Overtime – Episode #638: Andrew Cuomo, Scott Galloway, Melissa DeRosa

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

Okay, welcome over to your professor of marketing at NYU Stern School of Business, Scott Galloway, former Governor Andrew Cuomo's top aide, Melissa DeRosa, former governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo.

Okay, first question is

for you.

Is Trump right to think that the cases that Alvin Bragg and Tish James brought against him are politically.

okay, well there's a reversal.

Right, because the same people, right.

Alvin Bragg, that's the one about the

tush money to Stormy Daniels, right?

And Tis James is the one about his business dealings.

Apparently, he's a crook.

Is Trump right to think those cases are politically motivated?

The

first, Trump is never right in my book.

Just to start this off.

Was there ever a time when you were friends?

I mean, he goes way back in New York, as you know.

He goes way back.

We're both from Queens, New York.

Right, I do.

Our families knew each other.

I dealt with him extensively through COVID, literally on a daily basis.

No, we were never friends.

What is interesting about the question is there was actually a poll.

Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan District Attorney, brought the first case against Trump.

This is before Mar-a-Lago, before January 6th, 6th,

which were, in my opinion, frankly, more serious cases.

But they did a poll after Alvin Bragg brought the case.

76% of Americans said it was politically influenced.

76%.

76% of Americans don't agree on the color of the flag, right?

But 76% said it was politically influenced.

And I think that is telling, Bill, because if

we don't trust government, we don't trust the media, et cetera, if this country believes that the justice system itself is then politically tainted, then we have real trouble, because then you're on the precipice of anarchy.

But that's what I found telling about that.

It was more the public opinion was so high

that politics is influencing the justice system.

And I mean, Trump is the kind of guy, the more he goes to jail, the more popular he becomes.

It's like it's street credit.

He's like a rapper.

But it's true.

It's true.

It's absolutely true.

And also,

I never thought they should have brought

the Stormy Daniels one.

And the fact that there's four one, it just, to the people who don't follow it closely, you know, they should have just had one,

he's generally a piece of shit, Trot.

About

one omnibus piece of shit.

And

the Stormy Daniels case,

the Stormy Daniels case, it's like you're asking America to then think of this former porn star as a hero and Cohen, who's a known liar and fixer, as a hero.

And it was really a books and records case that was upcharged to beat the statute of limitation.

So, yeah, it made it really easy to roll your eyes on the other ones that were more serious.

The fear is that hush money or inflating your assets, it does reduce the veracity of much more serious crimes,

including nuclear secrets and trying to overturn the peaceful transfer of power.

I think it was just a tactical error to go after the first two.

Okay.

Melissa, is there a way to make politics less about personal vendettas and more about governing?

Yeah, again, that's what I said at the beginning.

I see why you two are pissed.

Because, like, I mean, Democrats at their best, I think, are wonks.

And I mean that as a great compliment.

It's the one thing that Republicans, you don't usually find Republican wonks.

They're Reagan, give me it on one page.

Bush, give me it on one page.

You know, they're one-pagers.

And that's, government is complicated.

And I know you two put in the time.

Government is complicated, and sometimes it requires sharp elbows, and sometimes it requires you to have to be tough in order to be effective.

But the thing I find so funny about it is the reaction to my book, some of it is people saying, oh, this is, you know, she wants to go out and attack people that attack them.

And I'm like, okay, well, there was a point when you were comparing me to Hitler's enabler, but now we're like, whoa, whoa, whoa, don't criticize anybody.

Don't, you know, don't call this out.

And really what I find interesting is nobody wants to talk about the facts of what happened.

Because when you look at the facts of what happened, it's so damning.

So it's easy to make it about personalities and about vendettas and about everything else.

Well, I feel like those things carry the day.

To answer that question, I asked you at the beginning, you know, why would a liberal state with a liberal paper go after a liberal governor?

Because I'm sorry I'd make it all about generations, but a lot of the younger generation who was raised on the phone, which makes you shady and passive-aggressive and mean and fake.

I'm sorry, it just does.

I don't think, you think they care about policy first and foremost?

I don't.

I think they take glee in this kind of shit.

They like taking, especially that nest of vipers that's Albany.

Yeah.

No, they love it.

It's sport.

It's actually sports.

It's sport.

So it's like, he's on my same team.

That's, who gives a shit whose team?

You know what?

I'm on my team.

And it's, you know, so, so.

Now, again, I don't know what happened and I don't know who's at fault,

but

I know there's two sides.

Okay.

Scott, how can we prevent China from

using AI to sow chaos and disrupt our elections?

Well, we can't.

It's too late.

You're about to see an AI misinformation Lollapalooza in Q1 and Q2 as Putin recognizes the fastest blue line path between him and victory in Ukraine is the re-election of Donald Trump.

So if you're spending $70 billion and 100,000 lives a year fighting a losing war in Ukraine, wouldn't you be stupid not to spend spend $5 or $10 billion on Albanian troll farms, A-B-tested information, and then an amoral management team in social media who will feel really bad about the misinformation the day after the election when all the checks have cleared?

We are about to see the weaponization of media platforms that have no fidelity to the Commonwealth and the GRU and AI

deposition Biden and Harris.

We're going to see the first real externality

of AI in Q1 and Q2 of next year in terms of misinformation around the election.

But Ozempic's still more important.

I still don't have the answer to that question.

Okay.

Governor Cuomo, knowing what you know now, is there anything you would have changed about the way you

administration handled COVID?

Okay, that's the question we didn't get to.

And I was going to read you the ProPublica statement, which they basically said New York was the only state.

Now, of course, the scandal, scandal, the issue involved, if people don't remember, is that, you know, obviously this is the beginning of the pandemic, everything was chaotic, we didn't know what was going on, but

we did know this.

It mostly affected the elderly people like most pathogens do.

They were the most vulnerable.

So you allowed people who had been in the hospital, older people, from a nursing home, now they go to the hospital, to go back into the nursing home without testing them.

ProPublica says you were the only state to do it without testing them when they went back into the nursing home, and that's what caused such death in the nursing home.

Is that true?

No.

Short answer is no.

Also, remember, you say what we knew.

First, this is Monday morning quarterbacking by which I could make the New York Jets champion, right, if we could do this.

When COVID started,

It was all the disinformation was amazing, right?

It was coming from China, wet markets, zootropic virus.

it was going to California and state of Washington, so we banned travel to

China, from China.

It turned out that China had already spread it to Europe.

All the European flights were coming to New York, JFK.

So it had been here for months, and it was astronomical.

When we first found out about it,

And Scott can appreciate this, they were projecting we would need 150,000 hospital beds to deal with the number of infected.

We only had 50,000 in the entire state of New York.

We did it to free up beds.

We were afraid of losing hospital beds,

but people who were in hospitals, who were considered medically stable, who were tested, were sent to nursing homes if the nursing home said they could treat that person in a way that protects the other people in the nursing home.

And that was a way to make sure we had a number lot of people.

But it didn't, did it?

I mean,

they also, I mean, the same organization, ProPublica, says, you counted the number who died differently.

In other words, you only counted the ones who died in the nursing home, whereas many people came from the nursing home and died in the hospital, and you didn't count those.

You only counted if they died in the nursing home, which they felt was deliberate.

Well, let me not get weedsy with you.

Every day I did a briefing.

And every day we collected information from the hospitals and from nursing homes.

And we printed two numbers on the screen every day.

This is the number of people who died in the hospital, this is the number of people who died in a nursing home, which means you had to go back every day to 1,000 hospitals, nursing homes to collect this data.

And this is how many died in the hospital, this is how many died in a nursing home.

They then raised the question and said, well, how many died in a hospital who were originally in a nursing home before they went to the hospital?

That's a different question.

And

that actually took the state controller a year to figure out and go back and do the audit.

But we said, there's how many died in a nursing home, this is how many died in a hospital.

Different question: how many died in hospitals who were originally in nursing homes?

You then have to go back and forensic.

So you wouldn't do anything differently.

I mean, is it fair to say?

I would run that number now, which nobody asked me for until months later.

But it would have been, you know, this is in the middle of COVID, and you're asking all these people to do accounting.

But if that's a number that people would have wound up wanting, which they didn't say for months, Bill, I would have put that number

up front in the beginning.

People died in a lot of nursing homes simply because the people who take care of the people in the nursing homes are poor.

And the poor people get COVID.

But it goes back to incentives.

We have social media algorithms that get more engagement and more Nissan ads if they call out people and really make them look as stupid and as mean as possible.

I was on the board of my kids' school during COVID.

I wanted a harsher lockdown policy, and in retrospect, I was wrong.

The damage to kids of keeping them out of school longer was greater than the risks.

But here's the bottom line:

myself,

our great people, the CDC, I'd like to thank the governor.

We were all operating with imperfect information, and we were doing our best.

So let's but let's learn from it.

Let's learn from it.

Let's learn from it.

Let's hold each other accountable.

But let's bring a little bit of grace and forgiveness in the shit show that we're coding.

Yeah.

But other states didn't do it differently.

Yeah.

I mean I read Florida asked for two negative COVID tests before you get back into the North Carolina.

The look if you want to first on Scott's point he's exactly right.

All the early information was wrong, as a matter of fact.

A lot of it now.

Not just from President Trump.

Dr.

Fauci, who I have great respect for early on, said this is not going to be a problem.

They said it was, you could contract it from touching a surface.

We sprayed all this off.

I remember washing the mail.

And we had,

yeah, I still do, by the way.

But we had no idea how infectious it was for seniors versus children early on.

We had no idea.

We didn't know if it was airborne, if it was by touch.

So this is, when I say it's all hindsight now, now you know.

And the way, Scott's exactly right, you know how it got into the nursing homes?

It got in months before we knew it was here.

The staff walked it into the nursing homes.

Like I said, the poor people, that's

what it is.

And also, I mean, it's a war.

In war, people die, and generals,

it's it's not like they're trying to kill them.

But

generals have to make decisions.

Not all decisions are the right decisions.

You don't know until after.

And to that point, I mean, when you ask the question, would you do things differently?

I would do everything differently.

Everything.

Literally, everything differently.

I agree.

There's nothing I wouldn't do.

And you never understand these people that interview us when they go, do you have any regrets in life?

No, I don't.

No, like, what?

And that's why we have to tell the story and we have to understand it because there will be another pandemic and we've got to learn from this one so we do it better the next time.

All right.

This is

the last one.

This is for our

two New Yorkers here.

What do you, New Yorkers, think of how Mayor Eric Adams and Governor Kathy Hochl?

Yes, yes, you pronounced it right.

I take it you're a big fan, have handled the city's migrant crisis.

I saw today they're offering any of these migrants, this sounds like a game show, a plane plane trip to anywhere in the world.

There's policy, you don't have to go home, but you can't stay here.

You know, Ed Koch started that in the 80s to help solve the homeless crisis in New York City.

He was giving out one-way bus tickets to the homeless population.

This is not new, but yes.

California is what they say.

They did, really, they did.

It's true.

So what do you think about how they handled the migrant crisis?

You know, I just want to say something in defense of Mayor Adams.

Immigration, this migrant crisis, is by definition a federal crisis.

It is.

This happened because of decisions made by the Biden administration and they basically made them unilaterally and then they didn't manage any of it.

And so people started showing up.

The governor's not stepping in.

The president's not stepping in.

And so Eric Adams is doing everything he can to try to manage this.

influx of people which the likes of which we haven't seen since World War II in New York City.

He doesn't have the money to do it.

He doesn't have the human resources to do it.

Or the space.

The space.

New York's crowded to begin with.

Yeah, and then it's like we have to turn around and say thank you because the president's offering to let us lease Floyd Bennett Field where we can put people.

It's like, what?

You caused this problem.

And we're supposed to say thank you because you're freeing up a field for us to build migrant beds.

It's the craziest thing in the world.

So, I mean, my heart goes out to Eric Adams because he really was put in a terrible position and nobody else has done that.

But didn't some of these places sort of deserve it, I'll ask you this, by saying we're a sanctuary city, like how these terrible racist border states were, and then when they called their bluff and sent the migrants to him, they were like, suddenly they weren't quite so liberal.

What I call liberal in theory, people.

A lot of people are liberal in theory.

And when the migrants arrived, they were like, yeah, what the fuck?

That's a.

The

sanctuary city was used during Trump when we were talking about illegals.

New York City said it was a sanctuary city.

New York State said it was a sanctuary state.

Many other cities did also.

This has nothing to do with sanctuary.

These people are here legally.

That's what we want to forget.

They are asylum seekers.

They are here legally under the law.

So it's not about sanctuary.

But for the federal government to abrogate its responsibility,

where we get to a point where the Texas governor is really deciding where migrants go.

send this to L.A., we'll send this.

New York City winds up with 130,000, and there's no federal oversight or management.

And you give it to the one level of local government that is least able to deal with it, which is a city administration.

And then the state says, you know, you're on your own.

It's crazy.

That's why I'm for Dean Phillips for president.

All right.

Thank you, everybody.

Appreciate it.

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