Ep. #611: Wynton Marsalis, Scott Galloway, Matt Welch

What up, y'all?

It's Joe Button here to talk about PrizePicks.

PrizePicks is the best place to win real money while watching football.

You can get up to 100 times your money.

PrizePicks will give you $50 instantly when you play your first $5 lineup.

You don't even need to win to receive the $50 bonus.

It's guaranteed.

Just download the PrizePicks app and use code Spotify.

That's code Spotify on PrizePicks to get $50 instantly when you play a $5 lineup.

PrizePicks, run your game.

Must be present in certain states.

Visit PrizePicks.com for restrictions and details.

Say hello to the next generation of Zendesk AI agents, built to deliver resolutions for everyone.

Loved by over 10,000 companies, Zendesk AI agents easily deploy in minutes to resolve 30% of interactions instantly.

That's the Zendesk AI Effect.

Find out more at Zendesk.com.

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

Start the clock.

Thank you, people.

Thank you very much.

I appreciate it.

Wait to see you.

Thank you so much.

Thank you very much.

Thank you.

I appreciate that.

I know why you're happy.

I know.

I know why you're happy.

The heat wave seems to be subsiding a little bit, right?

I mean, it's been a brutal week, right?

This town, oh my god, it's like L.A.

was like Death Valley with in-and-out burgers.

I mean.

People in this town are going to their hot yoga class to cool off.

I mean, it's

hot out there.

I saw this Gen Z kid.

He was so desperate to cool off, he changed his pronoun to

And now

they say we're gonna get rain.

We're gonna get like a

torrential downpour for 36 hours.

It's the worst.

Does anybody remember when people used to come to this state for the weather?

Remember that?

It was like a selling point?

But okay.

Let's not bore the rest of the country with our problems.

A lot of problems.

I tell you, the big story when we were off is the Biden speech.

Did you see Biden's speech?

He has...

I don't know.

I really liked it.

Right.

I mean,

Uncle Joe's taken a new tack.

The gloves are off.

No more Mr.

Nice Guy.

He called out MAGA Nation for being semi-fascist, and Trump was pissed.

Seriously.

Trump immediately called for a new election, or he said, if not that, he demanded to be just reinstalled.

How dare you call me a fascist?

Now install me as president immediately.

And one of his chief architects of MAGA Nation, Steve Bannon, you know Steve Bannon, he's been on this show, we know Steve.

Sure.

He's in big trouble, not for any of the really horrible things he did,

for something rather petty.

You know, when Trump was president, he wanted a member build the wall, and they didn't build anything.

So Steve Bannon had his own charity, we build the wall, and people sent him money so that he would build the wall, and then he took the money.

That's what he's in trouble for.

But to be fair,

they did build half a mile of wall.

So they were very effective in stopping the world's laziest migrant.

But you all know the big story.

Sad day for inbreeding.

Queen Elizabeth died at 96.

They say the cause of death was Megan Markle's podcast.

No, I liked the Queen.

I did.

Her personal estate, they said, was worth almost half a billion dollars.

It used to be worth a billion.

That's what you get for listening to Matt Damon.

But the

White House is saying for a long time they didn't know whether Biden was going to go to the funeral.

They finally said just a few hours ago, he is going to, I was not in doubt.

Biden funeral.

It's like when the dog hears your keys.

You know, I mean.

No, Biden sent his condolences to the people of England and said, we can do anything.

We're here

to be your friend.

And Trump also sent condolences and said they could bury her in his golf course if they wanted to.

That was his take.

Oh, and I mean,

condolences are coming in from all of, of course, the British people.

Very upset about this.

Elton John is writing a new song.

It's called Mustard in the Fridge.

Well, he's noting the fact that Diana was 36 and the Queen is almost 100, and Mustard in the Fridge

seems to me you lived your life like mustard in the fridge.

We're all upset.

I called Buckingham Palace to give my condolences.

They said, new queen, who did?

You know who's very glad the queen is dead?

QAnon.

Any QAnon people here?

I always welcome.

I say, everybody's welcome at my show.

But QAnon, they think the queen was part of the child trafficking ring that was eating babies.

but she lived to 96.

I say pass the baby.

All right, we've got a great show.

We have Matt Welch and Scott Galloway, but first up,

he is a nine-time Grammy Award winner and the first Pulitzer Prize-winning jazz musician.

He leads jazz at the Lincoln Center with its 35th concert season opening on September 30th.

Went in Marsalis.

Hello, sir.

How are you?

Great to see you again.

Pleasure.

Thank you for being here.

Great pleasure.

I feel like I owe you a debt of gratitude because, first of all, I associate you like synonymously with jazz.

Not that there haven't been giants in the past, but in my era, you are jazz.

And I associate jazz.

And I associate jazz with marijuana.

Right?

I mean, they used to even call a joint a jazz cigarette.

Is that not true?

I think so.

Remember, when people first started getting high, it was legal.

Jazz musicians were getting high, it was legal, and then it became illegal.

Louis Armstrong

was an advocate.

Pot was legal?

It was legal.

Cocaine was legal.

Well, I think pot was too.

I'm not sure about that.

Don't check me.

I think they

whatever it was, it was frowned upon.

Certainly

by the 20s and 30s, it was certainly frowned upon.

And the only people who were doing it were jazz musicians.

I mean, they sort of made it a thing.

Well, I think a lot of people were doing it.

They were getting publicity for doing it.

And,

you know, I think that actually legalizing it is the smartest thing to do.

It's much better than alcohol.

Oh, of course.

You know, it's going to seem crazy because I grew up actually in clubs.

I was always around people high.

Not just weed, but just whatever was there.

Me too.

It was always secondhand smoke that got me.

It was just people around me, wouldn't it?

No, I actually never got high.

I never smoked nothing.

I'm a brass player.

Wow.

But I didn't,

I don't, I don't think it's...

It's as big a deal as it's made out to be.

Sometimes it's fun to just tell people no.

And I think there are other more pressing drug problems.

Oh, there are.

Drugs that you pay for.

That's a bigger problem.

Well, over-the-counter type drugs that you don't pay just a few dollars for, that you pay for.

That you pay a lot for.

But you can't deny that it does have something to do with the flowering of people's imagination and creativity.

I don't think that.

I don't think getting high on her.

There must be people who think that.

It's like the great Jerry Mulligan told me once about getting high on heroin.

He said, we all thought we would play like bird, and we all ended up just being heroin addicts.

Wow.

Like you're not going to play like Charlie Parker because you're high.

Right.

And we have all the history to prove that.

So if you want to get high and have fun and you have your thing you want to do, okay, but it's not going to help you be Duke Ellington.

Geez, I'm going to have to make a big reassessment of a lot of stuff.

I got to go.

I would love to stay and talk to you, Witten, but you really rocked my world.

Well, listen, you know, we both travel America, right?

Do you see the same country when you go out to the middle of America that you read about in the media?

Because I don't.

No, I see people.

I've not been traveling the country by car.

I'm afraid to fly.

So

I traveled across the country in a car to come out here.

And I'm always in places talking with people.

And, you know, a lot of the things we think, when we meet people, they're people.

But when we view people stereotypically and we deal with them in their group and when they sit in their group, they're not like who they are when you see them in person.

Right.

You know,

about this afraid to fly, if you smoke a joint,

it doesn't help me.

No.

I wouldn't try it.

No kind of drug would help me with that.

I'm so afraid.

I just...

Right.

But you wouldn't know if you sat next to me.

I just fake being cool just the whole time.

I get some music.

I work on a score.

I'm just in here.

You are always cool.

I don't think you're.

I need a better phobia.

But last time you were here, we were talking about how, I mean, your theory that the, and I think a lot of people share it, that the media sort of keeps us fighting amongst each other.

Well, it's a hustle.

You know, and the hustle is always based on getting people on the bottom of a society to think that each one is the enemy.

And in our country, it's been, if you look at the position the poor southern white was in, he's angry at the people who cannot affect him.

And he's out fighting war for those people and those who don't affect him, slaves.

He's looking at them and he's mad at them.

You need to be mad at who can affect your financial condition.

Right.

I think.

Yeah.

If I'm out there,

the soldiers, the soldiers who fought for General Lee in the Confederacy did not really have a stake in that.

They were not owners of the Confederate.

They're still fighting.

And they're still fighting.

They're still fighting.

They're people fighting against who live in places where they never see a Mexican anytime.

They're fighting to make sure that Mexicans don't come here.

And they're fighting for issues that don't affect them locally.

And they're fighting as a group with some group that they can't even define really.

A group called white or a group called black.

And my brother and I were laughing about, can you imagine if you got people from

Vietnam, Japan, China, Thailand, and you put them all together and call them a group called Yellows?

And then you start to talk to them as if they were going to adhere to your concept of what they were.

And as a nation, we have to kind of,

we have to figure out what space do we want to be in in terms of our conception of ourselves.

We want to be symbiotic, like you and I, we're sitting there talking.

Do I want to fight you or do I want to come together with you?

Do I want to share the space?

And that's really what jazz is about.

It's about sharing space.

It's important to realize that you're sharing space with people who are not playing what you would play.

So sometimes they're playing notes, rhythm section is accompanying you.

They're not playing what you would play.

But you can't stop in the middle of what you're playing and say, don't play this, play what I would play.

So the exercise in the music is how can we use our form

to address the issue at hand, which is swinging and sounding good as a group.

And how can I work with you?

in the space and find a way for us to swing.

That's why we go back and forth.

And

it's not all funny games.

You know, sometimes it can get heated.

It's not all funny.

It's not all

on stage, it can get heated?

No, no, no.

You try to, if you're professional, it won't get heated on stage.

But there have been times when people have come to issues on stage.

For us and our group, we have a very,

really good balance, and we acknowledge it.

For the last 15 or so years, we all say most bands are very dysfunctional.

But you're saying because it's so improvisational, sometimes you get pissed because some guy is going off on something that certainly wasn't planned because it couldn't be, but you don't think that that was a great direction to go in.

Well, there's a lot of choice.

Right.

And wherever there's choice, there's strife.

Yeah.

And there are a lot of paradoxical moments, ambiguous moments, and somebody steps into the space and you have to make decisions.

And there are also hierarchies, like the drums are the president.

The piano is the legislature, and the bass is the judicial branch.

Now, you have to deal with them.

So,

you know,

a drummer might play something you don't like.

And also the jazz musicians are very, we have heated personalities.

Like we can speak

good, clear English to you if we don't like what's going on.

And we play with a lot of passion and feeling, but we're working out ideas and things could go in anyway.

But there's a form that you have to know that we follow.

You have to agree that you're trying to swing and that you will follow that form.

And you solo as long as you want.

So you may solo 15 choruses when two were good.

Now everybody's looking at you like.

So you know, you have to want to share space.

Can you impeach a drummer?

Because

I have heard tapes of people on stage yelling at their band.

I've heard Buddy Rich.

Well, you couldn't impeach him.

It was his band.

Buddy Rich?

You couldn't impeach Buddy.

No.

Buddy also had improved.

He was a drummer.

Some kind of eighth-degree black belt or something.

You had to be very careful trying to impeach him.

But they could be very mean.

I've heard James Brown call out a fine to his band on.

$50

because the guy

hit the wrong note.

It's a part of a kind of culture of excellence.

Sometimes people get heated.

When I was young, I was very heated.

As you get older, you start to learn how to not be that way.

Because you get more out of people when you're not.

But certainly,

as a Pulitzer Prize winner in your field, as the director of the jazz people at Lincoln Center,

certainly when you're on stage, I assume everyone just gives it over to you.

No, we don't have that type of bass player.

Really?

Actually, we have younger musicians that came up just more like, and we're familiar.

So sometimes I'll call a tune and our bass player calls Enriquez, who I've known since he was in high school, he'll be like, no, Papa.

I don't actually count our songs off.

The guy who sits in front of me, who plays second troubon, Chris Crenshaw, he has perfect pitch and perfect time.

So he's like a metronome.

So I learned to just say, Chris, what is 120?

And he will count the songs off.

We share the story.

What is 120?

I know what 420 is.

I think, I think.

I think 120 is a, I don't, Chris knows.

I don't know.

I ask him.

What is it?

What is it, Chris?

Well,

so you drove out here, you said.

Yeah, I drove out here.

From New York?

From New York.

Well, I've been across the country for 40 years.

No, I know you're playing the Hollywood Bowl.

I'm not

flattering myself that you're.

But I'm so flattered that while you are here on your long journey, you would come to see me anytime you want to.

I always love having you here.

It's such a pleasure.

Thank you.

All right.

Winston Marsalis.

Let's do it again.

Longer form.

All right.

Let's meet our panel.

Thank you, brother.

Hello, gentlemen.

All right.

He is co-host of the Pivot Podcast and author of the outcoming book Adrift, America in 100 charts.

Scott Galloway is back with us.

And he's editor-at-large for Reason Magazine and co-host of the fifth column podcast.

Matt Welch is over here once again.

Okay, I'm just going to ask one question about the queen.

Look, I like the queen.

Everybody likes the queen.

The movie, The Queen, was great.

Remember that movie?

And if you remember, the theme of the movie was like, you know, Tony Blair comes into into office, he thinks he's going to hate her, and she's old, and he comes away defending her and understanding why she is great.

Okay.

So,

but I made lots of jokes about the Queen.

I noticed whenever it was a British person, like even the ones who you see, my kind of classic, Sharon Osborne was here once, Piers Morgan, Andrew Sullivan, the British people, it's not funny.

It's like, oh, no, don't call her the old bag.

Whatever I, it's like, no.

They really, if you're, even the ones who who came to America, the British people,

they have a thing.

My question is, is it just for this lady?

I think it died with her.

I think that reverence, I think she was the last one.

And now the monarchy, I'm not going to say it's going to go away, but I think that kind of like, no, don't say anything about that.

I think that's going to go.

I think she was the last of a thing.

What do you think?

I have a hard time believing that Johnny Rotten is going to say, God save the king when

he tweeted out his like best wishage towards the queen, Johnny Rotten.

Johnny Rotten.

Johnny Rotten did, in addition to Ozzy Hoffman and everybody else.

I don't think it's going to happen with King Charles.

That's what I'm saying.

It's in their blood.

My mom came here in the early 60s with just two suitcases and she found, on a steamship, and she found space for China that had the queen's picture on it.

No, I don't think there's any individual in history that's reigned over an institution with so much grace over 70 years.

I thought it was also heartening to see a bunch of people come together and collectively be sad about one person.

It felt good.

In sum, I thought the double rainbow over the Buckingham Palace was fitting.

She did.

I mean there's been a lot of great stories.

This guy is only second generation British apparently and he's got a boner for her.

100%.

Unbelievable.

100%.

You'll get a boner from the following story which is that that's come out since.

She loved to drive, right?

She was a mechanic during World War II, and she loved to tool around in her Jeep.

She got the Saudi king Abdullah.

She's like, hey, you want to take a little spin on the properties to make sure?

She got into the driver's seat.

And he's, wait, that's not how this works.

And there wasn't anybody else.

And she just starts ripping, doing donuts in Balmoral, absolutely freaking out the Saudis.

So there's your bones.

Ironically, the same prince was a queen.

Sorry.

There was a comfortable silence.

Sorry.

And the saudi dude wore a dress.

Anyways.

All right, let's go to America.

The big thing that happened when we were off was Biden's speech.

And I got to say this, we're going to talk about whether you like the speech or not and whether it was the right thing to do, but I got to say, Joe Biden is an old dog that can learn a new trick.

He is.

He was all about, you know, and by the way, that's such a stupid phrase.

Old dog.

Can't teach an old dog.

Yeah, that applies to dogs.

Humans are actually the opposite.

We get wiser as we get older.

Something Americans are too stupid to understand.

So, like, he came into office.

I'm going to be

reconciled with the Republicans.

They're the old Republican Party.

He finally got it through his head.

No, they're not.

You cannot negotiate with election deniers.

So 59% of the people agree with him in his speech about MAGA is a threat to this country because they don't believe in democracy.

But 58% of the people said this speech was divisive.

I get this because I feel like it's kind of analogous to Afghanistan.

That he did it, I liked.

The way he did it, not good.

I think there's something...

to that.

I think this speech was a bad speech and a missed opportunity.

If you think, and I think you think and I think, that there's a subset subset of the Republican Party, MAGA Republicans, ultra-MAGA, whatever he's calling it, the MAGA force everyday changes

that don't believe in the results of the 2020 election, that are actively trying to elect people like Doug Mastriano in Pennsylvania, but people in secretaries of state and Michigan and other places that are going to engage in chicanery in 2024, then you can focus on that.

There's no business in the speech like that to talk about, as Biden did, infrastructure, contraception.

That has nothing to do with it.

The thing that you're talking about is a particular set of authoritarian or just kind of cuckoo bananas values.

And what you do in that case is say, what can we do to try to insulate ourselves as a country and a society against that?

One thing he could do is mention, which he did not do even once in the speech, the Electoral Count Reform Act, bipartisan, introduced by Susan Collins, a Republican, that would basically take off the table all of the novel legal tricks that the Trump team were trying in 2020.

Didn't mention it.

And Democrats are not bringing it up.

They're not bringing that vote up for the bill up for discussion until after the election.

If you really believe democracy is in peril, act like it.

I think you're giving him too much credit because I don't think people saw the speech.

The networks didn't carry it.

You know,

his big mistake was

two mistakes.

One, thinking that Americans can appreciate nuance.

He wanted to separate Republicans from MAGA-Republicans.

And let me give you the four criteria he said are a MAGA-Republican.

You reject the election results.

Support the candidates who reject election results, of which there are many on the ballot this November.

Approve of the January 6th rioters.

Support the political use of violence.

Okay, that's who he was talking to.

No one heard this.

They didn't watch the speech.

All they heard was he attacked us.

He attacked our side.

That's where his big mistake was.

People are not good enough to appreciate nuance in this country.

They didn't hear this.

If he had made a speech that critiqued the fringe of both sides,

I think he would be in such a winning place right now.

If he had, and I'm sure that

on MSNBC, they would be saying, oh, that's false equivalencies.

So fucking what?

Do you want to save the country or do you want to win points?

Yes, there would be some false equivalencies.

But if he had made a speech to that middle-of-the-country guy that we were talking about, who's actually all over the country, who comes up to me and says, thank you for talking since, you know, I just want some centrist stuff that isn't nonsense.

If he had called out the people he did call out, the Magocide, but then said, and the left, my party, has a lot of crazy shit that's going on.

And people,

and if he had said that, we don't want people who don't want fascism and don't want to lose the right to an abortion and also don't want their children indoctrinated when they go to school and called out some of that.

I think it would have been such

a big moment for the country.

The largest political party is now independents for 41%.

And I think

this mistake, this self-identification has gone from 34 to 41 percent.

The mistake we on the left make is that we believe people are going going to vote for what offends them as opposed to what affects them.

And

the opportunity to talk about economics, the opportunity, you know, I will say this, I do think it's a false equivalence.

Everybody is referencing the Lincoln speech and saying that, you know, four score and seven years ago, you need a pathos to bring people together.

The Lincoln speech basically said, I'm going to draw a drop of blood from every white soldier that we drew from black people.

It was not, it was, we are going to reunify the country by killing more white southerners.

And I think at some point you reunify the country by holding people accountable for their actions and their words.

But I think also,

I think you work backward from the what are the elements of Trump or Trumpism that are beyond the pale, right?

Let's say he lies more than everybody else.

He kind of does, right?

He encouraged people to admit, he encouraged people to riot.

He disputed the results of an election.

There are lies on the Democratic side, too, sometimes.

If you think about what are the traits that we don't want to see, then look to yourself and anybody's faction.

I'm libertarian with a small L.

It says small little faction.

People on that team, too, can engage in this and call it out.

There's a lot of election denial in the Democratic Party, depending on if you lose.

Stacey Abrams was not a gracious loser in the Georgia race a couple of years ago, and she's revered as a hero on the left, largely.

There's a lot of political violence in this country on the left.

It's not the same.

That's right.

But it's worth talking about.

If those values matter to you, you work back from the value.

I don't know why a smart guy like you would go there.

Honestly,

as a big fan of you,

I just think there's so many other things.

And you're right, too.

It is false equivalents.

The Republicans are more dangerous.

But again, do you want to win, or do you want to win points?

Yeah, but it is.

And then, sorry, to your point, like, please, Al Gore conceded the election.

Yeah.

Hillary Clinton got in her purple suit.

Okay, that's just the worst one to fight that on.

Maybe Stacey Abrams wasn't as gracious as she should have been.

That issue is a Republicans own that issue of election denial.

Let's fight, and Democrats have to own

another crazy shit where, you know, a bodega guy gets attacked and then he's brought up on charges charges because he fought back.

Go to war on that.

This bakery in Portland that I saw won a big suit this week because they were accused of racism

and they won a $135 million from Oberlin College.

Just pick out something.

There's something every day that Biden could have picked out and said, and my side has gone too far on this, and yes, it wouldn't be equivalent, but the country could then, the people in the middle and the people who don't want to feel like you're just attacking my team would be like, yes, finally, and then he could not have to run again.

I think we all wait a minute.

Hold on.

The extremists on the left, they want to fire some of my colleagues for making hapless remarks.

They want to try and seize social status by acting more virtuous than they are in their everyday lives.

And it's obnoxious and it's out of touch.

But election denial, wanting to move towards a white Christian nationalist nation, that's just fucking out of control.

I'm not arguing with you.

So

one is a dumpster fire.

One is a dumpster fire.

The other is a nuclear mushroom cloud that kills all of us.

Okay, but the people who populate this country aren't watching you or this show right now and just don't appreciate that difference.

And you've got to win.

You got to win.

Win, baby.

Just win.

But his job was to turn out Democrats, not to reunify the country.

Midterms are in two weeks.

He wanted, or coming up, he wanted to electrify his base.

I I don't think this is about reviewing.

But we're talking about

so much of the problem of this country, I feel, is that we're a grievance culture.

Now, that's especially on the right.

I used to always ask, I don't understand why the Trump voter, who thinks of themselves as so macho,

likes this whiny little bitch.

That was always my why.

And I realized,

because

they completely relate.

They relate to this feeling of grievance that we've been robbed of something.

And also insulted.

I mean, you hear that a lot from people who voted for Trump, especially the first time around, is that they don't like the way that the culture sneers at them, that they perceive that the culture, academia or whatever, is sneering at them.

And he speaks.

to them or in their language in some way.

That's as much as anything else,

people's motivation.

But again, I think what you do, you don't do a a campaign speech because that's not the majority.

You said, you know, 41% of people self-identify as independents.

I wrote a book about that 10 years ago.

It is a big thing.

People don't like the partisan scrum.

So there are values that you can appeal to everybody on within that.

And he didn't.

Just today, he tweeted out: we have to fight the ultra-mAGA agenda of cutting Social Security.

My people, that is a ridiculous thing to say.

Donald Trump, in the field of 2015 and 2016, distinguished himself as the Republican, laughing at Paul Ryan for wanting to cut Social Security.

Donald Trump changed Republican attitudes about cutting Social Security.

Ultra MAGA has nothing to do with cutting Social Security.

So stop trying to make a normal election out of it.

Talk about the abnormal things that Republicans are doing

with them on.

Why is there always this implicit notion and expectation that we on the left have a responsibility to understand the guy that dresses up as Jameer Aquoy, by the the way, he lives with his mother, lives with his mother, the guy who stormed the Capitol.

Why is there always the onus on us on the left to understand people who want to deny the election?

And

here's what I understand.

We have a constitution, we have laws, we're going to put their asses in jail.

And this notion around masculinity is an important one because a lot of men are failing in this country, and unfortunately, they've conflated toxicity with masculinity because of our last president not recognizing that true masculinity is the ability to garner strength and skills so that you can protect others.

That's what it means to be a man.

And

we need that in the Democratic Party.

Obama, Obama reflected that.

Our veterans reflected that.

We need more.

And by the way, and on the left, you also got to acknowledge

to be a man doesn't mean you're toxic.

It's okay to be a man.

It's a thing, and it's a really awesome thing.

Thanks, bro.

Not gonna help it.

Great to be with you guys here.

Meeting a football season last night.

Was it an awesome or fucking what?

Man, I can't believe the Bills kicked ass, man.

That's the worst impression of a man I've heard.

Let's talk about the queen.

Well, I mean, there are millions of men.

To your point about men being in crisis, there are millions of men who are playing fantasy football now.

They like have a make-believe football team that they're managing and they're going to ignore their family for the next six months.

Win-win.

What?

That sounds like a win-win.

I mean...

Yes.

Come on.

I always, my individualism dar starts going off when I hear a lot of big talk about men and women and what they need and what they don't.

But I think a big part of it right now is that men just don't work as much as they used to, especially young men, right?

Teenagers 20 years ago, more than half of them, 16 and over worked.

Now it's one-third.

That's a big drop-off in 20 years.

And every one of the generations afterwards works less as a cohort than they did up until, and this is good news for you guys, 55.

55 and older more share of men work than they did 20 years ago.

That's weird.

If we're like losing the idea of that getting a work ethic, figuring out how to

wake up, hungover, and show up to work on time, to get the independence of having a hostile third party allow, you know, pay you money to do indifferent work, that's important.

And we're not doing that anymore and that's, I think, is worse for masculinity than playing fantasy football.

But you're talking about the symptom.

We're trying to get at the root cause.

Why are men in such crisis?

I mean, the stats are like only 40% go to college.

So they're losing out to women there in a big way.

And women with degrees don't marry men who don't have degrees.

So

great, you'll be lonely forever, aren't you?

Why are you chewing that?

I didn't tell my wife.

They don't marry as much, which I think is great, but other people think that's a terrible thing.

Okay.

People do like a mate, whatever.

That's whatever your boat floats by.

But there is something going on.

I mean, mass shootings is a uniquely male crime.

It's always because some dude in Buffalo, you know, had somebody swipe left on him too much.

I mean, I feel like that's what's going on here,

is a lot of sort of maleness.

coming to the fore and announcing itself in violence and racism and hatred because they're lonely and lost and feel that they are not useful in society.

How did we get there?

The most unstable nations in the world have one thing in common, and that is they have too many lonely, broke, and alone men.

It's the most dangerous person in the world.

Someone Rusty wasn't attacked because of the fatwa.

He was attacked because a guy was living in his mother's basement.

We have a crisis among young men, and it starts at a young age.

Young men are twice as likely on a behavior-adjusted basis to be suspended.

Seven in ten high school valedictorians are women.

For every one female, for every two female graduates from college in the next five years, you'll only have one.

The scary stat, walking down the avenue that is America, only one in three men under the age of 30 have had sex in the last year.

And you hear sex and your brain fires.

But the bottom line is it's a key step to the elemental foundation of any society, and that is relationships.

Young men aren't attaching to work.

They aren't attaching to women.

They aren't attaching to schools.

We are producing too many of the most dangerous persons in society.

And we are losing out on a key.

We're not going to have kids, we're not going to have a productive society, we're going to have more violence, and also we're going to have a society that does not value young men and they do not.

Young men are different, they develop later.

And by the way, if you're a young man, this work-from-home thing is a disaster.

They need young men.

Young men need

Young men need guardrails.

They need to know how to read a room.

They need to put on a clean shirt.

They know not to get high or drink drink too much during the week.

And then get into the office the next day.

We have a crisis among young men.

It is one of the most, in my view, one of the most dangerous things in our society.

And where do you put the phone in this equation?

Because I put it high up.

Because, thank you.

Because

I was reading recently.

A Tinder, two to one male to female.

Oh, what?

No, it's just a startling statistic, yeah.

Right.

Why is it startling?

I mean, it sounds like a great idea.

Oh, I can just order women like I do a pizza on my phone.

I think I'll have the Kelly today.

Except when you go on it, it weeds out the people who aren't the best looking, I think, because it, you know, it used to go to a bar.

Okay, maybe it was potluck.

But you have to be able to learn to talk to a woman.

I don't think they're how to talk to a woman anymore, because it's just on the phone.

It's just like, what's up?

And then,

you know, what's up and send a picture of your penis.

Like, that's going to work.

Sometimes.

So you.

Sometimes.

You asked about the phone.

Simply put, it's a disaster.

Whenever technology comes into an industry, it consolidates it.

Mating has been consolidated in the worst way.

50 men on Tinder, 50 women.

46 of the women show all of their attention to just four men, leaving 46 men pursuing just four women.

If mating was a country, it would be more unequal than Venezuela.

We have huge mating inequality.

And here's the problem.

When people don't get together and there's no pheromones and there's no vibe, women, and we don't like to say this on the left, primarily try and make very quick assumptions about this individual's ability to garner resources in the future.

So what you have is this concentration of interest and you're ending up with Porsche polygamy, where 10% of the men get 90% of the attention, which does not lead to good behavior or form long-term relationships.

E-commerce was disastrous for retail.

Social media was disastrous for everybody.

Online dating is disastrous for mating and for men.

It's terrible.

And you can follow him on Professor Galloway.

I'm sure glad I'll be able to garner resources in the future.

Have you ever tried dating app?

Have you ever used a dating app?

No, never.

I wouldn't know how.

I wouldn't want to.

It's swiped the wrong way.

It's a beautiful thing.

Well, first of all, they'll catch you doing it, right?

That's actually true.

And also,

I wouldn't believe what people look like.

I don't understand why this is even a thing.

It's like inviting yourself to be fooled.

And you said pheromones, is that what it is?

Like when you smell somebody?

Vibe, humor.

Right, eye contact.

You're funny.

Whatever it might be.

And let's just not talk about men.

The phone has been a disaster for women.

About 2013.

About 2013, all of a sudden, self-cutting

and self-harm admittance into hospitals, not self-reporting, but actual hospital admissions, has gone up about 80% since social media went on mobile.

Imagine being...

presented with your full self as a 13-year-old girl 24 by 7.

I'd rather give my 15-year-old daughter a bottle of jack and weed than put her on Instagram.

So

speaking of social media, I don't know if you saw, but the new iWatch came out this week and it has like apps where you can tell you, oh, there it is.

Like when you're ovulating, will show up on your phone.

It'll tell you, like if you're getting into an accident, if you get into an accident, it'll call the cops right away.

These are not the only new apps on the phone.

Would you like to see what they have on the watch?

They have one.

There's some crazy shit out there.

Then something on this new iWatch reminds stoners what they were just talking about.

Look at this one.

Automatically skips all the songs in a playlist that remind you of your first husband.

That's.

This one automatically changes your pronouns every 90 days so you can remain perpetually offended.

Wow.

This one keeps a database of which Nicholas Cage movies are ironically bad and which ones are just bad bad.

This alerts your waiter to when you're telling a story so he can come over and ask you how everything is tasting just when you get to the punchline.

This one can scan any tattoo and tell you exactly where a woman's parents failed.

Oh,

fart Shazam.

Allows you to Shazam any fart to find out who did it.

I think that's.

And this is what alerts you in Canada, does something that makes you say, damn, Canada, you are supposed to be the normal country.

All right, so.

I want to go back to something you both

touched on.

Labor Day Day was Monday, and you were talking about people not going to work anymore, and we were also talking about how the Queen went to work for 70 years, never complaining, went to the castle every day.

All 2,800 rooms.

It was a...

What a tough job.

But

there's this new thing called quiet quitting.

And I read this week Gallup poll.

50%

of people in this country are quiet quitting.

If you haven't heard the term, I was explaining it to somebody who hadn't the other day, and I was saying it just means you do the minimum of what you have to do at work just to keep your job.

Some people like it.

And this person said to me, that makes a lot of sense

to me because of the way I've noticed customer service has gone down in the last few years.

And I thought, yeah, quiet quitting.

It sounds like this noble crusade were quiet quitting.

But really, what about the person on the other side of the counter?

You're just fucking them.

You're fucking your fellow citizens if you're not doing your job.

I've noticed a lot of quiet quitting, too.

When I travel, you notice it.

Hotels, a lot of quiet quits.

Not the maids, they keep doing their job.

It's the asshole with the college degree at the front desk.

Yeah, there's some mixed data on it because supposedly young people are just as engaged as they were before.

But I think work from home is a disaster from young people.

And be clear, if your job can be be moved to Boulder, it can be moved to Bangalore.

And if you want to quiet quit, you're going to be loudly unemployed for a long time.

Let me just sound, let me,

that gets applause.

Anyways,

let me just be very boomerish here, because I like to talk about what it means when you're in your 20s and 30s.

If you expect to be in the top median in this country, America becomes more like itself every day.

It's a great place if you're wealthy.

It's a rapacious, ugly place if you don't have money.

And if you want money in an increasingly competitive economy, I have just only one piece of advice.

Work your ass off.

Because

they will figure it out.

And there's one of the most successful companies in the world is Accenture.

And Accenture is basically targeting companies.

that have big work from home cultures and they come in and say, we got an idea.

It's called work from Hyderabad.

And we're going to start outsourcing all of these jobs.

That's it, and so get, you know, work from home, quiet quitting, whatever you want to call it.

There's no such thing as balance.

You can have everything, you just can't have it at once.

The reason we have balance, I'm going to go out on a limb here, is we worked our damn asses off.

And so, and you know what?

It gets harder and harder every year for young people.

But don't kid yourself.

Jay-Z followed his passion.

Assume you are not Jay-Z.

Get in the office, work your ass off.

I would add that there's been two big events over the last few years.

One's been commented on, one hasn't.

The commented one is COVID.

People have worked from home.

Their relationship to their job is just different.

You found out what you could do from a, did you really need to live close to New York City or could you move to Nashville?

You know, a lot of people kind of shook up the snow globe when it came to that.

So that changes their approach.

I think some of the data probably is reflecting that as much as it's reflecting anything else.

People are just sort of rethinking, where do I live and why?

But then the other thing that doesn't get talked about because we have such stupid politics about immigration in this country, we have choked off immigration, legal immigration in this country over the last five years.

Both presidents, Donald Trump started it, started it very, very hard, especially at the end of his term.

Joe Biden has continued quite a lot of it.

We don't have enough legal visas.

The hardest working sons of bitches in this country all the time are immigrants, and they also create jobs.

If you look...

If you look at the Bureau of Labor Statistics of what is the cohort hived off that works the most, Hispanics, right?

We need more Hispanics in this country.

it's, those people are not going to, if you go down to the Home Depot, you're not going to see Chad and Tyler in front of there.

That's not it, right?

We need people who are going to do that and other things.

Got to wrap it up there.

Thank you, gentlemen.

Thank you, bros.

Time for new rules.

Yeah, we'll grow out after the show.

Okay.

New rule, Timothy Chalamay and Harry Stiles have to tell us if they also go to the bathroom together.

Check that.

New rule, Timothy Chalamet and Harry Stiles shouldn't tell us if they go to the bathroom together, because I don't care.

I know you guys think your gender bending is blowing everybody's mind, but just so you know, this picture was taken in 1973.

New rules, stop sending me junk mail marked, the favor of your reply is requested.

Does this Jane Austen shtick actually work on people?

Oh look, an epistle has arrived.

Perhaps

it's an invitation to Lady Astor's garden party.

Oh no, it's just an offer on Bath and Body Works trying to sell me an asswashing mitt.

Urill, someone has to tell artist Amanda Booth, who has taken the slang term pearl necklace very seriously and says she will actually make a necklace out of your semen if you send it to her in the mail.

Thanks, I'm good.

Very real.

First, I don't know if my aim is good enough to get it in the envelope.

And if you thought a paper cut on your finger was painful.

In the wokeness is a worldwide phenomenon category.

New rule, someone has to tell the owners of Australia's Club 77, whose new zero tolerance policy deploys safety officers to remove people who stare or talk to you without first getting verbal consent.

You are giant pussies who've forgotten what a nightclub is.

Let me remind you, it's a place where men go to try and get laid and women go to dance with their friends and pretend they're not trying to get laid.

New rule, get a room.

Someone has to remind this couple engaging in oral sex in the upper deck of an Oakland A's game, there are families present.

No dad should be forced to have that embarrassing conversation where his kid asks, dad, what's she doing?

And he has to say, honestly, son, I can't remember.

And finally, new rules, someone has to tell me why the same film critics who find every movie somehow lacking in woke credentials are all in on Top Gun Maverick.

a two-hour propaganda ad for defense contractors, militaristic jingoism, and bombing foreigners.

Every other movie that comes out, all of which are made by liberals, for liberals, with ardent liberal intent, falls short.

If the movie is about poverty, the director didn't grow up poor enough to understand it.

If it's about being gay, it's not gay enough.

Asian, not Asian enough.

Female, not enough agency.

Race, don't even try sidelining, whitewashing, colorism, white saviorism.

No amount of virtue signaling is ever virtuous enough.

But somehow, 96% of film critics love Top Gun like a Catholic priest loves sleepaway camp.

And

look, I liked it too.

It's fun.

It's nostalgic.

And Tom Cruise has been such an ageless, reliably entertaining movie star for so long, it sometimes makes me think, Jesus Christ, is there something to Scientology?

But if you're a film critic and you've been making your life's mission to root out the insufficiently liberal in cinema, did you not notice that Top Gun is a lot about making warmongering sexy again?

The weapons porn, the endless money shots of engines burning jet jet fuel, the big dick energy,

the aircraft carriers dancing in the sumptuous oily haze, all to the manly macho masculine sounds of Kenny Lagin?

Did you know that if the U.S.

military were a country, its fuel usage alone would make it the 47th largest emitter of greenhouse greenhouse gases in the world.

Our military is the world's singest

largest consumer of petroleum.

It's fused so much smog you can barely see the highway to the danger zone.

Think about that the next time you're watching a flyover, how we're destroying the world to protect it.

Top Gun pretends our best fighter is still the F-18, but we spent $1.5 trillion on the F-35, which has never worked and never will, and yet we still buy it.

It's the Yugo of fighter jets.

There is nothing more bloated and corrupt than the Pentagon budget.

We conflate,

you may.

We conflate defense with defense contractors.

That's why their budget is $800 billion,

more than the next nine countries combined.

In 2003, it was $378 billion.

Somehow, we took two wars off the books, but now need to spend twice as much?

And on fighting who?

In Topcon, the enemy is just called the enemy.

We don't name them.

We never see their faces.

We don't hear them talk.

Who are they?

That's not important.

We don't know who we're bombing and we don't care.

We're bombing someone?

Awesome.

You had me at America?

Fuck yeah.

Whose ass we are kicking is on a need-to-know basis.

God bless America and death to whom it may concern.

Sorry, enemy.

It's not about you.

It's about us.

We have Tom Cruise and you don't.

This is a dick measuring cartes.

It doesn't really matter who owns the other dick as long as ours is longer.

It's just so ridiculous, the enemy.

It's like having a movie called Godzilla versus none of your business.

And

that's on purpose.

The people who made this movie understood that we as a nation right now are just too fractured to even have a common enemy that we can all agree on.

So they left it up to our imagination.

Who do you hate?

Put him in there.

You would think that for a nation like us that's been around a while and been through some shit together, it wouldn't be this hard to agree on a mutual bad guy.

It used to be Russia and still could be, but then Republicans started showing up in I'd Rather Be a Russian than a Democrat t-shirts and siding with Putin.

And liberals, you couldn't have the enemy be an Arab country, that would be Islamophobic.

Can't be an Asian country because that would be racist.

Next, you'll be blaming China for COVID.

That's right, not even a pandemic could unite us.

COVID couldn't do it.

Russia couldn't do it.

China couldn't do it.

Not even Amber Heard could do it.

You know, the old cliché has always been that if Martians attacked, it would be the one thing that brings the whole world together.

Now, I don't think it would even bring Americans together.

The Martians could blow up the White House like in Independence Day and half the country would be cheering in the streets.

When they said, take us to your leader, we'd start killing each other over who that is.

Giant robotic tripods could be vaporizing New Jersey and Republicans would say, this is what happens in Biden's America.

It never happened when Trump was in office.

Democrats would point out how the death lasers were disproportionately affecting low-income communities and

people of color.

And AOC would tweet, stop demonizing the Martian X community.

Alex Jones would call it a false flag operation and accuse the people whose heads were melted off of being crisis actors.

Marjorie Taylor Greene would criticize the Jews for not using their space lasers on the Martians.

And Lindsey Graham would volunteer for the Anal Probe.

All right.

That's our show.

I'll be at the Chicago Theater in Chicago tomorrow, September 10th, at the Uptown Theater in Kansas City on the 11th.

That's the next night in at Kleinings Music Hall in Buffalo, October 9th.

I want to thank Scott Galloway, Matt Welkes, Winston Marsalis.

Now go to YouTube and join us at Overtime.

Thank you, folks.

You were great.

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

For more information, log on to HBO.com.