Ep. #574: Andrew Sullivan, Jackie Calmes, Max Rose

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

Thank you, Master Bengers.

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

Oh, boy.

Wow.

That's a

thank you.

That is very...

Oh, please.

Thank you.

That's very.

Thank you.

Look at that.

That is very kind of you.

You are

very happy for people who just lost a war?

Well, we lost another one.

20 years in Afghanistan.

Oh my God.

First, they kicked Britain out, right?

Then Russia, now the United States.

If you're keeping score, the graveyard of empires, three, empires, none.

Man, this country collapsed faster than a condominium in Miami.

We're oohing already.

We're only like a minute into the show.

No, it's a heart-wrenching scene.

I mean, you saw this people clinging to the wing of the plane.

I mean, you know you're desperate when you're doing that.

Who's thinking, you know, this could work.

I saw Tom Cruise do it in Mission Impossible.

But I mean,

besides the loss of life, you know what this war costs?

$2.26 trillion, they say.

Do you know how many billionaires we could have sent into space for that kind of money?

Honestly,

I feel bad for Biden.

Because for years, the Democrats, the liberals were like, we got to get out of there, got to get out of Afghanistan.

And then Trump comes into office, he's like, we're getting out.

I think we should get out, too.

He made the deal.

So Biden gets in office.

He's like, well, everybody seems to agree on this one.

Let's get out.

Fuck you, monster.

I want your resignation tomorrow

Trump Trump wanted to meet the Taliban at Camp David

that's true say what you want about Obama's birthday party the Taliban wasn't there

They say Trump is very frustrated about this.

He says, if I could just get on Twitter, I know I could make this worse.

You can't make it worse.

It's getting worse than the Taliban.

They forbid music.

Well, music for pleasure.

You can still play Billie Eilish.

It's a battle between the groaners and the clappers tonight.

Clappers, you got got to punch the groaners.

That's good.

No,

the Taliban want to shut down schools.

They want to shut down bars, theaters.

Oh, wait, that's California.

I'm sorry.

Oh, I see you with the masks.

And of course, we're all safe here.

They're talking now about boosters.

People need boosters.

Johnson and Johnson says this time they're really going to try.

They said the last one was just baby shampoo and aloe, but we can do better.

And of course,

the big issue now, kids going back to school, whether kids should wear masks when they go back to school.

In Florida,

they have a rule against it.

You can't even try that.

That DeSantis guy in Florida, oh, he's hardcore, he doesn't like masks.

Today he was demanding to know why the weekend can't feel his face.

And finally, I must end on some sad news tonight.

OnlyFans is banning

somebody here today, because obviously they don't work, we're in the afternoon.

OnlyFans is banning sexually explicit videos on their platform, which is pretty much what OnlyFans is.

I feel bad for the women of OnlyFans, because since the pandemic hit, they're the only workers in America who are still shaving.

All right, we got a great show.

We have Max Rose and Jackie Combs here, but first up, he is the blogger of the weekly dish on Substack, whose notebook is Out on a Limb, Selected Writings 1989-2021, Andrew Sullivan.

Hello, sir.

Will you allow it for it?

I will.

You know me.

Who's never afraid of it?

I don't want to give a bad message that we're shaking heads, but I mean, you know, you have HIV.

We've shared a joint.

I know.

I know it was really nerve-wracking.

I mean, a marijuana cigarette, not a...

Anyway.

But we do.

We've shared a joint.

We do.

We love our weed.

Speaking of that, I heard you on a podcast say that you have a notebook called High Ideas.

High Deas.

High Dead.

High Ideas.

Okay, same idea.

I, of course, my whole life is a notebook called High Ideas.

What I want to know from you is what percentage of them, when you go back and read them sober, still good?

About three out of ten.

Really?

Yeah.

Yeah, no, that's low.

It is low.

I mean,

as a writer, I find smoking weed really helpful.

Not before I write.

I always write sober.

But when you write something and you smoke a little joint afterwards, your mind, your ego depresses a little bit.

And you begin to look at your work and you say, well, maybe that's just crap.

And some of them, you're right.

I've looked back and it's like, open a ketchup restaurant.

What the fuck does that even mean?

But I have what I call a bicameral mind, like a bicameral legislation.

If I have an important decision, I think about it sober, I think about it's high.

If the two bodies can agree on legislation, then I will sign it into law.

But they have to,

the two sides have to agree.

Your ego can get attached to crap because it's your crap.

Exactly.

And what we does is get you a little bit away from it so you're actually able to look at this.

You kill your own children, which is what all writers have to do.

You have to.

And I must say, Andrew, you're just killing it lately.

You're on this sub stack.

First of all, this is your 27th time on this show.

The best,

it is a record.

You have the crown.

And the best part of my job, really, is talking to the smartest people.

And of course, this is America.

They're kind of hard to come by.

Although, I must say, our staff, I think, does a brilliant job finding them.

But there's a reason why you're the champ.

Because I just find you always, you know, what this country lacks so much is common sense and perspective and and being lucid.

This place you're at now, Substack, right, you were at New York Magazine, but you kind of quit them because newsrooms right now have become a place where you should be able to fire by the editor or the owner.

Now you're fired because the woke in the newsroom, right?

You have to conform to the one true opinion or they don't even want you in the building.

It's a complicated thing because actually I was fired.

I was given four days notice.

I was nominated for a Pulitzer one year and the next year fired.

Not for anything I wrote, but because I wasn't going to completely go along with their woke agenda.

They knew that.

They knew that I don't know what they were thinking.

That's who I am anyway.

I don't know why it's so terrible to have someone in a magazine or in a complete mix of things, to have someone, a dissenter, in a magazine.

It's fun, right?

I mean, that's the whole point.

I grew up wanting to debate, wanting to argue.

I had a big Irish Catholic family.

We thought about everything.

What was the problem?

And afterwards we got together, we had a nice drink, we were totally cool about it.

And it's not even like you're very conservative.

I mean, you wrote the original article about gay marriage in 1989.

Here comes the groom.

It's in your book.

It's brilliant.

I mean, you were so far ahead of your time on so many of these things.

But, I mean, again, it's the common sense thing.

I feel like you have perspective.

I think you and I agree on so many things like who's crazier, the left or the right, the right.

Right there, you should be allowed in the newsroom.

We get opens, we get it, Bill, is that, but

is it the

editors are responding to social media?

Social media, Twitter,

is what creates these online mobs that create this pressure on the editors to fire individual writers, even if the editors are fine with the writer.

And the real problem with this is not so much the the work and the online media, because they are awful and they should be ignored, but they aren't.

It's the point of the people running these institutions, liberal institutions, universities, magazines, newspapers.

They don't have the balls to say no.

We do believe in a plurality of views.

We are going to defend unpopular writers.

Free speech means nothing.

In one of your great articles, it's in the book, we all live on campus now, is what you say.

Because your point being, and I think it's completely right, that the ideas that are coming out of especially elite universities, which also do good stuff and teach real subjects still, but a lot of it filters down.

Tell us about that.

I'd love to hear your words.

You know,

there are two ways to think of looking at the world.

And one is to see it as individuals coming against each other regardless of their race or sex and having a conversation, using reason, persuading each other or not persuading each other, deliberating the common good for democracy.

That's what it's about.

But when you start defining people, not as individuals, but as members of a race or a gender, and then saying that some races have to be given more precedence over other races, some genders have to be preferred to other genders, and what we cannot have at this conversation without having all of that set out in advance.

This started.

in the universities, it becomes obsessive in people's minds.

And then the newspapers and magazines and journalists actually were desperate for money, brought in a whole bunch of very young people straight out of these colleges and didn't have the balls to put up with them.

And then all of us are in this current climate in which things like due process, finding out if something is true or not before you condemn somebody, taking a person's whole body of work into account, instead of thinking one single thing you're going to get damned for forever.

And that's why I did this book.

I wanted to say, look, you've been making me out now to be some crazy ass right-winger.

Look at my work.

I nearly, look at it.

It's much more complicated than that.

And you might find you agree with lots of it.

We should be able to have discussions.

But they used to agree with it.

I know you've written a lot about how we seem to be giving up on the idea of a colorblind society, which used to be the goal.

It's like we didn't change.

You changed.

Right.

I still think that should be the goal.

It is the goal.

It must be the goal.

But it's like humanity matters more than the part of humanity we're from.

And America, of all places, the most multiracial, multicultural society on earth, will not survive if we are constantly in warfare between groups or genders, if we're constantly obsessed with it.

So, for example, we can absolutely should acknowledge that this country has a racist history that needs to be confronted directly and taught and

taught in schools, frankly.

Of course.

And

no one is against that at all.

Exactly.

I don't want that to be taught.

There are southern governors.

There are.

But no one we know.

And the point is, but you can do that.

What they want to do is say that is the single meaning of America.

Right.

Racial oppression.

Nothing else matters.

The country was founded in 1619, not 1776, because slavery is what this country is about.

Well, you know what?

It is about that.

We are, but we are also about so much else.

We're about religious freedom.

We're about freedom of speech.

We're about the empowerment of minorities.

And things have changed greatly since 1619.

Look,

you can go anywhere in the world.

Do you think the Chinese are less racist than we are?

Do you think the Russians are?

It's a miracle what we do in this country.

And we get so...

I mean, we...

We want to beat them not just in ping-pong, but in being less racist.

I love what you said about COVID.

These viruses challenge the psyche, and the trick, it seems to me, is not to deny their power and danger, but to see past them to the real goal, the living of your life.

If you are not careful, this one viral threat can cause you to be paralyzed by excessive fear, fear, and caution.

Thank you, because we need to hear this more and more.

Well,

it's not to say that you shouldn't get vaccinated or take precautions.

I have.

I'm triple vaccinated.

I have HIV.

But here's the thing: I've lived with HIV for 28 years.

It's in my bone marrow.

It's in me.

I could want to defeat it, get rid of it, out of my life, cure it, gone forever, but I can't.

So, what do I do?

I live with it.

I manage it.

You're here.

I get on with my life.

I try and see people.

I love it.

Shut my hand.

Yes.

I mean, at some point.

It's fucking risky.

You don't know where my hand has been.

And you say we should have no, get rid of all masks and social distancing mandates as long as we have a vaccine, right?

People should get a vaccine.

If they want to wear masks, that's absolutely fine.

But to be irrational about it, the way we're going to get past this is constant vaccines.

COVID is here to stay.

It's endemic now.

We're going to take vaccines every six months

like we do the flu.

It's just a way to get us back to life.

I'm not sure about loving that idea.

Well, it's not that bad.

You get a little prick twice a year, if you're lucky.

Maybe a chicken.

Maybe a big prick sometimes.

Well, I'm going to ask Max on the panel because he worked in government on that.

I mean, this is supposed to be a different kind of vaccine.

So

we'll find out about that.

Anyway,

come back for the 28th very soon.

Thank you so much.

All right, Andrew Sullivan, let's go Thanks, Green Our Panel.

Great to see you.

Hey.

How are you?

Okay.

He is a former Democratic congressman from New York and former special assistant to the U.S.

Secretary of Defense for COVID-19.

Max Rose.

Max, great to see you.

And she is the Washington columnist for the Los Angeles Science and Author of the new book, Dissent, the Radicalization of the Republican Party, and it's captured by the court.

Jackie Combs.

Jackie, great to meet you.

How are you?

Good.

Okay, so Afghanistan is obviously where we have to start.

I'm going to talk about two things, the decision, but first the execution.

The execution of how the pull-out was done.

Because what do you do when a guy like, I don't know, Donald Trump,

gets elected president somehow, and you've got this ridiculous clown in office, this buffoon.

He's both stupid.

I've always said that.

He's stupid and crazy.

That's a hard trick to pull off.

But he is.

He's stupid and he's crazy.

Okay.

So everything he did was fucked up and crazy and stupid and didn't work.

And then, oh, thank God, we elect,

get him out of office, and the adults are back in charge.

The people who know what they're doing, the Democrats with this.

And the pullout looks ex I can't think of how it could have been any different if it was Trump.

Honestly, I mean, how could it be more fucked up?

How could it be more incompetent?

How could it be more Trumpian?

So what do I say to myself to get to sleep at night when the adults are back in charge and they fuck it up exactly as bad as Trump would?

Well, you know how you would always say,

I can't believe Trump did that.

Nothing he did would make you think he had hit bottom and then he would go.

Right.

Well,

it could be worse.

How?

How could he make it worse?

What could it be worse?

They gave themselves months to get out.

There's still so many Americans over there because they thought the Afghan Army, which we have known for 20 years, would stand up at least for a few months and it folded in 11 days.

I mean, that's like when Tyson knocked out that guy in 30 seconds.

But don't get me wrong, I'm not defending Biden.

I would say that this has gone to his defining goal of his presidency.

He said democracies, this is about making us all see that democracies

as autocracies are rising around the world, democracies can do big things and they can do them well.

And he started to show that with the COVID vaccination mobilization, and then it's all, he's blown it in a week.

Let me say this, though, to start off.

I spent nearly a year of my life in Afghanistan as an infantry platoon leader.

I've got the

spars of that

war on my body, on my soul.

I'm getting text messages from my buddies, and this is a little triggering, right?

Because there's this sense of what the hell was this all for so I do want to add a third thing to what you said which is that we need to acknowledge the men and women who've served there for 20 years they did something they protected us now with that being said though we can't let that bleed into a defense for something that is totally untenable the scientific term is it is a shit show over there and I don't care if you're smart or not okay there are some things that we as a nation just cannot solve so now you got two people two separate camps right you have people one one who say, let's get out, a little sliver of that, who used to support it when Trump was president, and now they oppose it, they're frauds.

But then there's a third group of folks who are saying, no, no, we should have stayed there forever, like Japan and Korea, right?

And Germany.

That's absurd.

That's absurd.

There's nothing we could have done to have fixed it over there.

The better analogy is Vietnam.

Is there anyone who sensibly believes we should still be in Vietnam today?

Absolutely not.

So look, the military is working wonders right now.

They moved right back in.

The underlying intelligence here was definitely wrong.

No one should be saying otherwise.

It was definitely wrong.

But now they're going to get the job done.

I have full confidence in men and women in uniforms to be able to do that.

Get the job done and getting the Americans.

Absolutely.

Okay, but

that wasn't the job.

The job was first to get bin Laden and to stop the Taliban and second to rebuild a new country.

So that's not the job.

The second that we thought that that was what we were going to accomplish, we were destined for failure.

Because the end of this movie was inevitable.

Just to address your Vietnam thing, because it's so true.

Like, I've heard people say that, and I have the same thought.

Like, why didn't we learn from the exact same thing that happened in Vietnam?

We went into a country that's really different than us, doesn't understand us, we don't understand them, are not wanted there, and we're going to have to put a puppet in charge to keep the shit to shoe level, and that always is going to be corrupt and breed corruption.

How could we do the exact same thing again?

And I was saying last week, I'm going to say it again, again, it's the money.

It's the money.

It's the $2 trillion.

You know, it's easy to get money lost in this country when it's coming from government, but when you're 7,000 miles away, there is, the Pentagon is not audited.

That's

the Pentagon, which gets 700 plus billion a year, and we don't know where it goes.

Well, we know a little where it goes.

The president of Afghanistan left with $169 million.

They couldn't fit it in four cars.

It was falling off the helicopter.

That's just one day in Afghanistan.

That's why.

Because that's where the money is.

You know, Dylan just said, I rob banks because that's where the money is.

But where do the banks get the money?

From the government.

Well, I'm not going to disagree, except that a lot of that money does go to the troops.

As you know, it's going to pay.

It pays.

for their pay, their pensions, and their medical treatment.

And we're going to be paying a lot of money on medical bills.

And we're still paying.

We're paying bills right now for the Vietnam generation.

But if we didn't have a war, we wouldn't need that many troops.

And we wouldn't need to pour $90 billion

into...

Absolutely 100% right.

We poured $90 billion into a military that crumbled in 11 days.

If that's not wasteful, I don't know what is, but there's also another point here, which is just sheer unadulterated arrogance.

Now, what's alarming, though, is the very same people who are saying we can go to Afghanistan for multiple generations and transform it into Denmark, it's those same people that back here at home are saying no to universal child care, no to paid family leave, no to universal preschool, no to us spending anything to help anyone.

It is shocking.

I mean

to that point, it is funny like

Afghanistan, in a way, is like the only bipartisan thing we've done in a very long time.

Because as I was saying in the monologue, for years, Democrats have been wanting to hang out.

That's been a liberal position.

And then Trump gets in.

He literally makes the deal, sets the deadline.

If I didn't know who was president before Biden just flew down from Mars, I would have thought it would be someone from the same party because he continued the policy.

The one president said a year ago we'll get out in May.

The next president, oh, I've got the baton.

Close to May, no.

And then here's Trump did it this week.

Biden should resign in disgrace.

Rick Scott wants to invoke the 25th Amendment.

That's the one if you're,

we got to get you out.

He's crazy.

He did what Trump dealed.

Lindsey Graham, if

one American is left behind, Biden should be impeached.

The way they turn on a dime that just shows no issue matters.

It's just what team you're on.

And by the way, there were

when Donald Trump,

when Donald Trump wanted to get out of Afghanistan, there were some of my former colleagues that opposed it because he was Donald Trump.

And politics, a lot of these folks are just full of it.

And I promise you, if Donald Trump came out for socialism tomorrow, Republican leadership would be calling each other comrade.

So

it's just the nature of this business.

They are, for the most part, are often full of it.

The truth of the matter is that there was a bipartisan consensus that the war in Afghanistan, our longest war, had to end.

And that's what's happening.

It was never going to be pretty.

And

I believe in the future Biden's decision will look good and brave.

It was going to happen.

It had to happen.

And he was the one who fucking pulled the band-aid off.

100%.

So

your book's about the Supreme Court.

And the Republican Party.

How we got here.

Okay.

So, but I want to ask you about the court, because, you know, we're talking about partisanship.

That is the one place where we're supposed to not have partisanship.

I don't think that's true anymore.

I think it used to be pretty true.

But Stephen Breyer, now he is one of four liberals left, right?

Are there four?

Are there three?

Three.

Three liberals.

Right.

Okay.

He's 83.

Typically, a justice, if they're going to retire, retires at the end of the term, which would have been the end of June or the beginning of July this year.

He didn't.

So he's.

Didn't he watch what happened with Ruth Bader Ginsburg is my question to you.

I mean, you know,

we've seen this movie before.

He's rolling the dice.

I mean, I hope he lives to 100, but, you know, so did Ginsburg.

She thought she could win that bet, and she didn't, and it's a stain on her legacy.

And he saw even worse what happened to Merrick Garland, the fact that he's, in both cases, the common thread is Mitch McConnell in the Senate.

And if you have Mitch McConnell, especially if Republicans take back the Senate next year and he's the majority leader, even as minority leader, he would try hard to prevent Biden from filling a vacancy.

But

this is a man who, after Antonin Scalia died in February of 2016 and Merrick Garland was nominated in March of 2016, he said, let the people speak.

And he held that he prevented a vote all the way through the election.

So that we now have Neil Dorset.

And so this gets to your Steve Breyer.

This is a man who used to be a staffer on the Senate Judiciary Committee, and

he's seen this.

He knows what the politics are.

I can't tell you how angry privately Democrats are that he did not announce his retirement.

But it gets to what you say.

He must know that.

I mean, he must feel that.

I mean, Obama had that lunch with Ginsburg, right?

And that was when she was younger than he is now.

I think she was 80.

I think that was 2009.

And it was kind of like he didn't say it directly, but it was like, boy, you ever been to the Caribbean?

He must be having it.

time.

Never tried out a catamaran.

No streets are fantastic.

I could live on what I do.

He must be having a good time.

Look, I hope he retires.

Don't get me wrong.

But this is also, we just have to acknowledge the absurdity of all of this, that here we are waiting as a nation.

Most powerful, best nation in the history of the world.

Here we are waiting around to see if one of nine people dies, most of whom are well over 70, and we know it's going to descend us into political chaos and dysfunction.

We need term limits for Supreme Court justices, plain and simple.

Let's get out of this madness.

Yeah, I mean in my dream page one rewrite of the Constitution,

that's on the list.

You could get nominated.

For what?

Supreme Court justice.

Who knows?

I could see it.

Oh, you're adorable.

No, no.

I can't see it.

No, I cannot see it.

Nor Nor would I want to.

But you don't have to be anything special to be on the court, right?

You don't have to be a lawyer even.

No.

You can be anybody.

Sure.

Speaking of being anybody,

this is a perfect segue.

This is so fucking perfect.

Thank you.

That's the best segue I've ever had.

Here in California, we're about to have a recall vote for governor.

Because, why?

I don't know.

Because, I mean, we're a funny state.

We are just a very funny state.

I mean, we have this process where every four years we elect a governor, and then people stand outside of a Vons

with a petition, and enough people sign it, and then we try to unelect him.

There are 46 people on the ballot.

I think we vote in a couple of weeks.

And like, and this is, one of them is Angeline.

They know her.

Yes, you know her.

I mean, folks, folks at home, if you don't know around the country who this is, don't ask.

Don't ask.

But

yeah.

Yeah, Gavin Newsing got 62% of the vote when he was elected, but there's 46 people, including like, they all have their little issues.

Jacqueline McGowan, this is, you could vote for her, absolutely.

Facilitate a fair cannabis market is her issue.

You can vote for Jacqueline.

Brandon Ross, if nothing else, I hope to at least be an inspiration to addicts.

This is real.

I love this guy, Adam Papagon.

I am just really curious how government works.

Sort of like Trump, you know?

I mean, but, you know, the newspaper, I must say, it doesn't.

It doesn't.

It doesn't tell you all the people.

We got a complete list of the people.

Would you like to hear some of the other people?

Yeah.

Jamie Jansen is running to get the spitting out of porn.

Brenda Zilks wants to be governor because she feels it's the most efficient way to drive more traffic to my OnlyFans.

That can't be the right reason.

Hector Montalvo wants strict limits on the number of celebrities who can have their own brand of tequila.

Tate Brandon is running on a platform of no more bachelorette parties at gay bars.

That

seems very specific.

Chan Jensen is a one-issue candidate, and the issue is getting the gardener to stop blowing grass clippings into the pool.

I hate that.

Dusty Turner says he's running because he always wanted to see Sacramento, but he can't afford a bus ticket.

Amusou Massan is a Taliban member who just arrived this past week.

He's got a very anti-immigrant platform.

He says he's the only candidate in the race with a proven track record of kicking foreigners out of a country.

And Alexi Kelly says she's running to slide into Gavin Newsom's DMs.

I don't know what that means.

So, okay.

So I think that what this is, is just another example of a terrible development that we've had in this country in the last few years.

People just don't accept elections anymore.

This is part of it.

They just don't accept elections.

I mean, Gavin Newsom didn't do anything.

He's a Democratic governor who won in a landslide with 62% of the vote and then governed as a Democratic governor in a state where he won big, that it's only a quarter Republican.

That's the crime.

It's just you won, fuck it.

And this stupid state,

so stupid, that we have this.

You only need 12%.

12% of the people, he won by 62%.

If 12% sign this petition.

It's unbelievable.

Well, this is the only way a Republican can get elected statewide just about in California.

And at least you got to give them credit.

They're doing it by the rules this time.

Well, these are the rules.

but

the rules yes we have rules you know what you know that the guy who's number two is a youtuber he's 29 second and uh to larry elder leading for the uh guy who might win uh you can be 18

that you only have to be 18 to run and you could be governor at 18.

Some kid who's shaving her back on YouTube would be like...

Better than Angela.

We used to have this

bit about America's stupidest states, and it was always, you know, Tennessee and

this one.

And also, I just

Larry Elder.

I know Larry.

I like Larry.

He's been on this show or my old show or something.

He's the leading candidate to replace.

And he could.

This is very possible.

It's really.

Larry Elder, he's anti-climate change.

He's a climate change skeptic, opposes abortion, gun control, and minimum wage.

You know, like the usual Californian.

And he could win.

And he could win.

And there's national ramifications.

I don't think people realize this.

Governor Larry Elder gets to appoint a senator.

One of our senators is 88,

Diane Feinstein.

So I hope she lives to 100.

But if she doesn't, he could appoint the next senator who would then tip the Senate.

And then if Stephen Breyer croaks,

they they get to pick the Supreme Court judge.

It's an insane system.

I'm proud that I'm a New Yorker.

I mean,

this is crazy, but

I mean, you all just go vote because this is out of this world.

But I do think that you hit the nail on the head here.

There's a deeper point here, and we could tie this to what's happening with vaccines.

People don't think anything of their government anymore.

They just don't think anything of it, and they think that they just want to kick folks out, or they think they could do it better.

They don't trust a damn thing that they say.

And if we don't take a step back as a nation and actually try to invest in trust building in a very real way, which may I add, at times means being bipartisan, at times means the other side saying the other side's not evil and actually trying to get something done while being true to your values, we can't become that again.

We're going to be in this constant cycle, and it is dangerous.

It really is.

Can you ever get to that point?

Can you get to that point when we have now our separate information ecosystems?

How do you ever get to a place of trust when half the people are hearing?

Let's just take it because we have a Democratic president.

They're hearing something from Biden.

How are they supposed to ever trust him when then they tune in on One America or Newsmax or Fox News?

I don't trust either of them.

I don't trust either side.

You sound like you trust one side.

I trust one more than the other.

Slightly.

Yeah.

Well, look,

I'm I'm a proud Democrat, but before that, I'm a proud American.

So I don't see a problem necessarily with picking a side, but also not thinking that we are enemies here.

So you mentioned COVID and you worked.

What did you do for the Defense Department?

So I advised the Secretary of Defense on COVID matters.

I was a COVID coordinator and things along those lines.

I noticed the White House, this is from CNN last

about July 29th, I think.

The White House is frustrated with what it views as alarmist and, in some cases, flat-out misleading news coverage about the Delta variant.

This is why I don't trust either side.

Me either.

And they were, the New York Times wrote: the Delta variant may be spread by vaccinated people as easily as the unvaccinated.

And then the White House fired back: Vaccinated people do not transmit the virus at the same rate as unvaccinated.

And if you fail to include that context, you're doing it wrong.

So let's take a look at the obviously government is frustrated with media.

Sure, sure.

And I brought this fact up a few months ago.

Democrats, 41% think or thought in the poll, this is a few months ago, so this may have changed, but 41% thought that the COVID hospitalization, in other words, people who get COVID, how many go to the hospital, 41% of Democrats thought it was over 50%.

It's under five.

So there is, let's first talk about one elephant in the room.

There's a certain COVID elitism that has emerged amongst the far left.

I mean, you can imagine some of these folks.

COVID elitism.

Yeah, you can imagine some of them wearing a mask in the bathtub.

So it's

we, you know,

we can openly say wearing a mask sucks.

It's horrible.

But this is a crisis of hospitalization and hospital capacity.

And when we are getting to a place where 99% of ICU beds are overtaken, you've got to wear a mask.

And we should be wearing a mask before that so we're not getting to that place, place all with the intent though all with the hope the united hope of that we don't have to wear them anymore all right our kids should be wearing masks and they can until they can get vaccinated wearing them in schools but that is not to say that we should be doing this forever we should see the light at the end of the tunnel and we're not talking about that nearly enough but folks just got to get vaccinated man we're also not addressing the root problems i mean you're talking about hospitals absolutely you can't let the hospitals be overrun but the reason why hospitals get overrun is because because we run them like airlines.

100%.

They're for-profit.

Just the way an airline can ever have an empty seat, the hospitals don't want empty beds.

So they're always at almost capacity.

Absolutely.

That's no way to run a hospital.

No, there's a for-profit system that when you're seeing

a crisis of optimization.

Right, where just a small number of cases will tilt our hospital systems into abject crisis.

So, what we have to do is not do what we did after the Spanish flu, which is forget about it.

After this, we really have to invest in a country.

We've got missiles everywhere, right?

We have all the defense industrial complexes, one giant insurance package against something that we can't even imagine happening.

We need a pandemic insurance package after this, and that package has got to include dramatically reenvisioning our healthcare system.

Dramatically.

It also has to include addressing obesity.

The ultimate third rail, I know people hate it when you bring it up, but it's in, let me read, this is in the paper this week.

40% COVID deaths, people had diabetes.

Name

any other ailment someone would have, and you wouldn't say, oh my god, that's huge.

We know 78% of the people who have died or went to the hospital obese.

88% of the deaths in the world were from countries with high obesity rates.

How long can we ignore what is at the core of the problem?

It's something that was killing us slowly before COVID, and then with COVID, yes, your body cannot take the stress.

It's not healthy to begin with.

The least little thing will take you down.

And we still do not have any messaging from the White House, from Dr.

Fauci, from anybody.

They will not mention it.

Why?

They don't want to offend Pepsi-Cola?

Is that what it is?

And McDonald's, and all the shit food and stuff that people put in their body?

Don't people have, shouldn't they take some responsibility?

What would you?

I know you're the one asking the questions, but what would you have

the government, the government that, by the way, mention it?

Gives tax subsidies to sugar

to make a huge

food into poor neighborhoods.

Sure,

there's a million things you could do if you even addressed it.

They wouldn't even address it.

The government can't even get mandates to wear a mask, let alone take a vaccine.

So wouldn't it be a good idea?

Don't get fat?

You wouldn't.

Yes.

Yes.

Don't get fat.

That would go away.

And if you are, stop being so.

And you think the non-compliance with masks is big?

Wait until you start telling people.

You wouldn't worry so much about a mask if you weren't part of...

I just read the statistics.

Four out of five people who wind up dead.

This is the reason.

No, it's look, I.

Is this about life and death?

Obviously, I don't think anyone here is a believer in body shaming.

I think there's beauty across

the human experience.

Obesity, there is no doubt, is a public health crisis.

And we've now forgotten that First Lady Michelle Obama made this a huge priority with the Let's Move campaign.

And they hated her for it.

And I think that we can definitely invest in public education campaigns, robustly invest them, very similar to how we did when it came to smoking cigarettes.

There should be no shame in that because it is a public health crisis.

But on the same hand, though, I think that when you look at it.

It seems like we glorify gluttony now.

You know, it's fit shaming is much more common.

You should eat something.

No, you should not eat something.

I mean,

you know, because like now they want us to do all these boosters we were talking about with Andrew.

I mean, I don't want a booster.

Look, I never wanted the vaccine.

I took one for the team.

And that's, and by the way, you know who doesn't get a lot of vaccines?

Millennials.

I know a lot of millennials, especially the 20, 20-year-olds.

They don't want it.

They don't want it.

They don't think they need it.

They're probably right.

But I tell them, I didn't want it either.

I took one for the team,

but a boost, but every eight months you're gonna put this shit in me.

I don't know about that.

Maybe I don't need one.

I don't want a one-size-fits-all.

My body may be different than your body.

Yeah, I lost you, man.

That's crazy.

Look, my body isn't different.

Everybody's body isn't somewhat different.

I just read the statistics about who dies from this.

You're trying to be cute and you're rolling.

I'm not trying to be cute.

I know I'm in your house.

I don't want to step over the line here, but genuinely, genuinely, people's lives are on the line.

And

just as significantly, just as significantly, our very way of life is on the line here.

It's very important that people get vaccinated.

It's very important that we express trust in our lives.

And the teens.

Right.

I'm saying that.

Absolutely.

But if there's a need for boosters, particularly...

Particularly, absolutely, as the evidence is showing amongst those who have underlying conditions, amongst the elderly, so on and so forth, it's important that they take them and it's important that they trust those who are urging them to do it.

Okay, but you just said underlying conditions and elderly.

I don't count myself either.

So is my body different?

Can I make, could I have some medical autonomy?

No, look, you absolutely, no one is mandating it for you in your particular position, although they might, but I do think that it's very dangerous.

to enter into a conversation here about personal responsibility when the truth of the matter is is that this is a matter of collective responsibility.

If large groups of people do not get vaccinated, they go to the hospital and our hospitals get overrun.

That's why I do that.

And then you can't get a mammogram, you can't get a biopsy, and so many other things.

Literally, society, as we know, it can't function.

So, this is important

that people are urged to get vaccinated.

It's important that they do get vaccinated.

That's why I use

the team.

Well, we're proud to have you.

Because I did it for the team.

When you worked, I wanted to.

When you worked in the Pentagon for those months,

was part of your job getting veterans, and getting the military, members of the military, to get better?

Sure, and if you look at the military right now, they have a lot of resistance.

Well, no, it's exactly the opposite, actually.

That's a falsity.

The military right now, over 80% of the military is under the age of 35.

Over 75% of the active duty force, over 1.3 million individuals, they've they've gotten at least their first shot.

So they're setting a great example for how we can accomplish this.

What about the other 25%?

Why isn't it 100% in the nation?

Well, I don't think we're ever going to get 100%.

95%.

Well, I think the truth of the matter is, is if that the nation had what the Pentagon's or the Department of Defense's vaccination rate is right now, if the nation had that, we'd be well over 85, close to 90%.

Just to button this up, you talk about the military.

Before we had a vaccine, it went through a whole ship, the USS Theodore Roosevelt, 4,000 sailors.

I don't think they all got it, but about half the ship got it.

Absolutely.

There was one death.

Now, one is too many, but to the point about we're all different, healthy, millennial people, they didn't die from it.

Everybody should get the vaccine.

We're not arguing with that.

Absolutely.

But nuance is important, even when we're talking about

it has unnecessarily become taboo to agree with what you just said.

And that's wrong.

That's totally wrong.

All right, time for new rules.

Okay, new rule.

Now that the Taliban have taken Afghanistan, it's time to ask the obvious question.

Did the Orb not see this coming?

I can accept that the Pentagon, the CIA, and the State Department were caught off guard.

They're only human.

But the Orb?

You had one job, orb and you fucking blew it.

New rule, Us Magazine has to tell us who wore it best.

New rule, social media climbers need to stop throwing themselves fake pity parties.

A 25-year-old TikTok influencer who wears dentures says she can't get a boyfriend.

No boo-hoo.

Try taking them out, you'll get a boyfriend.

Neral, to prevent future college students from taking out crushing student loans just to get worthless degrees, baristas and waiters must start identifying themselves by their major.

Welcome to Applebee's.

I'm your server, art history.

Oh, I'm sorry.

I see your table hasn't been wiped out.

I'll go get gender studies.

Lyral, someone must tell Rudy Giuliani, who recently signed up on Cameo, the app where Celebrities Wish You Happy Birthday for a Couple Hundred Bucks, that if he really needs money that badly, don't sign up for Cameo.

Sign up for Chatterbait.

Seriously, Rudy, no one wants a birthday greeting from the undead.

But shove your hand in your pants like you did in the Borat movie, oh, we'll give you 50 bucks.

And finally, new rule, Apple needs to

think different about our privacy.

Apple, the company that made it possible for men to show their women their dicks from thousands of miles away,

is releasing an update that will allow them to hack into your phone without your consent, to snoop through all your pictures just in case you're a pedophile.

Or as Matt Gates put it, I'm switching to Samsung.

Now, let me be clear, I'm against pedophilia.

That's why I joined QAnon.

But nosing through everybody's private photo stash is casting an awfully wide intrusive net.

It's like if the company that sold you a safe said, oh, and we're going to stop by sometimes when you're not home to make sure you're not keeping naked pictures of kids in it.

Our phones should be like our wallets or purses, private.

What about probable cause?

What about the Fourth Amendment?

This is the very definition of unreasonable search and seizure, which can and will be abused to find evidence of other illegal stuff on our phones, in my case, drugs.

Now again, I think child pornography is bad and I don't care who knows it.

But it's also not a Trump card you can pull out that makes all our other rights disappear.

Thank you.

And I don't see a very strong fight brewing against this blatant constitutional breach.

And I think it's because we're so dependent on smartphones now that we will let them do anything to us.

Apple should admit that the problem with their phones isn't just what people might store on them, it's the phones themselves.

Today's phones make people assholes, full stop.

And I know whenever someone starts in on how evil smartphones are, there's always a pat answer coming back about how people have always freaked out about the latest technology corrupting young minds.

Come on, they said it about radio and the telephone and TV.

Yeah, it sounds like that argument might be right, but it's not.

It's not.

Not if you think about it for two seconds.

I don't remember lugging a TV under my cover so I could watch Huckleberry Hound

until the screen asked me, are you still watching?

I looked forward to seeing I Dream of Jeannie once a week, but it didn't throw off my circadian rhythm.

I liked Mikal's Navy.

I wasn't addicted to it.

I didn't watch it when I drove.

Radio to TV was a difference in degree.

Smartphones are a difference in kind.

Less like TV or radio, more like a pacemaker.

You know, something you can't live without.

No other device has ever commanded our constant attention the way the smartphone does.

Of course, when I was a teenager, I had a princess phone.

But I didn't stare at it eight hours a day.

There was no hardcore pornography on my family's 24-inch zenith television set,

sadly.

And we didn't have to worry that maybe my sister was on the land line with a strange man who was posing as another teenager but was really 50.

A former VP at Facebook said he felt tremendous guilt because the short-term dopamine-driven feedback loops that we have created are destroying how society works.

Yet TV didn't do that.

Psychology today says the average high school kid has has the same level of anxiety as the average psychiatric patient in the early 1950s.

And that's directly related to social media.

Increasingly, studies are linking phones to not just anxiety, but depression, bullying, hate speech, fake news, sleep disturbance, relationship problems, and photographs of knees on the beach.

TV didn't do all that either.

And TV didn't turn people into assholes, shady, needy, passive-aggressive, mean and fake, fake-outraged, fake-brave, fake-pretty, fake-supportive.

Phones make people fake their lives instead of living their lives.

It's more important to get a picture of you you looking like you're having a good time than actually having a good time.

And the pathetic addiction to likes.

Did I like my picture of lunch?

Maybe it wasn't good enough.

Does that mean I'm not good enough?

Phones have ruined self-esteem, comedy clubs, concerts, childhood, attention span, sleep cycles, using toilet time to reflect

and falling off cliffs.

Oh, and dating, which has been reduced from a quest for true love to looking at a menu.

I think I'll have the Kelly tonight.

Phones make people bullies, angrier, more vitriolic, more racist online than they would ever dream of being if they had to say those things to someone's face.

The phone made us passive-aggressive to our friends and hyper-aggressive to total strangers.

It has two settings.

I'll kill you or you're dead to me.

Not that if you're dead to me was the message you wanted to send to someone, you'd even bother sending it because even texting is too confrontational for most people now.

We don't engage with our friends when we disagree.

We just walk away.

Don't like something, delete it.

Don't want to talk to someone, don't reply.

Just ghost them.

Ghosting.

It's the electronic equivalent of going out for a pack of smokes and never coming back.

Cell phones have obliterated courtesy, the fundamental building block of developing any real relationship.

We all see it, groups of friends out together in a car or eating in a restaurant, and they're all staring down at their phones.

Imagine how rude that would be if instead of a phone, you brought a magazine to the table and read it during dinner with a friend.

Many is the night I've wanted to say to someone, can you just put the phone down for a minute?

After all, we haven't seen each other in weeks, and we're having sex.

All right, that's our show.

I'll be at the Eches Theater in Salt Lake City, September 12th, the City National Civic in San Jose, September 26th, and the Benedim Center in Pittsburgh, October 16th.

I want to thank Max Rose, Jackie Combs, Andrew Sullivan.

Thank you.

Okay, thank you guys.

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

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