It Could Happen Here - Making Left Wing Media in 2023

Episode Date: March 3, 2023

Robert sits down with YouTuber Thoughtslime to discuss the pitfalls and problems of creating left wing popular media in 2023.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadowbride. Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of fright. An anthology podcast of modern-day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to 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 introduce it myself, I'm going to bring on the person who I think some of 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 CoolZone for quite some time now. Thought Slime, you are a YouTuber and a good YouTuber who does a number of videos. Some of your recent ones are 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 you posted? Because you posted this

on Twitter the other day, and I started chatting with 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 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 than I think I really am, that I was helping in 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 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 as well, which is 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 has 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 going to say June of 2020. And it had a pretty sharp drop after that

point. And I both think it's valuable to still acknowledge kind of how remarkable what happened in 2020 was for all of its flaws and all of the really messy fallout from it. We saw an uprising of unprecedented scale. And part of why the crackdown in response has been so gnarly is that it scared the hell out of a lot of really unpleasant people. And the media had a significant role to play in that, both in the fact that there were a lot of people who were kind of already organizing and radicalized when the shit started to hit the fan and that as things happened, you know, what was happening in the streets, what the police were doing, the different kind of marches 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, 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 disseminated during 2020 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 an influencer, not somebody who was a professional political thinker, and everything else combined didn't have the influence of that video. Yeah, I think that kind of gets to the heart of it, right? Is that we express support for ideas and thus people tend to treat us as though we are the

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. I mean, there's always going to be – everyone who makes popular media forms a little cult. And so there's always going to be a number of people who take any given person in the media more seriously than they deserve. And that includes the both of us. And that's not attempting to be like humble or anything. That is simply a fact of how mass media works. It's not attempting to be like humble or anything. That is simply a fact of how mass media works. 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 been a pushback against that in the last couple of years. It's been healthy. And I think there's 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. I think people have forgotten some of the lessons of, 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 street streaming during riots and protests and whatnot, right? And the justified part of that backlash was due to the fact that past a certain point, particularly, those streams were primarily

being used by law enforcement, both to get charges on people and 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, including people who kind of got in

after the early portions of that in order to make shitloads of money by 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 in 2020 and why so many people got involved was Nico from Unicorn 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 lessons from 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 worked and then it didn't. 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, let's spread that rumor around. And I mean, yeah, the cop jacketing thing 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 2024 as it approaches, what do you think is useful from media that attempts to analyze and share perspectives that are left-wing, that are anarchist-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 that drives people to real-life organizing and taking action

outside of online spaces is obviously useful. online spaces is obviously useful. Beyond that, though, I think there is some value to just exposing people to ideas that they might not have found otherwise. But I think that a lot of that has been accomplished now. I feel like a lot of people are more familiar with kind of the leftist ideology, 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, any community develops a language that is to some extent its own. And that's part of politics, political analysis. If you're looking at things with a Marxist analysis or if you're analyzing things based on your understanding of generations of anarchist political philosophy, there's terms that you're going to use that other thinkers have created that are the terms that people use to discuss those ideas. But it is sometimes kind of a thin line between that and the thing that cults 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 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 I, 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 going to interpret this? Is it just going to like 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, but whose hearts are in the right place, and who I would like to be able 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 a specific balancing act, Because on the other hand, like you also have to give your audience a little credit that they're capable. 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 why do the work of like trying to re-explain it you know

but that being said i think there is a tendency to just assume people already are on our side or understand uh 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, uh, a musician will post their, uh, band camp page 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, the kind of, um, But you also can't get caught up in the kind of weaponized ignorance that people... You can't make someone understand something if they have a particular reason not to want to. So I absolutely agree that there is the danger of that group in speak.

But 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 though I am just like a child. Like 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 brought, we brought on a couple of years ago, people who, you know,

are now making podcasts for the team 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 just, you know, said a term that I think means a specific, or you just referenced a thing from history that I think that people are interested in and should know about, but you do have to go in and explain it and walk people through it. That's really one of the challenges I find, particularly with Behind the Bastards, where we're talking sometimes about

these complicated social movements and moments in history. It it's this kind of tug of war between you want to respect the intelligence of the audience and you want to give them enough detail that they have context and that they 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 10-hour long podcasts. Unfortunately, I do like, there's a degree to which I'm quite jealous of his work, the way he set up his workload. I would just never be able to think

of that many boxing analogies. Yeah, I don't know very much about boxing. I would probably just like throw in a whole lot of Balls Mahoney analogies. Yeah, a lot of, for me, it would be a lot of super punch out references hell yes welcome i'm danny thrill won't you join me at the fire and dare enter nocturnal tales from the shadows presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures.

I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows. as part of my Cultura podcast network available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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, 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 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 is 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? Your understanding of fascism in Romania will be influenced and is to some degree – you can't understand fascism in Romania without understanding fascism in Weimar, 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 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 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. I'm not going to listen. I don't have the time to listen to all of them.

Sure. Yeah. 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 you can, and this is the 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 the, that research is going to fuck me up. And like, so I'm not going to do it yet. I'm going to do this thing. That's funny. I'm going to read about the liver King this week. I need, I need a break. So the liver King is who we're talking

about. Yeah. Uh, everybody needs a liver King in their life at some point. Yeah. It's like, uh, I, I, um, I read the Turner Diaries for one video. Yeah. And I've been, people 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. Camp of the Saints is a little easier, but yeah, 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 excerpts and reading scholarly papers, analyzing this stuff.

And there always will be that. And I think to, 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, to do the deep reading. But if you want to understand the degree to which Siege and the Turner Diaries influenced the mass shootings that we see in the United States today 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 other folks who are creating this kind of media, other journalists do for folks. Yeah, I will. I would say that I strongly balk at the I don't consider myself a journalist. 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 of Myanmar last year, 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 a, I don't, I don't say this to belittle myself. I just don't see that as the function of my job. I think I have, in the course of my work, occasionally done journalism by accident. I did a long interview about the Chaz and the misconceptions that people had, and I had some talks with people within. like that is technically on its face, a piece of journalism. For sure. You know, it's, it's not what I consider my, uh, strength or role to be. Well, and I, I, honestly, this goes back to what we were talking about with the, the young woman who filmed the, the video of, uh, 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's certainly true. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter?

Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm curious, you and I, 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 every single guest we have, there are people who will be like, this is the best guest 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 bunch of straight. No, absolutely not. You've got a different relationship or at least a different method of, I think, communicating. I imagine it's different, um, because, because you're, you're Patreon supported. I'm interested in how have, if, if at all, have you seen kind of the conversations about what people want from you and, uh, you know, the, the way in which you've been talking

with your fans? How have you seen that change since 2020? Well, um, I think one of the major ways is since I've kind of taken a step back from this explicitly political content, 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 a tricky balance to strike again many of these things are like uh such a balancing act 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 contributes to activism because it is not, you are not like making the revolution more. Yeah, exactly. You know, you are getting a little drawing that I'm going to put at the end of my video. Like that's the value proposition here. Yeah. And I think that, you know, it's of, I don't, the reason I don't accept ad reads on Thought Slime, I do on Scaredy Cats, is because I don't want the perception that my views are going to be limited or held back by, you know, the desire to seek out advertisers,

which whether or not I would have the integrity to withstand, 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. Am I pushing people to donate more than they might be comfortable with? And so that's, you know, I don't really know, like, 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 probably take this money back. You probably weren't thinking straight 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 thought about that myself quite a lot. 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 things it's let us do. There's certainly downsides to it, including occasionally advertising for the Washington State Highway Patrol. But it's one of those things, I made a comment, and this is part,

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. I made a comment once about like, you know, because we get people asking, well, 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. It's how most of my career has worked. So that's what I'm most

comfortable doing. And 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 livings on Patreon. I do not have an ethical problem with supporting yourself that way. I will say that when I heard you mention that in an episode and it did send a chill down my spine briefly. No, I mean, I think like Cody Johnston, who I've worked with for 15 years now, has a massive Patreon. Tom and Dave lived with some of my best friends, you know. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think it's perfectly – it's certainly no less ethical and you can make a case people do that. It's more ethical than being 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 person are you and what's going to work best with you as like a creative method and a way of interacting with fans. And they have downsides and they have positives you know it's also like a matter of of uh what what you're able to do to certain extent because like i don't know how to get advertisers like 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 i should be i have no idea i just i just kind of wing it you know like if I'm getting as much money out of them as I should be, I have no idea. I just, I just kind of wing it, you know, but like, if you have that background in, in radio or broadcasting or what have you, like it can, you know, 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 15 year career in, not in broadcast, but you know, in, in comedy writing and whatnot. Um, and so I, I mean,

that's how I got the, I got my podcast hosted on I heart in the first place. And that's like a thing. And this is actually one of the things that concerns me most about the shit that's happening with AI right now, because, you know, there's this, uh, the, the folks that kind of, I came into making media for all of us started as fairly apolitical comedy. I mean, that's Cody Johnston, right? Some more news.

Cody was making videos about like chat roulette and penises. Uh, when we, when we all started working together, um, very funny videos, but like we were making silly things. Um,

and everyone has kind of, uh, moved into making like some, you know, pretty, pretty serious fact based media. You know, Cody does a very popular, very political kind of current event show. 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 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're not doing the best writing you're ever gonna 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 every year. And that's, that worries me a lot. I definitely know what you mean. I also feel that like there, there's a fear among some, I also feel that there's a fear among some people that 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. The AI stuff, I definitely share your concerns. The institutional barriers in people's way, I think that, to be frank, I started doing this on a shitty $200 computer and a completely legal video editing software. I love legal video editing software. software i found it in a dumpster and i used that so uh 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 uh but like i didn't know

what i was fucking doing like it was all self-taught and i think there has to be that kind of diy attitude yeah uh for people and it is something i try to encourage in people is that like just just do it like i did it you can do it yeah encourage in people 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. Cause I am coming at this from the, the old man, doomerist 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 career started that way anymore. And your point is very valid that, that while changes in the industry have closed specific doors, they've also created some. 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 is how I started my career. I think that's actually a really valid point. Yeah, I don't think that's, 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 my shit. I didn't like, I did not know what I was doing.

Yeah. And a bigger creator just reached out and was 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, know you you make space for to to lift people up with you and in doing so it's not an 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? Yeah. Like that's, that's a sense of, uh, for lack of a better term, mutual aid in a very loose

sense, I suppose. I, uh, that reminds me of something, a good friend of mine and a colleague at Cracked who now, uh, helps run the Small Beans podcast network, uh, said to me years and years ago, um, 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. 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 um and i do think that it's because i i see a lot and i i don't i'm not someone who

does a lot of time like i i like to watch i go watch like the stuff that you put together the stuff h bomber guy puts together where it's actual like um videos on topics and i'm learning something um the stuff that dan olsen puts together you know um i'm not so much into and this is not i'm not attacking anybody i'm not like trying to shit on the field but personally i don't watch like the just kind of like stream stuff a lot and i it does seem like there's a lot of conflicts between people in that and i'm i'm wondering you know, my hope is that there's more people building connections to create resiliency between the people who 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 in positive ways. And it sounds like from what from what you're talking about, you know, honestly, from what I experienced, too, I do think that's more the case than the drama that goes viral on Twitter from time to time. Yeah, I think – I would hope. I hope so too. I think that it's very easy to piss people off. Yes. And it's much harder to get people's attention by being kind.

And it's much harder to get people's attention by being kind. But, you know, I like, look, you know, I, 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 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-wing 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 the, I mean, not entirely because some of like the big moments, particularly in recent left-wing media, things like, you know, people doing these giant streams that raise huge amounts of money for a cause. So 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. It's also kind of difficult, and keep in mind this is perhaps coming from a biased perspective, when there are individuals, and I'm not going to name names, who do see that as an easy source of generating attention. I do see that as an easy source of generating attention. It's very easy to, the same way that like,

if I'm going to make a video 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 actually this is the truth. It's more attention grabbing than just, you know, a kind of neutrally positioned argument.

Yeah. So it's a tricky problem. Yeah. Yeah. I think one of the ones that I think on quite a lot. Well, I think that's most of what I wanted to talk about today. Did you want to like throw

in anything else? Or if not, we can go to plugs. Yeah, I mean, I'm good. That's pretty 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 send a message saying, 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 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. 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 creating media that's meant to make people feel things, part of that is manipulation, right? Manipulate is not an

inherently negative term. Stanley Kubrick is trying to manipulate you when he makes a movie. I'm trying to manipulate you when he makes a movie. I'm trying to persuade you. Yeah, you do. 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 not create too many cults. Yeah, as much as you can avoid it, for sure.

Yeah. All right, you want to plug your pluggables? Sure. You can find my work at youtube.com slash Thought Sl it, for sure. Yeah. All right. You want to plug your pluggables? Sure. You can find my work at youtube.com slash ThoughtSlime or ThoughtSlime.com. You can also find my horror content at youtube.com slash ScaredyCatsTV. ScaredyCats was taken.

That's me. That's what I do. I make videos about farts and 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 is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.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 coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow. Join me, Danny Trails, and step into the flames of right. An anthology podcast of modern day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.