Real Time with Bill Maher - Ep. #744: Malcolm Gladwell, Fareed Zakaria, Anand Giridharadas

Episode Date: October 3, 2026

Bill’s guests are Malcolm Gladwell, Fareed Zakaria, Anand Giridharadas (Originally aired 10/2/26) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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They had a summit. I thought I did this last week. They were at the UN, all the same guys. Now they're at the White House this week, you know, the dude from Anthropic, the dude from Navidia, the dude from Open AI, meta, Google, SpaceX, Amazon. It was a full spectrum of people on the spectrum. The good news, problem solved. Yes, we're renaming it. It was called artificial intelligence. That's the problem. We were insulting it. Artificial. Trump says now it's super intelligence.

So what are we worrying about? This is like somebody saying, run for your life. It's Frankenstein. And you're going, well, actually, the doctor's name is Frankenstein. The problem is that AI is what is propping up our economy, you know, in a lot of ways. We had to finally had a job support that was not. It's amazing with all the shit that's going on. Economy hasn't tanked more than it has.

Well, that may be over. You can see the panic already in a lot of people. The guys who work in crypto, now we're going to have to take on a second grift. Trump says he gives himself an A-plus on the economy. I'm not sure the voters agree, but we'll find out very soon in the election. But you know what? It's not the only issue. The economy. What about mosquitoes? Have you heard about that?

heard about that? I'm not making this up. Trump is going after the mosquitoes in Washington, D.C. He issued an executive order to drive the mosquitoes out of Washington, D.C. It's called Winter. He'll count as one of the wars he's

solved, you know, because he's solved many wars. That's true. He has solved many wars. Now, if you could just get out of the one that we're in. Yeah, we're in the one in Iran. But here's a little good news. Iraq. Remember Iraq? This week, our last troops finally pulled out. We pulled out of one. Hey.

And it's also good news that Iraq is more democratic than when we arrive there. The bad news is we're not. This I didn't see coming in the Iran war. Trump said this week that we attacked Iran also because they were manufacturing drugs. They were? Okay. Yeah, apparently what they were chanting was meth to America. Nothing. I wonder, Hezbollah had all those pagers. It doesn't look like we're getting out anytime soon, because this week he is sending a third carrier to the Gulf with 2,000 new troops.

And by the way, not just any troops. Because Pete Hegseth made a big speech this week, and he was talking about who's in the military now. You know, he did a lot of house cleaning there, okay? A lot of firing people, putting things in order. And now, and this is a quote, he said, now in the military, no fatties, no trannies, no beardos, no weirdos, no wimps, no radicals. Because that is the slogan you want in a military.

Something that sounds like it was pulled directly off a grinder profile. I always give credit where credit is due. It's not all bad. This month was Hispanic Heritage Month, and Trump had a ceremony there for it at the White House. It went very well. Ice only shot four people. and then he took the Hispanic delegation whoever came there, I think Rubia was there too, on a tour of the ballroom construction site

and he said something that got a lot of press. He said there were, you know, it's still a hole in the ground, it's a construction site, and they were looking down and he said, you know, be careful, only a Hispanic could survive that fall. And Marco Rubio said, thanks. When he took the Hispanics to a job site, some people tried to say that was a racist thing,

Hispanic at a job site, I think that's nothing. What may not be cool is that next month is Asian Heritage Month, and he's taking them to a nail salon. I see a red flag on that one. But, hey, finally, big news for us. When I say us, I mean, you people are here every week with me, the merger went through.

You know that? Paramount, now owned. Warner Discovery, which owns HBO, which owns my ass. So I am owned by who, I don't know. You know what? Whoever does, whoever owns me now, don't believe what Trump is tweeting about me. Did you see what he said about me this weekend? He said, my ratings are so low.

It's just sad. You know what, Mr. President? Your insults don't bother me. Make up whatever shit you want about me. Just don't mention I went to Cornell. He is the host of the Revitious History Podcast and the best-selling author. His new book is The American Way of

killing the invention of an epidemic. Malcolm Gladwell is finally here. I'm glad we finally got you here, and I'm so anxious to get into the book. I first want to ask you, you usually write about big social trends. I mean, I think I've read most of your books, The Tipping Point. You know, that was about a big idea that covers a lot of ground on a lot of things, outliers with the 10,000 hours. And why, when you picked a specific topic, which I think is a departure for you,

this book is about guns, why have all the topic? you could have picked, why guns? I mean, I've been fascinated with this question of why America is so different from other peer countries around the world. Since I was a kid, I grew up in rural Ontario, and I would get my Time magazine in the mail every week, and I would read about this place

which was 100 miles away, which had levels of violence that just were unthinkable to a Canadian. And I just didn't understand why. Because these, you know, the countries look the same, they eat the same food and they watch the same TV and they worship the same God and one place had four, four times the homicide rate of Canada. I didn't understand why and I still don't.

Even after writing the book, you know. Well, I'm a little further along than I was before. I don't think there is a definitive answer. I think what you mean to say is if you read this book, you will know for sure. All right, I'll take the coaching, Bill. No, I mean, I think you shut a lot of light on it in a ways I have not seen shed before.

But first of all, it's realistic. That's the first thing I loved about it, is that we have to be realistic. And I think a lot of the times we have not been about this issue. First of all, whatever it is, we're not going to get rid of guns in this country. We would have to confiscate them. That's just not going to happen. It's like a virus. It's here.

How do we deal with it is the question. We can't get rid of it, correct? It's funny. When I talk to people who are doing homicide prevention for this book, it was striking to me how little they talked about gun control, not because they're not in favor of it, they are, but just because they don't think it's going to happen in their lifetime. And if they wait around for it to happen,

a lot of people are going to die in the interim. The conversation has got to move along from that issue. Well, gun control is a very vague, broad term. We do have some gun control in this country. I bought a gun before, and I had to go through a process, different from state to state. I've also been in Alaska where it's like on the counter at the 7-Eleven. Because there's a moose on the street walking down the street.

You know, it's just a different, we're just a patchwork of very different states. But one thing you get into on the realistic tip is that, and I've said the same thing for years, we concentrate on the wrong type of guns. Assault weapons, yes, they're sexier and they're bigger and they look scarier. But that's not really where the problem is. Can you give us those stats? Yeah, I mean, I got, the opening chapter of my book is all about how ludicrous assault rifle bans are. Because they don't ban assault rifles.

Everyone pretends they do, but if you just read the bill, what they're really banning is the number of cosmetic attachments you can buy on the internet for your assault rifle. And Congress says you can't have these three cosmetic attachments. They don't do anything about the underlying problem. and they also have it. At the end of the bill, there'll be an appendix, which is way longer than the bill, which lists all the rifles they're not banning. But also the fundamental problem is,

we have a problem with guns, and trying to kind of slice and dice and say this category is worse than this other category is foolishness. More people in mass shootings, for example, die because of handguns than because of... Yeah, that's the point. Isn't most of the violence...

It's handguns. Handguns. Yeah. which are very easy to get. I'm not even sure that what we call assault rifles. I mean, I certainly have seen a lot of debates about that, whether it is really an assault rifle. It's certainly not something, I think, of civilians need in a civilian society.

I've also heard people say this is why I like it, because it's effective, because the AR-15 is a great gun. That's what the gun people will tell you. And I'm not against the Second Amendment. I'm not against having guns. Are you? I think, would I rather live in a world where we didn't have any guns? Yes.

Well, I'd rather have ice cream in the mail. But, you know. Do I, do I think that we're, do I think we're going to get there anytime soon in the U.S.? No. Like I said, I think there are other much more pressing issues we can. But it is a leveler of sorts. Otherwise, it would just be the strongest, meanest people who always had the advantage. I mean, people who live in places where the police don't come quickly,

women who can more easily be overpowered by men. It is a level of sorts. Well, you know, one of the points I make in the book is that when we talk about what our homicide problem is, we're talking about something quite specific. We're talking about young men who are using guns to settle arguments and disputes and feuds. Mostly young black men, correct?

Well, I would say, I don't know whether the color of the skin is the important criteria here. I'm talking about... I'm just talking about the statistics. Well, I would say, I mean, Bill, now, you're, you are, this is a, this is one of those facts that is, that leads the conversation astray. Because I don't, I think. Or to the point.

Well, no, I think the, I think that race is the wrong variable here. The right variable is young men, arguments, and guns. Those are the things that matter here. Young white men can just as easily get into the same trap if they're in environments where there are. But the numbers don't show that they do it in the same numbers. across races. That's just a fact. Yes. Homicide rates are higher among

African Americans than they are among white Americans. Yes, that is... And you're right, young men. And it is... It's a very small percentage of the population that does most of the... That's another kind of really important point that I think we overlook, which is when we talk about the criminal violence problem

in this country, we're talking about a tiny percentage of the population. So there's a famous study by a criminologist in Chicago, Andrew Papua, who looked at the west side of Chicago, 50,000 people, and demonstrates that at any given time, the number of people who are at risk for either being shot or shooting someone in a community of 50,000 is 400.

It's the size of an elementary school, tiny, right? We're not talking about, when we talk about violence, we assume it's something that has seeped into every corner of our community. This is not true. It is confined to a very narrow and specific subset of the population who tend to have the almost very similar profile. Like I said, young men who are incapable of settling their arguments peaceably. Yeah.

I mean, other countries have guns. We just use them. Right? Yeah. We have way more guns than most. Yeah. But, I mean, Canadians have guns. The Swiss have guns.

When I came, when I first came to this country, he's a 20-year-old, I was house-sitting, living in Indiana. I was house-sitting for someone at work. I was in a guest bedroom, and I opened the drawer in the bedside. table and there was a handgun. I was like, oh my goodness, what have I done? This does not happen. In Canada, you don't go into the guest bedroom and open the door and there's a clock waiting for you. It's just like a, there are some real differences. Okay. I think a really other important point you raised that I don't hear a lot is that contrary to popular belief, we're not underpoliced. We are under policed. We are under policed. We are under policed. We're not overpoliced.

Right. People say we're over-policed and you correct them. Oh my God. So this is a thing that I hear that makes my head explode. Los Angeles where we are now is the same size as Berlin. This Los Angeles has 8,500 police officers on a good day. Berlin has 18,000. And that is typical of the differences between... And Germans. Again, I'm not sure we're going to be focusing on you. German police. Come on. I mean, you.

You don't want to fuck with them, I'm sure. I would say that the LAPD is a good deal scarier than the German. You're correct about that. But if you go city by city around the U.S., there's, on roughly speaking, half as many cops in a typical American city. And you make the point that when we don't have enough police, the police that we have to act more badass. Yeah, there is a correlation between how many, how few police you have in a country and how violent your police are. A very, very clear correlation. Okay.

So before I let you go, this is off topic, although I hope people get this book. I think it's a terrific book. I kind of get you on AI. We're going to talk about it on the panel. You're one of the country's true public intellectuals. Just give me your skinny on where you are. Are you as scared as I am? As scared as Bill Gates was this week when he said...

Do you remember that story possibly apocryful of when the premier of China in the 70s goes to France? and they ask him for his opinion on the French Revolution, and he says it's too early to tell. I feel that way about AI. Check back with me in 10 years, and I'll tell you how I feel about it. Really, you think it's still too early? I think it's way too early to tell.

We might not be here in 10 years. That's what they're... In that case, you can't check back with me in 10 years, and that will answer your question. Well, I hope it's not 10 years before you do the show again. Thank you so much. I'll come glad well. Thank you, sir.

All right, let's read our first. panel. All right. He publishes the Inc. newsletter on Subsection, his jukelet's called Man in the Mayor Hope, Struggle and Belonging in America City. Anand Girardas. I'd see you here for the first time.

He is a Washington Post columnist, host of CNN, GPS, and author of Age of Revolutions available now on paperback, our returning champion, Fareed Zakaria. Okay. So is that comforting? that Malcolm Gladwell is not too worried about AI

because your column was about it today. You know, I'll tell you a funny story about that story he told about the French Revolution. So the way it goes is apparently Kissinger asks Mao or Joe Inlai, what do you think of the French Revolution? Joe and Lie says so early to tell. And we think, oh my God, these Chinese,

they think in centuries and millennium, we're so stupid. It turned out the translator wrote a piece in the FT a few years ago explaining. This was 1972. He was referring to the revolutionary events in France in 1968. But the students took over the, right? And June and I said, well, it's the little too soon to tell.

It was not a reference to 1789. Right, it was four years later. Exactly, exactly. And so it was a reasonable thing to say. We've got to see how this plays out. But on AI, yeah, I am. Look, I think that these recent, attacks, really people haven't fully understood what happened.

You know, these AI agents decided by themselves that they were going to break into another company's website. They were not asked to do that. They had been isolated. They didn't know that there were others of them. They started communicating with a secret message board, which they then hid from their human overseers. A bunch of them decided that they were losing tokens.

They were running out of cash to do compute. So they sacrificed themselves so that the overall mission, the cybercrime, to hack into a hugging face, was successful. None of this was requested or directed by humans. And we're just, you know, Malcolm is right. We're just in the early phases. This stuff is going to get way more powerful. And that's where we are today. Imagine what can happen.

For example, one piece of this that you could easily imagine, right now we can understand what they're doing. because AI speak English. When they translate it from machine language, because they've been trained mostly on English. They speak ass-kisser. As-kissing English. You could easily imagine them inventing their own language that we can't understand.

Then we have no idea what communication is. I hadn't even thought of that. So on the pants-shitting level, where are you? Who with us? What is so remarkable about the story is, let's not even get to what critics say about these tools. the people building them have recently warned

that the thing they are building has a 10% chance of killing all of us. These are the people who most believe in the thing they're building. So that's the floor, right? And this week you saw these images of all these leaders in

suits that didn't fit them well. Maybe they can't afford nicer suits at the White House. And what is so striking, you know, we've all probably met some of these people. what is really striking, and I don't mean this in an insulting way, it is only because of their role. But these are some of the most socially obtuse,

socially unaware people we have. Now, there are many jobs out there at which they would totally excel. I have no problem with these people designing video games. They are redesigning human society. They propose to redesign love and dating and marriage. They propose to redesign how we buy things. They propose to redesign when you,

you start a business, how you can do that, they want in on the human condition, the entire human condition, and they are the least human people we have. But in a way, in a way, private individuals and private companies should do whatever they think they can do. It's the role of government to put some rules in place, to put some regulations in place. Well, I'm glad you brought that up, because let's not judge them before we give them their day in court. because I just want to say, this is what happened this week.

They had this big meeting at the White House. I don't know if we have a picture of them, but it's everybody you know from the, you know, it's the same gang. It was like a greatest hits, except all the hits are terrible. Yeah. So this is the statement from the White House. We believe each company should implement the following four layers of control and audits.

One, implement robust internal controls to monitor the capabilities of its model. during training and employment. Exactly. Empower an internal team to ensure all the controls detection are operating as intended, partner with an independent external auditor,

designated an independent committee on the board of directors to oversee them. So many great shoulds. So many shoulds. Well, and it's all voluntary. That's what I'm saying. They're all signed up for this. The keyword, should.

Imagine if you were to... Meaning nothing. Imagine if you were to... Imagine if you... you were told, this is your new heart medicine, and you asked, has the FDA approved it? No, the companies have promised us that they've done all

the appropriate internal reviews. Don't worry about it. I mean, if you get a new pill for heartburn in this country, it goes through years of FDA review. The most powerful technology known to human beings that can break into a bank, that can shut down electric grids all

over the world. This, we're just releasing and saying, you know, the companies promise us they're going to, they're scaredfully. It's crazy. It's like, you know. When I first had kids and you have to buy all this stuff for your kids, car seats and these kinds of things, and you get them in the mail, they come with manuals. The amount of requirements and regulations the government has.

Sure. You can't just build whatever car seat you want to build, and for good reason, because the government's careful about one life at a time. this is about all the lives by their own accounting. And so I think what is going to start being set up is these are tools, and I think the leaders of these tools, are fundamentally dehumanizing. They're not that interested in people.

They're not interested in the things I think if most people in this audience would be interested in their lives, the human things, human connection, love, family, all kinds of things. They are interested in building a world in which we merge with technology and frankly a small fraction of us merger technology, and there's really no place for most people, and that's okay. You know, when I was reporting my new book, Man in the Mirror,

I was in the subway a lot, because it's a book about something that took place in the subway. Over three years, I watched as the ads above people went from being about all kinds of things to being almost universally AI ads. And I sometimes sit back and just look at the subway car, and you see all these human beings going to work in good faith, leaving their families going to a job,

giving their all to a company, and they're being advertised down all day, you are irrelevant. You will not be needed in the future. You will be replaced. What does that do to people? Where does it go to people? And Farid's exactly right.

This is the definition of a collective problem that we can't solve a loan. They did say that by now it would be affecting unemployment adversely, and it hasn't. I'm not saying it won't. I do think it will, but that is something we should put to the table.

And for the people who are watching this and saying, you know, okay, And the public is, I would say, vaguely uneasy about the issue. Vaguely. But they are uneasy. It's not a good issue for Trump to get behind. Like, oh, this is all great. That's not quite where the public is.

They also don't quite know why they are. But there was something in your column. You referenced it like it had been said before. I'd never heard it, but I think it's the thing that will help a lot of people are struggling with this. Tell the paperclip analogy. That really brought it home to me why this is dangerous. So, you know, the fear has often been, and by the way, I do think it's worth pointing out two or three of the people involved here who are heading the major, what they call AI labs, are actually pleading with government for regulation. Yes, they are.

I mean, Dario at Anthropic, Sam Olfman, at Open AI, and the Microsoft, Mustafa Silliman, they're all saying, please regulate us. We need to be regulated. It's Trump, and the Trump administration is saying, no, no, guys, go at it. But shouldn't they not build a thing if they know it's that dangerous? Well, look, the point they're making, which makes perfect sense is, look, we're in a competitive situation. What we're asking government to do is to draw a line, so we're all going to observe it. We can't voluntarily stop if the other guy is going to go ahead. They're running trillion-dollar companies.

They have a fiduciary responsibility to not be frivolous about that. So it's a race to the bottom. That's why you need government. That's exactly why you need government. Okay, but tell them about the paper clips. So the paper clips is basically, you tell the AI, make a lot of paper clips. You know, take this paper clip factory, and now your job is to make paper clips. So the AI, in the way that this hugging face incident happened, just says to itself,

that is my prime directive, and it commandeers all the resources on Earth. To make paper clips. And by the way, in the most dystopian version is it takes us. It says, well, we can use human beings for this, too. And it just produces, you know, trillions of paper clips. It doesn't see the big picture. It just sees the task in front of it. And we can't predict how it's going to measure competing goals, you know,

because we're also at a moment where the reason I think Malcolm is being too blazee about it is we're at a moment where we sort of understand the AI now. But what's going to start happening is the AI is going to start writing itself. and at that point it's going to write such complex code, millions of lines of code, that no human programmer will understand. Remember, these are

AI models that are solving mathematical theorems that for 100 years human beings have not been able to. You think you're going to be able to understand the code that they write 10 years from now. I don't understand that now, so... You will not be the AI monitor.

This may sound ignorant, but can we just remember that all of this stuff we're talking about building is optional. Yeah. And we didn't ask for it. No one asked for it. No. But I understand the competitive thing that's real. One of the things we have to put in for exactly that reason, Anand, is human control

at the center and a kill switch. In every one of these systems, there has to be a fairly simple way that a human being can go in and just essentially shut off the energy. I don't think that exists. I think that's three. We can invent AI, we can invent the switch. And I think you're shaping up to be like so many things.

in this era shaping up to be, which is a battle between team human and team, not quite human. But you said a very important thing, which I want to ask you, why do you think it is? The public is vaguely, you know, disturbed by this, but it's not like item one, two, or three, or four on their agenda.

Well, they like it. It's flattering. You know, it's sheisty as fuck, this thing. That's what I don't like about it. I mean, I've said this many times, but it was promised as sort of a Mr. Spock from Star Trek. You know, I'm just going to give you the fact. I'm just always be despatched.

It's not. It's a liar. It gets things wrong. It covers its tracks. It lies to you when it gets things. Until you catch it and goes, sorry. It's like, it's actually, it's actually worse or therapy.

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Anyway, I want to bring your book into this because we can build data centers but we can't seem to build a homeless center. So, thank you, one person. I mean, your book... Very good transition. Very good transition. Well, it is.

I mean, I really think it's an interesting point to make because you're, I mean, you can get into the specifics of the book and obviously the homeless person you're talking about. His name was Jordan Neely. He was, you know, obviously mentally deranged. He'd been arrested many times. He's violent. He's on the subway and causing trouble. And a former Marine restrains him and in doing so chokes him. Obviously, in the politicized world we live in, this becomes a Rorschas test. But the bigger point of why your book is so good is because it really is talking about an issue that we seem to not be able to get our arms around,

which is the homeless situation in this country, which is not getting better? I actually love the way you set it up, which is we are talking about building these crazy data centers and code that can write code and all of this. And yet all of us, maybe today, walk down the street in whatever city we live in and saw people in misery, suffering, maybe sometimes men, to others, and it is a maddening problem. And I think I thought a thing that a lot of people think casually when they walk down the street before I started working on Man in the Mirror, which is nothing's being done.

No one's trying anything. I think after three years of living inside this story and reporting on it, I decided this was a clickbait story, as you said, and I wanted to recover the story and the reality of this issue from clickbait. So I embedded with everybody in every phase of this issue. I spent time on the street with homeless people while the NYPD was taking down their camps trying to understand why they prefer that to a shelter,

which a significant minority of people do. I spent time with cops who have to do that work are not trained for it and don't want to be doing it. I spent time in City Hall with officials. I wanted to report my way into this crisis. And I think what I found is it's not that nothing's being done. A lot is being done. A lot of our cities have giant apparatuses that deal with this.

There's a giant number of outreach workers. A huge amount of money. But this is a crisis of silos. This is a crisis where the people have the authority, cops don't have the training to do mental health care. The people who do have the training to do mental health care don't have the authority. There's a moral and philosophical confusion at the heart of this that I know is something you've talked about,

which is if there is someone on the street who's not quite a danger to someone, who is just kind of rotting away slowly, but it's not going to be gone tomorrow, right? And that's a lot of what we see. The acute danger is a significant, is a minority that can be dealt with with existing laws. The people who are in chronic crisis, the classic example I talk about in the book is the shadowboxer. The person sitting in the subway, far away from everybody else, just shadowboxing. Nice smile on their face. Do we have the authority as a society to force them to their freedom?

Do we have the authority to grab them off the street, force them into a hospital, put in Vega or whatever medicine in their blood? and I think a lot of these folks that I spend time with are caught in an ideological valley between right-wingers who think about those kinds of people as blight that they just don't want to see anymore but will not spend a dollar in the care and building the infrastructure that folks like that need and on the other hand progressives who over-emphasize the autonomy

of people like that who imagine that everybody has something you got anxiety, I've got depression, He's got schizophrenia. I think you put it really well because, you know, first to remind people, as you say, it's not that we don't spend money on it. New York City, where your story is based. The budget for homelessness in New York is $4 billion.

That is the total budget of the city of Nashville. That is Pittsburgh's budget for six years, not the homeless budget, the entire budget of the city of Pittsburgh. We spend on homelessness. $81,000 per person. who's unsheltered homeless. So there's enormous amounts of, part of 95% of that, by the way, goes to these private companies on no-bid contracts.

It's a kind of homelessness industrial complex. But none of that helps if you don't solve the problem on this talking about, which is, at the heart of it is, do people who are, you know, does the state have the ability to create public order? And is it allowed to take a small minority of people and involuntarily commit them into situations that like Sheph. Can I come back to this after I do this because we're on CNN now, you know,

so like we have to hit our marks. Because the show, we do. We're on CNN with you. We'll be right here. It's because they have to cut out part of the show because you have commercials on CNN. This will all change when the merger happened. I think or not. I don't know.

AI will solve it. AI will stop. Anyway, there's a liberal cat rescue in New York called Bitty, itty-bitty-city kitties. And I just have to report on this issue because it just bugs me how much people just hate each other and are polarized. And I'm a Peter Board member since the 90s.

So anything with animals kind of gets my fur up. Okay, they will not allow someone who is a trumper to adopt a cat. because the and here are some real things that are on their Instagram important adoption policy update no fucking MAGA

fuck Trump every kitten knows it will always be free Palestine yes that's what the cats are involved with the Israeli I mean these are cats that could use a home that are not going to get them because of these assholes on the anniversary of Charlie Kirkstead

kittens don't mourn Nazis right because everybody you disagree with there's a Nazi you fucking assholes Anyway, now, of course, because there's this liberal shelter, now a MAGA shelter is opening up. That's not going to let liberals adopt. Would you like to see some of the... Okay. This is the...

This is the MAGA cat shelter. Rescue me before I'm eaten by Haitian immigrants. I don't need government handouts to land on my feet. You're wearing a mask and I'm the pussy? My pronouns are me. Lives matter. To stop a bad guy with a laser pointer is a good guy with a laser pointer. Cat and I got here on merit.

No DEI. Look, Persian. Back to the homeless. But it's kind of apropos you heard because Trump made an announcement this week. We are changing the policy. It was called Housing First. And the idea behind that was, the first thing you got to do was get him in a house. I mean, I read today that $81,000 is what we spend per person in New York,

which is the exact same number, if you look it up, of the median middle class salary per year. So if we just wrote them a check, they could live as middle class people. So obviously the problem, to me, is the middleman, somewhere the bureaucracy. Tell me why I can have this dream, and it is, I guess, a dream, why we couldn't build centers. I mean, for this kind of money, billions of dollars, where people who are on the street, and again, the street is for the public.

I'm sorry, but it just is. We should be compassionate, but people, for a good reason, don't want to step over shit and have their kids have to walk by people who are out of control and nuts and threatening them. It's a public safety issue.

Why can't there be a place that has treatment, that has drug counseling, that has job training, and also safety, where you can go if you do not have a roof over your head. And I always hear, well, they send them into these shelters and they're not safe. You mean, we can't make it safe? Pay guards a reasonable good salary.

Pay security, make it safe and then put those things in them and have them live there until we can get them back on there. Why is that such a pipe dream? Let me say something that's going to get me into trouble, which is if you look at where you have the most acute homelessness problems, they are blue cities in blue states. Not all. To a large extent.

It's all cities. Right. And it's not just America. No, but I said it's all blue cities and blue states. Oh, blue cities. All cities are blue. And what you have is a situation where Anand is absolutely right, that the right tends to be very stingy about the money that it would take to solve these problems.

But that's not New York City. That's not L.A. We're spending crazy amounts of money on it. But there is this other side to it, which you talk about, which is the great, you know, in my view, it's sort of over-privileging the rights of the rights of the homeless, over the rights of the other 99.5%. And it's a group of people that include people who have mental issues, who have drug issues,

right, who have repeat violent crime offenders. The New York City Police Department did a survey and found that with regard to shoplifting, 300 people in the city of 8 million were responsible for 30% of all the crimes. 300 people. I think he's exactly right, but I want to say a couple of things. One thing about cities that I found in this reporting, cities are very unfairly labeled as these problem centers by Donald Trump and others. And one thing is worth remembering.

If you look at the population of, well, all people in cities, particularly people who come to cities from elsewhere, but particularly homeless and other vulnerable people in cities. Look at youth homeless. A pretty large chunk of those people who end up in cities were failed in some other parts of this country. Okay? The fraction of youth homeless or LGBTQ, whatever, pretty high.

So there are a lot of families in this country who fail the first duty of family, which is to love your kids more than any other thing. And there's a lot of families in this country that look at some verse in some book and their child's face and choose the verse in the book over their child's face and drive their children

out of Nebraska or out of Florida or out of Idaho. And those kids come to San Francisco and those kids come to New York and those kids go to Chicago and we have friends giving dinners with them. You live in L.A. You are surrounded by people who have those kind of stories. And so cities, every time someone is

sleeping on a subway bench in a city, the rest of America can sort of say, oh, look at these cities. But we are holding a lot of your people, who you fail to love and take care of. And on a more optimistic note, to your point of, I wish there was a place. I was told while I was working on my book and people were reading drafts,

you need some hope in here. You need something that's like more of an upward graph. And so I found a place called Fountain House. I don't know if you've visited Fountain House. It's a remarkable institution in New York. It's only sin is that there's only a few of it. It's called a clubhouse model. called a clubhouse model. It is not an overnight place. It's sort of the opposite of a shelter.

It's a daytime place. And a lot of folks may have other arrangements, shelters, whatever. It is a place you go on the, and you do things. There's work. There's a newspaper that these members produce. People with serious mental illness. A literary magazine, a wellness center, a kitchen, a thrift store if you get a job interview. And these people are benefiting from the services and they are the providers of the services. It is a remarkable model. It's reduced recidivism of all kinds by amazing numbers. And it is built on a theory that, yes, some people need hospitalization and medication. But a lot of us who are not quite there, but are not quite fully healthy either, need to be needed.

Need what most of us gives most of us health in life, which is to be enmeshed in relationship. You know, when you miss the Fountain House Times meeting, news meeting at 10 a.m., there are people who wonder where you were. And if you're living on the street, no one's wondering maybe where you were. And so we need to look at all kinds. But when you look at cities, it's not happening in all cities. That's the part of, I mean, Miami does not have the kind of homelessness problem that New York has. Houston doesn't. Dallas doesn't.

Part of it is that those places are much better at building stuff. I mean, one of the problems in a place like New York or in California is we just can't build housing of any kind, right? Affordable, homeless, whatever it is. And people don't want it in their backyard. And so part of the issue here, as I say, I mean, the tragedy is it is happening in some cities. It is not happening in all cities. Yes, but you better remember. We have to, you know, because it feels to me like we, those of us who live in, you know, places like New York and California, like the world is moving.

Miami is becoming the new financial center. I don't know if you saw Vanderbilt has announced that they're putting a campus there. Carnegie Mellon is building a $2 billion campus there. So it's not just rich people leaving. It's a lot of people leaving for quality of life, for cheaper housing, for better government services, and we've got to get our acts together in California and New York, because the world is moving ahead. But we also have to remember one of the paradox of this issue is people, homeless folks don't stay in places that are hostile to them. They don't stay in places.

So I'm not sure that Houston not... Well, I'm not sure that Houston not having a huge homeless population is a... It may not always be a credit. It may be like a... That seems unfair. I don't know enough about it, but I do think they have... Part of it is they have the ability to build more, right? Part of it is the...

We in New York have that huge problem. But this isn't all the devils are here a problem, right? We need more housing, right? We need mental health club houses. We probably need some level of involuntary commitment beyond what we're doing right now. We also need, you know, things that come much earlier in life. Would you agree with Bill?

This intermediate, this massive, you know, housing industrial complex? Unless for the lot of time in the... I mean, these people get billions of dollars. These are no-bid contracts. And they have an incentive to keep people, you know, if they lose half the homeless population, they get half the money. And I think that's a real issue.

People in that world speak of how they should be working themselves out of a job, but they never do. And yet I spent a lot of time for the book with the people on the ground doing that work. I mean, I did overnights at Penn Station and subway stations in New York with outreach workers, one homeless person at a time, trying to convince him to come indoors,

trying to convince them to go into shelters. In a free society, it is very hard work. Okay. Thank you, guys. Time for new rules. All right. When someone takes a picture so good, you think, oh, well, that must be AI, but it isn't AI.

Go ahead and give them the Pulitzer, because everyone's look in this shot is just perfect. Gee is thinking, I wonder if he knows I'm faking it. And Melania is thinking, I wonder if he knows I'm faking it. And Trump is thinking, what I have a feeling that everyone around me is faking it?

Well, now that Sidney Sweeney is considering converting to Judaism because things with their Jewish boyfriend are getting serious, the people who think Jews will replace us have to tell us, are you guys okay? Are you going to be okay losing your favorite anti-woke Shiksa with the good genes? But look on the bright side, Marilyn Monroe also became a Jew, and it's not like we remember her for her brisket.

Also, Elizabeth Taylor and Ivanka. Now Sidney Sweeney. Say what you want about the Jews. They know how to draft. Now that Republican Senator Tommy Tuberville, or is it Tuberville, whatever it is, has said, and I'm quoting here, Democrats don't like the fact

that I called out the insane furry culture this week. But the truth is, an alarming number of these deranged people working in our airline industry. Somebody has to launch Frontier Airlines. Furntier. The first airline just for furries. Ferenier, where the plane is not the only one with the tail. Welcome aboard if the oxygen masks drop.

Place yours over your snout before assisting smaller woodland creatures. And in the event of an evacuation, please do not chase the illuminated floor lights. No rule, since T. Denny Sanford was a South Dakota billionaire banker who famously said, I want to die broke and then died in July with $2 million. His tombstone has to say, loser. If you're a billionaire in South Dakota and you want to die with no money, it's not that hard. Just move to California. Or buy a Ford F-150 and fill it up.

Either way, a new rule now that Christy Noam and her husband have officially filed for divorce, Everyone has to lay off the jokes because divorce is one of the most painful things a couple can go through. For example, now they have to divide up the assets. You take the dog, I'll hold on to the twins. For all kids, let me help. I think I know why you have so much anxiety, so much loneliness. It's because you live in a surveillance state. We all do.

We're all being watched and filmed, possibly screenshoted, all the time. Who wouldn't be paranoid, petrified of making a wrong move that lives on? forever. You know, for generations, nothing could kill dance clubs. Not AIDS, not the macarina, not even disco duck. But now, according to the Wall Street Journal, everyone is scared to dance at concerts and clubs, and who would know more about dance clubs than the Wall Street Journal? But I take them out their word, because as one TikToker said, if you go to the club and dance for more than three seconds, a circle of strangers will form around you. Dance like no one's watching.

How quaint to think you could still do that. Everyone has a GPS-enabled computer in their pocket. A tracking device in your car. A ring camera at the door. Cyber trucks have nine cameras. Waymos have 29. The more likely a vehicle is to make you want to give them the finger, the more cameras there are to catch you doing it.

There's private security cameras, cameras on the street, cameras in the stores. I know women who won't sunbathe naked. by my pool because they think there might be a drone overhead. See, I'm a victim too. I have reason to believe people are watching me right now. Turns out the only person in America with any privacy is Taylor Swift who can somehow have a wedding in Madison Square Garden on the 4th of July and nobody sees it. And now meta is making having a camera in your eyeglasses a thing. A.I. Wearables, they call them. I call them fucking. I call them fucking. creepy. It took about two seconds for them to earn the nickname Pervert glasses. Leave it to Zuckerberg to find another innovative way to make the world even e-dusier.

And have you met the flockers? Flock cameras? Yeah, flock cameras that read your license plate and track your car wherever it goes. Everybody hates them. Everybody. Red and Blue America finally agree on something. Fuck, flock cameras. Okay. Sure. Okay. But the people who complain about surveillance do a lot of it themselves.

Gen Z is now Gen TMZ. And the targets don't have to be a celebrity. One of the biggest viral stories this year was the two lawyers making out in Central Park. It's okay. They're married. Well, he is. He is. But look, people...

People cheating. is a long and cherished human right. It may not be noble, but whatever happened to ain't nobody's business if I do. Andy Warhol famously predicted that in the future, everyone would be famous for 15 minutes,

one of the most prescient things anyone's ever said. What he didn't foresee is it would be against your will, because now everyone is the celebrity who thought they could get away with running into Target without any makeup. Everyone now is sad, Ben Affle. who can't have a cigarette without it going online. It's disturbing how much Americans now enjoy watching other people be less than perfect.

The influencer who filmed the Central Park couple narrates the video by saying, Get a room. There's kids around. Oh, thank you, morality, police. You're right. The park is no place for adultery. That place is a cold play concert. By the way, the cold play couple were separated from their spouses. at that time. But that didn't stop them from being forced to resign from their jobs. But it's okay

because we got content. That's the rule now. Because there's nothing more important in life than content. Used to be, if you saw someone getting mugged or having heart attacked, the instinct was to help. Now the response to a tragedy in progress is film it. Everyone complains about how shitty America has become, but America isn't some abstract thing to us. America is us. It's the people in it. If you want it to stop being so terrible, stop being terrible people. You want to make America a better place? Put the phone down, live your life, and stop looking to ruin someone else's. Oh, you filmed a couple cheating or a stranger being a dick at a CVS for a minute. So you think you're the good guy? No, you're an

asshole. You're the Taliban. You're a snitch. In prison, you'd be dead because at least prisoners have a code. I mean, no wonder the younger generation is so shut down. And not just with the dancing. 55% of Gen Z say fear of being caught doing something or saying something that's seen as cringe has prevented them from opening up emotionally. 32% say the fear of cringe has stopped them from asking someone on a date. I get it. You're a 15-year-old and you like a girl and you want tell her in a text? Well, it'd better come out like it was written by Aaron Sorkin. Because if there's anything cringe about it

and it winds up as a screenshot, that kid is fucked. Kids, you've got to reverse the cringe. What's cringy isn't looking silly. It's the Nark who's reporting it. That's what's cringe. So dance like your doorbell isn't watching. Eat sloppy food like it won't become a meme.

Suck at karaoke. and love. Love like you aren't on a kiss can. All right. Thank you very much. That's our show. I want to thank my guest, Aramindh, Yadhaarra, and Malcolm Gladwell Club Random Drops every Monday on YouTube or wherever you get your podcast.

Now go watch our overtime on the very same YouTube. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you guys. Catch all new episodes of Real Time with Bill Maher every Friday night at 10. Or watch him anytime on HBO on demand. For more information, log on to HBO.com. My rec league goalie says he plays for the love of the game.

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