Dave Smith and Robbie the Fire Bernstein dismantle Bill Maher's claim that young people inherit the best world, citing a 37% surge in U.S. home prices since Q1 2020 against stagnant $74,000 wages, making homes cost five to six times annual income. They critique Nikki Haley's refusal to endorse Trump or Biden despite losing primaries by double-digit margins and expose Joe Biden's cognitive struggles on Seth Meyers, contrasting his incoherent rhetoric with Trump's age while blaming government policies for hindering generational independence. Ultimately, the episode argues that systemic economic failures and media manipulation define the current political landscape more than individual candidate viability. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Government Size and Dysfunction00:15:11
Fill her up.
You're listening to the gas digital move.
We need to roll back the state.
We spy on all of our own citizens.
Our prisons are flooded with nonviolent drug offenders.
If you want to know who America's next enemy is, look at who we're funding right now.
Every single one of these problems are a result of government being way too big.
You're listening to part of the problem on the gas digital network.
Here's your host, Dave Smith.
What's up, everybody?
Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem.
I am Dave Smith.
He is Robbie the Fire Bernstein.
What's up, dude?
How are you?
Dude, I had fun on the road.
Kansas City, Omaha, doing small little rooms.
It was a blast.
Well, that's good.
I'm glad to hear it.
And now you're back home in your part of the problem spaceship where you live.
And then we'll be back on the road very soon.
We got a bunch of cool stuff coming up.
Oh, that's the next one, right?
Shakago, which we have had.
I'll say, me and you have been to Chicago to do shows every year for the last several years.
I think since basically the COVID restrictions ended.
And we've had a great time every time we're out there.
So we will be out March 15th through 17th at Zane's in Rosemont and Chicago doing live stand-up shows and a live part of the problem podcast.
Then we'll be out in Key West just a few days later.
And then Portland.
That's the big one at the Aladdin Theater.
This is a theater show.
Fancy.
For me and Rob.
We are typically comedy club acts, but we're doing a big theater show out in Portland.
So please come grab tickets to that one.
Let's fill that thing up.
And then back at the St. Louis Funnybone, where we had a great time last year.
And then we got Nashville, Zaney's.
So that's going to be a lot of fun.
A lot of stuff coming up.
ComicDave Smith.com for all of those tickets.
Of course, RobbyTheFire.com for all of Rob's headlining shows.
And yeah, a lot of cool stuff coming up.
All right.
So he's, listen, the part of the problem schedule has been a little messed up over the last couple of weeks.
I apologize for that.
I apologized for that on our last show.
We've had some more dysfunction since then.
I swear to God, it is all his fault.
All right.
I'm okay with that.
And I'm telling you, if God were here with us right now, he would admit he would go, that was my bad.
Like if God parted the skies and came back to greet man and he was like, look, whatever you believe, if it's the, you know, if you're a Christian, it's been 2,000 years.
If you're a Jew, it's been 5,000 years.
If you're a Muslim, it's, I'm not sure.
I've never studied it that closely.
But he would be, whatever you believe, I'm back now.
And I just want to tell you, number one, I love Joe Rogan's podcast.
And number two, the part of the problem schedule, that has been a little bit on me.
He'd go 50-50, 50-50 on Dave on me.
That's what he would say.
It'd be nice to have that clarification.
It would be.
Listen, we're all waiting for it.
But anyway, that's so anyway.
But you know what?
We're here now.
We're here now.
That's what matters.
And we're going to be back with you for quite a while.
We got a lot of fun stuff.
A lot of fun stuff going on, Rob.
We got shows coming up.
We got a presidential election coming up.
Nikki Haley's continual humiliation is happening.
That's cool.
So we're ready to go.
And I'm drinking a beer.
I'm drinking a really bad beer tonight.
Nice heine again.
I was in the mood for a beer and I don't have any good beer in my house.
So this is what I'm this is what I'm working with.
So there was this was my uh the thing I was most interested in that I've seen over the last few days is that there's a Bill Maher clip that's going viral, um, which is uh him and I don't even know who the guy is, but they're talking about the state of young people in America.
And that this to me, I thought, I thought this was great.
So let's play this clip and let's respond to it.
They do.
The younger generations, I'm always ragging on them for good reason.
They deserve it, but they do, but and they know it.
They're inheriting a real shit show.
Oh, stop it.
They're inheriting the best world that it's ever been for a bunch of bullshit.
For who?
For them?
For Wall Street?
No.
There are a lot of people who can't.
They will never own a home.
There are people who will never own a home because of the way that things are structured.
That is a tough one right now, but actually, it's not even true.
I had this woman on my show just last Friday, Gene Twangi.
She's this expert.
She wrote the book on generation.
She's done a number of books on this.
One of the big revelations that surprised me and everybody else who was hearing it is that the millennials who we've been hearing forever, oh, tough economic times and living in their parents' basement and actually doing better comparatively by the numbers than every other generation.
Here's wow.
Every millennial right now rolling over in their parents' basement as they listen to you say this, but they're can't afford to hoping they're a part of it.
But they're not.
So get rent control.
Alan, there's actual, there's actual government statistics on this kind of stuff.
So what you're what you're citing is anecdotal.
That's what I'm saying.
I'm thinking that mom and dad croak right now so that they can try to get a house.
Again, we have actual information on that.
We have actual information.
So you want to, you can believe what you ever want because that's what religion is, just believing whatever the fuck you want.
But there is actual information.
All right.
So the gentleman on the show with him is Alan Richson, who's an actor, evidently.
I don't know.
I'm very out of it.
I don't know if you ever seen him with his shirt off, but it's spectacular.
Well, okay, listen, I'm very out of the loop when it comes to this.
So don't take that as like an insult that I don't know who he is.
I just, I pay attention to the stuff I pay attention to.
But I will say this, okay?
So Gene Twangay, who Bill Maher is referring to there, and I might be mispronouncing her name a little bit, but she is so I believe I've talked about this on the podcast many years ago, but I read her book, Generation Me.
And then I read another one of her books.
It was like the narcissism something.
But I read Generation Me in, I want to say 2006.
And it was right before, or maybe it was early 2007, but it was right before I found Ron Paul and became a libertarian and all of this.
It was almost like I was kind of, I think right before I found the Ron Paul Giuliani moment, I was kind of just searching for something.
Like I was like, I should be reading more.
I should care about something.
I should, you know, I was like kind of a kid who was like, fuck up in high school.
And then I had started stand-up comedy and I was kind of just, I don't know, I was just like interested in like, and I don't remember how.
I think maybe my sister recommended it to me.
I can't remember.
But anyway, I got my hands on this book, Generation Me.
And I loved it.
I thought it was so good.
And it was essentially a critique of the millennial generation and how self-absorbed the millennial generation was compared to previous generations and how unhappy we were as a result of it.
How the there was this generation that was more self-focused and more entitled than any generation before and yet more miserable.
And it was just so good.
I loved the book and I liked I liked her other book.
I didn't love it as much, but I liked the narcissism something.
You'll find it if you look it up.
I liked it too, but not quite as much as Generation Me.
So anyway, I like her.
I do think there's this thing that happens a lot with these conversations where, and tell me if you've noticed this before, Rob, but like people will say millennials when oftentimes what they're referring to is like 20 year olds today, but 20 year olds today are not millennials.
We're millennials, you know?
So anyway, that's that's another thing that I noticed there.
But when it, if the conversation is about what young people today who are living in their parents' basement, because like I'm 40 and I'm a millennial.
So I don't think people are saying 40 year olds are living in their mother's basement.
I think it's more a conversation about like 25 year olds, but maybe I'm wrong.
Maybe that is what they meant.
So I don't know exactly what data Jane Twangay brought on Bill Maher's show, but it is, it is totally not right to say that, oh, this is just a religion, the idea that young people today can't buy a house.
And if Bill Maher is saying that Jane Twangi was saying that, you know, the way he described it, this is the best off anyone's ever been.
There's no question about that in some regards.
In many ways, if you're a young person today, you are better off than previous generations in many ways.
I mean, if you, I don't know, if you have an infectious disease, you know, forget all the COVID stuff.
But if you're, if you need modern medicine, you're better off than previous generations were.
And let me tell you something.
The TV that I have, I shouldn't even say the, or I shouldn't say the TV.
I should say the TVs that I have in my house would blow my grandfather's mind if he were alive today.
You have a movie theater in your home.
Yes.
There's lots of things like that that we, and I mean, I don't know.
Like I have, I have a lot of technology, let's say, and you do too, Rob, that would blow our grandparents' mind.
I'd be like, that's insane.
To the point that if you brought it back to their time, like if you just went back to what year were your grandparents born in?
I don't know.
Who knows that information?
I don't know.
They died two years ago at age 85.
I'm not good with math.
Okay, so 85 years from two years ago, let's say.
Okay, so let's say your parents were born in the 1940s somewhere.
I think my math's not terrible on that, right?
80 plus two years ago.
Okay.
So, if you could be transformed back, or if you could be transported back to the 1940s and you could bring your phone with you, or you could bring your TV with you, back to the future thing, and I could bring my grandma.
I could be like, look at this.
You could go there.
Your grandma is about to be raped and you could stop her or something and you start disappearing.
But anyway, I'm just saying the phone and the TV, they would be like, This is insane.
And there's lots of modern medicine.
There's lots of different things that no one denies that.
Okay.
But the point is that back then, you could, okay, you could graduate high school and go get a job.
And with that job, and literally, you could go wait online to get a job.
And with that job, you could support a family.
You could buy a house.
You could have your wife not work and support your family.
And you could beat all of them.
Okay, that part wasn't so good, but I'm just saying you could theoretically.
No one would frown upon you for that.
Anyway, by the way, I'm against that.
I'm against the beating them part.
But that is the truth.
And, you know, look, there's something where one of the first, if you understand Austrian economics, which is the only good economics, and it's something that we talk about a lot on this show,
one of the core understandings of Austrian economics, which is what makes it better than every other school of economics, is that the Menger and Mises really understood that value is subjective.
And that that's the entire way to understand economics.
That value is subjective, meaning that there is no such thing as objective value.
You know, if you might see, let's say, if someone was auctioning off the pair of shoes that Michael Jackson wore on his first concert, someone, there's someone out there who might be willing to pay $10 million for that because they just think it's the coolest thing ever to have those shoes on, you know, in a glass case in their house.
But you might go, I wouldn't pay a dollar for that because I just don't care.
And the answer is, you're both right.
You're both right.
He's right.
If he wants that so much and he's got the millions to spend, then sure, he's right to spend them on something he values more than the money.
And if you don't value it at all, you're right to not be willing to spend a dollar for it.
And there's something where there is this thing when people don't understand that, where there's a tendency to say, well, if you're doing better by some economic metric, then you're lucky.
Valuing Time Over Money00:07:30
You're privileged, you know?
Whereas the reality is that value is subjective.
And to some people, one of those things might be better than the other, but not necessarily to everyone.
And so, look, if you're going to say that, okay, you got a really cool TV, you got really cool technology, you have a really cool phone, you have all of these things, that's what some people might find that more valuable.
However, the ability to, let's say, own a home and provide for a family.
There's many people who would say that's much more valuable than having a cool tv or having a cool phone.
There there's something, particularly to a large, uh amount of men and young men, that is far more valuable to them.
It's far more valuable to them to be able to say like, no, I'm a man.
I have my own stuff.
I have my own house.
I own the house that I have.
You know what I mean?
Like that, and that is something that we've lost.
And, or at least is further out of reach for people than it used to be.
And I think, look, in the same sense, when I say value is subjective, right?
Okay.
So in my life, I have two little kids and I have, you know, this career.
I tend to do about two weekends a month.
I'll go on the road and do stand-up shows.
That's what I try to balance it out to be because even when I'm, so I'll do like stand-up shows at a comedy club for a weekend.
Two weekends a month is what I try to shoot for.
That's always what I try to tell whoever my booking agent is to go for that because I also have other things that I have to add.
You know, there'll be podcasts like, you know, if I'm doing Rogan or Tim Poole or Candace Owens or, you know, whoever, Patrick Beth David or like one of these other shows, I end up adding those.
And so a lot of months then, if I have two stand-up gigs, it'll be three weekends a month.
I'm gone.
And then, and I have little kids.
Now, if I were to work every weekend and do stand-up shows every single weekend, which I could, I would make more money.
But I value other things.
Like I value not being Chris DeStefano and crying on a podcast about how I'm not watching my kids grow up.
By the way, love, love Chris.
He's on skanks this week and looking forward to that.
But you know what I'm saying?
Like I, I, we all pick the things that we value.
And so we, I try to find this balance between where I want to make as much money as I can and give my kids the best life, but also I want to be really present in my little kids' lives.
And so I limit my economic potential because I really value spending time with my family.
Now, let's just say hypothetically, I was forced by some government policy.
I was forced to be out on the road doing stand-up comedy all the time.
And you could say, look, you're making more money.
You're better off than you were before.
It would also be reasonable for me to say like, yeah, but I valued this other thing more.
I'm not happy to be better off here.
So the point I'm making is that a lot of people are in this situation, a lot of young people, not millennials, the younger generation, Gen Z or whatever, and millennials too, but more specifically Gen Z, who are in this situation where it's like, yes, they have a cooler phone and a cooler computer and a cooler television set, but they don't have the ability to provide for a family.
And by the way, I'm saying like there are people, there are kids who work at Starbucks who have a phone and a TV that would blow the minds of people who were millionaires in the 50s.
You know what I mean?
But they don't necessarily value that more than they value what the millionaire in the 50s had.
My point here is that the Austrian economic insight is that whatever you believe, you're right.
Like if you value that more, then you're right.
And if you value the other thing more, then you're right.
So in the same sense that if I value making good money, but not as good as I could make when I can spend more time with my family, then I'm right.
And if you valued making as much money as you possibly could and not spending time with your family, then you're right.
At least not morally right, but right in the sense that that is what you value more.
Then you are essentially winning the game of who gets more value.
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So this is the problem that I think people like Bill Maher, and particularly because he's somebody who doesn't have kids, has never been married, and is like a Hollywood guy who's a multi-millionaire.
He goes, yeah, I mean, if you're doing better, you know, if overall you're doing better, then you're doing better.
Reorienting Life Toward Purpose00:04:18
I don't know.
If you're overall wealthier, then you're doing better.
Whereas I think there's a lot of people, particularly young people, who have come to reject that premise.
And I've come to say that it's like, well, I don't know.
Maybe I'm doing better in terms of a, like you can make some pure argument that in my standard of living, I'm doing better.
I mean, certainly that's true.
Certainly it's true that in terms of standard of living, people today are doing better than 99.9% of human history.
But a lot of people, particularly younger people, have come to realize that if there's not a deeper purpose in your life, then all of that maybe doesn't matter that much.
And maybe they don't think that that's the most valuable thing.
You know, it's something.
Look, I'll just say this, and I don't want to get too preachy, but for me, I know that when I had my first kid, and when I became a father, one of the things that really stuck out to me about that, about this amazing experience, which, you know, people who are parents, they know it's when you become a parent, it's a pretty crazy experience.
And one of the things that really stuck out to me was that I realized there was this transformation in my life.
And that all of for the first time, I had a purpose.
And I was like, oh my God, I've been living my life without a purpose this whole time.
I never really thought about that.
But my entire life, and Rob, you had a much different childhood than me because you grew up like with religion and I didn't in that sense.
But I realized that my whole life had been kind of like, yeah, no, I don't know.
Like the meaning of life was, I don't know, I want to have fun.
I want to play like when I was a little kid.
I want to get my homework done so I can play video games or I want to, you know, make sure my teachers or my mom isn't mad at me so I can go play basketball.
And then after that, it was like, oh, I want to do stand-up comedy because it's really fun.
And, you know, like that was my whole life.
And it wasn't until I had my daughter that, and then, and then my son, that I was like, oh, my whole life is centered now around a purpose that's bigger than me.
Like, I have to exist because my job is to take care of this little girl.
I have to, you know, provide for her and protect her.
And there's this thing that was greater than me that I was responsible for.
And that reoriented my life towards something that was much more meaningful.
And then it gave me a lot more responsibility, but it also made me much happier than I had ever been.
And I think that's the thing that young people are saying that like they're they're upset about.
Like if you if you go like, look, people in Bill Maher's day could go to college and work a part-time job to and pay for their whole college.
And you could have the feeling that like you're, you took responsibility for yourself.
You did it.
You paid it off.
And going to college back then meant you were going to get a decent enough job that you could support a family.
That it may not be as valuable in terms of like technological advances, but the value in terms of like your own soul, there's something about being a man that you're like, yeah, I did it myself and I paid for.
And that was the norm back then.
Whereas today, these kids are going to college.
They very often have to go six figures into debt in order to do it.
And then they go get a job at Starbucks and their whole job is paying off their debt.
Experts, Debt, and Subjectivity00:03:11
And they have no plausible path towards supporting a wife and kids.
And, you know, you can feel however you feel, but there's at least, again, my point is not that one is objective or the other is.
My point is that it's subjective, but that you can understand that there's a plausible argument that that's far more value that they've lost than they've gained from the technological advances.
Does that make sense?
There's a spiritual void and the Gen Z is feeling it.
Yeah, I think that's right.
Well, look, I mean, just to say, he says there's these numbers.
I mean, just to bring up, by the way, I just thought that was so sheepish of Bill Maher where he goes, Well, objectively, what you're saying is wrong because I had this other expert on the show who said, Well, you're not coming with facts and figures either.
You're just rejecting what the other guy is saying and saying that it's anecdotal based off of what's essentially anecdotal that you had a single conversation with an expert who seems to reference other information that I guess owning a home isn't as difficult as people perceive it to be.
Well, look, and here's the problem with experts.
Okay.
And by the way, Gene Twangue, again, I said I loved her book.
I loved Generation May.
I thought it was so good.
But the problem with experts oftentimes is that if you are an expert in one subject and you have a thesis about that subject, you oftentimes will, when other broader topics come up, you will try to narrow it down to fit the thesis that you had, to fit the narrative that you had.
And we're all guilty of this.
You know what I mean?
Like, me and you are just lucky because the thesis that we have is continually proven right.
You know what I mean?
So, like, me and you were lucky in the sense because we are like libertarians who hate the government and the corporate media.
And so, when COVID came around, then the government was like, We have to lock down the economy.
And the corporate media is like, This virus is going to destroy everything.
We were, it was very easy for us to very quickly be like, No, we should have freedom and you're lying to us and all of this.
And that turned out to be right.
But, you know, if the if the situation had been just hypothetically, if the situation had been that COVID was worse than they were even saying it was, and hypothetically, the only way to stop it was that the government took some type of action, then we would have been in a bad situation where our priors would have led us in the wrong direction.
Luckily for us, the government is always lying and it's always the wrong answer.
And so, our priors lead us in the right direction.
But I do think that sometimes you'll have, like, I noticed this a lot with the new atheist movement, where they had their whole thing about how religion is poison and everything.
Inflation and Compulsive Decisions00:11:51
And, you know, that's the biggest thing.
And then when 9-11 happened, and then there were the terror wars, all of those guys jumped on the fact that the big problem is Islam.
Because of course, they're the more fundamentalist religious people.
And so they, they, it just, it, it behooved their argument.
It made them look really good to say, yeah, that's the problem.
These religious fundamentalists, they're more religious and more fundamentalist than the West.
And so they're the bad guys.
But then that would like blind them to all this other stuff, like the state violence of the West.
Anyway, I just think that maybe, and I don't know, I'd have to look at what her argument is now.
I did really like her book, but perhaps Gene Twangay, who's made her bones off being like, these young people are so self-centered, is slipping that in, is allowing that to cloud her objectivity on what's really going on here.
But I will tell you this: some objective statistics, okay?
The average home price in the United States of America is $417 Closer to $418,000.
That's a 37% increase from the first quarter of 2020 when it was $329,000.
37% increase from just 2020 to 2000.
And these numbers are from the last quarter of 2023.
So in three years, almost a 40% increase.
That's a lot.
You know, the average American has not had their wages go up by 40% in three years.
Just saying that.
And the median household income is $74,000 a year.
So $74,000 a year for a house that is $418,000.
You know, in my grandfather's day, the rule of thumb was that your house should be two years your annual income.
That was like, you know, so if you were making 15 grand a year, you could buy a house for 30 grand a year.
This is.
30 grand total.
Yes, yes.
30 grand total.
Sorry.
That's right.
So now you're talking about 74, let's round up to 75 grand a year for 418.
And look, the median household income being at 75 or 74, 5 grand a year, that's not what young people are making.
That's like, that's also accounted for what established people who are way, you know what I mean, have been working for years are making.
And that's between, you know, a household income.
So everybody who lives in the house.
And so I'm sorry, but like that is kind of crazy.
It is kind of crazy that people for people who are making, which there's lots of young people and not even young people, but people, and when I say young people, I mean people not as old as me, not 40, for people younger than 40.
There's lots of people who work really hard who make 20 grand, 30 grand, 40 grand a year.
And if you're in that situation, you're now to buy the average house, you would have to be making 10 to 20 times.
I mean, you would have to spend 10 to 20 times as much as you make a year for a house.
That is not, you cannot pretend like that is made up or you're just whining.
Oh, these young kids with their avocado toasts.
You know, like, go ahead.
Yeah.
And just to state two other variables at the 10, 20, 40, $50,000 a year, forget buying a house.
Just going on dates can feel very intimidating when you realize, oh, this is not a pathway to marriage because I couldn't possibly afford that.
And downhill from all of these decisions, in my opinion, is the fact that when you have inflation and you can't easily save money and see it, you know, continue to grow, people do make more compulsive decisions.
And so they do end up living with multiple roommates, buying the avocado toast, buying expensive coffee, taking vacations for Instagram pictures and having pricey gym memberships because all of the other things like just saving up to go buy a house, it doesn't seem that easy to do.
Because what do you got to do?
You got to figure out where to be in the stock market.
You got to figure out the taxes on CDs.
You got to try, you know what I mean?
Amount of things you have to try and figure out just to preserve your wealth to feel like there's something worth investing for, especially as a young kid without that much knowledge.
Think about it.
If you're coming out of college and you're not financially savvy and you're like, you're working a construction job and you're actually making good money, let's say you're making $25, $30 an hour, like you've actually, you know, you've got a skilled job and you're making money.
Think about what you have to do to try and be slick about actually saving that money to potentially go and buy a house.
Yeah, no, that's right.
And look, and then think about if you're not savvy like that, but you are like you're working hard and you're making something, whatever it is.
Yeah, say $30 an hour or something like that, or $40 an hour, and you're working hard and then the price of everything shoots up the way it has in the last four years.
That buries you.
And so like, why is it?
And look, for someone like Bill Maher, who's been, I don't know, a millionaire since the 90s, to just go, oh, no, it's these kids.
They've got it better than ever.
It's like, I don't think you have any idea.
I don't think you have any idea what it is actually like for people out there today.
And it's just not, you know what I mean?
It's just not, that's not right.
And you're right about that, that it does, all of the stuff that we talk about all the time, all of the kind of government interventions, whether it's the Federal Reserve or the income tax or just the rest of it, it does really disincentivize people from doing the right things.
It makes it much harder.
And anyway, I just thought it's like, it's a crazy conversation.
It's another one like we played before where Bill Maher's in this moment where he's like trying to argue these kind of like liberal progressive values against someone who's just responding with common sense.
Like they're just going, you know, like the other one was just like, have you bought eggs recently?
And he's like, what about the price of a house?
I mean, by the way, that's not even, you know, when I said the average price of a house, you know, it's like, oh, now go make that in a city.
It's insane.
Also, another variable, I'm going to just call it government chaos, which is I graduated from college during the, I think I must graduate in 08, 09, like heart of the financial of the last recession.
And what I could tell you is I was not a particularly good student, but in other climates when companies are just hiring and looking for bodies, I'm sure I would have just had some dumb job at some financial firm or something.
My career, and it's in part because of my decision to pursue stand-up comedy, but between the ages of like 24 and moving back home and then not having those first jobs out of college, I probably didn't have my first office job until I was age 30 when the economy was kind of hot again and they're just putting, you know, bodies in.
Now look at a decade later from what I went through in 08, kids are graduating college during COVID and you're not really getting hired in the same capacity because you're doing a work from home job.
You're not getting job training in the same way.
So what I'm trying to point out is that the government chaos in the system and the way that we kind of have centralized government now will, and also even just factor in, you know, your student loans because of the money that government has made available to colleges to increase those costs.
What I'm trying to say is all of these are government variables that will hinder your ability to feel like you're on a path of growth early in your career to make decisions like, oh, I want to be getting married at age 25, 26, or I want to be forward-looking and saving and building my career.
Yeah.
No, that's, I think that's absolutely right.
And that's a big deal.
And then it's like, what do you, how do you put a price on that exactly?
You know, like, how do you how exactly do you say to some young person that it's like, yes, you've been put in a situation where you can't be put on a path and forget even getting married and having a family because I know I'm like, I understand that I am to some degree injecting my subjective values into that equation.
But how about just being put on a path to being independent?
You know, because I think that's something that people like that really is an integral part of what it is to be a man.
And that's something that's robbed from so many people.
And it's not because of anything they did wrong.
It's because of the system that they inherit.
And to have, you know, it's so funny, man, because there is something where I do have this level of contempt for the baby boomer generation that Bill Maher is a part of.
And I don't get me wrong.
I'm not being a collectivist about this.
There's lots of baby boomers who I love.
I love my mother.
And I love my in-laws.
And I love, you know, I love a lot of baby boomers.
But there's something that it's so easy for people of that age, you know, people in their 60s or whatever to just go like, oh, you guys, you know what I mean?
Like, oh, you're so, you take it so for granted.
Look at all the toys that you have that we didn't have.
And you're going to complain about what we did.
And it's like, hey, look, you guys, at least through the policies of the politicians that you voted for, created a situation where it's impossible for your children's generation to own anything.
And then you look at them like they're the brats or something like that.
I just find that so awful.
Just to speak to two examples of that, because they rode the greatest wealth expansion in human history, but there's two variables at play there.
One is, you know, like a teacher who was working, let's say, 70 years ago in the New York City police, any New York City job for that matter, you're like that first tier of pensions.
So yeah, you guys are the beneficiaries of the Ponzi scheme you created because you're the first generation of people who got the best retirement benefits.
That changes your entire life planning.
Or I know my grandfather, for example, said that he had a couple real estate investments that if it wasn't for inflation, he would have lost a lot of money, but he was basically bailed out by inflation.
Magnesium Breakthrough Offer00:02:06
So that's another one.
How many of you guys literally rode the wave of the money that you guys facilitated the printing of that you owned assets that went up in value that changed the retirement and the ability of the lives that you guys lived for all of us to basically inherit that inflation?
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Housing Prices and Policy00:14:31
So I, uh, so I remember I was trying to years ago, I went to this accountant in Park Slope, Brooklyn.
This is probably uh 2018.
I may have told this story on the podcast before.
But so I went, I was uh, I was just starting to make a little bit of money doing what I do.
And I was behind on taxes.
So I went to this woman to try to, I was like, hey, look, I got to like go over my books here.
I've, I don't know, I have this crazy career, you know, and I've, I'm just starting to make money now.
And I, I don't know, let's go through what I owe or what I've done.
And she, um, she was an accountant in uh Park Slope, Brooklyn, which is a very like wealthy area of Brooklyn.
And I grew up in Park Slope.
And just to give you a perspective, I and this is not an exaggeration.
When I was a kid, is so I was born in the early 80s.
I grew up in the 80s and the 90s.
When I was a kid, the house, it was kind of a blue-collar area, but it was like a nice area, a safe area for sure.
But it was an area where like blue-collar people could buy a house and own it.
And there were lots of stories of you know, people who bought their house for like $75,000, $100,000, and the house was now worth $800,000, you know, from say the late 70s to the 90s or something like that.
And today, those same houses are, you know, like $5 million.
So the house that you would have bought in the 80s for $75,000 might be worth $5 million today.
I'm not exaggerating.
Like it was something like that.
There were houses that sold.
For example, I knew one family who bought a house that was kind of, it was like a block outside of Park Slope.
And so for a while, those houses were way like lower value.
And if I'm getting these years correctly, they bought the house for, I want to say in like 1997, they bought the house for $300,000 and they sold the house in 2002 for $1.3 million.
So like went from $300,000 to $1.2 million in a few years, you know, because it just the area was picking up.
And now, anyway, this woman I was talking to was not a libertarian.
And so forgive her for her theory on taxation not being correct, right?
So, but so I was talking to her a little bit about just like the neighborhood.
We were just like talking for a little bit.
And she goes, she was like, you know, I get all these people who complain about the taxes they have to pay.
And she goes, sometimes it just makes me infuriated where it's like, yeah, you didn't do anything.
Your house value just went up, you know?
And like, you're rich off of the value of your house going up and you're complaining that you have to pay these taxes where it's like, you just got rich because you owned this when you owned it.
And that now, from her perspective, because she's not us and she doesn't think about things the way we do.
And we're right.
She's wrong.
But I think she looked at it as just like, well, taxes are just like putting some money back into the pot for everyone, you know?
Like, so, okay, fair enough.
That's not the case.
Taxes are actually just like being forced to give money to war criminals.
So, like, okay, forget.
But just leaving that aside for a second, there was something to the point that she was making where she was like, it's very easy to just feel like you're entitled to this, but really, you just benefited from the policy of driving housing prices up.
That's what you got rich off of.
And now you're complaining that you have to give some of that back.
And in her mind, she's like, give that back to the less fortunate or whatever, which is stupid.
But leaving that aside, you do kind of get her point that it's like, wait, what are you talking about?
And so many of these boomers like lived through this great expansion where, hey, I owned a house and it tripled, quadrupled in value.
And oh, great.
Now my life is better.
And then they'll go like, if some politician were to come along and be like, hey, you know, I think we might need to cut Medicare and Social Security.
They're like, don't you dare.
I paid in my whole life for that.
And you're like, yo, like, how did you never, how do you never think that your kids, like as the price of housing was rising, did it never dawn on you that your kids now will never be able to afford a house?
Did it never dawn on you when you want your Medicare and Social Security that that money's been spent and your kids are being taxed to fund that or your kids' generation?
You know, like, and that's just what I see all over the place.
That there's no, like even that, there's no even attempt to go, oh, okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
I do see that this system that benefited me so much is also screwing over the next generation.
Like, it's also like I was on this kind of like ladder that was being pulled up and the thing that was pulling it up was cutting the rope underneath me so that no one else could climb up this ladder.
That's to me what I hate about all of this.
That's like, yeah, like, does that never occur to you that if the price of real estate is just soaring up?
Like, oh, yeah, but what does that mean for the next generation coming along who's trying to buy it?
Are their wages soaring up at that rate?
No, no, they're not actually.
You know, like, I tell you, I know these people and I know the family who bought a house for $300,000 and then a few years later sold it for $1.2 million.
By the way, today that house might be $4 or $5 million, but this was in 2002 or 2003 that they sold it.
Do I know anybody or could you say, is it true that the wages of the young people, that their wages increased by that much?
That their wages increased fourfold in a few years?
No.
No, that's not the situation at all.
So what the hell happened?
And I'll tell you what happened.
The kids who grew up in that neighborhood all moved to other cheaper neighborhoods.
Because none of them could afford to own the houses that their parents owned.
Is that good?
Is that a healthy, sustainable system?
I don't know.
I'll tell you, as a father, I would feel sick to my stomach if that was the system and I was happy with it.
And I went, oh, great.
I've got more money and my kids will never be able to live in the area they grew up in.
And I wouldn't go like, yeah, but they've got a cooler Nintendo.
You know what I mean?
So anyway, that's that's a, I guess that's basically the point I'm trying to make on this.
And just one more thing.
So Bill Maher is saying anecdotal, you know, he's saying your report that told that younger kids can't buy houses is anecdotal.
I had an expert come on here and say that it's actually easier.
From what I understand of the current economy, there are indicators saying that Biden actually has a strong economy.
But the one exception everyone talks about is that housing prices are out of control.
And I think food costs too, which are pretty important to people.
But I think one of the big ones is that people looking to start lives and get homes cannot do it right now because oddly enough, interest rates did go up a little bit, but housing prices haven't seemed to come down in tandem.
Not an expert in this.
I'm talking anecdotally from what I'm seeing in the paper, but it seems to me, one, Bill Maher is not really telling you the specifics of what he heard from the expert.
Two is I think if you're looking at the economy, it's kind of known across the board that housing is very expensive right now.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, I think there's no way there's no way to get around that.
That housing, like I just said, it's gone up 40% in the last three years.
It's, come on, let's get real.
Whose wages have gone up 40% in the, I mean, I'm not saying no one's, but has the average American's wages gone up 40% in the last three years?
I don't think so.
Okay.
Let's move on.
There's a couple other things that were just kind of fun to talk about before we get out of here.
All right, let's go.
Let's go to Nikki Haley first.
Nikki Haley was on Meet the Press this week.
Nikki Haley, by the way, has...
She's doing great.
She's number two.
Yeah, that's right.
Nikki Haley has, it's glorious.
She is being continually humiliated in every goddamn primary in South Carolina.
Her home state where she was the governor, she lost by 20 plus points to Donald Trump.
And she gave a speech at the end that she's sticking in the race until Super Tuesday, I guess.
And so anyway, let's go back to Nikki Haley.
And this is her message this weekend.
Have you taken the prospect, the possibility of endorsing him off the table at this point?
It's not anything I think about.
What I have said.
She said it off the table, Ambassador.
It sounds like you are in a different place.
Are people misinterpreting what you're saying?
Have you moved to a place where you're no longer planning to endorse him?
Well, I think, first of all, if you talk about an endorsement, you're talking about a loss.
I don't think like that.
When you're in a race, you don't think about losing.
You think about continuing to go forward.
What I can tell you is I don't think Donald Trump or Joe Biden should be president.
I don't think that we need two candidates in their 80s.
I don't think we want a Joe Biden who calls his opponents fascists or a Donald Trump who calls his opponents vermin.
No one wants that.
I think people want a new generational leader that is going to go back to what the American dream is, what we want for our kids in a place that's something that we can be proud of again.
Let me try it this way.
You did sign a pledge, an RNC pledge, to support the eventual nominee.
Do you still feel bound by that pledge?
I have always said that I have serious concerns about Donald Trump.
I have even more concerns about Joe Biden.
So is that a no?
Are you bound by the RNC pledge?
The RNC pledge, I mean, at the time of the debate, we had to take it to where would you support the nominee?
And you had to, in order to get on that debate stage, you said yes.
The RNC is now not the same RNC.
Now it's so you're no longer bound by that pledge.
No, I think I'll make what decision I want to make, but that's not something I'm thinking about.
And I think that while y'all think about that, I'm looking at the fact that we had thousands of people in Virginia.
We're headed to North Carolina.
We're going to continue to go to Vermont and Maine and all these states to go and show people that there is a path forward.
And so I don't look at what ifs.
I look at how do we continue the conversation.
I just love.
Look.
A lot of nonsense.
Kamala Harris level.
Yeah, it really is.
Sometimes, you know, they'll ask these questions when there's like 12 people in the race still.
And they'll go, in fact, this was the first question at the first debate in 2016 that they asked that, oh, Rand Paul just totally floundered on.
But the first question they asked, there's like 12 of them on stage and they go, Will you support the Republican no matter who it is?
And even in a situation like that, when you're competing with like 12 people, I don't think it's that tough of a question to answer, particularly if there's a wide variety of difference amongst the candidates.
Like to just say, no, no, I won't support the nominee no matter who it is.
Like, you're telling me that whether it's Jeb Bush or Donald Trump or Rand Paul, you know, people have like wildly different views.
I'll support them no matter who it is just because they have an R next to their name.
That's insane.
No, you shouldn't take that position.
And even if it was like a two-person race, this is a tactic that sometimes the corporate press will use.
Where they, I remember they used to ask Ron Paul all the time when he was doing really well early in the campaigns, they'd say, well, if you don't win, are you going to drop out and run third party?
And it was always kind of like the framing was to be like, look, we know you're not going to win, but like, so will you accept, will you start engaging in this scenario where you lose?
And you know what I mean?
Like there's a, but for Nikki Haley, when you've had, what is it, four or five primaries or contests at this point, and you've lost every single one by double digits, it is kind of a reasonable question to go, hey, so like, obviously, you basically have no chance of winning here.
Aside from something crazy where Donald Trump is removed, you're not going to win.
So like, are you, are you going to support Donald Trump?
Because anyone else would have dropped out at this point.
Age Concerns for Leaders00:12:23
But you're staying in.
So assuming he wins, which is if there isn't some outside legal, you know, thing, a 100% certainty.
So assuming he wins, are you going to support him or not?
And just like, I haven't even thought about that.
What are you talking about?
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I hate her preaching what the American people want when you're terribly unpopular.
Yeah, really.
What gives you the standing to go, what the American people want is a person who's going to be there who's going to be D.
No, they don't want you.
And they want the guy who is a loudmouth because they believe that he's going to maybe actually build a wall and return prosperity to them.
They do not care about the loudmouth part.
Otherwise, guess what?
It's a democracy and they literally vote on what do they prefer you being apparently more decent while pitching wars and that you know people might have to fight and die or this other guy who's a total loudmouth jerk from New York.
His age.
They're both old and I'm young.
And it's like, yeah, look, that is true.
A lot of people are like, hey, both Donald Trump and Joe Biden are too old.
But you're running against him.
And you're more unlikable.
And you're so bad that he's still not the voters still are not going for you.
The other thing that I think, look, I think that I'm sure both me and you can agree, Rob, that yes, Donald Trump and Joe Biden are both too old.
You know, when there's whenever there is, and again, there are, we've talked about this before.
I'm sure you could find a few exceptions to this.
But generally speaking, when anyone is looking for a high-pressure, high-value, high-stress CEO type job, they're almost never looking to hire an 80-year-old.
You know, because generally speaking, with few exceptions, very few exceptions, that's just not who you want in those positions.
You know, okay.
That's fair.
But there also is something to like when you just when you just start talking about how Biden and Trump are both old, you're kind of you're not really grappling with the issue because there is just this way of uh you know, it's like, um, I don't know.
If you were like, uh, you know, if there were two people and one of them had murdered 17 people And the other one one time punched a guy in the nose.
And you went, well, they've both been violent.
You know, you go, I don't think we want people to have been violent.
They've both been violent.
You're like, yeah, yeah, but like, these are two very different situations.
Like, one of them's a murderer and the other one one time punched a guy.
This is not the same thing.
That's almost what it feels like when you go, they're both old.
Yes, that's true.
They're both old.
Just like, yes, that's true.
They've both been violent.
But one of them cannot speak or walk.
And the other one is just probably a little bit too old.
But the Joe Biden situation is nothing like Donald Trump's situation when it comes to age.
And that's not about what the number is.
It's not about the fact that he's a year or two years older or whatever.
That has nothing to do with that.
It's the state of how he is.
For the record, or to prove that point, let's go.
Joe Biden was on Seth Meyer's show the other day.
And this is what he could do.
Let's play a clip.
And by the way, when we play this clip, listen to how much he struggles with speaking.
Concern for American voters.
How do you address that concern going forward as you come up to the 2024 election?
Well, a couple of things.
Number one, you got to take a look at the other guy.
He's about as old as I'm, but he can't remember his wife's name.
Yeah.
Brian, I'm going to need you to bring it back to the beginning.
I'm going to need everyone to hear that again.
This is the president of the United States.
Look at him and listen to him.
And how this is him attempting to speak.
Concern for American voters.
How do you address that concern going forward as you come up to the 2024 election?
Well, a couple of things.
Number one, you got to take a look at the other guy.
He's about as old as I'm, but he can't remember his wife's name.
Yeah.
Number one.
Number two.
I know what your ideas are.
Look, the audience listenes because, you know, he's trashing Trump.
But I mean, look, dude, like I've said, it's like we're living in the emperor's new clothes.
Like you're in this world where everybody's pretending that he's not naked.
And then it takes one little boy to go, yeah, what doesn't have any clothes on.
This is not the issue isn't the number of his age.
The issue is like, what is he doing?
The idea, dude, this is, I'm sorry.
The campaign that has been that, and we've already gotten like a pretty good view of what the Biden reelection campaign is.
And it seems to be the economy is great, even though no one believes it is.
Right?
Like that's it.
That's their big thing that they just have to teach everyone that the economy is great, even though everyone seems to think it's wrong.
And Joe Biden's accomplished a ton, even though no one seems to think he has.
And now Joe Biden is, oh, oh, the other one is the border is wide open, but it's actually Donald Trump's fault.
It's actually the border hawk's fault.
The guy who was a border hawk, who we all demonized as being a Nazi for being a border hawk.
Well, now the border's wide open, but it's his fault that we're not closing it now.
And also, Joe Biden is seriously going to make the case that Donald Trump can't even remember names.
I mean, what is going on here?
How is this even possibly the angle they're trying to take?
How could this possibly work?
Who could possibly think that, okay, the economy is great and you guys are just too stupid to recognize it.
The border's wide open and that's Donald Trump's fault.
The whole thing about demonizing him for wanting border restrictions, that never happened.
And also, Joe Biden's going to get up there squinting and struggling to put a sentence together and go, this guy can't even remember names and dates.
This is thalabrogasting to watch them attempt.
Let's keep playing.
I mean, this is a guy who wants to take us back.
He wants to take us back in Roe v. Wade.
He wants to take us back on a whole range of issues that are 50, 60 years, they've been solid American positions.
And I really mean this sincerely.
I think it's about the future and everything, every single thing we've done.
I think we've got some good things done.
Everything, and they told us we couldn't get them done because things were so divided.
But I think everything we gotta done, he's just friendly stated he wants to do away with if he gets elected.
And I really think his views on where to take America are older than anyway.
I know I get told.
You talked about bipartisanship.
And then he did the Biden thing.
He did the Biden thing where he just stops what he's saying in the middle of saying it.
This is the, I had a joke about this in my last comedy special, but he's trying to make the argument.
You think I'm old.
This guy can't even remember anything.
And then stutters and stumbles, gets to a certain point where he can't finish his thoughts and goes, anyway, whatever.
As he's just looking so old and squinting.
And I don't know what type of freaking Leslie Nielsen movie we're living in, but that just can't work.
It's impossible.
It's too ridiculous to.
And it does, I got to say, you feel horrible for him.
Joe Biden has been a truly evil person for his entire political career, his entire political career.
If you look back at his videos in the 80s and 90s, when he's just lying about his track record, when he's, you know, like just pressuring how we should, you know, give the death penalty for everyone short of jaywalking.
He partnered up with Strom Thurman to pressure Ronald Reagan from the right, that he should be a harsher drug warrior.
He was the credit card man, you know, the credit card companies man in Delaware.
He demonized everyone who didn't support the war in Iraq.
He's been horrible on a whole host of issues.
But at this point, you're just like, dude, what are they doing to him?
They're making him go out on these shows when he can barely speak?
Does no one care about him?
Does no one go, he's going out there and going to make the argument that Donald Trump is too old?
He can't even remember stuff.
In the sentence that he's saying Donald Trump can't remember stuff, he forgets what he's saying and bails on the sentence.
Jesus fucking Christ.
Last thoughts, Rob.
It's on an impressive selection of incoherent dribble, but you know, we're doing things for the future.
And the past was good too, because we've made some good decisions and we want to keep them.
Trump's Forgetfulness and Incoherence00:00:35
So, yeah, anyways, I mean, it's just pretty great.
Just two minutes of saying nothing.
It's unbelievable.
Unbelievable.
Well, it's March.
It's just the very beginning of March, and we got a lot more to go in this crazy year.
All right.
That's our episode for today.
Thank you guys very much for listening.
We'll catch you next time.
ComicdaveSmith.com for all of me and Rob's road gigs.