Overtime – Episode #689: Ezra Klein, Andrew Sullivan

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Speaker 5 Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO late night series, real time with Bill Maher.

Speaker 7 All right, here we are with the host of the Ezra Klein Show podcast and the co-author of the book Abundance Ezra Klein.

Speaker 7 And he writes the weekly Dish newsletter and hosts the podcast, The Discast with Andrew Sullivan. Andrew Sullivan.

Speaker 8 Okay, here are the questions.

Speaker 7 Andrew, what do you think of news that British intelligence knew COVID was a lab leak in 2020 and official and officially ignored their report.

Speaker 9 Not just knew, aided a 95% certainty. Same with the German intelligence service.
March 2020,

Speaker 9 there's a new book out called COVID's Awake. I was reading it this last couple of weeks.
And

Speaker 7 the

Speaker 9 core paper that killed off any idea that this was a lab leak in China, the proximal origin paper, which was produced with

Speaker 9 Fauci and Collins of the NIH and NIAD

Speaker 9 helping it along was a lie, a conscious lie, that the people who looked at it, we now have their emails, are saying in the very first days of looking at the virus, this looks very man-made to us.

Speaker 9 This is so friggin obvious this is man-made.

Speaker 9 So friggin obvious, one of them said. And then they wrote the report saying there is no

Speaker 9 evidence that this was made in a lab. The question is why?

Speaker 9 Why would they lie to us about that? And they did.

Speaker 7 Well, I can give you one answer, the New York Times.

Speaker 7 The New York Times said any questioning of this being from a lab was racist, which always struck me as odd because it seems much more racist to go, wow, these people are eating bats.

Speaker 7 I mean,

Speaker 7 it's just one example, but a good example of why people lost faith in the left, because they do stupid things like that.

Speaker 7 Not to be, and I told you so, but from the very beginning, I was saying this shouldn't even be political but it's at least a 50-50 came from the lab and that in 50 years I can't imagine people going wait you mean in 2020 there was this thing that escaped from a lab in Wuhan that started in Wuhan and there was a lab in Wuhan that was studying it and they didn't think that was connected and they blamed it on bats really

Speaker 7 It just doesn't make any sense.

Speaker 6 It makes a little bit more.

Speaker 7 It can gaslight people so easily.

Speaker 9 I don't think the Democrats are so much as fault as scientists who went along with this, knowing better.

Speaker 9 It's their integrity I'm concerned about to actually lie and distort what they could see with their own eyes because they were afraid of politics. The other question is this.

Speaker 9 This lab was a gain of function app. That means they were creating viruses,

Speaker 9 dangerous viruses, to turn, to figure out how to protect you from them.

Speaker 9 This gain of function was a

Speaker 6 research was always dangerous.

Speaker 9 Everyone knew it was dangerous. A long time ago, you go back to 2015, you will find a big meeting in London where they say there's one lab in the world most likely to have a problem with this, Wuhan.

Speaker 9 Do you know who was the biggest supporter of gain of function research for the last 30 years? Anthony Fauci.

Speaker 6 Anthony Fauci.

Speaker 9 Now, remember that name. There's a reason he was given a pardon back to 2014.
There is something very wrong going on here.

Speaker 7 Yeah, I also don't think he did it for nefarious reasons. There's an argument to be made.
There's an actual intellectual debate to be had. Should gain of function research be done?

Speaker 7 We want to get ahead of viruses. The other answer is, the other response would be, it's too dangerous because if it gets out, it's going to be bad.
And that's what happened.

Speaker 7 But it is a I don't think he's an evil guy

Speaker 7 like some people do who was trying to get rich off this.

Speaker 9 No.

Speaker 7 Okay, he just made the wrong call.

Speaker 9 No, he knew from the get-go that the Wuhan lab had security levels that were the average of a dentist's office.

Speaker 9 It should have been at the highest level imaginable. He knew that.
Not only that, he made the wrong call. NIH and NID had helped fund it.
Right.

Speaker 9 So you don't want to go down in history as the person who helped develop the virus that killed millions of people. You want to go down to the one who saved millions of people.

Speaker 9 That was at stake, a reputational matter.

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Speaker 11 A piece of a lot of this, it seems insane to me. is we are now years after,

Speaker 11 whether man-made or not, one of the worst disasters in human history. And we are genuinely less prepared for the next one than the last one.

Speaker 7 It's not one of the worst disasters in human history. I could name a hundred worst ones.

Speaker 11 Fair enough. But it was bad.

Speaker 6 I didn't enjoy it.

Speaker 7 I mean,

Speaker 6 it was a bad pandemic. Let's put it in.
It was a lot, lot worse.

Speaker 7 As pandemics. It's genuinely not my point on this.

Speaker 6 I'm happy to see that the Holocaust was worse than the pandemic.

Speaker 11 I think it's fine. But in other things, other countries, in this country, right,

Speaker 11 after something terrible happens, you often have these big bipartisan commissions that come up with a bunch of recommendations and try to create preparedness for next time.

Speaker 11 I sort of agree with you that we've gone way too far on airport security for too long, but we did a lot on things like biosecurity that made sense and actually did make us safer.

Speaker 11 And we have learned... We have anti-learned lessons, right? On the one hand, we had amazing success with things like Operation Warp Speed, and now you got RFK Jr.
running HHS.

Speaker 11 On the other hand, a bunch of huge mistakes are made on things like lockdowns, and we're just arguing about them. We haven't put out, say, a new best practices, right?

Speaker 11 Gain of function research, which y'all were just talking about. It is just an argument.
It's something I try to keep paying attention to, and they haven't come out with strong new guidelines.

Speaker 11 Bird flu, everybody I read who knows what they're talking about says we are in a terrible position on bird flu if it actually begins to mutate and make the jump. We just have never figured out.

Speaker 11 a way to find a policy equilibrium here as opposed to sort of keep rehaving the argument. The arguments are important.

Speaker 7 Because everything gets politicized.

Speaker 11 But everything gets politicized. We don't have the capacity to come to agreement.
It's really bad that we are this unprepared now.

Speaker 9 But that's why the integrity of science is.

Speaker 9 If we don't trust the scientists, who on earth are we going to trust?

Speaker 9 And

Speaker 10 I really.

Speaker 6 I don't want to trust them.

Speaker 9 I want to trust them. I trusted Fauci during eight.

Speaker 9 I'm really upset that I don't think I can trust him on this.

Speaker 9 We need to have empirical, good, objective search for truth. Right.

Speaker 6 You have to all care about it.

Speaker 7 What I hated was when he said, I am the science. That is so not what science is.
You're right.

Speaker 7 We need to trust the science, which means we needed to hear all of the scientists and not shut out the people who weren't on the page. That's what bothered me about this.

Speaker 8 Okay.

Speaker 7 Should we expect to learn anything revelatory from the JFK files just released? Well, what do you mean expect? We saw them and we didn't.

Speaker 7 Is it time to move on from this conspiracy theory? Well, I mean, do you think it's a conspiracy theory? I mean, plainly, there was not a single gunman, right? We all agree on that, no?

Speaker 7 I mean, that magic

Speaker 11 such weak opinions on this.

Speaker 9 I decided not to have an opinion of this.

Speaker 6 I'm going to be such an effort. I'm going to not.

Speaker 7 But the magic bullet. There could not have been a bullet that went through a guy, went around him, came back, went through the other guy, got lunch at the diner,

Speaker 7 came back, shot him in the back of the head. I mean, it's just, come on.
Everybody heard a shot from the grassy knoll.

Speaker 10 I mean,

Speaker 10 we care.

Speaker 9 I mean, honestly, I'm done with it. I mean, it's,

Speaker 9 I don't, I don't know.

Speaker 7 Right, I don't think we'll ever know for sure because this was the final news dump. And if they don't know now, they, you know, they don't know.

Speaker 7 But, you know, the idea that the CIA is going to now suddenly go, you're right, we had something to do with it. If they did, I'm not saying they did, but a lot of people wanted them to.

Speaker 11 The idea that in the files somewhere, in all these files that they were going to release, and there was going to be this one page that says, oh, we actually knew the whole time.

Speaker 3 Right.

Speaker 11 It was always a little fanciful.

Speaker 6 Yeah.

Speaker 9 That's why it's a little cruel to actually give them everything, right? Because they could always hope that some mystery was there.

Speaker 7 Well, what was cruel is to promote it like it's going to be great, and then it's Al Capone's fault.

Speaker 6 The Epstein files came out all redacted.

Speaker 7 What?

Speaker 15 The redacted Epstein files are the ones I've always been more interested in.

Speaker 7 Was a lot redacted from the Epstein files?

Speaker 11 A lot redacted from the Epstein files.

Speaker 8 And what do you think?

Speaker 15 I mean, I didn't go through and read them.

Speaker 11 I was seeing other people who cared more about this than I did talk about this on social media. But so long as we're talking about conspiracies, I've always thought that one's pretty weird.
And

Speaker 11 the Trump administration came in with this big show of releasing the files, and then a bunch is blacked out.

Speaker 11 And they made that one look yet stranger.

Speaker 7 Because Trump knew him, you mean, you think?

Speaker 6 I'm not making any suppositions on this.

Speaker 11 I'm just saying that when you come in and you make such a big show of decosification and you're going to tell everybody everything, then it comes out and you don't, it's a little weird.

Speaker 8 Right.

Speaker 7 Well, I always say whenever there's a guy with a lot of money and you don't quite know how he got it, he's probably some kind of a pimp.

Speaker 7 I've seen this before.

Speaker 7 I mean, that was Epstein's...

Speaker 7 That was Epstein's magic power. It's like rich guys want to get laid.
And sometimes it's like it's hard because they're famous or they have a wife or, you know. So, I mean,

Speaker 7 but really it's like, yeah, honey, I'm just going to have dinner at Bill at Epstein's house. He's a big philanthropist.
Yeah, not on the third floor, he wasn't.

Speaker 7 The U.S. ranked 24th in the World's Happiness Index, behind much poorer countries like Lithuania and Costa Rica.
Why are Americans so happy?

Speaker 7 Well,

Speaker 8 go ahead.

Speaker 7 Take a shot at it.

Speaker 7 I mean,

Speaker 11 you got an outside perspective.

Speaker 6 Why aren't we happier?

Speaker 9 I find the whole idea of happiness a little silly. I mean, happiness is not.

Speaker 7 And how do you measure it?

Speaker 6 I know, it's bullshit.

Speaker 9 These are polls they do of people that create news stories and fill in for bad news days. That's what this is.

Speaker 7 I think so.

Speaker 9 I don't want to live in Finland.

Speaker 8 Right.

Speaker 11 It's fucking dark and cold out.

Speaker 9 You can't see the valve.

Speaker 6 From the house, it's freezing.

Speaker 8 Oh, right. I know.

Speaker 9 It's so true. They're all blissfully happy, but fine, all right, good.

Speaker 6 Work yourselves out.

Speaker 7 I think they're just fucking with us when they take the poll.

Speaker 7 You're right. It's dark, like pitch black for like two months of the year.
I mean, every meal is fish.

Speaker 9 I've watched a lot of like seasonal.

Speaker 7 I mean I've been in the Nordic countries, you know, like I mean you think, oh it's going to be the Swedish bikini team.

Speaker 6 And you know,

Speaker 7 if you're there on a Tuesday it looks like Cleveland. I swear to God.

Speaker 6 I mean they're lovely cities but I was

Speaker 7 in Oslo on a Tuesday and it was just they weren't even blonde.

Speaker 8 They weren't even blonde, most of the people. I was very, I wanted my money back.
It was very disappointing. Where are all the blondes? Okay.

Speaker 7 Do the controversies surrounding Disney's Snow White remake show that we are still in the thick of the culture wars? Oh, have we been following the Snow White?

Speaker 15 Actually, the first time hearing of this.

Speaker 6 Really? No.

Speaker 10 Yeah.

Speaker 7 Okay.

Speaker 11 Good for you. Well,

Speaker 7 the two stars are Gal Godot,

Speaker 7 who she was in the Israeli Defense Forces. She's Israeli.
And then Rachel Zegler plays Snow White. I think Gal plays the...

Speaker 7 I was not a child, so I don't follow.

Speaker 7 I don't know fairy tales.

Speaker 6 I never read comedy books on. But something is...

Speaker 7 Is this the one with the poison apple and the

Speaker 7 whatever it is?

Speaker 6 Yes, the words are.

Speaker 7 And Rachel Zegler, being 23 or whatever she is, like so many kids raised on TikTok, she's all for infitata is the only global solution. So the two stars hate each other.

Speaker 7 And then they couldn't put dwarfs because this is just so typical of the left. The progressives always finding a way to find their way back to doing something not progressive.

Speaker 7 You'd think the most progressive thing would be get people jobs. And dwarves want to work.

Speaker 6 This is like a

Speaker 9 golden claimant opportunity for dwarfs.

Speaker 7 There's not that many scripts that come down the pipe.

Speaker 6 No, there's seven of them.

Speaker 7 That has, oh, and there's seven

Speaker 7 dwarf jobs here. But because I think it was Peter Dinklage said this is, you know, this is not right.

Speaker 7 This is demeaning.

Speaker 7 And they were like, what?

Speaker 6 We just want to work.

Speaker 7 We're dwarves.

Speaker 6 So, ho, ho, ho.

Speaker 6 Anyway, that's the.

Speaker 7 All right. Does SpaceX rescuing the astronauts mean that we will privatize space travel? Didn't we already? I thought we did, yeah.
What the fuck question is that?

Speaker 7 This guy's really out of it.

Speaker 7 Do you agree with Bernie Sanders that progressives should shed the Democratic label and run as independents instead? Is that what he's saying now? Should they aim to be angry moderates?

Speaker 11 I think it would be good not for all Democrats to shed the label of Democrats, but I think they should, more people should run as independents in more places.

Speaker 11 Dan Osborne in Nebraska, that was a great race. And it makes sense.

Speaker 11 And I mean, one of the ways that we've destroyed party competition in this country is that in a bunch of states, they either find the right so repugnant, I think at the moment for me understandably, or the left so repugnant, there actually is no competition.

Speaker 11 So having people run as independents and be able to make an argument outside of the party label,

Speaker 11 it makes sense. It would be good if we, I would like to see, I think a lot of political donors are functionally counterproductive.

Speaker 11 I think creating the infrastructure for independent competition in states that are otherwise one-party control would actually be a great use of political philanthropy.

Speaker 15 Okay. The thing I like.

Speaker 15 Yeah, go ahead. And what we're just about to get in D.C.

Speaker 9 is ranked choice voting.

Speaker 11 One, two, three.

Speaker 9 You actually show people that you don't like this nutter, but you'd rather this nutter than that one.

Speaker 9 So you give them a little priority, and as the people, as the candidates fall out, when they get, look, they then contribute their vote to the next one. So you get a consensus candidate.

Speaker 9 Is that a jungle?

Speaker 11 We got Eric Adams in New York, and it's really.

Speaker 6 Well, yeah. Can't blame no ranked choice, but I'm not sure.

Speaker 8 Is that a jungle primary?

Speaker 7 Is that what they call a jungle primary?

Speaker 15 No, jungle primary is different.

Speaker 11 California's jungle primary, right? What does that mean?

Speaker 11 Jungle primary, I think, is that you have a bunch of people running, and the top two vote-getters, no matter what party they are, then have a runoff.

Speaker 11 So that's how you get a general election in California. You have two Democrats running against each other.
Ranked choice is that the general election,

Speaker 11 you can have a lot of different candidates going, or in a primary, you could have a lot of different candidates, and you're ranking through them.

Speaker 11 So if you have people who who are a consensus, like if everybody has the kind of the same second choice, but people are split between like three more extreme first choices, you might get that second consensus candidate as the winner.

Speaker 11 For the Eric Adams joke, ranked choice voting is a good idea. We should do it.

Speaker 6 Okay, Eric.

Speaker 7 Thank you, everybody. I appreciate it.

Speaker 5 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.