George Santos is a Terrible Person and the Embodiment of the American Dream

Hey Heath, George Santos here.

I'm so proud of you for coming out as a furry.

And I just wanted to tell you that your friends and family all accept you.

And they're all excited about your fursona, which is awesome to be a beavapus, a beaver and a platterpus.

So let me tell you,

they all love you, Beavapuss.

Don't you ever.

get your head down and don't you ever, ever let anybody tell you what you can and can't be.

I'm so proud that the corporate folks at Arby's gave you the go-ahead to go to work in your persona.

So if you could just, you know, live it up and be as perfect as you want, just keep doing you and yiff, yiff, yiff.

Bye.

Hello, hello, and welcome back to A Bit Fruity, the show where we try to tell the truth, but not the whole truth.

It was always going to end this way.

It was always going to end with a podcast episode.

And we're here.

We've arrived.

We're at the Santosode.

Welcome, everyone.

Sit down, strap in, grab a beverage.

I'm excited to experience America together.

I'm Matt Bernstein, and I am joined today by,

you know, it has long been a dream of mine to call anyone a friend of the show.

And now, 10 episodes in, I am joined by a friend of the show.

Kat Tenbarge is here.

You might remember her from our second episode, which was about Amber Heard.

She, well, I mean, I'll let you introduce yourself.

Well, first of all, it's such an honor to be the inaugural friend of the show.

I'm a journalist.

I currently work for NBC News, and I write about technology, culture, and influencers.

Of which George Santos is one, you would argue.

In a way, he's all three.

Yeah.

So, all right, we're going to have an analysis of George Santos, but I want to explain, like,

why we're here today, why we're doing this today.

So last night I was at a bar and this guy came up to me and he was so, so, so nice.

Shout out if he's listening.

But he was like, I love your podcast.

And I was like, oh my gosh, thank you so much.

I'm actually recording recording tomorrow about, I'm doing the George Santa soad.

And he was like, I'm sure you're going to have a different take than everyone, which was a really great compliment.

But I want to be clear that like, I am not above drama for drama's sake.

I have loved following this as much as the next person, not at all times as like an esteemed cultural analyst, but because he's a mess and I love to indulge in mess.

It's my job as a homosexual.

It's my right.

But, you know, we're, we're here today because we love mess and also because like I have some theses I would like to conjecture.

You do too.

Yes.

Mine are about the American dream.

Yours are about influencers, which some could argue, I've argued, epitomize the American dream.

Yeah.

But before we do any of that, we are going to walk through George Santos' life.

And this won't be like most of the episode.

And I will try to keep it as brief as I can while hitting on the relevant points, because I feel like people at this point know that George Santos is synonymous with like politician and scammer and know that he lied about some stuff.

But like, I think his biography is important in illustrating how he became this like camp figure, but also how he is genuinely a bad person.

Like, I've seen a lot of, I've gotten a lot of messages being like, you really, you know, you shouldn't continue to talk about him because he's a bad person.

We're losing that truth in all of this.

And so I am pleased to say up front that I am not at all interested in laundering this man's image.

I also think, and you tell me where you are on this, but like, I think the most harm that he has been able to do has already happened.

He was already in Congress.

Yeah.

He was already like, you know, signing things that are anti-LGBT things and like petitioning to make the AR-15 the national gun.

Like, I think he has had more power than he will ever have again.

Yeah, I agree with that.

I think that, in a way, he will always have the potential to continue to scam because there will always be potential marks

for his future, if he does have any future scams.

But at the same time, there is a certain form of accountability in being known.

And I think that he was previously able to operate thanks to the fact that nobody was paying attention to him.

And now it's almost impossible to hear his name without associating him with this alleged bad behavior.

And so in that way, I think he has reached like the peak of his potential to scam.

But then knowing how other influencers and celebrities have actually like built their brand around being a bad person and having a bad image, there will always be the potential for more.

Right.

Right.

So, all right, let's go back to the beginning.

So, I want to start with George Santos as the world came to know him

a little over a year ago.

In 2021, he began his second attempt at campaigning for Congress for New York's third district.

So he's running for the House of Representatives.

He's running for a seat on the House of Representatives.

And New York's third district is the wealthiest district in New York State and the fourth wealthiest in the country, which is really interesting.

George Santos, he, you know, like all candidates for Congress and for any political office, he has a story about himself.

And the story that he runs on is as such.

He went to Horace Mann for primary school.

And Horace Mann is like a, it's a prep school in New York.

Like many prep schools, its tuition is ridiculously high.

I looked it up and its current annual tuition starting in kindergarten is $62,000 a year.

I mean, you're paying for like private college tuition every single year from the time that you're like five.

He withdrew from Horace Mann.

Do you know why he withdrew or why he says that he had to withdraw from Horace Mann?

No.

So he

he

says that he withdrew from Horace Mann in 2008.

So at that point, I guess.

The stock market, the financial crash.

The financial crash.

Yeah, yeah.

So he basically said his parents fell on hard times in the 2008 recession, and that's why he had to leave Horace Mann, which is

every detail of his story is so calculated because, right, it's not just insignificant details to explain, you know, why he might have dropped out at Horace Mann at a certain point.

It's like he dropped out because of the American recession.

Right.

It's like something that you'll see as a running theme through George Santos's story that he tells is that every hardship he's ever faced is the hardship of America.

Right.

He didn't just drop out because like his parents, he had to move or something or his parents' job moved.

He dropped out because he was affected by the thing that was like most notably affecting the United States of America.

And in that way,

every part of his story that turns him into a victim is like synonymous with American victimhood.

He's the forest gump of victims.

Yeah,

exactly.

So he ends up graduating with a degree in finance and economics from Baruch, which is a college here in New York City.

And then he, I think he says he got his master's at NYU.

Yes.

Master's in business administration.

Okay, master's in MBA.

Right, yes.

He works at two big banks, two huge financial institutions, Goldman, Sachs, and Citigroup.

And then he runs his own company called Devolder,

which is one of his middle names, We Come to Learn, which in his words is it's a consulting firm, essentially.

But at this point, he says that he made, over the course of having that business, he made three and a half, between three and a half to $11 million

from DeVolder.

He ran his own animal rescue foundation

called, yep, the dogs are not getting,

they're not coming out of the story unscathed.

He is called Friends of Pets United.

He says that between 2013 and 2018, the organization saved 2,500 cats and dogs.

We're going to return to that.

His mom died in 9-11.

Which is, again, it's this thing of like every bad thing that's ever happened to the United States has also happened to George Santos.

Specifically.

Specifically, and therefore, like, there is no differentiation between the story of the United States and the story of George Santos.

Kind of genius branding.

It is so genius, but when you work backwards and you look at all of these things in hindsight, it's like absurdly unbelievable.

Yes, yes.

It's like, how, it's like, I mean, he might as well have like signed the Declaration of Independence.

Right.

He was there in the back.

His

his

grandma was a Holocaust victim.

Yes.

Which, again, will return to all of these things.

He said he had four employees killed.

Like four of his personal employees at his job were killed in the Pulse nightclub shooting.

Which didn't happen to anyone.

No.

No.

Did anyone have four employees that were killed in that night?

Did Pulse even have four employees that were killed in the Pulse night?

I don't think so.

No.

Yeah.

He said his five-year-old niece was once kidnapped from a playground in New York that she was playing at.

Do you know why he speculated that she was kidnapped?

Because he was criticizing the Chinese Communist Party.

Yes.

So they allegedly came and kidnapped his niece.

Correct.

But they did get her back.

Correct.

Yeah.

And we can, we can laugh about this because like everything else in the story, this didn't happen.

His niece was never kidnapped.

But

it's again, it's like, it wasn't wasn't just that his niece was kidnapped.

It was that she was kidnapped because he was being patriotic and criticizing the Chinese Communist Party.

And so that's what happened.

He has a Jewish background.

Santos, a famously Jewish name.

And then it's like, there are some like a couple add-ons here.

Do you know about his entertainment stints?

In, oh, God, what was it?

Sweet Life of Zack and Cody.

And the other one.

Hannah Montana.

Oh, of course.

Of course.

He had small roles in Hannah Hannah Montana and The Sweet Life of Zach and Cody, which, again, it's so interesting that he ever got away with saying any of this because, like, these are pretty easy things for that regular, degular person to fact check.

To just look up.

Lip check IMDB.

He also said that he was a producer in the Broadway musical for Spider-Man a few years ago, which I thought was an interesting choice because Spider-Man was like notoriously a Broadway flop and there were a lot of like stunt injuries that that like hurt the actors.

It's like one of the most infamous Broadway musicals of all time.

Yeah.

But maybe there's like a maybe there's a reason he chose that one.

Part of me thinks that some of these details would make you think he's telling the truth just because it would be so unusual for someone to lie about something like that.

Right.

Like if he claimed that he executive produced like the Lion King on Broadway, people would be like, that seems incorrect.

But it's like, oh, that was me with Spider-Man Afraid of the Dark.

You're like, oh, well, people wouldn't wouldn't want to admit to that.

So he probably isn't lying.

Right.

It's like you have to have a few calculated fails in there.

Yes.

Yeah.

It's like he's being humble.

But even in the failure and even in being humble, it's still like.

I humbly failed at producing a Broadway show.

Right.

Which takes a certain amount of power and money, even if the show doesn't end up panning out.

Yes.

It's almost like he's trying to appeal to rich people by being like,

just like you, I have my rich successes and my rich failure.

Right, right, right.

Like, right.

It's like being like, oh yeah, one time in 2011, I crashed my yacht.

How embarrassing.

Yes, that's exactly what it is.

It's something that I find just really interesting about him is there, when I was researching for this episode, like people will delineate between the things that he said about himself that were meaningful lies, like where he worked

and where like his educational background.

And then the lies that like why would he lie about that that's such a silly thing to lie about like he he lied that he was on the volleyball team at Baruch which is just like such a specific and like theoretically meaningless detail but I think like what he's doing is not just lying about specific things it's inventing the the myth of his person he's myth-making he's myth-making where every detail matters because it's not you're creating I don't know what do you it's not like you're lying to get something specifically it's not like you're trying to say that you got an A on a specific test so that you can impress a specific professor.

It's like he's building an entire false life story.

Like he's every lie of his builds up to this like greater purpose of presenting a different person than who he actually is.

So it's more than just a lie.

It's like a pattern of lying.

And it's not lying by omission either, which a lot of people, politicians notably, do lie by omission, like frequently.

But he is like taking it to a whole other level.

And in essence, it's just every single word that comes out of this man's mouth, everything he says about himself is untrue.

He's fictional.

George Santos is a fictional person.

He's fictional.

And that's interesting, too, because when he was confronted by reporters initially, so, okay, this is the story that he tells.

And he gets elected.

He gets elected.

The election was.

last November, so a little over a year ago, and he gets elected to represent New York's third district in the United States House of Representatives.

And then I think it was only like a few days after he was elected and like, you know,

the hatchet had been buried.

Yes.

That the New York Times started reporting, like, hey, we looked into like this stuff and like, we don't think he went to school where he said he, like, we called Goldman Sachs and they were like, no, we have no record of this guy.

Yes.

And so it kind of started once nothing could be done about it.

Yes.

As far as him being serving in political office,

the lie started to get revealed.

And something that he said pretty quickly when like pressure was mounting on him to respond to that allegation, he was like, I embellished my resume.

It's true.

I embellished my resume.

Who doesn't?

Which I agree.

Who doesn't?

But that's not what he was doing.

Right.

He invented someone.

He invented someone.

And it's also such an interesting,

like it points to a lot of local failures, like a lot of accountability processes that we just assume are there are not.

Because the fact that he was able to win this race, which is not an insignificant local office, like he ran for the U.S.

House of Representatives, a federal position that doesn't just give him the ability to make decisions for his jurisdiction, but also for the entire country.

Right.

It makes him one of like the 500 most powerful, politically powerful people in the country.

Yes.

And it's so fascinating that it took the election actually happening for a national news outlet to even pay attention to this guy at all.

And there were some local outlets that had questions about his credibility.

There was like a local paper that put out an editorial endorsing his Democratic opponent, saying that he seemed fraudulent.

He seemed like he was a liar.

And so

that really coincides with like the failing of local media and just like the lack of attention that's been paid to local media.

But it also points to a lot of issues with our electoral process because, you know, reading up on like how this election took place, the local Democratic challenger for Santos in 2022 had a decision to make in the few months before the election.

They had like a small pool of money and they were deciding to either do opposition research on Santos or to like use that money to campaign.

And they used it to campaign.

So it just goes to show like he

really kind of got away with it through a series of just circumstances.

Like they could have, if they had had a little bit more money, they could have done both.

They could have paid for opposition research and they could have done more radio spots.

And the fact that he was able to kind of find these, they're not loopholes.

It was just like by chance, he kind of like squeezed his way in there.

And that's troubling.

Right, because this could absolutely happen again.

It could absolutely happen again.

Because it wasn't just like he, I mean, I think he is a little bit of a mastermind in his own way, but also a lot of people are scammers.

Yes.

And this was like a structural failing on a lot of levels.

Absolutely.

That's what's, I think, one of the most interesting things about it:

he

was very conniving and crafty to find himself in this position.

But a lot of people had to be essentially looking away, and a lot of priorities had to be displaced for him to be able to win this election.

So, who is George Santos?

Well,

Kat, let me take you back to the beginning.

It's July 22nd, 1988.

The air is warm.

Taylor Swift has yet to be conceived.

Taylor Swift has yet to be conceived.

I think.

We're like right around the point of her being conceived.

I like to think that there's...

There's something magical about the idea that George Santos was born during the conception of Taylor Swift.

Yeah, he just barely existed in a pre-Taylor Swift world.

We We live in a state of affairs such that everything exists somewhere on the timeline of Taylor Swift.

Yeah.

So we're in Jackson Heights, Queens.

George Anthony Devolder Santos is born.

His mom is a Brazilian immigrant who works as a housekeeper.

His dad was a house painter.

So, you know, real working class people.

He says now that he was poor and lived in a rat-infested apartment, which the interesting thing about that is that in New York, you don't even have to be poor for your apartment to be rat-infested.

Like you can be middle-class, you can be rich and your apartment is rat-infested.

We've all had rat-infested apartments in New York.

You can hear them in the walls.

Yeah.

Like when you go to sleep at night, it's like

they're scootering around up there.

They're just, they're roommates when you live in New York.

He attends,

he, so he did not attend Horace Mann ever.

He attends public primary schools in Queens and eventually gets his GED

before moving to Brazil.

And there's no evidence that he ever went to college, right?

He never graduated with any degrees.

No.

Wow.

Work.

He's kind of a revolutionary.

Yeah.

You know, in some ways, he's proving you don't need to go to college.

Yeah, he is kind of, he is, yeah, he's going to lead the revolution.

So he moves to Brazil at some point during his young adult years.

The timeline here is fuzzy.

You know, all of these people who like knew him then have spoken to the press at this point.

And like, there is no consistent timeline.

But essentially, he moves to Brazil at some point in this, these young adult years with his mother and his sister.

His mom is working odd jobs to get by.

She would bounce, like, all, all three of them would bounce from like apartment to apartment to avoid having to pay rent.

They were having their electricity cut off.

Like, it's, it's a rough time.

It's a rough time for them.

George Santos, even then, he always had a reputation of being like tricky, you know, which first of all, a lot of kids just have yeah and that's normal but you know he would tell people at this time that he was well off that he was you know that and he would spend money as if he was well off and when people would kind of side-eye that because his mother's obviously struggling they as a family are struggling he would say well my dad is an executive back in new york now for all we know his dad is still a painter right he's a house painter he's not an executive right there's nothing wrong with being a house painter but he's not an executive the myth-making had started at this point.

The myth-making had started.

The thing about his lies at this time is that they feel like a coping mechanism.

Yes.

Like lying for survival.

Yeah.

And to some extent, if you are existing under a system that doesn't meet your basic needs, then for many people, lying does come from that as a survival mechanism.

Yeah.

And it's like he was used to the process of, like you said, like they would move from house to house when bills were unpaid.

So it's like he's already kind of been molded by this living environment of like deceit.

Yeah.

Because that's the only way that he knows to live.

That's the only way he's been able to live thus far.

And like George Santos, like I think right now, which we'll get to, but like, I think this is the first time he's ever been wealthy.

Yes.

I think even through his election and his tenure in Congress, I don't think he's ever really had tons of disposable income.

Right.

And it's like you see through the various financial investigations, like what they found and sort of the evidence is that he was constantly portraying this life of wealth.

But in reality, he would call like a staffer and say, I have no money in the bank.

Like they would, some of the fraud that, you know, the alleged fraud that emerged from his campaign existed because he would say, like, I'm bankrolling my own campaign, like hundreds of thousands of dollars, but then that money wouldn't actually exist.

Right.

So fraudulent loans and checks and things would stem from that.

Right.

And like,

look, ultimately he turned into a dangerous individual.

But I think if we just go back to this time where his lies were basically only for himself, the people who knew him at the time, who have since spoken publicly about knowing him at the time, have said, like, we always knew that he was kind of full of shit.

Yeah.

Like,

he doesn't have the money that he's saying he does.

Right.

But maybe it's charming that he does these little lies, or maybe we just, we just let him, we're letting him be a little Dolulu.

Yeah.

We're letting him be a little Dolulu.

And if that helps him get by, then whatever.

And like, I feel like we've all known people like that.

Exactly.

Sometimes you have a roommate who claims to know a lot of famous people.

And at first you're like, well, I have no reason to not believe you.

But over time, you're like, okay, if you really knew all these famous people, then why do you live in a six bedroom apartment?

Yes.

Then why are we roommates?

If you have all of this going on, then why are we roommates?

Yes.

But it's like.

At some point you realize like, oh, okay, that's the story that you're telling yourself about yourself to cope with the fact that that is not the life that you have that that's not the life any of us have yes and i don't think that's a great quality in anyone but it's like a way of coping with the fact that like reality is not that good it's a very american personality trait i think how so in that i think a lot of people who have succeeded under american capitalism and this idea of american exceptionalism do so by inflating their own characteristics, their own history.

And for a lot of people, this turns out to be very successful.

Like a lot of successful corporations come from this place of like, we're going to sell an illusion to people.

And a lot of times illusions in America are very successful.

Fake it till you make it.

Fake it till you make it.

And this idea, yeah, this idea of like entrepreneurship and just presenting yourself.

I mean, that's to really break capitalism down.

A lot of it is if you're succeeding, you're kind of pretending that you're better than everybody else.

And in order to build this sense of like, I deserve more wealth than you, and you should work for me.

And like, I should get 98% of the profits, that has to come from a place of inflating one's own ego.

That has to come from like an inflated sense of self-importance.

I mean, you have people who started out remarkably wealthy

and will even obscure that fact because the idea of having worked to attain something is even more powerful than just having attained it.

Yes.

And it's like, I think about like Donald Trump and like, I don't know, Kylie Jenner, like these, the kind of myth-making that they do around the very real money that they have now,

but that they on some level always had.

Yes.

But it's not just compelling that they're rich.

It's compelling that the idea that they started from the bottom.

Yes.

The whole Kylie Jenner fake billionaire story is so fascinating because it's like.

Wait, do you want to explain that?

Yes.

Very briefly.

We're not going to derail too much because we're still in Brazil.

Yeah,

we're still at the beginning of George's biography, but Kylie Jenner, the Forbes cover where they said she was the self-made billionaire is so fascinating.

She was the youngest.

The youngest self-made billionaire.

She wasn't self-made and she wasn't a billionaire.

And it's just so interesting that you have somebody who has been really successful, is one of the most followed people on social media, is a huge A-list celebrity, but that's still not enough.

They need to both posit themselves as a victim and a winner simultaneously.

That's where you get the self-made part from, because that's obviously not true.

And that's what everyone criticized at the time of the cover: well, obviously, she's not self-made, but that wasn't it.

That wasn't the only part of that that was a lie.

Forbes years later, came out and said she also wasn't a billionaire.

She wasn't self-made or a billionaire.

Right.

And so, if this is like what we have being reported by an accredited journalistic institution like Forbes, what does that leave the rest of us?

Well, George Santos is what it leaves the rest of us.

Exactly.

Shall we continue on?

So, okay, we're still in Brazil.

In the mid-2000s, in Brazil, he starts, and this is a story that you, the listener, may recognize.

He starts dressing and performing in drag.

Yes.

As Kitara Ravace.

That's his drag name.

And at this point, he's like getting involved in the local LGBTQ community where he lives.

He's like handing out pamphlets, going to events and stuff.

And like he's performing in drag, but not as a way to make a living.

He's kind of just in and of the drag community there.

Like, you know, he'll just dress in drag to go to festivals and things like that, which is funny because ultimately when he's in office, he gets exposed for all these lies, da-da-da.

But the thing that really sets a lot of Republicans off is that these photos come out of him in drag.

Yes.

Which given the culture war that we're living through right now about drag queens and gay people, this is the thing that people are like, oh, now he has to answer for it.

Yes.

And what's interesting is he is swarmed by journalists outside of his office in DC.

And he famously says, hold on, I have the quote written down.

They ask him about it.

And he says, no, I was not a drag queen in Brazil.

I was young and I had fun at a festival.

And I love that.

I love that.

Like,

I'm just, I've used that as an excuse for things many times since.

I'm like, no, I wasn't caught robbing a bank guy.

I was, I was young and I had fun at a festival.

Can we all say the same?

We've all had fun at a festival.

I wasn't.

That was his version of the meme that's like, so women can't have hobbies.

Right, exactly.

Exactly.

God forbid a man is young and has fun at a festival.

God forbid.

I don't know.

I love this part of George Santos' life.

I find it like he's in his early 20s, late teens, early 20s.

He's like exploring drag drag for the first time in a way that I think a lot of like young queer people and young queer men can identify with.

Like exploring that, not only that part of your identity and yourself, but of your community, finding community with other queer people around you.

Like, I don't know.

I'm like, what if he had stayed here?

What if he like stayed

a member?

of this like queer community that he was in and like got a normal job and like continued participating in drag as a lot of these people do well into their middle age.

Right.

I don't know.

That's nice.

I wish it could have stayed here.

Yeah.

But then we wouldn't be doing this podcast episode.

So, unfortunately,

things did not stay there.

And I need to put an episode out every Tuesday.

So thank God.

I'm kidding.

I'm kidding.

You can't make jokes anymore without the woke mob canceling it.

But even then, he's lying about things that feel insignificant, but he's just, again, he's always lived in his own reality.

And so he'd like beef with other drag queens, which is just something drag queens do.

So that's fine.

But he would beef with other drag queens.

He would say like, oh, I performed at this club.

And then the other drag queens, the other local queens would be like, no, like, you definitely didn't.

Like, you didn't perform at that club.

I know who performs at that club.

And it wasn't you.

And so even in his drag queen career, he's, he's myth-making.

Yes.

So at this time, people are also, again, people are always kind of wondering, like, where are you getting this money from?

You know, people don't even know if he has a job.

We still don't know like if he had a job during this time.

Right.

But what did happen once is he, in 2008, George Santos walks,

sounds like the beginning of like a terrible joke.

Like George Santos walks into a boutique.

But George Santos walks into this boutique in Brazil and he buys $1,300 worth of like clothes and shoes.

And he pays with them with two checks.

He walks out.

The shop owner is like, feels like something's off.

He's like, you just dropped a lot of money.

And so he calls the numbers on the checks and they don't work.

And

the names that Jory Santos writes on these checks is a guy who was dead.

Oh.

So that's, you know, he.

That's one way to buy a bag.

He had not yet mastered the art of the scam at this point.

He's like, he's kind of getting his toes wet.

The shop owner contacts the police.

And again, this is all in Brazil.

The police end up trying to find him for three years.

And so in 2011, 2011, they finally put in a request for his arrest because they, you know, have the level of detail required to do that.

Yes.

And he is already back in the U.S.

Very catch me if you can.

Yes.

It's also, this is so interesting because in the fake timeline at this point, he was saying that he was leaving the Horace Man prep school because of the financial collapse.

But in reality, like his fake timeline, he was also making himself younger.

Right.

Because he's actually a man, man,

but he's presenting himself as like a schoolboy in 2008, but he's actually like a grown man.

Well, that's a very American thing, too.

We have to lie about being a little younger here.

Okay, this is where like,

because at this point, again, his lies are mostly affecting himself.

Yes.

I feel like the Brazilian shop owner is a turn.

And then this is a real turn.

So he in 2010, so a year before he ends up leaving to go to New York, his mom.

So again, his mom never really has much money.

And she also

didn't die in 9-11.

She also didn't die in 9-11.

No, I think she's now she's dead.

Oh, yeah, she's alive.

At the same time, she was alive.

She's alive at this point.

Yes.

Yes.

Yes.

Oh, yeah.

She was in Brazil during 9-11.

She was like firmly not even in the country.

You know, so I don't even

can't clarify that any further.

His mom in 2010, nine years after 9-11, introduces George Santos to her friend, Adriana.

She has money, but she's kind of down on her luck.

She has money because she inherited a bunch.

Adriana meets George Santos, and the two of them are like pals.

Like she finds him super charming, which everyone throughout George Santos' life, though the details are contested,

everyone agrees that he was always very good at talking to people.

Yes.

He could always talk.

People say that he had the gift of gab.

And so Adriana and George, they meet and they love each other.

And George is like, there's nothing for us in Brazil.

We got to get to the U.S., we got to go to New York.

Anyway, somehow she agrees.

And so Adriana, her daughter, and George move to New York.

They get an apartment on the Upper East Side.

She's paying for everything.

And she's like running out of money.

And at this time, like, so it's 2011, 2012, George Santos gets a job.

He's working as

a customer service representative for

Dish TV, which i just can't think of a more bland job he's making twelve dollars an hour and yet all the appropriate right

he's making twelve dollars an hour but like during his lunch breaks he would go on shopping trips

and his coworkers are like how yeah how adriana ends up so so everything starts devolving from here adriana later goes to the press and says that during this whole time george santos is stealing from her yes and stealing her jewelry stealing her money george his then boyfriend, Adriana and her daughter are living together.

And George is confronted by Adriana and his boyfriend about the stealing and all of that.

He, you know, categorically denies everything.

Adriana ends up having to move back to Brazil in, I believe, 2016.

She and her daughter moved back to Brazil totally broke and they still live there.

She lives off government subsidies.

Yeah.

She never spoke to George Santos again.

And so that's,

you know, it's dark.

It's dark.

It's really dark.

In 2017, George Santos starts working at this company called Linkbridge Investors.

He was making a $55,000 salary.

And then after that, he works at Harbor City Capital.

Yes.

Which he does talk about on the campaign trail, but like in a way that is totally false.

What do you know about Harbor City Capital?

The SEC said that it was like a Ponzi scheme.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It was a Ponzi scheme.

So, you know, that checks out.

In 2021, he starts the DeVolga organization.

We made it.

We made it to the true thing, but it's still not.

So he claims he's managing $80 million in assets for rich people at the Devolga organization.

He said that he was receiving a $750,000 salary.

He used the DeVolger company to lend his own campaign $700,000.

Red flags if you're a campaign finance investigator.

But then, whoops, on the company's financial disclosure, which you have to submit, there were zero clients listed.

Uh-oh.

So that's, you know,

a little weird.

It's just an unfortunate thing when that happens.

You know, now post-George Santos' investigation of every part of his life, it's estimated that the company's annual revenue was $50,000.

And it's now dissolved, I believe.

Oh, yeah, it's now dissolved.

Because they didn't file the correct forms needed to keep this alive.

Correct.

On Wikipedia, it says at the time that Santos filed his 2022 financial disclosure statement, Devolder had, guess how much money Devolder had in its company bank account?

Oh, I think I read this.

Was it like $4?

$4.

Yes.

Yeah, $4.

Does Wendy still do the four for four?

It's just famously difficult to lend your campaign $700,000 if you only have.

Four.

$4.

You're going to run into some things there.

But

yeah, so that catches us up to the rest of the story.

He gets elected to Congress in 2022 on the fake story.

And then he has a, you know, his time in Congress is mostly made up of people discussing his controversy, which becomes available after he was elected.

And then he ends up getting ousted, not for the lies, but for the lies that he told rich donors about where their money was going.

Yes.

And so that's his life.

Yes.

And what do you make of it?

So much.

So much.

One thing that I think about it that I think is so interesting is throughout his life, George's family really loves conservative politicians in Brazil.

And growing up, like family members of George's have said like the TV was always on in their house and it was always playing this news network, a Brazilian news network that leans conservative.

And at one point, he would even have claimed to work there as a journalist, which was never true.

But, like, that was one of the small lies, like small lies that he told people when he lived in Brazil, was that he had worked for this network at one point.

So he has this fascination and adoration

for conservative TV personalities.

And then when he gets into US politics, he loves Trump.

Right.

And I do think that you can see how Trump kind of paved the way for a personality like George Santos to have so much success.

Because even now, even in his like post-Congress career, which is just kind of beginning, he has succeeded in a lot of the same ways that I think Trump has, where the substance of what he's saying, the political substance, if there is even any, doesn't matter as much as if he's funny or not.

And I think, like, I can see why people would get sucked into the George Santos lifestyle.

And I can see why you would be his friend.

And I can even see why people give him money because he's so funny.

Yeah.

And a lot of times, I think for better, for worse, in some cases worse, if you can really tell a joke, if you can really make someone laugh, if you can turn whatever you're doing into something that's comedic, then people will find value in that.

And they might even support you, even if they disagree with the substance of what you're saying.

And this is something that Trump is so good at.

Like Trump can make even his strongest, like staunchest political opponents, I think he can make them laugh.

I I mean, something that I think about a lot when I like, I think about the trajectory of like his tenure in Congress is that he wasn't removed for the lies that he told about his biography.

Right.

And look, I'm not like politically knowledgeable to the extent that I would know if that's possible or not.

But we do know that he was, you know, he was eventually removed because of the campaign finance lies.

Yes.

Which were specific lies.

Yes.

That affected specific people and the feelings and egos of specific people.

Yes.

It's so interesting.

I think that George Santos seemingly did not become a politician because he had any substantive goals for policy in mind.

Why do you think he became a politician?

Such a good question.

I think that he was enamored with the way that he saw politics on TV and on social media.

I kind of think that he became a politician for attention.

It was a way for him to get stature.

It was a way for people to say his name, to know who he was.

And it was a way for him to actually not only exist in these upper class spaces defined by wealth.

He didn't just exist in them because he was a politician.

He had leadership in them.

But his trajectory as a politician, you know, there were really high-ranking Republicans who loved George Santos.

Elise Stefanik is one of them.

She not only helped him get elected, but then in Congress, she would defend him.

And the Republican Party in Congress used him for votes.

Like they were not gunning to get him out of there after all this was discovered because he helped them have a majority and he would also help them pass or have like the number, the desired target of votes for specific policy proposals.

As a Republican in this district, he was useful to them.

He was a vote.

He was a vote.

But substantially, he did not bring anything to the table.

right right that's what i mean like his his whole kind of political career was just marked by his celebrity it was and the you mentioned it earlier but like when you look at policies that he supported or things that he introduced they weren't things that had they wouldn't even have had uh like gen like consequential effects like one of the things that he uh co-sponsored i believe or co-introduced was making the ar-15 style rifle the national gun of America, which

means nothing.

It means nothing.

It's symbolic.

Yeah.

Totally symbolic.

Yeah.

So it's like he existed there as like some sort of culture warrior

more than he was actually a politician.

I was on Capitol Hill.

I almost made a joke.

On January 6th.

No.

I actually, so George Santos was.

Was he?

Yes.

Oh, work.

I mean, that makes sense.

Yeah.

He, I mean, he wasn't in the Capitol.

Like,

as far as I know, he wasn't in the Capitol, but he was at like the Trump Stop the Steel rally.

And he was tweeting, like, this is amazing.

Right, right, right.

I know, I was going to make a joke.

So we're recording this the day or two days after the breaking news of the

Senate Twink scandal.

Yes.

The Senate Twink scandal, which maybe that'll be, maybe that'll be a bonus episode on the Patreon.

I was at the Capitol a couple of months ago and I was speaking with Representative Lauren Underwood.

And she said something to me that really really stuck out, which is, some people do this job because they want to serve their constituents and some people do this job because they want a TV show afterwards.

Which was, I was like very shocked that even like a liberal representative would say something like that about the place that she works.

I mean, it's such a searing indictment of what Congress has become.

George Santos, his lies were exposed and then he was just kind of like, I mean, before the campaign financed him, he was gunning for a second term.

Yeah.

And I very well think that he could have.

oh absolutely part of the reason why i think that regardless of the lies is because i think like he represented what the vast majority of america already thinks about politicians yes we already think that they're all liars yes we already think that they're all you know narcissists on some level and living on a fundamentally different plane of reality than the rest of us.

And so like, what made this all the more different?

And like, I don't know if anything did.

And I think when you look at- Oh my God, maybe they're gonna clip that out of context and be like, Matt's an idiot because he thinks every politician is basically George Santos.

I don't think that, but I do think on some level, he just played into this, like, the caricature of what we already believe.

Yes, that's like in the same way that I think you could say a lot of the same things about Trump.

Like, he presents as what you think a politician is versus what a politician actually is.

And in the same way, like, George Santos, it's the appearance that matters more than the actual substance.

So for George Santos, he was successful because he had this appearance of being wealthy and this appearance of being conservative and having a conservative upbringing and being molded by wealth.

And the truth didn't really matter as much.

Even now, even now, when you look at how people respond to George Santos, when he admits his lies, it gets a laugh from the crowd.

Like when George Santos is like, I actually didn't go to Harvard Business School, but doesn't everybody lie on their resume?

Like people love hearing that.

And I don't think it's because they admire lying.

I just think that for a lot of people, something that seems funny is just, that's like a really dominant emotional reaction to have.

And it's like, if you're going to laugh at something, then that's going to leave a positive impression, even if you don't actually approve of what is going on.

Well, so what do you make then of his fame now?

Because he has, he's more famous than he ever has been.

Yes.

He's making more money than he ever has been.

Yes.

And he's charging initially, I think he was charging under $100 per video.

That is now up to $500.

And Vanity Fair reported last week that he was making $80,000 a day.

It was reported that in one day, or maybe not in a day, but in like, let's say one 48-hour period on cameo, which is roughly two days, he made more in like the first 48 hours than he made in the entire year of being a congressman in office.

Right.

And that $80,000 a day is his own self-reporting.

Yes.

Like he said.

But they saw their receipts.

They got the receipts.

The cameo receipts were provided.

So it was actually fact-checked that he was making that much money.

What's interesting is I read that and I was like, I have no reason to believe George Santos ever again in my life of anything he says.

And I fully believe that he was making $80,000 a day.

And just so my slate can be clean on this issue, if you are listening to this right now, do not buy a cameo from George Santos.

This is not a good person.

This is not a person I haven't, I'm interested in giving money or lending legitimacy to his schemes to get money.

Regardless of what I say or think, there are a lot of people giving him money right now because it's camp.

It is.

And it really goes back to the fact that he was able to trick so many people into giving him money in the first place.

Like going all the way back to his mother's friend who had inherited this money from her parents dying, he convinced her to give him a lot of money.

And he's convincing, I mean, when you go on cameo, you can see like the people who are on cameo, which it's a fascinating platform, like looking at the types of people who are on it and how they make money.

But so when you go to their profile, you can usually see a few examples.

Like they will post a few examples of the videos they've made publicly so that you can see what you're getting.

And some of the videos that George Santos posted publicly, he's addressing the people who bought them.

So you hear a little bit about these people who are buying these cameos from him.

And at least one of them was an actual NYU NBA student because in the cameo, he's like laughing about how he's like, you know, the piece where I pretended to go to college.

Right.

He's like making a cameo for the person I was pretending to be.

Yes.

But it's like, you think to yourself, like, why would this and like, why is this NYU student sending him hundreds of dollars?

But it's the same exact reason why donors gave him money for his Republican race.

And it's the same reason why roommates and friends were giving him money.

Like he, that, that gift of speaking, that gift of talking to people, he still has it.

And it really works.

And it doesn't even matter if you know he's a scammer or not.

People are still going to give him money.

Do you think the fact that he's a scammer is in and of itself something that people admire because having carried out a scam like that is still an accomplishment?

It's still an achievement?

I kind of think so.

And I think that I think that's something that most people people would not admit or even necessarily like realize.

But I do think that to some degree, when you look at the way scammers have become so prominent in our culture in a positive way.

Right, right.

We have like the Anna Delvey.

Yes.

I mean, we have entire podcasts devoted to entire TV shows dedicated to like scammers.

Like what, what, what do you make of that?

I think that when we see those sorts of like TV shows, when we hear about what these people do, we recognize that part of the scam, it's like they are doing something.

Like they're not just like sitting there and getting money.

When you think of a person who's already rich, making hundreds of thousands of dollars off of interest on the money that they already have, there's nothing impressive about that.

There's nothing entertaining about that.

They're not working for anything.

When you hear a story of someone successfully scamming thousands or millions of dollars, that's interesting because they did something to make that money.

It wasn't legal.

It wasn't ethical.

It wasn't moral.

But I think that in the same way that we have this sort of like American myth-making that we value, we also absolutely value the efforts of these scammers because we think it's interesting, but we also clearly recognize it as they are working.

Because I mean, every day.

The people who are already billionaires, every day, they make more money than most of us will ever see in our lives just off of interest, just off of the money sitting in there.

They're not doing anything for it.

They're not working for it but we recognize that scammers are working there's like so much media like there's that movie that came out with aubrey plaza where she yes you know the one

and like watching that movie it's like you're watching her become a criminal and emily the criminal emily the criminal yes as you watch emily pursue being a criminal as her new career, you see that she is working hard.

You see the risks that she's taking.

You see the work that she's undergoing.

And you feel like you're kind of rooting for her in a lot of ways.

Like you're rooting for her to scam this successfully because you know that she's motivated by very human and very universal sentiments.

Like she needs money, you recognize that.

And so, in a lot of ways, I think looking at American culture right now, it's almost like scamming has been valorized more so than what we look at as less impressive, the sort of passive income that is legal, but that is to us, I think, less aspirational than than even scamming itself.

Right.

I think in some way we all aspire to, I don't know, achieving a life for ourselves that can exist, at least in the United States, that can exist independently of like the soul-crushing

structure of capitalism

that keeps us chained and watching people kind of leap forward and try, even if, you know,

I have no interest in propping, you know, these specific people up, you know, people like George Santos who have hurt people in the process.

Yes.

Who have hurt a lot of people.

And he had hurt a lot of people, even if he hadn't become a far-right-wing politician.

Yes.

Which, by the way, do you think he actually has far-right beliefs?

I do.

But I think that they are,

it's so interesting because it's like, when you look at his real biography, his parents were immigrants.

His mother worked, lived, and died as a very low-class individual whose work and labor was being exploited by systems outside of her control.

And you would think that that would result in somebody having progressive beliefs, like championing people like his own mother.

But what you actually see in reality, like when you really look at how people's political beliefs are shaped, I think that more often than not, people would rather see themselves aspirationally.

Like somebody who grew up in this position would more likely vote for perhaps Donald Trump because they aspire to be him.

And I think that is really a lot of like the motivating psychology behind George Santos and people who continue to give him money is it's this aspirational culture.

And it has become aspirational even as we recognize that they're not telling the truth, that they are criminals, that they are scamming.

There's still that sense of aspirational nature to it.

And I think, you know, what we had said earlier about how George Santos is like the idea of a corrupt politician.

Like he's what you imagine politicians already are.

He's the cartoon version.

He's the cartoon version.

And I think in a lot of ways, these scammers who we've like kind of held up as a society, it's like people already think that they, people already know that our current environment, economically, socially, politically is corrupt.

So if everything is already corrupt, if we already are living in this corrupt system, then why wouldn't you appreciate and aspire to be this sort of scammer?

It's like a symptom of greater disillusionment in all of these institutions that has resulted in somebody like George Santos being the type of person who you would send $500 to.

Instead of just being like, oh, well, this person is like a criminal.

They should go to jail.

But I also think that you can hold these beliefs at the same time.

There's in the same breath as having this like greater disillusionment with the system, I also think that a lot of people trust authority figures to do do what needs to be done or what's right in the case of George Santos.

So it's almost like their decisions as a consumer don't really matter.

Like it's like, well, why wouldn't I get a cameo from George Santos?

Like, I'm not the ethics committee.

Right.

It's not our job to punish him.

But it is, at the end of the day, it is truly like mind-boggling that somebody would pay him hundreds of dollars.

Yeah.

And again, like, please don't.

Yeah.

I hope you don't.

I hope you don't.

But I also feel the same way about when people buy a new Jeffree Star palette.

Okay.

You know what?

So Pat and I were on the phone before we started recording this, and she made a claim to me that I found fascinating, which I now want you to explore,

which is that you see virtually no difference between George Santos and Jeffree Star.

Yes.

And it brings me no pleasure to admit that this is like at least the second time that Jeffree Star has come up on my podcast in episodes that have essentially nothing to do with it.

That makes sense.

I think that the comparison first started to come to me when I was really looking at the history of George Santos's lives.

And the lies that he told included things like pretending he was richer than he actually was, making up claims about his mother, like his by a lot, like literally, in essence, faking his own mother's death.

And for

the narrative.

Yeah, for the narrative.

And I was like, who does this behavior remind me of?

The first person that comes to mind is Jeffree Star.

And he's not the only influencer who does this, but he is one of the influencers who I think has done this in some of the most egregious ways possible.

Okay, in what way?

Because I will tell you, like, my understanding of Jeffree Star, you know, I have a deeper understanding of Jeffree Star than I would like to publicly admit in this moment.

But Jeffree Star is a beauty guru who like moved from LA to Wisconsin and he loves to like show off his wealth in really extravagant ways yes he used to be like a myspace musician yeah kind of and now is like fabulously wealthy selling makeup yeah at one point in the in at one point in myspace's history i think he was like the most friended person okay which would be equivalent to like the most followed person on tick tock today and as social media networks have risen and fallen and myspace is dead and tick tock is new jeffree star has always managed to maintain influencer status, which is no small feat.

He's one of the few people, I think, maybe one of the only people who was both MySpace famous and TikTok famous.

Right.

Yeah.

Like, it's kind of staggering.

And one way that he has done this is through constant myth-making,

most of which is not true.

So, like, for example, with the George Santos, My Mom Died in 9-11 claims, it made me think of how for years online, Jeffree Star would, like, show show pictures of his aunt and claim that it was his mother.

And then in like 2018, maybe roughly, he admitted that that was not his mom and that he was actually like ashamed of his family.

And so he just lied to everyone and pretended that his aunt was his mom for years.

And people, I think, just kind of were like, okay, and moved on.

You look at his whole life laid out.

You're like, that was a weird thing to do.

Right, but that's, I mean, that's what I was saying about like the quote unquote significant lies versus the seemingly insignificant lies is that there are no insignificant lies.

They're all of equal

importance because they are all about the creation

of an entire story

of a person that may or may not be you.

Yes.

And I think similarly to George Santos, I mean, they're both queer men who have at times, I think, lied for survival in the sense that when Jeffree Star was like getting his start, I think that he really did face a lot of discrimination and bigotry in his real life for being gender non-conforming, for being queer, for being gay.

And I think that lying became sort of a defense mechanism for him.

And then later in life, it became something that was very profitable for him.

But he lied.

Which George Santa, I mean, that's that is the same.

All right.

I'm understanding the parallel.

And no matter what, even though it's been years and years since Jeffree Star has started to admit and like actually fact check himself and be like, yes, I did lie about XYZ.

Yes, this was not true.

And he's done this in various capacities.

Despite all of that, his fandom still remains strong and people are still willing to give him money.

And it makes you ask, why?

And then you look at his fans, and a lot of them have this very aspirational relationship with Jeffree where they admire him for this behavior.

Why do they admire him?

Because it made him money.

And it's like, if the ends for a lot of people justify the means, but both Jeffrey Santa, Jeffree Santos,

both Jeffree Star and George Santos, with George Santos, we know for sure.

With Jeffree, it could go either way.

It's speculative, but both of them appear to have gone to great lengths to create the appearance of wealth.

And it's unclear how much wealth they actually have.

Like with Jeffree, I don't really know because there is no ethics committee for YouTubers.

So we're never probably.

There really should be.

there should be but if george santos had just become a youtuber

then it's unclear if any of these lies would ever catch up to him and now he can be a youtuber and get away with it all right

right

i think i think jeffree star and george santos would make a fantastic couple i think we're going to see them on a tick tock that's my 2024 prediction oh yeah on tick tock live they're going to be battling oh totally because jeffree is like every day is like one of the top tick tock live stream battlers.

He like has found a new medium to succeed in.

Yeah, again.

Along with George Santos, there has been a recent trend over the past few years of celebrity figures literally going to jail, but retaining their reputation and status in celebrity.

So we have Jen Shaw being, I think, one of the more recent examples.

Real housewife.

Real housewife, Jen Shaw, who like the things that Jen Shaw did were horrible.

Didn't she like scam old people out of money or something?

She defrauded the elderly.

It doesn't get much worse than this.

When I read about what Jen Shaw did, and then I look at the Bravo fans who still love her, I'm just like, what are we doing?

But at the same time, I understand the camp value.

Well, all the real housewives.

Because ultimately, like someone's makeup is good.

But this is, this is my question, right?

It's like, there are a lot of people online, even with me making this episode, there are people who will message me saying that I'm like, you know, laundering his image or

making light of the actual truly very bad things that he did.

And like, all of these people were talking about like Jeffree Star in his own way, Jen Shaw, Anna Delvey, George Santos, like they have all done bad things, they've all hurt people.

And then they become these kind of, not Jeffree Star.

Jeffree Star will never be a camp icon.

But the rest of them, like, there's this camp element where we like, they become icons, right?

People dress as Anna Delvey for Halloween.

Like, is that a bad thing?

Is it an indict?

Is it an indictment of like us as consumers of these stories?

Can people do whatever they want?

as long as they are funny enough to get away with it.

Right.

That's one of the big questions.

And I think that it's something that you have to look at like a very, like, it's up to us as consumers and people who a lot of times are making these people money like we don't like to think of I think a lot of times especially with internet culture people don't like to think of themselves as the ones who are deserve to be held accountable but as like a viewer as a listener as somebody who is putting on the Anadelve costume, as someone who is paying for the cameo.

It's like you are the building blocks of this person's success.

So it is sort of like an introspective, like turn it in on yourself question.

It's also a question of institutional systemic failure.

Because in theory, it's not anyone's fault that George Santos became a congressperson.

It's the United States government's fault for enabling this person to become a U.S.

Congressperson.

Right, for desecrating what it means to be a politician to the point where

he can.

And he wasn't the first.

Like, I think Trump, in a lot of ways, set the stage for George Santos and more, like, more to come.

Is there a moral responsibility on us to forcibly fade George Santos into obscurity?

Or are we allowed to erect a statue of him?

Because that was what I was going to do after we stopped.

I think one thing that gets lost a lot is sort of the distinction between like talking about someone or criticizing someone and then like platforming someone or supporting them.

And it's it's hard because through social media, they become one and the same.

Like, even if you go to a YouTube video and leave a comment expressing your displeasure with what's being said, in a lot of ways, that's a useful metric for the YouTuber.

Right.

Because you're still watching, you're still commenting.

Like, a click is a click, a view is a view.

It doesn't matter if it was positive or negative.

And so, in that kind of environment, it's easier to sort of shirk the responsibility and just be like, well, someone, if I don't pay for a

George Santos cameo, someone else is going to.

I think there's an element of personal responsibility, but I also think that like much, in almost every case, personal responsibility is used to eclipse broader systemic failures.

And I think that the George Santos story includes a lot of that as well.

Because ultimately, if you get scammed, for most people, there is no recourse.

For most people, there is no recourse for being scammed.

And so that's like kind of one of the bigger questions is like, well, how did he get away with all of this?

George Santos was the sixth serving representative to ever be removed, right?

He was the sixth to ever be removed in the middle of his term.

Yes.

Firstly removed.

From the House of Representatives.

And yet, when he was removed,

it's again, he has, he has the myth of himself.

He has the ongoing kind of like villain story of himself as the main character, which I think he is.

Yeah.

And there are these pictures of him walking down the Capitol steps in this like big overcoat that's he's not wearing, but it's draped just around his shoulders.

And he, you know, one of the reporters as George Santos was walking out was like,

what message do you send to the rest of your, or not your constituents, your colleagues, your fellow congresspeople?

And he was like, to hell with them.

And, you know, he aspired to political office.

I don't even know that that's what he was aspiring to, or maybe political office was just a symbol for him.

Was a symbol for him and a step to what he continues to aspire to through cameo and all these these other sorts of like, you know, celebrity image building things.

But like, he got kicked out of Congress.

Historically, he got kicked out of Congress.

And still, do you think he got what he wanted?

Yes.

I do think he got what he wanted, which was to be known.

I think that when it goes back to the very beginning, like something we said at the very, very beginning of this podcast was a lot of children lie.

And it's like, well, why do children lie?

A lot of times, to put on my child psychologist cap, which I don't actually have qualifications for, children a lot of times lie for attention because as a child, you do not have autonomy.

You are, as a child, you are generally only able to do things within the realm of what your parents or guardians allow you to do.

And so a lot of times children lie just to get attention, not because they're bad people or they want to hurt you, but they have a very human need for attention.

And what I see in George Santos is I see somebody who his desire for attention does not seem like it will ever be capped.

I don't think he'll ever reach a point where he's like, I'm finally satiated with the attention that I have.

Same with Jeffree Star or many of these influencers.

They never go away.

If what they wanted was, you know, respect or if what they wanted was a certain amount of money or a certain follower count, then eventually they would go away, but they never do.

They remain on the internet because they want that valve of just getting attention whether it's positive or negative yeah george santos said i am the embodiment of the american dream do you think he is in some ways i think he is yeah i think he totally is yeah and i think george santos is as truthful or as much of a lie as the american dream allows absolutely because when it when you boil down like what the general consensus of what the american dream is when you boil that down it's the idea that if you work hard then you can be successful But I think we all know

that that's not true.

We know that that's not true.

We know that the people who work the hardest are often never recognized for their work.

You could even say that about George Santos, his mother.

She worked hard,

really hard.

And all she has to show for it is dying in 9-11.

Oh, God, that's the end.

I think that's the end.

I'm sorry.

Kat, thank you so much for being here today.

Where,

my first friend of the show, friend in real life and friend of the show.

Where can people support your work?

Where can people find you?

You can find me.

I'm still on Twitter.

I refuse to call it X.

I'm still on Twitter, but it is a dying platform.

So you can also find me on Instagram, TikTok, and then I'm also on Threads and blue sky.

And you report on NBC News.

And my job.

My job.

Whoa.

And I report for NBC News.

Pratt, thank you so much for being here.

Thank you, the listener, for making it this far.

I hope that

you...

I usually say I hope that you learned something.

I don't even know what there is to take away.

I hope you had a good time.

I hope you had a good time.

You can't, we can, we can't always be morally righteous educators on this podcast.

I just hope you had a good fucking time.

And yeah, if you like the show and you want to support it, you can, I don't know, give us a rating or share it with your friend.

Or just don't do any of the above.

I'm glad that you were here and keep telling the truth or, you know, or don't.

See which one gets you further.

Until next time, stay fruity.