Endless Thread - MEMES, Pt. 5: The President of Kekistan

Episode Date: October 21, 2021

He is known by several names, but Gordon Hurd is the one this man-turned-meme adopted when he fled Cameroon for the UK more than two decades ago. Gordon eventually found the app Fiverr and started making videos for anonymous benefactors on the internet. That’s how Gordon adopted another name, Big Man Tyrone, and became a viral video meme who gives scripted testimonials and has been named the leader of a fictional alt-right country called Kekistan. But there’s a lingering question: Is Big Man Tyrone in on the joke? What happens when an African immigrant in the UK becomes the leader of a group of Trump supporters? We explore the complexities of the Big Man Tyrone meme and our own expectations of the responsibilities of Gordon Hurd.

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Hey, just a heads up. This episode briefly mentions the concept of pedophilia. If you're concerned about hearing that kind of thing, maybe check out one of our other episodes. Produced by the I-Lab at WBUR, Boston. We want to introduce you to a man who, at minimum, has two identities. One of them is a semi-famous person on the internet, a guy named Big Man Tyrone. Big Man Taron here.

This man's other main identity is a mild-mannered guy who, at home, goes by Gordon Hurd. How similar is Big Man Tyrone to Gordon Hurd? Very dissimilar. Very, very dissimilar. It's night and day. Gordon came first, and his story starts in his native country of Cameroon, where Gordon lived until he was a young man. I had worked at the Presidency of the Republic

as a translator-interpreter into French and English, and prior to that, I had worked at the Supreme Court of Cameroon as a draft person, but also as a senior translator. So I had quite a rich professional profile back in Cameroon, and I, you know, all that changed when I came to the UK, because I had to start all over again. 20 years ago, when he was a young man, Gordon fled Cameroon, which has had a long history of human rights abuses by authoritarian government.

It's been cited as one of the most corrupt countries in the world for decades. In 2020, government forces were engaging in extrajudicial executions, and when Gordon left, there were similar issues. At that time, to criticize the government was a thing that you, You know, you did not just do. Unless, apparently, you were someone like Gordon, who, after working as a translator in the office of the president and a drafts person at the Supreme Court of Cameroon,

got a job he describes as both prestigious and dicey. He started working as a TV journalist. Being a journalist, I had a voice. I could speak out. If the Minister of Sports stole tickets during a football match, and I saw it, I would say it. If the elections were rich, I would say it. But freedom of speech was heavily punished there, you know.

And that's just the way that it was and still is. Gordon doesn't like to talk too much about fleeing Cameroon. But the most painful part was leaving children behind and, you know, leaving other relatives behind. And my father died. You know, and I never had a chance to go back and bury him. Gordon Hurd is a quiet man. But living in the UK over the last 20 years,

Gordon has found his way to a new personality and a new way to make a living as a meme. Hello, it's Big Mantaron here. And Lestrade is working hard on a brand new season, all about memes. Wow, that sounds like a lot of fun. Get ready to hear about your favorite memes, like me. Yes, this is another story from our series on memes,

where we're looking at the personal, historical, and cultural impact of memes with some help from the memes themselves. Most people who create or become memes, don't really set out to do that, but that's what Gordon Heard did. And Gordon's an unusual example. Most people think of memes as an image that flies around the internet and gets changed by random people who add speech bubbles and impact font text jokes. But Gordon is kind of a live meme.

He stayed involved and made videos adding the new text jokes himself by reading scripts and acting out different scenarios. And he's done this on purpose because it's how he makes a living. We're going to tell you about the results of that effort and how some of what has happened since raises questions about what you gain when you become a meme and what you give up. Remember our meme chorus, our bunch of experts who are helping us understand memes? I am a firm believer in the definition that a meme is any type of content that goes between person to person and changes long the way. I completely agree with that the meme has to be changed to become a meme. This evolution kind of embodies additional meanings that might not be apparent when you just look at the image itself.

So what is the meaning that I think is in this piece that I'm sharing? Gordon didn't so much set out to become a meme as he set out to have his visage go viral. It was, in some ways, a last resort. When Gordon got to the UK 20 years ago, he tried a bunch of other more traditional jobs first. But trying to make a living as a Cameroonian immigrant in the UK was hard. One of his first stops was trying to continue his TV journalism experience in the UK. I had had hopes of getting into the BBC World Service. It made sense. He was a TV journalist in Cameroon.

He figured even if he couldn't get into the BBC main service, maybe he'd get into the Africa Service or the Asia Service. But Gordon says that wasn't so easy. But then I had a kick in the teeth when one of the execs told me point blank that I had the wrong accent for the BBC. He said that that was my first real contact, first real experience of racism in this country. Gordon was knocked down a few pegs,

but he says he tried not to dwell on the negative. So he started trying to get other jobs. He went door-to-door trying to sell house numbers, tried to get work as a translator. He applied to be a communications officer for African diaspora communities in the UK. But his luck in finding work seemed connected to where he came from and what his name was. My name was never Gordon Heard when I came into the United Kingdom.

My name was Gordon Doe from Doe when I came into the United Kingdom. But after about 170, 180 job applications, I found I was going nowhere and I had to change my name into a full English name. That's how I came about to be called Gordon Heard. And as soon as I changed my name into Gordon heard, then I started getting a lot of job interviews. But that was tough too. The communications officer job,

when he showed up for the in-person interview, he says the job description suddenly changed. It went from full-time to part-time. Gordon walked out of the interview. After about a decade of dead ends, with a family to support, he started to grasp at opportunities online, including on YouTube.

and he was hoping the internet fame thing would come easy. I had, you know, just like any other person, dabbled into the YouTube dream, you know, set up a couple of channels, which I thought would pick up pretty quickly and I become famous and make, you know, passive income. But that dream was never to be. He learned that to make money on YouTube, he had to really make stuff for YouTube. It wasn't a passive thing.

It was a hustle. So he hustled. I put up microphones in my wife's kitchen, one, one. morning and I just said, welcome to my YouTube channel. Welcome to Donald's official YouTube channel. And she came in and said, what are these lighting rigs doing in my kitchen? Could you pack them away, please? Because I need to cook and I need to get the kitchen tidy.

So I would pack them away. And then when she goes to sleep, I'll pack them back in again and do one or two videos and pack them away. And I said, yeah, you know, why not? Let's set up a channel. So here it is, guys, and it's on, okay? Great things will we have. Gordon had this equipment because, among his many ideas for supporting a family,

he had managed to bring over from Cameroon, he'd started to dabble in different kinds of online video for different websites. At that time, you know, I was already doing something on a website called fiver.com, F-I-V-E-R-R-com, where people would pay me $5, believe it or not, $5 to do videos for them. So I remember doing multiple videos of $5.8 just to eke out a living at that time. It was so rough. Fiverr is pretty much how Gordon describes it.

You pay someone about $5 to do something, usually something very small. But at the time, it was a gig economy job that Gordon could actually do and be sure of getting paid. Granted, he was getting paid to do something most journalists refuse to do, because they believe it's antithetical to the profession. He was trying to use his poise in presentation to give testimonials for products. Basically, if you wanted Gordon to say your thing was great, he'd say it was great. Bottos popping by the intergalactic is the sexiest music video ever. Because Greek is good is the best YouTube channel since the beautifies.

And Gordon had a philosophy around this. He's a Christian, so he was reading books about. wealth management from a Christian perspective, including a book called The Science of Getting Rich, How to Make Money and Get the Life You Want. There was an idea in the book that resonated with Gordon. If you take money from somebody to do a job, you must give back to the person more in use value than in monetary value. Gordon was like, if I make people feel like they're getting a great deal, I'll build a

rapport with my Fiverr customers. And he did. People even outside the UK started commissioning videos from him. But pretty quickly, people also started to take advantage. At the start, it was $5 for everything. So people would just dump those massive scripts on my lap, and I'll read it all day long. Sweet bikes, desserts are so good. They'll make you want to slap your mother.

Terron, how do I want you sport? Your mom and dad are hot. And your sister is hot as well. Every minute you don't subscribe to shock mouths, a member of his family dies. Oklahoma area, then you are in luck because you can request the services of the rice. This went on for a while without a ton of success for Gordon. He'd do a handful of videos, make a handful of cash, that's it. Then, in 2013...

You know, one day, there was this particular video, which I did. It was just a, I don't know, maybe 20, 30, 30 seconds. video, which I did, you know, I just said, welcome to Reddits and I laughed. And that was it. Front page. I did my heart to you. I did my federer to you. This short video got upvoted enough to hit the front page of Reddit, in part because of what Gordon was wearing.

One of the requests made by the person who ordered the video was that Gordon wear a fedora. which is a reference to another meme, a photo of freaks and geeks actor Jerry Messing, wearing a fedora in a pretty awkward photo, which was crazy popular in 2013 as both a sign of derision and a sign of pride for internet nerds. Wearing the hat helped. Now, I don't have hats. Did not have hats at that time. So my wife said, well, I've got a hat.

I said, but this is a pink hat. She said, put it on. Put it on. You know, it's a hat. And overnight, I became a YouTube star. What does it mean to go from being a Cameroonian immigrant in the UK scraping by, making $5 videos of any length to a YouTube star? For Gordon, it meant three things.

Starting with an explosion of business on Fiverr, which came right after the YouTube video hit the front page on Reddit. There was a day I had 385 commissions in one day. And the website shut down my account to further investigate why all these others came through. Fiver shut down Gordon's account almost immediately for suspicious activity. Checked it, realized it wasn't some kind of botnet or other scam, and turned it back on. Gordon's traffic on Fiverr was growing exponentially, virally, you might say. In part, because popular YouTubers were becoming his customers.

They'd pay for a custom video of Gordon saying something, silly, post that video on their channel, and then their viewers started becoming Gordon's customers too, buying and posting videos from Gordon saying the darnedest things. So the second thing that happened was that Gordon decided he needed to own the production line, expand. So he built his own online store. But when I moved on to my website, then I decided that I had enough clout and enough popularity to do things on my own terms.

Terms like 35 bucks for up to 30 words, word count goes up beyond that, cost goes up, etc. Things like if you want me to sing a song, insert graphics, if you want me to add a music soundtrack or a sound effect, if you want me to speak in a foreign language or have a green screen or produce the video in six hours. If you want me to do your video in six hours, that would cost you an extra $300. You're such a hustler. I love it. But there was one particular kind of order that really raked in the dough for Gordon Hurd. Something that as Gordon started to be morphed by the internet from regular person making fiber videos into viral personality, into full-blown human meme, it became a calling card. Now, if you want me to laugh, okay, you pay an extra $15.

If you want me to laugh. So I don't laugh, you know, you can, even if you tickle me, I don't laugh until you, you, you, you'll laugh until you, you, you pay an extra $15.00. Even if you tickle me, I don't laugh until you put the $15. There are two things I've sold more than any other thing in my life. One is the Big Man Tyrone laugh, and the second is my Kyrgyzstan uniform. This YouTube hustle is how Gordon got a new name, by the way. Big Man Tyrone. And another one, too, the president of Kekistan, a fictional country, which came with a uniform, a military uniform.

But let's start with big man Tyrone. In fact, the name Tyrone was a mockery when it first began. I don't know if you're aware that Tyrone is an urban name for a black anonymous person. They named Tyrone. So when I was given the name Tyrone on the internet, because people did not know my name, so, you know, they said, let's just name him Tyrone. I decided to embrace the name Tyrone to show these people that it doesn't really matter what you're called.

It doesn't really matter what your nomenclature is. It matters what you do. And that's why the name Bigman Tyrone has taken. Looking back, it's interesting to hear Gordon make this point about, how what you do is really the thing that matters. Because some of the things he's done, things people have paid him to do, have made Big Man Tyrone a kind of complicated character,

even before he shot straight to the front page of Reddit in 2013. Gordon's version of the story is that that one video made him a YouTube star, which is true, but there's a little more to it than that. Gordon didn't just make a funny video that went viral on Reddit overnight. First, he got inadvertently mixed up in the video. this esoteric, specific, and extremely referential world of message board memes. Internet users realized that Gordon and another guy offering testimonials, an Australian named Roger Stockberger, would basically read whatever script you gave them.

So people started paying these two guys to make professional-looking testimonial videos about random topics, like which kind of anime was the best kind of anime. YouTube users started paying Gordon to make videos that, at best, dod-a-ist internet jokes. And at worst, were jokes that feel pretty exploitative and gross. Here's a video from 2013 of Gordon reading a script about Lollicom. Hello, my name is Tyrone B.P. And I'd like to say that I'm a big fan of Lollicon.

There's no better feeling than to come home tired. LolliCon is short for Lolita Complex. It's a reference to an idea of being sexually attracted to pre-pubescent girls in anime cartoons. Now, generally speaking, there's a lot of stuff on the internet that is young kids making offensive jokes for the sake of testing out making offensive jokes.

And it's quite possible that a good portion of the whole LollieCon thing is a very misguided version of that. Videos like the Lollicon one, which became pretty popular on the internet message board for Chan, feel very icky. Partly because of the

subject matter, partly because it feels like Gordon didn't really understand. understand what he was reading. And even though Gordon is knowingly adopting the monikers thrown at him by the 4chan Jokers, there's something that feels a little mixed up about it. You heard him a minute ago saying that his Kekistan uniform is one of his primary sources of income. Kekistan actually started out as a country, a virtual country of, you know, a few people

got together and came up with the idea of creating a state of people that felt oppressed. Turns out, Gordon Hurd, who became a meme as Big Man Tyrone, also became the adopted president of a fake country, which was itself another meme that started in a completely different place and ended up somewhere nobody, including Gordon, expected. After some time, I began to see the associations between Kyrgyzstan and the fire rights. And then Donald Trump, I have never understood how Donald Trump became part of this whole mix, to be honest,

because he wasn't there at the start. How Gordon and Big Man Tyrone got caught up in a meme movement that can be followed all the way to the January 6th assault on the U.S. Capitol Building in a minute. At Radio Lab, we love nothing more than nerding out about science, neuroscience, chemistry. But we do also like to get into other kinds of stories, stories about policing. or politics, country music, hockey, sex, of bugs. Regardless of whether we're looking at science or not science, we bring a rigorous curiosity to get you the answers.

And hopefully make you see the world anew. Radio Lab, adventures on the edge of what we think we know. Wherever you get your podcast. There is something powerful about the sound of the human voice. Beautifully produced audio has the unique power to connect and inspire. Tell your organization's story with a customer, podcast from City Space Productions, the Creative Studio from WBUR's business partnerships team. Become a thought leader.

Recruit new talent. Reach new audiences. Whatever your goal, we can help. Discover how the magic is made at WBUR.org slash creative studio. Gordon became a meme as Big Man Tyrone. But his people took Big Man Tyrone and tweaked him, morphed him, evolved him into something else. Big Man Tyrone started to intersect with other memes, like the Fedora guy, who we already mentioned, and another one too, Keck. Which, like the live meme that is Gordon, isn't the kind of meme we often think of, a static image with some text over it.

Keck is a three-letter word reference, or inside joke, that itself morphed and spiraled out into something else completely. Remember our meme chorus? Let them sing you a tune. Uh. Memes are incredibly important because they will have this in-group function that brings people together. These niche communities are such huge pieces of identity for people. You put it out there into a community where you feel, like, feel safe? To do a meme, you have to know the codes of the meme. And then the memes themselves help that small in-group differentiate themselves from an out-group.

What's your first memory of Keck? My first memory of Keck. is seeing it in World of Warcraft, said by a horde player, when he was talking to me and I was on the alliance. Chris Demisa designs video games. And look, this is a video game sidebar, but come along for the ride, okay? It's going to be worth it.

Fine. Do your gamer thing, Ben. Okay. World of Warcraft is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game, or M-M-O-R-P-G. And Chris Demisa was there when the game launched. In the Eldon Times of the Mid-Ots, I used to be a community manager for World of Warcraft. Now, one thing I know about this is that millions of people play and have played this game. It's pulled in over $9 billion in revenue. It's a big deal.

It's a fascinating game, to me at least. Definitely to you. Because there's all this human interaction layered into the game. There's a chat tool, for instance, to talk to your fellow players. But you can't chat to everyone, and that's by design. In World of Warcraft, the players are divided into two factions, the horde and the alliance, who hate each other. They will fight and kill each other.

So that is the basis of a lot of World Warcraft. During the game, horde players can chat with other horde players in the language of orcish and alliance players can chat with alliance players in the language of common. Because you're supposedly speaking two different languages, orkish and common, and while your enemies can see your chats, they can't understand them. Because game designers built an algorithm that scrambles your enemy's chats into these two different languages. Now, it just so happens that the term lull, when said by someone who is speaking orkish,

translates as Keck. And the last thing you saw as you died was Keck. Because, you know, what does another player say when they kill you in a video game? Among other things that we probably shouldn't repeat, well, they say LOL or Keck. I know it began to be shorthand on the forums as a way to be a little smug and superior. This probably would have just been a super niche game joke. But with the crazy popularity of World of Warcraft, Keck moved beyond. the player forums. And Chris noticed. These communities shift and change, and they move on and they keep their in jokes and their memes.

And so having that move on and enter into another community made sense. Now, World of Warcraft launched 16 years ago, but the game has had staying power, and so has Keck, as a piece of internet vernacular. And eventually... Gamers making off-color jokes and memes with this war, word, bubbled up into something more organized and ugly, but still somewhat nonsensical. Kek became the name of a people and a country, Kekistan. In 2016, it started to be used by Trump supporters who also touted alt-right imagery. Trying to draw a straight line from World of Warcraft in jokes to the alt-right and big man Tyrone

would take a college-level anthropology class. And we don't have time for that. So let's just think of it more like a stew. Kek has its origins in orcish mischief and gamer jokes. Then it gets co-opted by people online making off-color jokes here and there. Eventually, Kek and Kekistan get associated with Donald Trump, which coincides with the 2016 election, when a lot of memes are actually being paid for by political campaigns. For example, Nimble America, a 501C4 organization,

which got a chunk of money from a tech mogul named Palmer Lucky, to create pro-Trump. memes online, including memes about Kekistan. Which is, of course, happening at the same time that Gordon heard, the live meme reading scripts for money as Big Man Tyrone is becoming ever more popular. Users of the message board 4chan end up nominating Gordon to take over the fake country of Kekistan in a fake military coup and in come the paid video requests. I'm a proud ethnic Kekistanian. For centuries, my people have been.

Gordon caught some of that tech millionaire funded wave. There was a coup d'etal last week in Kyrgyzstan, and Big Man, Taron led the army to take over the government. Now I'm calling on all true Kekistanis to join me in the fight against Nomi and Nomi oppression. CNN, you are fake news. The Mim Jihad is in full swing. Begone thoughts. Begone nomis. The president of Kekistan really came into play on Gordon's channel.

He had the military uniform. I'll do your video wearing military uniform and hat. Referencing vague images of problematic military leaders in Africa. And Gordon says making these videos, lots of them... Long live Kekistan! Is something he desperately needed to do to support his family. So I guess for me, making videos for... $5 was a welcome opportunity because it allowed me to at least earn some money.

And people would not believe that there were some months where I did $4,000. Yeah, you know, where I did $4,000. And that would help to, you know, assuage some of the financial difficulties that we faced. As we've said before, making these videos was far, far, far from Gordon's first attempt at making a life for his family in the UK. When he first got settled, he wanted to just keep doing the job he had been doing in Cameroon. But he ran into a wall.

When in 2013, after a decade of working various part-time jobs, Gordon started making a name for himself online, what he says was his best and only option. It came with its own examples of racism. The most bitter remarks I've had on YouTube, the most hateful comments I've had on YouTube. it's from the British public. People telling me you have traveled to our country and you are living off of YouTube. You should be ashamed of yourself.

If you go and get a proper job, monkey, you know, go back to the forest. This feels ironic, right? In the UK, Gordon Hurd is experiencing the latest in a litany of racist attacks that started as soon as he arrived from Cameroon. And at the same time, he's accepting money as Big Man Tyrone

and the president of Kekistan, a meme for online users who seem increasingly allied with the alt-right in the U.S. He says the metadata of his online business suggests 97% of his business comes from outside the U.K. A lot of it from the U.S. in Canada,

with some interesting clients in 2020. Coronavirus? Fuck China. I'm sick of Jack and Twitter. kicking all my friends out for no good reason. And don't forget to vote for Trump on November 3rd to really make your vote count. I've actually got commissions from a senatorial candidate

that came to me and I read script for them from the Republican Party. Hearing a man known as the president of Kekistan since 2016 described some of his clients as recent Republican Senate candidates. You have to wonder if, Gordon has been maybe used as a weapon in political meme wars for a long time. And maybe to him, that doesn't matter. Gordon lives in the UK, after all. But Gordon also says he was a fan of Donald Trump when he was elected in 2016.

And not just in the commissioned videos he's made, like this one. Build a wall. You can't stomp the Trump. Gordon says he originally liked Donald Trump for his business acumen. How does he feel about Trump now? He won't say. And we asked him over and over. But he will point out that he had a client who asked him to make a video criticizing Trump. And when Gordon made it, he lost 3,000 subscribers in one day.

And it seems like he'd do that again. Because Gordon says people who criticize him for the content of his videos or for not taking aside are really misunderstanding his reason for meaming. My job is to articulate that script verbatim. verbatim. And I asked people, I said, why is it that you accept that Denzel Washington or

Brad Pitt can be a pilot in one movie, a gangster in another, a priest in the other one? Why don't you call that hypocrisy? But you tap Big Man Taron as being a hypocrite, as living a double life on the internet.

So there's that difficulty that people tend not to be able to defray of the big man Tyrone as the meme from Gordon heard, the man. Of course, Brad Pitt or Denzel feel less like mouthpieces for hire than Big Man Tyrone. Something about this logic of I'm an actor just like them doesn't feel quite right. Gordon says he's turned plenty of things down, though. I have received scripts on my table here, some of them so vile and yet so high. paid that I had a difficult moral decision to make.

Gordon says a deciding factor is whether or not he feels like his kids will see him in a different light in the future, based on a video he makes or a script he reads, which doesn't feel crystal clear. There's still something a little strange about Gordon's connection to his fans. When Trump lost the election in 2020, Big Man Tyrone's YouTube channel went dark. for months. Out of respect, Gordon says, for the Trump supporters who were hurting. We're not really sure what that means. Do you ever worry that what you're, you know, what, what you're doing is at the risk of contributing to the kinds of things that led to, like, the violence

at the Capitol in the U.S. on January 6th? No, I'm not. Because after January, I became extremely cautious about that. A chap sent me a script from Israel. He's a regular buyer. He's been buying videos for me for such a long time. And I've done collabs with him on the gaming thing before. Now he sends me a script in which he mentions Kyrgyzstan and connects it to the attack on the capital.

And I reject it. I reject the script in total. I tell him, well, I'm not going to read the script because it is incendiary. The Americans have just come out of a very difficult situation. Gordon told this regular buyer from Israel that he didn't want to make a joky video supporting the January 6th riots.

So the guy changed the script and sent him a new one, which he agreed to. But then the guy wanted to Photoshop a Kekistan flag into the video. carried by one of the rioters, which even the president of Kekistan felt was inappropriate. Gordon didn't record the video. So he does have a line.

For instance, when a guy asked Gordon to record a video of himself saying, Jesus eats shit and had an image superimposed into Gordon's video of Jesus gusing a woman's breasts, he said no. But his line is a little blurry, at least from the outside. Maybe more than a little blurry. So at this point, have you officially distanced yourself from Kekistan and Kekistani imagery, if you can call it that? No, I've not. And I can understand why people would think that Gordon has to be true to character when he does Big Mataritan.

But that's because most people fail to grasp the essence of being an actor, which, as I've said before, It's like being for one of a better, you know, metaphor. It's being like a prostitute. So an actor dissociates himself from himself or herself. That's what an actor does. An actor is not an opinion leader. If you want to know what I think about the world, come to me as Gordon heard.

I do have opinions, you know. I have a master's degree. I've got a bachelor's degree in law. So I have my own opinion about things. But this is not it. You know, this is not that kind of setting. Do you, as Gordon heard, think that Donald Trump is potentially dangerous to democracy? Well, you know, this is an interview about, you know, this is, you know, what is this interview?

You know, how are you interviewing me? Is it as Big Man, Tyrone, or as Gordon, or as Gordon heard? You see, that's where, you know. I feel like we've been talking to Gordon. No, it's a bit. It's a bit going to. I was hoping you talk to Gordon. Well, you know, that's very slippery territory.

Oh, my God. We must have asked Gordon, not Tyrone, this basic question, about his support for President Trump, six different ways. And Gordon still never gave us a straight answer. And this is what's hard to reconcile. This difference between Gordon and Big Man Tyrone. Each one enables the existence of the other. Big Man Tyrone allows Gordon to provide for his family.

Gordon allows Big Man Tyrone to accept videos from users who, for random trolling reasons or something more insidious, associate his character with white supremacy. Maybe to be an unknowing mockery of himself. Sometimes it's hard to tell whether Big Man Tyrone is nudging Gordon Hurd out of the picture. That kind of Jekyll and Hyde danger. If Tyrone goes whole hog, does Gordon disappear? Gordon did try to do something recently as Gordon, not Big Man Tyrone. Though he still spoke about it on his YouTube channel,

he tried to start a political party, the UK Migrant Party, got a website going, had a platform. To support migrants in all areas of life and enable. them to fully contribute to life in the UK and to combat prejudice against migrants in all its forms. He made a video, too, to try to get some support via his YouTube channel. By helping eradicate the scourge of racism, you are helping to save lives that would otherwise be disrupted or destroyed by hate if nothing is done. The day I put it on the channel, it was the most hated video I have ever. put up on my channel.

The audience Gordon is built as Big Man Tyrone was not interested in supporting the migrant party. He eventually dropped it, didn't do the paperwork, let it go. So there have been ups and downs recently. Really, those ups and downs have been going for a while. Big Man Tyrone's YouTube channel has over half a million subscribers, but the views of his recent videos just don't have the same numbers as his old ones. Gordon's now offering different kinds of services, different outlets, different outs and outfits, too. Different personas. Now he's a golfer talking about a golf course. Now he's just gotten

back from vacation singing the praises of a travel agency. Over here, he's a chef, a dietitian, a doctor with a fake operating room background wearing scrubs. Here's a hopeful placeholder for his client's logo. If you want to promote your supplements, medication, or medical equipment, this is the right video for you. Gordon says he likes his job as a for hire. And maybe that's just plenty for now. I've got the best job in the world. Think about it. I wake up, you know, last night and I get two messages from the United States. A young man has just commissioned a video to advertise an app which wants me to announce on the channel. He's paying $234 for me to read

out four lines, four lines of text. And then I get a second message from him with the same amount saying, I just wanted to add $200 because I think you are awesome. It's a far cry from Gordon's young adult life as a translator and journalist in Cameroon. Even a far cry from his adult life in the UK, where he struggled for 10 years. A central African guy who fled actual government oppression dresses up as a military dictator from an invented country populated by internet trolls, affiliated with alt-right politics, to give paid testimonials for products and opinions whatever they are. His soundstage, a kitchen, in an immigrant household.

Big Man Tyrone keeps the memes, the keks, and the lulls going. As I said before, my job is simple. It is to say what people want me to say. and I might say something at 10 o'clock and say the direct opposite at 11 o'clock. And it doesn't bother me at all because Big Man Tarum is not an opinion leader. I said I'm like a taxi driver. I pick up everybody on the road. It doesn't matter what your character is.

It doesn't matter where you're going. If you're going to a wedding or a bank robbery, I would still pick you up because my job is just to deliver. Endless Thread is a production of WBUR in Boston. For the record, yes, we did pay Gordon, not for the interview, but for a video. You can find that at WBUR.org slash endless thread. We also reached out to the BBC about Gordon's application to work there. They quickly sent us a statement. Quote, we welcome a diversity of backgrounds and accents at the BBC,

and the World Service is proud to broadcast a wide range of voices from across the UK and around the world. Wherever they are from, what matters most is our presenter's ability to communicate and resonate with our audiences. We also got a letter from listener Lauren Patton this week, reminding us that any time we talk about NFTs, like we did in our Disaster Girl meme bonus episode, we should probably mention the huge impact cryptocurrency has on the environment because of energy use.

Lauren, keeping us on our toes. We like it. Want early tickets to events, swag, bonus content, pictures of Emery's glasses or my home blender? join our email list. You'll find it at wbUR.org slash endless thread. Also, we really do want to know what you think is the most underrated meme. So call us, yes, like in the old times, you can pick up the phone.

857-244-0338 is the number. Operator, give me endless threat on the line. Or if you're living in this century, you can record a phone. voice memo and email it to endless thread at wbUR.org. And we just might feature your voice memo or your voicemail and your meme suggestion on the show. Like right now, Catpick, if that is this person's real name. Hi, my name is Cat Pick. I'm from St. Louis, Missouri. And I think one of my favorite memes is the one of Shaquille O'Neal, given a little shoulder shake, followed by a cat doing its little butt shake like it's going to attack something,

and it just goes back and forth over and over again. It just makes me happy. You've got gentle giant shack looking so cute, and a cat. You can't miss. Big thanks, by the way, to our meme chorus. Sarah Laola teaches about digital culture and design at Coastal Carolina University. Joan Donovan is research director at the Harvard Kennedy School's Shorenstein Center. Gianluca Stringini studies online security, disinformation, and hate speech at Boston University.

Amanda Brennan has the extremely cool title of Internet librarian. Kenyatta Cheese co-founded the site Know Your Meme and Don Caldwell is editor-in-chief there. Please go find these people's work and benefit from their meme genius. Our series and our show is made by producers Dean Russell and Nora Sacks. We're co-hosted by us, Amory Seabridson. And Ben Brock Johnson. This episode was edited by Maureen McMurray. Mixing and sound design by Matt Reed.

Original music in this episode also by Matt Reed. Special thanks to an additional production work from Josh Crane, Frank Hernandez, Kristen Torres, Sophie Codner, and Rachel Carlson. Endless Thread is a show about the blurred lines between digital communities and the real-life, sweaty, furry convention that Ben has never been to. But kind of always secretly wanted to. Okay, someday, someday. If you've got an untold history...

I feel like it's... Yeah, it'd be fun. If you've got an untold history, an unsolved mystery, or a wild story from the internet that you want us to tell, hit us up. Email endless thread at wb-b-r.org. Keep it furry.