Real Time with Bill Maher - Overtime – Episode #744: Malcolm Gladwell, Fareed Zakaria, Anand Giridharadas

Episode Date: October 6, 2026

Bill Maher and his guests answer viewer questions after the show. (Originally aired 10/2/26) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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and unlock incremental reach for your campaign. Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO Late Night series, Real Time with Bill Maher. All right, he's a podcast host and best-owning author of The American Way of Killing the Adventure of an Epidemic. Malcolm Gladwell. He's the author of the new book, Man in the Mayor of Hope Struggle and Belonging in an American City.

Honored Gerdas. And he owes GPS on CNN and wrote the book, Age of Revolutions for Reid's Akari. Okay. First one is for you, Malcolm. Although I think we all can answer. Tennessee has now botched two executions this year. I've read 11 in the last five years. Should that make us question whether the state should be in the business of executing people at all?

Yeah, should that make us question whether the state should be in the business of execute a euphor capital punitive? I am not. I should absolutely make us question. This is a barbaric practice. And, you know, they're trying to find a vein and they can't find a vein, and they stab and stab and stab for hours and hours. I did a whole podcast series about this last year. This is an abomination. It's incredibly ironic that we were just talking about all the gun deaths in America. I mean, one thing you think this country can do is kill people. I mean, and if you're going to use drugs, hello, have you heard a fence? fentanyl. I mean, it's just...

I've once heard, you were talking about, you know, the surveillance state and things like that. And for anyone, you know, who's a classical liberal or believes in limited government, the idea that the state should have the power to take another, you know, human being's life, just in a peacetime situation, seems to me just, you know, we're going to look back on it as kind of insane, that we sanctioned the state. Life imprisonment fine, long imprisonment fine, no parole fine, but to kill somebody, particularly

in the situations where so much of the data we now have on DNA with DNA testing suggests something like 25% of them were mistakes. And to be clear, life in prison is a very, very grim punishment by itself.

We also sometimes, obviously Jeffrey Epstein is not quite how he died, but when we when we cut the process off, you deprive people of a chance to have all kinds of reparation, to have people actually around and have processes of truth-seeking.

George Will, good conservative, once said, conservative should be questioned this because this is a government program. We think all the other government programs mess everything up. Why do we trust this one? Right. Okay. Farid, the U.S. has officially ended

its 12-year military mission in Iraq. 12. I got back to 2003 on that. I guess we got out for a minute and then ISIS came. This was a violent, yeah. And we got back in. Okay. How has the Middle East changed since the war started?

Well, also I would add to that, what do you make of the Iraq state that is there now? It's not a failed state. No, it's actually worth pointing out that Iraq is a democracy. I mean, it's a dysfunctional democracy, but they do have elections. Join the club. Right. Right. It's harder and harder for us to point the finger at dysfunctional democracies around the world.

They do have elections. They do mean something. Was it worth going to war? Probably not the cost outweigh the benefits. But it's a reasonable place to live. The three communities, the Sunnis, the Shia, the Kurds. I mean, you just, it's just, you just don't know what the future holds. It's arrogant to ever. I was not for that war.

I mean, Iraq didn't attack us. They weren't Huitakness on 9-11, but it just didn't make sense to me. But I assume if we didn't do it, it would be Uday and Hussay, who would be with the rape rooms and everything else. Well, and, you know, it's also worth pointing out that it did kill a certain strands of Islamic militancy and fundamentalism. You know, the ISIS, the attack on ISIS was very successful. Now, it's happening at a weird time, Because what's happening is we're drawing a very small contingent of troops in Iraq that we're sort of keeping the government together.

And sort of a good example of America's role in the world. These are small numbers of troops. But there was a sense that America was watching and it disciplined everybody. What's going to happen almost certainly is Iran is going to largely take over Iraq in the sense that the dominant community in Iraq is Shia. They're pro-Iranian. They have very strong ties to the Iranian government. And why Trump would do this at a time when he's waging war with Iran, just as one more puzzle about Trump's, shall we say, very bizarre foreign policy.

But he understands it's not enough to undermine America from the inside. You also have to weaken it standing in the world. As it has been. What did you think of the airline hijacking this week? I thought it would be a much bigger story if you didn't see. First of all, let's pause for a minute to say a routine flight of Israel, almost completely a plane full of Israelis from the United Arab Emirates, a routine would not have happened five years ago.

I mean, that was part of the Abraham Accords. And of course, it was what happened was one of the pilots, was a jihadist, tried to hijack the plane, stabbed the other pilot, and then as in Let's Roll, the one that we stopped here. country on 9-11, the passengers took over and landed the plane safely. Here's a dirty question. Do you think if that plane full of Jews had crashed, the maclamores of the world would be celebrating it? I hope not.

But I think that the most interesting thing about the phenomenon you're describing is, and they landed in Saudi Arabia, and then Saudi Arabia sent the plane back to the UAE, is that the UAE and the Gulf states are in a kind of tacit alliance with Israel already. Whether or not they formalize it, they share intelligence, they share, you know, there's a new Middle East that's formed where Iran is, in a sense, on one side, and the Gulf Arab states have decided they're closer to Israel. You know, they share a lot of the same security concerns that is Israel. They always hated Iran more than Israel.

They pretended they didn't. But now they're willing to say it. Yeah, now they're willing to say it. Well, the future, I mean, Dubai is a rich place, and Tel Aviv is a rich place. It makes sense that there would be a flight between these two cities. It's like what they used to say. Like two countries of the McDonald's have never attacked each other. I think we passed that benchmark.

That sort of hasn't worked. There were McDonald's in Russia and Ukraine. Yeah, okay. And I'm going to say, if you followed the social media videos from inside that plane, you saw a lot of dads and moms comforting their little children during a nosedive of a plane, right? You think about what it would be like

to give that talk to your child. And contrary to the McClmore thing, it actually reminded me of a lot of videos I've seen from Gaza in the past few years. There is a universal and vast overwhelming number of people who that's all they want. Yeah. A stable life to have family that is secure and stable

and comfort their kids when they can't do anything for them because something bigger is going on. And those people are right now caught between leaders who are failing them in place after place after place after place. It did seem like the media is always a little reluctant to call it terrorism when it's obviously terrorism. I mean, after a while they do. Thank you, one person.

But, you know, I noticed when the Hamas propaganda is out there, boy, that gets fast-tracked. But this stuff, I mean, the original reporting was the two pilots had an altercation. Yeah, they had a little argument. I think we should crash the plane. You don't agree to disagree. All right. And then they used violence, as Malcolm says, to settle the debate.

Yeah, they'd have a handgun. Yeah, sometimes violence is good. All right. Our fantasy commission says for him it's all about the friendships. Cute, Kevin, but I disagree. Like with Bet365. I get paid the second my team goes up big with early payout and can cash out at any time before the game ends.

No hard feelings, Kevin. Just faster payouts from Bet365. The home of winning early. Must be 19 and older. Ontario only. Please play responsibly. If you were someone you know is concerns about gambling, visit connectsontario.ca.

Or call 1866 5 through 1,2600. Terms and conditions apply. Where some see heroes and others see egos. Bloomberg sees the era of billionaire athletes. A fad to some, the future of money to others. We see crypto's trillion dollar swings. The end of jobs or the end of human struggle. We see the endless funds fueling the AI hype.

While others follow the noise, we follow the money. Learn more at Bloomberg.com. Malcolm, in Blink, you wrote about, a great book, you wrote about the power of instinct and snap judgments in an age of misinformation should we trust our gut less or more. Well, that's a good question. I mean, the argument of Blink was that an informed intuition is a powerful thing. Yes.

And an uninformed intuition is a terrible thing. A little learning is a dangerous thing. Alexander Polk. You don't trust the instincts of a teenager behind the wheel, but you do trust the instincts of someone who's been driving their whole life. So the great question is, in the current world that we're in, are we doing a better or a worse job of educating our instincts? And I would say, I might be sort of terminally bullish,

but I do think that the best side of AI is it does allow us access to pretty credible information at our fingertips in a way that I think could have some real positive effects. for how clearly we see the world? Well, it certainly is going to have positive effects of it. I've already been reading about them. I mean, the way it can, like, analyze a cancer situation and go through in seconds every drug that's ever been tried on it

and get something that we couldn't do nearly in this time frame that it's doing it. Things like that. And, you know, who knows what cures might be around the corner. I mean, no one is denying that there's a huge upside. We're just afraid of the paperclip thing with nuclear weapons and whatever it's going to be. What do you make of the data that shows Americans are having far fewer dinner parties?

Have we sworn off in-person socializing altogether? I must say I missed that story. Americans are having fewer dinner. It's a great source. It's a great source. It's a very important issue. No, it is. It really is.

It's because it's part of this trend. It's a 70% decline. in the last 30 years. But there's a decline of all these kinds of social activities. Anything Americans did together, they're doing less. I feel like you guys live in a bubble. Most people don't have dinner parties. I'm telling you.

I think you guys are... Oh, you're saying we never had them in the first place. I don't. Dinner party? The phrasing is... You're picturing something very few. You think I'm walking around the dining room going home? Let's rephrase it.

Having people over for dinner. That's different than a dinner party. I mean, me... That's what we're talking about. The polls actually said, having people over for the... Oh, my gosh, these flutes don't match the napkins. Bill, Bill, Bill, Bill. Bill. Can I make the case to you

for why this is like an existential... Yes, please do. Level five. Yes, I want to know. Because if the only way... Think about... What people are doing instead of having people over... Right. ...is Netflix and...

Chill. And chill and order in DoorDash, right? A huge fraction of restaurant orders in New York now are going out the door as takeout instead of people coming in. What it starts to do is reduce everyday interaction, negotiation, dealing with people. And so then when the situations get more escalated and we've got to deal with harder stuff,

we have no training. I mean, Malcolm's written a book about what happens ultimately at the end of a chain of people not being able to resolve something at a level one, at level two, a level three, and then it ends in a level 10. We are, if these numbers are to be, it's not just dinner parties, it is so many forms of interaction.

I live in New York. My wife wrote a book called The Art of Gathering. We have people in our house all the time for dinner. When my parents were at our age, if you had someone over for dinner, those people had you over for dinner in some relatively short order. It was sort of a code.

And now there are these people called permigests. They're just, It's a perma guest. They just show up as guests all the time. They feel no obligation. And having people in your home in any culture in the world is how you build community. I'll tell you there's an AI connection here, which is imagine if people, there's an increasing reporting that says that young people are finding, they kind of enjoy spending time chatting with AI more than with other human beings because the AI is very sycophantic. The AI tells them you're always right.

the AI's. So you can imagine a situation where a person who has really been raised on an AI pal finds it very hard to form a relationship with somebody else because that person is an actual human. Other people are friction. Who is, you know, ornery and gets upset and doesn't agree with you all the time. You know, that's the danger is that we're kind of creating these silos. And there's all this reported loneliness and depression that is skyrocketing. I think, think it's because we are, as Anand was saying, because we're spending less time together. I didn't know about the dinner parties per se, and I'm not quite sure what the... America, please invite Bill for dinner party.

I don't know. I go out to dinner. I don't want to, yeah, dinner, yeah. I think the phrase is catching, it's tripping you up. No, it is. Go over to him. He's some flutes. I haven't.

I have people over my house all the time. We don't eat. we do drugs. I think that's okay. I think in this analysis, you've come out okay. Drugs, and then we order food in. Oh, yeah, that's... All right.

The head of philosophy at Williams College says we may be wrong to treat writing as the highest form of thinking. Ooh. Well, let's go to you on that one. That's the three wrong people. He says, we may be wrong to treat writing as the highest form of thinking.

That's interesting, because I've said it a million times. there's three modes of thinking. One is in your brain. That's really dangerous. We all would not want to have people see what we think at times. It just is sometimes not even our control. You know, don't think of a pink elephant. And there you think.

And then there's, you know, speaking, which is a little more clarifying. You know, we hopefully edit ourselves a little. But writing is the best because it takes a minute. And you've got to edit as you go and you see what you're writing. Absolutely. But this guy says, maybe wrong to treat writing is the highest form of thinking. What does he say?

He is the highest form of it. Doesn't say. He needs to think that too. He needs to write about this because he has not thought it through. It is funny. All right. I read that it was an op-ed in the New York Times, and it is hilarious that he wrote an article explaining that writing

is not the ultimate form of things. This could have been a video. Thank you very much, Heather. 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. My reg league goalie says he plays for the love of the game. You gave up six goals last week, Steve?

Maybe play to win, huh? Like with Bet365, I get paid the second my team goes up big with early payout and can cash out at any time before the game ends. Come on, Steve. 365, the home of winning early. Must be 19 and older. Ontario only. Please play responsibly. If you were someone you know is concerns about gambling, visit connectsontario.ca.

Or call 18665 through 1,2,600. Terms and conditions apply. Where some see heroes and others see egos. Bloomberg sees the era of billionaire athletes. While others follow the noise, we follow the money. Learn more at Bloomberg.com.