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

Episode Date: April 2, 2024

Bill Maher and his guests answer viewer questions after the show. (Originally aired 3/29/24) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO late-month series, Real Time with Bill Mark. All right, here we are with our social psychologist, NYU Stern School of Business, an author of The Anxious Generation, Jonathan Haidt, host of CNN's Fareed Zakaria GPS, an author of the new book, The Age of Revolution, Fareed Zakaria, and former Secretary of Defense. His memoir is a sacred oath, Dr. Mark Esper. Such an esteemed panel, and here are the questions that people have sent in for Farid. Why do you say that oil-rich countries have a hard time modernizing?

Well, it's sort of like think of trust fund kids, not working hard. Basically, if you have, you know, if you don't need to go through the hard work of modernizing your economy, educating your population, putting in the right infrastructure, if all you have to do is dig a hole, get oil, sell it to, you know, America and Europe, it's the easy way out. And it's one of the reasons why you've seen in all. Almost every oil-rich country, Nigeria, Venezuela, you know, Iran. Kuwait.

There's dysfunction. There's corruption. And if you look at the countries that have really done well in the world, South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, they had no resources. So they had no alternative but to, you know, educate their population, build good infrastructure, put in place market-friendly rules, and guess what? You know, you got a boom. Is it a function of the government

or the fact, I mean, the United States is an energy-rich country. Yes. Killing it in energy, yes. Killing it in energy. And so there are a few, exactly right. There are few countries where we got our political and economic system first,

and then the oil came much later. Right. And that turns out to help a lot. Right, because there seems to be no way to have the oil without it just being siphoned off by that corrupt cabal at the top. Exactly. Exactly.

So what happens? could be doing very well. Absolutely. And by the way, in all the ones you're trying, actually. The Saudis are trying, and the small Gulf states are so small. To modernize. To modernize, invest in their human capital, to, you know, not pay a stipend to every royal who's on the payroll.

But to just give you, you know, in the Gulf, labor productivity, that is, you know, the productivity of every person who works is among the lowest in the world. And it's not national labor either. It's important labor. So far, it's not working. All right, John. How does phone use? use and time on social men to lead to a spiritual degradation.

Spiritual degradation, yeesh. Oh, that sounds terrible. It does, why don't. So if you look at what ancient wisdom tells us, if you look at what the religious traditions and the stoics, if you look at all these traditions, they tell us things like, be slower to judge and quicker to forgive. They tell us things like, slow down, calm down, regain control of your consciousness,

and what is life on social media? It's exactly the opposite. Judge, right now, quick, no context, many times. Never forgive. And it's, how about hooking up your eyes and your ears to a gigantic fire hose and just pumping it full of garbage all the time? I've said it so many times in this show,

but I'm going to say it again. The phone takes everybody's worst innate feelings and makes them worse. Shady, needy, mean, fake, passableness. aggressive. Have you have any of those? That's what anybody gets you, right? Yes, that makes it worse.

I've often wondered if you said everybody who has an account, you can't use any avatars, any fake names, but you have to use your real name and your real location. And no filters? But even if we let people use fake names for privacy's sake,

at least companies, at least the platforms should have some sort of authentication so that they know it's a real person. It's not, you know, a Russian agent trying to manipulate us. So even that would make it a lot better. But I think about, you know, Bill, you must have the same experience. You know, I'm out there in the world with my views, and I've tried, you know, I travel around

and give, people are very polite. People are very, in person. But on Twitter or, you know, on social media, there's a whole different thing. Because suddenly you gain this nastiness. It's the point I think John is making. You may gain this nastiness when you have this platform where you can do it quietly, pseudonymously. It's very interesting to think about the contrast. At least I've noticed between people coming up to you in person and what you get from their Twitter feed.

Yeah. Okay. What does the panel think of RFK Jr.'s choice in running mate Nicole Shanahan? Okay. Well, if you missed this... Who? I didn't... I didn't know the name either. Then I was vaguely familiar because I read the gossip about it some time ago. She is the ex-wife of Sergei Bryn, who is one of the co-owners of Google, 10th richest man in the world.

The rumor was they split up because she had an affair with Elon Musk. That's just a rumor. I have no idea. They both deny it. I'm just putting it out there because you're going to see it out there. Anyway, RFK chose her as his VP, which is out of the box. You've got to say that. Obviously,

the first thing people are going to say is, well, now he has access to billions of dollars. In a way, it's kind of honest. Like, let's cut out the middleman. It's... You know... It's the vice president. Right. You know, instead of... It's like making Sheldon Adelson your vice president.

Let's go right to the... Right. So, let's... Let's just remember that it only helps in this one country. There is no other advanced democracy in the world with campaign

finance laws that would allow a multi-billionaire to spell and you can spend billion dollars electing yourself. Burlesconi didn't do that? No, no, you know, they're very tight campaign laws in all of Europe. Sylvia Berlusconi in Italy did not buy that presidency the same way we do? No, no, no. He was actually...

It was just coincidence he was the richest men in Italy who also owned all the media. He owned the media. That helped us. But there are campaign laws. We are the only country where you can spend essentially unlimited amounts on yourself. The interesting point about RFK is he's polling at 12 percentage points right now. when Trump is up beaten Biden by about five nationally. Right.

So where are those 12 points coming from? That's the question, and that's why everybody's trying to push him one way or the other. So the question is, is it going to be like Ralph Nader? Right. There are some people who think, on the other hand, since RFK's platform seems to be conspiracy theories, maybe he's drawing from the Trump vote.

I don't think we know for sure. Okay. What will the fallout be from the ISIS attack in Moscow? Yes, if you miss that story, ISIS attacked Moscow. Hey, they hate somebody other than us. There's always some good news in all the news, right? Look, I think it says a few things. First of all, ISIS has international reach beyond, you know, where they're based in either Afghanistan or Pakistan, number one. And number two,

they're able to allude most intelligence services except for ours. Apparently, we knew about it. And look, it's been a tragic attack, a hundred and, what, 37 or so Russians killed. But here's my point. What's the goal? Not taking away anything for the tragedy, though. Russia's been killing Ukrainians for two-plus years now, bombing with rockets and missiles and drones, maternity wards and hospitals and everything else. But ISIS didn't do it to defend Ukraine.

No, they didn't. Russia has a long history of a very brutal subjugation of Islamic militants. In Chechnya, nearly... In Chechnya and Dagestan, and this is payback for Syria. Don't forget, the Russians allied with Assad, the government of Syria, when he faced militant Islamic, you know, kind of insurgency, And they were pretty brutal. So Putin has been, you know, one of the enemy number one or two or three for these guys for a long time.

The really interesting part about it. It's not a false flag operation. No. No, I mean, it seems like I think Mark's point is very important, which is the U.S. intelligence warned the Russians not only of a possible ISIS attack, but that it might be in a theater. They had very good intelligence. I mean, I think it's a, you know, we keep talking about how terrible the U.S. government is.

On this, on Ukraine, U.S. intelligence has done pretty well. Here's what Putin's going to do with it, though, and you already see this happening. He's going to blame the Ukrainians, and the view is he's going to use it to do another mass mobilization of 200, 300,000 Russians to throw into the meat grinder that we call Ukraine. So keep an eye out for that. What does the panel think of Sam Bankman-Fried being sentenced to 25 years in prison? Is that just? I don't know. Obviously, far less than what the prosecutors wanted, but 25 years is a long time.

I don't know if he gets off for good behavior. I just wish we're... I'd love to hear what John thinks about. I think it's really encouraging because one of the problems with the global financial crisis in the meltdown here is that pretty much nobody went to jail, and I think that really contributed to the dissolution to the sense that the elites can get away with what they want, nobody gets punished. And here you have a guy who is just such an obvious fraudster,

and so at least the system worked in this case. But the whole thing is. a fraud. How can you have fraud? I mean, I'm not saying he shouldn't be in jail, but the whole thing is just funny money. It's based on nothing. I was hoping it would go away because of this. The only thing people it's good for are criminals. Yeah, I agree, and I don't get it, but as you say, Bitcoin is at 70,000 right now. And it's horrible for the environment. The amount of electricity they need to do this mining is a little bit like Trump. You can. You know, you can point this out all you want, and you just...

I agree. All right. Thanks, guys. Thank you, Alias. We'll see you next to you. 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,

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