Overtime – Episode #673: Fran Lebowitz, Yuval Noah Harari, Ian Bremmer

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Potential savings will vary, not available in all states or situations. Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO Late Night series, Real Time with Bill Maher.
All right, here we are

on YouTube.

She's an acclaimed author

and social commentator

currently touring

an evening with

Fran Lebowitz.

Fran Lebowitz!

He is the president

and founder

of the Eurasia Group

and GZera Media,

Ian Brummer,

and he's a historian,

philosopher,

and author

of the best-selling book

Sapiens,

and now Nexus, Yuval Noah Harari.

Okay.

All right, here are the questions people have written in.

Following P. Diddy's recent arrest...

Oh, more P. Diddy.

There was a notable increase in streams of his music

across various platforms.

Does this indicate that people are able to separate the art from the artist?

People I don't care about.

I am.

Totally.

I will play P. Diddy if I want to.

I'll play R. Kelly tonight if I want to.

I mean, we'd have to not play Michael Jackson, and no one's not doing that.

I still watch Woody Allen films, and I don't know.

I totally agree.

Well, Woody Allen didn't do anything. Are you really part of that? I don't know.
I just brought it up. I mean...
I know, but I wasn't on that jury. I don't know.
Well, there was two police investigations of that. I mean, we're at a strange place in this country.
Like, the people who want to find somebody guilty,

even when there are investigations and they're exonerated,

sorry, not good enough.

Kevin Spacey had two, completely innocent in two countries.

Sorry, we don't care.

You're still out.

Doesn't matter what.

Either you believe in the rule of law or you don't.

No? No?

If only I had some talkers here. For the first time in American history, young men are more religious than young women.
Does this shift matter? Not to me. It does matter?

I mean, in the sense just that it's one more sign of society atomizing.

You know, not as much time with families, not as much belief in church.

You know, people going to private school as opposed to more in public.

That's something I worry about generally.

I mean, I had never been aware of this to begin with,

that there was this men more religious than women now that it was

the reverse before. Were you?

Okay, so who cares? What were your thoughts on Trump meeting with Zelensky in New York today amid tensions between the two men? Tensions. Who does he not have tensions with? Zelensky has enough problems without having to talk to Trump.
There should be a loss. You have a raging war in your country, you don't talk to Donald Trump.
What do you think we should do about Ukraine? I think that we should defend them to the nth degree. Okay? If Donald Trump hadn't been the president, if there was no Donald Trump, there wouldn't be a question.
There's no parity between Putin and Zelensky. It's an absurd idea.
Except after two years, you know, the rest of the world getting tired. Global South says hypocrisy.
The Europeans saying, eh, we don't want to spend the money we used to. Germany cutting it back by half.
I mean, Ukraine is incredibly courageous. And the president has done a fantastic job leading in the teeth of this war.
But the willingness of the United States to keep this on the front pages and spend billions and billions, I think, under any president. I mean, if Kamala wins, this is still going to be a serious problem.
Well, and the willingness of those people to put up with what they've been putting up with. I mean, that's the issue.
Look, I agree with you, we should defend Ukraine. But it is them who's doing it.
Like, they're the ones who are fighting and dying and living with missiles raining down on them all the time. It's great for us.
We don't have to do anything. Money, we got plenty of that.
Do you notice the money that's missing because we sent it to Ukraine? None of us do. But we're not the ones who are actually dying.
And I wonder if, at the end of the day, are they really going to defeat Russia? Are they really going to defeat Russia? They're not going to get their land back. They're not going to get their...
Nobody believes that they're going to get all their land back.

Wait, so wait, wait, wait.

This is interesting.

Nobody believes they're going to get their land back?

All of their land back, yeah. And we're still letting them die for it?

No, we're still...

Because they want to defend themselves.

They don't want...

They remember what happened during the famine.

When millions were killed under Stalin,

they will fight to the last man and woman

to keep their country, to keep their territory. But the 20% that Russia's taken and the rapes and the deportations, yeah, they're not going to get all that land back.
No one thinks they're going to be able to retake that against a much larger Russia. I think it's a crucial thing to understand.
The most basic rule of the international system is that you cannot just invade and conquer another country because you are stronger. There are lots of conflicts in the world.
I come from the Middle East. I know that.
But since 1945, you have basically just one example of Iraq trying to conquer Kuwait. This was the situation for thousands of years.
We've managed to crawl out of that hole and build a different world. And now all of that is in danger.
If Russia is allowed to simply conquer and destroy Ukraine, and it should be very clear, this is the aim of Putin. He's not hiding it.
They are after destroying the Ukrainian nation. Yes.
If this can happen there, it can happen everywhere. True.
It can... Um...
Um... Do you remember when they used to say that no two nations with a McDonald's ever went to war against each other? What? No.
Even when Kamala worked there. I remember that.
But is that still true? No, it's not still true. It was true for a long time.
It was, but then they put more McDonald's around.

That's the problem.

Because even the dictators got McDonald's.

What are your thoughts on Kamala's trip to the border?

Will that help her close the gap with Trump in Arizona?

I don't think she needs Arizona.

I don't think anyone needs Arizona. I mean...
I don't think anyone needs Arizona. I would say in Arizona, with Putin, here, take Arizona, leave Ukraine.
Fran, you're wearing cowboy boots. I mean, come on.
You're even kind of showing some of the locals. They're not from Arizona.
You're going to... I read your plugs.
You're going to Nashville, right? Is that in Arizona? No, but it's... No, but it's a red state.
I mean, you don't want to insult all the red states. You go there.
I go there and I usually say, really, Nashville? That's what I said. But there are plenty of intelligent people in Nashville and in Arizona.
They come out to see you. Not plenty.
Look at their politicians, okay? Look elect you elected Eric Adams I did not New York did brilliant New York do we ever learn lessons no Thank you. Last week was our first playoff game, and my plaque psoriasis was so itchy under all my gear.
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Call 1-8444-OTESLA or visit otesla.com for prescribing info info about cost and more next question do you ever learn do we ever really learn lessons from from history or are humans fated to make the same mistakes over and over again well there's a famous sainteana quote about those who forget history are condemned to repeat it and we do seem to... It's just, to me, it seems like the amount of time, the gap between when we repeat the mistake gets shorter and shorter.
I mean, Trump was only president four years ago, and they seem to completely have amnesia about what that was like. Give us a few weeks.
You never know. We still don't know if we're going to repeat that mistake.
Oh, we're not. I already put my marker down.
Okay, good.

Yeah.

No, no.

Then it's a counterexample.

No, I'm not even worried about it.

That's a good idea.

You're not even worried about it?

No, not at all.

Really?

Yeah.

No, no, no.

He's definitely going to lose.

This, I, this is.

I hope you're right.

You can just feel it.

You can just feel it.

I hope you're right.

No, I said it weeks ago.

And now the polls are even.

But the polls will be even on an election day. I promise you.

Don't worry about it. Don't think about it.

I don't think about it. Just don't think about it.

What do you think about it? And then even

if he does win, well, you wouldn't have gone

through all that stress.

It's a better way.

It's a better way.

What do you make of comparisons

between the Roman Empire and the U.S.? Are we a society on the brink of decline? Hmm. Wow.
Better food than the Roman Empire. How do we know that? How do we know what they eat? We know what they eat.
How do we know? I'm going to give you a book. Food of the Roman Empire? It's the everything of the Roman Empire.
I've read books on the Roman Empire.

No, no, one book, I'm going to eat.

One book? Really? Okay.

Okay, so what did they eat?

I mean, I think all the rest of the food was more pure than the shit we eat now.

Of course.

Pasta.

You think the ancient Romans had pasta?

Yeah.

I thought it was invented in China.

It was.

But then they sent it to Italy.

They invented pasta in China, but... There was no connection between China and the Roman Empire.
There was no... That was...
I'm waiting for you. You've all wrote the book on this.
We have the guy who wrote the book. The Roman Empire fell in the 5th century, or some would say the 4th A.D.
I don't think connection. Marco Polo was the first person...
I'm just suggesting we should do some research. There was connection, but I don't think that this is the main issue.
It's definitely not the main issue. I think, again, it's important to understand the differences between different historical periods, and not just to make these analogies.
If you think, for instance, about the collapse of the Roman Republic, which is perhaps more pertinent to what the situation now is in the United States. Yes.
What we should understand is that in the ancient world, it was simply impossible to maintain a large scale democracy because it was impossible to maintain a large scale conversation. Democracy is basically conversation.
Dictatorship is one person dictating everything. Democracy is lots of people trying to talk with each other, rich decisions.
Now, the only examples we have of democracies in the ancient world are city-states, like the Warren Republic or Athens or small tribes, because you simply had no information technology to hold a conversation between millions of people spread over a vast territory. So you don't have any example of a large-scale democracy before the late modern age.
Only then you have the information technology, first newspapers, then telegraph, radio, television, that can maintain a large-scale conversation. And again, the crucial question now

is whether the new information technologies

that we are just inventing, like social media and AI,

might destroy democracy.

I mean, because democracy is built on top of information technology,

so if you have a major upheaval in information technology,

there is an earthquake in democracy,

which is what we are feeling right now. He was going to say that.
He was going to say that. I mean, this is the area that you go into a lot in Sapiens, and why so many of us love that book so much.
I mean, you talk about the difference between, like, a group of chimps, right? And I mean actual chimps, not Donald Trump. The biggest it can get is like 70 or 80 people, but because people, humans, basically lie to each other, believes in myths, you can get an army who all believe that Jesus Christ is Lord and we need to retake Jerusalem.
So you can get thousands and millions of people to do something that only 70 or 80 chimps could do. Isn't that right? But it's not all fiction.
I mean, you gave earlier the example of the U.S. Constitution.
I mean, you know, the Bible or the Ten Commandments start with, I am the Lord your God. And because of that, there is no amendment mechanism.
In the Ten Commandments, there is also an endorsement of slavery. In the Tenth Commandment, it says that you should not covet your neighbor's field or house of slaves, which implies in the Ten Commandments that God is perfectly okay with people owning slaves.
It's just wrong to covet the slaves of your neighbor. And there is no mechanism.
You have to start somewhere, Yuval. There is no mechanism of amendment there, which is why we still have the same text.
With the U.S. Constitution, because it acknowledges that this is a text created by humans, it starts with we, the people, it also includes this amendment mechanism which enabled eventually to change the Constitution and to banish slavery.
So it's not true that we are condemned to use only lies and fictions in order to unite people together. I mean, it's more difficult to do it with the truth, but it's not impossible.
So the biggest problem, we were talking about the UN before, biggest problem with the United Nations, the Security Council, is it doesn't have that process, right? I mean, the countries that are on the Security Council, Russia,

committing war crimes, but they have a permanent veto,

can't get rid of them. Germany, Japan,

the two major economies that most

stand up to the UN Charter and

rule of law, can't join

because they lost World War II. India

can't join because they weren't even a country

in 1945. It was 1947.

It's almost like the place is a joke.

You gotta make...

Uh, okay. in 1945.
It was 1947. It's almost like the place is a joke.
You've got to make sure that. Why do people hate the Jews? I just wrote that one.
I just thought it would be a good way to wrap it up and ask. The best historical answer that I know is something which doesn't really come from Christian theology, but still, I'll give you three statements and try to connect them in a logical way.
Statement number one, Jesus came to save all humans from our misery. Statement number two, I'm still miserable.
Statement number three, the Jews killed Jesus. How do you connect these three statements together in a logical way? You get antisemitism.
Right. I would add to that, I think that is one of the reasons that they think, a lot of people think the Jews killed Jesus.
Two, chosen people strikes a lot of people wrong. Just like, oh, you think you're chosen? Well, we'll see about that.
And three, successful. Very successful.
Right? Don't look at me. I didn't like it.
No, but why do you think that there's anti-Semitism? Because in the house. Okay, but what about the young people now? What about this weird alliance between wokeism and jihadism that's going on? I'd also add you've got like this many Jews on TikTok, which is the most important mechanism to transmit information among young people today.
And you've got a vastly larger Muslim population. The algorithms are driving the hate, as Yuval suggested.
That's actually a big component of why it's growing right now. So the answer is get more Jews on TikTok.

You've heard it here first, ladies and gentlemen.

Thank you very much.

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