Grubstakers - Episode 120: Grubble Stession - Part 1

Episode Date: December 3, 2019

It's the podcast crossover people have been clamoring for: Struggle Session and Grubstakers join forces to comment on the richest fictional billionaires. In this episode we look at whether certain fictional billionaires are good, what their offscreen activities might be, and whether they should be executed to a permanent end. Part 2 drops on the Struggle Session feed Wednesday December 4 (tomorrow!). Our thanks to the Struggle Session hosts for joining us. Check 'em out: Struggle Session podcast: https://soundcloud.com/strugglesesh Follow their hosts on twitter: Leslie Lee III @Leslieleeiii Jack Allison @JackallisonLOL

I want to be held accountable for what I'm doing. This may sound like an exaggeration, but it was like the 9-11 of my career and certainly of making kombucha. Jesus is smart. This idea of income inequality, that always strikes me as a very, it's a deceptive term, income inequality. Well, let's flip it around. It comes from outcome inequality.

Oh, what a time to be alive. I got the loot, Steve. Folks, we are here with a special, special crossover episode. We have Struggle Session here. I am Leslie III. I'm Jack Allison. And we also have the Grubstakers here. I'm Sean P. McCarthy.

Hey, Steve Jeffries. Andy Palmer. Yogi Poliwog. The Grubble Session. Yes, it's a Grubble Session. We talked about this before the show, and they asked my opinion, and the decision was, yeah, we're going to go with grubble session. Grubble session. I was against it from the moment it was mentioned, and I only made Andy dig in deeper.

And today, we're talking about where our two pockets overlap. Because, you know, on Struggle Session, we talk about, you know, fiction and narrative and the political implications of that. On Grubstakers, these fine fellas, they talk about how fucking awful every single billionaire in the world is. And I was curious, curious, you know, if it was possible in the world of fiction only if there were any good billionaires, because we're told in real world that there's good billionaires all the time. But as we all know, there are none. But I was wondering, maybe in these fictional realms in indoor, OK, in Harry Potterville, what the fuck ever, Downton Abbey, do any good billionaires exist? So we're going to go through a bunch of the fictional billionaires and see if any one of them deserve to live or if they have to say this is a parody comedy podcast. We can just straight out say, wow, Judd Clampett deserves to die. Right. And I'm going to kill him. But maybe they finally get us for copyright infringement. Like they couldn't get us for

threats against real billionaires. But we just mentioned Daffy Duck and they get the episode taken down. Wow. You think Judd Clampett was a member of more hate groups in the Appalachians or in Beverly Hills? Well, he was certainly providing funding for hate groups and probably, yeah, like probably like reforming, you know, the whole media landscape of America, like behind the scenes. It's so funny because my dad, he's from Kentucky and he fucking loved the Beverly. Like he's from Harlan County. And so he grew up around like there's actual hillbillies in Harlan County. They come, they live in the hills and they come down from the hills on the first of the month to pick up their welfare checks.

Yeah, they come to the first of the month to pick up their welfare checks. In Plycrate Town. Yeah, they come on the first of the month to get their dispensation. And he said, you know, they'll call you a nigger in a heartbeat if you see him in the grocery store on that date. But he liked Beverly Hillbillies. But he still liked the Beverly Hillbillies. Maybe there's something. Maybe Jed's got something. Maybe Jed was woke for the time.

Okay. So Jed Cl got something. Maybe Jed was woke for the time. Okay. So Jed Clampett. I mean, Jed Clampett is just a guy, you know, who and this is going to be the case with a lot of the fictional billionaires that we I think, you know, as I was looking as I'm like looking through the list, like there are a lot of sort of like oil rich fictional billionaires because this was such like a mythological event that you could just like be digging in the ground and suddenly be a billionaire. So Jed Clampett is one of a lot of the sort of oil billionaires. But, you know, he found oil on his land and then moved over to Beverly Hills like I guess to to, you know, just to argue the counterpoint, this is a man who had nothing and then became hugely wealthy. Should we begrudge him his success? I mean he worked for it.

He did shoot out some food. Yeah, and I feel like they just cut out where he called everyone the N-word. I mean I feel like that was happening, but it just wasn't. He was out there shooting food. He's like like why were you out there with a gun and he's like uh shooting food you know i'll defend uh jed clampett i'll say you know what what he did as soon as he got money is that he went to beverly Hills and made a bunch of snobby rich people's lives hell. All of them hated those damn clampets being there. He vexed them to no end.

And I think if you are a billionaire, there's no better way to spend your money than just making other rich people completely and utterly uncomfortable every day of their life. He's kind of a Nixon figure in that way. He definitely did a lot to own the libs. Like, that was probably one of his better redeeming values. Yeah, I mean, look, like, the real-life Beverly Hillbillies, or at least they've, like, fashioned themselves to be that way, are, like, the Duck Dynasty guys or whatever. Like, they're trying to kind of like

affect a you know they did it in reverse because they were actually like country club guys who then like took on the aesthetic of like um of what woodsy duck hunters or whatever um but yeah i mean like there are sort of closest uh parallel to you know uh the beverly hillbillies and you know i think triggering the libs is a good point because it's like you know i think that they would definitely be annoying to other rich people but i think they would also be some very bad rich people uh up to some very fucked up shit you know like this is like uh you know these are your like they're like Ike Perlmutter types or something. Well, I realized the new Tesla truck, it's it's got all those flat surfaces, which is perfect for the Judd Clampetts of the world to just cover it and triggered libs bumper stickers. All right.

So fine. Let's do give a final verdict on our boy, Jack Clampett. I if my dad said he was good, he has to be good. So I'm giving it, you know, Jed Clampett, we're going to take all your money, but we're taking that black mask off. We're bringing you away from the scaffold. You get to live. You can keep your cement pond. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I think we'd have to see what went on with Jed Clampett, you know, that wasn't on screen.

You know, we only saw his personal life. We don't know what he was using all that money for. Yeah, I would support leaving him with maybe a couple million and have him be kind of like a figurehead. Yeah, like he would be paraded around Hollywood. This is the only rich person allowed. The only rich person allowed. That would piss off all the billionaires if we just took all their money, kicked them out of Beverly Hills, and only let the Clampetts live there. I mean, the real truth is that Jed Clampett is like Trump, actually.

He's a rich guy who was never accepted into the inner circle of all the other rich guys who, like, now is all about triggering libs and, like, appealing to, you know. So maybe Jed Clampett would be, like, a horrible president, actually, at this point. I think that's so unfair. He is a good-natured man. He's a whizzer. He takes care of his family. He cares about his family. He is not a Trump figurenatured man. He's a murderer. Wow. He takes care of his family.

He cares about his family. He is not a Trump figure. Let Jed live. I think he should be a monarch, but only in the figurehead sense, where he gets to live in his nice house and comes out for events and waves at people. And that's all he does. The king of Beverly Hills, Jed Clapton. The king of Beverly Hills, yeah. But you're all just saying he's a good person because they had to cut that plot line where he funded the bombing at the 1996 Olympics. He's like secretly funding the Klan, but they keep that all on the cutting room floor.

See, that's what I'm saying, yeah. All right. Well, I don't think we can hold it against any billionaires for things that they made you off screen. So I'm calling it right now. You're right. We should appraise billionaires based only on their public persona. I agree with that. I am saying Jed lives.

He's one of the good ones. You're free to go. The first good billionaire on Grubb's Day. Also, I'm kind of biased because the theme does mesh so well with Dire Straits' Money for Nothing. It's just that that is a thing of beauty. I think next we should talk about the Monopoly Man. Oh, the Monopoly Man himself. You mean Rich Uncle Pennybags, as he's canonically named? Yes. Based on J.P. Morgan. So, you Uncle Pennybags? That's right. As he's canonically named? Yes.

Based on J.P. Morgan. So you know he's a good billionaire. I think we should set aside about four hours to talk about the Monopoly Man. Look, I'll be the one to say it. I would personally kill this motherfucker. Not even because he's a billionaire, but because I hate that damn game Monopoly. It takes fucking forever. I've never had a good experience with it. It sucks.

It's a bad game. I don't know why it's so popular. Well, that's the fun of it is that it's a bad game, and it makes everybody really, really pissed off. That's what the game is. It's supposed to teach you teach you capitalism yeah I could never figure out if that it's supposed to be a parody

or like just kind of a social commentary I think originally it was a parody and it like was made you know sort of to you know the rich uncle pennybags character is like you know this is what's to me like to mock monopolies this was like originally made you know at a time you know this is what's to met like to mock monopolies this was like originally made you know at a time you know when monopoly power in the united states like was looked at as

bad so like yeah this was like originally meant to be a satire but now they have like you know socialist monopoly that like you know has like vegan pasco and shit like that yeah actually it was created by a left-wing feminist named lizzie mcgee exactly what there was supposed to be it was supposed to be like a you know attacking uh capitalism and then like the company basically stole it she never gets any credit for it and now it's a pro-capitalism game yeah in 2009 the u.s national champ richard martin nashio does a perfect explanation of the game. Monopoly players around the kitchen table think the game is all about accumulation, you know, making a lot of money.

But the real object is to bankrupt your opponents as quickly as possible. Yeah. To have just enough so that everybody else has nothing. There's a national championship. Oh, yeah. That shouldn't surprise me. And if you win, you get the dollar amount that the game comes with, which is $23,900. Wow.

And the guy in 2000, a dude in Japan named Yutaka Okada won, and he challenged Masayoshi-san of SoftBank to play a game after he won because he was like, I want to take on that crazy mind of a genius. I think it does. Did Masayoshi-san like immediately go into debt for hundreds of billions of dollars? That's how you win in real life. That's how you win in real life. Right. And not have to pay it back. I think the game does train revolutionaries because everyone gets to a point where they just like throw the board off the table.

Sure. With a mousetrap or something. I mean, we can talk about how good the game is but this is about the man himself and so like okay he gets to be a fully ambulant person whereas you have to be a fucking shoe right that's how he looks at us we're objects objects to him. Well, he gets to just, in the middle of our carceral industrial complex, he can just pay $200 and exit jail at any time. At any time. Why is the thimble just slightly too small to be used as an actual thimble?

How come all of the jailers are white? Okay, what's going on in the Monopoly world? Yeah, I mean, look, I think that it's authorial intent that we're meant to want to kill the monopoly man i think that this is a character that's like been designed to you know uh stew in like a 1930s 1920s american uh a desire to kill and anger oh yeah all right so let's call it uh i'm gonna definitely vote vote for we kill this. Yeah. Murder. He's got to go. He's got to go. He's got to go. He's done. He's done.

Yeah. Being bags. That nice round head dropping into that. Satisfying. All right. I vote re-education training for a good five years so that by the time you put the gun to his head, he hails socialism before you pull the trigger. Yeah, we should kill him. Free parking every day. Yeah, we didn't even talk about the human trafficking operation. He's running out of his apartments on Baltic Avenue. All right. So next up, I'm going to pick one, probably the first one anybody thinks of when they think of fictional billionaires.

And I'm going to defend him against all these, you know, dirtbag socialists who have dragged his name through the mud all over the internet, all over Twitter. I'm talking about my man, the man, Bruce Wayne. He is, without a shadow of a doubt, a good billionaire. I'll tell you why. I'll tell you why. I know what you're thinking. I know what you're saying. What are you talking about?

He uses his money to build himself all these weapons, these military ordnance, so he can go around beating up poor people, which is a complete misunderstanding of the socioeconomic terms of Gotham City. All right. First of all, criminals aren't poor in Gotham City. They're all gangsters and they're all or henchmen who have some control over their work. They do have to wear uniforms. Yes. But they're all they do is like rob banks and shit. Right.

That's all Batman is stopping. You know, people who actually want to be rich themselves, like the penguin wants to be a billionaire. Why is Batman a bad guy for wanting to stop the penguin from also being a billionaire? One billionaire is enough for Gotham. And if you haven't noticed, every time Batman's Bruce Wayne is around other rich people, what's the thing they say to him? Oh, Bruce, you never come to these things.

Oh, Bruce, we never see you around. Oh, Bruce, we had such a great time in the Hamptons. Why didn't you accept our invitation? Bruce Wayne hates rich people more than anybody else he never wants to be around them in fact what he's doing as batman is slumming on the streets in the parts of town they would never go to and it's the only place he actually feels alive and human yes he's a deeply sick man yes he has violent tendencies yes yes yes for a billionaire, the way he spends his money just to get out his pathological need for revenge and aggression against organized crime who are, for the record, often Italian. I'm not going to say if that's a good thing or a bad thing.

I'm just pointing it out there. So I will say that Bruce Wayne – I'll say Italian. Being Italian is a bad thing. Is a good thing. I'm just pointing it out there. So I will say that Bruce Wayne is a good billionaire. I'd say that he's not the billionaire that we deserve, but he's the billionaire we need.

I've been reading Batman for a long time, and I've always, my sense of him was he was a misguided liberal. Yeah. And so, I mean, all of this raw aggression that you're talking about, that he could be working out by, like, buying up, like, child trafficking-backed securities and, like, laundering them through Goldman Sachs or something. He's instead using to fight, like, the scarecrow. Yes. And it's mostly, like, like most people you know and he

does do like liberal shit like funding boys homes now of course when he funds those boys home he's usually looking for recruits into the robin he's doing child trafficking child trafficking look it's technically trafficking and grooming he's's grooming. He is grooming them. But in order to be superheroic figures, he's also teaching them gymnastics. And that's a valuable skill to learn. It's tough because, look, Batman is in the DC Comics universe. OK, and so this gets back to the question of, you know, and this is talked about in Dark night returns and everything is uh where do these you know uh costumed you know super villains come from are they drawn to gotham because there's a batman

or are they there because the dc universe is different than ours like if the dc if they're there because like that's just the way the world is then maybe gotham needs a man to spend all his money on bat-shaped boomerangs to take these people down. Like but, you know, if these people are drawn to it like Gotham because there's like this weird rich guy that is like, you know, exercising his like childhood demons by wearing S&M gear. And that's like why what brings them all to this town. And like the town is just in the thrall of like batman's weird like daddy issues like then i do think that sucks but it just depends on you know where you stand on whether you know is it nature or nurture uh is this innately you know true to the dc universe or

uh uh or is it because batman's in gotham i guess it has to be nurture because apparently his dad is Mayor Bloomberg. That's true. I mean, Gotham is like really fucked up before, you know, like the the I guess that, you know, Gotham was so overtaken by a mob crime that it was would just naturally lead to eventually people calling themselves the penguin and things like that in in dark knight joker says to a room of criminals we need a better class of criminal so i think he was setting up a pitted bourgeois crime ring that just needed to be eradicated preferably by someone dressed as a bad yeah what if like just all the villains come from uh bad things done by wayne industries they just pollute so it's like he's just beating up the people his company creates

well that's taking responsibility for your mistakes as the corporate head of the corporation you know i i don't think that's a bad thing. He does. He definitely has to export the sort of bat throwing stars, because if those were made domestically, it would be really easy to trace the supply line to Wayne Industries. Yeah, I would actually say, Leslie, that we have to really look into how all of these bat items are produced and what conditions that they're produced in. If there are ethically produced batarangs and bat gadgets. And you know there aren't ethically produced bat products. I mean, you know. There's sweatshops making poison for

Batman every day. 8,000 Malaysian children were killed making the boob plate for Batman. You think the Joker's bad. You should see the labor unions he's been breaking up. Those are all the scenes that they don't You should see the labor unions even breaking up. That's what that's the. Those are all the scenes that they don't show is Batman destroying labor unions. Yeah, they're like, you know, the factory that does the boomerangs is trying to unionize.

Like we have to like break their backs. He works with Lucius Fox to like lock them out. That's how he got so strong. See, I think you're getting off track because you're bringing Batman into the real world, in the DC universe. There are no sweatshops because Superman would shut them down if they were sweatshops. I'm not as familiar with the lore. Do we know how Wayne Industries actually makes its money? Is this like Oak Industries? Absolutely not.

Absolutely not. We really, really don't. It is so weird because we learn that the Waynes have a bunch of money from like – they're like old, old money. It's got to be slavery. It's got to be slavery. Real estate is what we've heard before. Real estate. They own a lot of real estate. They have some family lore about like the Batcave was actually part of the Underground Railroad or some shit.

I'm sure someone's done that. That's gentrification shit. But we don't really know like what Wayne Industry does other than broadly like tech and they like build buildings in Gotham City, but we don't really know what the day-to-day is or why their CEO can spend seemingly 76 hours every day fighting crime with the company having no problems whatsoever. And none of that time going to jury duty to acquit the criminals he's beaten up in the first place. Look, I was just reading Dark Knight returns uh the other day for a episode struggle session which you can hear on patreon.com struggle session and he there in the first you

know chapter of that book bruce wayne spends millions of dollars trying to rehabilitate two-face now if he was a bad billionaire would he ever do this for someone who like tried to like kill him and his partner ward several dozen hundreds of times? Like, I think Batman, in spite of all his pathological need for, you know, vengeance and violence, he is ultimately, ultimately a good person trying to work with what he's got. And there are much worse comic book billionaires. Hopefully we get to him very soon. But he's not going around making arms for the US government to use. He just uses them himself because he's the only one that can be trusted with the bat tanks and the battle rings and the bat laser guns and all that stuff so i firmly firmly stand with batman and i hope the rest of the panel does as

well i do like that he takes government contracts and then just hurt like he'll they'll produce a prototype and then the government will be like nah and then he'll just use it for himself while like pocketing the difference yes i just feel bad for the shareholders of Wayne Industries. Billions of dollars of their funds diverted. Embezzled. I hope they have a good lawyer for the lawsuit. And Batman is finally taken down by the Southern District of New York when he's indicted for fucking diverting funds that'd be that's actually a very funny that's like a very good batman plot line is there's

like a wayne whistleblower who found out that there's just like hundreds of millions of dollars missing well here's here's the thing here's what you know great because they did cover this in the dark knight but grant morrison and all his his brilliant genius as a comic book writer decided to make it official that Batman funds, that Bruce Wayne pays for this mass vigilante who lives in Gotham. That's roughly the same height and build as him. But nobody puts two and two together ever. Thanks, Grant Morrison. Now I'm kind of worried that these Wayne Industry stocks that are funding Batman, they're just wiping out these pensions for coal miners in West Virginia. While those pensions could be better served by the very people that Batman is beating up via Jeremy Hoffa investing in some Vegas casinos.

Now I'm imagining the Wayne Industries whistleblower walking into the Batcave being like, what the hell? All of this money. This was earmarked for burning hydrocarbons. We should be putting this in the atmosphere. In Dark Knight, there was a whistleblower, right? Yeah, yeah. So Lucius Tharks shut him down. Oh, right.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then Batman ran his Lamborghini into him, too, to save him. All right. And he did, and no, he did not kill

that whistleblower. I think Tony Stark would have. But, final verdict. Four against Batman. I'm four. Strongly four.

I mean, he is a manufacturer of weapons, but he is trying to do good which i guess gives him some carte blanche but i don't know he lives batman lives how dare us you know i think a movie about um batman villains with the exception of joker i don't think it counts but in terms of like suicide squad uh apparently it sucks and. And so I feel like Bruce Wayne has to live just so that you have filler in between, say, the Heath Ledger scenes.

Sure, sure, sure. So, OK, I vote he lives. You know, I ultimately think that you have to look at things in context. And this is the DC universe where villains may exist, villains may exist, you know, either way. And so it is maybe a necessary thing that needs to be done. And if none of these people with actual powers are going to come to Gotham because it's like too low class or something like that, then like this guy has to take it into his own hands. The other thing I would say is that you have to look at like other billionaires in this universe like Lex Luthor and shit who have legit like spent the same amount of money on like just trying to kill Superman. And like became president and shit like that.

And so, you know, I think that we have to look at these things in context. And, you know, given that Bruce Wayne can sort of tentatively live but undergo reeducation from Oliver Queen. Yes, yes. Green Arrow, certainly the better billionaire. But Bruce Wayne, you get to live. Yeah, I think No Kill Batman is a good billionaire within the context. But I did just want to spend 30 seconds mentioning, because we did an episode about this, the closest real life equivalent to the Batcave is a billionaire named Henry Nicholas.

He's the Broadcom co-founder. make chips for uh smartphones and other things i think we have two real life equivalents but yeah but so he spent 30 million dollars making a real life bat cave underneath his mansion which he used to cheat on his wife and do drugs and that's the as far as we know, the only real-life Batcave is like a giant fuck den that had like innate Persian rugs and like these solid gold columns

all over the place. Again, $30 million. And then there's that other guy we covered who has kind of a murky source for his wealth, has a secret retreat. He has a bunch of international connections his own private airplane what are you talking about andy i forget his name well this just makes wayne look even better to me because like he has that bat cave and he didn't

use it for just mundane uh like lower class sort of proclivities like that. Ecstasy binges. I'd call those upper class proclivities. Yeah. At least he, I mean, he could have just been in there like with Talia Al Ghul or something the whole time. What if they went into Epstein's temple on the island and they found the Batcave? Epstein innocent. Epstein innocent. if they went into epstein's temple on the island and they found the bat cave that's the only reason they're covering up they're like they can't know he's the batman alan dershowitz was like a man who was like feeding him you know like he was like he was like the commissioner gordon no he's alfred choose wayne maxwell's robin the bad family is god is maybe the worst aspect to me

just training yeah gymnastics that would be grooming kids to go yeah fight uh fight like drug addicts i guess that would be the ultimate like so we'll hate him is like you're willing to let yourself be known as an international pedophile just to prevent people from discovering the existence of this vigilante crowd fighting robin robin what you have to do is like go to david boys and tell him a story like it's the only way yeah jeffrey epstein our real life Darth Maul. All right. Jesus Christ. Okay.

Well, I've got one I've been looking into. Probably one of the most cruel people in the fictional world. He is a King Kinkoopa Bowser. Wow. I mean, you can't say his net worth in dollar terms, but I think in terms of the GDP of the Mushroom Kingdom, he is certainly the equivalent of a billionaire. He is devoted to destroying a legitimate government and he's trying to traffic young women. And he, much like Elon Musk, has legions of kind of moronic creatures that will go and sacrifice themselves to defend him at any cost. And so I would put Bowser as maybe the worst fictional billionaire. Look, I think there were several irregularities with the last round of voting for the next princess of the Mushroom Kingdom.

I think, you know, Bowser is a reformer. He's a moderate rating force for the kingdom. And I do I support him. And also, you know, the, you know, completely and utterly grassroots uprising of the Koopas, of those little turtles. I think they're, you know, I think we need to listen to them. I think they're overlords of the mushroom overlords. Is there time to fall? And I support Bowser 100% for taking down the Mushroom Kingdom.

I mean, incidentally to Bruce Wayne, his villains are Italians. And that's something that's skeptical right there no yeah i'm with leslie bowser is a is a vladimir lenin figure he is rich but he is using his money to imprison and try to murder the monarchy and the koopas are the working class for For me, I guess I think that this is another example of that. We should really let the Mushroom Kingdom handle its own business. Are you kind of what I think? I feel like we're here. We're all in the United States and we're talking about like a factional, you know, war of, you know, and they know a lot more about this than we do and we like mario are you know paratrooping in from brooklyn and we think we know what's best

between i don't know what suits the mushroom kingdom best if it's a monarchy or if it's a bowser type you know i what i think is that we need to stop intervening is what i need to think i think we need to stop intervening and mario needs to stop going down the fucking pipe i think we know for a fact that two-state solution is no longer possible in the mushroom kingdom you don't know that what the hell do you know about that the land grabs recently by the princess has is forcing koopa's hand in this i don't know anything about it is my opinion there There's an ecological crisis going on there. There's more water levels than ever. Yes. I think – I mean I'm a fan of order and I think that what he introduces to the proud sport of go-kart racing with his introduction of shells, with his having the largest and most destructive kart is it's a plague on the sport.

And I'm speaking as a fan, as a fan of the sport. I'm a bit of a purist. Billionaires love racing cars and it's not not different with Bowser. But, you know, he has a shell on his back. He manufactures shells. He's a weapons manufacturer as well. I agree with this. You know, all I'm going to say is that, you know,

we don't know the long and storied history of the Mushroom Kingdom, and Mario is just some outsider jumping in and thinking, Mario's a white savior. Mario's a white savior, is what he is. Mario's a white savior. Well, he's Italian, so no.

Alright, so final verdict, everyone. Does Bowser get the axe? We don't know enough. I'm not gonna, I won't take a stance on this one. It's there. I vote murder. Murder. I vote grab him by the tail, throw him into a bomb. I vote

go under him when he's jumping and then touch the thing that kills the bridge. Wow. I think the Supreme Court has abolished the use of lava in executions. All right. So I think Koopa, I think, is done. Sorry to say, I do want to read, before we move from him, a tweet because I googled the idea of super mario being a white savior say i'm not gonna say who because this person i don't like this person they blocked me they're racist but they get a lot of shit from the far right so i'm not gonna say their name but

if you think about it super mario is a story about white colonialism rich monarchy princess peach occupies a native population toads infrastructure infrastructure spending is erased peach lives in the castle while populace is invaded by hostile foreign power mario is a white savior yep there we go they got it right yep they already got it right thank you for not revealing andy's twitter answer um all right so i have one uh which i i i was a little bit uh i i don't know i don't know where i stand on this person um and i didn't know necessarily that they were a billionaire um but uh i'm talking about the patriarch of the Adams family, Gomez Adams.

Gomez Adams, it seems, has cobbled together about $2 billion from investments. He's an investor and an attorney and the head of the Adams family. Ghosts or something? He doesn't practice that often anymore but and he lives mostly off of his investments uh but gomez adams is a billionaire well what do you think you want gomez adams to live or die he's kind of a weird guy under alan we go slander Alan Dershowitz. Oh man. I have to say, you know,

you bringing up that he's a billionaire that makes like some sense to me now. Right. Because there was the, there was the Adams family and there were the monsters and the monsters were like working class stiff, like monsters. Right. With the Adams family,

like they weren't nearly as monstrous. They had a better house. They didn't seem to have to do anything all day. They could just sit there being in that mansion, being weird all the time. So, I mean, we have seen a better example of a monstrous family patriarch. And I think Herman Monster. So I don't know why we need the Adams family. They can all fucking go. I think they appropriated goth culture yeah and profited off of it by investing in mid-2000s hot topic yeah after you say that leslie i'm like maybe i want to see the monsters tear apart

the adams family oh yeah they would fuck them up i just like according to wikipedia gomez owns uh businesses including a swamp a crocodile farm a buzzard farm a salt mine a tombstone factory a uranium mine and many others no so he's like he's got a wide portfolio of of sort of macabre businesses that other people wouldn't invest in. He sends the workers into the uranium mine, and then he gets them on the other end with the tombstone factory. Wow, fucked up. You should see his crocodile factory farm. Gomez is like a Bain Capital guy. Yeah, well, yeah, I don't know.

I guess, yeah, maybe Gomez does go up against the wall yeah yeah the monsters are explicitly uh working class well we already have the monsters we don't need this yeah yeah they're done they're done all right i never liked that snapping thing yeah well we should mention c montgomery burns, of course, which, you know, I mean, I guess the obvious thing would be to say he's an evil billionaire. But in fairness, we are going to need him for the Green New Deal. That's right. Because nuclear power is an important part of decarbonization. And he provides jobs for the people of Springfield.

I mean, what is Springfield without the nuclear power plant? Everyone works there. Yeah. That's their only economic base. Okay, but he may have the plants, but we have the power. But yeah, I don't know. I mean, Montgomery Burns specifically tried to block out sunlight altogether from Springfield so that people would have to use energy uh uh 24 7 you know uh he does provide jobs but he doesn't have any respect for his employees and

you know uh uh yeah i i think that montgomery burns probably is a pretty easy you know you look at like a montgomery burns compared to like a scrooge mcduck and it's it's just so clear how montgomery burns has to go well i think i think by blocking out the sun and uh he was saving the people from themselves because uh while today solar energy is in terms of uh price per megawatt hour uh now competitive with nuclear. In the 90s, it actually wasn't. It was much more expensive to produce solar energy. And so I think he was saving the people of Springfield from what would have been an incredible boondoggle.

Well, in terms of deaths per megawatt per terawatt hour of power supplied, nuclear power is actually safer than wind. Oh, really? Yeah. More people die constructing and maintaining wind power than nuclear power. Yeah. On average. So in that sense, I think Burns is maybe onto something and we should keep him.

But overall, though, I mean, blocking out the sun is just, that's too much for me. So that, you should go through the wall just for that almost. All the jobs that he created, creating that sun blocker. That's true. He did, I think he sterilized Homer Simpson, which does prevent the writers from creating a new baby in the show. So I think he does deserve some credit for that. And I guess, you know what, the funny thing is, in the canon, he made his fortune selling weapons to the Nazis, which again, you know, in your mind, bad billionaire. But I would argue that he reminds me of George H.W. Bush. Sean's going to get into how he feels about the jewish question as somebody who made his fortune selling weapons to the nazis you know that's kind of a throwback to the george hw bush presidency which

you know in the trump era i think is uh you know we should have nostalgia for that kind of person well trump is so much worse so yeah um yeah i don't know. I think that Mr. Burns is sort of cut from the same old rich uncle pennybags cloth that he's intended to be the archetypical billionaire that we should kill. He's a Charles Kane type. I think that's certainly the case with him, a lonely billionaire that spends his money on everything but just wants the one thing he doesn't have. I think it's also worth considering that the life expectancy in Springfield is much higher than other shows. I mean people have been the same age for 30 years now. Look, I'll say this. We should kill Montgomery Burns.

Not because of any of the bad things he did, but when he dies, finally that fucking show can end. It hasn't been any good in 25 fucking years, since literally the season where he got shot in Almost God. This show has not been fucking good. So please, please, please kill Montgomery Burns. Kill Mr. Burns and kill all the Simpsons. Kill every single character.

Kill every single character. Just leave Shelbyville. It's the working class district. All right, so final verdict on Montgomery Burns. I'm down with killing him. He's got to go. I think so. I'm going to keep him for the sake of our climate.

No, murder. He's dead. Dead to me. And the only one sad is Smithers. But he'll get over it. No, he goes in too. Smithers is hanging himself as soon as he finds out about Burns. It's the two for the price of one special.

Yes. But yes, now you guys convinced me. Burns will go. All cool all right next up this is going to be a controversial one i'm sorry to bring you innocent grub stakers lads into this you don't know how fucked up um film twitter people are being about um the property that this character comes from um you're going to begin yelled at by people you know calling you uh all sorts of awful things because of your opinions on this but you know in i think we'll be doing a disservice if we did not you know cover this very hot topic very

controversial issue in character adrian vite Watchmen. World's smartest man and richest man. Alright guys, that was the Grubstaker side of Grubble Station. For more of this, tune in tomorrow, Wednesday, on the Struggle Session feed and we will continue

our discussion of the best fictional billionaires. So thank you all for listening and we'll check you on the flip side. You must be the Monopoly guy. And with that, this has been Grubstakers. I'm Yogi Paul. I'm Andy Palmer. I'm Steve Jeffries.

I'm Sean P. McCarthy. The feed to Struggle Session will be in the description for this episode. You must be the Monopoly guy. Thanks for listening.