Ep. #592: Kenneth Branagh, Frank Bruni, Batya Ungar-Sargon

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.

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

Start the clock.

Thank you very much.

Thank you, people,

maskless people.

Thank you very much.

Great to see you.

And I do mean I can finally see you.

Thank you very much.

I appreciate that.

Yes, it's been...

It's been almost...

Oh, thank you.

Jeez.

What did I do?

Thank you.

Okay.

Thank you.

That's...

I'm very unverple.

Thank you.

Wow, these people fucking love me.

I don't know what I

do.

It must be the mag.

You're not wearing this.

The first time in two years I have seen an audience.

Thank you.

Great news.

I don't ever want to see another mask unless you're a surgeon or a Michael Jackson impersonator, okay?

Let's go back to when I thought Fauci was a brand of expensive handbag.

You know, I.

Two years.

I mean, the place Russia was trying to install a puppet government two years ago was here

It's a long time

But you know

Now that things are opening up I was out with a bunch of people there.

They said let's go someplace expensive.

So I took them to a chevron station

That's the thing we

We can finally leave the house and we can't afford to drive anywhere.

No, I was putting the nozzle in my car the other day.

It felt like I was taking it up the ass.

I mean, it was, I know.

There is a gas station in Mendocino County here in California charging $8.45 for a gallon of gasoline.

For that money, they should check your oil and your prostate.

That's.

But,

of course, part of it is because we cut off the oil from Russia, which we had to do because of the terrible war in Ukraine.

As people say, we are all Ukrainians now.

And by that I mean we're also armed to the teeth and our English ain't too good.

But

Americans,

when they go all in on something, like now everything Russian is bad.

Everything.

I mean, we are boycotting everything.

Russian vodka, pour that shit down the drain.

Wouldn't it be better if we used it up?

I don't know.

The crew.

Yeah, you know, Russian dressing, can't have that.

Don't even think about playing that game where you take a revolver and put one bullet in it.

No, that's.

Don't call it that.

You're going to do it.

It's called a night out with Nicholas Cage.

That's what we're calling

these are scary times because, you know, the more we put Putin in the corner, God knows what he'll do.

I mean, what freaks me out is every time I see a picture of Vladimir Putin, he's sitting by himself at the end of a ridiculously long table

all by himself.

He's like a cross between Ivan the Terrible and Howie Mandel.

And,

you know,

we don't want to start World War III, right?

I mean,

we're caught in the middle here.

We're trying to help Ukraine, but do it, you know, from the sidelines.

We're like the gay best friend in a romantic comedy.

That's American.

All right, we got a great show.

We have Frank Bruni is here.

And Batia Ungar Sargonan, first up, he is the writer, director, and producer of the film Belfast, nominated for seven Academy Awards.

One of my favorites, Kenneth Brunagh is here.

Wow.

sincerely thank you I appreciate that thank you

welcome to America thank you very much and I want Americans to see your movie because it's a fantastic movie thank you very much thank you

but I feel like we need to set it up because Americans they're not great on history you notice most historical movies

when they make them for the American audience, they put like a crawl at the beginning of the movie.

You know, in 1378, 1378, France was under the rule of.

Because otherwise.

Yeah, well, they just don't know.

That's not our big thing.

It's like the present and old-timey days.

I think we're a lot like you, to be clear.

Really?

Okay, so I'm going to like do the geography, and then I want you to do the history.

I think people know that there's England, they can picture that, and next to that, the Ireland, the

island of Ireland.

I don't think they understand sometimes that England is really the UK, the United Kingdom made of four provinces.

England is one of them.

Scotland, Wales, and then Northern Ireland is a piece of Ireland, but it's part of the UK, and that's where the heartaches begin.

Yeah.

Well put.

Okay, so we're talking about 1968, your childhood, when the troubles began.

Because in that Northern Ireland part, which again, part of England, half Catholic, half Protestant, unlike Ireland itself, which is all Catholic.

Okay,

why did it start?

Why?

They lived together for a long time, Protestants and Catholics in Belfast.

Why did it start then?

Well, just like in your country in the mid-60s, you'll know much better than I, there was a civil rights movement, and that was definitely on the streets in the north of Ireland, and that was expressing the dissatisfaction of the, in the north, as you rightly say, the minority Catholic population who believed that they were not free to the same kinds of social and economic opportunities as the dominant Protestant population of the UK controlled north.

So that was expressed, the assertion of those rights was expressed through the civil rights movement.

From the mid sixties onwards, by 69, August 15, 69, when the events at the beginning of this film unfold, it spills into violence.

Violence that, in the case of my own particular story, was in one street, one neighborhood.

We were mainly Protestants in that street, probably 70, 30, but we loved our Catholic neighbours and we got on with our Catholic neighbours with the same size houses, with the same kinds of jobs, we did the same kind of things.

But in one fell swoop, a Protestant mob came down the street, marked the houses of the Catholics with stones, they broke the windows, essentially said, we know where you live, time to get out.

And then what followed in that awful August of 1969, the summer of love here, there was the biggest displacement of population in a European city since the end of the Second World War.

And hundreds of thousands of Catholics were forced to move and there was a population rearrangement which began, as you say, a dark, dark period in the history of that part of the world of 30 years of the Transportation.

And it's so interesting, I mean, the way you bring it home in a very human way that everybody can relate to, is because, I mean, you're a Protestant family.

Yeah.

And you had good parents.

They kind of reminded me of my parents.

You mentioned the civil rights.

I lived in a house that I thought was a bit of an outlier in the 60s, an all-white town.

But my parents made me understand when I was a kid

what was right and wrong what was going on in America with civil rights.

And your parents sort of did the same thing.

I mean, because people came and threatened you.

You're Protestant.

They wanted to get rid of the Catholics.

And people came to your father and said, you're either with us or against us.

Okay?

There's no being in the middle here.

And your father stood up to that.

Well, tried to, and people did try and tried to.

And in the subsequent period, people tried to live what you might call a sort of independent existence where that really difficult thing to do of disagreeing fundamentally with someone not translating to then hating them or rejecting them but doing the even more difficult thing of actually trying to understand them that was what the example he set

and also doing the difficult thing when people become tribal which is what we have here in America, the very difficult thing, which is what we try to do here on this show, to

sometimes no success at all, of trying to say, I'm not with either tribe.

I'm thinking for myself about this issue.

I'm not going to join with you because you hate the Catholics for reasons I do not.

And that seems to be what your

father and your mother are telling you in this movie.

And a nine-year-old has to be taught that.

It does have to be taught that.

And also, you have to, you know, so much as you say that is in between

is that gray area.

And the reason we told the story of

this family's journey through the eyes of a nine-year-old is that often we forget that that child's eye view of the world,

which is a useful place to see the world from sometimes, not to be naive and sentimental, but because there's a simplicity to it that I think is very pure and can be very open.

But it's also the price that is paid when violence comes to visit, is that, you know,

that

things not only get polarized, but the people whose lives will be be forever affected by it, you know, across decades and decades of whatever you might call it, damage or psychic baggage or trauma or whatever it might be, which also has long-term domino knocking over effects, I think, is what gets lost in the immediate kind of standoff that is sometimes, you know,

polarizing and it can be very magnetic and compelling, leader to leader, but in the middle there's a lot of real people with simple challenges to get through their day.

And this obviously is an issue that is still with you all these years later.

Yeah.

Why now to make the movie?

I mean, you could have made it.

You've been a movie maker, a director, a producer.

I mean, you've made your own films for a very long time.

Why at this moment in your life did you make this movie?

Well, yeah, you talked very lovingly about your own parents, and I think one of the things that was gifted me was my parents'

belief that their stories were important to them but not special and some of the Irish DNA was to not believe that your story was more important than somebody else's, often to an extreme degree so that when we left Belfast in a sort of traumatic situation but we were a loving family who managed to stay together and we never ever spoke about it.

So 50 years old, we never ever...

Well because the cardinal sin would be well you moved to England right?

Yeah we moved to England.

You're Irish but you moved to England.

Yeah.

Is that why you speak British?

Yeah I guess it is.

It's across the I guess it is.

It's because...

Because I must have spotted it.

Because, you know, the movie, I started to watch it.

I was like, I got to put on the fucking subtitle.

Because...

No, really.

Because, I mean, the Irish accent is pretty heavy.

It is, but it's also a beautiful accent.

It is beautiful.

It is beautiful.

It's my heritage.

Exactly.

It has many, many sort of complexions to it.

But, you know, one of the things I wanted to do, Bill, when I left is I just wanted to, I left the most amazing extended family of communal street life.

For me, it was another beautiful day in the neighborhood every day and I did not understand why my friend Patty, who happened to be Catholic, today and this morning was my friend and I could play with him and this afternoon a man came and told me I couldn't because he's a Catholic.

He's got a badge that I shouldn't approve of.

That's been messing with my mind for 50 years so that's why I wrote it.

Wow.

If only they

when I was a kid, I wish they took me away from the Catholics.

Well, can I ask you a question?

May I ask you a question, which is,

have you found that

that part of your Catholic upbringing, wherever you've arrived at now, has behaviors or a legacy that you still can't get away from?

You know, that thing of the Jesuits would say, show me the kid till seven and I'll show you the adult.

And does some of it stay with you and you hate that?

Oh, fuck yes.

I mean,

I made a whole movie called Religilist.

I'm bitter.

You know, I mean, it embittered me.

We went to some catechism.

Yes, oh, Christ.

Of course, I didn't read that.

Oh,

that was the main subject, yes.

Well, the nuns were married to Christ.

Yes.

And apparently he was not putting out because

they were mean.

And they were mean to me in particular.

Anyway.

So.

Could this happen again, though?

I've been reading recently that the Catholic population, I think at the beginning of the century, was well outnumbered, like 53 to 43, something like that, in Northern Ireland.

So the Protestants have always been dominant, which, because they were part of England, again, a Protestant country, served them.

Now, as we've seen in other parts of the world, like the same kind of situation in Palestine, you know, in Israel, there's a kind of a demographic time bomb they're talking about.

The Catholics now could become the dominant,

the majority population-wise in Northern Ireland, which would just increase the desire to unite with the whole country of Ireland, which again, the country itself only became independent in 1922.

Before then, the British had subjugated it.

You worry that this, the troubles could begin again?

I think that since 1998, through the efforts of all parties, but particularly, as you'll know, Senator George Mitchell and President Clinton, who was involved in the Good Friday Agreement.

A sort of a squaring of the circle of many, many divided groups in the north of Ireland was made, reducing the violence hugely, but still creating a situation where the peace was uneasy, remains uneasy, and has to be won every day.

I think that across a generation across my lifetime that saw 3,700 people lost in the troubles that lasted for 30 years and damaged in some ways irreparably, that that part of the world followed by 25 years of relative peace has shown a generation, including people who are the age of the little boy who played the central character in our film, that something else is possible.

It's hard to achieve.

It continues to live inside friction-packed relationships in an atmosphere that is trying to polarize and trying to make it tribal, but they see across one generation the terrible cost.

of not talking to each other and the possibility, however compromised in feeling it sometimes is of talking to each other

it's on offer.

They're the same people.

It's the same thing if you go to Palestine.

Yeah.

You know, I mean, I've been there when I was making that movie and, you know, you eat in an Arab restaurant or something, and the Jewish bodyguards are nervous because terrorism is...

But basically, the people are just, they're the same people as you, as the Protestants and the Catholics, the same people.

It takes someone to stir up the shit.

You're right.

And that's when the bad stuff starts.

And one of the things that has appealed to audiences with this movie that has been touching is that I've seen, to sort of quote your example, a guy from Congo who was at a screening and he saw me afterwards, tears running down his face saying, that's my story.

A girl from Iran who comes up to me afterwards says, that's my story.

And the universe...

Sarajevo.

Yes, yes, so

what it deals with, what the movie deals with, is a couple of things that people identify with.

Family, the necessity for it, the need for it, and at its most functional.

And of course, it's tough because families often aren't functional.

But in as much as they can be,

that speaks to people as does the coping mechanisms that said families try to use.

And what is that?

Laughter.

Laughter.

Music, dancing, ad hoc parties, you name it, all the stuff that for a second releases you from the terrible pressure and tension and unhappiness created by holding these fixed positions where you choose not to understand what someone opposite you is trying to say.

And it's a lesson we all have to learn today.

Thank you.

You did it beautifully.

Thank you.

And I just want to to say one more thing to you.

Which is great.

I remember when you first came on the scene, you know, you did Henry V,

you did Hamlet, and people said, oh, this guy is like our generation's Laurence Olivier.

And I just want to say, you did it.

That's exactly what you did.

You became this generation's Laurence Olivier.

Well, thank you very much.

It's a great pleasure to meet you, sir.

Thank you so much.

Congratulations on the movie.

Okay.

I'm to meet our panel.

Hey,

how you doing?

Okay, she is the deputy opinion editor of Newsweek and author of Bad News: How Woke Media is Undermining Democracy.

Batya Angar Sargon, great to see you.

And he's a professor, oh, a professor now, excuse me, of media and public policy at Duke University and author of the New York Times best-selling book, The Beauty of Dusk, on Vision Lost and Found.

Frank Bruni, back for this.

Great to see you, my friend.

Okay, so boy, it's some scary news lately.

You know, I've been hearing a lot about Putin and nuclear weapons.

You know, when

people say to me, I don't follow the news because it's so depressing.

And I always say, well, you know, people who don't engage as citizens, you make the news worse eventually.

So I can't really endorse that position.

But a week like this, I kind of get it.

Because when I hear about, you know, Putin nuclear,

and the other word I hear a lot this week is off-ramp.

We have to give Putin an off-ramp

in Ukraine because we're doing the right thing by squeezing him, but it's also making him more desperate.

So, what thoughts on the off-ramp and avoiding nuclear war?

Anybody?

Just a tiny question.

Yeah, anybody want to field that one?

Oliv, you take this one first.

Sure, sure.

Why not?

Pass the buck, you know.

You know, look,

I am in the off-ramp camp.

I believe that if you're not going to absolutely crush your enemy, you have to give them a way out.

And the thing is, we're not going to crush Russia.

We are not going to crush Putin.

We should not be invading.

We should not be giving a no-fly zone.

Now, here's the interesting thing that people who are disconnected from the news, as well as people who are connected from the news, don't know, which is that on Monday, Putin laid out three conditions for immediately stopping the campaign in Ukraine, the invasion of Ukraine, that war there.

The three conditions were that Ukraine give up trying to become part of NATO, that the Crimea be be declared part of Russia, and that the Donbass region be recognized as independent.

In other words, Putin said, if you recognize the actual status quo, I am willing to stop this immediately.

Then later that night, Zelensky gave an interview to ABC News where he said, on NATO, he is willing to give up his claim to NATO, his request to join NATO.

On the Donbass and on Crimea, he said those requests, he's not going to accept them as ultimatums, but he is willing to negotiate on them.

In other words, the two sides of this conflict on Monday of this week said that there is room to negotiate and agreed on much of the territory.

You did not hear about that in any of the mainstream media, except for a tiny bit here, a tiny bit there.

Why aren't the headlines saying the two sides are willing to accept some of the same conditions?

They're moving towards each other.

You only read about that in the Israeli news.

Why is that?

Why aren't we helping them to end this?

Why are we escalating in our media?

Well, that's your book.

We're going to get to that in the second part of the show.

That's the media question.

You're right.

I mean, that all sounds very rational, but I don't think we're in the realm of the rational here.

I don't think Putin is acting rationally.

I mean, and so

I'm not as confident as you are that this thing can be negotiated.

You know, like sanctions, for example.

I think we're doing the right thing.

The more sanctions, the merrier.

I don't think they're going to work, though, because Putin isn't playing in the field of economics.

Putin is playing in the field of ego, his and his country's.

And I mean, this is war as a narcissistic meltdown, right?

I mean,

this isn't rational.

I don't know.

Well, he would have a different point of view.

The economics is going to bleed into the ego part because

in two weeks we have taken the Russian economy and completely decimated it.

I mean, you know, people there are already feeling it.

I mean, I'm sure he has cut off as much as he can the news getting in there, but it's going to get in.

This is the 21st century.

You can't stop people from understanding what's going on.

And when they can't get into their bank accounts, and when they can't get food, and when the ruble has fallen as much as it has, they're going to understand something is going on here.

I think they already do.

Yeah, so, I mean, the problem is that he is now a guy who's Mr.

Macho.

I mean, I think he did this in his mind.

He wanted to be a savior.

That's what I always think.

Men who are at that level, they have all the money in the world, they have all the power, what's left.

Same thing with Trump, I think, in his Trump.

I'm going to be the savior of this country.

They were both wrong, but that's what he thought.

I'm going to get Ukraine back.

This is our Slavic birthplace.

That's what he thinks.

He's going to be the ruin of his country.

No, because, right,

we've talked about, people are talking about he's Hitler.

He's not even Mussolini.

So he looks emasculated with his army.

I mean, they are going to eventually get there, but they're going to do what the Russian army always does when they get into trouble.

They're just going to level places.

They're doing it already.

Right.

But they're gonna do it like they did in Chechnya, like they did in Syria.

It's gonna get ugly.

So, yeah, off-ramp would be a great idea.

I don't see why, I don't see

what would it help for the Russians to know more.

I mean, there's already 14,000 of them who have been imprisoned for protesting.

Russia's not a democracy.

It doesn't matter what the Russian people want, right?

It matters what Putin is going to do, right?

Now, he told us in December, he told us in December, he said, I want a commitment that Ukraine will not be part of NATO.

He was laughed out of the room.

Now, I'm not saying that if we had given that commitment then, he wouldn't have invaded.

I don't know.

I agree with you.

He's not behaving rationally.

But we could have tried.

You know what I mean?

We could have tried.

It does matter what the Russian people want.

It depends on how many of them.

When enough people want something different, I mean, there was one time a thing called the Russian Revolution.

You know, they did once get in the streets and overthrow the government, and they could do it again if enough of them are unhappy.

They have been not that unhappy because, like in China, he bought them off.

He built a middle class.

I just feel like we are escalating to punish Putin for doing something wrong, something evil, something terrible.

But us punishing him for that is prolonging the suffering, it's prolonging the war, and it's prolonging the cost here as well.

But I don't know why you're making us sound like the villains here.

We're in a really tough spot, you know.

I mean, we want to help the Ukrainians, but we don't want to start World War III.

And I mean, we can be critical of our own government's actions, but let's not take our eye off the ball.

The villain here is Vladimir Kirk.

I totally agree with you.

I totally agree with you.

All due respect.

It sounds to me like you're going through all these ways in which we are not dealing properly with Putin.

Let's put the blame where it lies.

I totally agree with you.

Of course, Putin is the villain here.

Of course, nobody is responsible for his murderous actions except for him.

Completely agree with that.

Our job right now is to figure out how to save Ukrainian lives right now.

And the way to do that is to de-escalate, is to be anti-war, is to figure out a

way where are we going to be able to do it?

Because we're not going to sanction our way till the end of this.

So you do no sanctions.

No, I think the sanctions are a good sanctity.

We have to take a moral stand.

And to your point, in terms of the sanctions, I don't think they're going to work because, as I said, I don't think we're dealing with a rational man.

And yet, there is dissent in Russia already, despite a magnitude of censorship here that amounts to attempted national brainwashing.

And even so, we have seen people protesting.

We've seen people protesting, though they are then incarcerated for it.

So, I mean, if better information gets into Russia, if this clampdown on a free press doesn't work, and it's not working entirely, and if sanctions squeeze people, I mean, I think that might be our best hope.

And they're going to, well, let's talk about how they're squeezing us.

Because this week we announced, Biden did, we're not going to buy Russian oil anymore.

Now, Russian oil is a pretty big part of it.

I think they're the third leading oil producer.

It's about 10% of the market.

And, you know, oil is fungible.

People hear that word.

I don't know if they really,

you know, you know how you explain fungible.

I'm going to tell you the classic Las Vegas joke.

And that will explain fungible.

Here's the classic Las Vegas.

There's a guy standing in front of a casino.

Let's just say it's the Mirage, the best one.

That's where I work.

And a guy comes up to him and he says, hey, buddy, my wife, she's sick.

She needs an operation.

I'm the money.

Can you give me money?

If you don't give me money, my wife's going to die.

And the guy says, well, I could give you the money, but how do I know you're going to go right back into the casino and drop it on the tables?

And the guy says, oh, I got gambling money.

Because money is fungible.

You see my point about fungible.

And the same thing with oil.

When we cut off the oil from Russia, it raises the price because it's fungible.

Because all around the world, we're taking really from the same pot.

And then who gets richer from that?

Vladimir Putin.

I mean, there's something very strange about Biden saying, you know, we're going to cut off Russian oil, but I'm going to go and beg Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, and Iran, the people who like a few weeks ago we cut off and wouldn't buy their oil because they were the bad guy, but now they're less the bad guy.

We've got to find a better way to play this game than who's the bad guy of the week we're not buying oil from.

Well, it's a great argument.

It's it.

You're making a great argument for energy independence and you're making a great argument for cleaner energy.

Except that we're not doing it.

We're not doing so well on either one of those.

Well, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.

I thought that Go was making a better argument for drilling more at home.

I mean, isn't that essential to be a part of the power of the people?

Well, that can be part of energy independence.

No, I was making an argument to go seeing me at the mirage.

But no, but here's the thing is we always like to have the cart before the horse.

We're like, okay, we're going to stop drilling here domestically.

And look, I, I'm an environmentalist.

I don't want us to keep polluting the world.

The news keeps getting worse and worse.

I mean, we found out this week the Amazon has reached this tipping point.

If we don't save it now, it's going to become savannah, which I'm not sure what it is, but I don't think it's nice and wet.

So, but the problem is that we, you know, like, no, we're not going to get oil from Russia, but we still need the same amount of oil.

You know, no, we're not going to drill here, but we still keep using the same amount of oil.

You know,

that's the problem: is that we don't.

I read that last year, no, 2020, we bought more trucks than cars.

We're such, everybody's like on Instagram, so much environmentalist, and yet everybody needs

there.

I live in the suburbs, but I need a truck that can pull a redwood over a whale.

No one cares enough.

Well, I mean,

with the price of a gallon of gas where it is, if that truck is using a lot of gas, it may be a lot less popular in the near future.

Yeah, but I think what we're seeing a lot of is,

you know, this week we saw as gas prices start, you know, really climbed really high, you had a lot of these like very rich liberal celebrities out there being like, you know, I am willing to pay up to $15 a gallon for gas, you know, or, you know, President Biden saying, yeah, it's going to hurt, it's going to hurt, you know, or Bette Midler being like, I'm willing to pay more.

She's worth $250 million.

This is class warfare masquerading as vanity morals.

It's the morals of the elites and who has to pay the price.

It's the working class.

It's the guy.

It's all the cards.

You know,

they're going to buy electric cars.

It's like the let them eat cake of 2020, right?

Let them drive electric cars, right?

No, you're totally right on that.

And you are explaining why we elected Donald Trump in 2016.

You're explaining, I mean, that's the thing.

And

it's because of that elite disregard for the people feeling the pain.

And I saw today in the paper Biden's approval rating still at 42, not good, and that he's in a dead heat with Trump, 45 to 45, for the next election.

And you know, Trump, of course, is just going to pull stuff out of his ass on this issue.

Remember when I was president, gas was 99 cents.

And then the next

week later,

gas was 49 cents when I was.

Gas was free.

I think we all remember this free gas.

I mean, it's free.

And the environment was perfect.

I mean, there wasn't a problem.

It was crystal clear.

The water was cleaner.

It's all good, yeah.

Okay, so I mean,

yeah, I can't wait.

if we were not in total government paralysis, I feel like this country, if it was a normal country or the way it used to be semi-normal, we could make a grand bargain where the left gave up some things, you know, they would, I mean, nuclear.

I'm not for nuclear.

I know it's not a perfect solution, way less, but it's like there are no perfect solutions.

Give a little on that one.

Or maybe even fracking.

As long as we're going to use the energy,

use it here.

make it, use the stuff that we get, because we're a big energy producer now, we won't do that.

And the right, they could give up a little on green energy and at least trying to build up that sector more, but we're not going to do that.

So we're just going to, I don't know, I don't know what.

You spent the whole beginning of the show talking about the problem here, tribalism.

Tribalism, yes.

We've become so extreme that we routinely

let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

And that's true on the right and the left both.

Well, okay.

I'm always amazed at what goes viral.

I always try to predict it and I can't.

And then when I see what goes viral, I'm like, oh my god,

why did that go viral?

Okay, so I saw this thing on TikTok this week.

Some psychologists put out this TikTok video on how you know a relationship is over, like the five ways.

And all I could think of was like, the people on TikTok must be so young that this shit is news to you.

You know, like,

you need someone to tell you this.

Can you show a little of this guy?

I mean, it's, yeah, he's, and here are some, things like, you are no longer interested in emotional and physical intimacy.

Duh.

You would rather be alone than spend time with your partner.

You can't have a conversation without leading to conflict.

These are the things.

Again, duh duh duh.

That you know the relationships are.

So we thought we would offer a more specific group of ways you know.

Would you like to see how you know the relationship is over?

Okay.

She starts using her wedding ring to open bottles.

Okay, and they're

when she borrows your razor, it's to shave another man's ball.

Okay, and that's a

he says, He says, let's not ruin this moment by talking, and it's during marriage counseling.

The only time you smack each other's ass is when you're killing a bug.

Ways you know the relationship between

you're married.

Little ways to.

when you ask his favorite part of being a parent he says the babysitter that's a sure fire

she buys new bath towels that say hers an asshole

And you used to worry that someone will steal them.

Now you fantasize someone actually will.

Okay, so

let's talk.

Now we can talk about your book.

I thought it's fascinating, really interested.

It's called How Woke Media is Undermining Democracy.

So I thought I'll put on my reporter's hat and I'll ask the how, when, and,

what, when, and how?

These are my three questions.

What made it woke?

How woke media is undermining.

What made it woke?

When did it happen?

And how does it undermine democracy?

In other words, tell me your whole book right now.

Wait, in 30 seconds or less, go.

Okay,

read me the questions one by one.

First question: What made it woke?

The abandonment of the working class.

Journalism used to be a working-class trade.

It was a very low-status job.

Journalists lived in working-class neighborhoods.

They lived next door to factory workers and linemen.

Jimmy Breslin.

Exactly, maybe a little bit more money than them.

They saw themselves as outside of power, demanding justice on behalf of the little guy.

Throughout the course of the 20th century, there was a status revolution among journalists to where journalism became basically an elite caste.

It is now the provenance of basically people who are very, very, very highly educated, who come from rich, rich parents, who come from money.

Journalists, of course there are exceptions, but by and large the pathway to becoming a journalist now is through the elites, through elite universities.

And that has, as journalists ascended to the ranks of the elites, they abandoned the working class that they used to belong to.

And I argue that today they're using a moral panic about race to distract from the ways in which they have benefited from income inequality in America.

So it's a distraction from the real divide, which is economic and about class, rather than political even.

So I would even say the tribalism, it's not about politics, that's a mirage.

The divide in America is about class.

Second question.

When?

When?

When?

When.

Who, what, why, where?

And I'm a journalist right now.

When did this change take place?

Great.

Slowly and then all at once.

It started around the 50s and the 60s and the 70s.

In the 60s, people got televisions, which meant that suddenly a profession where college was never a premium, the majority of journalists never had a college degree before that.

After that, the newspapers wanted a more interpretive kind of journalism because you could get the immediate stuff directly to the public.

So that's not a bad thing, though.

That's not a bad thing at all.

So, well, I mean.

I kind of think for a journalist, I think that it had a very corrosive effect.

A college degree?

Yeah, I'm going to get to that in the undermining democracy bit.

So,

all right.

So, the 70s, you had all the president's men.

This movie came out, right?

And suddenly, like a journalist could be this, like, sexy sex pod who brings down a president, you know?

Suddenly, it seemed like it was a glamorous profession all of a sudden.

So, someone like JFK, who worked on the Harvard Crimson, he would never have dreamed of becoming a journalist because it was so low status.

And he was on this like meritocratic rise.

But after that movie, suddenly, people who wanted to become famous, who wanted to be be a big deal, wanted to have high status, they started considering becoming journalists.

These pressures increased, increased by the 80s and 90s.

Journalists were much more highly educated, much more affluent,

much more liberal than Americans overall.

So in 1937, less than half of journalists in the elite Washington cohort had a college degree.

Today it's over 92%.

Now remember that only 36% of Americans have a college degree.

So that disparity is a really big deal, right?

But it really took off with digital media.

What happened with digital media was essentially we can learn so much about our readers and our viewers from the back end that we could, you know, journalists could start to really target their journalism.

I thought I read something in your book about paywall, that that was the big deal.

This is, and you'll forgive me, sir.

So when

I'm about to talk about the New York Times.

You can say anything you want about the Times, you just can't call me sir.

That's not enough.

No.

Kenneth Browne is his sir.

Yeah, exactly.

Right,

let's be conscious of class here.

Sir is his dad.

So I'm going to say this really quickly so you have a chance to jump in here.

So around 2011 was when the New York Times erected its paywall.

What happened then was when the kind of the woke revolution really took hold in digital media, which is to say that words like

oppression, marginalization, people of color, people of color, and marginalization in the same sentence, right, creating that neural pathway, right, that kind of woke worldview where, you know, white people have all the power and are uniquely evil and people of color have no power and no agency and need our help and need us to take care of them.

That worldview started to appear in the New York Times, the Washington Post, NPR, the Atlantic, CNN, MSMEC, all of the liberal media outlets started to use these words.

words with just exponential frequency.

White supremacy, right, went from being mentioned 75 times to being mentioned, you know, 750 times in one year, right?

There's just this outpouring of articles that were obsessing over race all the time, starting when the media went digital.

And that really had an impact on how white liberals started to think and talk about race.

A rebuttal, sir?

No, no, no.

I don't have to say that.

I don't have that.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Somehow, when you called me, sir, it didn't sound the same.

I like the surf in here.

I was thought of you as more of an earl, but okay.

I don't have a rebuttal.

I think you have your finger on two really important problems.

I do think journalists have become detached from what they're supposed to cover, from the people they're supposed to champion.

Absolutely.

I think journalism used to be about you, and now it's about us.

You know, it's about your brand.

It's about your social media file.

And I think it's one of the reasons that trust in the media is so low is because I think the audience senses that.

They sense that we're not there for them.

We're there for our own deification, glorification.

And you are correct that wokeness is a problem.

I'm not sure the two things fit together as neatly as you're interlocking them.

I think wokeness in newsrooms and in society can absolutely be a problem.

It can also be exaggerated.

And I think journalists do need to come from a more diverse group of people, and they need to worry more about reporting on excuse my clichés, Main Street, and less about going to Davos, 100%.

The New York Times to me just looks like they feel so guilty about all the years and decades that they underserved the African-American community that they are like trying to in a few years now just overcompensate to comic proportions.

They obviously feel very guilty and they should, like everybody in America, should reckon with, oh, you know, we underserved.

No, it's it, but I mean, it does kind of be.

I mean, let's not beat up too much on the Times.

I mean, to the extent that Times might, to the extent that that might be true of the Times, it's merely an example in a mirror.

I think you're seeing it throughout society.

So, Matt Taibbi wrote an article last year I thought was fantastic called We Need a New Media System, which is kind of ironic because he's on one called Substack.

But he meant, I think, a bigger one than that.

And I thought the great line at the end was: media companies need to get out of the audience-stroking business.

And his point was that, yeah, see?

Anika's point was that they work backwards as to, let's not find the truth.

Let's say the thing that we know our audience is going to go, mmm,

that's right.

That's the problem.

Yes.

I do want to offer a rebuttal to that.

That's entirely true.

But we make it as if news organizations have done this all in isolation.

Readers, Americans, consumers of media have a responsibility here too.

The reason news organizations have abandoned their mission to some extent and done that,

begun producing the news that each organization's particular audience wants, is because people are clicking on things that validate their views.

People are not giving their readership, their eyeballs, their viewership to organizations that are saying, here, I'm going to try to play it down the middle, I'm going to show you both sides.

What organizations are those besides this show and Substack?

Because I can't find them.

I can't find them.

Matt Taibbi raises great questions and does great work, as do other people on Substack, but the Substack model is not the answer because there's a real economic problem when you ask people to pay those sorts of prices.

If you do four Substack subscriptions, you're now paying $300 a year.

It reminds me a lot

of what's going on with streaming.

Like in the old days, you had a television and you got all the channels.

Now, I've got to pay for each individual channel.

I've got to pay for Netflix and HBO Max and Hulu and Disney Plus or whatever.

I've got to pay for each channel.

And again, who can afford to do that?

So people wind up watching Rizzoli and IOL.

And this is to your point of the, you know,

to Americans.

No, and we've talked a lot over the last decade about food ghettos when it comes to income inequality.

Yes.

We now have news ghettos.

Yes.

And a kind of, yeah.

Right.

And that's so interesting.

I will just plug Newsweek.

We run opinion from across the political aisle.

I read you there.

You're right.

Yes, you've read me there.

I will say I think you can tell a lot about who the New York Times and the Washington Post and the liberal outlets are catering to based on what you read there, exactly like you said.

So who are they stroking?

And it's these liberal elites who have these vanity morals that they often impose on the working class, things like defund the police, that actually hurts working class black Americans more than anybody else.

81% of black Americans oppose it, but it's the only view that you could read in the New York Times.

I'm sorry.

No, no, no, that's not true.

For much of 2020.

That particular accusation is not true.

I mean, you certainly read about the defund the police movement, but you read plenty of voices and plenty of articles about the resistance to that.

You read about Biden and many Democrats saying, no, that is not a winning path for us.

I'm learning it much later.

I mean, when it became safe, like with COVID, right?

When it becomes safe to say, that's the ultimate market.

Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, who bore the brunt of the lockdown burdens?

It was the working class.

Rich people sat at home

and they turned being at home into a virtue when actually it was a sign of economic privilege.

Right.

That's where I was.

Wait a second, since you've been beating up on the Times Times and I'm not here to defend it, I see its flaws.

I mean the Times' pandemic coverage was marvelous and much of it from the very beginning was devoted to the disparity of the public.

But then they fired the reporter.

You fired the porter.

David Leonhardt is great.

And he's an outlier in the paper, but he's great.

We're having he's on the show coming up.

Wait, David Leonhardt gets the backing of the paper to the extent the morning, he's the author of the morning newsletter, every single subscriber gets that.

So he can't, it can't be like there's the Times, but then there's David Leonhardt.

No, but it's the Times.

But his point of view

is at great variance with everything else in that paper on that issue.

I'm sorry, I have to end it.

We got to go to New Rules.

New rules, everybody.

Okay.

New rules, someone has to get in touch with Vladimir Putin's mistress, the gymnast Alina Kobeva, and ask her what she's smiling about.

She's just mine.

neck hurts from reading in bed.

And what do you call a position where you blow Putin and twist yourself up in knots?

Oh, all right, the Tucker Carlson.

Neural, let's stop acting stunned when a ship that sunk to the bottom of the ocean is later found sunk at the bottom of the ocean.

This week, the 100-year-old Antarctic explorer ship Endurance was found 10,000 feet beneath the sea off the coast of Antarctica.

Or did you think we'd find it?

The Short Hills Mall?

Look, who doesn't love a good shipwreck?

But if you really want to impress me, find out which smoke detector is making the beeping noise.

Neural, if you're what is normally considered a grown-up and you're wearing this Disney dumbo-themed hoodie, you can't be offended if you walk by people and they start throwing peanuts.

Neural, these people in Veracruz participating in the annual holy burial of Christ celebration by dressing up as clowns and parading around town have to ask themselves, exactly what are we doing again?

Celebrating Jesus by dressing up like clowns?

Everybody knows you celebrate the resurrection with a big bunny who delivers eggs.

New rule, let me just say to Teresa Rose, the woman who agreed to a three-way with her husband as a treat for his birthday, realized during the encounter that she was a lesbian

and then divorced him.

Good for you for coming to terms with your sexuality.

And let me just say to Teresa's husband,

happy birthday.

And finally, new rule: don't make World War III all about you.

Watching the reactions to war in Ukraine these past few weeks, it's become obvious that America in this age suffers acutely from a particular disease of the mind, which is everything proves what we already believed, and everything goes back to the thing we already hate.

All issues today, pandemic, war, whatever, become a stress test for our reflexive partisanship.

Can you take a vastly complex situation that is 100% not about your thing and somehow still make it about your thing?

And our answer is, watch me.

Americans will put anything new in our mouths and nothing new in our heads.

So naturally, Republicans blamed Ukraine on Biden being the worst president ever, and Democrats blamed it on Trump's being the worst president ever.

Which he was, there is that.

But I'm not sure I can follow Biden's logic all the way when he dragged January 6th into this.

He said, look, how would you feel if you saw a crowd storm and break down the doors of the British parliament, kill five cops, injure 145, or the German Bundestag, or the Italian parliament.

I think you'd wonder.

Okay, but if Putin thought Trump was really that supportive of him, why didn't he invade when Trump was in office?

It's at least worth asking that question if you're not locked into one in tragic and thought.

Now, one guy we know who's locked into one thought is Donald Trump, who, when asked what went wrong with Ukraine, said, Well, what went wrong was a rigged election.

Kanye thinks less about Pete Davidson than Trump thinks about the rigged election.

His son is obsessed with Biden's son.

Who knows why?

Hunter Biden is an e'er-do-well entitled son of privilege with a party boy past, and Don Jr.

Never mind,

but

for whatever reason, Don Jr.

seems obsessed with Hunter.

So, when Ukraine happened, Don tweeted, Will it ultimately be Hunter's lucrative and shady as fuck business dealings in Ukraine that gets us into a war with Russia?

Let me field that one for you, mini Mook.

No

Nicole Hannah-Jones is the curator of the 1619 project, which posits racism as the deciding factor in pretty much every single issue in America, or apparently everywhere.

She said, We should care about Ukraine, but not because the people appear white.

All people deserve to be free and to be welcomed when their countries are at war.

Of course, agreed.

And the people there don't appear white, they are.

Maybe it should be a reminder that pain does not have a monopoly on race.

I know racism is bad, but other things are bad too.

It's not like an avocado.

You don't have to put it on everything.

Republican presidential hopeful Nikki Haley knows why this mess happened.

The reason Ukraine is in the situation is the United States has been completely and totally distracted.

We have to stop this national self-loathing that's happening in our country.

Oh, of course!

Self-loathing.

I hate myself for not thinking of that.

Thank you.

Can you guess what Pat Robertson thinks is behind the war in Ukraine?

I'll give you a hint.

In 1980, 1990, 2006, and 2020, Pat predicted the end of the world

due to some troubling story in the news.

Now, Pat says Putin went into the Ukraine, but that wasn't his goal.

His goal was to move against Israel

because that's where the Bible says the world will end in Israel.

It's where Pat gets raptured up to Jesusville.

By way of Ukraine?

Who's booking this trip?

Delta?

And then it gets really strange.

QAnon John says, I don't see this invasion of Ukraine as a bad thing.

I see it as clearing out of a very corrupt center of operations for the cabal.

Ah, yes, yes, the cabal.

That's the pedophile ring of elitist baby eaters that QAnon believes is the real problem in the world.

And naturally, when war breaks out, it's really about that.

No wonder the government puts chips in the vaccine to track you people.

By now, anyone other than a total idiot should see a pattern.

But in case Lauren Boebert is watching,

let me continue.

Vanity Fair wants you to know that the fight for Ukraine is also a fight for LGBTQ rights.

And conversely, Colonel Mitchell Swan, a Republican running for Congress in Georgia, believes allowing transgender individuals to serve sends a message to our adversaries that we are more focused on social experimentation than on the defense of our nation.

I see.

I see.

Yes, transgender, that's the key to the Ukrainian situation.

Yeah, Putin was on the fence about invading, and then one night he was watching a MASH rerun and

send in the takes.

Fox News is Monica Crowley's previous obsession has been cancel culture, and now she says Russia is being canceled.

Really?

Really?

She said that.

She said, I mean, between the fierce Ukrainian resistance and the sanctions, Russia is being canceled.

Wait, the Ukrainians shouldn't resist an invasion because that makes them part of cancel culture?

But isn't their country what's getting canceled?

You know, Justin Bieber once visited Anne Frank's attic in Amsterdam, and he wrote in the guest book, Anne was a great girl.

Hopefully she would have been a believer.

That's what you people sound like.

Don't take this personally, but don't take everything personally.

Ukraine is not mostly about your pet grievances, it's about Vladimir Putin's.

And Putin is bad, very, very, very bad, but he's still better than the guy who brings every conversation around to Bitcoin.

My pet cause is PETA, the people for the ethical treatment of animals.

But I don't think Ukraine got invaded because we haven't neutered enough cats.

And I guarantee you that right now, somewhere, some guy who can't get it up is telling a girl, this never happened before Ukraine.

All right, that's our show.

I'll be at the Smart Financial Center in Sugarland, Texas, April 9th, at the Tulsa Theater in Tulsa, April 10th, at the State Theater in Minneapolis, June 4th.

I want to thank Batia, Ungar Sargon, Frank Gruni, and Kenneth Verana.

Now go to YouTube and join us on Overtime.

Thank you.

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

For more information, log on to HBO.com.