Feeling Like Ozymandias, With Susie Banikarim

There is no reason for a normal person to know who Carlos Watson is. This is why I have made it my business to reach as many members of the normal-person community with the Good News about the disgraced and deliriously scammy founder and figurehead of Ozy Media, who was sentenced to nearly 10 years in prison for various oafish and common financial crimes earlier this week. I understand that my personal grievances with, say, Vice Media founder Shane Smith are my own, and my own problem; I understand, too, that there is no reason for really anyone to know who Jim Spanfeller is, although I have not always honored that. I get all this.

But it is my belief that Watson’s baroquely thirsty and fraudulent public arc, while powered by the specific scamminess and scuzz of online media during the previous decade, is wild and weird enough to resonate even with people lucky enough to have avoided working in that field during that time. We put that to the test this week by having our buddy and former GMG executive editor Susie Banikarim on to talk about her new podcast about Watson’s rise and fall.

Given our shared time together during The Spanfeller Years at our former home, it would have been irresponsible not to begin with some Jim Chat, and we saluted that business grinch and true weirdo as well as we could. It is important to build your uncanniness tolerance responsibly while working for shithead business boys and bummy private equity goblins, and for whatever else you can say about Jim Spanfeller—and by all means, go off—he did do a lot for all of us in that regard. Bad as he is, though, Spanfeller can barely touch Carlos Watson for the vastness and creativity of his sketchiness, and we pivoted fairly quickly to Watson and stayed there.

After I told my personal Carlos Watson story, we turned to the Carlos Watson story—the website he founded on the industrial-scale production of brand-safe stories about The New And The Next, a knack for getting rich people to give him money, and first the sort of lite malfeasance that defined the pump-and-dump era of online media and then became something else entirely. The Ozy Media story, as Dan wrote in an excellent 2021 post, is a monumental bummer, but its particulars are astonishing and amusing, from Watson’s claim that Ozy discovered Aaron Judge before anyone wrote about him, to its strange ideas festival, to the company’s name itself, which is based on Watson’s truly dazzling personal interpretation of Percy Shelley’s “Ozymandias.” The site itself, and Watson’s work on it, was never really remarkable in any way, but his singular ability to cultivate relationships with media investors like Laurene Powell Jobs was never anything less than astonishing. The lesson, as Susie says, is that “the level of due diligence people do to give away millions of dollars is close to none.”

This was always going to end poorly—a website that no real person reads, making videos that no real person watches, will eventually run out of money. We talked about how Watson kept it going as long as he did, both by leveraging the wonder-working power of Telling Lies to people who were either eager to believe them or didn’t care that they were lies, and because investor types would give Watson money just because they thought it would get them closer to the other elite investors that had done so—at least until Watson and a co-founder were busted using voice-altering technology to lie to Goldman Sachs in hopes of securing an investment. We also got Susie’s perspective on how fake or just different money is to rich people and institutions, and on the question of how much lying is too much lying in an industry where everyone is accurately understood to be lying all the time. The question of who gets away with what, and why, and how, runs through the whole episode, as does the fact that the media business, at least at its highest levels, is more or less totally arbitrary and uninformed. If that sounds a lot like other industries or institutions to you … well, I got almost all the way through the podcast without hitting that particular point, but I did get it in there. It might not be the most festive pre-Christmas episode—although we did give listeners a little post-credits bit as a treat—but damned if it isn’t seasonally appropriate.

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