Offline with Jon Favreau - How Tim Walz’s Big Dad Energy Went Viral

Episode Date: August 11, 2024

Why is Tim Walz, a 60-year-old dad from Minnesota, so internet savvy? And why is he so good at making right wingers look not just weird, but also extremely, chronically and dangerously online? Jon and Max discuss the meme appeal of Harris’ new VP pick, why Republicans are sinking deeper into weirdness with transphobic attacks on Olympians, and what X’s latest legal tantrum is really about. For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail] and include the name of the podcast.

There are a lot of different reasons that people would want to, like, meme Kamala onto the top of the Democratic ticket, right? I can't believe this is a sentence that was said here. Not only a sentence that was said, but a sentence that will, like, maybe determine the, like, course of democracy in the world's largest, richest country. We're GameStopping the Democratic ticket right to the White House. You know, I've said it before. The GameStop short sellers were right. They were right. And now the Democratic Party is right. I'm Jon Favreau. I'm Max Fisher. Max. Jon. The internet. Okay. Has gone from being coconut pilled. Oh my God. To being walls pilled. I'm walls pilled. Me too. Who isn't now? I literally don't know a single person who isn't who's not named J.D. Vance. The next viral political sensation is a 60-year-old dad from Minnesota

who Kamala Harris tapped as her running mate this week. Governor Tim Walls was a dark horse candidate who emerged from a crowded field of potential picks where Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro was the clear favorite of the political class, but the internet had other ideas. After Walls broke through the news cycle with his description of J.D. Vance and his ideas as super creepy and just weird, he became the choice of online resistance libs and even young lefties who have now basically manifested the entire Democratic ticket. Charlie Warzel has a good piece about this in the atlantic where he writes dad is exactly the right meme to counter the alienating

and extremely online tendencies of the right wing wall seems like he would rather not engage a feeling that may be familiar even aspirational to voters tiring of an era of doom scrolling and weird hyper online politics. How and why do you think the internet fell in love with a 60-year-old dad from Minnesota? So July 23rd, Morning Joe, the day the earth moved and democratic politics finally caught up with the internet. Charlie Favreau's birthday. Okay. July 23rd, big day. Timmy got him a present.

Also a little weird. So he went on Morning Joe, which is not the place where I would expect the Democratic Party to finally embrace the internet. And that was where he started to give this like just weird line. Or he had actually given it before, but that was the moment where the clip, for whatever reason, that was the clip that got like dropped into Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, and just fully took off. And that was where kind of like what happened to Kamala when it started to look like Biden might drop out and everybody got coconut pilled. The internet kind of made the collective decision that we loved this, we're really excited about this and kind of memed him into the stratosphere of democratic popularity and like i think a lot of people were not particularly familiar with him but it was this same kind of like

memes coming on memes like gathering momentum cycle where the more that people were like hey this guy is pretty funny and charming and he says things that are really attention grabbing that we started to see more and more of that people are pulling out more clips now there's an incentive to like chase virality by finding the next tim wall's clip that people really like and like people pulled a few of his psa interviews and moments they really liked of him like talking about sports and kind of turned him into this like internet main character in a way that seems to have put him potentially a heartbeat from the presidency if they win in November, which is like, look, I know we keep saying it. And I think we're going to say it more times in the course of this conversation.

Twitter is real life right now. And that is crazy. I know. And we're going to get to why that's also troubling. What's also interesting is that Tim Walz is good at the internet for being a 60-year-old dad. And his Twitter presence, he's like tweeted texts of his wife telling him that the cat's locked in the house. And then he tweets a picture of him putting the ladder up on the house so that he can go get it. And pictures of him fixing various things.

The Bob Seger records? The Bob Seger records. The Bob Seger records. That was the moment where I was like, it's fucking over for me. This is my guy. A picture of his cat who's upset because he's been trying to get Taylor Swift tickets all morning and the cat's looking at...

He has nailed that. What do you think about Charlie Warzel's take that Walls pits the kind of wholesome fun that used to dominate the internet against the extremely online weirdos like J.D. Vance. That's fun. So I think that's a good point. I think that is definitely part of it making it. And that was part of the like coconut of it all, which had like very little to do with Kamala Harris's record. But it's just like these are fun clips of her being like a little goofy and like talking in a way that is kind of unusual and isn't it kind of a fun bit for all of us to participate in it I think there is also something happening here and

I truly don't know how much is deliberate versus how much the walls team just fell into it where since like 2015 when Donald Trump like truly changed the way our politics worked, obviously in so many ways, but one of which being that he is like very much of the internet and his just like entire mode of controlling the attention economy is like very internet-y, is that like so many politicians have tried to capture that magic by being very of the internet like ron desantis trying to just like pull out these like weirdo like crazy ass like far-right forums and the way they talk about things and like groipers this is jd vance's whole thing is that he is just like from the internet but in a way that is scary and it sucks and it's like some democrats have tried it too and it never works and the thing that trump understood is that it's not about being from an internet subculture. That's not how you went over the internet. You understand the way the attention economy works

in the internet. And Donald Trump was really good at that by saying just like the most provocative things, but that were perfectly placed to just like absolutely dominate what everybody was talking about so that he would tweet something and he just like, we all had to talk about it for the next 24 hours because he just knew how to grab

attention in the way that algorithms and social media drive attention now and those things were typically horrible and sometimes they were very funny also like there were some tweets about elizabeth warren like what was the one where it was like with elizabeth warren is thanking her husband for being in her house. And it's like, he's supposed to be there. So I just wanted to clarify was there's another Elizabeth Warren tweet that is not funny because it's very offensive. So I just want to clarify. And he understood that. either deliberately or by mistake, have finally gotten to a place where they are now able to right? He's a pundit, really. Donald Trump is a pundit.

You might call him a podcaster. He is a pundit. And so he will give you his takes on politics, on what he's heard, on what he's seeing online. I do think J.D. Vance is interesting because he, like my take on J.D. Vanceance is my theory it's the same theory i have with elon musk is not that these guys are full of shit or they're doing x for the money or whatever else i think that they've actually been radicalized by spending too much time online and their algorithms and they've gone down these rabbit holes just like other many other people who've been radicalized and they've gone down these rabbit holes and now this is who they are.

And you see that with J.D. Vance where like the Diet Mountain Dew joke, you know, where he's like, Diet Mountain Dew, they're going to call me racist. And like no one knew what the fuck he was talking about. I still don't really know. But it's like a thing online. Right. And Donald Trump in 2020, I thought he was less successful in that campaign because he would go up, he would get up at his rallies and talk about shit that you have to have

like a PhD in MAGA, an online MAGA. He's being driven by the internet instead of driving it. And he's talking about Peter Strzok and Lisa Page and the lovers and the Russiagate stuff. And he's like all the way down this rabbit hole. And you can see it in 2020, people at his rallies just be like what like what is he doing yeah and he wasn't like that in 2016 right and so i do think that they're jd vance is an

example of someone who is too online much like ron desantis was in sort of like an unhelpful way i do think the broader point though that, and we spent most of this show talking about this, most of Offline, which is that people are, we might be at a tipping point where people are tired of the doom scrolling, tired of the outrage on social media, just like, just exhausted.

I can't get enough of it, personally. I love it. And when you think about the race before the big switch, it was, you know, everyone already being sick of Donald Trump. And just feeling bad. Right, and just feeling bad. And every time you see Trump stuff, it makes you feel bad.

Project 2025 was getting some life on the internet because it was a new scary thing. But Trump is like, okay, we've all seen it before. We're all a little numb to Trump. And then Joe Biden, who people on the internet were not getting too excited about. And they weren't even excited about attacking him. Yeah, that's true.

He couldn't, like his haters were just as unenthused as his supporters, right? And so it just felt bad talking about politics and being a politician. And I think where Walls and Harris and their supporters and everyone online who has brought them to this position,

what they have tapped into is this hunger for joy again on the internet. And, you know, Charlie in this Atlantic piece points out that there is this sort of dad internet

where, you know, it's on TikTok and it's just like it's dad humor, it's dad's fixing things, it's dad's cookingok and then it's just like very big it's dad humor it's dad's fixing things it's dad's cooking it's dad's just being normal guys and not assholes right right and it's popular because there is a hunger for it out there because people are sick of feeling shitty yeah it's the joy and i think it's also this sense of it being a collective thing that we're all coming together to laugh about, which is that's like part of it's right. It's a monoculture thing. And I think that that is part

of a like very hard lesson to learn about Trump's rise via the internet in 2015 and 2016. Because for those of us who are outside of it, like you and me, the message looked, it looked scary. It looked hateful, look outrage driven, and in many ways was and remains. But for people who were inside of that, which I was never going to be, of course, but people were inside of that, it did also feel fun, joyful. It was a mean sense of fun. I wouldn't be clear. I'm not, I don't think there's any mistake, any, any risk of people mistaking me for endorsing it. But you understand what I mean that if you were participating in it there's this sense of the like we are going to meme him into the white house like the meme lords on reddit on facebook are like driving politics now that was really exciting to people and like

maybe that feels familiar if you've been posting about couches and tim waltz for the last two weeks and now it feels like you're in charge of the democratic ticket because maybe you kind of are and i think that that is something that because it was so hard to see from the outside that the like joy and the fun and the jokes was such a big part of it that it has taken us a while to realize that that has to be part of the equation too because it's just like this is just how politics works now for better or worse is it just like you have to be thinking about the like what is the thing like saying these guys are just weird that is just going to perfectly hit the zeitgeist it's going to be like the viral post that makes you the main character for the day

yeah except instead of being the like perfectly calibrated press statement that speaks to all of the interest groups and that's like i don't have i don't think anybody has a magic formula for that i think it's also not really clear this is going to be such a short campaign i don't know if we're going to know coming out of this if Kamala Harris and Tim Walz actually mastered this, or if it just kind of was like a right time, right place, a couple messages that really hit. And it's kind of they're like surfers out, the Democratic Party is like surfers out in the ocean. They've been trying to catch a wave for 10 years, and they've been just getting crashed over by it, and they're drowning in the water,

and they can't get any air. And now they're riding the wave for the first time. And it feels amazing. And I think what we don't know yet is, did we learn how to ride the wave or did we just like get lucky and it pushed us? But maybe we can learn from that and figure out how to do it next time. Definitely think it's a little bit of both. Sure. And I think it's going to be hard to untangle after this election just because of the unique circumstances all over the place, right? we've never had a general election this short for at least the democratic ticket right um trump although should we just going forward yes yes is the answer to that uh trump running for the third time convicted felon right donald trump people have some feelings on kamala harris pops up tim i mean just, we are like, It's a very unusual. Wild times. Yeah. But what I will say is the animating force in politics since 2016

has been opposition to MAGA. Sure. Donald Trump MAGA, right? And that is manifested in 2018, in 2020, though it was close. And again in 2022, when we thought we were going to. So you've had this anti-mega coalition that's come out there's a lot of energy there the question has been where do you put all that energy yeah because you can say that candidates themselves don't matter as much

in a polarized electorate where most people vote the same way for the same party all the time it turns out maybe they matter more than we thought. More than we thought because I do think that for folks who come in and out of the electorate, who vote maybe one of those elections, but not all the elections, and to get you out to it, to get you to care, especially in this fractured media environment, you do need a little, you need some vibes. Right.

You need some vibes. And I think this is is it was hard to have that in joe biden even if he like even if you loved his record as i did on most issues and you respected the hell out of um first of all he was it felt old because it was not just because of his age but because oh it's trump biden again oh we just did trump biden now we're doing trump biden again and it kind of sucked the last time too. And he can't, he couldn't really perform in any of these spaces. I thought he did great.

Yeah. I don't know what you're talking about. Right. Yeah. I don't want to, I don't want to relitigate. But I think so. You have all this pent up energy, like people who want to help and they want to be excited and they want to be Donald Trump and they want to like move this country past this bullshit.

And there's Kamala Harris and Tim Walz being like, hey, we're just normal, happy people. We're going to be joyful. We're going to talk about freedom. We're going to make some jokes, call them weird. Right. Yeah. Be fun to watch.

Fun to watch. That's the thing. He is fun to watch. It's fun to look at clips of him. It's fun to share the memes of him. I think the Tim Walz thing was a really, for me, really decisive demonstration of how much I think the, like, the Tim Walz thing was a really, for me, really decisive demonstration

of how much vibes are driving politics now, which sounds like such a silly thing to say. Like, that was kind of a conclusion you could maybe draw

from Kamala's rise over this because you could say, like, look, there are a lot of different reasons that people would want to, like,

meme Kamala onto the top of the Democratic ticket, right? I can't believe this is a sentence that was said here. Not only a sentence that was said here. Not only a sentence that was said, but a sentence that will like maybe determine the

like course of democracy in the world's largest, richest country. Like we're GameStop and the Democratic ticket right to the White House. You know, I've said it before. The GameStop short sellers were right. They were right. And now the Democratic Party is right. There were like, there were multiple ways to read why the internet rallied around the Kamala vibes. Maybe it was it's like she's an alternative to Joe Biden on which people have like conflicted feelings because of Gaza and some other stuff.

It was a way to say like here's someone who can beat Trump, which we felt like was not going to happen. It's just a refresh. It's just a reset. A lot of things that are not specifically connected to kamala harris other than the like amazing laugh tim walls feels like a really powerful demonstration of this because he really rose among the left online and there's like some of that was reverse polarization against josh shapiro who again is like taking these very strong positions on israel and gaza and pro-gaza protesters in a way that the left really didn't like. But that reverse polarization could have gone to a lot of different people.

And it really clustered on Tim Walz like really decisively. And some of that is for sure his record. Yeah. Because he has these like – Well, of the top contenders, the most progressive record. record well yes and no because he has that he look he has this one year in out of his four years as governor of minnesota that is a like the minnesota miracle a true miracle of a progressive record with a one seat razor thin margin like we just did our how we got here episode this week about it like really incredible the number of policies he championed that are super progressive it's like

really mind-blowing but before that he spent what what was like nearly 20 years as a member of Congress. And pretty middle of the road record in Congress. Middle of the road for Congress to the right for Democrats. Every like ideological tracker that tracks like the bills that he sponsored, his votes in Congress are like this guy was one of the most rightward members of Congress. Now that was he was from a right leaning seat. So there are like, this guy was one of the most rightward members of Congress. Now that was, he was from a right-leaning seat. So there are like structural reasons for that. He won a district in 2016 that Trump won by like 13, 14 points. Right. And it was a district that Bush had won both elections before that.

I don't believe a Democrat has held it since he left it. But it's all just to say that like, if you were going by the record, there are strong reasons for progressive solo of waltz there are also strong reasons for them to look at his like quadruple a plus nra rating for the entirety of his time in congress and not like him but nobody fucking cared i mean i'm sure they do care but the thing that like led people was the online vibes and then that led people to discover his record that affirmed how they felt about him and that led them to like gave them permission to be like, yes, this is our guy. But I think the vibes

drove it, including for people who really do care about progressive policies. Like I'm not saying that people don't care, but that is just like, that really matters for how we feel about our government and our politicians now. And I think that just like we have to recognize that. I looked at the VP selection as, okay, we have a popular, super popular governor from maybe the most important state in the whole election. Right. Yeah. I think there's no question. Right. And he is a good speaker and he's young and dynamic. And so like, I realized that there were, you know, there's questions over Israel, questions over school choice, charters, vouchers. Sure.

A couple things here and there. But I was like, look, unless anything's really, really bad, you got just data. Yeah. Polling, state, map. You got a Josh Shapiro. It makes sense. And then I was like, you know, if Tim Walz gets it, I'll be very happy. Sure.

Then I watched the rally. Yeah. know if tim wallace gets it i'll be very happy sure then i watched the rally yeah and i watched shapiro and people were like first of all this is wild the josh shapiro similarities with barack obama yeah of course you like the way he talks but no but here's the weird thing i do think he is he's a very good speaker sure and he does have the sort of just the it's the mannerisms it's not just the way he yeah yeah he moves yeah it was like do you think it's gotta be deliberate right studied like tape of obama speaking like frame by frame like he's brad pitt at the end of money ball like playing the tape over and over again that's sort of that's it was a little weird but anyway fine um but then I watched Walls,

and I couldn't put my finger on exactly how to describe it until I listened to our pal Ezra Klein talk about it on his podcast. And he talked about how Walls sort of like broke the attentional barrier that's out there in politics right now, where there's just like so much content, and everything sounds the same. And I think Josh Shapiroiro while a very good speaker sounds like a polished elected official who could just give a good speech tim walsh was like oh he's different yeah he sounds different he talks different and he doesn't talk like he is like imprisoned by

all these political constraints and having to sound like a politician which and then i was suddenly like of course right this is what i i've known this forever right which is that like authenticity which gets overused and stuff like that but it's let it's authenticity is is the word that everyone uh you know gravitates towards but it's more about not being afraid to just like just talk like a normal person like you would at a fucking bar i used to give this advice to people when i was doing like speech coaching and speech writing just be like if you if if the paragraph you're about to read would seem really weird to say if you were sitting at a bar with your friend then like think twice about saying it that way yeah and tim walls

speaks like he's talking at a bar and so i think and that is like getting him attention that and that currency right now is so difficult to get attention in politics in anywhere and i think and i think that's going to be more valuable it It's almost, it's not quantifiable how valuable that is, but now I get it. I get why she picked it. Yes. And the, I think the, like the appeal of the authenticity has of course always been there for as long because it's just like, it's appealing in politics on a human level. I do think that the shift to online media has just amplified that by a thousand and

has also amplified the downsides of appearing inauthentic because in a like cable news, newspaper driven world, you could have the like consultant to death, like machine pressed, very carefully primmed out public statement speech that you gave,

like press release that you gave, like go to the reporter's scrum and say what you were going to say. And everybody's kind of playing on that game. and that's the media that you're refracting through and they want that and that is what they're going to kind of uplift and they're going to say like what's the substantive message here what's the like big line from the speech and now that social media twitter tiktok instagram are the things that are mediating how we consume news and politics it's just the, the punishment you get

for giving a, like, familiar-sounding politician speech. Nobody wants to watch that on Twitter. Everybody wants to watch the memeable moment. And that's where the earned media is now. And now you see that driving what appears in the New York Times,

what happens on MSNBC and CNN. And, like, we've known for years that Twitter is the assignment desk for the national news media. And that just becomes, like, truer and truer. And I, again, I think this is And like, we've known for years that Twitter is the assignment desk for the national news media. And that just becomes like truer and truer. And I, I, again, I think this is like, it is a lot of the Trump stuff just happening with like for good now. And I think when Trump did it, it was very easy to be like, it's attached to Trump. So all of it is bad. So none of it should be mimicked, but like, you know what? Fucking dominate Twitter, put out the brat meme. So

everybody will be tweeting about it. And then they're going to talk about it in MSNBC at 11 a.m. And if that's where you want to get, that's how you get there. And on the flip side, now that they have put specifically J.D. Vance in this weird box, it's hard to get out of the box once you're in the box. I would like to put him in a box. Because, and I've noticed that too, it's like once you i know because now you read it into every subject of mockery yes yeah you know it you know who is the master of this donald trump donald trump and then everything you say like even as you're trying to get like

you know someone was like what makes you what makes you smile and what makes you happy and he's like well i'm angry and then he's like why would someone want to have a beer with you and he's like ha ha ha because i like beer it's just everything jd vance does is now fitting into this frame right and it's i mean maybe he still will there's still time but it's hard to get out of that it is it's the and it's just it's a schoolyard thing when you're defending against the like whatever being called a dork then you're just losing and if it feels weird that that is the thing that is going to drive so much of our electoral politics but i mean better to win at it and then partly it works because he does hang out with some really he is also a weird weird people the peter teal we've talked about this but it's a it's a weird crowd speaking of that weird

crowd um republicans don't seem to be beating the weird allegations anytime soon. This week, Republican lawmakers, influencers, and even the Republican vice presidential nominee took to Twitter to attack Algerian boxer Iman Khalif, claiming that the female boxer who was born as and identifies as a woman was secretly transgender and therefore should be barred from competing at the Olympics. I saw this for the first time because it's been a couple weeks, been busy weeks. I saw this for the first time is that in the Globe, the Boston Globe had made this mistake. That's how far it got.

And then they corrected it. And so that's when it first came to my attention. I didn't even know what was going on. But this is a whole thing. Yeah. It's one of those things that it really unfolding on the right-wing internet and i am so happy to miss it but it's this specific thing which i hate to even explain it because it's it's it's so cruel and it's so hateful but there's this specific thing of online right-wing mobs basically like ginning up q anon style conspiracy theories accusing people who are not trans and being trans especially athletes and this is a

thing now this is a thing now it's a like i really do think this is actually like i mean the thing we call q anon was actually like a mutation of a thing that was like pizza gate which was a mutation of the thing before that that's just this like right-wing conspiracy sphere is just constantly spinning up into new horrible iterations of just collective harassment and hate and this is the thing that it focuses on now and it sucks that it is so big and it is so vocal that it is like reached up to the Olympics to the point where people have to make statements to push back on it. Yeah. And this happened because there was like, first of all, she, she like passed all the tests for the IOC, right? But there's like a international boxing association, which is like had a falling out with the IOC because it's run by some sketchy folks. And they were like not being forthcoming

about what kind of tests they said that she didn't pass right so it was like clearly bullshit but that aside that gives like that gives fuel to all the crazies

on the internet but I saw like like JK Rowling of course I know loves to do this shit yeah and her tweet about it

which is completely inaccurate yeah now just 100% inaccurate yeah 120 million views on that tweet. I'm like, I didn't even know.

It's too many views. It was wild how far this has gone. And then I'm like, this poor, like. I know, I know. I hate that this is the thing that they are on now. I mean, I don't know. Maybe the fact that it is a thing that is so obviously conspiratorial and hateful on its face will help to spur wider awareness both that this is happening and help people kind of bring people around to the like not doing this basically. By just seeing that this is like a horrible jk rowling tweet and

that's the face of this um i also think it to our previous conversation it does make them all seem weird and small and obsessed yes right that like this is it's not just a few twitter weirdos doing this right like it gets to the you know jd vance and jake like what what are they all spending their time on what are they freaking out about? Megyn Kelly is upset about it, like she always is. And this is to your point about J.D. Vance being, like, he's not someone who is able to champion the internet, but rather comes from the, like, weirdest, grossest, darkest corners of it, is that this is a longstanding harassment and hate practice.

They just, like, these really fucked up little, I mean, J.K. Rowling is, like, very, very big, but typically where this takes place is like weird little corners of Twitter. Speaking of Twitter. Okay. The hellhole formerly known as Twitter is back in the news. It's still known as Twitter to me. I'm going to be honest. I know. What are we?

On Tuesday morning, Linda Iaccarino, the often overshadowed CEO of the company formerly known as Twitter, posted a video on the app announcing that the company would be suing a group of advertisers it accuses of boycotting the app. The announcement follows a tweet earlier this week where Twitter owner Elon Musk declared war on advertisers. And of course, we all remember his infamous comment from November in which he told advertisers leaving the app, specifically Bob Iger, to go fuck yourself. Sounds like everything over at Twitter HQ is going swimmingly. What do you make of this lawsuit? It feels pretty frivolous to me.

It feels petty it feels like if i was going to read into this what happened is that they lost the advertisers because elon musk is who he is now and has alienated all of them and also because twitter's business is in the shitter because they're they're shrinking at a time when the other platforms are all growing that they decided or probably elon personally decided as a way to save face, to be like, you're not breaking up with me, I'm breaking up with you. So now I've filed this lawsuit that is just going to deepen Twitter's financial problems, which are really extensive. It's hard to know exactly what's going on there because their books are closed,

but occasionally reporting will come out, and it'll always be like, you know, double-digit percentage drop in advertising revenue, and they're losing all of this money. And it like, Elon is so rich. I know it's easy to say like, well, it doesn't matter because he will cover it. But the way that Twitter's finances are structured is that because he was forced by a court to buy it, he bought it with this huge, it was like 20, $20, $30 billion loan that sits on Twitter's books, that is on super, super high interest rates because everybody considered it such a high default risk. And that is covered by Tesla stock. And Tesla stock is not doing well because other

electric car makers are starting to outperform Tesla in terms of the market share, which I know sounds like a lot of moving pieces. But is to say that it's like, I know I'm constantly on like Twitter finances, Death Watch, but it's a house of cards over there. And there's like, he's just pulling more cards out, which is, you know, that's fine if he wants to do that. I am, I'm no lawyer, but however, but this, this lawsuit,

the idea that, and they just kept calling it an illegal boycott, right? And then it's anti-competitive. They're saying it's anti-competitive. And I was like, the idea. Okay, so let's, let's, let's say's let's

say that you're right on this one sure uh if if elon and linda yaccarino are right what they're saying is they can force private companies to pay up and to advertise on a private platform that's the free market free speech that's what free speech to elon musk means give him your money give him your money or else he's gonna sue you for not giving him your money. I mean, this was always the like crybaby online right wing version of quote unquote free speech. We're allowed to say whatever we want. And also we need like mega amplification. That's right.

All of the Trump shadow ban stuff. My God, could you imagine if he came back and we had to have all these debates again about his Twitter amplifying fucking Eric Trump's shitty tweets by enough or do we need to put

the FTC on it? You know what? I'm really talking myself into it. I don't think Trump should be president. Just specifically because of the segments

we would have to do on this show would be kind of annoying to talk about. Yeah, I like it. Politico ran a long story this week titled It's Elon Musk's ex and governments are having to live with it, where they helpfully noted that in just the last two weeks, Elon, quote, unloaded a string of posts

that poured fuel on the fire of Britain's worst anti-immigration riots in decades, shared a doctored video of Kamala Harris calling herself the ultimate diversity hire, and claimed without evidence that the Biden- harris administration is quote importing vast numbers of illegal aliens to swing the november election uh and apparently government officials around the world can't do much about this except complain and send sternly worded letters what do you think about this like are we if my view on twitter of which i'm still addicted to and are still and i think is useful and as we saw has now given us a comal yeah that's true that's true yeah there's some upside um is that like we are stuck with it it's here it's still the place

to go for news it's still where journalists uh go where heads of state go, where politicians go, and its influence once again is outsized compared to its user base or maybe what it should be under the ownership of Elon Musk. But like, that's what it is. And we're just, we're stuck with it. Do you think that? What do you think? So the fact that this is now a big deal in Europe, I think does matter. The Europeans really care about this specifically and have been pushing legislation and fines for like 10 years forward really aggressively, specifically on the issue of misinformation that leads to real world harm and that kind of spins up violence or real world violence. I spent like a lot of time in Germany reporting on this and like everybody very high up in government is very on it. Before our girl Lena Kahn came in at the FTC and like led the high up in government is very on it before our girl lena

khan came in at the ftc and like led the charge forever and regulating tech the kind of like tip of the spear of tech regulation was the europeans fining specifically on privacy and also in this issue so i think the fact that elon musk that has decided that another one of his many heels to die on is doing misinformation that will spin up violence in Europe specifically. Like, I think that they are going to slap some pretty big fines on him, and I'm sure that it's in the works already. And they just don't have patience for it because they don't care because they don't see it as, at least in the U.S.,

when we think about tech regulation, we balance the fact that these companies provide a lot of jobs and a lot of revenue for the U.S. economy. It doesn't do that in Europe. All it does is it's just shitty Elon Musk tweets that they read that they don't want to,

which is my experience with Twitter. Right. And yet, none of the alternatives took off. Oh, you mean like, are we stuck with Twitter

because there's not an alternative? Well, and part of it, right, which is like, I do think he is, he is now one of the worst parts of Twitter because he won't, like if he could just shut the fuck up,

you know, like all that list of things, that was all him pushing this, right? For no reason. And of course, there's like a bunch of, now there's a bunch of blue check marks

who should not have blue check marks and they get priority in the replies and so there's just, it's more hateful, it's awful, there's a million reasons. There's still ways you can figure out how to use it without dealing with that shit. But, you know, we talked before, many moons ago, that like maybe...

Are you going to say blue sky? Maybe threads. Maybe blue sky. Maybe we'll be skeeting and tuning our way. Are you threading these days? You know what? I have not been on thread in so long. I think it was really telling that when the future of American democracy was at stake,

our boy Ezra decided to depart threads for Twitter. Yes. And this is Twitter, one of the least used social media platforms. It's important to remember because if you're in politics and follow a lot of political news, it feels very important. But it's ranked very low among the major platforms for time on site and for users i really i know i've said this before i really continue to think that twitter specifically and this entire social media format generally of text-based short posts is just it's the aol cd-rom of social media it's just not where the future is you see this like

absolutely atmospheric growth for video-based apps, for Instagram, for TikTok. I'm sure there will be another one in the future. That's where everybody, for Snapchat,

that's where everybody's going. That's where the next generation are going. You and I are going to be in our 80s on Twitter and everybody's, we're going to be the last ones.

Better fucking believe it. That's right. Oh, I believe it. Don't get me wrong. Is the written word, that's it get me wrong. Is the written word? That's it? We're done with the written word? I think the written word will stay, but I think it will be, I don't know.

I mean, actually, now I'm just depressed. If you go onto the other platforms and Reddit is doing better, there are places for the written word. It's text-based micro-blocking. I think it's just not where the future is. I think there will always be a little space there because there are people who like it. But even on Twitter, more and more it's video and photos. But at the same time, text does exist on the video-based platform. So it's kind of all an amalgamation. And people are reading the news. It is good for

news. I mean, it's good for getting a quick... Sure, what's going on. And I'm going to click for more now. It's great for coconut meat. Maybe I don't want to read the whole piece. You know what Twitter is good for? What?

Saving American democracy. Speaking of which, we should mention that former President Donald Trump announced that he'll be doing an interview with Elon Musk on Twitter tomorrow.

Which is just another indicator that Elon Musk has fallen further down the right-wing rabbit hole. I don't even know if that's the indicator. Yeah, I think it's the indicator that Trump just doesn't have the juice anymore. Well, so Donald Trump is going to do it. First of all, when's the last time someone has done a big interview on Twitter and there hasn't been a technological failure? First of all. I do believe that it is something

that has actually been cursed by some sort of a god or demon because people who do big Twitter interviews, the tech doesn't work, it keeps crashing, and then inevitably something terrible

happens to them afterwards like their career tanks or like Tucker Carlson like completely disappeared. Yeah, I think this is all part of the big karmic downslide and collapse of because the universe has finally had enough of them. I feel like we are tempting fate with our, we have some irrational exuberance on this podcast. I'm projecting optimism.

Close race, close race is going to come down to a couple thousand votes. I know, I know, I know. Come on, let me have my fun. We're having a good time. We're having a good time. All right, before we go, some quick housekeeping. From the windows to the walls, now that Vice President Kamala Harris has picked her VP running mate, now is the time more than ever

to tune into the news cycle. On the newest episode of Polar Coaster, Dan Pfeiffer and guest host Celinda Lake dig into where Trump and Harris stand in the polls and in swing states, plus what the Democrats need to do to secure a win in November. Head to crooked.com slash friends

to get access to this subscriber-exclusive series now. And during her time as California's district attorney, Vice President Kamala Harris has often referred to herself as the state's top cop. To get a sense of how her past in law enforcement has shaped the politician she's become, What A Day hosts Max Fisher. I've heard of him.

And Josie W. Rice dived deep into her legal career. I didn't know we were in housekeeping now. That's so fun. You know? Thank you, Emma. You learn something new every day. You can head to the What a Day feed right now to listen. And that's all we've got for today.

Okay. Everyone have a fantastic weekend. Bye, folks. Bye. Bye. produced by Austin Fisher. Emma Illick-Frank is our associate producer, mixed and edited by Jordan Cantor, audio support from Kyle Seglin and Charlotte Landis. Jordan Katz and Kenny Siegel take care of our music. Thanks to Ari Schwartz, Madeline Herringer, and Reid Cherlin for production support.

And to our digital team, Elijah Cohn and Dilan Villanueva, who film and share our episodes as videos every week. How did two old unpopular men end up running for the world's most demanding job? Since 1992, every American president but one has been a white man born in the 1940s. If Trump wins, that could span 36 years. This cohort was born with aces in their pockets, and yet their last act in politics sees the two main parties accusing each other of wrecking American democracy. As the boomers near the end of their political journey, John Perdot sets out to make sense of their inheritance and their legacy. Search Boom from The Economist wherever you listen to your podcasts and unlock all episodes by subscribing to Economist Podcast Plus.