Ep. #629: David Sedaris, Scott Galloway, Annie Lowrey

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

Start the clock.

Hey, everybody, thank you.

Appreciate it.

Thank you very much.

How you doing?

I appreciate it.

Thank you, people.

All righty.

Thank you.

I appreciate it.

Happy spring.

Okay,

please, there's so much news to get to.

Please, I love your love, but there is so much news.

But I tell you, between March Madness Bracket and Stormy Daniels, what a week for big busts, huh?

Yes, all week everybody's been on pins and needles because we thought the word was going to come down that Trump was going to be indicted and arrested.

And it's true, Trump may be indicted in a criminal investigation.

And everybody in this country said the same thing.

Which one?

The storm.

It's the one with Stormy Daniels.

That's it.

It's not

Trump, the first guy ever to pay a porn star to shut her mouth.

And okay, so now, because this is all anybody's thinking about, a lot of these deep fakes, you know, these deep fakes, they can make anything look like anything, have been going viral.

Look at this one.

This is, yeah, this, people are looking at this.

You can tell

this is fake because Trump is running.

And there's one, I saw one of Melania.

You can tell

this is fake because she's upset.

But Lo, it could get...

Everybody thinks, you know, his crowd is roused up about this, could get violent.

So he today called for calm.

I'm kidding, of course.

He made it worse.

He posted that if he gets arrested or charged, he warned of potential death and destruction.

That would be catastrophic, catastrophic for our country.

What is known as an unveiled threat

makes you miss those innocent days when he just undermined faith in our elections, you know?

But Stormy, now, poor Stormy, she's caught in the middle of this, and now she's getting threats from Trump's crazy people.

And boy, if they're mad at Stormy about this, what did they find out what Debbie did to Dallas?

Yeah.

Of course, I think the person who's really laughing about all this is Hillary.

She's home going, who's getting locked up now, bitch?

But

that is not the only trial that is going on this week.

Another very important trial,

I could only describe this as peak Caucasian.

Gwyneth Paltrow

is in court in Utah for a skiing accident.

How do you make that wider?

I can't.

This is the only trial I've ever seen where the

the defendant's lawyer asked the judge for a recess so his client could steam her vagina.

And finally, researchers at Humboldt, wow, Humboldt University, have come up with this conclusion.

They say it's their conclusion that drugs and alcohol do not make you more creative.

Oh shit.

Okay, that may be true, but at two in the morning, who would you rather listen to?

Researchers at Humboldt University or Pink Floyd?

All right, we got a great show.

We have Scott Galloway and Annie Lowry.

But first up, he is the best-selling author and humorist whose 42-city tour kicks off at the end of this month.

David Sederis.

Hello.

David.

Hello.

Great pleasure to meet you.

How are you doing?

Good.

Oh, look what you've got on.

I got a pair of shorts on and knee socks.

Kind of a Harry Styles thing you're doing there, huh?

Is there something you want to tell us?

I look good.

We've never had anyone transition on the show.

I've never,

I don't think I've ever missed your show, but I've never watched it.

I listened to the podcast.

No, I listened.

I know what you're saying.

I listened to the podcast.

You listened to it.

So I didn't know what the set looked like.

Oh, the

audience, or yeah.

I could have been wearing that.

But listen, I got it.

You look good.

You do look good.

I got to tell you, you're a humorous is what I think the word.

And just as a

comedian, I hope you take this as the ultimate compliment, I mean it is.

As a comedian, you know, when we hear humorist,

we think one thing.

You're a humorous who's actually funny.

Like LOL funny.

And it's very, and it's, it's, uh,

and it's very rare where you can gather a big crowd to watch a guy read.

Really?

Well, it's, I mean, it's the laziest form of show business, but I never wanted to,

I never wanted to do more.

Like, I never wanted to memorize it.

I never wanted to act it out.

I just wanted to stand up, get dressed up, and stand up and read, and that was enough for me.

Well, and you're also a ballsy guy.

You're not afraid to get groaned at.

I think we have that in common.

I don't like it, but I'm not going to bend the knee and say something just because I know the audience wants to hear it if I don't think it's true.

And I think you're the same way.

I like a medley of responses, and so I think a groan fits in.

You know, there are different kinds of laughs.

Yes.

And there's a kind of a reluctant laugh and there's a, you know, a belly laugh and stuff.

But I think a groan is okay.

I'm not big on a hiss.

No.

No, but usually you get a hiss, like, let's say if you're somewhere and if you say something about Donald Trump,

they want want everyone around them to know that they don't like,

that's tiresome.

That's called virtue signaling, yes.

But I saw that you were at, was it Oberlin College recently and someone sort of rushed the stage?

I gave a commencement address, which they're hard to do because you have to be hopeful and you have to offer advice.

Well, I tried to think like, what do I know?

What do I really know?

You know what I mean?

And I made a list, and I don't know that many things.

But

I do know that you should should always keep a joke tucked into your back pocket.

So I just offered a joke.

And

the father of the one conservative student who ever went to that school

rushed the stage and tried to get at me, and they were holding him back.

And he was like, Let me at him.

And he was just over a joke that I never got any pushback over.

Can you tell it now?

And it's not,

it's not my my joke.

I didn't write it.

Somebody told it to me.

A cop stops a car.

Two priests are riding him.

I'm looking for a couple of child molesters.

The priests look at each other.

We'll do it, they say.

And

this father got so upset, but I didn't.

But what bothered me was

he waited until they were handing out the diplomas and he said, you're an asshole, Sidaris.

But that was the students' time.

You know, they were receiving their diplomas after four years of hard work.

If you wanted to do that, do it during my speech.

But it was, the timing was bad on his part, I thought.

And I just didn't, that's a new thing that you have to learn to expect now.

You have to learn to expect that if somebody doesn't like something you do, then they're going to try to get at you.

Well, yeah, I mean, obviously Chris Rock, we saw Dave Chappelle, I mean, a number of people.

I'm a little insulted.

I have not been attacked yet, but

no, I'm I'm kidding about that.

I don't want it.

Another thing I think we have in common is we hate kids.

Well,

here's what I've been thinking lately is that I feel like a lot of people who say that they're wounded or offended by something don't, they were never hit by their parents.

So I think, no, it's true.

Like, I know people who have never, ever

hit their children, and so they don't know what pain is, really.

But I think that if you don't want to hit your kids, then that's fine.

Of course, that's fine.

But other people should be allowed to.

Because as people that.

Because

I think that children are like animals that don't have any natural predators left, and they're just not afraid of anything.

Well, they're different than they used to be.

I mean, they're naturally feral.

They are.

I mean, it's true.

We all read Lord of the Flies, right?

Well, what did we get out of that book?

Kids are feral.

Right?

Okay.

They have to be civilized by adults, and adults stop doing that.

I think that's the root of almost all of our problems.

Well, I was in London.

I was in London not long ago, and there were these boys breaking the branches off a tree.

And this woman said, You boys, stop doing that.

And they said, You can't talk to us.

And they were right.

You know what I mean?

What she was doing was bullying, you know, according to the law.

So, and they knew it.

You know, they knew that.

But that's a sea change from when we were kids.

I mean, not only could your parent hit you, the neighbor could hit you.

Yeah.

Really?

Yeah.

It was like it takes a village.

That was the mentality.

Like, any adult could.

Right.

So maybe that's going a little too far, but I don't know.

I think that's better than what we have now.

I mean, I don't have children.

You don't have children.

And some people say to me, you know, like, how do you know?

I'm sentient.

I mean,

even if I didn't go out in the world,

every television show, every movie, presents this dynamic between kids and parents.

Every movie I see where the kids, they're told something, they just ignore it, or

they yell back at their parents.

They can't all be misrepresenting it.

This must be what it's like.

So, what about?

I've been.

You have a boyfriend, but you don't want to have kids.

No, no, no, no.

But

when I go on tour, I always do book signings, so I get to meet a lot of people.

And you meet people in a way you, and you can ask questions in a way you wouldn't ask someone in the grocery store or whatever.

You can ask whatever you want.

But I'm always surprised.

I meet a teenager and I say, what job, you have to have an after-school job?

And the parent always says, this is

Atticus's time to be Atticus.

Like they don't,

and the kids don't.

So that's why, you know, you go to McDonald's, you go to these places now, and there's nobody working there.

It's because people aren't sending their kids out to work anymore.

And I mean, we had to, like, I know this makes you sound old, but like when I was 14, my mothers like wanted us out of the house.

And so we had to to get volunteer jobs.

So I went straight to the state psychiatric hospital.

And I was there.

I worked there for two years.

Great training.

Great training.

And it wasn't like, oh, you're going to help these people make paper flowers.

It was, no, they need this orderly called in sick.

And I'm 14 years old, strapping a naked woman to a gurney, right?

That's an education.

That's an education for a 14-year-old.

And then I

and then I was a dishwasher.

But like if my parents said you need to concentrate on school, I wouldn't have spent my dishwashing time studying.

They knew that.

So I don't know.

I just think it's really important for teenagers to work.

Well, I think it's important for them to serve me, is actually what I say.

Well, I mean, you say that I'm having just read your book, a lot of it is, it's kind of dark, although it's funny, but it's about your father died.

I mean, you had, we know this from your other books, you had a very strained relationship, strained with your father who was like a Trumper.

Can we just broadly put it that way?

And then, I mean, you have this great line, he got to mention, forgot he was an asshole.

He did.

Which is, again, you're so funny.

How does that fit into the view with kids today?

Well, I think that he thought, you know,

when my grandmother got old, my father put her in a home.

And you don't do that when you're a Greek.

I mean you don't do that.

He got a lot of, his mother was shocked, like what do you mean?

That's why I had you.

You know what I mean?

I had you so you would take care of me.

And my father had us so we would take care of him and we were like, you're an asshole.

Like nobody,

so it didn't, it didn't really pan out the way I think that he hoped that it would.

Like we did, we weren't,

no one offered for him to move in.

with

what I couldn't imagine my father living with me.

But do you think that will haunt you for for the rest of your life?

No.

No?

I don't.

You've already forgotten.

No, I don't.

You know, I was trying to think

if I was ever rude to my mother or mean to my mother, and I honestly don't think I am, but if I recalled an occasion that I,

in which I was, I would feel awful about it.

I adored my mother, you know, and I hope the thought of ever causing one moment of stress or unhappiness would plague me.

But you know, you get what you pay for.

So I'm not,

I'm completely fine with my attitude with my father.

I would never, I would never feel guilty.

And it gave you a lot of material.

Yeah.

Not that.

Well, art is a kind of a receipt for pain.

You know, I mean, there's pain, but you get something for it.

And I mean, I think you're writing better than ever.

I think you think that yourself.

And you should, you know, I thank you.

Yeah.

Because I think in

a vocation like you're in, age does make you better.

You know, you learn more, you're wiser, and that's what you're training in.

You're a wise, funny guy.

You observe stuff.

Of course you're going to be better at 65 than 35.

Well, I think I don't know of any writer who doesn't look back at their earlier books and think, can we just shred them?

You know, can we go door to door and collect them and shred them?

You know?

Well, do you think you'll be thinking that about this book when you're 90?

I hope.

You hope?

Yeah, because you think that will become better.

What a great way to look at it.

Thank you so much for doing this.

Pleasure to meet you.

Thank you so much for coming.

David Sederis, let's meet our panel.

Hi.

How you doing?

All righty, professor of marketing at NYU Stern School of Business and host of the ProfG podcast.

Scott Galloway is back with us.

And she's a staff writer for Thanic.

Annie Lowry.

Welcome aboard here for the first time.

Great to see you, Annie Lowry.

Okay.

So I really don't want to give Donald Trump the satisfaction of talking about him.

I thought when he was gone, he'd be gone a little bit.

But, you know, there is an ex-president out there now who's going to be arrested, possibly.

And he is talking about violence in the streets of his supporters if he does.

So I don't know.

I kind of have to say, or get your opinion on this just one more time.

We can be quick about it.

But I just would like to go on record of saying I think this is a colossal mistake if they bring these charges.

Not this one.

You know, I mean, yes, he's done a lot of bad things, and I'm sure he did this.

Everything they accuse him of done, he did.

But first of all, it's not going to work.

It's going to be rocket fuel for his 2024 campaign.

And it's just going to look to Maga Nation like, oh, you know, you tried with Mueller, you tried with Ukraine, you tried with January 6th, now we go to the porn star.

Really, you're down to that?

Your thoughts.

Absolutely.

I think in the time that this has been coming forward, if we look over the past three months, Donald Trump,

as this indictment has been hanging over folks' heads and as his name has been in the news even more, his popularity rating has gone up.

His likelihood of being elected by Republican voters has gone up.

Ron DeSantis is no longer the frontrunner.

And I think that we've seen in the past however many years at this point that the more attention is on him, regardless of what that attention is about, the more the circus has him in the center of its rings, the better he tends to do.

So I think politically, there's sort of an interesting question.

The legal case itself, I don't know what to make of, not being a lawyer myself.

Yeah, if we're going to indict people who pay off their prostitutes and lie about it, it's going to be a perp parade, not a purpois.

If they do this, this increases the likelihood he's the nominee.

They need to put wood behind the arrow that sticks.

That's Georgia.

This is just not strategic to have.

And it's, what makes him look bad?

What devalues him in the eyes of Republican voters?

There was a poll that showed that 75% of Republicans agree that it's bad to pay hush money to somebody.

They agree that this was bad.

They've never thought that any of these charges really matter.

And so to the extent that Democrats have been able to keep the conversation about the economy, about what they are offering people, to the extent they've been able to sideline him, that's tended to work.

And to be fair and accurate, she is a porn star, not a prostitute.

Excuse me.

Let us be gallant.

Sex worker.

Okay.

What?

Sex worker, no?

A sex worker, yes.

Sex worker.

But that is different than a prostitute, I would say.

A prostitute, I think, is...

I think porn stars like having sex.

Prostitutes are just doing it for the money.

That's what prostitution means, doing something you hate for the money.

I think that.

Isn't that called work?

Yeah, I think that...

You call work, right?

We're all whores, exactly.

I think they're all doing it for the money.

Nothing wrong with it.

What's it?

I said, I think they're all doing it for the money.

No,

I think porn stars actually.

Let's talk about something else.

Hey, how about this?

No, it's true.

Porn star is high.

There is a difference.

Okay.

Let's lump people together.

That's wrong anytime we do it.

Let's talk talk about TikTok.

Boy, I can't wait to talk about TikTok.

So they were grilling the CEO of TikTok, Mr.

Shou Zi Chu, and the chairman of the committee opened by saying, your platform should be banned.

And then good morning.

Grilling.

I think that's pretty funny.

And indeed, you know, the Biden administration is kind of on the same page.

They've made a threat, you either sell it to an American company or lose it.

So for people my age watching who have no idea what TikTok is, but it's dominating the news every week, I know you're very interested in this, you're interested in this.

Tell them why everyone, and this is bipartisan, which is so interesting, both Democrats and Republicans are shitting their pants about TikTok.

What is it that's so scary about TikTok?

Well imagine a brain jack inserted into the neural network of two-thirds of our youth under the age of 25 who spend more time on TikTok than every other media source combined.

And then imagine how easy it would be to put your thumb on the scale of anti-American content and recognize that they would be stupid not to elegantly, insidiously, covertly raise a generation of American civic, nonprofit, military, and government leaders who day by day, minute by minute, just feel a little shittier about America.

If we had that

tool in China, we would do the exact same thing.

This is a defense threat.

It should absolutely be banned.

we can't have this

I think that there's sort of two ideas to hold in our head.

The first is the notion that the Chinese government would legally in Chinese law have the ability to be altering content on this platform and have that reach is terrifying.

On the other hand,

members of Congress have repeatedly said that they believe that this is being used as a tool of manipulation and perhaps propaganda.

We don't know that that's actually happening, and we've not seen cases where that's true.

So, is that because they can't tell us, or is that because this is still hypothetical?

I think that that's a question that's out there.

And as you point out, this is enormously popular among especially young people.

That means, especially young voters.

So, we would be

divesting from, or altering, or losing a platform that has 150 million American users.

And there's some polling showing that.

Why isn't there going to go?

I mean, if we get rid of this, then it's going to be click Dick or some other thing.

I mean,

I've seen just in my lifetime there's generations of things that come and go, social media platforms.

Maybe this one is bigger and has a little more lasting power.

But it seems to me the only way you get rid of these things is when mom and dad get on it.

Because

that's when the kids don't want it, but they will migrate to somewhere else.

I don't know how you ban something like this.

I think it's very easy.

You threaten to ban them, and then on the eve of the banning, they spin it to American interests.

You have essentially, with TikTok, the most powerful propaganda tool in history.

It's the most descendant platform in history.

It's gone from 600 million to 6 billion.

And the wonderful thing about America is our optimism, but the Achilles hill of that is that we're much easier to fool than convince we've been fooled.

And if you look at age and how people feel about America, it's inversely correlated.

And the negativity around America is positively correlated with consumption of social media and TikTok.

And you can't lay this at the feet of all media or social media or TikTok, but what you can say is it's not incumbent upon us to prove that they're not doing it, it's incumbent upon them to prove that they're not doing it.

And they are doing it.

There was an attempt to ban it already, right?

The Trump administration tried to do this, and there was a question about the actual security risk that it poses.

I'm not making an argument about what security risk it poses, because I don't know, but I think that as we're looking at the Biden administration and Congress, as they're trying to do this, regardless of the choice that they make, there's going to be a giant, like very expensive, very long legal imbrolio because there's a First Amendment issue also, which is that the administration is not supposed to be stopping the free flow of information.

And so I think that

I don't know that the Biden administration has great answers here.

I don't know that they have great choices.

now that this is such a cemented part of American life at this point.

So we can just do away with a ham ring and talk about trade policy.

There's asymmetric trade policy here.

They let our media companies into China just long enough to steal our IP, kick us out, prop up a local entrepreneur, and capture all the value.

Their equivalent of TikTok talks about prodigy pianists and how they want to be astronauts.

And our TikTok talks about income inequality and election misinformation and a lot of good things.

But again,

the clips from tonight, there'll be some that reflect America in a good light, some that reflect in a poor light.

Wouldn't they be stupid not to put their thumb on the streets?

Well, it's also about what they're getting, the data that they're stealing, that they're able to look at everything that somebody is doing on TikTok.

Now, I don't know if they're going to get a lot of information from our kids, because our kids don't know anything.

But

there is a lot of information to be gleaned.

And just in general, I mean, I noticed this is the 20th anniversary of the Iraq war, and you know, the naivete that we had with Iran taking over that country.

It just makes me think about this, just in broad strokes.

To not be naive about China, really, are they doing it?

Of course they're doing it because they're the country that puts the Uyghurs in camps.

They're the country that locks you in your apartment.

If you had COVID, they did crazy things.

It's a president for life.

It's a surveillance state.

And I saw, there's one congressman, Bowman of New York, who said,

this is wrong because it's racist.

This crazy card that they play, some people, that you can't criticize, China, the new Islam, you can't criticize any human rights violations because it makes you racist.

Right.

I assume you give no quarter to that.

The conversation is so eight months ago when I said it should be banned on this show, I was called a jingoist and a racist.

It's totally, the conversation's pivoted 180.

C-SPAN yesterday was this alien network where Democrats and Republicans were agreeing.

There's more unity.

There's more unity in Congress now around this.

People are more threatened by TikTok than Russian troops pouring over the border in Ukraine.

I've never seen this kind of unity.

By the way,

this season of C-SPAN is just off the hook.

I mean.

But have you ever seen this kind of this?

No, it's very rare.

They are going to pass legislation that gives the Commerce Department the ability to ban it.

On the eve of the banning, the CCP will decide we have 300 billion reasons to give them their way and we'll spin it.

There's too much money at hand here.

It'll be spun.

Okay.

So I know, Scott, you've been thinking a lot about young boys.

No, wait.

That came out wrong.

That came out wrong.

About the men in crisis problem, which I was reading some amazing statistics, knowing this is a pet subject of yours.

And

I feel like sometimes people in this country get caught in a paradigm that's just not happening anymore.

And in their minds, I think men are still ahead.

I know men are told often, you know, you have all the advantages.

Listen to this.

In a few years, twice the number of college graduates will be women than men.

Twice.

70% of high school valedictorians are women.

In 10 states, they're a grade level above the boys.

In all 50 states, they're at least half a grade level above the boys.

This blew my mind.

Single women, far more likely to own their own home than single men.

Far less likely to commit suicide or be in prison.

And almost twice as many are married under 30.

63% of women under 30 are married, only 34% of men.

So I don't know.

Do the liberals have the guts to take the case of somebody who's kind of lagging behind if it's a male?

Well, the question is, should they pay for the sins of their father and their grandfather?

Because a 19-year-old who doesn't have any prospects with just a college degree, without a college degree, who has an education system that's biased against them, boys are twice as likely to be suspended for the exact same behavior as a girl, five times as likely if you're a black boy.

You mentioned some statistics.

If you're a boy on, man on Tinder, if you're in the bottom half of our average attractiveness, you have to swipe 200 times to get a date.

So you get confirmation.

You have no value.

And we have to have an honest conversation.

Mating dynamics are different for men and women.

Women, 75% of women say that economic viability is important.

Only 25% of men.

Women mate socioeconomically horizontally and up, men horizontally and down.

So the result is a lack of household formation.

And essentially, there's nothing more dangerous than a lonely, broken young man.

And we're producing too many of them.

And finally, we're having a productive conversation because who wants more emotionally and economically viable young men?

Women.

This is...

Compassion is not a zero-sum game.

Civil rights didn't hurt white people.

Gay marriage didn't hurt heterosexual marriage.

Nor is having empathy for the group that has fallen furthest fastest, is that going to affect women?

We're finally having a productive conversation.

Advocating for men does not make you anti-women.

I think that's absolutely true and I think that there's probably some good policy answers here.

So making school more available to and more keyed towards boys is definitely one answer.

I also think that there's a cultural answer that's going to have to come into play here.

So one of our great living economists, Claudia Golden of Harvard, has studied men and women in the labor market and has found that when women enter a profession, men leave.

The profession becomes devalued, the people within it make less money because the men don't want to be associated with the women there.

It's called the pollutant theory of discrimination.

Women are the pollutant in the eyes of men.

And so I think that this is one way in which patriarchy is hurting men.

And I completely agree with you that this isn't zero sum, and it's a crisis.

In terms of other cultural things, I think that the media that young men are consuming and what they are being told about themselves and what the world owes them is unbelievably, disgustingly toxic.

I don't know how you combat Andrew Tate.

He's a,

I would say this specifically about him.

What he says is monstrous.

Andrew Tate.

Yeah.

Tell people who he is who may not know that name.

He is a

person

who no longer lives in the United States who creates YouTube content, I think, primarily that basically it's very, very homo-social.

It's all about being seen as sort of a big guy with a Lamborghini.

Women are kind of just accessories.

And he is.

He's under arrest now.

Yeah, he's facing legal trouble for his abuse of women.

Yeah,

he starts off fine.

He talks about self-reliance and physical fitness and being action-oriented, and it leads to a very dark place.

And I think a lot of people have a gag, an understandable gag reflex when you start advocating for men, because a lot of people on TikTok pretending to advocate for men.

It's just thinly veiled misogyny.

We need more male role models.

We need to redefine masculinity.

And also,

with respect to masculinity, there is nothing less masculine than being arrested for trafficking people and potentially tonight in a Romanian prison being someone's bitch.

That is the opposite of masculinity.

Why are young men so lazy, though?

That's what I don't understand.

I mean, you see them.

You see them on dates and shorts.

Yes they are.

Stuff like that.

I mean just like little things you could do and they just don't they just seem to be on they would rather sit home and jerk off to porn.

I don't get the the inertia that seemed to be built into them.

I think a lot of it is our fault.

I think that men who have achieved a certain level of success need the ultimate expression of masculinity, in my view, is to take an interest, a vested interest in the well-being of a young man or a boy who's not yours.

Because the moment, the number one indicator of suicide among teen boys is a fatherless home.

70% of men who are incarcerated didn't have a male role model.

So if we want better men, we have to be better men.

We have to get involved in our lives.

You're talking about mating dynamics.

I think in health, in high school, we should have a course on mating dynamics that teaches everyone, especially young men, how to approach someone and express romantic interest.

And there's nothing wrong with that.

It's not toxic.

While, while, this is the hard part, while making them feel safe.

They've been taught that it's toxic to express that interest.

Even if I wanted to help you with this, it's too risky.

You know, they would just say I was a pervert.

It was, oh, boy, Bill Maher suddenly took an interest in a 15-year-old boy.

Not at all.

Yeah, they would.

They would.

Sorry.

Anyway, speaking of this,

it's springtime when a young man's fancy turns to romance, so I was not surprised when I found out this week that Rupert Murdoch,

Rupert Murdoch just got engaged for the fifth time.

There he is.

He's

92 years young, and the last divorce was only seven months ago.

So this guy really works fast, and we wanted to know how does he do it.

And apparently he had written this book already called How to Bag a Fox.

Rupert Murdoch's pickup lines from a true player.

Would you like to hear some of Rupert Murdoch's?

For example, I wouldn't kick you out of a walk-in bathtub for eating crackers.

I like my women like I like my news, heavily made up.

Oh, I like this.

I may not be much to look at, but I'm a terrible person.

Are your legs right-wing propaganda?

Because I'd love to spread them.

Well, there's a good email.

You want to have a

catchy pickup line?

Is it hot in here, or is it just this blanket on my lap?

I destroyed democracy.

Now it's your pussy's turn.

Oh, no.

Want to see my prick?

Tucker, get over here.

Want to see my asshole?

Hannity, get over here.

All right.

So.

All right.

So we had yet another one of those reports this week from the UN Intergalactic Panel on Climate, or that's not the real name of it, but it's something like that.

I feel like I, talk about Groundhog Day, I feel like I've written, I've read this report every year, and it's always the same.

The world is coming to an end, which I think it is, by the way.

I think disaster is coming, but they always seem to predict very specifically when, and some of those dates have already passed.

I think they should, first of all, stop doing that, you know,

because it really bleeds their credibility.

It's kind of like what the Western Medical Establishment found out about COVID.

Don't lie about it.

Because people, you will lose their credibility.

But here's what I don't get.

In light of this report, in all these reports we've seen about just the ocean, we could take so many different parts of the environment, but I read that like plastic in the ocean will outweigh fish by 2050.

I mean, the coral reefs, the bees,

we're in the middle of a sixth extinction.

We're losing so many species.

And yet there are people, and I think you're one of them, who wants us to have more babies.

I don't get this.

Connect those dots for me, because I think the problem with the environment basically is too many people using too few resources and people being the assholes we are.

We're selfish and we're piggish and we're sloppy and we're going to use what we can while we're here.

So how does more people solve this problem, which seems to me the number one problem?

We don't need fewer people.

We can achieve our climate targets by using our resources more wisely.

I think the notion that...

We don't.

No, but we're trying.

I think that the idea that mathematically we need to have fewer people, fewer Americans,

I just, I'm resistant to the idea of telling people to have fewer children.

I think they are why we are here.

I think if we marshal our resources more wisely.

It's not about telling them to have fewer.

It's just not encouraging them to have more.

Celebrating spawning.

That's what I'm against.

And I mean,

doing something about Nick Cannon would be a good start.

Well, you don't have to celebrate it, but you shouldn't have economic policies that make it more difficult to have children, because there's really good research that shows that actually poverty

is inversely correlated to population growth.

And it wasn't population growth that hurt the environment.

It was lifestyle choices and energy choices of the wealthiest nations.

And we're not.

If you want to find reasons not to have the investments that are required to move to renewables, just let your economy go into decline, which is what happens when a nation goes into population decline.

It also comes down to what kind of world do we want to live in.

And current trends, at the turn of the century, there's going to be six times as many people over the age of 60 and half as many under the age of five.

Nursery schools are going to become like zoos with old people staring through fences at these creatures they don't see in the wild called young people.

Optimism, 10 brains, one ends up addicted to opioids, six are good citizens, two do great, and one is a fucking genius that figures this shit out.

We need youth.

Look at the Grammys, Nobel scientists.

They get them in their 50s and 60s, the award.

It's based on work in their 20s.

We need a youthful culture.

We need more young people.

Full stop.

Again,

I'm always amused by these arguments where people concede this big part of the point, but then go, aside from that, yes, aside from the fact that we can't grow water, there's only so much.

And there's already too little for lots of people in lots of places.

Already people are starving in places because they don't have enough food.

You can't keep up with it.

Yeah, I know we have enough space.

We just don't have enough resources.

And it's not going to change in the timeframe you're talking about unless there's some amazing technological breakthrough that we don't know about.

Food insecurity is inversely correlated with population growth.

The more people we've we've had, the less food insecurity.

Abject poverty has been inversely correlated to population growth.

People in loving, secure households with good educations and economic viability solve more problems than they create.

And we get that by having more people, because one of them could be a genius.

Is that?

Well, maybe not having population decline.

Italy and Japan are in population decline.

They're going to find reasons to cut investments in renewable energy.

And is there any limit to how many people can be on the earth?

At

at some point, when we hit kind of the max, which is supposed to be 110 or 120, it probably makes sense to think about not having policies to encourage more kids.

Until then, do you want population not only decline, but denigration?

40% of all government resources go to funding seniors.

It's about to be over 50 percent.

The U.S., where the average age of our elected representative is 64, but the average age of Americans is 38.

America is about to become a TV show of a cross between the Walking Dead and the Golden Girls.

This is.

We've already cut carbon emissions.

That's you soon, right?

That's you soon.

I'm down with it.

And you know what?

I want grandkids.

I think that

my advice to any young person is that,

okay, it costs a third of a million dollars to have a kid.

We've made it increasingly hard.

We've made it expensive for families to have kids.

People say they don't want kids.

I don't think that's true.

I think they can't afford to have them.

And my advice to every young person, I know a lot of young people watch this show, is that for me, I did like you.

I did not want to have kids.

Having kids has been absolutely the best thing I could have done to ruin my life.

Have kids.

I'm sorry.

What were you about to say?

It's going to say we're already cutting carbon emissions per capita.

There's not a magical solution that we need.

We have the solutions that we need and we have to implement them.

Okay, it's more people eating meat.

It's more people using

refrigeration.

It's more people driving.

Go vegan, Bill.

A movement away from...

I'm not even going to fly a commercial.

Okay, so

but let's talk about emissions.

Anytime you take one substance and transition to another, there are emissions.

You take fossil fuels, you transmit it.

To

oil to fossil fuels, you get emissions.

Plant-based calories to meat-based calories, you get deforestation and methane.

The emission we don't talk about is taking advertising to money.

It creates dissent, polarization, weaponization.

Our teens are depressed.

And the problem is it's actually more dangerous than carbon emissions because we can't have a sober, honest conversation around what needs to be done because immediately the social

media algorithms pit us against each other.

Well, you saw what's happening in France when they wanted to, the Macroni passed it.

They're raging the age you can retire from 62, which was, yeah, I mean, this is, Paris is burning.

I mean, there's garbage in the streets and there's there's rioting and fires, and a million people are up in arms about this.

Even the mimes wouldn't shut up about it.

But

to be clear, it's not a mime,

it's a pornographer, a porn star.

Sorry, go ahead.

Oh, I see what you were trying to do.

But I was trying to do.

But,

you know, in this country, 62, I mean, we get it at 67.

I think They did manage to raise it from 65 to 67.

And now the Republicans are talking about raising Social Security age to 70 because people are living longer.

What do you think about that?

It seems like it makes sense.

No, it doesn't make sense.

Not everybody is living longer.

So if you look at men who were born in 1930, the wealthiest of them lived about five years longer than the lowest income of them.

If you look at men who were born in 1960, the age gap, the longevity gap has increased to 13 years.

For people who are working who don't have a high school diploma, they retire as soon as 60% retire as soon as they can take some of their Social Security at 62.

There's no need to raise the retirement age.

We can raise all of the tax money that we need to by, this is very nerdy, by lifting the FICA cap and making all wages subject to payroll taxes.

If anything, I think we should be considering lowering the retirement age.

People love Social Security.

Republicans love it.

Democrats want it.

People do not want this to happen.

And it feels like Groundhog Day that every couple years we have this conversation about this fictional accounting problem that they've created in Washington.

And we'll keep having it until the heat death of the universe.

There's no reason let people retire with dignity.

Well, okay.

Okay.

But Social Security, originally something like 42 people were paying in for every worker, right?

Right.

And now it's like three to one.

So how does that math work out over time?

It doesn't.

It runs out of money in 2023.

So you either got to.

It's 2023 now.

I'm sorry,

2033.

It does not run out.

In 10 years, we have a funding crisis.

So you have only two choices.

You either reduce benefits or you increase funding.

Raising the age to 70 would reduce costs by 4%.

It's the most successful program, arguably, in history.

Senior poverty has basically been eliminated.

66% of funds go to people making less than $23,000 a year.

Annie's comments are exactly right on.

It's simple.

You raise the cap.

You make $160,000 a year.

You pay $10,000 in Social Security taxes.

You make $1.6 million.

You pay $10,000.

Your tax rate goes from 6% to 0.6%.

And the other more innovative solution is immigration reform.

Immigrants

pay into Social Security.

The legal immigrants typically sometimes don't get benefits because they work less than 10 years.

And quite frankly, illegal immigrants who take someone else's Social Security number and we force them to pay in, but they are eligible for benefits, are great funders of Social Security.

Immigration reform and a progressive tax policy, problem solve.

The people

who want to raise the retirement age and lower benefits, they're fetishists.

They're obsessed with this idea.

And the truth is that the money is there.

And the people who want to raise the retirement age are people who love their jobs, who get to sit at fancy desks and talk about these ideas like this

until they're in the grave.

People who stand on their feet working all day

don't want their benefits taken away.

Whatever that is.

80-year-olds in Congress.

Right.

We're all agreed.

All right.

Thank you, panel.

Very good.

Time for new rules.

New rules.

Okay, new rule.

The Americans slamming this K-pop singer for wearing a QAnon shirt without knowing what it means have to get over it.

For one thing, it's the first time anyone's looked good in a QAnon shirt.

And also, half of you are walking around with Chinese characters tattooed on your arm that say, My mom fucked a panda.

New world, now that this school lunch lady in Connecticut has been arrested for sending nude photos and having sex with a 14-year-old, that kid has to tell us, what's your secret?

I couldn't get my school lunch lady to give me extra tater tots.

And be careful, lunch lady's idea of protection is wearing a hairnet.

New Roll Home Depot must tell me why they chose this woman to be in their recruitment ad.

She doesn't look like she's ready to help you in the lumber department.

She looks like someone is holding a gun to her head off camera.

Home Depot, satisfaction guaranteed, or we'll blow her fucking head off.

Neural, now that Berlin is allowing women to go topless in public swimming pools, we must follow their lead because

America, I love you, but we're late on everything.

Legal weed, assisted suicide, female heads of state, high-speed rail, paying waiters enough so they don't have to live on tips.

Let's not be late on this.

It just doesn't make sense that this is illegal while this is not.

Number one, if you wear this shirt that says, I asked God to make me a better man, he sent me my son.

I asked God to make me an angel, he sent me my daughter.

You have to get a vasectomy.

Because clearly you don't understand the basics of human reproduction.

And also, that's way too many words for a shirt.

At least your wife's shirt keeps it brief.

And finally, new rules, all the people who've been telling me, Bill, you have to do something on Nepo babies.

Shut up, I don't have to.

But okay, here it is.

And if you haven't heard the term yet, here's a brief montage of all the Nepo babies in the acting profession beginning with Douglas Fairbanks Jr.

That's right.

Their moms and dads were all stars too.

It doesn't make them bad people or untalented.

In fact, some Nepo babies did very well in their first big roles.

But let's also admit that they weren't the only ones who could have done it.

But when it's between a few good people and one of them is going to get you this kind of publicity, who do you think is going to get the part?

So enjoy the good life, Nepos.

Just don't say you didn't have a huge advantage.

Or it didn't matter that much who your parents were.

Or it just got my foot in the door.

This is fucking show business.

Getting your foot in the door is 80% of it.

Yes.

Yes, there are difficult roles that require acting, only the great ones can do, but most acting, please.

Vin Diesel can do it.

Bodybuilders can do it.

Children can do it.

Steven Seagal can do it.

I did it.

Reality TV is acting, acting like you didn't know that glass of wine was going to get thrown in your face.

This is one reason why of the top-rated telecasts on television, sports last year accounted for 94 of the top 100, because it is the last refuge of meritocracy in America.

Show business is full of Nepo babies, politics is full of Nepo babies, even modeling.

which used to require the integrity to find a freakishly perfect 14-year-old in a small Slovenian village

has fallen to nepotism.

But in sports, there are no nepo babies.

There are the sons and daughters of former players, but it's not why they play.

Layla Ali didn't knock out 21 opponents by smacking them with her birth certificate.

Sports is the last place where it doesn't matter who you are or where you're from, just what you do.

No one gets hired either because it would make the team look like America or because their rich white daddy pulled strings.

I don't trust the government, media, churches, judges, juries, banks, Jiffy Lube, or anyone on a dating app.

Anyone on a dating app covering their chin with their hand.

But I do trust that the 450 players in the NBA are the absolute best 450 players the teams could find anywhere in the world.

The fact that this kid's future in the NBA is not assured, in fact, it's the opposite of assured, that's very assuring to me.

Everyone wants to see LeBron James' son play on the same team with his father.

There hasn't been a feel-good story that feel-good since Macaulay Culcin escaped from Neverland.

But just because we want to see it is not going to make it happen.

Only Bronnie James himself can do that.

Doc Rivers' kid plays, but not because his father played, and so it's a great story.

In sports, they don't tell each other stories.

They perform.

Maybe that's why sports looks to me, at least on TV, like a place that has really good race relations.

I mean, where else do you see a grown black man crying over his white coworker?

It's my team.

It's my quarterback.

On the field or court, it's just about who can get me the ball, who can score for our team when we need it.

They earn each other's respect, and the love follows.

So why does America have that in sports, something that is after all just a diversion, but not for stuff that really matters?

42% of private colleges admit applicants based almost entirely on the fact that their parents are alumni.

You get in if you work hard and your dad bought a building.

These are called legacy admissions, although I will also accept entitled fuckface.

But it also must be said that in the interest of righting historical wrongs and evening out our despicable past, the concept of merit itself is now under attack everywhere but in sports.

Instead of getting the kids who lag behind up to the higher standards, schools all over are eliminating honors classes.

80% of four-year colleges no longer require any standardized tests for admissions.

San Francisco's top-rated Lowell High School replaced merit-based admissions with a lottery in 2021 and the result was a three-fold increase in Ds and Fs.

Turns out getting rid of merit admissions just made kids feel worse about themselves and that's what Instagram is for.

At least 16 schools in Virginia are now under investigation for failing to give students their National Merit Scholarship Awards, which are a big deal.

They can open a lot of doors academically and get you laid at math camp.

The Republican governor there called it a maniacal focus on equal outcomes for all students at all costs.

You may not like him, but that accusation strikes a lot of people as true.

And this is a bad issue for Democrats because most Americans seem to agree if they're on an airplane, they want a cockpit that looks like America.

But they'd also like someone up there who knows how to fly the plane.

All right, that's our show.

I'll be at the MGM National Harbor in D.C.

Wow, April 22nd, the Performing Arts Center in Durham, North Carolina.

April April 23rd, and the MGO Northfield Park in Cleveland, May 20th.

I want to thank my guests, Scott Galloway, Annie Lowry, and David Sederis.

Now, go watch Overtime on CNN tonight at 11:30 or catch it Saturday morning on YouTube.

Thank you very much, everybody.

Okay.

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.