Ep. #617: Quentin Tarentino, Gillian Tett, Yuval Noah Harari

Charlie Sheen is an icon of decadence.

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

He's going the distance.

He was the highest paid TV star of all time.

When it started to change, it was quick.

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

Now, Charlie's sober.

He's gonna tell you the truth.

How do I present this with any class?

I think we're past that, Charlie.

We're past that, yeah.

Somebody call action.

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

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

Start the clock.

Thank you.

Thank you, Vermont.

much.

Thank you, ladies and gentlemen.

Thank you very much.

Thank listeners.

I think I know why you're excited.

The midterm elections are upon us.

They are 11 days away.

I guess I was wrong.

Not excited about that, but they are.

Well, I don't blame you for being a little apathetic.

I mean, wow, what an election this is.

The Republicans are putting up a slate of election deniers and oaths and crackpots and crooks.

And the Democrats have a guy who recently died of a stroke.

So.

No,

no.

Not die.

We're not making fun.

But I'm if you saw that debate in Pennsylvania, the Dr.

Oz against John Fetterman, he did recently have a stroke, Fetterman, and he is still a little shaky.

That debate, ooh, neurologists call that condition Herschel Walker.

Yeah, there's some mutes in this election.

Oh, Herschel Walker, another woman.

I cannot keep up with this guy.

Another woman came forward to say that he paid for an abortion.

This guy has provided more abortions than planned parenthood.

One of the popular costumes now for kids in Georgia is that the kids go out with a ghost costume and a sign that says, Herschel paid for this.

But that,

well, that was, or hopefully still is, a big issue in the election.

Abortion,

nothing.

This crowd is, nothing gets this crowd.

Okay, well,

out there in America, I'm telling you, it's a big issue.

It came up in the Federman debate.

Dr.

Oz said about abortion, it should be something that's decided between a doctor, a woman, and local political leaders.

Well, this is going to be new for women.

Yeah, the mayor's office, yeah.

Listen, I missed my period.

Yes, I'll hold.

But the big news in the tech world, Elon Musk has now taken over Twitter.

And probably we'll put Trump back on it.

Trump said yesterday, he said, Twitter now, he says, is in sane hands, but that's also what he said when Kanye bought a school.

So

oh, Kanye.

Kanye is in hot water.

Boy, he has lost his deals now with Adidas, Valenciaga, Gap,

Footlocker, and yesterday his mic dropped him.

Wow.

He's seen his net worth plummet to a fraction of what it was, which the bright side, he doesn't have to worry about

all those gold diggers.

And

he does have a school, the Donda Academy.

And if you have a child enrolled there, A, be aware, it may have closed, and B,

what were you thinking?

This is.

It's a very different kind of school.

It's open only on Jewish holidays.

And their motto is: a mind is a terrible thing.

And finally, I thought this was interesting.

I should bring to your attention this week, especially with all the tech news.

The Pope

made news.

He came out.

He said he is urging priests and nuns to delete all the porn off their phones.

I didn't know they even had phones or porn on them.

And the priest said, not a problem, just leave us grinder.

Okay, we've we've got a great show.

We have Jillian Ted, Yuval Noah, Ferrari.

But first up, you all know this guy.

He is the award-winning filmmaker and author whose new book, Cinema Speculation, is out on November 1st.

One of our great cinemats, Quentin Tarantino.

Hey, pal, how are you?

Okay, yeah, all right.

Look at that.

I haven't seen them.

Thanks a lot.

Yeah.

I've said these before, but it is amazing when a director is treated like a star.

The director is traditionally the person behind the camera.

People don't even know them.

You are a star.

Well, not to be too inside here, but actually, I hadn't noticed that the audience was kind of staggered like this.

It makes it feel like a nightclub when you look out.

It's a nightclub kind of feel from a honesty.

This is a legacy of what happened during COVID when we had to socially distance so we couldn't have as many people.

And the audience got much better because we turned out we just got rid of the groaners.

Yeah, right, exactly.

Really?

I believe it.

No, I believe it.

It's true.

Exactly, yeah.

So we kept it.

But before we lose all our time here, because you and I can get to talking,

let's get to the book because I feel like you were destined to write this book.

I think you, you know, one of the reasons why you're a great filmmaker is because you're a great student of film.

I mean, more than anybody, we've always known that about you.

You just love it.

And the book is so funny because, you know, you really were raised by movies.

I didn't even realize this about you, that you went when you were seven years old.

Yeah, yeah, uh-huh.

To very adult movies.

Yeah, yeah.

You know, it's talked about in the book at some point.

I realized that I was seeing movies.

Again, we're talking about the 70s.

So we're talking about, you know, like starting from 68 or whatever.

So the explosion of what they called New Hollywood.

Well, that's me getting used to going to the movies.

You know, as that's the New Hollywood are the movies to me.

And at some point, I did notice that I was seeing more, I was seeing different movies than the other kids were allowed to see.

And, you know, it was also interesting though.

Well, I saw, well, I see, yeah, I saw MASH three times in 1970.

I thought MASH was my favorite movie of that year.

But MASH and the French Connection and The Godfather, like a couple of times.

Adult movies.

Deliverance and the wild bunch.

Wow.

You know, but no, okay, but just to use it as an example, like, okay, so, okay, so there's the male sodomy rape scene in Deliverance.

All right.

So now I'm watching Deliverance as a kid.

He ain't gotten a hair in his mouth.

Yeah.

And that's what I'm seeing it at 73, so I'm about nine, I think.

Right.

And so I'm watching Deliverance.

Now,

do I know he's sticking his dick up Ned Beatty's ass?

No, I don't know that.

All right.

Did I know he was being sodomized in a

sodomized rape?

No, I didn't know what sodomy or what rape was at that time.

I knew he was being humiliated.

And he was being humiliated.

I knew he was being subjugated, even though I didn't know what that word meant.

Because every boy on the playground has been humiliated to some degree.

Not like that.

Not like that.

But we understand the dynamic.

You know, because I didn't understand the sexual part.

No, I did see him be humiliated in the group.

I'm not sure what the lesson is.

Well,

I guess the lesson is, is, like, especially when you take kids to see an adult, you know, there's going to be some stuff that goes over their head and some stuff you want to go over their head.

But there was a whole lot of stuff that,

even though I might not technically have known exactly what the characters were talking about, I got the gist of it.

And I got the gist by how the audience responded.

The audience of adults.

Whatever it was, I don't care.

It made you who you are.

And it made,

what I took away is that, I mean, I feel like the epiphany lesson is so clear in that book.

And it comes in the very first chapter when you talk about going to a Jim Brown movie.

Now, I don't know if people of a certain age don't know who Jim Brown is, but Jim Brown was the original athlete turned star.

Before that, Mickey Mantle never became a movie star.

Right, yeah.

It was always a joke when they put a guy like that.

Right.

And then it became much more of a common thing.

Okay, Jim Brown, and he was, I mean, I wanted to be Jim Brown, too.

When he was in 100 Rifles with Raquel Welch, and she's, oh, there it is.

Oh, that's the, oh, look at that.

That's the poster.

Oh, yeah.

Where she's hugging him from behind like that, and they both have a look on their face like, yeah, we just did it, and we did it well.

No, they're sexy in that movie.

Oh, and he's very sexy.

Okay, so you saw a Jim Brown movie when you were, how old were you?

Probably like 10?

I was 72, so I'm like

eight.

Eight years old.

Yeah.

You're in this all-black theater.

Okay.

And it's a double feature.

When they had double features.

And the first movie is kind of a messagey movie.

Yeah, it's called The Bus Is Coming.

But The Bus Is Coming.

And the crowd.

Dot, dot, dot, the crowd hated it.

Hated it.

Right.

They're literally yelling out, suck my dick.

Yeah, right.

Well, yeah, okay.

Well, it was the, you know,

I was a fairly sophisticated kid, so I've seen the adults kind of, you know, have different responses, you know,

to movies before.

And I'd even seen an audience turn against, an adult audience turn against the movie, but I'd never seen the level of contempt that this black audience felt towards the buses coming.

I mean, they just.

Which is a black movie.

Yes.

They just proceeded to just yell insults at the characters on screen.

From the, because like, yeah,

that's not the movie we came to see, so we only walked in.

So we had 45 minutes to go so for the whole 45 minutes they just yelled shit at the people on screen and the first time I ever heard the expression suck my dick

was like some guy in the audience yelling it to somebody in the on on screen and at first I'm a little trepidatious about it all

I'm a little trepidatious but all of a certain point they were just so funny I just start like uncontrollably giggling and then like you know and you know and the the guy who's taking taking me to see it is this football player who's dating my mom.

So he's trying to get in good with me.

And he takes me in an all-black theater and he sees me like being comfortable.

He's like, hey, you a cool kid, cute, you know?

And he's like patting me with his huge hand.

And so

I yell at something at the screen, kind of look at him to make sure it's okay.

He's like, ha ha ha.

He's like happy that I'm having a good time.

And so I suck my dick.

But actually, the funniest one, Zuck My Dick definitely had the benefit of being memorable, all right.

But the funniest one is at the end of the movie, the bus, which I think was supposed to be a metaphor, this 12-year-old kid's waiting for the bus, the whole film.

All right,

at the end, the bus finally shows up, and then the kid runs down the street screaming the title of the movie.

The bus is coming, the bus is coming, the bus is coming.

And somebody in the theater just says, Yeah, well, get on it and go fuck yourself.

I just want to say

if you're promoting this book on the Today Show, don't tell these stories.

It's just not going to work the same.

Do hit for the house.

But then the Jim Brown movie comes on, which is a kick-ass action movie, I'm sure, where he's cool

and the crowd loves it.

And you say you have never been the same.

Yeah, it wasn't.

And then your whole career, you've been trying to recreate that experience from 1972.

It was a magnificent experience, especially being

the son of a single mother,

and then even at that point, she was living with two of her best friends, so it's like a house with three young women.

So being taken by a football player, like a Rams player, to a Jim Brown movie

in 1972 on a Saturday night in an all-black theater, except for me,

that was probably the most masculine male experience I had ever had in my life.

I was like, fuck going camping.

This is it.

This is way better than fucking fishing.

All right.

This is cool.

I mean, whatever.

But there is an aspect I do say that it's like, you know, either as a movie consumer, going to movies and being part of an audience or creating movies for an audience,

that goal of a Jim Brown movie in 1972 on a Saturday night is always what I'm trying to achieve.

To me, it also read, like,

it's important to make,

I love a meaningful movie.

I can't stand one that isn't.

Yeah.

Usually, sometimes something will be just silly and I can enjoy it, but mostly I want to get into something.

But don't forget, we're entertainers.

Absolutely.

That to me was the lesson there.

The first one just wasn't entertaining.

And if you don't entertain people, it doesn't matter how good the message is, then you're just preaching and we're fucking bored.

Absolutely.

And the second one, well, it's entertaining.

And you certainly,

if nothing else, and you've been much else, have been entertaining.

Very entertaining.

Not much, sir.

And

I mean, a bunch of satisfied customers out there.

Thank you very much.

And I just want to ask finally, now that we see so many movies in the home, and you have these experiences that were so transformative when you went to a theater,

I'm guessing you're like a lot of the directors who are not digging this.

new way we absorb movies where we can turn it off in two minutes.

You've got to give a director time to put the arrow back before he fires the shot.

You know,

it was even to such a degree, you know, I haven't liked a whole lot of the, I mean, that's not a blanket statement, I haven't seen that much, but I haven't liked a lot of the new stuff that's come out in the last couple of years.

But again, I haven't seen that much, so it doesn't mean anything.

But like, for instance, I had a film that I was kind of interested in seeing, and I got the digital thing for it.

And so I invited about like six people to come over and watch it with me.

And so

it was like six of us us sitting in a really cool little home theater and we had it on screen and it looked pretty decent.

Now, I ended up not liking the movie, all right?

But

that first 30 minutes,

having six other people in the room, and we're all watching it, and it's not like it's a good movie that I like and now I'm introducing it to you.

That experience I'm used to.

But no, we were all, we were an open book.

But I felt their eyeballs.

I felt when people laughed.

I also started feeling when they

started losing the thread in the movie.

But I ended up, even though I didn't care for the movie, I ended up having a really good time.

Communal.

Because we were part of an audience.

Communal experience.

Yeah.

All right.

Keep making movies.

I know we go through this every time we see each other.

Don't quit.

We keep talking.

Don't quit.

All right.

I'll see you later.

Thank you, Mr.

Brown.

Thanks, Brown.

It's a great book, Jim.

All right, let's meet our panel.

Okay,

she is the chair of the editorial board and a U.S.

editor-at-large of the Financial Times and author of Anthrovision, A New Way to See in Business and Life.

Jillian Tett is back with us.

And he is the historian and best-selling author of Sapiens.

I've read it twice.

His new book for kids is called Unstoppable Us, How Humans Took Over the World.

Yuval Harari is with us.

Great to have you here.

Great.

Great to be here.

Well, I have two people here now who are really not Americans, who I call the lucky ones,

because, you know, we are about to have an election here in this country.

Same here.

In Israel?

Yeah.

I'm not sure who is luckier.

Well, you have more elections than we do.

I'm not sure being from Britain is great these days either.

Okay, but I think I can win this contest

because we are at a place here where the Republicans are about to elect a slate of almost all election deniers.

That's an amazing fact considering that January 6th was less than two years ago and at that time even the Republicans, almost all of them, condemned what Trump did.

Now some of them voted for it in Congress, but there was a lot of state.

Just in that time we've seen somehow Trump and his cohorts change the entire Republican Party to people who don't believe that Biden legitimately was elected president.

And the January 6th hearings, we had them all year, there were nine of them, they laid out all the facts meticulously by Republicans, turned out didn't change anybody's mind.

What I'm asking about is, have our brains been rewired?

mostly by technology to where we really can't absorb information anymore and nobody I could sit here tonight and say the election is in 11 days you got to get out there and vote and yes I will say that it won't change anybody's minds.

It won't change anything.

People are going to do what they've already decided they're going to do and what they all see on their own phones based on their own algorithms.

Well I'm going to leave it to you Val to give the academic aspect of this.

But if you look at some of the polling data recently, there's two things that's amazing.

Reuters Ipsos poll came out and did a poll about three weeks ago, which shows that 40% of American voters feared violence and intimidation around voting in the midterms.

40%.

That was even before we had the Pelosi attack yesterday.

And the other thing is that if you look at what's happened in terms of attitudes between the two parties to the other party, 72% of Republicans and something similar around Democrats now think the other people in the other party, not the party, but the people in the other party are dishonest, that they are essentially lacking in morals, they're bad people.

And that is twice the proportion of six years ago.

So we've really gone into a kind of tribalism which is getting hardwired into the way that people are seeing politics.

And this cell phone technology is adding to it.

I mean, you've looked at this in your book, Fapiens, haven't you, in the future books?

Yeah, and I think what we can all agree on is that something is broken in the information system.

We have the best information technology in history.

And yet people cannot no longer hold a conversation, can no longer agree on the most basic facts, like who won the last elections.

So something is definitely broken in the information system.

We are not sure what it is.

It's not necessarily the phones themselves.

But

people should maybe go on an information diet.

That we are so careful.

But they're not going to.

I mean, isn't that what you call data-ism?

When we can't resist.

I think that's actually been the case throughout history with technology.

Humans cannot resist technology.

You talk in Zapiens about just farming, which I would call the first technology, and you say, maybe humans would have been much happier remaining nomadic.

And I won't go through all the reasons why you say that, and I certainly don't want to be foraging for food tonight.

It is Friday.

But, I mean, or take something more recent like the cotton gin.

We were ready to give up slavery in this country, and a machine came along that made it much more profitable, and they went, let's go back to slavery.

I just think humans cannot resist when the technology comes along and the phone is just the most recent example of that and the most virulent because I do think it is rewiring brains.

I don't know if it's the technology itself, but the fact that so many people, I cannot imagine reading a book.

And these are not stupid.

But don't tell them that.

You know, everything is

rewiring our brains.

Just talking here and people listening to us, the brain is constantly changing.

So yes, we have to be very, very very careful about what we say, especially in public.

Like what we say here, the words are like seeds that go into the brains of millions of people, maybe.

So, we should be careful about what seeds we are sowing.

If we sow seeds of hatred, it will bring violence.

But also, people need to be careful about what they take in.

The same way they are very careful about food, that you have the diets and you have all these warnings on food, like you have the list of this is 40% fat and 20% sugar.

We need this also like on a YouTube video.

Like this is forty percent greed, twenty percent hate.

If you want now to take it.

One very important thing about technology, it's very dangerous to think that technology is like unstoppable, that it's it's not up to us.

It's always up to us.

You can always make changes about how we we can't roll the the clock back and give it up.

And in the twentieth century, you could use the technology of electricity and radio and television to build the Soviet Union, a totalitarian dictatorship, or you could use the same technology to build a liberal democracy.

It's the same in the 21st century.

But I actually think this actually, I'm clearly addicted, I brought it on set.

But, you know, these are addictive, okay, this technology.

It's designed to be addictive, deliberately designed.

But it also does something else much more subtle that really plays into what you're talking about in terms of polarization, which is that this has created what I call Gen P,

Gen playlist.

And by that I mean that

when we were growing up, if you wanted to listen to music, you had to accept somebody else's preset package.

So like a vinyl record, or you switched on the radio, and someone else decided what was playing when.

Today, nobody under the age of 30 would accept that.

Everyone wants playlists.

It's like listening to music when you want, how you want.

It's the ultimate customization.

Pick a mixed culture.

And we're extrapolating that onto consumer culture, our coffee choices.

I mean, you go to Starbucks, you want to order a coffee, you've got like 20 choices.

You have it with media,

you basically read what you want, you have your friends, you have your work, you might go into work if you feel like it, not if you don't feel like it.

That's played into the whole working from home thing, but also it plays into our politics.

Because we all think we live in our version of the matrix where we can pick issues whenever we want and we can basically just focus on one thing at a time and then change our minds.

You know, the idea of having old-fashioned things called parties is just so 20th century.

It's like literally a vinyl record for politics.

And I think that's playing into this sense of tribalism, this sense of

capricious, unpredictable bursts of energy that should then die down again.

It means that politics is becoming all the way.

And again, you point out all these things we could do, but people don't.

Yes, the labels on food say what the shit is in it, and then people eat it.

Not all of it.

It's not like they look at, oh, it has fat and sugar and they go, I can't eat this.

That's what they pull off the shelf.

And, you know, people could ignore the phone.

They don't.

They could choose to go on a media diet, but they're not going to.

We saw in the paper this week only something like 26 of 193 countries who signed on to do things about the environment have done anything.

We can't resist that either.

The convenience that is brought to us by things that pollute.

I've said this to the audience many times.

Like, if you could tomorrow give up the TV remote and have it cure global warming, would you do it?

Don't answer.

Well, it's easy to clap.

It's not just, of course, the responsibility of individuals.

This is why we have governments.

This is why we have institutions.

This is why we have regulations to help us with the things that, yes, it's very difficult to do it individually.

Partly because it was designed to be difficult.

You know, you have some of the smartest people in the world

basically hacking our own weaknesses and using it against us behind this device.

You know, some of the smartest people in the world, they learned how to use this in order to get into a lot of people.

I've got it.

Well, there are some people very upset today that Elon Musk took over Twitter and brought his sink with him.

I happen to be an Elon Musk fan, but what do you think about that?

Is that a good idea that a billionaire take over Twitter?

Because billionaires certainly own every other media outlet.

He's now officially a media baron.

Personally, I have a lot of admiration for a lot of the innovation that Elon Musk has brought to the world.

He has done some incredible things.

The problem with him is is that he's becoming increasingly godlike in the way he looks at problems right now and assumes that he can solve them.

And he is capricious and he's unelected.

And when I look at what he's done in Ukraine with something like Starlink, which is an incredible technology, you know, he

explain what he's done with Starlink.

Well, Starlink basically is this little terminal that gives people internet on the move without having to have these cell towers which get hit by missiles very easily.

So in the early weeks of the Ukrainian war, the Russian invasion, he spread Starlinks across the country.

He donated some, others were bought by Ukrainians, and it basically meant that the soldiers and civilians had internet throughout the war, which was amazing.

I mean, incredible.

Thank you, Elon.

That was good.

And Tesla, that was a good thing.

Tesla was good.

And relandable rockets, good thing.

But then.

Bad guy.

Then, wait for it.

Then, in the last month or two, he began to basically say, first of all, it wasn't clear who's going to pay for them.

And then he began to switch them off in some of the really important areas.

But they're on.

He didn't do that.

Actually, I've been in touch with the Ukrainians just recently, and yes, in areas that the Starlinks were switched off, and it's still unclear what's going to happen.

That's not what I read.

I read that he talked about it a little bit, and then there were some.

What he tweeted is not always what he actually does.

Right.

Shocker.

Well, like a lot of people, especially of the younger generations, they just tweet whatever comes into their mind.

I don't get that.

But that's how people are.

They're much more transparent than they used to be.

The privacy is almost something to be avoided.

Well, the issue is he treats everything like a hackathon.

Like he's hacking and testing and constantly testing ideas.

And that's a great way to hack a computer code.

It's not so great to try and do foreign policy.

When we found,

I would just say this about Elon Musk.

First of all, Twitter,

we'll get into that.

Do we really want to piss off the geniuses?

I mean, considering that this week we learned once again that we're not going to solve the environment ourselves, we're not going to do it by the model we thought we could do it by, which is everybody needs to conserve more and not just do whatever you want because that pollutes.

That's not working.

That failed.

It looks like we're going to have to have a technological response to this.

I don't know if Elon Musk is the guy we want to piss off.

Like, I want to identify the people who might have a shot at fixing this with technology.

So you're scared of him?

What?

Are you scared of Elon Musk or?

I'm not scared of him, no.

You sound like you're scared of him.

I'm not scared of him.

But the thing is, this is not a technological problem.

I mean, if you have a technological problem, yes, you need tech genius.

No, I'm talking about taking over Twitter, for instance.

Oh, okay.

That this is a problem of politics, of sociology, of human psychology.

I'm not sure that he's necessarily the best one to address it.

I mean, his view of Twitter, he often says it's like the town square, that we need to protect the free speech there.

But Twitter is not the town square.

I mean, Tristan Harris recently said that Twitter is actually the town's gladiator arena,

not the town square.

And it does, town square rewards

moderate talk, rational talk discussion that tries to lead to consensus.

And Twitter is more like a gladiator arena that rewards extremism, that rewards rage.

And, you know, you don't even fight there against other humans.

Like in ancient Rome, you fight against these big beasts, the bots.

But

I agree, there is a lot of rage out there, and it's terrible.

But there's a lot of stuff that annoys us that you just can't wish away or ban.

But there are easy fixes.

There are easy fixes.

For instance, you know, a bot tweets about 800 times an hour.

A human being...

But that's what he wants to get rid of on Twitter.

Okay, so first thing, I mean, if he, first thing he does, first day he comes to the office, instead of bringing a sink, is, okay, okay, let's get rid of all the bots.

And if this is a difficult engineering problem, then let's limit.

That was his main reason for dragging his feet on this deal.

I want to get rid of the bots.

So if you're not...

If he does that, that's a wonderful thing.

Right, okay, well, he's doing that.

And another thing is just limit the number of tweets that you can make, say, five an hour.

Yeah.

And that immediately puts a lead on all these bots.

But what I would say is that when you tell people that they can't be heard, they don't go away.

Donald Trump has been off Twitter.

He didn't go away.

He's going to absolutely get the Republican nomination next time.

And his people, they didn't go away either.

They didn't self-deport because he wasn't on Twitter.

And you see, there was an attack at a drag queen story hour at a Portland pub.

I don't know why people are bringing their children to a pub, but okay.

But then Nancy Pelosi, as you mentioned, somebody attacked her thinking she was home.

She was not.

Her husband got attacked in his home.

You know, this is this cold civil war that we're in, that we've been hearing about.

This is civil war.

It's not going to be like the last civil war.

It's going to be this kind of stuff.

And I think when you shut off that valve of letting people talk, I think that stuff only gets worse.

But the thing is, not just, oh, I agree.

Yeah, I agree.

People need not just to talk, but also to listen.

So we've created this wonderful technology that it is good, that it allows everybody to talk and voice their opinions, which we didn't have like 50 years ago.

But we now need to work on listening and not just talking.

One of the people.

Which is more difficult.

One of the people I love to listen to on Twitter is Marjorie Taylor Greene.

I don't know if you know Marjorie Taylor Greene, but she's really having a moment.

Trump is considering her as a running mate in 2024.

Oh, there she is, yes.

And she's also gotten a lot of...

Incredible press, and when the Republicans take over Congress in 11 days, she's going to be very important there.

So, we thought today would be a good time to do 24 things you don't know about Marjorie Townsend.

If you like to hear them, I'm sure you would.

For example, I've never been in a store without demanding to see the manager.

I have three kids: two in high school and one who was murdered by Hillary Clinton.

My greatest fears are snakes, spiders, and Jews.

Oh, we let a few of those groaners back in.

Shit.

To keep things sexy in a relationship, I sometimes open the door completely unarmed.

I was once kicked off Truth Social for not comparing something to Nazis.

My mom drank while she was pregnant with me, and even more after she met me.

I will work with the Republicans who dislike me because there's no I and team, I think.

Since classrooms are full of groomers, I'm trailer schooling my kids.

I would have liked Schindler's list if it was shorter, not the movie, the list of Jews he saved.

If I could meet anyone living or dead, I'd prefer living, because if I was dead, what's the point?

So, did I cut you off before you were about to say something to our last discussion?

I'm sorry.

I was just going to add in one more thing, which is basically Part of the problem with Twitter is not just a question of people not listening, it's that you get sucked into these echo chambers, these tunnels.

And there are things that they can do with the algorithms to actually force people to try and collide more with the different tribe shock.

And that's a lot of the problem right now.

People literally live in alternative universes.

Right.

Okay, so like the Marjorie Taylor Greene university.

The way the Democrats apparently think they're going to save democracy is through TikTok.

I saw this week

Joe Biden had eight eight TikTokers to the White House with a combined following of 67 million followers.

And he talked to them, and one of them said, a lot of the creators, they call themselves creators, I love that.

Influencers, you know, you know,

talked about how they didn't get a lot of civics education in school.

They were excited to learn about the structure of government.

And this is the problem.

If we were starting at, okay, here's how to register to vote, but we're starting at this is what government is.

I mean, we're so stupid in this country.

Another one of the kids,

Nia Su,

she has 8.3 million followers.

When she talked about the midterms, they thought she was talking about the midterms at her college.

I think,

I just think when you're trying to get the young people to vote, you've already lost the election.

I just don't think,

I don't, you know,

young people in this, do they vote in Israel, the young people?

Yes.

Yeah, because they're also pressed into military service and they're just more much more...

Well, you look what's happening now in Iran with the young people rising up.

against one of the most oppressive regimes in the world.

Sure.

And I think we should give some respect to what the young people do.

Well,

traditionally 15% of them vote in the midterm election.

15%

under 30.

So

I respect them 15%.

I mean that sounds about right to me.

Like three out of 20 have a brain in their head and the other, I mean they have brains.

We have let them down.

I mean we don't teach anything anymore.

But I think it's also a lot of them think that tweeting is politics.

They think if they're tweeting, they're engaging in politics, they're expressing their views.

They're not actually getting to the ballot box.

And the problem again with the issue about civics classes, it's back to this idea of Gen P, that if you live in your own world on cyberspace with your phone, you think you can literally fashion it around you as you want.

And the idea of boring government full of grown-ups and adults telling you how to live and imposing a structure on you just is so 20th century.

Right.

And that's a problem.

Right.

I mean, every generation has to find find a way to say to the people who gave them life and sacrificed their entire lives for them, fuck you.

Right?

And just do the opposite.

You know, if you listen to jazz, I listen to rock.

If you like your coffee hot, I like it cold.

I'll wear my pants, my underwear over my pants if it means I'm not like you.

But the thing is that having military service in Israel is really interesting because I suspect that's one of the things that probably creates a sense of common identity and brings people together, that you take young people and force them all to go and literally live together for a year rather than living in separate little tribal groups.

I wouldn't go for the army as the best way to do it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Because it has its downsides.

Of course.

But it's definitely true.

You know, I would like to see young people vote far more, especially because at least in the US, it could be their last chance.

I mean, the next presidential elections in the US could be the last democratic elections in US history.

And it's not a high chance, but there is some chance that this will be the case.

And what people often don't understand about democracy is that democracy is not elections.

That elections are an important part of a democracy, but it can turn into a ritual.

They have elections in Iran.

They have elections in Russia.

It's not about the election.

It's about understanding a very complex system.

You know, understanding dictatorship is easy.

There is this one guy, he dictates everything.

That's the only thing you need to know.

In democracy, it's so complicated.

It's all these checks and balances.

It's all these basically self-correction mechanisms.

The whole thing about democracy is the ability to say, we made a mistake, let's try something else.

You don't have it.

Well, I mean, and we have a system that...

I mean...

You too in your countries have parliamentary systems, which make that change.

I mean, you just elected a new minister.

I would not hold up the UK as a great shining example of how to do things right now.

You know, you heard of Liv Trust.

But you don't like the new Prime Minister?

Yeah, actually, I do.

I think he's pretty much a great idea.

But shouldn't we celebrate that more?

I mean, this is kind of their Obama moment.

If people don't know what?

Well, it is to a degree.

They never had anyone who wasn't white.

Now they have someone from Indian descent.

I mean, it was only.

Yeah.

Thank you, three people.

You know?

They're pre-Halloween exhausted this audience.

They're going British politics.

We're saving it for the party tomorrow night.

Here's the thing about what's happened in Britain.

I mean, you know, British politics used to be really boring, and then we became like Italy in terms of our political swings, but without the good food and sunshine, sadly.

So we've had a lot of turbulence.

We've now got Rishi Sunak, who is, as you say, Indian.

Of Indian heritage.

What's interesting, though, is that if you look at the the debates around him, the controversies, it's got nothing to do with the colour of his skin in the UK.

It's about the fact he's rich.

And there's a lot of voters who don't like that in the UK.

And it's kind of interesting, you know, race and ethnicity plays out differently in London from elsewhere and the UK.

And there were people in this country who said there was a backlash, and there wasn't.

It's just, I feel like sometimes people in this country, they're so into victimhood that when something of a progressive victory happens, they feel deprived.

They feel feel deprived of having something to bitch about.

I think

the other thing is that in the UK, race, ethnicity, colour of your skin is not viewed so much as being in boxes, but it's more a spectrum because there's been so much intermarriage.

You know, I've lived in London for years.

I now live in New York.

My own kids are mixed race.

And

people in London used to joke that everyone in London is coffee coloured, but on a spectrum from double espresso to flat white.

And because, you know, people are mixed up.

And so it's not seen as being quite so rigidly in boxes and that's a good thing.

Yeah.

So

let me go back to the environment for a second because your book, a lot of the stuff that I found so fascinating was about how what you call the cognitive revolution when people around 70,000 BC learn to cooperate

and this is what you say, and I think you're completely right, separates this from the animals, is that we can have an idea, and it's usually a myth.

It can be a lie, like religion, but you know if a million if a million people believe that you know Jesus is God and the wrong people have taken over Jerusalem, you can get a million people to march on Jerusalem like they did in the Crusades.

And a million examples of this kind of thing.

Okay, so cooperation.

We would need that to solve this environmental problem.

Why doesn't it work there?

I think we don't have a good story.

Cooperation is ultimately, as you said, it's based on a story that everybody not just accepts and believes, but makes you enthusiastic about it, willing to make sacrifices.

And it really goes back again tens of thousands of years to the Stone Age.

We did not, we were not adapted by evolution to worry about our environment

on the atmosphere.

on global climate,

but because as Stone Age people, you don't have any influence on that.

So you are programmed by evolution to worry a lot about the tribe on the other side of the hill, to worry a lot about people in your tribe who might be plotting against you, but not about the effects of your campfire on what's going to happen to the environment.

And so, and we are still programmed to worry about these things.

It's much more easy to press the emotional buttons of people when you tell them about the other tribe or about the traitors in our tribe than when you tell them about global warming.

So that doesn't sound very optimistic for solving this other than, like I say, with some sort of technological saving.

Because I don't see people cooperating on this.

But even they've been warning us for like 25 years now that doomsday is coming.

But even

for technology to save us, we need to invest the money in the right places.

You know, the important thing to realize about the problem of climate change, that it is completely within human power to solve it.

We are not these helpless victims.

We can do that.

We have the scientific knowledge.

We have the economic resources.

It's estimated that we need something like to invest 2% or 3% of our global budget as humanity in developing the right technologies and infrastructure to prevent catastrophic climate change.

Now, 2% of the global budget is a lot of money.

But it's completely feasible.

This is what we have politicians for.

Their job is to shift 2% of resources from you to their to do things.

But they don't.

They get raw took this impact.

This is what we could do, but they don't.

I mean, one thing I love about your book is you never forget the animals.

You never forget talking about how this march of civilization that we've been on, the biggest victims, have been the animals.

Everywhere we go, humans, Homo sapiens, are ecological serial killers.

And we're not stopping that either.

The bad things that we have been doing from the beginning don't seem to be be retreating.

I'm not quite so depressed because actually there is a younger generation coming up that cares a lot about climate change.

And right now in America they go back to...

They say they blame it on this generation, but then it's like, oh, you're not using cars?

Right, you're only traveling in Greta's sailboat.

You know, they care about it, they tweet about it, they don't do anything different.

But I think, again, very important is that we don't lay the responsibility responsibility on the younger generation, say on the teenagers.

This is not their job.

I mean this is our job as adults to solve it.

When they are 40, 50, then it will be there.

If they want to influence, if they want to help, by all means, they should be heard, they should be given the platform.

But it's very dangerous when people feel that, well, we can't solve it, the kids will solve it.

I couldn't agree more.

It's not their responsibility to solve it.

True dad.

All right.

Thank Thank you guys.

Time for new rules.

Okay.

New rule.

When a bear attacks a human, don't tell me at the end of that story that the cops are searching for the bear.

What are they going to do?

Put it in a lineup?

The bear attacked a hunter in the woods where the bear lives.

It's called stand your ground, bitches.

Neural, all political debates must now come with a skip intro button.

We know who you are.

You've been bombarding every media platform we have for the last six months.

Plus, your intro is never about you.

It's my dad worked in these mines, my mom cleaned houses, my parents came here with nothing.

Great, let's vote for your fucking parents.

Neuro, just because the technology exists to take this extreme close-up photo of an ant doesn't mean you should.

Look at this thing, it's like a murder hornet crossed with James Cordon after the eggs come out wrong.

If this is what's crawling around in my yard, screw the Orkin man.

My new exterminator is Sigourney Weaver.

New Rule, since the price of butter has gone up a dollar a pound this year, Landa Lakes has to bring the Indian back.

Come on, liberals, she's an Indian, she's in a field.

Just pretend she wants your vote for more gambling.

New ruler, the parents who are always telling me that I should have kids have to explain why 80% of horror movies are children or the devil.

Seriously, I feel pretty good about my decision because apparently few stories resonate with audiences more than this kid's behavior is so fucked up, he must be the child of Satan and a doll.

And finally, New Rule, if Halloween is too much for your fragile sensibilities and you're worried about seeing someone wearing something that's on the forbidden costume list.

Just stay the fuck home.

Every year we go through this bullshit.

lists of costumes you better not wear lest a night of irreverent dress-up spiral into something that resembles fun.

Here's an idea, clickbait websites.

I won't tell you how to harvest and sell my personal data, and you don't tell me what I can wear on Halloween.

Because

Halloween is supposed to be outrageous.

It's a festival of the sacrilegious and a celebration of the grotesque, from zombies to ghouls to bobbing for apples and other people's saliva.

Yet, every year there's a new list of offensive things we shouldn't do on the day that's all about being offensive.

You know what I want to cancel?

November 1st, All Scolds Day,

when the good people announce which costumes the bad people wore.

BuzzFeed, I mean Buzz Kill.

has a list of 23 costumes they're literally begging you not to wear.

Of course this year the number one no-no is serial killer, cannibal and Netflix sensation Jeffrey Dahmer.

eBay has already banned selling it because otherwise it would be impossible to find a blonde wig and aviator glasses.

Simone Biles tweeted, put the Jeffrey Dahmer costumes back in the closet.

We ain't having it.

Who's we?

What's with the we?

Who died and made you the great pumpkin?

I'm so tired of a handful of emotional haemophiliacs.

on social media telling us what we can't do on Halloween.

And by the way, please put drugs in in my candy.

Listen to these other verboten costumes on stupid lists this year including Queen Elizabeth because it's too soon.

Yes, 96, practically an ingenue.

Of course, don't even think about characters outside of your race and

no genies because genies were slaves, okay.

No sexy schoolgirls, no Playboy bunnies, no celebrities accused of pedophilia, including Elvis.

You can't dress up as Elvis.

That's an entire industry.

No zombie versions of deceased celebrities.

Well, there goes my zombie Angela Lansberry idea.

No unhoused person.

What we used to call a hobo, the default costume of every kid in history.

No one with an eating disorder, so goodbye skeletons.

And no transphobic costumes, because if kids want to see drag queens, they can go to Story Hour.

Also, listen to this.

No Putin, no Trump,

no anything related to the Will Smith Oscar slap.

No Johnny Depp, and of course Amber Heard is out, no shit.

And nothing related related to vaccines or COVID or monkeypox.

So have fun, kids, and let your imagination soar.

Can I tell you something, kids?

These are all great costumes.

Yeah.

Listen.

Listen to me.

I'm your last connection to fun.

You should wear all of them.

In fact, combine them if you want.

Have the queen shit in Johnny's bed.

Have Will Smith smacking a hobo.

Kevin Spacey hitting on a mariachi band.

Jeffrey Dahmer is the perfect Halloween costume.

What is scarier than a guy who fucks you, kills you, and eats you, not necessarily in that order?

For fuck's sake, it's Halloween, which is not just a fun holiday.

It's a necessary psychic release.

Yes, societies going back thousands of years knew that you had to have some release valve on the calendar to flirt with the macabre and let the demons out to role play so they wouldn't come out later for real.

Mexico has Day of the Dead, Japan has Oban.

Haitians have Fet Gadetay.

It's not a coincidence that Carnival comes right before Lent and Halloween right before All Saints Day.

Much the way getting blown at a bachelor party comes before the wedding.

You know, I find it so interesting.

You would think that a handmaid's tail costume would be acceptable since it derives from a completely woke-approved show that condemns the patriarchy.

No.

Buzzkill says no handmaid's tail costume either because It hits a little too close to home right now.

Okay, this is the life philosophy of zillennials.

Things that are interesting might also contain something which could cause a moment of discomfort, so ban it all.

It's not your fault, kids.

Your parents ruined you by over-protecting you, and now you're these assholes.

And that is the craziest part of all this.

Being irreverent, unclenched, unclenched, and playful should be the province of the young, but it's not.

Boomers are supposed to be to get off my lawn crowd.

But when someone in a problematic costume shows up at your door, it's literally Gen Z telling them to get off my lawn.

Except it's not even your lawn because you live at your parents' house.

So

I thought.

What better costume to wear this year than the most ridiculous one I could think of?

You.

This year I'm going as an uber woke, overly anxious, perpetually offended 20-something.

Would you like to see what I have for this costume?

I think you're going to really enjoy it.

Okay, first of all, I have my fuck the Patriarchy t-shirt.

Oh, yes.

And then I have a check from the Patriarchy to pay my car insurance.

Okay, I've got my nose ring,

my vape pen.

I've got my cloth surgical mask,

my surgical mask, my N95 mask, and my face shield.

Then after I leave the house,

I have my clonopin to take the edge off,

my Adderall to put it back on,

I have my participation trophy,

my cat ear headphones to listen to sad music, the stick that goes up my ash,

and the leash for my support animal.

And just in case anyone still doesn't get what I'm all about, I have a wet blanket.

All right, thank you very much.

That's our show.

I'll be at the Hulu Theater in New York, November 12th.

The Mirage in Vegas, November 25th and 26th.

The Maui Cultural Center, December 30th, and at the Waikiki, New Year's Eve.

Thank you very much.

Jillian Ted, Yuval Harari, and Quentin Tarantino.

Join us now on Overtime on YouTube.

Thank you, folks.

Watch all new episodes of Real Time with Bill Maher every Friday night at 10.

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