How to Improve the Danny Gonzalez TikTok Song Experiment (How to Go Viral on TikTok)

i’m a huge nerd and pretty much write and make videos about things that i find interesting i’m curious about the world and feel like sometimes i’m interested in some ridiculous topics with that being said i was extremely surprised how many of you enjoyed my last video about why the danny gonzales tiktok song didn’t go viral aside from analyzing human behavior and the psyche i like trying to figure out why things did or didn’t happen so i’m extremely grateful that so many of you are inquisitive as well with this video i don’t mean to milk the danny gonzales tick tock song topic but this is something that was on my mind throughout watching his video while watching danny’s video i just kept thinking there are so many things wrong with this experiment i debated on discussing it in my last video but i figured that’d make it way too long i love that danny goes out of his comfort zone and tries new things i think that’s one of the reasons why he’s one of the best youtubers on the platform right now it’s easy to see that danny has a curious mind and it’s great to see him experiment so i’m hoping that if danny sees this it will help him improve his method for the next experiment but more importantly i hope it helps all of you think a little bit more critically about how we conduct experiments to get a little closer to the truth scientific literacy is extremely important in this day and age we’re constantly flooded with clickbait headlines that say things like new studies shows breathing air cures cancer or how drinking a gallon of mayonnaise can extend your life by three and a half years yes i know those examples were exaggerated but you know what i mean in a world where people are fighting to get our clicks rather than deliver us the truth i feel it’s important that we understand what a good experiment looks like each day we put our trust in politicians doctors and others who tell us about studies too often we succumb to confirmation bias while neglecting all of the flaws in the study that we’re being informed about up until this year i didn’t know how to independently think about different studies and the information i was receiving so i made it a personal goal to better understand how studies are done and what separates good science from bad science i’m also extremely fascinated how people can fall for conspiracy theories so i was able to scratch all of these itches of curiosity with some great books some of the books that really helped me better understand the scientific method and good versus bad studies are the skeptic’s guide to the universe science fictions and calling bs while i personally find this topic extremely interesting i know learning about scientific studies and research can be pretty boring for some so this is why i love nerding out by taking pop culture topics like the danny gonzales tick tock song to help people better understand these sometimes boring topics so in this video we’re going to pretend that danny hired us to help him make a viral tick-tock song hopefully by the end danny and the rest of us can improve our experimenting process first we’re going to take a look at some of the research questions we’d want to answer as danny when trying to make a tick tock song go viral and then we’ll form our hypothesis after that it’s time to scrutinize our hypothesis and variables to try and make sure we’re not missing anything with our process finally we’ll put it all together to see what a proper experiment would look like as well as some limitations we may face while running it but before we get started if you’re new to the rewired soul make sure you subscribe and ring that notification bell here we use critical thinking and practice skepticism to better understand the world and improve our overall well-being and if you’re interested in any of the books that i mentioned the affiliate links are always listed down in the description below every experiment should have a goal and most experiments start with a question sometimes our questions are too broad or too vague so it’s important to sit down and really see what we want to accomplish with this experiment we want to help danny make his tik tok song go viral but what kind of research will we be doing the two primary types of studies are quantitative and qualitative qualitative studies are often used in psychology but they’re much harder to properly analyze because some of the data is based on subjective experience with quantitative research we’re looking at numbers since we’re trying to make a tik tok song go viral we’re going to have clear metrics we can look at but there may be some additional subjective factors so it’ll be both qualitative and quantitative next we need to narrow this down a bit what are we going to do what do we think might work well let’s say after consulting with danny we think that there’s a formula for viral tiktok songs so the more precise question we want to ask for our research is can a formula make a tiktok song go viral now it’s time to form a hypothesis and set up some variables our hypothesis is what we want to test what we’re changing and what we think is going to happen first we need to make sure we have an independent and dependent variable the independent variable is what we’re going to change or control and the dependent variable is what we’re hoping to have an effect on so in this situation the independent variable is the formula we’re going to come up with for danny’s tik tok song and the dependent variable is the amount of times people use the song in tik toks when we put it all together our hypothesis is that you can use a specific formula to make a tiktoksong go viral next it’s time to get serious and really figure out how we’re going to run this experiment i’m currently taking a course on effective research methods and something the instructor said was extremely important she said a proper experiment is trying to find the truth but if you’re just trying to confirm your hypothesis you have an agenda when we hear about research we often don’t want to do the extra work and get the details about who ran the study and why we often forget that even scientists have biases and agendas and unsurprisingly they can also be motivated by money decades ago a group of scientists from harvard came out saying that fats were the primary danger and not sugar years later it was discovered that the researchers were actually paid by the sugar industry to do this research disgraced dr andrew wakefield the man who started the anti-vaxx movement was being paid by the lawyers of parents to prove the mmr vaccine caused autism since then his research has been retracted but as we all know the damage has been done although we’re not making major decisions about health like the above examples in this hypothetical situation danny hired us to help with some research and since we’re ethical scientists we’re going to do some good work that’s why we’re going to scrutinize our hypothesis and variables before we get started first and foremost we need to ask a very important question does the problem underlying our research really matter to society at large well it’s easy to say no helping danny go viral on tiktok doesn’t matter we need to think about the bigger picture if we can prove that a formula can make something go viral on tiktok this is huge for people who are passionate about creating and want to be an influencer even more importantly think about the implications this could have for charity organizations and raising awareness about important global issues if we were to help the aspca go viral on tiktok think about all the animals that we could help or what if the national alliance on mental illness wanted to raise mental health awareness we could help them out significantly with this formula next we need to ask ourselves if we’ll be able to locate evidence for our research something that separates real science from pseudoscience is that the real science is falsifiable in this case if our hypothesis is that a formula can make danny’s tiktok song give 50 000 uses we’ll have data to know if we failed or succeeded if this was a pseudo- scientific study we wouldn’t be able to falsify it because we say something like the lack of views actually shows that it was a success it’s a heads i win tails you lose scenario but we’re awesome researchers so we don’t play like that now we need to take a look at the extraneous variables and i think this is where danny could have really improved his experiment an extraneous variable is something that could affect the results of the experiment that we may not be expecting in this case the biggest extraneous variable we might face is that people recognize danny with 1.5 million followers on tiktok and over 4 million on youtube if people find out it’s danny it’s an issue why due to its popularity if the song does go viral we won’t know if it was because of our formula or because of the fact that popularity can beget popularity like i said i think this was the biggest one that danny didn’t think about but if you can think of any other extraneous variables do me a favor and leave a comment down below with a proper experiment like this we’re starting from scratch so in this fictional world where danny hired us to help him we’re going to pretend he never independently ran his experiment on his own but at the brainstorming table denny brings us some ideas he had for running this experiment and they sound pretty good some of danny’s ideas include find a common style of beat that works for viral tik tok songs gather a bunch of viral tik tok songs and create a word cloud create a new account with a fake name to promote the song then create consistent content with the song and use some current tik tok trends to try and gain some traction these are all great ideas and we’re going to run with them but danny has one last idea he’s going to record the song and the videos while wearing a minimal disguise well this is why danny pays us the big bucks because we immediately bring up the extraneous variables danny has a unique voice and short of a special effects team it may not be too hard for people to figure out its danny so what’s a better way to run this experiment first we’re going to hire an actor to be the song’s artist ned flames aka fox season in order to limit other factors we need to find someone with a similar build to danny we’ll want to hire an actor with a slim build about six feet tall and has magnificent hair it’s important that we find someone similar looking to danny because let’s say you cast me and the song flopped is it because the formula was bad or because i’m overweight or if we hired a woman we’d have to take those factors into consideration as well but we’ll circle back to this topic during the replication process next we need to find someone with a similar quality of rapping as danny maybe the actor we hire can flow and if that’s the case that’s awesome if not we need to find someone else as we all know danny can rap so we can’t just hire someone like your dad to record the track even if danny writes the lyrics we need someone he can coach to have a similar style and quality and now that we have everything that we need we can run the experiment and check the results well the experiment is over and since danny hired the best team in the business we not only hit our goal but we passed it within just a couple weeks over 75 000 people use this track and it’s the latest banger on tik tok then we reveal to the world that this was an experiment and we get danny gonzalez a million more followers on tiktok and on youtube because we did such an epic job the end right well not exactly now is the most important part of the study remember we wanted to run this research for the greater good we want to help hopeful influencers go viral and we also want to help organizations that are doing good for the world so before we publish our findings we’re going to want to do two important things one try to replicate our findings and two try to disprove our findings but first let’s start with trying to disprove our findings we need to step into the role of a competing researcher or investigative journalist and do everything we can to debunk our findings then and only then can a researcher have any faith in their results in the scientific realm this is where peer reviews come in when a group of scientists publishes their findings more people from the scientific community get involved while running our research we may have been too narrow-minded and not thought of other factors that may have contributed to our findings or we may have succumbed to our own biases without even realizing it but in my opinion before publishing findings you’ll gain a lot more credibility by publishing all the things you did to try and disprove your research rather than confirm it this not only makes the work easier during the peer review process but it also shows that you’re trying to have scientific integrity lastly it’s time to replicate the study so let’s say since danny is such a nice guy he never made us sign an nda and he wants us to go around helping other influencers with our findings we give them our formula and see if they can replicate our success not only that but we run our experiment multiple times as well to see if we can replicate it one of the crucial aspects of analyzing results is having a proper sample size if we only tested it once and it worked we wouldn’t know if we just got lucky maybe the tiktok algorithm just happened to help us more than it normally would or maybe a big influencer just happened to use our song by running the research multiple times we could see how legitimate our research actually was once replicated we’d want to try a bunch of other different variables we want to change different pieces of the formula and i think a great place to start is with the actor we should try to replicate it with actors of various heights weights nationalities clothing styles and more then we should also record tracks with a female rapper and hire actresses to see if gender played a role interestingly enough there are companies that actually do this for any of you who watch the social dilemma on netflix you know there’s a lot of work that goes into the data that’s collected and hopefully now that you’ve got a better understanding of the process you can also better understand how algorithms are used to grab your attention for various agendas but my hope is that you take this knowledge and use it to satisfy your own curiosity and run some proper experiments to help you in other areas of your life all right everybody thank you once again for nerding out with me i think this is really important right like even though it’s like fun it’s fun to look at like you know the danny gonzales tiktok viral song experiment like i like i use this kind of stuff at my job like i i have a a very like cool position where i get to run different experiments and try different things to help our company to help our clients when i look at data and stuff like that and i want to make sure that i’m looking at the data correctly and here’s the thing here’s the thing this is something that i just started educating myself about like thoroughly like this year right and i’m learning so so so much something that i didn’t really dive into in this is biases right like i think one of the most important things and i talk about it all the time when i talk about critical thinking and all of that is like we need to educate ourselves about all the different biases we have all the different biases because if not we can just go down the wrong pathway like you remember in dumb and dumber right when they go on the wrong road for like hours or whatever and that’s when they end up getting a little moped anyways you know what i’m talking about and that’s why we need to be mindful of our own biases because our biases can make us feel like we’re on the right path and we’re just totally screwing everything up but again more importantly we’re constantly fed different studies and research and everything like that and educating ourselves about how proper research is done we can go a step further and be like is this really a credible study what does the scientific community actually say so like i said um i’ve listed those books down below the skeptic’s guide to the universe calling bs and science fictions those are all great if you’re interested in this topic and how research is properly done the difference between pseudoscience and regular science uh and all that stuff so check out the description down below all right but anyways that’s all i got for this video if you like this video please give it a thumbs up if you’re new make sure you subscribe and ring that notification bell and a huge huge thank you to everybody who supports the channel over on patreon or getting the books that i’ve written over at the rewiredsoul.com or using my affiliate links to uh get the books that i recommend that all helps all right you’re all awesome thanks again for watching i’ll see you next time .