Ep. #654: Jonathan Haidt, Fareed Zakaria, Dr. Mark T. Esper

I'm Scott Hanson, host of NFL Red Zone.

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Charlie Sheen is an icon of decadence.

I lit the fuse and my life turns into everything it wasn't supposed to be.

He's going the distance.

He was the highest-paid TV star of all time.

When it started to change, it was quick.

He kept saying, No, no, no, I'm in the hospital now, but next week I'll be ready for the show.

Now, Charlie's sober.

He's gonna tell you the truth.

How do I present this with any class?

I think we're past that, Charlie.

We're past that, yeah.

Somebody call action.

AKA Charlie Sheen, only on Netflix, September 10th.

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

Thank you.

Thank you, People.

How you doing?

Everybody's good.

Thank you so much.

Thank you.

Wow.

Okay.

Please.

I appreciate it.

Thank you very much.

Please, we have

so much to cover.

There's been so much good this whole month.

I mean, March.

Whoa, coming like a lion went out with P.

Diddy on the lamb.

Oh, I think.

Oh,

he's in a lot of trouble, boy.

The sex trafficking?

Why?

They said they paid women for sex, had people carry drugs for him.

What the record industry calls another day.

And Diddy's really fucked now because all the defense lawyers in America are working for Trump.

So

there's no one left.

You know,

are you on Truth Social?

Good.

I'm glad there's one guy who is.

We want to.

Ideologically mixed audience.

That's Trump.

Trump started that, you know, it's sort of his Twitter.

It went public.

He made $5 billion.

Idiots

bought shares in this money-losing imitation Twitter that no one uses.

This is why Trump is never really going to be against abortion.

He needs a sucker born every minute.

But listen to this, the race race between Biden and Trump now a virtual tie.

That wasn't the case a few weeks ago, so getting very interesting.

It's such a toss-up.

Shohei Atani says the interpreter won't go near it.

But

of course it's all about getting the money now.

Biden had a big fundraiser.

Did you see that the other night in New York?

Obama was there and Bill Clinton.

It was like the expendables of the Democratic Party.

And

it was at Radio City.

Biden was very excited.

He said he's heard very good things about radio.

But this is America in a nutshell.

Okay, so they have this big fundraiser there.

They have like the A-list stars.

Of course, they have ex-presidents, singers, dancers, Lizzo.

They raised $26 million.

Trump sold Twitter for idiots on the stock market and made $5 billion sitting at home.

And

listen to this.

This is not the only way Trump is raising money.

I'm not making this up.

Sounds like I am.

He's got his own Bible now.

He's selling his own Bible.

But it's not

just your your regular Bible, please, that you'd buy in the airport.

No.

It's a Bible also has in it the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.

So his fans are going to love it.

It has everything they pretend to have read in one book.

Trump selling a Bible.

It's like Chris Christie selling a vegetable slicer, for God's sake.

But

But it's just in time for Easter.

This is the weekend.

Came early this year.

Today is Good Friday.

That's good.

As Jesus said, good for who?

I mean, this is the day.

This is the day when Romans crucified Christ.

Or as the Trump Bible says, there were some very fine people on both sides.

But,

of course, the big story this week was the bridge in Baltimore that got hit by the boat.

But boat hit bridge.

I mean, it was, this is America.

I just can't.

I mean, this is a fairly simple story, tragic, you know, but it's a big country, a lot of shit going on all the time.

Shit's going to happen.

Boat hit bridge.

But

the internet is just, it's all conspiracies.

It's, no, this was a cyber attack.

It's somebody with the COVID vaccine.

Really, I'm not kidding.

Israel did it.

The Obamas did it.

Marjorie Taylor Green asked on Twitter, she said, was this intentional?

Or was this an accident?

Which is so funny.

That's the same question I have for Marjorie Taylor Green's mother about dropping her on her head as a child.

And finally some,

well, it's not good for him.

Sam Bankman Freed, you know, the crypto, the crypto creep, they call him.

I mean,

not good for him.

He got sentenced to 25 years.

That's the bad.

Yeah.

That is the...

The bad news for him.

The good news, he gets to meet P.

Diddy.

All right, we've got a great show.

We have Paris zakaria and former secretary of defense dr mark esper

but first up he is a social psychologist at nyu stern school of business and author of the anxious generation how the great rewiring of childhood is causing an epidemic of mental illness jonathan height

john

great book great to see you

Yes, important work you are doing.

Let's go through the title because I agree with it, The Great Rewiring.

But great rewiring, you're talking about children now because of social media and the phone and so forth.

Those are big words.

Great rewiring.

Tell the skeptics why that's not hyperbole.

Because something happened between 2010 and 2015.

That's when childhood seems to have changed.

I got a phone then.

Well, that's right.

We all did, right?

We all did.

But in 2010, we all had flip phones.

And what happened after that is the mental health of people born after 1996 collapses.

It's not just that they're saying that they're anxious and depressed, it's that they are cutting themselves and being hospitalized, especially pre-teen girls.

The rates of self-harm triple.

It's suicide, which is up 50%, and all of this starts in the early 2010s.

And my argument is that in 2010, millennials had flip phones, they didn't have high-speed data, they used their phones to call and text each other to meet up at the mall or whatever it was.

By 2015,

teens had a smartphone, high-speed data, Instagram.

They didn't get together anymore.

They sit on their bed, they communicate, and that is not good enough.

You can't grow up that way.

They don't need reality.

That's right.

That's right.

We've made reality obsolete.

Interesting choice.

Yeah, I noticed you used the phrase phone-based childhood versus play-based childhood.

Of course, we had play-based childhoods.

I mean, that was my whole childhood was playing.

And my mother never, I got home from school, my mother never once said, after I left the house where you going right kid stuff that's where I'm going that's right because

beginning you know beginning a few hundred million years ago whenever mammals were created the thing that mammals do when they're little is play because we have these large brains that wires up our brains and we did that from several hundred million years BC until around the 1990s and then we kind of stopped We said if we ever let our kids out without watching them, they'll be abducted.

And just as that was happening, just as we were pulling them in, the internet was coming in and luring them to stay online.

So there is a backstory here.

It doesn't all begin in 2010.

There's a backstory.

But mental health only collapses around 2012, 2013.

You make such an interesting point about how parents today, it's kind of the worst of both worlds.

Too much hovering in real life

where there is any left.

And then none with virtual.

Go in your room, lock yourself in there with the portal of evil, that is the phone.

That's right.

It's insane.

Explain that to me.

Well, so, you know, so for one thing, we were freaked out by child abduction, all sorts of things, and sexual predators in previous decades.

But guess what?

They all moved onto Instagram.

That's where they're hanging out because it makes it very easy for them to talk to young women, young men.

So

the real world has actually gotten safer and safer.

The online world has actually gotten more and more dangerous.

Most of us who remember the 90s, the internet was amazing.

We were all techno-optimists.

This is going to help democracy.

This is going to be the most amazing thing ever.

And it doesn't really get kind of dark and nasty until the 2010s.

And so

that's why we missed the switch.

We thought, well, okay, my kid is online all the time.

My kid is texting with other kids.

Maybe that's as good as playing with them.

Maybe.

We didn't know back then, but we were wrong.

It's not.

But wasn't it moving in that direction anyway?

I feel like parents, just each generation, ceded more control to children.

I don't know why, because it's worse for both of them.

It's worse for the parents, who have to be their chauffeurs and at their beck and call and always apologizing to their own kids and begging that they're pussywhipped by their own children.

I don't understand it.

And it's terrible for the kids.

Why it is your theory why parents kept ceding control and treating children just as short adults?

Well, you know, as life gets easier, as people get wealthier, as we move away from the old days, authority tends to decay.

There tends to be less respect for authority, less respect for the old ways.

So I think this is something that happens a lot with modernity and with progress.

But I think it's a mistake in part in that kids need structure.

They need moral rules.

This is something I learned from the sociologist Emile Durkheim.

When it seems as though anything's permissible, it doesn't make people happy.

It makes them feel disoriented and lost.

And that's what we see in the data.

It's really incredible, these survey questions, things like, sometimes I feel like my life has no purpose, or I think I'm no good at all.

You track out the percentage of American high school kids who agreed with that from the 70s all the way through about 2010.

And

those numbers are actually going down a little bit up to 2010.

And then they all skyrocket.

Once the kids move their social lives away from play and adventure and errands and people, they move it on to swiping and liking, they feel useless, they feel disconnected, they get depressed, they start cutting themselves, and suicide goes up again by 50%.

And no boundaries.

That's right.

Here's something that never entered my mind when I was a child, when my parents pissed me off.

I'm going to call the cops on you.

It was not an option that entered my mind.

Well, here's another problem, because I see in the news this week the governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, who of course is hated by the left because we are such a polarized country, he did something which you are advocating basically.

100%

he banned social media for anybody under 14.

That's right.

Okay, now, see, the problem with America now is because he did it.

Yeah, exactly, that's right.

It can't be good because DeSantis did it.

Well, that's true, except, I mean, it's true that we're going to react to that, except that.

However crazy polarized we are, this is the one issue on which we're actually not.

And you see this in Congress.

This is one of the only issues where the presses really come from both parties, because almost most people have kids.

Almost everyone sees this now.

So, you know, I hope we don't mess this up, but for now, this is the one area where we're going to put down our swords and say, can't we at least get together to

give our kids back some childhood?

Right, and you have a.

Your book lays out an actual prescription for this.

It's very practical.

Give me the four things.

I know that's one of them, right?

Well, that's what I'm saying.

The key, though, is to realize

the reason why we're stuck in this, where parents don't like it, teachers hate it, the kids themselves don't like it, is what's called a collective action problem.

Anyone who gets off is now alone.

It's hard to be the only one who doesn't get off social media.

Oh, yeah.

The only one who doesn't give a phone.

So

my four new norms would solve four collective action problems and then makes it easier for us to escape.

And they're very simple.

One is no smartphone before high school.

Just give them a flip phone or Apple Watch smartwatch.

That's what the millennials had, flip phones.

They came out fine.

You may not think so, but

the mental health data suggests that they came out fine.

Why me?

I don't even understand that joke.

I know.

You know, I'm not your best tech person.

I didn't get into texting

right when it started.

I had a phone, and when they got the one that replaced that, they said, you have 2,800 texts.

Had you turned it on?

I missed it.

I'd never turned on that thing.

I missed out on so many women.

Anyway, go ahead.

So

no smartphone till high school, no social media till 16, which is what the DeSantis bill does with a card right for printing.

16.

No phones in school.

Schools must go phone-free.

Yes.

Every school that does love it, the kids love it too.

Once they detox, after a couple of weeks, the brain resets, they actually love it.

And the fourth norm is far more independence, free play, and responsibility in the real world.

Because

if we're going to reduce screen time, we have to give them something to do.

We have to give them something constructive, like play with each other.

But see, this is again

always our politics, I think, is what screws us so badly.

Because,

well, because like super duper safetyism

became a part of the political identity of the left.

We saw it with COVID.

And so like anything that's like, if one person is hurt or dies from anything ever, we have have to stop that.

There's no perspective on, yes, life is a dangerous game.

And some people, yes, are not going to make it to the end, but we can't sacrifice everything else for that idea.

And parents sort of lost that idea.

A lot of parents are being short-term safe.

They say, I want to make sure that you don't do anything that could hurt you.

But if it's like if you protect a kid's immune system for their whole childhood, you cripple their immune system.

They're going to suffer from autoimmune diseases.

If you protect your child, don't let them take risks.

Kids need to take risks.

They need small risks to be able to manage them.

Then they can face much bigger risks as adults.

All right.

Well, it's a great book.

Thank you, John.

Pleasure.

Harmony is clarion call.

Hi, everybody.

Let's read our panel.

All right.

Good job.

Okay.

Hey, guys.

Okay, the guys club is here.

He is the host of CNN's Fareed Zakaria GPS and author of the new book, Age of Revolutions, Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present, available in the U.S.

and U.K.

Farid Zakaria is right over here.

And he was the 27th Secretary of Defense under President Trump.

An easy job, I would imagine.

His memoir is called A Sacred Oath, Memoirs of a Secretary of Defense During Extraordinary Times, Dr.

Mark Esper.

Jeff Seth, good to have you you here.

All right, I want to start with your great column.

Every week it's great, but today the first thing was about

Ronna McDaniel.

Now, if you don't know who that is, she was the head of the Republican National Committee, Ronna McDaniel, not the clown from McDonald's.

Although she probably wishes she took that job.

Because, okay,

this saga gets to such a fundamental question.

That's why I loved when you wrote about it.

I want to bring it up now.

Okay, so NBC News hires her because people are always saying to the news organizations, you're liberal.

Let's hear the other voices.

And it's not an invalid thing to say.

So they hire this Ronna McDaniel, but she was an election denier when she worked for Trump, has since changed her tune.

Okay, this is the problem.

It's like, how do you represent this large part of the country that does not believe the election was legitimate?

How do you say to people, you know, okay, we want to include you, but we can't deny that what you think is stupid, because Trump lost what you think is stupid, but we still want to include you.

Guys?

If you get to go close.

All right.

So

I think, as you say, you've got to remember about a third of the country still believes that the 2020 election was incorrectly decided.

That's about 85 million adult Americans.

And to be fair to her, she has now said that she thinks Biden is the legitimate president.

So really the question is how much do you punish her for her past lies?

And I think the point here is liberals are meant to believe in free speech.

That is one of the foundational values of liberalism.

And if you're going to say, you're going to de-platform 85 million Americans, that's a lot of people.

They say, no, it's not about that, it's that she lied.

Well, you know, Bill Clinton lied under oath.

I think last time I checked, he's been on MSNBC.

They say, well, she's an elect.

She's an electrician.

They say, well, she's an election denier.

Well, Stacey Abrams was an election denier about her own election, and they've had her on.

The larger point is, you know, the book I've written is really about this four centuries of progress and backlash.

And what you find is liberals often trigger backlash when they use illiberal means to get to their ends.

You know, they're like, we're going to do what it takes.

And the truth is, and I mean liberalism in a broad sense, liberal democracy, freedom of speech, constitutional, these are precious inheritances that we have.

The way you're going to defend it, the way you're going to move it forward, is by not cheating, not cutting corners, not having double standards.

Because if we have them, then what Trump says is, well, you know, you cut corners, I cut corners.

You have double standards, I.

You've got to be real.

I mean, look at what happened with the- You're nodding.

You agree with all that.

Yeah, look, I think he makes great points.

It was a fantastic piece.

I mean, both sides have to be able to invite other persons from the other side

into their fora, to speak, whether it's the media or whether it's college campuses, right?

Just because you don't want to hear what a conservative has to say doesn't mean that he or she should be excluded from speaking at Berkeley or wherever the case may be.

Which I absolutely was.

Literally once

disinvited to speak at Berkeley.

And then reinvited.

Those college presidents fell into the same double standard.

You know, people said, wait a minute, you're saying it's okay to say nasty things about Jews.

But when people said nasty things about African Americans, you said, oh, no, that's hate speech.

You know, you can't have these double standards.

If you're going to apply a standard, just apply it consistently.

A couple of things here.

I don't think I mentioned the fact that she was hired by NBC, and then their own on-air people, Rachel Maddow, Chuck Todd, objected

and she was then fired after one day.

Also, when you say a third of the country, it's a third of the country who thinks the election was stolen, but there's another something like 14%, because it's almost half, that either thinks the election was stolen or doesn't care, because they're still going to vote for Trump.

So it is almost half the country.

For that reason, I'm with you.

But I don't.

I'm not with you on the idea that a lie is a lie.

Bill Clinton's lies, Obama's lies, lies, whoever's lies are different than the election doesn't count when our guy doesn't win.

That is a separate thing.

I totally get that point of view.

I agree, but my point is that you have to recognize that at the end of the day, if you're in favor of free speech, look, you say these are liars, they're against the American system.

We've had communists run for the presidency of the United States.

When I was in college, I invited Gus Hall, who was the Communist Party candidate.

He believed in the violent overthrow of the United States.

Fine, in a liberal democracy, you get to say your piece and we get to debate it.

By the way, it would be good TV to have Rachel Manow ask her some of the questions you're asking.

I'm not sure he was for the violent overthrow of the United States.

He wanted for the overthrow.

He wanted communism, which is a form of government.

Which is not liberal democracy.

No, it is nothing but democracy.

You'd have to overthrow the government to get to it, right?

I mean.

No, you can elect a communist government.

Italy did it all the time.

Yeah.

Gus Hall was a little more hardline than the Italian communists who were basically communists and the community.

I think the other part of this NBC drama, though, from the reporting was not just was she hired by NBC, but then was enticed by the head of MSNBC to also appear on their shows, which she apparently did so reluctantly, and then all this, you know, all this drama breaks out.

And it begs the question, who's running the place, right?

Is it the on-air hosts or is it the corporate leadership?

Right.

I don't know.

Well, the other point you kind of raised, and you do it in your book as well, is that liberalism around the world, not just here,

is promoting a backlash.

I mean, I'm reluctant to use this word woke because some people hear it and they're very triggered by it because they remember what it used to mean, which was good at first.

Alert to injustice, we're all for that.

I would say it migrated to someplace weird.

And there's a lot of crazy shit, and that's what you and I, I think, are the same thing.

Like, this could lose Biden the election because the woke agenda.

What are the things you're talking about?

I know in your column today, you mentioned, for example, race,

getting to racial equality by means of quota or decree, something that is woke and doesn't strike a lot of people as the way to go.

But what are the other things you're talking about that are the woke agenda when people hear that word?

Well, people, I think when you when you

and if you look through history, what I try to do in the book is point out that

when liberals go overboard with this kind of puritanical zeal and say, you know, everything is going to be fixed, all these abstract ideas are going to be going to be fixed right away.

It produces a backlash.

So, you know, I mean, you know, you can see it actually very vividly in the French Revolution.

I don't want to go that far back.

But you look at something like even art and education.

It's all gotten so politicized.

You know,

whether or not when you have a play on, the first thing people now start asking is, or a movie,

how many people of what color are in this movie?

How many people of what, you know, can we just do a Hamlet that is supposed to be a great Hamlet without

having to think about, you know, and again,

I think it's important to emphasize the point you're making.

It comes from a good place.

There was too much exclusion in the past.

But the way you get past it is not, again, by using illiberal means.

This is the great point of Martin Luther King's famous phrase.

He wanted his kids to be judged on the basis of not the color of their skin, but the content of their character.

One of the things you hear coming out of the movement now is that we should not use the word, we should not say we're colorblind, that I don't see color, right?

Exactly.

This is exactly between liberalism, which I defend, old school liberalism, what you just said, Martin Luther King, and wokeism, which, why I'm always making this point, is something different.

That is not what the woke people believe, which I think is exactly.

They say we should see color first and foremost, always.

Normally, the position of fundamentally illiberal, because liberalism is about seeing human beings as individuals,

not as members of that group.

When you look at the issues affecting President Biden's reelection right now, we could talk immigration and the border, the economy.

I think it is this too, that you just can't put

your hands on, and that is pronouns, right?

You get corrected if you use the wrong pronoun.

You can't say there are homeless people anymore.

They're unhoused.

President Biden had to win.

No, there are people experiencing homelessness.

President Biden had to

walk back.

Biden had to walk back his comments

from the State of the Union speech when he said illegals.

I know.

He had to go on and say, all these

undocumented persons.

This is a big issue in your area.

The military?

I see all the conservatives are always trying to make this an issue.

Let me ask you, you would know better than anybody.

Is this valid?

I don't know what the, first of all, what are the specifics that they're talking about when they say say a woke military is threatening our readiness?

What are they talking about specifically?

What kind of things?

And is there any credibility to that?

Second question first.

Let me say, it's not as bad as the right would say, but it's worse than what the left will acknowledge.

And what does it look like?

That's everything in America.

You're right.

You know, this administration set up a DEI office that would dictate DOD policies for education.

There are classes on what to say and what not to say.

For example, you shouldn't say, hey, guys, you should say, hey, everyone.

In the military?

In the military.

You shouldn't say mom and dad.

You should say parents and guardians, right?

The colorblind argument.

There's the issue of, you know, drag queen story hours on post.

Now, look, I don't think this is driven from the leadership at the Pentagon.

I think it's coming from...

the White House and from people within the administration who come in and believe that they're pushing their agenda forward.

And look, you asked what's the problem.

The problem is

it takes time and resources away from the troops that they should otherwise be training and preparing for war.

And it further divides us.

It further starts putting people into buckets, whether you're based on your ethnicity, your gender, your sex, the color of your skin.

And my view is, I'm sorry, you're in the military, if you're in the Army, you're all green.

If you're in the Air Force, you're all blue.

We have a common mission, a common purpose.

Let's stop subdividing and identifying people along those lines because it creates friction that undermines morale and readiness.

Absolutely.

Here's why I think

it's a real problem for Biden, because the Biden strategy seems to be, you know, we'll give in

to the left on these issues, and then we'll just improve the economy and we'll run on the economy, and the economy is doing great.

And he's right, the economy is doing superbly.

But we are in a new battleground of politics.

That's in part the whole point of my book.

Because you look at Biden, his approval ratings are 38% despite the fact that the U.S.

economy is doing fantastically.

50-year lows in unemployment.

Our economy is double the size of the Eurozone now.

It was the same size in 2008.

But look at Europe.

Those leaders are doing badly.

People say, oh, we have all this right-wing populism because we hollowed out our manufacturing workforce.

Well, France and Germany didn't.

They're facing huge right-wing populism problems.

They say it's all because of economic inequality.

Well, the Scandinavian countries don't have as much inequality as we have by any stretch.

And Sweden has an actual fascist party as its second largest party.

The new politics is all about these cultural issues.

And I fear that Biden, instead of dealing with it, immigration,

he needs to do what Bill Clinton did with that sister Sojo speech and say, because he's not,

in fact, it would be truthful, Biden is not where where this woke left-wing progressive

groups are.

But

I think he's worried about saying it, and so instead he thinks, you know, we'll just make the economy better.

I think he just doesn't want to fight with that party.

I don't think he even understands.

Right, see, that's the tack I take.

Trans, what are you, transan?

What are you talking about?

He just doesn't want to fight with that woman.

And by the way,

he'd do well if he were to say just that.

All right.

That's my disappointment.

He came in and he could have unified the country.

He could have reached out and he didn't.

And instead, I thought he catered more to the far left, the progressive left, instead of being more of the moderate Joe that, you know, look, when I worked with him in the Senate, is the guy we actually knew.

And I haven't seen that in three years.

Changing subject for a second, I think everybody here knows I'm all about TikTok.

I am all in.

Inventing dance crazes, eating the Tide Pods.

So I was

especially excited when I saw a new trend called, well I'm going to look at it, of course I'm into TikTok, I know it,

called reaction videos, have you seen these?

These are videos of people who, you take someone who would be the least likely to have knowledge of a certain thing, and then you show them it, and it blows their mind.

It's all about blowing people's minds.

So here are some real ones.

I think these are on YouTube, but TikTok has the same.

You show a kid's The Eagle Singing Hotel California.

It blows their mind.

They just just can't believe that somebody made a good record in 1975.

British high schoolers try Wendy's for the first time, blew their mind.

Foreign girls react to John Wick.

These are all real, and it blows their mind.

So that's all of them.

We have no more.

Oh, no, I'm sorry.

We have.

Would you like to see some other ones that we've not?

Okay, this is

some other reaction videos that we can find.

Mormons try Tabasco for the first time.

Kanye reacts to the marvelous Mrs.

Maisel.

Rednecks listen to Beyoncé's other songs.

Gen Zers see pubic hair for the first time.

Wow, that's.

School trip to farm reacts to horse penis.

Oh,

actual Italians react to Sebastian Manascalco.

Pope Francis reacts to Euphoria.

Well, that's good.

And,

of course,

Nick Cannon opens a condom for the first time.

So.

All right.

Oh, good.

I got the second death laughing.

Oh, that's great.

I want to ask you about Donald Trump.

You've heard of him.

You worked for him.

I'm surprised you're asking.

Yeah, well,

I think a lot of people think a second term would be more of the same.

You know,

I hear a lot of people say, well, he didn't blow up the world the first time.

No, really.

And he didn't.

He didn't crash the economy.

I think it would be very different.

And I'm guessing from the guy who knows firsthand when he said he wanted to shoot missiles into Mexico.

Yep.

Okay.

Wanted to seize ballot boxes after the election, right?

Shoot protesters was suggested.

Nuke hurricanes.

And I just want to say, the first time he was elected, okay, he had to surround himself with some like normal people, what I would consider normal Republicans.

Yourself, General Milley, McMaster, John Kelly, Mattis.

John Bolton's a little nutty, but

I still think he's a normal.

Okay.

I don't think that's going to happen the second time.

I think it's Mike Flynn.

And I think Mike Flynn, General Mike Flynn, that is not a difference of type.

That is a difference of kind.

That is not a difference of degree.

Now we're into this true authoritarian realm.

Do you agree with that?

Yes.

And here's the headline.

The first year of a second Trump term will look like the last year of the first Trump term.

In other words, with all the craziness.

With the fresh troops in, remember he brought in all the fresh people

in March of 2020.

And those are the folks that carried that last year that eventually led us through the election and into the two and a half months of election denialism.

And so, yeah, look, I think it's going to be very rough.

And the number one attribute that he will seek from anybody coming into the administration will be loyalty.

And not to the Constitution, but to him.

That's the thing.

That's the thing.

And part of his thing is not just the Senate confirmed people and other political appointees.

But as you know,

one of the factors, one of the pillars of this kind of retribution

pitch when he comes in will be the so-called

Schedule F, I'm sorry, where he'll try to get rid of all the government employees, the civil service employees, and put in more of his loyalists.

So look, I think there's a lot to be concerned about.

I've said I believe he's a threat to democracy, and we should be very mindful of that.

So you'll vote for Biden?

Well,

you know, with every...

Ba-ba-ba-ba.

I'm not there yet.

I'm definitely not voting for Trump, but I'm not there yet.

This you'll have to explain to me, sir.

I really

respect you so much.

Thank you for your service.

I mean that so sincerely.

But I just don't understand smart people who don't get binary.

Binary.

Look, you also have the option to be able to.

How can you not be there

after what you just said?

There's no way I will vote for Trump.

But every day that Trump does something crazy, the door to voting for Biden opens a little bit more.

And that's where I am.

I think.

That's a slow opening door.

I think the Biden campaign should do an ad that says, when Donald Trump was president, he surrounded himself with the people he thought were the wisest, smartest people in America who could help him do his job.

All these people, his vice president, his secretary of state, his secretary of defense, his national security advisor, his chief of staff, think he is a dangerous menace to American democracy and to the world.

Maybe they know something.

Doesn't move the needle.

Well, of course, no, but I think to

your point, what I would say to you, Mark, is, and you behaved admirably in that crisis period, it's It's worth just stepping back and remembering, this is the first president in American history to try to prevent the peaceful transfer of power.

And not only that, forget about inciting the mob outside on January 6th, what he did inside that building, which was worse, he pressured a majority of House Republicans to vote to decertify an election that had been certified by 50 states and upheld by 60 court cases.

This is the guy we're talking about.

But nobody hearing this who doesn't already believe this is convinced.

Not one person hearing that.

I've been speaking out for two years now as has Bill Barr, John Bolton, and others, and it just doesn't resonate.

It doesn't.

A cult is a cult.

Whether it's a religious cult,

whether it's Trump, whether it's people who say, whoever Tyler Schwift tells me to vote for, I'll vote for.

No, and you can see how it's going to be.

That's a culture cult.

They're bad.

It's a solution, a kind of family cult by this.

Okay, the last Republican convention, there was no party platform, first time in Republican Party history.

The platform was one paragraph that said, whatever Donald Trump says is the platform is the platform.

And then there was not a single living presidential nominee or past president even invited to the Republican convention.

But there were five members of the Trump family given prime time speaking slots.

It's a family cult.

It's not a party.

This is why there's a lot of truth in what Liz Cheney says, which is kind of where I'm moving to, is, you know, she and I both have a lot of differences with Biden when it comes to policy.

But her view is, and I agree, is

we can survive four years of bad policy.

We can't survive four years of Trump eroding our democracy and the norms and institutions and everything else.

Well.

If you feel as strongly about this, it seems to me Bill is right.

If the stakes are that high, you've got to vote for the guy who's going to beat Trump.

I mean.

We've got eight months.

Right.

I mean.

He says he's moving there.

If you need someone to help you move,

Biden is old, but I think I will guarantee you he was not going to try to prevent the peaceful transfer of power.

No, I agree.

That's right.

So, all right.

So, what if Trump loses in November?

What does MAGA Nation do?

Well, I'm so curious about this.

Do they say, well, he's lost four elections in a row.

We leave him.

Or do they say, no, we just ride with this guy who is going to live live to be a thousand I mean he's a well

that's my that's my second concern my first concern is he loses and he comes out and says it was rigged and then you have violence in the streets well he's definitely going to see right so there's no if that's that's the first thing we need to worry about but then you're right what what happens to MAGA nation MAGA world after does he fight again in 2026 for the midterms or is there a or do they go is there a MAGA without Trump with a Trump successor whatever I don't think so they've tried to do that before they've tried But he's also tapping into a movement, Bill, that I think transcends him in some ways.

It gets to what you, I think, argue about in your book, and that is this backlash against what people feel is an affront to their thinking or the way things used to be.

And

we need a leader that will come in and address it.

And it's not going to be this generation of leaders.

We need a new generation of leaders at the top and everywhere in between.

And we don't have that right now.

You're absolutely right.

He has a remarkable way of tapping into this backlash in a way that almost nobody does.

So even, you know, the Bible thing is, of course, I mean, it's absurd.

It's like Trump has to tell Evangelist, I want to get my copy annotated with the Ten Commandments where he explains how he violated each one of them.

But what he's picking up on,

he's picking up on the fact that there is a great fear about the decline of religiosity in America.

You know, there's a great book by this guy, Ronald Engelhardt, who, great social scientist, who points out, for a long time in the Western world, you did not have much of a decline of religion.

And from 2007, you're seeing a very rapid decline, and the country leading it is the United States.

You're the sharpest drop in religiosity in the U.S.

You're welcome.

Exactly.

And I think that's,

I think it's more than that, though.

That's getting a lot of people very anxious.

It's not just religious, it's

values and norms.

Right.

and that's why when you look at Biden's disapproval rating, it's 54% disapproval.

That's the lowest of anybody, I think, since they started counting numbers.

They're saying nobody ever won with that.

But compared to this, the New York Times had this very smart article: disapproval ratings of other democracies, to your point about liberalism.

Liberalism is not popular.

Germany, this is disapproval rating of the leaders, 73%,

19 points worse than Biden.

France, 71, South Korea, 70, Japan, 70, the UK 66.

Justin Trudeau and Canada is at 59%.

Disapproval.

Now we don't know what the disapproval ratings of Putin or Xi are because you'd fall out a window.

3%, 1%.

Okay.

But it almost doesn't matter because the point is, liberalism itself

is not popular around the world.

Look, we've gone through 30 years of so much change.

Think about the economy, the massive globalization of the economy.

You think about the information revolution.

We created a whole new economy in bits and bytes.

You think about the cultural changes that have taken place.

You know, I mean, think about the role of women, the transformation of, you know, all of that.

It's a lot for people to digest.

And, you know, immigration becomes the focal point because you can't, global capital flows are an abstraction.

But this is something you can see.

And there is real data to it.

You know, in 1975, roughly speaking, 5% of Americans were foreign-born.

Now it's about 15%.

In Sweden, it's about 20%.

So people are looking at this and saying this is a lot of change.

And they have no perspective.

I got to say, Biden was interrupted at his big fundraiser the night six times by kids shouting about Gaza, genocide, Joe.

In the paper today, the Taliban announced, announced, like it's a press release, they're going to stone women again.

Yeah, I saw that.

In Gambia,

they're going back to genital, female genital mutilation.

Have a little perspective, kids.

I know you don't know anything.

Maybe learn something before you start opining.

Anyway, time for new rules.

Okay.

New rules.

New rules.

Now that the number of doomsday preppers fearing another Biden term has doubled to 20 million since 2017, they must check out my new store catering exclusively to their needs.

Prep boys.

That's right, the Prep Boys.

Prep Boys has everything.

You need food, we got tactical seeds.

Tactical seeds.

You need clothes, we got tactical socks.

Tactical socks.

You need a toilet, we got tactical buckets.

Tactical buckets.

Oh sure, you can find this stuff at Target, but does it have tactical in the name?

No fucking way.

New role, since every type of adversity has its own support group now, I want to raise awareness about a group of people who for too long have flown under the radar.

Really tall people who aren't in the NBA.

Did you know that one in six Americans over seven feet tall is in the NBA?

But what about the other five?

For them, it's a lifetime of, wow, you must be a professional basketball player.

But they're not a professional basketball player.

They're just tall.

They're the really tall people who aren't in the NBA, and they deserve to be seen.

Thank you.

Universal, Travis Kelsey has to go into acting.

Just look at this photo of Travis with, I don't know, some girl.

With only the back of his head, he's able to convey a range of emotions, weariness, resentment,

regret.

It's remarkable.

Yes, Travis, when you're done with football, Hollywood will be calling.

If she lets you have a phone.

Neural, someone has to explain to the 75-year-old Pennsylvania man charged with trying to arrange a threesome with two underage girls that it's okay if you don't check everything on your bucket list.

Some dreams are meant to just stay that way.

Dreams.

I wanted to play the the lead in Brian DePama's body double, but I didn't.

Unless I did.

I don't know.

It was the 80s.

There was a lot of drugs.

Numeral, someone has to break it to Eric Trump that contrary to what he's claiming, his father didn't actually build the skyline of New York.

You see, Eric, daddy likes to brag, but

here are all the buildings in New York, and here are the ones that daddy had something to do with.

He also doesn't regularly beat professionals at golf, and he also wasn't going to be a professional baseball player.

But, Eric, I will say this about your dad.

He can jerk off two guys at at once.

I'm going to show it every week in June of the election.

And finally, new rule, now that both Biden and Trump are asking voters the age-old question, are you better off than you were four years ago, someone must tell them that everyone's answer is, you're fucking kidding, right?

four years ago

yeah I remember March 2020 I was bartering for toilet paper and eating all the food out of my earthquake kit

yes what a great time that was when COVID hit and America wet itself emptied its pockets and curled up in a ball

Let me say, I get no pleasure having to characterize my country as panicky, inefficient, and stuck on stupid, but that's what we are.

And nothing proved it more than the flight from hell four years ago.

If you don't recall the saga of the Costa Luminosa, here's what happened.

After COVID had already begun spreading worldwide, a lot of passengers on a cruise ship out of Fort Lauderdale started getting sick.

So, nothing out of the ordinary so far.

But by the time the ship full of portly retirees

wearing Tommy Bahamas shirts

got halfway across the Atlantic, the coughing got so loud it was drowning out the Jimmy Buffett cover band.

So

it was decided to dock in Marseille, where the passengers were first crowded onto locked buses for five hours and then put on a nine-hour flight to Atlanta, where so many of the feverish passengers were collapsing the flight crew had to lay them out in the aisles, which really put a crimp in the beverage service.

Then, just in case by some miracle, someone on the plane still didn't have it, when the COVID Express landed,

the pilot announced that despite multiple distress calls to Atlanta, the headquarters of the CDC, mind you,

well, apparently nobody knew we were coming.

So everybody sat locked on the plane, sitting on the runway for another three hours.

Man, where's Boeing when you need a door to fall off?

Well, finally the CDC arrived and of course immediately quarantined everyone and gave them prompt medical attention.

I'm kidding.

What they did was make them fill out a questionnaire, give no one a COVID test, drop them off at baggage claim, let them go to the food court in the busiest airport in the world, and then sent them on to their connecting flights to 17 states in Canada, which to me is just inconceivable.

They made their connection in Atlanta?

But honestly, if some foreign enemy had intended to ensure COVID spread through the United States, they couldn't have done a better job.

The Fire Festival guys could have handled this better.

So

I get it that we didn't know exactly what was happening at the beginning of COVID and some mistakes were inevitable.

But four years on, I'm tired of hearing, well, we didn't know.

No, we didn't.

But some people guessed better than others.

And the people who got it wrong don't seem to want to acknowledge that now.

Some people said closing schools for so long was pointless and would cause much worse collateral damage to kids and they were right.

Thank you.

Don't be afraid.

Four years ago, the Daily Beast ran a story with the headline, Bill Maher pushes Steve Bannon Wuhan Lab Conspiracy Theory, which was typical of the mainstream media at the time.

Of course, it wasn't a conspiracy theory, and it wasn't owned by Steve Bannon.

And now, everyone, including the Biden administration, admits there's at least a 50-50 chance that the virus could have begun in the lab in Wuhan that was doing gain-of-function research on that virus.

Duh.

But I don't see a lot of retractions being printed.

Yet, when COVID hit, we did a lot of stupid things because America never reacts.

It only overreacts.

Ubers look like those Orthodox Jews who wrap themselves in saran rock in case their plane flies over a grave.

We washed the mail.

We played baseball in front of cardboard cutouts

and ate in parking lots

or with inflatable dolls.

They closed the ocean.

We banged pots and pans to show our love for nurses and our hatred for people trying to get a baby to sleep.

For two years, we had to get nostril fucked every time we left the house.

Serious people talked about having sex through glory holes, and if you don't know what a glory hole is, I wouldn't look into it.

We were told to wash our hands every five minutes and don't ever touch your face.

And if you absolutely must go to the beach, for the sake of all that's holy, wear a mask

outside, because the last thing you would want to do when a disease is afoot is get fresh air and sunshine and vitamin D.

No, much better to stay locked up, stressed out, and day drinking.

And if you do get COVID, remember natural immunity is always the worst kind.

So even if you've had the disease, you need a shot.

Yes, some very bad ideas were embraced as the conventional wisdom, ideas that haven't aged well.

And a lot of the

dissenting opinions that were suppressed and ridiculed at the time have proven to be correct.

Maybe that's why the powers that be never wanted a COVID commission.

Why not?

We love commissions.

The Warren Commission, the AIDS Commission, the 9-11 Commission.

The NFL even had a, is ramming your head into another guy's head bad for heads

commission.

Really?

So where's the COVID Commission?

Because it seems to me we haven't learned a thing.

Maybe the number one lesson from the pandemic was the need for proper air ventilation.

Second was never never go on a Zoom with Jeffrey Toobin.

But

if there's been a big national movement to retrofit buildings, I missed it.

Gain of function research is still going on in labs.

We're still torturing animals by raising our food in conditions ideal for viruses to make the leap to humans.

Bird flu was just found in a goat, which means we're just one lonely farmer from the next pandemic.

We handed out $4 trillion of free money, $280 billion of which was just flat-out stolen in what the AP called the greatest grift in U.S.

history, and which started an inflationary spiral that we now blame on Biden.

So we're going to bring back Trump, the guy who ignored COVID like it was the dinner check?

It's going to disappear one day.

It's like a miracle.

Talk about not learning anything, and there are no miracles.

Happy Easter, everybody.

Thank you, Daddy, buddy.

That's our show.

We're off next week and back on April 12th.

We'll be at Arizona Field and Phoenix, May 4th, Palace and Albany, May 19th.

And Club Random's always on every week, dropping on Sunday on YouTube or listening to Get Your Podcast.

I want to thank Farine Zakaria, Dr.

Mark Esper, and Jonathan Haidt.

Now go watch Overtime on YouTube.

Thank you, folks.

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

For more information, log on to HBO.com.