Today on WIRED Politics Lab, Pod Save America cohosts Jon Favreau and Tommy Vietor join the show to discuss what the Biden administration has to say about disinformation. Plus, how to wade through the social media muck and stay informed through this election.
Leah Feiger is @LeahFeiger. Jon Favreau is @jonfavs. Tommy Vietor is @TVietor08. Write to us at politicslab@WIRED.com. Be sure to subscribe to the WIRED Politics Lab newsletter here.
Mentioned this week:
Google’s and Microsoft’s AI Chatbots Refuse to Say Who Won the 2020 US Election by David Gilbert
Extremist Militias Are Coordinating in More Than 100 Facebook Groups by Tess Owen
The Biden admin has no firm plan to call out domestic disinformation in the 2024 election by Dan De Luce and Ken Dilanian, NBC News
How the Right Won the Internet and How the Left is Fighting Back Journalist Sasha Issenberg on Offline with Jon Favreau
Democracy or Else by Jon Favreau, Tommy Vietor, and Jon Lovett
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Transcript
Note: This is an automated transcript, which may contain errors.
Leah Feiger: Welcome to WIRED Politics Lab, a show about how tech is changing politics. I'm Leah Feiger, the senior politics editor at WIRED. And today on the show we have two of the Pod Save America cohosts, Jon Favreau and Tommy Vietor. Jon and Tommy, thank you so much for coming on WIRED Politics Lab.
Tommy Vietor: Thanks for having us.
Jon Favreau: Thank you for having us. Yeah.
Leah Feiger: And congratulations on your new book, Democracy or Else: How to Save America in 10 Easy Steps. It's out this week, listeners. Go check it out.
Jon Favreau: Thank you.
Tommy Vietor: Thank you.
Leah Feiger: Yeah, so just to hop right in. When I was reading it this weekend, I was really interested in the connection and feedback loop between outlets like Fox News and right-wing radio with election conspiracies and other misinformation and disinformation. How are you already seeing those dynamics play out in this cycle?
Tommy Vietor: I mean, right now you're seeing basically every single day on Twitter or I don't know, TikTok, pick a platform, some video of Joe Biden looking old and confused, and a lot of them are not AI Deepfakes, a lot of them are just kind of cropped or edited in a certain way that strips out context and makes him look bad. But it is an incredibly challenging thing for the Biden campaign to deal with, and it's a constant problem.
Jon Favreau: I think what makes it even harder this cycle is just the way that the media and information environments have changed is that it's just much harder to keep track of everything that's out there. And so, it's not like the days when, okay, Fox News is starting a conspiracy and you can trace it to a couple different podcasts and then that's it. Now it could be a TikTok that's gone viral that is just completely under the radar and that no one's talking about.
Leah Feiger: And if you're not checking the right Telegram channels, you don't know exactly where it's coming from.
Jon Favreau: Yes. Yeah, no, I talk to a lot of pollsters and they say WhatsApp groups now are the big, especially in the Latino community, there's just a lot of misinformation, disinformation being spread on WhatsApp groups, which are impossible for a campaign or anyone to really track down.
Tommy Vietor: Huge problem in Brazil too.
Jon Favreau: Yeah.
Leah Feiger: It's great out there right now, honestly, it's good all around.
Jon Favreau: It's a wonderful time for democracy.
Tommy Vietor: It's funny, the arc of our career has been how to deal with these sorts of things because I remember in the 2008 campaign, the questions about Obama's birth certificate and whether he was really born in the United States, the racist birther smear was sort of bubbling up and there was a big internal debate in the campaign of like, do you push back on these things? Do you acknowledge them? Do you rebut them? Or is that giving it credence and giving it oxygen? And we ended up creating a website called stopthesmears.com or something, that was our kind of foray into pushing back on these things.
Leah Feiger: Wow.
Jon Favreau: That would not work.
Leah Feiger: So lovingly 2008. We're in a totally new era of the tech of it all and the tech disinformation of it all. We ran an article in the last two weeks about how AI chatbots from Microsoft and Google would not say who won the 2020 election. That's wild. How on earth can a campaign handle something like that? But I want to talk specifically about the Biden administration here. NBC had a great report last week about how the Biden admin doesn't really seem to have a clear plan to call out domestic disinformation. Specifically, for example, in dealing with issues like deep fakes and AI. So it seems that unless it's coming from Russia or another foreign actor, the plan is that there really isn't a plan. Why do you think that is?
Jon Favreau: There's the administration, then there's the campaign.
Leah Feiger: Absolutely.
Jon Favreau: So I think from the administration perspective, we are awaiting, as of this recording, a decision in Murthy V. Missouri, which is a case right-wing conservative activists brought against the government because they're mad that they think that in the 2020 election, the government reached out to the social media companies and tried to censor them. And so, the argument is even though the government was just communicating with social media companies and saying, "Hey, you've got some misinformation about the vaccines here, it's not right." That's it.
Leah Feiger: Maybe don't print RFK's manifestos word for word. Feels bad.
Jon Favreau: They said that it was somehow there was pressure exerted. Right?
Leah Feiger: Yeah, sure, sure, sure.
Jon Favreau: So I imagine that now the administration, now that this lawsuit is still pending, is probably a bit more cautious in figuring out how to go after disinformation. I think on the Biden campaign side, what they did in 2020 was it was a shift in strategy from trying to deal with the supply side of the disinformation to trying to deal with the demand side. So because of what we were just saying, which is like it's everywhere now, it's hard to keep track of. You can't just go after every conspiracy and every lie and try to bat it down. What they tried to do in 2020 was figure out, okay, what are the most damaging narratives out there about Joe Biden that are wrong? And so they tested the Hunter laptop stuff. They tested a couple fake ones. And it turns out that the Hunter laptop stuff, a lot of people knew about it. It wasn't really moving votes, it wasn't changing anyone's minds. People didn't really necessarily think Joe Biden was corrupt. The Joe Biden is old stuff that was out there was very damaging.
Leah Feiger: People were into it, people were into it, still into it.
Jon Favreau: A lot of people had heard about it and it was moving votes. And so, they decided that that would be the disinformation that they would really attack. So I do think that this time around is probably similar. They have to figure out not just how much disinformation misinformation is there out there and can we knock it all down, but what's really damaging to Biden and to the political prospects of the campaign, and then how do we counter that? And I don't think countering it is just like, "Hey, that's wrong." But in 2020, they realized that what was at the heart of people's concerns about Biden's age was that it was a proxy for weakness. That it was like he wasn't in charge. And so, the more they had him out there talking forcefully about his values or actions that he was going to take, that helped people's concerns about his age. And so, without directly rebutting the age thing, they just kind of showed and didn't tell. I bet that would be the strategy this time around as well.
Tommy Vietor: The video of him at SoulCycle helped too.
Jon Favreau: Yeah.
Tommy Vietor: From the White House protective, you do run into very legitimate constitutional questions around free speech when you're trying to get rid of misinformation. And I think one person's misinformation is another person's tyranny. If you'd imagine how we would feel if the Trump administration was calling tech platforms and saying, "Take this, that, or the other down."
Leah Feiger: I mean, we're living in multiple realities.
Tommy Vietor: Right. And the campaign has different flexibility to have these conversations.
Leah Feiger: Right.
Tommy Vietor: But also, all of those conversations that happened even when done in good faith with these tech platforms basically just got everybody in trouble and pissed off everybody. And now all the tech platforms are like, "We want no part of these debates." Twitter has just given up on misinformation. They've in fact made it incredibly profitable.
Leah Feiger: I would actually argue that they didn't give up on misinformation, but are reveling in it now.
Tommy Vietor: Yeah, absolutely. They got on the wrong side of it.
Leah Feiger: They're like, "Actually this seems good. I want neo-Nazis around me."
Tommy Vietor: They want neo-Nazis, and also if you're a blue check mark. Listen, every week I see some tweet about something happening in Ukraine or whatever, and I look at a video and it turns out it was actually from Syria in 2015.
Leah Feiger: Or a video game.
Tommy Vietor: But someone is making money off of that, so they've just made it profitable to spread disinformation.
Leah Feiger: Look, that all makes sense to me, but I will say Taiwan, Sweden, France are all figuring out ways to at least call out disinformation to their constituents. And there does feel like quite the disconnect where I think we can probably agree that misinfo and disinfo are going to be doing at least a decent bit of damage this time around. And it does feel so strange that there isn't a plan for this.
Jon Favreau: Yeah, like I said, I do think it's just because first of all, it's capabilities and then it is figuring out you want to maintain trust. And so, I remember from that piece is the FBI in the right position to say, "This is true, this is false." Even if it is. But then suddenly you're making the FBI fact checkers and I feel like that could go awry.
Leah Feiger: Has before.
Jon Favreau: So I think it was a much stronger argument around vaccine misinformation. When you start to get into political misinformation and disinformation, it's much harder, I think, for a government and not just a White House, but an entire federal government to be in that business because again, like Tommy said, imagine the Trump administration doing that. We might not have to.
Leah Feiger: Yeah, fair enough. So you recently sat down with journalist Sasha Issenberg for your podcast, Offline, where you also talked a lot about disinfo. I thought a really interesting idea came up during your discussion when Sasha said that some Republicans now view disinformation as a crutch that Democrats have used to evade responsibility for lost elections. How do you feel about that? What do you think about it right now?
Jon Favreau: Yeah, look, I think there's a danger in that. It's like everything else in politics, it starts with a real kernel of truth, the problem, and then the more it gets spun up on social media, suddenly everything is disinformation and misinformation and it's like an easy thing to blame. People who spend a lot of time online doing politics online—
Leah Feiger: We're all ill, for sure.
Jon Favreau: We're all, first of all, broken people, but also it's a lot of people looking for easy answers, for someone to blame, some force to blame, misinformation to blame, disinformation to blame. And my view on it is instead of trying to figure out what's at fault, just figure out how to fix it. Because if we just keep yelling about misinformation and disinformation, I don't think we're going to fact check our way to victory. If someone believes something that's wrong and you just tell them, "Hey, you're wrong. You've been had by a propaganda outlet and you've bought into disinformation." And research shows this is true, that's not the best way to get them to change their minds. Instead, you want to find out why they believe what they do and then figure out what's at the core of why they are believing this in misinformation or disinformation and then figure out how to persuade them otherwise.
Tommy Vietor: It's a very unsatisfying two things can be true answer. It's like, yes, I believe there was Russian interference in the 2016 election, but I think there were a variety of reasons why we lost. The Russians didn't tell Hillary not to go to Wisconsin, as far as I know.
Jon Favreau: Or what we were just talking about. Right? Say there were no deep fakes of Joe Biden looking old, say there were no deceptively cut videos of Joe Biden looking old, Joe Biden looks fucking old. You can sit there, you can watch him—
Tommy Vietor: In print, on film.
Jon Favreau: You can see it.
Tommy Vietor: On the internet.
Jon Favreau: And so, to the extent that people are blaming the deceptively edited videos for people's perception of Joe Biden's age, I think it's like, yeah, like Tommy said, they're wrong. Those videos are not portraying Joe Biden accurately. And yet, for a lot of other voters who haven't seen those videos, they're still thinking, "Joe Biden's old."
Leah Feiger: There's an undercurrent of truth, which is for sure how disinfo is able to proliferate in that way. Is there any chance that Republicans have been the dog that caught the car with this? Going from 2020 to now, obviously we're all making so many parallels here, but January 6th, the buildup to that, and now Republicans have just held onto that so strongly, hostages, prisoners, et cetera, have they overdone it with an emphasis on Democrats leaning into disinfo?
Tommy Vietor: Think you're right that the further Trump goes down this sort of escalation ladder of defending the January 6 insurrectionists and calling them warriors and playing their song at his rallies, I think that's politically damaging for him. I think though fundamentally Republicans, their message right now is we're going to burn it all down. The system hasn't worked for you. The media is broken and biased, so we're just going to destroy it. And the Democratic Party, we're defending institutions, we are defending the media. And I think what they're trying to do is just make people question everything and give up and say, you know what? All politicians are bad. They're all the same. No one's looking out for me, so either I'm not going to vote, or who cares who I vote for? How about that RFK guy.
Leah Feiger: Leaning into the chaos.
Jon Favreau: Authoritarianism thrives on nihilism.
Leah Feiger: On that happy note, thank you both so much. We'll be right back with Jon Favreau and Tommy Vietor in just a moment.
[Break]
Leah Feiger: Welcome back to WIRED Politics Lab, Jon and Tommy. I want to talk a little bit about state-level politics here in Arizona. For example, we have Kari Lake, the former gubernatorial candidate who claimed that her election was stolen in 2022. She's also been a massive proponent of the conspiracy that 2020 was stolen as well.
Kari Lake [Archival audio]: He shouldn't have to run again because he won the last election, but he will win and President Donald Trump will come back with a vengeance.
Leah Feiger: And she's running for Senate now. Where else are you seeing similar disinfo and down-ballot races already, and what states or races do you think are especially prone to this?
Tommy Vietor: North Carolina governor's race.
Leah Feiger: Robinson.
Tommy Vietor: He is a nutbag.
Leah Feiger: One Facebook post Robinson shared just days after the Parkland shooting said the survivors rode, quote, "a river of blood to 15 minutes of fameville."
Tommy Vietor: He had a news cycle recently where he called Beyoncé a skank. That's how things are going for him.
Leah Feiger: Yeah, Mark Robinson's, there's just so much to say there.
Tommy Vietor: Endless.
Jon Favreau: It's hard to pick because MAGA is now most of the Republican Party, so most of the candidates are in the conspiracy or conspiracy adjacent. I do think that the Republican senate campaign committee got more of their preferred candidates who aren't like the Kari Lakes this time around, but even those candidates, even the, quote-unquote, normal Republicans, now still, in order to be the nominee of the party in whatever state level race they're running in, still have to espouse the election stolen conspiracy. Right?
Tommy Vietor: Yeah, absolutely.
Jon Favreau: This happened in Ohio in the Senate race there when the candidates who were running to take on Sherrod Brown and a couple of them, I think the secretary of state there in Ohio had previously believed that the election was fair and had certified the election as secretary of state. And then because he wanted to be the Senate nominee, the Republican senate nominee for Ohio, he just decided to change course and just buy into the theory.
Leah Feiger: Funny how that happens.
Jon Favreau: It really is in some ways a top. It comes from the original, you have to buy-
Tommy Vietor: It's table stakes.
Jon Favreau: Yeah, it is.
Tommy Vietor: You have to have be an election denier now.
Jon Favreau: Totally. Totally.
Tommy Vietor: Except for maybe Larry Hogan, he might be the only one.
Leah Feiger: And the fact that Hogan is around and is maybe going to win, that's shocking.
Tommy Vietor: Yeah, it sort of tells you that Trump's demands are not necessarily smart politics, although this time it seems like Trump's giving Larry Hogan a little more room to breathe and be his own person, because he wants that seat.
Leah Feiger: Right. To switch gears a little bit, you really can't ignore the role of social media here as you get into quite a bit in your book. At WIRED, we've been reporting recently that far-right militias are using Facebook to organize ahead of the election, which is awesome.
Tommy Vietor: Nice. Lovely. Awesome.
Leah Feiger: Everyone's so excited about that. And as we were talking about, X has just become an absolute cesspool of conspiracy content since Elon Musk took over. We clearly cannot rely on big tech to self-regulate. How should politicians and campaigns be addressing this? Big question.
Tommy Vietor: Yeah. Well, I mean, I think the disinformation conversation we're having earlier, I think there's no way for the Biden folks to stop these deceptively edited videos from going around. They can yell at the New York Post for example, and say, "Hey, you guys are a news-gathering organization, and yet you took a video from the RNC, further cropped it to make it more misleading, and then put it out on your platform. That's embarrassing for you." I think that's sort of a worthwhile exercise, but they can't stop Cat Turd 420 or whatever that prick's name is from spreading it to his millions of followers. So I think the only thing you can do really is fight fire with fire, which means partly putting out Trump's senior moments on their Twitter feed, which they do, but then also making sure that moments where Biden looks strong or the state of the union where he is on top of things that's out there. So hopefully people see that in their algorithm as well, and they think, you know what? This video of Biden looking lost, talking to a guy who just parachuted into the D-Day celebration doesn't actually jive with my understanding of him, because I just saw something else where he was cogent and he was making an argument, and I thought he looked like a leader.
Jon Favreau: When we interviewed our old boss, Barack Obama, in November on Pod Save of America, Tommy asked him a question about how to talk to people about Gaza, and he started by saying—
Tommy Vietor: Nine minutes later.
Jon Favreau: Nine minutes. Yeah. Right. It was a very long wind up from him, but it was interesting where he started, which was he was like in 2008, everyone was like, "Oh, Obama's using the internet and technology to revolutionize campaigning." He's like, "But the way we did that is we would use the internet to organize people so that they could meet up in real life, and then they would do politics in real life and get to know each other there." And now—
Leah Feiger: It's like, what a beautiful idea.
Jon Favreau: And now when you only organize people online and they only meet online and the debates happen online and everything, you're going to lose trust. And so, I do think that there's going to be, and where I've seen this already a return to sort of in-person organizing, in-person canvassing as a way to move voters because there's something called relational organizing. Right?
Leah Feiger: Yeah. There's a group that just put in 10 million to basically get your friends to tell you to vote.
Jon Favreau: Right. Because if you are a voter and you are on social media or you're watching the news, let's say you're undecided, you don't know who to trust, you don't know what to trust. The only people you trust are the people that you know. And so, the people that become the most trusted messengers and the most persuasive messengers. And so, a lot of campaigns, sort of going back to that model, realizing that just fighting it out on social media is not going to win you the election.
Tommy Vietor: Well, then you can also pay fitness influencers in Orange County to post your stuff.
Leah Feiger: I think RFK has figured out the fitness influencers.
Tommy Vietor: He's cornered the market on that.
Leah Feiger: He's got them all. He has them all listed, every single number. He's good to go.
Tommy Vietor: I came across a clip of him the other day where he was just on the floor at a gym, presumably between sets of bench or whatever he was doing, talking about Gaza and making a full-throated case for why the Israelis should be bombing the way they are. And I was like, "What is going on in this election? This is so weird."
Leah Feiger: We cover RFK Jr. quite a bit, and every single time, it's just shocking. My very favorite shark influencer, yes, that's a very specific thing. Maybe not my favorite, but up there with the shark influencers—
Tommy Vietor: Where are they based?
Leah Feiger: Hawaii, scuba diving.
Jon Favreau: That makes sense.
Tommy Vietor: I follow the New England–based one.
Leah Feiger: Yeah, fair.
Tommy Vietor: I really do.
Leah Feiger: There's a lot more.
Jon Favreau: Really?
Leah Feiger: Yeah. No, they're good. But this one in Hawaii took RFK out on the boat.
Tommy Vietor: That's smart.
Leah Feiger: He's everywhere. He has figured out the social media game for this election. How do you guys think that Team Biden is doing social-media-wise for this election?
Tommy Vietor: They're behind. I think they would be the first to tell you. The thing that really stuck in my head ever since I watched it was a couple weeks back, Trump went to an MMA fight in Newark or something. He walks into the stadium with Dana White, the head of the UFC, 16,000 people cheer for him. He daps up with Logan Paul and all these guys, and they're all just taking content. And the MMA, the crypto bros, the kind of Paul Brothers, they have a very smart strategy to find those people, talk to them on their channels, the NELC Boys, whatever. Some of your listeners probably never heard of it, but they're like YouTube pages with millions and millions of followers, and they're making a concerted effort to reach young men in particular. And I think the Biden folks, it's a lot harder when you're president. It's a lot more earnest stuff about policy, $35 insulin.
Jon Favreau: And it really can't come from them. Right before this, I was interviewing John Della Volpe, who's a pollster, who specializes in young people, polling young people, and he's also worked with the Biden campaign as well. And so I was asking him about this and he said, look, the challenge is people aren't going to buy it if it comes from the Biden campaign. It's not like they can set up their TikTok and just push out content that way.
Leah Feiger: That's fair.
Jon Favreau: He's like, "And the Trump thing happens because Dana White and other people invite him to these events."
Leah Feiger: Well, it just feels more organic.
Jon Favreau: It feels more organic. And he goes, and so what our side needs is everyone's always asking, what does Biden need to do? What does campaign need to do? He goes, "Everyone who doesn't want Trump, who is an influencer, who is a celebrity, needs to step up and say, 'I'm for Joe Biden, and it's great, and I think Donald Trump is a threat.'" And just not be afraid of that because right now it feels like uncool to do that. No one really wants to speak up, even though there's—
Tommy Vietor: Gaza's made it really complicated. Gaza's made it really complicated.
Leah Feiger: Yeah. It's also like how much are you going to be out there and in what way?
Tommy Vietor: Right. Yeah. And also, ever since I saw that UFC thing, I've talked to a million people, what is the progressive version of Trump going to the UFC? And I just have no idea what it is. Like an NBA game?
Leah Feiger: Well, I mean, honestly, I think of, we had Hassan Piker on as a guest a couple of weeks ago, and he became a really famous Twitch streamer when he had AOC on, and they streamed playing Among Us, and no Biden's not going to do that, but that would be kind of more in the space. But like you said, there's just so many different parts that would make that impossible.
Tommy Vietor: Irish Poetry Slam?
Leah Feiger: Ooh, good, but on Amtrak.
Tommy Vietor: Right. Yeah. Now we're cooking with gas. I like that idea.
Leah Feiger: I think there's moves. So in your book, you talk a lot about the promises and pitfalls of social media. We've gotten into some of those here, but I'm just going to read a quote that you guys have at the very end. I'm doing it.
Tommy Vietor: Cool.
Leah Feiger: At the end, you write, "Maybe we'll look back on this era as a time of democratic backsliding, of acrimony and misinformation and crisis, when we realized that we no longer knew how to live together or that social media showed us we never really knew how to live together in the first place." Do you have any advice for our listeners on wading through the muck this election? Especially because so many platforms have changed or not changed since 2020?
Tommy Vietor: Oh, that's really good. I think you have to find voices that you trust that are actually vetting information and follow those people and try to tune out the thing that's just super viral that is just from someone you've never heard of.
Jon Favreau: Yeah, don't get all your news from social media. And that's not to say, because I have Gen Z cousins who I've had this argument with.
Leah Feiger: It's easier said than done. Most people do.
Jon Favreau: They're like, "You don't understand, this person is good and they're providing valuable information." It's like they might, I'm not telling you, don't follow that person, or don't look at that account or don't believe that information. I'm just saying verify it with other sources of news that use things like editors and fact checkers and have an institution.
Leah Feiger: Thank you for uplifting my industry.
Jon Favreau: Just like crazy stuff like that.
Leah Feiger: This whole episode is actually just like a whole ploy to keep me employed.
Jon Favreau: Us in the mainstream media, we just got to circle the wagons.
Leah Feiger: Yeah. Thank you so much. We're going to take a short break and go to Conspiracy of the Week.
[Break]
Leah Feiger: Welcome back to WIRED Politics Lab to our favorite section of the week most possibly, called Conspiracy of the Week, where our guests bring me the most unhinged, fun, ridiculous conspiracies that they've been finding over the last week or so. And I'm going to pick my favorite. Pick the winner.
Tommy Vietor: Okay. Who goes first?
Jon Favreau: I'll go.
Leah Feiger: All right.
Jon Favreau: This has been floating around for a while, but I've noticed it getting more traction recently, which is the right believes that at the convention Democrats will replace Joe Biden with Michelle Obama. That's going to happen.
Leah Feiger: I love that conspiracy. I forgot about that one.
Jon Favreau: It's so funny.
Leah Feiger: I forgot about that one. Is it back?
Jon Favreau: It's back. It's back in a big way. They're like, sure it's going to happen. It's my favorite conspiracy just because Michelle Obama nearly hates politics.
Leah Feiger: I don't know if nearly, deeply, I think deeply.
Jon Favreau: I want to be fair to her because deeply she cares a lot about the country and issues. She feels deeply. But the practice of politics, campaign, hates it. Hates it. Barely made it through two campaigns and being in the White House because she smartly cared about raising her two girls.
Leah Feiger: Yes. Having a family.
Jon Favreau: Having them be normal, all that kind of stuff.
Leah Feiger: Yes. Seems fair.
Jon Favreau: And the idea that Michelle would, well, also, the idea that they would replace Joe Biden with Michelle, they just pull a switcheroo.
Leah Feiger: I love it. But it gets into the globalist conspiracy of it all. Like we're pulling the strings. You'll never know. Yeah. Yeah.
Jon Favreau: So every time I hear that, I hope they keep spreading it. Some of the conspiracies you worry about because they're damaging this. I'm like, keep talking about Michelle Obama running. That's fine. Knock yourself out.
Leah Feiger: Okay. I love that one. Tommy, what do you got?
Tommy Vietor: So mine came to me on TikTok a couple of days ago.
Leah Feiger: Good.
Jon Favreau: Where all good conspiracies come from.
Tommy Vietor: Do you guys know who Jim Brewer is? He was in the movie Half Baked.
Leah Feiger: Yes.
Tommy Vietor: Kind of just sort of like the guy who looks super high.
Jon Favreau: SNL.
Tommy Vietor: Yeah.
Leah Feiger: Yes, yes. That took me a second, but yes.
Tommy Vietor: Okay. So he was doing an interview on his podcast where he was talking about Dave Chappelle, and for folks like Jon and my age, The Chappelle Show was the most explosive thing in culture in 2003, 2004. It was the biggest show.
Leah Feiger: I do love that you revealed your age.
Tommy Vietor: Thank you.
Leah Feiger: Your cultural moment for you.
Tommy Vietor: Thirty-six. So the Chappelle Show was absolutely huge, and Chappelle did a couple seasons, then famously walked away from a $50 million deal because he just didn't like how it was going. He went to South Africa for a while and then came back and did a couple interviews and then took a few years off and now is doing whatever he is doing.
Leah Feiger: Got transphobic. It was nice.
Tommy Vietor: Yes. It's a weird winding path. Jim Brewer did an interview on his pod where he said that he believes that Chappelle was tapped on the shoulder by somebody. Now, spoiler alert, the somebody was the Jews. So it's not like all, it gets dark here too.
Leah Feiger: So sorry to tell you it was me.
Tommy Vietor: So he said that he got tapped by agents and then he said, "What's weird is that agents are all the same religion." But anyway, I digress. It was sort of one of those like, ugh, dude.
Leah Feiger: And they were from New York.
Tommy Vietor: Yes. Oh my God. He said that Chappelle went to South Africa, and then when he came back, he's pretty sure it was a different person.
Jon Favreau: No.
Tommy Vietor: Now he's not sure if it was—
Leah Feiger: Oh my God.
Tommy Vietor: Just a lookalike or a clone. But the proof points were one, he got jacked. Now, I just want to be clear that in the Oprah interview Chappelle did after he returned from South Africa, he's very much not jacked. He's very much just the skinny dude. He must have done the Dr. Dre thing in recent years. They all take HGH or whatever, and they just get massive. The other proof point was you can't walk away from them, the agents, $50 million or whatever, and then come back and get a bunch of Netflix specials. So it has to have been an invasion of the body snatchers. Now, he says this on his podcast, and then he followed up and elaborated in an interview with Roseanne Barr. Which is one of those—
Jon Favreau: That's where you go.
Tommy Vietor: One of those details where 15 years ago you guys would've been like, "Roseanne? What the fuck are you talking about?" Now you're like, "Oh."
Leah Feiger: Yeah. No, no, no. The minute I think of a conspiracy, I'm like, "Roseanne, let me tell you."
Tommy Vietor: There you go. Yeah. So Dave Chappelle went to South Africa, was replaced by a clone. Now he's back. That's why he's swole, and why a decade later he's getting Netflix deals.
Leah Feiger: God, that's good. I'm so sorry, Jon.
Jon Favreau: Oh, I vote for Tommy's.
Leah Feiger: Yeah, yeah. I think you won. You won.
Jon Favreau: And not only in good spirit, but also the fact that Tommy checked the Oprah interview.
Leah Feiger: Oh yeah. No, no, no, you did detailed work on this.
Tommy Vietor: I watched it on TikTok.
Leah Feiger: But don't forget, guys, social media shouldn't be your entire news consumption.
Tommy Vietor: Right. Yeah. Yeah.
Jon Favreau: I was wondering what you were watching in the car on the way over here.
Tommy Vietor: That's what I was watching.
Jon Favreau: I'm looking over, I'm like, "What is Tommy into right here?"
Tommy Vietor: What if he really was cloned? Joke’s on me.
Leah Feiger: That is absolutely incredible. Thank you guys so much for coming on. This was great.
Tommy Vietor: Thanks for having us.
Jon Favreau: Thank you for having us.
Leah Feiger: Thanks for listening to WIRED Politics Lab. If you like what you heard today, make sure to follow the show and rate it on your podcast app of choice. We also have a newsletter, which Makena Kelly writes each week. The link to the newsletter and the WIRED reporting we mentioned today are in the show notes. If you'd like to get in touch with us with any questions, comments, or show suggestions, please write to us at politicslab@WIRED.com. That's politicslab@WIRED.com. We're so excited to hear from you. WIRED Politics Lab is produced by Jake Harper. Sheena Ozaki is our researcher. Jake Lummus is our studio engineer, Amar Lal mixed this episode. Stephanie Kariuki is our executive producer. Chris Bannon is Global Head of Audio at Condé Nast. And I'm your host, Leah Feiger. We'll be back in your feeds with a new episode next week.
