Welcome to the Nick, Dick, and Paul Show. We have a very exciting episode today because we are actually going to talk about a bunch of different things. We're not going to stick to one topic. We're going to talk about slop, Crumbl Cookies, tariffs, SpaceX. I mean, you name it, we got it all today. It's like a Nick, Dick, and Paul buffet.
What do all those things have in common? I think we could probably all come up with I don't know what all those things have.
We should try to come up with what they all have in common. They're all too big to fail. Even the Crumbl cookie.
Especially the Crumbl cookie.
Should we just start with the Crumbl cookie?
The Crumbl cookie. That should be the tagline of the Crumbl cookie. Too big to fail.
Too big to fail. I've never seen anything quite like the Crumbl cookie. Paul sent the ingredients the other day. And do you, Paul, you want to tell us what this is? Is this like the end of the world?
Yeah, I'm sure it's a terrific cookie. I have no idea. But it's gigantic. What is it, like a thousand calories? My objection was that they do that classic thing of saying portion sizes, and the portion sizes were 200 or 250 maybe, which implied people eat these cookies in like four bites, which is obviously ridiculous. They just eat them.
Implies they only eat a quarter of a cookie.
Yeah, that's not happening. There's no chance that's happening. But it was just startling. This company has just exploded over the last probably four years or something like that. And you know, I'm sure they're all lovely people and they're doing their absolute best to keep their kids in the best private schools, but the cookies are lethal. You know, it's remarkable that these things even exist.
To be fair, 1,000 calories is one of the higher calorie count Crumbl cookies. Most of them are only 700 calories.
Well, isn't a normal cookie like 100 calories? Just a normal typical chocolate chip cookie. What are they putting in this cookie to make it more?
What they're putting in is more sugar with a sugar chaser, would be my guess.
Here's my question though. Is this all just part of the whole Instagram social destroy the world?
That's the most interesting thing about it because I had zero idea, and I have zero idea about many things, but I had zero idea that the thing that was really driving this was color palette. That it's basically a play on having something colorful and new in your Instagram feed. And they're under huge pressure, they being Crumbl, to constantly release not necessarily new flavors. Flavors are incidental. The thing that they really have to release is new colors. Sure, it's got new flavors and different sugar and whatever else, but it's really just the colors that drive people to go crazy about it and then in turn drive influencers and whomever to have people come to the store so they can take pictures of it. The idea that food's been reduced to a color palette is just seriously whack.
When they run out of colors, will the company crumble?
Yeah. I have a hunch that if you ever looked at Pantone, we have a long way to go. There's a lot of colors out there.
This is the Pantone-ification of diet.
None of you guys have ever tried one of these things, right?
I've never even seen one in the wild. I was just going to say I've seen one in the wild because there is a Crumbl store in the West Village in New York, but I have not had one. I've seen people leaving the huge line outside the store.
Oh, it's one of those line places.
What you also need to know about the Crumbl cookie, which I said as if I am an expert.
Yeah. Please, please carry on. I want to hear more.
Is that there are Crumbl cookie drops. Much like there would be shoe drops, which is you got to be at the spot the new Crumbl Cookie is dropping on the day it drops, which is when there are big lines to be, you know, TikTok-ing or whatever, highlighting the new cookie that you were an early tryer of. So those are the big Crumbl cookie moments when there's a whole line there. And the thing that strikes me about the Crumbl cookie that Paul mentioned is that it's the color along with the sort of the silly name of the flavor. So I always sort of imagine the Crumbl creative lab that some guy has an idea for the pumpkin spice cookie and the other guy's going, 'We already did orange.' You know, purple cookie, what's something that tastes purple? It's really, I just think the idea of reducing sugar—
But reducing food completely to aesthetic is just such a natural extension of everything that's going on, right? I mean, who cares what it tastes like? The colors are terrific and I can fill my Instagram feed with it. This is just like art. It's like art theory taken to its limit where it's just this idea of the art is irrelevant. I don't even care what the painting is of. I just like that there's this aesthetic that I can talk about and it's now cookies as an aesthetic.
Well, speaking of crumbling, you like the segue. See where I'm going with this?
Yeah, it's what we call a smooth transition.
I've been doing a lot of reading about shorts. And in China, it actually makes up for like 3 or 4 billion dollars in revenue. It's bigger than the theatrical there. It's about 1.4 billion in the US. But growing. And of course, they're the most ridiculous things on earth. Like, 'My husband is a secret vampire homeless billionaire' is one of—
We've talked about this, but why are they all vampires all the time? The one that I tried to come up to speed on was 'My boyfriend is a hockey player and a vampire and my dad owns the pro hockey team. Secretly my dad secretly owns the pro hockey team that my boyfriend plays for.' But so like someone's always a billionaire and someone's always a vampire. But why vampire? I just don't get why someone's always a vampire.
I think it's because they're targeting—
I think so. I talked to the CEO of Reel Shorts. I forget, I mixed them up. Or Short Reels. I don't know. I think it was Reel Shorts. Chinese guy. He was maybe he looked like he was six or seven. He was probably 26 or 27. But—
I mean the numbers are astounding.
Like he was telling me that they're pulling in three or four million a day in revenue. It's crazy.
They're reinvesting all of it back into ads.
I was going to say that it's all going back out the door again.
It's all going back. It's going to Facebook, I think a couple million goes into Facebook ads specifically because they're targeting women in the Midwest who are like stay-at-home moms,
Yeah, who are reading those cheesy airport romance novels because they don't have romance in their life. And for some reason they found—
Wow, that was very—talk about jumping to conclusions.
Well, also the funny thing is one of their other more popular—
I don't get enough vampire in my real life so I have to go to the shorts for it.
That's right. There's a new segment that is rising in popularity which is quote unquote the DILs. Do you guys know what a DIL is?
Oh, do you not know what a DIL is?
Double income, low tolerance.
I heard what I heard the rest of it. So it's just dad.
It's what? It's just a dad version of it. It's DIL.
It's a dad version. I guess women want DILs and then they want vampires.
Uh, but men are not into these shows apparently yet. But I think they are. Okay. So, let me just keep going. So, the reason the men are not into them is because they're not into vampires and DILs. However, for the most part, they're now starting to do horror because that's what the male viewers want. And so the horror is equally as ridiculous. Like it's horror porn where the girls are like half undressed and whatever. Anyway, the reason I bring this up is because—
It's a massive, massive, massive growing industry and the only—and everywhere in Hollywood, no one in the big Netflix, Paramount, all those places, Warner, they're not doing anything. It feels like Disney is the first to actually kind of want to try this out through Sora.
Oh, I think that's usually true. But I also think if you kind of abstract up a level, a lot of this is about how content has become so algorithmic and engineered. The reason why vampires are everywhere and why DILs—it's because it works and the algorithm says it works and since the algorithm says it works you do more of it and then you do even more of it and that's this breeds this homogenization and it's because it's algorithmic and engineered. This isn't content that the audience is only secondary. The real audience is running on a data center somewhere and it's a GPU. That's the real audience for this stuff, right? It's really just unsleeping GPUs inside of some data center in Northern Virginia that said that stuff works and that's what's driving everything. And that's what people miss here is that the human audience is weirdly secondary. It's the great Tony Shalhoub line from the Coen brothers movie Barton Fink where he says he's having trouble writing the movie and Shalhoub says, 'It's a wrestling picture. What do you want, a road map?' Like these things are all going to be basically the same version.
Yeah. And you don't get punished for that. You're not punished for doing that. So you're going to see even more of it. And it's the same reason why I find it amazing if you ever scroll through an Instagram feed, which is obviously completely toxically algorithmic with all the same things.
It's increasingly people saying, 'Oh, other people do this thing that I do.' Which at one level is sort of interesting and reassuring that everyone has the same foibles you do. But then at a second level, it's like, you know why everyone does the same thing you do? Because you all live in the same Instagram reel and you are essentially the same person now, right? It's a homogenizing force, not just a reflection. It's actually shaping the reality.
No, it's crazy. My kids were on my phone and they looked up a Mr. Beast video on YouTube Shorts and now if I go to YouTube Shorts, it's all Mr. Beast and it's so much so that I blocked the Mr. Beast app and then he started appearing on other apps. Like it was like a horror movie and I couldn't get rid of Mr. Beast. Like he's on the Mark Rober thing and I get rid of that. It's like it's literally the algorithm is so stupid. And it thinks that's all I want to have.
I have an ancillary sort of thing that I was astonished about with these shorts, which is that people have a surprising amount of disposable income that I wouldn't have thought they had. Like, spending these billions of dollars on a 90-second soap opera about the hockey player who got injured and the girlfriend's dad owns the team secretly. And then like it's 90 seconds and then you put another coin in the meter. Who has the money? Who's got all this money to do this that doesn't need it for like food and shelter?
No, it's totally true. It's absolutely true. You know what this reminds me of a little bit? You know those memes of like in Vegas where you just see the old people just pressing the button and there's hundreds of them. Like it's that—they're literally just looking for that next little high.
It's totally that. And they're just dropping—
But so is that—you know, so is Instagram feeds. All of these things are the same thing that, as I said, the humans are incidental. It's the algorithm that's the audience and they just keep feeding the algorithm with stuff and hopefully it just keeps engineering an audience out of it and around and round it goes and this is all of that and I think that's a huge slice of what you'll see in the future because you get rewarded for it. I have, about two or three months ago, deleted Instagram and Twitter from my phone and have not looked back and do not miss it in the slightest. Like I just feel so much better about myself. I do watch a lot of vampire love shows.
