Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO series Real Time with Bill Maher. Thank you. Oh, please sit down. Thank you so much. I know. Are you happy? Today is Memorial Day weekend cheering at home.

OK, well, I love Memorial Day. You know, I'm glad it's come because finally I got a chance to just kick back and hang around the house.

You know, I do love we all should love Memorial Day, it's when we remember the brave Americans who put their lives on the line to protect our way of life. I'm talking, of course, about the delivery people from GrubHub.

But the big medical news this week is, remember hydroxy chloroquine, the stuff that they were saying was going to be the big cure all, and then they were like, now this shit doesn't work. It's not for this.

And then Trump now says he's on it.

He's taking it. And not only that, he got mad at the Fox News anchor Neil Cavuto because Neil Cavuto heard him say, I'm taking this stuff. And Neil Cavuto said, yeah, that'll kill you.

I trump. I cut this man first. He says, let's try drinking household disinfectants.

Now, he's saw this shit today. Vladimir Putin said, I hope I don't have to poison this motherfucker. I don't think we have anything strong enough.

Now, this this this drug is for people who have lupus or malaria, so wrap your mind around this. The president, the United States has put himself on a drug for two diseases he does not have.

Also, he's starting on something next week for vaginitis. You know, just to be safe. I know I don't get this Donald Trump, he's never had a drink, never did pot, no drugs in college. But at the age of 73, Laura Ingram comes by and says, hey, man, put this on your tongue.

He's like, I'm all in. OK, but of course, he always is the master of changing the subject. This week it was to Obama gate. Obama gate. What a scandal. Yes, already losing steam the scandal, because it lacks that crucial ingredient that most scandals need to have an allegation.

No, Trump, Trump, Trump fans are ready to be all angry at this, but they don't know what it is, even Glenn Beck's chalkboard says to be determined.

But look, I guess the bright side of this is that all 50 states now, or at least partially open, but again, no plan, no, consistency's it's the opposite of Afghanistan.

We have no entrance strategy.

The theme seems to be you can go out, but you can't have fun. What married people called date night.

For example, California has reopened some parks, beaches, hiking trails, but again, the inconsistencies you can walk on the beach, but you can't congregate. And yet the restrooms are open for gay sex.

Oh, hiking. That's very big out here, you know, hiking people always going hiking, you know, hiking is that's when a guy and a girl walk up a mountain because she wants exercise and he thinks it's a date. Georgia, of course, one of the first states to reopen, they again inconsistent. You can go to the Waffle House to eat, but the the ban remains on parking lot fistfights and.

In Georgia and in Texas, they opened the churches and then they had to close them because people got the disease and, you know, look, I make fun of religion, but I can't blame people for wanting to go to church in person and have that experience is just something about speaking in tongues over Zoome that makes you feel like an idiot.

All right, we got a great show, we have Michael Moore, Thomas Friedman and Dr. Kate. Let's get right to it.

OK, he is the Pulitzer Prize winning columnist for The New York Times and author of the number one New York Times bestseller. Thank you for being late. Thomas Friedman is with us. I'm assuming from New York and Maryland.

Oh, OK. So your columns have been fantastic in these horrible times, horrible times, great columns. And of course, when I read them, I can't help but thinking of your seminal book, The World is Flat and how you are the guy who really identified that issue that we're all so interconnected. And originally that was more about economics. And technology, but now we're seeing it's really about disease, too, right? Yeah, I mean, basically, Bill, you know, I've been looking back at the last 20 years and what I realized, I've actually been covering one pandemic after another, but of a different time.

First, I covered a geopolitical pandemic called 9/11. Then I covered a financial pandemic 2008, not covering a biological pandemic called covid-19. And I'm probably about to cover a atmospheric pandemic called climate change. And the reason these are happening more often is because, one, the world is getting more greased, more tightly wound together through globalization, technology, air travel. Who knew that there were 50 flights from Wuhan direct to America, you know, between December and March?

And at the same time, Bill, we're taking a lot of the buffer's out of things that that really created redundancy, stabilize systems, whether it is ultra green supply chains or diversity. And and then we're pushing things to the extreme jihadi radicals, push them to the extreme around 9/11 bankers, push them to extreme run two thousand eight. We we pushed Eco-Systems to the extreme, ended up with Batz in domestic food markets. We're pushing the climate to the extreme.

And you put all these together in the world isn't just flat now. It's increasingly frail by being so tightly together and at the same time pushing a lot of things to their limits and beyond.

So I'm almost afraid to ask you about what your level of optimism has given that situation. I quoted you a couple of weeks ago on our show in your column when you said that America has been as dumb as we want to be. That really has been our policy. And it's true not just the politicians, but all of us for a very long time. And now it's coming home to roost. And when I read the paper every day, all I see is God could could we have fuck this up worse.

We tried to save the hospitals, so now we're bankrupting them. Testing other countries seem to be able to get the one lab. Trump has been touting forty eight percent of the time it works. You could flip a coin and do it just as well. You know, if you had a pregnancy test that half the time was, well, I guess that's wrong. I am pregnant. I don't think we'd be using that. I mean, we are just so bad.

And so how do you even begin to reverse this level of dysfunction or excuse me, a couple of things are going on.

Build up, but we're reaping what was sown not on your show, but on another network. We've lost our cognitive immunity. That's a term my friend Marina Gorbals used to the future. When we've lost our ability to sort out fact from fiction and science, from science fiction, because when we have a network that's been in the business of making people angry and stupid and at the same time we have social networks, whether it's Facebook or Twitter or others that look like these, these social networks are like open sewers.

They're full of untreated, unfiltered information. They have diamonds and rubies and gold and gems, and they have toxic waste, rusty cans and broken glass. And if you don't have a population that has the filters to sort out one from the other, you get to where we are today. Then overlay on that bill. We're kind of caught between what I call breaking news and President Breaking Bad. You know, on the one hand, which is assaulted with breaking news.

Twenty four kids in New York City have acquired inflammatory disease, a post covid-19, but it's not put in any context. So you don't know. Is that like one out of a hundred thousand? Is it one out of a thousand? But when you're constantly pounded with these breaking news stories, it's very hard to find your balance. And at the same time, then you have a president out there who basically is touting ultraviolet light colonoscopies and Lysol enemas or hydrochloric wind that has been rejected by his own FDA.

And between the two, Bill, it's become very hard, I think, for the average citizen to weigh the risks. When do I go? When do I not go out? Do I send my kids back to school? Do I not? Because no one is shaping the conversation at the top the way a real president would be doing in such a crisis. And other leaders around the world have been right.

And I'm glad you mentioned both sides, because the I mean, Trump was straight up got a mad king country. This has happened in history. You have a mad king. We have that now during a pandemic. But it's not like the other side has just all good information either. You wrote this and I was glad you did. You said we need your quoting Mother Nature. And you said Mother Nature says you need to get back in balance. And that starts with using the immune system that I endowed you with.

That's actually a controversial. And a lot of quarters we are so locked into this pharmaceutical medical establishment, bad food industry complex that we seem to have forgotten about. That's the way out of this is using our immune system. But not everybody wants to hear that historically, Bill.

That's how people overcame pandemics. The herd immunity, 60, 70 percent of the population. Got it. And then the virus runs out of people to infect. And and basically you get herd immunity. Now you through a vaccine or naturally. So I've been writing about that have been writing about Sweden from the very beginning. I don't know. Sweden's got the answer. Swedes don't even know if they have the answer, but they've decided to take an experiment that says, how is the best way for us to maximally save lives and livelihoods?

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

It's not for sure, but that's what they're anticipating. Well, the Swedes already believe they got about 30 percent of their population in Stockholm and their health workers who already have herd immunity. I don't know whether they're going to make it. They did not do well protecting their nursing homes. They would be the first to admit that they lost more people than they wanted. But what has really annoyed me to no end, Bill, the number of people, if you read the articles about Sweden who are rooting for them to fail and are already judging it is a failure because they may have lost more people now relative to Denmark, but not relative to other countries.

And I'm rooting for them to succeed. I don't know if they will, but if they can show us a different pathway here to maximally saves lives and livelihoods, God bless them.

And if I may, and historically, what we're doing now with the total lockdown, that's more of the experiment. Actually, what Sweden is doing is more what societies, including our own, have done in all past pandemics. That's the experiment. What we're doing is more the experiment. But let me tell you what, now that we're opening up again, Sweden, a state epidemic epidemiologist, said something I don't think we thought of about once you get into, excuse me, a lockdown.

He said once you get into a lockdown, it's difficult to get out of it. That's an interesting point. Now that we have scared the shit out of people and they're afraid to go out, even if businesses do open, are they going to patronise them? When you get people sitting home for three months, what sort of new habits do they have? Do they look at every other human being for the rest of their life like a leper? Is everyone going to turn into Howie Mandel and have this germophobia disease?

So I think that's a really interesting point. Once you once you get into it, it's kind of like a war. Easy to marchin, hard to march out.

Well, the reason we had to do that was because Trump, the leadership was slow to react. And so we faced a position where if we didn't lock down, the hospitals would likely have been overwhelmed. But the problem with lockdowns is all they do is exhaust you. They actually do nothing vis a vis the virus. They just spread out the time of infection and hopefully make it so it doesn't overwhelm your hospital system. Early on I wrote quoting Dr. David Katz, you know, that the idea should have been locked down for a very set period of time and then on a risk stratified basis, released into the workforce, people who were likely to experience this disease again, asymptomatically or is a mild flu, protect the most vulnerable, build herd immunity, and then sound the all clear once you have herd immunity.

And we never had that conversation. But one reason we didn't was in England. Boris Johnson wanted to do that. But a study by Imperial College that predicted massive numbers of deaths freaked him out of the ended up with locking down. And now what they've done is we've all done we've exhausted everybody and we now face the prospect of a second wave down the road as everyone wants to come out and go to the bar and understandably mixed together again.

So what do we do if there is a second wave? You know, South Korea was very tough with tracing, testing. They did it all great. And then they did have a second wave. So it showed that even that didn't really work. Now that we have decimated so many industries, I mean, hospitals and colleges, the restaurants and. Retail show business, you know, I don't know how many businesses you can destroy at once. I mean, you can keep putting people into a lifeboat, but eventually that makes the lifeboat sink.

So what happens if there is a second wave in the fall? What would you think we should do?

Well, I think what's what's going to happen by default, Bill, is that basically Trump has talked like we're being China testing, tracing. We're actually acting like we're going to be Sweden and go for herd immunity. We're preparing to do neither, though, actually. And we're talking like we're superior to both. And I think the the rubber will meet the road in the fall if there is a second wave. And when you listen to Dr. Foushee, he's basically said there will be a second wave.

And when you look at people and this has been my argument right now, I'm I'm really I so understand I've understood from the beginning the need for people to save livelihoods as well as lives. And I understand people want to come out now and they want to mix. And the reason I wrote that Mother Nature column was be smart, respect Mother Nature, just go out, but don't go into crowds, continue to wear a mask, continue to socially distance, play the odds, at least reduce the chances that you will get this disease symptomatically or asymptomatically and pass it on to someone else.

And I frankly, I don't know what will happen if it comes back in the fall. I think if that happens, we're probably just going to throw up our hands and go for herd immunity, hopefully protect the vulnerable and hopefully not overwhelm our hospital systems.

And I'll add one more thing. Get your immune system in better shape. It's it's within people's ability to do that, which is what I'm going to talk about with my next guest. But always great to see you, Tom. Always great to read you. Thank you for doing what you do. And I hope to see you in person soon. Thanks, Bill.

You too. I really appreciate it. Take care. O o o o o o o o o o. OK, my next guest is a family physician and bestselling author of The Fat Burn Fix. Please welcome Dr. Kate Shannahan to your homes. Hello there, Dr. Kate. Can I call you Dr. Kay? Yes, please. OK, so I'm going to start with what we have in common, I think. Cornell, right?

Yeah, OK. Are you biochemistry, studying biochemistry, their biochemistry and genetics there at Cornell? I was in the cannabis cultivation program and the undergrad school. The other thing we have in common, I think, is food and thinking that food is very important to your health and thinking that America doesn't mention that enough. I know you were the nutritionist for the Lakers, right? Yes. Yes. I read in several sources recently that only 12 percent of Americans are metabolically healthy, since that is your area of expertise, diet and metabolic health.

What does that mean to be metabolically healthy or unhealthy?

So there isn't even a standard definition for metabolism in the medical education. So that's just I say this just to give you an idea of how far we are from recognizing what the connection between diet and health, because metabolism is that connection. So so when people are metabolically healthy, we kind of generally understand it as you don't have diabetes and you are normal weight. And that's a good start. But we actually don't really define health in this country. So we don't define metabolic health.

We do define metabolic disease. And we've got a few common familiar diseases. Again, everybody knows that diabetes and obesity are associated with diet and have something to do with metabolism. But it turns out that the immune system hugely has to do the health of your immune system and the ability of your body to fight off. Viruses like the coronavirus has to do hugely with your metabolism because your metabolism determines whether or not you are, whether or not you are burning it, you're using energy efficiently, whether or not your body fat is the primary source of fuel for your body.

And we're we're really running our bodies on the wrong fuel is the essence of am I right? I mean, we certainly know sugar. I keep talking about sugar. The first guy said when the crisis happened, stop eating sugar. No, listen to me. Yes, well, I have sugar. There's a lot of doctors who agree with that.

One hundred percent. So we are still being that drum. But the other fuel that is the wrong fuel is the kind of fat that we have in our body fat.

And that's something that not enough people are aware of and almost nobody is even talking about it. So when I say the kind of fat I'm talking about, where where is your fat? Where did your fats come from? And it turns out that in this country over the past several generations, we've been eating more and more factory produced seed oils and almost completely cutting out the whole fat based foods like, you know, the animal foods. When you go to a grocery store these days and you try to buy like regular hamburger, most of it now is ninety five percent lean you it's there's not very much red meat that hasn't been trimmed of the fat, the chicken, most of it.

And most of what people know how to cook is boneless, skinless. Many of the dairy products like yogurt are fat free. You'd be hard pressed to find a flavored yogurt with that isn't fat free or low fat with a normal amount of fat. And so we've taken all this fat that was part of food out of our diet and we aren't eating any less that we're eating. Actually, about the same amount of fat, which is between 30 and 50 percent of most people's diets, is fat is not bad, I think.

Let me stop you there. I think people think fat equals I get fat. Fat is not what makes you fat, sugar and carbs, which, of course, become sugar in the body. That's what makes you fat people here nowadays. But the ketogenic diet, what's the ketogenic that means run your body on fat. Fat is the most efficient fuel to run your body on. Right. And you're saying we're eating the wrong kinds when we have we're talking about canola oil, right?

We're talking about corn oil, soy oil, sunflower oil, things that they didn't have fifty, one hundred years ago. And we're we're conducting this massive experiment of running our body on the wrong fuel.

It truly is an experiment and nobody knows that they've been participating in it. That's the big problem. And so that's why I tell people for the company that I work for, I've been telling. People that the best thing that you can do to boost your immune system is to stop eating these seed oils. And when I first started working here, nobody knew what the details are, but I've got them trained now. There's eight of them. I call them the Hateful Eight, and it's hard to memorize them.

But I do have resources on my website that make it real easy when you're shopping to avoid these things.

Well, I just mentioned the top four, I think. And I think what people have to understand is that they're in everything just like sugar is in everything. Just because you're not eating cake doesn't mean you're not getting tons of sugar because it's in salad dressing, it's in ketchup, it's in everything. And so are these oils that you're talking about. And I think what people have to understand is and I know they hate to hear this, but junk food is not just the junk food that we all think of as junk food.

The supermarket is mostly shit. It's mostly shit that's not make up the I know it sounds elitist because not everybody can go to Whole Foods, but they sell at Whole Foods.

Bill, a lot of people think that they think that Whole Foods is looking out for them. But if you look at the salad dressings. Sure. Right. You're going to be you're going to have a hard time finding one that actually has olive oil, even the ones that will say on the front made with olive oil when you turn it around, olive oils like listed after soy or canola or one of the other hateful eight vegetable oils.

OK, so this is very important. I think we have to in order to get this country back moving again and the fear and the fear is not going to go away because, well, first of all, the media loves fear and they're always finding and there are I'm not saying it doesn't happen. They're finding younger people, people under 40, let's say under 50, who die from coronavirus and they do coronavirus, which often brings on something else. Now, you know, you're going to talk about that.

But what I read so interesting that we you said is that you're willing to stake your reputation, that anyone who is of the younger set, who has died of this, it's not because they're unlucky. I think we have this idea that, you know, you just might get struck by lightning, the way coronavirus, the way the way you would get struck by lightning. And you are saying no, anyone who dies from this who is not an elderly person, it's because they are metabolically unhealthy, because they don't even realize that maybe they're not obese.

You're saying you don't have to be obese or have diabetes to have this sort of metabolic health? Could you explain that? Yes.

So what's going on is that the virus itself is not actually what's killing the younger people. What's killing the younger people is the inflammation that comes when your immune system tries to get rid of the virus. But your body fat has been saturated with these highly unstable fatty acids that come from eating all these seed oils. And so that's what I would stake my reputation on, is you show me one person who's been avoiding these seed oils for five years, one person under 60 who's had a serious case of the Koran where they were in the ICU or whether they died.

And because I don't think I don't think there is one. What I'm saying is that most that the underlying conditions, like we kind of got few of them nailed, like diabetes and fatty liver and even pre diabetes. Most of the people who are like in the media and saying, I'm healthy, I don't understand why I got so sick with this thing. They either have been have pre diabetes that hasn't been diagnosed because more than half of people with diabetes just aren't told by their doctor or they might have fatty liver.

But the underlying condition that underlies all these underlying conditions, including hypertension, including heartburn, is having body fat that's saturated with these unstable, inflammation prone fatty acids from seed oils, from living on them because we are living on them and they just build up over years in our body fat and make it increasingly hyper inflammatory.

It's interesting the way we often demonize things and health is very trendy. I don't know if people think of it that way, but it is it's it's worse in the clothing industry sometimes. If we were doing this show in the 80s, it would be all about carb up, get as many carbs in here as you can. I mean, 15 years ago, they were saying trans fats was what we should eat. That's margarine now. Now they say and I think it's the truth, those are the worst kind.

I think this is what you're saying. And another thing, they demonize the sun, which you need sun. Not too much, but yes, you need sun. It's not evil germs themselves. It is natural in the world to encounter germs. You actually need to. And cholesterol. I think that's one of your big issues, right. Is that we actually sometimes have to lower cholesterol. Somebody got it in their head that we had to just get rid of all cholesterol.

First of all, tell it what is cholesterol? It's one of the most important things in the body, is it not?

Yes. Cholesterol is a stabilizer molecule that helps every single one of your cell membranes maintain like do its job. And cholesterol is a building block also for important hormones like cortisol and testosterone. And estrogen in your brain is just absolutely loaded with cholesterol. And one of the interesting things that they've already discovered in Wuhan, where they're doing a lot more research on how to predict who's really going to get sick from Coronavirus is they found that the people who were hospitalized had very low cholesterol levels and the people who died were more likely to have their cholesterol levels actually dropped while they were trying to fight off the infection.

And the people who survived were able to bring their cholesterol levels back up to normal. And the connection between cholesterol and seed oils is that these seed oils actually will drop your cholesterol level and nobody really knows exactly why or how it happens. But it's been known for four decades. And in fact, that's why the doctors even recommend them sometimes because we have this pervasive, ridiculous fear of cholesterol, which is something that every single cell in our body needs.

And it's in most foods that are animal of animal origin. Suddenly we have to drop our cholesterol by eating fats that came from seeds. And by the way, the only way we could extract them from seeds was by extremely harsh processing in a factory which generates toxins that sit there in the bottle while it's on the shelf. And then, of course, you eat them and they are so toxic that they distort your normal microflora. So these things, these seed oils, they make you more susceptible to infection in numerous ways, starting with like where they enter your body.

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

OK, so I guess the bottom line is try to eat real or food. I know it's hard in this country. We stacked the deck against people. We don't subsidize the right things. We don't seem to care. And you know, the people who make the cures for the bad food, I guess they're happy about it to the pharmaceutical industry sometimes. But we won't go into that. We got to go. I appreciate you coming on and explaining this to us.

And I hope the people out there eat real food. Thank you so much.

You're welcome. And, Bill, if I may, I just want to say one thing we can do that's a positive from all of this is if we do change our diets, we are this horrible coronavirus makes us finally take our diet seriously. We're taking a sad song and making it better.

OK, thank so much to take care. Thank you. So I saw an article recently that I thought was pretty ridiculous because it was about how we haven't had any school shootings in the last two months yet because there's nobody in school. And L.A. is boasting with pride about how our air quality is better than ever for obvious reasons. I saw a headline that said in New York, there hasn't been a pedestrian death in 58 days because no one is athletes.

So I asked the staff to call the local papers to see what other municipalities are saying about what they're proud of. Would you like to hear some? I'm sure you do. OK, for example, in Tallahassee, it's been forty six days without someone on bath salts trying to fuck an alligator. Impressive. In New Orleans, they've gone twenty four days without a topless check falling off a balcony in Mississippi.

It's been 28 days without someone hooking up with their family reunion in Seattle. They've gone. Forty five days since someone on a Prius ran over someone on a scooter. Seattle Fire Island has gone six days without someone in an emergency room saying, I must have sat on it. I'm going to wait an extra week for that laugh at home in Venice Beach, right here in California, in L.A.. Fifty two days without a fight between a deadbeat with a lizard and a deadbeat with a parrot.

Salt Lake City is gone. Sixty one days since a Mormon got his necktie caught in a bicycle. On the Jersey Shore, it's been 60 days without a fight over what someone was looking at. And in San Francisco, it's been a record five weeks since a child has asked, mommy, why does that lady have a beard in Oklahoma?

Thirty four days since someone tried to kill a spider with a blowtorch. And Tampa, Tampa, Florida. Forty eight days without a junior high school kid getting blown by his teacher in a minivan.

OK, you know him, he is the Academy Award winning filmmaker and host of the podcast Rumball with Michael Moore and my good friend, the icon, Michael Moore. Michael, how are you? Are you in that apartment of yours?

I know so well, I yes, I am in this New York City apartment. He exists somewhere on top of actually on top of a movie theater. I was on the main floor, so that's convenient. But it's closed, so I can't go see him.

Oh, of course. What isn't? I hope you're getting out a little now that we're alone.

Yes, I've gotten out a little bit, but I really have been pretty much confined. This is day. I don't even know what they say.

No, I think I don't know what day it is. So but I do.

I'm lucky. I have a I have a narrow deck outside the window, the door. And so I've been going out there and walking a mile or two every day. But it looks, I'm sure, very ridiculous to the buildings, the apartments across the street or whatever, that there's this guy just walking by. President, the reason I look like who is that guy, the mob guy in the village? Yeah.

Yeah, I remember he walked around in the bathroom. That's all that's all that's missing from this. Looks like a crazy guy. So a deck. I wanted to ask you about the politics of this state we're in right now because there's a new poll came out today that said Biden leading Trump nationally by eleven. But CNN reported last week that he was actually losing in the battleground states that will determine the election. I thought this was an interesting demographic, that Biden is killing Trump in the demographic of people who hate them both.

I'm not kidding about that. So that's good. That's the kind of enthusiasm we need. But as as someone like me who was last time out, kind of worried that Trump would win, and you predict that he would.

What's your crystal ball saying now? Because I would have thought a president who handled this crisis the way Trump had would be in the teens and he's in the mid 40s.

Oh, yeah. No, no. He's going to do well. He will. He hasn't lost any of his support. He he will do well. And none of us should take him for granted. We need to behave as if he will win a second term. And anybody who right now just went, oh, no, you're really part of the problem because you're you're not taking this seriously. This he knows exactly what he's doing. He was in Michigan this week.

It's the third time he's been in Michigan in three weeks. So he knows he believes that he's going to somehow pull this off. But the polls you cited very similar to four years ago, Hillary was, you know, differently, if not well ahead of Trump. But but the polls also showed that she was doing well in those battleground states. And so what I think this means this time is we have the possibility of of winning this time. But win or lose, there's no doubt in my mind that Biden, whoever the Democratic candidate is, just in case he's not, we you know, it's not official yet, but the Hillary won by three million votes in the popular vote, as we call it.

I think Biden, he'll win by five million. I think a lot of people are going to come out of that state home mistakenly last time they're going to come out this time. But I think Trump could still win the Electoral College. And so all of us have to be really in fighting mode because he is and he he knows he knows his people. So he just has to he will get all that 44, 46 percent. Oh, he just needs a couple more percent of the people on his side who stayed home last time.

Yeah.

So he's so up front about how the less people vote, the better it is for Republicans. He literally said if we had more people voting, you'd never have a Republican in this country elected again. That's not the subtext of what he said. That is actually what he said. You got to give it to this guy. He does speak his inner monologue.

Yes. And that's and that's why if you listen to him and if you take him at his word, understand that he is a lot of the time telling the truth, not the greater truth, is truth. He believes that he'd pass a lie detector if you if you wired him up. And and he's right. If if we make it easy for people to vote, if we don't have voter suppression Republicans, you're going to lose because the. Already, the country does not support the Republican agenda.

The majority of the country are not climate deniers. The majority of the country believes women should be paid the same as men. The majority of the country go down the whole list. The majority of the country takes the liberal center left Democratic Party position on most issues. So. So the only way Republicans can win, and this has been true now for a few elections is to cheat, is to somehow game at Riggert, do whatever they need to do in this case.

What I'm worried about, Bill, is that last time I remember he threatened that he kept saying the whole election is going to be rigged. And what he said, my Second Amendment people, I appeal to my 2nd Amendment people, the gun people to get ready because this is going to be a rigged election. And the funny thing is, is that what he actually thought was he was certain he would win the popular vote because, of course, everybody loves him.

That's what a malignant narcissist would believe. But he was worried that the Clintons were somehow going to rig the Electoral College and that's how he was going to lose this time. He is he doesn't even have to. He's already got his gun, guys. The guys with guns in we saw this in Michigan the last couple of weeks showing up at the state capitol with their long their long arms and threatening everybody to the point where the governor last Thursday just shut the legislature down, called the day off, was so afraid.

This is this is my I want to appeal to people to not be afraid of these guys with the guns. I went to high school with them. I know them. They they want to kill Bambi. That's their idea of a real fight them and a deer. If if the deer were ever armed, if they if it was a fair fight, these guys would never be in the woods. It's so important that liberals who generally are not gun owners not be afraid because that's all they're trying to do now.

Liberate Michigan, liberate Minnesota. You know, good on all of you for showing up with those guns. He's just trying to scare liberals because liberals get scared easy. Don't be scared. You know, we are the majority. There's more of us than there are of them. The only way that they're going to pull it off is somehow he's able to cancel the election or postpone it. That is what we have to fight against because I'm certain that's what's going on in his head right now.

Well, one way he wants to rig the vote is he's kind of declared war on the post office because, for example, Michigan sent out ballots last week to everybody and Trump.

His response was to threaten to withhold covid aid to the state of Michigan in response, which, of course, sounds to me like the exact same playbook from Ukraine withholding aid. That's one of his big tricks, except this is our country right in the middle of a bad day. But he seems to be very afraid of male in votes that everyone and I don't know if that's true. We had an election flipped here in California, the Twenty Fifth District, which was Katie Hills district, the woman who was resigned because of a sex scandal, something no Republican would ever do, that it was a picture of her with a bong and a chick.

So she had to go stupid, the typical stupid democratic move.

Okay, so that a special election, the Republican one, nobody never heard his name, Mike Garcia, never heard of them, didn't do any campaigning. Of course, it was all mail in. So the mailing didn't hurt the Republicans in that one. I'm not so sure Trump is should be afraid of Maylands. I mean, his voters are older. They like the mail.

Yeah. But we also want to protect the post office. Let me just say that because the post office is you know, it's really part of our homeland security in a sense that if the if the government needed to send anything to every American tomorrow. Everybody everybody has daily contact with there's only one person from the U.S. government that has contact with you every day, and that's your mail woman or mail man and and the ability to actually let's say, for instance, there was medicine that we all needed to take immediately.

The only way to ship that out is through the U.S. post office, and it can be in everybody's mailbox the next day. So it's very important to protect the post office just for our own security. But he listen, he thinks whether he whether he understands what happened in California, it doesn't matter. All that he needs to do is follow Fox and Friends telling them. And that's good enough. The fact that seemed like a lot of people don't believe he's taking this this drug, the anti malaria drug.

I believe him. I'm I believe Trump what he so I do truth. I think he's taking it. And and he's so in such a state right now. And I think he knows that if it was a fair election, he's going to lose. So he's got to do whatever he can to gin this up in whatever way to make sure that that doesn't happen. And going after Michigan, a state that voted for him, makes, again, no sense.

But what he's really mad at in Michigan, that woman, as he calls her the governor, what happened after two years of Trump in the twenty eighteen election, the people of Michigan threw out all the top Republicans and and voted in the top four people that run the state of Michigan. The governor's a woman. The lieutenant governor is black. There's a lesbian who's the attorney general and a single mom is the secretary of state. That's who runs Michigan.

There's not a single white guy anywhere in there. And I think he doesn't like to deal with that. He doesn't there's I. I don't understand what it is with him and women, but, boy, that is that's worse than anything that he has to deal with these women in Michigan. And, you know, I hope he gets his comeuppance for it, but that will only happen if people do their job. And let me say this. It's really incumbent upon Biden here.

People like you and I, people are you and I are not going we can go on TV and say, hey, everybody, get out there and vote. That's not how it's going to happen. Biden has got to inspire people to get out and vote. Tell them what you're going to do for them. Use this pandemic to show all the things that have been exposed about how this society of ours runs and how awful and deadly Trump has been night.

When we're you know, we're we're at this point, what we're almost at 100000 dead Americans. You know, all of this could have been not prevented, but not this many people needed to die. No, not at all.

So let me ask you about. Yeah, yeah. Going away what I call my issue, because it's the thing I can't seem to let go of and have been trying to get and I think is their issue that lack the lack of belief in a deity.

Was that or that was my that was my old issue for the last four years. It's been he's not going to lose. He's not going to leave even if he is not going to. I'd like to I'd like to present this as evidence a little. They asked Jared Kushner last week, TIME magazine did about November 3rd, which is Election Day and the election happening on that day. And he said, I'm not sure I can commit one way or another right now.

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

But he did say that. I think it's indicative. You mentioned how Trump was railing about it's rigged and that was about an election he won. Now, I've heard you say, yeah, you think I'm right, maybe that he's not going to leave, but then the cops will take pleasure in ousting him. Have you ever seen him in front of cops? It's like James Brown at the Apollo. No, no.

The cops across America love him. OK, it's the cops in D.C. First of all, the D.C. police force is mostly black.

So right there, he's he's got to hope that the African-American police force in DC is going to protect him when he says, I'm not leaving, even though he took them to oust him and the FBI about the FBI, he's pissed all over the FBI, the CIA, the the the people at the Pentagon.

I mean, he's got he's he's created a lot of animosity.

But look at all the other people he's pissed on. You cannot name a senator, starting with Lindsey Graham, who he hasn't said horrible things about, and somehow they still wind up being his allies.

OK, well, listen, if that's the case that the police don't do their job, there's you and me, Bill. I mean, you and I are going to go there. At least I'm inviting you to come with me. But we are going to go there. And I think we can get thousands, millions of Americans to show up and escort him in the best eviction. However, he can place in the United States and remove him from that building.

OK, he's not staying. I mean, we everybody watching this right now, we all agree on that, right? We're not just going to sit back and and take that. I mean, you know, he's not going to leave again.

But you talk about and I have talked about him calling on his Second Amendment friends. Do you think they are not going to be there when we show up there? I think if it didn't turn violent, it would be a great ending to a Michael Moore movie. But I think it's going to be a different kind of movie because, again, we are not going to be the only ones in the streets when he is saying this was rigged and I should go.

I would hope that most of these guys I went to high school with, with their big guns that they know better. They they can see the end game of this. So they're not going to win and they're going to end up I mean, they're living their white life in their white neighborhoods. If they end up being arrested and tried for doing what you suggested, they will then be moved to a black and brown neighborhood called the United States prison system.

That's that's assuming that we have the old country that we've always had. I'm not so sure that we still have that one. He has trumped this week. This month has gotten rid of four inspector generals of different agencies. Impeachment turned out to be a horrible thing.

If I knew what I knew and how he bullied he bullied Mueller, he threatened him. And Mueller got scared and wouldn't even bring him in to be interrogated, didn't bring him before. The grand jury didn't bring down Jr. Anybody was. Mueller was afraid that I do his job, then Comey, then he threatens Comey and what is OK, but but that's what I'm talking about. That's the investigation. I'm Hillary.

But just the impeachment, you know, I mean, if I if I could do it over again, I wouldn't because it just emboldened have. Now he can conduct this war on accountability and nobody even barely made the papers.

I bet you most people are watching this and going, wow, I hadn't heard that because this is all going to be five now inspector generals. Right. And so, you know, I hope so. My heart's dog's best way to to take over an election or not leave the White House. I agree. But also not that just all the other things that people are watching us tonight don't know that happened in the last few weeks, the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, suspended, suspended.

We don't have time to do all this investigation. All those people go on and let me tell you if and when the pandemic ends and if it does open up or end, even in his term, those inspectors from whether the inspector generals, whether the people that do our clean air and clean water, they're not coming back, not under Donald Trump is his way to move this thing. I am. And it makes him very dangerous. And did I hear everybody at home say that they would join Bill and I in D.C. on January 20th next year?

It's my birthday. It's your birthday.

We'll have a birthday bash birthday. All right.

See and remove this motherfucker from the White House. All right.

Thank you, Michael. Always great to see you. And hopefully, hopefully things will be different next time we meet Michael Moore.

I'm counting on it. Thanks, Bill. All right. Take care. OK, now it's time for our new rules, everybody, new rules, new rules you're screaming at know, OK, new rule.

I get that stories need to remind customers to social distance, but this is a little much I want to buy shoes, not play Twister. And if I go the wrong way, will I hear this?

Nuriel, the the newspapers printing the story about an 81 year old man who's been accused of killing another man during a sadomasochistic sex act must stop burying the lead. Look, being in the best possible health should be on all our minds these days.

And if you're eighty one and have the strength to fuck and then kill another grown man, it's clear you're doing something right. I'm not saying release him and give him a book deal, but maybe someone can ask him about his workout routine near old.

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

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

We don't have any sports to watch. Let's start broadcasting fights between people who don't want to wear a mask and people who insist they do. Two men enter Costco. Only one leaves. Don't think of it as another sign of America coming apart. Think of it as Americans. Dumber version of Mexican wrestling.

Nor will the South Korean soccer team that used sex dolls to fill the empty stands doesn't have to apologize for that, but they do have to explain why they made them wear masks. One of the benefits of sex dolls is they're not going to give you the virus. Plus, that face is perfect for a soccer game. They all look like they're screaming, go, go.

And finally, new rule.

You can't have so much money that my computer's spellcheck doesn't know what to call you. Jeff Bezos is poised to be the world's first trillionaire. The headline says, Even my phone was like, that can't be right.

But it probably is because we now live in an age not of innovation, but of domination, startups are in a 13 year slump and financing is down twenty two percent from eight years ago because in the online marketplace, Amazon has become the only game in town.

And that was before an event happened that made everyone stay home and order everything online. Yeah. I mean, predictably, once the virus hit and America locked itself upstairs like a babysitter hiding from a slasher, sure.

Of course, the rest of the economy cratered, but Amazon stock price is up twenty five percent. That's what I call asymptomatic places like J. Crew and stage stores, Neiman Marcus, J.C. Penney, Sears, Pier One. They're all throwing in the towel, as it seems one of the unintended consequences of our current response. Is everyone going out of business at the same time except Amazon while we're all inside getting softer and hairier? It's out there getting bigger and stronger.

And if we don't do something, we're going to come out of our holes and discover that there's only one store and it knows where you live. You know, there was a famous folk song from the 1950s called Sixteen Tons, and like all folk songs, it was horrible, but it did raise awareness about the problem. I think just one store, because it was about the old mining towns where the workers only had the one company store. The chorus went sixteen tons.

And what do you get? Another day older and deeper in debt? Saint Peter, don't call me because I can't go. I own my soul to the company. So like I said, folk songs are horrible. But at least back then we understood that getting everything from one store was a bad thing.

But that was BP before Prime. You might be surprised to learn that Elizabeth Warren had a plan to break up Amazon, and I say let's go for it. Like Senator Warren, I'm a capitalist to my core. But when a company gets so big, it smothers all competitors in the crib. That's anticapitalist. Like when Amazon destroyed the startup diaper's dotcom by cutting Amazon's own diaper costs below cost. By one estimate, Bezos lost one hundred million dollars in his quest to corner the online diaper market.

But he owns it now, which raises the question what is wrong with this man? Jesus, OK, you had one brilliant idea that when people get drunk at home, they'll go online and buy shit they don't need.

Great. Congratulations, you won.

You are the best at making money. But one of the rules of the game of capitalism is you can win big, but not so big. There's no game. We've been through this before. A century ago, when John D. Rockefeller was personally worth two percent of America's GDP and his Standard Oil company became such an overwhelming monopoly that Congress wrote the Sherman Antitrust Act to break it up. But Rockefeller had only one product, oil. Amazon sells one hundred and nineteen million different items.

And when one supplier brings you everything, you're not a customer, you're a dependent. And look, I use Amazon, of course everyone does. I'm not saying Amazon is pure, unadulterated evil. That's Wells Fargo. But Amazon does prey upon the Achilles heel of the American character. We will sell our soul for convenience. Liberals are supposed to be environmentalists, they must notice how wrong it is for us to do so much of our shopping in such a wasteful, piggish manner.

Does anyone really need a grill cover to get to you overnight and in a separate box from something you ordered the day before from the same warehouse? When I was a kid, getting a package was a rare event. Now kids think the UPS man is their dad. What is socks need a protective air cushion. I'm going to shove my foot in it and stomp on it all day. They ship a disposable razor in a box the size of a coffin in enough plastic to choke a whale, which it eventually does.

And I haven't even mentioned that Amazon often pays no taxes and bathroom breaks for their workers are so infrequent they have to pee into bottles which are then resold as kombucha. Maybe this is just the hunter gatherer in me speaking, but someday I hope to leave the cave again and I'm going to want to shop somewhere in person. So this weekend.

Be a hero and go out to an actual store and patronize some other business besides Amazon, and let's see if we can get America back on its feet again because we're looking pretty raggedy. And you know, the old saying, if the shoe fits, you probably didn't get it online. OK, that's our show. I want to thank my guests, Thomas Friedman, Dr. Kate Shannahan and Michael Moore will be back next week, some day from the studio, probably from my backyard.

Thank you, folks.

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