060: Department of War Crimes feat. Asawin Suebsaeng

Jared and Mike are joined by Asawin Suebsaeng, a senior political correspondent for Zeteo, to discuss Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, the pro-Trump toadies who replaced news reporters at the Pentagon, and the Trump Administration's murder rampage of boaters in the Caribbean who they claim are trafficking narcotics. At the end, the hosts share their favorite music from 2025.

Links for Swin:

• Read his reporting in Zeteo and Rolling Stone

• Follow him on X (@swin24) and Bluesky (@swin24.bsky.social)

Pre-orders for our limited run of "Femdom" parody shirts now open: CLICK HERE TO ORDER

Use the code "STRANGE20" for a discount when you preorder Mike's book at this link: "Strange People on the Hill: How Extremism Tore Apart a Small American Town"

Transition Music: "Godlike" by Twen

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Support the show and get access to weekly bonus episodes on our Patreon page: https://patreon.com/PostingThroughIt

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
Well, today is another Liberation Day, the liberation
of America's warriors in name, in deed, and in authorities.
You kill people and break thingsfor a living.
You are not politically correct and don't necessarily belong
always in polite society. President Trump has your back,

(00:22):
and so do. I.

(00:56):
A few things off the top. This has been such a huge year
for the show and I mean we have worked hard.
Mike and I are just like what episode is this?
Which one are we doing? You know, between the main feed
in the premium those, who the hell is biographies?
Those take a ton of work. It's been huge, but so has the

(01:18):
response. Just want to say thanks to
everyone who's signed up for thePatreon and even those who
don't. Just thanks for being here.
Thanks for showing up every week.
It's been awesome. But.
As we. Look to the year ahead.
We have posted on our Patreon page a link to a survey form.

(01:38):
It's a little cheesy, but but we're interested, you know, what
have we been doing? Well, what could we do that you
would like? Who are some guests?
You'd love to hear some things you'd like us to cover.
So go to our Patreon page, whether you're signed up or not,
you can find the link and let usknow how we're doing.
The next piece of housekeeping before we bring in Swin and talk

(02:02):
about the Pentagon is the long rumoured the femdom shirts.
The parody T-shirts are happening.
Just a reminder this is a came from a joke I made while looking
at Erica Kirk's leather pants. Jared Basically she was wearing
the Charlie Kirk Freedom shirt and the leather pants and I said

(02:23):
same shirt but it says femdom. You'll be able to get your own
Femdom shirt. The way we're doing this is it's
going to be a limited front and you've got two weeks from today
until December 22nd to put in your pre-order for these shirts.
They are going to be US manufactured, printed with union

(02:44):
labor and all of the proceeds. Every dollar that we make from
these T-shirts, we're going to donate to a charity that helps
women experiencing homelessness.I just like the idea of somebody
going to like the Atlanta Bravesgame in in the femdom shirt and
having somebody look at it and see it and be like, Oh yeah,

(03:06):
Charlie Kirk, great. I like that.
Then I'm looking to be like waita second.
Because there is a small chance The Turning Point USA goes
ballistic on us for doing these shirts, we're going to hold back
the name of the exact organization that's receiving
these funds. We don't want them caught in the
crossfire, especially around theholidays, but when all is said

(03:27):
and done, we'll report back on exactly how much money was
raised and where it went. Of course, if you're a lady and
you're wearing it on your Tinderdate or whatever, you're making
a very profound statement. I think it's a good way.
It's a good way to weed yourselfout from particular like TPSA
supporters that might be, you know, in your replies.

(03:47):
We need to figure out a way to get one to Erica Kirk.
Like if she wears it, will people notice?
I think they will, Jared. All right, that's all the
housekeeping. Let's get right into it.
Joining the podcast now we have Swin Soopsang, who is a senior

(04:10):
political correspondent at Zeteo.
You may have read his work in Rolling Stone and The Daily
Beast before that. And if you ever listened to the
podcast Fever Dreams, you'll recognize his voice.
He's a Co host of that show withWill Summer and Kelly Weil.
So in What's up, Dude? I'm popping a tear on my left
eyelid right now because you mentioned fever dreams.

(04:32):
RIP. I'll I'll never.
Forgive you. He's the real deal journalist, I
will say. Far too kind.
Way more than I deserve. If if you have a media ethics
and methods class to teach your podcast audience at some point I
could dish to them on why being unavowed out and open leftist
snarling vulgar leftist things on the Internet can actually

(04:55):
help you get a lot of confidential sources in Trump
world and in elite Republican circles.
But again, that is a different story for a.
Different. I'm interested in that story.
Today we're having you on to talk about the ten kinds of
fucked up that has been going onat the Pentagon over the last
couple of months. Because, man, it sure is
something. So since January, the Pentagon's

(05:17):
been under the control of Pete Hagseth.
He's a military veteran, but he's better known as a Fox News
on Air personality. Jared and one thing he threw an
axe and it like hit like one of the one of the people to the
side in like some bit on fox andfriends.
I just want to he almost. Killed the guy on TV?
Yeah, almost. Killed the guy with an axe, so.

(05:38):
Yeah, we like the exaggerating alittle, but not by that far.
Like it, if you watch a video ofit, you're like, this guy's now
the Secretary of Defense, excuseme, secretary of War.
And it looks bad. And we're not even getting into
like the top 1000 worst things he's done or said in his career.
Well, he almost didn't get in atthe Pentagon.
Due to allegations of sexual misconduct, financial

(06:01):
mismanagement, and, among other things, excessive drinking.
JD Vance had to go in and break a 5050 tie vote in the Senate to
confirm him. He's clearly in way over his
head. Since getting in, he's been
purging senior military leaders who, you know, one might think
could help him run this Pentagon.
And he's doing that for reasons that sort of remain unclear.

(06:25):
There's a lot of speculation. On September 5th, they renamed
the Department of Defense to theDepartment of War.
Why? Because it's based in Epic or
something like that. That name change could cost up
to $2 billion in sacred taxpayermoney, for what it's worth.
Worth it. Also important to Pete Hegseth
for some reason is making sure that there are military bases

(06:48):
named for Confederate generals. Pete Hegseth was in the news
earlier this year for hauling a bunch of top military generals
out to a meeting in Virginia to lecture them about culture war
bullshit and tell them to resignif they didn't like.
Issuing new policies that will overhaul the IGEO and MEO
processes. I call it the no more walking on

(07:10):
egg shells policy. We are liberating commanders and
NCO's. We are liberating you.
We are overhauling an Inspector General process, the IG, that
has been weaponized, putting complainers, ideologues and poor
performers in the driver's seat.There's a lot more.
We don't have time to go over everything, but the screws are

(07:35):
starting to tighten on Hexa as of late and there's even been
some debate over whether war crimes have occurred.
We'll talk about that in a minute.
But first, Swin, I want us to talk about the new press corps
at the Pentagon. What did they do?
Earlier this year, they decided to institute a policy of

(07:57):
basically, I I may be trivializing this a tiny bit,
but it was essentially, you cannot report things that Sean
Parnell, Pete Hegseth, and the rest of the cabal at Donald
Trump's Pentagon don't want you to report, including if it's
classified information or top secret information.
You can't do that. This is a reporting process

(08:18):
where you guys are just going tobasically reprint our print
press releases. I'm only lightly paraphrasing
what what the direct was like, as you can probably guess, like
any journalist who is sitting inthat Pentagon press pool for all
these years worth even like a inches worth of their weight in
salt said no, fuck off. I'm not signing this agreement.

(08:40):
That is not what we're going to do to so we can be blessed with
being able to sit in your precious air conditioned room
and ask some Pentagon officials who step up to the mic
questions. So even new sources that your
audience may suspect might sign on to a Trump propaganda
document like that. Several of them or at least some

(09:02):
of them declined to do so. Like I think the Fox News of the
World were like, we need to maintain a patina of
respectability on this front. I'm sorry, I'm sorry.
We can't sign that. So in response to this and other
things, the Secretary of War Crimes or whatever the fuck his
title is now Pete Hagseth and his merry band of wannabe war
criminals there decided to say, OK, you're not signing the

(09:25):
thing. Get lost.
So then they flooded the Pentagon press pool with just a
a a parade of, of, of just like dorks and loons.
Yeah, I was looking over some ofthe reporting that's been out of
who has been confirmed or who has said they've received
credentials to replace legacy news outlets and they include

(09:47):
the My Pillow guy. Wait, the My Pillow guy for his
company? He has like a mini Armada of
quote, UN quote reporters now. Where there's Lindell TVI think
it's. Yes.
There we go. Yeah, a real TV station, Yes.
Your Pillow News is giving giving you scoops about the
military, apparently. Also on a name I found Raheem

(10:09):
Kasam, close associate of BannonWorld.
Laura Loomer. Live site News which is an anti
abortion blog. RedState a Salem Media property.
I should say Loomer makes RaheemKasam look like Walter Cronkite.
Almost, yes, yes, or, or or at least like Tom Brokaw or

(10:31):
something like that. But yeah, Laura Loomer, I'm sure
your audience knows is close to Donald Trump.
They're actually pals like thesesenior administration officials
of the president take her policyadvice from time to time.
She always felt like she was cheated to have a job in Trump's
West Wing, at least for this part of his second term.
Like, I don't none of us are looking at Laura Luma's cell
phone right now. But if you did, you would see

(10:51):
text messages from Donald Trump back right around the time of
the 2024 presidential election saying giving her pseudo job
offers if he got a second term. And she is a self declared proud
bigot when it comes to Muslims, Islam and other things.
So that kind of gives you the gist of like the caliber of

(11:12):
journalist that he's being proliferated there.
Yeah, you've got The Gateway Pundit.
You've got the Post Millennial Slash Human Events, Jack
Pasovic, Libya, Minsat Crew Front Lines, which is the media
arm of Turning Point USA and TimPoole for some reason.
Tim has been melting down because people don't think he's

(11:33):
a real journalist over this. And they and, and you know what?
It is this cabal, the media industry, the cultists who
demand. So they had their first big
showing in the Pentagon last week, and man, it was something,
as you just mentioned, Swin, Matt Gaetz showed up for one

(11:53):
American News. So supposed to be the sitting US
Attorney General right now, but we, we can just, oh, whatever,
nothing happened. He just isn't.
James O'Keefe, his outlet was there.
Laura Loomer showed up. Jim Hoft was there from The
Gateway Pundit. RC Maxwell, who's a real fucking

(12:14):
character. Very minor figure, but a Cam
Higbee, some dipshit from Infowars, And predictably, all
they did was glaze the Pentagon.We had some scorching scoops,
like Santa Claus has showed up at the Pentagon.
People, you know, trying to postlooking hard questions along the
lines of like, is the Pentagon going to sue the Washington

(12:38):
Post? My question is, does is does the
Department of War plan on pursuing any sort of legal
action against the Washington Post and what consequences will
there be for lying to the American people?
Because, of course, the implication there was that Pete
Hegseth. And Admiral Bradley are war
criminals and that that was the implication.

(12:58):
And that's what a lot of people on social media were saying
after the fact. So could you speak to that?
Yeah, it it is frankly disgusting that the Washington.
Swid I I just want to get your take on this as somebody who has
covered the first Trump administration.
You even wrote a book about it. Co wrote a book about it.
What what's your take on this? I mean, the first administration
was certainly hostile to the press, but this certainly seems

(13:20):
like an escalation. Right.
They're escalating in all kinds of ways, including ways that are
much darker and more destructive.
And behind the scenes in this, we can get in to that layer
before all of this cause cosmetic WWE inspired like just
trying to fuck with us and others publicly just for their
own amusement. To answer your question, I used

(13:41):
to be based in Washington, DC. I'm now based in the great
Cincinnati metropolitan area here in the great state of Ohio.
But when I was based in Washington, DC, I was a White
House reporter for The Daily Beast.
And during the first four years of President Trump, I would go
to the White House from time to time, including for mandatory

(14:03):
pool duty for the White House press pool.
So I'd be, you know, I'd be in that briefing room and I quite
frankly immediately found that there was an inverse
relationship between the amount of time I physically spent at
the White House versus the quality of my reporting on any
on that given day. Can you tell us a little more
about that? There are.

(14:26):
A lot of people, some of them have to do it whether they want
to or not because they work in the business of show TV where
you kind of have to have a camera and you have to have a
body there dispatching from the White House or other important
government Oregon. You have to be there physically
delivering your the news to the audience.
But for me personally, the kind of stuff that I do, I always

(14:49):
found that my reporting, my original reporting, whatever
investigations or scoops or whatever that I was working on
on that day. You might guess that barely any
of that comes from sitting in the White House briefing room.
Like, no, you're, you're trying to get documents or in depth
granular accounts from sources with direct knowledge privately.

(15:11):
You know, you're not going to bedoing it while trying to knock
on somebody's door on their office in the White House in The
West Wing, or while you're peppering a White House or
administration official who's upat the lectern who's just giving
you like canned talking points. Like the less time as a White
House reporter I spent physically at the White House,
like meeting people off site or somewhere else or making a

(15:34):
billion phone calls a day, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.
That is where I did the work that I was proudest of what I
was covering the first Trump administration.
And I can say the same about my my cruise coverage of Term 2.
Now my boring take and I'm sure so many others have had this for
the Pentagon press pool during the Hagseth era.

(15:57):
Getting purged and run out of town is not all of my brain, but
a good chunk about brain thoughtto myself, good.
All of you go out there, get scoops.
Like fuck, fucking do your job and don't just sit in that air
conditioned room waiting for Sean Parnell or whoever to come
out and lie to you and just say whatever they want to say and

(16:18):
what that they they typed on a note card like five hours ago.
Who gives a shit? If the administration wants to
continue to beef up their rabid propaganda apparatus and just
flood the zone with all these freaks and sickos, who are they
are going to pretend on the actual media?
I don't necessarily like that, but at some point, like they're
going to do what they want to do.

(16:40):
Like the what the the White House during Trump's first year
back in power did sort of a power grab with the White House
Correspondents Association with regards to, I think selections
the White House print pool or press pool, the daily rotation
or whatever the fuck. And at some point they're just
going to do for these four yearsof Trump 2 point O what they

(17:01):
want to do. And a lot of reporters,
including in legacy media and their bosses, are going to have
to decide, do we try to jockey and try to play the rules as we
wanted them to be and as they have been for decades or
whatever? Or are we going to adjust to
this new reality of what they'regoing to give us?

(17:22):
The middle finger, what's good for the goose is good for the
gander. Does that make sense?
Yeah, yeah. I mean, do you think this could
actually work right? Because the rules they asked
them to agree to are are are basically you're not allowed to
report information that hasn't been approved for release.
You're not allowed to solicit military for officials for

(17:42):
information. Basically, you're not allowed
to. Be a report.
You're not allowed to be able to.
Yeah, your your job is to regurgitate press releases and
stuff, right? But all of these outlets, with
the exception of One American News, which doesn't necessarily
have a reputation for getting hard hitting journalism, all
left, right. And I, I don't think they, I, I

(18:05):
don't think they can, they can'tstop them from reporting, right?
No, no, of course, I, I think, and feel free to correct me if
I'm wrong because I'm not a member of the Pentagon press
pool in the DC area. But I think what you're talking
about is they had to sign something for as a condition to
stay in that air conditioned room.

(18:27):
And people, including, if I recall correctly, fucking
Newsmax, the pro Trump, pro Republican Party Newsmax were
like, yeah, we're not going to sign this thing.
Like we have a responsibility asflimsy as that responsibility.
Maybe with the our dear friends over at Newsmax, they either
thought they had a responsibility to the truth and

(18:48):
reporting and the privileges andrights I should say that the
First Amendment offers us, or they thought to themselves, OK,
well we we can't look completelystupid.
Even if some of these organizations like Fox News or
Newsmax or whoever are a validlypro Trump or pro GOP, like they

(19:08):
they most of them do require like at least a sliver of
plausible deniability. I, I think it's important to
isolate that and just let it sitfor a second that this
administration is forcing Newsmax to soul search about
what it's, it can ethically do Newsmax.

(19:31):
I mean, that's just that that's kind of wild considering it is
it it, it does have the reputation of being, you know,
just a junk news network for reactionaries.
Yeah, it's gotten to a point where they've just pumped the
Pentagon press pool with a bloodlusting pro Trump
propagandist who are there to tell the Pentagon how awesome

(19:52):
Pete Hegseth Botox makes his cheeks look.
Your listeners can Google that Pete Hegseth Botox.
That is not something I'm just saying facetiously.
And how awesome the policy of the murder spree that the
administration has going on in the Caribbean Sea right now is.
It's it's it's very childish. I think it is abundantly silly.

(20:16):
But at the end of the day, whileit is emblematic of the
authoritarian blitz that this gang running the federal
government is on right now, at the end of the day, it's lower
on my chart of things that I'm getting apoplectic about.
Because this at least offers theWashington Post of the New York

(20:36):
Times, of the Associated Pressesof the World or whoever to say,
OK, the guys who we had based there depend on, let's get them
on, you know, some real fucking work right now.
And then, you know, the conversation will shift when all
those get people get charged under the Espionage Act.
But that's hopefully a differentconversation for a different
day. I mentioned war crimes earlier,

(20:57):
chatter about war crimes, that it seems to be a term on the
tips of tongues in Washington lately, centering on Pete
Hagseth's decision to extrajudiciously kill people in
boats in the Caribbean that he says are narcotics traffickers.
It is horrifying, and people in Washington seem to be getting

(21:22):
pretty freaked out that he just keeps doing it and keeps doing
it. It's a little bit out of our
depth. So I'm glad that you're with us
today to to fill us in. But for people who haven't been
following it really closely, youknow, the Pentagon bombing these
bows, can you catch us up on sort of how this started and how

(21:44):
things have escalated over the last couple months?
When you start trying to unpack it, including the legal
intricacies of the supposed justifications that lawyers in
the administration have gone about to, to say that this is OK
and quote, UN quote, legal over recent months, your brain starts
to bleed a little bit out of your ears because it is so

(22:05):
Orwellian, so dystopian, what they've been trying to do,
including with this bombing campaign in the sea.
Now they will argue this is about narco terrorism, including
narco terrorists who are coming out of and in league with the
government in Caracas, in Venezuela.

(22:26):
That's their stated justification.
And that's what I guess they have in still classified legal
paperwork in the bowels of the Justice Department, the
Pentagon, the White House. But what's important for your
audience to realize is, and I'm sure this will not stun them, is
that that is the administration just openly lying and spinning
to you. They have been doing these

(22:48):
bombings specifically as part oftheir broader campaign by the
Donald Trump's, the Stephen Miller's, and the Marco Rubio's
of the world to try to destabilize the Maduro regime in
Venezuela so that they can do a regime change operation or even
a potential war on Venezuelan soil.

(23:10):
Donald Trump has been talking for months about potentially
moving the bombing campaign ontoactual Venezuelan soil.
Right now, are you? Sure, because I was told, I was
told that Trump was the peace president.
That's what I was told by all the the kind of all right
activists in 2016, and then it was reiterated again when he was

(23:33):
running in in 2024. Well, the way I like to think of
that, including when people try to bring up Trump's rhetoric for
the past decade that he wants toend these endless wars and that
he's supposedly anti neo con is the difference between someone
like Donald Trump and Dick Cheney or George W Bush.
Post 911 is that, and I am cribbing this some from multiple

(24:00):
Republican sources I've spoken to over the years, including
ones working on Team Trump, someof whom, whether you like them
or not, aren't thrilled about some of this shit.
I would refer to him as a lazy and incompetent war monger when
you're trying to think of DonaldTrump's policies when some

(24:22):
people try to paint him as anti war or at least not as warlike
as your average neo con circa 2000.
Two my response is he's a war monger just like the other war
mongers are except he is lazy and incompetent.
So so often when he does things like bombing Iran, something
Dick Cheney and George Bush didn't do, he tries to limit it

(24:45):
to A1 and done thing tried to declare a victory and to be like
OK let's make peace and hug now because he doesn't have the
commitment to follow through with it.
I mean it's not a saving grace. I'm insulting him right now, but
would you rather have the non lazy warmonger or lazy
warmonger? I mean, whatever, but for the
sake of just talking about his worldview here, lazy warmonger.

(25:09):
And again, I'm stealing that quote and reappropriating it,
but I think that's a perfect wayto describe what he's doing,
including with regards to Venezuela right now.
So these boats in the Caribbean are being targeted with these
military strikes. Can you tell us more about what
these strikes actually look like'cause there's been a few of

(25:33):
them, right? Do you know how many there have
been? There have been dozens and
dozens of deaths. There have been.
Really. Dozens of.
Yes, there had been a lot of deaths.
This is a serial killing spree. It's essentially, and I would
not be the first to point out that when Donald Trump, JD Vance
or any of their propagandists goout there to tell the American

(25:54):
people we are killing the narco terrorists, Joe Biden didn't.
And you're a squash or you're a Lib or you're a pussy if you're
not on board with our bombing spree.
They do not know who are on these boats.
They claim that these are the worst of the worst narco
terrorists. They're basically Osama bin
Laden dangling like a cocaine baggie in front of American

(26:16):
children. That's what they want you to
think of with this shit. But there is absolutely no
reason to take the administration's word for it.
Yeah, given how much they lie about people they bomb or
assail, including American citizens or people in American
soil, people who their thugs literally shoot when they're
Americans or U.S. citizens. So given the rapidity and the

(26:40):
rapacious sets that they lie andspin and get caught lying time
and time again about that stuff with regards to Trump's
militarized ICE and BP crackdowns across the country,
there is absolutely no reason totake their word about it about
who are on these boats. We just have no idea who their
massacre. Are right now and even if there
are there were some it it first of all, I want to point out that

(27:03):
it's conceivable that there are no drug dealers on any of the
boats they've attacked. That's completely possible.
But even if there were some, these are not high level.
I mean, you're not blasting Pablo Escobar or whatever,
right? You don't, yes and you don't
just get to slaughter people whoare accused of things like this
is and this is being discussed through the prism of what they

(27:26):
are doing are possible or crimes, which I guess textbook
definition. Yeah, agreed.
Especially because this is Trump's and hagsess Pentagon
doing it. But it feels so Orwellian and
fucking strange to me to talk about it in that way.
When there is no war going on, There is no war going on.
It is a war crime in a time of no war.

(27:49):
Hence, a more accurate designation for what the Trump
administration doing right now in the Caribbean Sea and
elsewhere is just murder. It's just murder.
And it's not liberal Pod Save America style hysteria or
hyperbole to say stuff like that.
There are Republicans on CapitolHill who are starting to come
around do that. How badly do you have to fuck up

(28:13):
to the point that at least some senior Republican lawmakers in
Capitol Hill are coming out saying we demand answers, we
demand investigations, particularly with regards to
this double tap strike that was reported in the Washington Post
where I'm not sure if they're these Republicans are saying
yet, like you can't do that. But at the very least, they want
more aggressive oversight over the Trump administration.

(28:37):
All the Democrats are basically saying that.
But several senior Republican lawmakers in official Washington
have come around to again and again publicly joining them in
that chorus. And I repeat, how badly do you
have to fuck up with making yourcrimes so obvious that that is
starting to happen? And this is only year one of

(28:59):
Trump's second term. Well, Swint, speaking to your
sources and in the process of your reporting, have you gotten
a sense of what has changed because these boat strikes have
been going on for a while, you know, did did all of them just
like wake up from an app at the same time or?
If Donald Trump's poll numbers weren't weaving in and out of

(29:20):
the 37 to 39% US approval rating, I think maybe we'd have
a different story. But currently we have the
reality we have. You are correct in alluding
there to be very correct idea that before this stuff happened
in recent days with the Republican lawmaker suddenly

(29:40):
saying, oh, wait a minute, we should maybe fucking look into
this. All of this, all of these months
of bombings have been almost certainly very, very illegal
like so. So I, I do agree with some
people when they say we're missing the forest first, the
trees a little bit when we focuson this one reported double tap
strike, because if you think that's murder, then all of it is

(30:02):
murder. I I I do agree with that
generally. Right, the the very premise of
it. But I guess I've seen some
experts, you know, distinguishing on TV that maybe
because the president ordered it.
And in the past there had been attacks like, you know, ordered
by Obama or Clinton that that didn't receive congressional
approval. And then this would be in the

(30:22):
same realm as that. I don't know.
I mean, that's what that that's what they're claiming.
I mean, to me it seems like you're just blowing up boats
full of full of people who are not white and you know, you're
expecting us to swallow that as normal.
Right. And the thing that was different
about the reporting on this double tap strike, whereas the
first one of this now significantly long running spree

(30:47):
of bombings is that we had knownfor a while, I believe for weeks
now, if you were following reporting at the Intercept that
multiple strikes were ordered. And obviously that would,
whether intentionally or not, have the effect of killing
survivors who were maybe clinging to the boat.
The Washington Post revealed in recent days that according to

(31:10):
their sources with direct knowledge of the matter, that
Pete Hagseth himself ordered thechain of command to leave no
safe quarter to make sure that everybody was killed, kill them
all, and that if there were survivors clinging to the boat,
it didn't matter. Order follow up strikes to get

(31:30):
rid of them. That is where it escalated more
to the point that a lot of lawmakers who weren't really
publicly paying attention to this shit earlier started
saying, OK, if this is accurate and if this is what actually
happened, there needs to be restraints on this because what
was just described was so fundamentally just a war crime

(31:51):
and murder in this ongoing campaign that it freaked people
out. And we had some reporting at
Ceteo recently that in the aftermath of this revelation
from The Washington Post, the administration has sort of tried
to push back on it. But I think it was a little bit
instructive when you saw that Pete Hagseth's initial public

(32:12):
response to the Washington Post reporting was not a denial.
He didn't deny it. He was gleeful.
About it, yeah, he posted Franklin the turtle with a
bazooka, right? Like.
Yeah, and even before that, whenhe did a really huffy statement
about it, if you read it carefully, he does not deny that
he gave the order. Only more recently have he and

(32:34):
Donald Trump started to step back a little bit from the edge
of bear hugging this operation. And we have reporting at
zeteo.com that one of the thingsthat followed immediately before
the administration's upper echelon started walking back
their celebratory Glee a little bit was that lawyers in
different agencies and differentdepartments in Trump's second

(32:57):
administration started telling senior administration officials
and their colleagues that, just so you know, if what has been
reported in the Washington Post is correct, that is blatantly
and flagrantly illegal. This crossed the line even for a
lot of the lawyers who are stillpopulating and then still have

(33:17):
not been purged from Trump's second administration.
Even they were like, this does not look good.
This is not something you want to go on TV and brag about like,
you got to figure this out. This is a quote, UN quote
problem as some of them were telling their colleagues.
And lo and behold, right after that, the President of the

(33:38):
United States and the so-called Secretary of War started saying,
oh, you wait, no, it wasn't me. It was this guy.
It was this guy. It was this guy who ordered the
double taps, right? I we support him, he's great, we
love him, but it wasn't me. I'm, I'm, I'm struggling to
figure out how we can get the majority of American people in

(33:59):
this country to realize how grotesque this particular boat
thing is. Jared and I were talking about
this before we came on. There was a line that used to
float around white nationalist talking points, whatever.
And it used to be that we would,we would get a president in
there who would go to war with the cartels by just, you know,

(34:23):
doing drone strikes on places and, and whatever else.
I remember Kris Kobach was considered too extreme when he
ran talking about using the military as part of his thing to
to blow up, you know, things in Mexico or whatever.
So this is sort of been around for a while on the racist right
in particular. And you have this guy Hegseth,

(34:45):
who has, you know, is in the business of trying to bring back
the Confederate named things, get rid of Martin Luther King
Day events and comes in and he does this thing to me.
I feel like that story isn't outthere enough that just this is
like a really it's not only horrific from a humanitarian

(35:06):
perspective and like seems to behighly illegal in in multiple
ways, but it's also just like a a virulently racist thing where
just the idea is that they come from Venezuela, their fair game
for assassination. I'm guessing that you guys did
see or hear Megyn Kelly recently.

(35:27):
Trump ally and podcaster Megyn Kelly, former Fox News host,
going out there on her stupid little show, which sadly I'm
sure does pretty well with the listenership to say that she's
happy about what Trump and Pete Hagseth are doing and that she
doesn't just want these people blown up.

(35:48):
She wants like limbs blown off them to bleed out slowly in the
water for them to suffer and basically be tortured to death.
She seems like she's gotten likeshe's gotten more extreme in the
last couple of years. By the way, this is one of many
examples. I would argue there's a good
chance she has always been like this, including when she was
trying to moderate herself. So she would have fancy multi,

(36:10):
multi $1,000,000 gig at NBC. But it's, it's funny to think
about that era. We should talk about that more
on another date. So I, I, I think the tea leaves
were there that she's always been to like this to some
degree, but she has entered a phase now, well, now that she's
just podcasting and that she's not on the Evening News or cable

(36:31):
news or whatever anymore, that she's just letting the MAGA
freak flag fly in a sadistic manner.
And it is very illuminating to see how much she is bloodthirsty
about these operations to a cartoonish degree, believing
that the point of the US military or American law

(36:53):
enforcement or the federal government or whoever is to
torture to death people who you want to see either abroad or at
home, torture to death like. And I would like to believe that
that is an isolated thing among the manga sphere and the
Republican elite. But it's not.
And we know it's not because of how gleefully the federal
government under Trump's two point O is conducting not just

(37:16):
these operations, but so much else like it's it's
institutionalized A giggling bloodlust.
And to your point earlier about how people should communicate to
the American people, so it sinksin how not just blatantly
illegal, but how grotesque. This is the way I keep thinking
about it, not even necessarily as a political reporter or as a

(37:39):
guy who covers politics and injects it directly into his
like arteries day in and day out, but as just like a citizen,
as a registered voter, as as hopefully a seemingly regular
enough person living in the United States of America.
I constantly think to myself that they are doing this in our

(37:59):
name, funded by our tax dollars,constantly.
This atrocious Mer spree of people who we don't even know
who they are, they're laughing about on TV while simultaneously
trying to steal health care, food, neighbors, killers of your
community and everything else from millions upon millions and

(38:21):
millions of Americans and just laughing about it constantly on
live streams or on TV or on social media.
So that's what I think about when you when people try to say
like, oh, normal people aren't going to care about this.
I mean, in a vacuum, I don't know, maybe not.
It was kind of hard to get normal quote, UN quote normal
people to care about the Awlaki drone killing.

(38:44):
But in the sense of that this iswhat they're prioritizing after
years of saying we're not like the neocons.
We're we're all about ending wars, not starting them while
they are trying to steal so much, trying to mug so many
people. Maybe what you're saying is that
the more people feel that hurt economically, which has been,

(39:06):
which is gradually built up overthe course of the last year,
they're more likely to associatethe horrors of this with with
that? Right, Right.
To me, it's both as a reporter and as just an average Joe or
Jane. It's the same story.
It's the same Trumpian game showhost personality called
Fishistic Project. You can't separate any of these

(39:29):
elements from each other. Yeah, Going back to the point
you made, Mike, when I'm lookingat this, what I keep thinking
about is like you said, sort of this alt right when we were
calling at the alt right sort ofportrayal of immigration as
invasion, right? It's like great replacement

(39:51):
light. Like one of the first things
Trump did when he got in office was he declared a handful of
cartels as foreign terrorist organizations.
And to me, like even though Heg Seth is the face of this and
obviously the buck stops with Trump I.
I just keep thinking about Stephen Miller and like these

(40:13):
themes that they campaigned on basically that and I want to get
your take on this, but it seems like they may be over indexed on
how much they managed to convince people that immigration
is an invasion akin to some kindof military operation they have
to push back on. And now that they're acting on
those beliefs and murdering people for it, I'm almost

(40:38):
struggling to come up with wordsfor just how repulsive it is.
Oh, totally. It's it's sick.
It's depraved. Back when I was at Rolling Stone
magazine, I wrote something in the heat of the 2024
presidential election saying that look what Trump and his
goons are running on is that if they retake power, they are

(41:01):
going to use the federal government to turn it into the
blood orgy scene from the movie Event Horizon.
If only every single cannibal space demon from that scene were
played by the villain from the Adam Sandler movie.
Happy Gilmore I Stand. By Bob Silverman, Tear

(41:24):
reference. I stand by that and then some,
because I honestly believe to mycore, to the NTH degree, that I
actually undersold to readers how bad it would get during 2025
if Trump were restored to the throne in every conceivable

(41:48):
metric. There are so many things where I
just look at it, analyze it, report on it, and think to
myself, this is not just worse, but markedly worse than I
thought it was going to be. Just before he was re elected in
November 2024. And I had the shittiest

(42:09):
expectations for how this administration, if it were given
the ability to exist again, would turn out.
And the Venezuela stuff is a perfect example of those many,
many instances, largely because as bad as I thought it would get
if you were re elected, I did not have.

(42:31):
Oh, we're actually going to verylikely do an actual war on
Venezuelan soil and start bombing Venezuela's soil, not
just the coast off of it, but Venezuelan soil.
That we're going to use our tax dollars and our time and effort
to do regime change there in a big, big way.
Not just funding and supporting things covertly via the CIA to

(42:52):
try to destabilize the place, but actually kinetic big boy
explosive bombs and planes warfare on Venezuela.
I would not have put that on my Trump second term fascism bingo
card in December 2024. Maybe that's because I'm naive
or stupid. Did you guys have it on yours?

(43:14):
No, but I think when you put somebody like Pete Hagseth in
charge of of the military, or atleast he and Trump in charge of
the military, anything is on thetable.
Because I, I, I think probably when I woke up to the possibly
something like this happening. And it's and that doesn't make
it any less horrific to actuallysee it happening is when again,

(43:38):
he started to do that stuff witha changing in the names of the
bases to the Confederate things.And you know, all those other
like white nationalist coded choices that he made when he
first got the gig, because when I say if you somebody like this
who's who's capable of that, youknow, you don't want them in
charge of military power, it's really scary.

(43:59):
No, totally. And look like there's so much
horrifying, historically shambolic shit that's going on
with this administration and thefirst year of the four years
isn't even up yet, so it can getexhausting to try to catalog it.
But one thing I keep coming backto is when you look at the
historic history making tippy top of corrupt presidential

(44:23):
actors in perhaps all, not just modern American history, but all
of American history, Donald Trump and his pals both in and
out of government seem to have very quickly in a matter of
several months eclipsed them all.
Like it's not just me who says that.
It's like if you ask good government ethicists and people

(44:44):
who actually are paid to study this stuff intensely and catalog
it and look at things in the vast scheme of American history,
not just vibes or what you thinkis going on right now.
So many of them will say that even just the crypto stuff, like
the Trump meme coin stuff alone automatically makes Donald Trump

(45:06):
the most corrupt president in all of American history.
And that's not even counting allthe other stuff with his pals,
with his pardons, with his family, business empire.
Like there's so much else. I'm only flicking at the tip of
the iceberg right now. The levels of corruption that we
have being a ring LED by the supposed leader of the free

(45:29):
world right now is so intense and so brazen, so out in the
open and so open and shut textbook obvious corruption that
it is madding. It is sickening.
And it gets to the point where Iconstantly think to myself, boy,
when I was in high school or college, I first started reading

(45:49):
about the Marcos family in the Philippines.
I would think to myself, geez, how did the Filipino people ever
let this happen? Guy?
I have not thought that for a while as I start to get more
cynical and less naive about American politics, but boy, do I
not fucking think anything like that now.
Like Amy, the idea that there's any shred of American

(46:10):
exceptionalism left when you think of like corrupt tin pot
dictators in other country. And it's like, oh boy, at least
that things might not be perfecthere, but at least that doesn't
happen here. It all happened here and it
makes like the fucking Marcoses of the world and recent global
history look almost like small time criminals.

(46:33):
Well, Swid, before we let you get out of here, I, I just want
to ask you about one more thing that's been coming up on our
show a bit, which is that, you know, as you've noted earlier,
Trump's poll numbers are in the toilet.
Democrats have been sweeping. You know, they swept a bunch of
elections in November. They put up a hell of a fight.

(46:55):
I believe it was in Tennessee last week or the week before,
depending when this comes out. You you have people like
Marjorie Taylor Crean defecting.I mean, all of this is kind of
like an aside. There's a story here, a story
there, but now on top of the pile, you've got Republican

(47:16):
leaders in Congress looking at these boat strikes and
wondering, oh, geez, is our namegoing to be on this?
And, you know, I'm just thinkingif next year, if Democrats are
able to sweep elections again, make Trump a, a lame duck
president. I, I mean, where do things go
from here? I, I have a hard time imagining

(47:39):
the toothpaste going back in thetube on the Republican Party.
But have you thought about this?I mean what's on your mind in
terms of what a like post Trump MAGA movement might look like?
I'm I'm positive this is all extremely detrimental to my
mental health, that I consider the questions that you were just

(48:00):
asking rather profusely, both onmy professional time and in my
spare time. And I would like to wind it back
a little bit before I talk aboutthe MAGA movement itself.
Because the advent of Trump's second presidency has really
gotten me to think over and overand over again how silly it was

(48:21):
for me to spend years diagnosingthat the United States was an
empire in decline. But then also psyching myself
into thinking, particularly during the mid Obama era, that
we could do empire in decline without doing aggressively
empire in decline type things that all declining empires do.

(48:45):
And obviously sending the the racist game show host, demented
as he is, back to the White House twice and to unleash
everything, including what is currently going on is certainly
very empire and decline hours. There's like no way to get
around it. When you look at everything in

(49:06):
his domestic agenda and and foreign policy.
It it's it's great for the RomanEmpire that TikTok didn't exist
during their era. I'm sure it would be at least a
little bit less humiliating for them than it is for us now if
that had been the case, if that had been live streamed.
So I think about that a lot in terms of the Democrats will be

(49:31):
back in power at some point fairly soon in our lifetimes, or
whether that's on Capitol Hill or the White House.
I don't know exactly what the 2026 of the 2028 elections are
going to look like. But at some point soon, the
Democrats will control the justice appointment again.
They may even have a trifecta inofficial Washington in terms of
control of the federal government.

(49:52):
But I've long thought that for the left or center left, the
story of the coming years and decade is going to be 1 of
picking up the pieces of what's left.
Not necessarily completely undoing the horrifying degree of
damage that is going to be done and is being done just because
it's so hard to crib something you said earlier, Jared, it's so

(50:15):
hard to put the toothpaste back in the in the fucking thing.
And they have spray the entire room full of toothpaste.
Yeah, I mean, just just when thejust to point out this boats
thing in the in the context, if they get away with this, right,
it's precedent for who knows what, It's actually, it's like
really, really scary. Now, you could always point out

(50:36):
any kind of wise critic of American foreign policy.
We'll we'll just quickly say what about this, what about
that? And they'll be right about it.
But there's something about, there's something about the
cynicism of just of looking at the past and saying like, hey,
what if we took all that and made it worse?
And that's what I feel like is what's what.
They're always point out what somebody did in the past, but
then they do this, this the version of the same thing on

(50:58):
steroids. Oh, yeah.
And look, all despotisms and particularly the horrifying
idealities of the mid and early 20th century, they're all built
on other regimes and other practices and other forms of law
enforcement or imprisoning or whatever that came before them.
Like when people point out like,oh, what about Obama's drone

(51:19):
warfare? What about this?
What about that? It's like, yes, I no, no, no, I
understand that. And you can check the tape.
I think all three of us were probably hyper.
Well, yeah, I certainly was hyper critical the stuff while I
was covering it, while I was just a fucking nobody, like
basically a teenager or whateverwhile that was going on.
But the idea that what is going on right now, not just with the

(51:39):
murderer incorporated in the Caribbean, but everything else
foreign, domestic that Trump andthe Republican Party are doing
right now, the idea that it's not markedly historically worse
and different is facile. And it is important for people
like the three of us to analyze it in the context of, well, what

(52:00):
are the conditions now, what allthe things that brought us to
this moment that is fundamentally different than
using that very necessary smart form of analysis to excuse what
is currently going on for the Democrats.
My fear as an average citizen isthat when it's their time to

(52:23):
command things like the Justice Department and the Oval Office
and other fancy little trinkets like that, is that they will do
some sort of souped up a versionof Obama's saying in 2009, we
can't look back at the crimes oralleged crimes of the past.
We have to move forward. That sounds good, I think to

(52:46):
your median independent voter, maybe.
But it is terrifying to me that it is highly probable that we
are going to enter the next phase of the American saga
without an aggressive form of looking back at the alleged

(53:07):
crimes or very obvious crimes that have been happening in
broad daylight while Trump and the other individuals are just
laughing about it, just rubbing it in all of our hundreds of
millions of faces. So they've just, they've just
totally gotten away with it so far.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I, I hope I'm wrong.

(53:29):
I really hope I'm wrong. I'm hoping that some of your
listeners bookmark this and thenin four or five years they can
rub it in my face. Ha ha, ha.
Actions do have consequences. You were being too nihilistic
about it. I really hope that, that I'm, I,
I get so very savagely owned at this point.
I just don't have much 'cause I don't think for for optimism on

(53:52):
that point. But when it comes to the other
side of the aisle, how I am feeling about the future based
on my reporting and experiences over the past decade about the
post Trump MAGA movement and Republican Party, whatever that
looks like whenever he's no longer a candidate or whatever
he does in go into retirement orwhatever.

(54:14):
I do think that as deleterious aeffect that Trumpism has had on
not just the party but the country, that Trumpism will be
with us for a long time even when Donald Trump is no longer
around. Even if there are changes or

(54:35):
tweaks here and there. In the same way that the long,
long shadow of Reaganism in a big way loomed so large in
American life, and you can arguein many, in several key ways,
still does loom rather large, but in the gratuitous, hyper
gratuitous way that it did that lasted for a long time.
That was the defining thing about the Republican Party for

(54:58):
ages until, say, a guy named Donald John Trump came along.
And now it's just all Trumpism. Yeah, well, even the Trump
campaign, I mean, Make America grip great again, is, you know,
ripped off of Reaganism, right? So it's yes.
Yes, and Trump's whole thing in 2015 and on about how he is
campaigning for the quote UN quote silent majority is a RIP

(55:19):
off of people like Richard Nixon.
I'm, I'm not one of these guys who's like, oh boy, if only we
could return to the old days of the Republican Party.
I really do think that despite the tweaks with certain things
and so-called virtues, if you are someone who does not draw a
straight line from at least Richard Nixon and Barry
Goldwater to the moment we're living in now, I don't know what

(55:40):
to tell. I don't know what to tell you if
you view the history of the moderate Republican Party as
radically different from what we're seeing now.
So I think Trumpism, even without Trump, will be with us
in one form or another for a long time.
I think that is going to be disastrous in certain ways for
the nation part because no matter how unpopular he or they

(56:04):
get, we have a two party system.They're going to be after
they're out of power, they're going to be back in power not
too long after that. And I don't think the Larry
Hogan in Maryland of 2015 is going to be seizing power
anytime soon. Having said that, in the shorter
term, I think the Republican Party, and again, I'm willing to

(56:25):
be, I'd hope to be proven wrong on this, but it does kind of
feel, especially with his incredibly fucking low approval
rating right now, with all the reigns of terrors that he's
blasting out all over the nationand all over the world, it is
having effect. Your average person, your median
voter, and even swing voters arelooking at this.

(56:47):
And even if they're not as passionately anti ideologically
as you or I are, they don't likeit.
They are not fans of this, especially when they see
inflation continuing to be what it is, the cost of living
continuing to be what it is. They are not fans.
You have roughly 40% of Americans or fewer still

(57:08):
clinging to the idea of being onboard with it.
But that's a disastrously shittynumber for any president, even a
second term president. And the honchos in the
Republican Party have caught on.And they're really, really not
happy about it because they knowthey're going to have to try to
win elections when Donald Trump is at the top of the ticket.
Again, that's another thing to talk about and another set of

(57:31):
reporting that we can maybe diveinto on another day.
But I do think that the chances are rather high as things
currently stand if they don't dramatically improve for Donald
Trump and his party, that they are going to have their version
of what happened when another beloved by the base two term

(57:52):
president in the Democratic Party, what is suddenly off the
field and was no longer the top of the ticketer candidate
anymore. I mean, obviously Barack Obama
was and he is much, much, much, much, much more popular with the
American people than Donald Trump.
I'm not trying to compare them at all in that respect.
But when Obama was done it did leave this vacuum that we are

(58:17):
still feeling to this day in theDemocratic Party where it seems
rudderless and maybe a leader pops up a here or there but it
doesn't have the same once in a lifetime charismatic force of
nature, ultra party and political culture defining
figure with a built in vast hyper energetic personality

(58:40):
occult that an Obama or a Trump has.
And when that evaporated from the Democratic Party, we saw
what happened. We're living with the
consequences right now once Obama was suddenly done.
And I think the chances are highthat when Donald Trump is off
the field, that the JD Vances ofthe world and the other leaders

(59:02):
of the Republican Party are going to experience a similar
vacuum where they start to really, really figuratively
asphyxiate on the idea that it is not possible for Trumpism and
the Trumpist Republican Party tosucceed without Donald Trump
being at the top of the ticket. Right.

(59:23):
Well, that feels like a good place to wrap it up.
Today I've been joined by Swin Soupsang.
You can check out his work at Ceteo.
We'll put a link to his stuff inthe description.
Swin, thanks for joining, posting through it this week.
Thank you for the group therapy,it was very refreshing for me.
I'm a big fan of your work, I'm glad we had you on.

(59:50):
People who listen to our premiumepisodes know that at the end of
every premium episode, this is this is not a premium episode,
but the every premium episode, Jared, we give an album
recommendation and we kind of trade off.
So every it's fortnightly, everyevery two weeks.
I have one you, then you go and then Bah Bah Bah Bah Bah back

(01:00:11):
and forth and. These the albums we recommend
span all, all types of years andI think that'll probably be
continuing to expand in the yearahead.
As we go deeper into our into our archive.
We figured, let's actually talk about our favorite albums of the
year at the end of this conversation.

(01:00:33):
So we would do you want to you want to start us off?
What were your? What were your?
What were your favs? Yeah, some of my favorites that
came out this year, the record Never Enough by Turnstile.
They had put out a really just fantastic record a few years ago
and they came back with this. Another one was Straight Line

(01:00:55):
Was A Lie by The Bets. Again, another really fun follow
up album to a record I really enjoyed called Expert in a Dying
Field Moisturizer by Wet Leg. This band had a huge breakout
year. Really fun record.
I need to check some of these out.
I don't. I don't like I didn't even.

(01:01:16):
You're telling me now for the first time.
The Golden Heart Protector by Margaret Glaspie who is one of
my favorite singer songwriters. This is a record of covers but
really done true to form in her style.
I enjoyed it a lot and the last one I'll leave people with that
stuck with me this year came outfairly recently.

(01:01:38):
It's a record from the band Mamacalled Welcome to My Blue Sky.
I really have been enjoying thatone over the last week.
Is it It's recent? Yeah, it's, it's recent.
OK. Oh yeah.
All right. Well, I got it.
Well, I, I just preface by saying I like more than albums
that came out this year. I had a really good year going

(01:01:58):
to shows and I doubt that 2026 will be as good because it was,
it was uniquely good. And not only that, I just
foresee not being like schedulesand a lot of stuff going on.
I just don't see me being able to go out as much as I as I did.
But I, I, I saw craft work in March.
I saw Napalm Death in the Melvins in May.

(01:02:21):
I saw Underworld in May. I saw the rapper Mike who we'll
get into in in late May and I saw Wu Tang in in July with my
son. That was a trip.
And then in October I saw Stereolab, Hotline TNT, which
we'll also get into and awe Tekker, which was in total

(01:02:44):
darkness. I think we talked about it at
one show, but it was just, it was just, I don't even know what
I was. I don't even know what happened.
I found religion and in NovemberI saw the the the campy cult
cult group my life with the Thrill kill cult to wrap it up.
So my favorite albums Jared thisyear I'm going to do it like two
different ones that were like compete for #1 and like I'll

(01:03:06):
just do some also rants that were good.
I like I know he's very controversial.
I like the John Mouse album later than you think,
particularly like the the first song on that is just awesome.
But I really like the whole album and I love the stereo lab,
the new stereo lab album, instant holograms on metal film.
Thought it was awesome. OK, I'm just going to be

(01:03:28):
pretentious here. What is it called?
Tranquilizer. The new one O tricks point never
loop leap album. I thought it was pretty good
like this. It's not for everybody.
You got to be like, you got to be some on on some real hipster
bullshit for this. But actually it's it's really
grown on me and I like stuff I can work too.
And that was that's, that's one of them.
So my favorite albums this year,I guess #2 if we're counting

(01:03:52):
down is Raspberry Moon by Hotline TNT, which is just like,
I don't know many bands that like play shit hard and but also
have melody that are around anymore like quite like Hotline
TNT does it. What a what a great bandit Mom
Donnie was out hanging out with them at the show.

(01:04:12):
And yeah, it was just, they were, they were just so they're
so sincere. They're off Spotify you so you
can't really get them on Spotify, but I listen to him on
CD and and you can get it probably.
I think they're on YouTube Musicif you got that and my favorite
albums getting plenty of you know, it's cricketly acclaimed.
Lots of the crickets love it. So it's not like a shocker, but

(01:04:34):
it's showbiz by the rapper Mike,which I just want to describe.
When I saw Mike at Irving Plaza,it was so weird because it's
like, I think of him as being sort of this kind of like
ambient rapper where it's just like, I don't know how to
describe it. Whereas one song kind of flows
into the other and it can be like sort of background music.

(01:04:54):
And he's almost, you know, almost a spirit of a
contemporary tribe called Quest,but in a, in a sort of Internet
poisoned like clip, clip, clip, the way the the songs go along.
And I, I thought just the most mellow thing.
And then I got there. It was completely sold out.
And there's all these teens who are with backpacks and salt,
like just moshing to all these songs and like just whiling out

(01:05:17):
like every single track. And Mike is such a like he has
no like there's there's no mask on this guy.
He's just a dude with glasses from Brooklyn.
And he comes out and he's just and keeps saying please, please,
please, please put your hands together for for like, whatever,
just naming his friends and stuff.

(01:05:37):
I mean, I can really identify with this.
I feel like I do this on postingthrough it anyway with my
friends. So yeah, it was that.
And then afterwards, he had a few shots of vodka and he
decided to play a bunch of ChiefKeef songs, and people moshed to
that too. And I just was a totally surreal
experiment, like experience. I just, I've never been to a rap

(01:05:58):
show like that before. It was just like, it was just
like hanging out in somebody's backyard.
Anyway, I love showbiz. It's a beautiful album and
everybody should give it a try. Yeah, I'm starting to get old
enough now where if I show up toa concert and I see a bunch of
teenagers, I get a little scaredfor like, what?
I moved to the back of the crowdand put my earplugs in and just

(01:06:22):
vibe. But at the same time, I would
like, I like to, you know, I just, I like to see that energy.
I like to see that, you know, I like to, I like to see them out
of the house and not on their phones.
You know what I mean? I got AI got a son who's 12.
So like I like whenever he's puthis his phone down to do
something. That's great.
All right. Well, let's wrap it up here.
We'll see you guys next week. Bye everybody.

(01:06:43):
Thank you.