The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – The Fabulist: The Lying, Hustling, Grifting, Stealing, and Very American Legend of George Santos by Mark Chiusano

Episode Date: November 28, 2023

The Fabulist: The Lying, Hustling, Grifting, Stealing, and Very American Legend of George Santos by Mark Chiusano https://amzn.to/3Gi4891 From the dogged Long Island reporter who has been on his trail since 2019, the bizarre, page-turning, and frankly hysterical story of America’s most outrageous grifter—US Representative George Santos. America has grown used to larger-than-life politicians: Teflon Don, AOC, MTG, Dark Brandon, and all the rest have injected DC politics with an unmistakable edge of celebrity flair and tabloid intrigue. Yet in 2022, a new player on the national scene outshone them all. George Anthony Devolder Santos, and his revolving door of pseudonyms, shed glaring new light on how far we’d all let our politics slide as his claimed resume was shred to bits in the wake of a longshot run to office from New York’s 3rd Congressional District. From Wall Street gigs to an amateur volleyball career, from embellished claims of Jewish heritage to a fabricated 9/11 story involving his mother’s death, Santos’s legend continued to grow as his web of lies evaporated in real time. And the only thing wilder than this charlatan embedding himself in the warm, consequence-evading arms of our nation’s capital was the Queens con artist’s refusal to bow his head in shame. The Santos show continues, as he joins the ranks of high-wattage fakers like Anna Delvey and Elizabeth Holmes. Newsday alum and PEN/Hemingway honoree Mark Chiusano tells the full (well, as full as can be given the subject) story of Santos here for the first time. From humble years spent in Brazil, to glamorous nights on the west side of Manhattan, to the stunning small-time scams employed to ease his slippery climb up the American society ladder, The Fabulist tells a story you’ll have to read for yourself to believe…and even then, it’s George Santos, so who’s to say for sure. Combining the very best of boots-on-the-ground journalism, dishy backroom dealings, and glittery details about Gold Coast mansions and bodice-baring drag shows that’d feel just as at home in your next summer beach read, The Fabulist is truly stranger than fiction.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times, because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. This is Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com.

There you go. Welcome to the show, my family and friends. I hope you have all your arms, legs, and members tucked in, as whatever the announcer says at the beginning of the show. We're going to have a great show for you today, and I'm excited to hear from this author because I love political intrigue. I love political science. I love what little bit of democracy we may have left in the tank, and I guess I'm just going to have to enjoy watching it come down in flames. That's what it is.

So we're going to be talking to an amazing, I don't know why I'm excited about that. Sounds horrible. 248 years and whatever. It was a nice run. We've got an amazing author on the show. He's the author of the latest book called the fabulous the lying hustling grifting stealing and very american legend of george santos comes out november 28th 2023 mark chiasano is on the show with us today he will be talking about this interesting character who somehow got into congress and and it's still there i think that's what's interesting too as well before we get to that be sure for the show to your family friends and relatives go to

goodreads.com for chest christmas linkedin.com for chest christmas youtube.com for chest christmas christmas one of the tickety-tockety and christmas facebook.com uh mark took it upon himself to cover george santos as a columnist and editorial writer at New York's Newsday, Long Island's paper of record. As the youngest editorial writer in the paper's history, he interviewed national leaders like Hillary Clinton, Hakeem Jeffries, tracked and rode along with far-right patriot groups and fringe left activists, and traveled from New Hampshire to Puerto Rico to tell the story of American politics on the ground. He's also a New York City native and fiction writer whose story collection from Marine Park received a Penn Hemingway Award, honorable mention. His writing has appeared in places like The Drift, McSweeney's, The Paris Review, The Atlantic, and more. Welcome to the show, Mark.

How are you? Thanks so much for having me. Glad to be here. Thanks for coming. This should be an interesting show. A lot of interesting fun. Do I have to dress up like George Santos in Brazil to be in the show today? You know, there are lots of costumes.

He jumps from one to another. I feel like I should have came in drag for the show give us a your dot coms where do you want people to find you on the interwebs yeah i'm on twitter mj chisano ch i u s a n o but most importantly the book comes out on tuesday and it's going to be a lot of fun the fabulous i mean i think that's what was fun for me about doing this book was getting to just write about a kind of crazy character kind of catch me if you can story you know really american story there you go it's fun yeah when we put out the pre-show promotion on this i had people write me you're having george santos on because you know the picture of the cover wow oh man okay like that's gonna be an interesting show

i was gonna say do i look like george santos now i don't know no it's just you know the big face is right on there yeah and the fabulous kind of has uh i don't know it sounds like something he would write maybe entirely yeah well funnily enough he you know at his after he got indicted he gave this kind of wild press conference which maybe people have seen little snippets of but he kind of railed at the system and the indictment and really kind of went off on everybody. And at the very end of it, he said, you know, maybe this experience has been something for a book someday, something along those lines. So I do think he would love to write a book someday. Send him a copy, see if you can get an autograph.

We'll see. So give us a 30,000 overview of the book and what's inside? So this is the story of an extremely American guy who, born in Queens, you know, from what he called abject poverty. And he just had this ambition to be a wealthy man, a famous man, someone kind of who could become a celebrity. And that's who this guy was in the beginning. And lots of people feel that way, right? And the problem was that he got blocked on all levels. He was not able to make a ton of money on Wall Street. He was not able to go to one of the fancy colleges that he wanted to go to. So he started lying about it amazing grifter, kind of catch me if you can style thing. On the other hand, it's a story of an American political system that allowed a guy like that to flourish and thrive. And like you said, he's still in office as we speak.

Do you think that, you know, I mean, we see these copycats of Trump, Carrie Lake, him, all these other people. Do you think that, I mean, Trump broke our system so much that this is the new flood of the American politician? So what's interesting with Santos and Trump is that Santos really modeled himself after Trump in a lot of ways. He admired him, would sort of go try to hear him speak and hear his kind of, you know, aides and stuff speak very into Trump. And so he is in some ways a kind of mini Trump. See that in his political run. But what I find interesting is that, you know, Trump is a little bit sui generis. You know, he's a guy who had his own TV show.

He was famous before he left office. You know, he was he's not as wealthy as he says he is, but he's certainly a wealthy man, right? So kind of no surprise that a guy like that could win the presidency, right? And we've seen before with Reagan, et cetera. What's interesting is that Santos kind of followed the path without the wealth power or fame, right? Why bother to skip it? Just lie about it, right? I think that is what is concerning

about the american system is that now it seems it's been so broken that it allows a kind of common grifter you know someone without fame and power to to ascend yeah so how did you get tell us a little bit about your life story because people like to get to know the author as well. What was your upbringing and how did you get stuck with this from your, did your editor just say you're in charge of this now? kind of outer borough in a way. Upbringing to Santos, Santos grew up in Queens and not the parts that are kind of fanciest or anything like that. So I did have a sort of sense of the world that Santos came up in. I had been writing for Newsday for a long time, both in the city. I was covering New York City politics for a long time, then went out to the island and was writing about COVID, COVID pandemic and congressional politics. So this was, I guess,

my third or fourth cycle covering congressional politics out there. And, you know, it's, this is a race, a guy named Tom Swazi is the democratic incumbent, probably going to win again. And then suddenly this sort of random person says, I'm going to run for office. So yeah, basically my editor came to my desk and said, Hey, let's we do that we did this little newsletter about about New York politics. And so my editor said, Can you write a quick little intro about this person running for office? I said, Sure, no problem. Let me get the phone number. I'll give him a call. And this I write about this in the book. It's kind of a fun story. I call him up. And usually it's kind of hard to reach candidates, you know, they they're busy, whatever.

But he picks up really quickly, he's eager to talk. And I say, you know, hi, sir, whatever. When are you launching your campaign? You know, and he says, Oh, I'm launching it today. Great. Oh, wow. Okay. You know, can I come see it? Where is it? Oh, no, no, I'm actually in Florida right now, he says. And so this is a guy, a reminder, again, he's running in New York, so really far away, but he's in Florida on business on the day he's launching his campaign. So this was like my sort of meeting with him in this kind of weird way. And so you get into it with him and you start basically running the report on him. So how soon do you start identifying that something's wrong?

I mean, that was one, that was the sort of immediate strangeness, right? That's a very uncommon way to launch a campaign. But there were kind of other strangenesses that came soon after that, right? Not too long after that, we noticed that the address he was using, that's, you know, where he said he lived in sort of campaign finance documents seemed to not be in the district right and then he was very unclear on where exactly he was living which again is a strange thing usually you want to say i'm running for office i come from this neighborhood but he wouldn't do that he wouldn't be pinned down so i was writing a lot about these little weirdnesses he had a very strange recount campaign committee that he was

fundraising basically for a race he'd already lost in that first year. He also had sort of retweeted some QAnon slogans and said he actually didn't know what they were. So I did a lot about that. And in the first race, we knew he was going to lose. He seems to know he was going to lose too. And he did lose significantly by 12 percentage points. But this was another weird thing. Then he claimed, oh, actually I won just because there were, he won on election night, you know, that the number of people who'd voted on election day, this was this kind of red wave, the red mirage thing that happened all during 2020. But we knew he was losing by a ton because there were so many absentee ballots out. He sort of pretends he won, and he goes down to Washington for freshman orientation, which was kind of crazy. So silly.

We knew he'd lost. He actually showed up for the— Yeah, yeah. He wasn't like Carrie Lake where she's just like, did Carrie Lake try and show up? I don't know. I'm trying to remember. I'd be surprised if she did actually come to the game. I kind of think he fundraised a bit for her while he was down there.

He was trying to fundraise. He had all these strange things going on from the very beginning. Wow. And so you document all this stuff. How many times have you talked to him? Did you reach out to him to interview him for the book? I did. I tried to reach out to him a number of times.

He basically ignored me, ignored me. Then one day I called from a different phone number and he picked up with that phone, I guess by accident. And, you know, once he realized who it was, he kind of, you know, ribbed me for a little bit and then he hung up and then he called me back immediately to just kind of yell at me some more and you know you can read about that in the book because it's a fun scene of him sort of going back and forth with me just to kind of threaten me and say oh the reporter there you go yeah that's always uh as if i wasn't going to write the book yeah so he's basically busy with all of his babies i'm sorry to interrupt you a lot of baby yeah he he's fun carrying the babies around yeah Yeah. He did not want me writing the book, I guess, but he ultimately basically just explained that he was not going to participate at all. So I left him alone after that. There you go. So tell us about some of the tidbits that stick out in here. Evidently early on, he's stealing money from his aunt elma yeah yeah i mean the fun thing in this book was i got to go through all the really crazy lurid stories that everyone kind

of knows about him and i got to kind of dig into them a little more there's a lot of fun stuff about his volleyball non-history and his jewish his family Jewish history, which I actually kind of learned a little more about in the book than, you know, we kind of knew in the first place. But it has all of that fun stuff. But then, yeah, I mean, this is what's great about Santos is that he had so many lies and so many hustles and schemes that I was able to find some fun new ones. So one was that, yeah, he seems to have stolen from his aunt Alma, who is this woman who doted on him from a young age. She came from Brazil, like his mother and father, worked really hard to build a life in America. And he essentially seems to have stolen from her. And they have some sort of relationship even after that. She was the one, along with his father,

who kind of put themselves on the financial line to keep him out of jail. So, in the present, she's the one who, you know, they didn't actually have to put money forward, but they're on the line for his bond, which I think is a very sort of heart-wrenching experience. You know, this is an older woman who you've stolen from, and she's the one keeping you out of jail. Well, somebody, his family still loves him, evidently. I mean, I've known people like him that are, would you call him narcissistic? Would you call him, is he just a hustler grifter of fabulous? He's definitely, he seems to be a hustler. He makes everything up. What's fun in a book like this is, you know, I try to just get into his, what's in his head,

what drives him. And I try not to worry too much about labels, but one that some people floated to me was Pseudologia Fantastica, which is a kind of condition where, you know, you sort of believe your own lies. It's like you're getting even deeper into it than someone who's just kind of lying for personal gain. You know, it's a step beyond that. And so I do, you know, it could be something like that. It does seem compulsive with him. You know, he lies when he doesn't seem to need to. You don't need to leave.

You just do it for the game of it yeah you know i've had i've had two friends that were like that and we probably had that condition and fairly narcissistic but they but they they had built a lifetime of just this stack of lies and cards and one lie was built on the other and the lie was so big and they would have to constantly tell you all the lies to try and gaslight your program you wow and if you could if even if you could try and you know attack one of the cards and go okay this is clearly bullshit can you just quit telling me this story because this this story is bullshit you're lying the problem is they couldn't take it down because everything was so intertwined.

And you would sit and look at them and go, my God, you're like half the reason you have to tell your lies every day is because you're trying to remember them all because they're so goddamn complex. And they're stacked one on top of each other, if someone were to sit you down and disprove all your lies to your face and you were accepting of it, I don't know what you'd do. You'd either go into depression of funny form or jump off a cliff. You know, a funny thing that I looked into some of the psychological research when I was doing this book, and I was curious about the idea of how do you find out if someone's lying, right? And it turns out that scientifically, you know, a police officer didn't end up being that much better in this sort of study. And I think one reason is, is that it's not obvious when someone's lying and the things that work are hard to do, you have to, they're very physical. So the things that seem to work rely on how much energy it takes mentally to kind of keep a lie up in the air,

kind of like what you're saying. So, because you're expending all that energy, if I come to you, if you're lying to me, and I sort of say, well, hold on a second, can you just tell me that story backwards? You know, that's the kind of thing that trips up a serious liar. And so, if you don't have that, if you don't have someone who's kind of pressing you asking questions it is pretty easy to to kind of slide by and he does that it's just incredible and when you're telling so many lies you know i i imagine it's it's the same thing that trump does it does to the the news you know for a time, journalists really struggled with Trump because it was so overwhelming and the lies were racking up so fast

you couldn't... When you try to address one lie, you'd be like, wait, he told 20 more and this one's bigger over here so let's go over there. It's such a shit show fan of shit coming at you that trying to figure out which one to

address is what was it like didn't washington was it washington post new york times had the count where they counted how many lies trump told hundreds right yeah yeah it was insane and i do think it's something like that went on here with santos where he was telling so many lies and he had so many not even just the lies but he had so many kind of weird just the lies, but he had so many kind of weird things about his background and his campaign that people were writing about it. You know, like I was an editorial writer at Newsday and I was writing some things. The Daily Beast was writing some things, this place, the North Shore Leader. There were some people who were poking

holes in his story, but there were so many holes that we almost didn't realize that everything was a hole, you know? And so we, you know, there was kind of this sense that he's crazy enough. We understand his craziness, but we didn't know the half of it. Right. It was actually way deeper than we thought. I mean, when you're lying about so much stuff that, you know, it's, it's mere like, well, I don't know, man, there's a lot of, there's a lot of lies and stuff there. And where do we go? Somehow, how does he get over the threshold with the voters? Is it just charisma, likability? And by that time in New York, there was a real red wave that had been building for a couple of years. So to give people an example, everyone knows Chuck Schumer, right?

Super powerful Senate Democrat. In New York, he's kind of even more powerful than he seems on the national sphere in a way, because he's a super good local campaigner. He shows up everywhere. I think he spoke at two of my graduations over time. You know, he's, he just speaks at every graduation. He's there, you know, super attentive to district issues. Schumer lost Santos's district. Okay. So this is a guy who like won easily New York statewide, but things were so Republican-leaning in that district, that cycle,

that he lost. So that's kind of like every Democrat was killed in Santos's neck of the woods. So it was a little bit like anyone who was Republican was going to win there. That was a piece of it. But also Santos kind of was able to ride that bread wave even better than the normal Republican, because he was super willing to just say, you know, whatever the voters wanted to hear, to really embrace these social issues that were percolating at the time in ways that others, you know, might've felt a little weird about, like they didn't want to flip-flop. He didn't care about flip-flopping. He would say whatever he needed to say. Whatever he needed to say to get elected. Welcome to American politics.

And I guess one of the failures is, my understanding is, or I just heard it kicked around, was that whoever was going up against him from the Democrat side really failed at doing oppo research on the guy or something. So yeah, I write about this in the book, this process of how you gather the opposition research. So it's usually done by, you know, the first version of it is done by the DCC, Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. It's like this arm that helps congressional candidates. And the funny thing actually is you can look up their document. It's public, you know,

it's pretty, it has a lot of really damning stuff about Santos in it. It's, you know, dozens of pages long. It has the beginnings of his sketchy pet charity, which is not actually a charity, but, you know, people probably know that story, right? That was found early on, you know? And so they had a lot of things. And I think it's a little bit of what you said earlier

like the trump thing there was just so much wacky stuff that they found about him that they kind of thought this was enough you know the problem was they didn't find the sort of in the same way that you know i didn't find and the rest of the media didn't find the top primo wild things like him lying about his college degrees and his check fraud case in brazil those are the things that were missed and i think that would have helped people kind of draw the connect the dots you know there's the old there's the old thing about how when we move from radio to tv that the most charismatic presidential candidate or politician usually wins i don't know how if it's true on smaller cases but i know that that's kind of the method we use for the president

like the people who heard nixon versus jfk on the radio thought nixon won but the people who watch tv were like they saw the charisma of john f kennedy and he won and ever since then you can really look at each presidential race, mano a mano, and really the most charismatic guy wins. Even like George Bush Sr. wasn't that charismatic. I mean, he was against a sleeper. Who was it? It wasn't Bob Dole.

It was Amondale or Dukakis. I think Dukakis went down with the affair, didn't he? Wasn't that? No. I got them all mixed up don't i whoever was it was a sleeper yeah i think so it's interesting i think there is there's one element of that that's totally true you're right that he is very charismatic and that's something that everyone told me i mean i have this fun story in my book about him uh going out and ordering

200 bottles of wine you know he's that kind of guy. He's very gregarious. He's fun to be with. So he's super charismatic and that helped him when he was running. But I think there's kind of a deeper thing than what you were saying about the shifting of technologies, right? So we saw that with radio to TV. And I think now we're seeing that again, from maybe sort of TV to this cord cutting media universe with like podcasts, for example, or just, you know, social media, right? Which has a lot of benefits, right? This podcast is great. But there's also a lot of ways that, you know, disinformation can spread if you don't have, if there's just so much information out there, right? And I think Santos is a candidate who benefited from that shift, that technological shift.

He's going to get on podcasts, by the way. I've met people who base their whole outlook on politics from memes on TikTok. And that's all they know. And there's a whole other show for AI and what that might do to our future election. So you mentioned the Brazil thing. This is pretty interesting. You go down to Brazil and you track down the people who remember him as a drag queen. That's why I was doing the joke earlier, folks, if you didn't catch it, about showing up in drag for the show. Tell us about what that goes on with all that bit.

That was one of my favorite parts of reporting this book was getting to go down to brazil and spend some time there and find people who knew him you know when i started doing the book there was even there's a ton of lack of clarity about santos we didn't even really know exactly when he was in brazil we knew reader you know the listeners probably seen the famous pictures of him wearing that kind of red dress like Like we knew he had been in Brazil and dressed in drag, but it was a little unclear on when. And what I learned was that he had basically, you know, he kind of went back and forth. He had family there. And this is kind of a typical modern immigrant story, right? That people do go back and forth. He seems to have been born in New York. He was born in New York, as far as we know. But he, in his teenage years, late teenage years, he was spending a lot of time with family in Brazil. And he had this kind of flourishing

moment where he kind of could be whoever he wanted to be. You know, he wasn't, he was known, but he wasn't that well known. Everyone didn't know, they couldn't peg him, you know, they couldn't fit him into a into a box and he used that to his advantage he started you know experimenting dressing in drag performing to some extent and trying to perform more than he probably did and so the so when i was down there the really fun thing i did you know there's only a couple of pictures and videos of him dressing in drag yeah and and he has used that to his advantage because he says hey this was just like a one you know i didn't do this much like i had danced at a

festival i did it for halloween right which does not seem to be true uh certainly that's not what people told me when i was down there but you know we don't really know what it was like when he performed so what i did was i you, convinced his drag mentor to kind of welcome me into her home. And we spent a lot of time together here. You know, I just heard about about Santos and their life down there. And then the great thing was that this mentor said, look, you know, I don't perform much, but I'm performing on Friday night. I'm going to do the things that Santos kind of learned from me and you can watch it. Right. So basically I got to see Santos, you know, what Santos, what Santos

was learning from, you know, what was that like 20 years ago, a little less than 20. And so I go to this club, it's called a sauna. It, no women are allowed in. I actually, I actually, no, not allowed in or people who appear to be women in street clothes, right? Because there is a lot of drag dressing. Because I, and we know that because I went with my wife, who's also a reporter. And she was down there with me. You know, we were just going to kind of go together. We thought it would be fun to see it.

And they wouldn't let her in. They kind of slammed the door. Wow. So I go in alone. And it's, you know, it's a place where you can buy sex. Where you can, where you can, sex where you can where you can they give you a key actually when you go in and you can you know it opens up a door and you can bring someone in the door with you and and you know have sex and so i did not do that but i did go and see

the performance and it's you know it's there's it's interesting because there's a bunch of performers and some of it is very risque it's basically like stripping you know but then santos's drag mentor comes on stage and she's she's beautiful she's wearing a dress and she goes by she in her performing you know her performance name is aola rochard and and she's it's not a sort of risque strip thing. It's like this kind of beautiful celebration of femininity. And she's wearing a dress and she's lip syncing and dancing. Anyway, this was I think this is the kind of drag that Santos embraced when he was a teenager. I had a flash in my head when you said it of George Santos doing a strip tease. And I was like, oh, my God, I'm going to barf.

You know, you you talk in the book about how I'm trying to get that image out of my head. Yeah, sorry. I have to drink bleach later. You talk about how he was doing ozempic liposuction, lip injections, lap band surgery, all these things to try and sculpt his body. I imagine he used some of the illicit funds from from his things too i don't i don't know if you saw recently do you see him in those those skinny pants or something he's wearing that look painfully like painful to wear yeah he's always wearing it's funny you know

i talked to over 100 people who knew him for this book and a lot of them told me he always looks different you know you'd see him a few months later and he looked a little different. He's wearing so slightly different clothes. He does have this ability to kind of change or he seems to want to change his body and his and his looks. He yeah. And you're right. He this just came out. You know, I mean, I wrote a ton about this in my book that he's sculpting his body. He's using Botox, know liposuction etc but we did just learn that he was usually seems to have been using campaign money to to do his botox that's the evidence

from this house and house ethics report and and it looks like a for those people who are uh listening this 10 years from now we're at the point right now where correct me if i'm wrong he he survived one expulsion vote but now the house ethics vote is out he has two rounds of multiple charges from the justice department and god knows how much more as they dig through it and and we may be going to their vote maybe next week or something yeah he actually survived two expulsion votes this is number three. Wow. Yeah. And it looks like that report is maybe going to be the sinking ship for him. That's the, that's what people are saying who are, you know, in Congress or hearing from people in

Congress. And the evidence for that is that lots of members of Congress who before the report said, look, let's give him a chance, you know, due process. Now they're kind of switching over and saying it's time for this guy to go and evidently one of the broken things about them you know between mccarthy and and the new kevin johnson is that they need his vote so they put up with them which is a real stained albatross i think for republicans to have you know this guy and I think his vote, I think his constituents hate him for the most part. Is there anybody whose constituency this? Yeah, I'm fine with it.

It's a great question. I mean, they always, this sort of truism in politics is the only poll that matters is election day, you know? Yeah, that's true. I think it's true. You know, if he was actually on the ballot, if he is on the ballot, we would see how many people still support him. I do think there's an element in the district, just like in America in general, that doesn't mind.

They see him as kind of funny on one level and also kind of railroaded by the establishment on the other. So I don't think he has zero friends, but he's lost a lot of friends over time for sure it's interesting how voters can see through his bullshit and lies but they can't see through trump's yeah there's a you know i i sort of grapple with this question a little bit in the book because he is sort of the obvious one you know he's the one that is like providing cover for other Republicans who are doing sort of shameless things. In the book, I call them a kind of shamelessness caucus, the kind of politician who is there mostly to, you know, get sort of, you know, advance themselves, not do so much political work. And he is in that, he's of that, of course. But he's so much zanier and funnier than even Marjorie Taylor Greene or like Lauren Boebert or something, who also do crazy, shameless things just to get attention.

And so I think that he is his actions sort of give them a little bit of space. They can be shameless in a slightly less shameless way. Do you think our problem in politics is we've devolved to a point where we've basically taken and turned politics into the Kim Kardashians? We've gone from the Kardashians and the shit show that all that is and the spectacle and the horror show what that is, if you have any seriousness. And we basically just transposed it right over to politics. Is that where we're going? Is that the train we're on? I think so. I mean, what I love about American politics is kind of how cyclical it is.

And we've seen this show before in some ways, right? I mean, Reagan was seen as kind of, to some level, to some, you know, in some ways an unserious person who was an actor before he was an elected official, right? That being said, I do think that one thing that changes is the technology and kind of the technological moment we live in. And Reagan, in some ways, was way more serious than some of these politicians now who have no background in policy or really interest in policy either. It's really just about their own celebrity that they're kind of pushing.

And Santos is kind of the perfect symbol for that because he loves reality TV. He loves like Bethany Frankel, Real Housewives. This is what got him into politics in the first place yeah i was listening to i think it was somebody on msnbc's morning joe said it but they said one of the problems with a small small donor thing and the performative candidates that we have like mtg the guy who's the guy in florida who got paul goes there maybe paul goes there too the other guy matt gates you know that whole little crowd that goes on. They don't do any legislation. They just do this performative thing.

When the mics are on, they pull some sort of stunt. Nobody else. They're fairly behaved when the mics are off. And someone said one of the problems is the small donor donations that come in. And that's actually one of our biggest problems and it used to be everyone thought well small donor is good because you know it's from the people it's not you know it's not the citizens united you know buy your own scotus person but but they surmise that one of the problems is is that mac gates and mtg and these other people have tuned in that when they

do performative stunts, they can send out things to all their individual donors and they'll get this money, which is for the vast part, the crazies, like the people who are really fucking out there. And maybe somebody should, I don't know.

I don't know how you map something like this out or study it, but he said, that's the problem. He can get these crazies who will send them all sorts of money over any crazy stunt he does and they're just basically buying stunts it's like by your own interesting i i would i would take that anecdote and frame it slightly differently i agree with you that a lot of these shameless politicians are being shameless in order to put up something on social media and

raise money off it for sure. But I think the problem with that is how nationalized our politics has become. And so you as a person running for Congress, you do not necessarily need to build a sort of, you know, kind of support from your community. You don't really even need to know your local issues that well. What you do is you just be shameless on these national issues, you know, important issues, obviously, but issues that there is no compromising on, you're not going to convince anyone on abortion or immigration or something like that. And so our politics has become so nationalized that that's how you raise your money. And that's a shame because it's actually, if you, you know, if you are focused

on local things, you can really, you know, compromise and you can, there's more bipartisan agreement to be found on these lower level things that actually affect everyone's life in a big way. And, you know, the fact that various institutions have been broken and things have gotten so nationalized that kind of leads to this even more performativeness i think crazy and so they just perform and put on the show and and then you know send out a send out a hey send me some money i i somebody should look into that if if that's if it's true i i thought it was really interesting someone said that and they're like like, yeah, the Matt Gates of the world, all the crazies will send in the money.

And it's just, it's basically performative, higher stunts. You know, a lot of these people just have, they have the sort of things that Matt Gates says, you know, the C-bannons. They just want to burn it all down. I think somehow that would be good for everyone if you burned down the government.'s that actually doesn't end well if you know yeah not not not ideal it doesn't end well for everyone but you know there you go any final teasers or

thoughts you want to shoot out is to tease us about the book as we go out you know i think that what's so fun about this book is how compulsive Santos is about hustling. So it's kind of like every couple of pages, there's a new hustle. One of my favorites is the way he's scamming this 16 year old kid, friend of his family, friend of his sisters, actually, who's living with them, doesn't speak any English, also an immigrant from Brazil, looks up to Santos as a kind of brother figure figure and Santos scams him for the last couple of hundred dollars he has left. So this is kind of what this story is built on before he gets to Congress. It's just shameless, man.

There you go. Well, you've got a whole second book coming out, coming up if you want for all the more adventures, I'm sure, especially if he doesn't get exposed from Congress. I mean, I'm sure there's going to be more performance stuff. You pick the winter horse for writing some books on. Yeah, I know. I know. We'll see what's next. There you go. You build a whole

career on it. You just call yourself the, who was it, Bernstein and Woodward? Woodward and Bernstein? Just call yourself the Woodward and Bernstein of George Santos. Thank you very much for coming to the show, Mark. and Woodward, Woodward or Bernstein. Just call yourself the Woodward or Bernstein of, of, of George Santos. Thank you very much for coming to the show. Mark,

give us your.com. Where can people find you on the interwebs? MJ Chisano at Twitter. And the book is called the fabulous. It's out on Tuesday. There you go. And you, you just lie and tell people it's endorsed by,

it does have a blurb on the back from George making fun of me. So does it really? Yeah. I think in some way, shape or form. So there you go. And his faceb on the back from George making fun of me. Does it really? Yeah. That's an endorsement, I think, in some way, shape, or form. So there you go. And his face is on the cover. I'm surprised that he wouldn't be at least proud of that. Of course, it does say liar in the little sort of matrix print on the front of it.

That's right. That's right. He's not going to be happy about that. There you go. Thank you very much for coming to the show, Mark. We really appreciate it. Thanks, Chris. There you go.

And thanks for my answer to you. Go to goodreads.com for chest gross false linkedin.com for chest gross false chris false facebook.com and all those other crazy places on the internet thanks for tuning in be good to each other stay safe and we'll see you guys next time and that should have us out that was