March 3, 2023 • 36 mins
Robert sits down with YouTuber Thoughtslime to discuss the pitfalls and problems of creating left wing popular media in 2023.
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
Welcome too. It could happen here a podcast about things
falling apart and sometimes putting things back together. And you know,
today we're doing an episode that's kind of more on
the intellectual and emotional end of a very specific set
of things falling apart, And rather than clumsily try to
(00:28):
introduce it myself, I'm going to bring on the person
who who I think the thoughts that have kind of
been going through my head. I know they've been going
through the heads of a lot of the folks that
we have here at cool Zone for quite some time now. Thoughtslime.
You are a YouTuber and a good YouTuber who does
a number of videos. Some of your recent ones are
(00:50):
thoughts on ai Art, a timeline of Elon's Twitter mistakes.
She did a really fun video on the QAnon Queen
of Canada, who is a pretty problematic character. Welcome to
the show. Thanks for having me, Happy to be here.
Do you want to just kind of start by reading
us that thread? Because you posted this on Twitter the
(01:10):
other day and I started chatting with it, and then
we moved over to DMS and decided we should kind
of do a little more formal thing. Yeah, so basically
I said that I'm constantly considering making a Why I
Left the Left video about how my views have not
changed one iota, but I've become completely disillusioned about my
role in communicating them. Part of the reason I shifted
(01:34):
my focus to trying to be just entertaining is because
deep down I don't really see a lot of value
in getting people on my side anymore. I don't think
it does anything or means anything. But the best I
can do is give you information and hopefully a laugh.
I used to feel like I was participating in something
bigger than I think A lot. Then I think I
really am that I was helping in some small, in
(01:54):
some small way towards a sort of shift towards a
more revolutionary mass consciousness. I think that was a bit
of a childish fantasy. In retrospect, sometimes people will say
you made me an anarchist, and like, Buddy, I don't
even think it matters that I myself am an anarchist,
and I regret that that sort of we're fighting the
good fight mentality has allowed some of the worst grifters
on the platform to flourish by manipulating people's passions for
(02:15):
their own weird petty reasons. I think what I do
has a lot of value, But I'm just saying that
I think I perceive that value to be is a
lot different than what I thought it was a few
years ago. Is basically what I had to say. Yeah,
that I think does such a good job of nailing
the problem that I've been kind of dealing with emotionally
(02:36):
as well, which is it's it's not It'd be easy
to sum it up as like I no longer believe in,
you know, trying to transmit you know, leftist ideas or
political analysis, or that I don't believe in the value
of like trying to inform people about the world, because
that's not how I feel. But there is there has
(02:56):
been this shift, and I think probably the high point
for the version of me that was optimistic about the
ability to use mass media to build power and the
ability to take effective action on the left. I think
that kind of crescendoed I'm gonna I'm gonna say June
of twenty twenty um, and it had a pretty sharp
(03:16):
drop after that point. And I both think it's it's
valuable to still acknowledge kind of how remarkable what happened
in twenty twenty was, for all of its flaws and
all of the really messy fallout from it, we saw
an ups an uprising of unprecedented scale, and part of
why the crackdown in response has been so narly is
(03:39):
that it scared the hell out of a lot of
really unpleasant people. Um and the media had a significant
role to play in that, both in the fact that
there were a lot of people who were who were
kind of already organizing and radicalized when the shit started
to hit the fan, and that as things happened, um,
(03:59):
you know, the what was happening in the streets, what
the police were doing, the different kind of marches and
and different campaigns that were being started, got spread to people.
And I do think that you know, folks, you know
like you and me, were a part of that. Although
it never is far from my mind that the most
influential piece of media that was that was recorded and
(04:21):
disseminated during twenty twenty was the video of George Floyd
being murdered, which was filmed by you know, someone who
just happened to be nearby and had the courage to
film it, not a professional journalist, not a not an influencer,
not a not somebody who was a professional political thinker
and everything else combined didn't have the influence of that video. Yeah.
(04:44):
I think that that kind of gets to the heart
of it, right, is that like we express support for ideas,
and thus people tend to treat us as though we
are the progenitors of those ideas, or the guardians of
those ideas, or the leaders of a kind of decentralized
proxy party of some kind. Yeah, it's it's it's both,
(05:06):
because I think thankfully there's that. I mean, there's there's
always going to be every everyone who makes popular media
gets forms a little cult, and so there's always going
to be a number of people who, you know, take
any given person in the media more seriously than they deserve.
And that that includes the both of us. And that's
(05:28):
that's not attempting to be that's not attempting to be
like humble or anything. That is simply a fact of
how mass media works. Um. I do think we've seen
I think there's been a mix of a healthy pushback
against looking at people who are doing creating popular media
as more than what they are and more than what
that media is capable of being. I think there has
(05:49):
been a pushback against that in the last couple of years.
It's been healthy, and I think there's been a pushback
that's been unhealthy. Um, I think people have forgotten some
of the lessons of like one. I think a good
example would be there was a very justified backlash against
and when I say streamers here, I'm referring to people
who are actually in the streets streaming during riots and
(06:10):
protests and whatnot, right and that, And the justified part
of that backlash was due to the fact that past
a certain point, particularly those video those streams were primarily
being used by law enforcement, both to get charges on
people and to just to know where folks were as
an intelligence gathering method. And I think that the backlash,
which was understandable, and there was a lot of ugly behavior,
(06:32):
including people who kind of got in after the early
portions of that, in order to make shitloads of money
by you know, streaming people getting the shit beat out
of them by the cops, and that was I think
very justified, a pretty aggressive social response to that, but
I think it's also caused a lot of people to
forget that. A huge part of why things kicked off
(06:53):
in twenty twenty and why so many people got involved
was Nico from Uniform Corn riot on the ground every
night in Minneapolis, doing one of the most impressive pieces
of citizen journalism that I think we've seen in this country.
And so I do think that some of what's frustrating
here is that it's difficult for people. It's difficult for
us as a community to take some of the proper
(07:16):
lessons from these these things that are happening from the
push and pull of the conflict that we all find
ourselves in, in part because the nature of the way
people express their understanding of these lessons via social media
is very geared towards flattening them and making it a
very simple matter of this is bad or this is
good and not well in this period of time, this
(07:37):
worked and then it didn't. You know, there's no real
sense of proportionality in these discussions. It isn't just a
matter of like, hey, you fucked up. You should probably
take this down, or this could be dangerous if you
leave this up, or if you continue to do this.
It's more so like what are you a cop? What
are you some kind of cop doing this? Yeah, you know,
(07:58):
let's spread that rumor and it. I mean, yeah, the
cop jacketing thing is is kind of one part of
the problem. But I want to focus a little bit
on what you were talking about in terms of what
do you think as you're kind of looking at you know,
and we're all kind of staring twenty twenty four as
it approaches, what do you think is useful from media
(08:22):
that that attempts to analyze and share perspectives that are
that are left wing, that are anarchists inclined. What do
you think is actually the value that can be added
to attempts to achieve greater justice in our society. Well,
I think the answer is twofold. I think firstly, anything
(08:44):
that drives people to like real life organizing and taking
action outside of online spaces is obviously useful. Beyond that, though, like,
I think there is some value to just exposing people
to ideas that they might not have found otherwise. But
I think that, um, that a lot of that has
(09:08):
been accomplished now. I feel like a lot of people
are more familiar with with kind of the leftist the
leftist idehology one on one type of content that people
might expect in that way, So yeah, I would say
those are the two value propositions. I wonder if you
think a lot about because one thing that concerns me obviously, UM.
(09:30):
Any community develops a language that is to some extent
its own UM, and that's that's a that's part of politics,
you know, political analysis, if you're looking at things with
a Marxist analysis, or if you're analyzing things, you know,
based on your understanding of generations of anarchist political philosophy.
(09:50):
There's terms that you're going to use that that other
thinkers have created, that are the terms that people use
to discuss those ideas UM. But it is sometimes kind
of a thin line between that and the thing that
colts do where they come up with a bunch of
specific terms that no one else uses in order to
separate a community from the rest from everyone else. And
obviously I don't think there's any intentionality there. I don't
(10:12):
think people who are talking about you know, the dialectic
or whatever are attempting to separate their listeners from the
mass of humanity. But I do think that happens sometimes.
And when I listen sometimes to conversations on the left
about justice, in particular about social justice, I wonder, like, well,
how is somebody who isn't like reading all this shit
(10:35):
going to interpret this? Is it just going to sound
like nonsense to them? And I think maybe like part
of the purpose, the positive purpose of mass media that
looks at things from the left is trying to communicate
with folks who are not going to sit down or
at least who have not yet sat down and done
a whole bunch of reading on the history and the politics,
(10:56):
but whose hearts are in the right place and who
I would like to be to engage in conversations with
folks who maybe kind of get their heads a little
bit too full of specific terminology. Sometimes I think it's
it's a specific balancing act because on the other hand,
like you also have to give your audience a little
(11:16):
credit that they're absolutely but I think that like you
have to be able to meet people where they're at.
But at the same time, like if someone has expressed
this idea in a way that's already sufficient, like it's it's, uh,
why do the work of like trying to re explain that,
you know. But that being said, I think there is
(11:38):
a tendency to just assume people already are on our
side or understand ideas to the level of complexity that
we might like and that people are on board with,
like what even something as simple as what capitalism means.
You know, all the time you see people online who
will say that, Like a musician will post their band
(12:01):
Campaige and people will be like, oh, I thought you
were anti capitalist. You know. Yeah, it's it's like you know,
but like you also can't get caught up in the
kind of um weaponized ignorance that the people you know
like you. You can't make someone understand something if they
(12:22):
have a particular reason not to want to. So I
absolutely agree that, like there's the danger of that that
group in speak, uh, but it's it's a it's a
difficult problem to solve. I think the kind of approach
I take to it most of the time is that
I tend to write my scripts as the as though
(12:45):
I am uh just the like like a child. Like
I I try to write as though I'm speaking to
a five year old, you know, Yeah, I mean, and
I think. I also I think a lot about and
this is something you know here at cool Zone, I've
brought we brought on a couple of years ago. People
who you know are now making podcasts for the team
(13:10):
who when we brought them on, had a lot less
experience writing scripts and making media for mass consumption. And
one of the things that I found it was kind
of like my job to do repeatedly was to point out, like, Okay, stop, go,
actually go back to that term, because you you just
you know, said a term that I think means a
specific or you just referenced a thing from history that
(13:31):
I think that people are interested in and should know about.
But you do have to like go in and explain
it and walk people through it. And that's kind of
part of That's really one of the challenges I find,
particularly with Behind the Bastards, right where we're talking sometimes
about these complicated social movements and moments in history, and
(13:52):
it's this kind of tub of war between you want
to respect the intelligence of the audience and you want
to give them enough to hail that they have contexts
and that can maybe understand multiple sides of it, but
also you can't get bogged down in every detail, otherwise
you're never going to finish the damn thing. And we
can't all be Dan Carlin making ten hour long podcasts. Unfortunately.
(14:13):
I do like there's a degree to which I'm quite
jealous of his work, the way he set up his workload.
But I would just never be able to think of
that many boxing analogies. Yeah, I don't. I don't know
very much about boxing. I would probably just like throw
in a whole lot of balls mahoney analogy, Yeah, a
lot of for me, it would be a lot of
(14:34):
super punch out references. Like hell, yes, stan Lee would
always say to comic book writers that every comic is
somebody's first comic, and so you kind of have to
consider that, like every piece of messaging you do might
(14:57):
this might be like the first time someone is stepping
out of a completely different ideological bubble than you might expect,
and so you know, it kind of has the messaging
kind of has to stand on its own. But I
think that's also like a unique problem to mass media
because it also means that in a sense, it's much
harder to like build on previous work. It's harder to
(15:17):
like go from your one on one content and then
get to the more advanced subjects, because someone could just
start at the more advanced part and get lost. I
think that's a really apt way of describing what I
also find as one of the central problems because a
ton of the episodes of Bastards, especially the stuff when
we focus on fascists, builds on itself. Right, you, your
(15:42):
understanding of fascism in Romania will be influenced and is
to some degree. You don't really you can't understand fascism
in Romania without understanding fascism and ymar fascism in Italy,
fascism in the United States during the same period, and
vice versa. And so my hope is that the people
who catch all of the episodes are building a really
(16:05):
complex and durable understanding of the problem through it. But
it's also the struggle of like, well, a lot of
people are just going to be like, oh shit, I
know Hitler, but I maybe I'm not interested in hearing
about Romania, you know, and I'm not going to click
on those episodes. And there's nothing against people like when
I listen to podcasts, I find myself doing the same
thing where it's like, there's a million episodes of this show,
(16:26):
I'm not going to listen. I don't I don't have
the time to listen to all of them. Sure, yeah,
And that touches on another problem, which is that you know,
the subjects that people like us tend to cover are
biased towards what we think people will find interesting. Yeah,
you know, and beyond that, like what we ourselves find
interesting to research, Yeah, and what in what you can
(16:47):
And this is a thing that I try to point
out on my subreddit sometimes when people are like, I
can't believe you haven't done this guy or that guy,
and it's like, well, that doing that research is going
to fuck me up, and like, so I'm not going
to do it yet. I'm gonna do this thing that's funny.
I'm gonna read about the liver King this week. I
need I need a break. So the liver King is
who we're talking about. Yeah, everybody needs a liver king
(17:10):
in their life at some point. Yeah. It's like I
read the Turner Diaries for one video. Yeah, And I've
been constant people who have been constantly like, oh, you
should read Camp of the Saints, you should read Siege.
And I'm like, oh, I don't know if I want to.
First of all, I don't even know if I want
those things on my hard drive. Yeah. Yeah, Camp of
(17:30):
the Saints is a little easier, but yeah, maybe maybe
one of those a year and no more. That's like
the most I would recommend from like a mental health standpoint.
It's also like you don't need to read the full
text of all of those I mean, that's part of
the thing is that like you can get a lot
by checking in some exerpts and reading scholarly papers analyzing
(17:53):
this stuff, and there there always will be that um
and I think to a significant standpoint, like it's more
important to understand, you know, And this isn't true for everybody,
because there's some people who you know, are scholars of
this stuff, and you do need to to to do
the deep reading. But if you want to understand the
degree to which Siege and the Turner Diers diaries influence
(18:16):
the mass shootings that we see in the United States
state that are carried out by the far right, you
don't need to read those books to do that, right,
There's plenty of really good scholarly analysis, and that's part
of what you and I try to do for people.
And what what other you know, folks who are creating
this kind of media other journalists do for folks. Yeah,
I will I would say that I strongly balk at
(18:37):
the I don't consider myself a journalist. Um, yeah, I mean,
and I don't consider that's something people talk about as well.
On the subreddit, I get a lot of like comments
on people appreciating the journalism in the series, and we
do in some of our shows, like you know we
did we went to the Border, mean mar last year.
(18:58):
Garrison just got back from Cop City. But like Bastards,
isn't journalism, you know, sometimes it's like celebrating journalism, but
it's it's it's entertainment that I hope has like an
educational quality to it. Yeah, it's I don't. I don't
say this to belittle myself. I just don't see that
as as the function of my job. I think, like
(19:18):
like I have, I have in the in the course
of my work, occasionally done journalism by accidents. I did
a long interview where I had like about the chaz
and and kind of the misconceptions that people had, and
I had some you know, talks with people within and
like that is technically, on its face a piece of journalism. Sure,
you know, absolutely, it's not what I consider my uh
(19:43):
strength or role to be well, and I honestly this
goes back to what we were talking about with the
young woman who filmed the video of of George Floyd. Um,
journalism is a profession, but it's also just like a
set of tools, and you know sometimes you will use
those tools in order to do other things. You know
that that's that's certainly true. I'm curious you and I.
(20:15):
You and I both kind of uh like make our
our our work work uh differently. UM, mine's ad supported obviously,
so my conversation with fans, you know, outside of like
when I'm doing a live show is primarily through we
have a subreddit and we have Twitter, um, and that's uh,
you know, there's some difficulty there. For one thing, like
(20:38):
every single guest we have, there are people who will
be like, this is the best guests you've ever had,
and this person is the worst guest you've ever had,
And there's absolutely no way to make decisions based on that, right,
It's just a much Um. You you've got a different relationship,
or at least a different method of I think communicating.
I imagine it's different, um because because your your Patreon supported.
(21:00):
I'm interested in, how have, if at all, have you
seen kind of the conversations about what people want from you?
And you know the way in which you've been talking
with your fans. Have you seen that change since twenty twenty. Well,
I think one of the major ways is since I've
kind of taken a step back from this explicitly political content,
(21:22):
it's a lot of people have kind of encouraged me
to go more in that direction, and I have seen
like a big drop in my support as a result.
I think that it's it's a tricky balance to strike again.
Many of these things are like such a balancing act
(21:42):
because I always am careful to remind people that, like, hey,
you can support me on Patreon if you like what
I'm doing and want there to be more of it,
but please don't operate under the assumption that doing so
is activism or contr utes to activism, because it is not.
You are not like making the revolution more than exactly
(22:07):
you know, you are getting a little drawing that I'm
going to put at the end of my video, like
that's that's the value proposition here. Yeah, And I think
that you know, it's it's a I don't The reason
I don't accept ad ad reads on Thoughtslime I do
on scaredy Cats is because I don't want the perception
that my views are going to be limited or held
(22:31):
back by, you know, the desire to seek out advertisers,
which whether or not I would have the the integrity
to withstand like it, it would create the illusion. But
that creates the problem of, well, now I kind of
have to do what I think that my audience will want,
and that's its own kettle of fish. Like am I
(22:52):
am I pushing people to donate more than than they
might be comfortable with, and so that's you know, I
don't I don't really know like the the ethics of it,
to be perfectly frank, there have been times when people
have made big donations and I've had to message them
and say like, hey, I think you should you should
probably take this money back. You probably weren't thinking straight
(23:13):
when you sent me this money. I think you should
probably have it back. Yeah. That's such an interesting thing
for me because it also you know, I've I've thought
about that myself quite a lot. You know. I had
a decision to make when we first started doing these
shows about how it was going to be done, and
I took the ad supported corporate route, and I've been
very happy with that so far. There's a lot of
(23:34):
things that's let us do. There's certainly downsides to it, um,
you know, including occasionally advertising for the Washington State Highway Patrol. Yeah,
but um, you know, it's one of those things. I
made a comment, and this is part one of the
one of the frustrating things about making media for a
large audience is there's always going to be people who
will like read into what you've said something you never meant.
(23:56):
I made a comment once about like, you know, because
we get people asking why don't you do a Patreon
or whatever, why do you do it this way? And
I just made a comment like expressing what you had
just expressed, like, well, you know, I feel weird sometimes
asking for money. And if I can just like get
money from a big company and you know, hire my
friends and do my work, I feel okay doing that.
(24:17):
It's how most of my career has worked. So that's
what I'm most comfortable doing. And yes, there were people
who took from that, like, well, Robert doesn't think it's
ethical to have a Patreon. It's like half of my
friends make their living son Patreon. I do not have
an ethical problem with supporting yourself that way. I will
say that. When I heard you mentioned that in an episode,
(24:37):
and it did send a chill down my spine briefly. No.
I mean I think like Cody Johnston, who I've worked
with for what fifteen years now, has a massive Patreon.
Tom and Dave Boyd lived with some of my best friends.
You know. Yeah, Like it's it's I think it's perfectly
it's it's certainly no less ethical, and you can make
a case people do that it's more ethical than being
(24:59):
ad supported. It's just like, I mean, some of it
just comes down to like what kind of stuff are
you making and what kind of like a person are you,
and what's going to work best with you as like
a creative method in a way of interacting with fans,
and they have downsides and they have positives. You know.
It's also like a matter of of what you're able
(25:19):
to do to certain extents because like I don't know
how to get advertisers. Yeah, any advertisers that I've ever
gotten on my my horror channel have just reached out
to me, and like, I don't know if I'm getting
as much money out of them as they should be.
I have no idea. I just I just kind of
wing it, you know, Like if you have that background
in radio or broadcasting or what have you like it,
(25:40):
can you know that it's it's a much more viable
option for some people than it is for others. Yeah. Yeah,
I mean a lot of why it works for me
the way that it does is because I've had a
fifteen year career and not in broadcast, but you know,
in comedy writing and whatnot. And so I mean that's
how I got the I got my podcast hosted on
my heart in the first place, and that's like a thing.
(26:02):
And this is actually one of the things that concerns
me most about the ship that's happening with AI right now,
because you know, there's this, Uh, the folks that kind
of I came into making media for all of us
started as fairly a political comedy. I think that's Cody
Johnston right some more news. Coody was making videos about
like chat roulette and penises when we when we all
(26:23):
started working together, very funny videos, but like we were
making silly things, um, and everyone has kind of moved
into making like, you know, pretty pretty serious fact based media. Um.
You know, Cody does a very popular, very political kind
(26:44):
of current events show, and we were able to get
good at making the kind of media that we made,
and build the connections that we built, and build the
audiences that we built because we had years of time
where you could make a decent living writing stuff for
the Internet. And I see the kind of shit that
(27:04):
I'm afraid AI is going to do to these jobs
where people would get their start as writers and whatnot.
Maybe it wasn't the best, you know, it's not that
you're not doing the best writing you're ever going to
do the jobs that get replaced by AI, but it's
a foot in the door, and I keep feeling I
feel like I keep seeing the room for people to
put their foot in the door get smaller and smaller
(27:24):
every year, and that's that worries me a lot. I
definitely know what you mean. I also feel that like
there's a fear among some people that, like, you get
crowded out of these spaces the more people there are
doing this sort of thing, and I kind of feel
like that's not the case. I like the AI stuff,
(27:47):
I definitely share your concerns, but yeah, the the institutional
barriers and people's way, like I think that, like to
be frank, like, I started doing this on a shitty
too hundred dollar computer and a completely legal video editing software.
But I love video editing software. I found it in
(28:11):
a dumpster and I used that, so, you know, and
then like through that, I was able to like be
able to afford a fancy camera and some lights and
you know, but like I didn't know what I was doing,
like it was all self taught. And I think there
has to be that kind of diy attitude, yeah, for people.
And it is something I try to encourage in people,
(28:32):
is that like, just just do it like I did it,
You can do it. Yeah, you know. I think that's
a great point, because I am coming at this from
the the old man dumerist perspective of somebody who like
the world has changed from the way it was when
I'm young, when I was young, and people don't get
their careers started that way anymore. And your point is
very valid that while changes in the industry have closed
(28:56):
specific doors, they've also created some um and I think
probably in the long run, it is better for people
to get their foot in the door doing what you
did than rewriting a bunch of press releases about tech
gadgets for a shady website that takes advantage of the
Google algorithm, which has always started my career. I think
that's actually a really valid I don't think, yeah, I don't.
(29:18):
I don't. I don't think that's a It depends on
your end goal too, right, But I think like the
thing that becomes incumbent on people like me is to
like help people, you know, Like I've experienced a certain
amount of success and so, and I attribute that largely
to the fact that, like when I was just starting out,
like I had no idea how to make people see
(29:39):
my ship. I'd like, I did not know what I
was doing. Yeah, and a bigger creator just reached out
and it's like, hey, can I share your video? I
think it's really good and it kind of snowballed from there.
So my philosophy has always been, like you take these
uh you know, you you make space for to lift
people up with you and do so. It's not an
(30:01):
entirely selfless gesture either, because in doing so, if if
there's an extremely talented person who succeeds partially because you
help them, now you have a connection to an extremely
talented person, you know, yeah, like that's that's a sense of,
for lack of a better term, mutual aid in a
very yeah, loose sense. I suppose that reminds me of
(30:24):
something a good friend of mine and a colleague at
Cracked who now helps run the Small Beans podcast network
said to me years and years ago when he was
directing a video, which is, I want to spend the
rest of my career getting hired and fired by my friends,
Which is I think a nice way of looking at it.
(30:45):
And there's a degree to which it's a very old
Hollywood way of looking at it, but it doesn't. It
also works very well in this It can work very
well in this new, this new kind of ecosystem that
is still being put together. And I do think that
it's because I see a lot and I don't. I'm
not someone who does a lot of time like I
(31:06):
like to watch. I watch like the stuff that you
put together, the stuff h Bomber guy puts together where
it's actual, like videos on topics and I'm learning something.
The stuff that the Dan Olsen puts together. You know,
I'm not so much into And this is not I'm
not attacking anybody. I'm not like trying to shoot on
the field. But personally I don't watch like the just
kind of like stream stuff A lot, and I it
(31:27):
does seem like there's a lot of conflicts between people
in that and I'm wondering, you know, my hope is
that there's more people building connections to create resiliency between
the people who are are trying to make good shit
and trying to make stuff that people enjoy, and that
has an impact on people, and that even changes people
(31:48):
in positive ways. And it sounds like from what from
what you're talking about, you know, honestly from what I
experience too, I do think that's more the case than
like the drama that that goes viral on Twitter from
time to time. Yeah, I think, you know, I hope
so too. I think that that it's it's very easy
to piss people off and it's much harder to get
(32:11):
people's attention by being kind. But you know, I like, look,
you know, how many nice comments do I get in
a day can't count, But like the one shitty comment
will always stick out. It's the same way like if
if I have a thousand pleasant interactions with someone else, uh,
nobody notices. But if I you know, get into if
(32:32):
I pick a fight with somebody, you know, it's people
are going to remember forever. I think that's the thing
that unsettles me most. And this isn't actually even just
like this isn't about streaming media or left with media
or whatever. This is a problem of social media that
You're right, it's the it's the fights that always get
most of the attention as opposed to them. I mean,
(32:54):
not not entirely, because some of like the big moments
is particularly in recent left wing media things like um,
you know, people doing these giant streams that raise huge
amounts of money for a cause. So that that certainly
is a thing that happens and does get a lot
of attention when it does happen. But you are fighting
against and I think we have to be consciously fighting
against this system that does want to engender conflict. Yes,
(33:18):
it's also kind of difficult, and I and you know,
keep in mind this this is perhaps coming from a
bias perspective when there are individuals and I'm not going
to name names, who do see that as an easy
source of generating attentions. It's very easy to the same
way that like, if I'm going to make a video
(33:40):
on a subject, I will frame it as like I'm
disagreeing with Ben Shapiro or I'm disagreeing with Jordan Peterson.
It's very easy to go look at thought slime. There's
a big piece of shit because he thought this when
when actually this is the truth. That's more attention grabbing
than just, you know, a kind of neutrally positioned argument. Yeah,
(34:00):
so it's a it's a it's a tricky problem. Yeah, yeah,
I think one of the ones that I think on
quite a lot. Well, um, I think that's most of
what I wanted to talk about today. Did you want
to like throwing anything else? Or if not, we can
go to plugs. Yeah, I mean, I'm good. That's pretty
(34:21):
much it. I will say that one of the things
that tends to bother me the most is people will
occasionally say to me that they'll they'll send a message
thing you seem like a really good person, and I
will say thank you, But please don't feel that way
about content creators, because why would I make a work
(34:42):
that portrayed myself as a bad person? And while I,
in my mind think I am a good person, I
think it sets the dangerous precedent that you could allow
yourself to be emotionally manipulated by someone else who might
not be well the name of the game. When you
are creating media, particularly when you're create media that's meant
to make people feel things. Part of that is manipulation, right.
(35:06):
Manipulate is not an inherently negative term. You know, Stanley
Kubrick is trying to manipulate you when he makes a movie.
I'm trying to persuade you. Yeah, you do it does
It is incumbent upon the audience for their own protection
to keep that in mind. And it's incumbent upon ethical
people who make stuff to not create cults, at least
(35:26):
not create too many cults. Yeah, as much as you
can avoid it, for sure. Yeah, all right, you want
to plug your plugables. Sure. You can find my work
at YouTube dot com slash thoughtslime or thoughtslime dot com.
You also find my horror content at YouTube dot com
slash Scaredycats TV. Scaredycats was taken. That's me. That's what
(35:48):
I do. I make videos about fartsand or butts. Well,
thank you so much for coming on the show. That
is going to be it for us today. We will
be back probably tomorrow. It could happen here as a
production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from cool
(36:09):
Zone Media, visit our website cool zonemedia dot com, or
check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or
wherever you listen to podcasts, you can find sources for
It could happen here, Updated monthly at cool zonemedia dot
com slash sources. Thanks for listening.
Welcome too. It could happen here a podcast about things
falling apart and sometimes putting things back together. And you know,
today we're doing an episode that's kind of more on
the intellectual and emotional end of a very specific set
of things falling apart, And rather than clumsily try to
(00:28):
introduce it myself, I'm going to bring on the person
who who I think the thoughts that have kind of
been going through my head. I know they've been going
through the heads of a lot of the folks that
we have here at cool Zone for quite some time now. Thoughtslime.
You are a YouTuber and a good YouTuber who does
a number of videos. Some of your recent ones are
(00:50):
thoughts on ai Art, a timeline of Elon's Twitter mistakes.
She did a really fun video on the QAnon Queen
of Canada, who is a pretty problematic character. Welcome to
the show. Thanks for having me, Happy to be here.
Do you want to just kind of start by reading
us that thread? Because you posted this on Twitter the
(01:10):
other day and I started chatting with it, and then
we moved over to DMS and decided we should kind
of do a little more formal thing. Yeah, so basically
I said that I'm constantly considering making a Why I
Left the Left video about how my views have not
changed one iota, but I've become completely disillusioned about my
role in communicating them. Part of the reason I shifted
(01:34):
my focus to trying to be just entertaining is because
deep down I don't really see a lot of value
in getting people on my side anymore. I don't think
it does anything or means anything. But the best I
can do is give you information and hopefully a laugh.
I used to feel like I was participating in something
bigger than I think A lot. Then I think I
really am that I was helping in some small, in
(01:54):
some small way towards a sort of shift towards a
more revolutionary mass consciousness. I think that was a bit
of a childish fantasy. In retrospect, sometimes people will say
you made me an anarchist, and like, Buddy, I don't
even think it matters that I myself am an anarchist,
and I regret that that sort of we're fighting the
good fight mentality has allowed some of the worst grifters
on the platform to flourish by manipulating people's passions for
(02:15):
their own weird petty reasons. I think what I do
has a lot of value, But I'm just saying that
I think I perceive that value to be is a
lot different than what I thought it was a few
years ago. Is basically what I had to say. Yeah,
that I think does such a good job of nailing
the problem that I've been kind of dealing with emotionally
(02:36):
as well, which is it's it's not It'd be easy
to sum it up as like I no longer believe in,
you know, trying to transmit you know, leftist ideas or
political analysis, or that I don't believe in the value
of like trying to inform people about the world, because
that's not how I feel. But there is there has
(02:56):
been this shift, and I think probably the high point
for the version of me that was optimistic about the
ability to use mass media to build power and the
ability to take effective action on the left. I think
that kind of crescendoed I'm gonna I'm gonna say June
of twenty twenty um, and it had a pretty sharp
(03:16):
drop after that point. And I both think it's it's
valuable to still acknowledge kind of how remarkable what happened
in twenty twenty was, for all of its flaws and
all of the really messy fallout from it, we saw
an ups an uprising of unprecedented scale, and part of
why the crackdown in response has been so narly is
(03:39):
that it scared the hell out of a lot of
really unpleasant people. Um and the media had a significant
role to play in that, both in the fact that
there were a lot of people who were who were
kind of already organizing and radicalized when the shit started
to hit the fan, and that as things happened, um,
(03:59):
you know, the what was happening in the streets, what
the police were doing, the different kind of marches and
and different campaigns that were being started, got spread to people.
And I do think that you know, folks, you know
like you and me, were a part of that. Although
it never is far from my mind that the most
influential piece of media that was that was recorded and
(04:21):
disseminated during twenty twenty was the video of George Floyd
being murdered, which was filmed by you know, someone who
just happened to be nearby and had the courage to
film it, not a professional journalist, not a not an influencer,
not a not somebody who was a professional political thinker
and everything else combined didn't have the influence of that video. Yeah.
(04:44):
I think that that kind of gets to the heart
of it, right, is that like we express support for ideas,
and thus people tend to treat us as though we
are the progenitors of those ideas, or the guardians of
those ideas, or the leaders of a kind of decentralized
proxy party of some kind. Yeah, it's it's it's both,
(05:06):
because I think thankfully there's that. I mean, there's there's
always going to be every everyone who makes popular media
gets forms a little cult, and so there's always going
to be a number of people who, you know, take
any given person in the media more seriously than they deserve.
And that that includes the both of us. And that's
(05:28):
that's not attempting to be that's not attempting to be
like humble or anything. That is simply a fact of
how mass media works. Um. I do think we've seen
I think there's been a mix of a healthy pushback
against looking at people who are doing creating popular media
as more than what they are and more than what
that media is capable of being. I think there has
(05:49):
been a pushback against that in the last couple of years.
It's been healthy, and I think there's been a pushback
that's been unhealthy. Um, I think people have forgotten some
of the lessons of like one. I think a good
example would be there was a very justified backlash against
and when I say streamers here, I'm referring to people
who are actually in the streets streaming during riots and
(06:10):
protests and whatnot, right and that, And the justified part
of that backlash was due to the fact that past
a certain point, particularly those video those streams were primarily
being used by law enforcement, both to get charges on
people and to just to know where folks were as
an intelligence gathering method. And I think that the backlash,
which was understandable, and there was a lot of ugly behavior,
(06:32):
including people who kind of got in after the early
portions of that, in order to make shitloads of money
by you know, streaming people getting the shit beat out
of them by the cops, and that was I think
very justified, a pretty aggressive social response to that, but
I think it's also caused a lot of people to
forget that. A huge part of why things kicked off
(06:53):
in twenty twenty and why so many people got involved
was Nico from Uniform Corn riot on the ground every
night in Minneapolis, doing one of the most impressive pieces
of citizen journalism that I think we've seen in this country.
And so I do think that some of what's frustrating
here is that it's difficult for people. It's difficult for
us as a community to take some of the proper
(07:16):
lessons from these these things that are happening from the
push and pull of the conflict that we all find
ourselves in, in part because the nature of the way
people express their understanding of these lessons via social media
is very geared towards flattening them and making it a
very simple matter of this is bad or this is
good and not well in this period of time, this
(07:37):
worked and then it didn't. You know, there's no real
sense of proportionality in these discussions. It isn't just a
matter of like, hey, you fucked up. You should probably
take this down, or this could be dangerous if you
leave this up, or if you continue to do this.
It's more so like what are you a cop? What
are you some kind of cop doing this? Yeah, you know,
(07:58):
let's spread that rumor and it. I mean, yeah, the
cop jacketing thing is is kind of one part of
the problem. But I want to focus a little bit
on what you were talking about in terms of what
do you think as you're kind of looking at you know,
and we're all kind of staring twenty twenty four as
it approaches, what do you think is useful from media
(08:22):
that that attempts to analyze and share perspectives that are
that are left wing, that are anarchists inclined. What do
you think is actually the value that can be added
to attempts to achieve greater justice in our society. Well,
I think the answer is twofold. I think firstly, anything
(08:44):
that drives people to like real life organizing and taking
action outside of online spaces is obviously useful. Beyond that, though, like,
I think there is some value to just exposing people
to ideas that they might not have found otherwise. But
I think that, um, that a lot of that has
(09:08):
been accomplished now. I feel like a lot of people
are more familiar with with kind of the leftist the
leftist idehology one on one type of content that people
might expect in that way, So yeah, I would say
those are the two value propositions. I wonder if you
think a lot about because one thing that concerns me obviously, UM.
(09:30):
Any community develops a language that is to some extent
its own UM, and that's that's a that's part of politics,
you know, political analysis, if you're looking at things with
a Marxist analysis, or if you're analyzing things, you know,
based on your understanding of generations of anarchist political philosophy.
(09:50):
There's terms that you're going to use that that other
thinkers have created, that are the terms that people use
to discuss those ideas UM. But it is sometimes kind
of a thin line between that and the thing that
colts do where they come up with a bunch of
specific terms that no one else uses in order to
separate a community from the rest from everyone else. And
obviously I don't think there's any intentionality there. I don't
(10:12):
think people who are talking about you know, the dialectic
or whatever are attempting to separate their listeners from the
mass of humanity. But I do think that happens sometimes.
And when I listen sometimes to conversations on the left
about justice, in particular about social justice, I wonder, like, well,
how is somebody who isn't like reading all this shit
(10:35):
going to interpret this? Is it just going to sound
like nonsense to them? And I think maybe like part
of the purpose, the positive purpose of mass media that
looks at things from the left is trying to communicate
with folks who are not going to sit down or
at least who have not yet sat down and done
a whole bunch of reading on the history and the politics,
(10:56):
but whose hearts are in the right place and who
I would like to be to engage in conversations with
folks who maybe kind of get their heads a little
bit too full of specific terminology. Sometimes I think it's
it's a specific balancing act because on the other hand,
like you also have to give your audience a little
(11:16):
credit that they're absolutely but I think that like you
have to be able to meet people where they're at.
But at the same time, like if someone has expressed
this idea in a way that's already sufficient, like it's it's, uh,
why do the work of like trying to re explain that,
you know. But that being said, I think there is
(11:38):
a tendency to just assume people already are on our
side or understand ideas to the level of complexity that
we might like and that people are on board with,
like what even something as simple as what capitalism means.
You know, all the time you see people online who
will say that, Like a musician will post their band
(12:01):
Campaige and people will be like, oh, I thought you
were anti capitalist. You know. Yeah, it's it's like you know,
but like you also can't get caught up in the
kind of um weaponized ignorance that the people you know
like you. You can't make someone understand something if they
(12:22):
have a particular reason not to want to. So I
absolutely agree that, like there's the danger of that that
group in speak, uh, but it's it's a it's a
difficult problem to solve. I think the kind of approach
I take to it most of the time is that
I tend to write my scripts as the as though
(12:45):
I am uh just the like like a child. Like
I I try to write as though I'm speaking to
a five year old, you know, Yeah, I mean, and
I think. I also I think a lot about and
this is something you know here at cool Zone, I've
brought we brought on a couple of years ago. People
who you know are now making podcasts for the team
(13:10):
who when we brought them on, had a lot less
experience writing scripts and making media for mass consumption. And
one of the things that I found it was kind
of like my job to do repeatedly was to point out, like, Okay, stop, go,
actually go back to that term, because you you just
you know, said a term that I think means a
specific or you just referenced a thing from history that
(13:31):
I think that people are interested in and should know about.
But you do have to like go in and explain
it and walk people through it. And that's kind of
part of That's really one of the challenges I find,
particularly with Behind the Bastards, right where we're talking sometimes
about these complicated social movements and moments in history, and
(13:52):
it's this kind of tub of war between you want
to respect the intelligence of the audience and you want
to give them enough to hail that they have contexts
and that can maybe understand multiple sides of it, but
also you can't get bogged down in every detail, otherwise
you're never going to finish the damn thing. And we
can't all be Dan Carlin making ten hour long podcasts. Unfortunately.
(14:13):
I do like there's a degree to which I'm quite
jealous of his work, the way he set up his workload.
But I would just never be able to think of
that many boxing analogies. Yeah, I don't. I don't know
very much about boxing. I would probably just like throw
in a whole lot of balls mahoney analogy, Yeah, a
lot of for me, it would be a lot of
(14:34):
super punch out references. Like hell, yes, stan Lee would
always say to comic book writers that every comic is
somebody's first comic, and so you kind of have to
consider that, like every piece of messaging you do might
(14:57):
this might be like the first time someone is stepping
out of a completely different ideological bubble than you might expect,
and so you know, it kind of has the messaging
kind of has to stand on its own. But I
think that's also like a unique problem to mass media
because it also means that in a sense, it's much
harder to like build on previous work. It's harder to
(15:17):
like go from your one on one content and then
get to the more advanced subjects, because someone could just
start at the more advanced part and get lost. I
think that's a really apt way of describing what I
also find as one of the central problems because a
ton of the episodes of Bastards, especially the stuff when
we focus on fascists, builds on itself. Right, you, your
(15:42):
understanding of fascism in Romania will be influenced and is
to some degree. You don't really you can't understand fascism
in Romania without understanding fascism and ymar fascism in Italy,
fascism in the United States during the same period, and
vice versa. And so my hope is that the people
who catch all of the episodes are building a really
(16:05):
complex and durable understanding of the problem through it. But
it's also the struggle of like, well, a lot of
people are just going to be like, oh shit, I
know Hitler, but I maybe I'm not interested in hearing
about Romania, you know, and I'm not going to click
on those episodes. And there's nothing against people like when
I listen to podcasts, I find myself doing the same
thing where it's like, there's a million episodes of this show,
(16:26):
I'm not going to listen. I don't I don't have
the time to listen to all of them. Sure, yeah,
And that touches on another problem, which is that you know,
the subjects that people like us tend to cover are
biased towards what we think people will find interesting. Yeah,
you know, and beyond that, like what we ourselves find
interesting to research, Yeah, and what in what you can
(16:47):
And this is a thing that I try to point
out on my subreddit sometimes when people are like, I
can't believe you haven't done this guy or that guy,
and it's like, well, that doing that research is going
to fuck me up, and like, so I'm not going
to do it yet. I'm gonna do this thing that's funny.
I'm gonna read about the liver King this week. I
need I need a break. So the liver King is
who we're talking about. Yeah, everybody needs a liver king
(17:10):
in their life at some point. Yeah. It's like I
read the Turner Diaries for one video. Yeah, And I've
been constant people who have been constantly like, oh, you
should read Camp of the Saints, you should read Siege.
And I'm like, oh, I don't know if I want to.
First of all, I don't even know if I want
those things on my hard drive. Yeah. Yeah, Camp of
(17:30):
the Saints is a little easier, but yeah, maybe maybe
one of those a year and no more. That's like
the most I would recommend from like a mental health standpoint.
It's also like you don't need to read the full
text of all of those I mean, that's part of
the thing is that like you can get a lot
by checking in some exerpts and reading scholarly papers analyzing
(17:53):
this stuff, and there there always will be that um
and I think to a significant standpoint, like it's more
important to understand, you know, And this isn't true for everybody,
because there's some people who you know, are scholars of
this stuff, and you do need to to to do
the deep reading. But if you want to understand the
degree to which Siege and the Turner Diers diaries influence
(18:16):
the mass shootings that we see in the United States
state that are carried out by the far right, you
don't need to read those books to do that, right,
There's plenty of really good scholarly analysis, and that's part
of what you and I try to do for people.
And what what other you know, folks who are creating
this kind of media other journalists do for folks. Yeah,
I will I would say that I strongly balk at
(18:37):
the I don't consider myself a journalist. Um, yeah, I mean,
and I don't consider that's something people talk about as well.
On the subreddit, I get a lot of like comments
on people appreciating the journalism in the series, and we
do in some of our shows, like you know we
did we went to the Border, mean mar last year.
(18:58):
Garrison just got back from Cop City. But like Bastards,
isn't journalism, you know, sometimes it's like celebrating journalism, but
it's it's it's entertainment that I hope has like an
educational quality to it. Yeah, it's I don't. I don't
say this to belittle myself. I just don't see that
as as the function of my job. I think, like
(19:18):
like I have, I have in the in the course
of my work, occasionally done journalism by accidents. I did
a long interview where I had like about the chaz
and and kind of the misconceptions that people had, and
I had some you know, talks with people within and
like that is technically, on its face a piece of journalism. Sure,
you know, absolutely, it's not what I consider my uh
(19:43):
strength or role to be well, and I honestly this
goes back to what we were talking about with the
young woman who filmed the video of of George Floyd. Um,
journalism is a profession, but it's also just like a
set of tools, and you know sometimes you will use
those tools in order to do other things. You know
that that's that's certainly true. I'm curious you and I.
(20:15):
You and I both kind of uh like make our
our our work work uh differently. UM, mine's ad supported obviously,
so my conversation with fans, you know, outside of like
when I'm doing a live show is primarily through we
have a subreddit and we have Twitter, um, and that's uh,
you know, there's some difficulty there. For one thing, like
(20:38):
every single guest we have, there are people who will
be like, this is the best guests you've ever had,
and this person is the worst guest you've ever had,
And there's absolutely no way to make decisions based on that, right,
It's just a much Um. You you've got a different relationship,
or at least a different method of I think communicating.
I imagine it's different, um because because your your Patreon supported.
(21:00):
I'm interested in, how have, if at all, have you
seen kind of the conversations about what people want from you?
And you know the way in which you've been talking
with your fans. Have you seen that change since twenty twenty. Well,
I think one of the major ways is since I've
kind of taken a step back from this explicitly political content,
(21:22):
it's a lot of people have kind of encouraged me
to go more in that direction, and I have seen
like a big drop in my support as a result.
I think that it's it's a tricky balance to strike again.
Many of these things are like such a balancing act
(21:42):
because I always am careful to remind people that, like, hey,
you can support me on Patreon if you like what
I'm doing and want there to be more of it,
but please don't operate under the assumption that doing so
is activism or contr utes to activism, because it is not.
You are not like making the revolution more than exactly
(22:07):
you know, you are getting a little drawing that I'm
going to put at the end of my video, like
that's that's the value proposition here. Yeah, And I think
that you know, it's it's a I don't The reason
I don't accept ad ad reads on Thoughtslime I do
on scaredy Cats is because I don't want the perception
that my views are going to be limited or held
(22:31):
back by, you know, the desire to seek out advertisers,
which whether or not I would have the the integrity
to withstand like it, it would create the illusion. But
that creates the problem of, well, now I kind of
have to do what I think that my audience will want,
and that's its own kettle of fish. Like am I
(22:52):
am I pushing people to donate more than than they
might be comfortable with, and so that's you know, I
don't I don't really know like the the ethics of it,
to be perfectly frank, there have been times when people
have made big donations and I've had to message them
and say like, hey, I think you should you should
probably take this money back. You probably weren't thinking straight
(23:13):
when you sent me this money. I think you should
probably have it back. Yeah. That's such an interesting thing
for me because it also you know, I've I've thought
about that myself quite a lot. You know. I had
a decision to make when we first started doing these
shows about how it was going to be done, and
I took the ad supported corporate route, and I've been
very happy with that so far. There's a lot of
(23:34):
things that's let us do. There's certainly downsides to it, um,
you know, including occasionally advertising for the Washington State Highway Patrol. Yeah,
but um, you know, it's one of those things. I
made a comment, and this is part one of the
one of the frustrating things about making media for a
large audience is there's always going to be people who
will like read into what you've said something you never meant.
(23:56):
I made a comment once about like, you know, because
we get people asking why don't you do a Patreon
or whatever, why do you do it this way? And
I just made a comment like expressing what you had
just expressed, like, well, you know, I feel weird sometimes
asking for money. And if I can just like get
money from a big company and you know, hire my
friends and do my work, I feel okay doing that.
(24:17):
It's how most of my career has worked. So that's
what I'm most comfortable doing. And yes, there were people
who took from that, like, well, Robert doesn't think it's
ethical to have a Patreon. It's like half of my
friends make their living son Patreon. I do not have
an ethical problem with supporting yourself that way. I will
say that. When I heard you mentioned that in an episode,
(24:37):
and it did send a chill down my spine briefly. No.
I mean I think like Cody Johnston, who I've worked
with for what fifteen years now, has a massive Patreon.
Tom and Dave Boyd lived with some of my best friends.
You know. Yeah, Like it's it's I think it's perfectly
it's it's certainly no less ethical, and you can make
a case people do that it's more ethical than being
(24:59):
ad supported. It's just like, I mean, some of it
just comes down to like what kind of stuff are
you making and what kind of like a person are you,
and what's going to work best with you as like
a creative method in a way of interacting with fans,
and they have downsides and they have positives. You know.
It's also like a matter of of what you're able
(25:19):
to do to certain extents because like I don't know
how to get advertisers. Yeah, any advertisers that I've ever
gotten on my my horror channel have just reached out
to me, and like, I don't know if I'm getting
as much money out of them as they should be.
I have no idea. I just I just kind of
wing it, you know, Like if you have that background
in radio or broadcasting or what have you like it,
(25:40):
can you know that it's it's a much more viable
option for some people than it is for others. Yeah. Yeah,
I mean a lot of why it works for me
the way that it does is because I've had a
fifteen year career and not in broadcast, but you know,
in comedy writing and whatnot. And so I mean that's
how I got the I got my podcast hosted on
my heart in the first place, and that's like a thing.
(26:02):
And this is actually one of the things that concerns
me most about the ship that's happening with AI right now,
because you know, there's this, Uh, the folks that kind
of I came into making media for all of us
started as fairly a political comedy. I think that's Cody
Johnston right some more news. Coody was making videos about
like chat roulette and penises when we when we all
(26:23):
started working together, very funny videos, but like we were
making silly things, um, and everyone has kind of moved
into making like, you know, pretty pretty serious fact based media. Um.
You know, Cody does a very popular, very political kind
(26:44):
of current events show, and we were able to get
good at making the kind of media that we made,
and build the connections that we built, and build the
audiences that we built because we had years of time
where you could make a decent living writing stuff for
the Internet. And I see the kind of shit that
(27:04):
I'm afraid AI is going to do to these jobs
where people would get their start as writers and whatnot.
Maybe it wasn't the best, you know, it's not that
you're not doing the best writing you're ever going to
do the jobs that get replaced by AI, but it's
a foot in the door, and I keep feeling I
feel like I keep seeing the room for people to
put their foot in the door get smaller and smaller
(27:24):
every year, and that's that worries me a lot. I
definitely know what you mean. I also feel that like
there's a fear among some people that, like, you get
crowded out of these spaces the more people there are
doing this sort of thing, and I kind of feel
like that's not the case. I like the AI stuff,
(27:47):
I definitely share your concerns, but yeah, the the institutional
barriers and people's way, like I think that, like to
be frank, like, I started doing this on a shitty
too hundred dollar computer and a completely legal video editing software.
But I love video editing software. I found it in
(28:11):
a dumpster and I used that, so, you know, and
then like through that, I was able to like be
able to afford a fancy camera and some lights and
you know, but like I didn't know what I was doing,
like it was all self taught. And I think there
has to be that kind of diy attitude, yeah, for people.
And it is something I try to encourage in people,
(28:32):
is that like, just just do it like I did it,
You can do it. Yeah, you know. I think that's
a great point, because I am coming at this from
the the old man dumerist perspective of somebody who like
the world has changed from the way it was when
I'm young, when I was young, and people don't get
their careers started that way anymore. And your point is
very valid that while changes in the industry have closed
(28:56):
specific doors, they've also created some um and I think
probably in the long run, it is better for people
to get their foot in the door doing what you
did than rewriting a bunch of press releases about tech
gadgets for a shady website that takes advantage of the
Google algorithm, which has always started my career. I think
that's actually a really valid I don't think, yeah, I don't.
(29:18):
I don't. I don't think that's a It depends on
your end goal too, right, But I think like the
thing that becomes incumbent on people like me is to
like help people, you know, Like I've experienced a certain
amount of success and so, and I attribute that largely
to the fact that, like when I was just starting out,
like I had no idea how to make people see
(29:39):
my ship. I'd like, I did not know what I
was doing. Yeah, and a bigger creator just reached out
and it's like, hey, can I share your video? I
think it's really good and it kind of snowballed from there.
So my philosophy has always been, like you take these
uh you know, you you make space for to lift
people up with you and do so. It's not an
(30:01):
entirely selfless gesture either, because in doing so, if if
there's an extremely talented person who succeeds partially because you
help them, now you have a connection to an extremely
talented person, you know, yeah, like that's that's a sense of,
for lack of a better term, mutual aid in a
very yeah, loose sense. I suppose that reminds me of
(30:24):
something a good friend of mine and a colleague at
Cracked who now helps run the Small Beans podcast network
said to me years and years ago when he was
directing a video, which is, I want to spend the
rest of my career getting hired and fired by my friends,
Which is I think a nice way of looking at it.
(30:45):
And there's a degree to which it's a very old
Hollywood way of looking at it, but it doesn't. It
also works very well in this It can work very
well in this new, this new kind of ecosystem that
is still being put together. And I do think that
it's because I see a lot and I don't. I'm
not someone who does a lot of time like I
(31:06):
like to watch. I watch like the stuff that you
put together, the stuff h Bomber guy puts together where
it's actual, like videos on topics and I'm learning something.
The stuff that the Dan Olsen puts together. You know,
I'm not so much into And this is not I'm
not attacking anybody. I'm not like trying to shoot on
the field. But personally I don't watch like the just
kind of like stream stuff A lot, and I it
(31:27):
does seem like there's a lot of conflicts between people
in that and I'm wondering, you know, my hope is
that there's more people building connections to create resiliency between
the people who are are trying to make good shit
and trying to make stuff that people enjoy, and that
has an impact on people, and that even changes people
(31:48):
in positive ways. And it sounds like from what from
what you're talking about, you know, honestly from what I
experience too, I do think that's more the case than
like the drama that that goes viral on Twitter from
time to time. Yeah, I think, you know, I hope
so too. I think that that it's it's very easy
to piss people off and it's much harder to get
(32:11):
people's attention by being kind. But you know, I like, look,
you know, how many nice comments do I get in
a day can't count, But like the one shitty comment
will always stick out. It's the same way like if
if I have a thousand pleasant interactions with someone else, uh,
nobody notices. But if I you know, get into if
(32:32):
I pick a fight with somebody, you know, it's people
are going to remember forever. I think that's the thing
that unsettles me most. And this isn't actually even just
like this isn't about streaming media or left with media
or whatever. This is a problem of social media that
You're right, it's the it's the fights that always get
most of the attention as opposed to them. I mean,
(32:54):
not not entirely, because some of like the big moments
is particularly in recent left wing media things like um,
you know, people doing these giant streams that raise huge
amounts of money for a cause. So that that certainly
is a thing that happens and does get a lot
of attention when it does happen. But you are fighting
against and I think we have to be consciously fighting
against this system that does want to engender conflict. Yes,
(33:18):
it's also kind of difficult, and I and you know,
keep in mind this this is perhaps coming from a
bias perspective when there are individuals and I'm not going
to name names, who do see that as an easy
source of generating attentions. It's very easy to the same
way that like, if I'm going to make a video
(33:40):
on a subject, I will frame it as like I'm
disagreeing with Ben Shapiro or I'm disagreeing with Jordan Peterson.
It's very easy to go look at thought slime. There's
a big piece of shit because he thought this when
when actually this is the truth. That's more attention grabbing
than just, you know, a kind of neutrally positioned argument. Yeah,
(34:00):
so it's a it's a it's a tricky problem. Yeah, yeah,
I think one of the ones that I think on
quite a lot. Well, um, I think that's most of
what I wanted to talk about today. Did you want
to like throwing anything else? Or if not, we can
go to plugs. Yeah, I mean, I'm good. That's pretty
(34:21):
much it. I will say that one of the things
that tends to bother me the most is people will
occasionally say to me that they'll they'll send a message
thing you seem like a really good person, and I
will say thank you, But please don't feel that way
about content creators, because why would I make a work
(34:42):
that portrayed myself as a bad person? And while I,
in my mind think I am a good person, I
think it sets the dangerous precedent that you could allow
yourself to be emotionally manipulated by someone else who might
not be well the name of the game. When you
are creating media, particularly when you're create media that's meant
to make people feel things. Part of that is manipulation, right.
(35:06):
Manipulate is not an inherently negative term. You know, Stanley
Kubrick is trying to manipulate you when he makes a movie.
I'm trying to persuade you. Yeah, you do it does
It is incumbent upon the audience for their own protection
to keep that in mind. And it's incumbent upon ethical
people who make stuff to not create cults, at least
(35:26):
not create too many cults. Yeah, as much as you
can avoid it, for sure. Yeah, all right, you want
to plug your plugables. Sure. You can find my work
at YouTube dot com slash thoughtslime or thoughtslime dot com.
You also find my horror content at YouTube dot com
slash Scaredycats TV. Scaredycats was taken. That's me. That's what
(35:48):
I do. I make videos about fartsand or butts. Well,
thank you so much for coming on the show. That
is going to be it for us today. We will
be back probably tomorrow. It could happen here as a
production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from cool
(36:09):
Zone Media, visit our website cool zonemedia dot com, or
check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or
wherever you listen to podcasts, you can find sources for
It could happen here, Updated monthly at cool zonemedia dot
com slash sources. Thanks for listening.
It Could Happen Here News
Host
Robert Evans
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