The Glenn Show on TikTok

As you know, we at The Glenn Show like to experiment and test new ideas and formats—some of them work, others let us learn something new.

One experiment we’ve been running for the past couple of weeks is posting clips from the show on Glenn’s newly created TikTok channel.

TikTok is a strange beast. I’ve played with it a little to study its recommendation algorithms. What happens if I linger on clips from this category or that? I’ve found weird little portals into different worlds: DIY tutorials, Russian ex-convicts sharing questionable wisdom, manual laborers documenting their work days, examples of violence in nature, advice on how to save money on mortgages, political forecasts from self-proclaimed psychics, Chinese people complaining about how hard the Russian language is, and more (since I avoided the genres I already knew were popular, I didn’t see a lot of either dancing or unhinged wokesters). The last time I opened the app was a few days after the beginning of the war in Ukraine, and all I saw was war footage, often filmed by people on the front lines, soldiers and civilians both.

The point is, there’s a lot of different stuff there, and the feed acts as a kind of a mirror, quickly adjusting to the apparent interests of its owner. (This does, of course, raise the usual concerns about social media’s tendency to lead its users down ideological rabbit holes, which risks amplifying the already troubling political polarization of society.)

Still, I think the app is worth taking a look at. We might be able to broaden the show’s reach with its help, maybe getting more young people to check us out. We also might try this for a few weeks and decide to abandon the project. Regardless of the outcome, we’ll learn something in the process.

So, about two weeks ago, we started posting one clip a day without giving them any promotion.

A week and a half in, Glenn tweeted one link out.

Now I’m sharing the link to the channel with you:

So far, we’ve posted 17 clips.

The latest features Glenn’s “the only professor in the halfway house” story from a recent appearance on the Jordan Peterson podcast, and it’s too early to say how many views it will get.

Two, both featuring comedian Andrew Schulz, were very successful: in one he argues that public intellectuals and stand-ups should never share a stage (20K views), and in the other, he builds on a premise from Coleman Hughes by saying that Trump was “objectively funny” (11K views). Neither of these needed promotion to attract eyeballs.

5 more got between 1K and 10K views.

The remaining 9 got between between 100 and a thousand.

We’ll keep doing this for a few more weeks, without much expectation, and reassess after we have more data.

At this point, I invite you to (1) subscribe to the feed if you’re a TikTok user, and (2) share your thoughts on this experiment in the comments.