September 10, 2025 • 12 mins
On the Wednesday September 10, 2025 edition of the Armstrong & Getty One More Thing podcast...
- First, some delicious treats lead to a very provocative question...
- Joe brings us a pair of stories about influencers...
- Jack brings us something completely different!
Stupid Should Hurt: https://www.armstrongandgetty.com/
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Yeah, they're either fake or they're being paid. It's one
more thing I'm strong.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
And before we get to whatever that is, I think
I know the answer to this question. I don't know
if I can set you up for it. I don't
know if I would be the right way to set
you up for it. I know what your answer is, though,
that one of your least favorite sensations is stickiness. Sticky.
(00:27):
And so Jensen, who's our fill in newsperson, while Katie
is out, made these delicious treats she brought in, and
they're great. They're like a some sort of bread, cinnamon
bread with caramel and nuts and apple apple. Yeah, but
(00:47):
they're cutt into little finger squares. Everybody's picking them out
of there with their fingers and you get caramel on
your fingers and my hands are sticky and I can't
get rid of it. Sticky? Why is? And then I
was thinking about why is sticky so annoying? From an
ever polutionary standpoint? Is there some reason an interesting would
human beings just naturally be appalled by being sticky? You know?
Speaker 1 (01:10):
It was funny. Appalled is exactly the right word. I
was playing golf not long ago with a buddy of
mine and we're in his golf cart and and he's like,
my god, my steering wheel is sticky? How did this
get sticky? Why is this sticky? What happened? And he's
wiping in his hands and he's just he's appalled. It's
not like, oh that's weird, it's wet. No, it's like,
(01:32):
oh my god, why is it sticky?
Speaker 2 (01:35):
So how did he something? Maybe did I don't know,
did dinosaurs leave sticky residue or I don't know what
it was, but we didn't. We didn't coexist with the dinosaurs.
That I couldn't be.
Speaker 1 (01:46):
Yeah, I was just gonna let that go. I'm pedantic,
but I'm not that potantic. Could it be that something's
on you and it's staying on you?
Speaker 2 (01:58):
I don't know, you know way that like if you're wet,
it'll dry, disease, the plague something. I'll bet there is
some disease that being sticky was. You didn't really want.
Speaker 1 (02:10):
That, the creeping crud.
Speaker 2 (02:15):
Yeah, I don't like sticky.
Speaker 1 (02:17):
You're right, Sticky steering wheel the worst, Yeah, because you
have to keep touching it.
Speaker 2 (02:23):
Why is that sticky? Eh? Boy?
Speaker 1 (02:30):
So a couple of stories and I can't decide. You know,
I was gonna go big on the radio show with them,
but they're both fairly lengthy. One his excuse me, I
believe I will be coughing for the rest of my life.
One of them is at from the New York Times
(02:53):
talking about these influencers. Both of both of these stories
are about quote unquote influence culture, whether it's on Instagram,
which is huge, or TikTok or x or whatever. And
they mentioned a couple that, of course I've never heard of,
because I'm mostly repulsed by all of that and it
(03:15):
seems phony and shallow and stupid to me. But they
mentioned that a couple of these people's Lil Mikayla and
mia Zelu, have millions of followers and are generating serious
income despite the fact that they don't exist. They're entirely
created by AI.
Speaker 2 (03:32):
Oh wow. When Nancy Pelosi whoever came up with this
idea first, and that might have been two months ago, Uh,
was really smart. Why didn't I do that as soon
as our friend Craig showed us how to do the
AI thing, I should have created an influencer. Yeah, good
(03:53):
looking dude who can play the guitar or whatever, and
then built a thing around him.
Speaker 1 (04:00):
Right, but is like super conservative or whatever. Yeah, maga
guitar gym here with another you know, whatever the hell
he's heard a red, white and blue cowboy hat, I
assume anyway. So, for instance, Nancy Pelosi was at the
Outside Lands Music's festival taking selfies and took a selfie
with a popular influencer as two point four million followers
(04:23):
me vibing to Gracey Adams and I look up and
it's literally speaker, Pelosi said. The influencer goes by Lowel
Michaela as she captured the photo in which the two
are seen smiling. Catch, of course, is that she isn't real.
She's one of a slew of influencers created through aio
have gained popularity in recent years despite the fact that
they don't exist. Me A Zulu Zelu Zelu, a blonde haired,
(04:46):
blue eyed AI influencer with one hundred and sixty seven
thousand followers, recently made headlines for attending Wimbledon. A recent
report by the online creation platform cap Wing found that
a computer generated celebrities are amassing millions of followers and
millions of dollars in revenue for the teams behind them.
Speaker 2 (05:04):
This has got to be scaring the hell out of
actual influencers that whoa is this over? Already? Is the
era of the influencer? Did it come and go?
Speaker 1 (05:14):
This? Quickly? Listen to this shit? Would you? A Brazilian
AI influencer with more than eight million Instagram followers who
serves as the voice of the Brazilian retailer magalou rakes
in thirty four thousand dollars per post, while low Mikayla,
who again doesn't exist, makes about seventy thirty thousand, well,
(05:36):
seventy four thousand dollars per post. Hey, I just got
a cute little handbag. It's absolutely amazing. Goes with all
my outfits. I was out clubbing blah blah blah, and
here it is seventy four thousand dollars per for this
quote unquote influencer who doesn't exist.
Speaker 2 (05:54):
You know what, it'd be good as a fake little
kid that tries out toys like the babies the baby
I saw one the other day. This one was impossible
to not like. You'd have to have a heart of
stone to not like because it was baby me.
Speaker 1 (06:11):
I think that's entertainment for idiots. I'd reject the entire.
Speaker 2 (06:14):
Genre, but there's nothing cuter than babies laughing. And there
were these were babies telling jokes to each other and
they were laughing, and the laughing.
Speaker 1 (06:21):
Baby might get me.
Speaker 2 (06:22):
The laughing babies was one hundred percent dead on. And
I mean, you can't not enjoy a baby laughing. But
these babies were telling each other like corny jokes and
just dying laughing. Oh, I enjoyed that. But if you
could create a fake baby who's trying out baby products,
oh that's a gold mine.
Speaker 1 (06:40):
So this little Mikaila thing was introduced in twenty sixteen.
Maybe the original AI influencer has appeared on magazine covers,
released music, and served as the face of campaigns for
Calvin Klein and Prada, all while purporting to be a
Brazilian American teen from Downey, California. She now identifies as
(07:00):
twenty two, created by a tech company called Dapper Labs,
which specializes in creating video games and collectibles. Whatever the
hell that means.
Speaker 2 (07:09):
You want to hear one of the jokes that the
baby's told. The baby told the other babies that.
Speaker 1 (07:13):
They laugh, I absolutely do.
Speaker 2 (07:16):
Yes, Baby's sitting there at the straight face talking to
his baby friends. Oh boy, our dog ate all the
scrabble pieces the other day. We had to take him
to the vet. No word yet.
Speaker 3 (07:35):
Oh and is that's all right, mister president. That's a
pretty good joke that that that is. I'm going to
tell that to my wife as soon as we're done here,
and she.
Speaker 1 (07:48):
Would laugh like a little baby. So the other story
I want to tell you, which is kind of similarish,
Jeff Blair was writing about it National Review and it's
it's about left wing influencers. But he points out there's
absolutely this on the right. In fact, there have been
(08:08):
some cases of it that came to the fore on
the right. So many of these people who are like
lots of followers, super influential, post all the time about
politics and stuff, are being paid by organizations like there's
this organization called Chorus that pays as much as eight
(08:29):
thousand dollars a month to these people to just constantly
hammer left wing talking points online. And Jeff writes, you know,
here's a link to who these people are. He says,
I haven't heard of any of them. But he says,
I'm also not hip to like who's really moving and
shaking among twenty year old college girls online. But yeah,
(08:53):
these people are making thousands of dollars a month. All
they have to do is submit all of their content
to a shady progressive organisation called Chorus for preclearance and
message approval, while employing the appointed I'm sorry, well, employing
the appointed talking points of the day, and funneling all
bookings through their secret paymasters. The contracts reviewed by Wired
(09:15):
dot Com prohibit standard partnership disclosures, declaring that Creators will
not publicize the publicize their relationship with Chorus, or tell
others that they're members of the program without Corus's prior
written consent. They also forbid Creators from disclosing the identity
of any funder. Then they get into, of.
Speaker 2 (09:34):
Course, you'd make that part of the deal. We're going
to give you ten thousand dollars to spout this as
a twenty one year old about this political position. But
part of the deal is you're not allowed to say
we're paying you well.
Speaker 1 (09:44):
Of course, right, yeah, yeah, And they get into in
some of their documents, how hey, it's really great that
we exist as a nonprofit because we don't have to
disclose any of our contributors blah blah blah. Non but
and you can't disclose any of this either.
Speaker 2 (10:02):
I watch out for that. I don't understand. One of
the reasons I don't understand how the only influencer thing
works is don't you just assume that they're getting paid
by whatever that thing is. They're telling you it's so great.
That's where they're telling you it's so great. Not always,
but a lot of the time.
Speaker 1 (10:17):
So yeah, a lot of the time. And it does
happen on both sides of the aisle. And anyway, he says,
and I'm gonna I'm gonna read this just because there's
certain figures on the right who I find abhorrent to readers.
There's an invisible world out there, a hidden hand, and
it is driven by money, the dark matter of politics.
We caught a fleeting glimpse of how foreign money is
(10:37):
spent on the right at least once over the last
few years with the Tenant scandal. Recall that there Russian
intelligence use Canadian cutouts to recruit Lauren Southern Timpoole and
moral horror show Benny Johnson, among others, to record commentary
pieces about topics the Russians selected and scripted to advance
Russia's geostrategic interests among the MAGA right, that was but
(11:00):
one scandal discovered due to the carelessness of its practitioners.
Let's stick to the sort of unpleasant insectoid analogy that
began this piece, and therefore recall the rule of pests.
If you see one inside your house, rest assured he
brought company with him. There is far more and worse
that you can't see, lurking hidden within your walls or
your floors, a world going on underground.
Speaker 2 (11:23):
That's a pretty clever way look at it.
Speaker 1 (11:25):
Yeah, and then you know what, there's one more part
that I think is really good. It would be easy
enough to laugh at Democrats, to dismiss this humiliation as
yet more evidence that they are an unpopular group of
sad frauds who need to pay for their online influencers
the way maladjusted losers frequent brothels. But I ask myself
where all that Katari and Chinese money goes? And I
(11:47):
ponder the message coordination of so many rytoid influencers, and
I begin to wonder. I wonder who on my side,
or anyone I've taken on good faith in fact secretly
practices the world's oldest profession.
Speaker 2 (12:00):
A haha, good question.
Speaker 1 (12:04):
My only question is, so when do I get my
prostitute myself? Do you want us to say variety of
loathsome regimes?
Speaker 2 (12:11):
What do you want us to say? For how much?
Every day we're talking about how great Brundei is all
of a sudden, but we're not. Remember cars.
Speaker 1 (12:22):
When my youngest was studying combination of law and foreign
policy and that sort of thing and foreign relations, I
told her, look, you go to work for loathsome regimes
because they pay better. Put your scruples aside, take the
sad Russian money, and tell everybody online how Putin's really
(12:42):
standing up for Christianity.
Speaker 2 (12:48):
The dog ate scrabble pieces took him to the vet.
No word yet you get it?
Speaker 1 (12:53):
That is so funny. Well, I guess that's it.
Yeah, they're either fake or they're being paid. It's one
more thing I'm strong.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
And before we get to whatever that is, I think
I know the answer to this question. I don't know
if I can set you up for it. I don't
know if I would be the right way to set
you up for it. I know what your answer is, though,
that one of your least favorite sensations is stickiness. Sticky.
(00:27):
And so Jensen, who's our fill in newsperson, while Katie
is out, made these delicious treats she brought in, and
they're great. They're like a some sort of bread, cinnamon
bread with caramel and nuts and apple apple. Yeah, but
(00:47):
they're cutt into little finger squares. Everybody's picking them out
of there with their fingers and you get caramel on
your fingers and my hands are sticky and I can't
get rid of it. Sticky? Why is? And then I
was thinking about why is sticky so annoying? From an
ever polutionary standpoint? Is there some reason an interesting would
human beings just naturally be appalled by being sticky? You know?
Speaker 1 (01:10):
It was funny. Appalled is exactly the right word. I
was playing golf not long ago with a buddy of
mine and we're in his golf cart and and he's like,
my god, my steering wheel is sticky? How did this
get sticky? Why is this sticky? What happened? And he's
wiping in his hands and he's just he's appalled. It's
not like, oh that's weird, it's wet. No, it's like,
(01:32):
oh my god, why is it sticky?
Speaker 2 (01:35):
So how did he something? Maybe did I don't know,
did dinosaurs leave sticky residue or I don't know what
it was, but we didn't. We didn't coexist with the dinosaurs.
That I couldn't be.
Speaker 1 (01:46):
Yeah, I was just gonna let that go. I'm pedantic,
but I'm not that potantic. Could it be that something's
on you and it's staying on you?
Speaker 2 (01:58):
I don't know, you know way that like if you're wet,
it'll dry, disease, the plague something. I'll bet there is
some disease that being sticky was. You didn't really want.
Speaker 1 (02:10):
That, the creeping crud.
Speaker 2 (02:15):
Yeah, I don't like sticky.
Speaker 1 (02:17):
You're right, Sticky steering wheel the worst, Yeah, because you
have to keep touching it.
Speaker 2 (02:23):
Why is that sticky? Eh? Boy?
Speaker 1 (02:30):
So a couple of stories and I can't decide. You know,
I was gonna go big on the radio show with them,
but they're both fairly lengthy. One his excuse me, I
believe I will be coughing for the rest of my life.
One of them is at from the New York Times
(02:53):
talking about these influencers. Both of both of these stories
are about quote unquote influence culture, whether it's on Instagram,
which is huge, or TikTok or x or whatever. And
they mentioned a couple that, of course I've never heard of,
because I'm mostly repulsed by all of that and it
(03:15):
seems phony and shallow and stupid to me. But they
mentioned that a couple of these people's Lil Mikayla and
mia Zelu, have millions of followers and are generating serious
income despite the fact that they don't exist. They're entirely
created by AI.
Speaker 2 (03:32):
Oh wow. When Nancy Pelosi whoever came up with this
idea first, and that might have been two months ago, Uh,
was really smart. Why didn't I do that as soon
as our friend Craig showed us how to do the
AI thing, I should have created an influencer. Yeah, good
(03:53):
looking dude who can play the guitar or whatever, and
then built a thing around him.
Speaker 1 (04:00):
Right, but is like super conservative or whatever. Yeah, maga
guitar gym here with another you know, whatever the hell
he's heard a red, white and blue cowboy hat, I
assume anyway. So, for instance, Nancy Pelosi was at the
Outside Lands Music's festival taking selfies and took a selfie
with a popular influencer as two point four million followers
(04:23):
me vibing to Gracey Adams and I look up and
it's literally speaker, Pelosi said. The influencer goes by Lowel
Michaela as she captured the photo in which the two
are seen smiling. Catch, of course, is that she isn't real.
She's one of a slew of influencers created through aio
have gained popularity in recent years despite the fact that
they don't exist. Me A Zulu Zelu Zelu, a blonde haired,
(04:46):
blue eyed AI influencer with one hundred and sixty seven
thousand followers, recently made headlines for attending Wimbledon. A recent
report by the online creation platform cap Wing found that
a computer generated celebrities are amassing millions of followers and
millions of dollars in revenue for the teams behind them.
Speaker 2 (05:04):
This has got to be scaring the hell out of
actual influencers that whoa is this over? Already? Is the
era of the influencer? Did it come and go?
Speaker 1 (05:14):
This? Quickly? Listen to this shit? Would you? A Brazilian
AI influencer with more than eight million Instagram followers who
serves as the voice of the Brazilian retailer magalou rakes
in thirty four thousand dollars per post, while low Mikayla,
who again doesn't exist, makes about seventy thirty thousand, well,
(05:36):
seventy four thousand dollars per post. Hey, I just got
a cute little handbag. It's absolutely amazing. Goes with all
my outfits. I was out clubbing blah blah blah, and
here it is seventy four thousand dollars per for this
quote unquote influencer who doesn't exist.
Speaker 2 (05:54):
You know what, it'd be good as a fake little
kid that tries out toys like the babies the baby
I saw one the other day. This one was impossible
to not like. You'd have to have a heart of
stone to not like because it was baby me.
Speaker 1 (06:11):
I think that's entertainment for idiots. I'd reject the entire.
Speaker 2 (06:14):
Genre, but there's nothing cuter than babies laughing. And there
were these were babies telling jokes to each other and
they were laughing, and the laughing.
Speaker 1 (06:21):
Baby might get me.
Speaker 2 (06:22):
The laughing babies was one hundred percent dead on. And
I mean, you can't not enjoy a baby laughing. But
these babies were telling each other like corny jokes and
just dying laughing. Oh, I enjoyed that. But if you
could create a fake baby who's trying out baby products,
oh that's a gold mine.
Speaker 1 (06:40):
So this little Mikaila thing was introduced in twenty sixteen.
Maybe the original AI influencer has appeared on magazine covers,
released music, and served as the face of campaigns for
Calvin Klein and Prada, all while purporting to be a
Brazilian American teen from Downey, California. She now identifies as
(07:00):
twenty two, created by a tech company called Dapper Labs,
which specializes in creating video games and collectibles. Whatever the
hell that means.
Speaker 2 (07:09):
You want to hear one of the jokes that the
baby's told. The baby told the other babies that.
Speaker 1 (07:13):
They laugh, I absolutely do.
Speaker 2 (07:16):
Yes, Baby's sitting there at the straight face talking to
his baby friends. Oh boy, our dog ate all the
scrabble pieces the other day. We had to take him
to the vet. No word yet.
Speaker 3 (07:35):
Oh and is that's all right, mister president. That's a
pretty good joke that that that is. I'm going to
tell that to my wife as soon as we're done here,
and she.
Speaker 1 (07:48):
Would laugh like a little baby. So the other story
I want to tell you, which is kind of similarish,
Jeff Blair was writing about it National Review and it's
it's about left wing influencers. But he points out there's
absolutely this on the right. In fact, there have been
(08:08):
some cases of it that came to the fore on
the right. So many of these people who are like
lots of followers, super influential, post all the time about
politics and stuff, are being paid by organizations like there's
this organization called Chorus that pays as much as eight
(08:29):
thousand dollars a month to these people to just constantly
hammer left wing talking points online. And Jeff writes, you know,
here's a link to who these people are. He says,
I haven't heard of any of them. But he says,
I'm also not hip to like who's really moving and
shaking among twenty year old college girls online. But yeah,
(08:53):
these people are making thousands of dollars a month. All
they have to do is submit all of their content
to a shady progressive organisation called Chorus for preclearance and
message approval, while employing the appointed I'm sorry, well, employing
the appointed talking points of the day, and funneling all
bookings through their secret paymasters. The contracts reviewed by Wired
(09:15):
dot Com prohibit standard partnership disclosures, declaring that Creators will
not publicize the publicize their relationship with Chorus, or tell
others that they're members of the program without Corus's prior
written consent. They also forbid Creators from disclosing the identity
of any funder. Then they get into, of.
Speaker 2 (09:34):
Course, you'd make that part of the deal. We're going
to give you ten thousand dollars to spout this as
a twenty one year old about this political position. But
part of the deal is you're not allowed to say
we're paying you well.
Speaker 1 (09:44):
Of course, right, yeah, yeah, And they get into in
some of their documents, how hey, it's really great that
we exist as a nonprofit because we don't have to
disclose any of our contributors blah blah blah. Non but
and you can't disclose any of this either.
Speaker 2 (10:02):
I watch out for that. I don't understand. One of
the reasons I don't understand how the only influencer thing
works is don't you just assume that they're getting paid
by whatever that thing is. They're telling you it's so great.
That's where they're telling you it's so great. Not always,
but a lot of the time.
Speaker 1 (10:17):
So yeah, a lot of the time. And it does
happen on both sides of the aisle. And anyway, he says,
and I'm gonna I'm gonna read this just because there's
certain figures on the right who I find abhorrent to readers.
There's an invisible world out there, a hidden hand, and
it is driven by money, the dark matter of politics.
We caught a fleeting glimpse of how foreign money is
(10:37):
spent on the right at least once over the last
few years with the Tenant scandal. Recall that there Russian
intelligence use Canadian cutouts to recruit Lauren Southern Timpoole and
moral horror show Benny Johnson, among others, to record commentary
pieces about topics the Russians selected and scripted to advance
Russia's geostrategic interests among the MAGA right, that was but
(11:00):
one scandal discovered due to the carelessness of its practitioners.
Let's stick to the sort of unpleasant insectoid analogy that
began this piece, and therefore recall the rule of pests.
If you see one inside your house, rest assured he
brought company with him. There is far more and worse
that you can't see, lurking hidden within your walls or
your floors, a world going on underground.
Speaker 2 (11:23):
That's a pretty clever way look at it.
Speaker 1 (11:25):
Yeah, and then you know what, there's one more part
that I think is really good. It would be easy
enough to laugh at Democrats, to dismiss this humiliation as
yet more evidence that they are an unpopular group of
sad frauds who need to pay for their online influencers
the way maladjusted losers frequent brothels. But I ask myself
where all that Katari and Chinese money goes? And I
(11:47):
ponder the message coordination of so many rytoid influencers, and
I begin to wonder. I wonder who on my side,
or anyone I've taken on good faith in fact secretly
practices the world's oldest profession.
Speaker 2 (12:00):
A haha, good question.
Speaker 1 (12:04):
My only question is, so when do I get my
prostitute myself? Do you want us to say variety of
loathsome regimes?
Speaker 2 (12:11):
What do you want us to say? For how much?
Every day we're talking about how great Brundei is all
of a sudden, but we're not. Remember cars.
Speaker 1 (12:22):
When my youngest was studying combination of law and foreign
policy and that sort of thing and foreign relations, I
told her, look, you go to work for loathsome regimes
because they pay better. Put your scruples aside, take the
sad Russian money, and tell everybody online how Putin's really
(12:42):
standing up for Christianity.
Speaker 2 (12:48):
The dog ate scrabble pieces took him to the vet.
No word yet you get it?
Speaker 1 (12:53):
That is so funny. Well, I guess that's it.
Hosts And Creators
Joe Getty
Jack Armstrong
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
The Herd with Colin Cowherd
The Herd with Colin Cowherd is a thought-provoking, opinionated, and topic-driven journey through the top sports stories of the day.