WTW104: Bill Maher Tries Comedy. It Doesn't Go Well.
Part 2 of the latest Bill Maher debunk. Well, we couldn't help ourselves and this part mainly focuses on how unbelievably terrible Maher's "comedy" is. We also do a little debunking along the way, but the bulk of the remaining debunking is going to have to come in, that's right, part 3. We tried. We tried to make it only 2 parts but he's just so... dumb. If you enjoy our work, please consider leaving a 5-star review! You can always email questions, comments, and leads to lydia@seriouspod.com. Please pretty please consider becoming a patron at patreon.com/wherethereswoke!
What's so scary about the woke mob, how often you just don't see them coming Anywhere you see diversity equity and inclusion you see Marxism and you see woke principles being pushed Wokeness is a virus more dangerous than any pandemic hands down The woke monster is here and it's coming for every two everything
Instead of go-go boots the seductress green Eminem will now wear sneakers Hello and welcome to Where There's Woke.
This is episode 104 and more importantly is episode Bill Maher's an Idiot 2.
Well, is it two?
It's two of this one this current Bill Maher's an Idiot.
Yeah, I was gonna say of eternal Yeah, Infinity Volume 2.
I don't know.
I'm Thomas.
That's Lydia.
How you doing?
Oh, I'm doing pretty well.
Eager for this next round of bullshit from Bill Maher.
And I can't wait to get into it, personally.
Yeah, it was really hard to decide how to do this set of episodes.
I'm hoping it's two.
We'll see if it bleeds over because there's so much.
I wanted to structure it around the Bill Maher video, but that video structure is very weird.
So we ended up covering the real substance in terms of like the more academic type stuff in terms of like Democrats, should they moderate?
And I can't get over how weak the New York Times is arguing is.
Like it's just, it's just so weak.
It's just like misleading stats and weak argument.
Like the more I think about the Georgia example, I still can't get over that.
I know we're kind of reviewing yesterday's, you know, I know we're kind of reviewing last episode, but it's one of those things where it's like I edit and then we publish and then digest more.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And it's just like, how could you say with a straight face that the key difference between Warnock and Stacey Abrams was just that he pledged to be a moderate and she didn't like based on the vote count.
Yeah, that's insane.
It's incumbency two different ways.
It's Warnock was the incumbent at that time.
She was going against the incumbent.
He was a white man.
Like it's every which way.
And her vote difference was only 100,000 something less than his.
That's way more explainable by the incumbency by the horrible opponent that Wernock had.
Like that alone could be it.
Like literally any one of those factors, I feel like could account for the 100,000.
And the fact that they're not even like maybe I'm wrong.
I don't know, but the fact that they don't even engage with that.
They don't have an advanced statistical model that shows like, hey, yeah, we know there's these other things going on in that election, but when you run the numbers, this amount was actually the leftover centrism thing.
And that's just one of their shitty examples.
And they had so many.
In full fairness, I don't fault Bill Maher too much.
I fault the New York Times way more for that article, obviously, than Bill Maher for like relying on it.
It is an opinion piece.
So it's just him finding the opinion he likes, obviously.
Whatever.
I'll spot Bill Maher that one, but we're going to finally hit play on the video that we stopped two minutes in of an eight minute video.
Almost nine minutes.
It gets so fucking stupid.
I can't wait.
So we've kind of, in a way, eaten our vegetables.
And now we get to enjoy a nice dessert of Bill Maher's head.
His head on a platter.
Because it's just so stupid.
So that's what we're going to talk about after the break.
Bill Maher's an Idiot.
And we'll talk about Zoron.
We'll hear Bill Maher probably get his name wrong several more times.
We'll see.
Amazing.
And lots of other stuff.
Democratic socialists, their conventions, all kinds of fun stuff.
So after this break, which you can avoid at patreon.com slash where there's woke, avoid the ads, get bonus stuff, get a happy feeling in your heart.
Talk to us.
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Thanks so much to our supporters.
after this break, we'll get to it.
Okay, time to just hit play.
And I don't know how long I'm going to last.
For one, a part of me really wants.
I was, can why one more time just play when he bombs really fucking hard?
Yeah, why not?
Just for fun.
It's just so funny.
Yeah.
It's like the very beginning.
I just want to.
My favorite thing was when we played it the first time and then you realized that we played it sped up and then we had to endure it like in real time.
We had to endure real time and real time.
It's still enjoyable.
Like, yeah, like the no-roll Democrats must recognize that Zoran Mamdani is the future of the party.
Unfortunately, it's the Republican Party.
Oh my God.
It's so bad.
Get me out of here.
Oh, my God.
It's so fucking good.
Oh, God.
So keep that in mind.
And, you know, that was mainly for me.
But also, as I sort of tease early on, the audience gets more and more insane.
And I fucking love it because they're just fucking with him.
Or the other option is like they're paid to laugh or something, or they know they have to laugh because he sucks.
Or they're so dumb that they're doing it.
You'll see.
Okay.
So we're roughly around here.
Someone had been saying that all along.
He's doing his victory laugh.
Yeah.
Centrism.
It's such a great case.
And that's the thing is we haven't had enough people saying the left has gone too far.
That's the key.
There just haven't been enough.
We just need more.
It will crack through eventually.
Just keep saying that.
Every single media source all day for the past ever 20 years.
The left's gone too far.
The left has gone too far.
We just, we needed one more voice to say the left has gone too far.
God, imagine taking a victory lap over that.
But you know, welcome home.
Problem is, Gen Z thinks socialism's wired and capitalism's tired and billionaires are what's for dinner.
And who can blame them?
I love that either he has some younger person that he tries to pay to make him sound younger or they're just doing their best and it's so fucking bad.
Yeah, that was very wired and tired is like not even millennial.
That's like fucking Gen X, isn't it?
Like that's.
Is that a saying that people say?
Yeah, that something is wired and something is tired.
It's so old.
I think you're too.
I'm an elder millennial and I don't get it.
Yeah, something's wired, something's tired.
And then the richer what's for dinner.
Okay, so he's got a cadence going.
It has the cadence of a joke where it's like da Like it's kind of a rule of threes type cadence a little bit, which is like when you're writing, I don't write jokes.
I don't do a lot of this kind of thing.
You know, there's an art to it.
People are better horse at it.
But like, there's no logical flow from wired, tired to what's for dinner.
I had to look up when this is from earliest use of using the words tired and wired as a type of social barometer comes from the first issue of Wired magazine published on April 1st, 1993.
Okay, when I was four.
Yeah, exactly.
And it was, it was a vaguely 90s thing, but that's not millennial because we were too young.
That's like the Gen X. Exactly.
So it's a Gen X slang.
And I was corrected.
Did I say this on the show?
I assumed, I just assumed Bill Maher was Gen X, but he's way fucking older than I thought.
He's a boomer, yeah?
Yeah, he is.
He's a fucking boo.
I don't know why.
For some reason in my mind, I thought he was a lot younger than he is.
And I have no excuse.
Like, I just don't know why.
I just thought that.
He's like, what is he, mid-60s?
It was way older than I thought.
He is 69 years old.
He's almost 70.
Yeah.
I saw an article saying when he was dating Kara that he was 55 and she was 23.
I think it was it.
Yeah.
That's the thing that happened.
He is almost 70.
I did not know he was that fucking old.
I don't know why.
So he's a boomer.
Yeah.
So my apologies to the Gen X for that smear.
Yeah.
You're not responsible for Bill Maher.
Him trying to do Young Speak is wired and tired, something from when he was the young age of 40 something, you know, or whatever, and we were barely born.
Oh, my God.
Okay, I'll forgive that, but does he try to do a beef?
It's what's for dinner or something?
Because, like, I guess billionaires, it's what's for dinner.
It doesn't have any logical connection to the first two things.
Hold on.
Problem is, Gen Z thinks socialism's wired and capitalism's tired, and billionaires are what's for dinner.
What is that?
I think it must be the where's the beef or whatever.
Well, that's no, not where's the beef.
A beef thing.
Yeah, isn't it?
Beef is what's for dinner.
Hold on, beef.
I love how this is just us learning about stuff that's so fucking old.
We're doing history lessons.
I know beef, what's for dinner, launched in 1992.
So, oh my God, really?
Yeah.
So maybe, okay, was there something in 1992 or three or four or five that tied those things together?
This is fun, actually.
I'm now having fun.
Wired, tired, what's for dinner.
Just search that.
I just, is that a construction?
It would be actually a relief because otherwise I don't know what the fuck he's talking about and where he got that.
Nothing.
All I'm getting are like recipes to cook when you're feeling overwhelmed.
I think he's making this up.
I can't believe what's beef is what's for dinner and where's the beef are two different things.
Where's the beef is Wendy's, right?
Wendy's, really?
Old Wendy's commercial.
Well, I recognize, I do know it.
Well, okay, so where's the beef?
Now, this isn't Bill Maher's fault.
He's not doing Where's the Beef.
Where's the Beef is from 1984?
Even older.
Okay, Wendy's.
Super old.
Beef is What's for Dinner is from just like fucking big beef.
It's like the Beef Council or whatever.
Yeah, like got milk.
I was just gonna say so much milk.
Big milk and big beef would just do like our product in general.
You need it.
Oh my God.
Do you remember?
I just, I need a moment to think about this because I hated milk.
I hate, I never enjoyed it ever.
I hated it.
And I just remember like flipping through magazines and the number of times you'd see celebrities with a milk mustache in the middle of like teen votes.
Oh, like commercials.
Print ads.
That's what I meant.
Print ads.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It was crazy.
The ones I remember, Michael Jordan, I'm pretty sure.
Yeah, the whole milk had on this country.
But I think it's so funny that there are these generalized commercials.
Like they don't do that for any other product.
There's not like all the car manufacturers are like, cars.
Aren't they awesome?
Yeah.
Like commercials, like you need to eat three cars a day to maintain your diet or whatever.
Like cars are just great for you.
Maybe they do and I don't notice, but like it's funny that beef and like the dairy whatever just like got to our government.
Yeah, the dairy council isn't something corn also.
What do you mean corn?
Is there commercials where they're just like corn in general?
No, go with the thing I'm doing.
God, the thing I'm doing is that it's weird that there's a product where they're just like our product in general.
And it's not any one beef thing or milk thing.
It's not like a milk brand.
It's just like big cow.
Yeah, it's not happy cows come from California.
That's tied to a specific brand, right?
The dairy farms within California.
Oh my gosh, this is, we're so off the rails.
Point is something wired, something tired, and something is what's for dinner is nothing.
Those are two unrelated things from the early 90s.
It's so weird.
How do you even, how does one's brain put that together?
It has the cadence of a joke.
Like I said, where it's da-da-da-da-da-da-da, like, you know, rule of threes kind of joke.
And Bill Maher does his only method of trying to be funny that he has, which is saying something with that sort of quick cutoff tone to try to give the impression that like he's way ahead of you.
Yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
It's the most obnoxious fucking thing.
It's the one thing he has at all.
He does it all the time.
Sometimes he does a little mouth click with it.
But the sign he puts up or the image he puts up with this is eat the rich and it has a cookie monster thing on it and it's cookie monster eat the rich.
How is that related to rich people are what's for dinner or any of those elements of it, those early 90s things?
I don't know.
It's just silly.
Here's what I want to say.
I'm going to zag when you're thinking I'm going to zig though.
This is the brief 10 seconds or so when he has a good monologue.
So I want you to hear this.
Well, you probably have, but I want everyone to hear this.
This is like we get a brief glimpse of what Bill Maher could be or could have been.
This is like some decent comedy delivered terribly, by the way.
His delivery is awful.
But if this were on John Oliver, it would be a little better.
But like these punchlines could be on John Oliver in service of a good point.
And they'd be pretty good.
So listen to this part.
If you're 30 and still sharing a bathroom with roommates, capitalism isn't working for you.
People will reject any economic system where there's a strange hair on the soap.
Not bad.
That's not bad.
Like the delivery sucked.
But like if that was the line, for a moment, he's making a point that's good.
And he's punching up instead of down, which is, hey, capitalism is fucking us.
He has another decent one.
But notice the crowd actually likes him.
No one wants to be approaching middle age and still writing their name on food before they put it in the future.
That's a good one.
That's a good one.
So they're quitting quiet quitting capitalism.
That's the end of it.
Never mind.
I thought there was one more.
But no, like that idea, that kind of framing of like, hey, you're going to quit an economic system where such and such, you know, and those are great.
Hair on the soap.
Yeah, fine.
Writing your name on food.
I don't think I would have thought of that.
I think that's a good, like he's 70 and has been wealthy for a very long time.
I don't think he's thinking of that.
Probably one of his writers thought of that.
You know, examples of whatever, you know, like economic woes that we've had to face and our generation and younger have had to face that Bill Maher never got anywhere near.
I don't know his child.
Maybe who knows?
But like for at least 50 fucking years or whatever, like 40 years, he's been doing well.
And those are like decent punchlines.
It's not the funniest thing in the world.
I'm not like laughing.
And it's also, he's so fucking stuck up and his delivery sucks that like, I didn't really laugh.
But I had a moment of like, oh, if you did those kind of jokes in service of like, yeah, this is why people are turning towards Zoran Mamdani.
The funny thing is he's sort of doing that.
What is this doing in his monologue about how socialism sucks and we need centrism?
You know, it's like we've had centrism.
That's what has gotten us here.
What are you talking about?
What is this even doing here?
Yeah, it's really disjointed.
It doesn't make sense with everything else that he talks about.
There's one writer in the writer's room.
He's like trying to sneak in some sense.
Yeah.
Like, oh, okay, we'll use that thing.
Oh, you're going to use that to say capitalism sucks, right?
Oh, no, no.
It's ultimately going to be about centrism and how socialism sucks.
But we'll use this good observation here.
And so that was a brief few seconds of decent writing there.
Now we're going back.
I love this so much.
Now he's going back to trying to make references to be young.
He's going to use quiet quitting, but mess it up and say quitting first.
When's quiet quitting from?
Five years, six years?
That's a while ago, right?
Quiet quitting.
Is that post-COVID or pre-COVID?
I think it was, I want to say it was post-COVID.
It could be.
When was quiet?
Yeah, you might be right.
2022.
Okay.
So it was post-COVID.
All right.
That's only three years old.
So sure, that's something.
But then he just goes to like texting talk from like the early 2000s.
Just like, okay, here we go.
So they're quitting quiet quitting capitalism and texting socialism that they're down to fuck.
Just says socialism DTF on a fake phone and then a thumbs up emoji and a kiss heart thing.
That's not how the youths do it.
No.
DTF is like, that's like our generation.
We're down to fucking.
Yeah, I would say like, yeah, Gen Z, Gen Alpha, they're far more subtle than millennials were because.
I don't know about that.
No, I do think so.
I mean, like, they don't say things like DTF or anything like that.
There's also like a big change in hookup culture.
We're not going to get into it.
Probably just fucking gifts and fucking whatever.
Honestly, I just think about like, like we probably were just super straight to the point because the phones that we had, we had to press each button so many times.
Okay, by the like letter exactly, like that we were like, we need to be efficient about this.
Yeah, no, yeah, no, but this is so out of touch.
But also, why would quiet quitting be they're quiet quitting capitalism?
They're just quitting capitalism.
Are they quiet quitting?
I don't think it's quiet quitting.
I think he's just trying to sound relevant.
Yeah, exactly.
This is the closest he's gotten to modern times.
He's like, he's like in a time machine, but the controls are broken.
He's like, I'm not relevant.
Three years.
I'm within three years.
I can almost see current day.
Quick, grab something.
And there's, oh, no, shit.
You just went to DTF from a fake phone.
Ah, we're 20 years away again, at least.
Yeah.
They're down to fuck.
Thing is, socialism will fuck you because socialism, to put it simply, just doesn't work and has never worked like Kevin Federline.
Can you tell me what that means?
Do you know who Kevin Federline is?
Okay.
I know that.
Brittany Spear's ex-husband.
Oh.
Yeah.
So the joke is that he never really worked.
I think he was like a backup dancer or whatever, and then never has to work because he had sole custody of their kids for a while and like, from some people's perspective, manipulated the family court system in order to get more money.
What century was this in?
No, it's within the late 2000s?
I would say.
What is this reference?
It's not relevant.
Is he in the news or something?
I mean, a little bit, but not him particularly.
Tell you this.
Why don't you go for Bill Belichick's girlfriend?
Go for something that's like within the last, I forgot who this was.
I didn't know what the joke was.
The name reminded me of like the 90s, but I wasn't sure.
I was like, is that that sound feels older to me?
Like, it's just so fucking lame.
God, it's lame.
And then the other thing is, right when he had gotten within, you know, three years and then back to DTF, like 20 years, then he goes for, you know, Red Scare and his fucking time machine's back in the 50s.
He's all the way.
It doesn't work.
It's never worked.
To be fair, that's more of like a Ronald Reagan-esque thing, probably like that era.
Yeah, yeah.
Because, you know, in the 50s, we hadn't yet ruined every single other country that tried socialism in any way.
We hadn't, there's still several that we ruined after that that we hadn't gotten to to be able to say it never works.
But yeah, Kevin Federline, like it's just so fucking, God, man, don't even do jokes.
Like just do the part where you have Reagan-esque era commentary and then just own that.
You're not funny.
Yeah, I mean, it'll probably come off better and the audience will be less awkward.
Yeah.
Finally, the audience can just be sorted down to the maybe centrists at best, but kind of conservative people who would listen to this fucking garbage.
But listen to that Kevin Federline reaction.
Just doesn't work and has never worked like Kevin Federline.
The count is in there?
Counting the number of jokes.
Such a performative laugh.
Someone was like, oh, you know, my mom's going to be watching this at home.
She's going to hear it.
She's going to hear me laugh.
I think it's Bill Maher is going to be watching this.
Like, I really wonder.
He almost sort of looks annoyed at points in this.
So I wonder if it's like the guy that's like loosely associated with the, because there's always this fucking guy.
Like, I don't know if it's the exact guy, but every time we've ever watched it, there's this type of noise.
And it's not a funny joke and someone trying to go, ha, ha, ha, like.
Right.
It's just the plant.
I think so, but it's also a bad plant.
So I don't, I don't know what this is.
It gets worse.
I know the kids think that stuff that happened before their appearance on the planet didn't really happen, but it did.
We've run this experiment many times.
Yeah.
And the results are always obvious.
Okay, we've run this experiment.
Mind you, the central thing here is Zoron Mom Danny.
Much as he's going to say, Mon Dami several times.
Have we run that experiment?
No.
Have we ever done anything like Zoron, especially in New York City?
You know, like have we done finance?
And yeah, no.
Like you could argue there's a few places they've tried some socialism on a small scale, but not New York City.
Yeah, yeah.
I think like Vermont, right?
Vermont tried to do some healthcare related stuff.
We're going to get to that.
That's in this.
Oh, yeah, true.
But it's always like specific to a particular segment of life within whatever area, but never to the scale of New York City and never in like a full-fledged platform.
So this was something I went down the road of, well, okay, let's let's let him let him go.
I can't even say let him cook.
Let's let him fucking burn the nothing fast food that he ordered and then like burnt in an oven after that.
Here's capitalist South Korea at night from space.
Here's socialist North Korea.
Guys, capitalist South Korea versus socialist North Korea.
Do you think that's the difference between North and South Korea?
Yeah, and like look at them from space.
Look at them from space.
I mean, I've been seeing this graphic for 20 years or whatever, since they've had like decent satellite imagery.
It is disturbing and sad that there is this sizable chunk of the world that's just dark, that right above South Korea, which is insanely bright.
And it is absolutely true that South Korea is very successful.
North Korea, not so much.
Is socialism the key?
Did they try to give them too much health care in North Korea?
Was that what happened?
Was that they passed Obamacare in North Korea and everybody's just all of a sudden there's no lights?
It just took out all the lights.
Really strong socialists.
Like, we can't afford healthcare.
We've had to sell all our lights.
It's the only way.
Is that what's going on?
Or do they have a horrific fucking dictatorship where they have to worship a fucking moron who's in charge of their whole country and it's a planned economy that has nothing to do with any like sensible choices economically?
It's about honoring the dear leader and enriching one person and his family.
It's just so fucking dumb to try to do a gotcha on socialism.
Mind you, we're talking about socialism too.
So it's not communism.
I don't, I don't know.
I think maybe the name, let's see, is that I looked it up and I forgot.
Officially, the name is the Democratic People's Republic of North Korea.
I guess they describe themselves as an independent socialist state, but it's just not.
It's just dictatorship.
It's totalitarian dictator.
It's like saying socialism doesn't work.
Look at the fucking country in 1984.
It doesn't.
Yeah.
They're not doing well.
That's socialism for you.
Is it?
Is that what socialism is?
I don't really think so.
I think that's Red Scare bullshit.
And I went down a rabbit hole of this and then realizing like, okay, there's stuff that I just shouldn't try to take on in a Where There's Woke episode, like this massive debate over socialism and capitalism and then some other stuff we're going to reference later.
But I did find just for fun, I was like, I just want to hear smart people actually talk about this.
And I found a debate that was during COVID.
So it was done from each of the person's homes.
And it was two scholars and it was some, I think it was affiliated with Harvard in some way.
And it was really nice because they were like really cordial to each other and respectful.
And the guy, the guy who was arguing kind of against socialism was like still praising the other guy's book.
It was like, hey, you should take him seriously and read his books and all this.
It was nice.
And ultimately, it was like, yeah, there's not one socialism.
Like it's weird.
It's just simplistic to be like, socialism doesn't work capitalism.
And we never count the losses toward capitalism.
And I think it's, there's also this conflation of an economic system and a political system and saying socialist, well, that's in reference to the economy.
That doesn't also necessarily mean the government structure either.
Lots of totalitarians call themselves socialists for one reason.
Yeah, you collapse it onto itself and it's meaningless now.
Yeah.
And for a while, it had to do with the cold.
fucking nowhere near an expert on this, but I know like there's various reasons.
For one, it makes you appear more soft and human if your dictatorship government says you're socialist.
And it's like it sounds better.
And also there was some element of like aligning with either Russia or the US, I think.
And so there might have been, I believe there are some cases where you kind of advertise as communists or socialists in order to just get support from Russia because there was this literal fucking Cold War where each side was trying to like boost their allies and hurt their enemies on a global scale.
And so there's that too.
But like, didn't Hitler's party have like socialists somewhere in there?
Like it's just meaningless.
It doesn't, that's not important.
What's important is what you actually do and the actual economic system.
And one thing to point out is that they always count any example that can loosely be tied to socialism in any way, linguistically, if need be, like just merely linguistically if need be.
And any failure means all of socialism fails.
Meanwhile, the guy made a really interesting point that I actually hadn't heard articulated to this degree, which is they always say, and I don't know how much of this you've been exposed to, because I don't know how much you watch these kind of debates or whatever, but the classic like Reagan-esque talking point is always like, you know how many people that Stalin killed with starvation?
I don't know if you've heard that before.
Oh, you know what I mean?
It's a lot.
Like, it's a go-to anti-left, anti-socialist, anti-whatever, pro-US, pro-capitalism line.
And actually, I'm exposed to it most because they also try to tie in atheism to it.
They'd be like, Stalin, atheists.
Oh, yeah.
He killed hundreds of millions.
Like, it's a lot.
Like, it's awful.
And there's argument about this, but some people say it's Stalin trying to eliminate Ukrainian independence.
And so it's a man-made famine.
Some say it was, you know, it could have been a mix of causes.
But one way or the other, it's 3.5 to 5 million dead.
Wow.
It's really bad.
So they go to it.
And then I think there's more examples and they try to take this big tally and talk about, like, I've heard it in the atheism sense.
And they're like, that's how many people atheists have killed.
Add together Pol Pot and all the, you know, stuff that has nothing to do with atheism.
Now, here's the other thing.
Do they talk about things like, I don't know, the famine enforced by the UK on like the Irish that they call the potato famine or whatever, but is actually just fucking the same thing essentially?
Or the just colonialism and how many people that has killed in the last in the 1900s and 1800s, us trying to spread our kind of gospel of capitalism in a way and all the way into today.
Yeah, I would say Iraq war suck regardless of economic system.
Well, the point is, it's counting your hits and not counting your misses.
It's the general thing that's happening.
And they look at all the horrors of the Soviet Union and they label that as like, that gets to count against anything vaguely not capitalist.
So it's not just like communism.
It's not even just socialism.
It's like all of any left effort gets to be tarred with that.
But what about the fucking economic crisis of 2008?
What about the, well, the Great Depression, I guess.
What about the opioid epidemic?
Yeah.
The opioid epidemic is 100% capitalism.
Like you cannot call that anything other than unbridled fucking greed and capitalism.
And it's hard to estimate how many people have died from that.
I'm seeing estimates of, you know, more than 645,000.
And it's a lot of things like that.
We don't count all these ways that people have died that have to do with capitalism in one way or another.
And you could tally all those up, or you could just stop trying to make this a debate in those terms.
Like that's the terms people have to use is because during the Red Scare and on to today, they have to make people really afraid of socialism.
Like it can't just be like, well, we disagree with some of the aims.
It has to be like, no, this is death.
You know, like that's how fucking conservatives have had to do it.
It can't just be, we kind of disagree with the economic system over there.
It has to be, no, this is certain death.
You just fucking die.
We have to be as afraid as possible.
And this guy in this debate made that point and he had more examples too.
Like there's so many examples.
I mean, the Iraq war is, can you say that's just capitalism?
Not exactly, but it certainly has a lot to do with it, you know, and like the millions dead there.
There's so many deaths that we don't count.
Capitalist America doesn't count those.
It's just like, yeah, you know, those are costs of doing business or something.
But you count all the deaths on the other side that can even be just, like I said, loosely fucking linguistically tied to socialism, not even really directly from it.
No one that I know of has ever overdosed on socialism.
And so all this is to say, I didn't want to take on that entire big topic in this episode, but it's just such a feeble attempt.
Like at least you could make a more scholarly case in the capitalism-socialism, broadly speaking, debate.
But ultimately, when you look at scholars, it's like that's just too simplistic.
And it's very relative to where we are.
That's the thing that people also don't update in their minds.
These fucking boomers don't update in their minds is where are we now?
You know, they're arguing for more capitalism and less socialism, oftentimes based on like their fucking 1988 idea of what's going on in government because they're so fucking out of touch.
They're boomers.
They haven't had to worry about anything for that long.
And so they go in their minds to what they think the tax rate was then and what they think the whatever was then and the unemployment and all that stuff.
And they're like, oh, we can't have socialism.
It's like they don't know where we are now.
They don't know how fucking expensive everything is and how unattainable homes are for anyone younger than them.
Like it's, they just are so out of touch.
This is a feeble fucking attempt.
I said it in the first episode with the New York Times thing.
A sign that there's too much groupthink is how weak these arguments are with no one calling Bill Maher on it and no one calling the New York Times on those weak arguments.
There's no one telling Bill Maher no, which is weird because he does talk across the aisle sometimes.
He talks to Republicans a lot.
Realizing I was thinking across the aisle in that moment as progressives.
They'll come on sometimes, but then there's that other thing that happens that I really resent where it's like anyone going on Bill Maher's show, they're trying to get out whatever their message is and they're not ruffling feathers, you know?
And so it's like, no one really challenges Bill Maher on this shit like ever.
Or if they do, it's like me or someone else on the internet and he never has to listen.
So he can just keep making these tired ass, terrible arguments about North Korea being too socialist.
In 90, Venezuela was wealthier than Poland.
But then Poland, finally free of Soviet-style economics, went all in on capitalism.
And now their economy is as big as Japan.
And people there have high wages, low inflation, cars, vacations, homes.
Meanwhile, Venezuela traded capitalism for Hugo Chavez's socialism for the 21st century, which turned out to be like socialism in the last century or any century, a fucking mess.
Give that round of applause.
Listen.
It turned one of Latin America's richest countries into one of its poorest.
Low wages, high inflation, shortages, outages, 8 million people.
Pray for an amazing punchline.
If you think New York can somehow reinvent this wheel, you're in for a rude awokening.
Yeah.
Let's pause there.
I don't know shit about Venezuela.
You know who knows about Venezuela?
CraigerU.
They have a stupid video about this.
Probably exactly this.
Yeah, it is exactly this.
And it's animated.
So I did watch it when we were getting ready to do our CraigerU videos.
Yeah.
And I'm sure it is so simplistic and trying to talk about an entire country's economic hardships and things like that and the characterization of it from this like amazing place, you know, just a few decades ago to the squalor of the earth basically now and how they characterize it.
I doubt Prague or you in their little five-minute videos is doing it justice.
But yeah, I did, I did watch it.
But I do think one of the things that he's glancing over that a lot of people seem to glance over is the dependence on oil specifically.
That's the part that I know about is they're all in on oil.
And when the oil price of oil crashed, that killed the country.
And that's also when you look at authoritarian stuff, when you look at, you know, like corruption, does socialism always mean authoritarianism, totalitarianism, and corruption?
Does it?
I don't think so.
I think that there are reasons that there can be some correlations there.
One of which I already said, which is those awful people say they're socialists because it's like a sometimes like a softer image.
Like Trump got elected on pretending to be populist.
Like he, if we didn't have all the baggage around these, these words, there could have been an alternate universe where Trump became elected president by pretending he was a socialist, you know, in so many words, because he campaigned on those kind of populist level ideas.
Does that mean he actually was?
No.
So he had a headline up on the screen that I just wanted to check.
And it's from a history.com article.
You know, that's where all the academics go to make claims about socialism and whatever.
And I think what's funny is his claim is, again, socialism bad, capitalism great.
The reason Venezuela sucks is socialism.
But like already off the top of our heads, oil was obviously what it was.
Like without even, I just know that from reading vaguely, you know, like I'm not even talking about research.
I think anyone listening would probably say, yeah, weren't they heavily dependent on oil?
And then when that crashed in the 80s and 90s and like that made their government unstable, you know, a lot of stuff like that.
But even from this article, which is what Bill Maher pulls up, and I always love pulling those up to see, you know, like what he's actually looking at.
Yeah.
One of the first paragraphs.
Venezuela has long been dependent on oil revenues and the Bolivarian revolution of Hugo Chavez did not fundamentally alter that situation, explains Joe Marie Burt, an associate professor of political science and Latin American studies, blah, blah, blah.
The decline of oil prices, the massive social spending of the Chavez and Maduro governments, U.S. sanctions, and a combination of economic mismanagement and corruption at the top have contributed to the economic collapse.
And we've sanctioned their oil industry.
We've sanctioned their gold mining.
I think probably because of the forest stuff, I'm guessing.
But okay, let's look at that.
It is true that when they had a bunch of oil money, they started putting it in the Chavez Revolution, they started putting it towards social spending, like healthcare and other stuff.
And then from what I can see, the key wasn't, oh, and then because that always kills everyone and is bad, then they all died.
It was, well, the main thing that makes money for them stopped doing that.
Yeah, like if you've lost your job.
No matter what program you're talking about or country or anything, if the main thing you do stops making money, that equals bad.
Like there's no capitalism or socialism about it.
Like we had a Great Depression.
Yeah.
And here's the thing.
Did that mean that absent the social spending, they would have been fine?
No.
Like there probably was a path out of it.
And it is true that if you're at one level of social spending and your budget is like ruined, yeah, you're going to have to reduce your social spending.
And I think a lot of what happened there too is these are countries that have been destabilized by us over history, by colonialism, by all kinds of forces.
And, you know, not to put anyone there blameless too, it's it's also people there taking advantage every which way.
There's stories of South American stuff in throughout history that is so ridiculous in terms of like people wanting to take over governments.
And so they appeal to the U.S. or to Russia or one way or the other and saying like, hey, hey, we're capitalists.
Help us take over these socialists or communists, vice versa.
And then getting arms from the U.S. in order to do a coup somewhere.
I don't know if this is specific to Venezuela.
I'm just saying in general, a lot of that has happened.
It's very destabilizing.
And Venezuela was a country that was doing really well because it had so much oil at a time when oil was very high priced.
And any economy that's based on like one thing, when that one thing. dries up or the price goes lower, that's going to be a huge problem.
And they probably needed, who knows?
I'm not an economist.
There probably was maybe a way out, but it would have involved a lot of, I'm guessing, short-term pain and planning and all that and stuff that like is hard to do when you've been subject to so many like revolutionary takeovers and instability and all that kind of stuff.
Like it's, it's hard to have that kind of institutional knowledge when you've been so disrupted throughout history.
Like they haven't had a long, stable, calm period like the U.S., relatively speaking, has been able to have, where we've gotten a chance for our best and brightest to kind of flourish.
It's a different situation.
And the other point is the social spending, you can point to it as a problem, but it's not like when there's a big crash, if you're capitalists, the people do better.
And if you're socialist, they don't.
You know what I mean?
Like, when the Great Depression happened, I was going to say the recession too.
Yeah.
The recession, that sucked.
You know, like that wasn't like better for us because we were capitalist.
And especially the Great Depression, the route out of that was a lot of socialist programs.
And either way, if you have some sort of force, like especially when you're dependent on one product like oil and that crashes, it doesn't really fucking matter how capitalist or socialist you are.
You could have been all in on capitalism, but it's just oil capitalism, you know, and then you'd be fucked.
Like if you had a kind of capitalism that included more competition and like movement into different industries and diversification, I don't know fucking how that, how you force that or whatever.
Or like if the socialism was the reason that didn't happen, I really doubt it.
I really doubt it because that's not what determines major countrywide, like oil was like 50, 60% of its like GDP, you know, like, how did the socialism do that?
You know, like I don't even understand the claim there.
And it's just so simple-minded again and again.
It's also like more believable.
Like reflecting back on the recession, capitalism did make that happen.
Yeah.
Right.
Like that is actually the cause of the recession was lack of regulation.
100%.
Lack of regulation on a specific instrument in mortgage, all that stuff that we saw.
What's her name explain?
Margo Roberts.
Yeah, exactly.
It's explained pretty well.
Like that is directly a result of failure of regulation.
You know, what's really interesting is even now, whenever I see posts about like, hey, there's another coming crisis, it's coming.
We're getting another crisis.
And there's, you know, there's definitely reasons for pessimism.
But one thing a bunch of people will chime in and say, including people who kind of know what they're talking about, in my opinion, is like, yeah, no, this is bad, but like we can't actually have that same housing crisis.
Like everyone wants to say like, it's going to be the 2008, you know, seven, eight, nine housing crisis.
The bubble's about to burst.
Yeah.
And it's like, well, something bad sort of like that could happen, but that was a very specific credit default swap trading bullshit thing.
It's not to say it's impossible that something equivalent could happen, but it is actually true that if you just fucking regulate the problem in certain ways, it can greatly mitigate your risk.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It insulates.
It's a really interesting thing.
I learned a lot about it in like 2011.
I kind of took on my own like an economics class that talked about it.
And the way that that happened is really fascinating.
But basically an entire market became dependent on an asset that was fake.
I mean, it's not dissimilar to like Enron, like, but our whole country, or not our whole country, but a whole industry, like the housing industry, when it all is based on something that's revealed to be like, oh, this is actually bullshit, it quickly crumbles.
And we have regulated, at least as of now, who knows if that'll get reversed or something.
And a lot of it, a lot of the protections have.
It's funny, I had a pause for a second while I was trying to remember.
I was thinking of the timeline.
I was like, wait, I was in college a little too during the crash for it to be this.
I was thinking of Sarbanes-Oxley.
So we learned a whole bunch of stuff in accounting school as a result of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, which was directly in response to Enron and WorldCom and some of these other.
Things where it's again it's the same story every time where it's like, oh shit, we weren't regulating enough, we weren't keeping a good enough eye on this stuff and a massive fraud happened.
In the same way, Dodd-frank reformed a lot of that stuff and then what'll happen is they'll be like, well, things are going well.
It's sort of like if you have a severe mental health problem and you take meds to make it better and then the meds make you think you're fine.
You're like, I don't need those.
Fuck, why am I taking these for right?
In that same way and that's not to stigmatize that that's something I struggle with in the same way, when the cure is something like regulation and then all of a sudden, the crony capitalists are like, hey look, we're doing great, we don't need this regulation.
That's just slowing us down, and it's like no, that's the thing that's keeping us from collapse like, and they have undone a lot of it.
Now, some of it I remember learning in Sarbanes Oxley, That act and others some of it will be like, oh, this is a little too burdensome, but yeah, it's like you're trying to prevent a crisis.
There's going to be stuff that's like, ah, that's a little too far.
And then you can always, if you have a functioning congress, you can dial it back.
You know you can dial it in, but that's obviously not what we have.
Point is, all this was to say that, rather than taking these very silly Reagan-esque looks at like scary socialist countries versus great capitalist countries, and how amazing they are, there's a lot of nuance there and capitalism has huge problems that can be very well mitigated, if not solved in many cases, by regulation, something that is dirty socialism, you know.
Yeah, oh my gosh, we got to get back to this.
Here we go, can somehow reinvent this wheel.
you're in for a rude awokening yeah Zoran can't make your wishes come true You're thinking of Zoltar.
Feels a little uh, racist.
That is the cringiest thing i've ever heard in my fucking life.
Yeah, the joke or the laugh, or all of it, all of it together, it's racist, I think.
But it's also so dumb that i'm like, well, I mean, is it just because Zoron and Zoltar are z words?
Maybe, I guess.
That's probably what he would say if he was asked about it.
But Zoltar, isn't that the thing from from big?
Yeah, it's like it sure is.
I know a lot about big from the 1988 movie Big yeah, yet another reference.
It's so funny when the structure of his joke too.
Man no, this joke can't work.
I was almost gonna try to find a way for it to work.
This joke can't work.
It's terrible.
It's a terrible joke, but it even more doesn't work when the framing is, you're thinking of something that you haven't thought of in 20 years minimum, like something that literally no one is Is thinking of.
If my joke is, that's not Zoron.
You're thinking of obscure as fuck.
Well, okay, it's not that obscure.
Like people will know what that is, but it's from 1988.
No one was thinking that.
It's not a joke.
Like, at least find a way to craft the punchline that doesn't involve a direct contradiction of you're thinking of something you haven't thought of for fucking 40 years.
I think it also could have given them an opportunity to reference something that wouldn't make us all feel like this is a little racist.
Like this feels a little uncomfortable.
You drawing this comparison between this brown man and this brown.
Well, ironically, I pulled up.
Well, the Zoltar picture he has in the graphic is very white looking.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's even worse.
That's why I was like even more cringe because it's like white looking, but with vaguely, again, it's 1988 racism.
So like vaguely Middle Eastern like facial hair sort of or like also Indian.
Yeah.
It's just awful.
It's just, you should not be calling to this other than to make fun of 1988's racism.
Like it's just a mess, man.
Like there's no reason this joke isn't funny.
No one was thinking of that.
I know it's just a joke, but it's just a way to craft the punchline that works as little as possible.
Like it just doesn't, all of it is bad in so many ways.
It's cringy.
It's out of touch.
It's irrelevant.
And it's racist.
It's the most cringe thing.
And the people pretending that's funny is just like unbelievable.
Now, I will say, even if the machine looks kind of white, their logo, the company itself, their logo, Zoltar speaks.
Was this a real thing or in the movie?
No, no, no.
This is a real thing.
I'm on their website right now.
I can order a machine if we want one.
But their logo is most definitely a brown man, a person of color.
Yeah, yeah, no.
It's just funny because the skin is very white in the picture, but I, yeah, this is, I love this.
Because if you go on the Wikipedia, this is fucking 19 teens and 19 oughts level racism.
Like, that's when these date from.
They're that old and fucking racist.
They're from 1904.
That's like the first one.
So crazy.
I get that it's a reference from Big, which is slightly closer to now.
But the fundamental racism at play here is from 1904.
Oh my God.
And if you would like some of this racism at your house, just let's see.
Dear God, no.
$8,000 for the economy model.
Don't even nostalgic model is $13,000.
No one should spend money on that.
This is extended applause for Zolta.
Democratic socialism is like a dating profile.
Things look great until you meet up in the real world.
For example, Bernie Sanders, his big thing was always bringing single-payer health care to our country of 340 million.
But when liberal tie-dyed Vermont tried to do it for a population of 626,000, it collapsed like that poor fuck in the Oval Office last week.
All right, that's at least a reference that happened within the last century.
If he wasn't making it in service of a fucking pro-capitalist empire, point is not a terrible punchline.
Now I just want to ask Bill, like, what even are you, man?
Like, look, we know that he's just very conservative.
He's basically a libertarian.
And people do the thing online where they always want to exaggerate and be like, no, he's a Republican.
He's not a Republican.
No.
He's not going to vote for Trump, but he's also not left.
I think he's a libertarian.
I think he wants a few libertarian things.
He can recognize that Trump's an idiot at least, but he also went to dinner with him or whatever.
But he thinks of himself as on the left, I think.
He probably would say, oh, I was on the left, but the left left me or whatever.
Yeah, that's him.
But like, is part of that that you're against single-payer health care?
I could have sworn that in the past, he's also been like for it.
That's what is killing me is like, we're to the point where you're doing Fox News punchlines.
Like, I know, again, there's elements of him that are super right.
He's anti-left.
I won't say he's right.
Like, that's a key thing.
Fox News is anti-left and right-wing.
Many of these personalities like Bill Maher are mainly anti-left and then conservative as well, but they're not right-wing.
They're not trying to advance right-wing projects per se.
They're just usually useful idiots for the right by being anti-left, or they also have some conservative beliefs.
But like, it's just weird because like Bill Maher's been a defender of Obamacare.
I'm not going to do a whole fucking research project on his stances, but it's just, it's just weird to all of a sudden be like, wait, your whole point here is that single payer can't work?
Like literally can't work.
Look, it'd be one thing to say single payer might be impractical in the 340 million, whatever of the U.S.
I disagree.
But like, okay, that's one thing you're saying.
We'll set that aside.
But then to say, here's why it's impossible.
It wouldn't even work in a place that has 600,000.
Like that's the point you're going to make is it couldn't even work in Vermont because of some fundamental flaw in the very concept of single payer healthcare.
Buddy, there's other countries.
Don't you know there's other countries?
Also, I think like when we talk about the funding for something like single payer healthcare, it often is derived by taxing the 1%, you know, additional.
How many of those people are concentrated in Vermont?
Yeah, like who knows?
We didn't, this wasn't something we were going to research for this.
Oftentimes when things like this happen, to your point, often it's Republicans killing them and then saying they don't work.
Obamacare, which I think is kind of what you're saying, like if they don't give it enough money, if they don't tax enough people, if there isn't the tax, I doubt it's that there wasn't the tax base there because it's just not that hard.
Single payer is just not that hard.
But the other thing is when you're a state within the United States' terrible healthcare system, you're also kind of limited.
You know, you can't just like, we're a single payer state and that's going to solve all the problems because there's a lot of people around your state that then you need to figure out what to do with them if they come to your state.
Like there's all kinds of problems.
Yeah, exactly.
I think when you look at it at a state level, it definitely is a lot more challenging than if you look at it from a federal approach.
Exactly.
And I guess just broadly speaking, it's one thing if you wanted to argue that maybe, you know, for the United States, for some reason, it'd be too hard.
But his argument structure is, no, it can't work.
Like it literally can't even work.
Right.
I mean, he's saying, you want to do it for this?
Well, look where they tried it in this tiny place and it just doesn't work.
Like just to make sure we're all on the same page here.
But when liberal tie-dyed Vermont tried to do it for a population of 626,000, it collapsed like that poor fuck in the Oval Office last week.
Does he say anymore?
Let's see.
Bernie, A-O-C-Mandani.
Mandani.
Jesus Christ.
You know, I think it was so funny that the first one he did was like, technically, he got it right.
And then it was like, oh, were you wrong, Lydia?
Were you wrong?
And then he proceeds to mispronounce it seven different ways since then.
I know.
I'm feeling pretty good.
First, he said, he managed to squeeze out a Mandani like when it was very, like, he kind of mumbled it, but I think because he was reading.
And then after that, he was like, Danny.
And now he's just, did he say Mondon me or Mondan?
He might have said mom.
I don't even know if I can recreate the ways that he's pronounced his name.
Now I've done the thing where like when you say a word too many times and it's not a word anymore.
I've done that with Mamdani's name and I keep like forgetting it.
Let's see what he said.
Bernie, AOC, Mandani. Mandani. Mandani. Mandani.
Yikes.
That's really wrong.
It's just not that hard of a name.
No, it's not.
It's just not that hard of a name.
If you can't commit to pronouncing his name correctly or not even pronouncing, as you said, if you can't commit to getting the letters correct of a person's name, then maybe you shouldn't be covering them.
I'm going to say.
Like, maybe you should spend that time practicing the name.
I'm sure he made fun of George W. I'm not going to look it up.
I'm sure he made fun of George W. Bush saying nuclear.
Yeah.
Nuclear versus nuclear is harder than Mamdani.
Easily.
Easily.
Nuclear is a weird word.
Mamdani is not even hard to say.
Mom, you know that word.
Yeah.
Donnie, you know that word.
Those are two English names.
Yeah.
Mom is something you've said a million times.
Everyone says mom, arguably.
Like Donnie Osmond.
Donnie is in Donnie or like Donnie, you're out of your element.
Those are two very American sounds.
Mom, Donnie.
Now put them together.
Yeah.
That's it.
Oh, when I put them together, man, Jim.
No, I can't do it.
Why is it so hard when you put them together?
Need to do like a Miss Rachel approach to it.
Mom?
Oh, my God.
Someone needs to do that.
Oh.
Mom, Donnie.
Or I was going to make the more Bill Maher-esque reference to the old Sesame Street one.
Oh, yeah.
Mom, Donnie.
Yeah.
Which I think you should give me a password because it's Sesame Street.
Yeah, it's fine.
But it's very classic.
But somebody needs to do that parody for all these fucking old white assholes who all of a sudden can't read.
Yeah.
God, that's a hun.
You just had a brilliant.
Okay, no one take it.
No one's going to be.
I'm going to go get my pink headband, my pinkboard.
Someone on.
Ooh, that's.
No one's done it.
I'm pretty positive.
That's pretty good.
I mean, it sucks that we didn't think of this a month ago or whatever when it was more in the news, but it's like, if someone wants to take time to make a supercut of everyone mispronouncing Mamdani's name and then Lydia can do a Miss Rachel of it.
Yeah, I'll send you a clip of me.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Email us.
Lydia at seriouspod.com.
I'm serious too.
Yeah.
Well, folks, unfortunately, once again, blab too much.
And I got to call it here because I was going to try to get through the rest of it and rush it, except it just keeps getting dumber.
In the end, he starts going off about Democratic socialists and stuff that I have like so much on.
I watched like a whole Democratic socialist convention.
Yes, you did.
Oh, I love that.
I did not know you did that.
And I love everybody.
I put it on.
I was like, I'll put this on, you know, in the background.
And I did that.
And like, I have a lot to say.
I actually might have some surprising thoughts on that, but there's too much.
I don't want to rush through that.
And I'm sure the audience doesn't know.
We got to go pick up our kids.
So I was trying to make this a two-parter, but yeah, socialism got us.
We tried.
Here's the thing.
We tried to give our listeners too much taxpayer-funded social podcast programs.
SeriousPod Network has collapsed as a result.
And I starved a million people to death because of it.
Man, yeah.
Man, Danny.
Oh, my God.
Bill Maher sucks so bad.
But I guess we got to cover broadly the socialism ones mainly.
He's not done with that, but I guess I'll try to ease off that in part three and not go so much into the, because there's a lot more he talks about.
He blends socialism and communism as though they're the exact same thing.
Yeah.
There's a lot to come.
There's a lot of dumb to come.
I think this is a good metric for us to take, though.
A nine minute and approximately nine minute Bill Maher clip turns into approximately three episodes of where there's a lot of stuff.
And we're going to have to struggle to keep it to three, to be honest with you.
I'm putting my foot down.
It'll be three.
To your point, it could be four or five easily.
And I'm looking at the timestamp.
We did get through roughly a third of it in the first part.
Yeah.
And almost a third of it in the second part.
All right.
So it's, you know, I guess we could have expected that maybe if I'd done some math.
It's our Bill Maher to episode conversion rate.
God, it's amazing how wrong he can be per minute.
Like it's just so stupid.
And here I thought we had all the time in the world to like make fun of how not funny he is, but I don't regret it.
I don't regret it for a moment because he's so fucking not funny.
It's so bad.
All right.
Well, we'll get on that part three right away and we'll have it to you soon, soon-ish.
But we were trying to do two parts, so it might be not as soon as we were hoping, but we'll get it out to you.
Thanks for listening, everyone.
Bill Maher sucks.
Any closing thoughts on this section, hun?
Oh, boy.
I no.
All right.
Valid.
That is a valid, valid take.
Thanks, everyone.
Mom.
Next time.
So good.
Yeah.
Such a good idea.
And you could even put in like a picture of a mom and a picture of Donnie from Big Lebowski or something.
Like, it's not hard.
Mom, Donnie.
Not hard.
It's not hard.
Amazing.
God, it's a mom is the most basic thing that English-speaking humans probably learn.
Kids, it's their first word.
Yeah.
Like most of them.
Me daddy does.
America.
But yes, that's okay.
Okay, their second word.
You're right.
The second word is too hard.
Next time on Where There's Woke, Bill Maher is an idiot on Democratic Socialists.
