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I don’t need to be on a set slaving away 12 hours/day or sucking a director’s dick (metaphorically or literally because hey it’s Hollywood, right).
I just need some wifi.
We’ve got millions of followers across our pages. I’ve got 7 employees on 4 different continents. We get more views than half the TV shows out today on our memes.
Meanwhile, traditional Hollywood is crumbling.
“There’s not enough work,” writes The Hollywood Reporter. “Hollywood has yet to recover the jobs in film and television production that were lost when strikes by writers and actors brought production to a halt in 2023,” writes the NYT.
Meanwhile the creator economy is fucking booming everyday.
Why do you think every actor and comedian has a podcast from Conan O’Brian to Jason Bateman?? Because the internet is the new hollywood.
As a movie nut and Hollwood wanna be, this is all a complex feeling I’m still trying to understand. I think in memes and metaphors, so a few comparisons below.
When I was 15, I wrote in my notes app that I wanted to be on Forbes 30 Under 30. I could easily get on it now. But the best thing Forbes 30 Under 30 is known for is crime nowadays. The institution has fallen.
When I was 17, I went to University of Michigan Ross School of Business, the best undergrad biz schools in the country. Now I’m 28 and my wife and I both agree when we have kids, we’re not sending them to college.
When I was 18 at University of Michigan, I worked for the New York Times as a campus representative selling subscriptions to the paper on-campus and on the internet. I was the #1 campus rep in the country. Nowadays, you couldn’t pay me enough to even subscribe to The New York Times, the most corrupt paper on earth. @balajis was right. @shaunmmaguire proved it.
When I was 25, I wrote the book “Memes Make Millions” and couldn’t get a single published to pick it up. Meanwhile I raised $3M to make memes.
Last year alone, I was in Rolling Stone, The New York Post, Politico, Forbes, and on the front page of Inc labeled “The Gen Z Building The Canva for Memes.” It was a nice puff piece but idgaf. It's stupid I haven't even updated our site's press section and after all of it, I wrote a piece called “Front Page, Who Cares?”.
What all of this has in common: The efficiency of the internet has shown the inefficiencies in all our major institutions.
From legacy media to universities to cities to Hollywood itself, the internet showed us how inefficient and rotted the organizations themselves were.
The internet is the new Hollywood (there’s not enough jobs in LA). The internet is also the new New York (you can do finance anywhere). And it’s also the new Silicon Valley (why you don’t need to move to SF anymore).
None of the old shit fucking matters.
All that matters is the internet.
So that is why I have this scar.
The internet may have caused these industry-wide ruptures, but it's a scar I wear with pride and I know many others do too. Scars can be both painful and beautiful. And that's what's so damn confusing.
I’ll be filming the first episode myself this summer in France to post on the new Hollywood (the internet).
And who knows what’ll happen?
Maybe like falling in love with a toxic ex, it'll end up in Hollywood anyways.
