rant · moment 12 of 13
Augustus Caesar, Pablo Escobar, and Judges
from Brighton Beach Memoirs · #96
Audio-only archive episode — no video to seek.
7 minThey debate whether tyrants can also do genuine good, using Augustus Caesar and Pablo Escobar (and his schools and Quinceaneras) as examples, while touching on his murder of judges.
- 41:04Tim compares Augustus Caesar to Pablo Escobar as examples of tyrants who also did good things.
- 41:33Pablo Escobar built schools and threw big quinceañeras, but also murdered judges.
- 41:51Tim argues Escobar wanted to help poor people in Colombia, describing it as a Robin Hood scenario.
- 42:58Judges are supposed to be the final arbiters of freedom, which Escobar undermined by murdering them.
- 43:50Tim explains why so many comedians are Marxists: they don't understand incentives or how markets work because their own psychology is warped.
- 44:18Comedians who don't work put audiences through hell night after night while refusing to empathize with them.
- 44:51These people believe they can manifest things by thinking them into existence, so they don't understand the profit motive matters.
- 45:31Even predatory capitalists at Goldman Sachs would just bend the rules and thrive under socialism instead.
- 46:30People who believe nobody is funnier than anyone else and that all success is just good fortune really do see the world as a casino.
- 47:08Tim says he would've been a bum waving a Stalin flag if he lived in Soviet Russia, unbothered by the deaths.
- 47:22Tim dismisses the concern about family deaths under totalitarianism with "what's dead is dead, move on."
Pablo EscobarStalinNarcosThomas SowellGoldman SachsAugustus Caesar