Overtime - Episode #458: Evangelicals, Facebook, Cultural Suicide

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Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO late night series, real time with Bill Ma.

Thank you.

On behalf of the band and myself, we thank you. Okay, Ross, what do you think of evangelicals who give Trump a mulligan for his behavior that is otherwise condemned?

I don't think.

Well, you're not.

I don't think well of them. I mean, I think there are two.
That's not your tribe. You don't have to.
Right, I don't have to. No, I mean, I think there are two evangelical styles.

There's sort of a kind of, there's an evangelical style that says, we always knew he was a bad guy. We were just voting for him because he wasn't Hillary.

And we needed basically like a tough guy, a bodyguard, because we lost the culture wars. And we need to.
And that I can.

Right. And that, yeah.
And that I can at least understand. But then there's the other style that's like, you know, Trump, he's like, you know, he's like King David.

King David had a lot of wives, you know, and that's just sort of purely how important Jerusalem is in that. Well, that's right.
I really believe that.

A lot of the evangelicals believe that Jesus is coming back, many of them in their lifetime, because he's going to want to meet them.

He's going to want to meet you too.

He's a fictional character, but I'll be happy to meet him.

That'll partly do the trick for you, I guess. That's the one thing.
Well,

this is a fictional character, but okay.

All right, so do you think the conviction of Bill Cosby will lead to more celebrity trials?

Celebrity trials, meaning like

sure, why not?

I do think that's important.

What's really important about these cases, the Cosby case and the, you know, whatever is going on in the subsequent investigation of Harvey Weinstein, is that we really do need to make a clear division, as Ronan said earlier in the show, between the fact that there are people who have committed serious, felonious offenses and should be taken in front not only the Court of Public Handing, but the Court of Law, as opposed to people whose behavior is disreputable but not illegal.

And part of the problem in the early part of the Me Too movement, I think, was that there was a blending of the two.

I mean, one thing, which, no, after you. Yeah, and just speak up for the ladies.
I think one of the lessons of the whole movement is: don't talk over the ladies.

Thank you.

I was going to say, I think that those people who have committed

criminal offenses definitely should be treated to criminal court. And that's the only place you get due process.

All this other screaming and yelling about whoever didn't get your due process, you know, Al Franken didn't get due process. Matt Lauer didn't get due process.
Mark Halperin didn't get due process.

There's no due process for losing a job. Do you remember Mark Halperin? Unfortunately, yes.

I remember him really, really well, actually. But I would add address reporting can lead to criminal proceedings

at times. And that's not the job of reporters, but it can happen in tandem in that way.

And I would just say, in the Weinstein reporting, one thing that was really important about the Cosby precedent is in a world in which most women could never envision taking this risk, speaking out against a powerful guy, and actually being heard, saying, hey, look at these women who came forward against Bill Cosby.

Even though they were smeared, they were covered. Their stories were sort of, kind of heard.
That was a hugely important precedent to tell them about.

I think we err on the side of listening to women, not believe all women. That's not a thing.
No one says that.

But listening to women, letting women speak, and finding out if they're telling the truth, using reporting to find out more, I mean, that's what's happening.

I must tell you, the way you like lumped their Al Franken in the same sentence with Matt Lauer and somebody else, and it just bugs me. Mark Halperin.

Yeah, because I just don't think Mark Halperin and Al Franken are the same guy. I really don't.
Well, no, they're not.

And I I don't. But I'll tell you, that they don't.
What happened with both of them is they lost their job, which is a bad thing, but it's not like a lifetime tragedy.

Like, I've lost lots of jobs, quite frankly.

And I think. It's a pretty big tragedy for the Democratic Party to lose a leader like that.

At what cost do you put a leader like that? And I'm just going to take a look at the best. At what cost? I just think that was like an incredibly dumb outlay by the Democratic Party.

That's not about whether it's dumb or smart. It's like the right thing to do.
I'm a constituent of Al Franken's. I voted for Al Franken.
But I didn't know these things about him. If he runs away.

I still don't know those things. I know what a few people said.

You know, there's, you know, as Al, I think, has said, there's. Just that picture alone was enough for me to reconsider my vote for him.
The picture was just a joke.

Really, you can't get by the picture. You know, the one where he's doing that.

You know what? I can't get by it. Really?

That's somebody should lose his Senate job for taking that. We should especially lose a Senate job for that.
We should hold those people to higher account. But he was a comedian at the time.

It's a threat practice.

Really? Electing Trump certainly has to make all this so much more raw, so much stronger.

Because when the person who is in the highest office has obviously not only gotten away with all this stuff over the course of his life, but also clearly treats women as objects, as ornaments, it's horrifying to watch.

And I think that that's one of the reasons why people have just gotten so incredibly angry in rightful backlash.

Can I just say one of the most common things I hear from survivors of sexual violence when they hear debates like this, which are smart debates and very fair and all of that, the survivors, the people with the actual stories get lost because we have headline after headline about these men and we're not listening to the women and sometimes men as well who actually endured the mistreatment.

Like focus the conversation there. And we haven't for far too long.
And we should remember that most of these things, most sexual assaults, most victims of sexual violence aren't famous.

And the people that commit those acts aren't famous. And

those are the people that we really need to be paying attention to. It's rampant in service industries, it's rampant

in the restaurant industry, in the hotel industry.

And this is something that I'm glad we sort of transitioned from the Me Too to the Time's Up movement. And a matter of fact, I kind of want to start using that more.
That the Time's Up for everyone.

And yeah, I'm in too.

Okay.

Ian Bremer, the entire,

you wrote the entire business model of Facebook undermines liberal democracy. How can we stop that model?

I think it's almost impossible to stop that model because it is,

for me, the definition of dystopia is that citizens get their information about the world as determined by the world's largest advertising company.

And I, I mean, as much as

I'm on it. The world's largest advertising company.
Right. And I mean, I think, as for when Mark Zuckerberg said, I had no idea that this was going to happen.
I actually believe him.

I think he had no idea because he didn't want to look into it because he was talking his book, which is, I've got a model, we need to build money, fiduciary responsibility, that's the way it's going to be.

But it is very clear that of all the things that we've talked about that are ripping apart the fabric of liberal democracy, nothing is doing it faster than technology. Every day.

That's behind fake news.

That's behind sort of us versus them, that's behind everything that makes us not want to have civic nationalism and common values, and there's nothing that makes me believe that we're moving away from that.

But you don't want, I mean,

I've read part of your book,

and I think I agree with it generally, but I think one of the strengths of your book is that it's not just about sort of, I mean, I think there's a tendency for people who are sort of associated with the establishment in the West to want to pin everything on Facebook and fake news and social media and so on, when the reality is that, you know, the reason people believe conspiracy theories and fake news and all the rest is that the people running the West, you know,

the globalists,

to use your language, have had a really terrible track record over the last 15 years.

And I mean, the biggest threat to liberal democracy in certain ways is the fact that we had the Iraq war, a global financial crisis, you know, a sort of totally, terribly designed Eurozone that led to all sorts of economic problems that were totally foreseeable, but none of the people paid to foresee them, foresaw them, and so on.

And I mean, in that sense, I think the strongest part of your argument is about the people in charge, not the people crawling.

I really appreciate that, and obviously I agree with it, but I think the thing that you're doing... And everyone should buy your book.

But I think the thing that's... And my book.
But the thing that everyone should buy. Everyone's book.
Everyone's booking. Well, you're everybody,

yeah. But it goes without saying.

The thing that's really been turned on its head is that 25 years when we started started the internet, it was all about on the internet, no one knows if you're a dog, right?

It was empowering like Tunisia, Egypt. Those things happened in part.
Now everyone knows you're a dog on the internet. They do.
It doesn't empower people, but you're top down.

You're top down now.

We went from this ludicrous techno-optimism where this was going to liberate everybody and save civilization, and now it's destroying civilization, and we never went through the period in which it's like, it's got good parts and it's got bad parts, and maybe we can emphasize the good things and downgrade the bad things.

I mean, I take it. I kind of wish Steven Pinker here was to

make the case that he makes that actually we look at the bad part of it, but look at, for example, how many people have been lifted out of extreme poverty, probably a lot through globalism in the last 20, 30 years.

How many? A billion. A billion.
A billion people are out of poverty. It's never happened before in the history of mankind.
Am I pretty much optimistic in terms of the global most macro view?

It's a pretty good time to be alive

in the world in in general. Right, exactly.

There's actually less violence. I mean,

but the astral press, I mean, it's worse in the United States. We have our life expectancy going down here.
And income inequality is growing here.

And life expectancy between the racists is worse as well. But you said in the opening,

you said in the opening that what's coming is post-they is increasingly China, a country that is authoritarian, that uses technology top down,

and much poorer, right? And as a consequence, I'm much more concerned about a world led by that than I am about a world that had been led by that.

And we're eviscerating our capacity to go toe-to-toe with that.

But that's reversible. So that's reversible.
And all I'm saying is that... Only if we fund the State Department.
Well, of course, but I'm saying it's reversible. It may not be reversible this month.

First, by the book. Or this year.
But first, yeah, the book will do it all.

But I'm just saying, yeah. You're going to get the last question.
How would you stop the West from committing what you call cultural suicide?

Well, first they should buy Ian's book and Robin's book.

Ross's book Read books. And I have books out of print.
Bill has a novel called True You.

You can read Bill's novel. Oh, that's right.
Buy my book. Fuck Rogan's own book.

Get the host for it.

I have four books that are. It's so interesting that no one reads books anymore, and yet we're all selling books.

People are reading books. But I actually quickly have an answer.
I think a lot of people are going to buy our books. That's awesome.
Okay.

Okay, but I would say Roland's right that part of it is that we don't tell ourselves, we don't tell ourselves in the West that we are inheritors of a great patrimony, that we have a wonderful, great liberal tradition.

All we do is

most elites and most of the public discussion is about everything that's wrong.

It's important to highlight things that are wrong so they can be changed, but we have no cultural conversation about the fact that we live in a time of extraordinary growth and extraordinary opportunity.

And, you know, China is a danger and a threat. China also is a country that has no ideological hold on anybody.
It can't preach. It's got nothing to preach.
It's just a different matter.

And it can't breathe. And it can.
And it can't breathe. And it's

a gigantic

security problem in the next 10 years with like 350 million people needing

aid and relief and there's no money for it. And so I think if we think more positively, I mean, it sounds like

I would say that's all true, except that I just think the environmental iceberg is what's melting, and that's what's going to get us. Good night, everybody.

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