Ep. #620: Matthew Perry, Laura Coates, Jonathan Haidt

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

Start the clock.

Thank you, people.

How are you?

Thank you very much.

I appreciate it.

All right.

There we are for our last show of the season.

Thank you.

Thank you.

I appreciate it.

Thank you very much.

Hey,

thank you.

Thank you.

I appreciate it.

I know

it is our last show of the season.

I'm going to miss you a lot, but I feel feel like we are leaving on a high note because, hey, democracy survived, Trump is humiliated,

Putin is getting his ass kicked in the Ukraine.

I feel like I'm the star of a Hallmark holiday movie called

The Christmas Surprise.

No, we almost, and also good news, we were going to have World War III, and now we're not.

So that's good.

Because, yeah, no, interesting.

No, a missile from the Ukrainian war landed in Poland, which is a NATO country, and everybody was like, oh my god, is this going to escalate into World War III?

Fortunately, Biden got on the phone with both parties, settled it down.

Nothing's going to happen now.

And that is tonight's episode of Thank God Trump Isn't President.

Oh.

But that's not not going to stop him from trying again.

He made his big announcement.

Well, not that big.

Did you see that?

He announced he's running for president.

Very low-key, very low-energy.

Sad, I thought.

I mean, really?

Did you see him?

He looked like a gigolo on his 10th call of the day.

Tired.

I mean.

There were six American flags behind him.

He didn't hump any of them.

There was

no zhuzh there.

I mean, it was.

He's so 2000 late, this guy.

You know,

it's all yesterday's news.

Like,

it was like watching ATT announce a new landline.

They don't own us anymore, right?

All right, we'll get away.

And of course, he had to go through his greatest hits about American carnage.

And he said, literally, quote, our cities are rotting, he said.

They're cesspools of blood.

And half of Africa was like, what?

And were the shithole countries?

So the election, they're still counting some places, but basically the Democrats kept the Senate, the Republicans won the House of Representatives.

There will be be a new speaker.

Nancy Pelosi is stepping aside.

Of course, she has to.

Kevin McCarthy from right here in California will be the new speaker of the House.

Kevin McCarthy.

A couple of years ago, he said, I want you to watch when Nancy Pelosi hands me the gavel.

It'll be hard not to hit her with it.

He said that.

I mean, come on, it's just a joke.

Nobody thinks someone would really go to a Pelosi family member and hit them with a hammer.

But that's politics.

That's not what America cares about.

All America cares about is they can't get Taylor Swift tickets.

And Twitter is in chaos, and crypto is tanking, which I think is fantastic.

I have never been a crypto fan.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah.

We're going to talk about millions of people have lost millions millions of dollars on crypto, and a lot of them are blaming the celebrities who hyped it.

Yeah, now when married people are having sex, they're both thinking about getting screwed by Matt Damon.

It's interesting.

And Twitter, oh my God, Twitter's in a Twitter, I tell you.

You know, Elon Musk took over.

First of all, he fired like half the people.

He's like, get out of your nap pods and go home, you fucking.

I love it.

And then the people who were remaining, he said, either resign or I want you to give an exceptional performance, exceptional.

And this is very confusing to the millennials.

They're like,

my parents told me exceptional meant existing.

What the fuck is this?

And the media, of course, which is all under,

they're panicking.

They're like, well, it's falling apart.

Twitter is falling.

And how could it fall apart it's a website not a condo in miami

and and by the way

yes

three-quarters of the people are gone it's still up and running i checked in an hour ago there were five people telling me to kill myself it's fine

it's the same as it ever was

but

Maybe the biggest story in tech slash billionaire news, Jeff Bezos, made a big announcement this week, much bigger than Trump.

He said he's going to give away most of his fortune during his lifetime.

Yeah, come on.

It's not clear whether that's a charity thing or whether he's planning to marry and divorce again.

All right.

Got a great show.

We have Laura Coates and Jonathan Heidi.

Well, first up, he is an actor, playwright, and now author of the New York Times bestseller, Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing.

Matthew Perry is on.

Matthew Perry, how are you?

Great, hijack.

Good to see you, fellas.

They still love you, as they should.

First of all, congratulations.

I heard you broke Amazon.

Your book sold so many copies that they couldn't handle it.

You're like the Taylor Swift of writing.

It seems like I am.

I'm ahead of her book.

That's.

The amazing thing is, the first thing I want to say was: the amazing part is, I beat Bono

in Ireland.

Yeah.

That's kind of weird.

Well, I mean, it's a compelling book.

I mean, I could not put it down.

I feel like one of the big takeaways from the book is you like drug.

I got that.

I think that's clear to say, yeah.

And I just want to to say.

But that doesn't mean you read the whole book.

Well,

I noticed it as a theme.

Before we get too far, I just want to say, first of all, you look fantastic.

Thank you.

So it's amazing to me.

First of all, I'm so glad you're here.

Plugging a book, because a lot of people,

I mean,

a lot of people did have you in the Deadpool.

Yeah.

Maybe you.

Yeah.

You know, I had a horrible accident about seven years ago.

I was given a 2% chance to survive the night.

They didn't tell me that, obviously, because I wasn't really there, but they told my family.

And

I was put on a thing called an ECMO machine, which you having read the book, you would know what that is.

No, I did.

I took notes.

I underlined it.

Oh, no, I believe you.

But they call that a Hail Mary.

That's what they do when they put you on an ECMO machine when it's a Hail Mary.

And five people were on ECMO that night, and the other four died, and I somehow made it.

Well,

God is a fan.

Yeah, I mean, I know you're feeling about that.

But

I know that.

I'm a fan.

Maybe I'm a fan.

I know that once you've referred to it as a force.

And, you know,

I believe that.

I believe that power there is a higher power right i believe i've had a very close relationship with him that's helped me a lot and somebody's on your side yeah um

everybody's on your side everybody's glad you're here yeah and i i must say the human body reading that book and i did it's amazing to me

the paradox that the the it's so so fragile

and also so resilient.

It's so easy to die.

And also, it's kind of hard, which you approved.

It's kind of hard to die.

It can be, yeah.

You tried.

No.

Well,

I never tried, but I did so many drugs at certain times that I knew that it could kill me, but I would do it.

But I never wanted to die.

But the real thing for me, and the troubles that I've had is that reality is an acquired taste.

That's what I believe.

It's a great line.

And

I have had a great deal of time, a great deal of problems acquiring it.

Right.

And it wasn't until

I became really safe.

I felt really safe in my sobriety and really strong in my sobriety.

And to tell you the truth, I am resilient and I am strong.

Oh, my God.

And you look healthy.

You look healthy.

It's amazing.

No, I feel very lucky that I'm someone who could do drugs and still does drugs.

You don't have any on you, do you?

No.

And it doesn't affect me that way.

But I mean, your stats, I mean, unbelievable.

6,000 AA meetings, took 55 vodka in a day.

This is like Joe DiMaggia with the 56-game hitting streak.

I mean, no one's going to come up with these stats.

No one's going to beat you on some of this stuff.

Yeah.

And some of the things that I went through to get that many pills a day.

Oh.

You know, my whole life was math.

I mean, you know the story about.

The open house.

Can we talk about this?

Sure, yeah.

This is a, because I remember the David Bowie song, like Waiting for the Man.

Right.

This is where I first, I was a teenager, first learned the concept of what addiction was, I think, from that song.

Like, this is this big rock star, but he's waiting for the man.

Keith Richards just said the same.

Doesn't matter how big you are, how famous you are, the drug dealer, you are his bitch.

Yeah.

You're waiting for the man.

But you didn't wait for the man.

You went to open houses and stole drugs from people's medicine cabinets.

Such a better plan.

Right?

I would look in the paper and look at open houses on Sundays, and I would go and I would go upstairs to the medicine room.

And if it was an elderly couple, I knew I'd hit it home.

And then you look at the dates, you know, and if the dates are old and there's still a lot of pills, you can take a lot of them.

And

I'm telling, it's a horror story, and I'm telling it in kind of a funny way, but as I drove off, I was like, nobody's going to say, Chandler just stole drugs out of my

medicine department.

Exactly.

Yeah.

And what what kind of drugs were you looking for that they would have in these houses?

Any kind of, I was an opiate

guy, so any kind of opiates were what I wanted.

I quit drinking.

People would be surprised to see I haven't had a drink since 2005.

Right.

Yeah.

And

that's because it just stopped working.

I couldn't get drunk anymore.

Right.

So I...

I turned it up and went to something that I couldn't use.

But you did do say that after your

colon problem, I mean, your colon exploded, right?

And you were in the hospital for five months,

even after that, you wanted.

Yeah.

I mean, to get out of, to come out of an experience like that, if anyone doesn't understand how strong addiction is, I think that says it all.

That you would spend five months in the hospital, lose your colon, and still, first thing out of the hospital is, hey, let's get hired.

Out of the hospital.

It happened in the hospital.

I was told that opiates had done this to me, and I literally said, I'd like some opiates to solve this problem, please.

And,

you know, and got them, and then got home and was on a certain amount of opiates because I was lying about how much pain I was in.

And then it didn't become enough, and they said, no, you can't have any more.

The drug dealer said, yes.

And I happen to live on the 40th floor of a building, so I had to go down 40 floors, meet the guy on the street, come back up, and I had a nurse, a sober companion, and they caught me every time I did this.

Literally every time.

They were like, give us the drugs that you just got.

And I had to go to a rehab then.

And

the thing is, when you have something like a heart attack, and I've spoken to many people about this, you have a heart attack or you have some horrible, death-defying accident that I have, you would think you'd be filled with gratitude.

But that's not, you're pissed.

You're angry.

And at the things that you have to do in the future to get back to where you normally were.

You're not filled with gratitude.

You're like,

wait a minute, I got to be here for five months.

You can't, the things inside my stomach are so broken up that you can't do surgery for a year and a half.

And you're going to have to have a colostomy bag, which is, you know.

I'll leave you with a couple if you want.

Do you have one now?

No, no.

No, you don't.

So you had it, but you'd say.

I had it.

I had it removed.

And that was the one that I had.

Right, so your colon's working again.

Yes.

All right.

Well, we've talked about your ass.

Let's talk about your dick.

Sure.

I bring this up because you say you started in high school drinking heavily.

Yeah.

And you couldn't, like, you thought you were impotent in high school.

I couldn't keep it down in high school.

Right.

Well, that's kind of me now.

I'm sorry.

Well,

again, human body's resilient.

Yeah.

You know, you lost the colon, you got that back.

I'm sure the dick is on the way.

Yeah.

I'm not sure if you're hitting on me.

I don't know what's happening.

I'm not hitting on you.

But I am going to make a prediction about you.

I think you are about to enter a very, very productive period of your acting career.

Because, I mean, we know you from the past.

Okay, we love that.

It's still on.

It's the biggest hit still on on television friends.

But like, now you're the mature guy.

You're at that age when like actors get really great, I think, because they've had all this experience and you've had all this pain, which is bad in life but good in art.

And I just see people using you in the next 20 years in a lot of really great roles.

And I think you're going to do some amazing work.

Do you see that before you finish?

Thank you, yes.

A couple of good friends of mine have said your best work is to come.

I do.

I really believe that because you have all this experience that you're going to use.

Yeah.

And it's just, you know, it's not going to be Chandler.

It's not going to be that.

But it's going to be better stuff and more mature stuff and great movies.

I found that in

just the

talk show tour I've been on has been much more adult.

And I used to come on these things and write jokes and like it's got to have a moment of silence and I'm so awkward.

And this hasn't been that.

I've been quieter.

I've waited to really think about what I want to say.

And

it's different.

I mean, you're telling us everything.

I mean, you're telling us more than most people know about other people.

Yeah.

And you're doing it in a way that hopefully will help some other people.

And I think it has.

Yeah, and it's helped me.

Yeah.

You know,

getting to a point where

I was safe, because you can't give away what you don't have.

So if I'm afraid that I'm going to use in three weeks, I can't start helping people.

You know, but now I feel.

And

don't still feel you still feel the urge no I really don't oh good yeah all right well then don't come to the party all right Matthew Perry great to see you pal and you're here to this all right let's think please do

let's meet our panel

okay here they are

She is the CNN anchor and host of SiriusXM's The Laura Coach Show.

Laura Coates is with us.

Back with

And he's a social psychologist at NYU's Stern School of Business and co-author of The Coddling of the American Mind, How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure.

Jonathan Heidt, great to see you again, sir.

Thank you.

All right, before I get into the news, I want to

get well-wish to my friend Jay Leno.

Had a little accident this week, but he's Iron Jay, and I know he'll be okay.

I just wanted to say, pal, we're thinking about you.

We'll see you soon.

Okay, as they say in cable news, we have breaking news.

Breaking news.

Very exciting.

It happened a lot on our last show.

I don't know why it is, but Friday afternoon.

Okay, Merrick Garland, I guess he did this on a Friday because he was maybe afraid.

I don't know.

He spent two years thinking about whether he should appoint a special counsel or what he should do about Donald Trump being a criminal.

And now he has made up his mind he's going to give it to somebody else to do it.

He's going to appoint a special counsel to look into the two crimes would be overturning or trying to overturn the 2020 election, that little thing that Trump did, and then bringing the classified documents down to Mar-a-Lago and putting him in the shed with the croquet equipment.

So this guy, Jack Smith, he is the chief prosecutor.

He was the chief prosecutor at The Hague.

That's the world court.

He's going to be now the prosecutor here.

He's going to be the special prosecutor.

He's investigated war crimes in Kosovo.

So he's a serious guy with a serious job.

But it doesn't matter who, it doesn't matter how, it doesn't matter when.

The right is just going to say it's political.

So what's going to happen?

Why do it?

I think they should do it.

I mean, well, he is known as Teflon Don, you're correct.

But you know, there is a need in some respects for the DOJ to counter what you know is coming.

Donald Trump is going to say this is a political witch hunt.

They're only going to go after me because

he said it, and he'll say it again, and he'll say it another time.

But now he's declared that he's going to run again.

So now he is, because Biden has said he's intending to run again, they are political rivals.

So there is this moment of a time when the U.S.

does not necessarily trust our institutions, our Supreme Court, our court systems more broadly, and they're saying, look, I'm going to head this off.

Having said that, I was a prosecutor.

We were expected to be perfect.

We never had time to be.

I never had the time that Merritt Garland and the team have right now to be able to take all the time to investigate and look at issues.

But the stakes are really high.

And so if you can do one little thing to undercut the argument that this is all politics, why not try?

You gotta.

You can't let a guy get away with it.

That's a bigger precedent.

I know there's some bad sides of doing it.

Do you agree with that?

Well, I would just add that

we're kind of in a new era.

That is, we all have intuitions about what's proper and how things should work, and those are based on us living in the 20th century when things weren't completely nuts.

But since about

at some point in the 2010s, everything got completely nuts.

And I've been arguing that it's because social media rewired the way we share information.

There's no possibility of sort of a shared understanding of what happened or who we are.

So I think it's just difficult to second guess or game things.

I hope that Merrick Garland was at least thinking about

how this prosecution could actually work, come to a proper conclusion, and

not blow up the country.

I mean, the problem is everyone thinks that he's reactive.

And he might very well be, right?

The idea of he's having a special counsel who's going to have the day-to-day operations of everything.

It's not going to be Merrick Garland who's going to look at everything every day and decide what's going on.

And so now you'll have the appearance of not having impropriety.

The problem is, the American people are justified in many respects in thinking, are you just now getting to it, whatever it might be?

Are you just, were you waiting for him to announce to then have this special counsel be in place?

Because if that's the case, that's not going to cut it in terms of people getting, being more confident.

And you're right.

Bill, people are having that Mueller effect.

There's a long time.

He was a special counsel.

He was special counsel, and time means nothing with the pandemic.

So everyone thinks this is Mueller part two.

And in reality, there is a delineation.

So you'd think it would have been different, and I think you're probably right, if they had, right after January 6th, they had moved.

Because I kept saying on this show, like, what the fuck is going on?

If only we had some sort of department of justice who could do something.

Some sort of justice department.

All right.

I want to ask about...

So there's a new asshole on the block.

Move over.

His name is Sam Bankman Freed.

Move over, Martin Skrelly.

This is, I don't know if you, have you seen this story this week?

This is one of these guys.

There he is.

Okay, they're calling him the Millennial Madoff.

This is the crypto guy.

It's amazing to me the things you don't know that are going on in this world until they explode.

This guy ran a crypto.

Now, I'm not in crypto because I think it's a Ponzi scheme and I'm rooting for its failure.

He ran a crypto exchange where you can, I guess, buy and sell crypto called FTX.

He's known as FB SBF and he ran FTX and I say WTF.

But okay, unlike banks which have the FDIC which insures you so if there can't be a run on them, there's nothing here in the crypto world.

It's the Wild West.

I mean every month billions are stolen.

North Korea does a lot of it.

Okay, so this thing now collapsed like it was like a bank run in the metaverse.

Like $32 billion.

And it turns out he's a crook and a con artist,

hence the name Millennial Madoff.

So now they've appointed

him on Twitter, which is, you know, no more.

And yet I read it there an hour ago.

So now they've appointed this guy who was point, John Ray III was appointed after Enron.

Remember Enron collapse?

Okay, what was that, 2001?

Bush was president.

It was 2000, I guess.

It was before 9-11.

Okay.

They lost $74 billion in Enron.

So they appointed this guy, John Ray, back then to, I guess, take over the company, clean it up.

Now they're bringing him back.

Now he's going to run FTX?

He said, I've never seen such a complete failure of corporate control.

And again, he ran Enron.

He said,

really?

He said, this situation is unprecedented.

He said said the FTX group did not keep appropriate books or records of security girls.

It was so disorganized that

they were unable to prepare a complete list of who worked there.

At least Elon knows who he's firing.

I mean, these, so, and the plot thickens because this guy, SBF, this Sam Bankman-Freed, this millennial Madoff,

the second biggest donor to the Democratic Party after George Soros.

They loved his ass.

He was always with Clinton and those types.

He was at Davos, you know.

And it just sort of, to your point about we're in our silos, it's like everything now is, as long as you're on our team, we don't care.

We don't look at it.

It has a very Epstein feel, you know, Jeffrey Epstein.

This kind of smells of that.

He's one of us.

He's on our side.

He donates to our causes.

We don't need to look too hard into the fact that he's a con man.

I mean, his picture looks so trustworthy.

I don't know why you wouldn't give him billions.

I don't know.

I just feel like it would be a part of it.

I mean, the idea, it's called, I don't understand crypto.

The name crypto, maybe

you're not supposed to understand.

No one does.

And that's part of it, right?

It's crypto.

It's cryptic, right?

And that's part of the word.

But the idea that, you know, I think money just feels, many, a part of the social media world, it just feels, it's not tangible to people.

It feels like monopoly money.

You think this idea of that phrase, you know, fortune

favors the

bold, the brave, whatever it might be, obviously I don't have the fortune because I didn't get the quote right.

But the idea of thinking about it, people think about that, that must be me.

There's startups.

I can do that.

I can drop out of college.

I can do this.

I can rub elbows.

I can have a Miami stadium, an arena.

after these letters.

And I think people are living in this delusional world where you don't actually have to show anything besides bravado, and that gets you in every door.

That's right.

And people have been always falling for get-rich-quick schemes.

And that's why we have government agencies, is to sort of put a lid on areas where lots and lots of people get hurt.

And I understand the need for innovation in different spaces, but especially when you have ordinary people investing their money, investing their fortune, investing in their retirement, I think this is kind of showing us there is a need for regulation, for institutions.

Part of what, so much of what concerns me now about where we are as a country

that liberal democracy and the free market system that we have are kind of unnatural and unstable, and they only work because over decades and centuries we've built up institutions that allow us to, in a sense, live way above what we are designed for.

And now that everything is speeding up so fast, change can happen.

We don't understand what's happening.

And all around us, people are losing faith in our institutions, in part because our institutions are behaving badly.

And so we have to get a grip on this.

We have to understand what's happening to us.

And then I'm hopeful that this collapse will sort of bring us back to our senses and our reality about, you know, social media is sort of making a mess of our social lives.

How about if we bring that into our economy and our banking system?

Is that a good idea?

Probably not.

What I find so disturbing about it is it seems like they knew it was a scam.

He did.

You know, when you read that, he just did an interview with Vox, and he's kind of of admitting that, yeah, I know.

And he had a girlfriend who wound up with about, I think, a billion dollars of the money because there was so much of it washing around.

That's better than flowers, Bill.

She said, here's her quote.

I didn't get into this crypto as a true believer.

It's mostly scams and memes when you get down to it.

And like, this is what they're saying out loud.

You know, this is not just thoughts in your head.

So I also think there's an interesting connection here with academia because I was reading about his mother, SBF's mother.

First of all, a lot of the money came through this group called Effective Altruism.

It was a social movement.

This is, listen to this, I love this, the younger generation, when they think they've discovered something new.

A social move.

A social movement dedicated to using evidence and reason to figure out how to benefit others as much as possible.

Yes, why didn't we think of that?

But using evidence of, oh,

effective altruism, so onto something.

Okay, so

it turns out both his parents were professors at Stanford.

I'm bringing this up because you're into this area.

Yeah.

And the mother wrote an essay in 2013, Beyond Blame.

She said, the philosophy of personal responsibility has ruined criminal justice and economic policy.

It's time to to move past blame.

Yeah, this is.

Is it really time?

Personal responsibility is bad and blame, that's a thing of the past?

No wonder this guy's a fucking crook.

You were raised wrong.

You were raised wrong, asshole.

So I study moral psychology and I know you do.

And there are some really interesting studies done by a philosopher named Eric Schwitzgabel who looked at, are philosophers who study ethics more ethical?

And he looked at what books get taken from the library and never returned.

Ethics books are more likely to never be returned.

No.

Is that right?

He did

all kinds of surveys, like who calls their mother on Mother's Day?

You know, philosophers and moral philosophers are a little bit less likely to.

So,

at very least, there's no sign that thinking and reasoning and studying ethics makes you more ethical.

And one thing it does is it makes you very, very good at post hoc justifications of whatever the hell you want to do.

Kind of what religion is also.

When you think God is on your side, you can do anything.

I mean, the people who attacked on 9-11 thought they were doing God's work.

You know, it was a faith-based initiative.

Well, that's right.

Genocides, most of the,

if you've got large-scale violence, if you're mobilizing people to do something,

most likely they feel that there's a strong moral justification behind it.

And so we've got to watch those, especially in a liberal democracy where there's a new research, a paper just came out a couple months ago showing that in the countries that are backsliding the most, the countries that are

becoming less stable democracies, those are precisely the countries where polarization is rising.

In other words, the more you hate the other side, the more you can justify anything because they're an existential threat to the country.

And if we have to invade the capital to turn over the election, we'll do that, or whatever.

You see it on both sides.

And so I think one of the central things we've got to keep our eye on is the polarization.

The more we hate each other, the more we're going to do crazy things that are going to make it not sustainable, I think, to have a liberal democracy.

Well, you know,

I'm going to say, what I find,

maybe it's the prosecutor in me, but I have to call BS on her statement.

I mean, the idea that we have moved past blame or that blame is the problem.

I mean, it's kind of like the cousin of

the 16th place ribbon in a class of 16, where

there is right and wrong.

There is the idea of punishment there is the idea of actual gain and there's the idea of if somebody has done the wrong thing you don't have to look everywhere else to assign blame sometimes the person who did the deed should be blamed and ought to be held accountable for i mean we talk about people not being above the law and what that means to us societally it's the idea that it's deflection on society that it's society's problem that you see what i've done as wrong as opposed to what i've done as wrong and to think about that and there was it was written years ago before her son obviously was involved in all that he's doing right now.

But if that gives any insight into how she feels her son ought to be treated from here out, then that is really telling about a deficiency.

Yeah, and then that's why I brought it up because I really think, look, we are, I think when historians look back at our time, they will not divide us into red and blue and Republican, Democrat.

They're like, the things that were wrong with us were wrong with both sides in different ways.

I do think they manifest in a more dangerous way on the right.

But on the left, there is a rot, and it comes from academia.

I agree.

And it filters down.

Am I wrong about that?

That's where it's all coming from.

I just think this is an epitome of it.

This is what the mother says, and then the kid robs your money.

Yeah.

So I think part of what's happening here is that

we have certain institutions in our society that you can call them epistemic institutions, which just means knowledge generating.

And the academy is the premier one, the medical establishment, the courts are another.

And these only work if you have viewpoint diversity.

They only work if I say something and then people are going to challenge me.

And the academy has always leaned left, and that's not necessarily a problem.

The police lean right.

It's not necessarily a problem.

It's just people choose different careers.

What's happened, and I've been collecting data on this.

I started an organization called Heterodox Academy in 2015, and we've been arguing that maybe we should have some viewpoint diversity, not be Orthodox Academy.

Because when everyone's on the same side, someone says something crazy like, how about if we stop punishing people and other people are afraid to object because that would seem to put you against a certain political stability.

That's right, echo chamber, yeah.

And when that happens, what we get is what I think people call structural stupidity.

That is, you get...

Yes.

We see it all the time.

You get really smart people, but you put them together and they can't think straight.

And they say stupid things from the left that just play really well on libs of TikTok and give the right wing lots of ammunition.

And you get onion headlines as policy.

That's right, exactly.

That's it.

All right, so speaking of headlines, this is our last show before our winter break.

We will be back on January 20th.

I forget what day that is, but it's an important one in my life for some reason.

Oh, yeah, it's inauguration.

That's what it is.

Anyway, but anyway, always before we go, we do a future headline.

For the people who get their news from this show,

we will actually

provide, because we love you, the audience, we will provide for you the headlines that will be there when we're gone so you're not behind.

These are the future headlines you will see.

A chemical in my pillow stuffing found to make people stupid.

I guarantee you'll see that.

A Bitcoin now worth less than Coin Coin.

Wow.

Herschel Walker, Inc.

seven-figure deal to read book.

Paris Hilton ends marriage after catching husband with another mannequin.

Ted Cruz to open museum of all the things thrown at him.

AARP, BLM, and Magicians Union all call for boycott that old black mantle.

And IRS Questions Trump tax deduction for giving away Tiffany.

All right.

So,

all right, so I saw you on 60 Minutes last Sunday, and I want to get into that because it was so fascinating.

And, you know, I remember 20 years ago, people were talking about paint chips and saying the fact that, you know, when kids ate paint chips back in the day, it fucked their brains up.

And they thought that when we got the lead out of the paint, it actually affected crime 20 years later.

Because people who had paint chips in their brain were like committing crimes when they grew up.

I mean, it's probably true.

So, okay, we got rid of the paint chips.

But now we have TikTok brain.

No, which,

really,

and porn when you're eight years old on your phone, And smartphones, which make people stupid, and all this stuff, which is really fucking up kids' brains.

There's no other way to say it.

I mean, I guess there is another way to say it.

Probably.

You couldn't say it that way on CNN.

But on this show, that's how we're saying it.

It's fucking up kids' brains.

And nobody seems to care or be doing anything about it.

We should be doing something massive, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I can say it in a different way because I'm writing a book on what the hell happened to Gen Z.

Why is it that when you look at the mental health stats, if you look at rates rates of depression, anxiety, self-harm, and suicide, they're pretty flat in the early 2000s.

And then right at 2012, for girls, it goes way, way up.

It goes up for boys too, but not as much.

Something happened right around 2012.

Well, let's see.

The first front-facing camera comes out, the iPhone 4, in 2010.

Instagram is founded.

Everyone goes on Instagram in 2012.

So at least social media fits the bill.

But what I think people really need to understand is it's not just kids going on social media.

It's the complete rewiring of childhood so that kids used to be out having experiences.

That's what you need to grow up.

It's what you need to wire your brain up.

And then they hit puberty, which is actually a period of heightened brain plasticity.

Our brains are really open to experience when we're zero to two.

And then it's a little less.

And then right around age 11 or 12, the brain is almost looking for more input from the environment.

And that's exactly the age at which we say to girls, here you go.

Why don't you hook your brain up to a fire hose of garbage?

And then we'll see how you are on the other side.

So yes, we're really, what was your word, fucked up?

Fucked up.

Fucking the kids' brains up.

Are your kids on?

I don't let my kids, I don't let my kids go on social media.

I have an eight-year-old and a soon-to-be 10-year-old.

And when I think about what I hand them, I mean, I have a little watch, I can contact them, I can reach them.

But the idea of handing over to my kids a machine that tells them, compare yourself to everyone else.

I mean, I'm not somebody who even likes to go on social media because it's kind of like walking out your front door and saying, hey, anyone think I'm cute today?

Like, anyone want to criticize me?

Come on, I'm here for you.

Just go ahead and start.

And so with my kids, when they're trying to think about and figure themselves out, I mean, I cannot imagine going through puberty.

going through insecurities, going through life, and not just having whatever bullying, whatever insecurities, just in your own little circle, but it's there forever.

And it feels like everyone's seeing it.

And it goes from point A to point point Z in a matter of seconds.

I mean you have people feeling insecure into their into their adulthood.

Now you should see we're talking about on air you know someone will make a comment as a pundit and the commercial break they go anyone like it did anyone like it anyone like it what they say what are they saying

exactly these are people who are grown-ups who have lived a life before social media imagine those who have never like you see kids now and you wonder the two-year-olds who have seen people in masks for most of their lives at this point.

How does that shape their view of now seeing a mouth one day?

Imagine now seeing a real mirror, not a filter.

It's always like a fun house and I just, I try to stay away from it from my kids.

But don't your kids complain to you that the other kids have this and we don't?

I mean isn't it hard as a parent to do that when all the other kids have it?

For me, no.

101?

Look when I tell my kids, I'm like, look.

You can add it to the bill to get therapy in 20 years.

Mommy did so much.

You had had a bed, you had a house, all poor you did.

Can I give you an air fist bump on that one?

Oh, thank you.

But Laura, I just want to point that out.

So your kids are, what, eight and nine?

Eight and nine, yeah.

Okay.

So they're still in elementary school.

When they go to middle school, my kids go to New York City public schools.

As soon as they hit sixth grade, they say, Dad, everybody's on Instagram.

Can I have an Instagram account?

We're all faced with this trap.

No parent wants their kids on Instagram.

But we're all faced with this trap because the other kids are on.

We don't want our kids to be excluded because that is where things are happening.

So this is what's called in social sciences a collective action problem.

Each one of us might even be even worse off if we take our kid off and everyone else is on, but we would all be better off if everything was off.

So what we need to do as a starting move, and this is something we can all do, get the phones and social media the hell out of middle school.

Let's just protect middle school.

Okay?

And so, yeah, so

if you're watching this, if you're watching this at home,

talk to the principal of your parents' middle school and say, can you help us?

Because believe me, I've spoken at middle schools.

They hate this too.

So as a starting move, just have the norm be,

no phones in school.

When you come to school, put them in a phone locker or a yonder pouch.

The kids must not have access to their phones in school.

Usually the policy is, well, you know, we don't let them take them out.

Like, yeah, you know, tell heroin addicts, you can just leave in your pocket.

Don't shoot up.

Just leave in your pocket all day.

So

we have to get it out of middle school, and we also have to keep the kids off of social media until at least high school.

I think the age needs to be 16 after the brain is mostly developed, but we've got to get it out of middle school.

But the parents don't want it, right?

I mean, some of the, if you add it up, some of the middle school kids, their parents remember the introduction of Instagram and they love it.

I mean, look at the average middle school picture with selfie with a mother and daughter or a father and son, maybe mother and daughter.

They both got the duck lips going.

They're both doing them.

together.

I mean, they know they're doing it because they like it.

And so I hear you and I agree, but part of the collective action, I think, has to include the buy-in from a group of people who love the keeping up with the Joneses.

And until we solve those people, Instagram flourishes.

Right.

And you mentioned the girls.

You said that's a more.

Yes.

Yeah.

I mean, so what I can say, I've dug into all of the published studies.

I've got a Google Doc with hundreds and hundreds of studies.

And what I can show is that the correlations between time on social media and mental health problems are, they're not huge, but they're pretty solid for girls.

For boys, it's not so much.

Boys, because what happened around 2012 when all the kids got smartphones right around then, the boys mostly went for YouTube and video games.

And those are not particularly harmful, because what boys need to grow up is they need to be part of a pack competing with or hunting and killing other groups of boys.

And that's not harmful at all.

That's not harmful.

When it's playful.

When it's playful, it's not.

If it's playful, it's not.

That's what sports is.

But the killing.

But I feel like women will be the ones

to maybe lead us out of this because I feel like social media is

hated by women because it takes away the things that they need the most from men.

One, you don't have to have the balls to go up to a girl, which they want.

They want you to demonstrate that.

I'm willing to risk rejection.

And you don't have to do that over the phone.

And also, they want to be talked to.

Women like talking.

Boy, do they.

They like.

They do.

They like it.

they like you talking to them and them talking to you.

They're communicative creatures.

Men can get by without that, but women cannot.

And the phone is robbing.

So I think if anybody's going to lead us out of this wilderness, it's going to be women who are fed up.

Women cannot really like Tinder.

That is not something that conforms with their biological imperative.

It's perfect for a man.

Oh, what's up, my dick?

Well, I mean, except for the same reasons you don't want necessarily to have to demonstrate because it takes away some of the insecurity.

The idea of having to deal with the man who would say, what's up, my dick, and just swiping left or right, a better alternative.

There's a distancing of that as well.

But I do think that to the larger point, you're absolutely correct.

Women can do everything better and will lead us out of everything.

So that's good.

Okay.

We'll end the season on that note.

It's time for new rules.

Thank you, guys.

Okay, new rule: if they can make cars that drive themselves, park themselves, monitor blind spots, sense rain, keep you in your lane, tell when you're tired or you're drunk and see you at night, they can make one that changes its own damn clock.

Daylight savings time when your smart car gets stupid again.

Newer, someone has to make a movie where super glue fights crazy glue.

And then they realize they should be friends and beat the shit out of Gorilla Glue.

And then 25 sequels from a new movie studio that's all about the adhesive cinematic universe.

Hey, it's not stupider than four movies about Lego.

Nural Yusuf Shah, the 11-year-old British kid with an IQ higher than Einstein, has to explain the fascination with Rubik's cubes.

For us normal people, they're the most boring toy ever made.

But for the for the Mensa crowd, they're endlessly fascinating.

Look, I can solve it in three seconds.

Nobody cares, genius.

Go to your room and solve global warming.

New Roll Since Heinz Ketchup just reported that the design for their bottle squeeze cap involved 185,000 hours of product development over nine years and went through 45 iterations.

Someone has to ask them if all that time and all that tinkering included perfecting the fart noise.

New rule: if you don't want Americans to think you're calling us fat cows, you can't call your Asian noodle company Momo Fuck You.

The meal that says, hey, wait a minute.

Don't get cute with Asian food.

Just give us a simple name that tells us what's in it, like Panda Express.

And finally, new rules, since this is our last show of the season and our Thanksgiving show, I'd like to start tonight by giving thanks this year to Donald Trump and all the loons, Karens, Kool-Aid drinkers, D-list celebrities, and unqualified weirdos he put up for office who scared some sense into America on Election Day.

And thus made this holiday season so much brighter for me and millions of other Americans.

Thank you, Republican douchebags, class of 22.

Thank you, Doug Mastriano, and Tudor Dixon and Carrie Lake and Blake Masters and all the other election deniers who ran for Secretary of State and governor and swing states and lost, which was almost all of them.

And thanks to decent Republicans like Brad Raphsonberger, who defied Trump and won.

Yes, in 2022 against everybody's predictions, except Michael Moore.

The deniers lost and the defiers won.

And America showed the world that the reports of our death were slightly exaggerated.

We went from goddamn America to goddamn America.

Maybe we're not quite as crazy as we look.

Republicans showed they could dump their baggage and independents showed they could actually be independent.

Usually they're just closet Republicans, but this year they did what they never do in midterms.

They came out in droves for the party in power and told the party that ran on a platform of fuck elections, go fuck yourselves.

Sometimes this country surprises you with its ability to revert back to sane.

We saw it when we elected the first black president.

We saw it with the acceptance of gay marriage and with the end of disco.

We saw it when we ended prohibition.

and segregation and stopped allowing doctors to smoke during surgery.

One day we may even stop making comic book movies.

Sure, we're a country that chose to deliberately eat tide pods, but how about some credit for when we eventually stopped?

But this year, this year was something special.

Our better angels haven't put up a win like that in a long time.

Turns out we're not guilty by reason of insanity, and right now, I feel like we're having a not as as crazy as we thought moment.

Let's keep it going.

Let's keep it going.

Let's

rally the normies, which we now realize are still most of us, and bully the bullies on the extreme ends.

who are such a tiny part of us and yet thanks to social media and partisan politics are able to hog the microphone and make everything suck.

Our friend Jonathan here noted on 60 Minutes that the extremists are only about seven to eight percent on both sides, and yet they get 90 percent of the media attention.

92 percent of all tweets in this country come from 10 percent of the users.

Why are we letting 15 percent of the population make us all miserable?

It's like we're letting the crying baby fly the plane.

All the normal Republicans who stepped up last week, great beginning.

Let's keep it going.

Don't stay silent about insanity just because it's coming from your team.

Call out this conspiracy stuff.

Marginalize the people who believe in crisis actors and lizard people

and who think Democrats eat babies or run pedophile rings?

Jewish space lasers.

I don't even know what a Jewish space laser is.

But I know even Kyrie Irving doesn't believe in it.

We all need to call out the people of bad faith on both sides who pretend things they know are not true.

Like voter fraud, it's been studied a million times.

It doesn't exist.

There just aren't hordes of people showing up in gray-haired wigs pretending to be dead people

and risking prison to vote for Patrick Leahy.

Voting twice, it's hard enough to vote once.

Okay, you admit that, and liberals will admit that getting a picture ID is not a Herculean burden that minorities can't manage like everybody else, and which most don't even object to.

We need more grand bargains like that.

Everyone's always talking about how they're tired of the extremists and how they long for compromise.

Then do it.

Make deals.

Stop flirting with authoritarianism, and we'll stop flirting with communism.

Stop saying Democrats eat babies,

and we'll stop saying men can have them.

Stop denying the ice caps are melting, and we'll stop asking to disband ice.

Stop saying there's there's a war on Christmas, and we'll admit Kwanzaa's completely made up.

Keep a lid on the proud boys, and we'll see what we can do about Kanye.

All right,

let's all agree to form a less psycho union.

All right, that's our show.

We're off until January 20th, but you can see me at the Mirage in Vegas, November 25 and 26th, the Maui Cultural Center, December 30th, and the Waikiki Shell on New Year's Eve.

I want to thank my guest, Laura Coates, Jonathan Haidt, Matthew Perry.

Wait a second.

I also want to say thank you to my brilliant staff and their brilliant insights and incredible competence that they lend me all year long and HBO 20 years together.

Thank you for that.

We'll see you next year.

Go to YouTube now 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.

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