Ep. #622: Frances Haugen, Bari Weiss, Tim Ryan

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Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO late night series, Real Time with Bill Ma.

Start the clock.

Hi, everybody.

How are you?

Thank you.

Hey.

Thank you very much.

Thank you, people.

Thank you.

I appreciate you coming.

Thank you very much.

Thank you very much.

It's a very, I know, it's a,

I know it's exciting.

It's exciting to be.

It's an exciting week for Hollywood.

We're in Hollywood.

And the Oscar nominations came out.

Oh, I can't wait for

this year's show.

It's going to be special.

I cannot wait

to see who slaps who.

It's really going to be

the big, have you seen the big contender this year?

11 nominations.

Have you seen this movie, Everything Everywhere, All at Once?

Oh yeah.

Let's see.

It is the story of what you see when you shine a UV light on a motel bed spread.

It's very.

Also

did well in the nominations got Avatar.

Have you seen Avatar?

I'm against Avatar.

I have a hashtag OscarSoBlue.

And

Anna DiArmas, she's up for best actress.

Do we still say best actress?

Do we still do both?

Yeah, of course.

What about the people who aren't?

That's their problem.

Anyway,

they're going to have to deal with that shit.

But okay, for this year, she's up for best actress in Blonde.

Did you see that one?

I thought

an amazing performance.

There's a very graphic scene where she's, how can I, she's giving head to JFK.

Well, we think it's JFK.

He keeps saying back into the left.

And oh, war movies are back this year.

The All Quiet on the Western Front.

A German movie.

Yeah, it was terrific.

And also Top Gun, Maverick.

Two very different war movies, right?

One, they don't know why they're fighting, and one, they don't know who they're fighting.

I saw Top Gun.

I think it's Scientologists against Iran.

That's as much as I can.

But there's a real war actually now going on in the world, of course, in Ukraine.

And we, America now, is going to,

we're putting this off for a while.

We're going to send them tanks, our best tanks.

People are like,

yeah, okay, I don't know.

Do I lie?

I hate tanks, but I know Ukraine's good.

I don't know what the fuck we think.

Well, Biden says this is the most lethal weapon we have in our entire arsenal if you don't count the gas stove.

Have you seen this?

What is going on with

gas stoves?

They're apoplectic in this country now about, I didn't even know this was a problem, but apparently I don't get it.

You know, this country runs on Deltaco, pork rinds, and jerky, but cooking at home, that shit will kill you.

We're so unhinged, you know.

This is a small story, but I thought kind of emblematic.

A Republican, newly elected Republican congressman this week gave as a gift to all his Republican cohorts in Congress grenades, hand grenades.

I mean, they were all dummies, and the grenades were inactive, also.

Oh, I kid.

I kid the Republicans.

I keep hoping, I think they've finally made a U-turn on going to crazy town.

And then no, I mean, Trump, we were doing stories about this.

You know, after the election, he was finished.

No, three new polls came out this week.

He's trouncing everybody else, including DeSantis, for the Republican nomination.

I'd say, the Republican voters, you know, they're like the people who like, say, they're going to try the McDonald's salad, and then they find up eating the same old shit, you know?

And get this.

This story came out this week.

Marjorie Taylor Green

is angling to be the vice president on Trump's ticket in 2024, and he's into it.

Oh, couldn't you imagine those two running the country, a batshit bottle blonde with zero interest in governing, and Marjorie Taylor Green?

All right, we got a great show.

We have Barry White

here.

The first of season activist for social media accountability and transparency whose forthcoming book, The Power of One, How I Found the Strength to Tell the Truth and Why I Blew the Whistle on Facebook comes out in June and is available now in pre-orders.

Please welcome Frances Haugen.

Hey!

Great to meet you, whistleblower.

Okay, I'm so glad we have...

Oh, look at those sneakers.

I almost wore those.

Yeah, they match my jacket.

They're great for your age.

Me, it would look terrible.

And I'm glad you're here, your age, and

your job, because I need an expert on social media.

This is not my area of expertise, so you're going to enlighten me a lot.

But even I have noticed that everything now is TikTok.

Right?

It's like an invasive species.

Every media site does the same kind of this scrolling of

Instagram.

I saw one of the Kardashians was like, could Instagram please go back to being Instagram where we had pictures?

And even, wow, when a Kardashian can't move the needle, you know it's.

And I see TikTok brain

because it's...

Will you tell me what TikTok brain is, please?

It's something to do with the fact that when you see something scrolling this much, you can't concentrate?

Well, TikTok is different than, say, like Netflix, in that, like, you can't dual screen TikTok.

Like, TikTok,

you don't get another video unless you advance the next video.

And so people end up lasered in on one-minute experiences.

Right.

And so you end up in kind of like a compulsive cycle where it's like, you know, you're rolling the slot machine each time.

What are you going to get?

And it pulls you forward until you're up till 2 o'clock.

And it changes your brain.

I really, I mean, I've talked to people your age, and like sometimes I'll just say movies.

And I can't watch a whole movie.

I'm like, really?

That's...

Well, first of all, the first thing they say, if you mention a movie that was around before they were born, I wasn't born.

I'm like,

yeah, that's why they put them on celluloid.

But, okay.

Aside from that, they can't watch a movie because it's just sitting still for two hours.

Yeah, 90 minutes even.

Right.

Well, whatever it is, they can't, 90 seconds is kind of a stretch.

Okay, so this is evidence.

I mean, is this really what you're after is stopping this rotting of young people's brains?

Because we do seem to be doing experiment on young people's brains.

So right now, there's no incentive for TikTok to help you go to bed.

There's no incentive to keep you prison, right?

Every additional video you watch.

Or read a book.

Read a book, right?

They make more money the longer they keep you on there, which is why in China, there's actually rate limits on how much children can use it per day, like only 40 minutes per day.

And yet it is a Chinese app.

It's a Chinese app.

So they give us the one that rots our children's brains.

Is that right?

So they do nothing when the average child in the United States uses it for on average 100 minutes a day.

Right.

And every year that number's been going up by on the order of seven to ten minutes.

And so there's this question of what's going on where China says this is too dangerous for our own children to use, but it's fine if American children use it.

So why?

But you mostly worked on Facebook, right?

I mean, you've worked at Google.

You've worked at Hinge.

Pinterest.

Right.

You've been all over Silicon Valley, but Facebook is who you blew the whistle on.

I feel like Facebook is the least of the problems.

Am I wrong?

It seems like that's the old fuddy-duddy thing.

I mean, it's basically your high school yearbook come to life.

Which is why I never understood why I would want to be on it.

Why is Facebook evil?

Or on a par of evil with TikTok, say?

Is it?

So the product we use in the United States is the cleanest, safest, most sanitized version of Facebook.

Facebook overwhelmingly spent their safety budget on English and in the United States.

When around the world, Facebook went into some of the most fragile places and paid people, paid for their data for them to use Facebook.

And for at least a billion users, they live in places where Facebook is the internet.

And those are the same places where Facebook spends very, very little money on safety.

And so all the most dangerous things about Facebook, the algorithms, the hyper-virality for the most extreme ideas, that raw, most dangerous version of Facebook is the same product people in the most fragile places are using.

And that's why I blew the whistle.

But if you had to judge which is worse,

Facebook, being on Facebook or being on the smartphone all day, and I understand you can be on,

obviously, Facebook on your phone also.

But I feel like the phone is what makes people assholes.

I feel like it does.

I feel like it takes everything about it,

takes the worst possibilities in human nature and exacerbates them.

It makes people shady, needy, passive-aggressive, mean, and fake.

Would you agree?

I think there's definitely something where when we don't see the feedback of our actions, it allows us to be much more insensitive and cruel to other people.

And especially with kids, you see that kids treat each other radically worse online than they do in person.

And let's be honest, high schools aren't exactly the most pleasant place in the first place.

No.

I've read that it's the introduction of the like button

was very important in this, that we didn't have that until when was the like button first?

So the like button is pretty early.

It's like 2009, 2010.

I think what the larger

function was, was things like Instagram are products of social comparison.

They go on there and on Facebook you might have seen someone describing their day.

Now you see exactly how gorgeous the head cheerleader is.

You see exactly how exotic their tropical vacation was.

And that kind of social comparison really

has been shown to cause a lot of

things like eating disorders and self-harm with kids.

And anxiety.

Anxiety.

I feel like all I hear about with kids is anxiety.

Yeah.

At a time of life when you probably shouldn't, maybe it's the last time you don't have anxiety, and yet they have more, way more than I did

when I was that age.

And it's increasing.

And don't you think that's because, I mean, some of these things that you're talking about, they,

and it just brings out the worst in kids who are bad anyway.

This is what the.

Well, this is what the book, Lord of the Flies.

Remember the famous book, Lord of the Flies, back?

When there were books.

I know you'll never fucking read it.

You mean the movie?

Would take more.

Yeah.

And there's a movie.

But it was saying kids are feral.

Yeah.

They have to be taught to be good.

They're not.

So when you take them at that age, when they suck as humans anyway,

then you enable it.

Yeah.

Okay, so you also worked at Hamilton.

But also it's a thing where, you know, we talk about this idea of TikTok, Instagram, all these apps have only a business incentive to keep you up later.

Right.

The number one risk factor for mental health problems in kids in increasing accident rates, increasing substance use rates is sleep deprivation.

Sure.

And the American Association of Pediatrics is very clear about this.

And so some of those things that are making the depression worse, the anxiety worse, is just not getting to sleep.

They sleep with the phone.

They sleep with their phones.

They take them to bed.

And not people.

Yeah, it's true.

I mean, that's another thing.

Don't you think dating apps have ruined dating?

So not all dating apps are the same.

Different dating apps have different information.

Well, it's all a screen.

It is all on a screen.

You're not meeting a person.

Have you heard about Thursday?

I saw Wednesday.

Yeah.

Is that the sequel?

So

I want to pose a question to you.

If you had to choose who to go on a date with, would you rather choose someone who has seven days a week to spend swiping or someone who's like, I got better things to do.

I'm willing to swipe one night a week and then I'm going out on a date on Thursday.

Which person would you rather date?

I can't answer this question

for so many reasons.

Let's just.

But that's the thing.

So I'm just not.

The most exciting dating app right now for Melanie, for Gen Z, is called Thursday because they don't want to swipe.

They're like you.

They're like, this like endless swiping thing, this objectification thing is like...

But now they're just limiting it to one day a week?

But it's more that they're living their lives.

They're not living in anxiety cycles being like, why won't anyone swipe me back?

So you only swipe on Thursday or only go out on Thursday.

You only only go on Thursday.

So you do your dates on Thursday.

But when do you find this dates on your surface?

On Wednesday.

On Wednesday.

It turns on.

It turns on.

It turns on at 6 p.m.

on Wednesday.

But my point, though, is

capitalism is bringing us products where they're like, hey,

you don't like online dating.

It makes you miserable.

Do less of it.

It's still fucked up and stupid.

Yeah.

So what?

You've limited it.

You've limited it to two days a week instead of seven days a week.

What a giant improvement.

But here's the essence of it.

When it's on a screen, it's not like menu.

Oh, totally.

You know, I've read that most women swipe left immediately if somebody's less than six feet tall.

I brought this up to somebody else.

It was a wise-ass comment.

Okay.

But like what I was saying was, in the old days when you went to a bar and you met somebody, you had a shot

Because you could smell their ephemerons.

And you could tell jokes.

Tell jokes.

See a gleam in their eye, smiles.

I mean, you look a screen.

And it's fake.

Nobody looks like what their screenshot is.

Totally.

I totally agree.

Totally, man.

No.

But it's one of these things where I think one of the things that we're beginning to admit is like people are trying to say, hey, what are the limitations of these products?

Can we try to step away from them?

Right.

And I think when people get really fatalistic about saying, like, there is no hope for X,

people are saying, like, capitalism is remarkably good at saying products that make us happy do better than products that make us sad.

Well, that's a great note to end on.

I don't know if it's true, but I appreciate it.

All right, keep blowing the whistle.

Thank you, Francis.

All right, let's meet our panel.

Okay.

Hey, you guys.

All right.

He is the former Ohio congressman who was recently the Democratic nominee in Ohio's 2022 race against J.D.

Vance.

Tim Ryan is here.

Begin with the good fight, Tim Ryan.

Good.

Thank you.

She's the founder and editor of the Free Press and host of the podcast.

Honestly, we saw her grow up on this show.

Barry Weiss is over here.

Okay.

So

it was a really rough week for watching violent videos.

I got up today, the first thing I saw was the Paul Pelosi video, which was, I mean, there's just so much rage in this country.

There have been 39 mass shootings already.

We're not out of January.

And then

this week, people learned the names of a couple of cities here in California, Half Moon Bay and Monterey Park was the other one, right?

And, you know, these shootings happen.

We go through this ritual, where then we wait for them to announce the race of the shooter.

We're waiting for the Oscar nominations.

Because that's, you know, somehow to a lot of people the most important thing.

And I just thought it was very interesting that this week, Asians were killed by Asians.

Two Asian men who were, you know, 66 and 72.

And then this week we just got this video of the Memphis Five.

A black man is brutally beaten in Memphis by five cops.

They're all black.

I guess what I'm asking is America's culture of violence, it does go deeper than race, right?

And I think this mono-focus we have on race is short-circuiting us trying to fix some of the realer problems.

Would you agree?

Well, definitely deeper concerns here, and this is an opportunity for us to have that conversation.

The conversation about mental health, the conversation about guns, the conversation about

the cops.

In the stress the cops are under.

I'm not defending these guys, of course

this was a tragedy.

They should be prosecuted, full extent of the law, the whole nine yards.

But if we don't at some level realize that it's not a white cop or a black cop, it's a cop who's under stress, who's underpaid.

I had cops in my congressional district, Bill,

they were getting paid $14 an hour.

You know, you'd go out every day, risk your life in unsafe communities, and you make very little money, high levels of stress, and add into it what your conversation just was.

Everyone's on this now.

So everyone's doesn't have the attention span.

Everyone's kind of more impulsive than they were 40 or 50 years ago.

And that this may be an opportunity for that broader conversation.

I mean, I basically think we should classify every weekend in Chicago as a hate crime if that's what it's going to take to get people to pay attention to the violence in this country.

I feel the same way.

I feel like we hear about a horrible incident and we wait to see the race or identity of the perpetrator and the race and identity of the victim and we know exactly how it will play based on that.

But to the family of the person that's murdered, does it matter?

I don't really think it does.

It's misleading that everything is always racial.

I mean, I feel like this is one of the big flaws of the left these days is they have this monofocus.

You know, again, when the education system breaks down, people don't know a hell of a lot.

So they focus on something that's very obvious: black and white.

Everyone can understand racism, and of course, it is still a real thing in this country.

It's just not the only thing.

Right, and a black life should matter if the perpetrator of the crime is white, and a black life should matter if the perpetrator of the crime, as it often is in a city like Chicago, is black.

And I think, you know, we haven't seen the video out of Memphis yet, but I'm sure it's going to be as horrible as

the police chief there says it it is.

But I think I hope that the takeaway from it is not the takeaway of the summer of 2020, which is that we need to defund the police so that worse people decide to go and become police officers.

I mean, that is what we're living through.

And there's a big exodus from the police squads.

The LAPD is losing 50 police officers a week right now.

You call the LAPD, they will not show up for 30 minutes.

And who pays?

That's, again,

with the woke.

Who pays for that when there's less police and less competent police?

A lot of people of color

in communities where they want more policing.

Right, and if you're in a community like mine, you can go and pay for essentially private security, retired police officers.

Really?

Where are you living now?

Oh.

I'll tell you that.

I've been talking to you in a while.

I guess you moved up.

It's no Bill Maher spread.

It's not Beverly Hills, but I'm doing my best.

Don't say where I live.

I could live anywhere.

Okay.

So

Hancock Park.

Whatever, wherever it is, but don't tell people where we live.

We're talking about crime.

What?

What?

All right.

So I have a political question for you, because you had a very tough race there.

And, you know, Ohio is kind of a red state now.

It used to be like the ultimate bellwether state, but I don't think it's that anymore.

You put up a good fight, but J.D.

Vance, who is like George Santos without the Boa.

Like, this guy lies.

Like, you know, it's all impressionable.

But so everybody, you know, all I read all the time, everybody hates Congress.

Everybody hates the government.

Everybody hates in the government.

Biden's approval rating is basically what Trump's was.

Shit.

Always in the toilet.

Everybody's or the toilet.

Nobody likes anybody.

I read this week: you know who is popular?

Republican governors in blue states.

Phil Scott, he's never heard of him.

Probably the way he likes it.

Because he doesn't, Vermont doesn't say stupid things.

81% approval rating.

81%,

including most Democrats.

Charlie Baker, never heard of him either.

Massachusetts, 68% approval rating.

Larry Hogan, I heard of him.

He's the Republican governor of Maryland.

Again, 81% approval rating.

What's going on there?

Why is that the key?

This, to me, if we can solve this, maybe this will help us with our pol what's their policies?

What are they doing?

Is it something where like you can only get away with this if you're a Republican?

It sounds to me like they're enlightened because they're not Trump Republicans but not woke.

And that's what people apparently fucking love.

Yeah.

Well, you elect

The whole idea is you elect people to solve problems, your problems in your community, whatever they may be.

And most people really don't care what political party you're from.

And so if you have a centrist Republican who is pro-choice and moderate, tolerant, respectful, civil, doesn't throw fucking bombs all the time, you know,

you're actually palatable to a good swath of the country.

And I'm sure those people were running against super progressives on the other side,

and their legislatures are probably Democratic.

But isn't that kind of how you ran?

Yeah.

So why'd you lose?

Couldn't beat George Santos, I guess.

I think

that's a good idea.

Here's the problem in Ohio, and all on.

The Democratic brand in so many areas of the country is toxic.

There was a woman who ran.

Toxic.

Yeah.

I mean, there was a woman who ran for Supreme Court in Ohio,

sitting Supreme Court justice.

Two years ago, she ran and won and got on the court.

You didn't have to put D or R by your name.

Okay, and there's a county in southern Ohio, she got 51 percent, okay?

Great candidate.

Two years later, the Republicans changed the law.

You had to put a D or an R by your name.

Same woman, same court, same message, same candidate, lost, and in that county got 31 percent instead of the 51 percent she got when it was just, do I like that candidate?

There's a lot of Democrats watching the show tonight.

Tell me why that is.

Why is the detoxic?

Go.

We,

Democrats, not all Democrats.

Some Democrats will take the bait on all of the bullshit that the Republicans throw up.

So.

Or create the bait.

Well, they create it, right?

Critical race theory.

Instead of saying, of course, I don't want that stuff taught to my kid.

We want the full history.

We want good, the bad, the ugly.

Some will get in a fight about critical race theory.

They'll start with, like, well,

this is a college-level class that is taught because of that.

And then they go down the road, and the average person is going, what are you talking about?

Like, I want you to educate my kid, reading, writing, arithmetic, and that kind of thing.

A lot of Democrats will go down that rabbit hole.

And the problem is, when you're talking about that bill, you're not talking about jobs.

You're not talking about wages.

You're not talking about pensions.

You're not talking about safety.

You're not talking about a security.

Here's what your opponent just said, J.D.

Vance.

He said,

he claims that hundreds of billions of American tax dollars are sent to universities that teach that America is an evil, racist nation.

That stuff plays in Ohio.

And it's also partly true.

We do teach that a little too hard.

You know, it's one thing to teach, like you say, the real history, and we should.

But even when I went to school, we did teach that there was slavery and that it was wrong.

I don't think they completely, now maybe, I don't know what's going on in Texas.

They can be pretty crazy down there.

But generally teachers are going to teach that.

But we have gone too far in the other direction.

I mean, this is, you're starting a university, right?

Isn't it?

I'm on board of one because, I mean, there are something like 4,000 universities in the country.

You wouldn't think that we need another one.

And yet somehow, all of these schools with all of these unbelievable endowments that have fancy fancy slogans like Veritas and claims to truth in their motto and in their mission statement, you know, and above the doorposts of the schools, they don't actually believe in those missions anymore.

You know, I think often these days college degrees aren't worth the paper they're printed on.

They are bullshit.

And here's

what that's.

I've just seen when someone applies for a job with me and they haven't graduated college or gone to college, I am more interested in that person.

Well, and this is why this elitist argument works so well in places like Ohio.

There's nothing more elitist than college, and people know that.

And it's been in this position of this show for a very long time that the Democratic Party is kind of on the wrong side of this issue because their opinion is always, their program is always, get everybody into college.

Everybody should go to college.

Just the more people sitting in classrooms looking at blackboards, the better off we'll be.

And I've always said, no, college is bullshit, A.

And B, we should make college less necessary.

Don't get everybody in college.

Finally, someone's listening to me.

Josh Sapiro, he's the governor of Pennsylvania, Democratic governor.

This week signed his first executive order, 92% of state government jobs won't require a four-year college degree, opening up 65,000 jobs because you don't need a college degree for almost all the jobs they claim you do anyway.

Right.

It's a scam.

It's a racket.

Education is a racket.

But it's also great politics.

And great politics.

And it's great.

What Josh Shapiro just did is fabulous.

It's good for the economy.

It's good for Pennsylvanians, my home state, as we were talking about before.

And frankly, it's a thumb in the eye of the higher ed cartel in this country, which is a move that is fabulous for a party that is now totally associated with the urban elite.

It's just, it's great all around.

And we shouldn't stop with just state jobs.

Like, I think about journalism, right?

Used to be a blue-collar profession.

There's absolutely no reason you need to go to Yale and get a gender studies degree to go out in the street and ask people questions.

I tell you, Bill,

wanna

campaign for 18 months in Ohio, one of the biggest applause lines I would get, or nods, depending on the audience, was when I said we need to bring back shop class.

to our hospital.

And

if you want to start having people,

there's no reason we can't have a K through 12 education system where you're not job ready coming out of it.

We should be able to redesign that system in 2023.

And when I said that, it resonated.

It could have been rural areas, urban areas.

It didn't matter.

People recognize that the system is broken and that to go all in on we're going to forgive all of the student loan debt too, and you're going to take that money from a union worker who's driving two hours and working their rear end off to make ends meet.

You're going to take their tax dollars and you're going to give it to somebody who has a gender studies degree from wherever.

That pisses people off, and I think that's part of the chasm that we have in the country right now.

So listen to this.

44% of all job seekers with college degrees regret their field.

And the top regretted fields, I love this, journalism, sociology, liberal arts, general studies.

Why don't you just say partying?

I mean, really

general studies.

Communications, education.

In other words, all the bullshit.

And you know what's going to fix this?

AI.

Have you been on chat, GPT?

Because it can do everything all these bullshit majors can do.

Yeah.

And for the people at the Amazon

warehouse who had their job replaced by a robot on the floor, They're going to have the last laugh because now AI.

It's coming for me.

It's coming for white-collar jobs.

Exactly.

All this bullshit can you...

There's a...

I put it in and asked it to do a Bill Maher monologue on AI, and it spit out in 10 seconds like five paragraphs that sounded quite like you.

Quite like me is not me, my friend.

Exactly.

So let's not get too ahead on it.

I'm not saying you, I'm just saying the promo is.

No, I know.

It's at the door.

It's scary.

Two AI programs have passed the U.S.

medical licensing examination, and there's a robot lawyer that's going into court next week.

Here's the thing.

It's like they told us crypto and Bitcoin was going to be the thing.

No.

Right.

This is the thing.

This is the thing.

This is going to insinuate itself into everything about our lives.

And it's going to, I mean, I just think this is it.

Like, this is the next huge technology.

Everybody out of work.

That's what I want to know is what, of course it's the human instinct to always always be fat and lazy and sit around the cave and not have to work.

I mean, that's why we went in farming.

Before farming, we had to go out and shoot shit all day or capture it or whatever.

Now we could just, oh, it just grows.

I can sit around.

But what happens when everybody's job is replaced by this?

What do we do?

How do people make money?

How do people live?

How do they feel valuable?

God be.

Tim Ryan?

All right.

You invited me to give you the answer to that?

But it is is something we are going to have to start to think about.

But they said that about the internet, right?

And like,

people adapt to new technologies.

The internet didn't do our job for us.

It helped us do our job.

It didn't do it for us.

I mean, they said this about, yes, the cars, well, they're going to replace the horses, which is true.

But in this case, why the horses?

The horses.

All right.

There are shortages in the building and construction trades in the years to come.

There are shortages in nursing.

There's shortage, you know,

cops, right?

People, you know, I think, you know,

we'll be able to figure it out.

It will make it more efficient.

But I think it could be part of a healing process in the country for those white-collar workers to understand what the blue-collar worker has been going through for at least 40 years in this country.

Okay.

Well, I read about a new star this week, Toadzilla.

Have you seen Toadzilla?

Toadzilla is the,

well, we like to keep the audience informed on all the stories that are important.

The giant,

six pounds, this thing, but they found him in a rainforest in Australia.

Didn't even know Australia had rainforests.

And America immediately fell in love with Toadzilla.

And then, of course, what happens always happens.

Somebody went through his old tweets.

They can't ever let anybody have a day in the sunshine.

And I don't think they were so bad.

But would you like to be the judge of...

Okay, so

these are some of

Toadzilla's tweets.

I guess some of them were problematic in content.

Like,

I like Kermit, but his girlfriend's a pig.

Jeremiah was a bullfrog, was a good friend of mine.

Until I found out he was gay.

Oh, well.

When I wake up, I'm going death cod free on George people.

Oh, Toadzilla, you.

I support a woman's right to choose what to serve me on my lily pad.

Oh, see,

he's sexist.

Frogs are supposed to fertilize thousands of eggs.

What's your excuse, Nick Cannon?

Well, that's, yeah,

I could see how that's problematic.

Megan Markle, and I thought I was cold-blooded.

Well,

kiss me and I'll become your prince.

Well, that one's not so bad.

Blow me and then you'll become my angel.

And

you can disagree with Mitch McConnell's politics, but you've got to admit he's handsome.

All right.

All right, so

this toad was not the only obese thing in the news this week.

The king of blends, they call me.

There's a new drug on the market.

I've been reading about this a lot, Ozempic.

It's a diabetes drug that they are now using off-label to help you lose weight, and apparently it works.

Makes your face fall off, but it works.

Not fall off, but...

Well, fall off in the vernacular sense.

Yeah, I mean, it makes the face look very old.

But you lose weight, and

people are,

women are taking it.

I guess everybody can.

They're now prescribing it to kids.

Under 12, also, there are new guidelines from the American Pediatric Association, gastric bypass surgery.

You know, first of all, I gotta say, I hate this subject.

I don't want to ever be talking about obesity.

I'm always the bad guy who has to tell the truth.

But I'm sorry, the country is gaslighting me and a lot of other people with a lot of crazy bullshit.

And I just won't have it.

And the sad thing, this sick thing, is that doctors are going along with this new invented Orwellian world where there is no good foods or bad foods, where you can be healthy at any weight, where it's a disease.

I'm not going along.

I'm sorry, it's just not true.

And Ozembic, have you heard of it?

Do you have an opinion?

I got your back on this.

We should not be out on a limb here.

Like, this is insanity to think about.

Because we weigh too much.

That we're going to do gastric bypass surgeries for kids is insane.

That we now know there's a whole body of evidence developing that you can reverse diabetes through nutrition.

There are doctors literally prescribing food.

And you just, you got to change your diet.

You got to change your nutrition.

Even exercise is not as important as...

And so,

but

nobody makes money off that.

Right?

That's the problem, is that we know what to do, but we don't train our doctors that way.

But there's a movement happening in the country around food as medicine, around the pharmacy with an F, on how we, how we literally, because people don't know.

We've lost the generational education on how to eat, how to cook, how to grow food.

You talk talk to young kids today, say, where's that tomato come from?

And they say, a grocery store.

You know, like they just don't know.

But the cultural messaging on this has been just insane.

Like in the past two decades, we've gone from Michelle Obama, Beyonce, let's move, eat your fruits and vegetables, to don't say anything, you don't want a fat shame, body positivity.

To now we're saying, you know, let's maybe put 12-year-olds on a lifetime medication and make them more dependent on big pharma than they already are.

I just want to say how the policies that come out of Washington, D.C.

affect us.

We subsidize the crops that go into all of the fake food that people are eating and that kids are eating.

And if you want to know what drives a taxpayer nuts, is when you say we subsidize school lunches and school breakfasts, in which these kids will go in and they'll have 80 grams of sugar in their breakfast, which is more than you're supposed to have in a day.

You'll have that before you even go into your first period class.

That's all subsidized by the taxpayer.

You go into these schools, they're 70, 80, 90 percent Medicaid, which is the federal government program for the poor.

So now we have half the country has diabetes or pre-diabetes.

The government is subsidizing the bad food to our kids, and then the government's subsidizing the health care.

increased costs because everyone has diabetes now.

And you wonder why the taxpayers are livid as to why these systems are all broken.

But we can't even have that conversation now.

That's the problem with the policy.

Well, we're having it now.

We are going to have this conversation.

I've had it before.

I'm going to have to have it again.

And just for people who think that we're exaggerating this or that this is just from fringe people, this is as mainstream as it gets.

I don't know if you saw 60 Minutes a couple of weeks ago, but

Dr.

Fatima Cody Stanford,

she works for the Biden administration.

She's their chief medical officer on this.

She's talking to Leslie Stahl.

Leslie Stahl says, it's a brain disease.

This is what this Dr.

Fatima Cody is saying.

Okay, it's not a brain disease.

If it was, why didn't we have it 50 years ago?

Why did people look completely different 50 years ago?

We didn't evolve in 50 years.

Again, this is what I mean by gaslighting.

So Leslie Stahl said, so willpower.

Dr.

Cody says, throw that out the window.

Throw that out the window?

This is a doctor saying, throw that out the window.

She said, the number one cause of obesity is genetics.

No, it's not.

It's eating doughnuts.

Again, I'm just not going to go along.

She says, even with optimal diet or exercise, we can't change this.

Horseshit.

Horseshit.

She says,

Doctors do not understand obesity.

A 10-year-old could understand obesity.

This is backed up by the New Stupid Times, your old paper.

They did a whole article about this.

There's no consensus whatsoever.

They're quoting some researcher that they found that they wanted to quote.

There's no consensus whatsoever about what the cause of obesity is.

Really?

There's no consensus.

Let me think.

It's going to come to me.

This is Orwellian.

There are people now who go into the doctor's office with a card.

They're called don't weigh me cards.

And again,

this is a doctor, Dr.

Natasha Bouillon, a Phoenix-based primary care doctor, is behind this.

She says, checking weight can be triggering.

Good.

Good.

Maybe it'll get them to eat better.

Someone's health, she says, is not reflected by one number.

No, it's not by one number, but that's an important number.

It's like, I'm saying, don't tell me my blood pressure.

I don't want to know what my white blood

cell count is.

I mean, it's insane that doctors are going along with this shit.

You are not doing the patient any favors.

Thank you.

That's the main crux.

They have blood on their hands.

You do no harm.

You're here to help.

You're not doing them any any favor.

And I will say

there's so much added sugar and salt, but sugar primarily when we're talking about this, added to our foods that it does become an addiction.

Like this is lighting up your opiate receptors.

People do get addicted.

So, but yes, you can fix it.

That's the point that we're trying to make here.

It can be fixed.

I also think

you can hold two things that are true in your head at the same time.

On the one hand, frankly, like when I was growing up, it was Cape Moss.

That was the only thing that was beautiful.

And I like living in a culture, frankly, where that's not the only standard anymore.

On the other hand, denying, you know, that when I go to In-N-Out, that's not a brain disease.

That's a choice I'm making.

Sorry, I think it's a good choice.

Great choice.

We're going to do that after the show.

But I also think that this is part of a much broader,

very, very Orwellian ideological movement that is trying to deny the power of free will, personal responsibility, and choice.

And

it's terrible psychologically for a country to be in this headspace of, well, we couldn't possibly achieve that.

We have to take a pill or get surgery.

I worry also about the Democratic Party because I've always said, you know, everything in this country, there's only two sides.

It's only Pepsi and Coke cure.

Everything either goes into the blue bucket or the red bucket.

And this kind of shit goes in the blue bucket.

And I mean, between,

you know, gender is only a construct and being fat isn't a real thing, I just,

I think this is what you were talking about when you said the D is toxic.

People live practical, common-sense, kitchen table lives, and they see stuff like this, and they just go, yeah, he sounds okay, that Tib Ryan, but he's got the D.

Yeah.

And so he's got the D.

We're looking for a cure.

I need a pill, I guess.

Right, right.

You need a deactonine.

You got a...

And it's not fair to you.

No, because,

you know, you're not going to carry this woke water.

No, no.

I mean, in a lot of ways, ways, I took it on.

And I think in a lot of ways, that's why the National Party didn't come in to help me.

They didn't?

No.

I mean, and there was a comment.

Is that why?

Because you weren't woke enough?

Well, let me just say

there was a

consultant or somebody who was saying we need to put more money into North Carolina

or one of the other states because they have more college-educated voters.

And so the calculation coming out of D.C.

as to who are you going to support from the Democratic side, our chances are better if we go into a state that has more college-educated voters.

Not how do we figure out, like Tim Ryan was trying to do, get the working class, whether they're white or black or brown or gay or straight, if they're out there working, Tim's talking to those people, how do we help him?

Because that will help us shift the brand of the party.

I think if this man was the voice of the Democratic Party, it's like, I am a Tim Ryan Democrat.

But I think most people,

especially after COVID, are looking at a party that has school lockdowns.

Yeah.

You know,

kids on Adderall, now kids on Ozempic, puberty blockers, and they're like, I don't want this.

You know, I want to run in the other direction of whatever this is.

I read that in the Skokie

kindergarten, they spend five days on the gay pride flag.

Doing what?

I don't know.

I don't know.

But not learning about the American Revolution and Europe and Socrates and like a thousand other things, not in kindergarten, Socrates, but you know, like, I don't know.

But like, it goes all the way up the chain.

We need some aspiration in the country.

We need some vision.

We need the direction that the country can be unified

to where we need to go.

And it's not talking about all of this bullshit.

The people are just, you know, they're just fed up with it.

There's your button.

Stop talking about bullshit.

All right.

Well, we're done talking about bullshit for today.

Thank you, panel, but time for new rules right now.

New rules.

All right.

New rule, now that the unknown possible explosive device that prompted an evacuation in Louisiana was found to be an egg,

the person who put it there must tell me one thing.

What made you want to throw away your entire paycheck on a stupid prank?

Neural, the Minnesota boy who slept outside for a thousand straight nights must go inside.

But if you do insist on sleeping outside, at least come to California.

It's warmer, and if you pick the right spot, you might meet Andy Dick.

Neural, now that Shakira caught her husband cheating when she noticed that someone had been eating her favorite jam, a jam she knew he didn't like,

men everywhere must remember you better keep the kitchen perfect if you're thinking of fooling around.

Women notice things in the kitchen, so top off the cereal, wash the dishes, soak the towels, refill the salt shaker, clean the ass print off the counter.

If you have to, repaint.

It's either do all that or just tell her you want to break up and who wants to deal with that?

New rule, feel free to share this recently taken photo of a cloud that looks like a vagina.

But don't expect everyone to love it, like your woke friends who will accuse you of misgendering the sky or

the married guy who jokes, wow, I haven't seen one of those in years.

Or Lindsey Graham who says, what's that supposed to be?

Neural, now that the FDA is imposing limits on lead in baby food, someone must tell me, why did baby food contain lead in the first place?

Yeah.

We thought it was the paint chips making our kids stupid, but it was the applesauce all along.

The Gerber baby isn't cute.

He's saying, duh.

And finally, new rule, if insanity is defined as doing the same thing over and expecting a different result, we have to stop being insane in our approach to fixing the environment and try something new.

I don't know what will work, but I know what didn't work.

Asking people to be good.

Trying to convince our citizens and other countries to use less and pollute less, sacrifice more.

When you tell humans, if you do these environmentally friendly things, we can all continue continue to live, their response is, what's in it for me?

So just to be clear, I do still believe very much that climate change is an emergency, but I don't think we're going to win it by grocery shopping with a laundry bag

or banning the gas stoves or imagining a human can really drink this through a paper straw.

Scrolling on your phone can use more energy in a day than the refrigerator, but no one is going to give that up.

We'd have to go back to having sex with people we know.

And we all must be aware by now that what buying everything from Amazon does to the environment.

But do we stop?

No.

The verdict is in.

Humans are not good people.

It's just not in us, including me.

And I'm tired of living a, well, not a lie, but it's also something I never mention.

But it's a new year, and I'd like to come clean.

My name is Bill.

And I fly private.

And so does every other person who calls themselves an environmentalist who can.

Now enjoy this fun photo collage of some of your favorite stars and

politicians who speak about the need to reduce our carbon footprint, but who are always on private planes.

That's right, all of them.

If you don't see a celebrity's picture here, it's because we weren't allowed to use it.

Or their series got canceled.

But all the environmentalists of Hollywood and Washington do it.

Their position on climate change is, we must do more to stop pouring carbon into the air, except for me when I want to go somewhere and then I take a private jet.

It turns out there is one thing in this world that is completely impossible to resist, and this is it.

It's like heroin.

If you do it once, you'll never stop.

There are two kinds of people in the world, those who fly private and those who would if they could.

A third category, those who could but do not, does not exist.

Except for Ed Begley and Greta Thunberg.

And that's why you never see a picture of her smiling.

Ed and Greta, that's who walks the walk.

Everyone else is full of shit and I'm done being full of shit.

I can take being a bad environmentalist because almost all of us are, but I can't take being a hypocrite.

Now, I always justified renting a plane because I only used it for work and literally could not get to most of my stand-up gigs.

on time any other way.

How do you think I did it all those years?

I said good night here at 8 p.m.

and was on stage in Vegas at 10.

But I don't need to do stand-up like tomorrow night in Albuquerque.

And outside of heads of state, almost everyone else could fly commercial.

Why don't they?

Ask anyone who tried to get home for Christmas last year.

And don't tell me the younger generation is better.

They're not.

They're just poorer.

They're actually worse.

This is who they look up to.

The family where everyone has their own private jet.

And kids love Bitcoin, which to determine the value of takes an amount of computer

processing that uses more electricity than some whole countries.

Kids could have rejected that, but they didn't.

They love it.

Why?

Because they want to be rich.

Why?

So they can fly private.

No one can resist it.

John Kerry is our climate czar and he uses a private jet.

It's like if the Secretary of Homeland Security smuggled drugs in his butt.

People take jets to environmental conferences.

If you could run TED Talks on hypocrisy, you wouldn't need coal.

But sorry, not not sorry.

I tried to do my part for the environment.

I never had kids.

The one thing worse for the planet than private jets.

It's true, because then they have kids.

I had the first generation Prius in 2001.

It looked like a Tylenol gel cap.

I was always handing my keys to valets who were driving a better car than me.

I had the first Tesla in 2010.

And honestly, both these cars sucked.

The Tesla came up to about here on me.

If I had a hard-on, I couldn't fit in this thing.

But both times, I said to myself, okay, I'll take one for the team.

Because I have a platform, so I'll do the right thing, and then everybody will follow.

Every people will...

nobody followed in 2021 80% of new vehicles weren't electric weren't even hybrid they weren't even cars they were SUVs and trucks that's what people want in 1973 the share of global electricity generated by coal was 38%

you know what it was 46 years later in 2019 after all the talk and all the trying

37%

You know what percentage of plastic gets recycled?

Five.

Five percent.

Those blue bins that are everywhere, they're not full of bottles, they're full of shit.

Can you blame us for being a little cynical when you find out that all that plastic that we've been painstakingly separating out for the last 20 years all goes to the same fucking place anyway?

So yes, it's fun to laugh at powerful people.

That's how I can afford to fly private.

But we need to get serious.

Really?

More nuclear, moving way more money into research and development?

I don't know.

But something serious.

Because the real technological problem is the way people are wired.

I know it's easier just to blame Taylor Swift's plane, but honestly, do you want to be stuck on Southwest with a pissed-off Taylor Swift?

All right, that's our show.

I'll be at the Kiva Auditorium in Albuquerque.

I will tomorrow, January 28th, at Valley's Lake Tahoe, March 11th.

Oh, and Club Random, if you want to see me do this super high, go to YouTube or listen wherever you get your podcasts.

I want to thank Tim Ryan, Barry Weiss, and Fretis Haugen.

Now go to YouTube and join us on Overtime.

Thank you.

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

For more information, log on to HBO.com.