The Glenn Show's New Initiatives

Let's do the work!

As many of you may be aware, the conversations I’ve been having on the Glenn Show over the last year—especially those with my friend John McWhorter—have made an impact. The show has become a kind of intellectual and emotional resource for people who feel alienated by the tenor of the current conversation around race in the U.S., and they’ve been reaching out to let us know, to ask what they can do to help, or in some cases even to ask for help themselves.

In fact, so many people have been reaching out that it’s become impossible for me to respond to everyone!

Consequently, the team here at the Glenn Show has put together a set of new initiatives to help organize everything, to make sure everyone gets heard, and to help bring the community together.

The first item is a new email address: thework@glennshow.com. The second is a Discord server, a place where people who contribute to the Glenn Show on Patreon will be able to connect with each other directly.

In the conversation below, I talk with Bloggingheads Creative Director Nikita Petrov about the genesis of these initiatives, how they work, and what we hope to achieve. We lay out what you should send to the new email address (there are a couple simple instructions) and why we think this project is so necessary right now.

Let’s do the work!

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NIKITA PETROV: There's a couple of things that we want to announce. There's a special email address that we set up for people to send in certain kinds of messages, and there's going to be a Discord server, like a platform for the patrons to communicate with one another on an ongoing basis. 

Now, we'll get into that in a little bit. But I think for the purposes of clarity, for me as well as the audience, I want to ask you whether it seems to you, if my perception is correct, that the Glenn Show recently has become more than what it used to be. Like when we started the Patreon, the community started gathering. I've heard you and John talk about the volume of messages that you're getting in the email. And that's the reason we set up a special email address that we're going to talk about in a little bit. How recent is the change in the volume or has it been huge for the last years?

GLENN LOURY: No, something is going on for sure, I think, in this last year since the summer of 2020, the murder of George Floyd the protests, the rise of Black Lives Matter to an even higher degree of prominence, the global reaction to events in the United States, the sense of a reckoning, the election of Donald Trump and the subtext of racial themes that that carried with it. 

I mean, there's a long list of stuff that one could point to here. The continuing negative and problematic encounters between people of color and police officers that create one after another after another of these viral incidents and so on. There is a heightened sense of concern about race-related questions, which had been the beat that John McWhorter and I, the Black Guys at Bloggingheads.tv, had carved out for ourselves. So, I mean, you're the guy that keeps track of the metrics. My guess is that some of the episodes that John and I posted at the Glenn Show where we entertained some of these questions and talked about them candidly and critically attracted extraordinary attention—you know, a hundred thousand plus views on YouTube—much more so than our conversations had been attracting heretofore. 

So there's a heightened interest in the subject matter. There's a distinctive voice, I think it could be said, that I am bringing and that John and I are bringing. We're not clones, John and I. John McWhorter speaks quite well for himself. He is my conversation partner on a regular basis at the Glenn Show. We talk more or less twice a month as a regular course of affairs. But we have a somewhat distinctive voice. It's a kind of contrarian voice. We're not saying what you would find on the cable news channels or on the pages of the national newspapers and magazines or in the websites that you associate with progressive reportage. We're cutting against the grain a little bit. 

People who watched the Glenn Show will know more specifically what I mean by that. But it has a character that I think people—many people, if I judge by the comments that are left at YouTube and at the Bloggingheads site and at the Patreon page that we have—judged by the reactions of people in the comments there, they are identifying something that's unique about the way in which we're talking about these issues. Uniquely distinct from the acceptable politically correct view. I mean, we cut against the grain, and I think that people are attracted by that. 

So you asked me if there's been a change qualitatively in the nature of the reaction to what we're offering at the Glenn Show. And I believe that that's the case. I don't have an exact count, but I can tell you that I could spend all of my time reading and reacting to email messages that I get to my personal account. I use my Brown University email for pretty much a hundred percent of my email traffic. It looks like that's probably a mistake. You are going to explain at greater length what you have done for the people communicating to us at Patreon to segregate some of those messages out. 

But there's a lot of stuff that's coming in. People are asking us for advice. People are basically spilling their guts. They're telling us their life stories. They are confessing to us or confirming for themselves that at least somebody can understand what it is that they're talking about. They just need to write the letter. And I'm talking about hundreds of people, because that's the volume of the incoming that I'm experiencing. And I think John McWhorter could similarly report. 

So there seems to be a hunger out there. You know, we're national treasures in some of these accounts. We are making it possible for people to go on with their daily lives, where we're saving them from madness. They quite literally are saying, “I would go mad but for the relief that I get when I listen to you guys,” and so on. So yeah we're at a particular kind of cultural/political moment, it would appear, in the country here in the United States of America. 

And on the race questions, I want to say this modestly, I think that what I've been saying and writing and what John McWhorter has been saying in writing—and again, I emphasize we are distinct personalities with our own respective views of these matters—has touched a nerve in America and even beyond. I mean, we get correspondence from people in Europe and Australia and so on as well. It's touched a nerve out there somewhere, and I've felt a certain degree of satisfaction that we're so appreciated. Of course, there are many who don't appreciate us, but that's another question.

So by way of outlining the trajectory of where we are now and where we might be headed. I heard a conversation between you and John where you said those things, similar things to the ones that you said just now. I guess you just aired the idea right there in that conversation: Maybe now that there is some money in the Patreon account, maybe you guys should hire somebody to sort through all of these messages. Because even reading them is becoming difficult, let alone answering or answering meaningfully, actually providing some advice if a person is asking for advice and things of that sort. 

And so what we decided to do, as we're trying to figure out what to do with this, is to set up a special email address—thework@glennshow.com—that would be used specifically for these kinds of messages that seem to require action on your part. I suggested that we set up four categories that people could label their message with, if I can remember them: work, grow, info, and help. 

If somebody wants to offer some volunteer work, they would put the word "work" in the title. If somebody has ideas for how this project, the Glenn Show, and your overall enterprise can develop, they should use the word "grow." If they need help, ‘cause you've been getting these messages where somebody is asking, like, “I need a lawyer, is what I need at this juncture,” then they should put the word “help” in the subject line. And then if there is information that they want to share about what's happening at their place of employment or the school they attend or the school their kids go to that is relevant to your beat, then they should put the word "info" in it.

So this is the first time we're mentioning this email address on the Glenn Show, but we put it out on Patreon and in your newsletter on Substack. Those are not huge venues, but we've gotten quite a few messages. I was looking at those messages, and at the time of looking at those messages is when I realized that I underestimated the scope of this thing. And by “this thing,” I mean, both the Glenn Show and the subjects that you are discussing.

Can I just interrupt for a moment, Nikita? Because I want to just reiterate what you said. The email address is thework@glennshow.com, and we ask that people use one of four code words in the title or the subject line of their email: work, grow, help, or info. Those are pretty much self-explanatory. But it's a great help to us if people both direct their communications about the Glenn Show to that email address, and if they identify the rough subject that they are writing about with these code words: work, grow info, and help. So I just wanted to reiterate that.

We've gotten quite a few messages, and I was thinking of structuring this conversation around those messages. Certain themes seemed like important, difficult-to-address challenges to deal with, to me. So I wanted to bring some of those to your attention and hear your views on those. 

Well, actually before we go into that, another announcement. Since it is still the case that even though there is a special email address and fewer emails there, I suppose, than in your personal account, that's still a lot. And it's still a challenge to figure out how to actually do something about the concerns that people send in. 

So the next step that we thought of is to set up a platform for people to connect with one another. And we decided we're gonna launch a Discord server. Discord is an app that people can use to have group texts chats and audio calls and video calls. And all of the patrons of the Glenn Show will have access to this place where they can talk to one another. Part of the reasoning behind that is some of the messages that came into thework@glennshow.com seem complementary to one another. So one person writes, “Could you point me to a good attorney?” And then another person writes and says, “I'm an attorney, and I would be happy to help if somebody needs my help.”

So if we just put these people together, they could help one another. That's part of it. And I guess another part of it is some of these people are writing and say they've been feeling alone or like they're going crazy or that something is happening to them and they don't know if it's only happening to them or if it's a part of a bigger trend. It seems that in just sharing their experiences with one another, getting to understand the situation in a broader scope than their particular locality, there can be a benefit too.  

We don't know how it’s going to go, but we're hoping that this is going to be of help. So if you are a patron of the Glenn Show, you're going to have access to this Discord account. We're going to put instructions on the Patreon website and I'll check in at that place and we'll see whether a productive conversation can be fostered there. 

Let me underscore that the email portal that we previously discussed here is open to anyone who wants to communicate with us, but that this community that we're going to be creating at the Discord server that allows for interested parties to interact with each other will be accessible through our patreon.com/glennshow page to our patrons at either the $5 per month or the $10 per month tier.

That's correct.

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