The Daily Beast Podcast - George Conway Still Has Faith Mark Meadows Will Go Down

Episode Date: January 25, 2022

George Conway joins this episode of The New Abnormal to address the possibility of a Mark Meadows indictment from Merrick Garland’s DOJ, co-hosts Andy Levy and Molly Jong-Fast talk about why Newt Gingrich is ‘minutes away’ from becoming the next Rudy Giuliani and Johann Hari, aka the guy who gave a viral TED Talk on rats and addiction, talks about his new book Stolen Focus and how getting stoned during work is actually more productive than answering emails during a task. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm Molly Zhang Fast, no relationship to Kim Jong-un. I'm a left-wing pundant and a writer at the Atlantic Invo. And I'm Andy Levy, former Fox News and CNN-HLN guy, and current cable news conscientious objector. And I'm producer Jesse Cannon, and I'm here to make sure things don't go too far off the rails. We're here to have fun, smart, conversations with the wisest and funniest and funniest people in science and media and politics that help make what's happening today clearer. Our world has been turned upside down, and on the new abnormal, we'll talk about the people who got us into this mess and how we'll hopefully get ourselves out of it. What a great show we have today. Washington Post-contributing columnist George Conway will join us to lend us his legal expertise. Then we'll talk to author Johann Hari, who you may know from his genius books chasing the scream and lost connections.

He's going to tell us all about his amazing new book, Stolen Focus. But first, let's have some fun. Andy leaving. Molly John Fast? There's a lot of stuff out. Too much stuff. But first, most importantly, the thing that's really occupied, the kind of the talking heads, some say the intellectual dark web, has been, why is green Eminem less hot than she was before?

We're going to just jump right into the deep end and not, you know, get into it with lighter stuff first. Look, I was going to talk about Spinoza, but instead we're going to talk about Eminem's. Tucker Carlson. Yeah, he's very upset about, I guess, no longer, I don't know how I'm going to put this as gently as possible. He no longer wants to fuck M&Ms. You know, here's the fundamental problem. Those kitten heels did a lot for Tucker. They did.

They did. And now they're gone. And now he's bereft. And I don't know where he's going to turn for inspiration. I would love to know. I wonder how his wife feels about all of this. That's what I kept. thinking as I was watching this.

Like, do you know, is your wife watching this? Like, does she know that you're highly upset that the green M&M is not wearing high heels anymore? I mean, he made such a big deal out of this. And it's just, I don't even know where to go with it because it's so bizarre. Like, rule number one is you're not so, but you don't talk about, you know, your personal issues on your show. And he decided to completely violate that and talk about how upset he is.

that he no longer wants to fuck the green M&M. Predilections and peccadillos. But you know what I thought was interesting about that? And again, I don't want to inject seriousness into something so stupid, but I would like to point out, when not doxing people or doing white nationalist talking points, Tucker Ralson is actually focused on really stupid crap. We thought Mr. Potatohead was the lowest point we were going to get, and here we are.

The whole channel is so low rent. It's just deeply weird is what it is. And it's just, you know, making a culture war thing out of M&Ms. Like the funny thing is like everyone was having their fun with the M&M thing right and left. But then, you know, Tucker gets up there and makes it seem as if this is what the people on the left want. Meanwhile, the people on the left were laughing at this and poking fun at it at just as much as if not more. than people on the right.

Who do you think wants this? Look, they're doing their thing. Nobody cares. Like, nobody thought about this for two seconds until Eminem decided to do this. But it's all, you know, if you want to take it to a more serious note, this is what Fox News does.

They find a thing to gin up culture wars that don't exist, and they hammer it home, and, you know, they take it to some ridiculous extreme. That's where we are. I mean, this is the top-rated show. or one of the top two or three rated show is on cable news. And this is what he's about.

One of the funniest things, too, because it's always inherent in Fox News, too, is that there's this thing that Marjorie Taylor Green and Steve Bannon right now think it's a winning message to say that they want to ban porn. And Tucker Carlson's going, they're taking the sexiness out of everything. They're trying to do it. It's like, wow, like you have Marjorie Taylor Green on your show all the time. But this woman is literally like every Instagram post is like January 6th is bad. And then at the bottom of it.

Oh, yeah, we have to ban porn, and you're like, what the fuck? Wait, I didn't know they wanted to ban porn. It's this weird thing. She keeps slipping into things. And I talk to, I have a friend and a listener of this podcast that tells me what Steve Bannon talks about. And apparently he thinks this is a winning message, too. You know, it's so interesting because it's like a lot of the stuff from the 70s, besides overturning Roe, which is like something I, you know, my mother fought for Roe. A lot of women in that generation fought really hard for Roe.

and now we're letting it slip through our fingers. But there were a lot of these, like, weird kind of 60s and 70s troops, like banning books in the library. I mean, what kid goes to the library to get a book? I mean, you know, like, they could just go online. You're the one with kids on this podcast, so, you know. I mean, my kids, actually, my daughter goes to the library all the time. She, like, takes a library book out every day.

But I think there's a point here of, like, they really are going back to these sort of, like, things they thought won hearts and minds in the 70s for them. Look, I just, I want to take this back to the important thing, which is that not only does Tucker no longer want to fuck the M&M, but he said something about, he said, they're not going to be satisfied until there are no cartoon characters that you'd want to have a drink with. No way. He didn't say that. He did.

No, that's exactly what he said. I don't know exactly how old Tucker is, but he's got to be 50s, I guess. And it's like, really? That's, what cartoon characters do you want to have a drink with? Like, I read comic books and I don't sit there and go, oh, I'd like to have a drink with, you know, Ms. Marble or whatever. Well, she's underage, so she doesn't say. The good news is I have no idea who you're talking about. But the point is, like, what are you looking at cartoons for and thinking that you want to have drinks with, like, you know, I mean, other than Jessica Rabbit, yes, fine.

Oh, yes, yes, yes, yes. She is a rabbit. Set that aside. 12-year-old me and Jessica Rabbit, wow. Isn't that like beastiality? But that's the point. It was 12-year-old you. It wasn't 50-year-old you.

He's upset that. He's afraid he's not going to want to have drinks with cartoon characters anymore. I just, read some manga. You'll be fine. Wait till the woke mob tries to get to manga. Let me get us away from this dark, dark place. We've gone to a different dark place.

He's two shows away from, talking about tentacle born. That's where we're at. Well, one of the greatest tweets of all time. Yeah, things have gotten really off the rails. So speaking of people with psychotic fantasies, Newt Gingrich is talking now about jailing the January 6th committee if the GOP controls Congress in 2022.

Can you play a clip of that? And I think when you have a Republican Congress, this is all going to come crashing down, and the wolves are going to find out that they're now sheep, and they're the ones who are in fact going to, I think, face a real risk of jail for the kind of laws they're breaking. Well, this is such a great analysis. It's really scary to call for political leaders to be imprisoned for doing their jobs and certainly not a great indication of where we are as a democracy.

And again, Newt really did ruin the world in the 90s and he said about to ruin it again. That said, he is like minutes away from, because he's not. coming Rudy Giuliani with a hair dye dripping down his forehead. It is kind of incredible because whatever he did in the 90s, all of which was basically bad, he didn't seem like just a straight up crazy person. And that's sort of where the Republican Party has gone. Like they did things in the 90s and you could look at them and say, well, I completely disagree with this and it's awful.

But the guy presenting them these awful ideas at a bare minimum did seem sane and rational. just had really, really bad ideas. To the point of that tweet, that was Rudy Giuliani, too. And now it's just, this is what the party has become. Seriously, I listen to things like this, and then I do wish that they were more, like, all they talked about was M&Ms. And that was their main concern, and they just, you know, would go off the deep end with that stuff.

But as you pointed out with Tucker, when he's not talking about M&Ms, you know, he's talking, he's pushing white supremacist's talking points and white. nationalist talking points. So, and it's the same, you know, like you're saying, it's the same with Newt and, I mean, Giuliani is just whatever, he's just completely gone. But Newt is clearly, as you said, heading down that path. And Molly, was it you? Somebody tweeted, I think it was about this, that if this happened in another country, we'd have a lot to say about it. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. And that, I really do think that gets to the heart of it. Like all the things we're seeing now in America are things that we're used to reading about in other countries and sort of,

you know, clucking our tongues and going, oh, and tis-tisking them, you know, and being like, shame on you. How can you live in a country like that? And now we're learning, you know, overtly learning exactly what it's like to live in a country like that. I almost feel like once you open the door to that kind of light fascist rhetoric, light-spout L-I-T-E, because this Republican party is so, it's in such a race with each other to the bottom that, you know, once Trump started like lock her up, it was like the entire party was like, who else could we lock up? Oh, this is good rhetoric for us. You know, and that's what Newt, you know, Newt was saying like, but I also think there was some, you know, earlier that we, this week, there was reporting that Democrats were, that

there was some anxiety that Republicans would then, you know, punish Democrats when they won the back, if they won the House back, I think it's important we phrase this as if, because the idea that they will is not a foregone conclusion in any way. So I think that you do see that there has really been a kind of, you know, Republicans have already started to threaten Democrats. And even before that, I mean, you had Kevin McCarthy threatening tech companies saying like, if you comply with the subpoena, if you give the January 6th committee, phone records will come after you when we're back in power. So Republicans have really been doing this for the last, you know, year and because they just think they can. So, you know, I'm worried about it, and it's all bad, but Newt Gingrich is not a

huge departure from Kevin McCarthy who actually holds office and isn't just some crazy guy. Well, and the thing is, like, you know, Matt Gates is backing this idea of, of Newt's, and that, you know, if that doesn't set off a red flag for Newt, again, going back to the 90s where it was the contract for America. Like, you can 100% disagree with what was in that contract for America. I suspect most of us do. But it was like, it was like an intellectual thing. You know, it was like it had heft.

You could look at it and say, well, this is a crock of shit and it's all bad. I don't know how to put this. There was policy there. There's nothing. Right. Well, that's what I'm saying. And he's gone from, he's gone from that to spouting off this stuff that a person like Matt Gates gets excited about. Like, if that doesn't talk about your personal.

de-evolution, like, I don't know what does. Yeah, no, he wants to jail Liz Cheney for trying to investigate Trump's failed coup. Yeah, for wanting to legally do what she's doing. Nothing the J6 committee is doing is against the law. So what are you jailing them for? When you slide into fascism, you don't get to choose how far you slide in. No, I guess, I guess that's a good point. And like you said, once you open the door to, like, you know, fascism light, it's not that big of a jump to full on.

fascism. It is interesting though with the military coup. What I've been sort of impressed with is that every day we see a different insane thing that's happening that Trump tried to try, Trump tried to do after the 2020 election between the 2020 election and January 6th. Like last week it was these fake electorates. Right. And the idea here was that there were a slate of fake electorates that were going when Mike Pence threw out the vote, which he didn't do because he talked to Dan Quayle. I mean, we're literally in hell, right? We're in hell, right? He talked to Dan Quail and Dan Quill said you can't throw out the election results because this is the stupidest. You know, it's funny because it's like I thought if we lived through a time this stupid,

it would be fun or a little funny, but it's not. Yeah, no, it's the same, you know, it's the same people who said Trump was going to be great for comedy and like, you know, when he got elected, which first of all, he wasn't. But second of all, is that, that's not really what you want in a president? I think I went to a debate. Is Trump good for comedy? And once you start going to, you know, it's fascism. Hilarious. Yeah. Right. Exactly. Yeah, not great. So this slate of fake electorates, it never got done. Like, you know, so I think people in Trump world will say, like, attempted crimes are really crimes, right? That's one of their favorite defenses. Right, which, first of all, isn't true. There's a thing called attempted robbery.

There's a lot of people in jail right now for attempted murder, attempted robbery, you know. Yeah. But if you're an affluent white Republican man, I think you get your, unless you can, unless you actually kill the person, you don't have to go to jail. Well, and even then, I mean, for those people, real crimes aren't actual crimes a lot of the time. But yeah, and look, you go back to Dan Quayle, which just made me think of, you know, Dan Quayle has been a punchline ever since he, you know, was on the vice presidential ticket back in the day. And now he's the one, you know, along with Mike Pence sort of maybe saved democracy. Meanwhile, Newt Gingrich, who was taken very seriously back then, is now, is just a walking punchline spouting this absolute nonsense. So it's just kind of funny how their, you know, their two careers sort of went in completely opposite directions if you look at it that way.

But look, this fake electors stuff is, as you said, this is just every little piece of this is just more and more evidence of how close we really came to a free election being nullified. And my guess is we're not even completely there yet. as you said, more stuff keeps coming out week after week. So it's a question of, you know, what's going to be next? But it's like, you know, you got the fake electors. You got the January 6th stuff. Every little step of the way, this was like, we are very lucky that a lot of these people were stupid.

You know, we know that. I'm not saying anything we don't know. This is, you know, common knowledge. The scary thing will be when someone who's not quite as stupid uses this as a blueprint. and does it a lot better. I mean, that may be an even greater fear than, you know, having Trump run again in 2024. At least he's a buffoon who will surround himself with buffoons. But the scary thing is if people learn their lesson, you know, other want to be fascists

learn their lesson from Trump and go down the same road, but do it in a much smarter way, we could be in really, really big trouble. Yeah, I mean, I think that's a very likely scenario. I just don't understand there's nobody but. Kinsinger and Liz Cheney and a sort of smattering of other people who are not running for re-election. I mean, there are no other Republicans who are like, wow, this is really fucking bad. There's no grownups in the room. To take that even further what you're saying, Molly, I think that the Beast had a report this week that the head of U-Line, which is, you know, one of the most pervasive companies in everybody's life because you go to a coffee shop, you're probably using U-Line products, that he was funding a bunch of this.

And like, we used to always hear that, like, no, capitalism will be fearful of a fascist takeover. It's like, no, capitalism is now funding it. Like, the corporations are funding it. And, like, it really is seeming like everybody's given up and just accepted this at the top tiers of the gears in our society. I mean, I don't necessarily agree with that because I think ultimately you'll see, I mean, that guy's just a nod. I mean, I think ultimately you'll see most businesses are that crony capitalism is actually really bad. Because you look at the markets in those countries that have these like vaguely fascistic governments. And they're not, it's not good for the markets, ultimately.

But then you look at all the companies and corporations who said they were going to stop donating to any of the Republicans that helped the January 6th stuff along the way and who were claiming, you know, that the election results were fake. And they stopped those donations for like two or three months and then went right back to giving to those candidates. No, you can't expect corporations to do the right. thing. I mean, that we've seen again and again. Like with climate change, corporations will never do the right thing. And it's never going to be, I mean, no, of course not. Even like the idea that solar power is cheap, you know, is cheaper, right? It's free if you get the panels. But, I mean, there's no, yeah, there's no incentive for change. I mean, that's one of the larger problems going on.

Hey, folks, if you haven't heard every single week we do a special bonus episode for Beast Inside, the Daily Beast membership program. Sometimes we interview senators like Corey Booker, or the folks who explain what's happening behind the scenes in media, like Jim Acosta or Soledadadad O'Brien. Sometimes we just have fun and talk to our favorite comedians and actors like Busy Phillips or Billy Eichner, and sometimes we just have friends around to analyze what's happening in the news. You can get all of our episodes in your favorite podcast app of choice

by becoming a beast inside member where you'll support the beast fearless journalism, as well as getting full access to podcasts and articles. To become a member, head to New Abnormal. That's New Abnormal.com. That's new abnormal. That the DailyBeast.com. George Conway is a contributing columnist at the Washington Post. Welcome back to the new abnormal George Conway.

Hello. I have so much to talk to you about, and I'm so glad you came on the podcast. I really strong-armed you into it. You did. Say that for the record. You did. I'm making a stop at the emergency room to get my shoulder replaced. You got to snore people.

It's like part of my... It's my heritage. Where did I hear that? Schnoor. It was like a movie where somebody was saying Schnorer. What was that movie? It's Yiddish.

And if it's not Yiddish, duh. Well, it might be some kind of, it may have some kind of, you know, earlier history than Yiddish that I don't know about. You know, like it's like Lidino

or some language that I don't even, I know that if I'm wrong, someone will text me or DM me to tell me. No, it was like, schnorer means like, you know, somebody who, leeches off other people. Yes. But I'm snoring you, which means I'm just sort of

putting pressure to it. Yes. I guess it's contextual. This part of Yiddish with George Conway. Yes. Yiddish lessons with George Conway. Hey, we do pronunciation. We can do Yiddish pronunciation. But I want to talk to you about the chutzpah of this, the former guy, and the January 6th committee. The former guy, he has chutzpah. Yes, he does.

Okay. So, let's talk. You wrote a piece for the Washington Post where you talked about Hutzpah. Yes. Explain to us what is going on right now. The former guy seems to be in the news a lot because he seems to have done bad things over a number of years. And he's a bad person. And when lawyers have to represent bad people who do bad things, generally they often end up. This is kind of a legal principle that's unwritten.

They don't really teach you this in law school, but you figure it out sooner or later. bad people who do bad things and have lawyers, often the lawyers are forced to make bad arguments for them. I know this is surprising, but it's true. And that's one of the reasons why he lost, he lost big, in this case where he tried to invoke the privilege of having been the chief executive of the United States of America to avoid the production of materials from his White House relating to the events of 6th January 2021. And he lost in record time. He lost in the district court. He brought suit in October. He lost in the district court of November. He lost in the Court of Appeals in December. And he lost big time last week in the Supreme Court of the United States, which basically refused perfunctorily, but with like six sort sentences or so, give or take,

to entertain if he used the grant, his application for emergency relief to prevent these terrible documents from being, or I guess he felt they were terrible. That's why he was trying to suppress them, from being produced. But now they are in the hands of the committee to investigate the January 6th attacks and all is well. George, I want to stop you for a minute.

because this Supreme Court ruling was an eight to one ruling. Well, you actually, I don't think you can actually tell that it was eight to one, but that's probably right. The dissenter. Yeah, there are only one person, only a one member of the court. Justice Thomas noted disagreement with the order, and it was just, he didn't even explain his reasons. It was just one sentence. Basically, you can assume it's probably right that eight members of the court voted for the order. So let's just talk about this for another minute here. Michael Tamaski wrote a piece today. I don't know if you read it that was from Jane Mayer's piece this weekend, which connected Ginny Thomas to a lot of, again, we don't know how connected she is, but there's certainly some connections between her and a lot of very kind of shadowy conservative causes, for lack of a better word. There was some pressure that he might recuse himself from this decision. He didn't. Tamaski sort of threats,

needle and says he should be impeached. I mean, obviously that's not going to happen because nothing ever happens, but do you think that that's reasonable, or does that just strike you as totally partisan? She's been an activist on the right for a very long time, and this isn't anything all that new, although we're entering kind of a new world after January 6th. But the fact of the matter is, you can't, it's not necessarily problematic for a spouse to hear cases that another spouse might have, I'm not going to say an interest in, but has viewpoints about. Just because somebody's on the bench and their spouse engages in political activities doesn't necessarily mean that anything that might touch upon the politics of the current era would result in disqualification. I mean, an example

would that would be, there is a judge on the Third Circuit. I think she's now as senior status, but her name was Marjorie Rendell. And for, you know, her husband at one point during her judicial career was chairman of the Democratic National Committee. At another point in his career, he was mayor of her career, I think. He was mayor of Philadelphia. And then he was later governor, a Democratic governor of Pennsylvania. And yet, So, you know, it wasn't, nobody said, well, her husband's involved in politics and involved in all these issues and taking positions on candidates and things. You know, we can't have her on the court. She did have to recuse herself from things when he was governor of Pennsylvania. She recused herself from things that involved specifically, I think things that involved the interests of the executive branch of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.

but there's no kind of general proposition that judges can't have spouses who engage in political activity or even legal activity. I mean, there was a big controversy. There was, it was somewhat controversial, but, you know, it wasn't grounds for impeachment that I think there was a judge on the Ninth Circuit, who's now passed, whose wife was head of the ACLU of California, and he actually heard civil liberties cases. So you have to be really, really careful in this regard. But I do, I do understand, And it's not great that she engages in activities that are controversial while her husband is on the bench. I mean, for example, Jane Roberts was, I think before he went on to the bench, was a practicing lawyer, and she was involved with feminists for life and other groups. And she basically chucked all that.

And she became a legal recruiter. It's a tough thing to sort of set rules that govern spouses. I mean, the kinds of rules that do that are strict regarding traditional spouses are financial disclosures. Right. Which, again, Jane Mayer writes about. Right. If a judge's spouse owns stock, that's attributable to the judge because presumably if you're married, you know, you have a kind of a unified financial interest in most cases. You know, spouses who have real marriages. So it's a tricky, tricky, tricky thing. But I do understand why people don't particularly like. her involvement with some of these groups and then, you know, the attacks on the January 6th Committee and then his hearing a case on whether or not the executive privilege applied against

the January 6th Committee. But the letter she signed, though, didn't actually address the issue as she wasn't a party before the court. So I think technically there was no issue. I'm not professing to be an expert in judicial ethics on this. Right. It definitely smacks of some preferable all around that people not be, you know, they're not being ammunition to attack a judge's participation in a case. I mean, there's always going to be something sometimes. Anyway, it didn't matter here because it was so overwhelmingly elopsided. So the thing we had Preet on last Monday, and Preet said something that I have been really concerned about and his concern only may be more concerned, which is, you know, Merrick Garland has this Mark Meadows criminal referral, and he has not

yet issued an indictment. Doesn't this strike you as that he's not pulling his weight here? I'm not going to prejudge Garland harshly for that at this point. I mean, I think it took a while, you know, people were saying that about why haven't you indicted Bannon? Why haven't you indicted Bannon for weeks, and then, boom, there it came. You know, the Department of Justice is a big department, okay? And it's got lots of people in it. It's got many, many layers of management, and it takes a while sometimes to do things. And, you know, this has to be done through the U.S. Attorney's Office. You have to convene a grand jury. You know, there are actually, there are people out there. There are other crimes being committed that need, you know, that need attention,

including in the District of Columbia, all of these people who have been arrested and charged in connection with January 6th. I mean, the caseload there now, the docket there is very, very heavy with all this stuff. And that's why, you know, in the U.S. Attorney's Office is overwhelmed with all of this stuff, no doubt, and the Justice Department. And I just, it would be nice if everything worked faster, but that's just not realistic as, particularly in the era of COVID, where, you know, it's difficult to get court time and things like that. You do feel like it's very important that the Justice Department follows up on these indictments or congressional indictments. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. It should not be. It's crazy that people should be able to flout these subpoenas. And particularly in this case, they should pay for not complying with these subpoenas. A lot of people think that these sedition charges against the oathkeepers are Merritt Garland making a larger case of sedition against people who are higher up.

on the food chain. Do you see a world where that's what's going on? Yeah, I think that is what's going on. The question is how far up the food chain do they go and how long it takes? And I don't think we can really answer that yet, but absolutely. That's the classic way that prosecutors deal with big events, big cases, complex cases involving lots of people in large, potentially large criminal conspiracies, is they work their way from the bottom up. And, you know, that was what the, that was the point of Garland's speech two or three weeks ago. You know, this is the way we make case. And we've done a lot in a year, particularly given COVID and the difficulty in getting arraignments before courts because you can't actually appear in court in a lot of situations.

And, you know, it's been, it's, they've done a tremendous amount. It's clear. I mean, the Oathkeeper's indictment shows just an incredible amount of piecing together information from multiple sources, such as social media, private phone texts, interviews of cooperating witness. and tens of thousands of hours of video that was taken on January 6 by these boneheads. Is boneheads a legal term? It's official legal term for what you call people who, you know, who commit crimes and take videos of themselves doing it. And then post them on social media under their own names and then brag about it.

Yes, that's bonehead, yes. If it's not in Black's Law dictionary, it should be. So we have really right now, the Justice Department doing one, investigation, which you think is the seditious investigation, which could go up, we don't know how high up. And then you have the January 6th committee, which doesn't have the same, they can make referrals, but they can't actually, right? I mean, can you explain how justice could be brought by the January 6th committee to those of us who are not lawyers? Well, I mean, look, I mean, I think first of all, they are going to be collecting evidence that the Justice Department may not have collected. And they are

also, I think this is very important, is they're building a record that could be used by the Justice Department. And they're also building potentially, they could potentially change public sentiment or enlighten the public as to what happened here and to make people understand that what happened here was not just some rowdy protests of limited import, but a very serious attempt to destroy the Constitution. And I think, yeah, I think all of those purposes are, are important. And I think, you know, in terms of the potential criminal prosecutions, it might make people understand the need for them if they don't already. Yeah, which I think is useful. Thank you so much for joining us, George Conway. That was really great. I love it. Love being here.

Johan Hari has authored books like Chasing the Scream and Lost Connections. And today he'll talk to us about his new book, Stolen Focus. Why You Can't Pay Attention, and how to think deeply again. Welcome to the new abnormal, Johan Hari. I'm so happy to be with you. Well, we're very happy to have you. Jesse has lots of questions, but I first want to start with the famous,

because we just were talking about this, the famous rat TED Talk. Can you explain that to the listeners who are not completely inside baseball here, our parents, our dads? I was in a taxi in London, and the taxi driver said to me, I'll recognize you,

and I said, oh, I don't think you did. And he said, no, no, I recognize you. And the whole journey was trying to guess who I was. Are you an actor? And I'm like, no, I'm not an actor. So I paid him and I got out. He drove off. And then a minute later, he drove back and said,

Oi! And I said, yeah, and he said, you're the addicted rat's TED Talk, Cunt. And I was like, yes, that is me. I once gave a TED talk, because we had, I mean, I can tell you the gist of the TED Talk in like a minute if you want me to. So we had a lot of addiction in my family. One of my earliest memories is trying to wake up one of my relatives and not been able to.

So for a book I wrote called Chasing the Scream, I did loads and loads of research on addiction, trying to understand what causes it, what we can do about it. And there was a moment where my whole conception of addiction changed. Let's think about heroin addiction because that was so close to me. If you'd said to me when I started doing the research, well, what causes heroin addiction? I would have looked at you like you were an idiot. And I would have said, well, obviously heroin causes heroin addiction. The clues in the name, dummy, right? We've been told this story for 100 years that's become totally part of our common sense. we think if I kidnap the next 20 people to walk past my apartment right now,

and like a villain in a saw movie, I injected them all with heroin three times a day for a month. At the end of that month, they'd all be heroin addicts. For a simple reason, there's chemical hooks in heroin that their bodies would start to desperately physically crave, right? And that's addiction. The craving for the chemical hooks. That's why in English we call it being hooked, right?

That is one part of the picture, but it turns out it's a really quite small part of the picture. And I only began to understand that when I went to Vancouver and met one of the most remarkable people I've ever met, a man named Professor Bruce Alexander, who did an experiment in the 70s that has transformed how we think about addiction. And Professor Alexander explained to me, the story we have in our heads that addiction is caused primarily or entirely by the chemical hooks, comes from a series of experiments that were done earlier in the 20th century. The really simple experiments, anyone listening at home, if you're a bit bored, you could do this yourself, although I don't recommend it. You take a rat, you put it in a cage and you give it two water bottles. One is just water. The other is water laced with either heroin or cocaine. If you do that, the rat will almost always prefer the drug water and almost always kill itself

quite quickly. So there you go. That's our story. That's how I feel like me. That's who I am. Exactly. You are that lonely rat because you're exposed to the drug. You want more and more of it.

And quite quickly you overdose, right? Obviously, we hope we don't get to that point with you. But in the 70s, Professor Alexander was looking at these experiments and he says, well, hang on a minute, you put the rat alone in an empty cage with nothing that makes life meaningful for rats. All they've got is the drugs. What would happen if we did this differently? So he built a cage called Rat Park, which is basically like heaven for rats. They've got loads of friends, they got loads of cheese, they got loads of coloured balls, they can have loads of sex. Anything a rat wants in life is there in Rat Park. And they've got both the water bottles,

the drugged water and the normal water. And of course, they try both, they don't know what's in them. This is the fascinating thing. In Rat Park, they don't like the drug water. They don't use it very much. None of them use it compulsively, none of them overdose. So you go from 100% compulsive use and overdose when they don't have the things that make life worth living to no compulsive use and overdose when they have the things that make life worth living. This is why I concluded, and there's a huge amount of human research, the opposite of addiction is not sobriety. The opposite of addiction is connection. That brings me to a good segue since you've written two of my favorite books.

I'll pay you the compliment that I bought Lost Connections for nearly everybody I know who doesn't understand depression and a loved one. And they're always so thankful for that gift. And you've now written another absolutely amazing book. But because you're in friendly territory, I want to pre-up this with you are dealing with two people with severe Twitter addiction. So go easy on us with this thing. Not me. I don't know what you're talking about. No, definitely not you.

Certainly not an addict Looking at a worse addict, for sure, no But when we're reporting the podcast You'll be like, I see you tweeting during Yeah, bad I have been where you are, don't worry There is no judgment in this space You've written a book on depression

And a book on the drug war And a book on addiction How did you get to the fact that we're so distracted And writing a book about attention? Yeah, every book I ever write there's a sort of mystery that I want to solve for myself, right, that I don't understand. Obviously, I don't start as a total blank slate. I've got some ideas, but I want to get to the bottom of it. And for this book, which is called Stolen Focus, Why You Can't Pay Attention,

I just noticed that with each year the past, my own attention was getting much worse. It felt like every year, things that require deep attention, like reading a book, were getting more and more like running up a down escalator. Do you know what I mean? I could still do them, but it was getting harder and harder. And I noticed loads of people around me seem to feel the same way, and I was particularly worried about some of the young people I love. But for a long time, I just thought, oh, you know, you get older, your brain doesn't work as well. It's very easy to mistake your own deterioration for the deterioration of humanity. Isn't this just a perennial human problem? You know, and then I started looking at some of the early research. It's quite striking for every

one child who was diagnosed with serious attention problems when I was seven years old. There's now a hundred children given that diagnosis. The average American office worker now focuses on any one task for only three minutes. So I think, well, has this really always been the case? But actually, I only really began to delve into the science of it when I had an experience with a young person I love. Are you okay if I tell this story? It really, it's funny. It happened on the sofa just behind where my laptop is, and I, even looking at that sofa, I felt a bit choked up for a moment. So when he was nine years old, my godson, Adam, developed this brief but freakishly intense obsession with Elvis.

I never understood where it came from, but it was especially cute because he didn't know that Elvis had become like a cheesy cliche. So, you know, he was singing like Viva Las Vegas and suspicious minds with all the heart-catching sincerity of a nine-year-old who believes he's genuinely being cool. And he kept getting me to tell me the story of Elvis's life, and I obviously tried to skip over the bit of the end where he shits himself

to death on a toilet. But one night, I was picking at him. And he looked at me very intensely, and he said, Johan, will you take me to Graceland one day? And I said, sure. And he said, no, do you promise? Do you swear you'll take me to Graceland one day? And in the way you give promises to nine-year-olds,

knowing they'll forget them the next morning, I was like, I absolutely promise, I will take you to Graceland. And I left the room, and I didn't think about that again for 10 years until everything had gone wrong. So he dropped out of school when he was 15. And by the time he was 19,

this day when we were sitting on my sofa over there, I can't think of any other way to describe, other than that he appeared to have fractured. He spent all his time, and I'm not hyperboising, all his time alternating between his iPod, his phone, his laptop. His life was just passing in a blur of YouTube, WhatsApp, porn, Snapchat. And it was like he was whirring at the speed of Snapchat, where nothing still or serious could touch him. And we were sitting there one afternoon, and I've been trying to talk to him all day, and nothing was getting any traction in his mind. And to be honest, I wasn't much better. I was sitting there looking at my own phone. And I just thought,

this is terrible. And I suddenly remembered this moment 10 years before. And I said to him, hey, let's go to Graceland. And he was like, what? He didn't even remember this promise I'd made all these years before. And I was like, we've got to break this numbing routine. Let's go all over the south. Let's go to Graceland. But on one condition, which is that you leave your phone in the hotel when we go out during the day. And he promised he would. I could see it igniting something in him. And two weeks later, we took off in New Orleans, where we went first. And a few weeks after that, we arrived at the gates of Graceland. And when you get there, have either of you guys been to Graceland?

No. Never. I really recommend it. But when you get there, this is even before COVID, there's no person whose job is to show you around anymore. What happens is they give you an iPad. You put in these earbuds and the iPad guides you around. It says, go left, go right. It describes the room you're in.

So what happens is everyone walks around Graceland just staring at. their iPad. So I'm kind of walking around getting more and more tense and I'm trying to make eye contact with someone else to go, this is kind of funny. We're the people who traveled thousands of miles and actually looked at the place we traveled to. And finally, I made eye contact with a guy and I was about to say it. And I realized he'd only looked away from the iPad to take out his phone and take a selfie. So we got to the jungle room, which was Elvis's favorite room in Grace Land. And I'm looking at it. And there was a Canadian couple next to me. And the husband turned to his wife and said,

Honey, look, this is amazing. If you swipe left, you can see the jungle room to the left, and if you swipe right, you can see the jungle room to the right. And they start swiping, and I laughed out loud. I thought he was joking. And I turn, and him and his wife are just swiping left and right. And I turned to them, and I lean forward,

and I said, but hey, sir, there's an old-fashioned form of swiping you could do. It's called turning your head, because, look, we're actually in the jungle room. You don't have to look at a good. Did he try to shoot you? Exactly. Well, I said to him, you don't have to look at a digital representation. We're actually there. And they looked at me like I was crazy. Fortunately, they didn't take out a gun and kind of back to the way. And I turned. I think it's a concealed, is it a concealed carry state? I'm not sure. So I'm pretty sure. So I turned to my godson to sort of laugh and go, isn't this crazy? And he was just in a corner looking at Snapchat because from the minute we landed, he could not stop. And I walked up to him. him and I did that thing which is never a good idea with a teenager. I tried to grab the phone

out of his hands and I said to him, I know you're afraid of missing out. This is guaranteeing you will miss out. You are not showing up to your own life. You're not present at the events of your own existence. And he stormed off, again, understandably. And I found him that night in the Heartbreak Hotel around the corner where we were staying. He was sitting by the guitar shapes swimming pool looking at his phone. And I went up to him and I said, I apologize. and he just looking at his phone and he couldn't look up at me, but he just said, I know something's really wrong, but I don't know what it is. And that's when I thought I had to really investigate this.

So over the next three years, I traveled all over the world from Miami to Melbourne to Moscow and even to places that don't begin with the letter M. And I don't know why I became so illiterative then. And I interviewed over 200 of the leading experts on focus and attention. And I studied their science in great detail. And I learned from them that there's scientific evidence for 12 factors. that can make your attention better or can make it worse. They include some aspects of tech and go way beyond it.

And the evidence shows that loads of the factors that can harm our attention really are getting much sharper. This is a real attention crisis. And the most important thing to understand is your attention didn't collapse. Your attention has been stolen from you by these big forces. And we're going to have to take on those forces. So one of the ones that I think is really common that people rebel against when they realize this about themselves,

that their brain is broken, is they'll buy a flip phone or try to revert technology backwards. You tried this. Can you talk about what you saw? When I came back from Memphis, I was so disgusted at myself that I announced to everyone I knew,

and I was really lucky I'd been able to do. It's basically one of my books have been made into film, so I had some money. And I just said, look, what I'm going to do is I'm going to go completely off the internet for three months.

So I booked a little room in a cottage in a place called Provincetown in Cape Cod. For people who don't know Provincetown, It's a little kind of gay resort. It's the kind of place where more than one person earns a full-time living by dressing as Ursula, the villain from The Little Mermaid,

and singing songs about Khamelago. It's a great place. And I went there, and I had no laptop that could get online. My friend Imteyaz gave me his broken laptop that couldn't have online in years. And I had no smartphone. I had an old brick phone that almost no one had the number two. It was a really interesting experience

because I had some ups and downs. The thing that blew my mind was how much my attention came back. I thought, you know, aging must have just damaged my brain. My attention went back was as good as it had been when I was 17. I could sit and read books for like eight hours a day. I can talk about what I later learned from the scientists about why this was. But I remember at the end of those three months, thinking, well, I've cracked the code then. I'm never going to go back to how I lived before.

And within a month of getting my phone back, I was almost as bad as I bit. Not quite, but almost as bad. I only understood why when I went to interview this guy called Dr. James Williams, an amazing guy. It was a senior Google strategist. It was so horrified by what they were doing to us that he quit. and has become, I would argue, the leading philosopher of attention in the world. And he said to me, the mistake you've made is thinking this is purely an individual problem

that you can solve just on your own is like thinking the solution to air pollution is for you personally to wear a gas mask. Not against wearing a gas mask. If I lived in Beijing, I'd wear a gas mask. But this is being done to us. At the moment, it's like someone is pouring itching powder over us all day and then leaning over and going, hey, buddy, you might want to learn how to meditate. Then you wouldn't scratch so much.

And it's like, yeah, I'll learn to meditate. but you need to stop pouring itching powder on me, you motherfucker. And so what we've got to do is have two levels at which we respond to this. There are all sorts of things we can do in our individual, personal, private lives to protect ourselves and our children. I'm strongly in favor of that. I go through loads of things I've done in the book and that other people can do. But I want to be level with people that will only get you so far.

Professor Joel Nigg, who's one of the leading experts on children's attention problems, who I interviewed in Portland in Oregon, said to me that we have to ask now if we're living in what he called an attentional pathogenic environment, one that is undermining the ability of all of us to pay deep attention. And we've got to change together the specific aspects of our environment that are doing that to us. Otherwise, this is going to continue to be a quite serious crisis. What happened with your godson? He's doing, you know, it's interesting. He's doing a lot better, partly because he found a job that is really meaningful to him, where he's helping people. And there's a lot of evidence that attention evolved to attach to meaning. When something is meaningful to you, you will

find it easy to pay attention to it. When something is meaningless to you, your attention will slip and slide off of it. This is why it's such a fucking disaster that we have a school system that's built around meaningless rote learning and tests that don't mean anything. Because if you wanted to kill children's ability to pay attention, that's what you do. It's not a coincidence when the No Child Left Behind Act is introduced by George W. Bush, President Bush, in 2004. We're always, You remember that nightmare? Yeah, but yes. That massively increases the amount of rote learning and standardized testing.

In the next four years, diagnoses of ADHD went up by 24% in the United States. Kids can't focus on meaningless shit. And that is not a flaw in those children. That's actually a fucking healthy response in those children. So, my godson had a real, when he found a sense of purpose and meaning, his attention massively improved. So, you know, there's still a lot of challenges because there's still a lot of factors in the environment that are undermining his attention, but he's a lot better. Yeah, that's a really,

very heartening. One of the things I noticed between lost connections of this is that you found some of the things also were more holistic health problems that you could deal with to get your attention back. Yeah, so it was fascinating. So there were so many things that I learned about. It never even occurred to me were connected to attention and focus. So let's think about the way we eat, right? One of the things that change, so I'm a complete junk food addict. You can't see this, But actually, I had a real low point in my life was in 2009. I went to my local KFC in East London. It was Christmas Eve, which makes this story even sadder.

It was lunchtime. Well, it's only lunchtime. I said my normal order, which is so disgusting, I won't even say it out loud. And the guy behind the counter said to me, Oh, Johann, I'm so glad you're here. Wait a minute. And he went off behind where they fry the chicken and everything. And he came back with everyone else who was on staff that day.

And they had bought me a massive Christmas Christmas Christmas. card in which they'd written to our best customer and everyone had like personally signed it and written messages to me. Oh no, that's terrible. And one of the reasons my heart sank is I thought, this isn't even the fried chicken shop I come to the most. It was a real, real low point. And I never went back to that branch. About two years later, I bumped into that guy. And he said to me, oh, yeah, and you didn't come back. And I said, yeah. And he said, and we just assumed you'd had a heart attack. I was like, fuck off. Terrible.

So the way we eat is profoundly affecting our focus and attention. And there's three big ways that I learned about for me to being, you know, many experts on this. First way is the standard Western diet. So think about the standard, you know, American British breakfast. You have sugary cereal or you have white bread, right? What that does as one of the leading nutritionists in Britain, Dale Pinnock, explained to me, is that releases a huge amount of energy really quickly. You get a shot of glucose to the brain and you feel great.

suddenly feel awake. But an hour or two later, you're sitting at your desk or your kid is sitting at their desk, and they will experience a huge energy slump. And when your energy crashes, you experience what's called brain fog where you just can't focus very well. Your head is just foggy. And you get your attention back when you have another sugary carbly snack. The way we eat means that we live on a roller coaster of energy spikes and energy crashes, which leaves us with long patches of brain fog throughout the day. The way Dale put it to me is it's like we're putting rocket fuel into a mini. go really fast for three minutes and then it'll just conch out. And then you're going to struggle to focus. Whereas if you eat a diet that releases energy steadily throughout the day, your attention

will be much better. The second way is that for your brain to develop fully, it needs certain nutrients, it needs certain things in the food you eat. And it turns out our diets at the moment, the food we eat, just lacks a lot of those nutrients, things like omega-3s, and supplements just don't do it. Your brain doesn't metabolize supplements as well as it does when you get it in actual food. The third way is even more disturbing. It's not just that our food lacks the stuff we need for our brains to develop. It also contains chemicals that act on us like drugs. There was a study here in Britain in Southampton in 2007. They got 297 kids and split them into two groups. And the first group was just given, I think, water to drink. And the second was given a little, a drink that contained loads

of the kind of chemicals that occur in normal food you get in the supermarket and candies like M&Ms. And the second group were significantly more likely to become manic and struggle with their attention. So there's all sorts of factors in the way we currently eat because our food supply system has changed so much that are fucking with our focus that we've got to deal with. So that's one of the 12 factors and one of the ones that most surprised me because I was like, it didn't even occur to me that that would be playing a role in my attention and focus. Talk to us about Facebook. Yeah. It's bad, right? I've come to the conclusion that it's bad, discuss. It's funny, I go back to Provincetown for a second, right?

Trying to understand why did my attention get so much better in Provincetown. And one of the reasons was that I wasn't being interrupted. And I only understood this better when I went just across the water, actually, in MIT, after I'd finished this period offline. I went to interview one of the leading neuroscientists in the world, a guy named Professor Earl Miller. And he said to me, look, there's one thing you've got to understand about the human brain more than anything else.

You can only think consciously about one or two things at a time. That's it. This is a fundamental limitation of the human brain. The human brain has not significantly changed in 40,000 years. It ain't going to change on any time scale you and me are ever going to see. You can only think about one or two things at a time. But we have fallen for a mass delusion. The average American teenager now believes they can follow six or seven forms of media at the same time.

So what happens when scientists get people into a lab? It's painful, isn't it? What happens when scientists get people into a lab and get them to think they're doing lots of things at the same time? They observe them. And what they discover is in fact, when you think you're doing lots of things at the same time, you're juggling very rapidly between them. Your consciousness kind of papers over it, you don't realize it, but you're juggling.

And that juggling comes with a really big cost. The technical term for it is the switch cost effect. When you try and do more than one thing at a time, you will do all the things you're trying to do significantly less competently. You'll make more mistakes, you'll remember less of what you do, you'll do them all less creatively, you'll screw up a lot more. There's loads of evidence for this, but there was one study in particular that really drove it home to me. And it's a very small study, but there's much wider body of evidence for this.

So Hewlett-Packard, the printer company, they called in a scientist to do a little experiment with some of their workers. He split the workers into two groups. And the first group of workers was told, just do whatever your task is for now, and you're not going to be interrupted. And the second group was told, do whatever your task is, and you've got to answer a heavy load of email and phone calls. And at the end of this study, they tested the IQ of all of them. And the group that had not been interrupted scored on average 10 IQ points higher than the group that had. To give you a sense of how big that is, if the three of us sat down together now and got fully stoned, we just smoked a load of fat splifts together, our IQs would go down by five points.

So at least in the short term, you'd be better off sitting at your desk, getting stoned and doing one thing at a time, than sitting at your desk, not getting stoned, and just being interrupted all the time with email and phone calls in the way most of us are. So in Provincetown, obviously it's better to neither be stoned nor be interrupted if you're doing your work. It's just to be clear.

And so I realized, one of the reasons I got my attention back in Provincetown is I just wasn't being interrupted all the time. Professor Michael Posner at the University of Oregon discovered that if you're interrupted, it takes you on average 23 minutes to get back to the level of focus you had before you interrupted. But most of us never get 23 minutes spare, right? So we're constantly operating at this depleted level of brainpower. This is why Professor

Miller said to me, we live in a perfect storm of cognitive degradation as a result of all these interruptions. Now, this is really important for your question, Molly, about Facebook, because there are many things going on with Facebook, but one of them is it is designed to interrupt us. For a very simple reason, every time you pick up Facebook and start scrolling, they start to make money because you see ads and they learn more and they learn more about you to sell information about you, to advertisers so they can hack your attention, right? So every time you open Facebook, every time you pick it up and every minute extra that you scroll, they make more money. And every time you put Facebook down, they lose those revenue streams. So all of their engineering

power, all of their algorithms, all of this genius gathered in Silicon Valley is geared towards one goal. How do I get Molly to pick up her phone more times and how do I get her to scroll longer? That's it. Just like the CEO of KFC only cares about whether you eat fried chicken. All they care about is as I said that I felt a little bit of a hunger pang. But the CEOs of all these social media companies, all they care about is how do we get people to pick up their phones more and scroll longer? What we've got to do is deal with this underlying business model. If we don't deal with the business model, they will carry on hacking and invading our attention. A big part of what I argue in the book is we've got to defend ourselves. There's all sorts of practical steps that I go

through in my book, Stolen Focus, about how you can defend yourself and your children on a personal level. And we've got to form a movement to take on these big forces that are doing this to us. Because we're in a race. They are going to become more invasive if we let them. They are going to fuck with us even more. Think about how much more addictive TikTok is to a child. The metaphors. Exactly. At the other side, there's got to be a movement of ordinary people saying, no, you don't get to do this to us. And it requires a shift in perspective. We've got to stop blaming ourselves.

We are not medieval peasants at the court of King Zuckerberg begging for a few little crumbs of attention from his table. We are the free citizens of democracies, and we own our own minds, and we can take them back from the fuckers who've stolen them from us. I love it. I think we've got our poll quote right there. Thank you.

Yoha, thanks so much into our listeners. There's no more interesting books that I could recommend than yours. So please, please buy these. Thanks so much. I'm so moved by that. Thank you, guys. I really, really enjoyed this. What's crazier than QAnon, more outlandish than Pizza Gate,

and scarier than a Mexican getaway with Ted Cruz? The answer is what the American right wing has planned next. Be one of the first to listen to Fever Dreams, new podcasts from The Daily Beast, tracking the conspiracy slingers, orange acolytes, and straight-up grifters pushing to retake power. Every Wednesday hosts Swin Subisang and Will Summer

checking in on the movement of the radical right. Head to the DailyBeast.com slash podcasts or your favorite podcast player to catch the first episode and get subscribed. That's Fever Dreams, which you can subscribe to wherever you get your podcasts. Andy Levy. Molly Johnfeff? My fuck that guy is

Robert F. Kennedy the second or junior as he prefers, I guess. who spoke at a, well, they don't want it to be called an anti-vax rally, but it was an anti-vax rally in Washington. What do they want it to be called? I think they wanted to be called like an anti-mandate rally or something like that. Because then they seem less crazy?

Yes, exactly. But RFK Jr. is, you know, he's anti-vax, and he spoke there, so I'm going to call it an anti-vax rally. He compared our current society to Nazi-German. because of things like vaccine mandates and 5G technology and satellites and stuff like that. And what he said was, he said, today the mechanisms are being put in place that will make it so none of us can run and none of us can hide. And then later he said, even in Hitler's Germany, you could cross the Alps into Switzerland. You could hide in an attic like Anne Frank did.

Now, there's so many things wrong with this statement. First of all, Anne Frank wasn't hiding in an attic in Germany, but we'll let, that's like the least of his mistakes. Yes. Is the geography of the whole thing? And obviously, the biggest of his mistakes is either he didn't finish the book or read the epilogue or I don't know how he thinks the Anne Frank story ended. You know, look, it's easy to go to Nazi analogies. And it's honestly, it's easy for us to do that, too, with people. on the right. And I think we have a little more of, you know, we're a little more correct when we do it,

but it's still, you got to stay away from it. But these people don't want to stay away from it. And he, like I said, he, he is actually saying that we are currently in a worse position than Nazi Germany. You know, he's saying, well, even in Hitler's Germany, it wasn't as bad as this, is what he's saying. And it got me thinking, I really want, like, I want the Q people to be right just, just for once. want JFK Jr. to come back and just slap RFK Jr. in the face and then go back to heaven or wherever he is. And that's what I really, so I'm praying for the Q people that they are correct that JFK Jr. is still out there. And I just want him to slap his, is it his cousin, I guess, in the face. But so RFK Jr. is absolutely my fuck that guy for this week. You know, it's so funny,

because I'm so conflicted about this because I don't like it when people who are anti-vaxxers who've chosen not to get a vaccine compare themselves to like my great-grandparents who were murdered because they were Jewish. Because it's not the same thing at all, right? And every, you know, the line is your, you don't like that? You don't appreciate that? Your inconvenience is not the Holocaust. But I'm glad that they still think the Holocaust is bad. Yeah. But I mean, like, some of these people are actual Nazis, right? Like, the proud boys marched with them.

So I am glad that they still think the Holocaust is bad. I'm just saying. Well, that's the thing. I was actually thinking that, and thank you for reminding me of that. I was actually thinking that Kennedy, you know, that RFC was giving, RFC Jr. was giving this speech. And I was thinking half the people in that crowd probably think the Holocaust was a good thing. So you've lost them.

And then there's like another, probably another third of the crowd thinks the whole. thinks the Holocaust never happened. Right, exactly. Who are you talking to? Like, I don't even know who you're talking to at this point. So bad. That was literally my first son. But that's the thing you should look around, you should look around and see the people you're talking to. And that should make you rethink your position. It's worth talking about this whole weekend, you know, there was, in D.C., where I am right now, there was an anti-vax rally with proud boys on Saturday. On Friday, there was the quote-unquote March for Life, which should be called the march against women being able to choose over their own bodies. And that was the 49th anniversary of Rose.

So, D.C. saw a lot of stupid this weekend. Well, that's not unusual. It's true. But usually the stupid is not imported. That's true. It's usually homegrown. So one of the things Jesse Cannon has done as my penance is that I watch, I am forced to watch. watch Bill Maher every Friday because it makes Jesse happy. That's not what it does.

It's true. And because he's a sadist. And no. But anyway, so I was watching it this week on Saturday morning because I don't stay up until 10.30. I mean, what are you nuts? And poor Andy, they get text from me at like 6.30 in the morning. In completing my goal of becoming Angela Lansbury, the character from Murphi. or she wrote in this soliloquy that was actually, you know, she's quite a gifted orator in her way.

Barry Weiss declared that she was done with COVID and that she was sick of it and that everyone else was sick of it too, but people were too scared to say they were sick of it. So she was going to get up because, you know, she loves to do things like this. And she's going to tell us all how she is done with COVID and that she's done with lockdowns and she's done with this and she's done with that. And she used to care and she used to wash her Pringles. Honestly, like, I was like, she bought, she buys Pringles? She talks about eating Big Mac every day. She literally said she was, she wants to eat a Big Mac every day.

Nobody is that healthy in my household, but like Pringles are on the no-fly list. I really hope Joe Rogan, uh, since he's so in love with her, he really, uh, takes her up on that one next time she's on since he loves going off about that. Well, so anyway, she buys Pringles. She used to wipe them down. She doesn't wipe them down anymore. and she wants us to know it. So a lot of people were rightly horrified, and you know, there are certainly a lot of people who have comorbidities who are really, you know, for whom even a mild case of, not that it's all mild, but a mild case, even a mild case would be, could end them in the hospital or threaten their lives. So I think there's, you really on the wrong side of history here.

But the other thing about this, and I don't think she's wrong. Like, we're in a pandemic. We are in year three. People are very frustrated, right? I mean, this is not how any of us have been living before the pandemic, and it's very stressful and it doesn't feel good. And, you know, I mean, but in the same sense, every, all this, you know, 97% of all American schools are open, right? Airplanes are flying. Restaurants are open.

I flew down to D.C. today. I took a taxi. Taxis are happening. I mean, there's not any, you know, I went to a movie last weekend. Like, like this shutdown that they're talking about, where is that? The only thing that Barry Weiss has to do differently now than she did prior to COVID is put a piece of fabric across her nose and mouth. Well, not fabric, but, you know. Well, whatever, whatever the mask is made. No, but a mask. I mean, other than that, what. I cannot, for the life of me, figure out how she is inconvenienced by COVID in any way. And I'm sorry, it's just everyone's over COVID, as you said. Like, nobody's happy. This is the thing that really bugs me is, you know, saying I'm over COVID and then saying, I have many liberal and progressive friends who feel the same way, but they're too afraid to say it in public.

Fuck off. I'm so sick of that. I've been hearing that for like the last, even pre-co. COVID. Like, this is the big thing with the intellectual dark web and the people who claim their politically tribalist is that, oh, I have so many messages from people saying the same thing, but they don't want to say it in public. No, you don't. Absolutely do not. I was out of the hipster coffee shop and, you know, yeah, exactly. I'm just so tired of hearing that. Like, look, I stay out of the whole school closings, openings, because I don't have kids.

So I don't feel like it's my place to take a position on that. And I've heard, arguments from people on sort of both sides of that that makes sense to me. So I just figure I should stay out of that. But like, again, I don't have kids. COVID is not that big an inconvenience to me anymore. I just, all I have to do is when I go somewhere, I put a mask on for a couple of minutes. And I go to the store or I do whatever. Big deal.

Like if you can't handle that little bit of inconvenience in your life, you know, an inconvenience, by the way, that might save the life of someone. like you said, someone with comorbidities or an elderly person, like, fuck off. I'm just, I'm so tired of it. I can't, I'm over those people. That's what it is. On that note, we'll wrap this episode of the new abnormal from The Daily Beast.

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