After the Callaghan interview was published, producers for two other shows—the South Africa–focused Wide Awake show and Shawn Ryan’s podcast—reached out. Biden said yes. Other than helping other addicts, he says he didn’t necessarily have a plan or understand exactly who he was speaking to, but he felt ready to talk. Shawn Ryan, a podcaster, former Navy Seal, and former CIA security official, had spent many hours over the years attacking Biden’s father and boosting allegations from the laptop. “People told me that before I went on. I was like, look. Let him ask me anything that he wants, anything, and I’ll give my best answer,” Biden says. “Thank goodness I didn’t watch everything that he did.”
By January of this year, Biden says he began to see these appearances as an avenue for reinvention and purpose. Doing so via independent media with gigantic audiences is an obvious strategy to anyone paying attention. (“No one gives a shit with what anybody says on CNN,” he says.) It is also an unmistakably Trumpian turn.
“People have confused audacity with authenticity. I don’t think that Trump has ever had an authentic day in his life,” Biden says of the comparison between them. “I think everything that he does is calculated and it’s audacious. It’s audacious the way that a malignant narcissist is audacious. He will lie about anything.”
Biden, meanwhile, knows the entire world has seen him at rock bottom, meaning authenticity isn’t really a choice. He sees value in an audience like Channel 5’s, which attracts more than 3.5 million subscribers on YouTube and appeals to the kind of people who don’t trust anything. An even more powerful figure for Biden, whom he mentions early in our conversations, is Candace Owens. Her reach is even bigger—with 35 million followers across social media platforms.
“I’ve been trying to think through it and figure out maybe where the opportunity is to get people that are, you know, MAGA-adjacent or even MAGA to open their hearts a little bit,” he says. “I don’t believe that this country is actually nearly as divided as we are constantly told that we are. I think that we’ve all been manipulated by algorithms in which a handful of oligarchs make trillions of dollars and we have to start to address that before we can get back to Thanksgiving dinner together.”
Biden created an X account just two days before his Owens interview dropped on May 21, and he’s since been tweeting with the fervor of a former drug addict, sometimes more than 100 posts a day. “Despite my feelings about X,” he says, “I think X was the best place and the most dangerous and frightening, the same way that going on Candace was not a comfortable space to be in. But I feel like I have the opportunity to really take everything head-on now.”
By the time his interview with Owens ran, he’d already racked up tens of thousands of followers (and eventually hired a PR person). During the interview, Owens apologizes to Biden, calls her previous behavior “gross” and her former viewpoint “warped.” He had won over not only Owens but also many of her deranged sycophants, who just a year ago swore he was the liberal Antichrist. In an email to WIRED, the podcast host says she isn’t surprised: “In the midst of a political cycle where we are being perpetually gaslit, Hunter admitting to his faults and past addictions arrived as a breath of fresh air,” Owens says. “I felt confident that interview would land as it did, because you can’t fool the public; Hunter was honest, so the public was receptive.”
