Waylon Smithers

He owns a power plant.

He's got people like Smithers.

as is sort of lackeys and then you have like a couple of professionals and then you have uh this sort of manual working class people like you know your homers and and and lenny and things like that um but no that's massively changed since the 70s and 80s a huge de-industrialization um capitalism is totally global you know we've sold off all our industries everything's owned um by international firms you know i don't even know if there are like national capitalists but you know firms have got more complicated huge amounts of money into advertising um massive expansion of the state bureaucracy um massive expansion basically of service work and not many people working in what we might call productive work like manufacturing making commodities more and more people are involved in circulation of those products selling them and more more people involved in like your health your health care is one of these i think the biggest biggest single employer in wales at the moment like working in health and social couch is crazy you know a lot teaching um public sector i mean if you look at some of the stratification analysis you've just got about a million different types of occupations and like you know any attempt to theorize all this is necessarily going to be imperfect because there's a huge amount of uh work experiences more and more people bounce between jobs so it's really just like trying to find a heuristic which can act as a shorthand to explain that that's my caveat but i think that the way to understand this you've got to theorize this bloated middle class so i think on the one hand you've got the professional managerial class which is the you know your key standards of this world is a theory that's Barbara and John Ehrenreich came up with in the 70s, and this idea that you have basically a group of people that are essentially managing the state on behalf of capital, you know, and they can work as social workers, they can work as teachers, they can work as sort of managers in industry.

I mean, we won't necessarily get into some of the problems of that theorization because you're grouping together professionals and managers.

Burner suggested the Let's Be Friends bee.

That One Motor Guy suggested the bee that stings Smithers, and Eugenia suggested Maya.

But again, w- we're, we're ver- we're very clearly doing the leg of evil, so please, we- we're, we're trying to give you easy points, but we have rules here.

Uh, my Rodrigo pick or suggestion is Lisa's three-legged race partner, who is definitely too busy of a design, I think.

I still think it gets me every time.

Larry's sort of like Mr. Smithers version of Charles is so great.

Of course, Camilla, and shout out to my wife, by the way, for pointing that out.

But then Camilla, who's like, it's like, oh, Fabienne.

[laughs] Uh, you name it, he does quite a few.

And then there's Harry Shearer is the voice of, uh, Mr. Burns, Principal Skinner, uh, Smithers.

He was Dr. Hibbert, not anymore.

Harry Shearer-

So I guess I- I'm, uh, I'm looking too much for logic.

Exactly.

So, uh, Mr. Burns and Smithers go to...

They're looking for a human brain for the, uh, f- to put into the robot body, which they find Homer asleep in the thing, where even he says the stench is overpowering.

say.

Smithers.

Yeah, Smithers.

Harry.

There we

I remember we had theories and did not end up being true, but I guess that's true of everybody.

I remember pausing it, or me and you were watching it on, like, the 14th time or something, and pausing it and watching Smithers leave.

And I remember going like, "Oh, there's Smithers.

He's leaving.

You see? That's how he must have shot Mr.

Yep, I remember that.

I remember trying to decode the pointing to south and west.

Waylon Smithers, of course-

No, the Reven- the Revenue Commission is like Mr. Burns, just mu- just m- swirling their hands going, "Excellent."

[laughs] And one, and Simon Harris is Smithers out there too.

[laughs]

[laughs]

Yes, certainly a commissioner.

[laughs]

[laughs] He does have a kind of Smithers look about him, doesn't he, in fairness?

Oh, he does, and then there's Me Hole that Burns.