Real Time with Bill Maher - Ep. #654: Jonathan Haidt, Fareed Zakaria, Dr. Mark T. Esper

Episode Date: March 30, 2024

Bill’s guests are Jonathan Haidt, Fareed Zakaria, Dr. Mark T. Esper (Originally aired 3/29/24) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO late-night series Real Time with Bill Mark. Thank you so much. Thank you. Wow. Okay. Please. I appreciate it. Thank you very much.

Please, we have so much to cover. There's been so much to this whole month. I mean, March, whoa. Came in like a lion or not with P. Diddy on the Lamb. Oh, I did. He's in a lot of trouble, boy, they're sex trafficking. They said they paid women for sex, had people carry drugs from, what the record industry calls another day.

And did he's really fuck now? Because all the defense lawyers in America are working for Trump. You know, are you on truth social? Good. I'm glad there's one guy who is. We want to ideologically mixed what he into. That's Trump.

Trump started that, you know, it's sort of his Twitter. It went public. He made $5 billion. Idiots. Bort shares in this money-losing imitation Twitter that no one uses. This is why Trump is never really

going to be against abortion. He needs a sucker born every minute. But listen to this. race between Biden and Trump now a virtual tie. That wasn't the case a few weeks ago, so getting very interesting. It's such a toss-up. Shohei Atani says to interpret, it won't go near it. But, of course, it's all about getting the money now. Biden had a big fundraiser. Did you see that the other night in New York? Obama was there and Bill Clinton. It was like the expendables of the Democratic Party.

and it was at Radio City. Biden was very excited. He said he's heard very good things about radio. But this is America, in a nutshell. Okay, so they have this big fundraiser there. They have like the A-list stars. Of course, they have ex-presidents, singers, dancers, Lizzo. They raised $26 million.

Trump sold Twitter for idiots on the stock market and made $5 billion sitting at home. And, listen to this. This is not the only way Trump is raising money. He, I'm not making this up. Sounds like I am. He's got his own Bible now.

You saw that he's selling his own Bible. But it's not just, just a regular Bible, please, that you'd buy in the airport. No. It's a Bible also has been at the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. His fans are going to love it. It has everything they pretend to have read in one book.

Trump selling a Bible. It's like Chris Christie's selling a vegetable slicer. But it's just in time for Easter. This is the weekend. It came early this year. Today is Good Friday. Oh. That's good.

as Jesus said, good for who? I mean, this is the day this is the day when Romans crucified Christ or as the Trump Bible says there were some very fine people on both sides. But, of course, the big story this week was the bridge in Baltimore that got hit by the boat. A boat hit bridge.

I mean, it was... This is America. I just can't. I mean, this is a fairly simple. simple story, tragic, you know, but what's a big country? A lot of shit going on all the time. Shit's going to happen. Boat hit bridge. But the

internet is just, it's all conspiracies. No, this was a cyber attack. Somebody with the COVID vaccine. Really, I'm not kidding. Israel did it. The Obamas did it. Marjorie Telegreen asked on Twitter, she said, was this intentional?

Or was this an accident? Which is so funny. That's the same question I have for Marjorie Taylor Green's mother about dropping her on her head as a child. And finally some, well, it's not good for him. Sam Bankman-Fried, you know, the crypto, the crypto creep, they call him. I mean, not good for he. He got sentenced for 25 years. That's the bad, yeah.

That is the bad news for him. The good news, he gets to meet Pete Diddy. All right, we got a great show. We have Fareed Zakaria on former Secretary of Defense. Dr. Mark Esper. But first up, he is a social psychologist at NYU Stern School of Business and author of The Anxious Generation,

how the great rewiring of childhood is causing an epidemic of mental illness. Jonathan Haidt. John? Great book. Great to see you. Thanks. Thank you.

Yes, important work you are doing. Let's go through the title, because I agree with the Great Rewiring. But great rewiring, you're talking about children now, because of social media and the phone and so forth. Those are big words. Great rewiring.

Tell the skeptics why that's not hyperbole. Because something happened between 2010 and 2015. That's when childhood seems to have changed. I got a phone then. Well, that's right. We all did, right? We all did, really. But in 2010, we all had flip phones.

And what happened after that is the mental health of people born after 1996 collapses. It's not just that they're saying that they're anxious and depressed. It's that they are cutting themselves and being hospitalized, especially pre-teen girls, their rates of self-harm triple. It's suicide, which is up 50%. And all of this starts in the early 2010s. And my argument is that in 2010, millennials had flip phones, they didn't have high-speed data,

they used their phones to call and text each other to meet up at the mall or whatever it was. By 2015, teens had smartphone, high-speed data, Instagram. They didn't get together anymore. They sit on their bed, they communicate, and that is not good enough. You can't grow up that way. They don't need reality. That's right.

That's right. We've made reality obsolete. Interesting choice. Yeah, I noticed you used the phrase phone-based childhood versus play-based childhood. Of course, we had play-based childhoods. I mean, that was my whole childhood was playing. And my mother never, I got home from school, my mother never once said after I left the house, where you're going.

Kid stuff, that's where I'm going. That's right. Because beginning a few hundred million years ago, whenever mammals were created, the thing that mammals do when they're little is play. We have these large brains that wires up our brains. And we did that from several hundred million years BC until around the 1990s.

And then we kind of stopped. We said, if we ever let our kids out without watching them, they'll be abducted. And just as that was happening, just as we were pulling them in, The internet was coming in and lowering them to stay online. So there is a backstory here. It doesn't all begin in 2010.

There's a backstory. But mental health only collapses around 2012, 2013. You make such an interesting point about how parents today, it's kind of the worst of both worlds. Too much hovering in real life where there is any left. And then none with virtual. Go in your room, lock yourself in there with the portal of evil. that is the phone.

That's right. It's insane. How did, explain that to me? Well, so, you know, so for one thing, we were freaked out by child abduction and all sorts of things and, you know, sexual predators in previous decades. But guess what? They all moved on to Instagram. That's where they're hanging out, because it makes it very easy for them to talk to young women, young men. So the real world has actually gotten safer and safer.

Right. The online world has actually gotten more and more dangerous. Most of us who remember the 90s, the Internet was amazing. It was, we were all techno-optimists. This is going to help democracy. This is going to be the most amazing thing ever. And it doesn't really get kind of dark and nasty until the 2010s. And so that's why we missed the switch.

We thought, well, okay, my kid is online all the time. My kid is texting with other kids. Maybe that's as good as playing with it. Maybe. We didn't know back then, but we were wrong. It's not. But wasn't it moving in that direction anyway? I feel like parents, just each generation,

ceded more control to children. I don't know why, because it's worse for both of them. It's worse for the parents who have to be their chauffeurs and their beck and call and always apologizing to their own kids and begging their pussy whipped by their own children. I don't understand it. And it's terrible for the kids.

Why it is your theory why parents kept seeding control and treating children just as short adults? Well, as life gets easier, as people get wealthier, as we move away from the old days, authority tends to decay. There tends to be less respect for authority, less respect for the old ways. So I think this is something that happens a lot

with modernity and with progress. But I think it's a mistake in part in that kids need structure. They need moral rules. This is something I learned from the sociology to Emil Durkheim, when it seems as though anything's permissible, it doesn't make people happy. It makes them feel disoriented and lost. And that's what we see in the data. It's really incredible. These survey questions, things like, sometimes I feel like my life has no purpose, or I think I'm no good at all.

You track out the percentage of American high school kids who agreed with that from the 70s all the way through about 2010. And those numbers were actually going down a little bit up to 2010. And then they all skyrocket. once the kids move their social lives away from play and adventure and errands and people, they move it on to swiping and liking, they feel useless, they feel disconnected, they get depressed, they start cutting themselves, and suicide goes up again by 50%.

And no boundaries. That's right. Here's something that never entered my mind when I was a child, when my parents pissed me off. I'm going to call the cops on you. Yeah. It was not an option that entered my mind.

Well, here's another problem because I see in the news this week, the governor of Florida Ron DeSantis, who of course is hated by the left because we were such a polarized country. He did something which you are advocating, basically. 100%. He banned social media for anybody under 14? That's right. Okay. Now, see, the problem in America now is because he did it.

Yeah, exactly. That's right. It can't be good because DeSantis did it. Well, that's true, except, I mean, it's true that we're going to react to, except that. However crazy polarized we are, this is the one issue on which we're actually not. And you see this in Congress. This is one of the only issues where the presses really come from both parties, because most people have kids, almost everyone sees this now.

So, you know, I hope we don't mess this up. But for now, this is the one area where we're going to, like, put down our swords and say, can't we at least get together to give our kids back some childhood? Right, and you have a... Your book lays out an actual prescription for this. It's very practical. Give me the four things. I know that's one of them, right?

Well, that's right. But the key, though, is to realize the reason why we're stuck in this, parents don't like it, teachers hate it, the kids themselves don't like it, is what's called a collective action problem. Anyone who gets off is now alone. It's hard to be the only one who doesn't get off social media.

The only one who doesn't give a phone. So my four, my four new norms would solve four collective action problems and then makes it easier for us to escape. And they're very simple. One is no smartphone before high school. Just give them a flip phone or Apple Watch, smartwatch. That's what the millennials had, flip phones. They came out fine. You may not think so, but the mental health, the mental health data suggests that they came out fine. Why me? I don't even understand that joke. I don't. You know, I'm not your best tech person.

I didn't get into texting right when it started. I had a phone, and when they got the one that replaced that, they said, you have 2,800 texts. Had you turned it on? I missed it. I'd never turned on that thing. I missed out on so many women. Anyway, go ahead.

So no smartphone till high school, no social media till 16, which is what the DeSantis bill does with a car for... Right. 16. 16. No phones in school? Schools must go phone free. Yes.

Every school that does love it, the kids love it too. Once they detox after a couple of weeks, the brain resets, they actually love it. And the fourth norm is far more independence, free play, and responsibility in the real world. because if we're going to reduce screen time, we have to give them something to do.

We have to give them something constructive. Like, play with each other. Let's see, this is again, always our politics, I think is what screws us so badly. How so? Well, because, like, super-duper safetyism became a part of the political identity of the left. We saw it with COVID.

Yeah, that's true. And so, like, anything that's like, if one person is hurt or dies from anything ever, We have to stop that. There's no perspective on, yes, life is a dangerous game. And some people, yes, are not going to make it to the end, but we can't sacrifice everything else for that idea. And parents sort of lost that idea.

A lot of parents are being short-term safe. They say, I want to make sure they can do anything that could hurt you. But it's like if you protect the kid's immune system for their whole childhood, you cripple their immune system. They're going to suffer from autoimmune diseases. if you protect your child, don't let them take risks. Kids need to take risks. They need small risks to be able to manage them,

then they can face much bigger risk as adults. All right, well, it's a great book. Thank you, John. I'm telling this clarion called. Jonathan Haidt and Hyde, everybody. Let's read our channel. All right, good job. Okay.

Hey, guys. Okay, the Guys Club is here. He is the host of CNN's Fareed Zakaria, GPS, and author of the new book, Age of Revolution. Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the present available in the U.S. and UK. Fareed Zakaria is right over here. And he was the 27th Secretary of Defense under President Trump.

An easy job, I would imagine. His memoir is called A Sacred Oath Memoirs of a Secretary of Defense during Extraordinary Times. Dr. Mark Esper. Jeffsett. Good to have you here. We'll be back. All right, I want to start with your great column. Every week it's great.

but today the first thing was about Ronna McDaniel. Now, if you don't know who that is, she was the head of the Republican National Committee. Rana McDaniel, not the clown from McDonald's. Although she probably wishes she took that job. Because, okay, this saga gets to such a fundamental question. That's why I loved when you wrote about it. I want to bring it up now.

Okay, so NBC News hires her. because people are always saying to the news organizations, you're liberal, let's hear the other voices, and it's not an invalid thing to say. So they hire this, Ron and McDaniel, but she was an election denier when she worked for Trump has since changed her tune. Okay, this is the problem.

It's like, how do you represent this large part of the country that does not believe the election was legitimate? How do you say to people, you know, okay, we want to include you, but we can't identify. that what you think is stupid? Because Trump lost. What you think is stupid. But we still

want to include you. Guys. So, I think, as you say, you've got to remember, about a third of the country still believes that the 2020 election was incorrectly decided. That's about 85 million adult Americans. And

to be fair to her, she has now said that she thinks Biden is the legitimate president. So really, the question is, how much you punish her for her past lies. And I think the point here is liberals are meant to believe in free speech. That is one of the foundational values of liberalism. And if you're going to say, you're going to de-platform 85 million Americans, that's a lot of people. They say, no, it's not about that, it's that she lied. Well, you know, Bill Clinton lied, under oath. I think last time I checked, he's been on MSNBC. They say, well, she's in a... She's an... She's a little... She's a... She's a... She...

They say, well, she's an election denier. Well, Stacey Abrams was an election denier about her own election, and they've had her on. The larger point is, you know, the book I've written is really about this four centuries of progress and backlash. And what you find is liberals often trigger backlash when they use illiberal means to get to their ends. You know, they're like, we're going to do what it takes. And the truth is, and I mean liberalism in a broad sense, liberal democracy, freedom of speech. speech, constitution. These are precious inheritances that we have.

The way you're going to defend it, the way you're going to move it forward is by not cheating, not cutting corners, not having double standards. Because if we have them, then what Trump says is, well, you know, you cut corners, I cut corners. You have double standards. You've got to be real.

I mean, look at what happened with this. You're nodding. You agree with all that. Yeah, look, I think he makes great points. It was a fantastic piece. I mean, both sides have to be able to invite other persons from the other side, into their fora to speak, whether it's the media or whether it's college campuses, right? Just because you don't want to hear

what a conservative has to say doesn't mean that he or she should be excluded from speaking at Berkeley or wherever the case may be. Which I absolutely was. Literally once disinvited to speak at Berkeley and then re-invited. Those college presidents fell into the same double standard. You know, people said, wait a minute,

you're saying it's okay to say nasty things about Jews. But when people said nasty things about African Americans, you said, oh, no, that's hate speech. You know, you can't have these double standards. If you're going to apply a standard, just apply it consistently. Well, I would... A couple of things here. I don't think I mention the fact that she was hired by NBC

and then their own on-air people, Rachel Maddow, Chuck Todd, objected. And she was then fired after one day. Also, when you say a third of the country, it's a third of the country who thinks the election was stolen, but there's another something like 14% because it's almost half, that either thinks the election was stolen or doesn't care

because they're still going to vote for Trump. So it is almost half the country. For that reason, I'm with you. But I don't... It's a tough lie. I'm not with you on the idea that a lie is a lie. Bill Clinton's lies, Obama's lies, whoever's lies are different than the election doesn't count

when our guy doesn't win. That is a separate thing. I totally get that point of view. I agree. but my point is that you have to recognize that at the end of the day, if you're in favor of free speech, look, you say this is these are liars, they're against the American system. We've had communists run for the presidency of the United States.

When I was in college, I invited Gus Hall, who was the Communist Party candidate. He believed in the violent overthrow of the United States. Fine, in a liberal democracy, you get to say your peace, and we get to debate. By the way, it would be good TV to have Rachel Manno. Ask her some of the questions. I'm not sure.

He was for the violent overthrow of the United States. He was for the overthrow. He wanted communism, which is a form of government. Which is not liberal democracy. No, it is not. You'd have to overthrow the government to get to it, right? No, you can elect a communist government. Italy did it all the time.

Gus Hall was a little more hard line than the Italian communists who were basically communist in Maine. I think the other part of this NBC drama, though, from the reporting was not just was she hired by NBC, but then was enticed by the head of MSNBC to also appear on their shows, which she apparently did so reluctantly, and then all this drama breaks out. And it begs a question, who's running the place, right?

Is it the on-air hosts or is it the corporate leadership? Right. I don't know. Well, the other point you kind of raised, and you do it in your book as well, is that liberalism around the world, not just here, is promoting a backlash. I mean, I'm reluctant to use this.

word woke because some people hear it and they're very triggered by it. Because they remember what it used to mean, which was good at first. Alert to human justice. We're all for that. I would say it migrated to someplace weird. And there's a lot of crazy shit. And that's what you and I think are the same

thing. Like this could lose Biden the election because the woke agenda. What are the things you're talking about? I know in your column today you mentioned, for example, race. Getting to racial equality by means of quota or decree something that is woke and doesn't strike a lot of people as the way to go.

But what are the other things you're talking about that are the woke agenda when people hear that word? Well, people, I think when you, and if you look through history, what I tried to do in the book has point out that when liberals go overboard with this kind of puritanical zeal and say, you know, everything is going to be fixed. All these abstract ideas are going to be fixed right away. It produces a backlash. So, you know, I mean, you know, you can see it actually very, very, very.

vividly in the French Revolution. I don't want to go that far back. But you look at something like even art and education. It's all gotten so politicized. You know, whether or not you, when you have a play on, the first thing people now start asking is, or a movie, how many people of what color are in this movie? How many people of a...

You know, can we just do a hamlet that is supposed to be a great hamlet without having to think about, you know? And again, I think it's important to... To emphasize the point you're making, it comes from a good place. There was too much exclusion in the past. But the way you get past it is not, again, by using illiberal means. This is the great point of Martin Luther King's famous phrase. He wanted his kids to be judged on the basis of not the color of their skin,

but the content of their character. One of the things you hear coming out of the movement now is that we should not use the word. We should not say we're colorblind, that I don't see color, right? Exactly. This is exactly the between liberalism, which I defend, old-school liberalism,

what you just said, Martin Luther King, and wokeism, which, why, I'm always making this point, is something different. That is not what the woke people believe. Which I think is... They say we should see color, first and foremost, always, formerly the position of the clan.

Which is fundamentally illiberal, because liberalism is about seeing human beings as individuals, not as members of groups. When you look at the issues affecting President Biden's re-election right now. We could talk immigration and the border of the economy. I think it is this, too, that you just can't put your hands on, and that is pronouns, right? You get corrected if you use the wrong pronoun.

You know, if you, you can't say there are homeless people anymore. They're unhoused. President Biden had to walk... No, there are people experiencing homelessness. Get it right. Had to walk back... Biden had to walk back his comments from the, from the, from the, from the state of the union speech when he said,

illegals. I know. He had to go on and say, oh, I'm sorry, they're undocumented persons. This is a big issue in your area. The military? I see conservatives are always trying to make this an issue. Let me ask you, you wouldn't know better than anybody. Is this valid? I don't know what the... First of all, what are the specifics that they're telling on when they say

a woke military is threatening our readiness. What are they talking about specifically? What kind of things? And is there any credibility to that? Second question. First, let me say it's not as bad as the right would say, but it's worse than what the left will acknowledge. And what does it look like?

That's everything in America. You're right. You know, this administration set up a DEI office that would dictate DOD policies for education. There are classes on what to say and what not to say. For example, you shouldn't say, hey guys, you should say, hey, everyone. In the military?

In the military? You shouldn't say mom and dad. You should say parents and guardians, right? The colorblind argument. is the issue of, you know, drag queen's story hours on post. Now, look, I don't think this is driven from the leadership at the Pentagon. I think it's coming from the White House and from people within the administration who come in and believe that they're pushing their agenda forward. And look, you ask what's the problem? The problem is it takes time and resources away from

the troops that they should otherwise be training and preparing for war. And it further divides us. It further starts putting people into buckets, whether you're based on your ethnicity, your gender, your sex, the color of your skin. And my view is, I'm sorry, you're in the military. If you're in the Army, you're all green. Right. If you're in the Air Force, you're all blue. We have a common mission, a common purpose.

Let's stop subdividing and identifying people along those lines because it creates friction that undermines morale and readiness. Absolutely good. Here's why I think it's a real problem for Biden, because the Biden strategy seems to be, you know, we'll give in to the left on these issues. and then we'll just improve the economy and we'll run on the economy and the economy is doing great.

And he's right, the economy is doing superbly. But we are in a new battleground of politics. That's in part the whole point of my book. Because you look at Biden, his approval ratings are 38%. Despite the fact the U.S. economy is doing fantastically, 50-year lows in unemployment. Our economy is double the size of the Eurozone now. It was the same size in 2008.

But look at U.S. Europe, those leaders are doing badly. People say, oh, we have all this right-wing populism because we hollowed out our manufacturing workforce. Well, France and Germany didn't. They're facing huge right-wing populism problems. They say it's all because of economic inequality. Well, the Scandinavian countries don't have as much inequality

as we have by any stretch, and Sweden has an actual fascist party as its second-largest party. The new politics is all about these cultural issues. And I fear that Biden, instead of dealing with it, immigration, you know, he needs to do what Bill Clinton did with that sister-sojews speech and say, because he's not, in fact, it would be truthful. Biden is not where this, you know, woke left-wing progressive groups are. But I think he's worried about saying it. And so instead he thinks, you know, we'll just make the economy better.

I think he just doesn't want to fight with that part. I don't think he even understands. Right. See, that's the tack I think. Trans, what are you? Trans Am? What are you talking about it? He just doesn't want to fight with that wing of a crime. He'd do well if he were to say just that. That's my disappointment.

He came in and he could have unified the country. He could have reached out and he didn't. And instead, I thought he catered more to the far left, the progressive left. Instead of being more of the moderate, Joe, that when I worked with him in the Senate is the guy we actually knew. And I haven't seen that in three years. Changing subjects for a second.

I think everybody here knows. I'm all about TikTok. I am all in inventing dance crazes, eating the tidepods. So I was especially excited when I saw a new trend called, well, I don't know to look at it. Of course, I'm into TikTok.

I know it. Called reaction videos. Have you seen these? These are videos of people who, you take someone who would be the least likely to have knowledge of a certain thing, and then you show them it, and it blows their mind. It's all about blowing people's minds.

Here are some real ones. I think these are on YouTube, but TikTok guys are saying, you show a kid's the Eagles singing Hotel California. It blows their mind. They just can't believe that somebody made a good record in 1975. British high schoolers try Wendy's for the first time. Blew their mind. Foreign girls react to John.

These are all real and it blows their mark. So that's all of them. We have no more. Oh, no, I'm sorry. We have... Would you like to see some other ones that we... Okay, this is... Some other reaction videos that we can find. Mormons try Tabasco for the first time. Kanye reacts to the marvelous Mrs. Maisel. Rednecks. Listen to Beyonce's other songs.

Gen Zier See pubic hair for the first time Wow School trip to farm reacts to horse penis Oh, that's Actual Italians react to Sebastian Manuscalco Um Pope Francis reacts to euphoria

Well, that's good one And Of course Nick Cannon opens a condom for the first time All right So, all right. I, oh, good, I got the second deaf laughing. Oh, that's great.

I want to ask you about Donald Trump. You've heard of them. You worked for him. I'm surprised you're asking. Yeah, well, I think a lot of people think a second term would be more of the same. You know, I hear a lot of people say, well, he didn't blow up the world the first time. No, really? And he didn't, you know, in Christ's the economy.

I think it would be very different. And I'm guessing from the guy who knows firsthand when he said he wanted to shoot missiles into Mexico. Yep. Okay. Wanted to seize ballot boxes after the election, right? Shoot protesters was suggested. Newk hurricanes. And I just want to say the first time he was elected, okay, he had to surround himself with some, like, normal people.

What I would consider normal republicans. yourself, General Millie, McMaster, John Kelly, Mattis, John Bolton's a little nutty, but I still think he's, I still think he's a normal, okay? Yep. I don't think that's going to happen the second time. I think it's Mike Flynn. And I think Mike Flynn, General Mike Flynn, that is not a difference of type. That is a difference of kind. That is not a difference of degree. Now we're into this true authoritarian realm. Do you agree with that? Yes. Here's, and here's the. headline, the first year of a second Trump term will look like the last year of the first Trump term. In other words, with all the craziness, with the fresh troops in, remember, he brought in all the fresh people in March of 2020, and those are the folks that carried that last year

that eventually led us through the election and into the, you know, the two and a half months of election denialism. And so, yeah, look, I think it's going to be very rough. And the number one attribute that he will seek from anybody coming into the administration will be loyalty, and not to the Constitution, but to him. That's the thing. That's the thing. And part of his thing is not just the Senate confirmed people and other political appointees, but as you know, one of the factors, one of the pillars of this kind of retribution pitch when he comes in will be the so-called Schedule F, I'm sorry, where he'll try to get rid of all the government employees, the civil service employees, and put in more of his loyalties.

So, look, I think there's a lot to be concerned about. I've said, I believe, he's a threat to democracy, and we should be very mindful of that. So you'll vote for Biden? Well, you know, with every... I'm not there yet. I'm definitely not voting for Trump, but I'm not there yet. This you'll have to explain to me, sir.

I really, I respect you so much. Thank you for your service. I mean that so sincerely. But I just don't understand smart people who don't get binary. Binary. I understand. Look, you also have the opportunity.

How can you not be there after what you just said? There's no way I will vote for Trump. But every day that Trump does something crazy, the door to voting for Biden opens a little bit more. And that's why I am. That's a slow opening door. I think the Biden campaign should do an ad that says, when Donald Trump was president,

he surrounded himself with the people he thought were the wisest, smartest people in America who could help him do his job. all these people, his vice president, his secretary of state, his secretary of defense, his national security advisor, his chief of staff, think he is a dangerous menace to American democracy and to the world. Maybe they know something. Right. It doesn't work than either. Well, of course, no, but I think to your, what I would say to you, Mark, and you behaved admirably in that crisis period, it's worth just stepping back and remembering, this is the first precedent in the, American history to try to prevent the peaceful transfer of power. And not only that, forget about inciting the mob outside on January 6th. What he did inside that building, which was worse, he pressured a majority of House Republicans

to vote to decertify an election that have been certified by 50 states and upheld by 60 court cases. This is the guy we're talking. But nobody hearing this who doesn't already believe this is convinced. Not one person hearing that. Speaking out for two years now, has Bill Barr, John Bolton, and others, and it just doesn't resonate. It doesn't. A cult is a cult. Whether it's a religious cult, whether it's Trump, whether it's people who say, whoever Taylor Swift tells me to vote for, I'll vote for. No, and you can see how it's a...

Cults are cults, they're bad. You can see how it's a kind of family cult by this. Okay, the last Republican convention, there was no party platform. First time in Republican Party history. The platform was one paragraph that said, whatever Donald Trump said, whatever Donald Trump said, is the platform is the platform. Right. And then there was not a single living presidential nominee or past president, even invited to the Republican convention. But there were five members of the Trump family given prime time speaking slots. It's a family cult. It's not a party.

This is why there's a lot of truth in what Liz Cheney says, which is kind of where I'm moving to is, you know, she and I both have a lot of differences with Biden when it comes to policy. But her view is, and I agree, is we can survive four years of bad policy, we can't survive four years of Trump eroding our democracy and the norms and institutions and everything else. Well, if you feel as strongly about this,

it seems to me Bill is right. If the stakes are that high, you've got to vote for the guy who's going to beat Trump. I mean... We've got eight months. He says he's moving there. If you need someone to help you move. Biden is old, but I think we can...

I will guarantee you he was not going to try to prevent the peaceful transfer of power. I agree. That's right. So, all right. So what if Trump loses in November? What does Magination do? Well. I'm so curious about this.

Do they say, well, he's lost four elections in a row. We leave him. Or do they say, no, we just ride with this guy who is going to live to be a thousand. I mean, he's a... Well, that's my second concern. My first concern is he loses and he comes out and says it was rigged, and then you have violence in the street.

Well, he's dead. definitely going to say that. There's no if. That's the first thing we need to worry about. But then you're right. What happens to Maga Nation, MAGA World After? Does he fight again in 2026 for the midterms? Or is there a MAGA without Trump, with a Trump successor?

I don't think so. They've tried to do that before. But he's also tapping into a movement, Bill, that I think transcends him in some ways. It gets to what you, I think, argue about in your book. And that is this backlash against what people feel is an affront to their thinking or the way things used to be. And we need a leader that will come in and address it.

And it's not going to be this generation of leaders. We need a new generation of leaders at the top and everywhere in between. And we don't have that right now. You're absolutely right. He has a remarkable way of tapping into this backlash in a way that almost nobody does. So even, you know, the Bible thing is, of course, I mean, it's absurd. It's like Trump-est televangelist. I want to get my copy annotated with the Ten Commandments where he explained. how he violated each one of them. But what he's picking up on, he's picking up on the fact that there is a great fear

about the decline of religiosity in America. You know, there's a great book by this guy, Ronald Englehart, who, a great social scientist, who points out, for a long time in the Western world, you did not have much of a decline of religion. And from 2007, you're seeing a very rapid decline, and the country leading it is the United States. States. You're the sharpest

drop in religiosity in the U.S. You're welcome. Exactly. And I think that's I think it's more than that, though. I think it's getting a lot of people very anxious. It's not just religious. It's... Exactly. Values and norms.

And that's why, when you look at Biden's disapproval rating, it's 54% disapproval. That's the lowest of anybody, I think, since they started counting numbers, they're saying nobody ever won with that. But compared to this New York Times had this. Very smart article. Disapproval ratings of other democracies? This is to your point about liberalism.

Liberalism is not popular. Germany. This is disapproval rating of the leaders. 73%. 19 points worse than Biden. France, 71. South Korea 70. Japan 70. The UK 66. Justin Trudeau in Canada is at 59%. Disapproval. Now, we don't know what the disapproval ratings of Putin or G are because you'd fall out a window. One percent.

Okay. But it almost doesn't matter because the point is liberalism itself is not popular around the world. Look, we've gone through 30 years of so much change. Think about the economy,

the massive globalization of the economy. You think about the information revolution. We created a whole new economy in bits and bites. Right. You think about the cultural changes that have taken place. You know what I mean? Think about the role of women,

the transformation, all of that, it's a lot for people to digest. And, you know, immigration becomes the focal point because you can't, global capital flows are an abstraction, even, you know, globalize it. But this is something you can see. And there is real data to it. You know, in 1975, roughly speaking, 5% of Americans were foreign-born. Now it's about 15%.

In Sweden, it's about 20%. So people are looking at this and saying, this is a lot of change to digest. And they have no perspective. I've got to say, Biden was interrupted at his big fundraiser of the night, six times by kids shouting about Gaza, genocide Joe. In the paper today, the Taliban announced, announced like it's a press release, they're going to stone women again. Yeah, I saw that.

In Gambia, they're going back to genital, female genital mutilation. Have a little perspective, kids. I know you don't know anything. Maybe learn something before you start opining. Anyway, time for new rules. Okay. Now that the number of doomsday preppers, fearing another Biden term, has doubled to 20 million since 2017, they must check out my new store catering exclusively to their needs.

Prep boys. That's right, the prep boys. Prep boys has everything. You need food? We got tactical seeds. Tactical seeds. You need clothes? We got tactical socks.

Tactical socks. You need a toilet? We got tactical buckets. Tactical buckets. Oh, sure, you can find this stuff at Target, but does it have tactical in the name? No fucking way. New rule, since every type of adversity has its own support group now, I want to raise awareness about a group of people who, for too long, have flown under the radar. Really tall people who aren't in the NBA.

Did you know that one in six Americans over seven feet, tall is in the NBA. But what about the other five? For them, it's a lifetime of, wow, you must be a professional basketball player. But they're not a professional basketball player. They're just tall. They're the really tall people who aren't in the NBA and may deserve to be seen. New rule, Travis Kelsey has to go into acting. Just look at this photo of Travis with, I don't know, some girl. With only the back of his seat. head, he's able to convey a range of emotions, weariness, resentment, regret. It's remarkable. Yes, Travis, when you're done with football, Hollywood will be calling. If she lets you have a phone.

You know, someone has to explain to the 75-year-old Pennsylvania man charged with trying to arrange a threesome with two underage girls that it's okay if you don't check everything on your bucket list. Some dreams are meant to just stay that way. Dreams. I wanted to play the lead in Brian DePama's body double, but I didn't. Unless I did. I don't know. It was the 80s.

There was a lot of drugs. New Role, someone has to break it to Eric Trump that, contrary to what he's claiming, his father didn't actually build the skyline of New York. You see, Eric, Daddy likes to brag, but here are all the buildings in New York, and here are the ones that Daddy had something to do with. He also doesn't regularly beat professionals at golf, and he also wasn't going to be a professional

baseball player. But Eric, I will say this about your dad. He can jerk off two guys at once. I'm going to show it every week in June with the election. And finally, new rule, now that both Biden and Trump are asking voters

the age old question, are you better off than you were four years ago? Someone must tell them that everyone's answer is You're fucking kidding, right? Four years ago? Yeah, I remember March 2020. I was bordering for toilet paper and eating all the food out of my earthquake kit.

Yes, what a great time that was when COVID hit and America wet itself, emptied its pockets, and curled up in a ball. Let me say, I get no pleasure having to characterize my country as panicky, inefficient, and stuck on stupid, but that's what we are. And nothing proved it more than the flight from hell four years ago. If you don't recall, the saga of the Costa Luminosa.

Here's what happened. After COVID had already begun spreading worldwide, a lot of passengers on a cruise ship out of Fort Lauderdale started getting sick. So nothing out of the ordinary so far. But by the time the ship full of portly retirees wearing Tommy Behind, shirts got halfway across the Atlantic. The coughing got so loud it was drowning out the Jimmy Buffett cover band. So it was decided to dock in Marseilles, where the passengers were first crowded onto locked buses for five hours and then put on a nine-hour flight to Atlanta,

where so many of the feverish passengers were collapsing, the flight crew had to lay them out in the aisles, which really put a crimp in the beverage service. Then, just to in case, by some miracle, someone on the plane still didn't have it, when the COVID Express landed, the pilot announced that despite multiple distress calls to

Atlanta, the headquarters of the CDC, mind you, well, apparently nobody knew we were coming. So everybody sat locked on the plane, sitting on the runway for another three hours. Man, where's Boeing when you need a door to fall off? Well, finally

the CDC arrived, and of course, immediately quarantine everyone and gave them prompt medical attention. I'm kidding. What they did was make them fill out a questionnaire, give no one a COVID test, drop them off at baggage claim, let them go to the food court in the busiest airport in the world, and then sent them on to their connecting flights to 17 states in Canada,

which to me is just inconceivable. They made their connection at Atlanta? But honestly, if some foreign enemy had intended to ensure COVID spread through the United States, they couldn't have done a better job. The fire festival guys could have handled this better. So, I get it,

that we didn't know exactly what was happening at the beginning of COVID, and some mistakes were inevitable. But four years on, I'm tired of hearing, well, we didn't know. No, we didn't. But some people guessed better than others. And the people who got it wrong

don't seem to want to acknowledge that now. Some people said, closing schools for so long was pointless and would cause much worse collateral damage to kids and they were right. Thank you. Don't be afraid. Four years ago, the Daily Beast ran a story with the headline

Bill Maher pushes Steve Bannon Wuhan Lab conspiracy theory, which was typical of the mainstream media at the time. Of course, it wasn't a conspiracy theory and it wasn't owned by Steve Bannon. And now everyone, including the Biden administration admits there's at least a 50-50 chance that the

virus could have begun in the lab in Wuhan that was doing gain of function research on that virus. Duh. But I don't see a lot of retractions being printed. Yeah, when COVID hit, we did a lot of stupid things. Because America never reacts. It only overreacts.

Ubers look like those orthodox Jews who wrap themselves in Suranrop in case they're playing. plane flies over a grave. We washed the mail. We played baseball in front of cardboard cutouts and

ate in parking lots? Or with inflatable dolls? They closed the ocean. We bang pots and pans to show our love for nurses and our hatred for people trying to get a baby to sleep. For two years, we had to get nostril fucked every time we left

the house. Serious people talked about having sex through glory holes, and if you don't know what a glory hole is, I wouldn't look into it. We were told to wash our hands every five minutes and don't ever touch your face, and if you absolutely must go to the beach

for the sake of all that's wholly, wear a mask. Outside? Because the last thing you would want to do when a disease is afoot is get fresh air and sunshine and vitamin D. No, much better to stay locked up, stressed out, and day drinking. And if you do get COVID, remember, natural immunity is always the worst kind.

So even if you've had the disease, you need a shot. Yes, some very bad ideas were embraced as the conventional wisdom, ideas that haven't aged well. And a lot of dissenting opinions that were suppressed and ridiculed at the time have proven to be correct. Maybe that's why the powers that B never wanted a COVID commission. Why not? We love commissions. The Warren Commission. The Commission, the AIDS Commission, the 9-11 Commission. The NFL even had a, is ramming your head into another guy's head, bad for heads. Commission. Really?

So where's the COVID Commission? Because it seems to me we haven't learned a thing. Maybe the number one lesson from the pandemic was the need for proper air ventilation. Second was never go on a Zoom with Jeffrey Tubin. But if there's been a big thing. Big national movement to retrofit buildings. I missed it. Gain of function research is still going on in labs.

We're still torturing animals by raising our food and conditions ideal for viruses to make the leap to humans. Bird flu was just found in a goat, which means we're just one lonely farmer from the next pandemic. We handed out $4 trillion of free money, $280 billion of which was just flat out stolen in what the AP called the greatest griff in U.S. history, and which started an inflationary spiral that we now blame on Biden. So we're going to bring back Trump? The guy who ignored COVID, like it was the dinner check? It's going to disappear.

Talk about not learning anything. And there are no miracles. Happy Easter, everybody. All right. Thank you, everybody. That's our show. We're off next week and back on April 12th. I'll be in Arizona Field in Phoenix, May 4th, Palace, and Albany, May.

and Club Random's always on every week dropping on Sunday on YouTube or listen whenever you get your podcast. I want to thank Fareed Zakaria, Dr. Mark Esper, and Jonathan Haidt. Now go watch overtime on YouTube. Thank you, folks. Catch all new episodes of real time

with Bill Maher every Friday night at 10 or watch them anytime on HBO on demand. For more information, log on to HBO.com. Lazzang sur-gillet, Puitance for 15 minutes. We're like It's the hour

Dojo! Prere to enjoy? Vive the pleasure with Leo Jo. The casino in line that propose the more recent machine-as-a-sue

to play in-d-d-d-d- -dose-d-d-a- on-Begbass Bonanza without exentanyed. Hey, I've gained. Woo-hoo! Sonture the pleasure Play-O-Jo!

18-N-N-Pos 1,000, 10-2-Rourgene-Tourgues per capita per deposit-Begbis-B-B-B-B-B-Bon-A. DePosmineineine money of a lot.