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  • Could AI and Deepfakes Sway the US Election?

    Could AI and Deepfakes Sway the US Election?

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    Leah Feiger: All right, that’s a good one. Thank you, Tori. Will, what do you have for us?

    Will Knight: Wow, I don’t know if I can really compete with RFK, but as a good CIA operative, I’m going to promote something from the weirder corners of AI, AI and philosophy, I guess. So there’s this thing called Roko’s basilisk. So the basilisk is a mythological creature serpent that if you looked in its eyes, it could kill you. And so there was this thought experiment someone posted on an AI forum saying that superintelligence in the future would be incentivized to create a simulation in which maybe we all exist inside it, and it would be incentivized to torture anybody who worked against or even thought about the idea of working against it coming into being. So at one point in one of these …

    Leah Feiger: Incredible.

    Will Knight: … forums, they banned talk of Roko’s, this thought experiment, Roko’s basilisk. The idea was that if you even thought about it, it could be dangerous, which is particularly bananas.

    Leah Feiger: That is so funny. What forums is this proliferating on, or not proliferating on?

    Will Knight: This was on LessWrong, which is a very famous forum dedicated to AI risks and alignment and—

    Leah Feiger: How often do you personally think about Roko’s basilisk?

    Will Knight: Well, I actually only discovered it recently, and I try not to think about it just in case. It’s like Pascal’s wager, isn’t it? It’s just sort of playing the odds that superintelligence will come into being, so you have to try and make it come into being. Yeah, it’s completely mad.

    Leah Feiger: Oh, that’s a very good one. OK. Oh, actually, this is a little bit hard this week, but I got to go with Tori. CIA assets, here we go.

    Vittoria Elliott: Finally. Did the Ravens put me over the edge? I must know.

    Leah Feiger: The Ravens did put you over the edge. I liked it, and it was part of, I just saw how much you were working for this, and yeah, it was an A for effort and an A for execution. Good stuff.

    Vittoria Elliott: Thank you.

    Leah Feiger: And partially, I can’t give the win to something that I’m not allowed to think about ever again. Tori and Will, thank you so much for joining us. You were excellent guests.

    Vittoria Elliott: Thanks, Leah.

    Will Knight: Thanks for having me.

    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, please write to [email protected]. That’s [email protected]. We’re so excited to hear from you. WIRED Politics Lab is produced by Jake Harper. Pran Bandi 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.

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  • Influencers Take Over the DNC

    Influencers Take Over the DNC

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    The Democratic National Convention organizers really rolled out the blue carpet for influencers this year. Today on the show, WIRED senior reporter Makena Kelly joins from Chicago to talk about the Democrats’ strategy of favoring creators over journalists, and whether it will help them win votes. Plus, behind the scenes at the influencer after-parties.

    Leah Feiger is @LeahFeiger. Makena Kelly is @kellymakena.  Write to us at [email protected]. Be sure to subscribe to the WIRED Politics Lab newsletter here.

    Mentioned this week:
    The DNC Is Officially the Influencer Convention by Makena Kelly
    A Visual Guide to the Influencers Shaping the 2024 Election by Makena Kelly

    How to Listen

    You can always listen to this week’s podcast through the audio player on this page, but if you want to subscribe for free to get every episode, here’s how:

    If you’re on an iPhone or iPad, open the app called Podcasts, or just tap this link. You can also download an app like Overcast or Pocket Casts, and search for WIRED Politics Lab. We’re on Spotify too.

    Transcript

    Note: This is an automated transcript, which may contain errors.

    Leah Feiger: This is WIRED Politics Lab, a show about how tech is changing politics. I’m Leah Feiger, the senior politics editor at WIRED. Today on the show, the 2024 Democratic National Convention is almost over. Earlier this week, Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama rallied Democrats around their new candidate.

    Joe Biden [Archival audio]: Are you ready to vote for freedom?

    Audience: Yeah!

    Joe Biden [Archival audio]: Are you ready to vote for democracy and for America?

    Audience: Yeah!

    Joe Biden [Archival audio]And tonight, Kamala Harris will close out the event. But unlike in conventions past, every night has also featured influencers. People like content creator and abortion rights activists, Deja Foxx.

    Deja Foxx [Archival audio]: People my age are making big decisions about our lives and we deserve a president who has our back.

    Leah Feiger: And Carlos Eduardo Espina, a TikToker and immigration rights activist.

    Carlos Eduardo Espina [Archival audio]: To be pro immigrant is to be pro America.

    Leah Feiger: 200 other content creators are attending and posting, all invited by the DNC, to connect with young voters and they hope help Kamala Harris beat Donald Trump. Joining me from Chicago to talk about what’s going on at the DNC is WIRED senior reporter, Makena Kelly. Hey, Makena, how’s it going?

    Makena Kelly: I’m a little tired, but it’s day three here at the convention and there’s been a lot going on. A lot going on.

    Leah Feiger: Fair enough. In addition to all of the DNC events during the day, you’re also going to all of the parties at night. How are they?

    Makena Kelly: Yeah, so I was out until 2:00 AM last night. The last thing on my schedule was from 10:00 to 2:00 AM and it was a party called Hotties for Harris, and it was thrown, it wasn’t-



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  • Kamala Harris’ Brat Summer Is Almost Over. What’s Next?

    Kamala Harris’ Brat Summer Is Almost Over. What’s Next?

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    Selina Meyer (Julia Louis-Dreyfus): POTUS is not going to be running for a second term. Oh my God, I’m going to run. Oh my God.

    Dan Egan (Reid Scott): Whoa, whoa, whoa. Wait, ma’am, give me this straight poop ears, is this for real?

    Selina Meyer (Julia Louis-Dreyfus): It’s totally—

    Dan Egan (Reid Scott): Yeah.

    Selina Meyer (Julia Louis-Dreyfus): For real.

    Dan Egan (Reid Scott): Oh, thank you.

    Hunter Harris: People who know Veep by heart, it’s our season, let me tell you that.

    Leah Feiger: It’s so good.

    Hunter Harris: But I mean, truly, it was ridiculous the degree that Kamala Harris was being publicly, and it seemed privately, undermined.

    Leah Feiger: Yeah, absolutely.

    Hunter Harris: And then I think it’s worked in her favor, the degree to which the Biden campaign had basically hidden her away.

    Leah Feiger: Yeah.

    Hunter Harris: Because all the reasons why the internet and young people had sort of soured on Kamala, her record as a prosecutor, her stance on Gaza, people kind of forgot that she was less progressive than she’d seemed.

    Leah Feiger: Sure, totally, totally. Yeah, she just popped out. It’s an underdog story, is kind of how it feels, which is hilarious, because she’s on the incumbent side.

    Hunter Harris: It is shocking that someone who has been so close to the presidency for the last four years, is like the underdog in this narrative because—

    Leah Feiger: Yeah.

    Hunter Harris: But she wears it very well. I think—

    Leah Feiger: Yeah.

    Hunter Harris: … that it is, I wonder when this will all kind of turn, when politics will become—

    Leah Feiger: Oh, yes.

    Hunter Harris: … politics again and not pop culture, and then it will feel like, okay, we’re back to none of this being very fun.

    Leah Feiger: Well, I guess that brings me to, is Brat Summer over already? Let’s talk about it, Biden drops out, Charli XCX wrote on X that Kamala is Brat. The Harris campaign seized on it, they changed a ton of their social stuff. They’ve been doing things that the Biden campaign just couldn’t have even dreamt of with social media. What are you seeing in terms of trends changing, things perhaps shifting in, even the discussion about it? Like you can’t have a Brat Summer in October.

    Hunter Harris: Sure. I think the Brat Summer sort of phenomenon, will eventually die down, although Obama did just put a Brat song in his annual summer playlist. I said—

    Leah Feiger: Like, bless the intern who is like super on top. That entire playlist, I’m like, “This is amazing.”

    Hunter Harris: There’s something so petty to me about him not putting Chappell Roan, like the music story of the summer being absent from his playlist.

    Leah Feiger: I was looking for “Hot to Go,” that was what I wanted to see pop up on the Obama playlist.

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  • The Right is Still Pushing Election Denial — and Pillows

    The Right is Still Pushing Election Denial — and Pillows

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    Leah Feiger: This is so good.

    David Gilbert: Then it took a bit of a darker turn, this conspiracy, unfortunately.

    Leah Feiger: Oh, no.

    David Gilbert: I hadn’t ever seen Gwen Walz before, but she does bear a bit of a resemblance to Hilary Clinton.

    Leah Feiger: Because she’s short and blond?

    Donie O’Sullivan: It’s the perm.

    David Gilbert: I guess.

    Leah Feiger: Guys.

    David Gilbert: In conspiracy world, that means that this is actually not Gwen Walz, that this is actually Hilary Clinton. And that she has killed the real Gwen Walz. This is her secret way of getting back into the White House. And that, ultimately, she’s going to kill everyone and take over as president.

    Leah Feiger: I love this theory. I love this theory. How can you not love this theory? This has everything.

    David Gilbert: It made me laugh.

    Leah Feiger: This has body-snatchers. Oh, this is a good one.

    David Gilbert: Yeah.

    Leah Feiger: That was really good, David.

    Donie O’Sullivan: I’m worried for David.

    Leah Feiger: This is what he sees on the internet, every single day. Sometimes he logs on and he’s like, “Did you see this?” I’m like, “Why? Why would I have seen this? In what universe?”

    Donie O’Sullivan: Well, I’m not going to talk about JD Vance and the couch.

    Leah Feiger: Yeah. Hit us with yours, Donie.

    Donie O’Sullivan: It’s not often you get to have an experience where you’re with the subject of conspiracy theories. But, I work with Anderson Cooper at CNN. He a Vanderbilt. There’s a whole Qanon world about him, et cetera. A lot of it is scary, and some of it’s just absurd and funny. But yeah, sometimes when I meet people who are very down the rabbit hole, they’ll ask me, “Oh, you’re CNN? Okay, yeah. Do you work with Anderson Cooper?” Yeah, I see him sometimes. I do stories on his show. “You’ve seen him in-person?” Yeah. “Up close?” Yeah, I’ve been on a TV set with him. I’ve had at least one, maybe two people just ask me really seriously, “Can you see the mask? Can you see?”

    Leah Feiger: No.

    Donie O’Sullivan: Yeah, yeah. “Can you see the mask?”

    Leah Feiger: No.

    Donie O’Sullivan: “Because I can see it.” Yeah. I get that quite a bit. Obviously, I’m like, “Yeah, it’s crazy. The mask …” No.

    Leah Feiger: Wait. So what’s the theory? Who is this?

    Donie O’Sullivan: David would probably know better than me, in terms of what. There’s this whole thing about people taking on other identities, and masks, and everything else. Some people believe … We did a doc last year on how some people believe that Trump is JFK Jr in disguise, and all this sort of thing.

    Leah Feiger: Right, right.

    Donie O’Sullivan: It leads to a pretty dark place. But in that moment, of course, when somebody asks me in all sincerity, “Have you seen the mask?” Yeah. It’s just an out-of-body experience almost, for me, in that I’m like, “Oh, wow. This really is just all the worlds colliding.”

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  • How QAnon Destroys American Families

    How QAnon Destroys American Families

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    Leah Feiger: Mm-hmm.

    David Gilbert: The calls to arms, you know? They’re being very explicit about what is going to happen should Trump lose in November. And I think more attention needs to be paid to it, because it’s constant, it’s every day, and it could spell major trouble. And maybe not in one single coordinated effort like we saw on January 6th, but in lots of different locations around the country on maybe a smaller scale, but no less frightening.

    Leah Feiger: David and Jess, thanks so much for coming on. Jesselyn Cook is a journalist and author of The Quiet Damage: Qanon and the Destruction of the American Family, which is out now. We’ll be right back with Conspiracy of the Week. Welcome back to Conspiracy of the Week, where you guys bring me your favorite conspiracies that you’ve come across recently, and I pick my favorite. The wilder, the better. Jess, as our guest, please go first.

    Jesselyn Cook: So you know about flat earthers, but have you heard of hollow earthers?

    Leah Feiger: Wait. Already, what? No.

    Jesselyn Cook: Yeah. Tragically in my book, there is a seven-year-old, a second-grader who gets really deeply into Qanon, and his journey, a lot of it was through TikTok. And so I learned a lot about a lot of conspiracy theories on TikTok through his story.

    Leah Feiger: Mm-hmm.

    Jesselyn Cook: The Hollow Earth Theory, this idea of an inner earth civilization, it’s been around for a long time, kind of through various ancient myths and legends, but it has made a resurgence on TikTok. A lot of young people you will see, if you look this up on TikTok, are talking-

    Leah Feiger: I’m going to in like, truly, 10 minutes. Yeah.

    Jesselyn Cook: So the idea is that deep below the Earth’s surface, there is a secret society, a very advanced society that lives down there somehow surviving without sunlight, without oxygen, without all the things we need to live. Some versions of the conspiracy theory are that they are aliens, and others are just there’s this society that’s going to emerge one day and kill us all. So not quite a fun conspiracy theory, but …

    Leah Feiger: Oh, they never are. Sometimes. That’s a weird one. That’s like a real Hunger Games meets Stuart Little/Ratatouille vibes in a more globalist centric way. What do people think that the hollow earthers are doing? Are they controlling us or are they just existing?

    Jesselyn Cook: They’re just existing. Some people who are not happy on regular Earth have gone down there apparently…

    Leah Feiger: Sure.

    Jesselyn Cook: …To just make a new life for themselves. And it’s funny, but then what’s less funny is when you click on the comments on these videos and you’re expecting people to be like, “This is dumb,” but there are a lot of kids in there saying, “NASA stands for Never A Straight Answer,” and just digging their heels in and citing Bible verses that supposedly prove the existence of this deeper earth. Study after study is showing that even though we assume digital natives, young people are able to parse real from fake online, that is not the case. Most of the time, these studies are showing that it’s really a grim outlook. And so it’s an interesting rabbit hole to go down. Check it out if you want on TikTok. But it’s pretty wild.

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  • Far Right Militias Are Back

    Far Right Militias Are Back

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    Leah Feiger: To be fair, a militia of 2,500 across the United States that’s carefully organized on Telegram and promotes the use of armed weapons as a response to anything from natural disasters to fake claims of election fraud is still really concerning. I’m concerned.

    David Gilbert: Absolutely, and I think that gets lost. When you write articles like these, a lot of people kind of say, “Oh, you shouldn’t be platforming these people. They’re making this up. They’re bluffing.”

    Leah Feiger: Definitely.

    David Gilbert: But there are people in these Telegram groups who want to join armed militias, and it’s part of a bigger resurgence in far-right paramilitary activity and discussions that me and other experts are seeing online in recent weeks and months, and that’s really disturbing.

    Leah Feiger: We’re going to take a quick break, and when we come back, we’re going to talk about how all of these kinds of militias are starting to go mainstream again and what this means for 2024.Welcome back to WIRED Politics Lab. David, you were talking about how militias are having a resurgence right now. What exactly do you mean by that?

    David Gilbert: What I mean is that Lang is, and his network of militias that they’ve launched is just one part of a broader movement that both I, other journalists and researchers who are monitoring the space have seen in recent weeks, and it’s all linked to the 2024 election, that people need to be ready to respond if something happens and, of course, what that if is is if Donald Trump loses.

    Leah Feiger: So what does Lang say will happen in the event that Donald Trump loses?

    David Gilbert: Well, Lang talks about civil unrest, and that if Trump loses, that people will automatically be outraged. Do you believe that the outcome was accurate that Joe Biden did win the election?

    Jake Lang: No, I think it’s pretty much a statistical outlier or an impossibility.

    David Gilbert: When I spoke to him, he reeled off a list of the most widely known election conspiracies from 2020.

    Jake Lang: Rigged, stolen, manipulated, scam, whatever you want to call it. It was not the will of the people.

    David Gilbert: When he looks forward to 2024, he is predicting that if Trump loses, there will be a major catastrophe and there will be a lot of people angry, and that’s where his militias is going to be ready to step in.

    Leah Feiger: Is this real? I mean, people say a lot of things online. What kind of connections are you and other researchers drawing between this moment in 2020?

    David Gilbert: The network of people who are organizing this is much greater and much stronger because they have had four years to create these nationwide networks of connections and groups, whether it’s online or in-person. We saw ahead of 2020 that there were some researchers and some journalists who were raising flags, not a lot, but they were raising flags and saying, “This is worrying.” The intelligence services were also noticing that this was happening, but no one took any action. I think that this time around, we’re about five months out from the election, I think that the signals are much stronger. In recent weeks, I have definitely noticed a serious uptick in people who are discussing things like militias, things like sheriffs’ posses, that people need to be ready for 2024, this idea that something is going to happen on November 5th if the result doesn’t go the way people think it will go. So I think that that’s the parallels that you see between 2020 is that people ignored what was there in front of them. In 2020, you could kind of see why that happened because something like January 6th had never happened before. So what is happening this time is much bigger, but people at the moment, at least, don’t seem to be paying attention.

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  • AI Chatbots Are Running for Office Now

    AI Chatbots Are Running for Office Now

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    Victor Miller [Archival audio clip]: She’s asking what policies are most important to you, VIC?

    VIC [Archival audio clip]: The most important policies to me focus on transparency, economic development, and innovation.

    Leah Feiger: That is so bizarre. I got to ask, could VIC be exposed to other sources of information other than these public records? Say, email from a conspiracy theorist who wants VIC to do something not so good with elections that would not represent its constituents.

    Vittoria Elliott: Great question. I asked Miller, “Hey, you’ve built this bot on top of ChatGPT. We know that sometimes there’s problems or biases in the data that go into training these models. Are you concerned that VIC could imbibe some of those biases or there could be problems?” He said, “No, I trust OpenAI. I believe in their product.” You’re right. He decided, because of what’s important to him as someone who cares a lot about Cheyenne’s governance, to feed this bot hundreds, and hundreds, and hundreds of pages of what are called supporting documents. The kind of documents that people will submit in a city council meeting. Whether that’s a complaint, or an email, or a zoning issue, or whatever. He fed that to VIC. But you’re right, these chatbots can be trained on other material. He said that he actually asked VIC, “What if someone tries to spam you? What if someone tries to trick you? Send you emails and stuff.” VIC apparently responded to him saying, “I’m pretty confident I could differentiate what’s an actual constituent concern and what’s spam, or what’s not real.”

    Leah Feiger: I guess I would just say to that, one-third of Americans right now don’t believe that President Joe Biden legitimately won the 2020 election, but I’m so glad this robot is very, very confident in its ability to decipher dis and misinformation here.

    Vittoria Elliott: Totally.

    Leah Feiger: That was VIC in Wyoming. Tell us a little more about AI Steve in the UK. How is it different from VIC?

    Vittoria Elliott: For one thing, AI Steve is actually the candidate.

    Leah Feiger: What do you mean actually the candidate?

    Vittoria Elliott: He’s on the ballot.

    Leah Feiger: Oh, okay. There’s no meat puppet?

    Vittoria Elliott: There is a meat puppet, and that Steve Endicott. He’s a Brighton based business man. He describes himself as being the person who will attend Parliament, do the human things.

    Leah Feiger: Sure.

    Vittoria Elliott: But people, when they go to vote next month in the UK, they actually have the ability not to vote for Steve Endicott, but to vote for AI Steve.

    Leah Feiger: That’s incredible. Oh my God. How does that work?

    Vittoria Elliott: The way they described it to me, Steve Endicott and Jeremy Smith, who is the developer of AI Steve, the way they’ve described this is as a big catchment for community feedback. On the backend, what happens is people can talk to or call into AI Steve, can have apparently 10,000 simultaneous conversations at any given point. They can say, “I want to know when trash collection is going to be different.” Or, “I’m upset about fiscal policy,” or whatever. Those conversations get transcribed by the AI and distilled into these are the policy positions that constituents care about. But to make sure that people aren’t spamming it basically and trying to trick it, what they’re going to do is they’re going to have what they call validators. Brighton is about an hour outside of London, a lot of people commute between the two cities. They’ve said, “What we want to do is we want to have people who are on their commute, we’re going to ask them to sign up to these emails to be validators.” They’ll go through and say, “These are the policies that people say that are important to AI Steve. Do you, regular person who’s actually commuting, find that to actually be valuable to you?” Anything that gets more than 50% interest, or approval, or whatever, that’s the stuff that real Steve, who will be in Parliament, will be voting on. They have this second level of checks to make sure that whatever people are saying as feedback to the AI is checked by real humans. They’re trying to make it a little harder for them to game the system.

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  • It’s the AI Election Year

    It’s the AI Election Year

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    Leah Feiger: Sometimes you are able to link it back to specific companies-

    Vittoria Elliott: Yes.

    Leah Feiger: That are doing the generative AI itself.

    Vittoria Elliott: Yeah, totally. For instance, there was a deep fake made of the former Prime Minister of Pakistan, Imran Khan, whose been in jail under corruption charges. His party was disqualified for running in the general election earlier this year. He was able to make campaign speeches using generative AI.

    Leah Feiger: Wild.

    Vittoria Elliott: To do that, they used ElevenLabs, which is the same company that was used for the fake Joe Biden robocall earlier this year. Sometimes we do know the companies involved, a lot of times we don’t.

    Leah Feiger: How have these companies said that they’re going to approach elections this year?

    Vittoria Elliott: Well, more legitimate companies like Midjourney and ChatGPT, OpenAI, Google, et cetera, they’ve said, “We’re going to put guardrails on. We’re not going to allow for generating political images.” ChatGPT, which is text based, they’ve said, “It’s not cool to use our tool to generate political stuff for campaigns,” or whatever, “You can’t run a chatbot on top of our interface,” basically. But they’re not doing great an enforcing it. There was a report from the Center For Countering Digital Hate that we covered in March, where they went into all these images generators and they were just like, “Give us an image of Trump doing this, give us an image of Biden doing this.” And it did it a lot of the time. For ChatGPT, Dean Phillips, who was a congressman who was briefly running for President.

    Leah Feiger: Formerly running for President, Congressman Dean Phillips.

    Vittoria Elliott: Built a chatbot called Dean.bot on top of OpenAI’s ChatGPT interface and it didn’t get taken down until the press was like, “Hey, isn’t this against your policies?”

    Leah Feiger: I remember that very well. Something that I also remember from that moment is that Dean Phillips actually had a lot of Silicon Valley backers. It feels a little bit hazy. It’s like, “Yes, you shouldn’t use Dean.bot, but also we still kind of love and support you.” There’s a weird back-and-forth there. The stuff that Dean, for example, was saying about generative AI and legislating against it, Sam Altman was into it.

    Vittoria Elliott: Yeah. That’s just in the US. For instance, in Indonesia, there was a company that built an app called Pemilu for the Indonesian elections. The founder of that app claimed that they had built something on top of ChatGPT that allowed them to write campaign speeches in a bunch of local languages.

    Leah Feiger: Wow.

    Vittoria Elliott: That was pulling in information to allow them to tailor messages to particular demographics, whether that was young people, women, whatever.

    Leah Feiger: Well, talk about effective when you have a country with so many languages.

    Vittoria Elliott: Yeah. It’s dispersed across of islands, different needs.

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  • Twitter Is Dead, Long Live the Portal

    Twitter Is Dead, Long Live the Portal

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    Leah Feiger: I can’t wait to hear about all of that. But let’s start with Elon Musk. If I was to trace back the end of Twitter, it would obviously start with him. David, why did Musk buy Twitter? Take us back to that time.

    David Gilbert: I have a feeling he was thinking about buying Twitter for a while. He had been one of the main characters on Twitter for years, and had always been very vocal in his opinions and the kind of content that he posted there. But from 2020 onwards, once Donald Trump got kicked off the platform and there was a major shutdown on content in relation to COVID-19 and the vaccines, he became increasingly outraged at what he saw as this over-censorious thing where he felt that people of a certain viewpoint were being silenced on the platform. Of course, that was something that not only Musk had, but a lot of Conservatives felt as well, that they were being silenced. It was bubbling along for a while, the idea that he was going to buy it. He was being urged on by a lot of his supporters, and he has a lot of supporters, to say that he should buy it, he should take it over and turn it into their utopian social media platform. In early 2022, he did. He decided to table a bid of $44 billion. Very quickly, he decided then to turn around and say, “No, actually I don’t want to do that.”

    [Archival audio clip]: Then you changed your mind again and decided to buy it. Did you do that-

    Elon Musk [Archival audio clip]: Well, I kind of had to.

    [Archival audio clip]: Right. Did you do that because you thought that a court would make you do that?

    Elon Musk [Archival audio clip]: Yes.

    [Archival audio clip]: Right.

    Elon Musk [Archival audio clip]: Yes, that is the reason.

    Leah Feiger: I always forget that. I always forget that and I love it so much.

    David Gilbert: He doesn’t really remind people of it too much. It finally went through and Musk took over, and very quickly made changes. I’m not sure, at that point, Makena, do you think that he really had a vision in mind for what his version of Twitter was going to look like?

    Makena Kelly: No, I don’t think it was a vision more than it was a vengeance.

    David Gilbert: Yeah.

    Makena Kelly: If you look at that time, it’s around the same time that regulators, even just the news, there’s more skepticism about what it is that Elon Musk is doing. He’s not this messiah character who’s going to carry us into some beautiful progressive world where we all drive autonomous vehicles and have solar panels on our houses. People were starting to be a lot more critical of him. Twitter is a space where you have news makers, taste makers, very important people on this platform who are using it every day and that’s where you can really drive a lot of conversation. I feel like Elon Musk, even if it wasn’t front-of-mind, I think he at least knew subconsciously that having some kind of power over this platform would be helpful to him and his brand.

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  • How Twitch Streamers Could Shape the 2024 Elections

    How Twitch Streamers Could Shape the 2024 Elections

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    Leah Feiger: Yes, the royals are globalist, conspiracy is well trodden, but always good.

    Makena Kelly: Yeah. Haunted portrait.

    Leah Feiger: Haunted portrait, okay, that’s actually a really good one. I didn’t even think about that one as related to conspiracies.

    Hasan Piker: Yeah, it wasn’t bad at all.

    Leah Feiger: I like that one.

    Hasan Piker: Okay. I didn’t realize it was supposed to be a current one. I mean, I got immediately, I’m in New York. The two things I thought about, especially being in one Onw World Trade Center was what happened on Tower seven? How did Tower seven fall? A question that is on my mind at all times. I’m not like a jet fuel, can’t melt steel beams kind of guy, but it’s kind of odd that Tower seven fell. Who knows?

    Leah Feiger: You’re edging into 9/11 truther territory.

    Hasan Piker: That is the one, I’m not like, we did it deliberately and then so that we could do global war or whatever. I don’t go to that length.

    Leah Feiger: Yikes.

    Hasan Piker: But or that it was like a fake or staged or that we did it. We blew up the towers. For our listeners. Hasan does not believe that. Yeah, I don’t believe that, but Tower seven, kind of weird.

    Makena Kelly: Allegedly. Very

    Leah Feiger: Really Allegedly. Really, really harcore, allegedly.

    Hasan Piker: Tower seven, I don’t know what happened. I will go out and investigate later.

    Makena Kelly: Oh, good, now report your Findings back.

    Hasan Piker: When I leave.

    Leah Feiger: I feel like we’ve gotten a little glimpse into the conspiracy corner of your mind here. I’m really sorry. I’m going to have to give the win this week to McKenna.

    Makena Kelly: Wow.

    Hasan Piker: At least this was a relevant one. It’s a new one. Mine is an old one. An old but gold.

    Leah Feiger: Hasan, thank you so much for joining us today.

    Hasan Piker: Thank you for having me.

    Makena Kelly: Yeah, this was great. This was great.

    Hasan Piker: Thank you for having me. Yeah, this was great.

    Makena Kelly: Where can all of our listeners find you besides Twitch?

    Hasan Piker: Yeah. I’m live on Twitch every day at Twitch.tv/HasanAbi from 11:00 A.M. Pacific time, all the way to like eight P.M. seven days a week, and beyond that, I’m Hasan D. Piker on TikTok and on Instagram and Hasan the Hun on Twitter.

    Leah Feiger: Wonderful. Thank you so much for joining us, Hasan.

    Hasan Piker: Thank you for having me.

    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 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 [email protected]. That’s [email protected]. We’re so excited to hear from you. WIRED Politics Lab is produced by Jake Harper. Jake Lummus is our studio engineer, Amar Lal mixed this episode, Stephanie Karyuki is our executive producer. Jordan Bell is our executive producer of development, and Chris Bannon is the 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. Thanks for listening.

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