Tom Segura

The episode opens with praise for the new season of a show belonging to one participant. The other has watched two episodes and singles out a dance episode and a "Freaky Friday" episode with Jamie. The show is described as one of the best examples of a single person's vision reaching the screen, without a crowd of people saying "don't do that." The show's creator says the people behind it impose almost no limits.

They gave us, they give us no restraints in the craziest greatest sense.

The dance episode came out of a rivalry with Bert. The idea was that everyone should make a dance video, but Bert released his first and then claimed to be the better dancer. That leads into Bert's confidence and his weight loss. In the Netflix Is a Joke 5K, held a few weeks before the recording, Bert cut 16 minutes off his previous year's time. He had also lost 50 pounds, which the hosts compare to having run the earlier race in a 50-pound vest.

The vest comparison turns into a practical point about weighted training. One participant usually trains with a 25-pound vest. For the heavier version, they load a backpack of about four pounds with one 45-pound plate, and they say the shoulder and neck area gives out first. They use this before hunting season to get ready for carrying a pack in the mountains. They also say they do not carry a full camp the way some backcountry hunters do: hunters out for eight to ten days may carry 60- or 80-pound packs holding a week of food, bedding and shelter.

The hunting topic moves to children. One participant's sons want to go hunting after target shooting, and the other offers a lease where they could hunt pigs. Wild pigs are described as an infestation you can hear in the bushes, sounding "like demons" and "like monsters."

It's the craziest infestation of animals you've ever seen.

The conversation gives specific figures for how fast the population grows. Wild pigs can have as many as three litters a year, with as many as six piglets per litter, and they start giving birth at six months old. The number of wild pigs in Texas is given as 2.6 to 4 million, with the caveat that nobody knows the exact count because it keeps rising. The pigs are said to be "destroying everything" in the ecosystem. That is why the participants say hunting them is effectively unrestricted: day or night, with night vision, and also from helicopters. In their view, killing them helps the environment.

Cooking comes with a warning. Wild pig is not like restaurant pork, because the animals eat almost anything, including each other, dead deer and skunks. Undercooked meat can carry trichinosis, so it has to be cooked thoroughly. A pig that has been eating acorns, though, is called delicious. One participant describes the first pig they shot, in California, slow-smoked on a Traeger, as darker meat than store-bought pork.

This leads to a chef, transcribed as Jesse Griffith, whose restaurant appears in the transcript as "Di Duae" and "Dai Duet" and serves Texas wild game. The participants explain that the only hunted animals that can be served this way are ones people own, such as exotics, or pigs. The menu examples are wild boar sausage, nilgai, Texas redfish and wild hog. One participant first heard of him on Steve Ronella's podcast, then hunted with Steve near the Mexican border in South Texas, where the chef cooked for them. Diver ducks usually taste bad because they feed on the muck at the bottom of the water, but he made them good by marinating them for a long time and then grilling them.

The chef also runs a cooking school, identified during the episode as the New School of Traditional Cookery. It takes groups of about six to eight people with no prior experience through rifle safety, sighting in a rifle at a range, hunting, butchering and breaking the animal into cuts, and cooking. The other participant names the step after the kill as the main thing that puts them off hunting, and the reply is "I can teach you some of that, too." On-screen photos show whitetail and a big fatty boar with dried chiles and onions. The chef is said to prefer old boars, against common advice, as long as "you know what you're doing."

The most imposing part of hunting to me is what do you do after you shoot the animal.

The more aggressive side of pig control comes up next. Taylor Sheridan, described as the producer of "Delstone" and said to have possibly the biggest ranch in Texas, reportedly brought in special operations personnel who planned the job like a counterinsurgency operation. Online videos show Tannerite placed at feeders: the feeder goes off, pigs that have driven deer away crowd in, sometimes 30 or 40 at once, and the explosive is set off. The participants call this both wrong and legal in Texas, and they repeat that the pigs "have to go."

The section ends on family shooting. A lease shared with a friend named Tyler from Archery Country is about an hour and 20 minutes to an hour and a half away. On a recent ranch visit, one participant's seven-year-old shot pistols and a rifle described as the new DEVGRU ("Dev grew") SEAL Team 6 model from the bed of a pickup truck. The other suggests that shooting a pig and then eating baby back ribs for dinner would change the boy's whole outlook. Sponsor reads for Wayfair and AG1 interrupt the conversation at this point and later on.

Prompted by "speaking of violence," one participant says they have been reading about dictators, including Idi Amin, Mussolini and Stalin, and then about the Hussein family. They recount that Saddam Hussein's mother rejected him from birth, after his father died before he was born, and saw him as a "devil child." The other asks whether she made him that way. The answer is that horrifically violent adults almost always have childhood trauma and neglect behind them, so her rejection may have been a self-fulfilling prophecy. Another possibility is raised half-jokingly: "maybe she just fucking knew." Saddam is described as violent from a young age, as an enforcer who killed someone as a teen, and as someone whose violence in power was politically motivated, to stay in power.

Uday is presented differently, as a sadist who enjoyed killing. The accounts given in the conversation include: abducting and raping women who were about to marry (the transcript's wording about what followed is garbled); throwing a woman off a hotel rooftop; shooting a chef in the head in the kitchen for over-salting food; beating and shooting a man at a party attended by visiting Egyptian president Mubarak; and firing a submachine gun at a family party, wounding his uncle so badly the leg was amputated and killing six other people.

imagine a serial killer that's the prince of a country

As chairman of the Olympic team, he is described as torturing athletes who lost. Passages read aloud from an unnamed on-screen source say athletes were made to kick a concrete soccer ball, dragged through gravel and then dipped in sewage to infect their wounds, and sometimes flogged for three days. The same source says iron maidens, which "may have never been used in medieval times," were frequently used on athletes.

More readings describe cruelty toward his own circle. Attributed to his chief bodyguard: a close comrade who planned to leave Iraq was invited to Uday's 37th birthday and arrested, and an eyewitness said militia members cut out his tongue. A maid said she saw Uday cut off a guard's ear and use a welder's torch on his face. A butler was given falaka lashes on his right foot and right armpit for smelling of sweat. Friends who passed out or napped at his boat club were thrown into a cage with a whiskey-drinking monkey named Louisa.

The figure that draws the strongest reaction is that, according to his bodyguards, at least 200 people died at his parties every year. The participants say he threw parties all the time, that guests could not decline, that the music had to keep going after a killing, and that he once shot a man for not laughing hard enough at his joke. Guests then had to look as though they were enjoying themselves, because reacting the wrong way was also dangerous. At these parties, entertainers were reportedly given 10 minutes to drink a "cup of friendship" that was 90% alcohol and sometimes contained drugs. Those who failed had their hair and eyebrows shaved off or were beaten.

The participants also discuss why nobody stopped him. As they imagine it, the family knew he was "demonic" but treated him as the son and heir: "He's first in line." They speculate he probably killed his first person as a teenager, or by about 20 at the latest. They describe the brothers as having unlimited money, access, weapons, cars and their own kill squad, with no consequences, which they call "the worst formula for that personality trait." They call him possibly the most sadistic person in power in modern times, though the claim comes with hedges like "I think." They cite street accounts as support: people backing against walls and looking down when he passed, and Uday pulling a man out of a car in a traffic jam and beating him with a hammer while nobody honked.

Some details are explicitly uncertain or contradict each other. Uday's lifespan is given tentatively as born in '64 and died in "what, 2003?" For the 1996 assassination attempt, he is first said to have been shot "somewhere between seven and 17 times." A later reading says attackers shot at him "exactly 50 times" with 17 hits. His secretary is quoted as saying he got much worse afterward. Accounts that he was impotent, and that he was shot in the groin, are given as popular belief and rumor that enraged him. The participants also say he had people record rapes and killings so he could watch them later.

The reprisals after the assassination attempt are read out. The assassins' fathers and brothers were imprisoned or executed. One mother was told to collect bodies from the Baghdad morgue. The families' homes were bulldozed and their property confiscated. One attacker was later traced to Iran and assassinated in December 2002 on "the Elder Hussein's orders."

Uday's death is first guessed to have been "a bombing," and a reading then describes a 1 p.m. missile barrage that killed Uday and Qusay Hussein ("Cusay" in the transcript). X-rays were used to identify the body, and its old wounds matched injuries from the assassination attempt. A related detail: Larry Garrett, a hypnotist from Chicago, traveled to Baghdad in April and September 2001 to treat Uday's inability to walk with his left leg, spending more than 60 hours with him. The participants marvel at the account Garrett gave of Uday, which describes him as educated, versed in the Quran, and someone Garrett grew fond of.

He never condescended. It was just two men sitting around at night.

Limitations: the documents read aloud are never named, the participants themselves pause over grim passages they "didn't read," and several facts are offered as guesses ("I think," "what," "probably"). These stories are relayed from sources shown during the episode. The conversation itself does not verify them.

The participants draw a general lesson from Uday: someone like him with a nuclear weapon would "100% would use it," possibly on "Day one." They say that is why people insist on keeping power in check when certain individuals rise. They wonder what would have happened if Saddam, perhaps in his 60s or 70 when he was killed, had lived another 20 years. Their speculation is that Uday might have removed his father if the succession took too long. They also mention that Saddam used mustard gas and a nerve agent on his own people.