Ep. #580: Steven Pinker, Robert Costa, Michael Render (aka Killer Mike)

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.

Thank you.

I appreciate it.

Thank you very much.

Oh my gosh, a full crowd.

Thank you very much.

All right.

Thank you, people.

Thank you very much.

Please, I don't know.

Thank you so much.

I'm glad.

Thank you very much.

Thank you so much.

I'm so glad you're in a good mood because I'm kind of down.

This state, fires, droughts, and now we have an oil spill.

Have you seen this shit?

It's right off the coast here.

L.A.

residents are furious.

The last thing we want is oil in our sewage.

You know.

And then can we have a moment of silence for the tragedy that happened this week?

Facebook went down on Monday.

Oh, my God.

To the millennials and Gen Z, oh my god, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, they all went on for six hours.

And I think as Americans, we all will remember where we were that day.

When we couldn't take a picture of ourselves in the bathroom mirror and send it out.

When we couldn't argue vaccine mandates with our lab partner from seventh grade.

When there was nowhere to post a meme of Biden and Bill Gates jerking Satan off.

It was a terrible day, but we're over it.

It's over.

And there is some actual really good news, I think.

COVID cases, they say, are declining precipitously.

Health experts are saying we may be at the beginning of the end of this fucking nightmare.

Please, please, Jesus.

No, really, they say, keep your fingers crossed.

By Christmas, airline passengers may be back to punching each other over the armrest.

Not everyone, I'm going to tell you, not everyone is on board with this, there's a state representative from New Hampshire, guess which party,

who's blocking COVID funds because he says babies of vaccinated women are being born with pitch black eyes and they

And they can stand and walk at three months, which

I don't think is true.

But honestly, would walking babies be such a bad thing?

I'm sure there are parents out there thinking, you know what, that would be awesome.

When the kid cries for milk, I can just say, you know where the refrigerator is, get it yourself.

Like I would know.

And this guy also says,

listen to this, he says the vaccine contains tentacled creatures.

I think someone has been watching a little too much squid game.

Have you been watching?

There's always a new stupid show.

That's the one people at Squid Game.

It's about this hyper-violent South Korean version, I guess, of hunger games.

And in the movie, the series, people who have debts and can't pay them are forced to murder each other.

And Mitch McConnell said, I'm listening.

Oh, I kid.

I kid the rich.

I kid the super rich.

Did you see the Forbes?

You know, every year they have the Forbes 400 list that comes out, the richest 400 Americans.

40%.

I mean, of the 400, 40% are richer than they were just last year.

Or they're 40% richer, something.

They're richer.

I know it's fucked up.

But the Republicans, they always say a rising tide lifts all boats, to say nothing of what it does for private rocket ships.

Really lifts those.

Now,

it's getting chippy out there.

Did you see what happened with

Kirsten Sinema this week?

You know who she is.

She's the Arizona senator who's two of the senators, you know, Democrats are holding up their big $3.5 trillion program.

And a lot of people don't like this.

So she was at Arizona State University at an event, and a gang of Gen Z activists followed her into the bathroom,

started yelling at her in the bathroom while she was peeing.

And then they went back to demanding that we make campuses a safe space.

Yeah, I think that's a little over the top.

They followed her in there and they were recording themselves yelling at her.

while she's in the stall.

And she's like, they're telling her, we're streaming live.

And she said, I am too.

Get the fuck out of here.

No,

people are angry.

Everything is politicized.

Monday's Columbus Day.

Used to be kind of a fun holiday.

Oh, no.

Somebody went through his old tweets.

Let's just say he will not be hosting Jeopardy anytime soon.

There's a new Bond movie movie out finally.

You know, that

one person is right.

Really?

James Barnes?

Well, yeah, because even that's controversial, you know, because he has to step up with the Times, and they have stepped up with the Times now with James.

He still sleeps with three beautiful women, but two of them have a penis.

So

we're trying.

And speaking of penises, now,

California, our state, always ahead.

We have, this is.

I'm not.

He said sarcastically.

Anyway,

no, a lot of times we are, but this one I wasn't even aware of.

We have now, this is true, outlawed stealthing.

You know what it is?

Okay, one guy, some people know, I did not know what it is, stealthing.

Got a newsom signed this today.

It's a law to make it a crime to secretly remove remove a condom during sex.

Okay, I have many questions.

First of all, how do you even do this?

Honey, look over there.

No,

did you take it off?

You felt something weird?

Maybe it was an orgasm.

I don't know.

I certainly didn't take off the condom and put it back in.

Wouldn't you know?

Okay.

And shockingly, it is still legal for two identical twins to switch places while their dates are in the bathroom.

That's

a loophole.

And also, in a related story, sort of, the International Organization for Standardization and Quality Safety Standards has given new safety standards to sex toys, dildos, butt plugs, and anal beads.

And not a moment too soon.

I mean,

half the time, I don't know what's up my ass these days.

But they say the testing process is going to be a huge undertaking, but on the bright side, they have never seen so many employees show up for early, early to work.

Fuck it.

You know where I was going.

All right, we got a great show.

Killer Mike and Robert Costa are here.

First up, he's a professor of psychology at Harvard and author of the book Rationality, What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters.

Steven Pinker.

Okay.

How are you, sir?

Good to see you.

Good to see you.

Steven Pinker.

Welcome back to our show.

Thank you.

I'm going to get into the specifics of your book first, but also for people who know the name, they know a little about you, let's clear up some things for them.

You have this reputation as a guy who's a little too happy

about progress.

And all you're ever doing is citing the statistics, right?

I mean, give us some of your greatest hits, like like extreme poverty, right?

Where has that gone like in the last 30 years?

Well, 200 years ago, 90% of the world lived in extreme poverty.

90%.

Now it's less than 9%.

And that changed a lot just in this century, right?

Didn't we?

Yeah, just in the last 30 years.

And billions of people.

I mean, child labor, things like that.

Child labor down, illiteracy down, maternal mortality, infant mortality,

war deaths,

deaths from violent crime, violence against women, racism,

laws that criminalize homosexuality, capital punishment, all of them down.

People used to shit in the street

way more, right?

Wasn't that a big thing?

Like not that long ago, like a billion people shit in the street.

That's right.

Well, and it used to be true in

Europe and the United States.

Wow.

Several hundred years ago, their cellars were filled with human feces.

People would empty their bedpans out the window.

But

in the poor countries, it is also way down now.

There've been a huge increase in access to clean water, in sanitation.

So you coined this term.

I did a whole editorial about it.

Progressophobia.

Why is it, do you think, that people want to resist the idea of progress?

It seems to me like they can't keep two thoughts in their head at the same time.

That, okay, we've made great progress, and yet we still have some progress to go.

I feel like they, you know, clap themselves on the back because, like, if I think things are worse than you think they are, I'm a better person.

Yeah, there's some of that.

Part of it is just sheer incredulity because the news is a highly non-random sample of the worst things that happened on Earth the day before.

Very non-random, as we found out from the Facebook whistleblower and other people.

Indeed, but conventional news as well.

News is what happens.

Right, but Facebook did make it worse.

They did make it worse.

They do have an algorithm.

And there is a negativity bias in conventional

editors and vetters.

It bleeds, it leads.

It's not a new thing.

But in general, if you're presenting things that happen, there will be a bias toward the negative because good things are often things that don't happen.

Like there hasn't been a war in Southeast Asia in 40 years, but there's never a Thursday in October in which that's a fact.

Right.

It's like nothing wrapping up.

It's slow moving, sure.

And a lot of improvements are incremental.

There are a few percentage points a year, which then compound and add up.

But again, there's never a day in which it makes a headline.

So Max Roser points out that the papers could have had the headline, 137,000 people escaped from extreme poverty yesterday, every day for the last 30 years.

Wow.

But they never had that headline, and so a billion people escaped from extreme poverty, and no one knows about it.

So there's just that bias in the nature of news, which feeds into one of the most powerful cognitive biases, the availability bias, which is that we estimate probability and risk and danger by how easily images come to mind.

So you read about a shark attack, and you don't get in the water, even though the much greater risk was driving to the beach.

But it lodges in your mind, and that's what the news stokes, what it provides, images of things going wrong.

But you noted there's also a...

an ideological reason why people are reluctant to acknowledge progress, both on the reactionary right that looks back to a golden age,

make America great again, we're living in an era of American carnage, and the revolutionary left, the system is so evil and so unreformable that there's nothing to do but burn it down and expect that anything that rises out of the ashes is bound to be better.

Now, both of those ideologies are kind of discomforted by evidence that bit by bit things can get better.

So people are not rational.

I know that's a major theme of the book.

Did they used to be more so?

Well, I'm always wary of saying something is bad now, therefore it's gotten worse.

So often things were bad in the past, too.

The best explanation for the good old days is a bad memory.

And, you know,

there were plenty of conspiracy theories, the protocols of the Elders of Zion and the Illuminati.

There was

paranormal phenomena.

We call them religious miracles.

There was fake news, reports of religious miracles.

The papers of 150 years ago were filled with stories of sea monsters, of life on Mars, and two-headed babies.

So there's always an appetite for entertaining nonsense where you don't really try to get to the bottom of whether it happened or not.

So, what is the root of it?

I mean, I know that there's a big difference between ignorant and stupid.

Stupid means you can't learn because you're fucking stupid.

But ignorant just means you're not aware of something.

Indeed.

I mean, and most of us are not aware.

I mean, there's an infinite number of things you could know, and even the smartest people like you are only aware of a tiny bit of them.

So we're all ignorant mostly.

That's right, and we have to rely on institutions and expertise.

And if you distrust

the standard sources of information, then you'll be open to all kinds of nonsense.

None of us really know enough atmospheric chemistry to be able to retrace the steps that lead to the conclusion of human-made climate change.

We kind of trust the people in the white coats, and if you don't trust them, then you're naturally going to be open to

alternative stories.

And speaking of climate change, I read

the

paper this week, 4.7 million is where we've reached worldwide deaths from COVID in the last year.

But

pollution, 7 million.

So even before COVID was in the air, the air itself was killing more people.

But that's to your point about it's a slow-moving disaster.

There's no headline.

Indeed, and coal kills vastly more people than nuclear power, probably the safest form of energy ever invented.

But because there are gaudy disasters like Chernobyl and Three Mile Island that lodge in the mind, people mistakenly think that nuclear is more dangerous than coal.

But speaking to your point about stupidity versus ignorance, there's also bias.

And

there is a correlation between intelligence and being resistant to classic cognitive fallacies and biases, like the gambler's fallacy and the cost fallacy and so on.

They're not perfectly correlated.

And there are some biases that have no correlation with intelligence, in particular the my side side bias.

Namely, you steer your reasoning toward the conclusion that you want to be true in the first place, and that's usually one of the sacred beliefs or talking points of your tribe, your clan, your political coalition, your sect.

And

that's one of the biases that smart people are as vulnerable as developers.

Well, you know, a smart people, when I made my movie Religilous,

the beginning of it starts with me saying, I want to know how otherwise very intelligent people can wall off a part of their mind and believe in something which I think is intellectually embarrassing and obviously false.

I know many people, very intelligent people, who've had an experience with what we would call a ghost.

They're not religious people necessarily.

They're not irrational people.

They're very smart people.

And they have I've never seen a ghost, but they have some testimony of something that happened.

They saw furniture move,

an odor and a whooshing went by,

some sort of thing which led them, these very rational people, to think, I don't know what it is, but there's a fucking ghost in the world.

What do you make of that?

Yeah.

When smart people...

It's an easy intuition to have because all of us are dualists in the sense that we think people have a mind and a body, two different things.

Because when we deal with each other, we don't treat each other like robots or wind-up dolls.

We assume there's something going on inside the head, their beliefs, their desires, their feelings.

From there, it's kind of a short step to imagine that the mind can exist independently of the body, because we already think of the mind as separate from the body.

And there's even some experiences that make that plausible, like dreaming.

You know, your body's in bed looking at the body.

I said, I wasn't asleep, I wasn't drunk.

The chair went across the room.

What is that?

Why would an otherwise rational person say that?

Well,

if they had that experience with a spiritualist or medium, it's because they have a lot of things.

No, they were just cleaning up late.

You know, they were just really.

I mean,

I can't explain it either.

Yeah.

There's a long tail of complex physical events where we don't know what happened, and it would be way too boring to try to find out.

Right.

But houses expand and contract, and they're sometimes earth tremors, and they're breezes through windows.

Just like with unidentified flying objects.

Yeah, they're unidentified.

No one wants to go to the trouble of figuring out every last speck in the sky.

The fact they're unidentified doesn't mean they're paranormal.

It doesn't mean they're extraterrestrial.

Exactly.

Always great to see you, Doc.

I'll see you in the next slide.

All right, Steven Fitzgerald, let's meet our panel.

Oh, my kid.

Hey, there they are.

How are you?

All right, he is the star reporter for the Washington Post and co-author of the new book, Peril.

Robert Costa is over here.

And you all know this bad man.

He is one half of the group.

Run the jewels.

Their latest album, RTJ4 Deluxe, is out now across digital platforms.

Michael Render Killer Mike is over here.

Okay.

So I'm going to start with you, Robert, because you're both a panelist and a newsmaker.

sort of on our show this week, because your book Peril with Bob Woodward is one of the things that sort of lit a fire under the January 6th Commission and there's been a number of subpoenas now issued and I read in the paper this week Trump orders the people who got subpoenas.

This is Steve Bannon.

We know who that is, Mark Meadows, he was the chief of staff, others, but those are the two famous ones.

Trump orders them not to

answer the subpoena.

He's like a mob boss in jail.

He's not even the president anymore.

He just orders from, you know, don't show up.

So I want to ask about this subpoena thing.

We saw this also with the Mueller report.

There were subpoenas that just don't show up.

What is it with not showing up for subpoenas?

This is a critical moment for the House January 6th committee.

Because the conventional wisdom on January 6th for so long was that President Trump was idle in the Oval Office dining room, watching television, kind of a passive presence.

What our book shows is that he was anything but passive.

He was talking to Bannon.

He was talking to Scavino.

January 5th, pressuring lawmakers, pressuring Vice President Pence.

This was a coordinated campaign to overthrow an election and throw it to the House of Representatives.

These people who are defying the subpoenas have information about the president's role, not just the hundreds of people who stormed the Capitol and are being prosecuted by the Department of Justice.

But it comes back to Trump, and that's the unanswered question.

I just want to know on behalf of black drug dealers, how do you pull it off?

Like,

all my homies who saw we got to show up when they get subpoenaed, you know?

I really think that.

To be fair, I also read Eric Holder was subpoenaed and ignored it.

So was Janet Reno.

It's a thing.

You know what it is?

When Congress subpoenas you,

no one has showed up since the early days of the Republic.

If someone crossed that line, they could arrest them.

They could put them in.

They can.

I feel like they don't do it because we would be crossing the line, a real red line, with, oh, now we're arresting each other.

And we're so close to a civil war as it is.

We're so close to being in the streets, I think, that that would just...

Then in states where a Republican was the governor, they'd start arresting people.

It's like no one wants to cross that line of, oh, we actually arrest you.

Maybe they shouldn't.

I got stoned and watched Carlin the other day.

Which is a habit in my house.

Oh, speaking of which, I've wrote this for you.

Oh, thank you so much.

I'm going to like that stuff later.

You're going to enjoy that later.

Not now,

I got to say, not now.

We don't want another time.

Who did that once?

Carlin made the point to say it's us versus them.

We, at this time, need to go ahead and admit that this country that started out to become a republic, a shining light city on a hill, has become just a fucking country ran by oligarchs.

We have a political class that cooperates with one another, they share jet planes, they laugh at us behind our backs, and they won't arrest each other.

So until we push the line as a proletariat, as a group of people regardless of party, to say, fuck that, your kids don't get better schools than our kids.

Your kids don't get to drink clean water and we still have Flint.

Until we do that together, we're fucked.

When I go out to do a story with Bob Woodward, I have a pen, a notebook, and a recorder.

Congress has subpoena power.

If everyone ignores Congress, what power does Congress have?

I don't know.

And here's the question the Democrats are going to have to answer.

I've been asking around about this.

Will they actually hold these people in inherent contempt and have the sergeant-at-arms go and knock on their door and maybe try to put them in prison or have criminal prosecution of them?

The reason they don't want to do it is they worry if the House Republicans take over the House next year, the House Republicans will be able to do it.

That's what I'm saying.

We don't want to start arresting each other, especially since the mood.

I mean, have you seen that people are chanting at football games, fuck Joe Biden?

Like, it was at the Jet game.

That's New York.

Yeah, fuck the Jets.

No, I'm sorry.

That was for my tour manager.

I love you, Christian.

It's not fuck the Jets.

Well, as a Jet fan my whole life, fuck the Jets.

They won last week.

Giants on the Jets.

But I mean, New York football is sad.

But

I always stick with my town.

Okay.

But

of course they did it in Talladega.

You know, I mean, Ricky Bobby was, I'm sure, out there

screaming, but that's Alabama.

But even then,

where's the pushback from decent people?

I'm sure there are many people in those stands, even if they're conservative or didn't vote for Joe Biden, who don't want to hear fuck Joe Biden as a chant.

I mean, lock her up was bad enough.

But now we're fuck Joe Biden as a chant, and we just let that happen.

This is a dangerous.

Well, the First Amendment still matters.

And even though you don't want to hear people saying fuck unless there's some real good fucking going on,

you got to say to yourself, Joe kind of parades himself as a tough guy, has a couple German shepherds, tells black people, you ain't black if you don't vote for me.

And under rap rules, you can get a fuck you, cuz.

And

I'm not

necessarily saying that's what you want to do to the president, but I heard a lot of fuck Donald Trump's in the Atlanta protest, too.

So just know that the fuck you campaign is going to be.

So that's your theory either until we're not fucked anymore.

Because we're fucked.

Like they're at this point.

Mike, your theory is that Biden, he's such a badass because he also used to like challenge people to go out in the parking lot.

Yeah, like that.

Remember Corn Pop?

He had that thing with Corn Pop?

Yeah.

So that's why he's getting tough.

I'm up there saying

you play tough, you get tough talk.

I don't know.

Where does his anger for President Biden come from?

Well, exactly.

On the behalf of the black community, I could tell you something.

We were promised $45 million in college funds, $45 billion.

We're getting two.

We were promised better law enforcement, qualified immunity stands.

We don't have a George Floyd Act.

We were also told by Corey Bush came out of Missouri, and she said, we're not even in the infrastructure.

But Killer Mike, inside the White House.

Just Michael is fine.

Okay.

Thank you.

Michael.

Great job.

Killer Mike's the guy I play on stage.

Michael's the guy who votes and pays a lot of taxes.

Michael.

Look,

when Woodward and I were doing this talk, we talked to people inside the Biden White House.

They said Biden's made a choice to be a progressive transformational president.

You're saying you don't see that.

I'm saying

Bernie Sanders.

And if you're going to talk, and I'm not saying I have to have him.

He's been working closely.

I'm not saying he hasn't been working closely.

I'm saying progress.

And we've made some, like my grandfather told me what Steve just told you.

My grandfather's saying, if you think Christmas is bad for you guys, you didn't get everything you wanted.

I didn't get shit for Christmas.

And your grandma got oranges and potato sack drawers.

So I understand we've made progress, but when you promise the people something, you have to deliver on some of the problems.

When you tell Americans, I'm going to exit student debt, and then I look at 60 minutes and look at soldiers, people who have been, I think it's 60 minutes, people who have been soldiers, still

have crippling students.

And these are the people that are putting their life on the line for us.

You're going to have to find a way to make it right.

And that means I want my president to succeed in his promises, but you have to make an earnest attempt at bringing the promise home, or it's not just going to be the people in MAGA hat saying F you.

You got to wonder if that's the sentiment inside the Democratic Party.

Do they come out, do voters come out in 2022 with the same fervor for Biden and Democrats?

Keslin Figaro

is a black woman on a black news network.

She's tough as shit.

You guys look her up.

But she tells, she gets on Bernie's shit.

She gets on Biden's shit.

But she tells people all the time, because you're not coming through now, people aren't going to show up in 2022 and get ready for that.

But Biden's going big.

He's working with Sanders.

That's what our reporting shows.

He's made a choice to work with Sanders, not against him.

But what's he doing in terms of working with the people that gave him Georgia?

If it had not been for Georgia being flipped blue, and that was the black vote, the black working class vote, men and women together.

To his point, I mean, there's one big giant fight going on now in the Democratic Party, and that is the progressives want the giant $3.5 trillion bill.

The moderates want just the $1 trillion real infrastructure bill.

Biden's thrown in with the progressives.

Exactly.

The progressives wanted a lot more.

They wanted $15 trillion.

They wanted a lot more.

$15?

Well, you know, that acts high, but you don't get that low.

$3.50.

When I first started covering Biden, he was vice president.

He would go to McConnell's office in 2011 to cut deals on the fiscal front with McConnell.

He's not Amtrak riding centrist Joe Biden anymore.

So he seems to try to be progressive.

He looks up at that picture in our book of FDR and says, I want to be that kind of president.

Yeah.

So let me ask one more question about decorum, because this, I mentioned it in the monologue, Kirsten Cinema, chased into the bathroom.

I think this is outrageous.

I just, I mean, you may not like the politics, but when this shit starts to happen,

I don't know where the safe space is in America, and I don't know where it ends.

You want to piss it off the pot.

What?

There's an old southern term.

You got to piss her get off the pot.

Like Democrats promise something and with her and Joe in particular, not Biden, my other guy who dresses like a gangster bees down in West Virginia, I think.

Yeah, Joe mentioned.

But is it right to follow her into the police?

No, I don't think it's right.

I don't think it's right.

It's kind of raunchy in women's bathrooms.

They get wild in there.

But

I'm saying that to the Democrats, who I voted for for most of my life, my grandmother worked on campaigns for, you guys got to bring something home because your base is angry with you and your base is angry with you because they got the guy out of office you asked but they aren't seeing rapidly enough but one reason they're not bringing anything home they could have that one trillion dollar infrastructure bill and by the way one trillion dollars still to some people a lot of money

they could have it's a lot of jobs building bridges and roads and all kind of stuff but the black guys aren't in the room either again that's being held up mike by people who are saying what you're saying.

We want everything and we want it now.

And if we don't get it, then you don't get anything.

And sometimes when you ask for the whole loaf, you get none.

And sometimes you get more when you push for more.

Sometimes

it's a record deal and you're offering one and I'm asking 3.5, it meets meet me at 175 or 2.

There's a bigger issue here.

The Democrats are fighting with each other over this.

But democracy in this country is on the brink.

And so the Democrats are at war with each other over the spending.

Should it be 3.5, 1.5?

And what's going on?

Democracy is being tested in every single state.

All right.

So listen, I have two sons of cops here.

That's true.

That's a weird coincidence.

Did you smoke as much weed as I did?

No, I don't think.

I'm going to keep that off the record.

That's me over here.

I'm the one who smokes it, but as you do.

Not him.

So

look, journalists, you guys get a lot of shit.

I got to say, sometimes, boy, they do some really great stuff.

They went undercover, sort of and found out that police killings in america have been undercounted because this is buried in the statistics up until very recently like two weeks ago when the story came out we thought police killings in america were the

i was going by the stats that the fbi gave us well about 55 percent of fatal encounters between 1980 and 2018 were listed as another cause of death when it was really the cops.

The main reason?

The medical examiners

were covering up for them.

You know, they work in the same office.

It's like when your buddy breaks the copier and you cut a copy, you know.

And so

we thought 17,000 people were killed.

It was actually 31,000 and, of course, a stark racial gap.

3.5 times as likely to be killed as a black American as a white by the cops.

So, I mean, there's a lot to that story, but I wanted the reaction of two guys whose dads were killed.

Well, you need to bring more of this data out into the light.

It's appalling that the Washington Post six years ago had to be the one to build this whole database on police killings in this country.

And so often, when you look at the data, too, we don't even know the names of police officers who were involved with the deaths of young black men across this country.

And as a reporter, bring it all out.

Pull it into the sunlight.

Because you can't hide from the truth here.

And there's always more truth when it comes to police killings.

It's evasive, the culture around it.

And you just got to keep digging.

I want to acknowledge it's not easy being a police officer.

I don't think anyone wants to get up and see the things that I have two cousins that are currently police officers.

And with that said, I don't want what happened in Brunswick, Georgia to happen.

An ex-cop can hunt a black man down or any person with their kid, and because they're friends with the prosecutor, just get a get-out-of-jail free card until people come in.

I think that in terms of being punitive, I've often heard politicians talk about coming down on crime.

Police officers that are guilty of these crimes should serve no less than life in jail in terms of murdering someone.

Police officers that do this should have their pensions cut off and paid to the families of those murdered, and the taxpayers don't need to keep paying these suits off.

And last but not least, we need to make police officer training longer than six to eight months.

It needs to be like a junior college, at least a couple years, and you need to either be reflective of or come from the communities you're policing.

Because if not, what you're setting up is a hunter-in-prey situation.

And I think that's what's driven American police.

You know, when I was growing up, My dad was a cop in Washington, D.C., in the northeast section of D.C.

My dad, I always will remember this.

My dad said the greatest thing he ever did as a police officer is never had to fire his weapon.

That there was, that

he takes pride in that, that he never had to fire his weapon.

And you just see across all these cities and communities, it's the escalation constantly that leads to this and this just fervor around tense events.

A paraplegic young man was just drug out of a car.

A paraplegic who's telling the cop, my legs don't work, it's drug out of a car.

We've seen women and mothers, it's time to reform policing in a way that's punitive to bad cops and in a way that encourages education to people.

The Congress walked away from it, though, in September.

Yeah, they did.

Reform, key word,

as opposed to defund.

I think if you said the word defund, I think a lot of Americans would think, oh, that's the position, defund the police, of most Democratic politicians.

It's not.

It's the position of a lot of Democrats on Twitter.

There was

a senator from Alabama, Tommy Tuberville, I think he was a football coach.

He's a moron.

He is.

He's just a moron.

I mean,

he wanted to put Senate Democrats on the record to being against or for defunding the police.

And it was 99-0 against it.

So the Democratic politicians are not for defunding the police.

It's the Twitter mob that is.

And this is the problem.

The Democratic politicians wear that on them because people don't make that differentiation.

And you're not for defunding the police.

You said reforming the police.

I want to reform the police, but I also would like to move where money goes.

In Atlanta, we had a wonderful police athletic league.

It was putting great kids out that were sports, that were into boxing, that were into things like reading after school.

And that funding got shrunk.

And I was working with them for a while because I wanted to see more young men learning how to use their hands and less young men learning how to use guns on the streets.

I'd rather you be at a firearms taught by a real instructor.

So I'd like to see the funding that currently goes into militarizing police with tanks and dogs and

Israeli soldier type training.

I'd like to see that go into a different type, a different form in our policing.

So I'm not saying, because I don't ever think America's going to defund police, but that does not mean we can't say what our tax dollars should go to do.

Okay, so you're a...

You're a banker now, Link?

I have.

I'm a part of a fintech company, and we just got called one of the 250 best fintech companies.

And it's called Greenwood.

It's named after the part of Oklahoma that was burned down by racial rioters, partially sponsored by the government there at that time.

And we're trying to make sure that black people, working class white folks, Latina ex people have an opportunity to bank fairly since banks have exited our communities.

You can go to bankgreenwood.com right on your phone in your bank.

Didn't know I was introducing a commercial.

No, but we got to get black folks banking.

All right.

But you know, I don't know if you saw this week, something called the Pandora Papers came out.

This is what,

I'm not saying you're this kind of banker.

You're the good kind of banker.

But bankers have been doing some shady things because this happened a couple of years ago.

It was called the Panama Papers, where I don't know how they get it.

But again, I think journalists doing good investigative work and they find out some shit.

And mostly what they find out is that rich people want to hide their money so they can spend it on weird shit.

That's a lot of, and the people in this, like King Abdullah of Jordan, has 14 houses.

This motherfucker,

what a crook.

14 houses.

And he's got a palace, I'm sure, that the people of Jordan pay for.

I mean, but, and celebrities, too.

I mean, Tony Blair, well, he's a politician, Putin's in there, Elton John, Julio Iglesias, all these people.

So we got the complete list.

Would you like to hear the complete list of people?

Okay.

Some of the things I am telling you,

some of the things that the rich and powerful spend money on, like Nicholas Cage spent 300 grand on a dinosaur bone organizer.

That is just

not unnecessary.

Nikki Minaj spent $300,000 renting a grand ballroom for her cousin's friends' grand balls.

Oh, Mark Zuckerberg, he can afford it.

He paid $1.4 billion to an Italian cobbler named Geppetto who said he could make him a real boy.

Nick Cannon spent $277,000 on home pregnancy tests.

Wow.

Kevin Spacey spent $3 million to digitally put himself back in the movies they digitally took him out of.

Tiger Woods spent $4.2 million to have every street near his home straightened.

Gwyneth Paltrow spent $2.5 million on getting her vagina to smell like a candle.

Wow.

That's a reverse.

And Eric Trump spent $260,000 helping a Nigerian prince access his fortune.

Oh, he's...

That's snowy.

So.

Every few months, we read the same story about this crisis at the border here in America, our southern border, and a couple of weeks ago we all saw the picture of that

trooper or whatever he was, border god, whipping somebody.

We know that's not what we should be doing.

What should we be doing on the border?

Not that.

What should we be doing, though?

Because, I mean, the stats, in July, 200,000 people, this is the biggest number of people to show up at the border in 21 years.

And three in 10 of them, for the first time, a number that high, were not from Mexico or Guatemala, Honduras, or El Salvador.

They're from all over the world.

The people getting whipped were Haitians.

What do we do about the border?

I feel like this is the Democrats' version of health care for the Republicans.

The issue they don't really address, they don't seem to really have a plan for it.

And always is there Achilles' heel come election time.

And it was what propelled Trump in part to the presidency in 2016, making the case to working-class voters, many of them white, that immigration levels need to be lowered.

both legal and undocumented workers.

And you see now in 2022, that's going to be a major issue for Republicans.

We've got a scene in this book where Kevin McCarthy, the House minority leader, is saying, we're not going to even really engage with Biden.

We're just going to just focus on knocking him around, and immigration once again will make sure that those voters who used to be kind of Democratic voters, union voters, will still stick with the Trump coalition.

I've just told Democratic politicians in Georgia that are running that don't ignore the fact that it's not only white working class people, but black working class people are afraid of immigration in a way.

not only because they fear for the jobs and scarcity of, but they know that even when black immigrants are here, oftentimes they're pitted against one another.

So there's no real campaign to help African immigrants that are coming in, immigrants from the Caribbean, and Haitian immigrants that were at our border had been in Venezuela and were pushed up through.

They had been out of Haiti.

So I don't think that there's a real plan for immigration.

And beyond that, there's worse of and less of a real plan for black immigrants because they put them on a boat and just return them back immediately versus even trying to work them into a correct.

So when Trump said, if you open borders, my God, there's a lot of poverty in this world and you're going to have people from all over the world.

And I don't think that's something we can do at this point.

You think that's right?

Well, I think that if you're talking about...

Wait, that was Bernie Sanders.

Well, whoever said it, I think that if you're talking about working class people in America, I think that they deserve more from this country.

I think that they deserve universal health care.

I think...

That if we're going to be building infrastructure the next 20 years in this country, that there should be a trades program as early as high school training American children how to be the laborers and how to be the skilled laborers we're going to need.

And I think that you, you know, my grandmother used to say, you got to take care of your own house first.

I want black people who are trying to come in here through the border treated better.

I also want the black people that have been here for four or five hundred years to get what they deserve.

So at some point, we're going to have to have a conversation in this country.

What does immigration look like?

Because I represent a group of black people that have been here over 400 years and we still get the shit in under the stick and we're not chasing people in the bathrooms.

But I want to come back to what you just said.

Senator Sanders said that quote.

That was Senator Sanders?

That was Senator Sanders.

The progressive left has often been against escalating immigration levels for the issue of protecting American jobs.

And the problem for so many Democratic congressmen I know and talk to is they worry the Republicans just weaponize immigration and lose the union voter.

So how do you get that union voter who was tempted by the siren song of Trump to come back if you're seen as the Democratic elite party?

Yeah, I think that Democrats need to get off the elitism.

Like, for instance, in Georgia, I'm going to bring it local.

Because a lot of times we have a lot of national arguments.

I'm a Georgian.

I've grown up in Atlanta.

I come from blue-collar.

I'm from a blue-collar street in a neighborhood that was mixed economy.

Blue-collar people want to know that if I do skilled labor, plumbering, carpentry, things of that nature, that there's a future on the other side that will allow my children to take that trade or go to college.

We are not promising that.

We once used to do that as early as high school.

One of my best high school teachers was a history teacher who also could upholster any chair in here because when he went to Booker T.

Washington High School, he had to learn academics and he also had to learn how to use his hands.

If we do not return to that tradition in this country, what we're going to have is a bunch of scared people who are going to refuse immigration.

They're going to be Republican and Democrat.

And we're going to lose the ability to bring skilled labor here because a lot of the people that are trying to get here have skills and they have skills to add to America.

But that's not what our immigration system is based on.

That's Canada's immigration system.

Canada is much more to the right than we are in immigration.

You have to have a skill.

That's mostly what it's based on.

Ours is mostly based on family.

And it's odd because we still can't find enough workers in this country.

And we want to pay people less that are coming.

Part of

our allure to immigration is the jobs, the lowest level jobs.

I remember there was an anecdote that said people don't want to be picking strawberries.

People don't want to be picking blueberries.

So we have to bring people in to do that for cheaper.

Well, why the question is...

Well, that's been proven.

Yeah, but the question

is, why aren't we paying people in rural areas more?

Why aren't we helping people acquire farmland, acquire farms, giving them government subsidies?

Why aren't we doing whatever?

Because Congress is broken.

I mean, you think about immigration in the 80s reagan and the democrats on capitol hill they strike a major deal 2007 2013 congress used to come together now immigration is being driven so much by the executive branch by this overpowering institution of the presidency and you don't have kind of consensus that would lead it to the answer you're you seem to be seeking well it's interesting because i keep reading about the build back better bill they want to we can't we don't have enough workers even if we passed it tomorrow and because of all these supply chain problems we don't have building supplies.

So

we can build back better if you have no workers and no supplies.

We may build a ship.

It's a good idea, though.

It's always a good idea.

All right.

Thank you very much.

Time for new rules.

Okay.

All right, New Rule, now that the New York Public Library says it's getting rid of late fees on books, they have to tell us one more thing.

What's a library?

No one who isn't homeless has been in one since 1995.

When it's Halloween and you dress as sexy librarian now, people think you're Kirsten Cinema.

Number one, the woman who says she just discovered her dog's been blind since his entire life must admit the signs were there.

Like

when you said, come and he walked into a wall and

when you did nothing and he walked into a wall

and oh by the way your cat that's been curled up in a ball for six months not napping

Nero someone must tell me why men and women's shirts button on the opposite sides I'm just wondering.

I'm not saying it's a bad thing.

In fact, I celebrate celebrate the differences between the sexes.

For example, there's a huge difference between a woman saying and a man saying, I went through a whole box of tissues watching that movie.

New old Jiff peanut butter must stop working blue.

Their new slogan is that jiffing good.

Let's jift up.

Is that family friendly?

Are choosing moms okay with that?

What was your first choice for a slogan?

Jif, put our nuts in your mouth?

Neural, if Facebook is free just because the people who use it are exposed to advertising, then I should be able to get free weed if it comes with advertisements.

Which

I don't.

which I don't mind.

Knock yourself out.

Call it Indiga by Ford Trucks or

Purple Hays.

State Farm Insurance is always there for me.

And finally, new rule, don't make me be and I told you so again.

You know, I was a young man of 59 when I started using the term slow-moving coup.

And it pains me to have to report, it's still moving.

A document came to light a few weeks ago called the Eastman Memo, which was basically a blueprint prepared for Trump on how he could steal the election after he lost it in November 2020.

It outlined a plan for overturning the election by claiming that seven states actually had competing slates of electors, which, while not even remotely true, would have given Mike Pence the excuse to throw out those states and thus hand the election to Trump.

But of course, the plan required election officials in those states to go along.

Trump thought the ones who were Republican would.

Most did not.

And that's what he's been working on fixing ever since.

No, not a good thing.

Not a good thing.

Fixing on.

I'll finish.

Some presidents spend their post-presidency building homes for the poor or raising money for charity or painting their toes.

Trump has spent his figuring out how to pull off the coup he couldn't pull off last time.

Here's the easiest three predictions in the world.

Trump will run in 2024.

He will get the Republican nomination.

And whatever happens on election night, the next day he will announce that he won.

I've been saying ever since he lost, he's like a shark that's not gone, just gone out to sea.

But actually, he's been quietly eating people this whole time.

And by eating people, I mean he's been methodically purging the Republican Party of anyone who voted for his impeachment or doesn't agree that he's the rightful leader of the seven kingdoms.

Yes, we're going to need a bigger boat.

There was a grand total of 10 Republican congressmen who voted to impeach Trump.

And by 2024, even those will all be gone.

One of them was Liz Cheney, arch conservative, daughter of Darth Vader,

and yet now politically dead in Wyoming.

Another of the 10 was Anthony Gonzalez.

He's already bout out for running for re-election because he can see opposing Trump means you have no chance.

The other eight will either, like him, not run, or they'll get primaried by a Trumper, or they'll have a sudden epiphany about how, come to think of it, Trump did win that election.

The purge is also at work in Republican legislatures, as several states are already in the process of changing election laws so that they,

non-partisan election officials, are in charge of certifying the results.

Two weeks after the 2020 election, Trump famously called the Republican in charge of elections in Georgia, Secretary of State Brad Rafsenberger, and told him he just needed to find an additional 11,000 Trump votes.

Rafsenberger refused.

But he's not going to be there next time.

Of the 15 Republicans running for Secretary of State in the key battleground states, only two concede that Biden won that election.

These are the people Trump is going to call on in 2024 when he's a few votes short, and these people are going to give it to him.

So here's what's going to happen.

2022, the midterms.

Republicans win big.

Why?

Because the out-of-power party always does in a country where the electorate can't think past, throw the bums out.

So the Republicans take back the House, where disputed elections are decided, and the Speaker is Kevin McCarthy, a man with all the backbone of one of those inflatable tube men outside a car dealership.

Republicans will also have more key governors.

Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan all had Democratic governors who protected the vote in 2020.

But they're all up for re-election in 2022.

At least two will lose.

2023, Trump announces his candidacy and starts having large rallies across the country, which become increasingly angry and threatening as Trump indulges his love for inciting violence.

Knock the crap out of them.

They'd be carried out on a stretcher, folks.

Throw them the hell out.

I'd like to punch him in the face.

You know, I know the Hitler analogy is over the top in many ways.

It is.

I don't think Trump hates Jews.

There are too many rich ones.

And I don't think committing genocide is in his future.

But the mentality of how to take over a country is exactly the same.

Play on this feeling of, we have been cheated, robbed, betrayed, and now we're going to take it back.

Two-thirds of Republicans believe the election was stolen.

21 million believe force is justified to restore Trump to to office.

A majority want to secede, whatever the hell that would entail.

And yet, 2024 comes, and Democrats treat it as a normal election year.

They are living in a dream world where their choice of candidate matters, their policies matter, the number of votes they get matters.

None of it does.

I won't even predict who the Democratic nominee will be, because it doesn't matter.

It could be Biden.

It could be Harris.

it could be Amy Klomichaw, it could be Timothy Chalamay.

As long as they have a D by their name, they will be portrayed as the leader of the army of Satan.

But even if they win, Trump won't accept it.

But this time, his claims of illegal voting by immigrants or mail-in ballots coming in after the deadline or the system was hacked by Venezuela or whatever Giuliani comes up with on the fly,

they will be fully embraced by the Stooges he's installing right now.

December 16th, 2024.

This is the day electors gather to vote for president.

Arizona and Wisconsin both send a slate of bogus Trump electors, setting up a showdown on January 6th and daring Kamala Harris to do what Trumpers wanted Mike Pence to do, throw out election results.

The difference being, this time, those results really are phony.

And this time, it's not just 600 diabetic Fox News junkies and a nut in a Viking helmet.

10 million Trump voters have signed a pledge to come to Washington.

Of course, not in a half million flake.

But half a million still show up and they're heavily armed and incensed when Harris does what Mike Pence wouldn't.

Demonstrations grow in the streets.

The kind of Antifa versus Proud Boy violence we've seen in Portland erupts across the country.

People are afraid to go out anywhere where their political tribe isn't in the majority, which hurts commerce.

The stock market is spooked by the unrest and tumbles as Inauguration Day approaches.

President Biden is under extraordinary pressure to do something to stop the coup before his authority over the military and the Justice Department evaporates at noon on January 20th.

What happens when two presidential candidates show up on Inauguration Day, both expecting to be sworn in like a bad sitcom pilot?

The ding-dongs who sacked the Capitol last year?

That was like when Al-Qaeda tried to take down the World Trade Center the first time with a van.

It was a joke.

But the next time they came back with planes.

I hope I scared the shit out of you.

Thank you very much.

That's our show.

We're off next week and back on the 22nd.

I'll be at the Phillips Center in Orlando, October 17th, the Wind Creek Event Center in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, the 24th, and at the Fox Theater in Atlanta, November 6th.

That's our date, right?

We got to do it.

Okay.

All right.

Thank you, folks.

Thank you, Robert Costa, Killer Mike, and Stephen Crinker.

Okay.

Yes.

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.