Offline with Jon Favreau - Trump Tours the Manosphere, Russia Funds MAGA Influencers, and Hawk Tuah Girl Cashes In

Episode Date: September 8, 2024

It’s not just supplements and energy drinks fueling the manosphere. Your favorite right-wing podcaster may be sponsored by…Vladimir Putin! Jon and Max discuss the new federal indictment alleging that the Kremlin has been funding right-wing internet personalities, including Tim Pool. Then they break down why the Brazilian Supreme Court has blocked access to X and why the “Hawk Tuah” girl’s new podcast showcases the difference between virality and popularity. But first! Donald Trump is doing the red-pilled podcast circuit in an effort to get young men to vote for him. The guys take stock of the former president’s appearances from Jake Paul to Lex Fridman, and explain why a “laid-back” Trump is so dangerous. 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.

If the Trump in your mind is the like scary fire-breathing guy from rallies and you're just like an 18, 17, 22-year-old whatever guy who's like not that into politics, listen to these podcasts because you like UFC. And it's like I'm not sure if I'm in with all the like wild Trump stuff. And then you hear like, oh, he's just a guy who talks about UFC and golf. He's not that scary. The Democrats say that he's terrifying. But like I don't know. He seems chill and he talks about his brother. I think that that really like makes him a little fuzzier and softer and creates maybe a little bit of a permission structure.

I'm Jon Favreau. I'm Max Fisher. And believe it or not, this podcast is not part of a Russian influence operation to infiltrate the manosphere with anti-American propaganda that we know of. But here's my checking account number in case anybody wants to make a deposit. All right, we'll get into all of this soon, plus lots more news to cover. So we're going to, again, skip the guest to get straight to the headlines. This week, a new federal indictment alleges that the Russian government has been funding right-wing internet personalities. The Brazilian Supreme Court blocks access to the social network formerly known as Twitter. And Hayley Welch, better known as the Hak Tua girl, follows the path of every red-blooded American looking to monetize and extend their 15

minutes of fame. Oh boy, does she. She's starting a podcast. Oh yeah. Good for her. We need more podcasts. We need more podcasts. I'm always saying the podcast economy is too sparse. Welcome to the family, Hayley Welch. But first, Donald Trump has embarked on a tour of the manosphere. Over the last couple of weeks, the Republican nominee for president has skipped interviews with traditional outlets in favor of conversations

with right-wing aligned YouTubers, streamers, and podcasters. Among them, an interview with YouTuber-turned-boxer Jake Paul, a kickstream with Aiden Ross, in which the streamer gifted Trump a Tesla Cybertruck. Hard to find something more ugly. Which you actually give me after every podcast.

I do, yeah. Which is really nice. There's a lot of Cybert cyber trucks in the parking garage. He also had an appearance on This Past Weekend with Theo Vaughn, in which Trump had a surprising number of questions about cocaine. And most recently, an interview with AI researcher turned pseudo-intellectual Lex Friedman. Lots of different podcasts, lots of different conversations, but notably, all of these creators share one thing in common.

Their audience is overwhelmingly young and male revealing a concerted effort by the Trump campaign to target Gen Z men, uh, just as a, just as a flavor of what this was like. Uh, here's Trump with Theo Vaughn. Is cocaine a stronger up? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you're way up with cocaine more than anything else you can think of. Cocaine will turn you into a damn owl, homie. You know what I'm saying?

You'll be out on your own porch, you know? You'll be your own street lamp. You're freaking. And is that a good feeling? Well, it's a miserable feeling. But you do it anyway, just like the guy you're saying with the scotch. This really stepped on our topics for this week. Does cocaine make you an owl?

John, what do you say? So Max and I were texting about this last night. Like, he seems in this clip, Donald Trump, like he is a man from the distant past, an old man from the distant past who just showed up in 2024 like

so cocaine that is that makes you feel that's an up like you are a 70 white powder you are a 78 year old

asking about jazz cigarettes you're just learning about cocaine and the bee boppers it is so weird I was talking to Emma about this

it is so strange to hear him having just a normal conversation where there's like an exchange and a back and forth and he's asking questions and he's saying, oh, that's interesting. Like the probably hundred cumulative hours of Donald Trump I have consumed in my lifetime, every second of which I regret. I've never heard him have a normal conversation and it's weird. It's like watching a dog walk on its hind legs. It's a very, it's a different Trump, which I think is part of the strategy. I agree. Yes, it is. Yes. But so for our audience who may not be familiar with the worlds of Theo Vaughn and Jake Paul, how would you describe these personalities, why they're all connected and why they have such a big audience? What do you think is the percentage

overlap between offline and Theo Vaughn listeners? I mean... More than 1%. Yeah, well, let us know. Let us know if you've... Okay, yeah, write in. Yeah, write in, let us know if you've been listening to Theo Vaughn. So I would say that this circle of podcasters, which is huge, is like news media for young

men who don't want to consume news media. Yes. It's like anti-woke, but like not in a Ben Shapiro super political sense or in a red pill sense. It's more just kind of like a man cave for the guys who want a safe space with the boys and like want to chat about UFC and listen to stand up comedians who have the same joke, which is you're not allowed to make jokes anymore. It's probably all people who are like have lurker Twitter account. Like they're online. They're kind of online. Like they're going to spend a lot of time on YouTube and on reddit and the shows are

like relaxed and funny and there's trolling but it's not outrage bait and they're like openly kind of dumb like kind of proudly dumb they all go on each other shows like a bunch of them live in Austin and there's like this the kind of like Joe Rogan extended universe and I think that it just like it's about providing a sense of social connection. Yes, it's like a community. It's a community, exactly. Politics isn't their focus.

Usually comedy, sports, MMA, UFC, gaming. And when they do talk politics, it's usually not in an explicitly partisan way. Though you can tell that they are mega curious or at least, you know, conservative coded on many issues. They think the wokes have gone too far. And the feminists have gone too far. But to understand it, it's not, you're right, it's not like that's their soapbox all the time. I mean, it depends on who it is. That's not their soapbox all the time. Their focus is like, we're going to talk about other shit. And then if something happens in the

news, that seems like an opportunity to yell about the wokes. We can do that. And they love Elon Musk and they love, you know, the tech companies and Teslas. And it's, I think it's more just like a lifestyle brand that is like vaguely conservative coded more than it is explicitly politically conservative but if you asked i bet if you asked a lot of the the viewers uh of these programs and they don't take sides and that's what's interesting about they're actually not registered they're independent and they listen all yeah they listen to all sides and they don't really get into politics that's what they would say yes um have you had a chance to sit down and watch any of these Trump interviews?

So I did listen to half of the Theo Vaughn podcast. Okay, good, because I listened to the Lex Friedman one. Okay, well, tell me about the Lex Friedman at all because we just heard Theo Vaughn. I mean... It's a weird show. It's a weird show. We're going to talk about like why,

whether this is a good strategy from Trump, but I can see why he fits with these programs in some ways. It is a good format, as all podcasts are, for people who can't shut up like Donald Trump. So he just goes on and on and on. The Lex Freeman one was like an hour and a half. I had around 1.75 to get through it. I'm laughing because I think we did,

we went a half hour over talking about Fight Club a few days ago. So it's like, I don't have so much ground to criticize as a like podcaster who loves to talk about the stuff I love to talk about. But it's different for me because I'm right. You're right. Yeah, right. Softball questions. Yes, very. They're all softball to Trump. It's not a journalistic interview.

And you could tell a couple of times Lex Friedman's like, yeah, you know, some people who like you, they don't like the whole insurrection, stealing the election thing. Like, they don't like that as much. And Trump's like, you know, Trump will not. He's not going to follow you to a trap. Well, he's trying to lead Trump to these more helpful places.

Trump will not go. Trump's like, oh, that's because the Democrats cheated. You know, you're like, okay. So there's a lot of that. That's the old Fox News thing. They would try to like implicitly, you could watch them coaching him through the interview. Yep.

But Trump tends not to rant and rave like he does at rallies or during TV interviews, especially somewhat hostile TV interviews. He is still an incoherent crazy person, but more subdued, more subdued. Yeah. And then on the other side i noticed in a couple of these he just he doesn't totally fit with the vibe the theobon cocaine comment is a good example

of like he's a little too old yes he's better and like he's done some uh things with like golf uh like very popular like sort of golf influencers yes and, he seems like a natural fit because he is a good golfer. And the UFC stuff, because he's been going to fights for a long time. With his boy Kid Rock. With his boy Kid Rock. And he likes Dana White, right?

So that is a little bit better of a fit. But some of the younger comedians, like Theo Vaughn, he doesn't seem like it's as much of a cultural fit as you might assume. He's very Abe Simpson, sitting down and talking with them. So did you enjoy it? Was it fun? No, no, I didn't enjoy it at all. That was terrible. I mean, honestly, like the only, first of all, the only thing left to

enjoy about Trump is when he says something truly crazy and unhinged that we haven't heard before, but nine years in, it's getting kind of old. And so like when he is challenged, that's fun to watch. Right. When he's just like rambling on, I don't know. I couldn't pick up anything interesting. So when I started listening to the Theo Vaughn thing, my first take was this is so, it's just boring. Like I'm really bored with it.

Like the rallies are terrifying, but at least there's like interesting stuff popping off. There's like a firework show. And I was like, boy, he really doesn't have it like this. I don't think this is a big deal. And the more I started listening to it, the more I actually started to think back to the first conversation you and I ever had

about podcasting and about how part of the power of it is that it really makes you feel like you have a connection with the person that you're listening to. And the way that it's like, especially the long conversation between two people, you you know you get that sense of it's like the back and forth feels very natural and conversational and it's even like the way you talk on podcasts like the terry gross like softer voice lean into the microphone and like trump was talking with the very soft voice like you get to the end of it and you feel like you've had an

intimate hour with this person that makes you feel like you have more of a connection with them and it's humanizing and i like i to be clear i did not feel like i had a personal connection with donald j trump that's not what i'm saying but if the if the trump in your mind is the like scary fire-breathing guy from rallies and you're just like a 18 17 22 year old whatever guy is like not into politics, listen to these podcasts because you like UFC. And it's like, I'm not sure if I'm in with all the like wild Trump stuff. And then you hear like, oh, he's just a guy who talks about UFC and golf. He's not that scary. The Democrats say that he's terrifying.

But like, I don't know. He seems chill and he talks about his brother. I think that that really like makes him a little fuzzier and softer and creates maybe a little bit of a permission structure. Well, and what's notable there is that a lot of those folks have not watched the rallies. Right. And they have not followed Trump in the news like we have followed people in the media being like, he's a threat to democracy. He's going to, and then you listen to him.

You're like, oh, maybe they're just hysterical. And I, and there's also a lot about, you know, I know we're going to talk about like, well, the podcasters endorse them. Are they, you know, what are they like? How will they weigh in politically? But just like hearing someone have a friendly conversation with an hour with someone is like socially, it's an endorsement. Like not in the sense that like they came out and say, I endorse this entire political profile, whatever, but it just, the way that our brains work, we say that as like someone I trust, trust and likes this person. Therefore I trust and like that person. I think it brings him into the circle. Right, I mean we've talked

about this a million times, but like a Taylor Swift endorsement, or even not a Taylor Swift endorsement, but a Taylor Swift just like talking about Kamala Harris. Suddenly you've got a bunch of Taylor Swift fans who aren't politically engaged who are like, well maybe if it's not an endorsement, like she seems to like her, so that's cool. Honestly, are

these podcasts, are they the Taylor Swifties of the right? I kind of think they might be. They're just like a pop culture phenomenon. It's vaguely political, but kind of not. So Dan Pfeiffer actually beat us

to the punch on this conversation this week. He did. He's hacking into our Slack again. You know, it sounds, when Crooked Media puts out content that's similar, it sounds like we planned it.

We didn't plan it. You mean collusion? Our brains are all just broken by the internet in the same way. Unfortunately, that's true. And so, yeah, Dan and I frequently tweet things at the same time that are similar. Really? Sure enough, he did this message box. Quote, unquote, Dan.

Dan, yeah, right. It's called How and Why Trump is Targeting Gen Z Men, in which he highlights the absolutely massive gender gap between Gen Z men and women. I'll just put some statistics behind this. So the latest Time Sienna polls in the six swing states that have Kamala slightly ahead show a giant gender gap, especially among young voters, more so among young voters than older generations. She's up by 38 points with women between 18 to 29, but Trump is up by 13 points among young men. Among young men, the Democratic advantage in partisan identification, which is more stable than what happens from election to election, it fell from nine points in 2012 when Obama ran for reelection to just five points

in 2023. For under 30s? For under 30s. Democratic advantage. Yeah. And what's interesting to know about this group of voters, this group of young men, a majority in this group still supports abortion rights, same-sex marriage. They are not necessarily socially conservative, but almost half of them say that there is some or a lot of discrimination against men in American society, more than older age groups say that. And up from a third who said that just in 2019. Really? Yeah. And now there's a half. Yeah. I know. And these are a lot of, I mean, that's, you know, at least a bunch of Democratic men in that group, again, support same-sex marriage, support abortion rights. So it's not the social conservative stuff that's getting them. It is more of this like cultural vibes kind of thing.

So what do you make and the gender gap there, what it found is that Gen Z men support Trump at actually comparable rates to millennial men and to boomer men. The reason for the gap is that Gen Z women are so much more supportive of Kamala than women in other generations. So there is an unusually wide gender gap among Gen Z, but it's mostly from women being like much more pro kamala than men being pro mega but the lead that kamala has among under 30s is just plus 16 which is down from plus 24 that biden had in 2022 so it's definitely a problem i i think my read and you kind of hinted at this is i think that it is a gender polarization problem first and an internet problem second like the just a gender polarization thing that's getting routed through the internet. There's this theory by a guy named Michael Kimmel called aggrieved entitlement. Have you heard this theory? No. So it says that the backlash

among young men is this sense that the world is less and less favorable to young men. But where that comes from is just there is inching steps towards progress in society for women and for people of color. And so the way that a lot of young men experience that is that they thought they were going to be as entitled as the generation before them as young men, and they feel that they have less of a special place than they used to, and that feels like something is being taken away. And that's something that you hear like Gamergate 10 years ago.

It's something you hear 20 years ago. It's kind of a like persistent thing, but it becomes more and more pronounced as gender and racial equality like makes its baby steps towards a better direction. And this is especially pronounced among non-college people, people without college diplomas, which shows up a lot in the gender polarization data. And then I think a lot of it is social isolation, which may play a role in why it's so much higher among young men, where the rate of men who do not have close friends is way, way up. Who have zero close friends is up from 2% to 10% among college graduates. And among non-college graduates is up from 3% to 24%. People say they have no close friends. And I think that that sends people into, you know, bad podcasts, the internet, when you don't have a kind of community to anchor yourself. And then what you do is you go look

for answers to say, why do I have this feeling of aggrieved entitlement? Why do I feel like my special status is being taken away by society? And someone will have answers for you. Right. Someone will have answers. We know Right. Someone will have answers. We know that the algorithm will provide a set of answers that is going to be the most polarizing, the most outrage-inducing, the most kind of radicalizing. And then communities form on the internet or among podcasts around those answers that say it's the feminists, it's video game companies, whatever it is, and that now your entire sense of self is built around the answer that your community on the internet gave you for why you feel like something's being taken away. And I think that a big part of the increase in that on under 30s is just the pandemic. I think a lot of people spent two or three years indoors finding community

on the internet when it's mediated through algorithms that were pushing them towards the worst possible answers for the problems they felt they were facing. I also think that there is a difference between hearing that there is a pay gap between men and women and that women should get paid just like men do, that women should have the right to choose, that there has been historic discrimination against women in the workforce, that there has been sexual harassment and assault that women have had to deal with. Like, there's a difference between that and then young men being told that, like, they are to blame for things. Sure. Yeah. Right. And so it's like the, you know, what is wrong with men? Yeah. You know, kind of, kind of discourse that was, you know, probably peaked in like 2017, 2018, 2019.

Sure. But I do think, and, and I think young women now are doing better in school, tending to achieve more. And economically, you hear a lot of these young men say that like they, you know, you used to be able to raise a family with a college degree and now you hear a lot of these young men say that like they you know you used to be able to uh raise a family with a college degree and now you can't right and so they feel like their place in the world not just culturally but economically right and like you know they're still raised with the traditional notion of of family and masculinity so they're like okay i'm supposed to support the family but i can't and what does that tell me about who I am and stuff like that and um and that leads them I think into these spaces and there's like it sounds very silly to peg a lot of it to like

anti-woke comedians but these podcasts have huge I mean truly staggering audiences and a lot of what they have on are comedians that are anti-woke and the thing that those people always complain about and always talk about is like you used to be able to make this joke or that joke or used to be able to make like race jokes or make jokes about women and now you're not allowed to do that anymore and we are not quote-unquote we are not allowed to talk the way that we want to talk or that we talk amongst each other because societies become hostile to us right and i think that that really gets internalized and look and again it's it's a it's a big diverse bunch here so there are there are some who are much more like yeah oh these wokesters and you know all they can do is make trans jokes you know and it's like really just lame yeah and then there's people who we used to be able to make these kind of jokes

instead of complaining about that, just make those kind of jokes. Yes. That are much more like borderline still that are more reflective of how people might talk in private. Right. And I think that is attractive

to a lot of these young men who are like, that's true. Oh, these conversations I have with my friends. Right. If I had them publicly anymore, I'd get in trouble. Right. Well, it's not for nothing

that a lot of these audiences are 14, 15-year-old boys. Like 14, 15-year-old boys have terrible impulses. I used to be one. Like we should not be allowed to say things publicly or on the internet.

But 14, 15-year-old boys go onto Reddit and they're making jokes that are, you know, I think we could say bad and offensive. And then there's a backlash to that. And then the backlash, like reacting against the backlash becomes your identity.

And it like, again, it feels silly to say that like vast political movements in the country are happening because of people not feeling like they're allowed to make jokes that they used to be able to make. But it is, it does get internalized as a sense that like society is threatening to me and society is trying to control me as a white man and the things that I just want to say to my bros and we're like hanging out. And you know, they're the, that's why it feels to these people like the feminists or whatever are coming for us and that we have to push back against them so we can be real Americans, which is, you know, not good, but. Well, and again, what everyone wants is community

and to be included and to feel like they belong. Yes. Right. And so that doesn't mean that we accept like hateful misogynistic views. Right. But it does mean that as we are trying to like build either a political coalition or a larger American community, you want to sort of invite people in and not make people feel like they should not be part of X community because of their identity, regardless of what their identity is. Well, Bernie Sanders went on the Theo Vaughn podcast and he was just Bernie Sanders and it was great. And they just had a nice conversation and, you know, it was lovely. Well, and this is why I think it's also useful for Democrats to go on these and to talk to them because I watched a clip of Bernie talking to Theo Vaughn and Theo Vaughn's like complaining about drug companies and how they, you know, charge too much money for prescription.

But he's like, well, why don't we know about which politicians are part of this and that are helping out the drug companies? And you can see in Bernie,, instead of laughing or being angry, which we might have done, right? Or he does from time to time. Yeah, he does from time to time. Was very calmly explaining, like, well, here's the deal. There was this, the Inflation Reduction Act, and the Republicans voted against it.

So there is some education to be done there, too. Right. And, you know, there is this tendency to be like, oh, if you go on that person's program, you're platforming that person and it's bad and there's guilt association and stuff. Right. But just from a strategic standpoint,

from the democratic political strategic standpoint, like there is an audience of people there who could be our voters and who we need because their views on a lot of issues align with us, that if we could go on and reach those people, not by telling inappropriate jokes or laughing at them when they happen, but just by explaining our position

in a calm, rational way, you pick up some votes there. Well, and 15-year-old boys do not have the most acutely defined political views. Also, they don't vote. But they grow up and vote. Right. Well, some of them do.

Yes. And I think a lot of what is happening is it's a 15-year-old boy who has like a fuzzy sense that like the system is rigged or the status quo seems unfair. And the only people who are speaking to that are the Joe Rogans and doing the like the Peter Thiel's come on and like the vaguely right coded stuff. But Democrats have answers to that. Democrats have answers to why the system might feel like it's unfair. Bernie Sanders has a lot of answers to that and, and extending those when people are still young enough to be in a place of like, well, I have this fuzzy sense of the world is not fair, but I don't have a specific hardened answer for why that is. It's a good time to get in there. Yeah. So I think it's a pretty, it's a smart strategy for Donald Trump to do this. It was funny, Max Reed and his sub stack, he was talking about why Trump seemed

to fit with these podcasters. And he says he is himself manifestly the same kind of dramatic, gossipy, maldeveloped, attention seeking nuisance is the creators who populate the greater dipshit media economy. Dipshit media economy is good. It's very good. And the thing is, I think a lot of them would embrace that. I think it's kind of the like, we're just the bros. We are dipshits. Yeah.

We're dipshits. I've got my moments of dipshittery, I'll be honest. It's happened. Not me. Never been a dipshit. That's true. All right. We're going to take a break.

But first, some quick housekeeping. The first ever presidential debate between former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris is set for September 10th. Assuming someone doesn't chicken out. Will we see a heated exchange of policy ideas or will it be a master class in dodging questions? Honestly, your guess is as good as ours. One thing's for sure. You won't want to miss it. Join our Friends of the Pod Discord community for a

subscriber live chat to process your debate feelings and anxieties with fellow Crooked listeners in real time. Head to Crooked.com slash friends to sign up for access and other subscriber exclusive content. Also, we're on tour. We are going to Phoenix

tomorrow. We're recording this Friday. are going to Phoenix tomorrow. We're recording this Friday. By the time you listen to this, we've already been in Phoenix. Yeah, it's going to be 108 degrees. Have a great time. I'm so sorry I can't make it. We're doing some campus kickoffs,

I believe, during the day. There's some brave volunteers. Really cool. I salute all of you. We are also heading to, Pod Save America is heading to Michigan and Pennsylvania this fall in the run-up to Election Day for some big live shows.

You can join us in Ann Arbor on October 5th and Philadelphia on October 6th and turn our collective election year panic into motivation and jokes about J.D. Vance. Get your tickets at crooked.com slash events now. When we return, turns out it's not just supplements and energy drinks fueling the manosphere. Your favorite right-wing podcaster

may be sponsored by Vladimir Putin. Okay, in other right-wing internet personality news, this week the Justice Department unsealed an indictment that alleges Tenet Media, the so-called supergroup that includes MAGA favorites Dave Rubin, Tim Pool, and Benny Johnson, was being funded by Russian operatives as part of a Kremlin-orchestrated campaign to influence the outcome of the 2024 election. The indictment accuses two employees of RT, the Kremlin's media arm, of funneling nearly $10 million to Tenet and states that the goal of the operation was to fuel pro-Russian narratives and push content

favorable to Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump. Surely this must be a resistance-lib fever dream, right? It's hard to imagine how it could be more Blue Maga, yeah. Well, here's an example of what we're talking about from tim pool ukraine is the enemy of this country ukraine is our enemy being funded by the democrats i will stress again one of the greatest enemies of our nation right now is ukraine they are expanding this war ukraine is the greatest threat to this nation and to the world we should rescind all funding and financing pull out all military support and we should apologize to russia

i wouldn't say that's very subtle something that is so fun so the youtube clip of this has this very funny thing where the image is just him zooming in and out on a Google map of Ukraine? Because I'm sure he was an expert before. Ukraine. Ukraine. Ukraine. Just as a reminder, everyone, Vladimir Putin did invade Ukraine. I did hear about that. Yeah. I don't think war crimes all over the place. I don't know. I don't think Ukraine's our enemy. He is a brutal dictator in his own country and now has, you know, decided to, he wants to bulldoze Ukraine. So there you go. Are you saying all this to prove that Putin is not funding us? Oh, no.

Are you trying to, you're really selling it? Well, I'm, yeah. Notice I'm not saying anything about the CCP. Are we living in 2016 again? What's going on? So it is a real marker of how things have changed since 2016 that instead of hiring out an elaborate hacking and influence campaign, they just shoveled money to America's dumbest YouTubers.

Like they really learned some lessons about our media environment and how easy it is to exploit. It's just like write a check to Tim Pool. You don't have to hire all the hackers. You don't have to do the fake news and the hacking. Just prop them up.

Just prop them up. Although then in defense of Russia's shitty plan here, the guy who led the 2016 Yevgeny Prigozhin was blown up in an airplane after leading a failed insurrection. So they're working with some blunter tools. Sometimes you take a hit on the team. So far, Tim Pool and Dave Rubin have both strongly denied any knowledge of the Kremlin-backed funds. Oh, well, if they strongly denied it. Stating that they were deceived by the Russian government.

I also saw this morning that Tim Pool is, like, cooperating with the DOJ. I bet he is. Do you buy that, that they knew? Do you think the Kremlin was relaying talking points to them? Or did they just want to prop up voices who were already aligned with them? So the indictment says that the two founders of the company who are big social media personalities themselves did know that it was Russia and that they, the indictment also conspicuously does not name them, which is strongly suggestive that they are cooperating.

And it's, there were like a number of conversations where Tim Pool and Dave Rubin were asking like, hey, where's all this money coming from? Because it sure is a lot of money. This is the best. So the answer was that from the two founders who knew that it was Russian money from the Kremlin, he said that it came from a fictitious Belgian investor named Eduardo Gregorian. That's two N's at the end. He's just a free speech enthusiast. And they were like, okay, case closed.

Gregorian's name was misspelled on many of the documents. And Tim Poole and Dave Rubin did look for evidence that he was a real person and did not find any. And they said, well, that's good enough for us. That's good enough for us. Quick Google search turns up nothing, which usually happens. My $400,000 check, please. I mean, look. $400,000 a month for 16 videos.

In some cases, $100,000 a video. $100,000 a month for 16 videos. In some cases, $100,000 a video. $100,000 a video. And some of these videos were getting like 1,000 views per episode on YouTube. I know. These videos would, with the way that YouTube monetization works, like $100. A couple hundred bucks generously was what they would make. So there were at least a couple of instances where the Russian agents directly relayed talking points to them. They ordered them to produce a video blaming Ukraine and the United States for a mass shooting at a Moscow music venue.

And the response from the company's founder was, we are happy to do that. Which is great. Good stuff. The two Russian agents were also in the team discord, although under fake names. Oh, that's funny. There was one of my favorite details from the indictment is that the, um, one of the Russian agents was getting really frustrated that the people they were paying weren't doing enough to promote the network.

I was just about to read it. No, no, take it, take it. No, it's, it's so, it's so funny. This is in the Washington Post story. It says, even after recruiting their talent, though, the Russians purportedly running Tenet were frustrated with Tenet's lack of success. Best line in the story. Like many media executives, they worried that their employees were doing more to promote their personal social media brands than their new outlet. In February of 2024, Elena Afanyeva, one of the indicted RT employees, allegedly complained under an alias in a tenant chatroom that the influencers she had hired weren't boosting tenant enough.

I know this is not an obligation, but we are falling behind with numbers. But wait, the best part, the best part is when they wouldn't listen to her, they just took her money. So she started a second alias to pretend to be another manager. And it was like, well, I'm hearing it from two managers, which frankly, brilliant management strategy. That's when we start to hear from Jon Favre but spelled f-a-v-r-o-o who just happened to vote with you on everything uh there's been some great tweets about this uh someone said uh how do you live how do you live down finding out you were an actual real life useful idiot you have to go the rest of your life knowing another country sat down

and had meetings about how stupid you are. They all got around a table and voted and said, yeah, he's fucking dumb. Let's use him. And they were right. They were right. Honestly, someone could call me dumb if they were going to give me that amount of money.

I wouldn't take it from Russia. But if the trade-off was they are going to call me stupid, but they're going to pay me to say something I was already going to say, I would consider that. All right. Can we assess the effectiveness of this particular- It's one of the funniest parts of it.

Influence operation. Complete, utter failure. Yeah. They got, there was, at one point, the indictment really plays up the fact that they got 16 million views across 2,000 YouTube videos. That's 8,000 views in a video. That's nothing. Yeah.

That's 8,000 views in a video. That's nothing. Yeah. It's zero. I do. I was trying to, you know, then Jeremiah Johnson in Infinite Scroll, great sub stack, makes the case that, you know, it talking points about disinformation, misinformation about the war in Ukraine, about Russia, sort of just like make their way through this ecosystem. Sure. And, you know, if the Russians are spending money to amplify it, you know, on the margins, when then you get members of Congress who, you know, delayed for a long, long time. Yeah. The funding for Ukraine, even when like some Republicans had initially been like, sure, we'll fund Ukraine because that's important.

There's more to back it up. And then they suddenly turn around one day and like half the Republican caucus is no longer in favor of Ukraine because they believe a bunch of false narratives that were spun up on some of these very podcasts and YouTube shows. You know, it's very chicken or egg, like where did it start? But it can have an effect on the margin. It actually made me think a lot about reporting that I did a few years ago on the influence

of Saudi and Emirati funding in DC think tanks, which is, of course, one difference is that that's not secret. It's out in the open, but otherwise it's pretty similar. Right. And a point that a lot of people made to me is they were like, look, no one who's getting hired by these like Saudi funded think tanks is saying things that they would not otherwise say or don't otherwise believe.

But part of what happens is that when you spend years getting paid by whoever is that paying you and you know they want to hear certain things and you know they're going to reward certain things, you just lean into those. Maybe you already believed it, but maybe you just like say it a lot more, you lean into it a lot more.

And when you're well-funded, you tend to have bigger and bigger platforms. Exactly. Or at least you have the opportunity. Right. Those people are getting resources that are not going to other people. And that it's just like the Saudi-funded people are the ones who have all the platforms in DC foreign policy circles. Those are the ones who get invited to all the panels because they have that money. A lot of that money goes towards funding other programs. And so it just perpetuates their views much more widely.

Like Tim Pool was going to say the crazy shit he was going to say anyway, but the fact that he now has a ton more money to plow into his media company is bad. Also, you can imagine if the CIA or Defense Department like was looking at Russia and saw some media properties and media outlets and media personalities who were like, Vladimir Putin actually sucks. Now, it'd be a little tough in that country because he'd shut them down. But you could see us being like, yeah, we'll fund those pro-Western, pro-USA voices.

Sure. And we have. That happened for a long time. I mean, the Open Society used to fund Navalny. They funded all these other people who were genuine dissidents who really believed what they were fighting for. But yeah, the foreign money helps.

Yeah. All right. In other news, Twitter is officially dead in Brazil. On Monday, Brazil's Supreme Court upheld the decision to ban Twitter nationwide after Elon Musk and his social network refused to comply with orders from the nation's top judge

to suspend specific accounts over misinformation concerns. Musk has, of course, taken the ban well, taken to Twitter to call the judge a dictator and claim he's, quote, destroying free speech for political purposes. And threatened to basically get him sent to prison. Yeah. Yeah, he's not happy. Which is a cool thing to do to a Supreme Court justice.

Can you give a little bit of history on how this ban came to be, how we got here? Okay. So last year, Brazil had basically their version of January 6th. It was actually on January 8th. So they got pretty close. Yeah. Where Jair Bolsonaro, who is the far-right president, lost election. A bunch of his supporters tried to storm a bunch of government offices to overturn the election.

It didn't work. As part of the investigation after the fact, the Supreme Court, which is involved in the investigation, has been looking into Twitter accounts that were spreading election disinformation to spin up the violence on January 8th. And as part of that, they asked Twitter to suspend some number of accounts that were under investigation for posting things that were illegal, basically, illegal incitement. And they did that last year. It was fine. Twitter suspended the accounts. It was no big deal. Again, they asked this year some more accounts. These are pro-Bolsonaro accounts. Bolsonaro is Trump's guy, so is Elon Musk's guy. Twitter refused to comply. And then the escalation that led to this is Twitter then

withdrew all of its staff from Brazil. And the reason that they did that is that way, the Brazilian government has no way to enforce regulations against Twitter. And they're saying that they thought the Brazilian government and this judge would arrest potentially some of the Twitter employees in Brazil. There's evidence for that. It's just a thing that Twitter said that's in other countries that has happened. But the reason that Brazilian law requires that Twitter maintains an office in Brazil

is so that they have a way to regulate the company because there's an office to receive fines, to receive regulatory rulings. They just need to have a legal representative there. Otherwise, they're completely above the law. So Elon Musk withdrew their staff so that they could basically say, we're going to post whatever we want. We're going to allow whatever accounts we want, and you're going to have no way to enforce against us. And that was where the Brazilian Supreme Court, after several months of this,

said, if you're really not going to reinstate your office, we're going to block the platform to compel you to reinstate it. So we're usually quick to assume that Elon Musk is in the wrong on most of these issues because most often he is um but the washington post published an op-ed about this titled in this free speech fight musk's x has marked the right position what a headline uh okay that's so clever yeah so clever uh in which they argue, as the title states, that despite Musk's typical inflammatory and often inconsistent approach to free speech, this time he actually has a point.

What do you think? Well, what do you think? Because I've thought a lot about this. Yeah, I mean, the key graph in the Washington Post editorial is, if this sounds authoritarian, it is. Whatever the threat to democracy that the accounts Mr. Marias wanted gone might have posed, the threat from one government official limiting the speech of 220 million people is greater,

and the entire episode is turning into a cautionary tale for democracies that believe the answer to troublesome online expression is to suppress it. I will say that the op-ed made me think of like how much, I mean mean this is a different country's political system but like how much power do you want to vest in one judge to decide what should be taken down and what should not what is like legitimately potentially inciting violence like the kind we saw on january 6th here and january 8th there or undermining democracy and what is just speech and like where i mean we've talked about content moderation a million times but like where does this this is sort of like we just talked last week about the uh case here

where all these right-wing goons suggested that um the government leaned on Twitter and other social media companies to take down COVID disinformation, but also to like suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story, which is all bullshit. But this would be an example of the government actually ordering a social media company to take down content that they do not like. Yeah. So I think there's kind of two issues here. I think one is kind of two issues here. I think one is what you're raising about, do we think that it's good for the Brazilian Supreme Court to have the ability to order Twitter

to suspend certain accounts? To be clear, it wasn't just like a judge going through and being like, I don't like this tweet, I don't like this tweet. It was because those accounts are under investigation for breaking the law, for inciting an insurrection. But I do take your point. And I think this is a hard one because there's no perfect actor to regulate social media. It's like it's either governments or it's the companies. I sure don't trust the companies

to do it. There are a lot of governments I don't trust to do it. Donald Trump comes back into office. I don't trust him to do it. Right. That was my first thought. Right. You know, like imagine if if imagine if like Donald Trump and and Clarence Thomas, just the two of them were deciding what speech online should be censored or taken down and what should be allowed. We wouldn't want that. In this case, the Brazilian Supreme Court did ultimately vote unanimously to back up the decision. But at some point, someone has to decide. And it's uncomfortable. It's uncomfortable to have anyone deciding this. But I think we all agree that we're at a point where social media is so impactful and can be so potentially dangerous that someone has to do it.

And it seems like in most cases, in democratic countries, the government is the least bad answer. But I think the bigger issue here is that what Elon Musk is trying to do by taking his offices out of the country, and the reason that Brazil blocked Twitter is trying to do by taking his offices out of the country, and the reason that Brazil blocked Twitter is because this was a move explicitly designed to put Twitter above the law in Brazil. The explicit reason he did this is so the government would have no power over it whatsoever, regardless of whether you like the decision, what the decision is. And I just, I don't think that we can have social media companies operating above the law by using this cheat of completely offshoring from countries.

And like I reported a few years ago in Sri Lanka where there was like Facebook and Twitter and YouTube were spinning up all of this racial violence and this religious violence. And the government kept trying to contact the social media companies and saying, we want to do something, anything. Just work with you to get incitement and hate speech off of the platform before it gets more people killed. And, of course, Facebook ignored all the phone calls until they shut down access to the platform. The other thing that really, like, I just am not sympathetic to Twitter or Silicon Valley generally on this question of, like, you can't let governments ban us because it's free speech. You know who fucking loves the ban button? Facebook. They blocked access for news. And we've talked about this many times because it makes me so mad. Blocked access for news in Australia and then in Canada because they didn't

like regulations passed by the government. So the real fight here, I think, is whether Silicon Valley is going to let governments get away with regulating them in any context whatsoever. And Elon Musk put the government in this position to say, your only lever left is going to be to ban the platform to try to force me to bring offices back in the country so you can have what they actually want to do, which is not to ban the entire platform, but just to regulate like, hey, maybe don't incite insurrections on it. Well, and also a government has the ability to look at a foreign company that is operating media within their borders and to try to regulate or expel them altogether, which is what we just did here with TikTok. I mean, it is a similar...

Or Russia today. Or Russia today, right? And so, you know, you have to weigh those concerns. The other important thing to point out here is that under Elon Musk, Twitter had given into 83%, according to one analysis, of requests from authoritarian governments to remove content. So when Modi's government in India or China asks them to, you know, authoritarian governments ask Musk to take down certain content, he complies. But when it is a left-leaning government in Brazil, not so much. Yes, I think that it's the political affinity with this Trump ally. And I think it's also the fact that authoritarian governments have been much looser with the

block button in the past, especially countries like Turkey and India. And democracies have not been. And I think that, honestly, I think it's important for Brazil to show that democracies will do it too so that we don't have to get to this point. Brazil is one of Twitter's largest markets. 40 million users. Do you think it's going to have a big effect on Twitter's struggling business or do you think they's going to have a big effect on Twitter struggling

businesses or do you think they're going to resolve this? That business is doing great. They're doing fine. They're doing so well. $24 billion he lost investors. I just saw. I know. Could you imagine being an investor in Twitter? I mean, I hate to say that you had it coming, but what kind of decision was that? $24 billion. This is the guy we're putting in charge of the Trump administration's government audit. Trump wins again. He's going to do great. He's a brilliant businessman.

No, I mean, it's not a total disaster. Brazil is a huge market, but Twitter has been declining there for a long time. Like people just, they use video platforms. They use WhatsApp a lot. They use WhatsApp a lot. There's like a Chinese platform, Kuai, that I'd never even heard of that is bigger than Twitter now. Just heard about it now. The real thing that is really going to,

have you heard about this European Union, the DSA, Digital Services Act thing? Oh, yes. Yeah. Like the European Union is now telling Twitter, you're in violation of our social media regulations. It was just a couple of weeks ago in this letter and a senior MEP,

which is a member of the European Parliament, said that the EU, all of Europe, could block access to Twitter if he doesn't resolve it. That's the really big one. That's death spiral. Yeah, that's bad. And I don't think Elon Musk is going to take it well. I don't think it's going to improve the experience on the platform.

All right, finally, on Wednesday morning, Hayley Welch, the internet personality better known as the HawkTuaGirl, dropped a video announcing her exciting new project. I'm Hayley Welch. A little while ago, my life took a complete left turn and it changed forever. And along the way, I realized that everybody's entitled to their own opinion. Well, now it's my time to talk. And Pookie.

Who is Pookie? Who is Pookie? He may stop by, too. Check out my podcast every week, Talk Toa, where I'm sitting down with the coolest guests and having actual conversations with them. New exercise every week! Subscribe to that thing! You heard that right, folks. Hawk Toa is joining the glamorous world of podcasting.

The show, brilliantly titled Talk Toa, is set to debut this week and will be part of Jake Paul's Better Content Network. We've come full circle, folks. Max, for the folks who may not be familiar with Hawk Tua, can you please explain Welch's meteoric rise and tell us why she's referred to as Hawk Tua? You are unfortunately not allowed to leave out any details. So I could not possibly do as great a job summarizing this as the Google auto-generated info box that you get when you Google. Did you see this? No.

It says this is like actually a thing that pops up on Google if you search on your phone. And it says, quote, known for onomatopoeia catchphrase during interview. I'm never going to top that. Okay, so two months ago, which feels like a thousand years ago, there was a man on the street interview with these YouTube accounts where they go out and talk to people when they're going into nightclubs or whatever

and just ask them provocative questions. And someone asked her, what's one move in bed that makes a man grow crazy every time? Which is not a question we ask a lot on this show. And her answer was, you got to give him that hoctua and spit on that thing, as in lubricate that thing. And I'm not going to explain what that thing is

if you don't know at this point. Now, if you haven't figured out already, hoctua is the sound that you make when you're about to spit. That's right. And she really nailed the sound. She was funny. She animated. You can see why she went viral.

But then it became this thing that happens on TikTok where it's getting remixed and people are commenting on it and kind of like eats its own tail. She did interviews everywhere. I think there was rumors she was going to like sign with UTA, this big talent agency. She was in Kamala's Veep Stakes running. Yeah, it's kind of a dark horse candidate. And I gotta tell you, her numbers in Pennsylvania, they're good. There were rumors when they thought that Beyonce was going to show up at the convention. That's right, that it was

hog to a girl. That's right. Okay, so why are we talking about this? That's a great question. Ryan Broderick had a great piece in his newsletter Garbage Day this week about how the internet has made it harder to gauge what's actually popular and that Welch is probably the most egregious example of this phenomenon. What did you think of that piece? Is there actually an audience for this show or is this

just some weird viral thing that sort of like went out of control and now people are trying to make it popular offline? So initially that I was like, it's one of those two. And I was kind of thinking about it. I was trying, I was thinking a about how, like, you know, well, there's this thing now where people keep trying to create a pipeline of, like, viral moment to, like, real-world merch or, like, books. Like, there was the drill book. Do you remember the shit my dad says book? No. Yeah. Well, that's good.

Okay. This is a viral Twitter account from, like, the early 2010s where someone quoted, like, her dad would say funny stuff, and they turned it into a book that sold eight copies. People have been trying forever to turn, like, how do you make more money off of these viral moments and i think you like you look at the fact that there's all this merch and she's getting a podcast and everything and it's like is that happening now and i think actually just what's happening now is i think that this is just very specifically the like online gambling industrial complex because the actual places where she's making her money are not anything that is suggestive of her having a real audience it's hawking crypto and going to crypto conferences which will pay literally anybody to show up yep and hawk some sort of

coin because it's just a form of gambling hawk that's that's right yes which is part of why they love her i'm sure and the quote-unquote podcast that she's getting is on better which is a sports gambling network, which is just gambling. It's just straight-up chance gambling. And I think this is just like people trying to generate advertising for gambling websites basically by saying, boy, they got the hawk to a girl. Maybe that's the sports gambling website that I should go to. It's also a bit of a talent pipeline, and it's like an opportunity to prove yourself right?

It's true. Because it's like oh why did she go viral? There's an attractive young woman who was talking about sex. Everybody knows

about her right now. She's talking about talking about sex and she and so they're like why not this person become famous?

Other people have become famous for less. That's true. I guess it's always possible that she could like catch a second time and actually generate an audience. And if she does, God bless.

Although, please don't do it on a sports gambling network because sports gambling is immoral and it's wrong. And I don't think that you should support it with your newfound celebrity hawk to a girl. Wow, okay. We're going to have to have a debate

about sports gambling on this podcast. This is not going to help with the Manosphere very much. Yeah, that's true. They're all funded by... That's probably part of it, is that we legalize sports gambling. You know what I blame? I blame the state legislatures for the Manosphere podcast. I do. I'm serious.

That's who's funding these guys. It sounds like a special WOD6. It has been and will continue to be, yes. Broderick says, though, in the piece, the conclusion I've come to this summer,

one I'm not totally sure I fully believe yet, is that what's really happening here is that virality is decoupling from popularity. And I think you could even argue that the very idea

that mass appeal had to be accurately reflected back to us online and vice versa was an entirely millennial idea, which goes into a... I think that's interesting just because of all the silos now. Something that we assume

is something went viral that will have this sort of mass popular appeal, which... That is interesting. It's actually, as I'm thinking about it, a like contrast with 10 years ago is that when we would have online monoculture moments, it would just be because we all saw a video that was fun. So the person or whatever was happening in that video could become actually popular on its own. And I think more often what happens now is that a moment like this becomes popular

in the online monoculture, not because of the video itself, which is like you watch it for eight seconds and then you're done, there's nothing else to do, is because of the remix culture introduced by TikTok. Everyone's iterating on the original. Everyone's iterating on it, right. And it's like, we have some harsh words for TikTok, but I think it is genuinely cool what

can happen on platforms like this when people create like new versions of it. They do things with it. They like remix it in crazy ways that then you can turn an eight second clip into like probably too many hours of content, but like new and interesting things. But that is to say that the thing that is actually drawing people in isn't the moment itself. It's the creativity around the moment,

which is much harder to monetize, unless you're TikTok. Yeah. And I think that she will, like the first episode of that podcast, you know, people are going to tune in. What's she going to say?

What's she going to say? And then if it's not much, then that's it. Yeah. But she hasn't lost anything. That's what I'm saying. So it is the opportunity that it gives you, the morality gives you. Yeah. All right. say what you're gonna say and then if it's not much then that's it yeah but that's but that she hasn't lost anything that's what i'm saying that's so it is the opportunity that it gives you the morality gives you yeah all right that is our show for today uh we will be back again here next week and uh and we'll see you then i won't be here but have a great time oh i'm going on vacation so i'll

be in wow yeah that's right i'll send you a postcard that's fun yes this is a great end we're keeping all we're keeping all this in bye everyone send you a postcard. That's fun. Yeah, send us. This is a great end. We're keeping all of this. We're keeping all of this in. Bye, everyone. Offline is a Crooked Media production. It's written and hosted by me, Jon Favreau, along with Max Fisher.

It's produced by Austin Fisher and Emma Illick-Frank. Jordan Cantor is our sound editor. Charlotte Landis is our engineer. Audio support from Kyle Seglin. Jordan Katz and Kenny Siegel take care of our music. Thanks to Ari Schwartz, Madeline Herringer, Reed Cherlin, and Adrian Hill for production support. And to our digital team, Elijah Cohn and Dilan Villanueva,

who film and share our episodes as videos every week.