I can't hear anyone say they have an auto-immune disease and need time away to deal with it without just assuming they're hiding drug addiction issues or something.
i think auto-immunes are way more likely if you do drugs but i don't think the science backs it up. it could be like aids where it does seem to only happen to faggots, but there is a 3% chance for it to just happen, i will say it does seem to be more of a post-drug issues deal than a current one. the only people i know get it had a fun life but moved on only to find out years down the road they're fucked. at least with mike it happened almost concurrently.
Also episode tomorrow right? its been about a week.
Also its crazy how little anyone in the fandom talks about James Fritz, i know everyone only got hooked on bar in the last 5 years, but he's the longest running co-host in terms of # of episodes with jules only just beating him out this year, and his tenure coincides with the start of the current archive. he stayed on all the way until mike gets cut. he was never given the title of co-host like Dean, but he was there or mike impersonated him from 2006-2011.
he's such an odd character too, he has a very redditor-type personality basically and is just "the hole" for the show. but he's also the punching bag as well. like he's clearly there to be abused but its because of that quality that the rest of the cast loves him. like he's homeless for a good chunk of the show, and despite it costing him $5 in bus fare to go to Mike's apartment he does it because of the weird hold Mike has over him, even when Mike clearly is rolling in the cash, he never made a dime off the show and is routinely treated like shit by the callers and hosts.
Having said that, he's clearly almost Mike conscious, while Kyle was the devil on his shoulder, the other blonde Fritz was all about being nice to everyone(meaning gays, women and minorities) and having the show focus more on mocking the douchecanoes of the era.
honestly i do feel like if this were fictional, James would be a blatant representation of what Mike feels "normies" are or how he would be if he just buried his emotions and tried to act normal and the funny part is that its clearly a very shitty life. Fritz clearly overcompensates for how he truely feels by adopting an extreme liberal outlook, because when you get him drunk or angry enough he will be his true self and ends up acting like Sven from years later. Despite that it never helps him, Fritz has been either homeless or bordering on it for the last 20 years, no one needs another lefty AVclub style comic who wants everyone to get along.
Meanwhile Kyle shows how far you can get and how freeing just not giving a shit truely is, almost two years of being friends with kyle and mike has committed more felonies and did more antisocial behavior than any person old enough to rent a car should do. all the fun hoodrat shit Mike missed out on from age 18-26 he speedran with Kyle.
Its honestly such a weird dichotomy, because in fiction james and kyle's resulting life would either be switched or not so obviously extremely different. James childhood is literally the one every alt-right or conservative person determined was the best one and yet James is 40 and has been homeless most of his adult life, meanwhile Kyle had your average hoodrat upbringing (raised by grandparents when his single mom realized she couldn't take care of her kids from different dads and that sleeping in motels and cars wasn't giving them a good life) and yet being a hustler and psycho, skipping out on bills and getting into fights eventually paid off better than anything. being able to afford the best apartment and best clothes and living the high life while being a low life.
Its just such a hilarious subversion of how it works in fiction, yet obviously its reality. honestly its sort of sad how Kyle and Mike broke up, between the podcast, the club, and chicago becoming a major shooting location for tv and movies from 2013 onwards, they could have rode that wave to being the top podcasters in the areas. or at least until the woke bullshit comes in.
Honestly thats what makes it bittersweet, even if Mike wasn't fucked over, instead of a decade of a show that eclipsed his old one, we would have instead gotten just 4 years of a more famous one that would have been destroyed by controversy. the Redbar of 2016 onwards probably would have been the same regardless of what happened because of how bad people got TDS in chicago. its just that Mike never got that fame or got to enjoy the last years of hardcore free-speech comedy. The Die probably would have been the breath of fresh air people were clamoring for at that time.
its just funny to me how such a huge part of oldbar is basically a nobody when he was connected to the hip to mike and just by not being controversial or rocking any boats he never gets a mention in the history books.
Honestly though, everything redbar from before Kyle gets on is a waste of time, you shouldn't bother listening. Mike's lawsuit fucked him hard and made him scared to truely go nuts so everything before august 2009 is not even worth listening to. Kyle really brings Mike out of his shell. you shouldn't bother listening to them unless you're going for completion and even then they don't make you laugh, at best you'll go "oh" because of how many future famous people mike was semi-connected to in chicago or because you'll hear takes on historical events as they happen.
the only good episodes pre-kyle lane are the david angelo episodes. but anything not having them as hosts you can skip of the old pre-2012 redbar era
