It Could Happen Here - Executive Disorder: White House Weekly #46

Episode Date: December 19, 2025

The gang discuss escalation with Venezuela, an AI executive order, the trial of Judge Dugan, the mass shooting at Brown University, and a new travel ban. Sources: https://gothamist.com/news/ice-enters-nyc-shelters-armed-and-without-judicial-warrants-reports-show https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/12/designating-fentanyl-as-a-weapon-of-mass-destruction/  https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/12/restricting-and-limiting-the-entry-of-foreign-nationals-to-protect-the-security-of-the-united-states/  https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/70255703/united-states-v-dugan/  https://bsky.app/profile/klasfeldreports.com/post/3ma4gf7vm772z  https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/71930356/pablo-pablo-v-lyons/   https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4g562vz34roSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back. I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting. Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation

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intended for audiences 21 and older gentlemen's cut bourbon boon county kentucky for more on gentlemen's cut please visit gentlemen's cuthuburn.com. Please enjoy responsibly. Have you ever listened to those true crime shows and found yourself with more questions than answers? Who catfishes a city? Is it even safe to snort human remains?

Is that the plot of footloose? I'm comedian Rory Scoville and I'm here to tell you Josh Dean and I have a new podcast that celebrates the amazing creativity of the world's dumbest criminals. It's called Crimeless, a true crime comedy podcast.

Listen on the eye-heartedly. HeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. CallZone Media. All right. I'm due the intro. What up, crackers and crackettes? Is that good? Perfect.

Can we say that? I think so. Okay. Do you have a non-binary cracks? Crackams? I think I'm definitely not a cracker. I'm going to say this. The one non-cracker.

I just wanted to use the word crackettes. I understand it's not appropriate. That's reasonable. Welcome to ED. Yeah. Thanks, Robert. We should just, we should cut off that. Sorry, James.

No, let's just keep doing it. Do the intro. This is it could happen here, executive disorder. Our weekly newscast covering what is happening in the White House, the crumbling of our world, and what this means to you. I am James Stout, and I'm joined today by Robert Evans and Mia Wong. And Sophie. Sophie is also here. And this episode, we are covering the week of December 11th to December 17th, the week before the week that is Christmas.

That's right, baby. So I hope you've done your shopping. I hope you got me a gift because I pay attention to which of our listeners do and do not buy me presents. Yeah, so do I. You will never find me and you shouldn't try. That's right. And it's currently Hanukkah. Happy Hanukkah. Oh, happy Hanukkah. That's right. Yeah. Happy Hanukkah. All the holidays. Have a, yeah, Quasi Kwanza, have a solemn, dignified tet.

All the holidays. Have a good one of them. Happy winter solstice, which is. Happy solstice. More unhappy solstice. It's kind of a bittersweet holiday. Yeah. Super Saturnalia, you know.

Super Saturnalia is a good one. So, holidays are nice, but we're going to talk about some things. that are less nice today for government. Yes, the government and specific parts of the government. Let's start with some headlines. Gothamist has obtained information about ICE being able to enter private parts of New York City shelters without a judicial warrant or being able to obtain private information about residents, despite both of these in theory being prohibited by sanctuary city laws in New York, right? This happened at least five times.

The way Gotham is found this is by making a public record request for incident reports, which is a clever use of public record law, nice one. The city is already aware of both jail and police officers violating these laws. I think this is a good example of how people think of sanctuary city laws as like inassailable, but in fact sanctuary laws, be their city, state, whatever jurisdiction, are very often violated. And it's good to see that being reported on more. Last week we talked about Faustino Pablo Pablo, right? The guy who had been sent to Guatemala,

despite the fact that he had protections under the Convention Against Torture for being returned there. The government has returned him to the US, which is good. That is a rare, good immigration story. Yay. Yay. Yay.

Yeah, you love to see it. It did really bum me out to see that, like, there were dozens of articles on him being sent there, right? And I couldn't find anything, any reporting on him being returned, which is kind of like, We should be happy for these people. We should, we should, we don't get many wins, and we should take them. Yeah, we should be happy that this guy is not being likely to be tortured.

At least, it is still possible for them to remove him to a third country, right? That is not outside the realm of possibility, but right now he's not in a place where a judge adjudicated. He was likely to be tortured, and that is good. Good. And Trump has designated fentanyl as a weapon of mass destruction, which is great. What are we doing here? Like, I am trained as a historian, and I probably should remind you that we have been down this road before with the weapons of mass destruction. And I hope this is not leading where it did last time, but I am very worried that it might.

Yeah. Yeah, it's one of those things. I'm both, we'll see. We'll know before this episode ends whether or not I'm wrong. Tucker Carlson stated recently that a source has told him the presidential announcement coming up is Trump declaring war, right? That like we're doing a war with Venezuela full on, not just some like air strikes and stuff, just not to minimize illegal airstrikes in the sea or on Venezuela's soil. I don't know if I think that that's the likeliest thing.

It just seems like such a huge jump. But also, at this point, there's a whole armada blocking off Venezuela from the rest of the world. And Trump put out a statement saying that their oil is our oil and belongs rightly to American companies. Oh, wow. Very, very possible. Very possible. We're about to go to war with them. I'm certainly not a—I don't know what's going to happen, y'all.

I'm white-knuckling it like everybody else. Yeah, that fucking sucks. I didn't know the thing about that oil being R-O. It's amazing. I'll read the exact quote to you, James. This is from a Trump, a truth social post, which has 12.4,000 re-truths and 47,000 likes. Venezuela is completely surrounded by the largest armada ever assembled in the history of South America. It will only get bigger, and the shock to them will be like nothing they have ever seen before.

Until such time as they return to the United States of America, all of the oil, land, and other assets that they previously stole from us. The illegitimate Muduro regime is using oil from these stolen oil fields to finance themselves, drug terrorism, human trafficking, murder, and kidnapping. For the theft of our assets and many other reasons, including terrorism, drug smuggling and human trafficking, the Venezuelan regime has been designated a foreign terrorist organization. Therefore, today I'm ordering a total and complete blockade of all sanctioned oil tankers going into and out of Venezuela. The illegal aliens and criminals that the Maduro regime has sent to the United States

during the weekend and up Biden administration are being returned to Venezuela at a rapid pace, yada, yada, yada. Yeah, all of our oil land and other assets have to be returned to the United States. He's talking about oil that American companies have. had at points like contracts to exploit, but he's phrasing it as like, their land and oil is our land and oil, which... Yeah, it's a very colonial way of phrasing, like, a contract. Oh, 100%.

Again, a lot of times, you know, I would be like, okay, well, I don't know if war is the most reasonable thing to expect. When the president's posting shit like that, it's very reasonable to be like, I think we might go to war. I think he might be about to invade Venezuela. I don't know what's going to happen, but you're no longer being like, a kooky conspiracy theorist to be like, well, maybe he's about to try to take over Venezuela. Maybe that is what's coming.

Yeah. I don't understand how in that instance they would continue to get Venezuela to accept people. The U.S. is removing. That's one of the sticking points that I see. Maybe he's found a third country, right? They've been very fond of finding third countries. I guess I should explain a little bit about oil leaving Venezuela. just so, like, people are aware of that.

So, like, Robert read the, uh, the truth. That sounds like something someone says in church, doesn't it? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Here we are. So they're talking about, like, blockading sanctioned oil tankers. Not necessarily every tanker that enters Venezuela is sanctioned. Like, I believe Chevron has some contracts.

Chevron tankers should be cruising. Yeah. There's a lot of Chevron. Yeah, that shouldn't be an issue, right? They should be able to go back and forth if they're not sanctioned. It's the Venezuelan state oil company, which is. in English, I guess you would say PDVSA. Puttvasa.

Puttvasse is that. You say in English, okay. Yeah, yeah, yep, yep. What Venezuela has done previously, and this is not by any means unique to Venezuela, but this is generally how many of these regimes that are kind of in the ambit of Venezuela, I'm talking about Iran and Russia here, have avoided sanctions and sanctioned entities so far is by using what are called ghost ships. I will link to an explainer on this.

what they will do is use the names and identifiers of vessels that have been scrapped. They will change the flags of vessels, often to these small island nations for whom allowing ships to use their flag as kind of a source of income, right? And they will often use these to go out into international waters and then offload cargo, in this case, oil rates. So this happens pretty frequently with Venezuelan vessels. It was that was one such vessel called the skipper that the U.S. Coast Guard boarded, I think, last week as we're recording this. Yeah, sure.

That is how Venezuela has previously been evading these sanctions. And Iran does this too. Russia does this too. They also do things like spoof their location or turn off. They have like a locator beacon that ships are supposed to use. The transponder, yeah. Yeah. So this is fairly common practice, but obviously the way to stop that is a physical blockade, right?

Like, that's not going to be possible if the U.S. is effectively, like, inspecting ships leaving Venezuela, right? Or sort of keeping a very close eye on them. So that will end. And with that, we'll end a very important source of income for the Maduro regime if they keep doing this. Yeah. Now, obviously, one of the sort of issues we're trying to work out what is going to happen here, especially before whatever speech Trump is about to give, is that we're trying to figure out state policy from Trump posting. Right. Yeah, yeah.

And there's a lot of this that is enormously incoherent. So, okay, the thing about designating the government of Venezuela as a foreign terrorist organization is one of the weirdest things I've ever seen. And this was also unhinged. The closest thing we've ever really gotten to that, I guess, was the IRGC. Yeah. And maybe you could go back and say the Khmer Rouge, but, like, they weren't really a government by that point. So this is not a designation that has ever been given to a government before. Right. It doesn't make any sense to give it to a government.

It doesn't make sense to give it to this government. I mean, you know, even if you're working with in the logic of counterterrorism, which is just, you know, unhinged, murderous imperialism to begin with. But all of the reporting on this has been assuming that the blockade will be of, you know, like, of these specifically sanctioned oil tankers.

However, the thing about the foreign terrorist organization designation is that it does things. And one of the things that foreign terrorist organization designation does is that if you do business with a foreign terrorist organization, you are now immediately on the line for material support of terrorism charges. Like Chevron. So, yes. There are lots of countries. Like Facebook does business. I'm fine with the U.S. military carrying out airstrikes on Chevron executives and their property. Let's be clear about that. I would salute the red, white, and blue if we dropped some hellfires on that C-suite. Yeah, I don't know.

This is all very weird. My understanding of the FTO designation process is that, how it's supposed to work is that the president proposes it, and then the Secretary of State and Secretary of the Treasurer, I think, have to approve it. And then there's a seven-day period where Congress has an opportunity to say no, and then it goes up. So right now, we should be theoretically in the seven-day window, but it's also really unclear what the administration has actually been doing, because, again, we're being governed by post. Yeah, like, it's, so... It's not announced as an executive action on whitehouse.gov,

and I think normally it goes there, and then the seven-day comment congressional period commences, then it's not in the federal register either. Right now, all we have is a truth. So, like, Yeah. And like, and this is the problem is that this is sort of the Calvin Ball War in that they're using, they're using the names of actual legal categories and things that have material effects in the world, but they're just posts. And I want to be very clear about this. Even just doing a blockade on these sanctioned vessels is an act of war. Yeah. Like that's a, that's very deliberately an act of war. It is an act of imperial aggression. It is morally wrong. It is also unbelievably. illegal under the War Powers Act, and this is actually gotten a response from Democrats and Congress. There's been a few measures. CBS is reporting this. There's been a few measures to stop the president from starting a war here. I'm going to quote CBS. A second measure from Democratic rep Jim McGovern in Massachusetts would remove the armed forces, quote, from hostilities with or against Venezuela that have not been authorized by Congress. McGovern's resolution could

face the best chance of potential adoption since it has three GOP co-sponsors. Reps, Marjorie Taylor Green of Georgia, Thomas Massey of Kentucky, and Don Bacon of Nebraska. Bacon says he would also vote in favor of Meeks as measure. Bacon is taking a very weird line here of Keeney's congressional approval and also I support him doing this. So, purely a procedural objection. Yeah, it's a, I want my war, but I want Congress to have a little shred of power. Yeah.

So I think it's also worth noting. what exactly is going on here. I'm someone who's on the record as talking about how political economy in Latin America and American imperialism is usually slightly more complicated than they just want a resource, but they just want a resource here.

Yeah, this one really is. No. Like, so it's only like, like Bolivia, for example. Everyone thinks that the whole coup in Bolivia was about lithium and it wasn't. I'm very mad about this. It was not. If you look at the people, if you look at Camacho, if you look at people who were actually running that

coup. They were all Bolivian agro barons because a huge part of what was going on there was a rebellion by the sort of agro business like agricultural elite who like joined with parts of like a reactionary middle class. Okay. But this is not that. Venezuela has the world's largest oil reserves, but there are significant problems extracting the oil, right? Many of these problems stem from the 2002-2003 opposition general strike. This is back after Hugo Chavez was elected. So in 2002, there was a coup against Chavez that failed and was sort of overturned famously. But later that year, there was also a sort of opposition general strike that lasted from like late 2002 to early 2003.

And a huge part of that general strike was oil workers specifically. And it was very specifically, one of the things about the structure of oil production is that there were a bunch of very, very highly paid and highly skilled technical workers who are very, very loyal to the oil companies themselves and who are very loyal to who are sort of tend to be very right wing. These people went on strike and sort of got fired on mass. Oil production requires both a huge amount of heavy capital and a bunch of highly skilled workers. And if you don't have both of those things, then you can't do oil extraction. And this has sort of been a recurring problem for the entire time, both sort of Fugos and Majuro has been in office, is that they

haven't had the capacity to actually extract a bunch of the oil. And also they've refused to turn the oil over to more American companies than have already been contracted. And it's also worth noting there's a lot of talk about like Venezuela having the world's largest reserves. And a lot of that is like them jinking the numbers by including a lot of like tar sands that would be, that no one's going to try to get extract like fuel from because it's too expensive and too much of a pain in the ass. It's just not worth it. Anyway. And also their claims to reserves that are not actually part of Venezuela at this time. Right. Right. Like we're not working with exact, with accurate information. Yeah. It's messy. And it's also worth noting that like the oil numbers, I mean,

obviously all oil numbers are political, but the oil numbers here are extraordinarily political, because these are numbers that are basically used as a pitch by sort of like the opposition to try to get a U.S. backed coup. And it's also sort of we're noting that the other thing that's happening here, and the reason this is all going to probably cause really significant economic problems and probably humanitarian disaster, both in Venezuela and probably also in Cuba, which extensively relies on Venezuelan oil to have their economy function, is that the Venezuelan economy has been really structured around oil in a way that they

failed to transition out of multiple times? the first big one I've done in a different episode about this in the neoliberalism series a bunch of years ago but there was a whole bunch of deliberate sabotage by American car companies over the attempt to build a car industry there's a long sort of history of this but it means that both of these countries' economies are desperately relying on oil

and the more of this that is cut off the more fucked it's going to get for just everyone in Venezuela yeah and you can already see how much worse it's got from the time I went to Venezuela to now, like, they're very vulnerable to changes in crude oil prices, right? And that has, along with corruption and a government, which doesn't really give a shit about the material welfare of its people, has already made things unsustainably hard for people in Venezuela, and that will only get worse. Yeah. So I want to conclude basically on a couple

of things. One, there's that. Two, this is going to cause more waves of migration and refugees fleeing the country, both from potential U.S. military strikes and from the economic damage. There's been some moves in the international stage with China and Mexico expressing support for the Venezuelan government. Shinebom in Mexico is offered to facilitate negotiations and mediate negotiations between the U.S. and Venezuela. It's also kind of word noting that right before this whole thing, there was a giant Vanity Fair interview with Susan Wiles, who's Trump's chief of staff, who, Oh, boy. This is for Reuters.

Susie Dubbs, this big collar here. God. Said Trump, quote, wants to keep blowing up boats until Maduro cries uncle, which is one of the most hideous things I've ever heard. Yeah.

It's gangster. It's terrorism. It's literally terrorism. It's a highway. Yeah. Yeah. It is straight of structurally, unless you reside,

we are going to keep killing civilians. Like, it's hotchist taker shit. Yeah. It's hideous. It's also a fundamental misunderstanding of how the regime operates, if that is the case so, because they don't care if their people kept dying. I have seen Venezuelan people die in the Darying Gap, right?

Because, in part, their government is incapable of providing for their material needs. They don't care. Killing some other people with boats is not going to fundamentally change the way that government works, because there's only one way it can work. Yeah, and I think there's the one last thing I want to say about this before we head out slash before whatever giant update comes after the speech. Yeah, I've got one after you finish here. One of the big problems here is that people in the administration really do believe this.

They actually do think that you can knock off the governments with airstrikes. And no, you can't. No, you can't. They thought this about the Houthis, too. It's wrong. It's never been right. It's hideous. We just finished doing like a five-parter on bastards about like the nuclear doomsday device.

That also dealt heavily with the work of that Italian Air Force General Duhay, who was the first guy in 1921 to be like, Like, all you need are bombers. Nothing else is necessary in militaries now. It's nothing but bombers from here. And if you have enough bombers, no one will ever attack you. And this logic has always been wrong. And it's also every new generation of like military leaders, especially in like air power

field are like, all we need is air strikes. You don't need to send in ground. You can accomplish all of your goals, all of your power projection just by bombing people or shooting missiles at them. And they're always wrong. It doesn't work. It's just not effective. Yeah.

Like, I think the Trump administration is somewhat, I don't want to say high on its own supply. They had success in Syria with removing the territorial caliphate, mostly using U.S. air power, right? It wasn't a big U.S. grandpa. But that was the U.S. part. There was still, as you know, James the shitload of Kurdish fighters. Yes, that is the thing, right. The Syrian and, yeah, yeah, yeah. 11, 12,000 Kurdish people died to remove the Islamic State.

And more have died since. right? Yeah, and also a shitload of Iraqi soldiers and mix of Kurds and largely guys from in and around Baghdad, but like, yeah, like a lot of... Sure, and a bunch of Arab Syrians, and I don't mean to, like, ethnically gate this at all, Assyrian people, Armenians. No, but like a huge amount of the effort was guys, I mean, literally, I was in bed with some of these guys, a lot of, like, the fighting tip was like literally dudes with fucking

knives and hand grenades, clearing buildings and hand-to-hand combat. Yeah. Those were the people who faced danger, right? And that's what you need to... Unfortunately, you can't do war with computers yet. Yeah. But yeah, I think that might be where this belief. That and like the Marco Rubio lobby, right, the Florida Cubans who are invested in this kind of Trump corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, right? And the idea that they can roll back leftist regimes in, like, South and Central America.

Yep. I think that's where a lot of the pressure is coming from. Yeah. Speaking of pressure, we are being pressured to go to ads. That's right. Beautiful. It's 5.23 p.m. One of your kids is asking for a snack. Another is building a fort out of your clean laundry.

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We'll look into some of the silliest ways folks have broken the laws. Honestly, it feels more like a high-level prank than a crime. Who catfishes a city? And meets some memorable anti-heroes. There are thousands of angry, horny monkeys. Clap, if you think, she's a witch.

And it freaks you out. He has X-ray vision. How could I not follow him? Honestly, I got to follow him. He can see right through me. Listen to Crimeless on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back. I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.

Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians. Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leveh, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolfe, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name. And this season, I've sat down with Black Pumas, Alessia Kara, Sarah McLaughlin, and more. Check out my new episode with John Legend. I feel like in a lot of ways our careers are paralleled in some ways, but they just never intersected for some reason. I know.

We don't know which way you go Listen to Nora Jones is playing along On the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, everybody, it's Chuck and Josh from the Stuff You Should Know podcast, and it's that time of year again when we knuckle down to do our annual holiday episodes. We collected our best past classic holiday episodes and compiled them into a 12 Days of Christmas Toys playlist that the whole family, can enjoy. That's right. Maybe you missed it the first time we detailed the history of

Beanie Babies, Monopoly, or Yo-Yo's, and a whole lot more. So listen to the 12 Days of Christmas Toys playlist on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back. There's an update I just came across as we're doing this. We talked about how Tucker is an inside source saying that Trump's basically going to declare war. There's another article that just came out on stitch snitches by Gloria Shaw, citing a pro-Trump host on Real America's voice, who characterized the upcoming Oval Office address as a PR thing, meant basically as an acknowledgement that a lot of Trump's voters are frustrated that he keeps talking about, like, international issues, like Venezuela. While everything is more expensive

for them and they continue to lose their jobs and the economy is shit, to quote from that article, And this is them quoting a segment from that, a Real America's Voice podcast. The remarks came during a segment on the water cooler with co-host David Brody, who teased the 9 p.m. Eastern address is an elevated effort to regain the narrative on affordability. The president is going to be in the Oval Office tonight. 9 p.m. Eastern, Brody said, big address to the nation. He's elevating this. Clearly, this is to regain the narrative and explain more about the affordability issue in America and what this administration is doing. I think they're trying to seize this right

off the top and make sure it doesn't get away from them. And the claims here is basically like this is Trump trying to steal a night. March on the 2026 election cycle and reset a lot of what people are talking about around affordability. Like this argument is that, no, he's basically acknowledging that it's been kind of a mistake to focus so much on his overseas policies. And he really needs to start promising that that golden age is actually going to come for his voters, which the numbers don't bear out, right? Like almost no jobs have been added in the U.S. since April. there's about 700,000 more people unemployed now than there were in November of

2024, like things aren't good. Yeah, inflation is still wild. Inflation is real bad. Like, food and like the material things that we need are going up in price faster than general inflation. Like, it's not good. And people like on his own side, I thought Jessica Tarlov, who's a Fox News host of the five, quote tweeted a post about how like the hiring recession just with the golden age.

attached, which is like what Trump has been saying, you know, we're going to have a new golden age if you make be president. So like the fact that he hasn't done, he hasn't followed through any of his promises to actually improve life for his voters or the economy is starting to hurt. And I guess I'm hopeful that that's what it is rather than the Marines are about to be in Caracas, right? But I guess we'll see very soon. Yeah. Great stuff. Yeah. Talking of international stuff, Trump is doing, let's talk about the new travel ban. So this travel ban dropped yesterday. That was Tuesday. So it previously had this 19 country travel ban, right? Some of that was a complete bar to entry for citizens of those countries or to new visa entries. Some of it was a partial bar to

immigrant visas, not to non-immigrant visas, right? They have now expanded this to 20 more countries. So totally bad now from getting new visas to enter the USA, a citizen of Burkina, Faso, Mali, Nishir, South Sudan, and Syria, as well as a Palestinian Authority. The Syria one is particularly wild because Al-Shara justice to the White House. There are like individual case-by-case exceptions, right? It's not that they, they wouldn't block Al-Shaara, I'm sure, but like it's interesting to look at the justifications that they use here. What they are basically saying, I'll just read a couple of them here to give you an example, right? Quote, at least one country lacks mechanisms in hospitals to ensure births are reported,

and widespread with a general lack of vecking and poor record keeping, result in any non-citizen being able to obtain any civil document from that country, particularly if that person is willing to pay a fee or engage an individual that specialises in assisting in such fraud. They go on to basically document failures in government bureaucracy, that they talk about corruption, right? They talk about places where birth certificates are just written by hand. They talk about places where the government does not control all the territory, prevalence of crime, places which offer citizenship by investment without physical residence. They also talk

about some of these countries not being willing to accept their nationals to the U.S. Deports. And again, visa overstay rates, right, which is what they spoke about last time. what is getting less reporting, or at least was this morning when I looked, was that they have removed exemptions which existed for the previous 19. These include family member visas, right? So that means that, for instance, someone who could have themselves become a permanent resident or even a citizen now cannot bring a family member, say a spouse, a sibling, etc., across, even though those people were people to be vetted.

And it appears some, there is, Certain categories of SIVs are exempt, but I believe not all SIV. So that's a special immigrant visa, right? The vast bulk of SIVs will be Afghan people who worked with the U.S. military in Afghanistan. The 19 countries who are now partially restricted are just going to read them off. Angola, Antigran, Barbuda, Benin, Coutivois, Dominica, Gabon, Bagambia, Malawi, Mauritania, Nigeria, Senegal, Tanzania, Tonga, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. For some reason, the first five of these are underlined on the White House website.

I don't know if someone were copied and pasted them across with hyperlinks. I don't know. I'm unable to work out why. They're not hyperlinked in the document, but there doesn't seem to be any explanation. There's no special set of sanctions for those, and they're just in alphabetical order. They actually reduced restrictions on Turkmenistan because, quote, The suspension of entry into the United States of nationals of Turkmenistan as non-immigrants on B1, B2, FM and JV visas is lifted. Because some concerns remain, the entry into the United States of Nationals of Turkmenistan as immigrants remain suspended.

The last element of this that I want to cover is it would appear to stop international adoptions from the listed countries, like all of those 39 listed countries, which is wild. and particularly unfortunate because I know like people who who adopts children from outside the United States like that it's a process that takes years and I can imagine it being horrifically traumatic to have it suddenly cut off like this but consciously or unconsciously that is what this executive action appears to do so that is not great it seems that the United States is using this as a kind of cudgel right to encompass to those countries to, it's kind of a quid pro quo. They get what they want and they got from Turkmenistan, apparently, then they will remove some of those restrictions. Otherwise, they will continue them. So yeah, that's not great. So Judge Hannah Dugan's trial began this week.

Dugan, if you're not familiar, she's not the judge in New Mexico who was accused of providing firearms to somebody who was not a permanent resident or citizen. She is a judge who is accused of allowing a migrant, a man named Mr. Flores Luis, to leave her courtroom from a door that is not the usual door. That door led to a private corridor. In that private corridor, there was one exit to a public area and also a door to a fire escape. Mr. Flores Ruiz took the exit to the public area. He then took a lift down, I think, to the ground floor with an ICE officer. He then attempted to run away when ICE officers attempted to detain him when he left the lift, he was caught and detained. So we learned quite a lot in this, and it's just been interesting

to follow, right? First of all, we see that several of the people who were taking part in the apprehension were reassigned FBI agents. This is increasingly common, right? Like, all branches of the federal law enforcement have had some of their capacity redirected. to doing this, right? To doing, like this guy, I believe, had misdemeanors. The agents were using

signal to communicate. They had a group chat called Frozen Water. Obviously. Jesus Christ. Yeah, really funny. God, I hate these people. The FBI agent conceded

in cross-examination that's not an app approved by the FBI, but according to one... Shocking. The DHS apparently does approve it, according to a CBP agent who was cross-examined there, which obviously creates an issue for the retention of records, right?

Because signal, if you're not familiar, auto-deletes things after a period of time that users can configure. It also appears that when one of these DHS agents entered the courthouse, the court security officers told him that he needed an escort, but then he appears to a preceded without one. In a text of colleagues, this DHS employee said, quote, this is going to be a pain in the dick. So there's that.

Jesus Christ. Yeah. Do what happens, it seems like, is Judge Dugan sent them to the chief judge because it didn't have a judicial warrant? It's had an administrative warrant, right? Another judge testified against Judge Dugan, a judge called Judge Severa. So Judge Severa was with Judge Dugan when they confronted the agents. Judge Dugan wore her judicial robes when confronting them, which apparently is not usual.

well, it's not usual to wear them out of the courtroom. And Judge Severa seemed to disapprove of that. And then she said, quote, Judge Dugan could, quote, have been more diplomatic. And then she said, quote, judges shouldn't be helping defendants evade arrest. At the same time, Judge Dugan's defense lawyer asked her if she had warned her sister of the ice presence, which she had, and it appears that her sister had a hearing at the courthouse the next day, which Judge Severa said she was not aware of. So there's like a lot still to be unpacked here, right?

This is just the first day. This could go on past Christmas and into the new year and it probably will. But there's been some pretty good reporting on this from a substack called All Rise Media. And I will keep checking in on this and we'll report it on it again after the new year. Hello, this is Garrison Davis reporting from Tokyo. Unfortunately, I was unable to attend the regular executive disorder group recording due to being halfway around the globe, so I'm recording my section solo.

This past week saw two devastating mass shootings back to back. On Saturday afternoon, a mask shooter entered an economics class at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, and opened fire with a concealed handgun, killing two people, injuring nine others, all students. About 30 minutes after the shooting started, the university police announced a suspect was in custody. 20 minutes later, they retracted that statement. Then, university police reported shots fired in another section of campus, which they also later retracted. President Trump posted on Truth Social, quote, I've been briefed on the shooting that took place at Brown University in Rhode Island. The FBI is on the scene. The suspect is in

custody, God bless the victims and the families of the victims, unquote. This too was untrue, as the university released a statement about an hour later, clarifying that the shooter was not in custody and that over 400 officers were on the scene to assist in the investigation. The next morning, Providence Mayor Brett Smiley announced that a new person of interest was detained. The Providence police chief told NBC that they were confident that the suspect was the shooting. major news outlets later named this individual, though later that evening this quote-unquote person of interest was released with the Rhode Island Attorney General saying that the evidence quote, now points in a different direction, unquote.

The shooter currently remains unidentified and at large. On Sunday night in Sydney, Australia, a father and son, Sejid and Navid Akram coordinated a targeted attack against Jewish people attending a Hanukkah event on Bondi Beach. Fifteen people were killed in the shooting. Victims include a 10-year-old girl and a Holocaust survivor. 24 victims remain hospitalized. A bystander named Ahmed al-Ahmad, a son of Syrian refugees, charged one of the gunmen and wrestled his gun away.

Ahmed was later shot multiple times, but survived, and has been labeled a hero by the Australian primetime. Minister. Police say that a vehicle used by the gunmen contained homemade Islamic State flags and improvised explosive devices. The men were not part of an official terror cell, though the Prime Minister says that they were motivated by Islamic State extremist ideology. Counterterrorism officials believe the shooters received, quote-unquote, military-style training in the Philippines a month before the attack. On Tuesday, self-styled online investigators and right-wing social media content mills falsely identified the Brown University shooter as an LGBTQ Palestinian

studying at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, citing gate analysis based on surveillance footage of the unidentified suspect released by police. The university removed this queer Palestinian student's online profile in an effort to prevent doxing, though this itself was used by the online smearer campaign as evidence of guilt. Brown University laid published this statement, quote, in the aftermath of the shooting, we've seen a harmful doxing activity directed towards at least one member of the Brown University community. It's important to make clear that targeting individuals could do a revocable harm. Accusations, speculation, and conspiracies we're seeing on social media, and in some news reports are irresponsible,

harmful, and in some cases dangerous for the safety of individuals in our community. It is not unusual as a safety measure to take steps to protect an individual's safety when this kind of activity happens, including in regard to their online presence. As law enforcement officials stated clearly on Tuesday afternoon, if this individual's name had any relevance to the current investigation, they would be actively looking for this individual and providing information publicly, unquote. On a final note, after the holiday break, we will be reporting on the indictment against four alleged members of the Turtle Island Liberation Front.

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Have you ever listened to those true crime shows and found yourself with more questions than answers? And what is this? How is that not a story we all know? What's this? Where is that? Why is it wet? Boy, do we have a show for you? From Smartless Media, Campside Media, and Big Miner,

players comes crimeless. Join me, Josh Dean, investigative journalists. And me, Roy Scoville, comedian, as we celebrate the amazing creativity of the world's dumbest criminals. We'll look into some of the silliest ways folks have broken the laws. Honestly, it feels more like a high-level prank than a crime. Who catfishes a city? And meets some memorable anti-heroes.

There are thousands of angry horny monkeys. Clap if you think, she's a witch. And it freaks you out. He has X-rayed vision. How could I not follow him? Honestly, I got to follow me. He can see right through me. Listen to Crimeless on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back. I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting. Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians. Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Lave, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name. And this season, I've sat down with Black Pumas, Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, and more. Check out my new episode with John Legend. I feel like in a lot of ways our careers are paralleled in some ways, but they just never intersected for some reason. I know.

We don't know which way you go. Listen to Nora Jones is playing along on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, everybody. It's Chuck and Josh from the Stuff You Should Know podcast, and it's that time of year again when we knuckle down to do our annual holiday episodes. We collected our best past classic holiday episodes and compiled them into a 12 days of Christmas toys. playlist that the whole family can enjoy. That's right. Maybe you missed it the first time we detailed the history of Beanie Babies, Monopoly, or Yo-Yo's, and a whole lot more. So listen to the 12 Days of Christmas Toys playlist on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

We're back, and we have some news that's going to be really sad for everybody here. It could happen here, and just all of you listening, which is friend of the pod, Dan Bunch. Gino is stepping down from his work as deputy director of the FBI. I think it's been a nice vacation for him, but, you know, America needs him in his much more important role, whatever podcast he was doing before he got brought in to be deputy director of the FBI. You know, look, if he was podcasting right now, they would have caught the mass shooter at Brown. I think we can all agree on that.

Yeah, he'd have podcasted his way through it. Either that or just him not being at the FBI. would have made the FBI do their jobs better. Look, what we're learning from this is that you can never escape the podcasting minds. No matter where else you try to go, they will drag you back down. Oh, look, if you make me director of the FBI, I promise to stop podcasting and start being the most corrupt director of the FBI we've ever had. That's a tough challenge, but I think you're up to the task. I know. I know. I think I'm up to the task.

prepared to work at it. Yeah. So, yeah, that's cool. I wanted to talk a little bit about an executive order that our beloved president put out very recently. Some of you may be aware of this,

but on December 11th, 20, I mean, this year, 2025, Trump released yet another executive order, this one titled, Ensuring a National Policy Framework for Artificial Intelligence. And basically in this, and Trump stated that, like,

the reason he's doing this is because it's absolutely critical to the U.S.'s future that we be at the top of the game when it comes to AI, that we be global leaders in this burgeoning new field. These states in the EO, these efforts have already delivered tremendous benefits to the American people and led to trillions of dollars of investments across the country. Certainly haven't. But we remained in the earliest days of the technological revolution and in a race with adversaries for supremacy within it. Trump stated in an interview that he expects AI to be 50 to 60 percent of the U.S. economy

in the near future, which is nuts. Maybe that's just because everything else will just go to complete shit, you know? The reality is that, like, AI is not even close to being that value in terms of, like, what the economy produces, but nearly all of our growth is related and, like, is tied right now to data center investment.

So Trump absolutely needs AI, because without it, the country is very obviously in a recession. Like, this is the only thing propping up the image of the economy as not being in the shitter. Now, what does this EO actually do? Well, the goal of this, the statement is that it is the policy of the United States to sustain and enhance the United States as global AI dominance through a minimally burdensome national

policy framework for AI. This EO will establish an AI litigation task force within 30 days of this order going out. The Attorney General is supposed to establish this task force whose responsibility is to challenge state AI laws that are inconsistent with the policies set forward above, right? that we need to be globally dominant in AI, right? So this task force is supposed to go out and find state laws that it believes are like an onerous burden on the development of this technology. Going along with this within 90 days of the order,

the Secretary of Commerce is supposed to do an evaluation of all state AI laws in order to like point out which ones this task force should go after. And then the stick that this EO establishes is that if this task force decides that like a state AI law is in violation of our need to be dominant in AI, we can restrict state funding to things like the broadband equity access and deployment program, right? Basically, they'll cut off federal funding for like broadband access in order to punish states that try to restrict or in any way, shape, or form govern what people can use, what companies can use AI for.

And the primary thing this is all about, I know we all think about the stuff that like most people have more direct experience with, which is like all the slop, flooding the internet, the disinformation that's continuing to cook the brains of a lot of our peers and elders, and just the fact that, like, it's making certain industries full of hardworking people a lot harder to exist because companies are just trying to replace quality work with absolute, like, slop, trash. Yeah. But really what this is about, and the primary focus of most of these state-level laws

regulating AI is the housing market. Right? There's a good article in Politico about this written by Cassandra Dumay, but she notes that per a national conference of state legislatures analysis in July, there were more than 40 pending bills across the United States related to just AI in the housing sector. And most of these bills are attempting to stop landlords from using different AI programs to coordinate pricing. Basically, there are a couple of different programs, the most prominent which is called Real Page. And what they do is landlords, join these programs, and they share information on, like, what their different properties cost, and then the AI knows what everybody is charging and can suggest that they charge higher prices, right? Yeah. Now, the way that this is supposed to work is that you as a landlord look out at what's publicly available about the prices of your competitors and look at, like, what your customers

are currently willing to bear, and then try to set your prices and, you know, future price increases based on that. What Real Page is doing is a legal collusion, right? This is price fixing. It's just the AI is doing the actual active price fixing. The landlords are just sharing their data and paying a fee to the service. And so a bunch of states have tried to stop this because this objectively makes the housing crisis worse. I know there's some annoying assholes who come out and be like, you shouldn't talk about anything but increasing the supply of housing. And like, that's idiot shit. Yes, we need to increase the supply of housing. This objectively hurts people.

These programs objectively increase the price of rent. They do damage. We should be mitigating or making it impossible for businesses like this to exist. Anyone who disagrees is just being a dummy. New York passed a law in October that banned the use of AI algorithms to allow landlords to do price fixing. There's a similar bill in the Massachusetts legislation that's making's way forward right now. And this is fundamentally what a lot of the opposition to like state-level AI regulation is about, is that the landlords basically think that this is a great way to make a shitload of money

and tech companies are like, and we can continue, we can make a shitload of money, selling them the tools to do this, and states are trying to push back on this. And like, that's fundamentally what a lot of the impetus behind this executive order is, is an attempt to stop people from making this even more harmful. There is some, like, in this, that political article, they quote from Kevin Donnelly, who's the executive director of the real estate technology and transformation center. And he talks about, like, well, actually, we're currently using AI to identify buildable lots and promote sustainable construction so that we can actually, like, reduce some of the

cost of housing. And all of these bills could, you know, undermine our ability to improve people's, like, yeah, it's just fucking go, like, literally jump off a bridge, man, fuck you. Yeah. No, we know that's not how it works. We have data on this. No, this isn't theoretical. Yeah, anytime a landlord, anytime a landlord says anything or a real estate developer that says anything that suggests the thing they want to do is lower rent, they are lying.

You can tell because they don't fucking lower rents unless like a global pandemic happens. Yeah. Like, that's not how any of this works. And this has been controversial. Trump, before putting out the EO, tried to encourage the passage of a bill through Congress that would have done the same thing as the EEO. right, and would have actually had like more force of law behind it, basically making it illegal for states to have their own laws regulating AI. That didn't pass because even Republicans don't really like that idea. For one thing, states' rights is still supposed to be a pretty

big part of the party. But for another thing, there's like a lot of things that conservatives are really unhappy with in terms of AI. For example, it keeps exposing children to pornography and other things that kids shouldn't be exposed to. For another thing, there's a lot of American jobs that are going to be lost as a result of or potentially could be lost as a result of AI slop automation of a bunch of industries. And so there's there's even a significant amount of resistance among Republicans to this, which is why the bill didn't pass, right? And Trump, when he announced this EEO, basically sat down with like a chunk of the conservatives who were more critical of this. And I think basically bullied them into getting on board and saying,

no, he promised us this won't restrict state levels to, like, improve safety for children, right? There's absolutely, like, no guarantee of that. Like, you just have David Sachs, it was Trump's top AI advisor saying, no, no, none of this is about trying to stop state laws to make kids safer. It's just trying to stop state laws that will make rent less expensive. Yeah, there's Marjorie Taylor Greens come out against this. She's basically said that, you know, this is a violation of states' rights. It's bullshit.

Steve Bannon is in the same place. He had a good quote, I found in an article by the Hill. After two humiliating faceplants on a must-pass legislation, now we attempt an entirely unenforceable EO, tech bros doing utmost to turn POTUS MAGA base away from him while they line their pockets, which is essentially accurate. Yeah, he's no wrong. He's not as Steve.

Old Stevie ain't wrong about that. So all this is like pretty annoying and fucked up. We'll see what actually becomes of this. I tend to agree with Bannon that it's pretty much unenforceable. like the lawsuit, the court battles that will come from this is just going to be expensive and time consuming, but I actually don't think this is going to work the way they want. This is Trump making it very clear

that he is bought and paid for by the tax set and that he understands that he is hanging on by a thread in terms of popularity. One of the only things stopping the situation from getting worse is that AI spending on data centers and shit is propping up the image of the economy, right? That's what this is all about. Yeah, and this is something where he can simultaneously show up his tech base and shore up his landlord base.

Yeah. Which are like, yeah, it's great. Yeah, it's great with them. Two kinds of guys to do like Donald Trump. Yeah. I guess there's an end here where I could, I wanted to make a note about something also related to AI, which is that there's an incredibly stupid article in Vox that came out this week. Many such cases.

Like, literally the title is like, America, you've made it very clear that you hate AI. But what if it's the only way to restart the. idea machine, right? Oh, yeah. And this, this dipshit columnist's argument is that, like, well, we're not, we're running out of ideas. And AI, like, human beings can't come up with ideas enough to create growth at the level that the economy needs to be growing.

And in order to, like, take humanity into the future, really AI's the only way to generate more new ideas. And I wanted to look at, like, what is this based off of? And I think I figured out what, like, the fundamental. source of all of this shit is, which is back in 2017, there was a research paper put out by the National Bureau of Economic Research by Nicholas Bloom, Charles Jones, John Van Rinen, and Michael Webb. The kind of summary of that article reads as follows, in many growth models, economic growth arises from people creating ideas. And in the long run, growth rate is the product

of two terms, the effective number of researchers and their research productivity. We present a wide range of evidence for various industries, products and firms, showing that research effort is rising substantially while research productivity is declining sharply, right? So basically, we have more people doing research and we're spending more money on research, but that research is translating into economic gains at a lower level than ever before, right, to the point where we're not going to be able to continue to make economic gains like we used to be unless something changes. And if you're kind of paying attention to this, you might notice that that study, which is the underpinning of that Vox article

and all these claims that we need AI for ideas really is not actually making an argument that people aren't having more ideas. It's making an argument that it is harder to profit from ideas than it used to be, right? Now, that is fundamentally different from people not having ideas.

For one thing, it's reducing an idea to something that delivers a return for venture capitalists, right? That's all an idea is in this. It's something that makes money. And a lot of great ideas like the post office, don't generate a direct profit. Now, obviously, it's a net benefit to the economy that we have a post office,

but the post office runs at a loss, right? Which is why you have state funding for certain things, because they're just not going to be the kind of ideas that, like, a bunch of Silicon Valley investors want to throw money into, right? Now, the other part of the issue here is just a very practical one, which is that a lot of the ideas, the great ideas last century that were, like, most correlated with massive gains in, productivity, stuff like the introduction of vaccines on a wide scale, indoor plumbing and

electricity on a wide scale, phones. There's not ideas like that that are like that big and that much of a game changer left. Right. The low hanging fruit has been picked. There's not another the telephone waiting out there. We already did that. It was the smartphone. There's not another indoor plumbing, right? There's not something that's going to be as much of a sea chain. for the economy and for the quality of human life as those ideas, because those were really big things. Yeah, like, maybe you can put it as something like

actually cleaning the air that we breathe. Yes, but again, that's not profitable in a direct way, right? Like, you, that's an idea that would have a change that big, but there's not a profit incentive for it, right? Don't we privatize the air, Robert? Right, yeah, until we privatize the

fucking air. Yeah, and there's a lot, again, I find this whole, this discussion pattern, like, it's an example of the fact that, like, people like this fucking Vox article who I don't feel like deserves to be named to this have been using chat GPT so much that they're no longer thinking. They're not really sentient in a meaningful way, right? Like, when you write something like that, it's because your brain has been completely fucking cooked. I did find a good article, ironically, from 2017, from Vox

EU, that is titled, Ideas aren't running out, but they are getting more expensive to find, which is making a lot of the claims that, like, I've made, which is that, or that I've been bringing up so far in this, which is that it's not that there's a lack of ideas, that it costs more money to do stuff like that now. Like the costs, and because everything's so much more complex, the big ideas we're looking at aren't as simple as indoor plumbing. They require a lot more computing power. They require a lot more people working on them, right? Like, we've plucked the low-hanging fruit. And it ends with a paragraph I find kind of valuable here. Returning to the oil metaphor, we are digging deeper into a trickier part of the rock. Of course,

we could be wrong and humanity may have just been chipping away at a particularly hard point that will soon give way, creating decades of cheap ideas. This is the hope of those who emphasize the revolutionary power of artificial intelligence and the singularity, an accumulation of technology that triggers runaway growth at some point in the future. Although we all enjoy science fiction, history books are usually a safer guide to the future. In this case, history suggests that large increases in research effort are need to offset its declining productivity. And again, if you want to have the big ideas and the Star Trek future that all of these billionaires like Elon Musk pretend they want, what you actually have to do is be willing to put

a lot of money into research and development without any promise of a profit. Your motivation can't be, well, now we have to get a 200% rate of return in our investments, right? It has to be, well, this would improve people's lives and make life more sustainable, right? Like finding solutions to a lot of problems with climate. Cleaning the air, like dealing with like lack of access to clean water, lack of access to basic medical care. These are, You're not things where doing them means that your company gets an immediate profit and evaluation in the tens of billions of dollars, right? That's just not the way providing life-saving aid to people works.

But the net value to the global economy would be massive if, for example, kids weren't going without food and access to clean water and had better access to education and thus were able to go into fields where they become researchers and generate ideas that eventually turn into profit, right? like these AI fucks aren't talking about ideas they're talking about fracking the human mind right that's what they want to do that's a good way to put it yeah yeah i think that there's another thing we're saying here too um there's a david graver arguments about this where he makes an argument that i think is also very compelling that part of the decline in the rate of technological change has been the extent to which everyone who

was trying to do this stuff is just increasingly dealing with more and more layers of bureaucracy instead of actually doing the thing they're trying to do. And this is a huge problem in academia where it's like, okay, so you have, you know, you're teaching in academia, but you're also spending like a quarter of your time trying to get another job. You're spending another quarter of your time dealing with all of the unhinged whatever like accounting bullshit that your fucking supervisors have like, or like university management has like put upon you. And this is something that's also true for government researchers where there's just like this, you know, there's been this incredible increase in sort of the people. the amount of bureaucracy they have to jump through. Largely because of the right and because of all of the weird

shit they do where they hate government funding. They're like, oh, everyone has to like justify their funding literally every 10 seconds. And I think like that's like one of the other angles of this. And it's something that's only going to get worse because this administration is just fucking annihilating the entire basis of American science. Yeah. They're just killing it.

The damage that they've done to the pipeline of the people that would produce these researchers, right? With with the ways that all, suddenly like American science postdocs, just there's no money for it. There's no money for grad students. They're killing all of the pathways that would do this. And then they're going, oh, the only solution is the fucking tech boondoggle we've created to the problems that we created by just annihilating the capacity to do science. It sucks. I hate them.

If you want to email us, you can do so. It is cool zone tips at proton.me. If you want it to be encrypted, you should use a proton mail address as well. They're free. All right, guys. I think that's the podcast, listeners, haters, lovers. It's our last E.D. of the year, friends. It's our last E.D. of the year. Well, I don't know. We'll see if those pills come in.

But, yeah. I hate you. Happy holidays, everyone. Put a trans girl on your couch. Put a trans girl on your couch. Go love it. Or a bed. I mean, yeah, if you got a bed.

Yeah, if you got a bed. Isn't it? A futon? Those are acceptable. Inflictable mattress. Yeah, we love those. One of those, like, chairs that leans back to where it's, like, basically flat. Yeah. Not a lazy boy in this instance.

Sure. A lot of options. A neutral lazy chair. Yeah. An inflatable mattress. Why not? Yeah, why not? Yeah.

Water bed. A water bed. Oh, water beds are great. Your floors are strong enough because they are heavy. Yeah. They're really, and generally, you're not allowed to have them, but yes. Anyways, we reported the news. Arguably.

We reported the news. It Could Happen here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, poolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources where it could happen here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening. Hey, everybody, it's Chuck and Josh from the Stuff You Should Know podcast, and it's that time of year again when we knuckle down to do our annual holiday episodes.

We collected our best past classic holiday episodes and compiled them into a 12 Days of Christmas Toys playlist that the whole family can enjoy. That's right. Maybe you missed it the first time we detailed the history of Beanie Babies, Monopoly, or Yo-Yo's, and a whole lot more. So listen to the 12 Days of Christmas Toys playlist on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast. or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back. I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.

Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians. Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leveh, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name. And this season, I've sat down with Black Puma,

us, Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, and more. Check out my new episode with John Legend. I feel like in a lot of ways our careers are paralleled in some ways, but they just never intersected for some reason. I know. We should take it slow. We're just ordinary people. We don't know which way you go.

Listen to Nora Jones is playing along on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Stefan Curry, and this is Gentleman's Cut. I think what makes Gentleman's Cut different is me being a part of developing the profile of this beautiful finished product with every sip you get a little something different. Visit Gentleman'scutburbon.com

or your nearest Total Wines or Bevmo. This message is intended for audiences 21 and older. Gentleman's Cut Bourbon, Boone County, Kentucky. For more on Gentleman's Cut Bourbon, please visit Gentlemen'scutturbin.com. Please enjoy responsibly. Have you ever listened to those true crime shows and found yourself with more questions than answers? Who catfishes a city?

Is it even safe to snort human remains? Is that the plot of Footloose? I'm comedian Rory Scoville, and I'm here to tell you, Josh Dean and I have a new podcast that celebrates the amazing creativity of the world's dumbest criminals. It's called Crimeless, a true crime comedy podcast. Listen on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast, guaranteed human.