The Breakfast Club - INTERVIEW: Rashad Robinson Talks ‘From Presence to Power: How to Take on the Fights That Matter and Win,’ Trump, Black Representation, Technofeudalism + More

Episode Date: July 29, 2026

Today on The Breakfast Club, Rashad Robinson Talks ‘From Presence to Power: How to Take on the Fights That Matter and Win,’ Trump, Black Representation, Technofeudalism. Listen For More!Yo...uTube: https://www.youtube.com/@BreakfastClubPower1051FMSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Starting point is 00:02:07 And listen now Oh no Every day I wake up Wake your ass up The Breakfast Club You're all finished Or y'all's done Morning everybody
Starting point is 00:02:18 It's DJ NV Just hilarious Shalermaine the guy We are the breakfast club We got a special guest in the building Yes indeed We have Rashad Robinson
Starting point is 00:02:26 Welcome brother Thanks for having me Good morning How you feeling? I'm feeling good I'm feeling good Pub Day Oh, yes.
Starting point is 00:02:33 This book, man, from presence to power. I got hip to it because I was listening to Native Land Pard with Angela Rod. Yeah, okay. I loved what you was talking about, so it made me dive into it. I love the title, right, from presence to power. And you say that we, black people, confuse presence with power. Can you explain that? Yeah, presence is visibility, awareness.
Starting point is 00:02:53 It's all the things that gets incentivized in this moment, everything from, you know, followership numbers, shoutouts from the stage. power is the ability to change the rules. And when you mistake presence for power, you can think something has happened that hasn't actually happened. You can mistake a black president for thinking that we're post-racial.
Starting point is 00:03:13 You can mistake our celebrities trending for the idea that America loves black people as much as America loves black culture. What we know is that America can love, celebrate, and monetize black culture and hate black people at the same time. For people that don't know who Rashad Robinson is, break down who you are first before you start diving into the book.
Starting point is 00:03:36 Who is Rashad Robinson? Where are you from? And then let's talk about how you got into writing this book. Well, for the last 20 years, I've been building movements. I've been working across the social justice space to help win change on a wide range of issues. I grew up on Eastern Long Island, the last Exeterland-Intyne Long Island Expressway, Riverhead. And my family got there through the Great Migration. Yeah, but my family's like working class.
Starting point is 00:03:58 We got there through the Great Migration. the farm fields of like southern Virginia to the farm fields of Long Island. And I grew up there where you have to understand power. Because just to get anything done, you are black in a largely white community. And very early on, I had to navigate what it meant to live in a world that was not designed for me to win. And I've translated that into the work I do every day. And whether it's working across criminal justice or voting rights or economic justice, I've won a lot of campaigns and we've lost.
Starting point is 00:04:31 And along the way, along the way, I've sort of recognized that part of the reason why we lose is that we don't recognize the role of power. And we mistake a lot of things that we've achieved, a lot of recognition for the ability to actually shift the incentives to shift the rules. And that's what this intervention is about. That's what this book is about. And my hope is that with it and with the tools inside of it, that it will be applicable for everyday people who just want to find their power in this moment, whether you're fighting a book band in your community
Starting point is 00:05:06 or whether you want to get involved in shaping Congress. You would probably screaming at the top of your lungs on the Black Square movement, huh? I mean, you know, I led an organization at the time that did not take corporate money. And so I was watching as these corporations were naming my organization saying, were giving money corporations that I had been running campaigns against for years.
Starting point is 00:05:28 So I knew right away that it was performative, that it wasn't real. These companies were not shifting their policies. They were not changing their rules. And at the time, launching a campaign that was called Beyond the Statement, you know, are you going to change your rules about hiring formerly incarcerated people? Are you going to change your hiring practices? And over time, we saw that these companies were not serious. But many folks took the money and thought that there was change.
Starting point is 00:05:53 change happening. And I think what we have to recognize is the things that we've done to walk into this mess that we are in are not the things that are going to help us walk out of it. You know, I love the whole from presence to power concept. And I feel that often on social media, like you said. You know, I guess some people would call it, you know, Twitter activism, but just because you're viral and have a presence on social media, it doesn't mean it's actual power, right? So what's the biggest mistake people make by confusing representation with actual power. Well, you know, we end up not winning real things.
Starting point is 00:06:28 Or we think we've won something and we can't hold on to it. It slips away very quickly. And so the idea of sort of going viral on platforms that we don't own designed by people who actually don't want us to win in the first place is already a setup. There are not rules to these platforms, right? Our cars are not safe. because the auto industry is benevolent.
Starting point is 00:06:54 They are safe because there are rules and regulation that people have won over time. When you go into the supermarket and you look at the back of a label of a food product, you see a whole bunch of things on it that are a result of people fighting and winning. And so we don't even have rules on social media about how these platforms are designed.
Starting point is 00:07:13 And as someone who's fought these platforms and also tried to fight for regulation, I know that they are designed for us to stay on there and fight amongst each other. They are designed. You know, when I testified in front of Congress about, you know, social media platforms, I testified next to the Facebook whistleblower who had all these papers about the ways in which they've set up the algorithms to keep you fighting. They monetize our emotions.
Starting point is 00:07:38 They monetize it because they can place ads next to it if we stay on longer. That's right. If we share more. And so it is by design. And so, you know, you may think that you're making a little bit of money. You may think that you're going viral. But over time, they're going to change the algorithm. The minute that we get a little bit of progress, they're going to change the system.
Starting point is 00:07:58 And so what I want to do is I want to help us begin thinking about how we change the environment. And that's not just about corporations. That's also about the Democratic Party, right? I watch the right wing change how their politicians have to operate, change the incentive structure. And so I'm not here to say we vote just because. or we follow just because. I'm saying we have to change the air and the water for the politicians. And that looks like what the right wing has done.
Starting point is 00:08:29 They wear their caps and they wear their jerseys. You go into the gym and they will change the channel to Fox News. They have created an incentive where their politicians have to follow them. And I think we have to do some of that as well because we're not going to be led by those that are currently in office. Is power morally neutral? No, power's not morally neutral. And there are all different types of power. But when I think about sort of the work to both understand power,
Starting point is 00:09:07 build power, and then practice power, it absolutely isn't morally neutral. I mean, we look at what Donald Trump is doing right now. And that looks very different. than people that we might put in office. But I think... But could that power in the right hand be good? Absolutely.
Starting point is 00:09:28 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Absolutely. That's what we want, right? That's what we want. I mean, we want power. Like, the fact of the matter is that we should strive to have the type of power that changes rules, that changes the incentive structure of the criminal justice system, that changes how banks operate, that changes how things...
Starting point is 00:09:46 And we've won things over time. and then we can sometimes lose them and we can sometimes have backlash. The backlash that we're experiencing right now is a direct result of what we've won. We want a lot of things over the course of 2017, 2016 into 2020 and now we're experiencing backlash.
Starting point is 00:10:05 But do we want that power, right? You talk about it, but do we really want it, right? I'm going to tell you, we say we want it, right? We talk about the social media app, right? And you just talk about the app that we're all on that we don't own. That's not designed for it. us. There's a brother that owns a social media app. And we don't support a lot of us.
Starting point is 00:10:23 Well, a lot of us do, but the community doesn't support it like we support these other apps, Facebook or Instagram or X, right? You look at HBCUs. We do support them, but we don't go all out for our HBCUs like they go out for all these other schools out there. We talk about clothing brands, right? Yeah. We don't support our clothing brands like people support the Gucci's, the Fendys, the Levis and all that. So we say we want it, but when it comes to somebody in our community that designs it, it takes a lot for us to follow. To support, yeah.
Starting point is 00:10:52 And to support. Absolutely. I mean, and that's also by design. We live in a society that does send us constant messages to, you know, perhaps not support one another, to fight amongst each other. Part of what I've done with this book and tried to do with this book is there's nine exercises at the end of the chapters
Starting point is 00:11:14 because there's a lot of theory and there's some definitions. but I wanted everyone at the end of it to be able to do something that I talk about is find your power. So it's about finding your power in the singular. And through those, you can take the exercises and really sort of dig into sort of what do I have at my disposal? What am I not using? What am I not sort of leaning into? And then how do I find my power in the plural? How do I sort of understand my people, find my people?
Starting point is 00:11:45 And I do want us to ask those questions and dig into those questions perhaps about what am I not supporting? What am I not leaning into? How do I engage differently? I also have one of my one of the most important chapters in the book to me is the chapter on profiteering. Because I do think we do lean into this system of profiteering. And I don't talk about profiteering just about money. Profiteering is also about hierarchy. Stephen Miller.
Starting point is 00:12:15 is one of the biggest profiteers, and I don't think he's in it for the money. I think he's in it because he wants his kids to have access to things, and your kid's not to. And so when we talk about profiteering and we talk about sort of how these rules are designed, we do have to disrupt these rules.
Starting point is 00:12:33 And I think when we do disrupt it, when we do disrupt the challenges, more people will follow, more people will engage. And that's the role. We don't need everyone for the march. the civil rights movement, not everyone not everyone engage. We need
Starting point is 00:12:48 enough of the right people focused on enough of the right things in order to actually make the type of change possible and when we win, that is reinforcing. More people will follow, more people will engage and I think that is part of I think the work of disrupting this current trend that we're in,
Starting point is 00:13:06 the current challenges that we're facing. If we talk about magical thinking you know what? Can you break that in? magical thinking is sort of the stories that we tell ourselves that are not true. Like if you're not at the table, you're on the menu. You can be both at the table and on the menu at the same time. The stories like the moral arc of history bends towards justice.
Starting point is 00:13:31 We actually have to bend it. Donald Trump is a perfect example that it doesn't just bend. It's not automatically. Progress doesn't automatically happen. But there are all these stories that were almost incentivized to believe that can sometimes you know, keep us tired or relaxed or not sort of on our front foot about what is happening in the world
Starting point is 00:13:53 and magical thinking is part of one of the reasons why I wrote this book because after the 2016 election, I was going to all these meetings and watching people act like they did not just get surprised by a Trump victory and were acting like they knew what to do
Starting point is 00:14:09 now that he was in office. And I was watching people walk into the Trump election like it was George W. Bush 3.0, designing what they were going to do next, not thinking that we were walking into an authoritarian regime. And many of the people who lost really badly were trying to then show up as the resistance. And even watching, going to the Obama White House as they were sort of wrapping up, going to meetings about criminal justice, and they were celebrating things that they were just announcing. And I was like, Jeff Sessions is about to become the attorney general. How is any of this safe?
Starting point is 00:14:45 And they were like, well, we've made the type of culture change. We've changed things. And they actually obviously didn't. And so going to those meetings, going to meetings with Chuck Schumer and Senator Schumer and having him say to me and other activists, don't worry about Jeff Sessions becoming Attorney General. I can work with him. We work out together in the gym.
Starting point is 00:15:08 Right. Those were the things that we were hearing. And it was just one more recognition. that we needed to not just run campaigns. And over those years, I ran campaigns. I led the largest boycott in American history taking on Facebook. I led campaigns to force credit card companies to stop processing fees for white nationalist groups.
Starting point is 00:15:31 But we actually had to change some of the ways that people think about power. And the goal here is to make that intervention in ways that people can understand and people can use. And whether you're just, just starting out, just wondering what you can do or whether you're a seasoned activist, I think there's something in here for everyone. You know, you write about power instead of just progress.
Starting point is 00:15:54 Yeah. What's the difference? Well, power allows us to actually win progress. Power is being able to dictate what happens, being able to force decision makers to do things that they don't want to do. I open the book up with Hurricane Katrina, which I think is really important, because it really does show the difference between presence and power, right?
Starting point is 00:16:17 Kanye West had probably the most visible sentence in that sort of moment of George Bush doesn't care about black people. And there was no movement or infrastructure to take those sort of very visible words and translate it to anything else. But while all that was happening, Mike Pence, then a congressman, not vice president yet, 20 years before Project 2025 was at the Heritage Foundation, which created Project 2025. He was in late night meetings where after the levees broke, they divided up New Orleans. They privatized it, and they put in motion the work to make it impossible for so many
Starting point is 00:16:57 people to come back and so many people to recover. So while we were very present on telethons, folks giving charity, they were working for structural change and actually changing the rules. And so the difference between presence and power is oftentimes a difference between having charity versus structural change. It's the difference between being able to be heard versus being heated. So presence and progress can really never equate the actual power. I mean, progress is a result of having power.
Starting point is 00:17:30 People who have power win progress. And we see when our opponents have power have power. they get progress for their side. But I feel like progress is when somebody, you know, people would be like, oh, we got the first black. Oh, that's representation. That's representation. Okay, okay, okay.
Starting point is 00:17:47 But people call that progress, too, though. People do call that progress. And I think that, like, you know, the New York Police Department can be as diverse as ever. That doesn't necessarily mean black people having a better experience. I don't think that things will change without diversity, but diversity alone will not change things. And when we mistake diversity for actual structural change, that's once again sort of mistaking presence for power.
Starting point is 00:18:15 Do you think in 2026 with all of the performative stuff that you see in activism, we actually have the leaders that will make the real change you're talking about and not just get stuck in a performative, like in a real way? Yeah. I think part of what we have to recognize is that we need more people on the playing field. This cannot be about expecting some leader or individual leader an elected leader to show up. What I hope is that more people recognize this.
Starting point is 00:18:43 There's no shortcut for saving time. But saving money is simple. Just combine your car and home insurance with Bel Air Direct and save. Get a quote at bellair direct.com. What's up, fam? I'm sports journalist Ari Chambers. Hey, what's up, y'all? It's your girl, Sam J.
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Starting point is 00:21:57 The man who had given her that ride she barely escaped from was Ted Bundy. Listen to Discrace Land on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or everywhere. you get your podcasts. Their role to play and their role in pushing back. And more people have the tools to, you know, understand the difference between what's real and what's fake. And my goal is to try to unlock that for folks. Because I think if we're waiting for an elected leader to come and save us,
Starting point is 00:22:26 you know, it's just not going to happen. And what I've seen on the right is that over the last, you know, 10, 15 years, they have forced their elected leaders to have to change. They've, you know, taken people out, made people actually have to change. And what we've watched is politicians who were once considered perhaps institutionalists, like they would follow the rules, have to bend and change, you know. Things that were once kind of sacred insider rules, they've changed and they've shaped. But they've shaped it as a result of the people on their side expecting something.
Starting point is 00:23:05 different. And so I think for us, particularly for black people, we have to demand something different from our elected leaders. And I'm not just talking. I'm talking about the leaders that look like us and the leaders that don't look like us. But if you come to our community and ask for our vote, we have to expect you to do something different. And we have to expect you to engage differently. And I think that that is going to be part of the work moving forward if we're going to get anything different out of our politicians. Now, how does money play into all of this? Well, money does play. I mean, this is profiteering, I think, is so, incredibly central.
Starting point is 00:23:37 People would say that when you talk about power is usually financial. The more finances you have, the more power you have. That's what people would say, right? Absolutely. Well, money is absolutely connected, but we have a history of winning things
Starting point is 00:23:49 even when we've been outspent. We have a history of disrupting systems even when we don't have money. And I think money is a piece of this, but I don't think that overnight we're going to have as much money as the other We're not going to outspend them. So we're going to have to be smarter.
Starting point is 00:24:08 We're going to have to be more strategic. And I think that that is about finding and picking the right fights. It's about making profiteering unprofitable, right? Injustice has to be unprofitable. Behind every injustice, behind every sort of thing that we face, whether it's the mass incarceration, whether it's what the banks do to us, there is someone profiting from it. That's right.
Starting point is 00:24:35 Now, how do you feel about, when you look at, let's say, Donald Trump, how he uses his power right now. He uses his in a negative way, but he uses his power. 100%. I feel like, regardless who's in office, we never use our power the way he uses his.
Starting point is 00:24:49 He's going to take care of home. He's going to take care of hours. I feel like we have to beg for that. Beg for somebody to say, this isn't right. Beg because I think we, a lot of times, look at, that's not right. What are they going to think? When he's his first day signing and throwing pens in the stands?
Starting point is 00:25:05 We have a lot. We play by an old set of rules that were not designed for us to win. And I think Donald Trump has proven that you can disrupt those rules. I remember back during the Obama administration, I was working with a group of formerly incarcerated leaders. And we were working to ban the box, the box that gets, yeah, you have to check for employment that says, were you incarcerated or not. And if you check the box that you've been incarcerated, you don't get the job. If you lie, you get the job, and then a month later they find out.
Starting point is 00:25:38 And so these leaders, we built this campaign. We had tens of thousands of people signed petitions. We show up to the White House. We are out in front of the White House with the petitions. And we did not have a meeting at the White House, but they called and they said, we want you guys to come in. And then they said, we want you, Rashad, to come in. And I was like, well, I'm not the leader of this effort.
Starting point is 00:26:00 I'm just the person that helped build the technology. petition, but these folks have been working on this campaign for year. Well, we can't clear them to come into the White House because they are formally incarcerated. And I said, well, I won't go into the meeting. And they said, well, we are going to, are you, will we tell people, we tell people that you decided not to go into a meeting at the White House. I said, well, I will be on the Amtrak back to New York this, this afternoon, one way or
Starting point is 00:26:30 the other. And they found a way. With all the rules that they said they couldn't, they found a way to invite the leaders in, folks like Norris Henderson and others, went into that meeting. They told stories to Valerie Jarrett and others around what it meant to be denied the ability to take care of their families. They told very clear, compelling stories. I was not in the room. I was on the train, like I said, I was going to be. And in 48 hours later, they put an executive order out to deal with that issue at the federal level.
Starting point is 00:27:06 But had we just played by the rules, had I went in that meeting, there's no way in the world I would have told as compelling of a story. It would have been a performative act of a professional activist going in. Instead, so over and over again, what I've learned is that you don't take the first offer. You push back. If you want to change the rules, then you have to make a different. different type of demand. And I do think that if we are going to not just be present but be powerful, then we have to sort of recognize that rules are oftentimes designed for us to lose. And part of it is that we have to change those rules. You know, algorithms, right, they shape attention now.
Starting point is 00:27:47 Are social media companies the most powerful, I want to say political institution, but just institution in America that nobody voted for? I mean, the technology. that can bring us into the future is dragging us into the past. I look at all of the ways in which the technology, you think about AI and algorithms that can decide whether or not you get to rent their apartment, can decide whether or not you get a callback for a job.
Starting point is 00:28:18 And these, by design, can get around all the civil rights laws that we've fought for. the lack of regulation on these platforms has to absolutely change. And this is a problem that we face by both Democrats and Republicans. I have been in the room when Democrats could have moved legislation forward, and they, you know, didn't. And we are in a time right now where we did not get regulation during the sort of rise of the social media age, right?
Starting point is 00:28:54 and people said, oh, we helped get Obama elected. It gave us Arab Spring. It gave us all these moments. And then we saw the ways in which the technology was used in the 2016 election. We saw foreign interference. We saw all the ways that we talked about earlier around how the algorithms incentivize people to sort of be their worst selves. The cloud capital is conflict. It's conflict.
Starting point is 00:29:22 And sometimes people will respond, oh, this is about freedom of speech. But the tech companies are deciding what gets amplified. This is not freedom of speech. This is about what they decide to push forward. And so during sort of the height of some of that work back in 2017 through sort of 2020, 21, you know, I was running campaigns against Facebook, trying to take them on and some of the other platforms. and we were winning some stuff along the way. We got some victories.
Starting point is 00:29:56 We called for a civil rights audit. We got a civil rights audit at Facebook. And, you know, what was really interesting is while that happened, while we were sort of in these conversations, the New York Times sort of found out that Facebook had hired this PR firm to attack me in the organization. And they were trying placing stories about, you know, to try to undermine what we were doing,
Starting point is 00:30:19 even though they were saying that they were coming to the table in good faith, that forced Facebook to actually have to deal with us differently. And so I ended up moving from talking to like senior level folks to having to go directly to being conversation with Mark Zuckerberg and Cheryl Sandberg on a regular basis. I remember the first time I went out to Menlo Park to their offices, they wanted me to sign an NDA. And I was like, no, like you all were attacking us. So they gave me a big badge to say, that said no NDA on it. And Warren, no DA. But I talk about in the book that I learned very clearly the difference between being in a dialogue and a negotiation.
Starting point is 00:30:57 Your opponent wants to keep you in a dialogue. They want to keep you talking. They want to say we were talking to those black folks. How often do you see that? We had a meeting. It was a constructive meeting. A dialogue is just their way of placating you. It's their way of being presence.
Starting point is 00:31:12 A negotiation is when you have leverage. When they either want something from you or want you to stop doing something. That's when you have actual power. You may not win everything in a negotiation, but that's when you are on the path to change. And I think for all of us, we have to look at our leaders and our organizations who are representing us.
Starting point is 00:31:30 Are they in constant dialogue or are they in negotiation? Are we getting a $100,000 check from an organization that's spending $100 million to keep us down? Those are the type of questions that allow us to recognize is something moving us in the right direction or is something holding us back? And I think far too often we are mistaking dialogues, conversations with those that are not on our side
Starting point is 00:31:55 for actual negotiations where we have the leverage to change rules that will make a difference. What do you think black people's limits are when it comes to disrupting profiteering? Actually, I know they use it for like war and like prison systems, right? But whenever you find out about a black person or any type of company involved with any black being an owner
Starting point is 00:32:17 or any profitable person from like a prison or a jail or whatever, people get really, really upset. But then there's a conversation of like, in order for us to fix it, we have to be a part of it. What's our role in disrupting if our own people don't want us to be in those conversations? Yeah, I mean, I think that, I think when you expose profiteering, and I've had a lot of experience with this, when you expose it, you give people the facts and the background information.
Starting point is 00:32:44 Folks are ready to take action with you. I've led campaigns sometimes against black institutions where profiteering became very clear and people are like, you know, this organization is taking money from private prisons. But we do have to make it clear. We have to lay it out for folks. We have to make it plain and help people understand what's at stake. And so I think that's part of the work. And my experience is that the community will follow us if we give them. very clear things and very clear ways to engage.
Starting point is 00:33:18 I know I keep going back to social media, but it's because I feel like that's where we have a large presence that we think is power, but it's actually not. So I've been reading a lot about techno-futility. Yeah. Right? And how the new ruling classes, these Algo bosses,
Starting point is 00:33:35 the Musk and the Zuckerbergs and the Sam Altman's, and we know how they're using social media to misinform and disrupt and consolidate power, but yet we're still on those platforms. And a lot of times when I talk to people about why they're still on those platforms, they say they feel like that's where they can get their messaging out, right? Can the same tools used to oppress also be used to advance justice and get us about it? It depends on how we use it, right?
Starting point is 00:34:02 Television and movies were not designed for our liberation, but there are ways in which certain types of content advance things. I mean, you think about birth of a nation, which was one of the first. movies. 1950. And, right, and so you have, there is a history on all these platforms. So I think it's not being fooled to think that by these, by that the design of these
Starting point is 00:34:25 platforms alone is going to produce sort of justice. It's recognizing how we're using them and how they are using us. And, you know, I met with Elon Musk right after he bought then Twitter. And, you know, there was all this talk, right, black Twitter. you know, we had helped to make this company profitable. And all along the way, we had been winning changes at the platform, content moderation, other things that were heading into the 2022 election. And then I had to sit in this meeting with this, you know, white South African who,
Starting point is 00:35:03 I think I've never heard him talk about what he feels about Mandela or Desmond Tutu or anyone else, which only makes you know what he actually thinks about them because any white South African would probably tell a black person I was with Mandela. And so you know that this person, he's talking about how he wants to make Twitter fun again. He's talking about how he wants to make it a public square. And all of that, for me, was coded language from this sort of South African. Had we won regulation, had we won rules, government rules, structural rules, all of that would have looked much different. And so I'm not interested in sort of begging billionaires or begging tech giant.
Starting point is 00:35:44 to treat us well. I think we actually have to build more power over our elected leaders and our elected officials create a world of consequence if they don't do it. Because I do know that had we been able to create more consequence
Starting point is 00:35:59 for the elected officials that did not get us regulation, we would have gotten regulation and rules. And part of what I recognize in all of this is that we have to operate differently if we want different things. I like what you talked about on Native Land, too,
Starting point is 00:36:15 you talk about how we exert our energy towards the wrong thing. Yeah. But I agree with that. It's just like, I'm tired of y'all podcast monologues. I'm tired of you screaming from the car, okay, like about stuff that don't even really matter.
Starting point is 00:36:28 Yeah. I mean, behind every, once again, behind every injustice is someone or something profiting from it. And if we're not willing to talk about that, if we're not willing to make it uncomfortable, you know, when I talk about Hurricane Katrina, And I talk about the levees breaking. At the heart of it, no one was nervous about disappointing black people.
Starting point is 00:36:50 And if no one is nervous about disappointing your community, it doesn't matter what facts and figures you have. It doesn't matter who gives a great speech. It doesn't matter what tech knowledge you have. And so part of all of this is creating the right level of energy where folks in power are nervous about disappointing us. And that means that we have to do something different because there are too many people in power that are not. nervous about disappointing black people. And as long as they're not nervous about disappointing us, we can be loud, but we're not going to necessarily get results.
Starting point is 00:37:20 I agree with that. And why do you think we're so quick to go at each other? But meanwhile, you can, like, in the same week that Elon Musk made a trillion dollars, it was that conversation about reasonable doubt being in Target. And I saw more people with mad smoke for the reasonable thousand than Elon making a trillion dollars. Stuff like that blows my mind. It's like, We're focused on the wrong things. It is.
Starting point is 00:37:45 We rather attack ourselves a lot of time, I feel like than go against the system. And we don't even make the right attacks, right? You know, there are sometimes where we should either call our folks in or call our folks out. And I think that that is healthy in any community. But lots of times it's performing on these platforms and only helping those that actually don't care about us
Starting point is 00:38:15 and actually have an agenda to keep us down, it only helps them make more money. And so, you know, I could sometimes watch on social media and see folks, you know, sharing mugshots of black people without any context or, you know, and I always ask myself, those are going to travel a lot quicker. than any good story about us.
Starting point is 00:38:42 So we should be asking ourselves, what are we sharing? What are we engaging? What are we uplifting? How are we using our time? And how are we using our time effectively on these platforms that are, once again, are designed to profit off of our pain
Starting point is 00:38:59 and are designed to profit off our suffering? It doesn't mean that I'm telling everyone to get off the platforms. What I am telling us is to think about how we're using them and who's profiting on the other people. side. That's right.
Starting point is 00:39:13 From presence to power. I mean, I could sit here with a million more questions. Yeah, absolutely. The last thing I was going to ask you, I was, you know, is power using those bots for negativity? Like you just said, they did a campaign against you, right? Yeah. We've seen campaigns against the Breakfast Club, Charlemagne, myself.
Starting point is 00:39:29 Is that a power that they use that maybe we should be using? I mean, it's a tactic. Instead of for the bad, instead of for the evil, but really displaying the things that they're doing that are not. in the way of the people. I think that that can create a lot of awareness, but it's not going to actually change anymore. It's not power.
Starting point is 00:39:49 And I think, like, you know, part of this is, like, creating a system and a structure where, like, those type of bots don't actually work anymore. And I think that that's what we have to work on winning. Okay. Well, pick up his book if you're out and about today.
Starting point is 00:40:06 Rashad Robertson, thank you for joining us this morning. For presence to power. How to take going to fights that matter and win. And thank you for joining us, bro. Thank you for having me. That's the Breakfast Club. Good morning. Oh, no.
Starting point is 00:40:16 Every day I wake up. Wake your ass up. You're all finished or y'all done? Hey, Portlandia fans. Carrie Brownstein and Fred Armisen here. The Dream of the 90s is alive in podcast form. We're launching Podlandia, A.O. rewatch, our brand new podcast where we revisit every episode of Portlandia together,
Starting point is 00:40:36 breaking down sketches, going deep on our iconic characters, and pulling back the curtain on how it all got made. And we'll also be joined by the TV. people who helped bring it all to life. Guest stars, collaborators, and friends, including director Jonathan Chryssel, the mayor himself, Kyle McLaughlin, legendary musician Amy Mann, and many more.
Starting point is 00:40:53 Kyle is going for it here. You fully improvised, not just words, but a song about it. Well, I thought you were all going to write a song for you. I remember you thinking that. Listen to Podlandia. A.O. Rewatch on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What's up, fam? I'm sports journalist, Ari Cham.
Starting point is 00:41:12 Hey, what's up y'all? It's your girl, Sam J. And we're the host of Everyone Watches Women's Sports, a new podcast from Together and I Heart Women's Sports. We're breaking down the biggest headlines. Naomi Osaka, showing out. Shout out to you, Naomi. The viral moments. I've been obsessed with Kashan Rock's boxing journey. She looks good.
Starting point is 00:41:29 Her combos are swift. And the stories everyone's talking about across women's sports. Because everyone watches women's sports. Listen to everyone watches women's sports on the IHeart Radio app. Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcast. This is Chelsea Hamler from Dear Chelsea. Every week, the news gets worse. The world gets crazier, and Yamanika is here to tell whoever's responsible,
Starting point is 00:41:49 you're the problem. Do you know I just found out who Sidney's Sweeney was? If he got a bunch of women, then I should have a bunch of men. Do better or do less, so I don't have to do so much. I'm Yamanika, and I'm out. Listen to You're the Problem with Yamanika on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. I'm Jake Brennan, and on the Disgraceland Podcast,
Starting point is 00:42:14 I explore the wild lives of rock stars and unbelievable true crime stories from music history. These are the stories you haven't heard, the kind you'll end up telling someone else. Like the time Paul McCartney spent in a notorious prison or the bizarre crime Lady Gaga is accused of or that time Blondie's Debbie Harry escaped Ted Bundy. Listen to Discresland on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
Starting point is 00:42:41 or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast Guaranteed human

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