Ep. #521: Dr. Anne Rimoin, Nicholas Kristof

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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 so much.

Thank you.

I love you too.

It's an exciting day.

Tomorrow, a rare event, leap day tomorrow.

And

the way the stock market is going, there's going to be a lot of leaping.

The market lost $6 trillion

this week.

I know.

Pretty soon that adds up to real money.

Bloomberg is not even sure anymore he can buy the country.

I mean, it's.

And of course, that's because of the coronavirus.

Now, look.

Is this serious?

Yes, it is.

The CDC is now calling it the COVID-19, and you know a disease is serious when they give it a rap name.

But panic?

No.

We should not panic, and it doesn't merit panic.

First of all, we live in L.A.

The air is so toxic.

Anything that comes out of anybody's mouth is killed immediately.

It doesn't, germs, viruses.

But will life change?

Yes, it will.

You just have to take more precautions now.

I mean, just assume everyone is infectious.

The same warning they give contestants on the bachelor.

I tell you.

One person in this country who was way ahead of this, Melania.

When someone tries to touch her hand, boy, she slaps it away.

She knows what's up.

Now, fortunately, her husband Donald Trump is in charge.

And when I say fortunately, I mean, oh, fuck.

This would be a nice time, wouldn't it, to have a president who doesn't talk out of his ass and think with his dick and eat with his hands.

But we don't have that.

We don't have that.

We have a president who thinks this coronavirus is a minor annoyance like the common cold or the Constitution of the United States.

One who appoints as the person to head up this massive medical emergency Mike Pence,

who doesn't even believe in evolution.

Really?

It's like making Jared ambassador to Funky Town.

No.

No, we have one.

We have a president who just keeps telling us crazy lies that contradict everything the CDC is saying.

He says the virus is ending.

They say, of course not.

It's inevitable.

It's going up.

Who are you going to believe?

Infectious disease experts or the guy who fucked Stormy Daniels without a condom?

Yeah, because that's Trump's attitude.

Can you blame him?

His attitude is, I fuck raw.

I raw dog porn stars.

I eat a diet that would gag a raccoon.

I won an election where I got the fewest votes.

Fuck you, science.

Fuck you, math.

That's his attitude.

I commit crimes and my lawyers go to jail.

Reality is for losers.

He said yesterday, the virus, it's going to disappear.

One day, like a miracle, it will just disappear.

Really, Mr.

President?

Because just hoping that it'll be gone, I've tried that with you and it doesn't work.

So listen.

Now listen.

We've known each other a long time, right?

Right?

We've known each other.

Okay, so I'm going to tell you my message.

You're going to hear some scary things.

And some of them are really going to be scary.

Today it was in the news.

In Hong Kong, they think a dog tested positive.

They think it's just environmental contamination.

But just in case, I told my two dogs, bark into your elbow.

And do not drink out of the same toilet.

But

just please please remember what the great Jimmy Breslin once said.

The message of TV, he said, is stay inside and watch more TV.

It is very important to remember all the other times that cable news was telling you that we were all going to die.

SARS and MERS and Ebola and swine flu and bird flu and this flu and that flu.

Please say it with me now.

Flus will not replace us.

Flus will not replace us.

Thank you very very much.

We've got a great show.

Jane Flogg, Buck Sexton, and E.J.

Deion are here.

And a little later, we'll be speaking with author and economist Nicholas Kristoff.

But first up, she is a professor of epidemiology.

Oh, I knew I was going to fuck that one up.

I had a real role on it, too, didn't I?

Like I knew.

Professor of epidemiology

at UCLA's Fielding School of Public Health and director of the Center for Global and Immigrant Health.

Please welcome Dr.

Anne Ramoyne.

Dr.

Ann.

Thank you so much.

Oh, we're not.

I was going to bow.

See, I told everybody, not even fist bumps.

The Japanese had the right idea.

We don't know where that hand has been.

That's...

I don't mean you in particular, but you know, you're okay, right?

As far as you know.

How comfortable.

But look, I mean, I said it in a minute ago.

Life will change, right?

And it should.

First of all, you know what?

I never liked the handshake anyway.

I don't think it adds anything to anything, right?

Anybody who you really care about touching, you don't shake hands with.

Well, you know, there are lots of other things you can do.

Like I said, you could do the fist bump, you could do the Ebola elbow,

or you could just wave.

Yes.

Exactly.

There are even studies now or projects where they're trying to have handshake-free zones in hospitals just for the very same reason that we don't want to be transmitting disease.

And this was long before

this new coronavirus came.

I was told that during the Spanish flu in 1918, they stopped people, well, they tried to stop, they had a big campaign against spitting.

People used to just hackaloogie whenever.

You see, some still do.

But we don't, as a nation, we generally don't expect to rate.

Correct.

Correct.

Thank you.

So life is better post-epidemic.

Let's talk about the Spanish flu.

Because it got my attention that they said about 2%

of the world died in that one, or who got it.

Right.

And that seems to be the same number they're saying now for this.

I mean, I always heard the Spanish flu was a rough one.

And obviously, if the numbers are the same, would you say this is a good comparison?

Well, it's not time yet to compare this to the flu.

And not even the Spanish flu.

This is a different kind of virus, and we're still learning a lot about it.

I mean, listen, it's always scary when you have a new pathogen jumping from animals into a human population starting to spread.

And we just don't know enough about this disease yet to really make strong comparisons.

Because when we talk about the Spanish flu, we think, you know, we can talk about it from a very long distance.

And we know exactly how many cases there were.

We know now all about the epidemiology of the virus or the disease.

but back then we

didn't, and people were just as scared then as they were.

But if it's not a flu, what is it?

So it's a coronavirus.

And a coronavirus is different from an influenza virus.

Coronaviruses are a large family of viruses.

They also cause respiratory infections, but most of them are in animals, not in humans.

Yes.

What is it that humans will put anything in their mouth?

Seriously, I mean, isn't this, this started when someone ate a bat, and I was thinking, oh, these primitives.

And I remember Ozzie Osborne ate a bat before every show.

Well, it actually isn't coming directly from bats.

And same thing with SARS or MERS.

We think that these viruses originate in bats.

And then they jump to another species with SARS.

It was a civet cat.

With MERS, it seemed to be a camel.

And in this instance, we're not sure yet, but it seems like it might be a pangolin.

And so it comes from

a pangolin, which is a very small animal that it's actually the most trafficked animal in the world.

They're eating it?

They're eating it.

It looks like an armadillo.

They weren't eating the camel.

Well, people were

in areas where people

were using camels.

They were different.

Anyway.

No, but

you bring up a really good point.

These things often happen around wet markets.

These are open-air markets where you have animals.

And so you can imagine walking into these markets that happen everywhere in the world, but in particular in Asia and Africa, where you'll have, you know, you'll have bats in a cage, and then you'll have pangolins in a cage above it, or,

you know, civic cats in another one.

And so you're having all of these species altogether stressed, and they're spreading disease to each other.

And it's amazing what the human body can ingest and be okay.

Right?

It's true.

I mean, if you ever walk through markets just in this country, in a certain ethnic Chinatown, I've seen

shit on sticks and animals hanging.

I mean, it's like

our digestive system is almost too strong.

It can take so much that we'll just put any piece of shit in our mouth.

Well, you know, I often when I teach a class on epidemiology, I often use the example people, because I work on Ebola.

It's another thing that I spend a lot of time working on.

And

that is also a disease that crosses species from animals to humans.

And people often talk about, well, people eat bats, and how could they eat bats?

And I say, well, you know, I mean, culturally, people eat all sorts of things.

And most of the time, you're not getting a disease spilling over.

I mean, people eat meat, but you know, there's bad cow disease.

Well, yeah.

If you were the czar, the Mike Pence job, would you?

Crazy idea, you with your degrees at a title I can't even pronounce, but okay.

So would you stop planes from overseas, from certain countries from coming into here?

Well, I think, you know, these kinds of draconian measures of stopping travel, they don't really work at the end of the day.

I mean, listen, the virus is already here.

We already know that it's here and it's already spreading.

And the problem is when you really stop travel and you have all these travel bans, people find ways in and then you can't track them and then you don't know what's happening.

And so, you know, you have to be careful when you really start putting these rules in place that are supposed to stop people, and then people who really want to get in, they're going to find another way.

Also, it has so many problems with trade and

all these other diplomatic issues.

It doesn't necessarily make that much of a difference.

So there are better ways to be able to.

Can you get it twice?

That's a good question.

For this particular coronavirus, we don't know.

There are other coronaviruses where people have been able to be reinfected, but with this one, we don't know yet.

But don't you build up, isn't that the whole point?

Is that you get something or you get a vaccine for it and then you have the immunity?

Why doesn't it work after one time?

Well, you know, that just certain diseases do not

provide immunity after the fact, and which is why you can keep getting them.

You know, strep throat is another example you could get that again, right?

So right now we don't know.

It's very possible that you could have immunity at least for a period of time with this coronavirus.

But right now,

like so many things about this virus.

But you're very cheery about it.

I like that.

No, that's one reason I wanted to have you on.

I learned this word once, catastrophizing, when you make things that are not a catastrophe into a catastrophe, and that isn't helpful.

And we don't really, it's not even appropriate right now.

Is that correct?

No, you have to keep everything into perspective here.

And right now, we are learning what's happening.

We do not have widespread transmission here in the United States.

We're still trying to figure out

We're probably going to have a fair amount of spread here in the United States, but we don't know how much and we don't know where, and it's not going to happen overnight either.

No, but

what does happen if there are too many?

I mean, we only have a certain number of hospital beds, and we're not going to build one in a week like the Chinese.

Right, right.

Not that that was really a hospital.

But I don't know if we could even put up a room with beds.

We can't build

housing for the homeless.

So I don't have.

Well, you you know, you're bringing up a really.

I assume you're cheering that that's a bed.

No housing for the homeless.

Great.

Yeah, but you're bringing up a really good question.

What do we do if all the beds are filled and there's X thousands more people who need a respirator?

Right.

Well, so first of all, what is going to happen is we're not going to see, like I said, you're not going to have this happen all overnight.

Right.

We've had other bad flu seasons.

You know, we had the, we've already already had a pandemic year.

We had the H1N1 pandemic in 2009.

So we have hospitals prepared to a certain degree.

We know what they need to do.

They know what they need to do.

People have been preparing for this.

You know, you can set up makeshift hospitals as needed.

But I think that this really brings up the important point about pandemic preparedness and how important it is to be prepared.

And the problem has been is

there hasn't been good funding for this in a long time.

In fact, ever.

Now more.

But no administration has been good at funding pandemic preparedness.

Okay, can I ask you, it's a semi-political question, but it is a political show.

Bernie Sanders,

you know, when people

campaign for president, it's grueling.

They always get sick.

As you might imagine, they're in planes all day with that crappy air recirculating and you're run down.

Plus, he's 78.

He just had a heart attack.

Show this picture.

He's always in crowds touching a lot of people.

What's the over-under on him making it to election?

I mean, this does not.

This

honestly seems like a perfect storm for him not.

Well, you know,

the disease is definitely

people don't have as

successful

now you're not so cheery are you they don't have as successful outcomes

in in people that are older or who have comorbidities if you love Bernie don't touch him right well you know I would bet you that don't touch Bernie I would bet you that Bernie is doing what everybody else should be doing right now which is washing your hands regularly I don't but not touching your face I don't know if the crowd I go into the crowd and touch a million people think and survive this or like I said life will change well life will change and that's yes and that's okay and and it is yeah right yeah but ultimately I would think my theory you have to be good about how you take care of yourself your best line of defense is it not your own immune system germs pathogens are ubiquitous you can't become Howard Hughes locked in an airtight room pissing into jars that's the only other alternative right

I mean, people who put hand sanitizer all over their hands all day, I've had more than one very smart doctor tell me that destroys the pH on the skin, makes it more permeable.

You have to have a good immune system.

Stop eating sugar.

Wouldn't that be a great start?

Well, you know, there are so many things that you can be doing.

In short, sugar can cause inflammation like so many other things.

Smoking is a lot of fun.

Isn't it the worst thing for your immune system?

Is sugar?

There are so many things that are bad for immune system.

But wouldn't sugar be number one?

Sugar is

on the list of the top things that you should probably decrease.

But, you know,

smoking is also bad for you.

And people should exercise more and they should eat well in general.

And I think that that's really important.

And so I agree with you.

Being healthy and doing everything you can to make sure you are healthy, including maybe eating less sugar, would be a good thing to do.

No sugar.

But

finally,

whatever it is, they always end, don't they?

They do.

They do.

It will end.

It runs its course, and then it ends.

Well, I mean, most of these viruses will disappear, although there are some instances where they become endemic.

Let's end on that.

Let's say they always.

All right.

Thank you, Doctor.

I am bowing to you.

Let's meet our family.

Let's pretend it always is.

It's much better to live in reality.

Come on.

All right.

He is the New York Times best-selling author of the new book, Code Red, How Progressives and Moderates Can Unite to Save Our Country.

E.J.

Dion, great to see you back here, E.J.

All right, here's the chair of the Nebraska Democratic Party and author of Harvest the Vote, How Democrats Can Win Again in Rural America.

Jane Clebb.

Jane, how you doing?

And he is a former CIA officer and is now the nationally syndicated host of the Buck Sexton Show.

Buck Sexton back with us.

Buck, how gentlemen.

Okay.

So Donald Trump had a rally a few hours ago.

He is calling the coronavirus their new hoax.

So I'm going to look on the bright side of this and say that I think the coronavirus is going to change people's views of Donald Trump finally.

Not for the better.

Not for the better.

There are, I think, there are two simultaneous conversations that are happening from the president's side and really across the country.

One of them is this is one of the very few issues out there, up there with foreign military invasion, right, where everybody goes, this is something we have to deal with.

I was at Long Island Railroad, JFK yesterday, people have got the masks on.

Everyone's freaked out.

Markets are tanking.

And nobody wants this to be a pandemic.

The administration doesn't want to be a pandemic.

So all of our interests are aligned.

That said, there are people who, even at this stage, we haven't had a single fatality on U.S.

soil, don't know the extent of the problem.

There are people who are trying to score political points and say things like, Chuck Schumer said the administration has no plan for this.

And that's just not true of any administration.

Okay, but he is lying his ass off about it.

Do you really not have?

I'm just he, Donald Trump has like one go-to, which is deny, which works.

You know, if someone accuses you of sexual assault, you can say they're not my type.

If somebody says, you know, accuses you, say, I didn't know them, and then they have a thousand pictures of them.

Wait a second.

Wait a second.

You would admit he lies his ass off.

And that's part of the charm.

I get it, because government is for trolling and making liberals cry their liberal tears.

But that's not so funny now, is it?

Do you really have no buyer's remorse with a guy who is lying who says we're going to have a vaccine soon when there isn't?

He's trying to cut.

But wait, he said there's going to be a vaccine, but there isn't.

Well, there will be a vaccine soon.

12 to 18.

That's not what he said.

First of all, our government is supposed to keep us healthy and safe, right?

And so for me, this is an exclamation point about how Donald Trump has not been running a government that is keeping us healthy and safe.

Whether it's the meat packing plants where they have increased the production line so you can essentially slaughter as many animals as you want and there's no risk to the workers' health on the line, or it means that the plant workers are now the one inspecting our meat rather than government inspecting the meat.

This is all happening under President Trump.

And I hope it's the exclamation point.

That was going on before President Trump.

But you know, not the increase of.

I mean, the reason I think your theory might be right is in a time like this you want a president who when he talks to you you have some confidence that he's telling the truth.

That he doesn't set stuff up.

That if

If he lies about how often he plays golf or his crowd size when the pictures are right there, how can you trust what he says about this?

And you need trust in the White House.

But the other is you want an administration that actually believes that sometimes experts are to be called on to solve a problem.

And

Bill Cohen,

Bill Cohen, the former Republican senator and Secretary of Defense, once said, government is the enemy until you need a friend, and experts are nasty elitists until you need somebody who knows what they're talking about to help you solve a problem.

And this administration

doesn't like experts in government.

A clip.

This is John Kennedy.

He is not that John Kennedy.

He is the Republican senator from Louisiana.

He's a Republican, and he's been a big defender of Donald Trump.

Here he is talking to our acting head of Homeland Security.

I didn't even know the guy's name because these temps come through the.

I mean, I'm just.

They're permanently out of the way.

I'm surprised it wasn't Ivanka's wedding planner, quite frankly.

But this is a Republican senator talking to this man.

Watch this, about the virus.

And your job is to keep us safe, but you can't tell us how how many your models are anticipating.

No, Senator.

Again, I would defer you to the Health and Human Services for that.

Since you think you ought to check on that?

We will.

As the head of Homeland Security, how is it transmitted?

A variety of different ways, Senator.

Tell me what they are, please.

Again, human to human is what we've

primarily human to human.

How?

You're asking me a number of medical questions that I'm asking you questions

of homeland security, and you're supposed to keep us safe.

That's a Republican summit.

Does that guy make you feel safe, Buck?

Well, there's a lot of information that you heard from the expert before that they're still figuring out about how transmissible is it, what the fatality is.

You can't really know the mortality of the future.

So, we don't share John Kennedy's feelings on that.

No,

what I'm saying is that everyone has the same feeling here, which is that they want the best response possible from the government.

The only people that seem to be rooting for failure are people.

We're not rooting for failure, we're rooting for health, we're rooting for competence.

And there literally hasn't been a single Democrat who's gone on TV saying, Oh my god, this is such a crisis, we're all melting.

You guys keep on saying that we're saying that, but none of us have.

Instead, we have President Trump who slash and burns our government to carry the mantra of the Republicans that we don't need to do.

This is not about the result.

I mean, this is like Trump is terrible, therefore he's bad at this, and that's actually not talking about

the money.

I don't even believe this bullshit.

This is a risk.

I'm looking into your eyes.

Yes.

This is a crisis This is a serious crisis and the guy is a liar who is putting into place people who are not competent to handle something like this.

Do you think he wants zero deaths from this?

Do you think he wants zero deaths from this?

What he really wants is the stock.

What he cares about is the stock market.

That's what he said.

I mean, I totally think at some point, like, there's just a derangement where the president's interests are aligned here.

If he wants to get re-elected, he's going to do the best job he can of this, no matter how terrible anybody here thinks he is.

But he doesn't win.

But Luck, I almost admire you because somebody who tries to do the impossible should be admired.

But

trying to argue that this president is dealing with this in any other way but to protect himself, not protect the country.

Why did he tell the Chinese?

Why did he say the Chinese are doing a great job here?

Why didn't he intervene there?

I mean, why did he cut off flights from China when some experts initially said that that was a bad idea?

Now they're saying actually, why don't we have more kits and why don't we have more testing kits all across our country, especially in our rural communities?

More masks.

You know what?

It's so interesting.

You know, in World War II, as soon as the war started, they closed down all the car factories.

And in weeks, they were making bomber planes

and tanks.

We can't in this country make masks.

Nobody can get a mask because they're sold out on Amazon and everywhere else.

Well, the experts also say that the masks aren't as effective at preventing the spread for some people

as they think.

For healthcare workers, yes.

Doctors actually have testing kits rather than have to go through the CDC to get a significant problem.

I mean, look, the testing kits, the money has gone out.

New York City's actually trying to come up with their own revenue.

Okay, I'm going to tell you what's going to happen because it is going to get worse.

And then instead of fixing the problem, your president is going to sulk, blame, and further divide.

I mean, I'm shocked that we can't even come together on this.

I thought tribalism would end at a thing like this.

I think if we were attacked by Martians,

what is the part of his response that is wrong, though?

What has he done so far in terms of action?

Did you miss the first 20 minutes of the show?

He told lies.

He lied to us.

He said lies.

He said the vaccine, the disease is going away, and it's not going away.

He said the vaccine is coming soon, and it's not.

He told me that he has a record for the vaccine progression.

That's actually, everyone said, it's a record of the process.

Let me ask you a question.

I'm not going to pursue this anymore.

There's going to be layoffs, lots of them.

13% of the people today, it was reported, this is early on in this crisis, are not flying anymore.

They've closed schools overseas.

I mean, it's just going to...

People are not going to go to restaurants.

They're not going to...

I mean, I'm afraid of who they're going to put their hands in my salad now.

I've had food poisoning.

It's no,

okay, what's going to happen?

The people are not going to go to restaurants.

Then those people are going to get laid off.

And we know half this country does not have any savings.

Or health care.

So if somebody is sick, if they don't have health care, then what are they supposed to do?

What happens then when there's massive layoffs, people have no money, and there's not enough health care?

What happens then?

Let me just say that.

Australia.

I'm saying, you don't think that's going to happen?

Layoffs?

We just lost $6 trillion in a week?

There's definitely fear of a recession right now, for sure.

There's no question about that.

People are really concerned, but that also goes to the government.

The Fed's not talking, they're taking action.

No one's asleep at the wheel on this.

I think they understand the implications.

I mean, I know that that's so funny, but I also think it is.

It's ridiculous because it's ridiculous.

It's not ridiculous.

I mean,

the response, we don't even know how bad the cases are going to be in this country.

We don't know if the market's going to read out the business.

But that's the point.

Australia has a worst case scenario plan out there that the public can now read.

Where's our worst case scenario?

They've said that their worst case scenario.

They said that their worst case scenario was that 40% of their current statements.

But

here's some facts on the cuts.

He's cut.

Trump cut the defense fighting budgets of four agencies.

CDC, National Security Council.

He cut their entire global security health unit.

Wait a second.

Homeland Security.

That's that moron we just saw.

Health and human services.

The CDC used to operate in 49 countries to shut down this shit before it started.

China was one of them.

Yeah, but Trump is a good person.

Now it's not a

Congress set up.

Congress sets budgets, not the president.

So the president has.

This is how government works.

Congress does not act.

Congress is the one that's in charge of this, not the president of the United States.

The president is putting it in the city.

He put budget cuts that in many cases Congress rescinded, thank God.

Right.

But these cuts speak to a whole attitude toward government itself, as if all these things government does are useless.

I hope in this course of this crisis, we go back and play clips of what Donald Trump said about President Obama's handling of Ebola.

And when you go back to look at an administration, again, that took science seriously, that took what government could do seriously,

they actually did an exceptional job on Ebola, not only here, but overseas.

Because if you don't help people overseas to contain this, it's going to come here.

We can keep talking about the lack of expertise.

I mean, Dr.

Anthony Fauci and NIH, the people that are running the CDC, these are careerists who.

He was told he couldn't talk.

Right.

That's not.

Again, this is not accurate.

Vice President Pence, no, Vice President Pence was like, we just want to have a coordinated message.

Let's actually talk before we talk.

That's all that he said.

Well, Nebraska.

Fauci says something that might be true that contradicts what the administration says.

We've already seen that.

Yes, well, I mean, but we're not going to be able to do that.

And Nebraska is one of the states that they're actually bringing some of these folks to, right?

Because we have an expert at the University of Nebraska Medical Center.

And they were saying that they didn't have any funding.

They weren't even being asked to prepare things.

So that's a problem.

Just until a couple days ago, they were the ones that were leading on the Ebola.

So there's a problem when you don't have a leader leading.

I'm going to bring out Nick in two seconds.

I just want to

quote two things.

The mayor from Jaws

said, it's a beautiful day.

The beaches are open and people are having a wonderful time.

Amity is a summer town.

We need summer dollars.

And Trump said the coronavirus is very much under control.

Stock market's starting to look very good to me.

Just saying, he's the Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for the New York Times, who with his wife Cheryl Wudun co-authored the book Tightrope Americans Reaching for Hope.

Nicholas Christoph is over here.

Nick.

Nick.

You're going to.

How are you, sir?

You don't miss the handshake, do you?

No, okay, thank you.

Okay, so listen, let's first, we'll get back to this subject, but I want to talk about your book first because it's a fantastic book.

And if we ever get past this crisis, and we will, we will have to contend with the fact that the same old things that have been making people die will still be making people die.

And you zero in on what you call, I think, deaths of despair in this country.

What are we talking about when you say deaths of despair?

So we're talking about deaths from drugs, alcohol, and suicide, which every two weeks kill more Americans than died in the entire Afghan and Iraq wars.

And it's the story of my hometown, a quarter of the kids on my old school bus.

Where is it?

It's in Yam Hill, Oregon, right where the Willamette Valley goes into the coastal range.

Of course, I know it well.

The Yamut Valley, many a

few summers out there.

Okay.

So, and that's, and this is

typical of rural America?

This is a very rural area?

It's kind of a Great Depression that has struck parts of America, but not geographically, but demographically.

It is a crisis that has hit working class America.

So these people would seem to be the ideal Bernie Sanders voters.

They would seem to be more ripe for a political revolution than anybody.

But when you look at the political map, those areas are always red.

Why do you think that's a good idea?

So the white working class is

socially very conservative.

Economically, though, they tend to be actually much more liberal.

And so, look, if they go in the voting booth and they are thinking about abortion, guns, then they will vote for a Republican.

But Democrats have to fight for those votes.

And if they are thinking about raising the minimum wage, if they are thinking about parental leave, increasingly if they are thinking about health care, about expanding Medicaid, then there is a fighting chance to have them vote Democratic.

So what, our drug war has been a massive failure.

It's one of the worst policy failures in America.

And bipartisan.

Absolutely.

It's gone on for Bloomberg.

Pot.

Yeah.

I mean, it goes way back earlier than that.

Yeah, yeah, but really, I mean, a guy is supposed to be so smart about so many things.

Okay, so what does a good drug policy look like?

So a good drug policy, I mean, we actually have a good comparison.

In the 1990s, the U.S.

and Portugal were both wrestling with the heroin problem.

They both looked at what to do.

The U.S.

doubled down on a law enforcement toolbox.

And Portugal, meanwhile, convened a panel and decriminalized drug possession, even heroin, cocaine.

But above all, what they used was the public health toolbox, encouraging people to providing treatment.

And the upshot is that the number of heroin users in Portugal has dropped by two-thirds.

Portugal now has the lowest drug overdose rate in Western Europe.

And meanwhile, we lost 68,000 Americans last year.

Wow.

And

I know I'm always the bad guy when I bring this up, but I saw it in the paper yesterday, obesity.

The school of, when is it, the Harvard, Chan School of Public Health at Harvard says in 10 years, not that it's not bad now, half the country in 2030 will be obese, a quarter will be severely obese, 40,000 deaths a month, a month from obesity.

And that is a big problem.

Absolutely.

That's what we're talking about in the areas you're talking about.

Absolutely, it's enormous.

But

you can't just look at it the moment that somebody is reaching for some potato chips.

It's very much a reflection of this miasma of depression that has struck much of the country.

And when people lose jobs,

lose good, well-paying jobs, then they self-medicate with methamphetamine, they self-medicate with alcohol, they also self-medicate with soda and potato chips.

And so, you know, there's no there's no silver bullet, but there are silver buckshot.

And you can address that in part by providing better paying jobs and

supporting education in these areas.

And, you know,

that helps to address so many of these problems together.

I heard a lot about how the farmers were going to turn on Trump.

You must know a lot about this, right?

Okay, okay.

But because of the trade war, and of course we know that he wrote a lot of checks to them to cover that, which is $35 billion,

of course.

But 83% is this, wow, that is a lot of voters, farmers who are,

that they serve at pro-Trump.

That's a huge number.

Why can't the Democrats do a little better?

I'm not asking for the world, but 83%, you can't win more than 17%?

Well, they can if they actually started to go to these rural communities once again.

So rural voters used to be with Democrats.

We used to have Democrats elected in South Dakota, North Dakota, Iowa, Kansas, et cetera, because we used to stand with them when they were hurting.

So when the farm crisis happened, Democrats were there on the tractors, Jesse Jackson included, saying that we need to unite the eaters and the feeders if we're going to have real economic and land justice in our country.

And Democrats, when was the last time you saw a Democrat when we had a historic flooding in Nebraska?

Not a single Democratic presidential candidate came to Nebraska or Iowa when they had flooding as well.

So there is real problems that us as a party have completely abandoned these communities.

And so why should they build a family?

That's where you find they just don't show up.

That's fair.

And you know, so Kansas now has has a Democratic governor.

And

for 50 years, basically, America was engaged in this project of lowering taxes and lowering investment in human capital.

And finally, Kansas Republicans rebelled and said, raise our taxes because you've hurt our schools too much.

And I wonder if that won't be remembered as some kind of a turning point in this long era that may lead to renewed investment in American human capital in ways that would help address the problems in Yam Hill and Kansas and Nebraska and in so many other places.

And

I think that's completely right and I think it goes to one of the things I write about in the book is Kansas and as an example of the radicalization of the Republican Party over the last 20 years where the governor said if we slash these taxes, cut this spending, cut the schools, the economy will boom.

The economy didn't boom and a lot of middle-class Republicans who actually wanted their kids to go to good public schools said, wait a minute, this program is terrible.

And so it was actually repealed in the state legislature

by votes from all the Democrats and a bunch of Republicans who said, we can't do this anymore.

And when the Democrat won, it was those moderate Republicans who actually supported the, many moderate Republicans supported the Democrats.

And you do see whiskers of Democrats emerging in other states.

You know, Utah and Idaho passed passed Medicaid expansion.

So did Nebraska?

But the debates are not.

Am I wrong about this or you?

The debates, like the one we had Tuesday, are not helping the Democrats.

It depends on who you want to help.

It's helping Donald Trump for sure.

Exactly.

Put that up in the political ad the market.

Really bad.

And if I may, I'm sorry, Bill.

No, please.

I was just going to say, I mean, in response to the Republican Party getting more radical over 20 years, I mean, the Democratic Party, I just read in the New York Times two days ago that effectively the DNC establishment is like, all right, Bernie's actually crazy.

We can't really do this.

Excuse me.

Excuse me.

I'm just reporting.

I'm just telling you what was reported in the New York Times.

You're right.

My opinion.

It's interesting the hypocrisy.

It's interesting the hypocrisy here.

First, it was, hey, you Bernie bros, you got to get on board this time.

Whoever the nominee is, now that the nominee is Bernie.

That's right.

That's right.

And then now.

They're like, we got to stop him.

Wait, wait, I thought you said whoever the nominee is.

I'm going to have to get a Democrat consultant class, and there's all these people that I think are still kind of hoping Hillary.

She's got a podcast coming out that she's somehow going to get rid of the history.

First of all, it is true that some parts of the Democratic establishment don't like Bernie Sanders and that he makes him, he makes them very uncomfortable.

That's true.

And I think it's okay that the Democratic Party is uncomfortable right now.

We have a transformation that we need to do within our party.

We have two wings, right?

And you need both wings to fly.

You need the progressive and the moderates.

I always say you need all shades of blue.

And so it is clear, it is clear that as Democrats, for the past 10 years, we've been talking about this rising American electorate, that it's younger, that it's going to be more diverse, that it's women, that they're going to be more progressive.

Guess what?

They're here.

And guess what?

They want Bernie Sanders.

So we're

going to bring everybody to be able to do that.

Great.

I like this idea.

Let's get more of this.

I mean, the first line of my book, bless you for that many shades of blue, is, will progressives and moderates feud while America burns?

And if you take the earlier part of the conversation, do they really want to say that these differences between Medicare for all or a public option when they all want to cover all Americans to get decent health care, are those so important that you're going to have a debate like that and the country sort of turns around and re-elects this president who, for all the reasons you said in the first part of the show, presents a real crisis?

That's right.

I mean, I think there's a point related to that, and I bet this will resonate in Nebraska, that right now politics are so polarized that there are an awful lot of Democrats who see every Trump voter in 2016 as a racist and a bigot.

And that is not clarifying, and that is not helpful for winning those voters.

This is absolutely This is absolutely true, by the way.

And it's one of the reasons why there were some Democrat candidates that actually started resonating early on with some Republicans.

People have a, on the right, have a fondness for Tulsi Gabbard.

They like Andrew Yang.

They like people that are at least willing to go.

I mean, some of the Democrats are such wimps.

You can't even get them to go on Fox News.

You want to be president of the United States?

This is absurd.

The latest Axios poll has Bernie losing to Trump, but closer than all the other Democrats, 47 to 15 nationally.

He beats him in Pennsylvania by four.

Look, all these pundits who I hear say things like, well, Bernie will lose 45 states.

Shut the fuck up.

You don't know what the fuck you're talking about.

You never know.

We never know.

You're the same people who said Trump wouldn't even get the nomination.

You don't know.

What we don't know is Bernie needs a revolution to show up.

He needs people who have never voted before.

Now, they are not showing up in those numbers in the primary, but we don't know.

Now, since Trump, I think, is not going to leave anyway, Might as well run Bernie.

He's not.

He's not.

And by the way, when the virus gets bad, he's going to declare martial law.

Watch that.

Oh, my God.

That could happen.

That could totally happen.

Your point about people being dismissive about Bernie, I even tell people on my side, on the right, this, do we forget 2016?

You had this fractured establishment field on the right.

You know, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, and everyone kept saying, can't be Donald Trump, can't be Donald Trump.

And then all of a sudden it was Donald Trump.

The establishment, by the way, did kind of reject him for a long time up to the convention.

And now obviously we know how it went from there.

There are parallels with Bernie Sanders' rise now and Donald Trump's rise in 2016.

That Republicans are saying, oh, we really want to defend Bernie Sanders against this Democratic establishment, and the day after he's nominated, he is a horrible socialist who will endanger the country.

They either believe one thing or the other, but I don't know if you're trying to...

Fair process.

That's right.

That's right.

Well, then, why don't you vote for it?

There's something called the,

oh, damn, I lost it now.

The Duty to Report Act.

This require candidates for federal office and their campaigns to report any contacts with foreign governments to the FBI.

Seems simple enough.

Even 75% of Republicans are for it.

Mitch McConnell won't let it come to the floor.

Why not?

Duty to Report Act.

Campaigns have contact with foreign governments, I mean, foreign officials all the time.

There's conversations at constantly.

Well, this just says, well, first of all, that's what I'm saying.

It just says you've got to report it to the FBI.

Why fight that?

Well, again, it's because there's all these contacts and there will be a discussion about whether or not it's a nefarious con campaigns talk to foreigners.

That's what I think.

Or the fact that Trump still doesn't really admit that Russia has meddled in our elections and that they're still meddling in our elections.

Was there Russian collusion?

But wait,

just clarify one thing.

Well, first of all, yes.

Yes, they talk to foreigners.

So what's wrong with saying they should report that?

I don't see what that doesn't answer the problem.

Let them talk to foreigners, sure, but tell the FBI, especially if that foreigner is offering you help in your election.

Well, I mean, Mr.

McConnell would also say that just passing this law, I mean, it's all meant to be from Democrats to slap in the face of Trump.

It's ridiculous.

Of course, anybody who is a patriot would say, hold on a second, if you're trying to get me to do something illegal in an election and you're a foreigner, we will not do that.

So why didn't Trump report it?

I mean, why?

I mean, I mean.

It's like the Mueller report never happened.

It's like the Mueller report never happened.

The Mueller report did happen, but he shit the bed.

Mueller did a horrible job.

Someday liberals will understand that.

He did a horrible job.

Weissman did a horrible job, really.

Mueller was mostly a figurehead.

I saw from the interview that he did.

Okay.

This week, ABC News suspended David Wright.

You'll like this.

Actually, I'm going to surprise you on this one.

Why?

Because

I don't know what to get into.

No, no, no.

No, no.

Okay.

I won't tell the story.

I remember him on the news.

He looked like a very good reporter.

Somebody came up to him.

It was actually that guy from Project Veritas.

Yes, it was.

Those people who dress as pimps and, you get the receptionist to admit she's a Democrat at Planned Parenthood.

Oh, they're so clever.

Anyway, so he didn't know who he was talking to, and they got him on tape, and he admitted that the network news is shit, basically.

And he said, with Trump, we're interested in three things, the outrage of the day, the investigation, and the palace intrigue.

But we don't really cover the guy.

We don't hold him to account, and we also don't give him credit for what things he does do.

That's a guy off the record when the cameras weren't rolling, talking about the media.

I don't like discuss.

I don't like people doing this to people, especially it's happened.

I disagree with James.

Good for you, Clark.

I'm just saying, I don't like

finally.

But I just think that's a good idea.

I think that when someone's off the clock and they're talking about the boss and to put them on camera, I mean, unless it's somebody very high,

but on the ABC side of it, I mean, why is ABC taking this action against him for just exactly?

I mean, the problem here is ABC.

ABC should not be giving any credibility to Project Veritas, right?

So they go around the country and we knew that they were in the bar.

I was telling, I was in the same bar that this all happened in.

So I was talking to all their state party chairs.

Yes, because these guys with like beards and hats were like acting all these ridiculous.

No, of course not.

But you know how to start to identify these people when you're in the business for a while.

And so they had fall caps on and they're all bearded.

And I said, so, you know, they started asking me all these weird questions about Bernie, et cetera.

And so I said, so are you.

with the media?

Because it was all media and state party people in the room.

And they said, no, we're just here because we think it's really fun to take a guy's trip to observe the New Hampshire political process.

And I was like, oh,

but just that.

It is easy to make fun of the media.

They deserve it.

I mean, that debate, the fact that we were in the middle of this coronavirus problem.

to say the least, plus the stock market, they didn't ask a question about that, but the first one was about a saucy joke that Bloomberg told in 1980.

Please.

Anyway.

Everyone pretty much agreed that debate, including a.

I mean, they're not.

But the media does not help.

All right.

Thank you, panel.

It's time for new rules now.

We're still doing new rules here in the time of the plague.

Okay, New Rule, if your trial involves long, disgusting descriptions of you showing women your deformed genitilia,

don't use a walker with green fuzzy balls.

New rule, don't be an asshole.

If this little girl thinks she just met Barney the dinosaur, let her think she just met Barney the dinosaur.

Neural, the planet Earth has to give us a little credit.

We tried.

Yeah, we still burn coal and eat meat and drive SUVs and buy shit we don't need, but at least we don't just throw out plastic shopping bags anymore.

We shove them under the sink for a year and then we throw them out.

New rules, now that I have to honk my horn every time a red light turns green because drivers are looking at their phones, someone must invent a traffic light that has a honk built into it when it turns green.

That's a good idea.

I know this is LA and by law people must check their phones at every light, but let me save us all some time.

Yes, that is a text from your agent, and no, you didn't get the part.

Now go!

New rule, to the people who engage in the fad of foraging, where you go out and gather weeds and other wild plants and eat them, you go ahead, I'll catch up.

No, no, no, it looks delicious.

You enjoy.

It's just that I just saw my dog pee there.

And finally, new rule, Americans need to find a better way to say, I disagree with your position than I'm going to kill you.

It's one of the few things the left and the right have in common now.

Adam Schiff and Chuck Schumer received death threats for impeaching Trump, and Susan Collins got death threats for not impeaching him.

A guy named Salvatore Lippa was arrested last week for calling Schiff's office and saying, I dare you to come to New York because I will put a bullet in your fucking forehead.

And then he went back to the bar and started screaming, How come women don't like nice guys?

Last week, some Bernie bros got very angry at the Culinary Union in Nevada for preferring their own current health care plan to Bernie's Medicare for All.

And as we know, the price for advocating for an alternative health care plan is death.

Except these are people on your own team, fellow workers.

fellow Democrats with a slightly different idea who you want to kill.

This is what was so frightening to Karamo Brown, one of the stars on Queer Eye, who got death threats after saying he planned to be nice to Republican Sean Spencer on Dancing with the Stars.

Mr.

Brown said, The minute that my son started getting death threats was the worst moment for me because a lot of it wasn't coming from the other side, it was coming from my own side,

his own side.

Death threats from liberals to children.

Over this?

Why don't they just make an app for death threats?

You could call it Ender.

Look, I'm not saying there's no place for blind bloodlust like in the Bible or when they run out of the chicken sandwich at Popeyes.

But everything?

A singer who wore her support for Trump proudly to the Grammys got death threats.

Gail King got death threats for asking a too-soon question about Kobe Bryant.

Elon Omar gets death threats for being an immigrant, and death threats went out to a woman who wrote a pro-immigrant book because she wasn't actually an immigrant.

The Ukraine whistleblower got death threats, and nobody even knew who it was.

They just sent open letters to whom it may concern, I'm going to kill you.

This is what happens when you let cancel culture spin out of control.

It's the same attitude, just taken a little further.

We take your livelihood.

Let's just go ahead and take your life.

Because all the geniuses in this country are so 1 million percent sure they're right about everything, that it's always just my way or the die way.

You know, Trump may want to be a dictator, but he is hardly alone.

A lot of people in this country love to say, off with their head.

Don't like that thing you purchased?

Threaten to burn down the factory.

Don't agree with someone who won the Oscar?

Tell them you're going to find where they live and slit their throat.

Don't like the call the ref made at your kids' soccer game?

Send them a picture of you brandishing an axe.

When did Americans become the fatwa people?

Every minor dispute has to go from zero to Mel Gibson in three seconds?

Did you know that the new pop sensation Billie Eilish spent her big night at the Grammys apologizing for winning?

Yeah, because her overriding emotion wasn't pride, it was fear that super fans of rival pop stars would attack her.

Oh, if only we had this kind of passion for something that mattered in this country.

Bellie Eilish kept winning all night, and she kept saying things like, no,

and please don't let it be me.

And all the other artists in this category, I know your fans are going to talk shit about me for years because of this.

Imagine being 18, winning five Grammys, and all you could think of is, oh shit, they know where I live.

You know things are out of control when even potheads are issuing death threats.

Yeah.

Reporter Alex Berenson recently cited a link between weed legalization and a rise in violent crime.

And pro-cannabis activists wanted his head on a pike.

Let me tell you, if you're a stoner and you want to kill someone, you might consider switching from sativa to Indica.

All right.

That's our show.

I'll be at the Mirage in Vegas, March 13th and 14th.

At the Fox in Atlanta, March 28th.

At the Taft in Cincinnati, March 29th.

I want to thank E.J.

Dion,

Jane Clem, Buck Sexton, Nicholas Christoph, and Dr.

Ann Ramoin.

Ramoin.

Stay tuned for Robotime.

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

For more information, log on to HBO.com.