Portions of this interview were published in this months issue of The Progressive - which I recommend picking up - it's in stores now! It's about 2000 words of a 7500 interview I did with Alex Winter... one that I managed to never ask him a question about Bill & Ted as I am a serious adult journalist and not a fan boy. (It was really really tough). The video version of this interview will be posted soon here - assuming I can post such a long video, I haven't tried yet. 

This is our first episode of the New Year and we’re opening with a big one. I interviewed actor and documentary filmmaker Alex Winter - who you of course will know as Bill from Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. For nearly as long as he’s been acting, he’s been directing - doing everything from TV shows like Ben 10 to documentaries like the incredible Panama Papers.

Winter’s latest documentary film, The YouTube Effect, delves into how YouTube, its parent company, Google, and the public need to come to terms with its far-reaching influence on society. It does this quite subtly by speaking with the people who know the site best—its founders and content creators. Winter told me that he did not want anyone on camera that “wasn’t embedded in the YouTube machine somehow.”

Winter speaks to content creators who have achieved Hollywood-level stardom—although you may not know them unless you are in their demographic. Ryan Kaji, of Ryan’s World fame, is an eleven-year-old with 33.6 million YouTube subscribers. Anthony Padilla was the co-creator of the Smosh channel, which had twenty-five million subscribers and over ten billion video views.

The influence and reach of these channels, especially with kids and young adults, is undeniable. But even as someone who covers online content for a living, I had never heard of them. Both are noncontroversial figures in the YouTube world, but there are many more on the site that create edgy content for views—and millions of dollars in advertising revenue. For some creators, that means becoming a gateway to the alt-right pipeline.

For years, YouTube’s algorithm pushed videos to viewers that it believed they would like, based on videos they had previously watched, which usually meant ones with a large amount of interaction and controversy. This would lead people from Joe Rogan to Jordan Peterson, for example, and then to someone like white supremacist Stefan Molyneux.

The film speaks to the wider issue of online polarization and the effect of social media on all of us.

YouTube is here to stay, so we will have to figure out how to deal with it. The YouTube Effect is an important documentary about a problem that so many of us seem to hope will resolve on its own. Spoiler alert: It won’t.

Get Andy's book here: https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/andy-campbell/we-are-proud-boys/9780306827464/

Welcome to the Visu.news podcast, I’m Zach D Roberts and this week I’m chatting with Huffington Post reporter and author of a new book on the proud boys - Andy Campbell. 

Much of the American public first learned of rightwing hate gang the Proud Boys after the infamous presidential debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden in which Trump ordered them to “stand back and stand by.” But they were terrorizing communities for years before that. Andy Campbell is one of the few reporters who have been covering the Proud Boys from day one. In his superb new book, We Are Proud Boys: How a Right-Wing Street Gang Ushered in a New Era of American Extremism, Campbell lays out everything you need to know about the gang that helped organize a coup attempt in Washington, D.C. on January 6.

Campbell started out at Huffington Post as a crime reporter. He moved to politics in 2016 and, as with many journalists covering Trump, his job shifted into covering far-right extremism. “The Proud Boys stuck out right from the beginning as something more concerning than the other guys,” Campbell told me when I interviewed him for the article below. He was right, of course, and unlike a lot of the media in those days, he covered them with the skepticism that they deserved. 

Generous media profiles of the Proud Boys’ cool hipster co-founder Gavin McInnes, who also  co-founded Vice magazine, made the rounds on the Internet. Many journalists allowed him to promote the gang on their airwaves and websites as a “drinking club with a patriotism problem.” Unfortunately for the nation, these profiles ignored his regular calls for violence along the way, something that We Are Proud Boys documents extensively. 

The story of the Proud Boys wouldn’t be complete without discussing Trump’s boogeyman: antifa. Campbell’s book, in chronicling the far right, also features interviews with some of the people who investigated and infiltrated the organization at a time when law enforcement was defending them at Black Lives Matter protests. 

We Are Proud Boys does the tough job of delving into the origins and myths that bolstered the gang, including the odd and cruel story behind the source of its name (it’s from the Aladdin musical, but you’ll need to read the book for the messed up part). Even if you’re already familiar with the Proud Boys, this book is a riveting read that reminds you of all the times that we could have stopped them. 

Read the interview at https://progressive.org/