This F*cking Guy: Jake Paul

**Erin Ryan** (0:08)
Welcome to the latest edition of This Fucking Guy, the series where we spotlight one fucking guy making America worse and explain why they suck. I'm Erin Ryan, host of Crooked Media's Hysteria podcast.

**Nina Parker** (0:19)
Yes, and I'm Nina Parker, co-host of Crooked Media's Keep It.

**Erin Ryan** (0:22)
We love a synergy moment.

**Nina Parker** (0:24)
We connect it.

**Erin Ryan** (0:25)
I'm so glad you're joining me to take on this fucking guy. Well, he's not a head of state or religious scammer or a slutty cabinet secretary leading us into a forever war that's way over his mucus smeared head. Cough hello, Pete Hegseth. Influencer turned high school dropout, turned boxer, Jake Paul, is a physical embodiment of everything obnoxious about the Internet.

**Nina Parker** (0:46)
Times two. He is the final boss of kids that give middle school teachers PTSD, you know, the type that read with their fingers. And the most pathetic part is that this mental child is almost at the big age of 30

**Erin Ryan** (1:01)
Jake Joseph Paul was born on January 17th, 1997 to parents Pamela and Greg. Like many of America's worst whites, he was born in Ohio.

**Nina Parker** (1:10)
Yes, Jake is the younger brother of Logan Paul. Now, we're only going to skim the surface on his brother's terribleness today, but just to break down their whole vibe for you, Jake and Logan Paul are the kind of people who give themselves nicknames.

**Erin Ryan** (1:23)
By all accounts, the pair were a couple of exhausting morons from a young age, but were always rewarded for their tedious behavior, and thus it calcified into their personalities. Their Christian, church-going parents divorced when the boys were young.

**Nina Parker** (1:35)
Yes, marriage is sacred, unless it's hard.

**Erin Ryan** (1:38)
Unless it's hard. But according to Jake's 2016 memoir, which is rated a 1.7 out of 5 stars on Spotify, their split was amicable, but it does sound like the elder Paul was kind of a dick.

**Nina Parker** (1:50)
Yeah, and a 1.7 is still higher than expected, but please tell us more about Elder Paul.

**Erin Ryan** (1:56)
Well, he seems kind of like the sort of guy who would play a bad dad in a Ryan Murphy show, like a football-obsessed, divorced house flipper. He's literally a house flipper, who let his wild boys ride dirt bikes and thought that videos of churlish nincompoopery were evidence of his son's brilliance. Now, the way that Jake tells it, the boys were gifted a video camera when they were only 10 and 12 years old.

**Nina Parker** (2:20)
You rarely hear the words Jake Paul with gifted, but most 10-year-old boys aren't even tall enough to ride a roller coaster at Six Flags at that time. But sure, give them tools to upload videos to millions of children and probably thousands of perverts. Sounds like a great idea. But the boys filmed themselves doing absurdly stupid things. First, just for their own amusement and then for the amusement of others.

**Erin Ryan** (2:42)
In 2013, they started posting to Vine, a short video social media platform that was, if those of you were not there when the black magic was hitting, like me, a sort of shitty TikTok. But it was great for the kind of ball-tasering, jackass ripoff content that the Paul brothers would become known for.

**Nina Parker** (2:59)
Now, by the time Vine went bye-bye, Jake Paul had 5.3 million followers and billions of views. And I blame the boys and the bots.

**Erin Ryan** (3:09)
That is a pretty good theory.

**Nina Parker** (3:11)
Their shared YouTube channel, Zoosh, launched in 2007 But in 2014, Jake started his own channel on YouTube. The brothers increased their output, including asinine and violent pranks.
We use quotations for pranks.

**Erin Ryan** (3:25)
Yes, pranks.

**Nina Parker** (3:26)
Including a concerning amount of tasering. This is all very stupid, very silly, very stupid.

**Erin Ryan** (3:33)
Very stupid, Nina.
Nina, I cannot emphasize how concerningly dumb, concerningly dumb these boys sound in every single interview that they've ever done. Even before both of them started getting hit in the head professionally. This is especially evident in Jake Paul's aforementioned 2016 memoir, You Gotta Want It.

**Nina Parker** (3:54)
God.

**Erin Ryan** (3:56)
Which is narrated by the author and available to listen to on Spotify. I listened to the whole thing.

**Nina Parker** (4:02)
I think this might qualify you for hazard pay. I don't know what you do with this information. Also a memoir.
Who would have thunk it?

**Erin Ryan** (4:09)
Yeah, I know. I am a glutton for punishment, so I read the whole book or I listened to the whole book.