The Greg Bovino Episode Extravaganza!

Finally, an episode about the life and times and possibly crimes of Border Patrol sin eater Greg Bovino.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Media. Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast that
is about bad people, and it turns out there's a
lot of those in the world, only more of them
every year. It feels like to commiserate with me about
that point. My guest today, Jack O'Brien, Doctor Jack O'Brien,

(00:25):
mister Colonel Jack O'Brien, President Jack O'Brien. All of the titles,
esquire what other titles are there? Do we have titles for?

Speaker 2 (00:36):
Like I don't know, I like colonel the honorable colonel,
because that that's one that when they give it to you,
you can just start calling yourself that, Like you just
did an episode about this dream the colonel dream was
just like just like somebody called him that one time,

(00:57):
I think in like New Orleans and they were like,
we'll make you honorable colonel, and he was like started
trying his name on legal documents.

Speaker 1 (01:08):
Oh yeah, what if I ever if I was ever
made a Kentucky colonel or whatever other kind of anytime.
The second I get made a colonel, I am never
introducing myself any other way, like I.

Speaker 3 (01:20):
Like to think.

Speaker 4 (01:21):
So when we went to the R and C and DNC,
they had this display of President's shoes. I like to
think if there was like a podcast version of it,
it would just be Jack's, Jordan's.

Speaker 2 (01:33):
Jordan's Yeah, I have some behind me right there. Yeah.
I think that's very nice with you, Sophie. I don't
think I can take credit for all podcasts.

Speaker 1 (01:45):
You know what's not nice of me? Maybe I thought
they're telling you the telling you the life story of
Greg Bovino. No, I really like the Robert.

Speaker 4 (01:58):
Can you share the working title that you did, because
it's it's a great working title.

Speaker 1 (02:03):
I just I don't know, you see, I was I
went back and forth on it because I feel like
it's too obvious. I just called him America's Kirkland brand
Gestapo chief.

Speaker 2 (02:10):
Yeah, yeah, I love it. I like it.

Speaker 1 (02:12):
I like that there's there's the thing because like there
are people. He gets angry that people compare Ice to
the Gesta and he's not with Ice, he's Border Patrol.
But you know they're all gestapo esque and people get
angry about them. And there's there's like three different kinds
of people here. There's like normal people who are like, yeah,
it seems like some Gestapo kind of thing. There's like
closet Nazis and Trump administration being like, first off, it's

(02:35):
Gestapo and second.

Speaker 2 (02:37):
Second, you're using the wrong font to make that accusation.

Speaker 1 (02:41):
And then there's guys like me who tries to switch
between the two. Yeah, just because I've read too many
books and watch too many documentaries about the Gestapo. Wow,
we're doing Yes, I'm not being sus.

Speaker 4 (02:54):
Shocked to hear that about you. Robert Evans, host of
Behind the Bastards.

Speaker 1 (03:00):
Yeah, so, Jack, what do you know about Greg Gregory?
That time we had a Greg commit like crimes against
humanity in this country? Now, yeah, it was about it
was not about time, but I feel like it hasn't

(03:20):
happened before.

Speaker 2 (03:21):
I think, you know, diversity of first name is really important.
So I was also welcoming when Greg showed up on
the scene.

Speaker 1 (03:29):
Finally, finally, some Greg representation in the crimes.

Speaker 2 (03:34):
I host a daily news show called The Daily Zeh as.

Speaker 1 (03:41):
A man, you were a man who needed no introduction.
But clearly that's irresponsible.

Speaker 2 (03:45):
Well no, but I mean due to that show, do
have some experience covering the latest happenings. But we do
that show twice a day, and therefore I don't I
didn't have a lot of time to dig in to
his backstory to really, uh see what makes this guy tick?
You know, Yeah, I have a feeling. I I was

(04:07):
just like kind of uh using context clues and making
educated guesses about what makes him tick. Yeah, yeah, I don't.
I don't know that much other than that he his
rapid rise and precipitous dismissal.

Speaker 1 (04:27):
Yeah yeah, and that's actually happened once before in his career.
We're not tad about a little bit. Yeah, not Greg
Greg again. You can't mean, like like you go back
to like the other crimes against humanity this country has committed.
You can't imagine like a greg having some significant role
in like the displacement of the Native Americans, right, or

(04:47):
like you can't imagine Greg like Greg's not an old
It's like, yeah, it's I have trouble imagine. I can
imagine a Gregory. I can imagine like a Gregory something
are there being involved in one of this nation's great crimes.
I can see that name signed on too, like the
order to in turn people. But not a Greg you know,
like there weren't Gregs until very recently. I feel like

(05:09):
it's certainly not in a position where they could do
crimes against humanity.

Speaker 2 (05:13):
Like Gregg Gregg. It's like kind of got like a
gen X like quality to it, where it's, yeah, yeah,
you can just call me Greg.

Speaker 1 (05:24):
Would it be better worse if he was a Craig,
Like would we believe him more or less? Because I
feel like Greg, I do believe Greg doing more than Craig.

Speaker 3 (05:35):
Greg is worse.

Speaker 1 (05:36):
Craig is a is a trustworthy name, you know, Greg.
There's a little something sketchy about it.

Speaker 2 (05:42):
Yeah, when did Gregg's first start showing up just not
Gregory's but Greg.

Speaker 1 (05:47):
Greg It had to have been like the seventies.

Speaker 3 (05:50):
My cousin Greg succession.

Speaker 1 (05:52):
There you go, that's the birth of Greg.

Speaker 2 (05:55):
Greig is a young person's name.

Speaker 4 (05:58):
Further point, but literally in that show, he decides he
wants to be taken seriously and he's like asks people
to call him Gregory, but he says it like, uh
gregor as.

Speaker 2 (06:10):
On the wrong syllable, Yeah, the wrong syllable. Uh Yeah.
I recently met a seventy something year old man named Corey.
You're are you the first Corey? And I did? I
did ask him that, and he didn't think it was funny.
Cory is such a young person's name. Yeah, yeah, Greg.

Speaker 3 (06:35):
Well, we've all tried to learn about this.

Speaker 4 (06:38):
Joyd hearing more because it's gonna be upsetting.

Speaker 1 (06:42):
I will be over on my end googling historical Greg's
first Greg History Comma uh so I said to have
to write this episode the week mister Bovino lost a
special job dressing like a Naziqual overseeing Border patrol operations
alongside ice in Minneapolis. He made the news several times
for statements in the wake of the murders of Rede
Good and Alex Pretty, and during the first year of

(07:04):
the Trump administration had generally turned himself into the physical
embodiment of the regime's violence towards Americans. It's too early
to say what the future holds for Greg, but given
that he just took a turn a sin eater for
the Trump administration, I think it's time we look into
who this guy is and where he came from. And
in short, he's not quite the guy I expected. There's
very little in Bovino's early life and even in most

(07:26):
of his career with the Border Patrol that would have
led one to predict he'd have turned into this I'm
not saying you'd have expected him to be like a
great guy, but that like the fact that he wound
up in at this moment in history doing this thing
is like a little surprising most of his former Yeah,
he's not. He doesn't seem like he was built for
this his whole life. And you don't get a lot

(07:47):
of quotes from his pre people who used to know
him being like, oh yeah, that makes sense for old Greg,
you know, yeah, most.

Speaker 2 (07:54):
Of more just like they don't really remember him no
more of like, uh huh that guys doing that. Huh.

Speaker 1 (08:03):
It's the general reaction. It's it's again like if this
guy in your school who wasn't super bad at anything,
but wasn't very good at anything and never really stood
out at anything winds up on the news dragging Americans
out of their home and tear gassing them in the
street for no reason. You're like, is he dressed like
a Nazi?

Speaker 2 (08:23):
Whereas like Stephen Miller is like the James of Nazis,
Like where everybody in high school was like, this guy
is going to be Nazi the world?

Speaker 3 (08:34):
Did you just say the le bron James of Nazis.

Speaker 1 (08:38):
I think it's a good comparison, so.

Speaker 2 (08:42):
That he was a standout Nazi from from the very
earliest ages. People you couldn't miss chosen.

Speaker 1 (08:51):
He was the lebron or Stephen Miller in sixth grade.
You knew what they were growing up to do. This
guy is gonna be the best basketball player where ever,
and this guy's gonna be a fucking Nazi.

Speaker 5 (09:03):
Yes, yeah, I think you're right money with that, Jack,
Not really.

Speaker 1 (09:11):
No, there's maybe one piece of evidence, but it's not good.
So most of the evidence is that he's kind of
like not the guy you'd expect to have done this.
Now that said, we don't have a lot about Greg's
early life. The only journalists who have really dug into
Bovino's life in a credible way are Dan Mihelopolis and

(09:32):
Lauren Fitzpatrick of the Chicago Sun Times, and they did
great work. They did both a podcast and an article
looking into his backstory. Aside from them, there's just one
Daily Mail article that talks to his sister, and so
we have a lot from his sister, who I don't
consider the most credible witness about this guy. Right, So
there's just not a ton of detail. And then there's

(09:53):
some sketchier sources on the matter, so we got some
open questions still. That said Greg was born on March
twenty seventh, nineteen seventy in San Bernardino, California, which I
bet you didn't call San Berndino Baby.

Speaker 2 (10:07):
You know that's good I didn't because I don't know.
I cannot differentiate any like any of those la.

Speaker 1 (10:16):
He's the pieces. That's such a West La thing to say, too, Jack, It's.

Speaker 2 (10:20):
A I'm bad at LA stuff too.

Speaker 1 (10:23):
I'm just like I.

Speaker 2 (10:25):
I grew up on the East Coast and I'm just
like San.

Speaker 4 (10:29):
Yeah, Inland Empire, Jack Inland Empire.

Speaker 1 (10:32):
In about San Berndino from the Frank Zappa song San Bernandino,
And hearing that Greg Bobino was born in San Berdino
makes me also think of the Frank Zappa song Baby Snakes,
because at this point he's a baby snake, you know. Yeah,
and those are bad right they can well really but
yeah baby snakes. Sure, yeah, absolutely, It's not their fault.

(10:54):
They're just snakes. But yes, yes, he's born there. And
because he would embark on a career of at and
facilitating the brutalization of immigrants, a lot has been made
of the immigration history of his own family. And I
have some qualms with this because you're mostly bringing this
up to be like you're hurting these people, yet a
generation or two ago your family was in the same situation.

(11:15):
Can't you see why that's fucked up? And my answer
to that is no, they can't. They're bad people, right,
Like It's like, at a certain point, are you like
you could again people do this thing with Stephen Miller's
background or Trump's and it's like, yeah, I mean they're bad.
They don't care. They don't care, they're bad people.

Speaker 2 (11:30):
They suck Like, oh, that didn't work pointing out the
hypoglypsy of the behavior their background.

Speaker 1 (11:36):
Yeah, I feel.

Speaker 2 (11:37):
Like a three million time we do it, it's just
gonna like break through it and be like a damn
and they'll be like.

Speaker 1 (11:44):
Yeah, it's the too many people believe their moms when
they were like that bully. You know, if that bully
knew he was hurting you, he'd feel bad, and it's like, right,
he's a dick. That's not how they work. So yeah,
it's it's also just like, yeah, basically every white person,
if you go back two generations, has like an immigration

(12:04):
story in this country because it's the United States. That's
kind of how it happened here for most people. But
as you might have guessed from the name, the Bavinos
were originally Italian. In nineteen oh nine, Michelle Bovino, who
is Greg's great grandfather, left the village of Alprigliano in
the mountains of southern Italy. His home was racked with

(12:24):
poverty and dominated by organized criminal cartels, much like certain countries.
Our administration doesn't think he should be sending us immigrants today,
so it is a pretty direct comparison.

Speaker 2 (12:34):
Not a popular source.

Speaker 1 (12:35):
Of people back then, right, No, no, they were not.
The United States not thrilled these people are coming over.
So Michel, who I'm sure was immediately called Michael as
soon as you can't be going by that here, left
his wife and kids behind. So they are staying back
in Italy, and I guess he's sending them back money
as he seeks to make a life for himself in

(12:56):
the United States. So he's doing that for years until
this takes a while, until in May of nineteen twenty four,
there's a panic over immigration in the halls of power
in the United States, and this was you know, the
result of kind of a long simmering pot. From the
early eighteen hundreds, most immigration into the US had been
Western and Northern Europeans, aka the whitest of the white people.

(13:17):
And we had some issues with some of them, right,
There's some like, oh, a welshman's here now, but like
you know, for the most part, it's like, well, they're
all pretty We're all pretty white, right, these people. You know,
not to say that nobody faced bigotry when they came here,
but they're all you know, this is like the founding
stock and the ideas of people by that point in time,
by the time you hit the eighteen hundreds, and by

(13:39):
the late eighteen hundreds and early nineteen hundred, shits starting
to shift. Immigrants are now coming more from Eastern and
Southern Europe, where the white people are not quite as white.
The first twenty or so years of the nineteen hundreds
also coincided with the largest search in immigration in US history.
Up to that point, eugenics was beginning to become a
popular topic of discussion, and among educated racists, it was

(14:00):
believe that many different European nations were also effectively different races.
Per an article in the Migration Policy Institute, The influential
eugenicist Charles Davenport considered Italians prone to crimes of personal violence,
while Jews were characterized by intense individualism and ideals of
gain at the cost of any interest. Since eugenicists believe
individual races possess different characteristics and abilities, Davenport argued, the

(14:23):
government should be careful not to adulterate our national germ
plasm with socially unfit traits.

Speaker 2 (14:29):
And you know, and what this was in what small
corner of the internet. Oh wait, this was in academia.

Speaker 1 (14:37):
This is this is in Congress at this point, I mean, this.

Speaker 2 (14:39):
Is it was so popular, Like Americans don't understand how
popular that was in the early twentieth century. If you've
seen a picture with a man with like a stethoscope
or a fucking pince nez or whatever and doctor in
front of his name. In nineteen ten, he believed the
most racist things you can imagine because he read it
in the text book that was like the dvs Czech

(15:03):
has these characters like a D and D source book
where it's like, oh, they get plus two to strike,
you know, like that's literally how these people are like
learning this shit. It's in textbooks, and it's in the
textbooks that our congressmen are reading, and they're going to
yell at too about all of the Italians that are
coming into the country. Enter the Dillingham Commission, which was
set up by Congress to study the consequences of immigration.

(15:24):
It released report in nineteen oh nine, that's right after,
but two years after Michelle came to the United States
that argued northern and Western Europeans were just kind of
better people from the other parts of Europe, and it
suggested the Dillingham Report suggested a wide range of policies
to discourage immigration from unworthy places, including literacy tests and
racial quotas. Right, that's where a lot of this stuff,

(15:45):
you know, is when America really starts thinking about immigration
and the border in a very modern way. You know,
there'd been panics over it before, and you know, legislation,
but a lot of our modern apparatus of how we
think about immigration, of how we think about white genocide,
and that sort of all starts right in this period
of time. And to make a long story short, the

(16:07):
Dillingham Commission releases that reported nineteen eleven. You know, things
still move slowly in the halls of power, but this
eventually culminates in nineteen twenty four in the Immigration Act,
which restricted immigration in an attempt to ensure most deriving
immigrants were from the good places.

Speaker 1 (16:22):
For the MPI, it closed the door in almost all
New Asian immigration and shut out most European Jews and
other refugees fleeing fascism and the horrors of the Holocaust
in Europe. One of the most restrictive immigration laws in
US history, it played a key role in any of
the previous era of largely unrestricted immigration. So this is
when immigration as like a modern concept really gets started.

(16:45):
And Greg Bevino's ancestor, this is just.

Speaker 2 (16:49):
A relevant context for people who are like, this is
not what America is about.

Speaker 1 (16:54):
Well, it's kind of been the way we have it
for a while in the last one hundred and something years.
And Greg Bavino's ancestor knew that this posts a threat
to his plan because he's making money and he's sending
it over to Italy. But his plan is I want
to bring my family with me right to the lane
of opportunity at some point, and he sees this Act
to get passed and He's like, shit, that's about to

(17:16):
get a lot harder. So within days of the Immigration
Act passing, he files paperwork to start the process of
becoming a citizen. Once this process was completed in nineteen
twenty seven, he brought his family over and they became
citizens through a process known as chain migration. Here's how
The Sun Times explains what happened after Michelle was naturalized
in nineteen twenty seven. He was reunited with his wife

(17:38):
and four children and at Pennsylvania Cold Company Town after
their arrival on the steamship the SS Giuseppe Verde Record Show.
Then the kids, including Vincenzo twelve, Gregory Bovino's future grandfather,
automatically benefited from a derivative citizenship law for minors. Luigia
would become a naturalized citizen. So all is it's, you know,
chain migration is kind of exactly the thing that they're

(17:59):
trying to stop now. It's to be part of why
they want to reverse some of the citizenships that have
been granted, because a lot of them are granted in
ways that are very related to this right, right, and
it's what they want to stop because they want to
stop families from coming over here and getting larger.

Speaker 2 (18:14):
They've just they've benefited from this random crapshoot of laws
and everyone did.

Speaker 1 (18:19):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (18:20):
They don't want anybody else to get lucky like they did.

Speaker 1 (18:23):
Right, And they don't want any other ethnic groups, as
they see it, or racial groups to come here and
start breeding, right, which is what Italians did. You know,
It's what everybody did. It's kind of the entire point
of the country, you know.

Speaker 2 (18:39):
Kind of the whole deal. The melting pot is a
very chaste way of saying a lot of people came
here and started fucking each.

Speaker 1 (18:46):
Other pot, right, and.

Speaker 2 (18:48):
Everything kind of mixed together. I do love how rigorously
Italian everything. It's an incredible name of the boat that
they came over all.

Speaker 1 (18:59):
Yeah, just Agenzo. Yeah, they were nearly out of pizza
by the time they hit the dops. Yes, I know.
The Trump administration has cited the nineteen twenty four immigration
law as an example of the kind of reforms they
seek to make. They've also repeatedly cited chain migration stories
like this as an example of things like why birthright
citizenship and Juwsoli need to be revisited. For his part,

(19:21):
Baveno does not seem interested in his family background, and
I don't know that it was much of a factor
in his raising. For him, the most influential thing that
happened in nineteen twenty four may not have even been
the Immigration Act because that is also the year the
Border Patrol was created, and that's going to be Greg
Bavino's whole life. So, like I said, he's born in
San Bordino because his father had just been drafted to

(19:43):
fight in Vietnam. So don't worry. Like my native Inland
Empire people, they don't stay very long. They're just stationed
on a military base nearby, and two years later, when
his father gets discharged, the family moves back east to
Blowing Rock, North Carolina, which is the real name of
a place. Don't make fun of it, you know.

Speaker 2 (20:01):
Blowing Rock, North Carolina.

Speaker 4 (20:05):
When you first mentioned San Bernardino, I was like confused
because he doesn't give big Inland Empire energy.

Speaker 1 (20:10):
No, he's not an Inland Empire guy. No, he's there
two years.

Speaker 4 (20:13):
Yeah, so this this makes more sense.

Speaker 2 (20:17):
He does give Blowing Rock energy.

Speaker 1 (20:24):
I do. I do kind of wonder is there any
and he doesn't say anything about this, so maybe I'm
reading into it. Maybe two years isn't enough time. But
I've lived in parts of uh, you know, the the
deep rural areas where oh, you didn't come here to
you were two. You're not really from here, boy, you know.
So I don't know if that was any part of
his background or not.

Speaker 2 (20:44):
New family.

Speaker 1 (20:47):
Coming up here. That was twenty years ago.

Speaker 2 (20:50):
Mark called him Hollywood, here comes Hollywood.

Speaker 1 (21:00):
Yeah, I could see that, but they don't say anything
about that. That's purely a head cannon for fucking Greg Bavino.
And to be fair, probably not the case because his
dad's side of the family's just come here, but his
mom's side of the family goes back at least they say,
eight generations in the Blowing Rock area. The Bavenos had
two more children, Natalie and Nicholas, born in seventy four

(21:21):
and seventy nine, after moving back to their part of
the country, and one gets the feeling that young Greg
may have benefited a bit from only child syndrome, because
he's a good bit older than his siblings, right closer
to his sister than his brother, but he's got some
oldest sibling memories. At least his younger sister, Natalie is
one of our few semi detailed sources in Greg's childhood.

(21:42):
Although she seems to idolize her brother and I don't
credit her with a lot of skepticism or scrutiny about him.
She describes their early childhood as Rockwellian, which means reminiscent
of the paintings of Dorman Rockwell, right, and is also
based I think, often on some misunderstandings of them. But
like she's thinking of like those nice paintings of kids
hiking in the woods and you know, idyllic Christmases with

(22:04):
the family gathered around the fire and stuff, right, Like,
that's what she means. There were about a thing.

Speaker 2 (22:08):
Norman Rockwell like fucked up.

Speaker 1 (22:11):
I actually know he's pretty good politics. I mean he's
not perfect. There's some stuff you know, you find with
any illustrator of that period. They did some uncomfortable illustrations
if you look back far enough, right, But no, he
did a lot of He was like super pro integration,
super pro civil rights movement. Like he was just like the.

Speaker 2 (22:27):
Carefully curated version of the paintings that make it happen
to be curated by white supremacists.

Speaker 1 (22:34):
As is often the case, a bunch of white supremacists
have taken his paintings to be like, this was the
ideal America before everything got when Norman Rockwell was just
painting pretty things.

Speaker 5 (22:42):
You know, Norman Rockwell, Yeah, he was also painting like
because he did some paintings of like civil rights movement,
like protests and stuff that were contemporaries.

Speaker 1 (22:52):
It wasn't all but you know that. Yeah, they forgot.

Speaker 2 (22:57):
So you're sure she was referring to Norman Rockwell when
she said Rockwellian and not the eighties artist who's saying
somebody's watching me.

Speaker 1 (23:04):
Yes, I do not believe she's referring to the eighties
artists who sick somebody's watching me. Thank you though for
bringing that up.

Speaker 3 (23:10):
Norman fucking rock Well.

Speaker 1 (23:12):
Yeah, there were about a thousand people in their hometown,
which she describes as literally perfect. So again she has
these idyllic memories of their early childhood. The Bavino's benefited
from a tight family and an extensive one, right. They
have a lot of in laws and relatives, and they
had money too. They're doing very well for a while.
Their father had started a successful bar, the Library Club,

(23:35):
And the reason why it's such a big deal here
is that their town is like the lone wet county
in the middle of a bunch of dry counties. So
there's a bunch of bars in town. And it's kind
of like a vacation town. So it's both where people
come on vacation, but also if anyone nearby wants to drink,
they have to come to Blowing Rock, right, and the
library Club's like one of the biggest places they're going
to go to.

Speaker 2 (23:55):
You can make a good living by having the brilliant innovation.
We are in a town where I can open a bar,
and no other towns around those over the bar. I
bet people will drink here.

Speaker 1 (24:08):
I bet people will drink here. And they different did.

Speaker 2 (24:11):
Because people talk about like being able to like how
you know, previous generations you could buy a house for
this and like everything was so much cheaper. It was
also so easy to like succeed.

Speaker 1 (24:22):
Backless less ideas had been had, you know, Like I
don't know, I think people will use plastic in the
future room getting into plastics.

Speaker 2 (24:32):
Yeah, you become a millionaire.

Speaker 1 (24:34):
Yeah, it's it was easier. It was easier most of
the sources I find out. I will say, though, Jack,
I don't know that we fully understand how the Library
Bar made its money. Most of the sources I find
just describe it as a bar, and weirdly enough, the
thing that made me think maybe something more was going
on here was that interview I found with Natalie and
the Daily Mail where I don't think she's trying to

(24:54):
let on that her dad was a criminal, but that's
kind of how it sounds, because here's a quote from her.
In those early years, the family was living the good life,
thanks largely to the success of the Library Club, and
here's Natalie. The bouncers would drop huge sacks of money
off stacks and stacks. He did incredibly well. The family
was able to buy their house into both they'd ride
on Wataga Lake and the membership in a country club

(25:15):
where they ran a side business, a drink stand on
the ninth hole. And that's not how.

Speaker 5 (25:21):
We don't come to your own with sands of money.

Speaker 2 (25:27):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (25:28):
I've known a few bar owners and none of them
have the bouncers drop sacks of money off at their houses.
That's your dad was moving something.

Speaker 2 (25:38):
Yeah, he was moving.

Speaker 3 (25:43):
On the ninth hole. Is such a fantastic detail.

Speaker 2 (25:47):
Wow. Yeah, Well, we were basically millionaires for the time
because he had a drink stand on the ninth hole
of a golf course.

Speaker 1 (25:55):
Oh yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, that doesn't sound like
the way you bribe the judges about it.

Speaker 2 (26:00):
They droven ice cream truck getting sallar.

Speaker 1 (26:07):
You know, the bouncer's dropped sacks of money off at
the house as is normal. Maybe she's not remembering things right,
but that sounds sketchy as a fuck to me.

Speaker 3 (26:18):
And speaking of stacks and stacks at stacks.

Speaker 1 (26:21):
Speaking of sketchy as FUCKO, here's the sponsors of our show,
and we're back. So yeah, I don't know. Greg grows
up to be fair. Whatever the truth is about their dad,

(26:42):
the kids didn't grow up aware of anything sketchy. Greg
spends his early childhood hunting fish and and exploring the woods.
His parents got him his first shotgun at age eight.
He reads hunting magazines voraciously, which is how he encountered
his first pieces of pro border patrol propaganda. And this
is interesting because I got a different answer. Every other

(27:03):
article I read was talked about a thing we'll discuss later.
There's a movie he watches and the like, and this
is the first time he encountered the border patrol and
it's actually talking to his sister that the Daily Mail
gets this piece of information that I think might be
more accurate, because it feels more accurate to me, at least.
The hunting publications featured columns written by old time border
patrol agents such as Skeeter Skelton and Charles Askins. The

(27:24):
young boy had found his calling. He thought it was
the wild West. Natalie Babino to The Daily Mail, it
was like a true frontier. It was those old timers
that inspired that in him. And that is more believable
to me than the other story, just because, like I
too was a young boy once, and I've read a
lot of similar articles and a lot of similar magazines.
I could see that happening to this kid.

Speaker 2 (27:45):
You're familiar with the works of Skeeter Skelton.

Speaker 1 (27:48):
You know what, Jack I am. That's what we're going
to talk about next. Because the second, as someone with
a comedy background, the second I read the name Skeeter Skeleton,
like we gotta deal with that, ask Skeeter, Peter.

Speaker 2 (28:05):
Skeeter Skelton fucking rules, I'm sorry.

Speaker 1 (28:08):
What is that short for? Like skeet Tropolis? Like, what
the fuck?

Speaker 3 (28:14):
Skeeter?

Speaker 1 (28:15):
I've known a couple Skeeters, but I never thought it
was a given Christian name. I'm gonna be honest, is it. Yeah,
that's what it seems like. It's written on everything that
it's it's byeline. I don't know. I don't know the
man's birth certificate, Jack Skeeter Skelton. It's just weird hearing
the name, seeing the name Skeeter written and a real

(28:37):
publication is supposed to hearing it across the bar, which
is how you're supposed to.

Speaker 2 (28:42):
Those guys usually don't make it out of the library
club are usually there. They do not.

Speaker 4 (28:49):
I just am thinking of that that Nickelodeon show called
Cousin Skeeter from like the nineties.

Speaker 1 (28:56):
Oh geez, I don't even remember that one. Yeah, I
read the name Skeeter Skelton. I had to look into
it more. And he was a lawman from Hereford, Texas
who served in a bunch of different coproles. He did everything.
He was in everything from the Amarilla Police to Border Patrol,
to DEA to customs. And he starts writing for Shooting Times,
which is a magazine that still exists in nineteen sixty six.

(29:17):
And again it's one of those like no one had
had the idea to have a magazine about shooting. So
they start having one in sixty six and he's like,
I'm gonna write about handguns. It's like, no one had
that idea before. So he goes from pitching them to
becoming the handgun editor in the next year because they're like,
what a great idea people in America writing about handguns.
You're a genius, Skeeter, And he had.

Speaker 2 (29:39):
Guy whose nickname is just a slang term for mosquitoes,
as a genius.

Speaker 1 (29:46):
Oh God, Skeeter Skelton. Yeah, he's the handgun editor of
Shooting Times until his death in nineteen ninety eight. If
you want to know his main claim to fame, he's
generally credited with reviving interest in the forty four special round,
which is the bullet Dirty Harry uses. So without Skeeter Skelton,
we may never have Dirty Harry.

Speaker 2 (30:05):
He popularized it before Dirty Harry.

Speaker 1 (30:08):
Oh he's not.

Speaker 2 (30:13):
Yeah, okay, he's got like Dirty Harry actually stole that
ship from me. I do know, I got it. So
we're doing a new version of TDZ where we dive
into icons. We just did a Marilyn Monroe episode and
we found this character named George Solitaire, who I can't

(30:34):
stop thinking about and talking about because he had a
claim to fame. Uh, he was just Joe Demaggio was
like drinking buddy, and his claim to fame was that
he invented the phrase Splitsville and Dollsville. And he was
like he had a whole origin story about it that
because he was born in Brownsville and moved to Bronxville.

Speaker 1 (30:56):
That's just he thought about vil.

Speaker 2 (30:58):
Yeah, like Bill in a Blood Yeah. But otherwise he
was just a guy who got drunk with Joe DiMaggio
and he's like all over the historical record, and he
was like love it. Scalper was just like like that,
having a claim to fame that is that specific and
stupid is just like my hat's off to like what
a weird world?

Speaker 5 (31:19):
What.

Speaker 1 (31:19):
It's one of those things the second someone tells you that,
they're like, you know, I kept up with that word Splitsville.
You're like you must have would claim to have done that, Yeah,
that's not a thing anyone would pretend.

Speaker 2 (31:32):
Yeah, like to be like I popularized this one round,
that's kind of shit.

Speaker 1 (31:38):
It's kind of if an ancient man came up to
me and said I made the forty four. Popular'd be like,
you probably did.

Speaker 2 (31:44):
Yeah, I guess, I don't know. I would like about
to lying and like get it to just find a lie.

Speaker 1 (31:51):
So specially there you go.

Speaker 2 (31:52):
People, nobody would ever be like, what, Okay, Yeah, I
guess so that that makes sense.

Speaker 1 (32:00):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'll believe it. And so I haven't
had the time because he wrote articles for twenty something years,
I haven't had the time to go through all A.
Skeeter's old articles on shooting times. But I found you
one article and I read.

Speaker 2 (32:14):
And I read the first.

Speaker 1 (32:15):
Paragraph of it, Jack, And this kind of tells you
all you need to know about what young Gregory might
have picked up reading Skeeter's columns.

Speaker 2 (32:23):
Oh my god.

Speaker 1 (32:24):
Almost all the objections to the three point fifty seven
magnum as a police weapon come from city police departments.
It is argued, with some justification, that an officer who
fires a magnum in a crowded city is more likely
to kill innocent, non combativets than he would be if
armed with a standard thirty eight special, Not much as
given to the fact that the same officer runs a
hell of a lot more risk of being killed himself
when his low powered thirty eight fails to put an

(32:45):
armed opponent out of action.

Speaker 2 (32:47):
Yeah, so just.

Speaker 1 (32:49):
Like, look, some city cops say, this bigger bullet gets
regular people killed because it goes through doors and stuff, right,
but have you thought about the danger of not killing
a guy?

Speaker 2 (32:59):
Yeah?

Speaker 3 (32:59):
Out action?

Speaker 1 (33:01):
I love? And you see also because this was this
is actually like was published right after his death, but
he wrote it a little before, so this was published
like posthumously in eighty eight. But you can see the
early birth of a lot of the warrior ethos, like
warrior cop shit here the whole well, you know, you
could say, you know, an officer was more likely to
kill innocent non combatives as opposed to like innocent people,

(33:23):
innocent civilities. Nona could have done something right, right.

Speaker 2 (33:27):
Everything of the assumption that someone's attacking you. That's how
you leave the door in the morning. Yeah, everyone is
entering on that situation right with It's it's worth the
risk to have a gun that shoots through four people
in a crowded urban environment exactly.

Speaker 1 (33:49):
And so this is the kind of shit he's reading
as a kid, Like the early precursors to a lot
of that is what Greg Bavino is the fact that like,
as like a nine or ten or eleven year old,
he's reading yes, something like because he was born in seventy,
so he would have been born like a couple of
years after this guy started writing for Shooting Times. So
from the time he's a little kid, he's reading stuff

(34:10):
like this, like he's almost patient zero for this, like
warrior cop ethos bullshit, like he may have been. He's
among the very first kids who got hit with this
stuff as a child, you know, he's not an earlier generation. Yeah,
right into the bloodstream and it just takes over as
far as we can tell. So Natalie's interview is the
only place I found reference to Bavino reading these magazines,

(34:34):
and every other piece on him lists as I said,
a very different, inciting incident for his interest in the
Border Patrol as a career. Here's how the Chicago Sun
Times describes it. Bavino has said that he was inspired
to join the Border Patrol when he saw a movie
called The Border that came out when he was just eleven,
produced by a distant cousin of his mom. It just
starred Jack Nicholson and Harvey kai Tell as agents, but
the end, Bvino was crestfallen that the movie portrayed the

(34:56):
agents as bad guys and said that he was moved
to join the Border Patrol in nineteen six ninety six
to show that he was the opposite a good border cop.
Making the border secure is my personal responsibility, Bavino said
on a podcast in twenty twenty one. And I wonder
is it that maybe he saw the movie and then
started reading the magazines. But his sisters describes the magazines

(35:16):
as kind of the first thing. So is it that
Bovino doesn't want to admit that, like, well, I read
some magazines by some Border Patrol guys and thinks that
because this is a more convenient right wing, modern right
wing narrative, right that, Like well, I saw the liberal
Hollywood movie about the Border Patrol, and I wanted to
prove him wrong, you know, which is kind of what
I suspect.

Speaker 2 (35:36):
And it's like, you're instead of having to rely on
people wanting to learn more about Skeeter Skelton, you can
just br like it had Harvey Kaye Tell and Jack
Nicholson like that, those are names you've heard before. This
will stick in your brain. I don't have to say,
Skeeter correct those guys, rather than being like, well, have
you read the works of skied Skill? No? Yeah, that's

(36:00):
a name you just made up?

Speaker 1 (36:01):
Man, Yes, it's not a real guy. So the idyllic
perfect part of Greg's childhood also ends the same year
the Border comes out. When he's eleven, his father drives
home drunk one night from work. I'm sure it wasn't
the first night, can't have been right, and he winds
up crashing his truck directly into a car, killing a
young woman and brutally injuring her husband. They were twenty

(36:22):
six and twenty nine years old, respectively. It was a
bad crash. There was no sign that Bevino tried to
break before hitting the other car, which the local paper
described as bold. Over by the impact, Mike was unharmed.
The victim's husband sued the Bovenos and sued Mike's bar
and uncle. Ultimately, Mike pled guilty to a misdemeanor charge
of death by motor vehicle, but the judge in his

(36:44):
case ordered he'd be sent to state prison a treatment
for his alcoholism, and he stays there for four months.
There's an article written about him While he's in jail,
he tells the Charlotte Observer that he'd long struggled with
his drinking and that he'd gotten drunk the night of
the crash because his wife had begged him to quit
sauce and that had made him angry. He promised not
to do so again after getting out of jail, saying
I've got a dead woman on my hands. Getting dead

(37:06):
drunk just isn't worth it. I don't know how else
you frame that, but that's not the best way. Maybe
I don't know. The lawsuit destroys this.

Speaker 2 (37:15):
Clever bit of word play.

Speaker 1 (37:17):
We need you kill the woman. Why are we doing
word play here?

Speaker 2 (37:21):
We could just skip the fucking Hallmark poster And yeah,
I stopped drinking a horrible thing as a result of
my drinking.

Speaker 1 (37:31):
Yeah, that's a weird way to describe it. Yeah, yeah,
just I killed a woman would have been enough to say.
The lawsuit destroyed his business, obviously forcing him to sell it.
Betty decided she'd had enough and divorced him after this,
gaining soul custody of their three children. Mike left the
family and settled in New Mexico. Greg was fourteen when

(37:53):
his dad left so this takes a while. You have
to imagine this is a bad three years. And he
enters high school right around the same time divorce was finalized.
He was not recalled by his peers as an overly
memorable student, right, He's not someone who really makes a mark.
When he started it would talk a high school. He
joined the wrestling team. And if you have seen photos
of Greg around other people, he's not a large man, right, No, man,

(38:18):
he's he's a smaller fella, right. And height isn't everything.
There's weight a classes and stuff. It's not everything. And
wrestling it's.

Speaker 2 (38:25):
Great for wrestling to be small.

Speaker 1 (38:26):
Yeah, it can, it can be handy. But he's also,
even in that world, kind of small, right, And he
doesn't seem to have developed in other ways to compensate
for that. And everyone who talks about his time in
wrestling is very polite about this, but he was not
good at it. Sometimes people actually talk to his old
high school coach, who it seems like a very nice
man because when they bring up was he good, he's like, well,

(38:49):
when he was, you know, he wasn't the biggest boy.
He wasn't the biggest guy. But at the end of
his senior year, he got the Most Improved award, which
is something even though the team had an unusually tear season,
which is a very sweet way to try to describe
this boy.

Speaker 2 (39:05):
Yeah, our team got so shitty that he was actually
like kind of par for the course for our tea.

Speaker 1 (39:10):
Yeah, that's kind of what he's saying.

Speaker 2 (39:14):
How I am just curious, now that you've researched three
thousand of the worst people to ever live, how common
is the like not remembered versus like, oh yeah, I
remember that shit ahead.

Speaker 1 (39:30):
Like mostly you know, generally, when we come across a
guy who there's not much about their childhood or background,
it's because they were like some weird con person the
eighteen hundreds, and it's like they just hopped onto the
historic record when they were thirty and we don't know
what the fuck was going on previously. Yeah, or it's
someone who's such a minor weirdo or creep that there's
just not a lot, you know, no one, no major

(39:51):
you know, they haven't been covered by a major newspaper,
no one's dug into them that much. With someone like Greg,
this is it's not common. They have this little We
actually talked to a bunch of their classmates in Peers.
That's the weird thing.

Speaker 4 (40:04):
The one thing that we that we typically come across
that's like a common commonality is like somebody who has
crazy ambition, and that's what people remember. Yeah, I'm not
I'm not hearing that here for Greg at all.

Speaker 1 (40:16):
Nobody says that about about because that's.

Speaker 4 (40:18):
Like that that is a very common bastard tradi is
that they had way too much ambition at an early
age and then they, you know, become like Jeff Bezos
or whatever.

Speaker 2 (40:29):
They were like, Yeah, yeah, he was voted person least
likely for you to be asking this question about them
because he thought he wasn't gonna do ship.

Speaker 1 (40:40):
Because Greg, seriously, Greg.

Speaker 2 (40:42):
Gregg, Well, first of all, Greg, Greg, Yeah, did.

Speaker 1 (40:48):
You realize his named Greg? Sorry, the Greg's out there.
I just it's hard to It's not even an insult.
It's just hard to imagine a Greg being like the
mouthpiece of a.

Speaker 4 (40:58):
Fashion I do literally have a cousin and he is delightful.
Cousin Greg, if you're listening to this, I love you,
cousin Greg.

Speaker 1 (41:03):
Yeah, I'd have trouble imagining your cousin Greg is the
mouthpiece of a fascist regime.

Speaker 2 (41:07):
You know, we literally all cousin Greg. They're all great,
My cousin Greg rocks except Greg. Bavino's cousin has a
cousin Greg. Not so great.

Speaker 3 (41:15):
Not so great.

Speaker 1 (41:16):
Yeah, So Greg's coach said this about him. Quote. Greg
was not bashful, He had no problems asking the coach questions,
and you know, he liked to tell stories, funny stories.
He also expressed when these reporters ask him a lot
of surprise that he went into law enforcement. And he
says so in a way. I love this. The coach
says this in a way that makes me think, like, oh,

(41:39):
I think this coach might not like the police very much.

Speaker 2 (41:42):
Quote.

Speaker 1 (41:43):
That was a real surprise. I just didn't picture Greg
being in law enforcement. He was always very pleasant and
I didn't see him as that. That to me didn't
seem to fit his personality. It wasn't did beg him
for a huge asshole.

Speaker 2 (42:00):
He turned into a piece.

Speaker 1 (42:01):
He was that kind of pricks coach.

Speaker 2 (42:06):
I love it, cool guy, when you go back like
it's it's also interesting when they don't have anything interesting
to say, because, like I do feel like most of
the time when you're asking a normal person about like
that they'll have made up a memory about them. Yeah,
you know, because just to be interesting at like dinner parties.

Speaker 1 (42:27):
Yeah, I remember he never stopped reading that book about
Ryan hard Heidrich. Just love the guy like something, you know. Yeah,
but no, there's very other other than his sister being
like he read Skeeter he read.

Speaker 2 (42:39):
And his coach being like, I didn't think he was
a big enough asshole to be aoud be a copy.

Speaker 1 (42:44):
Yeah. Jason Perry, his wrestling teammate, also expressed surprise at
what had become of Bovino. He described Gregan's school as
very polite and added, I don't think Greg would not
do his job, and like, if they're asking him to
do something that's not fair to minorities, I'm sure he's
hating it. This is kind of a Bible Belt community,
so I know Greg was exposed to compassion and love
for his fellow man, but it's dangerous to speculate what

(43:06):
a man is thinking. I hope whatever happens, I hope
it works out good for him and his family and
the people that are being mistreated. You know, is such
a middle of the road thing. I hope both the
guy hurting people and the hurt people are get better.

Speaker 2 (43:19):
Okay, it's crazy because I know he's aware of compassion,
like he's heard of it.

Speaker 1 (43:24):
Like, yeah, he's aware. He's not supposed to He must
not like what he's doing because he's not supposed to
act this way he has heard of Yeah, I know
he's not supposed to be doing this shit. Yeah yeah. Now,
if you spend any amount of time looking this guy
up on social media, you'll run into some claims made
by a purported former classmate of his on Reddit that
are much more negative than the recollections gathered by The

(43:47):
Sun Times. It opens with the opie head bar nine
three one six writing, I just found out I know
Greg Bovito personally. Here are some things you can tell
him when you next see him, And the poster claims
that he's a current Minneapolis president who used to live
in Boone, North Carolina, near where Bvino grew up, and
that they went to the same school, and he posted
a clip from a yearbook with a picture of Bevino

(44:07):
on the wrestling team as evidence that said a bunch
of these pictures are floating around, not guaranteed that that
means he actually went to school with this guy, and
then he provides a bunch of suggestions for things that
protesters should say to Bovino. Hey, Greg, you're the reason
your dad got drunk and killed that woman in Blowing Rock,
which led to your parents' divorce. And I don't think

(44:27):
that that's necessarily accurate. I think his dad killing someone
and bankrupting the family is probably enough of a reason.
That might be a bit of a dick move, but
I think we're just being an asshole to this guy.
That doesn't really expand our knowledge about Greg though, Right,
so let's move on to the next one. Hey, Greg,
do you think it's weird that the Wataga High yearbook
has you listened as most likely to shit his pants

(44:47):
in public? Now they don't seen this yearbook. That's a
nice burn. But also yearbooks don't do that. That's not
a thing. Like no public school yearbooks not are you
someon go.

Speaker 2 (45:00):
To jail in the South?

Speaker 1 (45:02):
In public school, You're not allowed to do that for
a lot of reasons. It's abusive to the students. Again,
he would have been eighteen, Like, hey, Greg, your history
teacher thinks that you're a pathetic Nazi punk. No wonder
you failed all his classes. This doesn't seem to be
accurate based on again it's a burn, But I don't
think it's true because I think his grades were decent.
At least it sounds like that I could. I can

(45:25):
believe some of his teachers hate him now, but I
just I don't think he actually did fail all of
his classes. I haven't found the evidence of that. So
another extal allegation is that a local store banned him
for sniffing shoes after people tried them on. Don't have
anything about that, one way or the other.

Speaker 2 (45:39):
Right, it's a good one. Now we're getting too like
pretty good lies to tell about someone. Yeah, kind of
weird and specific enough, like having invented Splitsville. It's like, no, yeah,
he had to be from pay less shoes.

Speaker 1 (45:58):
The last one is really specific and again not when
we can back up in any way, Hey, Greg, do
you remember eating that the Wataga Pioneers wrestling team's soggy biscuit?
Is it still gay to eat stemen off of Bojangles biscuit?
Or was that just an eighties thing?

Speaker 2 (46:13):
Now?

Speaker 1 (46:14):
Again, first off, he was born in seventies, so he
wouldn't have been I mean, yeah, yeah, that could that
works out. I guess, yeah, yeah, that does work out.
The timing works out. The Bojangles biscuits make sense. That said,
I can't back up the rest of this, and there's
enough wrong with the previous parts of this that I

(46:34):
maybe this is someone who went to school with him
and is just like throw it out shit because they
didn't like him. You know, maybe he did sniff shoes
in a local shoe store. I can't prove it, but
there's no evidence. People are gonna bring this up because
it went crazy viral. I can't back any of this up,
and there's nothing here.

Speaker 2 (46:51):
I feel like we can confirm both of those things
happened in that guy whoever in the post. Yeah, yeah,
and like he's just like spific because those are like
good and specific weird, Like, yeah, those are real. He's
probably just taking those and being like these having a
Greg Bovino And.

Speaker 1 (47:08):
Yeah, I believe some guy did those things.

Speaker 2 (47:11):
Yeah for sure.

Speaker 1 (47:12):
I mean, yeah, again, maybe, but I can't I can't
prove it, and I can't find any specific reason to
believe that this post that people are sharing around is real.
Uh boy, if anyone can prove that Greg Bovino got
banned from a store for sniff and shoes. Let's have it.
But nobody else seems to be sharing this yet great,
some cub reporter go down to boone figure this out

(47:32):
break the mystery.

Speaker 2 (47:35):
So just looking through microfiche looking for sho.

Speaker 1 (47:39):
Sniffing microfiche in the basement of the shoe store. It's
all just shoe store related articles, all right.

Speaker 2 (47:47):
So I'm gonna come clean here and say, I like
the smell of new shoes.

Speaker 1 (47:54):
What is it?

Speaker 2 (47:56):
So if you're smelling, if you're at a shoe store,
wait to finish on shoes, right, So are you taking
their shoes while they're they're existing shoes while they're trying
them on? Because yeah, that's you.

Speaker 1 (48:09):
Can see how you'd shoot this in a TV show,
right where like you have you have somebody putting on
take off the shoe, put it up, and then you
have like, oh, Greg sneak around the corner check see
that the coast is clear to the shoom.

Speaker 2 (48:25):
I think new shoe, new tennis, ball, and new car
are underrated, like synthetic chemical smells that I enjoy, Like
I will I will pair of sneakers that I just
opened the box on and take a nice deep deep
huff and I, okay, should I be banned?

Speaker 1 (48:43):
Yes, for.

Speaker 2 (48:47):
Nobody's worn them yet, I don't know. Shoe sniffer, A
new shoe sniffer, brand new shoes.

Speaker 1 (48:56):
Brand new. Come on now, all right, So that's that's
the myth about Greg Devino that I had.

Speaker 2 (49:03):
I don't know.

Speaker 1 (49:04):
It's not even busting, it's just pointing out I've seen
this going around. This doesn't directly comport with anything else
that's independent, and I have no specific reason to believe
this is all true. So anyway, His sister describes him
as a voracious reader in high school, and I've seen
a few other accounts that match this. He liked military
history and cowboy novels, particularly the work of Louis Lamore,

(49:25):
and his favorite book was probably Robert Heinland Starship Troopers.
Surprising no one. His sister told The Daily Mail that
he reads Starship Troopers once a year, which completely makes sense. Yeah,
oh man, yeah, and I get so did I back
in the day.

Speaker 2 (49:41):
But no, wait, I know the movie is satirical. Is
the book also?

Speaker 1 (49:46):
No, not at all. So Robert Robert Heinland was an
interesting guy, a very influential science fiction writer. One of
his books, The Moon's a Harsh Mistress, is often seen
as providing a lot of the ideological underpending for the
libertarian movement. Right Like, it's a foundational text for American libertarianism. Yeah,

(50:06):
by the way, I said influential. I said influential. That's
that's not a value term. And he's a guy he
started out as a socialist and then he had his
like weird super reactionary right wing like John Bircher period,
and then he became kind of more of like a
normal libertarian sort of deal. But Starship Troopers was It's
it's often seen as a fascist novel, and that's certainly
a very valid reading of it. There's a lot of

(50:28):
it that reads very fasci It's also, if you understand
Heinland's life, there's a lot of it that's like, oh, yeah,
you were a guy who like joined up during World
War Two and served in the military during that period
of time. Of course you have a very positive view
on what the state and the military could do together,
right Like, there's also a bit of that in it
where it's like, well, you just feel there's some like
nostalgia towards that period of time too. In this but

(50:51):
it is. It is a book about no Literally, the
best type of government would be the military runs everything right.
So I can see why Greg Bavino is attached to
this book as a kid, especially without any of these
slight mitigating factors in Island's own life. And Heinland pretty
racist guy. I'm not that interested in mitigating it. I'm
just saying there's a little bit more there than there

(51:13):
would be with a guy like Baveno. So once he
graduates high school in nineteen eighty eight, Baveno went to
Western Carolina University, where he studied natural research conservation before
becoming the first member of his family to graduate college.
He then joined the Border Patrol in nineteen ninety six.
He graduated as part of class three hundred and twenty five.
One of his classmates, Jason Owens, would wind up his

(51:35):
head of Border Patrol. The two have podcasted together per
The Sun Times with Jack you know is the strongest
bond that two people can share. During their their podcast together,
Baveno claims Owens had better grades and graduated at the
top of the class, but that he was better at
pe and marksmanship, and he makes this claim a lot
that he was the best shot in the border patrol. Basically,
I haven't seen independent confirmation of this. Seems like he

(51:56):
might be kind of just jazzing himself up a little bit.
But pretty easy claim to make, Pretty easy for you
to make.

Speaker 2 (52:04):
Rarely do people be like, all right, that's it, let's
go to a range together, right now.

Speaker 1 (52:09):
Yeah, you know, yeah, you got used. Usually like at
least an hour long thing to set up, you know.
He starts working at the famous El Centro sector, which
is on the border of California, not far from what
he where he'd been born, but across the country from
his home. For the Sun Times quote, Bavino told Owens
later that he was impressed when the sector chief showed
up in the field alongside the agents. Bavino said it

(52:31):
showed him the need to get into the fight. It's
not a fight. It's a bunch of hungry people walking
across the desert, not a fight. Not a battle. Seeing
a couple of battles, they don't look.

Speaker 2 (52:43):
Like that enemy bugs out there.

Speaker 1 (52:46):
I mean, there are hungry people stumbling around battlefields, but
you don't look at them and go, ah, the fight.
You look at them and go that guy's starving. To
death because he hasn't eaten in three weeks.

Speaker 2 (52:56):
Non combatants, we'll call them for bat is good to
see though, if they got any weapons.

Speaker 1 (53:02):
They might get into the fight. Yeah, that's right. So
he was promoted steadily over the years and wound up
transferred to Washington, where he got a master's degree in
national security at the National War College, and then New
Orleans where he led a sector. In twenty twenty, he
was sent back to El Centro as a commander. He
also spent some time in tactical units. Per his sister,
who makes this dubious claim, early in his career, Greg

(53:25):
would run into cartels and be the first one in
the door because he had the best marksmanship. There you
see that claim again. A lot of times it was
drug cartel base, which he said is now infiltrated every
major city with the crime and corruption. And again, I
don't think Natalie knows all that much about this stuff.

Speaker 2 (53:39):
Now.

Speaker 1 (53:39):
I think her big brother just told her this and
she's like, that's the way it's got to be.

Speaker 2 (53:43):
By the way, if you talk to the sun or
like sister, or you know, children of any law enforcement
officer who are gullible enough, this is the same first
person in You guys don't know how dangerous it is
out Yeah the door. Their dad is actually secretly the

(54:04):
sickest marksman.

Speaker 1 (54:06):
Yeah, he's the best for the gun.

Speaker 2 (54:07):
Like it's crazy. They thought, ye how yeah, yeah, that's amazing,
but it's great. You you know, it's a certain type
of person who lies about stuff to their sister, right.

Speaker 1 (54:19):
Because I haven't found this claim repeated elsewhere, clearly not
anywhere credible, but we do have documentation of his career
running El Centro, where he oversaw about eleven hundred employees.
Critics say that under Boveno's leadership, BP employees were violent
and cruel towards migrants. The acl you accused one of
his agents of assaulting a Salvadoran migrant in twenty twenty two,
separating her from their ten year old child for nearly

(54:40):
a year after presumably she was beaten. The woman was
charged with assaulting an agent in detention, and then the
charges were dropped. The Suntimes quotes Monica Lungerica, a senior
attorney for the Center for Immigration Law and Policy, as saying,
I think it was a prosecution that sought to silence her,
stop her from speaking out about the assault that she experienced.
We've seen it here at the border for a very
long time, and obviously, you know, Bavino has taken that

(55:01):
show on the road. And I bring this up because
you can see this exact pattern and the rest of
it in his most recent chunk of his career, right, yeah, right, where.

Speaker 2 (55:10):
Someone is being assaulted by the people under his command
and that is treated as an assault somehow.

Speaker 1 (55:19):
Yep. There, Yeah, it's interesting, yep. So for his part,
Bavino has bragged that the consequences El Centro agents force
upon migrants lead to fewer people trying to cross in
the first place. Earlier in his career he seems to
have had more of an interest in portraying himself as
a good guy to members of the public. Not long
after he got transferred back to lead El Centro, a

(55:39):
local activist Edie Harmon eighty one complained about border patrol
vehicles harming wildlife. Bavino fancies himself a conservationist. He's gotten
a degree on the subject, and he once wrote a
thesis about the danger of illegal immigrants post to animals
in the Southwest. So he agreed to go hike with
Harmon and he wrote her a thank you note, insisting
Border Patrol cared about the environment too. For The Sun Times,

(56:00):
she said Movino tried to win her over by offering
to install a guzzler a watering tank for the sheep
and to dedicate it in the name of her dead husband.
She said she declined because no biologists recommended that. Before
Mavino left their hike, He's asked to take a photo
with Harmon each standing on opposite sides of a cactus.
And that's just.

Speaker 3 (56:18):
So weird, man, so weird weird. That's weird guy behavior.

Speaker 1 (56:22):
What do you mean, what do you mean the Biden administration.
I think he's trying. He's got to pretend he cares
about the environment. And I think he also sees it
as because he's got this background. This is a wedge
you can drive between the liberal conservationists and the the
quote unquote illegals, right, is if you're like, well, they're
bad for the environment, you know, and.

Speaker 3 (56:41):
For the environment, Greg fuck off off.

Speaker 1 (56:44):
And and Harmond made the very good point that like
he wanted to install a water tank for that the
reason the sheep are in dangerous because the Border Patrol
keeps putting concertina wire up across their grazing ground. It's
the razor wire that's bad for the sheep. They need water.
Them lying around.

Speaker 2 (57:00):
Now, they're gonna want some water. Robert, Yeah, that is true.
As somebody who has done three thousand podcasts on Hitler,
I'm wasn't Hitler also like very into animals and animal
rights US not at all for those two things to overlap.

Speaker 1 (57:23):
No, And I think, you know, this may just this
may be Vino. Maybe there's another version of Greg Levino
who just went into conservation. But also maybe it's just
it's there's a degree. I think certainly by the time
he's back at Alcentro, there's this understanding that like, well,
maybe this is a way we can drive a wedge
between the people that I want to target and the
majority of the voting population of this state. Right. Baveno

(57:46):
is one of the guys who completely drank the Border
Patrol kool aid. Right. He loves to use the nickname
the Green Machine to refer to the Border Patrol, which
is what they call themselves. I think they think it's
cool good.

Speaker 3 (57:58):
That's like a naked juice. It's like what they that's
like a naked Juice flavor.

Speaker 2 (58:03):
Yeah it is, yeah, after the green juice from Naked
Juice that like some it's really like sometimes fine and
sometimes it's so fucking bad. Had a bad green juice
I have? I had one of those, Yeah, like seven
eleven green juice can go can go off.

Speaker 4 (58:22):
Yeah yeah, speaking of random products, Robert, it's about that time.

Speaker 2 (58:29):
Don't want me to keep talking about how native juice
green machine can sometimes go off.

Speaker 3 (58:35):
I've never seen you drinking naked juice. I sat next
to you for years.

Speaker 2 (58:39):
Yeah, that's because I had a bad experience once.

Speaker 3 (58:41):
You're a round dew guy.

Speaker 2 (58:43):
That's right. Sophie's seen me at my finest.

Speaker 3 (58:50):
That's your green.

Speaker 2 (58:51):
Juice is about That's right. Why what were you talking about?
I once did a money phone in front of Sophie
with a six a mountain dew.

Speaker 3 (59:01):
You at that picture.

Speaker 4 (59:06):
If I do know that that picture is somewhere, I
am gonna have them put that up on the nutfla.

Speaker 2 (59:11):
My finest work.

Speaker 1 (59:15):
All right, everybody, here's ads and we're back. Sou But Vino,
as I said, really drinks the Border Patrol kool aid.

Speaker 2 (59:30):
He will.

Speaker 1 (59:31):
He loves reciting the agency slogan on her first with
little provocation, which at least one Border Patrol whistleblower has
said is often used by men in the Border Patrol
to mean on her first because they like to sexually
assault female agents and women in there. Credit cust today,
good stuff the Border Patrol. Bavino described the Border Patrol

(59:52):
as his life's work in Brandon el Centro, the premier sector.
He's the one who considers it that. It is a
very busy sector. It's a big it's a lot of
people come through it. But he's like, no, this is
the this is the state of the art. You know,
this is this is the best one. You know, We're
the standard from which all the other sectors are set.
I appreciated with One journalist for calmatters dot org said

(01:00:13):
about this, it's similar to the way states have mottos
on license plates that aren't necessarily used by anybody else
to describe that state.

Speaker 2 (01:00:21):
Right, there's some good ones of those.

Speaker 1 (01:00:23):
Yeah, there's some good ones of those. So state, Hey,
now hey, now hey, now I gotta stand but actually
that that's that is an insult to people from Missouri.

Speaker 2 (01:00:34):
Yeah, why do they do that? Why they do that?

Speaker 1 (01:00:36):
It dates back to again like the eighteen hundreds. But
it means that, like people from Missouri were so dumb
that like if if they wouldn't believe you unless you
showed them something. Right, he just tells someone like, oh
there's there's big boats, now you gotta they got to
see the boat because they're dumb.

Speaker 2 (01:00:50):
Right, don't believe in dinosaurs, that sort.

Speaker 1 (01:00:52):
Of thing, right, right?

Speaker 2 (01:00:53):
Yeah, Calling something the premiere anything is a great like
weasel where like that that's got to be one of
the MVPs of like bad movies posters. Yeah, like we're
like the premiere crime.

Speaker 1 (01:01:08):
It's like Miller calling itself the Champagne of beer. Yeah, okay, guys, no, no, no,
it's gonna call it that unless we're joking the poetry
of lying, you know. Yeah. During the Biden years, Bavino
started running into trouble, first for tweeting. He made a
He made a lot of tweets that got him in trouble.
One of them was about a citizen who had been

(01:01:29):
killed by a documented person driving drunk that his superiors
made him delete because it was too political. He claimed
to be a political and did not understand what was
wrong with his post, but he would later prove to
have something of an obsession with the subject. He has
in the Trump years, the most recent year in Change
at least repeatedly brought up the threat of undocumented immigrants
driving drunk as a reason for aggressive immigration rest. Yes, yes, wow,

(01:01:53):
nothing psychological there, Okay, Okay, that's okay, great, Like that's
so fuck. Last year's Operation Midway Blitz in Chicago, which
is where theveno and not where he first gained widespread
national visibility, but it really, really massively increased his visibility

(01:02:14):
was in honor of a twenty year old who'd been
killed in a duy, right, Like this is a thing
for Greg And it's like again, man, like, Okay, you
didn't want to go to therapy, but he's taking your
anger at your dad out on some random people, almost
none of whom did anything wrong, Like almost none of
whom have ever driven drunk.

Speaker 2 (01:02:33):
Right, this is up there with Tucker. I'm sure you
guys have talked about it before on the show. But
Tucker Carlson's we got to get our tucky of hippies
and women and then his mom left his dad for
like a French hippie and like his mom was a hippie.
It's just like, damn man, it's almost like too obvious,

(01:02:54):
Like how do you land where you are without being
like this is like everybody's know what? This is so bad? Yeah?

Speaker 1 (01:03:04):
Yeah, that's often the case, and you know it. It's
the case with old Greg right now. One thing that
made Bevino's El Centro stand out is that he had
five agents whose whole full time job was making videos,
which is interesting and it shows again he understands he's
at least someone who sees how good a shot Trump
has it coming back in the Biden years and is like,

(01:03:26):
I know what to do to get on this fucker's radar.
Is I need to start making some shit that goes viral.
I got to piss off some libs. Right. Here's how
cal Matters describes a representative example. Two agents sitting their
vehicle at night listening to a news broadcast about an
undocumented migrant charged with the rape and murder of a
sixty four year old woman in Santa Maria. The news
clips from a real CBS report from ten years ago.

(01:03:47):
An agent shakes his head and discussed and turns off
the radio, saying, man, that's the second one in less
than a week, things are getting out of hand.

Speaker 2 (01:03:53):
Oh wow.

Speaker 1 (01:03:53):
And if you're trying to make the case that, like, wow,
every week, multiple people are getting raped by immigrants, and
it's like, yeah, your one example was from a news
clip from ten years ago.

Speaker 2 (01:04:04):
Their most powerful weapon maybe is selection bias, where they
will find a will find and make it seem like
it is constantly happening right next toward you. Yeh, yep.

Speaker 1 (01:04:15):
Now at that moment, dispatch comes over the radio and
it tells the agents there's a nearby vehicle loaded with migrants.
The agents catch three of them in, but one gets
away and sneaks into any Town, USA, where he murders
an American citizen, taking the man's cell phone and running off,
and the screen goes dark, and the message every apprehension matters.
Do you know who got away?

Speaker 2 (01:04:35):
Again?

Speaker 1 (01:04:37):
So much plot, it's so much plot for such a
shitty ad.

Speaker 2 (01:04:42):
Like thirty minutes of a Chuck Norris movie.

Speaker 1 (01:04:45):
Yeah, yeah, that's the opening of a Check Norris movie.
Only about one percent of the people the border patrol
encounters have a criminal conviction, compared to eight percent of
American citizens. But there's a little point in bringing reality
into this. They don't care, right.

Speaker 2 (01:04:59):
They just to treat these people like complete shit, right,
and so it's like a chance. Yeah, it's bully tactics
where you just find the person who's the least protected
and then.

Speaker 1 (01:05:09):
Yep, go after him.

Speaker 2 (01:05:11):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:05:12):
So Bavino was called to testify before Congress in twenty
twenty three. He discussed how crossings in his sector had
increased significantly and basically made the border hot case that
the Biden administration was failing to protect the border. Bavino's
own history came up, including what turned out to be
repeated issues with social media. One relevant quote was, I
think there was one post with two Yameni's terrorists. I

(01:05:32):
was ordered to take that down. Ravino was relieved of
command after his testimony, which the Republican House members who
convened the hearing saw his retribution, and it probably was
right like retribution.

Speaker 2 (01:05:44):
For him, say, being a dick this stuff and being.

Speaker 1 (01:05:48):
Me at a fucked up asshole. But I guess that counts,
and it's also those retribution. I was fired as retribution
for being bad, as he's bad at his job in
this right because he's his old claim is that like
you got to be brutal to reduce crossings, and he
admitted that crossings were at at all time high and
he's in charge. I don't know, man, maybe you were

(01:06:09):
just saying you sucked at your job. But he didn't
suffer any consequences for his actions. Those House members complained
about his demotion, and he was reinstated at El Centro.
And you know what happened not long after Donald Trump
won re election. On January seventh, twenty twenty five, the
day after Congress certified as victory, Bavino led sixty five
agents in operation returned to cinder per calmatters dot org.

(01:06:30):
Most of the official information about the raid came from
Vino's Facebook comments. He posted blurred photos of three Latino
men alongside a photo of thirty three pounds of marijuana
in the trunk of a car. He wrote, here, in
the premier sector, we go the extra mile or five
hundred of them to protect our nation and communities from
bad people and bad things. So congratulations, Greg, you protected
California from pot Like great man, keeping that welled out

(01:06:55):
of a store smelled it here ever since that thirty
three pounds really put a dint in the state. Wow,
seventy eight people were arrested. The Border Patrol told local
business owners that the raids were targeting criminal activity, but
this was obviously untrue, and a cal Matters investigation partnered
with Evident in Bellingcat, showed that the Border Patrol had

(01:07:16):
no prior knowledge of criminal history of any kind. For
seventy seven of seventy eight arrestees, this was very likely illegal.
In the acl you has sued on behalf of the
farm workers agents are accused of failing to id themselves
or percent warrants, and of using brutal force. In one case,
they slashed the tires of a US citizen and then
arrested them for seemingly no reason. I say, very like,
this was very illegal. You know, this is all very illas.

Speaker 2 (01:07:39):
Slashed the tires.

Speaker 1 (01:07:40):
They loved doing that, they loved doing it.

Speaker 2 (01:07:44):
What so on what grounds were they arresting them if
it wasn't for them having like warrants or anything.

Speaker 1 (01:07:50):
Here legally here, illegally here, illegally.

Speaker 2 (01:07:54):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:07:54):
I mean that's their argument, is that like they were doing,
that's the illegal thing they were doing.

Speaker 2 (01:07:57):
You know.

Speaker 1 (01:07:59):
Son the papers, right, Yeah, that's who they all are. Minjucho,
a senior lawyer for the ACLU called this operation a
pilot project for the ones that Bavino would leader spearhead
around the country. He earned the attention of the Trumpet
administration for his combative presence on social media and willingness
to use federal forces to brutalize people. On June of

(01:08:20):
twenty twenty five, he was named tactical commander of a
mass rate in Los Angeles, which sparked protests across the city.
And you're all pretty familiar with what happened next. We're
not going to go into crazy detail about everything Bavino
did in the last year because you all lived through it, right,
we don't need to do a ton of that. His
agents helped ICE agents as they brutally detained random Angelino's.
They blew up indoors to houses, They gas people in

(01:08:41):
the street. Bavino had his video to Division craft ads
depicting his men's violence to regular working people as action
movie scenes. He led his agents in an armed patrol
outside of a political rally held by Gavin Newsom, which
some might suggest could be seen as actual treason. Bavino
claimed not to have known that Newsom was in the building.
Continue his habit of giving answers to questions that present
only the The only other answer is like, well, so

(01:09:03):
the end, you're incompetent, right if you didn't know he
was in the build, like what the fuck was this about?

Speaker 2 (01:09:07):
Dipshit? We just like saw a crowd and we just
yeah kind of we were like, oh shit that patrol does.
Was that also when they did the military rage of
uh MacArthur Park.

Speaker 1 (01:09:20):
And yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, which we should be
talking and he was like, we're giving this back to
Maul and Paul America. And it's like, man, the people
who live there are the ones that you're fucking with.
They're the ones who use the park dipshit. But again
he knows this. I'm not going to give a blow
by blow of every violent act as men perpetrated, but
I should read this quote from an article by Gabrielle

(01:09:41):
Cannon and The Guardian. Two undocumented people have died trying
to flee Babino's agents. A Mexican farmworker fell from a greenhouse,
and a Guatemalan day laborer was hit by a vehicle
following a rate at home depot. In another episode, the
paper reported they detained a disabled fifteen year old high
school student in a case of mistaken identity, after drawing
their guns and handcuffing him, leaving unfired bullet. It's on
the ground, so cool people just like well trained, good

(01:10:04):
at their jobs. Raveno's obviously sent to Chicago after LA,
where he enacts similar violence. On one occasion, he throws
tear gas on camera against a crowd of peaceful protesters.
He and his agency had just been enjoined against using
gas without justification, so Bavino claimed that he'd been hit
in the head with a rock and had no choice.
Bavino later admitted that he'd lied to the US District

(01:10:24):
Judge Sarah Ellis about this.

Speaker 2 (01:10:27):
That seems fireable. Robert should spirable doing violent, a violent thing,
and they hit me in the head with a.

Speaker 1 (01:10:41):
To do I'm a huge piece of shit, sorry, guys.

Speaker 2 (01:10:46):
Uh.

Speaker 1 (01:10:46):
In October of twenty twenty five, he had been declared
Commander at Large of the Border Patrol, which is not
a real job but basically removed him from the normal
Border Patrol hierarchy without giving him formal control over the
whole group. In other words, it's the job you give
a guy who you want, you want out there in public,
you want to let him do stuff for a while,
because you know eventually you pissed people off too much
and you want to be able to make him your

(01:11:06):
sacrificial lamb. Right, it's make him a job that'll put
him out in front of everybody, because this dipshit is
not going to be able to help himself. He was
the face man for Trump's brutal mass deportations, and his
main job, again, I think, was to provide a focus
for public outrage walking around in his Nazi coat looking
like Doogie Howser at the end of Starship Troopers. Shit
like this serves as a useful distraction, but Vino has

(01:11:27):
gotten to defend his choice of outerwear several times. In
interviews per globalsecurity dot org, he explained that he purchased
it around nineteen ninety nine as a young Border patrol
agent and had worn it for more than twenty five
years in cold weather or formal settings without prior controversy.
He pointed to a twenty twenty two Department of Homeland
Security ceremony under the Biden administration where he wore it
and received only compliments. Survivors argue that the design draws

(01:11:48):
from long standing US military traditions such as the m
nineteen thirty nine style overcoats or bridge coats used in
law enforcement and formal uniforms rather than exclusively fascist imagery.
But we know why you're doing it, Greg, and we
know why you like it. You like it because it
makes you look like Doogie Howser at the end of
Starship Troopers.

Speaker 2 (01:12:06):
And also to be like it's not fascist, it's from
the US military. He's like, well, okay, let's take a
look at the US military history. Yeah, there was something
we were talking on Zecho about how the like they're
thinking about bringing ice to the Winter Olympics, and there

(01:12:27):
there's just a quote from somebody in Italy talking about
their prison camps over there, like they're deporting Albanians and
taking them to like a black site. And they were like,
it's like Italian Guantanamo. And I was like, oh, we
use Nazis as like our touchstone. The other countries use
US as they're They're like, yeah, it's it's almost like

(01:12:50):
we're America as they're like fascism touchstone.

Speaker 3 (01:12:55):
M yes, yes.

Speaker 1 (01:12:58):
So anyway, I'm not sure how much there is to say.
I mean, there's a lot more, but you've all lived
through it. Right, you know, we know where he is
right now. After two murders in Minneapolis, he was picked
to be the face of the Trump administration's miscalculation. He
was removed from his fake job and sent back to
El Centro. I'm sure this is not the end of
us hearing about Gregory Bavino. They're kind of keeping him

(01:13:18):
in the cooler, right.

Speaker 2 (01:13:20):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:13:20):
He had made a couple of claims previous, even previous
to Minneapolis, about wanting to retire in the next two years,
which I think was part of why the Trump administration
this may have even been an open like, Look, we're
gonna give you a special, fancy job. You're gonna be
on camera. You're gonna get to be the face of
the border patrol doing all this fascist bullshit you've always
wanted to do. And then when stuff gets too hot

(01:13:41):
for us, we're gonna cut bait, right, and then you'll
just retire with full benefits. Doesn't that sound good to
you? You can get a nice job on Fox News or something,
and you're retired.

Speaker 2 (01:13:50):
You get to wear that jacket that you keep asking
us to wear to every meeting. You get to wear
that on the news.

Speaker 1 (01:13:56):
You can wear that every day, buddy, Greg, anytime you
want to wear you dumbedge, please put it on. Put
it on a la fuck it like anyway. That's that's
my read of the Greg Bavino story. We will maybe
do an update on the fucker if more becomes of him,
but it may also just be a thing. We'll wait
around a little while in elcenttro you know, probably get

(01:14:18):
get his rocks off a few times, hurting people down there,
and then retire, you know, like he'd plan.

Speaker 2 (01:14:23):
To, right. Did you see the video of the woman
who was just like kind of dragging him outside of
a seven eleven and his response was just he's like, oh,
that's real nice. Oh you're being real nice. It was
just like, I don't I don't know, man, that's I
don't think your place is to tell people that they're

(01:14:43):
being not nice. At this stage.

Speaker 4 (01:14:47):
He's a weird little guy that got too much power,
and I hope to never see him again, but I think, unfortunately,
the way this world's been working, we probably will.

Speaker 2 (01:14:58):
Yep. Yeah, there a lot of weird little guys. I
feel like someone should make a show about that.

Speaker 1 (01:15:03):
Yeah, we should probably have a show about weird little
guys on our podcast network.

Speaker 3 (01:15:07):
Oh great news. I have a great news.

Speaker 4 (01:15:12):
Molly Conger has a show called Little Guys.

Speaker 1 (01:15:16):
They figured out how to launch a second podcast.

Speaker 3 (01:15:19):
Wow, Jack, is there anything you like to plug here
at the end?

Speaker 2 (01:15:23):
Oh my god, Sophie, thank you so much. First of all,
such a pleasure to be with you, guys, Robert uh
The my first intern at Cracked, our first intern discovered
by the great Daniel O'Brien, and so so fun to
have been working with you on the podcast base all

(01:15:43):
these years. And Sophie Lichterman, one of the greats to
ever do it. So thank you guys so much. I
always enjoy being back Daily Zeitgeist is a show that
I do twice a day with Wonderful day suffering cou
Miles Gray. And we just published our two thousandth episodes.

Speaker 4 (01:16:07):
Oh congratulations, dude, two thousandth main episode Crazy, the second.

Speaker 2 (01:16:11):
We didn't even count the second one, but lord, we
did it. We made it to two thousand. What it
is We're not sure, but we did it.

Speaker 1 (01:16:20):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (01:16:21):
And then, like I mentioned, we have a new series
that I think fans of the Cracked podcat the old
Crack podcast will like, called the iconograph where each Monday,
me and a researcher do a deep dive into a
different icon. What's an icon, you ask? By our definition?

(01:16:42):
So our first episode was about Einstein and our second
was about Erkle. So it's just any of these like
big pop culture wore cruxes that drive a lot of
meaning in the zeitgeist, and it lets us do a
show that isn't about the news, which is so nice.

Speaker 4 (01:16:59):
Fun Sophie lore for you. My first ever crush was
Einstein's like great grandson.

Speaker 2 (01:17:06):
Are you serious? Damn?

Speaker 1 (01:17:09):
Yeah, for sure.

Speaker 2 (01:17:09):
I should have had you on to this talk about that.

Speaker 4 (01:17:12):
If you're listening to this, Yes, I loved you. It
was first grade. I loved you.

Speaker 2 (01:17:18):
Yes, Hi. You don't think he knew?

Speaker 4 (01:17:21):
Oh no, he I was not cool, you know me.
I can't hide any anything. I've never changed. I've always
been this way, Like.

Speaker 3 (01:17:30):
He for sure knew, He for sure knew.

Speaker 4 (01:17:32):
And the way I know he knew is I got
teased about it by this other guy, so I kicked
him in the shin and then I got in trouble, so.

Speaker 3 (01:17:37):
He knew he knew. I've been this way my entire life.

Speaker 2 (01:17:41):
And I picture you kicking him in the shin and
his shin bone snapping backwards like Steven Segal.

Speaker 3 (01:17:46):
Yeah, yeah, no, he definitely knew but h and.

Speaker 2 (01:17:51):
His name was Greg Einstein, Gretin Simon Einstein.

Speaker 4 (01:17:55):
Shout out if you're listening to If you're listening to this,
I loved you.

Speaker 2 (01:17:59):
I was in grade. But yeah, anyways, that's a fun one.
Those come out every Monday morning. We're calling the iconograph.
We just did Marilyn Monroe, which is a really fun episode.
Dolly Parton, Tony Hawk's coming up and Robert would love
to have you on one. So sure. We like to
reach out to the guests and be like, Okay, here's

(01:18:21):
our list. Who do you like or pitch us the
icon that you want to go over. So maybe a
chance for you guys to talk about people you don't
who aren't the.

Speaker 1 (01:18:30):
Worst, Sure, people who aren't the worst? Yes, icons, icons, Yes,
like the iconic Jack O'Brien, who thank you for being
on our show.

Speaker 2 (01:18:40):
It's so wonderful being here. Also Jack underscore O'Brien on Twitter.

Speaker 4 (01:18:43):
And yeah, one last plug against the State by James Stout,
our colleague. His book is available now, please buy it.
It's fantastic. Love James, That'll do it right, Robert.

Speaker 1 (01:18:57):
Yep, That'll do it Holy shit?

Speaker 3 (01:19:00):
By bye.

Speaker 4 (01:19:04):
Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website Coolzonemedia
dot com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
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but Behind the Bastards are now streaming on Netflix, dropping
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don't miss an episode. For clips in our older episode catalog,

(01:19:26):
continue to subscribe to our YouTube channel YouTube dot com
slash at Behind the Bastards. We love about forty percent
of you, statistically speaking,