Behind the Bastards - Part Two: Kim Jong Un and His Family of Dictators

Episode Date: July 4, 2019

Robert is joined again by Eli Olsberg to continue discussing Kim Jong Un and his family.   Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest? I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What's back my listeners? You are. This is behind the bastards. The podcast where we talk about the worst people in history and I make increasingly stretch and terrible introductions. I'm losing it. I'm losing my everything here. But who's not losing his personal capacity?

It's Eli Olsberg, our guest today, comedian, writer, and host of The Closure and Pod is a Woman Podcast. Eli, are you ready to learn some more about Kim Jong-un? I am, and you're right. I have it together, but I'm hanging on by a thread just so the audience knows. Yeah, I threw out the threads long ago and we'll just get into this. Hell yeah. In March 2010, a South Korean Navy vessel named the Cheonan sunk just a few miles south of North Korea's nautical border. 46 of the 104 South Korean seamen on board were killed, or possibly abducted, because the Cheonan is believed by virtually everyone to have been sunk from a torpedo by North Korean midget submarines,

possibly on the express orders of Kim Jong-un, who was at that point still just a leader in waiting. For what it's worth, the North Korean government claims the sinking was fabricated by pro-U.S. conservative administration seeking to incite a standoff between the two Koreas. Now, it's hard to say exactly why North Korea would want the Cheonan sunk. In subsequent years, Kim Jong-un has continued to deny any role in the attack and repeatedly refused to apologize for it. So it may be as simple as the fact that attacking the Cheonan gave him something to rattle his saber about, an issue to loudly deny complicity and while also gaining respect and loyalty from the Navy for letting them sink their teeth into the hated enemy. Whatever the truth, if the sinking of the Cheonan was masterminded by Kim Jong-un, or at least a plan he approved of,

it wound up being a very successful gamble. South Korea moderated its response to the attack, and the North faced very little in the way of consequences for the deaths of those men. People have trouble understanding why dictatorships like North Korea would take a risk like this, what they would have to gain from kicking a hornet's nest. It's the same question people ask when they see reports that the Assad regime has gassed its own people. Why would they risk international sanctions from using WMDs? Doesn't it make more sense for them to tow the line and not antagonize the U.S. and its allies? Well, the reality is that often it does make sense to antagonize the U.S. and its allies, that often the gambles pay off.

One could make the same point about Hitler's quest to annex Czechoslovakia. Many of his generals, in fact, did. Pointing out that if it came to war, the Czech defenses would decimate the still-rebuilding German Wehrmacht, leaving them easy prey for the French and the British. It seemed as if Hitler had nothing to gain from pressing for the conquest of Czechoslovakia. But Hitler, like all dictators, was a gambling man. So was Kim Jong-un, so was Bashar al-Assad, so are all dictators who wind up hanging onto power. Now, of course, the gambles of dictators don't always work. Saddam Hussein gambled when he started kicking you in weapons inspectors out of his country.

He could have just let them do their work and maybe managed to hang onto power. But he gambled that he could stick a thumb in the eye of his enemy, and their desire to avoid war would overwhelm their desire to punish him. Now Saddam was wrong, and it's also probable that nothing would have stopped George W. Bush from invading Iraq. But Kim Jong-un has so far been remarkably successful as a gambler. He bet correctly on the Qionin, and he would bet correctly many, many more times in the years to come. It's always interesting to me which of these guys, because Qaddafi was another gambler. Civil War started against him, and he started claiming that he was going to wipe out the city of Benghazi and kill all 600,000 people inside it, just bomb it to the ground with his air force.

That gamble backfired. He got called on it, and he wound up killed in the streets. Yeah, I think about that often too. And also, going back to the previous episode, we were talking about when it came up about Kim's frame of reference. This is a kid from early on who was critical of people and who was very in charge from the get-go supposedly. How much of that is propaganda versus how much of that is true is another story. But when you have those frame of references, you're going to double down until you meet your match or you lose. And then at that point, I think it really becomes almost like gambling addicts where even if you lose this round, it's trying to win the next one to undo the losing. You know what I mean? It's momentum one way or another. And the thing that Kim Jong-un will have as soon as he comes to power, that Gaddafi and Saddam didn't have, for example,

that I think is a big reason why all of Kim Jong-un's gambles have worked out a lot better than those other dictators' gambles did, is he has nukes. And that's like always having a pair of aces in your hand every time. It's just a little bit of extra assurance that your gambles, no one's going to call your bluff because you got those nukes. So, yeah. As Kim Jong-il grew sicker and sicker, from the consequences of being a 64-year-old man with a $2 million-a-year Hennessey cognac habit, he carefully prepared the stage for his son. They increasingly showed up at public events together, as he'd done with his father in the 80s. North Korean propaganda mills began to spread stories of the young Jong-un's close relationship with his grandfather, even though the two had probably never met. One famous parable is that Kim Il-sung once asked Kim Jong-un for an apple, so Kim Jong-un asked for a shovel so he could dig up an apple tree and present it to his grandfather. The message was that the North Korean people should be prepared to go the extra mile for their new leader, just as he'd gone the extra mile for Kim Il-sung. Very subtle messaging here.

Kim Jong-un's propaganda charm offensive had begun with the military, but it quickly expanded to the rest of society, according to the great successor. At their compulsory, weekly education sessions, people around the country were having messages drilled into them about the incredible feats of this young genius. They heard the one about firing a gun when he was three years old, and the ones about riding horses and driving cars at an age when most kids are just learning their ABCs. It was hard for people to believe these things, we just laughed at them. It may have worked for kids, but not for adults. Mr. Kang, the drug dealer, told me. But if you questioned it, you'd be killed. Some of his efforts to sell the new leader pushed the boundaries of credulity, even in this totalitarian state. One officially sanctioned biography called The Childhood of the Beloved and Respected Leader, Kim Jong-un, claimed that he had perfect pitch, that he could ride the wildest horses at age six,

and that when he was just nine, he had twice beaten a visiting European powerboat racing champion. The youngster had driven at speeds of 125 miles an hour, it said. It was so unbelievable that the textbook was recalled after whispered criticisms began circulating that it distorted and exaggerated the leader's early years. It was revised to make it more credible. Wow, that's like playing a game of telephone and then starting the game all over again. Yeah, it's really interesting, but it's interesting that they'll revise it, which is going to come up later. This guy's going to be a little bit less actually dishonest to the people of North Korea than the previous leaders have been. A little bit, teeny, teeny bit. It's not a high bar.

So I do think it's worth talking about right now sort of how many of these crazy claims are believed within North Korea. Because these are the stories that most commonly make it out to the world media about the Kims, all these crazy tales about the lies that are supposedly believed in North Korea about the Kims. And I found an article on a website called North Korea News that was written by a former citizen of the DPRK who fled home and included interviews with several other refugees from North Korea. And this writer claims, quote, it is not wrong to say they believed the propaganda 100% before the death of Kim Il-sung. But the years of famine convinced many North Koreans that their government could not be trusted anymore than most people trust governments. The article concluded, 20% of people believe what the government says, 40% aren't quite sure what to believe, and 40% don't believe anything at all. So that's one dissidence opinion on how many people buy the government line on things. Which it makes sense, you know, if you've got 20% who believe everything you say and back you to the hilt, and 40% who aren't willing to take a stance one way or the other, then that 40% who realize that they're being lied to aren't going to be able to make anything happen.

Yeah, they're already in the minority. Yeah, exactly, exactly. Now, I would also be remiss if I talked about North Korea's propaganda and I didn't point out that the bullshit spigots spews both ways. The closed nature of North Korean society has made it easier for the government to lie to its people, but it's also made it easier for others to lie about North Korea, since few people can come forward to counter any falsehoods. I found one anecdote on a Christian missionary news site called DoTheWord.org that I found deeply interesting. Now, this is from an article written by a missionary who lived in South Korea with his wife, and he's recalling a conversation he had with another missionary. Ms. Foley and I were in Korea talking to a man doing North Korea human rights work who shared with us the report of a tragic execution in North Korea, a North Korean woman who had been assisting a health care project of an international NGO inside North Korea. She was accused of being a spy and, after a rather summary investigation, executed.

But here was the tragedy that compounded that tragedy. The man said to us, Americans want to hear stories about Bibles and people being killed for having Bibles. I'm going to tell the American media that she was killed for distributing Bibles. And so he did. And so that's what American media reported. The story was everywhere. It was completely untrue, a total fabrication. The man who spoke to us wasn't even a Christian, but in his mind he had accomplished his purpose, punish North Korea with bad press even if the press was inaccurate. His logic was this. If there was no Bible, there would have been no news interest. If there had been no news interest, the North Korea would have gotten away with the killing of yet another innocent without any recrimination at all. As it was, the outcry led to an outpouring of donations to Christian NGOs doing North Korea work. That's really interesting. That is really interesting. Yeah, it's funny. I can't even like hearing that. I'm kind of almost out of lots of words for it because it's so fascinating. It's almost like a thing where you're like, what else can you do with it? Do you know what I mean? I'm already kind of a little dumbfounded. I'm like, well, yeah, totally.

And if you're an activist who hates the North Korean government, which is a totally reasonable thing to hate, and you see it pass on to its third generation of ruler and realize that this shit's not dying out. Yeah, so I can't even blame a guy in that position for telling whatever lie he thinks will hurt the regime, even though it just makes it harder for other people to try and figure out what's actually going on over there. I can feel the frustration. Yeah, and just to kind of like almost draw a parallel, it's like that there's a lot of arguments happening here now in regards to how Democrats approach things and how liberal and leftist approach things in regards to like, well, you have to be above that. And some people are like, no, you have to be as fucking dirty as the other side is in order to get it done. And that kind of seems like it's obviously in a much more, it's morphed a little differently there. But that's kind of the same thing where you're like, well, by any means necessary at whatever cost. And other people are like, well, no, you still have a kind of sense of duty and ethics to this whole thing. And I don't, and I don't, I almost want to say the truth lies somewhere in the middle. But at the same time, to say that means that, well, yeah, you're kind of acknowledging it does have to be you have to play dirty. And, you know, I don't know what the answer would be there. Yeah, and I think the frustrating thing is that the only real answer can be the truth is whatever works. So if whatever succeeds, whatever is shown to have succeeded in the long run.

That's, that's the truth. And so it's kind of hard to say, like right now is that guy right to have lied or not. Well, it looks like he was wrong to have lied because it didn't help. Sure. But maybe like, yeah, I don't know, like it's But what if it worked, you know, that goes the other way where that creates like 8000 arguments because like, well, it worked, but at what cost and then some people are like, well, that's what you had to do what he had to do. So, you know, it feels like it's ultimately like it can really be a lose lose situation, something like that. Yeah, yeah, it is like it's, it's so messy. Yeah, it's, it's, it's really fucked up. So back to Kim Jong-un and his ailing father, as Kim Jong-il got sicker and sicker, and it began to become clear that death was imminent for him. Several actions were taken by the North Korean government to very quickly prepare the way for Kim Jong-il's heir.

He started following his father on public inspections of military units. His birth home was made a historical site. He was made to assume leadership roles in the military and the Communist Party and in the security divisions. And he was made a forced army general in 2010. So he's, he's, he's very quickly pushed up the ladder much faster than his father had been because again his father's got like 20 years as the heir apparent. And he's really only got like three or so. On December 17th, 2011, Kim Jong-il suffered a catastrophic heart attack on his private train, probably driving around to tell farmers how to farm better. His death was officially announced two days later. Kim Jong-un, for the first time, was addressed as the great successor to the revolutionary cause. Now, 2011 was a more optimistic time in the rest of the world.

The Arab Spring was still fresh and it looked as if a surge of democracy and freedom was in the process of overtaking numerous dictatorships. Most international experts placed very little faith in Jong-un's ability to hold power and maintain the rule of the Kims. Victor Chah, who negotiated with North Korea for the George W. Bush administration, ran an op-ed in the New York Times where he joyously predicted the regime's collapse. The article was titled, Will North Korea Become China's Newest Province? From the article. I love, by the way, that he still calls it when he became the successor of the revolution. What revolution?

It's always going on, man. It's always a revolution in North Korea, baby. Exactly. Yeah, yeah. It's still that same thing where it's like using the saying, the democratic people of the people and for the people. Yeah, it's, you always want to associate yourself with something that's as lively and exciting as a revolution. Because just being, nobody's excited by being part of a government that just functions. Like, you want to just be caretaker over in fucking Norway where the state pretty much works and things go about fine? No, it's boring as hell. That's why nobody watches. Who watches that? No, nobody pays attention to Norway. Everybody pays attention to America because we're a train wreck 24-7.

Yeah, that's what people want to see. It truly feels like at the moment it's like a disaster where everybody's just gotten a huge car crash and they're exchanging insurance information and a semi-truck just comes along and plows through that. Yeah, and that semi-truck is driven by a seven-year-old Kim Jong-un on a box. Yeah, and the back cab's on fire. Yeah, oh yeah, yeah, forever on fire. So, yeah, this, as soon as Kim Jong-un comes to power, like all these experts and pundits start saying that like the regime's about to fall. It was unprecedented that Kim Il-sung passed on power to his kid. There's no way it's going to happen for three generations. Victor Chah wrote, Mr. Kim's death could not have come at a worse time for North Korea, economically broken, starving, and politically isolated.

This dark kingdom was in the midst of preparations to hand power over to his not yet 30-year-old son, the untested Kim Jong-un. The great successor, as he's been dubbed by the state media, is surrounded by elders who are no less sick than his father and a military that chafed his promotion to four-star general last year without having served a day in the army. Such a system simply cannot hold. Now, as a general rule, when you have people writing statements like this system simply cannot hold about a system that is part of a foreign country that we don't really know all that much about and have great sources inside, you can assume they're talking out of their ass a little bit, and Victor Chah definitely was, because all signs over the last six years of power for Kim Jong-un suggest that he has the potential to be definitely a more successful leader than his father ever was, and potentially even more successful than his grandfather, which doesn't mean he's not a terrible person. He absolutely is. But the initial reactions to him in the world media were to make fun of him as a bumbling overweight simpleton. In China, he gained the nickname Kim Fatty the third, and that nicknamed spread faster than Chinese censors could remove it from their internet.

Reports began to surface in Western media that he'd murdered his girlfriend, who was a singer in a North Korean girl band. The tabloids reported she'd been killed after he caught her making lesbian pornography. Like most of the most lurid stories of North Korea, this was complete bullshit. The supposedly murdered woman later showed up just fine, clearly still in favor with the regime, which is essentially the same thing that happened with those negotiators for the nuclear summit. That's become a trope. That's also what I'm fascinated by because K-pop is having a moment right now more so in America than it ever has, and I wonder what North Korean pop stars, what that kind of sounds like in comparison to K-pop. Because K-pop is referred to, obviously, as South Korea. Yeah, and there have been some K-pop acts that have performed in North Korea altered versions of their songs in the last couple of years as part of the mild rapprochement that's occurred between North and South Korea.

Oh, okay. So that's something, yeah, yeah. Now, when he initially came to power, Kim Jong-un's strategy was to tie himself closely with his grandfather rather than his markedly less popular dad. This has been helped by the fact that Jong-un bears a striking resemblance to the old man, one that might have been enhanced through plastic surgery. It's also equally possible that this, too, is a lie. The Brookings Institute writes, Just a few months after he became the leader of North Korea, on the 100th anniversary of his grandfather's birth, Kim delivered his first public address, as he invoked his grandfather's legacy in the lengthy 20-minute speech he also affirmed his father's military first policy, proclaiming that, For this was the first time that North Koreans had heard their leader's voice in a public speech since Kim Il-sung's days. Kim Jong-il shunned speaking in public during his almost 20 years of rule.

In fact, he only said like one sentence in a mass public speech to his people. So right out the gate, Kim Jong-un is a very different leader from his dad. Spends a lot more time in front of the people, does a lot more public speaking, is a lot more hands on. Seems to be a more functional guy in general. Now, Kim Jong-un would continue to buck North Korean tradition and plow his own path as the supreme ruler of the world's most totalitarian state. On April 13, 2012, the Korean Committee of Space Technology launched Lodestar 3, a brand new observation satellite. The name was a reference to the holy star that supposedly bloomed in the sky when Kim Jong-il was born. Despite its name, Lodestar 3 only stayed airborne for 90 seconds before crashing into the ocean.

Now, given what gets reported about North Korea, you might expect the state propaganda to have denied any failure. Instead, they leaned into it, admitting that Lodestar 3 had failed to enter its preset orbit and announcing that their scientists were looking into the failure. This marked the first time that the North Korean regime openly copped to a mistake of this magnitude. It started to appear as if North Korea's new leader was trying to position himself as a more reasonable open-minded ruler than his father or grandfather had been. Now, how true any of this is is debatable. Vanity Fair spoke with Bill Richardson, former U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. and a guy who actually negotiated with North Korean leaders in Pyongyang on several occasions. He generally is seen as having decent connections inside North Korean leadership. In 2015, he said, Wow, that's one opinion.

Yeah, and that sounds like somebody pushing 30. You know, when I bought that up, I think a little earlier, I had mentioned, like, I feel like he, because he's so young, like, you know, he's going to be someone who's hitting 30, which, by the way, when we were talking about earlier, like, how all these things that could have affected him being the product of an affair, that his uncle and, you know, them, his uncle and aunt fleeing and all those things, this is when that shit starts getting actualized. Do you know what I mean? Like, in terms of your brain starts processing those things and whatever you're going to be like as a result of that is coming to now. Yeah, and that starts to come out in Kim Jong-un. And one of the things we see from him is that he is capable of forging a new path from his ancestors and also capable of at least presenting a more open appearance. But another thing that he shows of his personality is that he is capable of the same kind of brutality that has kept his family in power for almost a century. He famously had his uncle, Jang Song-taek, murdered, reportedly for not standing up when Kim Jong-un entered a meeting. One witness later recalled, his uncle kind of sat in his seat and didn't really get up. He was very slow to get up until the last minute, and then he didn't really do the full clapping. On December of 2013, Jang was fired and arrested on state television. He was not torn apart by ravenous dogs, as reported, but he was executed, probably by firing squad.

Kim Jong-un also had General Yong Chol purged in 2016 after he fell asleep in a meeting where Kim Jong-un was speaking. In this case, the execution was as brutal as you'd expect based on the fake news about the Kim family. General Chol was publicly shot to death with anti-aircraft cannons, which essentially would have just yet disintegrated the guy. Yeah, holy shit, that is, oh my god. Look, as someone who eats up a very specific brand of B-movie that has that kind of shit, for that to be an actualized, not exaggeration without hyperbole is fucking bonkers. And it does sound like the execution that you order if you're a kid who's raised on Jean-Claude Van Damme movies. Exactly, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's hard not to see a little bit of a line there.

Yeah, totally. Now, if Kim Jong-un was indeed behind the sinking of the Cheonan, the years since 2010 seemed to have seen him double down on his strategy of launching provocative attacks. Many of those have occurred online. North Korea has long had a devoted cadre of hackers attacking South Korean banks and TV stations. But according to Brookings, quote, the state's hacking activities have grown exponentially under Kim Jong-un. South Korea is hit by about 1.5 million North Korean hacking attempts every day. That's 17 every second, according to southern officials. Pyongyang used cyber attacks to mount asymmetric warfare. The American military commander in South Korea said, at the end of 2014, North Korea provided a stunning illustration of this theory. The first target was Sony Entertainment Revenge for the Film The Interview, which ended with a Kim Jong-un character exploding in a fireball to a Katy Perry soundtrack. Hacking is the country's strongest weapon, said another former student. In North Korea, it's called the Secret War, he added.

American intelligence agencies say North Korea has a total of more than 1,000 cyber operatives living and working abroad, where there is better access to the Internet. Most are in China, but some are in Russia and Malaysia. They have one purpose, to earn money for Kim Jong-un's regime however they can. Malware, ransomware, spearfishing, sneaking into gambling and gaming sites, as long as they meet their targets. The good ones can make $100,000 a year, 90,000 for the regime, 10,000 for themselves. And I'm curious, did you see the interview in theaters when it had that small run? No, you know I torrented it. Once it got released onto the Internet, I did that whole thing. I remember I saw it at the Los Feliz 3, it was one of the few theaters that got it in LA. Every showing was sold out. And I remember that very well, it was Christmas Day, it opened. And I went on a whim and managed to get a ticket and I was like, oh great, okay I'll watch it. And it's been a while since something's felt like, because I remember there was a thing that you're like, is there going to be a consequence for me seeing a movie today?

You know what I mean? You couldn't help but think that way. Kind of in the same way, obviously the stakes were a little different, but I remember thinking, you know, I remember after like 9-11, they were like saying go shopping, go to the movies, do the things that bring you pleasure, but double down on them. And I remember the interview, that was a thing that you're like, go see the movie, don't let that strip your freedom almost. There was almost this mentality towards that. Yeah, and it was not a great movie. That's what kind of, yeah, of course, that drives the whole thing that you're like, well, even on the level of what those guys were delivering for the movie, you're like, that's fine. Though I will say, if I remember correctly, this was a few months ago, Seth Rogen was on Fresh Air and had a lot to say about it. And it was a pretty, pretty, and I don't want to quote any of it because I'm really, my brain's kind of a little, not remembering it super well right now, but he was pretty articulated about it and felt like, you know, had his, had pretty okay feelings about the whole thing, like once it was all said and done.

Well, we're going to talk about the interview a little bit more after this, and we're going to talk about Kim Jong-un's nuclear ambitions after this. But I have to bring us into an ad pivot right now because Sophie is not here to call them, and I am very late on calling it this episode because I fall apart without Sophie to run this thing. So that's a terrible ad segue. I think that's the best one to date. Just admitting my incompetence and throwing to dick pills. I wish, yeah, I wish more podcasters were vulnerable about that. Well, I'm bad at my job by dick pills because erections are good. And that's it. That's the ad fucking pivot.

What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt. And I'm Alex French. In our newest show, we take a darkly comedic and occasionally ridiculous deep dive into a story that has been buried for nearly a century. We've tracked down exclusive historical records. We've interviewed the world's foremost experts. We're also bringing you cinematic historical recreations of moments left out of your history books.

I'm Smedley Butler, and I got a lot to say. For one, my personal history is raw, inspiring and mind blowing. And for another, do we get the mattresses after we do the ads or do we just have to do the ads? And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space.

313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI.

How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back! Okay, so we're talking about the interview, which, yeah, it was an interesting provocation from North Korea. Because it's the first time any state did anything like that. Because there were threats of violence. I remember they made claims about how, like, if theaters showed it, there would be attacks on the theaters. There would be like 9-11 in scale, which none of that happened. But they did really fuck with Sony's bottom line and throw a lot of their internal emails and stuff onto the internet.

And it was kind of a preview of some of what we'd see in the 2016 election with Russia and the DNC leaks and stuff. Yeah, and what I remember about it specifically very well was that, like, it is interesting that that threat about, like, going to the movies, it could have consequence or showing it at a certain theater. And I remember it was the first time that I was like, oh, we're actually more worried about, like, hacking and those kinds of attacks versus, like, a physical threat. Like, that actually outweighed it. I remember that being somewhat the sentiment. And one of the things that's interesting to me, if we're looking at how Jong Un is different from Kim Jong-il, is, you know, Kim Jong-il had his own movie that was arguably even more offensive from the perspective of the North Korean state, Team America, where he's, yeah, like, it's interesting that nothing was done about that. And maybe it's just like the internet was not as pervasive a thing when that movie came out as it was when the interview dropped.

But I think it also might be evidence that, you know, there weren't, North Korea didn't have nukes. Well, I'll also say in regards to Team America, it didn't, going into seeing it didn't ride that same wave of controversy. And they also, that movie isn't single-minded in who it was going after. It had so many people on their play as Trey Parker and Matt Stone are known to do, which is that they go after anybody, you know what I mean? Like, to the point that they literally had Isaac Hayes walked away from South Park because they wouldn't even been, they're like, well, you're not the exception here after going after Scientology. So they were throwing in everything and the kitchen sink in terms of who they went after. And so I think that was their one advantage that they had, even though he is still kind of the main villain in the whole thing. But I mean, you know, they literally go after everybody in that movie.

Even Michael Moore, who at the time had just did Fahrenheit 9-11. Yeah, Fahrenheit 9-11. Whereas the interview, I think, came after this period where we were, what, in Obama's second term. He beat Romney effortlessly. And Kim Jong-un was very new in power too. So there was like this stuff to prove too. Yeah, and not only that, but he was just the sole focus in a way that we weren't thinking about other people. You know, any other movies that had come out at that point, like Zero Dark Thirty, these were things that were looking back on victories in a certain way.

Whereas this, you know, a movie like this is pure speculation. You know, one thing I do remember about the movie that is the scene where he goes out into the street and it turns out it's all like a set, a constructed set. And I do think about that in relation to everything you're talking about in terms of the stuff you're reading off about how much of it is edited versus real. Yeah. What if it's all just a huge veil? Yeah, and it's, you know, I've heard from a couple of North Korean dissidents who have written about sort of, or dissidents even the wrong term, people who fled North Korea, who took offense to the interview in a way that I don't think I've heard about them doing to Team America. And I think part of that might be that kind of the, in addition to sort of like, like it's one thing to lampoon a dictator. And it's another thing to kind of lampoon the idea of a revolution against a dictator and put a couple of white guys from Hollywood at the center of that revolution.

So I think that was something also that like some people who, some North Koreans or former North Korean, I don't know like what terminology would be best used, but some people who grew up in North Korea and had to leave because of the terrible government in that country, reasons why they too were offended with the interview. You know, even though they have no issue with wanting to fantasize about Kim Jong-un being blown up in a helicopter or whatever. Right, right. Yeah. And yet, I bet, like I said, and we obviously talked about this way back at the beginning of part one, which is that like, I bet this guy watches whatever is out, you know, whatever the big stuff, be it MCU stuff or first reformed or any, you know, whatever movie. Yeah. He makes all of that in with much more of an open mind. I would argue that it's like, because you were saying earlier, the consumption of Western art and all of that, he must just have a huge pile of just stuff he streams day in and day out. Well, and it's that's like one of the longest running dictator tropes because Stalin loved cowboy movies and Adolf Hitler loved American movies and like one of the things that's like, you know, in terms of like another movie that we that an American comedy star made about a dictator,

Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator was very controversial at its time. It kind of ended Chaplin's career or was a big factor in Chaplin's career collapsing. He had to fund it himself. And we know Hitler watched it twice. We don't know what he thought about it, but we know he saw it twice. So I would be very interested if I almost want to know more what Kim Jong-un felt about Team America, World Police, that I want to know how he felt about the interview just because I feel like Team America has more artistic merit to it. And I wonder if if even he could lose himself and sort of like, oh, well, this is some really cool puppets. This is like a neat they're doing something interesting. Yeah, I would I would that that's a really good point. Because again, I think part of that is that there are so many other people that get targeted in that movie and in terms of what they go after and what they're commenting on that I wonder if he does look at it as like the same way a celebrity attends their own roast. Yeah. So Kim Jong-un, if if you're listened to behind the basket, drop us a line. Let us know what you think about Matt Stone and Trey Parker depicting your dad as a singing puppet. At Eli Olsberg. Let me know. Yeah, yeah.

If you would whatever you're into. Yeah, he's on Twitter, right? Yeah, Kim Jong-un. Yeah, he's a big Twitter guy. So yeah, what I do think the interview is illustrative of and a lot of coverage of Kim Jong-un is illustrative of is just sort of how consistently underestimated he's been by a lot of world media. He was famously declared little rocket man by our president. A New Yorker cover on January 18, 2016 showed him as a fat baby playing with toy nuclear weapons and tanks, especially early on in his reign. He was depicted as like this idiot fat child who had inherited an arsenal and didn't really know what to do with the power in his hands. And I think that time has proven all of those takes very wrong. Absolutely. I was just telling me all these things. I'm like, man, every person involved in that. I bet on that day got a real fucking pat on the back and now looking back at it. It's obviously it's a sign of the times, but it's still like, Holy shit, not only were they off, but they were way off. Yeah, Kim Jong-un has carried out four of his nation's six nuclear tests, including the largest in September 2017, where they detonated a 100 to 150 kiloton warhead roughly 10 times the size of the bomb we dropped on Hiroshima. He has tested 90 ballistic missiles three times as many as his father and grandfather combined. Under his leadership, North Korea's arsenal has expanded to between 20 and 60 nuclear weapons. His scientists have built ICBMs that can theoretically reach the continental United States.

CIA analysts consider North Korea now to be the hardest of hard targets. And much of that is due to Kim Jong-un's incredibly successful military policies. According to the great successor, quote, nuclear weapons and missiles have been built into lessons at school with little children taught to have pride in the programs and older ones taught about the physics involved. An elementary school socialist ethics textbook published in 2013 shows a man, a boy, and a picture of an Unha 3 rocket. Is it true that you gave joy to the respected leader? The child is asking his father who appears to be an engineer. Kim Jong-un has lavished praise and luxuries on scientists of all stripes since he became the state's leader. Boundless is Kim Jong-un's loving care for the scientists and technicians who have played a big role in improving the people's livelihood and beefing up the defense capabilities. State media reported when the great successor visited Kimchike University of Technology, the MIT of North Korea, in 2013. One of the most surprising images of Kim Jong-un's tenure that did not involve Dennis Rodman came after the ground test for a new rocket engine in March 2017. The respected Marshal in brown overcoat and with a broad smile gave a piggyback ride to one of the key men involved in the project. The clearly anguished rocket scientist who has decades as senior bounced around on Kim's back as other officers, all decked out in all of green military uniforms, laughed and cheered. I always remember the Dennis Rodman thing, and then I forget about it, and then I remember it again, and every single time I hear it, I literally chuckle to myself.

Yeah, that's in the mix here too. I love thinking about him giving rocket scientists piggyback rides. It has its root in Korean wedding ceremonies. The groom is supposed to put his bride on her back and carry him around, so he's almost symbolizing his marriage to nuclear weaponry, the marriage of the regime to nuclear weaponry. Yeah, totally. And that ultimately serves as a thing where he's like, look at what a fun guy we can be with my nuclear family. Yeah, it's so weird. Now, under Kim Jong-un, the North Korean economy has also improved markedly, reaching estimated growth of 4 to 5% per year, which is low for the region but substantially better than the country enjoyed for virtually all of his father's tenure. Much of this is because of reforms that Kim Jong-un instituted, allowing rudimentary markets to form or to be more accurate, allowing the rudimentary markets that had formed already to not be wiped out by state power. According to Andrei Lenkov, a Russian North Korea expert, he decided to do what his father was deadly afraid of doing. He allowed farmers to keep part of the harvest. Farmers are not working now as essentially slaves on a plantation. Technically, the field is still state property, but as a farming family, you can register yourself as a production team, and you will be working on the same field for a few years in a row. You keep 30% of the harvest for yourself, and this year, according to the first unconfirmed reports, it will be between 40% and 60% that will go to the farmers. So they are not slaves anymore, they are sharecroppers. Wow. Yeah, he's been involved in consistent reforms, and they seem to have been pretty successful.

I was going to say, this is results-oriented. What's weird is, when you look at the U.S. economy and other economies, it's obviously a combination of who's in office at that time, and then part of it is cycles, obviously, and some of them inherit the bad, while others get to inherit the good and call it their own. That doesn't seem to be the case here, because the family is like the through line, so whatever they're doing seems like they can really not only brag about it, but in a way that almost can't come under scrutiny. Yeah, yeah, that may be the case. And it's, of course, made easier by the fact that they have so much control over outside. But also, that's probably why he's had to open things up somewhat, is that over the last decade, North Korea has become a lot less closed. Because the regime wasn't able to stop much smuggling, like people have been getting in DVDs and whatnot, they watch South Korean soap operas, they watch American movies, they've become aware of how the rest of the world lives. And so, they really kind of, I think Kim Jong-un knew that he had to open things up to allow them to gain some of the luxuries that they knew were out there, because the information, the world just wasn't as closed anymore. I wonder how much of China he uses as a reference point for that, because they allow art in, but it's very specific to what goes in and what goes out, and how much of it can be edited. Obviously, with China, it's different, because they also have funding coming from there, for certain movies. And we're keeping box office in mind for them, though. But I wonder how much of that benefits North Korea as well, not in terms of being in bed with China, but what I mean is how much of that is mimicked.

Yeah, and I couldn't tell you that, but it does seem that the evidence suggests things are a lot better in North Korea for average people than they were 10, 15 years ago. Which isn't that long ago. Not that long ago. I found a quote in a Vanity Fair article I came across from Brian Myers, who's a professor at South Korea's Dongseo University. He has defectors from the North visit his class, and has been doing this for years, to talk to his students. But in recent years, previously, when he'd have defectors in, they would talk about the unspeakable privation in North Korea when they fled, and how rough it was, and how many people were starving. But over the last few years, the newer refugees who have fled have been more likely to describe the company as, and these are Brian's words, a cool place, where they would have liked to remain if they hadn't been forced out for one reason or another, usually due to government repression. But they described life as reasonably nice in the place where they came from, and were more regretful of having had to leave. So yeah, that's one data point, at least.

Now, speaking of data points, Eli, this is another ad pivot, which I am just not on the fucking ball with the ad pivots today. I don't know. I mean, ads are generated by data. Yeah, that's true. And data is how they, how they sell, how they hawk the stuff. So I don't know. I think it was a good segue. Yeah, well, contribute your data to these product producers, and let's all contribute to the glorious cycle that allows our great leader, which is the almighty dollar to, I don't know where this was going. Products! What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup. Back in the 1930s, a marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism.

I'm Ben Bullock. And I'm Alex French. In our newest show, we take a darkly comedic, and occasionally ridiculous, deep dive into a story that has been buried for nearly a century. We've tracked down exclusive historical records. We've interviewed the world's foremost experts. We're also bringing you cinematic, historical recreations of moments left out of your history books. I'm Smedley Butler, and I got a lot to say. For one, my personal history is raw, inspiring, and mind-blowing. And for another, do we get the mattresses after we do the ads, or do we just have to do the ads? From iHeart Podcast and School of Humans, this is Let's Start a Coup. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows.

I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space. 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

We're back. We're back moving fast so that nobody notices how bad that last ad plug was. So pro Kim Jong-un propaganda has continued to be outwardly ludicrous during the later year or the more recent years of his reign. In 2015, the Telegraph published an article about a manual that had leaked out from North Korean teachers, ordering them to inform students that their new leader had some spectacular talents. North Korean children are being taught that Mr. Kim is a skilled artist and a composer of musical scores while he was able to drive when he was three. Mr. Kim is also apparently a natural sailor. At the age of nine, Kim Jong-un raced the chief executive of a foreign yacht company who was visiting North Korea at the time, the book's claim, adding that he overcame the odds to claim victory. So this is the second rumor we've come across of him being really good at racing yachts as a little kid. It's interesting the stuff that it's important because you see the repetition in the different types of propaganda. He really wants people to believe he can race yachts and has been doing so for a long time and that he was driving as a toddler.

That's important. I feel like the only one missing is that he flew a Harrier jet. He actually is a pilot. He has a pilot's license. He does fly things. That actually seems to be real. He does fly planes and stuff. But he doesn't lie about having flown a plane as a kid that I found, but he lies about piloting a yacht for some reason. Which flying a plane is impressive. That's a cool thing. If we had a president who could fly a plane, that would be a thing they'd brag about. Of course.

Bush bragged about it. Exactly. I was just going to say that was one of Bush's few things where people were like, oh yeah, he did it. He could fly that plane. That ain't nothing. That's just so weird to me. One of the things I'd be really interested to learn is how much input he actually has. Clearly if he wanted the propaganda to stop, he could. But does he approve it all or does he just trust his propaganda people to put out whatever? And they have kind of done like focus testing to be like, the people are really soothed when they hear about him driving a yacht at age three. That's a good question.

Where does this shit come from? Yeah, I don't think he dreams it up. I can tell you that's where Trump serves as a reference point. Because this is a guy who literally will just on the fly say something that is a complete crock of shit. And about whatever. I'm sure at some point, if he was like, yeah, I flew a plane and then when I got off the plane, I landed on a ship that I actually steered back to home. We'd all be like, what a fucking liar. And since he has people doing it for him, I do think there's an approval process. That would be my guess.

If it wasn't coming from people and he was just doing it, like talking about it on a podium in that same way, like pontificating in this way, then I would say he's obviously not consulting a team, but I think he has some say in it somehow. He has to. Yeah, and that must mean that it is really important to him that people believe he was driving a truck at age three. Yeah, because otherwise, if he had people just doing it without any kind of say in it, like those people who are making this up, one, they're playing without a net, and they're also putting themselves at a risk for being killed because if they say something that makes them look bad, he's going to have them killed. And this is what's so interesting to me about trying to psychoanalyze this guy from afar and with his little information as we really have about him, is you get these snippets of his personality, like you see the result of his actual policies, which is pretty cold-blooded and effective.

He's been a very effective dictator, and most of the sober analysis I've read about him recently, people say he doesn't seem to be crazy. He seems to have a pretty reasonable understanding of the geopolitical situation. He's been very smart with his gambles and they've mostly paid off for him, but you also get these hints that there are chunks of him that never grew up, that are still childish, like this desire as a kid, lying about driving a truck at age three is like the kind of lie a seven-year-old would tell in kindergarten. Right. I think that goes back to the mythology thing that the family has as a throughline. And I think if he were to X all that out, it would almost be like writing off the nonsense of past. You know what I mean? There's this thing there that I think that'll always be there, but I'm sure there's a soft rollout of lessening it maybe. Yeah, it's really hard to say. I'll say it's less ridiculous than the stuff you were hearing about his dad, so yeah, maybe it has gotten milder.

But there are, in terms of just trying to figure out what this guy is like personally, one of the other data points we have is the 2013 trip that Dennis Rodman, former Chicago Bulls star and actor in the perfect movie, The Minis, which you should really see if you haven't seen The Minis. And just to tie it all together, this podcast in double team with Jean-Claude Van Damme. In double team with Jean-Claude Van Damme. That's damn right. Van Damme right, as a matter of fact. So yeah, Rodman in 2013 traveled to North Korea with vice producer Jason Mohica and a camera crew, all of whom apparently got shit faced with Kim Jong-un after like a series of big public press events. Now, unfortunately, there's not video footage of all of this because at a certain point they weren't allowed to have their cameras on. But the great successor has a pretty good write-up of what happened when things went off the rails. And it paints, I don't know, it adds a little bit of extra depth to our picture of Kim Jong-un.

So I'm going to read that excerpt now. Mohica, who's the vice editor, feeling emboldened by the shoju, which is like a type of liquor in that part of the world, kind of vaguely analogous to like schnapps maybe. Invited Kim Jong-un to make the return journey to New York. He then raised his glass, a tumbler of Johnny Walker black that the waiters had been filling throughout the night as if it were wine and took a sip. All of a sudden, the young dictator was yelling and gesturing at him. For a second, Mohica wondered if he'd committed a grave error. Then the translator kicked in with a bottoms up. It was a command performance, Mohica told me. The evil dictator was demanding that I chug my drink, so I chugged my drink. He was woozy, but he still had the mic. He slurred, if things carry on this way, I'll be naked by the end of the night. Madame Cho had a look of complete disgust on her face, but as the translator, she relayed the mark to Kim Jong-un, who broke out into laughter.

The shoju was working. Kim's face grew progressively rudder, and a smile grew broader, revealing the discolored teeth of a heavy smoker. Mohica estimated that the great successor had at least a dozen shots of shoju. Everyone was, in the vice producer's words, wasted. At one point, the globetrotters were on stage, hand in hand with the morangbong band members. Later, Rodman had the microphone and was singing my way. Wild Barthelomy played the saxophone, leaning back with his eyes closed like he was channeling Kenny G. Rodman sent his sidekick over to Mohica to tell him to tone down their raucous behavior. That's when Mohica realized how out of hand things had become. You know it's wild when an internationally notorious bad boy is telling you to cool it. Everything else is hazy. If I was being my best journalist, I would have stayed sober and committed everything to memory, said Mohica.

But we all get really caught up in the spirit of the evening. After several hours, Kim Jong-un stood up to give the final toast. He said that the event had helped promote understanding between the peoples of the two countries. So, he's this guy who's capable of kind of deftly navigating the takeover of power from his father and like the continuance of an unprecedented like chain of succession within a communist country. And also the kind of guy who is going to get wasted with Dennis Rodman when he comes in and like clearly like aspects of him that didn't grow up and aspects of him that are very cunning. But like you get this like these flashes that he still has this like lack of impulse control in some ways that his dad did. Totally and again and I hate to keep chalking it up to that but that's age right there. I mean this guy didn't get to you know I mean look at the end of the day I do think even people of whatever stature anybody who like comes from that type of privilege is going to want to just fucking party. Like you know and it's like the one thing people at that level can't do which to be clear is a champagne problem. They can't just be normal fucking people. They can't just go out and party and be seen partying and be seen being in any way shape or form sloppy drunk even buzzed.

Yeah. And it's just interesting to me that that same guy is capable of the discipline and planning that was necessary to. I mean he really came off as the winner in the nuclear summit with our president where he didn't give up anything. He didn't get up into getting a single real concession from North Korea and that and he got the thing that every generation of North Korean leader before him had failed to get which was a direct meeting with the United States president which is the kind of legitimacy that the North Korean regime has always wanted. I think from like their point of view like if you wondering like why they're so like in terms of like why they're so married to their nukes like number one they see what happens to Saddam Hussein and Momar Gaddafi who like give up their nuclear programs and get murdered as a result of it. And they also see like if you have nukes you can get an American president to the table with you and that brings you a kind of legitimacy that nothing else does. And you know it was not Kim Il-sung who managed that it was not Kim Jong-il who managed that it was Kim Jong-un the little rocket man the kid that like everybody made fun of when he took power. Which is how that's really interesting to me like he comes across as maybe the most adept of his family. Which really says something because this is the period I think in in terms of all the cultural shifts we've had in the past since since that family first took hold. This is the one where and I'm talking about on a global level for everybody in terms of any kind of career anything you're doing.

This is the period I feel like things are the most in free fall and it's the hardest to adapt to things because you don't know what what's going to be the thing or what's the right way to go about it. And yet it does make you wonder like in that game talking about gambling before if it's just him rolling the dice every time or if it's him with a specific instinct for this shit like what is it because a lot of other people in so many different ways have failed in terms of careers in terms of all these other things because the paradigm shift of the last like 10 to 15 years has been so severe. Do you know what I mean. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And it really has. And if nothing else like the message that you get from Kim Jong-un's story is like if you're going to be a dictator you better have a couple of fucking nukes in your pocket. Yeah. Because like that really smooths out your ability to handle the travails of the world. It does. Oh totally. And it is. And I guess in talking about all this stuff we're saying we're like the past few years he's managed to adapt to these things that obviously is the big you know the key the secret. Yeah. And he's you know as the years have gone on there have been other things we can tell about him you know from pictures we know that he's gotten more and more obese shall we say. In 2014 he was out of commission for six weeks and when he came back into the public eye he was wearing a walking stick. The rumors that circulated widely in the news were that his addiction to rich Swiss Imentale cheese had made him so fat that his ankles had collapsed. More realistic and sober appraisals of things suggest that he probably just got gout better known as Paul Manafort's disease.

So kind of the end of this the picture that we're left with of Kim Jong-un is a cunning brutal and sometimes brilliant generally balanced insane dictator who knows how to sort of weigh practical repression of his people with enough freedom to maintain power and give them a sense of improvement and hope for the future. But he's also a guy of strong appetites and little self control when it comes to desires of the flesh and I can't claim to know the man but based on my reading the most compelling picture I think I found of his personality was written out in a Vanity Fair article by Mark Bowden. Mark notes at age five we are all the center of the universe everything our family parents home neighborhood school country revolves around us for most people what follows is a long process of dethronement as his majesty the child confronts the ever more obvious and humbling truth not so for Kim his world at age five has turned out to be his world at age 30 or barely very nearly so everyone does exist to serve him the known world he really is configured with him at his center the most senior men in his kingdom have power because he wills it and they smile and bow and scribble notes and moss and little notebooks whenever he dines to speak not only is he the one and only Kim Jong-un he's officially the only person who can carry the given name that's what I got it is a thing where I mean I don't know that said it's what I've been thinking about a lot actually for this entire coverage of all of this has been like this guy has it doesn't matter what nature whatever he's chemically bound to whatever it is pure nurture I think that has shaped him through and through a lot if this kid hadn't been the son of a dictator he would have been that kid that

you like played PlayStation sports games with and like through the controller across the room when he lost yes and then as he grew up he either would have like become an incel and join the alt right or he would have like gotten some sense smacked into him somewhere along the line and like grown up as a human being and like become a functioning member of society or become those tech dudes like a merciless even a merciless version of well a lot of those guys are merciless and he's I would argue would probably become an app developer that would shift everything for the better for his pockets and the worse for everyone else yeah if he wound up having that kind of he is pretty mechanically inclined so maybe but you know he's I think one of the things that ought to be clear to everybody at this point after seeing how he's taken advantage of the Trump years is that he was made fun of pretty much roundly when he first came to power but he's proven himself to be one of the most able people in global politics which is frustrating and it's like not a fun note to end these it's way more fun we can end them on like the you know dying from self indulgence or being killed by their people or whatever but like he's in power and he'll probably be in power for decades he's only he's not even 40 yet like yeah whatever is rain ends if the pot if the pod still going if climate change hasn't rendered a podcast obsolete we should talk about it again yeah we can we can finish his story either in a podcast or in what I'm sure will be the the method of communication of the future which is shouting into Kant shells from underneath dead power lines

like the like the troubadours used to do yeah like the troubadours of old yeah yeah well Eli you got some pluggables to plug yes please at Eli Olsberg on all the socials and you can listen to closure the podcast that never ends on iTunes Spotify where we get your podcast and we talk about I just interview people in regards to certain events or situations in their lives or anything they want to talk about and if they found closure in it much like we haven't found closure in the story and yeah you could also listen to pot as a woman which I co-host with Theresa Lee and we do track by track breakdowns of Ariana Grande songs and whether our guests like them or not and lastly if you're in LA please come to performance anxiety at the pleasure chest second Tuesday of every month check out performance anxiety at the treasure chest check out Eli's treasure treasure chest pleasure chest pleasure chest oh that's a way better name than treasure chest check out Eli's podcasts and you know check out this podcast online at behind the bastards dot com find us on Twitter at Instagram and at bastards pod this is the episode that everybody wanted me to do and I'm sorry that it ends with no closure and that it's not nearly as funny as you are all hoping for but this is the best information I could bring you on the Kim so be careful what you fucking ask for sometimes it's just a bummer that's the episode buy a t-shirt on t-public.com we're we're done go uh we'll build your own boots it's the only way to be safe but our federal agents catching bad guys or creating them he was just waiting for me to set the date the time and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen listen to alphabet boys on the I heart radio app Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast

did you know Lance Bass is a Russian trained astronaut that he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow hoping to become the youngest person to go to space well I ought to know because I'm Lance Bass and I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down with the Soviet Union collapsing around him he orbited the earth for 313 days that changed the world listen to the last Soviet on the I heart radio app Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts what if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price two death sentences in a life without parole my youngest I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday listen to CSI on trial on the I heart radio app Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts