907 - Big Balls feat. Kath Krueger & Jeff Stein (2/10/25)

All I wanna be is ill jumbo.

All I wanna be is ill jumbo.

We

don't tell resources.

All I'm gonna

That's very telling to me that I haven't seen anyone post any clip of that interview.

It was like the Jon Stewart Hakeem Jeffries interview where like out of an hour plus long interview, like the clip that was like sort of edited to highlight was Hakeem Jeffries going, saying of Elon Musk and Doge, he was like, it's definitely a scheme.

Like literally, like if you said that on public broadcasting, you would not get dinged for making making political speech.

You would not be under the fairness doctrine.

It's barely speech.

That's the same thing as

when Katy Perry was in Brazil and they had to zoom in on the crowd and people were like, if you've got to zoom in on a crowd in Brazil, you're really,

you're in dire straits.

Yeah, if you're doing a concert in Brazil and there's anything less than 400,000 people in attendance, people are just ants.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

We're rolling.

Okay.

We're rolling.

Okay.

It's Monday, February 10th.

It's Chopo Trap House.

Welcome back, everybody.

Happy day after the Super Bowl.

Sadly, there will be no more football for the next seven months.

We are now living in the time of the girlfriends.

So joining Felix and I on today's show is the wonderful Catherine Krieger, my favorite guest on the show.

Catherine, welcome back.

Hello.

Thank you for having me.

You know, this is kind of fortuitous.

I was the first guy to break this news.

This is a big thing in girlfriend news.

Taylor Swift and Travis Kelsey, they will be breaking up.

They had a massive blowout because Taylor Swift made Travis Kelsey famously stop using the word Finna.

And he's convinced that

they would have won if he was still saying Finna and all the stuff he used to say.

I fully believe that he says the soft A in the locker room, though

no she she took all that stuff away from him well and you saw the you saw the results yeah you saw the results if you watched the game one of the one of the most lopsided she did however she did however uh hook him up with a hair transplant though i'm pretty convinced yeah he's rocking the will miniker these days

yeah yeah

his hair is flowing yeah

i saw the like uh an outfit that like uh sean penn would have worn in carlito's way oh my god

the fit that he showed up to the game in.

Think about losing horribly and putting that back on.

It reminded me of

the leather trench coat that Ziggy gets in season two of The Wire after doing their Coke deal.

And they're like, now don't spend any money.

And then he shows up with a leather trench coat.

And I believe Method Man's character says of it, shit, even a black man couldn't style that shit.

But

obviously,

the big game was sort sort of a dud, but like, as we do, sort of, I guess, on an annual tradition on the show, I do want to talk about the spectacle of the Super Bowl.

It's like sort of like the defining sort of event on the calendar year that sort of focuses the attention of America through both athletic competition, but more importantly, through advertising, that I think

can be used as sort of augury to determine perhaps where we're headed, where we're going.

We all remember a couple years ago, it was the crypto Super Bowl.

Most of those companies are either dead or in prison right now.

But Catherine and I, we watched the game together and

made note of the don't tell people our business.

And we made note.

Okay, well, so I'm giving a little, just a keyhole glimpse.

That's a shout out to the woman in Pakistan, Felix.

Is that the story you followed, Felix?

Well, which?

Oh, that like American black woman who just like, she like, She went to Pakistan, flew to Pakistan, like to meet this guy she met online.

And it turned out that he was like a teenager and his family and it and his family was just like oh absolutely not um and then she was just hanging out in pakistan being like and like she became kind of a cause celeb like you know people were like constantly interviewing her and being like you know you're a local cause like let her marry this 15 year old no the cause the cause is just like her hanging out there and being like really annoying like she was like people would be like are you ever going back to you got to check this out people would be like are you ever going back to america and she'd be like uh It's private, but no, I'm from Pakistan now.

Yeah, it's really good.

I can't believe I haven't heard of this.

Yeah, this is really up your alley.

Incredibly annoying woman.

I know she's back now.

I know a lot of Pakistanis too.

You know, I try to keep abreast of Pakistani culture.

I've never heard of it.

What's her name?

Onabi O N.

Just Google Woman in Pakistan.

Okay.

She's the only only one, so this is a big deal, I assume.

Oh, I forgot.

She also made material demands of the Pakistani government.

She was just like, I demand $2,000 a month.

Like, I'm just, they're like, we're going to send you back.

She was like, no, I'm from Pakistan now.

It's none of your business.

But I do demand, I demand like $2,000 a month to make Pakistan a better place.

I love that.

Imran Khan would have sorted this situation out

in like a day.

Oh, her name is Onesia, Onesia Robinson, and she was on her way back to New York three days ago.

Show her on the show.

Anyway, that's sad.

Pakistan never

acknowledged what she did for them.

Yeah, she was trying to make it better.

What if that was like the last USAID program?

They were like, just let us do this.

I know it sounds weird, but it's going to help somehow.

Returning to the big game spectacle, though.

Sorry, Sorry for the fire for letting people in our business out of the world.

Our business, sorry.

We did watch the game last night.

And I guess it was hard to discern.

I don't think there was a particular flavor or style of commercial this year outside of just bad and exhausted.

But Catherine, if you had to diagnose American culture based on what we saw at the Super Bowl last night,

how would you describe it?

Deeply, profoundly ill.

Actually, I observed this.

There's one through line for the commercials, which is body horror.

Yes.

There was so much body horror.

You had to see the commercial twice where guys' heads looked like foreskins wearing like cowboy hats.

Yeah, like their head was like their skull was like

their skull was like a cowboy hat, but covered in flesh or something.

Yeah, it was very crimes of the future.

Where

people's tongues were like dancing out of their mouths.

We had not only Eugene Levy's eyebrows flying away, but also like mustaches from

James Hardin and like in a Pringles commercial.

Like body horror is in.

That was the through line that I observed.

And we're not okay.

These rotting museums of flesh will soon abandon us, but not before being mutated horribly in some way.

I think that's.

Not before consuming nerds rope.

Going through the, like, I mean, there was really, there was really nothing of note.

And I guess like the outside of body horror, the only other thing, the only other through line I could take was just like celebrities.

Like, it's just, I feel like celebrities are now just robbing work from commercial actors.

Like, we used to be like, that was a job.

You were an actor in commercials, but now it's just like Harrison Ford pitching you a Jeep.

Hard to compete with that.

Yeah, and they were also all like short films.

Like, they've all, I, you know, I don't know if they were like actually longer than 30 seconds, but they all felt like the Harrison Ford one kind of felt like Yellowstone.

And there was just like, you know, like really big name actors.

I, what I was on like watch for was kind of like, cause like ad departments spend, I'm sure, all fucking year or even like buy it, like two year cycles planning these, you know, huge Super Bowl campaign rollouts.

So I was on guard for like, was your ad campaign too far planned along or had you already spent too much that you couldn't pull the plug after Donald Trump was elected?

So like, you know, ads that were still woke in spite of themselves.

And I think like we, there were like a few of those.

The usual like Dove, women should play sports.

And there was the Nike one.

But wokeness, wokeness is basically dead, I think, in commercials.

As is AI.

I was expecting there to be AI commercials, but there were only a few.

And interestingly enough, like they all had to have an angle about like AI is actually for like a kid with cancer,

not for taking your jobs.

They were all like really weirdly humanitarian angles on AI.

The wokeness in commercials seems to be on the wing, but we have yet to round the corner of having openly racist nationalism in commercials, but who knows?

Give it another year.

I say, save for, save for the Tom Brady Snoop Doggs.

Did you see anything?

I saw that.

Snoop Dogg is like, has he ever turned anything down?

I put this out as a challenge to myself.

I think that

with only about a week's worth of work, I could get Snoop Dogg to do an identical commercial but for Ansurala.

Like, if you work for Ansurala's ad buyer department, get in contact with me because I think I can make this happen.

Also, like Tom Brady,

one of the most horrifying looking people.

He looks terrible.

He looks like a skull.

Yeah,

when Catherine and I were watching the broadcast, I was like, I will, I will, Mr.

Brady, I'm not a fan of yours, but I will donate some of my buckle fat to put back in your face because he's looking like the guy from the Phantom Painfield.

you know skullface yeah he looks like skullface when tom brady

looks like that is and is on tv and he's like we need you need to be nice to jewish people that in the mind of like the the you know idahoan someone who's never met a a jew he sees this and they're like oh my god was he did the jew did the jews do that to him he was mean to them and they sucked all the life out of his face these guys are really scary i did kill them though that like they did not foreground that it was about anti-Semitism.

It was just kind of like

and then like right at the end, they like slid in.

Like, it was not one of those very annoying billboards that says to like jubelong.com or something.

It was kind of lo-fi.

It was like, it was like Tom Brady and Soup Dog, and they were like, I hate you because we from different neighborhoods.

I hate you because you look different.

I hate you because I don't understand you.

I hate you because people I know hate you.

I hate you because I think you hate me.

Cause I need someone to blame.

Cause you talk different.

Cause you act different.

Cause you're just different.

I I hate you because you look different.

I hate you because you worship different.

I hate you because hating's fun sometimes.

Yeah.

And then they're like, and then at the end, they're like, man, I hate that we have to do a commercial about this.

And it was like, it was so vague and like non-specific.

Yeah, those are the two types of like Israeli lobby funded like anti-Semitism ads.

It's either like

so plotting and literal where it's like, would you have taken a selfie with Anne Frank?

And that's like,

you know the jew belong style no no i tried to turn the location off before yeah but then the other

rappers get killed all the time now you know your girl your girl's student no selfie um but the the other style is like this extremely vague almost like if you asked like a space alien to make an anti-racism ad during summer of 2020 where it's just like there are so many people on earth don't be someone who hates them before you meet them.

And then at the very end, it's like sponsored by the Removing African Immigrants to Israel's uterus foundation.

So, yeah, just

a few other ads of note.

The one ad I thought was kind of funny was the one with Willem Dafoe and Catherine O'Hara, where they're like sort of pickleball hustlers who hustle people for Michelob Ultra.

That was the only commercial that got a chuckle out of me because, you know, Willem Defoe.

And it was like, at least it had a concept.

Like, I really think

they're using AI to write a lot of these ads now.

I think AI commercials have gone away because people hate it, but they're using AI technology because there were many commercials that had a premise, but no follow-through or punchline.

It was like,

there was one where aliens wanted some guys' Doritos, and that was it.

And then the punchline of the commercial was a guy just sitting next to an alien going, hey, cool.

Okay,

I have a very important data point to go back to body horror just for one minute.

I'm forgetting the biggest offender of all, which was the Mountain Dew commercial with Seal as a Seal.

Uh, Felix, I want to give you three guesses who directed that commercial.

Oh, uh, Taika Watiti.

Yeah, all right, all right,

which is absolutely insane.

Um, like, I was like, is this offensive somehow?

It was just really, yeah, really off-putting.

How, like, um,

is there any way to like get rid of him?

I can't stand that guy.

He's literally the most,

you know, he's very lucky that Elon Musk

exists because he would be like the most annoying public figure by far.

He's not as Elon Musk's energy, if you think about it.

Like he is kind of like an epic sauce guy for guys who like hate Elon Musk.

Yeah, that's

a good way.

Yeah, that's a very good way of putting it.

Yeah, they are.

Yeah, they're mere images of one another.

Yeah, the yin and the yang.

Chris, you said, like, did we touch on the commercial that you, that you, that you saw one of a couple of things?

There was one moment that stood out to me.

Uh, and I, at the whole party I was at, I don't think anybody else noticed this, and I kept describing to people.

So maybe I hallucinated it, but Fox News ran an ad for Fox News.

They ran three.

The tagline for all of them is Fox News for all of America.

And the conceit of these were kind of like black and white images or footage of current events with one item highlighted in color.

And the thing thing that sort of stood out to me,

yes.

And the thing that stood out to me was that the Fox News for all of America,

the only flag that was colorized in this photo was the flag of Israel.

Yep.

I caught that immediately, Chris.

Yes.

And that there was also a Fox News commercial with Brett Baer and Sean Hannity.

And they're in their makeup chairs and they're like, it's tougher than ever to make a decision this year.

And they're sort of like, you think they're talking about politics.

And then they take off like the little barber smock or whatever for their pancake makeup.

And Brett Bear is in an Eagles jersey.

And Sean Hennity is in a Chiefs jersey.

Sean Hennity is a long island.

He's a fucking Irish guy from Long Island.

The fact that he's running for the fucking Chiefs is just about the weakest shit I've ever seen.

I mean, it's so is Donald Trump.

It makes sense.

You know, like, it's just like, you know, like for New York people.

It's for New York people who want to be racist and want to win.

It used to be the Giants and the Jets.

We had two options for that, but not anymore.

Thanks Thanks to Woke.

Now, an ad that I was reading about this morning, but that I did not actually experience because I guess I wasn't in the correct market, was Kanye West's ad that featured him in a dentist's chair directing people to his website, which is now shuttered save for the sale of a t-shirt that just a swastika.

You know, I know Kanye

had a, I'll say he had a big week this week, but you know what?

Like the thing about it is like every time he comes out with something even more offensive and ludicrous people care even less i think he's just mad that kendrick lamar is getting all the fucking like attention and like he can't make a good album anymore and i think this is just like it's it's past desperate for him at this point this is the pattern with insane guys though like an insane guy only has so many tricks up his sleeve and he's already done half of those tricks

like you know the i figured it out all you need is love like you know

guys haven't been saying that since the dawn of time uh the you know hitler stuff and then it's like you know you just rewind you're playing the heads um

it would be such a better world if we went back to the thing we did where we would capture these guys with butterfly nets send them to the funny farm and you know just be like no you know one flew over the cuckoo's nest stuff i would not authorize uh lobotomies of anyone unless they kept doing this then i wouldn't i mean what is being addicted to nitrous other than a self-elected lobotomy but yeah

yeah

but um you know when we did that to insane guys they invented game theory like john nash computers computer former they did no pedophilia was probably invented by sane people unfortunately yeah you're right yeah yeah people who run governments yeah you know philosophers Yeah.

I, you know, there's a lot I like to put on the insane, but I'm not going to blame them for that one.

But I, yeah, no, he is, he is a real case study in that, in the failure of the post-butterfly net world.

I just, I was thinking back to your tweet from years ago, Felix, where it was like Kanye reporting for the irony drill instructor.

And then he's...

I love Hitler and I miss my family.

Nope.

Take a lap.

Back to the drawing board, kid.

I suppose we talk about the other big spectacle from last night, the halftime show.

Does anyone have any thoughts on the halftime show?

I thought it was.

I mean, like, I'm loving it.

I mean, I love the culture war reactions the day after the halftime show, which are, which are, let's be honest, the halftime shows are never good, but the culture war reactions to them are great.

And this year, it's sort of like, even, it's sort of like, there's several different,

it's not like evenly split, there are different like categories to it.

On the one hand, it's like people who are like, that was the most revolutionary moment.

Sort of like,

you know, like this subversive takedown of America and everything.

And I will say, I give a lot of props to the guy who was in the crowd or like in one of the, among the dancers who unfurled the flag of Palestine in the Sudan before putting the rest of the people.

That didn't make the

national broadcast.

Well, you know, like a lot of

overheated praise for Kendrick Lamar here.

But then on the other side, the right-wing culture war reactions to it break down into two very weird, sort of like

contrasting reactions.

One is the very standard predictable one, which is like calling it a DEI halftime show, which is, I mean, the guy had the biggest song of the year, just won five Grammys last week, and has had like, I mean, whether you're a fan of his or not, the idea that they were like, oh, can we get some unqualified minority to do the halftime show?

Yeah, is a bit, is a bit rich.

I've really enjoyed yeah the the polarization reaction where on one side you have people going like you don't understand what he did to trump by doing all that yeah and then like people would be like what was it what did he do and they would and people would go you don't know

like i was adjo yeah i was legitimately trying to figure out what the statement there was and no one would tell me but then on the other side i've enjoyed all the conservatives who are like you know, Grand Funk Railroad's still touring.

Why don't we have them instead of this

hip-hop crap?

I saw one tweet that hand to God said at least his pants were up to his waist.

I saw you retweeted someone last night who said, like, why couldn't we just have a marching band?

There's been so many good reactions for that from that.

There was a marching band at the beginning.

Yeah, I've been farming cat turds replies for replies like that,

where it's like, with like

68-year-olds who are like,

you know, Captain Freakout would be a great choice.

Everyone loves him.

Like these acts from literally the Carter administration.

I saw Jack Paseybeck

being like, here's a real halftime performance.

And it was when Creed played a Cowboys series.

It wasn't even the Super Bowl.

And someone was like,

what's so good about this?

And then Jack's reply was, there's literally a man flying.

And, like, I remember I'm watching this clip, and it's like this ballist, like, like, sort of like doing that cirque du Soleil thing where they're sort of like spinning around on large pieces of flowing fabric or something.

It was, yeah, well, when he saw that, that supercharged the Polish aviation program

that shocked him.

But they don't have wire foo in Poland yet, maybe in a thousand years.

Yeah, uh,

but the other, the other interesting reaction is the number of people who sort of took

the red, white, and blue color motif of Kendrick's halftime performance to be like, this is the first non-satanic halftime show we've had in years.

Thank you, Kendrick.

And we had Samuel L.

Jackson as Uncle Sam.

Finally, they're showing love and respect for America.

But then I saw some interesting...

To me is even more baby brain.

Like, it clearly was intended to be subversive.

Like, Uncle Sam is black and all this red, white, and blue.

I just, you know, I don't want to make anyone too mad.

It just doesn't, it doesn't matter.

It's in the, I just thought, I also just thought it was pretty lo-fi, you know, and like, I really wish we could just fully called,

but, you know, it's really good family fun.

That kind of like, you know, brought me back to probably the halftime show that most shaped my childhood.

And, you know, it's dishonest even to compare these, but like.

uh the justin timberlake janet jackson one oh right yeah um that that carved grooves in my brain you know the family memories that will be formed around everyone just saying A minor, the whole family.

I love what that says about America.

I mean, like, Kendrick Lamar is obviously like a billion times better as a rapper than Childish Gambino.

But the people talking about like this specific halftime show, like it was just.

the most incredibly socially significant piece of art they've ever seen.

It reminded me of when you would be arrested if you said you didn't like the This Is America.

Yes, yes.

It's the same idea.

Game idea.

And that's, A lot is still on the books, so watch yourself.

My favorite reaction, though, was

this from, this is a Twitter account, Texas MAGA Dad.

And he was a fan of Kendrick, and he writes here, I actually was not entertained.

However, my wife tells me the songs were a direct attack on Drake and the cabal.

So maybe we white folks don't just like rap.

we just don't like rap and hip-hop.

I sure didn't like the music, but if this truly was a diss track against the cabal, I'm all for that.

These people are unreachable.

Anti-Cabal diss track.

I mean, what's wrong with it?

Like, you already have Forgioto Blow, and he's the best rapper in the world.

Why do you need more rappers?

Another good one was from Benny Johnson, who was not a fan of the halftime show.

And he says, hey, NFL.

Hey, NFL.

Well, I mean, he wanted Lady Gaga.

He wanted Lady Gaga or Charlie XX or something like that.

She is back.

Yeah.

But

I bet Benny's more excited about that than just about anyone.

But he says, here, hey, NFL, Trump won.

We no longer let talentless, mumbling, pagan, satanic cultists do halftime shows and pretend like people like it.

Thanks, everyone.

And like, this to me is the perfect thing.

It's so cold.

It's the eternal dissatisfaction of the MAGA mindset where it's just like, you've just

won the election.

You know, like, it's just you've got to be like, you're remaking the world in your image.

Yeah, like, I mean, we're, we, we'll talk to Justine in a second about what they're up to, but like, could you just like, like, the fact that the Super Bowl halftime show wasn't to your liking, you're like, this is, I thought, memo to the NFL, it's illegal to have a bad halftime show now.

Yeah, I mean, there was never going to be anything that, like, Benny Johnson specifically liked unless it was, like, you know, starring Liza Minelli, which maybe, maybe in the second year of Trump, we'll have that.

But, yeah, no, it was very revealing.

I mean, Satan.

He was like, Patty LuPone is still around.

She could belt out a Broadway standard so that everyone would love.

Yeah.

I'm just thinking Bo is afraid starring Benny Johnson.

Benny is afraid.

I mean, with Benny Johnson, it literally just is like depression.

It just is like being in a loveless marriage where like fucking your wife is this awful chore, like cleaning the gutters

but um

like they they're supposedly at their lifes long uh their their lifeselong dream of obliterating the administrative state roe v.

wade is gone but i mean to rework a famous quote they don't want cultural power they just want to endlessly critique culture yes yes that's that's exactly it and like at the end of the day like you just won the election you just won the election.

Like, you know, 40 years ago, like, many people thought that was impossible.

Donald Trump, like I said, dominant political figure of our era.

They're changing our federal government soup to nuts right now to fit their preferences.

But the thing is, for the right wing, for conservatives specifically, what you see on TV is power.

And if what you see on TV displeases you, then you are being oppressed.

That is oppression to them.

It's having a Super Bowl halftime show that's not Morgan Wallen or something like that.

You know, like to have a single moment on TV that doesn't cater entirely to your specific tastes and prejudices is intolerable to them.

It's sad.

On some level, it's sad.

It'd be nice to feel like a winner once in a while.

They're going to love the next four years.

Cause they don't really have anything to offer up to replace this.

And again,

people don't really want it anyway.

I guess, yeah.

I mean,

that is sort of an interesting dichotomy, though.

The split between the sort of cat-turred, more traditional Republicans, that is, like, guys who would be Republican no matter if Trump had happened or not, yeah, versus the younger, either women who are married to gay guys or the gay guys who are married to the women themselves and run like deep tallow multi-level marketing schemes.

Yeah.

Yeah.

The, the, the older, more traditional Republicans are saying, well, this sucks because it isn't, you know, um, Dr.

Underage and the freak up for baby.

You know, I think, favorite shit.

Yeah.

Yeah.

My, yeah,

you know, hey, what the fuck?

You know,

Fox Butterfield.

Is that a guy, Fox Butterfield?

Oh, no, that's a that's a journalist.

I'm thinking of Paul Butterfield.

That was a different.

That guy is the 70s musician.

Paul Butterfield's still alive, isn't he?

They're at least like suggesting something that they like,

even though they're also miserable.

But the younger Trump people, there's no even like,

there's no like calling back to an idealized past, even.

It's just, this all fucking sucks.

I hate it.

You're all satanic.

This sucks.

It's your fault that I don't enjoy having heterosexual sex.

Fuck you.

Like just pure misery.

It's your fault.

Cartoons aren't real.

You know, I mean, it's just like, it's once again, it's this contrast between like unprecedented political wins to like dismantle the liberal state and enter a new and enter now officially the hour of the wolf where like you know uh strength is strength

yeah strength is truth and you know we'll just conquer countries and you know deport American citizens brown them up put them into camps but like all of that is like ashes in your mouth if your personal life or like what or what is perceived as cultural i.e like how you feel in your everyday-to-day life still sucks shit and you're still a loser with no job no girlfriend like you know no prospects uh yeah it'll be interesting to see what happens with that but it's just like there's no political victory that can assuage the essential feeling of loneliness and misery and self-loathing that these people have.

And cultural disenfranchisement.

I am very interested to see what happens on the cultural front for that reason.

Because I do think the hard lesson that a lot of these companies are going to learn is A, that like there still are like a lot of like,

you know, whether they are libs or just like wholly disinterested in this cultural and political program, there's still a lot of those people in this country also.

And that nothing you can do for these people will satisfy them.

Yeah.

There is no, there is no like perfectly anti-woke cultural product that they will love that also that won't also like freak out or annoy the remainder of the country.

If you think about it, making it the Super Bowl halftime show kind of does necessarily make it a part of the woke apparatus, and yeah, exactly.

And so it's a it's an ouroboros of like dissatisfaction and discontentment.

Exactly, like, no matter what it is, it's going to be satanic.

Yeah,

that satanic satanic just means like I don't know that like people under 70 know about it, right?

Uh,

here's a conservative guy who doesn't like sports.

Uh, I watched the big game for the psyops and the humiliation.

Shut the fuck off.

Fucking, oh my gosh.

Destroy off.

Yeah.

There are tons of psyops in your life.

Shut the fuck up.

That's worse than any sports ball tweets.

Oh, the psyops are worse than ever this year.

They really give it a break.

They should just let Beyoncé should do it every year.

Yeah, Beyonce should do the humiliation ritual every year.

There's a football in the middle of my Beyonce concert.

All right.

Well, I think that's

a good transition point to we're going to be talking to Jeff Stein of the Washington Post about the Dog department and the ongoing evisceration of the federal government.

So without further ado, let's turn it over to our interview with Jeff Stein.

Great.

And just before we log off, I have been asked to plug something on behalf of friends of the show, Jacques Gosselin and Grace Freud.

They have a show coming up this Wednesday, February 12th at the Lodge Room here in Los Angeles.

It is called Game Show Pig.

It is a variety show.

I will be trying to make it out there.

The last Show Pig that they did here in LA was a lot of fun.

A lot of friends of the show are going to be featured there, including Brandon Wardell, Will Sennett, Nate Fisher, April Clark.

So, show Game Show Pig this Wednesday, February 12th at the Lodge Room here in Los Angeles.

Check it out.

All right, now on to Jeff's Don and talk to you soon.

Okay, joining us on the program now is Washington Post reporter Jeff Stein, who has been covering the inauguration of the Department of Government Efficiency, the power of the Doge.

So, Jeff, I'm wondering if you could perhaps like for our listeners, could you just like narrate like the first couple weeks of this new government department?

Or is it part of the government?

Is it not?

But like, like, how would you describe so far Doge and Elon Musk's interaction with the federal bureaucracy?

Yeah, I mean, so just to go back for one second, I'll try to be quick here.

After the presidential election, Trump said that Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk would be leading this Doge thing outside of the government and giving non-binding recommendations for the White House to consider implementing.

And at the time,

I was taking it seriously because I'm a reporter and whatever I cover is, by virtue of me covering it, important.

But it objectively didn't seem like necessarily that big of a deal.

But shortly, like around the time of the inauguration, we were getting word that Vivek was considering leaving.

And sure enough,

what we've reported since is that Ramaswamy had almost certainly sort of legal concerns about what Doge was becoming.

And what that was, was something very different than sort of this non-governmental outside panel giving advice.

It was saying, can we sort of transform the government from within to not just

follow the typical procedures of saying, hey, Congress, you should do something about this or that, which is like any old Washington, D.C.

think tank can just say that and do whatever they want, but to say, can you just put this guy in there and have him go to town on getting rid of all kinds of stuff he doesn't like, doesn't want?

And that's, you know, been the last few weeks.

Musk has really

not only is he sleeping in the executive office building, which is just kind of amazing for the world's wealthiest man to just be sleeping in a cot in like a government office.

That's how much he cares.

Yeah, no,

just trying to demonstrate that he truly does not need to go visit his family.

Jeff, I mean, like,

just like

from watching from the outside here, I mean, so far I've seen like everything being couched in terms of like, look at, like, look at, look at all the fraud and illegality we've uncovered.

But mostly all I've seen are like screenshots of spreadsheets showing money appropriated by Congress that's being spent in a way that they don't approve of.

But like, as far as a fraud hunting operation here,

have they uncovered anything that's actually illegal or fraudulent?

Or are they just saying these laws passed by Congress are illegitimate and this is fraud and this is corruption and we're saving all this money for the taxpayer?

That's a really good question, actually.

And, you know, there are instances in which they've clearly just said, you know, oh, we don't like the fact that Congress approved money for health care for this group.

So it's illegal, which is not how laws work.

On the other hand, there is this sort of like grayer area where Trump, when he came in, signed these executive orders, right?

He, you remember the ceremony where he, you know, was like, that's a good one.

That's a good one.

Yeah, that was amazing.

And there is some question about whether spending money in violation of the EO

is itself illegal, because those executive orders do carry the force of law.

On the other hand, if the president is just going to say, like, anything I declare to be illegal is, we've like, I don't know, it's, it's, it's, um, I mean, like, the, the president, like, the president can't, that's not under executive powers that, like, okay, no more, like, the government can't exist anymore.

You know, like, that's not, like, that's not one of the outline powers that, like, Congress controls the purse strings.

That's what everyone learned in the schoolhouse rock anthology.

And like, the president does have, like, some discretionary spending power, but it's like, and I guess that could extend to a lot of things, but not like a total spending freeze.

No, I mean, and this is the thing where it's like, I have been wary, as I know you guys have, about like the idea of TDS and just like the sort of overly reactive, hair on fire, lib and SMBC response to every fucking thing that happens that Trump does.

But like, you look at the facts here.

I mean, it's just like, it's hard to avoid the conclusion that you just articulated, Felix, where they basically put you know like um do you guys remember the scene um from in the loop where malcolm comes to washington oh and he's like is this the meeting is this it yeah and it's like it's like a 19 year old guy and he's like no disrespect but it looks like you have your head being shoved on a fucking toilet right now oh and here we are the fucking vice president has also graced us with his presence give him a bottle of milk

That guy is now in charge of like literally every agency.

I know.

Okay, no, no, Jeff, I have to take issue with that because you'll remember the guy from in the loop was like the 19 year old heritage foundation like intern but he was wearing a crisp suit the guys in charge of the government now are fucking

a different breed big balls big balls i mean like that that is like sort of the problem though with like this sort of like trump one framing of all this especially the idea of like Trump as like an aberration that like the Republican Party must be saved from.

That plus, like, all the sort of like doomed, like, Lev Parnas type shit against Trump that sort of like added, was sort of like delegitimized like future attacks on him.

It all, it also, like, took away the any remaining muscle memory that the Democrats, as like a nominally center-left opposition party, had of opposing austerity.

Like,

I should be.

Don't put down Lev Parnas.

I learned so much about Lev Parnas from the Digglitter that I can't deal with all those years wasted.

I was really excited to find out that Lev Parnas' son is one of those like shouting pro-DNC TikTok children.

Oh, is he on Donut Twitter?

Yeah, well,

he hangs out with like Harry Sassan.

and all those other kids.

You really can become anything in America.

It's sort of beautiful.

Like your dad can be like a sort of like thumb-shaped Ukrainian crook,

but you can become like like a screaming democratic twink.

It's awesome.

I love the idea that the Harry Sassan types are going to like rediscover donut Twitter in like four years and be like, these are like our ancestral roots.

These are iological origins.

Yeah.

These are the elders.

Yeah.

It's like the

forerunners in Halo for them.

Yeah.

But

Jeff, can I jump back to Musk and Doge here?

Like, like I said, like, this, this is all couched in the language of we're rooting out corruption and we're returning all this money to the American taxpayer.

But I get the sense that what government corruption is or what corruption is means something different to Elon than it does to, I don't know, myself or other people.

Because

he is a government contractor to the tune of something like $200 billion.

I just get the sense here that his conception of government corruption is when the government spends or gives money to anyone who isn't him.

Yeah, I mean, the thing that I've been like

having a hard time adequately communicating in my coverage, I feel like, is like the scale of the amount of money they're talking about.

I mean, there are obviously fraudulent payments that the government does, but it's a small fraction of the federal budget.

But more importantly, it's like they are currently, as we speak, in the process of passing a tax bill that conservatively is going to be at least four to five trillion dollars and Elon Musk is like on Twitter like every day being like oh my god I found like this like $300,000 program or like oh we found out these

these like foreign aid programs for Mauritania cost like two million dollars and it's like you are in the process like the the scale here is so disproportionate like their tax bill is 10, 20, 100 times potentially bigger than anything that they've even purported to have found thus far.

Yeah.

I mean, it is like, if, if you were to like take them in earnest and, you know, act like this is just like, you know,

a genuine search for inefficiencies and like overblown costs and fraud, then this would be like the greatest example of amphetamine thinking ever.

Just this idea that you can just go in with no special knowledge of the administrative state and just cut things like a hundred thousand dollars at a time until you get to 26 trillion i guess there's also ways in which like i think they are discovering from what i've heard like in in in the last few days that like to deregulate you actually need people to do that and it's kind of like a somewhat counterintuitive thing but like to get rid of a business regulation that like corporate america wants to get rid of you actually have to have the civil servants like put that in motion.

Like That's not just a thing that you like go to like a code and switch it off.

Like you need a person to do it.

Even the deregulatory agenda is stymied by just annihilating the civil service.

A competent functioning bureaucracy is not just crucial to like American empire in a way that like I think even like the Trump people would want to preserve, but it's also sort of crucial to maintaining like the functions of business.

And like the American neoliberal state, whatever, actually does need a civil service that is not just constantly in this complete crisis mode that they've been in the last few weeks where they're accidentally turning off entire government systems for NIH funding or Head Start.

Those are things that are, I mean, I guess to go back to what you were saying earlier, Felix, like, I'm torn because I very much have heard and appreciate some of the left critique of this idea that Trump is not a normal Republican kind of misses the ways in which he's just like kind of a typical pro-business guy who wants to cut government programs.

And that is quite normal for Republicans, but the legal mechanisms here really are like so

extraordinary.

The levels of chaos is kind of beyond

what the business community itself wants.

Yeah, no, I mean, I kind of think like both things are true.

I mean, like, I think the answer to that is that it's not that he's an aberration.

It's that this is like the logical conclusion of like, you know, 40-50 years of a deregulatory agenda, that it ends with this, yeah.

The ultimate, the point of deregulation where you get so far into gutting government that you can't even deregulate anymore,

yeah, exactly.

That like everything is so degenerative that, you know, just like how uh Tony Blinken thinks that he's Dean Rusk, you have like, you know, 19-year-olds who don't even know how to convert a file to PDF because they were raised on tablets by parents that hate them.

Could Dean Ruskin jam like Tony could?

You know, they think they're, I guess, like the inheritors of like the Grover NorQuest mantle.

But NorQuest was like a bureaucratic knife fighter.

All these guys were, they had like a working knowledge of the regulatory state that they wanted to obliterate and arguably were like much more successful in the long term and also set the stage for this because of that knowledge.

Yeah.

And like, Jeff, the question I want to ask you is like, when you get into things like defunding the National Institutes of Health or even the, or even getting rid of the Department of Education, which is this like big, you know, liberal sacred cow, you know, conservatism and trying to get rid of it forever, but like things like the NIH and Department of Education represent a huge source of federal money.

for many states and like in and employment in those states as well.

So like, are you beginning to see fractures between the sort of professed sort of nationalist populism of the MA movement with this like uh the with Musk's agenda of completely just getting rid of the federal government and everyone who works for it I mean I think this is um a really important sort of tension point to emphasize and and not just sort of the MAGA movement I mean sort of normal

so-called you know Republican types like Susan Collins and and just normal Republican senators like don't like having all the hospitals in their districts being like where's our funding coming from next month?

Like, there is enough institutional resistance to the GOP that I think, like, to sort of just cutting all this stuff, that I think the Republicans on the hill, I mean, got at least some of the measures that

the Trump White House started in terms of funding freezing, freezing funding reversed.

I will say that, like, I think Elon has done like, not to be like masterful gambit sir, but like, he

has managed to like keep like a reputation as like fairly based in a way that like has lasted longer from the MAGA perspective than I thought possible.

Like, you know, Steve Bannon was out there like going hard on Elon a few months ago, and it looked like when the H-1B fight happened, did you guys follow that closely?

Where it's like Elon Musk and Ramaswamy were like basically agreeing with Trump that there should be a skilled immigration program.

And then basically all of MAGA world turned on Ramaswamy, where it's like, well, you can't make that argument, you know, but like,

Trump can.

But I guess like, like, just quickly, the, the, Musk ability to go up, you know, on Inauguration Day and do that, like, salute that triggered the libs to such a degree that, like, it, like, reversed, reverse polarized MAGA into liking him.

Again, I think it's given him, like, a leash within Trump world.

I was hearing a lot of.

So basically, like,

we'll allow programmers from India as long as the person hiring them is openly Nazi.

And the programmers themselves, I mean, like,

over the weekend,

this guy tweeted.

Do you see this story about Marco LI?

Yeah, no, he was like, I hate Indians.

He said, and he said, I was like,

normalize Indian hate.

He also said,

you couldn't pay me to

marry outside of my ethnic group.

It's like, buddy, you're going to need to be paying them to marry you, regardless of the ethnic group.

J.D.

Mance was like, who among us didn't have a tweet at 24 that was virginally?

He was like, This 25-year-old boy didn't let a have a bad tweet ruin his career.

It's like, this isn't just some kid who's getting fired from like, you know, like a summer job because they said something edgy.

This guy now is like running the treasury department, apparently.

He's cut his iPad time tonight.

He doesn't get as much screams as hell.

By the way, like, did they, did they rehire that kid?

I mean, I say kid, that 25-year-old child, innocent child.

They're bringing him back to Doge.

So he's going to be

working for elon is his uh his sentence that's great that's great that's really good they should make him like the deputy for big balls like that should be his punishment going back to um

the sort of like the the seeds of like intra-maga dispute and like uh musk's you know retained uh negative polarization based popularity i sort of think that if there is a schism there, it's not going to come from the direction of Trump ejecting him so much as it will be the stress on Elon of sort of, sort of like being the sin eater for Trump.

And by that, I mean like Trump's popular, Trump's like general popularity will fall just because he weirdly came in on sort of this similar pitch to what Biden came in on in 2020.

And when you're going, when you come in on like,

we're going to make everything go to normal type deal.

And you know, within three months, everything isn't dramatically better.

People really start to hold that against you.

But I think that like Elon is going to absorb a lot of the immense unpopularity that we personally saw for Trump during Trump one.

And I don't think there's a floor for that quite like there is for Trump himself.

I like there is a floor, but it's much lower.

And I don't really think that he's prepared to be quite that despised and i just i just like i think his just the unpredictable elements of his personality and his sort of like need to be liked will cause some type of like volatility that may see him like split with an also unpopular administration at that point i do think we see with trump though like you know he is fairly teflon among his supporters i think we're going to see this you know like without getting too far afield,

you know, like I've already seen people kind of being mad, you know, Trump voters about tariffs, but they're just never, they're totally disinclined to ever hold Trump responsible for what are policy decisions made by his administration.

And I think like we'll probably see the same thing, you know, like as people lose their jobs to, I don't know, automated,

you know, everything because of Doge, you know, like they'll just find someone else to be held responsible.

And I think Felix is right.

Like that very well could be Elon Musk.

Well, you say that, Catherine, but I think, I think what you will find is that as America gets great again, people will realize that paying overdraft fees from their bank and having medical debt count against their credit score is actually quite epic and based.

I think they will find that, yeah.

But Jeff, like one of the things you talk about in the article you wrote is about like Elon's plans here.

Is that like one of the things they're already doing is just trying to make physically coming into work for federal employees almost impossible.

And like that includes shuttering like, I think their plans are to shutter half of all federally owned buildings and make the buildings that people do have to come into work in be as like have like no heating or like filled with black mold or something.

I mean I felt kind of stupid when I when this finally clicked because In my head, I've been thinking like, okay, well, they like want return to office, so like they must prize a culture of hard work from you know with your colleagues but then I'm like wait but why are they also trying to liquidate like half of all non-military federal buildings like these things seem like contradictory but then they're resolves when you realize that they're both driven at the idea of increasing attrition and this is something that Musk has been like tweeting about a lot where he's like He doesn't know how exactly to get rid of as many federal workers as possible, but this is clearly part of the game plan.

And when you layer in sort of this attempted buyout offer and the fact that they're gathering information on sort of low-performing people or people with bad performance reviews and people in their probationary periods, I mean, we're looking at, you know, they've said at least 10% reduction in the size of the federal workforce.

And I think that's going to be an undercount because that's also kind of just their goal for the buyouts.

And yeah, what it does to like what they don't know that they could break as they do this is pretty interesting.

Yeah, like I'm really curious.

Like to me, this whole thing just basically you know like obviously i see it as part of this this much broader silicon valley plan to like you know um make most americans totally obsolete and not participate in the economy other than having to buy high-priced uh goods uh but i also just see this whole like elon mosqu push is a huge data mining operation you know like he just wants to get his teens in like as quickly as possible and under the hood to like basically steal as much american confidential like medical data, God knows what else, like now they're in the treasury, you know, and to what end, I guess, you know, we're probably going to be living with the effects of for years.

Like, do you have any kind of like insight into, you know, like what the big plan is there?

I mean, like, and just a follow-up question on top of that, like, I've heard a lot about these teens, like big boss, having access to, quote, read and write privileges over the code that governs the systems of, for instance, like the departments of the treasury or labor.

What would that that actually mean?

Or like, what are the, what is the, I guess, like implications of that, like, uh, should be taken literally.

So I think everything Catherine said is like absolutely worth like paying close attention to and like closely scrutinizing.

I can say like in terms of what we know already about what they are hoping or planning or have already done in some cases with the data they're hoovering up is basically like to feed all this information that they're consolidating on these internal systems into some sort of like AI machine learning yada, yada, yada, thing that I don't know.

Oh, God, that's so bad.

And then

come back with

like a list of things that could be automated.

So it's like

we've taken all of the treasury payments.

This is like sort of me guessing a little bit based on reporting and like some other things, but my understanding is that like at the education department, for instance, they've taken all this data on loans and grants and like who does that work and they feed it into the AI.

And then they're like, oh, actually, we don't need a human being to approve XYZ grant.

We can actually just have like, you know, Grok like decide whether you like

nine years of pay for public student loan forgiveness was like not accurate or not, you know?

So have everything, everything in the administrative state will run like when United Healthcare won't approve the claim.

Yes.

Everything will run, everything will run like,

yeah, the United Healthcare chat bot

or it's ai that made like you know that just out of hand denied 90 of claims the first time around no that's what i mean like

this exact same system i would not everything everything becomes to see united healthcare to see elon do like a chat bot that's literally named after big balls and like that's where you like process your tax return so we we jeff we mentioned it a couple times who who is big balls what what what do we know of this young man and and and and his balls

He's a 19-year-old who now has a State Department email address.

He is, my colleagues reported today, and I'm just pulling this up because I don't want to be sued for liable for telling you the wrong thing.

He, yeah, that never happens.

Jeff, that never happens to anyone currently on the show.

Yeah, no Washington Post reporter has ever gotten in trouble for something they've said on Chapo.

Shout out, friends of the show.

Friends of the show, if you're listening, which I bet you are.

Yes, he worked for Neuralink, and now he's a senior advisor at 19 for the State Department's Bureau of Diplomatic Technology.

And literally, as I'm reading this article to you, I got a message that I cannot confirm about him having permissions at a separate federal agency.

So we will have to run that down and see if Big Balls is not just in the State Department.

Wait, do we not know his name?

I really haven't.

Oh, yes,

his name is Edward

Cordestein.

And he's worked for a bunch of the Musk companies.

And so he's part of this.

He's part of the Doge team that's been going agency to agency.

And we think, based on what we've understood,

is working to look through all their data and see what can be automated, essentially.

You know, Jeff, when I was reading your piece in the Washington Post,

and I was thinking about this

when you brought up

the critique of like, oh, Trump is just a regular Republican, but then when you really consider the full scope of what they're trying to do right now, it would seem to

it would seem to contradict that.

And I got to say, Jeff, when I was reading your piece,

a significant part of me had to admire the sort of, I don't know, political will to enact an agenda in this administration, damn the consequences or legality of all of it.

I mean, it seems like they are really dedicated to this goal, regardless of whether it's constitutional or legal.

I mean, they're not, what I'm saying is they're not going to let the parliamentarians stop them from doing this.

And I guess, like,

I admire it

aside from the fact that everything they're trying to do is evil.

Like,

I admire the big balls of it.

But, like,

Jeff, like, what is the end goal here?

Because, like, it starts with gutting the federal workforce and then, like, it goes from there.

But, like, is the end goal here is essentially to make Elon Musk and all his subsidiary companies the U.S.

government?

Because that's what it seems like to me.

I mean, if you take Musk literally at his word at what he said, and we can get into whether this is BS or not, but his stated goal is to say that the most important thing for humanity is to build extraplanetary civilizations and to establish beachheads

on other.

Oh, yeah, we're so

close to that.

We're so close.

If only it wasn't for the Department of Education, we'd be on Mars by now.

Clearly, you need to cut education funding to have the next generation of researchers help us get to Mars.

That is what he

repeatedly says.

You look at his speeches, he's quite explicit.

That's the goal here, is how do we prevent the U.S.

government from defaulting?

Because the stability of the U.S.

government is the precondition for establishing life on Mars.

But Will, I really like your point about

the willingness to just go for it.

And I feel like, you know, it's like that meme where it's like Dems just keeps saying like a dog can't play basketball.

Yeah.

and then and then fucking yeah and then Lassie is doing like a 360 jam right in their face.

Yeah.

Like what is what is the response?

Like there's no

we're at the point now like as we speak on Monday where courts like several judges have said like this is breaking the law.

You can't do this that or the other thing.

And over the weekend J.D.

Vance and Elon Musk were repeatedly tweeting about how you know you have to be all this language like about a judicial coup and the illegitimacy of like left-wing Obama judges and all this stuff is like,

I don't want to get ahead of myself because we're not quite there yet, but they're clearly laying the groundwork for this very,

I mean, I don't want to, I mean, I don't want to be too dramatic here, but like this potential Lincoln suspension of habeas corpus or like Jackson ignoring the Supreme Court and Trail of Tears, something that has happened very rarely in American history where the president just says, like, I'm not listening to any of the other branches of government.

I'm doing what the hell I want.

And like, they're clearly like telegraphing that that is a legitimate place that they could go.

Jeff, like, I mean, I have to credit

Dylan Saba, who posted this today.

And I thought it was like, put things into perspective, it's like,

over the course of my entire lifetime, the conservative right-wing movement in this country has finally achieved basically a complete stranglehold over the Supreme Court and the federal judiciary with their

religiously fundamentalist Heritage Foundation vampires.

At this exact moment, as Elon sort of tries to take over every aspect of our government, they are going headlong into like overturning judicial review.

And like, we're going straight into Marbury v.

Madison right now.

So, like, Jeff, like, what is the state of opposition to this?

Because right now it seems like the courts are the only roadblock here, and maybe not for long, but like, is there any political opposition that's in any way effective?

It's just people saying dogs can't play basketball.

It's like, yeah, yeah, that's where we are.

I mean,

I guess the question is: have you guys seen Show Me a Hero that that HBO show?

Yes, I do.

I remember that.

Yeah, it was Oscar Osio, an order writer.

It's about like housing in Yonkers.

Yeah.

And in that story, a judge orders the city of Yonkers to basically comply with the order to build public housing.

And when the city doesn't do it, they start imposing greater and greater penalties on.

the officials themselves with a threat of jail time.

And I mean, I don't know, but where we could be headed headed is a situation where a judge is saying to Trump officials, like, if you do not rescind this offer, you are personally, criminally, or civilly liable to the court,

which would be like a, I don't know, I can't think of a time where that happened in American history.

Does Trump, I mean, he has, you know, he has the pardon power, so where does that go?

But right now, you mean,

the only check on this is the courts, but it's not clear that even the courts will be.

Well, I think that's a good place to leave it.

I certainly don't have any

answers.

No,

it does seem like kind of doom and gloom, but

I heard a podcast this week that sort of like

it made me realize that like people everywhere are standing up to fight.

Hakeem Jeffries

was on, you know, whatever Jon Stewart's new show is called, and he was just on fire.

I mean,

I think Hakeem Jeffries has what it takes to put an end to this.

As soon as he discovers the leverage, you got to find some leverage, though.

Yeah.

I thought you were going to say you were listening to Hakeem Jeffries podcast, which I didn't know was a thing.

Oh, no, no.

Even no, even the Democratic

that

more Hakeem Jeffries media is not helping anyone.

The newcafe.com is just Hakeem Jeffries.

Although I did say just before we hopped on from Politico that like, you know, the Democrats' big plan is they're like

just today, I think launching some big task force.

And like one of the biggest prongs of it involves litigation.

And it's kind of like, didn't we just see like the limitations of going after Trump, you know, through litigation?

Yeah.

It's a task force, Catherine.

It's a task force.

They're going to study the problem.

It's, it's, it's, it's, it's, they've been tasked and they have some force.

We'll see what happens, though.

But yeah, I don't want to keep you too much longer, Jeff.

But Jeff,

thanks for the reporting and thanks for your time.

Hey, my pleasure.

Thanks, guys.

Cheers.