Ep. #530: Thomas Friedman, Dr. Cate Shanahan

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

Start the clock.

Thank you.

Please sit down.

Thank you so much.

I know why you're happy today.

It's Memorial Day weekend.

Cheering at home.

Okay, well, I love Memorial Day.

You know, I'm glad it's come because finally I get a chance to just kick back and hang around the house.

You know, I do love, we all should love Memorial Day.

It's when we remember the brave Americans who put their lives on the line to protect our way of life.

I'm talking, of course, about the delivery people from Grubhub.

But the big medical news this week is, remember hydroxychloroquine, the stuff that they were saying was going to be the big cure-all, and then they were like, no, this shit doesn't work, it's not for this.

And then Trump now says he's on it.

He's taking it.

And not only that, he got mad at the Fox News anchor Neil Cavuto,

because Neil Cavuto heard him say, I'm taking this stuff.

and Neil Cavuto said yeah that'll kill you

I Trump I got this man first he says let's try drinking household disinfectants now he's

now he's on this shit today Vladimir Putin said I hope I don't have to poison this motherfucker I don't think we have anything strong enough

No,

this drug is for people who have lupus or malaria.

So wrap your mind around this.

The President of the United States has put himself on a drug for two diseases he does not have.

Also, he's starting on something next week for vaginitis.

You know, just to be safe.

I don't get this, Donald Trump.

He's never had a drink, never did pot.

No drugs in college, but at the age of 73, Laura Ingram comes by and says, hey, man, put this on your tongue.

He's like, I'm all in.

Okay.

But of course, he always is the master of changing the subject.

This week it was to ObamaGate, ObamaGate.

What a scandal.

Yes, already losing steam, this scandal, because it lacks that crucial ingredient that most scandals need to have: an allegation.

Now,

Trump fans are ready to be all angry at this, but they don't know what it is.

Even Glenn Beck's truck board says to be determined.

But look, I guess the bright side of this is that all 50 states now are at least partially open, but again, no plan, no consistencies.

It's the opposite of Afghanistan.

We have no entrance strategy.

The theme seems to be: you can go out, but you can't have fun.

What married people call date night.

For example, California has reopened some parks, beaches, hiking trails, but again, the inconsistencies.

You can walk on the beach, but you can't congregate.

And yet the restrooms are open for gay sex.

Oh, hiking, that's very big out here.

You know, hiking, people always going hiking.

You know what hiking is?

That's when a guy and a girl walk up a mountain because she wants exercise and he thinks it's a date.

Georgia, of course, one of the first states to reopen,

again, inconsistent.

You can go to the waffle house to eat, but

the ban remains on parking lot fistbites.

Parking lot...

Yeah, in Georgia and in Texas, they opened the churches and then they had to reclose them because people got the disease.

And, you know, look, I make fun of religion, but I can't blame people for wanting to go to church in person and have that experience.

There's just something about speaking in tongues over Zoom that makes you feel like an idiot.

All right, we got a great show.

We have Michael Moore, Thomas Friedman, and Dr.

Kate Shanahan.

Let's get right to it.

Okay, he is the Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for the New York Times and author of the number one New York Times bestseller.

Thank you for being late.

Thomas Friedman is with us, I'm assuming, from New York.

No, but

oh, okay.

So

your columns have been fantastic in these horrible times.

Horrible times, great columns.

And of course, when I read them, I can't help but thinking of your seminal book, The World is Flat, and how you are the guy who really identified that issue, that we're all so interconnected.

And originally that was more about economics and technology, but now we see it's really about disease too, right?

Yeah, I mean, basically, Bill, you know, I've been looking back at the last 20 years.

And what I realized, I've actually been covering one pandemic after another, but of a different kind.

First, I covered a geopolitical pandemic called 9-11.

Then I covered a financial pandemic called 2008.

Now I'm covering a biological pandemic called COVID-19.

And I'm probably about to cover a atmospheric pandemic called climate change.

And the reason these are happening more often is because, one, the world is getting more greased, more tightly wound together through globalization, technology, air travel.

Who knew that there were 50 flights from Wuhan direct to America

between December and March?

And at the same time, Bill, we're taking a lot of the buffers out of things that really created redundancy, stabilize systems, whether it was ultra-greece supply chains or diversity.

And then we're pushing things to the extreme.

Jihadi radicals pushed them to the extreme around 9-11.

Bankers pushed them to extreme around 2008.

We pushed ecosystems to the extreme, ended up with bats in domestic food markets.

We're pushing the climate to the extreme.

And you put all these together and the world isn't just flat now.

It's increasingly frail by being so tightly together and at the same time, pushing a lot of things to their limits and beyond.

So I'm almost afraid to ask you about what your level of optimism is given that situation.

I quoted you a couple of weeks ago on our show in your column when you said that America has been as dumb as we want to be.

That really has been our policy and it's true, not just the politicians, but all of us for a very long time.

And now it's coming home to roost.

And when I read the paper every day, all I see is, God,

could we have fucked this up worse?

We tried to save the hospitals, so now we're bankrupting them.

Testing, other countries seem to be able to get that.

The one lab Trump has been touting, 48%

of the time it works.

You could flip a coin.

and do it just as well.

You know, if you had a pregnancy test that half the time was, well, I guess that's wrong.

I am pregnant.

I don't think we'd be using that.

I mean, we are just so bad.

And so

how do you even begin to reverse this level of dysfunction?

Well, it seems to be a couple of things are going on, you know, Bill, but we're unreaping what was sowed, not on your show, but on another network.

We've lost our cognitive immunity.

That's a term my friend Marina Gorbis from the Institute of the Future coined.

We've lost our ability to start out fat from fiction and science from science fiction.

Because one, we have a network that's been in the business of making people angry and stupid.

And at the same time, we have social networks,

whether it's Facebook or Twitter or others, that are, look, look, these social networks are like open sewers.

They're full of untreated, unfiltered information.

They have diamonds and rubies and gold and gems, and they have toxic waste, rusty cans, and broken glass.

And if you don't have a population that has the filters to sort out one from the other, you get to where we are today.

Then overlay on that bill, we're kind of caught between what I call breaking news and president breaking bad.

You know, on the one hand, we're just assaulted with breaking news.

24 kids

in New York City have acquired an inflammatory disease post-COVID-19.

But it's not put in any context.

So you don't know, is that like one out of

100,000?

Is it one out of 1,000?

But when you're constantly pounded with these breaking news stories, it's very hard to find your balance.

And at the same time, then you have a president out there who basically is touting ultraviolet light colonoscopies and Lysol enemas or hydrochloroquine that has been rejected by his own FDA.

And between the two bills, it's become very hard, I think, for the average citizen to weigh the risks.

When do I go out?

When do I not go out?

Do I send my kids back to school?

Do I not?

Because no one is shaping the conversation at the top the way a real president would be doing in such a crisis.

And other leaders around the world have been.

Right.

And I'm glad you mentioned both sides because the, yeah, I mean, Trump straight up got a mad king.

You know, country, this has happened in history.

You have a mad king.

We have that now during a pandemic.

But it's not like the other side has just all good information either.

You wrote this, and I was glad you did.

You said, we need, you're quoting Mother Nature.

And you said, Mother Nature says you need to get back in balance.

And that starts with using the immune system that I endowed you with.

That's actually a controversial statement in a lot of quarters.

We are so locked into this pharmaceutical, medical establishment, bad food industry complex that we seem to have forgotten about.

That's the way out of this, is using our immune system.

But not everybody wants to hear that.

Historically, Bill, that's how people overcame pandemics through herd immunity.

60 to 70% of the population got it, and then the virus runs out of people to infect.

And basically, you get herd immunity either through a vaccine or naturally.

So, I've been writing about that, I've been writing about Sweden from the very beginning.

I don't know if Sweden's, you know, got the answer.

Um, uh, Swedes don't even know if they have the answer, but they've decided to take an experiment that says, How's the best way for us to maximally save lives and livelihoods?

And they thought it was to keep their economy partially open, continue to social distance, close colleges and universities, but let K9 schools continue, keep restaurants and malls open if people wanted to go, and at the same time, let that portion of their population that is healthy, that will likely experience this disease either asymptomatically or as a mild or tough flu, but will not require hospitalization to acquire the disease, build the antibodies, and become immune on the hope and assumption that that will provide them a period of immunity for it.

It's not for sure, but that's what they're anticipating.

Well, the Swedes already believe they got about 30% of their population in Stockholm and their health workers who already have herd immunity.

I don't know whether they're going to make it.

They did not do well protecting their nursing homes.

They will be the first to admit that.

They lost more people than they wanted.

But what has really annoyed me to no end, Bill, the number of people, if you read the articles about Sweden, who are rooting for them to fail and are already judging it as a failure because they may have lost more people now relative to Denmark, but not relative to other countries.

And I'm rooting for them to succeed.

I don't know if they will, but if they can show us a different pathway here to maximally save lives and livelihoods, God bless them.

And if I may,

historically, what we're doing now with the total lockdown, that's more of the experiment.

Actually, what Sweden is doing is more what societies, including our own, have done in all past pandemics.

That's the experiment.

What we're doing is more the experiment.

But let me tell you what, now that we're opening up again, Sweden's state

epidemiologist said, something I don't think we thought of about once you get into, excuse me, a lockdown.

He said, once you get into a lockdown, it's difficult to get out of it.

That's an interesting point.

Now that we have scared the shit out of people and they're afraid to go out, even if businesses do open, are they going to patronize them?

When you get people sitting home for three months, what sort of new habits do they have?

Do they look at every other human being for the rest of their life like a leper?

Is everyone going to turn into Howie Mandel and have this germaphobe disease?

So I think that's a really interesting point.

Once you get into it, it's kind of like a war.

Easy to march in, hard to march out.

Well, the reason we had to do that was because

Trump, the leadership, was slow to react.

And so we faced a position where if we didn't lock down, the hospitals would likely have been overwhelmed.

But the problem with lockdowns is all they do is exhaust you.

They actually do nothing vis-a-vis the virus.

They just spread out the time of infection and hopefully make it so it doesn't overwhelm your hospital system.

Early on, you know, I wrote, quoting Dr.

David Katz, you know, that the idea should have been locked down for a very set period of time and then on a risk-ratified basis, release into the workforce people who were likely to experience this disease, again, asymptomatically or is a mild flu, protect the most vulnerable,

build herd immunity, and then sound the all-clear once you have herd immunity.

And

we never had that conversation, Bill.

One reason we didn't was in England, Boris Johnson wanted to do that, but a study by Imperial College that predicted massive numbers of deaths freaked him out.

They ended up with locking down.

And now what they've done is we've all done, we've exhausted everybody.

And we now face the prospect of a second wave down the road as everyone wants to come out and go to the bar and understandably mix together again.

So what do we do if there is a second wave?

You know, South Korea was very tough with tracing, testing.

They did it all great.

And then they did have a second wave.

So it showed that even that didn't really work.

Now that we have decimated so many industries, I mean, hospitals and colleges and the restaurants and retail, show business,

you know, I don't know how many businesses you could destroy at once.

I mean, you can keep putting people into a lifeboat, but eventually that makes the lifeboat sink.

So what happens if there is a second wave in the fall?

What would you think we should do?

Well, I think what's going to happen by default, Bill, is that Basically, Trump has talked like we're being China, testing, tracing.

We're actually acting though like we're going to be sedent sweden um and go for herd immunity um we're preparing to do neither though actually and we're talking like we're superior to both and i think that the rubber will meet the road in the fall if there is a second wave and when you listen to dr fauci i mean he's basically said there will be a second wave and when you look at people and this has been my argument right now.

I'm really, I so understand, I've understood from the beginning the need for people to save livelihoods as well as lives.

And I understand people want to come out now and they want to mix.

And the reason I wrote that Mother Nature column was be smart, respect Mother Nature.

Yes, go out, but don't go into crowds.

Continue to wear a mask.

Continue to socially distance.

Play the odds, at least reduce the chances that you will get this disease symptomatically or asymptomatically and pass it on to someone else.

And I frankly, I don't know what will happen if it comes back in the fall.

I think if that happens, Bill, we're probably just going to throw up our hands and go for herd immunity, hopefully protect the vulnerable, and hopefully not overwhelm our hospital systems.

And I'll add one more thing: get your immune system in better shape.

It's within people's ability to do that, which is what I'm going to talk about with my next guest.

But always great to see you, Tom.

Always great to read you.

Thank you for doing what you do, and I hope to see you in person soon.

Thanks, Bill.

You too.

I really appreciate it.

Take care.

Okay, my next guest is a family physician and best-selling author of The Fat Burn Fix.

Please welcome Dr.

Kate Shanahan to your homes.

Hello there, Dr.

Kate.

Can I call you Dr.

Kate?

Yes, please.

Okay, so I'm going to start with what we have in common.

I think Cornell, right?

Yeah, okay.

Biochemistry, study biochemistry there.

Biochemistry and genetics there at Cornell.

I was in the cannabis cultivation program in the undergrad school.

The other thing we have in common, I think, is food

and thinking that food is very important to your health and thinking that America doesn't mention that enough.

I know you were the nutritionist for the Lakers, right?

Yes, of course.

Yes.

I read in several sources recently that only 12% of Americans are metabolically healthy.

Since that is your area of expertise, diet and metabolic health, what does that mean to be metabolically healthy or unhealthy?

So there isn't even a standard definition for metabolism in the medical education.

So that's just, I say this just to give you an idea of how far we are from recognizing what the connection between diet and health, because metabolism is that connection.

So,

when people are metabolically healthy, we kind of generally understand it as you don't have diabetes and you are normal weight.

And that's a good start, but we actually don't really define health in this country.

So, we don't define metabolic health.

We do define metabolic disease, and we've got a few like common familiar diseases.

Again, everybody knows that diabetes and obesity are associated with diet and have something to do with metabolism.

But it turns out that the immune system hugely has to do the health of your immune system and the ability of your body to fight off viruses like the coronavirus has to do hugely with your metabolism because your metabolism determines whether or not you're

whether or not you're burning, you're using energy efficiently, whether or not your body body fat is the primary source of fuel for your body.

And we're really running our bodies on the wrong fuel, is the essence of it.

Am I right?

I mean, we certainly know sugar.

I keep talking about sugar.

It's the first thing I said when the crisis happened.

Stop eating sugar.

No one listened to me.

Yes, well, sugar.

There's a lot of doctors who agree with that 100%.

So we are still beating that drum.

But the other fuel that is the wrong fuel is the kind of fat that we have in our body fat.

And that's something that not enough people are aware of, and almost nobody's even talking about it.

So, when I say the kind of fat, I'm talking about

where did your fats come from?

And it turns out that in this country over the past several generations, we've been eating more and more factory-produced seed oils and almost completely cutting out the whole fat-based foods, like

the animal foods.

When you go to a grocery store these days and you try to buy like regular hamburger, most of it now is 95% lean.

There's not very much

red meat that hasn't been trimmed of the fat.

The chicken, most of it and most of what people know how to cook is boneless, skinless.

Many of the dairy products like yogurt are fat-free.

You'd be hard pressed to find a flavored yogurt with that isn't fat-free fat-free or low-fat, with a normal amount of fat in it.

So we've taken all this fat that was part of food out of our diet.

And we aren't eating any less fat.

We're eating actually about the same amount of fat, which is between 30 and 50% of most people's diets is.

And fat is not bad.

I think, let me stop you there.

I think people think fat equals I get fat.

Fat is not what makes you fat.

Sugar and carbs, which of course become sugar in the body, that's what makes you fat.

People hear nowadays about the ketogenic diet.

What's that?

Ketogenic.

That means run your body on fat.

Fat is the most efficient fuel to run your body on, right?

And you're saying we're eating the wrong kinds when we have, we're talking about canola oil, right?

We're talking about corn oil, soy oil, sunflower oil, things that they didn't have 50, 100 years ago.

And we're conducting this massive experiment of running our body on the wrong fuel.

It truly is an experiment.

And

nobody knows that they've been participating in it that's the big problem and so that's why i tell people uh for the company that i work for i've been telling people that the best thing that you can do to boost your immune system is to stop eating these seed oils and when i first started working here nobody knew what seed oils are but i've got them trained now there's eight of them i call them the hateful eight and you don't it's hard to memorize them but i do have resources on my website that make it real easy when you're shopping to avoid these things.

Well, I just mentioned the top four, I think.

And I think what people have to understand is that they're in everything.

Just like sugar is in everything.

Just because you're not eating, you know, cake doesn't mean you're not getting tons of sugar because it's in salad dressing.

It's in ketchup.

It's in everything.

And so are these oils that you're talking about.

And I think what people have to understand is, and I know they hate to hear this, but junk food is not just the junk food that we all think of as junk food the supermarket is mostly

it's mostly that's not making you healthy i know it sounds elitist because not everybody can go to whole foods uh but i don't say though at whole foods bill a lot of people think that they think that whole foods is looking out for them but if you look at the salad dressings and

you're gonna be you're gonna have a hard time finding one that actually has olive oil even the ones that will say on the front made with olive oil when you turn it around, olive oil is like listed after soy or canola or one of the other hateful eight vegetable oils.

Okay, so this is very important.

I think we have to, in order to get this country back moving again, end the fear.

And the fear is not going to go away because, well, first of all, the media loves fear.

And they're always finding, and there are, I'm not saying it doesn't happen.

They're finding younger people, people under 40, let's say, under 50, who die from coronavirus, and they do.

Coronavirus, which often brings on something else, and I know you're going to talk about that.

But what I read, so interesting that what you said is that you're willing to stake your reputation that anyone who is of the younger set who has died of this,

it's not because they're unlucky.

I think we have this idea that you just might get struck by lightning

coronavirus, the way you would get struck by lightning.

And you are saying, no, anyone who dies from this who is not an very elderly person, it's because they are

metabolically unhealthy, because they don't even realize it.

Maybe they're not obese.

You're saying you don't have to be obese or have diabetes to have this sort of metabolic health.

Could you explain that?

Yes.

So what's going on is that

The virus itself is not actually what's killing the younger people.

What's killing the younger people is is the inflammation that comes when your immune system tries to get rid of the virus, but your body fat has been saturated with these highly unstable fatty acids that come from eating all these seed oils.

And so that's what I would stake my reputation on is you show me one person who's been avoiding these seed oils for five years, one person under 60 who's had a serious case of corona, where they were in the ICU or whether they died um and and because i don't think i don't think there is one i'm what i'm saying is that most that the underlying conditions like we've kind of got few of them nailed like the diabetes and fatty liver and even prediabetes most of the people who are like in the media and saying i'm healthy i don't understand why i got so sick with this thing

They either have been have prediabetes that hasn't been diagnosed because more than half of people with prediabetes just aren't told by their doctor or they might have fatty liver but the underlying condition that underlies all these underlying conditions including hypertension including heartburn

is having body fat that's saturated with these unstable inflammation prone fatty acids from seed oils from living on them because we are living on them and they just build up over years in our body fat and make it increasingly hyperinflammatory it's interesting the way we often demonize things in health.

Health is very trendy.

I don't know if people think of it that way, but it is.

It's worse in the clothing industry sometimes.

If we were doing this show in the 80s, it would be all about carbo up, get as much carbs in you as you can.

I mean, 15 years ago, they were saying trans fats was what we should eat.

That's margarine.

Now they say, and I think it's the truth, those are the worst kind.

I think this is what you're saying.

And another thing they demonize, the sun, which you need sun, not too much, but yes, you need sun.

It's not evil.

Germs themselves, it is natural in the world to encounter germs.

You actually need to.

And cholesterol.

I think that's one of your big issues, right?

Is that we actually sometimes have too low cholesterol.

Somebody got it in their head that we had to just get rid of all cholesterol.

First of all, tell it, what is cholesterol?

It's one of the most important things in the body, is it not?

Yes, cholesterol is a stabilizer molecule that helps every single one of your cell membranes maintain, like, do its job.

And cholesterol is a building block also for important hormones like cortisol and testosterone and estrogen.

And your brain is just absolutely loaded with cholesterol.

And one of the interesting things that they've already discovered in Wuhan, where they're doing a lot more research on how to predict who's really going to get sick from coronavirus, is they found that the people who were hospitalized had very low cholesterol levels.

And the people who died were more likely to have their cholesterol levels actually drop while they were trying to fight off the infection.

And the people who survived were able to bring their cholesterol levels back up to normal.

And the connection between cholesterol and seed oils is that these seed oils actually will drop your cholesterol level.

And nobody really knows exactly why or how it happens, but it's been known for decades.

And in fact, that's why

doctors even recommend them sometimes, because

we have this pervasive, ridiculous fear of cholesterol, which is something that every single cell in our body needs.

And it's in like most foods that are

animal origin.

Suddenly, we have to drop our cholesterol by eating fats that came from seeds.

And by the way, the only way we could extract them from seeds was by extremely harsh processing in a factory, which generates toxins that sit there in the bottle while it's on the shelf.

And then, of course, you eat them, and they are so toxic that they distort your normal microflora.

So, these things, these seed oils, they make you more susceptible to infection in numerous ways, starting with like where they enter your body.

They actually,

they distort the microflora so that we have more of the pathogenic type of bacteria and fewer of the good type of bacteria that actually do play a role in fending off viruses, it seems.

Okay, so I guess the bottom line is try to eat realer food.

I know it's hard in this country.

We stack the deck against people.

We don't subsidize the right things.

We don't seem to care.

And, you know, the people who make the cures for the bad food, I guess they're happy about it too, the pharmaceutical industry sometimes, but we won't go into that.

We got to go.

I appreciate you coming on and explaining this to us.

And I hope the people out there eat realer food.

Thank you so much, Doc.

You're welcome.

And Bill, if I may, I just want to, one thing we can do that's a positive from all of this is if we do change our diets, we are,

this horrible coronavirus makes us finally take our diet seriously.

Right.

We're taking a sad song and making it better.

Okay.

Thank you so much, Doc.

Take care.

Thank you.

So I saw an article recently that I thought was pretty ridiculous because it was about how

we haven't had any school shootings in the last two months.

Yeah, because there's nobody in school.

And LA is boasting with pride about how our air quality is better than ever for obvious reasons.

I saw a headline that said in New York, there hasn't been a pedestrian death in 58 days because no one is out.

So I asked the staff to calm the local papers to see what other municipalities are saying about what they're proud of.

Would you like to hear some?

I'm sure you do.

Okay, for example, in Tallahassee, it's been 46 days without someone on bath salt trying to fuck an alligator.

Impressive.

In New Orleans, they've gone 24 days without a topless chick falling off a balcony.

In Mississippi, it's been 28 days without someone hooking up at their family reunion.

In Seattle, they've gone 45 days since someone on a Prius ran over someone on a scooter.

Seattle, Fire Island has gone 16 days without someone in an emergency room saying, I must have sat on it.

I'm going to wait an extra beat for that laugh at home.

In Venice Beach, right here in California, in LA, 52 days without a fight between a deadbeat with a lizard

and a deadbeat with a parrot.

Salt Lake City has gone 61 days since a Mormon got his necktie caught in a bicycle.

On the Jersey Shore, it's been 60 days without a fight over what someone was looking at.

And in San Francisco, it's been a record five weeks since a child has asked, Mommy, why does that lady have a beard?

In Oklahoma, 34 days since someone tried to kill a spider with a blowtorch.

And Tampa, Tampa, Florida, 48 days without a junior high school kid getting blown by his teacher in a minivan.

Okay, you know him.

He is the Academy Award-winning filmmaker and host of the podcast Rumble with Michael Moore, my good friend, the icon, Michael Moore.

Michael, how are you?

Are you in that apartment of yours I know so well?

I, yes, I am in this New York City apartment that sits somewhere on top of actually on top of a movie theater.

It's on the main floor.

Oh, that's

convenient.

But it's closed, so I can't go see any movies.

Oh, of course.

What isn't?

I hope you're getting out a little

now that we're on the movie.

Yes, I've gotten out a little bit, but I really have been pretty much confined.

This is day,

I don't even know what day 6 is, I think.

I don't know what day it is.

But I do, I'm lucky.

I have a narrow deck outside the window, the door.

And so I've been going out there and walking a mile or two every day.

But it looks, I'm sure, very ridiculous to the buildings, the apartments across the street or whatever, that there's this guy just walking

back and forth.

For no reason, I look like, who was that guy, the mob guy in the village?

Yeah, Jim Chin.

Yeah.

Remember, he walked around in the road.

That's all that's missing from this.

It looks like a crazy guy

fucking

a deck.

I wanted to ask you about the politics of this state we're in right now, because there's a new poll came out today that said Biden leading Trump nationally by 11, but CNN reported last week that he was actually losing in the battleground states that will determine the election.

I thought this was an interesting demographic, that

Biden is killing Trump in the demographic of people who hate them both.

I'm not kidding about that, so that's good.

That's the kind of enthusiasm we need.

But as someone like me who was last time out kind of worried that Trump would win, and you predicted he would,

what's your crystal ball saying now?

Because I would have thought a president who handled this crisis the way Trump had would be in the teens and he's in the mid-40s.

Oh, yeah.

No, no, he's going to do well.

He hasn't lost any of his support.

He will do well, and none of us should take him for granted.

We need to behave as if he will win a second term.

Anybody who right now just went, oh no,

you're really part of the problem because

you're not taking this seriously.

This, he knows exactly what he's doing.

He was in Michigan this week.

It's the third time he's been in Michigan in three weeks.

So he knows, he believes that he's going to somehow pull this off.

But the polls you cited, very similar to four years ago.

Hillary was,

you know, decently, if not well ahead of Trump.

But the polls also showed that she was doing well in those battleground states.

And so what I think this means this time is we have the possibility of winning this time.

But win or lose, there's no doubt in my mind that Biden, or whoever the Democratic candidate is, just in case he's not,

you know, it's not official yet, but

Hillary won by 3 million votes in the popular vote, as we call it.

I think Biden, he'll win by 5 million.

I think a lot of people are going to come out that stayed home mistakenly last time.

They're going to come out this time.

But I think Trump could still win the Electoral College.

And so all of us have to be

really in fighting mode because he is.

And

he knows his people.

So he just has to, he will get all that 44, 46% out.

He just needs a couple more percent of the people on his side who stayed home last time.

Yeah.

And he's so upfront about how

the less people vote, the better it is for Republicans.

He literally said,

if we had more people voting, you'd never have a Republican in this country elected again.

That's not the subtext of what he said.

That is actually what he said.

You got to give it to this guy.

He does speak his inner monologue.

Yes, and that's why if you listen to him and if you take him at his word, understand that he is a lot of the time telling the truth, not the greater truth, his truth.

He believes it.

He'd pass a lie detector if you wired him up.

And he's right.

If we make it easy for people to vote, if we don't have voter suppression, Republicans are going to lose because the majority of the country does not support the Republican agenda.

The majority of the country are not climate deniers.

The majority of the country believes women should be paid the same as men.

The majority of the country, go down the whole list.

The majority of the country takes the liberal, center-left, Democratic Party position on most issues.

So the only way Republicans can win, and this has been true now for a few elections, is to cheat, is to somehow game it, rig it, do whatever they need to do.

In this case, what I'm worried about, Bill, is that last time, remember, he threatened that he kept saying the whole election is going to be rigged.

And

what did he, he said, my Second Amendment people,

I appeal to my Second Amendment people, the gun people,

to get ready, because this is going to be a rigged election.

And the funny thing is, is that what he actually thought was, he was certain he would win the popular vote, because of course everybody loves him.

That's what a malignant narcissist would believe.

But he was worried that the Clintons were somehow going to rig the Electoral College, and that's how he was going to lose.

This time, he,

he doesn't even have to, he's already got his gun guys, the guys with the guns.

We saw this in Michigan the last couple of weeks, showing up at the state capitol with their long, their long arms and threatening

everybody to the point where the governor last Thursday just shut the legislature down, called the day off, was so afraid.

I want to appeal to people to not be afraid of these guys.

with the guns.

I went to high school with them.

I know them.

They want to kill Bambi.

That's their idea of a real fight.

Them and a deer.

If the deer were ever armed,

if it was a fair fight, these guys would never be in the woods.

It's so important that liberals, who generally are not gun owners, not be afraid, because that's all they're trying to do now.

Liberate Michigan, liberate Minnesota.

You know,

good on all of you for showing up with those guns.

um he's just trying to scare liberals because liberals get scared easy don't be scared um

you know we are the majority there's more of us than there are of them the only way that they're going to pull it off is somehow he's able to cancel the election or postpone it that is what we have to fight against because i'm certain that's what's going on in his head right now well one way he wants to rig the vote is he's kind of declared war on the post office because for example Michigan sent out ballots last week to everybody and Trump his response was to threaten to withhold COVID aid to the state of Michigan in response which of course sounds to me like the exact same playbook from Ukraine withholding aid that's one of his big tricks except this is our country

in the middle of a pandemic but he seems to be very afraid of mail mail-in votes that everyone and I don't know if that's true that We had an election flipped here in California, the 25th district, which was Katie Hill's district, the woman who was resigned because of a sex scandal, something no Republican would ever do.

That it was a picture of her with a bong and a chick, so she had to go.

Stupid,

typical, stupid Democratic move.

Okay, so that a special election, the Republican won.

Nobody never heard his name, Mike Garcia, never heard of him.

Didn't do any campaigning, of course.

It was all mail-in.

So the mail-in didn't hurt the Republicans Republicans in that one.

I'm not so sure Trump should be afraid of mail-ins.

I mean, his voters are older.

They like the mail.

Yeah.

But we also want to protect the post office.

Let me just say that, because the post office is, you know, it's really part of our homeland security in a sense that if

the government needed to send anything to every American tomorrow,

everybody, everybody has daily contact with, there's only one person from the U.S.

government that has contact with you every day, and that's your mailwoman or mailman.

And the ability to actually, let's say, for instance, there was medicine that we all needed to take immediately.

The only way to ship that out is through the U.S.

Post Office, and it can be in everybody's mailbox the next day.

So

it's very important to protect the post office just for our own security.

But he, listen, he thinks

whether he understands what happened in California or not, it doesn't matter.

All that he needs to do is follow what Fox and Friends is telling him.

And that's good enough.

The fact that, see, like a lot of people don't believe he's taking this drug, the anti-malaria drug.

I believe him.

I believe Trump when he says

I think he's taking it.

And

he's so in such a state right now.

And I think he knows that if it was a fair election, he's going to lose.

So he's got to do whatever he can to gin this up in whatever way to make sure that that doesn't happen.

And going after Michigan, a state that voted for him, makes, again, no sense.

But what he's really mad at in Michigan, that woman, as he calls her, the governor, what happened after two years of Trump in the 2018 election, the people of Michigan threw out all the top Republicans and voted in the top four people that run the state of Michigan.

The governor's a woman, the lieutenant governor is black, there's a lesbian who's the attorney general, and a single mom is the secretary of state.

That's who runs Michigan.

There's not a single white guy anywhere in there.

And I think he doesn't like to deal with that.

He doesn't, there's, I

don't understand what it is with him and women, but boy, that is that's worse than anything that he has to deal with these women in Michigan.

And, you know, I hope he gets his comeuppance for it.

But that will only happen if people do their job.

And let me say this:

it's really incumbent upon Biden here.

People like you and I,

people are, you and I are not going to go.

We can go on TV and say, hey, everybody, get out there and vote.

That's not how it's going to happen.

Biden has got to inspire people to get out and vote.

Tell them what you're going to do for them.

Use this pandemic to show all the things that have been exposed about how this society of ours runs and how awful and deadly Trump has been.

We're at this point, we're almost at 100,000 dead Americans.

All of this could have been not prevented, but not this many people needed to die.

No.

Not at all.

So let me ask you about him going away, what I call my issue,

because it's the thing I can't seem to let go of and have been trying to get people.

Is there an issue, the lack of belief in a deity?

That That was my old issue.

For the last four years, it's been he's not going to lose.

He's not going to leave even if he loses.

I'd like to present this as evidence a little.

They asked Jared Kushner last week, Time Magazine did, about November 3rd, which is Election Day, and the election happening on that day.

And he said, I'm not sure I can commit one way or another.

Right now, that's the plan.

Now, he later retracted that and blamed the error on being an overwhelmed dipshit who has no business and being in government.

But he did say that.

I think it's indicative.

You mentioned how Trump was railing about it's rigged, and that was about an election he won.

Now, I've heard you say, Yeah, you think I'm right, maybe that he's not going to leave, but then the cops will take pleasure in ousting him.

Have you ever seen him in front of cops?

It's like James Brown at the Apollo.

No, no, no.

The cops across America love him.

Okay.

It's the cops in D.C.

First of all, the D.C.

police force is mostly black.

So right there, he's got a hope that the African-American police force in D.C.

is going to protect him when he says, I'm not leaving, even though

it's not to them to oust him.

And

how about the FBI?

He's pissed all over the FBI, the CIA,

the people at the Pentagon.

I mean, he's got.

He's created a lot of animosity.

But look at all the other people he's pissed on.

You cannot name a senator starting with Lindsey Graham who he hasn't said horrible things about and somehow they still wind up being his allies.

Okay, well, listen, if that's the case, if the police don't do their job, there's you and me, Bill.

I mean, you and I are going to go there.

At least

I'm inviting you to come with me.

But we are going to go there.

And I think we can get thousands, millions of Americans to show up and escort him in the

best eviction ever that's taken place in the United States and remove him from that building.

He's not staying.

I mean, we, everybody watching this right now, we all agree on that, right?

We're not just going to sit back and take that after

it says he's not going to leave.

Again, but you talk about, and I have talked about him calling on his Second Amendment friends.

Do you think they're not going to be there when we show up there?

I think if it didn't turn violent, it would be a great ending to a Michael Moore movie.

But I think it's going to be a different kind of movie because, again, we are not going to be the only ones in the streets when he is saying, this was rigged and I shouldn't go.

I would hope that most, again, these guys I went to high school with with their big guns,

that they know better.

They can see the end game of this.

They're not going to win.

And they're going to end up, I mean, they're living their white life in their white neighborhoods.

If they end up being arrested and tried for doing what you suggested, they will then be moved to a black and brown neighborhood called the United States prison system.

That's assuming that we have the old country that we've always had.

I'm not so sure that we still have that one.

Trump this week, this month, has gotten rid of four inspector generals of different agencies.

Impeachment turned out to be a horrible thing.

If I knew what I knew now.

He bullied.

He bullied Mueller.

He threatened him.

And Mueller got scared and wouldn't even bring him in to be interrogated.

Didn't bring him before the grand jury.

Didn't bring Don Jr.

anybody.

Mueller was so afraid

to do his job.

Then Comey, then he threatens Comey.

And what does Comey?

Okay, but I'm talking about this.

That's the investigation on Hillary.

But just the impeachment.

You know, I mean,

if I could do it over again, I wouldn't because it just emboldened him.

Now he can conduct this war on accountability and nobody even barely made the papers.

I bet you most people are watching this and going, wow, I hadn't heard that because the news is all I think there might be five now, Inspector Generals at last count.

So nine watchdogs, best way to take over an election or not leave the White House.

I agree.

But also, not just all the other things that people are watching us tonight don't know that happened in the last few weeks.

The Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, suspended.

Suspended.

We don't have time to do all this investigation.

All those people gone.

And let me tell you, if and when the pandemic ends, and if it does

open up or end even in his term, those inspectors from whether the inspector generals, whether the people that do our clean air and clean water, they're not coming back, not under Donald Trump.

This is his way to move this thing permanently.

It makes him very dangerous.

And did I hear everybody at home say that they would join Bill and I in D.C.

on January 20th next year?

It's my birthday.

It's your birthday.

We'll have a birthday bash

in D.C.

and remove this motherfucker from the white house all right thank you michael always great to see you and uh hopefully hopefully things will be different next time we meet michael i'm counting on it thanks bill all right take care

okay now it's time for new rules everybody new rules new rules ah you're screaming at home

Okay, new rule, I get that stores need to remind customers to social distance, but this is a little much.

I want to buy shoes, not play Twister.

And if I go the wrong way, will I hear this?

New Rule, the newspapers printing the story about an 81-year-old man who's been accused of killing another man during a sadomasochistic sex act.

Must stop burying the lead.

Look, being in the best possible health should be on all our minds these days.

And if you're 81 and have the strength to fuck and then kill another grown man, it's clear you're doing something right.

I'm not saying release him and give him a book deal, but maybe someone can ask him about his workout routine.

New Rule, the Virginia restaurant that's filling its empty tables with 1950s era mannequins, has to admit this is more depressing than leaving the tables empty.

Though I must say you nailed the 50s part where the wives are clearly bored and the husbands are obviously gay.

New Roll, since we don't have any sports to watch, let's start broadcasting fights between people who don't want to wear a mask and people who insist they do.

Two men enter Costco, only one leaves.

Don't think of it as another sign of America coming apart.

Think of it as America's dumber version of Mexican wrestling.

New Roll, the South Korean soccer team that used sex dolls to fill the empty stands, stands doesn't have to apologize for that but they do have to explain why they made them wear masks

one of the benefits of sex dolls is they're not going to give you the virus plus that face is perfect for a soccer game they all look like they're screaming goal

goal

And finally, new rule, you can't have so much money that my computer's spellcheck doesn't know what to call you.

Jeff Bezos is poised to be the world's first trillionaire, the headline says.

Even my phone was like, that can't be right.

But it probably is, because we now live in an age not of innovation, but of domination.

Startups.

are in a 13-year slump and financing is down 22% from eight years ago because in the online marketplace, Amazon has become the only game in town.

And that was before an event happened that made everyone stay home and order everything online.

Yeah, I mean, predictably, once the virus hit and America locked itself upstairs like a babysitter hiding from a slasher,

sure, of course, the rest of the economy cratered.

But Amazon's stock price is up 25%.

That's what I call asymptomatic.

Places like J.

Crew and Stage Stores, Neiman Marcus, JCPenney, Sears, Pier One, they're all throwing in the towel, as it seems one of the unintended consequences of our corona response is everyone going out of business at the same time, except Amazon.

While we're all inside, getting softer and hairier, it's out there getting bigger and stronger.

And if we don't do something, we're going to come out of our holes and discover that there's only one store and it knows where you live.

You know, there was a famous folk song from the 1950s called 16 Tons

and like all folk songs it was horrible.

But it did raise awareness about the problem of having just one store because it was about the old mining towns where the workers only had the one company store.

The chorus went 16 tons and what do you get?

Another day older and deeper in debt.

St.

Peter don't call me because I can't go.

I own my soul to the company stow.

Like I said, folk songs are horrible.

But at least back then, we understood that getting everything from one store was a bad thing.

But that was BP, before prime.

You might be surprised to learn that Elizabeth Warren had a plan to break up Amazon.

And I say, let's go for it.

Like Senator Warren, I'm a capitalist to my core.

But But when a company gets so big it smothers all competitors in the crib, that's anti-capitalist.

Like when Amazon destroyed the startup diapers.com by cutting Amazon's own diaper costs below cost.

By one estimate, Bezos lost $100 million in his quest to corner the online diaper market.

But he owns it now.

Which raises the question, what is wrong with this man?

Jesus, okay, you had one brilliant idea, that when people get drunk at home, they'll go online and buy shit they don't need.

Great.

Congratulations, you won.

You're the best at making money.

But one of the rules of the game, of capitalism, is you can win big, but not so big there's no game.

We've been through this before, a century ago.

when John D.

Rockefeller was personally worth 2% of America's GDP, and his Standard oil company became such an overwhelming monopoly that Congress wrote the Sherman Antitrust Act to break it up.

But Rockefeller had only one product, oil.

Amazon sells 119 million different items.

And when one supplier brings you everything, you're not a customer.

You're a dependent.

And look, I use Amazon.

Of course, everyone does.

I'm not saying Amazon is pure, unadulterated evil.

That's Wells Fargo.

But Amazon does prey upon the Achilles heel of the American character.

We will sell our soul for convenience.

Liberals are supposed to be environmentalists.

They must notice how wrong it is for us to do so much of our shopping in such a wasteful, piggish manner.

Does anyone really need a grill cover to get to you overnight and in a separate box from something you ordered ordered the day before from the same warehouse?

When I was a kid, getting a package was a rare event.

Now kids think the UPS man is their dad.

Why do socks need a protective air cushion?

I'm going to shove my foot in it and stomp on it all day.

They ship a disposable razor in a box the size of a coffin and enough plastic to choke a whale, which it eventually does.

And I haven't even mentioned that Amazon often pays no taxes and bathroom breaks for their workers are so infrequent they have to pee into bottles, which are then resold as kombucha.

Maybe this is just the hunter-gatherer in me speaking, but someday I hope to leave the cave again and I'm going to want to shop somewhere in person.

So

this weekend, be a hero and go out.

to an actual store and patronize some other business besides Amazon.

And let's see if we can't get America back on its feet again because we're looking pretty raggedy.

And you know the old saying, if the shoe fits, you probably didn't get it online.

Okay, that's our show.

I want to thank my guest Thomas Friedman, Dr.

Kate Shanahan, and Michael Moore.

We'll be back next week.

Someday from the studio, probably from my backyard.

Thank you, folks.

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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