Tomorrow, Today - Influencers, Organizing, and Performative Radicalism with Charles McBryde

Episode Date: December 5, 2022

In this episode, we're joined by social media personality Charles McBryde as we unpack the radically accelerating world of social media activism and its co-optation by both political fringe politics and by the capitalist apparatus. We've watched as social media evolved from traditional marketing to absurdism to the anthropomorphizing of brands on social media, including fake feuds and shit-posting. How much more can brands mimick people, and what happens when it is no longer an effective marketing method?  These questions are imperative to begin thinking about as we try to find ways to engage and use social media for meaningful work, and how we can further separate branding for just causes in platforms designed to sell you more products. Ultimately, if we understand how the system works as platforms rise and fall, what can we do to start being proactive in this cycling process to leverage the system for a more egalitarian world? Check out Charles on Instagram and TikTok at: @CharlesMcbryde Support his work getting emergency medical supplies to citizens in Ukraine at: https://missionkharkiv.com/

Welcome back to tomorrow today. This is Andy, and I'm with my lovely co-host, Nash Flynn. Hello. Say hello. It's you. I'm the problem. It's me. The problem, not the solution.

Correct. So today we're talking with a friend of ours, Charles McBride, who most... A real person. A real person. Doesn't look like it, looks like a model, but he's a real human being. It doesn't sound real either, quite frankly. Wow. Charles McBride, that doesn't sound like a fake James Bond name to you.

I mean, I was thinking more like IRA, but yeah, I guess. Like an IRA fake name. Okay, yeah, I could see that. Like maybe he detonated some bombs in dairy and doesn't want us to know. Or tried to kill the queen. Maybe he did kill the queen. Oh, no, it was Margaret Thatcher, was the person whose hotel exploded. You know what?

So today we are talking with Charles McBride, who is best known today, despite his chiseled face for his social media prowess. So you may know Charles from Instagram, TikTok, B-reels, which I still don't know is a thing or from saying it correctly, but it's a thing. The general idea of this talk was to discuss some of his work that he'd been doing in Ukraine. So while he was in Ukraine a few months back, he was working primarily to raise money for medical care, for people that were stuck in Ukraine needing life-saving care. So he was raising money for cancer patients, people with diabetes, things like that. They're really interesting part of this is that the only reason he raised any money is because he's a social media personality, right?

What does that say about the future of social media, how we interact with the world around us, and ultimately how that influences like politics and what this means for the future? Pretty people rule the world. Pretty people rule the world. That's what we found out about it. That's true. I mean, that started with JFK. Was he pretty? I don't feel it.

No, you don't know about this? So JFK, the reason why he's. he won the first election against Nixon is because why do you look so scared? Nixon. I thought it was, oh, I was going to say I thought it was Reagan, but that's even more wrong than maybe the other thing. So the reason why JFK ran away with the election against Nixon is because he was actually on the first televised debate.

And Nixon didn't really care or give a shit. And he was like, he looked like a wrinkled potato. I was going to say a melted candle in a haunted factory. But yeah. Yeah, any of those terms. work really well here. But the point is that JFK really understood the importance of presentation in a way that Nixon hadn't figured out yet. And now, like, looking back, you're like, duh. Like, of course, if you look like a fucking ghost on TV like Nixon did because it's black and white and he

had no makeup on and, like, he wasn't doing anything to help himself. Yes, historically, most of our presidents have been very good looking. Thank you, Donald Trump and Joe Biden. Yeah, well, the point here is that Part of what made JFK so good at being in politics was that he understood how to leverage the media of the time. And it's one of those things in retrospect that can seem like really common sense. But, you know, it's really hard to tell from today. So, you know, when we were talking with Charles or when I was talking with Charles, we got into this conversation about, you know, we live in a time where we don't need to necessarily donate to the Red Cross for our causes, right? You can go to the source, so to speak, of whatever's going on. And you also have access to, like, a number of different sources you didn't have 30, 40 years ago, right?

And what does that mean for how we organize, how we connect with one another, how we find common ground? Alternatively, how does that impact, how we understand community, and ultimately how politics kind of webs its way into all of these things in a way that it didn't necessarily do before. Not to say the Red Cross wasn't a political or isn't a political organization in some ways because it is inherently capitalist, so it has a political position. But it didn't present as a political affiliated organization because there was no alternative. And it was in a very black and white setting of we're raising money, you know, because an earthquake happened. And we are the only people with their infrastructure and resources to get money there. So I'm curious, though, do we think that there's more opportunity, given how splintered we can find information now and how easily it is to donate to causes? Do we think that there's more of a prevalence of misinformation and finding what you go out to find?

Or do we think it's been reduced because we're not relying on sources for which we'd have to purchase that information in one way or another? It's really both, right? Like we have these different relationships and a different more nuanced understanding of what organizations are. And I think that falls back on that personality, right? So you've got, you know, to pick on him, you've got this pretty boy selling, you know, that we need to get cancer medication to Ukraine, right? Right. He has no qualifications. But he has a social media platform and he can go on his phone and say I'm live here in Ukraine.

He has koalifications. He has qualifications. He's cute. Do you guys get it? Do you get it? He's blushing right now listening to this. I love it. You know, we watched the anthropomorphization of like companies, right, with like Wendy's shit tweeting, right?

Slim Jim being absolutely unstoppable on Instagram. Like, guys, you can do other things. So maybe if you spent a little bit less time, you know, roasting some roast beef company and actually like making edible slim jims. That would be perfect. Thank you guys so much. But the point is that we're seeing this evolution of how we relate with things, how it influences the corporations around us, the nonprofits around us, how they want to influence how we react to them. As we share things back and forth on social media, that evolution is so quick that companies, nonprofits, and so on can't keep up. That's where these like influencers can play these really crucial roles for better or worse

and how we relate with these, with what's going on in the world, right? And ultimately, because of these algorithms and what's happening, you have this natural splintering, not just in the way you were talking about with, like, how we're identifying worthy causes to support, but also, like, how those can fester into, you know, fringe political leanings and things like that. It's a very complicated web, and we're sitting, like,

it's really hard to see sometimes that we're sitting slightly, above where like the media industry is like currently organizing like you look at a meme from five years ago and you're like this is stupid like this is terrible and you remember thinking like it was the funniest thing you'd ever seen five years ago first of all memes from five years ago were like beautifully stupid right like sure let's go with that gorgeously and also second of all I find that kind like I find that comment from you ironic yeah I didn't I didn't look at me five years ago. I didn't look at memes three years ago, and here I am. A meme creator. Yeah, I'm going to burn out fast because I'm going to lose the connection with the meme culture or something.

Or the older you get, the less you understand humor, the better your memes become. I don't know if that can happen. Your meme, Jesus. So the key thing here, I think, is that we're in this web of echo chambers that are somehow, weirdly connected through these social media influencers who can be political, but in many cases are not, right? And we're watching all of this play out in like a, it kind of is like we're in a test tube, right? And we're watching how these things interact for the first time where you can have hyper-specialized marketing, hyper-specialized everything. The data that's behind every

decision of every ad you see is like mind-numbing to the point where I don't think it's even very effective anymore. Traditional marketing doesn't work for Gen Z for millennials, right? Like, it doesn't matter who shows up on TV and holds up a product and says, I like this product. You're not going to buy it. Like, there's nothing that you're going to bite on unless it's a micro-influencer in a lot of cases, right? Because it's like, I've talked to that person. I think they're a genuine person. Therefore, if they're pushing this, it's because they genuinely believe in it. And that is a really weird inversion of how we've related with products. Right. While I'm sitting here, I find it more ironic that you and I are discussing the values and potential drawbacks of using social media influencers as reasons to buy things or to be persuaded towards capitalism because we're sort of sitting here doing a similar thing, right?

This is like podcasts are now how the universe is understanding itself, right? We're like talking about trends that are happening in a sort of trend media. We're micro trend, yeah. We are micro trend niche celebrities. Tomorrow Today podcast brought to you by Slim Jims. Oh, fuck. We didn't realize. We weren't supposed to shit on Slim Jims.

Get that salty meat. Quick. Put a Slim Jim in your mouth. Is that a Slim Jim in your pocket or are you happy to see me? I'm disappointed to see you. That's why it's in my pocket. That's why it's a Slim Jim. That's why it's a slim gym and not like a thick rick.

A thick rick. You just say that to me right now in this space. I'm quitting this podcast and probably life. Oh, my God, you made yourself cry. Charles, you're welcome. This is my magnum opus. I was going to say this is our most serious introduction yet. And then that happened, and now we're fucked.

Okay. we're done here um hopefully you guys enjoy this it was actually a very serious conversation mostly and um i think you guys will really like it it was a lot of fun for me so i'm about to listen to it for the first time so see you on the other side charles thanks so much for coming on in a little while how you doing i'm good i'm uh i'm back in la um recovering from a bout of pneumonia so it's been a slow november oh yeah excited for thanksgiving for folks that aren't familiar with uh your background, you've got kind of a diverse history of social media presence and activism. And that's predominantly why I wanted to have you on to kind of unpack some of the way these things are

playing out and kind of what our future looks like around how social media and activism are kind of intertwined. Yeah, I appreciate that. Diverse is the right way. I've been on, on, on the right description. I've been on all sorts of sides of these various different issues. I mean, I think my first, my first, I would say, social media activism was like in when I was in college, you know, still kind of a Republican consulting on the Marco Rubio campaign. Like that's how long about it was. And that is an almost unrecognizable start to where we are today. And I do think that speaks a lot to like the power of social media that I'm sure

wasn't the people around you in Marco Rubio's campaign that moved you a very, far away from that. No, certainly not. I mean, it actually, well, it wasn't. I mean, I grew up, I was one of those, like, you know, I mean, my parents were very conservative, still remained fairly conservative in a very like Reagan-esque sort of sense. So I grew up being a Reagan Republican. I got really, like, it was big, like, I thought like Mitt Romney was going to, he was going to make things right, you know, in the country after it had been taken down the path of socialism by Barack Obama. And so I kind of thought of myself as this like, you know, whatever, sophisticated intellectual Republican who didn't play with this populist nonsense of the Trump administration. And I was like,

well, I was already kind of looking for the door in terms of Republican activism and politics. My mom would drag me to like Republican Party meetings in my small little South Carolina town and stuff. So I was always deeply involved from a young age. But I was kind of looking for the door in college. And my friend was like, well, can you can you, can you, can, you're the only person who knows social media, can you, like, help Mark a review campaign with social media? I did that for like two weeks. Now, honestly, actually what happened was the, that shooting in Charleston. Okay, yeah.

And just like, I think this was, I think this is the same time. And that just, like, exploded everything in politics. And then I literally went off to study abroad that summer. I just, like, quit everything. I was like, nope, I don't want to do this. That sent me on like an apolitical sort of couple of years sort of throughout the rest of college and everything. So yeah, very interesting starting point.

So it wasn't. I mean, I would say Trump and what he did to the Republican Party was certainly a springboard for me to become disillusioned with the right. Certainly didn't put me towards the left, not for a long time. That took a lot more life experience and learning. You know, I think it's been interesting as somebody that didn't know you from that far back and has known you primarily from like a progressive Democrat lens at the beginning. I do think it does speak a lot to the power of social media and its ability to challenge us, but also the power of social media in its entirety in the sense of how big it is. And in that bigness, you can find these microcosms, these very niche communities,

things that can kind of suck you in for better or worse. And how that plays out as somebody that does social media in some capacity, how that opens up, you know, from a marketing standpoint, from an advertising, standpoint, from an engagement to an audience standpoint, the opportunity to engage with a massive audience that otherwise would be like sparsely populated throughout the country, that otherwise, you know, is very, you know, atomized and, you know, those people feel very alone. And then you've created these niche communities on the internet. And then you have social media, which can then organize around those niche communities in a way that is just like totally different than anything

in history in a lot of ways. And it's, you know, you know, you know, you know, It offers us a really unique opportunity to try to envision what the future looks like around activism, social media, branding. You know, like, before we started recording, you'd brought up, like, the Red Cross. And, like, why it existed was because people knew it was the thing to do if you wanted to give money to a cause to some kids or a war, whatever it was. It was like, well, these are your options, unless you're going to pull out, like, you know, a yellow pages or something like that. Or your options are pretty limited. Yeah, I think it is. It's the democratization of philanthropy in a way. And I would say that that's maybe one of the upsides of the social media game, which we often focus on the downsides, especially as it's kind of at this point, it's kind of no secret that the right is much better using social media to like catalyze and catalyze its base and turn them into an army. Whereas the left is we use it to fight each other over like long, like anarchists who died. of syphilis 150 years ago. But I think that focusing on the upsides can be important because

there is a huge aspect of social media that enables some things. It can enable a genocide in Myanmar, sponsored by Facebook, or it can enable mutual aid groups from across the world to work with each other when conflicts break out in their sort of spheres of influence. I think that's really interesting and really important. I think people are treating social media for what it is. And instead of disengaging, they're like, let's reorient it towards our values. We all hate it. We're now, you know, 12 years into this experiment. We're all hate it.

We hate the dating apps. We hate the atomization of life. We hate the performance mentality. We hate that our entire lives are being commodified and sold for profit to corporations as a business model in order for us to socialize with each other. And I think people are just being like, okay, it's time to like just mess with the algorithm, you know, and try and use this for whatever we can. I think, yeah, I mean, I think your recent ideas have been very interesting about that, which is like how can you basically use the fact that this is a profit-driven business model and get the engine itself to like pull the cable car.

I'm no good with train metaphors. I haven't spent a lot of times on the United States. We don't have them. Yeah, yeah. I don't know. I think that's a really interesting concept. But maybe you want to dig into that a little bit more. Yeah.

So for folks that aren't familiar, podcast is a part of a small network that is just, being born, you could say, around this concept of leveraging the social media infrastructure to provide free advertising, basically. How do we take the machine that exists to profit off of us and to share viral content and then basically like a tick latch on podcast content, audio content, to that viral piece that is geared toward the podcast content? And it's a really interesting idea and it's something we've been playing with with this podcast you might be listening to this episode because of seeing a meme that at the end of it had an ad for this show and you said huh i want to learn more about that and you're listening to it right now and we did not spend any

money on advertising and ultimately the goal would be that we can kick money back to meme pages who do all this work make instagram facebook meta twitter you know millions and billions of dollars through just wanting to do something to engage with other people and actually being able to give them something back for that. And in that sense, you're creating a marketing department. That's not actually a marketing department. They're part of a cooperative with equitable shares or ownership of that network. I don't know where it's going to go.

I don't know how successful it will be. But to Charles's point, I think people are frustrated. We recognize the absurdity of the marketing that exists around us. traditional marketing doesn't work for millennials and gen z because we have been so exposed it doesn't have any real effect and you've seen this play out you know from if you think probably eight ten years ago when old spy started making these like surrealist commercials and everyone loved them because they were just they were stupid they were totally nonsensical and it was just a breath of fresh air to like watch this thing that was like making fun of the whole concept of advertising and

And it worked. And like now that's like its own thing. Like every brand does that. Right. Like brand Twitter is like cringe now. Even though. Yeah. Everyone thought it was hilarious that Wendy's was like sub tweeting Sonic and

calling them gay or whatever. Yeah. Like there was like this short window where people were like, yeah, this is cool and different. And then it was like, is this really where we're at? We're pretending these brands are our friends. And obviously like that's that's not good. but you know the point is I think what we're seeing is this really you know social media is this very quickly evolving thing because it's literally like an echo chamber right where everything

is feeding back off of what is being liked by people and that's changing so quickly that the social media algorithm changes around with it advertising is trying to keep up and it's just going faster and faster I'm not sure if there's any getting off that ride but the reality is that this is going to fundamentally change how we relate to social media how we relate to identity, identity, politics, identity, you know, organizing, fundraising, things like that through how we perceive ourselves. And then how those organizations that fundraise for said causes are going to advertise or create a social media presence for that person to engage.

Yeah. Yeah, I think the evolving nature of that is really critical, like you said. I mean, the key, all of this stuff is driven by young. creatives and you're right the advertising industry then pays millions and sometimes billions of dollars just to try and catch up yeah because they find out about what people are doing on Brail or Tick talk or Snapchat and then suddenly it takes them about a year and a half to ruin those apps I mean I would say Tick-Tock is already kind of like I I'm already exhausted by Tick-Tock it

the not the risk to reward but like the effort to reward ratio of Tick-Tock is not what it was last year and that enough is just like even just that small change is enough of a barrier of entry to me who already has a massive platform on that platform and i'm just like i i don't want to put in the effort for this because it's already they're monetizing it more you know they're cranking up the engines they do this every single time they they flood it with ads and they find more ways to exploit you and sell your information so you're right it's it's it's a constant game of like staying ahead of the advertisers and finding ways to find ways to game the system because that's actually where all

influencers came from. It's very rare that influencers actually arrive when all of the advertising gears are up and running. That whole generation of early Instagram influencers, there's no way that they could blow up now because their brands, I mean, it was just Instagram rewards so many different things now. Like they reward advertising in a way that they rewarded creativity early on. And those same people wouldn't have a chance. The early TikTok creators who were just like dancing and they got six million followers because of the algorithm just decided to show them

to like the other 12 people that were on TikTok. Like that wouldn't happen today, you know, and what's the next thing that's going to be like that where there's a brief window where people can really sort of stand out

and become the leaders in that. And the problem is that so often these people are just the most vapid, like, you know, off gassing of late stage capitalist society. It's like your Jake Paul's and your Bella Porches and all that. sort of stuff. But I think, you know, if you're actually paying attention to it and seeing it

for the powerful tool that it is, I think there's a chance that you can get a kind of more cooperative and decentralized model in there. Yeah. Yeah, it's, it really raises a lot of questions, though, about, you know, this, this idea of like building infrastructure, right? So, you know, this is one of the things I personally struggle with is because it's like we obviously have a decent platform on a couple of different social media sources. And those are predominantly, you could call them, older, saturated platforms. And you can see this play out on Instagram where you can get to a certain size, but they will not let you grow past that without spending money.

They do not want you to grow past that size. They will not push your content unless another bigger page shares it. Like you are where you are and that is it. And I think you probably start to feel that a little bit too. You carry capacity thing. Like, all right, we're not going to let you progress from this, from this level to the next level unless you put some advertising dollars behind you. Yeah. And like, obviously that that speaks to the fact the market is what it is.

There's no organic growth in that sense. And I mean, you see this a lot now with like YouTube and that like there's people still trying to get in on something like YouTube, even though it's so fully saturated. It's, it's impossible to try to stand out. Whatever you were going to try to do, someone has probably done it. and to circle this back to this conversation of like how this relates to you know organizing raising funds what i like to call low effort high reward organizing where you can do something very simple as you know i'll just pick on myself you know posting on instagram you know we're looking for reviews if we hit x amount of reviews we'll have more reviews than so-and-so

like a far right wing pundit or whatever it might be and like just basically shitposts our way to get like 300 reviews on iTunes and like you know that that took five minutes of me and you know two minutes for each person to go up on iTunes and give a five-star review or whatever it was like in terms of like iTunes that's a huge like bumping to 300 iTunes reviews is like massive that is like bigger than 95% of podcasts like most podcasts don't have that many reviews you're not going to get it from the podcast you have to use another source yeah exactly Like a slew you have to open up the, you have to open up the sluice juice from Instagram in order to juice the podcast and yeah, all that. Yeah, like I think about it like if you like you live in New York City, you're on the top floor.

You have all that heat coming up. And if you have good insulation, it's all just going to sit there. And then you open that window and that pressure from the heat, the temperature difference just like shoots the air out the window. And that's what you're doing by having these social media platforms that you can then leverage into these other things. And that's where all that the gimmicks, frankly, the bullshit that you can do with social media to start drawing attention and then converting it to that low, low effort, high reward activity. That's where I see a lot of like the mutual aid organizing, you know, all these other things that people are starting to try to figure out how to do constructively on social media to take advantage of those algorithms in a way that can be, again, more accessible to people. And I think there's a number of ways we could be doing that, that we're not doing a really good job. One of them, I think, is voting, where I think we need to do a much better job on the left, even if you don't believe in voting or whatever.

That, like, it's a low effort activity. How do we, how do, with high, you know, medium to high potential rewards, right? Depending on who the candidate is, whether it's blocking a dangerous candidate or, like, you might have that one in a million chance where you've got a pretty, like, progressive person who might actually be able to take. it if that 10% of the population that's progressive left actually all 100% showed up to vote, right? There's a number of ways we could do this. And I think trying to figure that out and like acknowledging like you'd said before, the like we're at the point where we've grown through the social media. We've seen what it is and the negative effects. Now we have to soberly look at it and say what are we actually going to do this for, right? And I think you honestly,

going back to this, you have to study the right because they're incredibly good at this. Like, I mean, do you think school boards naturally select for theocratic fascists who want to eliminate critical race theory? No. But why is every school board across the nation suddenly populated with those people? It's because a bunch of 50-year-old moms on Facebook groups heard something from Fox News and decided that they were going to be concerned parents. And they influenced a local election because no one gave a crap about the school board. Yeah, and even to that point, like, there's infrastructure in place. And, you know, like, the thing I think people need to understand and why I think.

think this is so important is that the right has money and we might not have money but we know how to do fucking social media like the right is terrible at that they can toss money at it so that it can kind of work for them but like it doesn't and if it did then young people would be in support of these things and it it doesn't happen so like what what what can we do with like to be blunt what can we do with memes in comparison to money and I think we can go pound for pound if we're willing to like organize around it and that's seems like insanity, but I truly believe it. I 100% believe we can do that. I think so too. You know, I would push back on a couple things. First of all, I don't think the right is bad at

social media. I think they're quite good at it for their voting demographic, which happens to be boomers and gin Xers on Facebook. They were really good. For years, they have been capitalizing on Facebook groups and pages that share extremist content that radicalize people. This is what the Russians found out is that you could just create a random, nonsense like Maga page and create, you know, huge amounts of traction. And those are incredibly active people on social media. I would say they use it very effectively. What they don't understand is like how to use new media, stuff like TikTok.

And they're much slower on the uptake with that sort of thing. And you're right. They don't share the values of the younger generation. So the younger generation is less likely to, they're more likely to see through the grift. But I don't think they're bad at social media. In fact, I think there are lessons that the left can take. The problem with the right is they get a little bit overconfident with this stuff. That's kind of the Brad Parscale lesson when he got dunked on by a bunch of TikTok kids

who bought all the tickets that Trump at the stadium. That was really cool. And that's the sort of stuff. That's kind of where I see like, yeah, how do you weaponize? How do we on the left weaponize social media for that sort of stuff too? Create, like understand the algorithms and understand how we can radicalize our own people to do that sort of stuff. because it happens on the right all the time. I mean, the right just feeds you, you go into the alt-right pipeline,

and suddenly, like, you're sharing anti-Semitic memes on a closed Facebook group, and I don't want to share any anti-Semitic means. I'm just saying. I think there's strategies that we can replicate. The thing is that usually starts with, like, there's not really an equivalent to the kind of money coming from the Koch Foundation to, like, the Daily Wire and Prager University and this sort of stuff. Like, we don't have billions of dollars to spend on literal.

griffs. But we can educate. And I think that doing that in a communal way that doesn't emphasize on, like, whenever you see this happen, when you see someone rise above the pack, it's like a, it's like why am I forgetting his name, the leftist Twitch streamer? Oh, Hassan. Talk about it. Why is it like Hassan Piker who gets to be like a leftage Twitch channel?

He just gets to be this like huge match of celebrity. What is he connected to? Loosely the young Turks, which is like a mildly progressive organization. Like, what is his thing? Who is he working? What's his praxis? What's his mutual aid? You know, like, he has a brand that's ethically sourced and union made or whatever.

But what is what is Hassan Piker doing to lift up other Hassan Pikers? Because Hassan Piker has probably single-handedly radicalized a million young people to consider leftist politics. Yeah. He's kind of doing that on his own, right? What if he was identifying future Hassan Pikers, if those are his actual values to, like, do more of that? Yeah. No, you make a really good point. that, you know, and I think this is unfortunately somewhat common on the left is that so few people

break through that they're, you know, that they can actually like make a living being a personality, which is unheard of given, again, this, this continuing like point that we don't have the financial backing that all these other, you know, the right has. And it's, it's, you know, a very precarious position to be in to have that kind of power and to like actually give up your job. And, you know, and I think in a lot of ways, and I'm not going to say Hassan is in the same category, but very much like understand that you're going to be doxed and you will probably, if you become that big, never be able to work like a normal job again. Like this is who you are because you have to be because people are not nice on the right

very often when you are very public and have left-leaning values. But you've made a really good point about Hassan that there isn't, and this for some of our audience might be a little niche, but that he doesn't do a whole lot, at least that I'm aware of, around organizing and connecting people and using the resources that he has to build something bigger than himself. That's disappointing because he does have this incredible reach, and he is, despite the fact that a lot of people on the left don't care for him, he does have a very important role in that spectrum of left politics. And I think that spectrum of left politics is a really good point, because, like, I got radicalized into this stuff, listening to Elizabeth Warren. and reading an non-Garrett Harrodos in the most like milk toast social democrat like books and stuff and I came into the 2020 election like a FDR like social democrat thinking we could yeah I mean

that was like there's stages for all of this stuff right and Hassan Piker is a stage of that his stage is getting the kid who like is used to griefing people on modern warfare to not become a school shooter or a fashion, an online fascist, because he's maybe considering something that this cool guy Hassan, who's a good gamer, said about economics or whatever. And then if he's more interested in that, then that's when he gets handed off to someone who knows more about what they're saying, like my friend Jessica Burbank, who's also on the Young Turks, and it's definitely building something bigger than herself online. Let's just constantly give each other ideological purity tests without understanding that, like, they didn't

just show up one day and have like all of this knowledge just dumped on them. Like they got sort of left pilled through a variety of gates and they stopped at those way stations, you know, one after another. And they can't expect that people who are still at those way stations will be there forever and dismiss them for that notion. Or that they're at the last station, for example, which I find really common that they've found the subjective truth versus like recognizing, hey, I'm 25 or 30 or whatever. it might be 18 years old, I probably don't know everything about life yet. And that's okay. Like I can say,

this is what I believe right now. It's probably going to change. And that is a really difficult pill to swallow in the social media platform, right? Like where everything is documented. It exists. And like we're expected to be perfect. And like that plays into like this whole like cancel culture issue that exists where everyone is expected to, again, just be perfect and be with the proper vernacular. of the time and like it's just it's totally disconnected from the fluidity of the world we live in and especially the fluidity of how social media operates and influences and again we have this like call and response with social media that it's so quickly changing that there's no way to to be you know even according to the social media you know if you tried to follow what is expected of

social media personalities or your how you want to present on the internet there's no way to do that in like real time and and reflect your values 100% and not do something problematic. Right, totally. And like, dude, like, we're two white dudes on a podcast talking about this sort of stuff. Like, I really hope we're not someone's final way station for entry into left because, like, I don't know what I'm saying. And, you know, we can only embody our values to such a degree.

Like, we are the representatives of the privilege that this society has created. I mean, that is us. Yeah. So it's like, I think people on the right understand. And it was funny because like when I was in those circles, people always be like, oh, yeah. Well, he's like, they're slow. And they would talk about how, like, they would see different liberals who were becoming centrist and then they'd become conservatives because like the left had gone too far or whatever.

And they would like see them making that transition and be like cheering them on. Like, oh, yeah, he's starting to listen to Jordan Peterson. Soon it'll be Ben Shapiro. Then it'll be, I don't know, I don't know, Richard Taylor or Richard Spencer or whatever. You know, like, and I think for us, like, we need to be more appreciative of the fact that there's a wide net that, like, I don't know. In my opinion, the left should be the most welcoming place for anybody. And instead, it's a fucking minefield. It's a huge minefield.

And it is because it is, the way that it behaves is so opposite, it's, it's proposed values. And it's really interesting. I mean, like small, and I don't want to wander too far off your topic. So let me know if I'm straying. but like small anecdote here growing up sort of in the church and everything I was always just struck how the things we were taught to believe about the world and God and the universe and each other seem to be so opposite to how the church as an institution and the people inside of it behaved towards each other it was just I was constantly affronted by the hypocrisy of the dissonance between values and behavior and I feel like that when I came to the left I was like I was excited. I mean, I knew better than to be like rosy-eyed because I'd had a lot of interactions with the left before I actually started to be convinced by them. And I was trolling the left before I was trolling from the left, if that makes sense. So I knew better than to think it was just going to be all rainbows and butterflies.

But I genuinely was hoping it would be a more welcoming place. And in many ways it has. Like, I do not deserve to be welcomed in the left as much as I have. But a lot of people have had worse treatment than me. And I think it should be a place that is just very open to. who I keep using religious language, but repented people. People like me who were dyed in the wool Republicans who were raised from birth to basically become heralds of Christian nationalism

and capture the apparatus of the state on behalf of like a Christopacist apocalyptic vision. It's a long way to come. There's a lot of people who are at various stages of that, you know, and you got to sit with them and let them germinate and marinate for a little while until they're ready to kind of come to the next step, you know, which is dismantling fossil fuel infrastructure. Obviously, yeah. You know, I think this all plays, though, like, into the same narrative, though, of, like, you know, why social media, you know, we've been talking about kind of, like, how you can organize around it, but also, like, it does inevitably have this, like, pyramid effect, right, where you can't really stay in the middle. You are going to go left or the right.

there's a peak and no one can stay there for very long because it's just not possible you know i obviously like on social media we're pretty far left leaning and um like the the content if you go like on the explore page is pretty left leaning but if i look at something that's one image that's anti joe bush uh joe bush joe biden like suddenly all my feet will be ben shapiro and you know joe rogan and like really replacement theory stuff within at least on tictock yeah like it goes very quick and like you brought up this fact about like social media and how the right is actually good at it for what it wants to do but that's where you see that that monetary piece right they can stuff that explore page with advertisements like they have you know limitless amounts of money to try to run that

machine to pick up whatever scraps they can from anyone that's you know slightly center anti joe biden or whatever it might be and just toss content at them and see if something sticks and we don't have that, but we do have the virulness, right? We have the ability to make content, people engage with and share and can go viral. And there's a lot we can talk about in terms of like how the algorithm manipulates and like we were just saying, can throttle pages that are going viral because we aren't the ones spending money. But it doesn't mean that power isn't still there. No, I mean, I got 50,000 followers on TikTok in about six months just by like talking to the camera while I was like unemployed and like didn't have health insurance like living in california just chilling doing

nothing and my production value is shit but like they allowed me to build a platform there and now they're starting to throttle it right as my like production quality is getting better and i'm actually policing my content to make it more interesting so yeah like there's definitely an opportunity i think it's a window a window of opportunity to get in on these things before they get throttled but you got to take advantage of it now i'm a little bit older than you so uh you can probably speak to this a little better than I can, especially given how much time you spend with social media. We haven't talked too much about some of the work you've done, but you did raise a bunch of money for some folks in Ukraine that were in need of medical care.

You know, that was completely based in having a social media presence. And I think it speaks to the power of, again, the low, effort, high impact return on being able to just utilize something like a social media platform. But what does this really mean when we start thinking about the future of these platforms? you know, we're seeing today, you know, as we're recording, Twitter is like a disaster. It's falling apart. Facebook has just reported, like, huge earnings losses. Even though their earnings losses aren't because of advertiser revenue, you're seeing

more strict throttling because they need to raise money to offset the costs of the Metaverse. And like, then you've got TikTok, which is starting to go through the same monetization as meta and Twitter. So, like, there's obviously the proverbial wheels are starting to come off the franchise the social media platforms that have existed now for five years to a decade now, that means something is going to change. And I'm curious about your thoughts about what that looks like or how we can take the knowledge we've learned at this point around organizing under social media to be ready

and ahead of the curve with whatever it might come. It's truth social, man. That's the future. Yeah. I don't know how to predict it. And I only say that. I say that because I'm literally the last person to like, Be Real was the first. one of the things where I was like slightly ahead and I was still behind like most college students.

I don't know what that is. I'm going to be completely honest. Be real. It's supposed to be like anti-social media. It's basically it's like what Snapchat was supposed to be where it's like this role unfiltered like part of your life. But basically it's an app where it sounds so dumb when you describe it. It really is and I'm embarrassed that I'm on it. But it's fun.

So basically once a day every 24 hours a notification goes out to everybody in the world. to take, they have two minutes to take a photo, whatever it is. Yeah, I think I've heard of this now, now that you say it. And so it's supposed to incentivize you to share your authentic experience. It is really nice when you're like, my life is not interesting. I'm just like staying home and doing a thing. And then you go on Be Real, it's like all your friends are sitting in their offices or on their commutes.

And it's like, okay, look at us. All equally image. And then there's that one person who's like at a vacation in the Maldives and you're just like, okay. So it is, it's a more authentic form of social media. And it's user base is very young, which is like a great indicator. The oldest person I know on Be Real just friended me like three days ago. And he's like 36.

I wouldn't be the oldest person. Look at that. Barely, but I wouldn't. Yeah. So it's like, I mean, that's a trend, right? What are we doing with Be Real? I mean, do we need to be doing anything with Be Real? Maybe not.

Maybe people just want to look at pictures of each other eating sandwiches. It's kind of like what Instagram was supposed to be until influencers ruined it. So I don't know how to predict what's next. It's just kind of you have to know it when you see it. I feel like there are probably people who are better at predicting that. I think it's more like once you do see it, putting an action plan into place for how to use it. That's also difficult because like you and I are not organizationally affiliated.

Like we're not working with the DSA. We're not working with like, and there's reasons I don't do that. There's reasons I don't work with the S.A. You know, like, there's reasons I don't work with a lot of these other organizations, even like BLM and stuff like that. I mean, I may attend some of their events or reshare some of their content and stuff like that, but like I don't want to be a participant in their organizing strata, but you kind of have to build an organizing strata.

And I think that that's something that has to be done communally. And with the help of organizations, but not under any, like, I don't know. It's a weird place. It's a weird place to be because I feel like you and I are both in this slightly disillusion stage of all this. I don't know what you're talking about. Never been disillusioned. Still like trying to be positive and trying to create connections and stuff while dealing with sort of, I don't know. I mean, I would say you and I are definitely, we're definitely, I think we appeal more to the libertarian left side of the left. We're certainly more forgiven by them. And I think, you know, you've brought up this idea of, like, how do we organize without becoming these, just recreating the monster that exists on the other side.

You know, obviously there's limitations from what we can and can't do because of resources. And, you know, ultimately, for 99% of us, this will never be a job to do this kind of work. But that that doesn't mean the work isn't necessary. And that, like, the future of the planet doesn't very much depend on, like, people organizing and figuring out how to game these things. because that that is like the sober reality, right? That we have to figure it out there. The alternative is bad for the entire planet. Yeah.

And that seems silly to say that about like Twitter, right? Or TikTok or Instagram that, you know, we have to figure out how to game these systems to be able to organize and to reach people and to de-radicalize people. And again, like thinking of that like pyramid, like keeping people from following the other direction, right, to going down these like fascist right-wing, rabbit holes because they're so welcoming and they've you know even as a social media platform that's

like very vocal about our politics what we see or what i've seen is multiple people reach out and like just drop some like very light fascist ideas and like very like nicely and trying to engage with me and like not pushing it and just being like i'm going to let this idea sit in the simmer and like yeah there's like really yeah i get respect i get respectful emails from fast all the time being like, hey, would you like to debate this in a respectful way? Or like, I would like to have a discussion with you on my podcast about, you know, whatever weird fascist idea. Yeah.

And like, they're always very respectful about it. Yeah, because. Whereas like, like, FOP, you don't share my precise interpretation of Marx. Yeah, like, it speaks to the fact that they understand this. Like, I think about it like as fishing, like, you know, like quite literally fishing. Like, you know, you have to, you're playing the long game. You don't expect the fish to bite the first time. You don't, you know, rip the fish out of the water the second it shows any interest.

It's like this whole game, this cat and mouse game that they play. And they're really good at it. And it's understood that's the way it's played for the right. We don't do that at all. And again, the way we engage with the social media, I think, is really important in understanding that. Because that manifests in the, just like you had said, in this way of how we engage with the social media post about, like, whether or not it's, you know, problematic or whatever it might be. or if somebody comments and it's not, you know, your brand of whatever, that like they're, they're terrible people.

Whereas the right is, like, some of that exists, like for sure. But also, like, it's much more encouraging to get to the finish line, so to speak. Whereas we're critical that you're not at the finish line and as though there is a finish line. As if leftism is a competition that you only win when you're like executed via a firing squad in some struggle somewhere. Yeah, like, yeah. it gives me so much anxiety. But here's the thing that the right benefits.

Because the far rights ideas are hateful on their face. So they have to be, the poison pill has to be hidden in a palatable container. And they are really good at that because they understand that their ideas are hateful on their face. They're not going to lead with the conversation. I mean, you might have this in like white supremacist prison gangs. but like your actual white supremacist who's like trying to like black pill you or whatever

or red pill or whatever they're going to be hiding all of the nasty stuff behind a veneer of very respectable conversations they just want to engage with you about crime statistics they just want to engage with you about immigration and climate change they just want to engage with you about you know white birth rates whatever it happens to be they're going to hide their conclusion, which is that we need to create a safe homeland for white children in a much more nuanced conversation because they're hoping to catch you off guard. And I think that the left needs to adapt the strategy that they take, the pains that they take, not to mask their ideology necessarily, because we believe in things that are valuable and, you know, on their

face, I think good ideas. We still have to get through 100 years of anti- anti-leftist propaganda which has been sponsored at every level of government and business which has made people knee-jerk react with negative associations when you say things like socialism, communism,

anarchism, you know, John Brown Malcolm X, all these sorts of things like lots of people have negative associations for those things. I had great conversation with a Republican school teacher from Oklahoma the other day who hated Trump because he was a history teacher and he hated all this sort of stuff and he he was like a like a Lincoln Republican you know like this sort of thing just like a pro-life

evangelical guy but like very history oriented he understood why the Republican Party had gone insane and you have to and I had an amazing conversation with him because I was like you know what I share your concern about this that and the other like I am right there with you on this that and the other and I was like I don't even really I don't really identify as a democrat so now that's interesting you know and I thought about it was like yeah my my ideology is basically, you know, is summarized by like this random dude in Kurdistan who came up with like a feminist-led reading of Murray Bookchin's ideas about social ecology. And he's never heard of that.

But he's like, oh, the Kurds. Yeah, we like the Kurds. Yeah. I mean, like the Kurds are our allies. You know, this. And so I was like, yeah, the Kurds. Yes, the Kurds. They're our allies.

They're great, right? We love the Kurds. And they have been fighting for freedom, you know. And it was kind of like a really interesting sort of. way to get into that conversation without being like i think your party is full of fascists who want to destroy like not only the planet but also most good things about life and i i think that's something um that if you don't get off of social media you don't have those experiences although social media can be an opportunity for those as well like not to you know there's always that asterisk where those

things can happen but when i was younger was a carpenter union you worked a lot of union guys and a lot of them we're boomers, right? So, you know, this 20-something-year-old, early 20s, you know, long hair, big beard, radical. And all these guys would, you know, be talking about, like, you know, going out hunting. Remember when we were kids, there'd always be snow on the ground during hunting season? It's not there anymore. And I'd be like, yeah, that's climate change. And they'd be like, no. I'm like, well, then why do you think there's never snow on the ground in the fall anymore? And, like, it was because I was engaging with it from that, like, taking a very loaded word or phrase. and engaging with them on the subject matter,

and they were going to have that knee-jerk reaction without just saying, like, yeah, you're right. Isn't that weird? It seems like the whole winters aren't as cold as they used to be. And just being like, we should do something about that. Or like, we should look into that. You know, like, just getting them to think about it instead of it being this political knee-jerk, right?

I mean, do what the fascists do and very patiently, like, you know, show them, show them like small statistics or whatever. Like, you're trying to basically bring them into this radical understanding of it. It's just that their radical understanding is incredibly hateful and involves genocide. And I was just like, can we please have nice things? Can we have healthcare? And we have healthcare and forests. That's all we're asked to please. Yeah, Charles, this has been really interesting. Any last final words you want to leave? Social medias, because obviously you're on all of them.

Anything like that? Yeah, I would just say, first of all, like you mentioned something earlier, which I wanted to kind of push back on a little bit because you're talking about, it was like bullshit that you're like creating memes and like everyone's doing memes. And maybe you found a podcast because of a meme. But like I did find your podcast because of a meme. I found your account because of a meme. So like that works. And now I've appeared on your podcast two times. So like you, there's proof of concept here. And I think that you might think these are like, like you said, low effort investments into something. But they are really high reward. So I just wanted to encourage you from that standpoint. Yeah. So now everyone that's listening,

doesn't follow us on social media is going to be like wait i miss the memes i need to see these memes how do i need we need to come up with some memes to announce this oh don't worry i will that's my new my new methodology for how i drop episodes uh and we can we'll talk about that after we get off and i can tell you how that's going but uh yeah this has been great go ahead i was just going to say people can follow me on ticot and instagram at charles mcbride that's mcbride with a why it is a It is a wild ride and I really can't even recommend that you follow me on social media. It's just very random. But if you would like to subject yourself to that, you're welcome to do that.

And yeah, I mean, the organization I set up in Ukraine, I still give a lot of time to that. That's Mission Harkiv. We're a medical relief organization. And if you want to support that, it's just missionharkiv.com. And we're on social as under that handle as well. Thanks so much. Yeah, man. Take care.