Ep. #704: Andrew Huberman, Frank Bruni, Christopher Rufo

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Rated mature.

Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO late night series, real time with Bill Ma.

Start the clock.

Thank you.

Thank you, Faithful.

How are you doing?

How are you doing now?

All right.

Thank you so much.

Thank you for coming out

and supporting us

as we support you.

All right.

Thank you.

You sound like you're in a

great mood.

Our friends on the East Coast, I know why you're happy.

They dodged the bullet there.

There was a hurricane heading for these hurricane Aaron.

Did you see this?

But it just touched land and then went back out to sea.

Not even the hurricanes want to come to America anymore

oh

oh here's something

here's a little

tidbit in the news today the border wall you know the border wall that we

Trump built there or whatever, I don't know, but there's some of it there.

And you know how things get hotter when they're black?

You know, that's why people wear white in the summer.

Well, he's going to paint it black.

And Benjamin Moore is going to pay for it.

He's painting the border wall black, so it's harder to get on.

Wow.

Yeah, and well, this is maybe not surprising.

Polling shows now that Hispanic voters who went for much bigger this last election, they are now souring on Donald Trump as the president.

They're not sure the reason why.

It could have something to do with being gang tackled at Home Depot when they go in to buy a curtain rod.

That's possible.

Oh, and

in a somewhat related story, the Menendez brothers have been denied.

This is true, denied parole, the first instance of the government telling a Hispanic criminal to stay.

I think it's just one Menendez brother has been

denied parole.

But I tell you, fans of military-style autocracy

were a little disappointed this week because Donald Trump, in his new capacity as DC police chief,

you know,

he gives himself a lot of jobs.

He said he was going to go on a ride along.

I thought, whoa, this is going to be great.

This is going to be like

Cox meets cake boss, you know.

But,

well,

didn't happen, just turned into a big grub hub run.

He just went out there and gave them pizzas and hamburgers, you know, because nothing says we put no planning into this like pizzas and hamburgers.

So disappointing.

I was very disappointed.

Trump said he wanted to go, but the old bone spurs were acting up,

but he'd be there in mixed spirit.

Oh, also in America's Different Now news.

And I remember John Bolton.

He was,

oh, wow, that's a sophisticated crowd.

Yeah, John Fulton.

There he is.

He was in the Trump administration, and then

he left the administration, wrote a book, you know, a kind of a tell-all book, and said Trump only cares about retribution and will abuse the Justice Department.

And today the FBI raided his home.

So,

well,

the Trump administration says it wasn't about retribution, it was about law and order.

They think he might have been the guy who beat up big balls.

Well,

I I will say this, ladies and gentlemen.

In the future, historians will say this is a very dark time in American history.

They won't say it publicly or put it in a book.

They'll whisper it to each other when the cell phones are off.

So remember to support your local police state.

But that is not what is bothering a lot of America.

What is bothering a lot of America is that Cracker Barrel.

I couldn't make this shit up.

Cracker Barrel has changed their logo.

It's just the words Cracker Barrel.

They used to have a barrel

and, quite frankly, a cracker

standing next to the barrel.

And now it's just the words.

And conservatives have not been this upset about a rebrand since Caitlin Jenner.

I tell you,

it's tough out there.

And if you think we're not in a culture work, get this.

Hillary Clinton this week said she thinks the Supreme Court is going to overturn gay marriage, which we've had since 2014, and it will be left up to the states.

How's that going to work?

You're married in California, but not in Texas?

Honey, I'm going on a business trip to Dallas.

The fuck you are.

All right, we've got a great show.

Frank Rooney and Christopher Wilco are here.

But first up, he is a tenured professor at Stanford School of Medicine and host of the top-ranked health customer Huberman Lab.

I wanted to have him on for a long time.

He's finally here, Andrew Huberman.

Finally.

Finally, he's there.

And you've got a standing arrest for Wonder Cook.

Okay, Andrew.

Finally, I get you here.

Thank you for coming.

I want to congratulate you.

I feel like you have done more than anyone for kind of mainstreaming a sort of of alternative view of health that I've been talking about here for 20 years and they always made fun of me and said, what are you?

Now you're a comedian.

What are you talking about?

And there is a different way of looking at health and I think a lot of Americans are catching on to that.

I mean, simple thing.

I'll take a good example that I said and they were always dragging me online when I was talking about the sun.

Like the sun is not your enemy.

We demonize things.

That's right.

And it was like, Bill, what do you want people to get?

Skin cancer?

No, I don't.

I'm just saying we're solar creatures and we need some sun.

And this is a big point of yours, yours, right?

Absolutely.

I mean, it is true you want to avoid excessive UV exposure.

So that's typically in the middle of the day when the sun is overhead.

However, one of the very best things you can do for your sleep, your mood, your wakefulness, for your mitochondria, we always hear about the powerhouse of the cell, mitochondria, metabolic health, and all that, is as soon as possible after waking up, get outside.

Take off your sunglasses, eyeglasses and contacts are fine.

Look in the direction of the sun.

Obviously, don't force yourself to do it.

Blink as you need to protect your eyes.

You have a natural reflex that will protect your eyes.

But that sets off a circuit, you know, lining the back of your eyes are some neurons.

Your eyes are part of your brain.

People don't realize this, but these two things, part of your brain outside the skull.

That viewing of the sun communicates to your brain's central clock, causes an increase in all sorts of hormones that are great for wakefulness in the morning.

It literally wakes you up.

It sets a wavefront of wakefulness for mood, focus, all the things people want throughout the day.

And most importantly, it sets a timer so that shortly after sundown, your body starts to release something called melatonin.

Most people have heard about it as a supplement, but you make it naturally, and that's what makes you feel sleepy and fall asleep.

Viewing sunlight, I would put right up there next to you, exercise, like getting your steps in, you know, cardiovascular exercise, resistance training, and nutrition as one of the foundations of mental health and physical health.

When you view sunlight in the morning, and it's also good to do it in the evening if you can, just for a couple of minutes, when you do that, you're getting very little UV exposure.

So you don't have to be worried about damage to your eyes, damage to your skin, skin cancers, and so forth.

Because when the sun's low in the sky, there's a filtering that happens in the atmosphere.

We don't have to go into the details.

But it is so important.

And when you get sunlight in your eyes like that, what you'll notice is, okay, sure, you can drink your caffeine, you should hydrate, do all those things, but you'll have more energy.

After about two or three days, people notice a significant increase in their energy.

It also sets in motion a bunch of things related to your immune system.

And we can actually say that if you're concerned about longevity, mental health, physical health, that morning sunlight viewing is really the anchor to all of it.

And I'm not,

excuse me, sorry, I didn't mean to go on, but just one final point is that it's very important that people understand that if you miss a day or if it's overcast, the sun when it's overcast is still out.

People always say, there's no sun where I live.

I wake up before the sun comes out.

Well, unless you have powers I'm not aware of, you still have to wait like everyone else.

But go outside.

And so people say, oh, there's no sunlight here.

Well, compare 8 a.m.

in the middle of winter on an overcast day to midnight the night before there's sun what you need are these photons that are coming through forgive me

no you're

you're here to talk about yourself all right

well thank you for coming time to meet our panel

all right well let's

let's go through some of the other greatest hits of of the things that I think are important to health, but I feel like Western medicine has been remiss about.

One is the mind-body connection.

You talk about that a lot.

I feel like doctors mostly, unless they can quantify it, if they can read it on a chart, it doesn't exist.

What would you say to that part of the medical community that doesn't really pay attention to the mind-body connection and define it for us?

Yeah, the mind-body connection is essentially the fact that your nervous system, your brain and spinal cord and your organs, they're all in communication with one another.

There is a shift nowadays.

I mean, my laboratory at Stanford and a laboratory that I collaborate with have done studies for instance on a very simple way of breathing that allows your the diaphragm which is involved in breathing to communicate with your brain and to calm you down very quickly under conditions of stress.

I can teach you that now and then I'll just go into the description of the mind body.

And I'm happy to entertain why Western medicine has been remiss in not paying more attention to these sorts of things.

It turns out the fastest way to calm down under conditions of stress is not to engage in self-talk, like I'm going to try and calm down.

That doesn't generally work, right?

The fastest way is to use your physiology to lower what's called your level of autonomic arousal, aka stress.

And it turns out that there's a very specific pattern of breathing that you do unconsciously in your sleep, a dog does right before it goes down for sleep, in which you do a double inhale to maximally inflate your lungs, and then you exhale all of that air.

So it essentially looks like this.

And this is not extensive breath work, it takes about five seconds where you go.

That's the fastest way we know to de-stress your mind and and body.

Unless you're doing it with Coke.

Unless you're doing it with Coke, exactly.

Exactly.

And the reason is it balances the levels of carbon dioxide and oxygen, you know, gases in your system that your brain needs both of and your body needs both of.

Breath work of that sort, the problem is it's been called things like breath work.

It's respiration physiology.

We've known that how you breathe impacts how you feel, and how you feel impacts how you breathe for a very long time.

You know that guy, Wim Hoff.

That's right.

I'm sure you do.

I mean, he has proved just by breathing.

I do his 90-breath thing.

We do that 90 times.

I don't know why, it's boring,

but after you get three times, then you test how long you can hold your breath.

That's right.

He's climbed Mount Everest in shorts

because the breathing apparently has this amazing effect on how how it controls the body's feeling of cold and other factors.

Yeah.

I mean, what it does is when, so Wim Hof breathing is related to an ancient technique called tumo breathing, which you do what's called cyclic hyperventilation.

It's the opposite of what I just did.

So instead of emphasizing the exhale, actually we can make it even simpler.

If you want to slow your heart rate down and de-stress, do a deliberate long exhale.

That's the simplest way.

There's something called respiratory sinus arrhythmia.

The physicians will recognize this.

When you exhale, your heart rate actually slows down.

Every inhale, your heart rate goes up a little bit.

Wim Hoff breathing or tumo is where you deliberately emphasize the inhale.

So it's...

And as you said, by the third one, you feel different.

Why?

Because when your heart rate increases that way, it also stimulates the release of adrenaline.

also called epinephrine from your adrenals, little glands that ride atop your kidneys, and a brain center in your brain called, has an interesting name, locus ceruleus, which basically fire hoses your brain with a bunch of norepinephrine, which is similar to epinephrine.

So you're getting, by breathing more deeply, your heart rate increases.

And I should say by inhaling with more emphasis, your heart rate increases, you're releasing adrenaline, essentially in your brain and body.

Your levels of alertness go up.

When you emphasize your exhales, so

your heart rate slows down, and the knob on those neurochemicals gets turned down a bit.

So we think so often about using self-talk and meditation as a wonderful practice, but all of these things that I'm describing have been known about for thousands of years, long before the neurophysiologists and the psychiatrists and the neuroscientists got into this.

This has been known for thousands of years in India, in yogic traditions.

And one of the reasons why it was so late to arrive here, although it arrived first in California, like most interesting things.

Yeah, man.

Sorry.

I've never lived to eat.

I mean, just the personal computer, like health, you know, anyway, I've never lived east of Interstate 5.

So there's nothing for California.

I've been other places, but one of the reasons why it stayed under wraps is because, unfortunately, the U.S.

medical system and science has been very wary of anything that has mystical language.

So it's called tumo breathing.

And I'm a big fan of something called yoga nidra, which is essentially like a nap where you try and stay awake.

There are great data that this restores mental and physical vigor.

It doesn't interrupt your sleep.

So it's different than a nap, different than meditation.

Now we are finally coming to terms with the fact that the mind and the body are connected, duh.

This has been known about for thousands of years.

And there are now great clinical trials.

I've published clinical trials on some of these things, like the respiration physiology, its role in stress and de-stress.

In fact, if you wake up in the middle of the night and you're having trouble falling back asleep, try just doing some long extended exhales and get this.

This sounds really weird, but it has a basis in physiology.

Keep your eyes closed and just move your eyes from side to side behind your eyelids like this, back and forth.

Do some long exhales.

I can't promise, but I'm willing to wager like maybe one pinky that within five minutes or so, you'll be back to sleep.

And it's not mysticism.

It's because your eyes and your breathing and how you view the world are one of the main ways that you control your levels of stress or reflection.

Let's try that tonight.

So, okay, so we have a new regime there in Washington, more radical than we've ever had as far as our health goes, RFK.

What do you think he's getting right and what is he getting wrong?

Okay.

Yeah.

You have two minutes.

And I have two minutes, Chuck.

Okay, I'm not known for being succinct.

Okay, so I know Robert,

and I know Jay Bhattacharya, our new director of the National Institutes of Health.

He was a colleague of mine at Stanford until he took that position.

Let me start just briefly with NIH.

NIH is doing a very thorough audit of the types of science that taxpayers are paying for.

I think they're making some good decisions about funding young investigators, meaning new scientists, new laboratories, more vigorously.

This is so essential.

I'm not saying older scientists need to all retire, but many of them do.

I'm not saying that the NIH has only been funding derivative work.

That's not super, super high progress.

But for the last few years, meaning the last 25 years, there's been a lot of emphasis on funding things that are sure to work, which is great, but we've really lost out on some of the bigger discoveries.

Well, let me cut to the next one.

So that's key.

Let me cut to then mRNA.

Okay, sure.

Because I was a guy who did not want the COVID vaccine, but I do want research on mRNA.

Sure.

I don't think that that's crazy stuff.

In fact, when the next one comes along, I may want to be first online for it.

So I'm not down with, I like Bobby too, but I'm not down with him cutting that shit.

Yeah, so

mRNA is in every single one of our cells.

A DNA, RNA, RNA protein is kind of like the pathway.

So mRNA itself is not bad.

And the messaging around mRNA vaccines has led people to believe that anything that carries the letters mRNA is bad.

We are all here and we would not be here were it not for mRNA.

mRNA vaccines are a relatively new technology, controversial because of their implementation during the COVID pandemic.

And indeed, there are people out there who either insist on or have evidence that they have vaccine injuries of some sort, and that has been the rationale for removing this $500 million of support for mRNA research.

I'm going to get some hate.

I might get some love.

Doesn't really matter to me.

What is important for me to say is that there is incredible work on non-COVID-related mRNA vaccines related to cancers and related to neurologic conditions and many genetic diseases and many, many things for which we would be absolutely foolish to ignore the technology.

Who's going to hate you for that?

Well, many people.

And look,

I've been a vaccine skeptic.

I'm a skeptic of everything medical.

Because everything medical, let me ask you one final question.

How much do you think we know?

Like if you had 100%

is everything we could possibly know about medicine and how the body works.

My difference with a lot of people is they think we're like at 90%.

I think we're at 20%.

I think we're at 10 at best.

10.

And I'll give you a different answer.

And I'm not trying to undercut the careers and trust in my friends who are physicians and scientists.

I'm a scientist.

I'm still tenured at Stanford, and I love science.

I love medicine.

And I believe in certain medications and supplements and nutrition and behaviors.

I do think all of it's important.

A good friend of mine who's a chair of neurosurgery, perhaps one of the greatest neurosurgeons ever to live, I asked him, I said, what percentage of the information in medical school textbooks in the United States and elsewhere is

inaccurate, is just false, and we know it.

And he said, at least half, given the new information.

And then a good friend of mine said to him in the same conversation, what do you think the impact of that is on human health and the treatment of disease, et cetera?

And he said, incalculable.

We are still in our infancy of understanding.

That is not to say we haven't made great discoveries.

And I should say, it's not to say that the NIH is a failed endeavor.

It has returned beautifully in many areas of science and medicine.

I do think an audit and a revision of what we're doing, a careful audit and revision is great, but we can't just throw things out because of what they're called.

Glad you're on the front lines of all this.

Great work.

Thank you, Andrew.

All right, let's greet our panel.

Finally, I had a witness who backed me up.

Hey, how are you doing?

Frank, how are you?

Can't read you up.

All right, he is a professor of journalism and public policy at Duke University and best-selling author of The Age of Grievance.

Our friend Frank Bruni's over here.

How are you?

You look great.

He's a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and author of the best-selling book America's Culture Revolution.

Wanted to have him on for a long time.

Chris Rufolk, Chris, great to see you.

And look,

because you're a professor now, and what?

I'm just laughing.

Why is that funny?

You're a professor.

I don't think of myself that way so much, you know.

Well, I hope your students do.

I think they do when they get their papers back.

Yeah, I'm sure they do.

And this is a subject you're very into and have done a lot of, I think, great work.

And I think you and I are going to agree a lot on this.

And it was on this tip, I think, before you were even talking about it.

But we're not going to talk about that at first because we have to talk about what's most important.

And I wish every week was not Donald Trump week.

But it is.

And so the first thing I want to talk about tonight is what's going on in Washington, D.C.

Now, I don't know if I was the first one to use the phrase slow-moving coup.

I know I was using it before he was.

Thank you.

I know I was using it before he was president the first time.

So, maybe somebody got to do it first.

I don't know.

And people were laughing at it.

I mean, whenever I said he was never going to concede power, they would say, Oh, you smoke too much pot.

Well, it turned out I smoked just the right amount of pot.

So, now

what's going on in Washington, D.C.

I'll ask you this first, because he does this magic trick.

You know, he's passing out pizza, and it's all about big balls, and we're all laughing at what's going on in D.C.

Yeah, he's passing out pizza to the troops.

If there was a slow-moving coup, let me just describe some of the steps, and you tell me if I'm being paranoid.

First, create a masked police force.

Get people used to looking at that.

Normalize snatching people off the street.

Get them used to that.

Normalize seeing the National Guard and the military on the street.

Then start talking about crime in the capital, which is basically, you know, has always been a fairly crime-ridden city.

This is our nation's capital where elections are decided.

And then have, because the crime is so bad, have other states start sending their troops.

Not just the National Guard there in D.C., but now at least six other states are sending their troops, which then Trump can then federalize.

So you're having many states' troops on the ground there, and now they're under federal control.

So you have in the capital a sort of permanent police presence.

So when an election dispute might come up, just hypothetically,

I mean, I don't want to be a big pessimist, and I'm going to pretend for the rest of the duration that the Democrats do have a chance of winning, and they might win the next election.

I just don't think they're ever going to take power because this is what's going to happen.

Because I think this coup is going to go off a lot smoother than the last one.

Yeah, I would disagree and I think actually the stated reason is the reason.

Look, Washington, D.C.

has a higher murder rate than Baghdad, Kabul, most countries in Latin America, most countries in Africa.

Also less than some cities in America.

That's true, but the difference is that D.C.

is a federal territory, so he has authority and jurisdiction over the district.

And if you you look at since Trump actually mobilized the National Guard, you've had zero homicides, which is a record in the state and the District of Washington, D.C.

You have an 86% reduction in carjackings.

I lived in D.C.

years ago when I was a student at Georgetown.

I saw a carjacking,

a group of guys at gunpoint, dragging some elderly people out of their car, beating them up, driving away.

And so these are real things that affect real people.

And there's a very simple lesson.

So we bring it to you.

broken windows policing, more law enforcement on the street, less crime.

He's proving that, and I think he's challenging other cities that have huge problems as well, that they should get a bit tougher and solve them.

Well, I don't think one week proves anything.

I mean, when he was out giving, as you noted in your opening pizza, to people, he said this has been a huge success.

DC is now based on one week, based on one week.

I don't know.

I would love

to see that.

I would love to meet the statistician who would extrapolate from one week and say this is a sustainable solution.

By the way, it ends after 30 days.

But, Bill, can I say one other thing?

It is, to give Trump credit of a sort, it's an act of political genius because it is true that we have too much urban crime.

It is true that we have too much of it in Washington, D.C.

But

he's putting his finger on a problem that people rightly care about.

But then he responds in such an overzealous, performative, and provocative way the Democrats have to say something about it, but they have to figure out how to say something about it without seeming to be soft on crime.

And you may have noticed they're not so dexterous with this stuff lately, Democrats, right?

I'm just going to reiterate the one thing I said here that I think is being passed over here.

He's creating an army in the nation's capital, not just of D.C.

police, but from, I mean, they happen to all be southern states,

Operation Happy Coincidence.

And

I just think

the presence now of this army in Washington is going to have its toll taken when the next election comes around.

Because, you know, we have a very asymmetrical way of doing elections.

When the Democrats lose, it's like, oh, we lost.

Enjoy.

When the Republicans lose, they don't do that.

And they never will do that.

I mean, not in the age of Trump.

Maybe it'll revert.

I don't think so.

But whoever is the candidate next time, and of course, this week we also saw him giving out hats that said Trump 2028, 28.

I mean, that, you would admit, is blatantly unconstitutional, would you not?

Yeah, of course.

And I think he's trolling.

I don't think that's serious.

I don't think he's running.

And we'll know long before Election Day who's the nominee for the Republican Party.

And so I think that is a concern that I don't have.

I don't think that's in the cards.

And I think he's just, again, telegraphing a sensationalist media narrative because look Trump has been doing this for decade after decade he's very good at it he knows that's the source of his power but I wouldn't take it seriously we do we we see we seem to be at this point where when he does something that is not constitutional because we know the Republicans in his party are not going to stop him we don't it doesn't even register.

I mean, this week he said he wants to get rid of mail-in voting.

Well, the Constitution says the president can't do that.

It just, that is not even in the mix anymore.

And the reason why, he said he wanted to get in, get rid of mail-in voting, because Putin, last week they were in Alaska, had a bro weekend.

And Putin told him that's why your elections are rigged.

And if you can't trust Vladimir Putin on

the subject of electoral integrity, who can you trust?

I mean, sadly, Bill, Trump has gotten advice from people worse than Vladimir Putin, sadly.

But you said the president is trolling people.

I just want to say those things we've gotten used to.

The fact that we have the sentence, the president is trolling people, is so friggin' sad.

I used to.

I mean,

I used to.

I used to expect and hope for more when it came to the conduct of a president.

And quite frankly, I find his conduct humiliating.

But what about Newsom?

He's trolling.

He's got this new...

I don't know.

You don't like it.

This is not a function of an individual personality.

It's a function of technology.

Politics works differently in the age of the book and then radio and then television and now social media.

And look, the fact is that social media is driven on negative media cycles.

It's driven on rallying up a passionate base of people.

We may not like it.

It may not be ideal.

We don't have John Adams and Thomas Jefferson anymore.

I wish we did.

And we're never going to have the same thing.

But the reality is we have Donald Trump, Kamala Harris, and Gavin Newsome, and they're all playing the same game.

And so I don't think it's fair to just blame it on one man.

But let's edify the people who don't watch the news every week.

We're not all playing the same game.

There's a new game being played by Gavin Newsom.

Gavin Newsom is now trolling Trump.

I've never seen a Democrat do this.

I think it's very funny.

Can you show

some of the

Newsome tweets that he's been putting out there?

Okay, he's imitating Trump's exact style.

I mean, like he's...

This is Newsome.

and he's a, he will fail as he always does, sad.

And I, the peacetime governor, our nation's favorite, will save America once again.

Many are calling me the, you know, he's a Gavin Newsom, many say the most loved and handsome governor.

Now,

I feel like

I feel like Gavin has grasped the essential thing about American culture in this day and age.

Don't try to outsmart people.

You have to outstooped them.

You don't like it.

Why don't you like it?

I mean, why don't I like it?

It doesn't bode well for the direction we're headed.

But I also, the Gavin Newsom stuff, I mean, it's bringing a lot of attention to Gavin Newsom.

And at least it's something kind of bold, which Democrats haven't done a lot of.

But I'm not sure it's smart.

I mean, we have spent, since Donald Trump came down that escalator in 2015, Democrats have been mocking him and belittling him as a strategy.

And we're now in the second Trump presidency.

I don't think this is the way to go.

Yeah, but they've been doing it in a different way.

This is imitating him.

This is aping him.

I find it very funny.

But maybe you're right because I saw,

I mean,

here's the real problem for Democrats.

It's not even mail-in voting or even the gerrymandering, which of course is going back and forth now.

I mean, Texas did it.

Texas has now gerrymandered five districts.

They have Austin.

I mean have you ever been to Austin?

Austin's a Republican district now.

Their motto is Keep Austin weird.

And

that's some heavy-duty gerrymandering.

But California has already done it too, and so have the blue states.

But registration, this is really a buried story this week.

30 states allow registration.

Well, they have some facts about it now.

Democrats have lost lost 2.1 million people.

Republicans have gained 2.4.

That is a huge turnaround.

That is bad news for the Democrats.

And I'm sure you would say that is because

Well, look, I mean, I think it's good, and I think for precisely the reasons we're talking about, the Democrats don't have a good message.

They were utterly captured by their furthest left radicals.

They were pushing COVID lockdowns, critical race theory, DEI, you know, transgender transgender ideology, you name it, and people are sick of it.

Your average middle-of-the-road American is worried about a lot of things.

And Trump is not perfect.

We can all agree on that.

But at least.

But at least.

We can all agree.

But at least

he's tapping into, and you could mock his style, and it is funny, the news and tweets are funny, but what they're missing is that underneath all of the bluster, the bravado, the orange makeup,

you know,

he's actually tapping into real fears, anxieties, and even hopes.

It may sound ridiculous to people in Los Angeles or Washington, D.C., but that's why he has passionate supporters.

That's why you're seeing Republicans expanding the playing field.

And that's why you see in a state like Florida, where, I mean, it just went gangbusters the last five years.

People are fleeing from the kind of empty ideologies of people like Kamala Harris.

And love him or hate him, they're saying that Trump, at the very least, cares about what we're thinking about.

He's He's addressing real issues.

Okay.

Well, let's go to what happened in the Oval Office this week then, because

I don't know if you've been following what happened after last week's meeting in Alaska, but Zelensky came to the White House, and this time he was dressed for success.

He was not in.

He wore a suit and he wore a tie of sorts.

It wasn't something I would have picked out, but

and he was there with all the other European leaders, and he thanked Trump 11 times, so he got that message.

And this is what I'm trying to tell you here: is that what's going on now is that the whole world is sort of becoming the Trump cabinet.

Trump cabinet have always been huge ass-kissers.

We used to give away this award.

This was the

ass-kisser of the month award.

And now,

I mean, this is

the Italian Prime Minister said to him, something has changed thanks to you.

The NATO chief, I really want to thank you for your leadership.

And this is, he also called him daddy.

Okay, that's just plain, homoerotic weird.

The president of Senegal said, he's a tremendous golf player.

Golf requires concentration and precision qualities that also make for a great leader.

But these not are all the ass kissing that went on in the Oval Office.

Would you like to hear something about that?

Okay.

So

Georgia Maloney from Italy was there.

She said, it's ironic the guy who's single-handedly putting an end to crime in DC just stole my heart.

Oh, the president of France was there.

Macroni said, your magnetism puts me in such a trance, my wife had to slap me again.

The Chancellor of Germany said the Nazis convicted at Nuremberg were less hung than you.

Oh, I'm telling you, they're all kissing his ass.

Zelensky himself said, enough about the war.

How's that ballroom coming along?

And then countries that weren't even there started to call in.

Victor Urban of Hungary left a message, you make me want to be a better strongman.

The president of Spain called in.

He said, not since Don Quixote has there been a man with the balls to take on windmills.

The Prime Minister of Japan called up.

He said, our declining birth rate is due to our women holding holding out for a chance with you.

Even the leader of the Taliban called.

He said, since meeting you, I've completely lost interest in underrated shepherd boys.

And even our number one adversary, frenemy, China, Xi Jinping, called up.

He said, there's only one Donald Trump, no substitutions.

Okay, so.

All right, now let's talk about education, because the big story is that Trump is, some people would say, extorting these colleges.

Now, look, I told you at the beginning, I've been on this tip for a long time that colleges are out of control.

Before Trump was talking about it, I thought this was crazy.

It's a bit of a scam in America that you need a diploma to do a lot of things you really don't need a diploma for, and a lot of the diplomas are bullshit.

But a lot of what's going on with Trump, it seems to me, is like he's just like the guy who used to collect the rents.

Did you see the movie The Apprentice?

It's fantastic if you have it.

Sebastian Stanley.

It's just so great.

And it shows

Trump when he was coming up and his father used to send him out and he would collect the rents.

And you know, sometimes when you knock on the door and they open it, they throw hot, boiling hot water at you because they don't want to pay the rent.

And I feel like he's still that guy.

I mean, he's collecting rents from, well, he went around to the law firms, you got to pay

first of the month.

NATO, he made them pay.

NVIDIA, they make computer chips.

They got to pay 15%.

The tariffs, that's all that.

And now he's doing it to colleges.

I mean, I get it that colleges did need some changing.

I just don't get why it's about the money.

Can you explain that just to begin with?

Why is that the method that we're using?

Let's take Harvard, for example.

Everyone knows that Harvard discriminated against white and Asian students in its applications.

The Supreme Court kind of slapped their wrists.

They continued to discriminate and also build out this massive DEI bureaucracy where they had hiring guides that said explicitly put white male applicants to the bottom of the pile.

They wrote this down.

They had affirmative action plans that I uncovered in some of my reporting that said, we want to reduce the number of white men in certain occupations university-wide to less than 10%.

They wrote this down.

They even went around the campus and said, there are too many photographs of white men on campus.

Take them down.

We don't know who they are.

We don't know what they accomplished.

We don't know maybe why their posters are up, but take them down.

And so all of these things add up to enormous, brazen, and systemic violations of the Civil Rights Act.

And the reality with these institutions is they're so captured ideologically.

You can't just reason with them and say, hey, you're violating the law.

You're violating a Supreme Court decision.

You actually have to make them feel some kind of pain in order for them to modify their behavior and to comply with the law.

I think that is the substantive case

and I think it's starting to work.

Harvard is getting rid of their segregated graduation ceremonies.

They feel inside the university that they have to figure out how to bring it back to comply with the law and come back to the middle.

So I think it's good.

Segregated graduation ceremonies, meaning.

That's right, after the main convocation at Harvard for a number of years, this is a story that I broke, they had separate racially segregated graduation ceremonies.

Asked for by who?

Administrators, the DEI bureaucracy, and they had

black,

Asian, Latino,

LGBT.

To be clear, this is not white people asking for separate white ceremonies.

This is minorities asking for their own separate ceremonies.

Correct.

And the university provided separate graduation ceremonies for all groups except for whites and, by extension, Jews.

And so, look, I said this is a violation of the Civil Rights Act.

They kept it up for a little bit.

They finally abolished it under pressure.

But that's just the kind of thing that they think it's a good idea.

But what Trump is showing is that the American people send $150 billion a year to America's universities.

There's basic obligations, basic rules they have to follow.

And if they don't follow those rules, they don't deserve public cash.

So as a professor, professor, and you are.

Yeah.

Okay.

I will now cop to it, yes.

Yes.

What is your view on that?

Well, my view on that is Chris has identified a lot of real problems in higher ed, you and your allies.

And I really respect the fact that you, you know, I pick up my colleague Michelle Goldberg's column.

You call her back, you talk to her, you're on the daily and all of that.

But I don't understand how holding up, I think it's up to $2.6 billion in research money to Harvard, most of which is going not to the humanities and not to the social sciences, which is where you find stuff like critical race theory, but it's being held up from actual scientific research.

I don't see how that connects with the complaint.

I don't see how it connects with anti-Semitism.

I also think it's really dangerous.

It doesn't.

There's been a lot of debates.

It doesn't.

There's been a lot of debates about international students.

No, it doesn't connect.

Again, Trump very often identifies something that is a real problem and then goes about monkeying with it in just the wrong way.

Yeah, you have a headache, here's some leeches.

That's the way it goes.

I actually still agree with Leeches.

But I also want to say you asked me to...

Because I am a professor and because I've been at Duke for more than four years now, I want to say that some of the descriptions, everything you accused Harvard of, may well be true.

It's not all of Harvard, and I tell you, it's not Duke.

I also go and give speeches at many of these schools.

And the complaint against them, while it has legitimate elements, it ends up amounting to a caricature.

I have taught at Duke for four years.

I have brought conservative speakers to campus.

I've had them zoom in.

I've never had a school complained.

I sit here not yet being canceled.

Maybe this academic year will be a little bit more difficult.

Duke's in the South.

Universities are much more complicated places and they're much more diverse places in good ways.

But after 2020, we did see a lot of professors who were shit canned just for not having the one true opinion.

I mean, just for saying things that were just,

can't we debate?

I mean, one of them got fired because he objected to Biden's appointing of Katanji Brown Jackson.

He's just, he's not a racist, he was just saying, I don't agree with that, a pick.

That's where we were, things like that.

Or when

somebody would say,

racism is a public health issue.

Well,

maybe we should designate it as that.

But that was a new idea.

It was like when we said obesity is a disease.

A new idea.

Maybe we'll come to that.

But the fact that he got fired for that, we just couldn't even talk about that, this is a new way of looking at things.

That's what my problem with the left has always been in this new and the woke era, that they don't allow for debate.

They come up with some very, very new ideas, like gender is just a construct, and

we don't believe in a race, colorblind society anymore.

We see race first, things that are very different than we, and if you don't agree right off the bat, then you're a bigot, bigot you're a racist you're a bad person and we know you are a brigot and a basic and a bad person no

but

but

I would say a couple things One is that, I mean, Harvard is really the poster institution for that kind of ideologically driven cancellation.

About 1% of professors at Harvard are conservative, so that diversity you're talking about certainly isn't there.

And look, the reality is that this is the law.

I'm all for debate.

If you want to come to a university and say men can become women, we should treat people differently on the basis of race, we should have a communist utopia, that's fine.

I actually think that's healthy for an intellectual environment.

But it's quite different from an administration practicing illegal racial discrimination.

And so the question about scientific funding is this.

It's not, well, why does Trump tie up scientific funding for the bad behavior of the Harvard Central Administration?

The question is, why is Harvard's central administration so committed to violating the Civil Rights Act that they're willing to sacrifice that $2 billion in funding?

That's a much more interesting question.

Because

their endowment is $43 billion.

That's not entirely fair.

The story is not over for one thing, and they're not saying we're not going to pay you money, we're not going to unleash that funding because we're going to keep committing civil rights violations.

They're saying we think the requests that you're making of us absolutely destroy our academic freedom.

That's a different concern than a desire to keep violating laws.

But look, yeah.

All right, let me ask before we run out of time.

So

Oklahoma is having a America first test.

Teachers who are applying, Oklahoma has a teacher shortage, so they need to attract teachers.

And they have a school chief there who's, to say the least, a Republican.

And he's saying anyone who applies, they're going to get a test to root out woke indoctrinators.

Now, I'm not sure that teachers from California, New New York are anxious to be teaching in Norman, but maybe.

Is this a legitimate concern that a teacher from California would come to Oklahoma and be a woke indoctrinator?

Well, I looked up the data and it's about fewer than five per year.

Teachers from California are applying to be teachers in Oklahoma.

So on one case, in one hand, this is a kind of media spectacle, right?

It's not serious in itself, but I actually think there's a real issue underneath it.

The issue is this.

Every institution operates on a system of values, either explicitly or implicitly.

And what the superintendent, who's a friend of mine, is saying with this is that Oklahoma public schools, which are paid for by Oklahoma taxpayers that serve Oklahoma families and educate Oklahoma children, should have an explicit set of values that respond to the people.

In other words, the public institutions should reflect the values of the public.

And look,

I think California schools and New York schools and Oklahoma schools and Florida schools should all be different.

That's why we we have 50 states.

That's why we have the system that we have.

And I'm fine with Oklahoma having a different system and making sure that their teachers are.

But what if the public is wrong?

And what if the public and their belief goes against what the Constitution says?

For example, this guy wants to put the Ten Commandments in the school.

But that's not what the Constitution says.

Because we don't have any state religion.

Can we put the Koran in there?

Well, look, the Ten Commandments is a contested legal question,

and we'll see.

If they take it to the Supreme Court, we'll see what the outcome is.

But I think that the point is that

they're saying that they want to have Oklahoma schools that reflect the values of the people in the state.

That's a completely reasonable thing.

And look, Oklahoma.

It's reasonable unless it's unconstitutional.

We'll see.

All right.

Thank you guys.

That was fun.

Time for New Rule.

Okay.

New Roll, you know you're getting too chummy with another world leader when the start of your summit looks exactly like the opening arrivals on The Bachelorette.

Are you here to end the war in Ukraine or go on a hot air balloon date?

I mean,

at least now we know why this guy always looks like he didn't get a rose.

Neural tourists must stop taking selfies that look like they're holding up the Leaning Tower of Pisa.

I mean, it's cute, but it's been done to death.

And if you really want to straighten out the tower, try this.

Neural, now that the watch brand Swatch had to pull this this ad where the model is pulling his eyes to appear slanted, get ready for companies to start making more ads like that.

I haven't thought about Swatch in years, and I hadn't thought about American Eagle Jeans ever.

But

now I'm thinking about both.

If you want your stock to rise, stop trying to make people say I want that and start figuring out how to get them to say, I'm going to kill your CEO.

New role, now that researchers have discovered that it's common for some birds to experience sex reversal where a male bird presents as a female, they have to answer the next obvious question: how long before he's on the girls' swim team?

And for you true ornithologists, you probably also know that female baby birds can also be born as males, or as it's known in professional circles, chicks with dicks.

Neural, if you want people to click on your news story, don't say horse rescued with crane after falling in pit.

Oh my god, internet?

Please, you invented clickbait.

This is what you do.

That's the best headline you could come up with.

Let me help you out.

Total stud pulled out of dirty hole, hung like a horse.

Thank you.

And

finally, new rule.

I told you so.

I've been telling Democrats for years the Republicans are going to steal pot from you as an issue, and now Trump says

We're looking at reclassification and we'll make a determination.

What'd you expect?

He is the master at winning votes from small groups who are passionate about one issue, picking up a couple percent here, a couple there, until on election night it's why MCA.

While Democrats offer up high-minded intangibles like equity and saving the soul of America, Trump says, hey waitress, how'd you like to pay no tax on those tips?

Remember that?

And everybody was like, what didn't we think of that?

Las Vegas is a town where everybody gets tips, so maybe that's why Trump was the first Republican to win Nevada in 20 years.

You know by how much?

50.59%.

Because napalm in the morning smells like victory.

He did it with the tips.

He got the TikTok vote.

He got the people for whom toilets are very important vote.

He got the enough of taking our shoes off at the airport vote, the crypto bro vote, the tech bro vote, the bro bro vote.

He got rappers and caleaters.

Oh yeah, Bobby Kennedy will never be president, but his Make America Healthy Again People, oh that's another, I don't know, 4% he picked off.

And they're ride or die.

Choosy yoga moms choose natural sugar and soda, not corn syrup.

And they want vaccines to be their choice, and they think your breakfast cereal shouldn't glow in the dark.

It might sound like snake oil to you, but remember Bobby Kennedy actually cooks with snake oil.

Trump never forgets.

It's only hypocrisy if you had other beliefs to begin with.

In his first term, he signed an executive order banning TikTok and then got trounced by young voters.

So in 24, he campaigned on saving it.

And apparently, every Tide Pod eater responded

because his youth vote was up 21%.

In his first term, he called cryptocurrency not money and based on thin air and said it seems like a scam.

And who better to know a scam?

Well,

well, that was then.

Now he's on more coins than Julius Caesar.

Overnight, he became the crypto candidate as opposed to Biden, the crypt keeper candidate.

So

chalk up another one or two percent.

Democrats used to own Silicon Valley, those California do-gooder liberals who wanted to save the planet.

Yeah, right.

Trump came along and said, Regulations, we don't need no stinking regulations.

Not only did he win them over, in his second inauguration, they were all sitting up on the stage with him.

There was an entire section that looked like the full range of the autism spectrum.

Trump said he would build

10 freedom cities with flying cars.

Is that going to happen?

Of course not.

But that kind of talk gets incel nerds harder than an OnlyFans model who speaks Klingon.

Trump runs her office like that kid in eighth grade who ran for school president on a pledge of more snow days.

Okay, I was that kid.

Now.

Now,

could I actually make it snow more?

No, but elections are won on the margins by a coalition of little things that hit people personally.

Trump gets this.

He feels your pain in the ass.

Kamala ran on democracy, which is the most important important issue.

But without the political skill to sell it, it added up to nothing.

Meanwhile, Trump was running on, I'll make the poop go down.

He never shut up about bad shower pressure, shitty light bulbs, and low-flow toilets.

Not exactly, ask not what your country can do for you, but for some little niche group, it was all that mattered.

He's right.

It shouldn't take two flushes to make my shit go away.

That's my guy, YMCA.

People say, it doesn't make sense.

He's a billionaire from New York, no less.

And everything he sits on is gold.

How could he possibly connect with the common man?

And yet he keeps winning more of them.

Trump got trounced by black voters in 2016, so he brought in some muscle from the West Coast, someone he knows black men men love, Kim Kardashian.

Yeah.

Together they passed the First STEP Act, which scaled back restrictions on felons, a connection he built on in 2024 by becoming one.

And then he pardoned Lil Wayne and pardoned Kodak Black and the CEO of Jay-Z's company and the founder of Death Row Records and the former mayor of Detroit.

So it's not surprising that Kanye and Wayne and Chris Brown and Amber Rose and Snoop and DeBaby all talked him up.

That last one out of professional courtesy.

Now, did he win the black vote?

Not even close.

But he doubled.

what he got in 2020 and in places like Philly, Detroit, and Milwaukee, that was the difference.

And now he's going to do it with pot.

Finally, he got around to me.

All right, that's our show.

We're off next week.

And back on the fifth, I want to thank my guests, Frank Rudy, Chris Ruffo, and Andrew Huberman.

Club Random drops every Monday on YouTube or listen wherever you get your podcast.

Thank you, folks.

Watch overtime on YouTube.

Catch all new episodes of Real Time with Bill Ma every Friday night at 10, or watch him anytime on HBO On Demand.

For more information, log on to HBO.com.