The Viners Are All Grown Up 🌳
Reviewing Drew Gooden’s “Greed is Destroying the World”
Neighbors,
There’s a piece of advice I received early on about sustaining a creative career:
One for the head, one for the heart.
The reality is that we’ll never love every single facet of the work. It is a job, after all, and a good chunk of projects arise from a place of logic—not passion.
Still, I find that listening to the latter voice every once in a while is the key to reminding yourself why you create in the first place. That’s why I’m incredibly excited to screen a new cut of my film, How to Live a (More) Whimsical Life, at the Loose Ends & Friends Film Fest next Thursday, December 18.
Our good friend (and Creator Mag reader) Noah Guardado is hosting the fest at the historic Ramova Theatre. Join 200+ patrons and come watch six original short films—all proceeds support The Greater Chicago Food Depository.
It’ll be a special night for the creative community here. For me personally, I know showing something in front of a crowd—something I poured a lot of heart into—means so much more than any number of views online, and I’d love to see you there.
Alright! Onto this week’s edition of Neighborhood Watch.
— NGL
P.S. The day after Loose Ends, we’ll be hosting an end-of-year holiday mixer with filmmakers and creatives from around the city. RSVP here.
P.P.S. Last blog, we shared five things inspiring us right now as we reach the end of 2025. You can read it here.
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Video: ‘Greed is Destroying the World’ (2025)
Creator: Drew Gooden
Runtime: 33m 25s
Review by: Nathan Graber-Lipperman
In June 2012, the shortform video platform Vine launched, with its six-second, looping clips quickly attracting a cult following. Four months later, Twitter acquired the company for thirty million dollars. Just four years after that, Vine went dark.
Why? The widespread explanation at the time was that the platform failed to provide sufficient monetization for its breakout creators. Another line of thinking says that the explosion of TikTok and Reels a decade later proves Vine was simply ahead of its time.
Whichever argument you buy, what’s undeniable is the cultural impact Viners contributed to the next era of YouTube (and beyond). Logan and Jake Paul turned daily vlogs into high-profile careers in combat sports; Liza Koshy’s quick wit landed her roles in KPop Demon Hunters and The Naked Gun as recently as this year; and Nicholas Fraser launched a cooking show in between selling his “Why you always lying?” Vine as an NFT for *checks notes* ninety-six thousand dollars.
But look past the Viners who crossed over into the “mainstream” entertainment industry, and you’ll find Drew Gooden, who rose to prominence via his “Road Work Ahead” Vine. Gooden, a community college dropout (twice) with not much additional experience past performing improv, began uploading commentary videos to YouTube in 2016—and never looked back.
Gooden’s focus began with Internet culture criticism, reviewing everything from gaming streamer Ninja’s infamous “Masterclass” to YouTubers’ subpar books. For the late twenty-tens, it could be written off as low-brow stuff no mainstream publication or pundit would ever dare take seriously.
As it turned out, a lot of people were interested in critical analysis of scammy “life hacks,” or Jake Paul’s sophomoric live show. By 2019, Paste Magazine referred to Gooden (alongside his collaborator and fellow former Viner, Danny Gonzalez) as “The John Olivers of YouTube Culture.”
Yet during that era, most viewers still opened the platform on their laptop (if not their phone) with a set expectation of being entertained by relatable creators uploading videos from their bedrooms. As YouTube grew to become the dominant television streaming service, Gooden matured with it, his criticism evolving to center topics now boiling over from the Internet into mainstream culture.
You slowly began to see it: first with commentary on the alternative, “weird ads” taking over feeds, before moving into the entertainment industry’s existential crisis during the 2023 strikes and how gambling influencers exploit vulnerable men. This clear deviation from his amateurish origins has not gone unnoticed; comedy creator Man Carrying Thing recently released a parody, “basically the 2 types of drew gooden videos,” where he oscillates between SpongeBob memes and commentary on “class struggles.”
Which brings us to “Greed is Destroying the World,” a video Gooden released at the beginning of the month. The creator runs through:
The disconnect between a thriving stock market and the average person’s sky-high cost-of-living;
How AI speculation is propping up GDP, even as data centers destroy local communities;
A brief history of trickle-down economics and layoff culture popularized by former GE CEO Jack Welch;
The harm the government shutdown caused on vulnerable populations unable to access SNAP;
And the widening wealth inequality gap that will not self-correct at the rate we’re going.
You might read all this and think, cool, another media figure libbing out. But Gooden comes with receipts, citing twenty-eight sources ranging from academic articles to ProPublica investigations. Most of the policy positions he takes are widely popular whenever Americans are polled. And his video ends with a bridge-building call-to-action, arguing we need to “put down our phones, set aside our differences for a little bit, and unite on this one issue.”
The topics Gooden addressed in this video weren’t exactly niche. What struck me was the creator’s delivery. In a little over half-an-hour, he tied a clear thread between complicated, wide-ranging issues, all from a home office with a “Mancave Open 24/7” sign on the wall. Quips and quick cuts mixed effortlessly; Gooden even joked about the irony of pausing to deliver a brand deal in a video about greed (it was for a VPN, because of course it was).
It’s a tightrope more treacherous to walk than you’d think, to elevate one’s subject matter while still playing within the confines of the YouTube sandbox viewers expect. What’s clear, however, is that Gooden and his contemporaries are raising the bar for high-brow commentary we can expect from that sandbox. After all, I watched Gooden’s video on my TV; if his analysis continues to sharpen, why can’t he become the Next John Oliver, period?
There’s a conversation to be had around culture becoming post-literate, a race to the bottom in which our media standards become so low that we desperately require the guys who once gave us Vines to feed us something deemed semi-educational. While that conversation can be tabled, it’s worth noting that Gooden himself is thinking about his place in all of this, ending this video with a self-aware declaration:
“I don’t know all the answers because, at the end of the day, no matter how hard I try to expand my legacy beyond it, I’m still just the ‘Road Work Ahead’ guy.”
If class solidarity can form in the comment section of a thirty-minute video essay, we’ll have an origin story to point to: those inescapable, undeniable, six-second loops that changed culture forever.
Quite the legacy, indeed.
Nate’s Score: 4.6 / 5
Dedicated to the books, music, movies, and physical media that played a meaningful role in stopping our scroll.
Album: Let God Sort Em Out (2025)
Director: Pusha T and Malice (aka Clipse)
Runtime: 40m 47s
A metanarrative in the Clipse’s triumphant return is the seemingly never-ending rollout of their latest album, Let God Sort Em Out.
The project, for context, dropped in July. But in promoting the album, the Clipse have done everything from starting a beef with Travis Scott to recording Reddit AMA videos to becoming the first rappers to perform at the Vatican. Heck, Pharrell—who reignited the longstanding collaboration with his fellow Virginia Beach natives by once again producing for them—leaked the album’s standout track, “Chains & Whips,” during a Louis Vuitton show way back in 2023.
Did a bunch of Gen Xers make the best hip hop album of the year? Rolling Stone declared so yesterday, and you won’t hear any arguments from me. Push and Malice’s bars are sharper than ever; the Kendrick feature lives rent free in my head; and it’s all elevated by Pharrell’s Paris-produced beats.
But a world-class album is nothing without a great metanarrative. Watching the Clipse still continuing their rollout—linking up with Tyler, the Creator and Lyrical Lemonade’s Cole Bennett for the “P.O.V.” music video, which dropped this week—leaves a small, happy tear on this Zoomer’s face.
Rumor has it they’ll still be rolling out the album fifty years from now.
Nate’s Score: 5 / 5
Invention: Coconut Alfajor Candy Bar (Fourteenth Century)
Creator: Unknown
When we need to take an afternoon break here at the studio, we often walk ten-ish minutes to the bodega down the street to grab a snack (or caffeinated bev).
While coconuts often don’t sit well with this writer’s stomach, I do have a soft spot for Samoas. And as it turns out, the bodega sells a distant, delectable cousin: the pink-topped Mexican candy bars called alfajors.
Chewy and sweet, these confections have become a staple around the studio during late-afternoon editing sessions. Speaking of which, it’s about that time of day…
Nate’s Score: 🥥 / 5
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