Liam repeating NATO talking points. Guests saying drivel like “AMLO is liberal trump”
When will @wtypstan answer for the crimes of the podcast.
Liam's dad tweeting at him that the podcast's definition of Communism could have come directly from the CIA was amazing
Liam isn't funny and as far as I can tell Alice is only on Trashfuture because she's so unfunny that she makes the other hosts seem funnier. Franklin was a fantastic piece of dry wit and I mourn that its death was necessary to birth a mediocre podcast.
Franklin obviously took a lot of effort, meanwhile WTYP research is like 30 seconds of skimming wikipedia most of the time. It makes sense why he moved to the latter, unfortunately.
The early WTYP episodes clearly had a bunch of research put into them. It's very low-effort now though.
I subbed to Justin's Patreon for Franklin content and as soon as I started doing that he never put out another episode. It's the only Patreon I've ever been subscribed to. Cancelled once they started doing WTYP.
Man id really like some Franklin content.
But they make boatloads of money on wtyp so Franklin is donezo.
Justin should kick those 2 freeloaders out and get the mcmansion hell person as a cohost
Because they're giant libs, and the pod has never been good anyway. WTYP is one of the weirdest fucking interests I've seen people on this site share. Watching a couple episodes of it made me feel like I'd just realized all my friends are really into My Little Pony or something. Like, harmless, but god this is awful.
I think it got a lot of goodwill by being derived from Rocz's solo YouTube stuff which was actually pretty good, class conscious urban development and planning stuff. His dry delivery kinda gave him the air of a based lefty Plinkett. Genuinely sad that the YouTube stuff has been left to die in service of the podcast.
Still waiting for that next episode. His cities skylines stuff got recommended on the sub if I remember correctly and was a big moment for me understanding more about better urban planning and how it impacts our material conditions.
I think the first few episodes had a lot of promise, and the Atmospheric Railway episode has a similar energy to it to early Chapo bits like when they talked about the Noid. But where Chapo evolved into something consistently decent WTYP burned out its energy and evolved into something consistently boring, honestly idk why people listen to it any more either.
Never seen a good thing said about it here and I don't think I was actually able to ever make it through an episode. There might be one ok person on the pod if I'm thinking of the right guy but the pod itself was really bad.
I share that feeling, it's honestly the most off-putting media fixation here, including the stupid shrek shit and so on
I wish they'd replace Liam. He doesn't really add anything in general and his politics are so far to the right of the other two hosts. It's like bring your kid to work day.
Rocz and Liam are best friends irl, big time drinking buddies, codependent alcoholics, and Liam regularly alleges that his alcohol addiction saved him from his heroin addiction. So good luck getting him off that podcast lol. Any time Roczniak has been approached about what an asshole Liam is he goes full "I will always defend my friends!!!" mode.
As a person who has dealt with addiction and has been friends with other addicts, codependent friendships based on addiction typically end up very well :) especially when one friend has a worse addiction than the other
Like my dad always used to tell me
The people you spend time with says a lot more about you than your mouth does
Of course, he'd say it in Spanish and usually because I hung out with the goth kids in school
episode 200 should be liam's dad dunking on the other 199 episodes
There was an episode where he drops off halfway to watch a fking baseball game lol
Nah dude he was still randomly butting in about how the yankees are winning because he's watching it on his tv while still recording
you could replace Liam with a Markov chain bot and it would be an improvement
Aside from being a loud mouthed lib and talking over the other, funnier hosts, what did Liam do? Or does that pretty much cover it? I've heard a lot of people talk about disliking him.
There's that and he just doesn't contribute much in terms of the group dynamic. Rocz is the engineering expert and narrator, Alice is the polymath theory nerd who brings jokes, the guest is the subject matter expert, and Liam is just... an arbitrary guy from Philly who is weirdly attached to both of his co-hosts. He derails most episodes multiple times and it isn't usually for any good reason.
If you subbed him out for a sandwich, would the quality of the podcast suffer?
uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh Probably wouldn't even notice for a couple episodes if he was.
So we have an engineer and a semi-lawyer, who else would you put on there as your dream replacement for Liam? Can't be too funny because Alice is already class clown so to speak.
They could still have a wild card guy like Brace in Trueanon, Jake in Qanon Anonymous, or Henry in Last Podcast on the Left. That wild card guy just can't be obnoxious or derail the podcast. Maybe get some radical urbanist or a political economy nerd in terms of contribution, or just a non-obnoxious normal schmuck who will yell the same radical things I want to yell. Someone like Adam Conover or the Crime Pays But Botany Doesn't guy would be the ideal. When Alice has historian Patrick Wyman on Trash Future he's also a good fit for their dynamic.
Yeah my first thought was a radical urbanist too. Brace being on wtyp would be like the avengers of left podcasts
You don't need a replacement. The sweet spot for number of people in a podcast is two hosts plus the guest. Three hosts is already too crowded unless one of the host rarely talks and is more like a side commentator than an actual host.
If you subbed him out for a sandwich, would the quality of the podcast suffer?
Depends on the sandwich
I'd take Liam over a PB&J, a Reuben might not be a bad replacement, I'd pay for a higher patreon tier for a BLT instead of Liam
I mean, being very reactionary does matter when they are discussing a Soviet project or anything else AES
Agreed, and the other two can already be reactionary enough on their own sometimes.
I guess I just have my lib-filter dialed in, tuning out all but the most egregious examples. I don't expect much more from podcasts.
the best thing they ever did was that time they found out RBG died in the middle of recording an episode and everyone started cackling maniacally
It’s wild that WTYP was the podcast that helped me realize that the USSR wasn’t all gulags and sadness just two years ago.
It's wild where that seed can be planted. With the way that the background anti-communism in the West is so ubiquitous, anything that slips past it stands out.
Hell the first positive thing I can recall hearing in media about the USSR was the inane "we tried to make an equal society, but we can't help that life is always unfair because of love and luck" speech in Enemy at the Gates. The whole movie was a greatest hits compilation of anti-Soviet propaganda, but it was the first time I remember hearing something predicated on the assumption that the USSR was in any way a good faith attempt to create a better society. Sure it was just as completely wrong about what the ideals of communism actually are as it was about everything else, but showing something positive was enough to stand out.
And to be fair to my younger self, I’ve always to some degree or another identified as a communist, I just bought into the idea that the USSR and China are bad because their leaders are corrupt or something.
Enemy at the gates was cool. Showing USSR farm boys as heros fighting Nazis is something we could use right now, even if they have to wait for their buddy to die before they get their own rifle.
I would do dark magic for a Band of Brothers-style show about a Soviet military unit. Start out pre Barbossa, show life in the Stalin era - then have like three episodes of defeat as everyone retreats east. Halfway through the show is Stalingrad, and the first victory won by the protagonists - then you see all the same locations from the first half of the show but in reverse, learn about the horrors the Germans visited upon the captured populations, liberate a concentration camp, reach Berlin, V-E day and an episode where everyone thinks they're going to get sent to Manchukuo but then they don't.
Liam is 50% oppositional defiance disorder and 50% internet tough guy poured into a failed comedian, he sucks and makes the podcast mostly unlistenable for me. The guests seem to usually be whoever they've noticed is very active on twitter which makes them statistically skewed towards being insufferable
There are sometimes bad takes on the podcast. Since I took this name, I've moved further left. I can forgive basically every episode except for the palace of the parliament one, which is godawful. The Berlin Wall episode also did such a poor job talking about Nazis in West Germany that it almost makes my list too.
Is that the one about Ceaucesku? I've heard that one brought up multiple times but knew nothing about him besides their take. What do they get wrong? I'd genuinely appreciate being deprogrammed.
That's the one. Adam Something is a cowardly fascist who has called the Soviets worse than the Nazis. He claims to be "deradicalized" but I think he just put the NATO mask back on. The guy sucks and earned the title Azov Something for a reason.
Adolf Something says communism failed cause the Russians never got the enlightenment
Ppl here like to shit on Chapo, (rightfully in many cases)
But they have never been as bad as these 3 chucklefucks
And chapo is actually an edited product and isnt like 30% dead air and ppl talking over each other
Chapo's politics have generally gotten better over time. I took a year or two off from listening and when I returned I was shocked how their politics sort of kept pace with mine (not as good, but not relatively worse than before).
it is not a good podcast and i'll die on this hill but then again most podcasts are not good
Engineers are usually iffy when it comes to anything that isn't directly tied to their area of focus
Rocz is the only engineer on the podcast though. And frankly, his takes are usually the least iffy of the 3. Though come to think of it, that's probably because he usually just sticks to the engineering side of things
The guests they invite though are frequently worse than Liam, in my opinion
Peak bad guest is that time they had some rando youtuber who went so openly fash they had to apologize on the show for inviting him on lol
Azov Something if I recall, but I can't find the episode where they apologized about it
Lol i think it was like a "yeah, sorry about that" from Alice, which is a very mininal apology but Alice not doubling down when shit hits the fan is in itself impressive.
That's the episode that made me unsubscribe from the patreon. They haven't done enough to apologize for that guest, and they should have taken the Palace of the Parliament episode down.
War_Takes is just the worst. says he's neither a socialist nor an anarchist, but has a big twitter banner of an American M1 Abrams tank with an antifa flag on it. Beyond parody.
In my experience furries are either anarchists or fascists with no inbetween.
Engineering attracts a certain kind of clueless person with no common sense. I was staying at a friend's house once as a kid and his father, who was an engineer, was trying to pull down a living tree with a big cable attached to the hitch of his truck. I could see like three ways this could kill him and I was like 15.
I'm just surprised there's not a black market of WTYP edits that cut out all the stuff people find annoying
I had to stop watching entirely after they had that adam someone guy on. Around then I noticed Alice and Liam in particular would have a new, anti-communist, historically illiterate take on the USSR to parrot in practically every episode. Really glad I didn't stick around long enough to see their takes on the Ukraine war, I'm sure that only made this tendency of theirs a million times worse.
I used to really love the show, it sucks it turned out this way.
I'm right here, man
