Has Hunter Biden fumbled the bag?

0:00This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK.

0:30Listen to Choiceology at schwab.com slash podcast or wherever you listen. If you are currently overpaying on software to run your business, remember this number, 10 ,000. That's the number of new businesses that join Odoo per month. Join Odoo today at odoo.com. That's O-D-O-O dot com. Today on Top Comment, Mariana and I are going to talk about the renaissance of Hunter Biden, one of the greatest internet reinvention stories of all time, which sadly then came crashing and burning when he decided to shill a cryptocurrency, but also how the story of him and the story of his laptop tell the story of X, Twitter, and the 2024 election in so many different ways.

1:17And we're going to be talking about how sleuths thought they had uncovered Channing Tatum's burner account and what that tells us about the way that burner accounts work now and how they can distort social media conversations. But before we get into those topics, let's talk about someone else who we've mentioned quite a few times on the podcast, Clavicular. Now, we joked about him quite a lot, particularly because of some of the content that has been shared online about him. We want to talk about something today, though, that is much more serious. So Clavicula, whose real name is Braden Peters, is being charged in Massachusetts with rape and drugging a person for sexual intercourse, as well as procuring alcohol under the age of 21.

1:56And the alleged victim is a 17-year-old woman. Peters is also facing a civil case in Florida. And the probable cause was found on all three criminal charges earlier this month. And this arraignment has been set for October the 14th. And this is really serious, right? He could go to prison. Yeah, I mean, it could be up to a 20-year sentence. But we should be clear that these remain allegations at this stage. A representative for Brayden Peters said he denies the allegations and intends to defend himself. In a social media post apparently inspired by these charges, Clavicular essentially tweeted, you know, this happens to all successful young men.

2:30People try to come for your money. Now, obviously, this case is very relevant to loads of the topics we discuss in terms of social media, the content that's shared, allegations, accusations that are made against influencers who become really prominent on the sites. And we will keep following this case and see what happens next.

2:56To get top commenters up to speed, should we go back to the original laptop saga so that they understand why Hunter Biden became such a polemic figure? Hunter Biden, obviously son of Joe Biden. So the story all starts in 2019 when a man proclaiming that he is Hunter Biden walks into a laptop repair shop in Delaware and hands in a laptop asking for the data on it to be recovered. The man who takes this laptop in, a man named John Paul Mac Isaac, doesn't know if it really is Hunter Biden, because according to him, he's legally blind, which is the first of a number of questions that led people to wonder about the veracity of this laptop and whether it was Hunter Biden's.

3:44What do you mean by according to him? Well, because he wasn't so legally blind that he couldn't see what he called was criminal material on this laptop, which led him to then give the data to Rudy Giuliani, who at the time was working for the then president of the United States, Donald Trump. So Mac Isaac and Rudy Giuliani get this hard drive to the New York Post, who published a piece in October, which kind of questions whether there's evidence on this laptop that indicates that Joe Biden's dealings with Ukrainian businessmen and his son's dealings with Ukrainian businessmen amount to some form of corruption or unethical conduct.

4:27There was actually nothing of note demonstrating that. It's kind of agreed by most journalists on that laptop. But by this point, the story's moved on. But the concerns at the time, and I remember this, There were lots of concerns that this could be a foreign influence operation, an attempt to impact the outcome of the election. And as a result, quite a few of the major social media companies chose to block links to the article or to restrict access to that content. And that's kind of where this gets interesting, right? Because it becomes a key moment where it's felt as though the social media companies are censoring.

5:04Yeah, and overreached in terms of the way that they then perhaps impacted the outcome of the election. Whether or not this whole Hunter Biden laptop thing would have affected whether people voted for Joe Biden or Donald Trump is perhaps another question. Exactly. So it wasn't an October surprise that helped Trump win the election. He lost the election. But it may have helped him win the next election. It may have helped Elon Musk by Twitter because it led to this huge controversy over certain journalists and certain Democrats claiming that this was fabricated by Russia. This was a disinformation campaign by Russia and censorship allegations against social media companies that a result that we heard for the next four years.

5:41Now, the reason there was somewhat of a knee jerk reaction from within the social media companies, I think, was in part because think back to the election before that, the one in 2016. There were all kinds of allegations about foreign influence operations. And actually, the companies came under a lot of pressure after that election because people said you didn't do enough to deal with disinformation. And you may have led to Trump winning the first time. So now they're kind of overcorrecting possibly in the other direction. And so Elon Musk ends up buying Twitter towards the end of 2022. It was October 2022.

6:13And one of the first things he does is release these files that he essentially says demonstrate problems within what was Twitter and how they would enforce their rules around misinformation, etc. etc. Particularly around the Hunter Biden laptop story, but actually more broadly, that they were being unfair on the right and the way their policies worked favoured the left. And he used that to justify all kinds of things he did, like losing huge numbers of people who worked in the curation team, the fact checking teams, the safety teams, the design teams. I've interviewed loads of these people and they at the time even mentioned him talking about this or sharing internal communications about this.

6:50Like this was something that he was very, very concerned about as a wider issue, this bias thing. And specifically when he spoke to Joe Rogan, he said how, for him, that was kind of one of the moments where he decided, I want to buy Twitter. Thank you so much for buying Twitter. You're welcome. Thank you so much. You're welcome. I'm not exaggerating when I think you changed the course of history. I really do. What they were doing with social media by suppressing information and when you had a combined government effort, like what they were doing with the laptop story. Yep. I mean, the reason I bought it was like, it's like, man, if I don't do this, I think we're screwed as the issue.

7:23So I've looked at those, you know, emails as you have as well, those internal emails from Twitter, and they kind of show sloppy decision making and questioning internally as to how to deal with this. Kind of like panicking, basically. Yeah, kind of panicking. They don't really show what the right wing critique of Twitter claimed, which was government coercion, right? To a lot of people on the right, the fact that Twitter censored these stories in some way was evidence of the national security apparatus colluding with social media companies to hide this negative, damaging story about the Biden family, even though, by the way, it's his dad, not him running for president, but whatever.

7:57And that narrative and the screaming and shouting and hashtagging about Hunter Biden's laptop lasts all the way into the next election. and the thing is is that hunter biden from that point onwards really becomes sort of the symbol of what the right perceived to be corruption on the left hunter biden is a deeply corrupt figure everybody knows this all the talk about how you need to leave hunter biden alone is really pathetic the man is in his sixth decade of life on planet earth so they keep treating him like he's 14 like he's being made fun of like chelsea clinton was made fun of when she was like 12 or like she's the bush daughters or something or she's malia and sasha she hunter Biden, the man is like 15 years on me.

8:39Okay. Like he is, he is at best a middle-aged human and he happens to also be a complete derelict. And there are all of these kind of quite degrading images that start to circulate on social media because after the whole laptop thing, there was then in 2022, this iCloud leak on 4chan, which is quite a niche forum, but known for sort of nasty content. The worst place on the internet. Yeah, the worst kind of content spreading around, which include photos of Hunter Biden and private messages. And it was a lot of that content that then migrated from 4chan onto the main social media sites, especially X, and started to just go mega viral and allowed him to become a real sort of figure of ridicule online.

9:21He becomes super meme-ified, to some extent, not actually dissimilar to what we chatted about on the episode about Kirkification, the way that Charlie Kirk has been memed or actually we've seen it happen to J.D. Vance. But with Hunter Biden, a lot of this content was very, very offensive to the point where I thought there's no way that he ever is going to come back from this because he's been totally ruined by the internet. And there are images alleging that he's in kind of compromising situations with sex workers and other people and escorts. Exactly. Because the thing is, Hunter Biden was addicted to drugs.

9:54I mean, he's someone who, of course, had a very difficult life. You know, he was in a car accident where his mother and his sister died. His brother and he survived, but his brother died of brain cancer at 46. And that just destroyed him. You know, he was using crack. He was allegedly using sex workers. And that was around the time when he was at his lowest point that he gave this laptop to Mac Isaac, right? I mean, people were not in any way empathetic to him having an addiction. They weren't empathetic to what he'd been through. They were just trying to destroy him and use it to help Trump win.

10:26And I guess that some of the people who were showing this content would argue, well, You know, he is the son of a president or then at this point a former president. This is fair game in the way that essentially all and whether you think this is fair or not, all politicians, whether that's Donald Trump and his family or Biden and his family, find themselves targeted in this way on social media. But this got particularly out of hand. And what kind of amazed me this year was then when all of a sudden he starts becoming a bit of a troll on X and he's sort of owning it all. and you're like, oh, wow, how is he kind of, how is he coming back from this?

11:00Because he has been like dragged by meme in a hardcore way. And now he's suddenly like almost poking fun at himself a bit. So after being, going through this terrible character assassination and having these images leaked, he makes this triumphant return to X with the tweet, I'm Hunter Biden, you've never actually heard from me. Today's episode is brought to you by Apple Ads. Ads on Apple Maps are changing the way local businesses get discovered. Reach customers when it counts, right when they turn I'm looking into I'm going. They're in decision-making mode, actively searching for businesses like yours and deciding where to go.

11:42Customers can easily call you, visit, and more from the same place they're viewing your ad. And all of this happens on Apple Maps, a privacy-first environment that respects customers and helps them discover new places. Get started with ads on Apple Maps today and for a limited time, receive 15 % credit back on your monthly ad spend for a year up to$1 ,000 per month. Terms apply. Head to ads.apple.com slash maps to get started. Try business like never before with ads on Apple Maps.

12:23Self-directed investing. Trading, full-service wealth management, automated investing, financial planning, thematic investing, retirement planning. Phew. And to think, that's just a small taste of what Schwab offers. Because Schwab knows that when it comes to your finances, choice matters. No matter your goals, investing style, life stage or experience, Schwab has everything you need, all in one place, so you can invest your way. Visit schwab.com to learn more. And he's hilarious all of a sudden, right? Someone tweeted that there was a bag of cocaine found in the White House and someone tweeted that they thought it was Hunter Biden's and he responded, no, that wouldn't have been mine.

13:06I never would have forgotten my drugs. Or someone else called him a meth head on Twitter and he said, no, I'm actually, you got it wrong. I'm a crackhead, right? So he's not only being funny, but he's being very vulnerable and open about his struggles with addiction. He's saying things like all of the worst parts of my life, you know, the sex workers, the me smoking crack, me naked, is out there for everyone to see. So that means I have nothing to hide. So all I can be is genuine. You said 2020 on. Do you feel like that's the year the world kind of went crazy? No. I think that that's the year that we all kind of woke up to the realization that things are crazy.

13:45But no, I think that they've been going crazy for a while. He went on Andrew Callahan's show. That interview went super viral. He went on Candace Owens. He was all of a sudden like having bipartisan discussions. He was seen as like a MAGA whisperer. Candace Owens likes him, but people on the left like him. He's like the hero of the internet. People talk about whether he should run for president in 2028. And it's a deliberate decision, right, Matt, to engage with these influencers. Like if you can fall out with these kinds of people, like go on their podcast, go on their videos, it will do well.

14:14But perhaps it's even better to actually go full circle and get them and be their mate to some extent, or at least have some kind of mutual understanding. Yeah, but it was kind of amazing to see someone who's very adversarial against the Trumps be brave and open about facing off against some of the furthest right personalities out there. Nick Fuentes, Candace Owens. I mean, he did weirdly lend some credulity to the to Candace Owens conspiracy theories about Charlie Kirk. But Candace Owens went from, you know, hating this guy to speaking positively about him. So he kind of was bridging the divide that no one had bridged.

14:53It was refreshing in that we had been so gaslit over the last two years. Population just lying about everything. What do you mean, the Epstein files? We were talking about the Epstein files. That when I saw him just owning the fact that he was a crackhead, I was like, well, there's something different. He was friends with Candace Owens, but also like friends with the Democrats. And actually, maybe we should also, to put this in context, note that a lot of these influencers are also not that keen on Donald Trump at the moment. They've kind of split from the original MAGA influencer base. And that could also explain why they are more willing to welcome Hunter Biden onto their podcast or onto their YouTube channels or whatever it is.

15:38What I thought was especially interesting about what we might call a resurrection on social media, which doesn't happen all too often, is that he also seemed to inspire these groups of fan accounts, so stans. And they're actually using these images, photos that were leaked and were used to ridicule Hunter Biden as a good thing. They're like, look, these are thirst traps. It's great. Let's rehabilitate his image. Guys, is this a safe space? Is this a safe space?

16:11Hunter Biden is so hot Why I see this girl coming on here talking about Hunter Biden And why y 'all ain't telling me that man was fine Now I don't play any fucking snow and shit But he alright with me So the streets are calling Hunter Biden trailer park hot Have you guys ever seen a picture of young Joe Biden Young Joe Biden was bad as fuck bro He was bad And there's an element of how, and we've chatted about this on Top Comment Loads, being authentic on social media, like truly authentic in a way that people believe, that seems credible, does work, right? So people are like, oh, actually, I kind of rate that this person who's had a hard time and had all these allegations and not had it very easy is willing to poke fun at himself and to own it and not to pretend to be something else.

16:58And I think that it was that that really triggered the change, not just in the average social media user, but then a lot of the people who set the tone for how you are received on social media, like the sort of messiahs of the Internet, if we want to call them that. I mean, I personally believed it. There's something so refreshing about seeing someone coming back from that to a place of ultimate vulnerability and genuineness and doing it seemingly to help other addicts who had been through that. And we had this rare thing of like a genuine vulnerable man on the Internet, you know, being himself and kind of being open with everyone.

17:35And that lasted like for about 10 minutes. And then he shilled a cryptocurrency. It's sort of like you don't know what you've got till it's gone. When you're winning the Internet, you feel invincible, perhaps. And then you over Internet it and then you. It was just so disappointing. And especially because the moral high ground of saying, you know, I was called Biden crime family. I was called the corrupt one. Now the Trump family are doing the allegedly corrupt stuff. They're making billions off of crypto. He was winning that argument. People were saying he should have ran for president. And then he releases a meme coin called Laptop.

18:13Full circle. Yeah, full circle. I want to make one thing clear is that this is my fucking token. I've been working on this thing for six months straight. And I have gone in deep in terms of cryptocurrency and understanding exactly what I was getting into. And what I was getting into was trying to do something just markedly different than what has been offered up to the community in the past two years. That's something that actually could help build community and do something that's worthwhile. And how does this crypto work? Like all cryptos, it'll have some complex... Top commenters, don't worry if you don't understand the next three minutes of the book.

18:56Well, I was going to say, like all cryptos, it professes some kind of utility. But in reality, it just serves to make the people who mint the cryptocurrency at the beginning rich. I mean, 80 % of people lost money within the first 24 hours of this crypto being launched. So the meme coin, it's a meme coin. A meme coin is a coin that has no real value, but you can buy it and invest in it and its value goes up and down. And so you can make money on it in a similar way to how you could on a stock. and look he agreed that certain events in the real world would trigger a burning of laptop coin what that means is if such and such thing happens then we will destroy a percentage of the the laptop coin in circulation which means the holders of the laptop coin their laptop coin is now worth more so they get richer and those things were things like if a democrat wins the 2028 election or if laptop becomes more valuable than Trump coin.

19:53Now, supposedly, if these events happened, that would trigger a burning event and the holders of the laptop coin would get richer. He financially incentivizes people to vote for Democrats, basically, which, you know, maybe sounds like a little bit like, if you agree with him, like a more of an ethical meme coin. But remember, 30 % of the coin is owned by the people who minted it, including Biden. So what does it do? It makes him rich, except it doesn't because it crashes and burns. And this is the thing. the thing that was working in his favour was that he was seen to be authentic and honest and open and transparent.

20:25And now he's done something that feels at odds with what he was saying, even though he would argue otherwise. And so he's been sort of recancelled on social media. I mean, I always wondered, these people who can fall in and out of favour so extremely, you always wonder whether they'll just like fall back in favour again. But if we're going to use this to plot X's journey as well as a social media platform, you know, from the decisions Elon Musk made to then the proliferation of the content about Hunter Biden to then his sort of resurgence. And it feels like X is creating a genre of political influencer who you almost can't tell the difference between any of them, right?

20:59It's like they all sort of are like rage bait coded, kind of authentic, a bit of a mess, but then also do things like launch crypto coin. You're like, oh, wow. And you know what else they do? You know what else they are? Fickle. Like they change so quickly. You know, the things that Candace Owens and Nick Fuentes would say about Hunter Biden in the past and now it's the opposite. Have retracted, yeah. Joe Rogan, you know, endorsing Donald Trump, going on and on about the travesty of Hunter Biden's laptop, now saying he should run for president in 2028 until the crypto thing. Don't you think as well that this is symptomatic of how social media platforms work?

21:34Because if you're a famous quote unquote person off of social media, then often you're, you know, it's like when people's old tweets used to get dug up and they'd be, it'd be like, well, hang on a second, you previously said this or this wasn't okay. Same with politicians. But with these kinds of people, like we're talking about the mega influencers, they're so unashamedly fickle and there's often no cohesion to what they think. And they're just like riding the wave of the Internet and sort of figuring out what floats, what sinks and then keeping going. It's how they survive, really, whereas most people sink.

22:05Yeah, yeah. Most people do sink unless you're willing to completely sacrifice all of your values to do whatever garners the most attention at that given moment in time. And once you get that attention, once you get those followers, it's a hop, skip and a jump to making a shit ton of money by marketing a cryptocurrency to those followers. And that is what X is. I mean, so many of the accounts on X now, the most popular accounts, may appear to be politically engaged. Oh no, but they're all about, it's all about making money. Yeah, it's all about crypto.

22:42Matt, have you been trolling me with your burner account? No, that's a strange question. Why do you ask? Not underscore Matt underscore Shay. It's tempting. The amount of hate I get, the amount of haters I want to respond to. Well, I know you do use your burner to comment on Justin Bieber's install. Oh, yeah, that's true. That's how we discovered, you see, that you love him. I've got a score of pro Bieber burners. The reason that we're talking about burner accounts is because there's been a lot floating around alleging that Channing Tatum has been running a burner account. Now, sleuth disease, although maybe it's sort of sleuth superpower in this case, but possibly still sleuth disease, has infected a large portion of the Internet.

23:21So much so that people spotted there was this account called Bidness Nonya, none of your business. Sorry, as someone who's grown in the East Coast, I have to correct that. It's none of your bidness. And it was commenting on the gossip page de moi. And people noticed how it was basically enjoying hate that was being directed at Zoe Kravitz, who is the ex-partner of Channing Tatum and is now engaged to Harry Styles. And people noticed that that account, which had this like blue butterfly profile picture, was followed by Channing Tatum. And so immediately social media went into meltdown and they were like, this must be Channing Tatum's burner.

23:58What do you mean Channing Tatum's secret Instagram account was discovered and he's the messiest bitch on the planet? Channing Tatum being exposed for having a burner account that is dedicated to hyping himself up and hating on Harry Styles and Zoe Kravitz and also his ex-wife is actually probably the funniest thing I've seen this week. And it seems like he has a lot of hate for everyone except, you know, like himself. he commented under this post and said he's so genuine no false pretenses with this guy and funny as hell too these celebrities are just like us they are not above doing even the most pettiest of shit to get back at their ex because burner accounts are broadly speaking anonymous accounts that people use to do all sorts of stuff and we'll get into the purpose of them you've got a whole like deck of burners my entire career but you use them for journalism yeah running burner accounts to investigate stuff the suggestion is this is a celebrity using a burner account to express their real views about a relationship and or to possibly distort the conversation about it in a way that's negative and praise himself and praise himself yeah and people were noticing like similarities in in language or comments that he's he'd made before about so kravitz etc it got so out of control that he actually posted on his instagram story saying yo i truly can't believe you'll think this is what i'm doing with my free time.

25:16Also, why would I follow a burner account if I didn't want people to connect me to it? WTF, come on. But if I really need to say it, I only have one IG account. Now, then everyone was like, this is more suspicious. Obviously, what is highly likely here is that Channing Tatum, who follows a huge number of accounts, he follows 8000 different fan accounts. It is completely possible that this is just a fan account of his. Also, a fan account of his might be negative about his ex-partner. That wouldn't be surprising. And he is kind of right to point out that it would be a bit of a mad move to follow his own burner account.