Hello, everybody. I was just warning Matt. I have the two producers awake. So who knows what's

going to happen? Last time we ended the show with Lily doing my hair. Matt Christensen is back.

Really glad to have him. He is going to tell us all about this. This is a headline from NPR.

DOJ says Russia paid right-wing influencers to spread Russian propaganda. I'm sure many people are aware of this story. A lot of people have been talking about it. And I wanted to have Matt on so we could just hear firsthand. Matt, what I thought was interesting, too, is that in this indictment, you're not actually named along with like Tim Poole and Dave Rubin. It just, right, I don't think you, it's not you're in there, but somehow everybody figured it out. Oh, it's got it's Matt Hutchinson, Dave Rubin, Tim Poole, and a couple of other people. Can you explain two things? Just let's talk. What was the indictment? What does this headline mean? And is it and did they get it right at NPR? And then also, how did everybody figure out it was you and all these other people?

Okay, so I'll start from the beginning. And this is, NPR and then also how did everybody figure out it was you and all these other people.

Okay. So I'll start from the beginning. And this is kind of complicated. So I'm going to give the quickest possible explanation for what happened. I along with the other five personalities

you mentioned, we were contracted to a company called Tenet Media, and you may have seen a lot of

our stuff over the course of the last year. We started the project in November of 2023,

and running the project, running the company was Lauren Chen and her husband Liam. You might

know her by roaming millennial. Now, I can't speak to everybody else's experience because we were all, we were all

operating independently. We were all contracted separately. But July last year, roaming millennial,

Lauren Chen and her husband, Liam, they came to me and we've been friendly for years.

And they said, hey, we got this awesome new media startup we're working on we think you'd be a good part a good

fit for this operation what do you think uh what would it take to get you to create content

exclusively for this project we worked it out we came to an agreement the project launched

in november and since nove November everybody has been independently making

material actually let me back up a little bit what I cared about most in in my

own contract and what I know everybody else cared about too in so far as

everybody agreed to similar terms on this piece most important to me was that I retain editorial

control, that nobody's telling me what to say, that they're coming to me and they're saying,

we like your material, we think it'd be a good fit, we want to host it, but that's all that's

really a part of this discussion is hosting it. It's not telling me what to say. It's not writing

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