Overtime – Episode #744: Malcolm Gladwell, Fareed Zakaria, Anand Giridharadas

Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO late-night series Real Time with Bill Maw. All right, he's a podcast host and best-selling author of the American way of killing the adventure of an epidemic. Malcolm Gladwell. He's the author of the new book Man in the Mirror, Hope Sturgo, and Belonging in an America. It's with you. I'm Andrew Dardas, and he helps GPS. I'm CNN, and wrote the book, "Ager Revolutions for Reads of Curry." Okay. First one is for you, Malcolm, although I think we all can answer. A Tennessee has now botched two executions this year. I've read 11 in the last five years. Should that make us question whether the state should be in the business of executing people at all? Yeah, should that make us question whether the state should be in the business of execute? Are you for capital punishment? I should absolutely make us question. This is a barbaric practice. They're trying to find a vein, and they can't find a vein, and they stab and stab and stab for hours and hours. I did a whole podcast series about this last year. This is an abomination. It's incredibly ironic that we were just talking about all the gun deaths in America. I mean, one thing you think this country can do is kill people. I mean, and if you're going to use drugs, hello, have you heard a fentanyl? I mean, it's just. Hey, thanks for having me. You were talking about. You were talking about, you know, the surveillance state and things like that. And for anyone, you know, who's a classical liberal or believes in limited government, the idea that the state should have the power to take another, you know, human beings life, just. in a beast-time situation, seems to me just. You know, we're going to look back on it as kind of insane, that we sanctioned the state. Life in prison and fine, long in prison and fine, no parole fine, but to kill somebody. Particularly in the situations where so much of the data we now have on DNA, with DNA testing suggests something like 25% of them were mistakes. And to be clear, life in prison is a very, very grim punishment by itself. We also sometimes, you know, obviously Jeffrey Epstein is not quite how he died, but when we cut the process off, you deprive people of a chance to have all kinds of reparations, to have people actually around and have processes of truth seeking, George Will, good conservative once said, conservative should be a question this, because this is a government program. We think all the other government programs mess everything up. Why do we trust this one? Okay. Fareed, the U.S. has officially ended its 12-year military mission in Iraq, 12. I got back to 2003 on that. I guess we got out for a minute and then ISIS came. This was a volunteer. And we got back in. Okay. How has the Middle East changed since the war started? Well, also I would add to that, what do you make of the Iraq state that is there now? It's not a failed state. No, it's actually worth pointing out that Iraq is a democracy. I mean, it's a dysfunctional democracy, but they do have elections. Join the club. Yeah, right. It's harder and harder for us to point the finger at dysfunctional democracies around the world. They do have elections. They do mean something. It was worth, you know, going to war, you know, probably not the cost of way the benefits. But it's a reasonable place to live. The three communities, the Sunnis, the Shia, the Kurds. You just don't know what the future holds. It's arrogant, however. I was not for that war. I mean, Iraq didn't attack us. They weren't who attacked us on 9/11. It just didn't make sense to me. But where would I assume if we didn't do it, it would be Uday and Hussay? Absolutely. Who would be in, you know, with the rape rooms and everything else? Well, and, you know, it's also worth pointing out that it did kill a certain, certain strands of Islamic militancy and fundamentalism. The, you know, the ISIS, the attack on ISIS was very successful. Now, it's happening at a weird time because what's happening is we're drawing a very small contingent of troops in Iraq that we're sort of keeping the government together. And we're sort of a good example of America's role in the world. These are small numbers of troops, but there was a sense that America was watching and it disciplined everybody. What's going to happen almost certainly is Iran is going to largely take over Iraq in the sense that the dominant community in Iraq is Shia, their pro-Iranian, they have very strong ties to the, to the Iranian government. And why Trump would do this at a time when he's waging war with Iran just as one more puzzle about Trump's, shall we say, very bizarre foreign policy? You know, he understands it's not enough to undermine America from the inside, you'll also have to weaken it standing in the world. As it has been, what did you think of the airline hijacking this week? I thought it would be a much bigger story if you didn't see it. First of all, let's pause for a minute to say a routine flight of Israel, almost completely a plain full of Israelis from the United Arab Emirates. A routine would not have happened five years ago. I mean, that was part of the Abraham Accords that this is, and of course it was what happened was one of the pilots, was a jihadist, tried to hijack the plane, stabbed the other pilot. And then, as in let's roll, the one that we stopped here in this country on 9/11, the passengers took over and landed the plane safely. Here's a dirty question. Do you think if that plain full of Jews had crashed, the mackle mords of the world would be celebrating it? I hope not, but I think that the most interesting thing about the phenomena you're describing is that they landed in Saudi Arabia, and then Saudi Arabia, you know, sent the plane back to the UAE. Is that the UAE and the Gulf states are in a kind of tacit alliance with Israel already, whether or not they formalized it, they share intelligence, they share, you know, there's a new Middle East that's formed where Iran is in a sense on one side, and the Gulf Arab states have decided they're closer to Israel. They share a lot of the same security concerns that is Israel. They always hated Iran more than Israel. Now they're willing to say it. Yeah, now they're willing to say it. Well, the future, I mean, Dubai is a rich place, and Tel Aviv is a rich place. It makes sense that there would be a flight between these two cities. And it's like what they used to say. Like two countries with the mcdonalds have never attacked each other. I think we passed that benchmark. That sort of hasn't worked. There were mcdonalds in Russia and Ukraine. If I may say if you followed the social media videos from inside that plane, you saw a lot of dads and moms comforting their little children during a nose dive of a plane. Let me think about what it would be like to give that talk to your child. And contrary to the mcdonalds thing, it actually reminded me of a lot of videos I've seen from Gaza in the past few years. There is a universal and vast overwhelming number of people, but that's all they want. A stable life to have family that is secure and stable and comfort their kids when they can't do anything for them because something bigger is going on. And those people are right now caught between leaders who are failing them in place after place after place. The kids seem like the media is always a little reluctant to call it terrorism when it's obviously terrorism. I mean, after a while they do. Thank you one person. But, you know, I noticed when the Hamas propaganda is out there. Boy, that gets fast-tracked. But just I mean the original recording was the two pilots had an altercation. Yeah, that little argument. I think we should crash the plane, you don't agree to disagree. And then they use violence as Malcolm says to settle the debate at a handgun. Sometimes violence is good. Malcolm, in Blink you wrote about a great book. You wrote about the power of instinct and snap judgments in an age of misinformation. Should we trust or got less or more? Well, that's a good question. I mean, the argument of Blink was that an informed intuition is a powerful thing. Yes. And an uninformed intuition is a terrible thing. A little learning is a dangerous thing. You don't trust the instincts of a teenager behind the wheel, but you do trust the instincts of someone who's been driving their whole life. So the great question is, in the current world that we end, are we doing a better or a worse job of educating our instincts? And I would say, I might be sort of terminally bullish, but I do think that the best side of AI is it does allow us access to pretty credible information at our fingertips. In a way that I think could have some real positive effects for how clearly we see the world. Well, it's certainly going to have positive effects. I've already been reading about them. I mean, the way it can analyze a cancer situation and go through in seconds every drug that's ever been tried on it and get something that we couldn't do nearly in this time frame that it's doing it. Things like that. that and you know who knows what cures might be around the corner. I mean how does he No one is denying that there's a huge upside. We're just afraid of the paperclip thing with nuclear weapons and whatever it's going to be. What do you make of the data that shows Americans are having far fewer dinner parties? Have we sworn off in-person socializing altogether? I must say I missed that story. Americans are having fewer dinner. It's a great, credible piece. I'm not going to say it's a 70 percent-- No, it is. It really is. It's part of the trend. It's a 70 percent decline in the last 30 years. But there's a decline of all these kinds of social activities. Anything Americans did together, they're doing less. I feel like guys live in a bubble. Most people don't have dinner parties. I'm telling you, I think you guys are-- Oh, you said we never had them in the first place. I don't. I don't. But the dinner parties, the phrasing is-- You're making sure you're doing something. OK, I think I'm walking around the dining room right now. Let's rephrase it, having people over for dinner. That's different than a dinner party. I mean, that's what me and I were talking about. I was actually saying having people over for dinner. Oh, my gosh, these flutes don't match that happen. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Can I make the case to you for why this is like an existential-- Yes, please do. --level five. That's right. I want to know. Because if the only-- I think what people are doing instead of having people over is Netflix and chill and chill and order and door to ash. Huge fraction of restaurant orders in New York now are going out the door as takeout instead of people coming in. What it starts to do is reduce every day interaction, negotiation, dealing with people. And so then, when the situations get more escalated, and we got to deal with harder stuff, we have no training. And Malcolm's written a book about what happens ultimately at the end of a chain of people not being able to resolve something at a level one, a level two, a level three, and then it ends in a level 10. We are-- if these numbers are to be-- it's not just dinner parties. It is so many forms of interaction. I live in New York. My wife wrote a book called The Art of Gathering. We are a big bully. We have people in our house all the time for dinner. When my parents were at our age, if you had someone over for dinner, those people had you over for dinner in some relatively short order. It was sort of a code. And now there are these people called permagests. They're just permagests. They just show up as guests all the time. They feel no obligation. And having people in your home in any culture in the world is how you build community. And it's important that there's an AI connection here, which is-- imagine if people-- there's an increasing reporting that says that young people are finding-- they kind of enjoy spending time chatting with AI more than with other human beings, because the AI is very psychophantic. The AI tells them you're always right. The AI is-- so you can imagine a situation where a person who has really been raised on an AI pal finds it very hard to form a relationship with somebody else because that person is an actual human-- other people are oppression-- who is an ordinary and gets upset and doesn't agree with you all the time. That's the dangers that we're kind of creating these silos. And there's all this reported loneliness and depression that is skyrocketing. I think it's because we are, as Anand was saying, because we're spending less time together. I didn't know about the dinner parties, per se. And I'm not quite sure what the-- America, please invite Bill for dinner. I don't know. I don't know. [APPLAUSE] I go out to dinner. I don't want-- yeah, I think the phrase is catchy. Is it stripping you up? I think that's the same. I think that's what it is. Go over to work. No, I think it's a-- I have a plan. People have my house all the time. We don't eat. We do drugs. [LAUGHTER] I think that's OK. I think it's the nicest. You've come out OK. So I'll turn in your order for it in. Oh, yeah, that's-- All right. I'm getting my-- The head of philosophy at Williams College says, we may be wrong to treat writing as the highest form of thinking. Ooh, well, let's go to you on that one. That's the three wrong. Is that got you? He says, we may be wrong to treat writing as the highest form of thinking. That's interesting, because I've said it a million times. There's three modes of thinking. One is in your brain. That's really dangerous. We all would not want to see-- have people see what we think at times at justice. Sometimes it's not even our control. You know, don't think of a pink elephant. There you go. And then there's speaking, which is a little more clarifying. We hopefully edit ourselves a little. But writing is the best, because it takes a minute. And you've got to edit as you go. And you see what you're writing and seeing it. But this guy says, we may be wrong to treat writing as the highest form of thinking. What does he say? He is the highest one. Doesn't say. So I-- Yeah. Well, he needs to think that too a little bit. He needs to write about this, because he has not drawn it through. There it is, funny. [APPLAUSE] All right. Hi. Hi. I love it. Right side, we listen up. And in the New York Times, and it is hilarious that he wrote-- Right. --an article explaining their writing. It's not the ultimate film. It's going to be a video. Thank you very much, everybody. You're welcome. 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.