"Egg horror" and other bizarre viral recipe videos

Plus: Miami scams! Bitcoin freaks!

Greetings from Read Max HQ! In today’s edition:

• What the fuck is up with this weird fucking recipe video? And what can it tell us about the effect of A.I. on social media?

• Miami watch: Zoomer con-man package-return scam edition

• Celebrating the insane Bitcoin guy who spoke at OSU commencement and made everyone there sing 4 Non Blondes

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What the hell is going on with this weird recipe video

The following recipe video recently crossed my feeds thanks to a tweet from venture capitalist Max Meyer reading “Disturbing trend on TT/YT/IG: entire social channels with nonsense recipes. They're clearly narrated by AI and likely written by it, but the videos appear real. The channels have no affiliate websites, but millions of subs. It's just chaos.” He calls the recipe “egg horror”; I invite you to watch it yourself:

If you can’t watch the video, allow me to reproduce the recipe:

1. Poach seven eggs in hot oil. Add salt and pepper. (“I’ve gotten into the habit of making my eggs with pepper,” the narrator’s chipper A.I.-generated female voice says. “It makes them so much tastier.”)

2. Drain eggs over pot and place in bowl. Add one cup fine plain bread crumbs.

3. Add one half chopped raw onion.

4. Add “some” melted butter. The butter looks like this:

   

5. Add scallions and herbs. Mix. Serve.

The video is one of several uncanny recipe productions from the YouTube channel “Super Recipes,” which has two sister channels, “SuperYummy” and “YumMakers.” All of the channels feature close-up vertical video of disembodied hands cooking extremely basic recipes on cooktops, but only Super Recipes features the upbeat A.I. narration all the way through each video. All of the recipes are, strictly speaking, edible, but most of them seem to be missing a step or an ingredient, or, alternately, feature too many steps or ingredients. A subtle favorite is this four-ingredient flan advertised in the title and introduction as “Only 2 ingredients, you will be surprised with the result”:

Super Recipes and SuperYummy both boast over one million subscribers and over 400 million views. The early comments on videos tend to feature a lot of people whose screen names are “firstnamelastnamenumber” saying normal things like “Watching from Melbourne Australia and I LOVE BREAD 🙂” and “I love bread. Knoxville TN USA here” and “I love bread but can I get it in cups or teaspoons??? Calling from N.Y.”:

But the Super Recipes channel has also organically created a genuine, human audience for its videos. Longtime commenters watch for regularly used ingredients and new variations on favorite recipes (like the “two-ingredient” flan):

A.I. or just Brazilian?

What is going on here? It would be easy and engagingly spooky to attribute the uncanniness of “Super Recipes” entirely to “A.I.,” as Meyer did in his tweet. But as far as I can tell the only “A.I.” involved in the videos is the voiceover. (And, presumably, the spam comments.) In my estimation at least 50 percent of the videos’ apparent uncanniness to American audiences can be attributed to another fact: They’re from Brazil.

As many of Super Recipes’ commenters have realized from glimpses of packaging in the videos, and as is clear when you visit the channel’s Facebook page and learn the company behind the videos is “LS MOTA NEGOCIOS DIGITAIS LTDA,” the Super Recipes family of brands comes from Brazil. A number of strange details suddenly make more sense once this becomes clear: The almost constant use of condensed milk, for example, is not the product of some A.I. hyperfixation but a regular feature of Brazilian home dessert cooking; the inclusion of something called “green smell” in the recipe list makes more sense when you know that it’s a literal translation of a Portuguese phrase for an herb mix.

This is not to say that Brazilians would find these videos “normal”--but in most cases they’re sloppy, corner-cutting, made-to-be-viral renditions of recognizable Brazilian dishes. (As Ryan Broderick points out, the Portuguese-language videos made by the same company are much less sloppy and gross.) This video of chopped up lime being blended whole with condensed milk and ice to make “lemonade” might read to an American like a completely bizarre combination of ingredients that only an A.I. would put together and call “lemonade,” but to a Brazilian, well, the video just shows a (slightly over-involved) way to make what’s known as “Swiss Lemonade”:

In some cases, it’s true, the Brazilianness of the channel interacts with the A.I. in ways that deepen the overall uncanniness: As one commenter points out, the bizarre title for an unappetizing potato salad recipe--“Are there cockroaches in your house? Do not waste. Make this delicious recipe.”--probably emerged when the A.I. voiceover translator “misheard potatoes (batatas) for cockroaches (baratas).”

But in general I think that in this case, and in many cases of “uncanny” encounters online, much of what is theorized as the strangeness of “A.I.” can more likely be chalked up to something like “culture clash.” Americans still underestimate how much of the internet is non-American, and even non-European; huge swathes of social media are Indian, Indonesian, Nigerian, and, yes, Brazilian. These countries have large, educated, English-speaking middle classes connected enough to share many cultural norms and references with American audiences, but also large and secure enough to also bring their own norms and touchstones to the table. For a variety of reasons, platform-content entrepreneurship is viable and attractive business proposition in many of these non-Western countries, but attempts by social-media entrepreneurs to capture American (or English-speaking) audiences will definitely come accompanied by rough edges--bad translations, misunderstood references, more condensed milk than Americans are used to. “Weird things you might encounter online” are not always, like, Terrifying Dark-Age A.I. Artifacts of our weird and uncanny future. Sometimes they’re just Brazilian!

Though, admittedly, I can’t figure out where the very first oil-fried egg with raw onion recipe comes from, and my Brazilian correspondents are equally baffled, so maybe that one is actually a weird Dark-Age A.I. Algorithmic Artifact.

The decline and fall of the viral recipe video

In any event, even if 50 percent of Super Recipes’ weirdness to Americans can be chalked up to “being Brazilian,” the remaining 50 percent of weirdness--likely felt by everyone--can be fairly attributed to “the algorithm,” “A.I.,” and other things lurking in the digital-future abyss that everyone loves to stare into so much. As I wrote earlier, even some Brazilians might wonder why someone is making strange, sloppy, and incomplete video recipes for flan.

The answer to this is pretty simple, and probably people who spend a lot of time online will intuitively know it: “The recipe video” is one of the canonical types of engagement-bait content, up there with animal videos, sports highlights, fight videos, “lifehacks,” “unassuming person is revealed to be unexpectedly good at something,” and other types of video that are all but guaranteed to get some pop on the social-video platform of your choice.

A genealogy of the engagement-bait recipe video is, perhaps, revealing. The genre was effectively invented by Buzzfeed’s “Tasty” division in 2015, which pioneered the top-down, sped-up, no-faces format. Something about the therapeutic neatness of the bird’s-eye-view camera, the satisfaction of seeing ingredients transformed into food in two minutes, and the visceral chum-box draw of gooey ingredients made the channel an enormous viral success and revenue generator for Buzzfeed.

It also drew in competitors. But where Tasty had relatively high production values and an actual team of humans writing real (if not always completely replicable) recipes, its new, lower-rent competitors--in the classic fashion of platform content wars--were less concerned with the quality or functionality of the recipes than they were with the engagement they could generate. And, as these pages iterated and produced video, it became clear that what was most compelling wasn’t usefulness or reliability but grossness and “weirdness.” You can see where this is going: After the initial Tasty competitors, who were not exactly creating great recipes but were at least nominally creating real recipes, came a wave of new content creators--professional magicians, as it turned out--intentionally creating disgusting, incomplete, and otherwise bafflingly strange “recipe videos,” because this was the fastest shortcut to engagement. The “bad recipe video” content type--of both the intentional and unintentional variety--is so prevalent that it’s spawned a whole ecosystem of response-video creators dependent on bad recipe videos for their own videos, the most prominent being the (wonderful) Tanara Mallory, whose catchphrase is an enthusiastic if ambiguous “everbody’s so creative!”

I don’t know that our Brazilian friends are making their recipes mysterious and sloppy intentionally or unintentionally, but nothing about the incentive system of YouTube will be dissuading them from making their content as weird as possible. As noted above, the organic audience for the videos has arisen because of their strangeness, not despite it, and I suspect most of their non-bot subscribers are there to see what weird shit they’ll cook up next rather than to learn new ways to make flan.

“Strangeness,” “wrongness,” “disgustingness,” the last decade or so has taught us, can be fast shortcuts to visibility on platforms. (As those of you who recognize the phrase “the egg is bigger than before” will remember.) Well-calibrated weirdness and incorrectness demands our attention, not just in recipe videos but in political disputes on Twitter, as Choire Sicha recently wrote in a newsletter (did you know that Choire Sicha writes a daily newsletter for New York magazine?), about the somewhat strange lyrics of the (excellent) Sabrina Carpenter song “Me Espresso”:

“That’s that me, espresso” is the lyric of the summer, thank you, Sabrina Carpenter, and everyone keeps saying it because it’s wrong. […] Ever since 2021’s Toilet Ice Cream, the bad, the fake, and the stunty have been rewarded with attention. The revolting-food video trend? The senseless DIY video trend? That was all just engagement porn. Being wrong? That just gets you corrected, an extremely durable form of attention. Making a “wrong” or linguistically weird lyric is just bait for the meme culture, and you’ll see a lot more of it. I’m of course pro: Anything that pushes usage into weird corners or generally degrades the language is aces in my book.

AI is bringing a next level to the party: making things that just actively feel wrong or deranged without much oversight. See: the popular TikTok account that creates songs from stats that play over Google Maps.

The point about A.I. is a good one. You see a lot of predictions that the increasing amount of A.I.-generated or A.I.-assisted content will kill social platforms by clogging them up with bizarre and useless content--or, worse, that as A.I. gets better and less obvious, we’ll only ever consume A.I.-generated content, perfectly formed to our delights and desires. But the “success” of Super Recipes suggests something like the opposite--weird and bad A.I. generated content is often much more arresting and engaging than the human equivalent, and the “better” A.I. gets--the more human--the less we’ll even bother looking at it.

I leave you this video, origins unknown, via Twitter user “Penicio Del Toro.” (I think, without being sure, that the explanation for the weird A.I. scatting is that the automatic A.I. voiceover-transcriber is picking up cutting and cooking sounds in the video and interpreting them.)

And now, a word from Defector…

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We think Max Readers will like these and other Defector blogs. For a limited time, you can try a monthly subscription for $1 with code MAX at checkout.

…and now back to our regularly scheduled programming.

Miami watch: The Package King

I remain fascinated by Miami, the most cyberpunk city in the world right now (derogatory), a mecca for tech investors, art dealers, crypto hustlers, OnlyFans agents, C.I.A.-backed reactionaries and dozens of other kinds of frauds, racked by inequality and slowly drowning inch by inch in the rising Atlantic. A new piece by Ezra Marcus, the foremost chronicler of Miami’s scammy overbelly, helps get at what makes the city so compelling (and so cyberpunk) through the story of Matthew Bergwall, a University of Miami student recently arrested and accused of operating a business specializing in package-return scams:

…nearly 10,000 fraudulent returns between December 2021 and April 2022, which “resulted in more than $3.5 million in lost product and sales revenue to victim-retailers.” […] His alleged operation, called UPSNow, was run, like most refunding operations, on Telegram, where he went by the pseudonym MXB and worked alongside a number of unindicted co-conspirators. He specialized in FTID with a powerful edge: The government claims that Bergwall hacked into five employees’ back-end accounts at “a multinational shipping, receiving, and supply chain management company” confirmed by sources to be UPS.

An archive of the UPSNow Telegram channel shows the complexity of running a business like his. “Our infrastructure is that of a legitimate company,” MXB bragged in the channel. “We have 8 full time employees and have the ability to scale.” Still, there were challenges. […] MXB often seemed overwhelmed — not surprising given that he was allegedly overseeing a multimillion-dollar fraud ring while juggling school, VC networking, and a highly active social life. “Y’all mfs start assuming shit’s patched sooo fast,” he wrote on March 7, 2022, when customers were complaining about delays in service. (By “patched,” he meant UPS cutting off his insider access.) “Shit ain’t patched trust me i’d tell you if it was. give me a sec to finish giving the UPS ceo a handjob so we can get it back up and running.” A few minutes later: “wishing i was the ceo of ups 😔.”

I mean, come on, a little dipshit Zoomer hustler carving a multi-million-dollar scam out of a vast and alien logistics network encircling the globe? Only in Miami, as Marcus emphasizes. Bergwall isn’t a native; he grew up in Connecticut, where his impressive grades and hustle meant “his friends expected him to go to an Ivy,” but instead he chose UMiami.

By the time he arrived, Miami had already taken its place as a haven for a particular flavor of techno-optimist capitalist: libertarians, crypto bulls, and OnlyFans agencies. The city promised a […] lifestyle on the bleeding edge of the new-money grind-set. Bergwall was not alone among his classmates in idealizing this. The campus is overrun with wannabe digital players, several students told me. Everyone is an influencer; everyone is launching a brand. […] “A lot of kids come to Miami and try to emulate the lifestyle,” said Jesse Fromer, a recent graduate who grew up in South Florida. He said he sees the school’s culture as downstream from the ostentatious flexing of the city’s most visible residents — club promoters, influencers, VC bros. The cars are more than likely rented, the jewelry fake. “But if you’re not from here, it’s hard to tell what’s real and what’s fugazi,” said Fromer. […] The status anxiety on campus is acute, Fromer said, because of how ostentatiously rich the upper crust of the student body is. Like Bergwall, many students come from Northeast suburbs where they might have gone to private schools and thought of themselves as wealthy. But the richest students at UMiami are a different breed — trust-funders released from any sort of East Coast stealth-wealth sensibility.

From a distance, Bergwall’s Miami feels like the physical instantiation of social media--a simultaneously hellish and compelling place, populated by liars and freaks, almost definitely trying to scam you, probably dying in the long term but highly lucrative in the short term if you know the right people. How can any other city compete? Please read Marcus’ piece here, his previous piece on Miami OnlyFans scammers here, and if you’re in a position to make it happen, pay him to write a book about this fucked-up place.

Did you see the weird Bitcoin/friendship bracelet guy’s commencement speech at The Ohio State University?

(video via r/Columbus)

It’s a high bar to clear, but the stupidest ritual of modern American higher education might be the commencement speech from a notable person. I recognize there’s a marketing aspect to it, and I suppose it’s meant to impress the parents who just dropped 200 bills on their kids’ education, but there are more colleges than there are interesting people, and competitive pressure is tossing up some stinkers. I applaud the Dickinson students who successfully fought to disinvite C-tier centrist pundit Michael Smerconish from the university’s commencement on the basis of previous remarks he’s made in support of racial profiling--but I also do not understand why there was a Michael Smerconish commencement speech in the first place? What could Michael Smerconish possibly have to offer the Dickinson class of ‘24? The following day, would any single student or parent still remember a word Michael Smerconish had said?

But the requirement to find some worthy to speak at graduation offers more trailblazing institutions of higher education an intriguing chance to “shoot the moon”--invite a speaker so low-rent, so stupid, so awful that the speech and the day become singularly, utterly unforgettable. This year, The Ohio State University did exactly that:

Ohio State's chosen commencement speaker for the class of 2024, entrepreneur Chris Pan, was high on ayahuasca while he wrote his speech, according to posts he made on social media. […] In the weeks preceding graduation, Pan shared multiple drafts of his speech on Instagram. His earliest posted draft included a lengthy section about the Israel-Palestine conflict and a moment where he removed his shirt.

Who is Chris Pan, exactly? Well, he is a “social entrepreneur” who used to work as a program manager at Facebook and now runs a bracelet company with a mission “to be a catalyst for meaningful conversations and positive action in the world.” He did graduate from OSU himself, but otherwise it’s not precisely clear why he was chosen to speak to the graduating class of one of the nation’s premier land-grant universities. The best reporting I’ve found on the selection process can be found at The Rooster, a local Ohio-news Substack:

The Commencement Speaker Advisory Committee is truly advisory in nature. Just because the university taps a committee and spends hours vetting candidates, all that work can be thrown in the trash by the university president.

That’s what happened with President Carter, who, for some reason only known to himself and God, elected to go with an obscure Bitcoin freak over a final list of 10 individuals curated by his underlings. […] While it’s indeed comical that the crowd booed Pan at the mere mention of Bitcoin, it’s less funny when you consider that Carter, who personally tapped Pan as speaker, sits on the Board of Directors for Terawulf, a Bitcoin mining company and is invested in the cryptocurrency himself.

Yeah, sure, maybe it was crypto corruption from the obvious bozo appointed to run The Ohio State University… or maybe he’s just the kind of bozo who thinks that a mission-oriented bracelet company promoting “meaningful conversations” is impressive… or, just maybe, he’s the only guy with the vision necessary to disrupt the boring old commencement-speech game. Pan’s speech ultimately did not feature any material on Palestine, and his shirt stayed on the whole time. However, his speech did ultimately feature:

Pan leading the entire crowd in a rendition of “What’s Going On?” by 4 Non Blondes

Pan telling graduates he believes Bitcoin is a very misunderstood asset class.

Pan promising all attendees they would receive custom bracelets from his company MyIntent.

Pan leading the crowd in a rendition of “This Little Light of Mine” (audience shot).

You can, if you so choose, watch the entire speech at this link; it begins around 1:14:30.