Trae Crowder
speaker
594 appearances
3 recordings
2 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Trae Crowder’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
He was preaching fire and brimstone about the dangers of transgender people using the bathrooms with their little girls and all this type of stuff. And it's like not a dick joke inside. It wasn't funny at all. Just spewing venom. And it had like 20 million views or something like that on Facebook. Amongst people on the right, obviously. But when I saw that, I was like, oh, wow, okay.
If that guy doing that thing, if that's what I'm trying to make fun of or whatever, then I don't need to do anything fancy about it. In fact, that would be a mistake. That would be the wrong thing to do. I should just do exactly what this guy does. I should just pull my phone out and yell at it. Yeah. And once I had that sort of realization, I made the first one like in the next couple of days.
And the first one got like 50,000 views or something, which I was over the moon about. I was thrilled with that. And then the second one I made was also about the whole transgender bathroom law thing. And that one like went to the moon. It's like 30, 50 million views or something. And just like. went like crazy, you know, megaton viral and like changed my life literally overnight.
So it was like zero to a thousand. So I'd been working at it for a while and it was a very deliberate thing, but I also did not expect it to work like that. And then when it did, like I still had a day job at the time and I posted it the night before and I was sitting at my day job the next day and it was like an office job. I worked for the U.S.
Department of Energy, which I'm sure won't exist soon, but I used to work there. And I was sitting in a conference room in some meeting, and, like, my phone, like, got hot in my pocket. Like, so hot. Like, I don't know if you remember, around this era, phones would sometimes just explode. Yes. Remember how phones used to just blow up for a while? Yeah.
So my phone got like real hot in my pocket. And I like freaked out, put it up, threw it on the table or whatever. Like, you know, told everybody to duck, get down. It's going to blow. But it didn't. It wasn't exploding. It's because I had, you know, I got like notifications and stuff. And it overloaded my phone when it all started.
And the phone never did explode, but it ran the battery completely down in 15 minutes or something. And my phone died. And I'm still at work knowing that something is happening. But now my phone is dead and I'm there the rest of the day. And by the time I got off work and got home, it was like... You know, I mean, like I said, my life had changed. I wasn't ready for it either.
Now I have a fan page. First of all, at this point in time, Facebook was still the main one.
Well, 10 years ago, almost 10 years ago, Facebook was still the main one. Of course, yeah. And so all this was on Facebook. And I didn't even have a fan page or nothing. That first video that went viral was just on my personal Facebook page. So I maxed out my number of Facebook friends immediately. First of all, I shouldn't have been accepting all those people as friends. Because it's different.
Followers and friends, it's two different things. But at the time, I was like, I got to accept I accept everybody, but I maxed that out immediately, and then it was just nuts, and I was getting... I got contacted by Warner Brothers. They signed me to a development deal. I signed a book deal with a publisher. I started touring. I quit my day job and started touring.
I didn't think anyone was going to... Even in spite of all that, I didn't think anyone was going to come to the shows. I was like, you know, dude, look, it's one thing to watch somebody... Like, to click play on a video on your computer or on a phone. Right. Like, it's a very different thing to... Spend $20 and get a babysitter or whatever and come out to a comedy show.
I was like, nobody's going to do that because of these. And we did a trial run of one week of dates. And the very first tour date I ever had as a headliner was at the Punchline in Atlanta. And it sold out almost immediately. We had to add a second show and it sold out too. And that's when I was like... Holy shit. This is wild.
So thankfully, I did beforehand, I had a manager already who lived in Los Angeles, but she was very green and new. She was like a rookie manager herself. They gave you the rookie, yeah. But she... still she helped me navigate all that because she at least, you know, had some notion of how things were supposed to work, but like, I didn't even have an agent yet or anything.
And the, the Warner brother, the, the, um, like, uh, uh, assistant to, or secretary of, or something like that of the president of Warner brothers television, like sent me a message on Facebook is how that is, how that happened initially. And then, um,
and then I got contacted by a literary agent, uh, because she knew that, you know, there was, uh, whatever, a publisher wanted to do a book deal or something. And, um, yeah. And it just, I mean, it was wild. And then I was on, you know, a couple months later I was on like real time with Bill Maher the Friday after the election in 2016, like three days after the election appearance.
Like the whole, that was so surreal, that whole thing. Because, I mean, you know. Of course. Everybody was pretty gobsmacked in that audience or in that production staff and everything. Like people were not expecting that to have happened. And the mood was just wild. And especially added to it is the fact that I'm fresh out of the holler and I'm, you know, I'm new to all this.
So just the experience of even being there was crazy to me. And then add on top of that, the larger societal context and the energy and everything. And it was like, I mean, it was nuts.
I mean, I don't know. I really do think like I know I just said a minute ago, like right before I went viral and I was doing that bit on stage in 2015 and it was fine. That is all true. But it still does feel to me like it. A happened pretty quickly and be like, you know, coincided with the rise of Donald Trump and MAGA specifically.
And I feel like the reason for that is all the people who are not on board with it were so just so powerfully like you guys are joking, right? Like that's you cannot be serious here.
And then the people who were on board with it were already so sensitive to feeling condescended to, or however you want to put it, by the same people, that that really struck a nerve with them, the general reaction to it. And also they liked it in a way that we were so put off by the whole thing. And it just like...
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