, the most popular, he was suspended and eventually they settled.
And, you know, they must have had some sort of non-compete.
I never specifically asked him, but now he works in a completely different job where he's really good at it.
It's more public relations oriented.
And at the same time, Sinclair and that station stopped doing the red alerts.
And so it's, it worked, but at the cost of his job.
Yeah.
And so he didn't go the way of the guy on network getting his own show where he has to, yeah, he gets corralled into it and do this same shit every night now.
Yeah.
Be as angry as possible night after night.
Right, right.
Which is good because he's a really nice guy and I don't think he could get angry.
So, but it is interesting because I mean, you know, something like that that really, truly did happen that, you know, going against the bosses to benefit the audience.
Yeah.
That red alert thing.
I think I've seen that parodied in other places, particularly on content I've seen from the Onion News Network.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So anyway, yes, that was a bit, I mean, it's so unlike me to go on a tangent, but especially on this podcast, Shaman.
Right, right.
Yeah, for listeners, you know, Spencer said, oh, this is, this is going to be a short podcast.
And I said, I said, nice.
We'll see.
All right.
All right.
Well, let's move on then.
Getting on with the content.
So I think personally, in my belief, I think people who get captured by their audience, who get an audience that wants a certain thing from them, they are captured in a big part by meta thinking.
You and I did an episode where we talked about meta thinking as part of manipulation.
And to understand that a person is captured by their audience is to understand that that person knows what their audience wants.
And they also know that they want the attention from their audience.
And so it's not anymore an authentic reaction that's happening between them and the audience.
It's not an authentic exchange.
They are attempting to manufacture the thing that they think the audience wants.
And they're probably right that the audience wants.
Another thing that happens here often, and I think we see a lot, is that in this interchange where they understand that this is what the audience wants and they want the audience to be bigger, there becomes like a unofficial and difficult to measure reward system that's only measured by the number of audience members watching for not only being on topic,
but increasing the extremity of the thing that you're talking about.
If it's you're going to rant about, I don't know, the climate or the deep state or whatever, you have to rant harder about it next time in order to keep up because there's other people competing with you in the way that we described about audience capture in the first definition, other people trying to capture the glow from you.
And in order to keep this, you have to be more extreme than all those other people.
And this drives a group of influencers to become as extreme as possible.
Some inevitably drop out because they just can't bring themselves to be that extreme.
And again, I've talked about this in other episodes of this podcast where we talk about grifters who, or people who are conspiracists who find a limit to a line they won't cross in the unreality that they're willing to believe in.
But some we can see online don't seem to have very much of a limit at all.
They will take on any unreal belief and rebroadcast it to their audience because that's the more extreme thing.
That's going to get them the glow that they're looking for.
Yeah.
And some, you know, get fired by the Republican National Committee and suddenly go to work for MSNBC and NBC and say, oh, no, I didn't really believe those things because now you're paying me and therefore I'll say something different.
Well, that's this more meta-thinking, right?
Yeah.
That's the inauthentic exchange that will lead them to their new paycheck.
Yeah.
Yes.
Going back, deleting old tweets, things like that.
For anyone who's confused, this he's having this conversation because I believe her name is Ronna McDaniel, who just yesterday started at NBC and is now, I believe she's a correspondent there.
She's hired.
Is that right?
Yes.
Yes, that's right.
I haven't looked into these details too quickly, but I've seen them in brief glimpses on my newsfeed, etc.
It's a lot of people are up in arms about it as of today.
So very topical today.
This episode might not come out for a couple of weeks.
Yeah.
Yeah, you're right.
Meta beliefs that meta thinking that leads to just adopting a whole new belief system because a lot of these people are just charlatans.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And it's interesting when you mention they're captured by their audience because I think of captured as like unwilling, but they're quite willing.
You know, they're willing participants in all of this.
And it's there are a lot of different examples that we can talk about.
And I think one that jumps out at me is people who had, you know, been fairly okay in most medical topics.
Yeah.
But then when COVID happened and the vaccine happened and they got it in their head, oh my God, these were these were created so quickly.
There must be a problem.
And they started listening to the charlatans who were saying that, the, you know, the anti-vaxxers without realizing that they were actually anti-vaxxers.
And they started making those same talking points.
And you would have certain people like Dr. David Gorski, who has, you know, fought anti-vaxxers for decades, saying, you're saying the same thing that the anti-vaxxers said 20 years ago.
This is nothing new.
And they would keep going.
And they would say, oh, I'm not anti-vax, but something, something, something anti-vax.
And as COVID has continued, or I'm going to say has lessened in the impact of the discussion, because we're still seeing thousands and thousands of people dying with it.
And a lot of anti-vax rhetoric.
Yeah.
Right.
A lot of these people have slid more and more into pure anti-vax, whether it's someone with a radio show who is a doctor whose name sounds like the past tense of drawing.
And he hosts guests who have been more and more anti-vax while still claiming not to be anti-vax.
They'll post things saying, before COVID, I accepted what the medical establishment said about vaccines, but then my eyes were open and now I see.
And it's like, no, your eyes have been sewn shut is what has happened because they have been captured one way or the other.
Now, is it because of this topic we're talking about?
Yeah, I think a lot of it is.
They got a taste of what it's like to be noticed by this audience, but they can't stay on just COVID vaccines forever.
No.
So they have to expand.
Right.
You know, you mentioned that you think of this as captured as being involuntary and that these.
I think voluntary.
I think they've been voluntarily.
Well, they're right.
But I think that I think that in some cases we see people who get this attention on them and they're uncomfortable and they aren't sure what to do.
And, you know, I can't, I don't have any specific examples of that right now.
But I do think that an interesting case of audience capture, possibly the most confused man in America with a microphone is Bill Maher, right?
Yeah.
He's on the left.
He's on the right.
He's, he's not against vaccines.
He's against vaccines.
He's always been against vaccines.
He's always been against any type of scientific medicine.
And that's why it was so terrible years ago when the Dawkins Foundation gave him an award for being an outspoken atheist.
And it's like, okay, it's not enough to just not believe in God.
You need to believe in science or not believe in.
You need to accept science as well.
And there was a lot of people who were very upset about that.
Still, still are.
Well, and Bill Maher, he's almost like Joe Rogan in that he says a huge number of words.
He talks on a huge range of topics.
And it's difficult to follow him enough to keep, to even keep track of where he is on a day-to-day basis.
Like he's flip-flopping all over the place all the time.
And I think he's doing it more and more.
I used to think he was doing it because he's authentic.
Like we're talking like back in the 2000s.
He seemed like he was a really interesting part of this set of political talking heads, right?
He had this show where he was going to be politically incorrect.
It was the name of the show.
And he wasn't going to adhere to all the niceties of social situations so that he could talk about more real stuff.
That was kind of the idea.
But I think more and more he's less about that and he's more about just trying to scoop up as much of the audience as he can.
And he's almost captured by too many audiences is what he is.
Like he's trying to service all the masters in almost every scenario while pretending to not give a crap about any of them.
And anyone who watches him long enough knows he gives a crap about how it comes together.
He's not just going to say, screw you, I'm out, but he's going to pretend to be.
So he's like, he's trying to be this leather jacket wearing rebel who doesn't care what society thinks in this counterculture way, but he absolutely does care.
And he's going to change what he's saying in the next two weeks to another thing that makes it look like, you know, if you like him enough, maybe you could, you know, forgive some of the things he's saying that aren't quite, you know, don't quite fit.
Right.
And as a character study of a celebrity that is in a, in a audience capture scenario, he's very interesting.
In most other respects, he's no longer very interesting.
But in that respect, I think he still is.
You say no longer.
I would say even the name politically incorrect that is designed to draw attention.
Like, ooh, look at me at the time.
I'm going to say things that you can't say normally.
Yeah.
He's meant to be outlandish.
Right.
I mean, that right there is exactly what you were talking about before.
He's purposely going to a more extreme standpoint.
That's not the way true things get decided.
You, I mean, I understand that the Republican MAGA party may not, you know, agree with me there, but that's not, you know, that's the reason that the extreme MAGAs are so mad at the speaker as we're recording this is because the speaker of the house had the nerve to negotiate in order to get a budget to keep the government going once again.
And they don't want that.
They think if we just shut everything down, everybody will cave in to us and we'll just have to say more and more extreme things.
And I mean, it's the same thing.
He was drawing people by saying more and more extreme things.
Yeah, true.
And I mean, it's succeeded for him.
It's given him a great career, you know, lots of money.
Has it helped the country?
I doubt it.
And, but that's not his goal.
And the thing is, you can go from that, in my opinion, to much more mundane areas.
Okay.
Now, people who've listened before know that I spend most of my time podcasting about reality TV.
And on Survivor, there was a player by the time this goes out, it may have been a couple of weeks ago, but who was extremely emotional, melodramatic.
And he also happened to have a very, very minor acting career, playing a few roles like Guy on Street, uncredited, you know.
But he had an IMDP, IMDb page.
So that meant he was an actor.
And some people got it into their heads that he was acting on survivor so he could get better roles.
And they started spreading this conspiracy belief.
Well, what happens?
They start getting more attention, the people who are spreading this conspiracy.
Yeah.
And I'm sure, you know, it's nothing like Bill Maher, but it's in our little survivor world, you know, these people who had otherwise been fairly unnoticed suddenly have people saying, ooh, look, this person's saying something and it makes sense.
And, you know, compared to the stuff we usually discuss here, it's pretty mundane and harmless, but it's still wrong.
And it emphasizes an incorrect mode of thinking.
And so I have tried to push back on this.
And when he did, he was voted out and he did interviews.
And never once did he mention acting, which if this conspiracy was correct, he would have needed to because the conspiracy was he was acting so that he could get better roles.
Well, the only way he can use this as an audition reel is if he tells people he was acting.
Yeah.
I was only acting.
See how good I was acting there?
I was acting when I did that.
Clearly, that's not the real me.
That's the acting me.
Right.
But he never mentioned it.
So I pointed that out.
Did these people change their minds?
No, they came up with more and more intricate conspiracies going further and further out there.
They had, as you said, been captured.
They could not publicly admit they had been wrong because that would lose whatever influence they had.
So then the conspiracies evolve.
Oh, it's the show preventing him from talking about it.
They won't let him discuss it.
Really?
What's your evidence of that?
Yeah.
Well, we know it's out there.
And of course, this usually ended up with them blocking me.
But, you know, and I'm sure if this had kept going long enough, someone would have invoked aliens, you know, like, well, the aliens controlling the government, controlling CBS are the ones who really wouldn't let him do it.
I mean, and again, I know this is very mundane, very meaningless in the grand scheme of things.
And some people even said that to me.
David, why are you arguing with them?
Well, it's because it's the same mode of thinking.
And if you're going to believe this, you're going to believe the next little conspiracy that comes down.
Yeah, the system of thinking that led to this will still be existent in those people.
Right.
And they'll use those that same level of thinking to come up with other conclusions that are also false.
Right.
Crank magnetism.
And so, you know, using my own experience again, in terms of the feeling that someone who is audience captured gets.
I am, in addition, a, what I would say, very minor content creator.
I make reality TV related videos to post on TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram.
I have occasionally seen some of my videos go somewhat viral.
Okay.
I had one that was over 4 million on TikTok views and over 6 million on Instagram.
Okay.
That's a lot for me.
That's the most on TikTok for me.
And so, of course, I immediately am like, okay, what did I do here?
How can I replicate this?
So you're also thinking that too, right?
Yes, well, of course.
And yet when I've tried, I've almost always failed because I don't know why the algorithms.
The magical thing of why.
Right.
Right.
I don't know what caught their attention there.
And it's just so hard to replicate.
But if I were to start spouting nonsense, just make videos of myself spouting nonsense and those started picking up, it would be a lot more obvious.
You know, like I would know exactly what it was that caused it.
Now, especially if you did it a second time and then also got a second bump in that way.
Yeah.
Right.
That would confirm for you what you were doing was on the right track.
Yeah.
And, you know, now, personally, I've been writing and talking about science and skepticism and politics for over three decades, always in small, smaller venues.
So I'm not going to suddenly change to get a few clicks.
If I was going to do that, I would have done it 30 years ago.
And I would, David.
Yes, I know.
But just from my own experience, yeah, I like whatever that, you know, endorphin hit is of doing something and knowing lots of people are watching.
Yeah.
Almost anybody would.
And I think especially if you intended for it to be watched.
Right.
And I think the people, I think a lot of these people start that way.
And then they realize they can make money on it.
Now, don't get me wrong.
If I could make money on the videos that I do, I would.
The money incentive definitely cranks it up a notch.
Right.
Yeah.
I'm not.
There's very little money.
Fame is already a pretty good incentive for a lot of people, though.
Right.
Yeah, it is.
But I think for a lot of these, it leads to money.
I mean, I was saying that about Bill Maher.
And once they realize they can make money, then they really have to keep going.
Because besides the high of a video, have a lot of people see a video or listen to you.
There's the low of something you put a lot of work into and it doesn't go anywhere.
And that's just when you're doing it for fun.
So if you're doing it for money, it's much worse.
They can't lose their audience.
So they have to keep ramping up.
They literally have to.
Some of them have put their hearts into this, certainly not their brains, but they've put whatever they have so that they could turn it into what they are known for and what they are making money at.
It becomes just another job that sucks.
Well, I don't know.
I mean, I've been in jobs where I've been in that job and I just, oh, this job sucks.
Yeah.
Maybe I, you know, sometimes I think in that time, maybe I should get a different one, but I'm like, no, I already have this one.
Right.
Like, I should just, I should just keep going with this one until it's, you know, it sucks worse or it's, it's not useful anymore.
And a lot of people are in that situation.
I think they understand that.
Right.
And I think it's interesting you put it in that term, that idea that you're captured by the extra things that come with that audience, like the money.
You know, Libs of TikTok is recently been known as who the person is behind it.
And that person is looking to capitalize on getting their name known everywhere.
Oh, yeah.
And just make as much money as they possibly can.
And it's unclear to me anyway, whether they really enthusiastically support the things that they say, but they seem to enthusiastically support the attention they get from saying it.
And that much I think is clearly true, right?
Yeah.
And that's why, you know, that's why there's the old saying, don't feed the trolls.
You know, now some trolls like Libs of TikTok are too big.
You can't not feed them.
Feed them.
They're going to get enough food.
Yeah.
Right.
But there's, again, recently going back to survivor, there was recently several, several people on Twitter making fun of a contestant's body type, making fun of her weight.
And one of them said something and immediately was descended upon by so many people that they deleted their Twitter account.
They could not handle it.
The other person, it turns out, is more of a troll.
And they probably did it on purpose to get attention.
And they got lots of attention because a lot of the players this season quote tweeted that tweet and said, don't be like this person, report this person.
And finally, I jumped in and I said, you know, by quote tweeting them, you're giving them more attention.
Right.
They're spreading it around.
Stop doing that.
And I mean, I said it nicely and I didn't call anyone out.
I just said, you know, just so you know, because some of them are newer to Twitter.
They only got on Twitter when they got on Survivor.
And so shortly after I did that, whether it was me, whether it was other people or whether they realized it themselves, a number of them deleted their tweets, reposted it with a screenshot, or just said, I have deleted my tweet because it is getting that person attention.
And that was never the intent.
And so hopefully there's a lesson there, you know, and that's why they say, if there's someone like that, do a screenshot.
You want to slam someone?
Do a screenshot.
That way it won't get even more engagement.
Now, in some cases, I won't bother.
If it's Elon Musk himself, I may not bother doing a screenshot.
He has enough reach.
It doesn't matter.
His tweets are going to go where his tweets are going to go.
He could just turn the whole thing into just his megaphone if he wanted.
Well, he pretty much has.
But yeah.
But other people, yeah, I will screenshot it and it'll be like, okay, here is why this person is wrong.
And it also has the added benefit that their little troll army doesn't necessarily follow as easily.
Yeah.
But yeah, I mean, just in general, I think it can go from the smallest kind of, you know, seeking an audience to the biggest being captured in that way.
And again, though, I still will say it is voluntary.
They have chosen this path.
They want to keep the money flowing in.
They want to keep the attention flowing in.
They could stop.
And that was going back to Ronna McDaniel.
One of the things she said in her first NBC interview was, well, I had to say that because I was the mouthpiece for the Republican Party.
I had to go along with what Trump was saying, even if I didn't agree with it.
I had to.
I had to.
No, you didn't have to.
You could have quit at any time.
You chose to because you were being well paid to.
And now that you're being well paid by NBC, as of this moment, you're choosing to say different things.
I think it will be interesting eventually to go.
At some point, there might be a useful comparison to be made after we get some time of Ronna McDaniel, if she stays on NBC for any length of time, to compare the things she said immediately leaving the RNC to the sorts of things that Megan Kelly said when she left Fox News after she first went to another thing.
That might be, if someone could go out there and like in a month or so and take some things together, I know some people will like to do this and like put together that sketch.
I think that would be really edifying for the world to compare the view of two women leaving Republican narrative strongholds and then going to other places where they had to navigate what people thought of their, you know, placement in those Republican information strongholds.
And yeah, because, I mean, they were both audience captured too, right?
Yeah.
Well, I, what I would be even more interesting is, I mean, she's not going to be on NBC forever.
Matter of fact, it wouldn't surprise me if she's not on NBC even for the length of her contract.
But afterwards, she may well end up at Fox or one of these other networks.
It'll be interesting to compare what she says then.
Is she going to turn around and say, well, my NBC masters told me that I had to take that back, but I truly believe that the election was stolen.
And, you know, is she going to flip again?
The two realities approach, which as I call the Alex Jones on the show and the Alex Jones in the courtroom.
Yes.
Yeah.
So, okay.
Well, we're going to wrap this up here.
I think I will mention that the fact that there are two related meanings for a single term is unfortunate, but probably unavoidable.
The phrase exactly describes what is happening in both situations.
So I don't know how we're ever going to get around it.
Although I'll probably refer to this definition as audience captured rather than captured just to try to get some space between these two things because it does get confusing.
So until we come up with a better term and coming up with better terms is always useful.
This is what we have.
So anything to close out?
Where can people find you, David?
Well, I am at Twitter, as I mentioned, at David Bloomberg.
I'm also on Blue Sky at David Bloomberg.
I'm on Threads at David Bloomberg TV.
Neither of those are nearly as good for having discussions just because, I mean, Threads doesn't even want to be a place to have political discussions.
But if you want to see examples of the reality TV videos that I was talking about, you can find me at David Bloomberg TV on any of the places I was mentioning, TikTok, YouTube, or Instagram.
And if you want to hear survivor podcasts, I am on the Rob has a podcast network, Reality TV Wrap-Ups, doing Why Blank Lost?
Talking about why each player, excuse me, lost survivor.
Great.
And as mentioned, you can send emails to truthunrestricted at gmail.com.
And you can find me on Twitter at Spencer G Watson.
I'm also on threads at SpencerWatson39 because reasons.