Overtime – Episode #662: Matt Welch, Abigail Shrier

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Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO Late Night Series, Real Time with Bill Ma.

All right, here we are with Reason Magazine's Ender at Logan, the host of the fifth column podcast, Matt Roach, and she's a journalist and author of the New York Times best-selling book, Bad Therapy, Abigail Schreier, back with us for overtime.

Okay, here are the questions people want to know. What does it say about the Republican Party that Larry Hogan was excoriated? Okay, let's tell them who Larry Hogan is.

Not everybody knows who Larry Hogan is. He was the Republican governor of Maryland.
Very popular across party lines.

I've said that many times. Republicans, governors in blue states, very popular, because they can't be too far out on either side.
Popular in their states. In their states.

Popular as national politicians under Trump. Right.
Larry Hogan was excoriated after calling for everyone to respect the verdict in Trump's hush money trial. Yes, I read this story.

Larry Hogan said something like, we should all just respect the verdict from a jury. I mean, it was the most anodyne statement, and Trump's guy

tweeted out, your career is over.

Subtle. Seriously, subtle, right? I mean, it's so mafia.
It's so self-defeating. It really is self-defeating for Trump.
I mean, if Trump were to get elected, he would want a Republican Senate.

And from the very blue state of Maryland, my home state, you're only ever going to get a moderate. And that's what Larry Hogan is.
So attacking him does not seem like the message.

This is more evidence of what I'm always saying about Trump, arguing with people.

He's not a mastermind. He's not thinking ahead like that.
He does not think ahead. He's a crazy person who thinks

in the moment. You're right.
That would be the smart play.

Oh, I'm going to be president. I'm going to need a Republican senator here.
It's just, it's just ego.

It's a smart play. Sorry to interrupt.
It's a smart play if you want to reshape the entire institution of the Republican Party around yourself.

Do things like, I don't know, appoint your daughter as the RNC. Like it's

daughter-in-law. Sorry, a big difference.

He has

made the entire enterprise about himself. And he's done it block by block.

I mean, he kneecapped the Freedom Caucus, which was supposed to be about individual liberty and rule of law and limited government.

And by 2018, it was about I want to be a henchman for Donald Trump as soon as possible. And he's done that systematically.
So for that project, he doesn't mind if a Republican loses.

He just minds that the Republicans are loyal to Trump, as he would say.

But the message to other Republicans is rather chilling, I feel. That's the thing.
Because

it's one thing to be loyal to your party over your country. That's wrong.
But now you have to be loyal to Trump over your party. Yes.
And not only are elections suspect, but jury verdicts are suspect.

Everything is suspect unless we win.

What do you think of him going to... Now, I read today that he's in Orange County tomorrow, which I go, oh, orange, him, orange, I get it.

What?

Tell me everybody didn't think that. It was like, you're right.

And Marjorie Taylor Greene is going to Stupidville, you know.

But

going to San Francisco, not exactly what you would think is... should be his best hunting grounds, and went to the Bronx,

the South Bronx.

I don't think even Obama went there or maybe he did once.

I think the last Democrat was Clinton or Carter or something. I mean,

he does,

he goes. That's what the Republicans do.
They go where you wouldn't expect them to go. They come here.
You know, they're not afraid.

They're not afraid to take their message to the people who don't agree with them right off the bat.

I mean, it's one of the things that's always puzzled me about those who proclaim themselves to be defending democracy all the time.

And I know that they oftentimes are or think that they are, but actual democracy is going out everywhere and trying to get people's votes. And populists, left or right, tend to be pretty good at that.

You know, Bernie Sanders will go anywhere too. He's a left-wing populist, but he will go on Fox News and whatever.
You're right. Trump will do that too.
And that's to his credit as a politician.

And in the process,

the coalition that votes for Republicans is changing.

It's bifurcating on class in ways that's very, very interesting. And Democrats better come up with an idea to combat that.
Right.

Okay, from Matt, what did you make of the recent turmoil at the Washington Post, whose editor just resigned abruptly? Well, you're going to have to catch me up on this story. I'm not that familiar.

So they had a leadership change, and it's a bit controversial. The editor left Sally Busby.
A new one came in. I forget his name.
He's British, so it doesn't really matter.

Wait, why?

It's just me being loud.

The number that I want people to think about, about, regardless of how they feel about any of this, is that the Washington Post last year lost $77 million

of Jeff Bezos' money. Yes.

Last time, look, I don't know too many billionaires who got rich by losing $77 million on stuff that is not like betting on the future. It's betting on the past, which is a newspaper.

So if you're losing $200,000 a day, the reaction that you should think of if you're in that newsroom isn't necessarily like, oh, it's terrible that the female editor is replaced by a male editor, which a lot of people in there are saying.

No, you've got to do something about that business model. It is absolutely hurting.
They went all in on Democracy Dies in Darkness as a slogan, and that was great.

They got the sugar high until people stopped caring about that as a primary motivating force for subscribing to a newspaper.

And when that fell off, it really fell off. They've lost something like 500,000 readers.

So they, like a lot of places in the old mainstream media, are just hammered in ways that I think we'd like to attribute it, or people on the right like to attribute it, they went woke, they went broke, and whatever, or they tried this.

It's just been a structural issue as well. The LA Times is a husk of its former self.
My God, I mean, compared,

that used to stride the world like a colossus of a newspaper. And now it's dwindled down to nothing.

So there's structural issues in that, and people are like fighting over the last little scraps of something that's withering away.

I also think it's not a great incentive when the person who owns the paper does not really need to make money from it. I mean, what did you say? He was losing $200,000 a day.
Yeah.

You know he makes more than that in interest. Sure, but again, you don't get rich by losing money for fun.
But he didn't buy that to make money. I'm just saying, you need to be incentivized a little.

And I don't think they have that there.

I mean, they don't have it within the newsroom either. I've worked with and a journalist forever, and they always want

some rich person to come and subsidize them, and they get really mad when the rich person doesn't want to keep losing money. You've got to figure out how to make money in journalism as a journalist.

Well, good luck with that.

What are the panel's thoughts on Pat Sajak retiring?

I am agnostic on this issue.

I think Biden should take a hint.

If Pat Sajak

said it was time to go, I think, okay.

Abigail, would you be in favor of banning smartphones in schools as New York Governor Kathy Hoko has proposed? Banning smartphones in schools. Yes.
Yes.

Yes. Right? I mean, wait, what? Howie, this is the biggest non-brainer.
Exactly. I mean, again, talk about.

It's not even hard. Do they need to be talking to their friends? Their friends are with them.
They could put the phones down. And it's also distracting.
Of course they can't learn anything.

I mean, talk about gentle parenting. That you can't even tell a kid.

You know, I've said this many times. I'm going to say it again.
My hat is off to parents today. I think it's very hard to be a parent because you're not allowed to boss them around.

They'll call child services on you.

I mean, the idea that I could have had called this child services place that I never even heard of as a kid, child services were whatever my mother and father wanted to do for me.

Those were the child services I got.

I hope in that process of getting phones out of high school that we can break the tether between parents who want to conduct surveillance over their kids, which is an aspect of it that also.

Abigail, how did the research and conclusions of your books impact the way you parent your own children?

Well, I had to sort of take my own medicine a little bit and ease up on monitoring my kids and give them some genuine independence, which I hadn't done before.

You were monitoring them too much? Yeah, I mean, I think we all do. I think that we're afraid to let them out of our sight.

I mean, my kids didn't have smartphones, but they did, you know, they were in my sight a lot. And I had to give them things like

errands. They had to have chores.
They had to think about something other than themselves. That's so interesting because when I was a kid, I remember hearing the phrase, get out of my sight.
Yeah.

Right.

That was healing that. And I wasn't even insulted by it.
All right. Thank you very much, everybody.

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