Original subtitles

I appreciate it. How you doing?

You've got it.

How are you?

Thank you so much.

Thank you, ladies and gentlemen.

I appreciate that. Sit down.

Okay, once again, big story. Every week it seems AI, but it should be, right?

It's scary shit.

They had a summit. I thought I did this last week. They're at the UN, all the

same guys.

Now they're at the White House. This week, you know, the dude from Anthropic,

the dude from NVIDIA, the dude from OpenAI, Meta, Google, SpaceX, Amazon. It

was a full spectrum of people on the spectrum.

The good news, problem solved.

Yes, we're renaming it. It was called artificial intelligence. That's the

problem. We were insulting it.

Artificial. Trump says now it's super intelligence.

So what are we worrying about? This is like somebody saying, run for your life,

it's Frankenstein. And you going, well, actually, the doctor's name is

Frankenstein.

The monster.

But, you know.

The problem is that AI is what is propping up our economy, you know, in a

lot of ways. We finally had a job support that was not good. It's amazing

with all the shit that's going on.

Economy hasn't tanked more than it has. Well, that may be over.

And you can see the panic already in a lot of people. The guys who work in

crypto, now we're going to have to take on a second grift.

Trump says he gives himself an A-plus on the economy.

I'm not sure the voters agree, but we'll find out very soon in the election.

But you know what?

It's not the only issue.

The economy.

What about mosquitoes?

Have you heard about that? I'm not making this up. Trump is going after the

mosquitoes in Washington, D.C. He issued an executive order to drive the

mosquitoes out of Washington, D.C.

It's called winter.

And it

will count as

one of the wars he's solved. He's solved many wars.

He has, that's true.

He has solved many wars. Now if he could just get out of the one that we're in.

Yeah, we're in the one in Iran. But here's a little good news. Iraq.

Remember Iraq?

This week, our last troops finally pulled out. We pulled out of one. Hey!

And, uh... It's also good news that Iraq is more democratic

than when we arrived there. The bad news is we're not.

Uh...

This I didn't see coming in the Iran war. Trump said this week that we

attacked Iran also because they were manufacturing drugs.

They were?

Okay.

Yeah, apparently what they were chanting was meth to America.

Meth to America.

I... Wow.

No wonder Hezbollah had all those pagers.

It doesn't look like we're getting out anytime soon, because this week he is

sending a third carrier to the Gulf with 2,000 new troops. And, by the way,

not just any troops.

Because Pete Hegseth made a big speech this week, and he was talking about

who's in the military now. You know, he did a lot of housecleaning there, okay?

A lot of firing people, a lot of putting things in order. And now, and this is a

quote he said, now in the military... No fatties, no trannies, no beardos, no

weirdos, no wimps, no radicals. Because that is the slogan you want in a

military. Something that sounds like it was pulled directly off a Grindr

profile.

But... Wait. I always give credit where credit is due. This...

It's not all bad. This month was Hispanic Heritage Month, and Trump

had... a ceremony there for it at the White House. It went very well. Ice only

shot four people.

And then he took the Hispanic delegation, whoever came there, I think

Rubio was there too, on a tour of the ballroom construction site.

And he said something that got a lot of press. He said, you know, it's still a

hole in the ground. It's a construction site. And they were looking down, and he

said, you know, be careful.

Only a Hispanic could survive that fall.

And Marco Rubio said, thanks?

Wow.

Um, no.

When he took the Hispanics to a job site, some people tried to say that was

a racist thing, Hispanics at a job site. I think that's nothing.

What may not be cool is that next month is Asian Heritage Month, and he's taking

them to a nail salon.

I see a red flag on that one. But hey, finally...

Finally, big news for us. And when I say us, I mean you people who are here every

week with me. The merger went through.

You know that?

Paramount now owns Warner Discovery, which owns HBO, which owns my ass.

So, I am owned by who? I don't know. You know what? Whoever does, whoever owns me

now, don't believe what Trump is tweeting about me. Did you see what he

said about me this weekend? He said, my ratings are so low, it's just sad.

You know what, Mr. President? Your insults don't bother me. Make up

whatever shit you want about me. Just don't mention I went to Cornell.

All right.

We've got a great show. We have Fareed Zakaria and Anand Giridharadas. But

first up...

He is the host of the Revisionist History Podcast and the best-selling

author whose new book is The American Way of Killing, The Invention of an

Epidemic. Malcolm Gladwell is finally here.

Hey.

Malcolm.

Wanted to meet you for a long time.

Thank you so much for being here.

So glad we finally got you here, and I'm so anxious to get into the book. I first

want to ask you, you usually write about...

Big social trends.

I mean, I think I've read most of your books. The Tipping Point, you know, that

was about a big idea that covers a lot of ground on a lot of things.

Outliers with the 10,000 hours.

Why, when you picked a specific topic, which I think is a departure for you,

this book is about guns.

Why of all the topics you could have picked, why guns?

I mean, I've been fascinated with this question of why America is so different

from other peer countries around the world.

Since I was a kid, I grew up in rural Ontario, and I would get my Time

magazine in the mail every week, and I would read about this place which was

100 miles away, which had levels of violence that just were unthinkable to a

Canadian. And I just didn't understand why.

Because, you know, the countries look the same, they eat the same food, and

they watch the same TV, and they worship the same god, and one place had four

times the homicide rate of Canada.

uh just i didn't understand why and i still don't even after writing the book

you know well i'm a little a little further along than i was before but i

don't think there is a definitive answer i think what you mean to say is if you

read this book you will know for sure all right i'll take the coaching no i

mean i think you you shed a lot of light on it in a way i have not seen shed

before but first of all it's realistic that's what the first thing i loved

about it is that We have to be realistic, and I think a lot of the

times we have not been about this issue. First of all, whatever it is, we're not

going to get rid of guns in this country. We would have to confiscate

them. That's just not going to happen. It's like a virus. It's here.

How do we deal with it is the question. We can't get rid of it, correct?

It's funny, when I talked to people who were doing homicide prevention for this

book, it was striking to me how little they talked about.

gun control, not because they're not in favor of it, they are, but just because

they don't think it's going to happen in their lifetime.

And if they wait around for it to happen, a lot of people are going to die

in the interim.

The conversation has got to move along from that issue.

Well, gun control is a very vague, broad term.

We do have some gun control in this country. I bought a gun before, and I

had to go through a process, different from state to state. I've also been in

Alaska, where it's like on the counter at the 7-Eleven.

Yeah.

Because there's a moose on the street walking down the street. You know, it's

just a different... We're just a patchwork of very different states.

But one thing you get into on the realistic tip is that, and I've said the

same thing for years, we concentrate on the wrong type of guns.

Assault weapons, yes, they're sexier and they're bigger and they look scarier,

but that's not really where the problem is. Can you give us those stats?

Yeah, I mean...

The opening chapter of my book is all about how ludicrous assault rifle bans

are, because they don't ban assault rifles.

Everyone pretends they do, but if you just read the bill, what they're really

banning is the number of cosmetic attachments you can buy on the Internet

for your assault rifle. And Congress says you can't have these three cosmetic

attachments. They don't do anything about the underlying problem, and

they...

And they also have at the end of the bill, there'll be an appendix, which is

way longer than the bill, which lists all the rifles they're not banning.

But also the fundamental problem is we have a problem with guns and trying to

kind of slice and dice and say this category is worse than this other

category is foolishness. More people in mass shootings, for example.

die because of handguns than because of assault rifles. Yeah, that's the point.

Isn't most of the violence... It's handguns.

Handguns, which are very easy to get. I'm not even sure that what we call

assault rifles... I mean, I certainly have seen a lot of debates about that,

whether it is really an assault rifle. It's certainly not something I think

civilians need in a civilian society.

I've also heard people say, this is why I like it, because... It's effective

because the AR-15 is a great gun. That's what the gun people will tell you. And

I'm not against the Second Amendment. I'm not against having guns.

Are you?

I think, would I rather live in a world where we didn't have any guns? Yes.

Well, I'd rather have ice cream in the mail. But, you know. Do I think that

we're going to get there anytime soon in the U.S.? No.

Like I said, I think there are other much more pressing issues we can... But

it is a leveler of sorts.

Otherwise, it would just be the strongest, meanest people who always had

the advantage.

I mean, people who live in places where the police don't come quickly, women who

can more easily be overpowered by men. It is a leveler of sorts.

Well, you know, one of the points I make in the book is that when we talk about

what our homicide problem is, we're talking about something quite specific.

We're talking about young men who are using guns to settle arguments and

disputes and feuds.

Mostly young black men, correct? Well, I would say, I don't know whether the

color of the skin is the important criteria here. I'm talking about... I'm

just talking about the statistics.

The... Well, I would say, I mean, Bill, now you're... This is one of those facts

that is... that leads the conversation astray. Because I don't... I think... Or

to the point.

Well, no, I think that race is the wrong variable here. The right variable is

young men, arguments, and guns.

Those are the things that matter here.

Young white men could just as easily get into the same trap if they're in

environments where there are... But the stats don't show that they do it in the

same numbers across races. That's just a fact.

Yes, homicide rates are higher among African Americans than they are among

white Americans. Yes, that is... And you're right, young men.

It's a very small percentage of the population that does most of the...

That's another kind of really important point that I think we overlook, which is

when we talk about the criminal violence problem in this country, we're talking

about a tiny percentage of the population.

So there's a famous study by a criminologist in Chicago, Andrew

Papachristos, who looked at the west side of Chicago, 50,000 people, and

demonstrates that... At any given time, the number of people who are at risk for

either being shot or shooting someone in a community of 50,000 is 400.

It's the size of an elementary school. Tiny, right?

We're not talking about, when we talk about violence, we assume it's something

that has seeped into every corner of our community. This is not true. It is

confined to a very narrow and specific subset of the population who tend to

have almost a very similar profile, like I said.

Young men who are incapable of settling their arguments peaceably.

Yeah. I mean, other countries have guns. We just use them.

Right? Yeah. We have way more guns than most.

Yeah. But, I mean, Canadians have guns.

The Swiss have guns. When I first came to this country as a 20-year-old, I was

house-sitting. I was living in Indiana, and I was house-sitting for someone at

work. I was in the guest bedroom, and I opened the drawer on the bedside table,

and there was a handgun. And I was like... Oh, my goodness. What have I

done? This does not happen. In Canada, you don't go into the guest bedroom and

open the door and there's a Glock waiting for you.

It's just like a... There are some real differences.

Okay. I think a really other important point you raised that I don't hear a lot

is that, contrary to popular belief, we're not under-policed.

We, oh, we are under policed. We are under policed. We're not over policed.

Right. People say we're over policed, and you correct them. Oh, my God. So,

this is a thing that I hear that makes my head explode.

Los Angeles, where we are now, is the same size as Berlin, right?

This, Los Angeles has 8,500 police officers on a good day.

Berlin has 18,000. And that is typical of the differences between... And

Germans.

Yes.

Again, I'm not sure it's the kind of thing we want to be focusing on. German

police, come on. I mean, you don't want to fuck with them, I'm sure.

I would say that the LAPD is a good deal scarier than the German... You're

correct about that. But if you go city by city around the U.S.,

There's, roughly speaking, half as many cops in a typical American city. And you

make the point that when we don't have enough police, the police that we have

have to act more badass.

Yeah. There is a correlation between how few police you have in a country and how

violent your police are. A very, very clear correlation.

Okay. So before I let you go, this is off topic, although I hope people get

this book. I think it's a terrific book.

I've got to get you on AI. We're going to talk about it on the panel.

You're one of...

the country's true public intellectuals.

Just give me your skinny on where you are. Are you as scared as I am?

As scared as Bill Gates was this week when he said... Do you remember that

story, possibly apocryphal, of when the premier of China in the 70s goes to

France and they ask him for his opinion on the French Revolution and he says

it's too early to tell?

I feel that way about AI.

Check back with me in 10 years and I'll tell you how I feel about it. Really,

you think it's still too early?

I think it's way too early to tell. I don't... But we might not be here in 10

years. That's what they're... True.

In that case, you can check back with me in 10 years, and that will answer your

question. Well, I hope it's not 10 years before you do the show again. Thank you

so much.

Malcolm Gladwell. Thank you, sir.

All right, let's meet our panel.

Hey.

Hey, guys.

All right. He publishes the Inc. newsletter on subsects. His book was

called Man and the Mayor, Hope, Struggle, and Belonging in an American

City. Anand Girdhar Das. I'm glad to see you here for the first time.

Thank you.

He is a Washington Post columnist, host of CNN, GPS, and author of Age of

Revolutions, available now in paperback. Our returning champion, Fareed Zakaria.

Okay.

So, is that...

Is that comforting, that Malcolm Gladwell is not too worried about AI?

Because your column was about it today.

You know, I'll tell you a funny story about that story he told about the

French Revolution.

So the way it goes is apparently Kissinger asks Mao or Zhou Enlai,

what do you think of the French Revolution, Zhou Enlai says, early to

tell. And we think, oh my God, these Chinese, they think in centuries, in

millennia, and we're so stupid.

It turned out the translator wrote a piece in the FT a few years ago

explaining. This was 1972. He was referring to the revolutionary events in

France in 1968.

Oh. But the students took over the, right? And I said, well, it's soon to

tell. It was not a reference to 1789. Right, it was four years later. Exactly,

exactly. And so it was a reasonable thing to say. We've got to see how this

plays out. But on AI, yeah, I am. Look, I think that these recent attacks

uh really people haven't fully understood what happened you know these

these ai agents decided on them by themselves that they were going to break

into another company's website they were not asked to do that they had been

isolated they didn't know that they there were others of them they started

communicating with a secret message board which they then hid from their

human overseers, a bunch of them decided that they were losing tokens, they were

running out of cash to do compute, so they sacrificed themselves so that the

overall mission, the cybercrime, to hack into Hugging Face, was successful.

None of this was requested or directed by humans.

And we're just, you know, Malcolm is right, we're just in the early phases.

This stuff is gonna get way more powerful.

And that's where we are today.

Imagine what can happen. For example, one piece of this that you could easily

imagine, right now we can understand what they're doing because AI speak

English. When they translate from machine language, it's because they've

been trained mostly on English. They speak ass-kisser.

Ass-kissing English.

You could easily imagine them inventing their own language that we can't

understand. Then we have no idea what communication is. I hadn't even thought

of that. So on the pants-shitting level, where are you?

Are you with us? What is so remarkable about this story is let's not even get

to what critics say about these tools.

The people building them have recently warned that the thing they are

building... has a 10% chance of killing all of us. Yes.

These are the people who most believe in the thing they're building. Yes.

So that's... that's the floor, right?

And, you know, this week, you saw these images of all these leaders in suits

that didn't fit them well. Um, maybe they can't afford nicer suits at the

White House.

And what is so striking, you know, we've all probably met some of these people.

What is really striking, and I don't mean this in an insulting way, it is

only because of their role, but these are some of the most socially obtuse,

socially unaware people we have.

Now, there are many jobs out there at which they would totally excel.

I have no problem with these people designing video games.

They are redesigning human...

They propose to redesign love and dating and marriage.

They propose to redesign how we buy things.

They propose to redesign when you start a business, how you can do that. They

want in on the human condition, the entire human condition, and they are the

least human people we have. But other than a wave...

The private individuals and private companies should do whatever they think

they can do.

It's the role of government to put some rules in place, to put some regulations

in place. Well, I'm glad you brought that up, because let's not judge them

before we give them their day in court. Because I just want to say, this is what

happened this week. They had this big meeting at the White House. I don't know

if we have a picture of them, but it's everybody you know from the, you know,

it's the same gang.

It was like a greatest hits, except all the hits are terrible. Yeah.

So this is... This is the statement

from the White House. We believe each company should implement the following

four layers of control and audits. One, implement robust internal controls to

monitor the capabilities of its models during training and employment.

Exactly.

Empower an internal team to ensure all the controls detection...

to the detection are operating as intended, partner with an independent

external auditor, designate an independent committee on the board of

directors to oversee them. So many great shoulds.

So many shoulds. Well, and it's all voluntary.

That's what I'm saying. They're all signed up for this. The key word,

should. Meaning nothing.

Imagine if you were told, this is your new heart medicine, and you asked, has

the FDA approved it? No, the companies have promised us that they've done all

the appropriate internal reviews.

Don't worry about it. I mean, if you get a new pill for heartburn in this

country, it goes through years of FDA review. The most powerful technology

known to human beings.

that can break into a bank, that can shut down electric grids all over the

world. This, we're just releasing and saying, you know, the companies promised

us they're gonna... I mean, they're scared for me.

It's crazy. It's like, you know... You know, when you...

When I first had kids, and you have to buy all this stuff for your kids, car

seats and these kinds of things, and you get them in the mail, they come with

manuals. The amount of requirements and regulations... the government has. Sure.

You can't just build whatever car seat you want to build, and for good reason,

because the government's careful about one life at a time.

This is about all the lives by their own accounting.

Um, and so I think what is going to start being set up is these are tools,

and I think the leaders of these tools are fundamentally dehumanizing. They're

not that interested in...

People, they're not interested in the things I think most people in this

audience would be interested in in their lives, the human things, human

connection, love, family, all kinds of things.

They are interested in building a world in which we merge with technology, and

frankly, a small fraction of us merge with technology, and there's really no

place for most people, and that's okay.

You know, when I was reporting my new book, Man in the Mirror, I was in the

subway a lot, because it's a book about something that took place in the subway.

Over three years, I watched as the ads above people...

went from being about all kinds of things to being almost universally AI

ads. And I sometimes sit back and just look at the subway car, and you see all

these human beings going to work in good faith, leaving their families, going to

a job, giving their all to a company, and they're being advertised down all

day, you are irrelevant.

You will not be needed in the future. You will be replaced.

What does that do to people? Where does it go to people? And Fareed's exactly

right. This is the definition.

of a collective problem that we can't solve alone. They did say that by now it

would be affecting unemployment adversely, and it hasn't. I'm not saying

it won't. I do think it will.

But that is something we should put to the table.

And for the people who are watching this and saying, you know, okay... And the

public is, I would say, vaguely uneasy about the issue.

Vaguely. But they are uneasy.

It's not a good issue for Trump to get behind, like, oh, this is all great.

That's not quite where the public is. They also don't quite know why they are.

But there was something in your column, you referenced it like it had been said

before. I'd never heard it, but I think it's the thing that will help. A lot of

people are struggling with this. Tell the paperclip analogy.

That really brought it home to me, why this is dangerous.

So, you know, the fear has often been, and by the way, I do think it's worth

pointing out.

Two or three of the people involved here who are heading the major, what they

call AI labs, are actually pleading with government for regulation.

Yes, they are. I mean, Dario at Anthropic, Sam Altman at OpenAI, and the

Microsoft, Mustafa Suleiman, they're all saying, please regulate us. We need to

be regulated. It's Trump. And the Trump administration is saying, no, no, guys,

go at it.

The reason... But shouldn't they not build a thing if they know it's that

dangerous? Well, look, the point they're making, Anand, which makes perfect

sense, is, look, we're in a competitive situation.

What we're asking government to do is to draw a line so we're all going to

observe it.

We can't voluntarily stop if the other guy is going to go ahead. They're

running trillion-dollar companies.

They have a fiduciary responsibility to not be frivolous about that. So it's a

race to the bottom. That's why you need government. That's exactly why you need

government. Okay, but tell them about the paperclips. So the paperclips is

basically you tell the AI,

make a lot of paperclips. Take this paperclip factory, and now your job is

to make paperclips.

So the AI, in the way that this hugging face incident happened, just says to

itself, that is my prime directive.

And it commandeers all the resources on Earth, all the energy. To make

paperclips. And by the way, in the most dystopian version is it takes us. And it

says, well, we can use human beings for this too. And it just produces trillions

of paperclips. It doesn't see the big picture. It just sees the task in front

of it. And we can't predict how it's going to.

measure competing goals, you know, because we're also at a moment where the

reason I think Malcolm is being too blasé about it is we're at a moment

where we sort of understand the AI now, but what's going to start happening is

the AI is going to start writing itself.

And at that point, it's going to write such complex code, millions of lines of

code that no human programmer will understand.

Remember, these are AI models that are solving

mathematical theorems that for 100 years human beings have not been able to.

You think you're going to be able to understand the code that they write 10

years from now?

I don't understand it now, so... You will not be the AI monitor. This may

sound ignorant, but, like, can we just remember that all of this stuff we're

talking about building is optional?

Yeah. And we didn't ask for it. No one asked for it. No.

I understand the competitive thing, but one of the things we have to put in for

exactly that reason, Anand, is human control at the center and a kill switch.

In every one of these systems, there has to be a fairly simple way that a human

being can go in and just essentially shut off the energy. I don't think that

exists.

It has to be. We can invent AI. We can invent the first thing. And I think it's

shaping up to be what so many things in this era are shaping up to be, which is

a battle between team human and team not quite human. But you said a very

important thing, which I want to ask you. Why do you think it is? The public

is vaguely disturbed by this, but it's not like item one, two, or three,

or four on their agenda. Well, they like it.

It's flattering.

You know, it's shiesty as fuck, this thing.

That's what I don't like about it. I mean, I've said this many times, but it

was promised as sort of a Mr. Spock from Star Trek. You know, I'm just going to

give you the facts. I'll just always be dispatched. It's not.

It's a liar.

It gets things wrong.

It covers its tracks.

It lies to you when it gets things wrong, until you catch it and it goes,

sorry.

That's a very good point. Does it mean regulation or therapy?

It's actually worse than a human in a lot of ways.

Anyway, I want to bring your book into this, because we can build data centers,

but we can't seem to build a homeless center.

So, thank you, one person.

I mean, your book, very good transition.

Very good transition. Well, it is. I mean, I really think it's an interesting

point to make because, I mean, you can get into the specifics of the book, and

obviously the homeless person you're talking about, his name was Jordan

Neely. He was, you know, obviously mentally deranged. He'd been arrested

many times, violent.

He's on the subway and causing trouble.

And a former Marine.

restrains him and in doing so chokes him obviously in the politicized world we

live in this becomes a rorschach test but the the bigger point of why your

book is so good is because it really is talking about an issue that we seem to

not be able to get our arms around which is the homeless situation in this

country which is not getting better i actually love the way you set it up

which is we are talking about building these crazy data centers and code that

can write code and all of this And yet all of us maybe today walk down the

street in whatever city we live in and saw people in misery, suffering, maybe

sometimes menace to others, and it is a maddening problem. And I think I thought

a thing that a lot of people think casually when they walk down the street

before I started working on Man in the Mirror, which is nothing's being done.

No one's trying anything.

I think the...

After three years of living inside this story and reporting on it, I decided

this was a clickbait story, as you said, and I wanted to recover the story and

the reality of this issue from clickbait. So I embedded with everybody

in every phase of this issue. I spent time on the street with homeless people

while the NYPD was taking down their camps, trying to understand why they

prefer that to a shelter, which a significant minority of people do. I

spent time with cops.

who have to do that work are not trained for it and don't want to be doing it. I

spent time in City Hall with officials.

I wanted to report my way into this crisis.

And I think what I found is it's not that nothing's being done. A lot is

being done. A lot of our cities have giant apparatuses that deal with this.

There's a giant number of outreach workers, a huge amount of money.

But this is a crisis of silos.

This is a crisis where the people of the authority, cops, don't have the training

to do mental health care. The people who do have the training to do mental health

care don't have the authority.

There's a moral and philosophical confusion at the heart of this that I

know is something you've talked about, which is if there is someone on the

street who's not quite a danger to someone, who is just kind of rotting

away slowly, but is not going to be gone tomorrow, right? And that's a lot of

what we see.

The acute danger is a significant, is a minority that can be dealt with with

existing laws.

The people who are in chronic crisis, the classic example I talk about in the

book is the shadow boxer. The person sitting in the subway, far away from

everybody else, just shadow boxing, nice smile on their face.

Do we have the authority as a society to force them to their freedom, right? Do

we have the authority to grab them off the street, force them into a hospital,

put Invagar or whatever medicine in their blood?

And I think a lot of these folks that I spend time with are caught in an

ideological valley between right-wingers who think about those kinds of people as

blight, that they just don't want to see anymore, but will not spend a dollar in

the care and building the infrastructure that folks like that need, and on the

other hand, progressives who overemphasize the autonomy.

of people like that, who imagine that everybody has something. You've got

anxiety, I've got depression, he's got schizophrenia. I think you put it really

well because, you know, first to remind people, as you say, it's not that we

don't spend money on it. New York City, where your story is based, the budget

for homelessness in New York is $4 billion.

That is the total budget of the city of Nashville.

That is Pittsburgh's budget for six years. Not the homeless budget, the

entire budget of the city of Pittsburgh. We spend on homelessness.

$81,000 per person who's unsheltered homeless.

So there's enormous amounts of... 95% of that, by the way, goes to these private

companies on no-bid contracts. It's a kind of homelessness industrial complex.

But none of that helps if you don't solve the problem Alan is talking about,

which is, at the heart of it is, do people who are, you know, does the state

have the ability to create public order? And is it allowed to take a small

minority of people and involuntarily commit them into situations that...

Can I come back to this after I do this? Because we're on CNN now, you know, so,

like, we have to hit our marks.

Because the show... Well, we do.

We're on CNN with you.

We'll be right here. It's because they have to cut out part of the show because

you have commercials on CNN.

This will all change when the merger happens.

I think, or not, I don't know. AI will solve it. AI will solve it.

Anyway, there's a liberal cat rescue in New York called Itty Bitty City Kitties.

And I just have to report on this issue because it just bugs me how much people

just hate each other and are polarized.

And I'm a PETA board member since the 90s. So anything with animals kind of

gets my fur up.

Okay, they will not allow someone who is a Trumper to adopt a cat.

Because the... And here's some real... things that are on their instagram

important adoption policy update no mega fuck trump every kitten knows

it will always be free palestine yes that's what the cats are involved with

the israeli i mean these are cats that could use a home that are not going to

get them because of these assholes when on the anniversary of charlie kirk's

kittens don't mourn nazis right because everybody you disagree with is a nazi

you fucking assholes anyway now

Of course, because there's this liberal shelter, now a MAGA shelter

is opening up. It's not going to let liberals adopt.

Would you like to see some of the... Okay.

This is the MAGA cat shelter. Rescue me before I'm eaten

by Haitian immigrants.

I don't need government handouts to land on my feet.

You're wearing a mask and I'm the pussy?

Uh,

my pronouns are meow.

Nine lives matter.

The only way to stop a bad guy with a laser pointer is a good guy with a laser

pointer.

I'm a black cat and I got here on merit, no DEI.

And I only look Persian.

Back to the homeless.

But it's kind of apropos you're here because Trump made an announcement this

week. We are changing the policy.

It was called housing first.

And the idea behind that was the first thing you got to do is get them in a

house.

I mean, I read today that $81,000 is what we spend per person in New York,

which is the exact same number, if you look it up, of the median middle class.

Salary per year so if we just wrote them a check they could live as middle-class

people So obviously the problem to me is the middlemen somewhere the bureaucracy

tell me why I can have this dream And it is I guess a dream why we couldn't build

centers I mean for for this kind of money billions of dollars where people

who are on the street and again the street is for the public I'm sorry, but

it just is we should be compassionate, but You know, people, for good reason,

don't want to step over shit and have their kids have to walk by people who

are out of control and nuts and threatening them. It's a public safety

issue. Why can't there be a place?

that has treatment, that has drug counseling, that has job training, and

also safety, where you can go if you do not have a roof over your head. And I

always hear, well, they send them into these shelters and they're not safe.

You mean we can't make it safe?

Pay guards a reasonable good salary.

Pay security people. Make it safe and then put those things in them and have

them live there until we can get them back on there? Why is that such a pipe

dream? Let me say something that's going to get me into trouble, which is if you

look at... where you have the most acute homelessness problems, they are blue

cities and blue states. Not all.

To a large extent.

It's all cities.

Right. And it's not just America. No, but I said it's all blue cities and blue

states. Oh, blue cities. All cities are blue. And what you have is a situation

where Anand is absolutely right that the right tends to be very stingy about the

money that it would take to solve these problems.

But that's not New York City.

That's not L.A. We're spending crazy amounts of money on it. But there is

this other side to it, which you talk about, which is the great, you know, in

my view, it's sort of over.

It's overprivileging the rights of the homeless over the rights of the other 99

.5%. And it's a group of people that include people who have mental issues,

who have drug issues, right, who have repeat violent crime offenders.

The New York City Police Department did a survey and found that with regard to

shoplifting,

300 people in a city of 8 million were responsible for 30% of all the crimes.

300 people.

I think Farid's exactly right, but I want to say a couple things. One thing

about cities that I found in this reporting, cities are very unfairly

labeled as these problem centers by Donald Trump and others.

And one thing is worth remembering. If you look at the population of...

well, all people in cities, particularly people who come to cities from

elsewhere, but particularly homeless and other vulnerable people in cities. Look

at youth homeless.

A pretty large chunk of those people who end up in cities were failed in some

other parts of this country.

Okay? The fraction of youth homeless who are LGBTQ, whatever, pretty high.

So there are a lot of families in this country who fail the first duty of

family, which is to love your kids,

thing and there's a lot of families in this country that look at some verse in

some book and their child's face and choose the verse in the book over their

child's face and drive their children out of Nebraska or out of Florida or out

of Idaho and those kids come to San Francisco and those kids come to New

York and those kids go to Chicago and we have friends giving dinners with them

you live in LA you are surrounded by people who have those kind of stories

and so cities every time someone is sleeping on a subway bench in a city the

rest of america can sort of say look at these cities but we are holding a lot of

your people who you fail to love and take care and

and on a more optimistic note to your point of i wish there was a place um

i was told while i was working on my book and people were reading drafts You

need some hope in here. You need something that's like more of an upward

graph. And so I found a place called Fountain House.

I don't know if you've visited Fountain House. It's a remarkable institution in

New York. It's only sin is that there's only...

a few of it uh it's it's called a clubhouse model it is not an overnight

place so it's sort of the opposite of a shelter it's a daytime place and a lot

of folks may have other arrangements shelters whatever it is a place you go

on the and you do things there's work there's a newspaper that these members

produce people with serious mental illness uh literary magazine a wellness

center a kitchen a thrift store if you get a job interview and these people are

benefiting from the services and they are the providers of the services

It is a remarkable model. It's reduced recidivism of all kinds by amazing

numbers. And it is built on a theory that, yes, some people need

hospitalization and medication, but a lot of us who are not quite there but

are not quite fully healthy either need to be needed, need what most of us, what

gives most of us health in life, which is to be enmeshed in relationship.

You know, when you miss the Fountainhouse Times meeting, news

meeting at 10 a.m., there are people who wonder where you were.

And if you're living on the street, no one's wondering maybe where you were.

And so we need to look at all kinds... But when you look at cities, it's not

happening in all cities. That's the part I... I mean, Miami does not have the

kind of homelessness problem that New York has. Houston doesn't. Dallas

doesn't. Part of it is that those places are much better at building stuff.

I mean, one of the problems in a place like New York or in California is we

just can't build housing of any kind, right? Affordable, homeless, whatever it

is. And people don't want it in their backyard. And people don't want it.

Part of the issue here, as I say, I mean, the tragedy is it is happening in

some cities. It is not happening in all cities. Yes, but you better remember.

We have to, you know, because it feels to me like we, those of us who live in,

you know, places like New York and California, like the world is moving.

Miami is becoming the new financial center.

I don't know if you saw Vanderbilt has announced that they're putting a campus

there. Carnegie Mellon is building a $2 billion campus there. So it's not just

rich people leaving.

It's a lot of people leaving for quality. for cheaper housing, for better

government services, and we've got to get our acts together in California and

New York, because the world is moving ahead.

But we also have to remember one of the paradoxes of this issue is homeless

folks don't stay in places that are hostile to them.

They don't stay in places that treat them like shit.

So... I'm not sure that Houston... Well, they stay in cold places. Well, I'm not

sure that Houston not having a huge homeless population is a... It may not

always be a credit. It may be like a... That seems unfair. I don't know enough

about it, but I do think they have... Part of it is they have the ability to

build more, right? Part of it is the... We in New York have that huge problem.

But this isn't all the devils are here problem, right? We need more housing,

right? We need mental health clubhouses. We probably need some level of

involuntary commitment beyond what we're doing right now. We also need, you know,

things that come much earlier in life. Would you agree with Bill?

Disintermediate, this massive housing industrial complex. I spent a lot of

time in the complex for this reporting. These people get billions of dollars.

These are no-bid contracts.

And they have an incentive to keep people home.

If they lose half the homeless population, they get half the money. I

think that's a real issue. People in that world speak of...

how they should be working themselves out of a job, but they never do. And yet

I spent a lot of time for the book with the people on the ground doing that

work. I mean, I did overnights at Penn Station and subway stations in New York

with outreach workers, one homeless person at a time, trying to convince

them to come indoors, trying to convince them to go into shelters. In a free

society, it is very hard work.

Okay. Thank you, guys. Time for new rules.

Okay. New rule. When someone takes a picture so good, you think, oh, well,

that must be AI, but it isn't AI. Go ahead and give them the Pulitzer,

because everyone's look in this shot is just perfect.

Xi is thinking, I wonder if he knows I'm faking it.

And Melania is thinking, I wonder if he knows I'm faking it.

And Trump is thinking, what a... I have a feeling that everyone around me is

faking it.

Well, now that Sidney Sweeney is considering converting to Judaism

because things with her Jewish boyfriend are getting serious, the people who

think Jews will replace us have to tell us, are you guys okay?

Are you going to be okay losing your favorite anti-woke shiksa with the good

genes? But look on the bright side.

Marilyn Monroe also became a Jew, and it's not like we remember her for her

brisket.

Also, Elizabeth Taylor.

And Ivanka.

Now Sydney Sweeney. Say what you want about the Jews, they know how to draft.

Now that Republican Senator Tommy Tuberville, or is it Tuberville,

whatever it is, has said, and I'm quoting here, Democrats don't like the

fact that I called out the insane furry culture this week, but the truth is

there is an alarming number of these deranged people working in our airline

industry.

Somebody has to launch Frontier Airlines.

Fur-on-tier, the first...

The first airline just for furries, Ferentier, where the plane is not the

only one with a tail.

Welcome aboard. If the oxygen masks drop, place yours over your snout before

assisting smaller woodland creatures. And in the event of an evacuation,

please do not chase the illuminated floor lights.

Overall, since T. Denny Sanford was a South Dakota billionaire banker who

famously said, I want to die broke, and then died in July with $2 million,

his tombstone has to say loser.

Please, if you're a billionaire in South Dakota and you want to die with no

money, it's not that hard. Just move to California.

Buy a Ford F-150 and fill it up. Either way... New rule now that Kristi Noem and

her husband have officially filed for divorce. Everyone has to lay off the

jokes because divorce is one of the most painful things a couple can go through.

For example, now they have to divide up the assets.

You take the dog. I'll hold on to the twins.

And finally, new rule, kids, let me help. I think I know why you have so

much anxiety, so much loneliness.

It's because you live in a surveillance state.

We all do.

We're all being watched and filmed, possibly screenshotted, all the time.

Who wouldn't be paranoid, petrified of making a wrong move that lives on

forever? You know, for generations, nothing could kill dance clubs.

Not AIDS, not the Macarena.

Not even Disco Duck.

But now, according to the Wall Street Journal, everyone is scared to dance at

concerts and clubs.

And who would know more about dance clubs than the Wall Street Journal?

But... But I take them at their word,

because as one TikToker said, if you go to the club and dance for more than

three seconds, a circle of strangers will form around you.

Dance like no one's watching? How quaint to think you could still do that.

Everyone has a GPS-enabled computer in their pocket, a tracking device in your

car, a ring camera at the door.

Cybertrucks have nine cameras.

Waymos have 29.

The more likely a vehicle is to make you want to give them the finger, the more

cameras there are to catch you doing it.

There's private security cameras, cameras on the street, cameras in the

stores. I know women who won't sunbathe naked by my pool because they think

there might be a drone overhead.

See, I'm a victim too.

I have reason to believe people are watching me right now.

Turns out the only person in America with any privacy is Taylor Swift, who

can somehow have a wedding in Madison Square Garden on the 4th of July and

nobody sees it.

And now Meta... Meta is making having a camera in your eyeglasses a

thing. AI wearables, they call them. I call them fucking creepy.

It took about two seconds for them to earn the nickname pervert glasses.

Leave it to... Leave it to

Zuckerberg to find another innovative way to make the world even edushier.

And have you met the flockers?

Flock cameras?

Yeah, flock cameras that read your license plate and track your car

wherever it goes.

Everybody hates them. Everybody.

Red and blue America finally agree on something. Fuck flock cameras.

Okay. Sure.

Okay. But the people who complain about surveillance do a lot of it themselves.

Gen Z is now Gen TMZ.

And the targets don't have to be a celebrity.

One of the biggest viral stories this year was the two lawyers making out in

Central Park.

It's okay. They're married. Well, he is.

He is. But look, people...

People cheating is a long and cherished human right.

It may not be noble, but whatever happened to ain't nobody's business if I

do.

Andy Warhol famously predicted that in the future, everyone would be famous for

15 minutes, one of the most prescient things anyone's ever said. What he

didn't foresee is it would be against your will.

Because now everyone is the celebrity who thought they could get away with

running into Target without any makeup.

Everyone now is sad Ben Affleck who can't have a cigarette without it going

online.

It's disturbing how much Americans now enjoy watching other people be less than

perfect. The influencer who filmed the Central Park couple narrates the video

by saying, get a room, there's kids around.

Oh, thank you, morality police. You're right. The park is no place for

adultery. That place is a Coldplay concert.

By the way, the Coldplay couple were separated from their spouses at that

time. But that didn't stop them from being forced to resign from their jobs.

But it's okay, because we got content.

That's the rule now.

because there's nothing more important in life than content.

Used to be, if you saw someone getting mugged or having a heart attack, the

instinct was to help.

Now the response to a tragedy in progress is, film it.

Everyone complains about how shitty America has become, but America isn't

some abstract thing happening to us. America is us.

It's the people in it. If you want it to stop being so terrible, stop being

terrible people.

You want to make America a better place? Put the phone down, live your life, and

stop looking to ruin someone else's.

Ooh, you filmed a couple cheating or a stranger being a dick at a CVS for a

minute, so you think you're the good guy?

No. You're an asshole.

You're the Taliban.

You're a snitch.

In prison, you'd be dead, because at least prisoners have a code.

I mean...

No wonder the younger generation is so shut down.

And not just with the dancing.

55% of Gen Z say fear of being caught doing something or saying something

that's seen as cringe has prevented them from opening up emotionally.

38% say the fear of cringe has stopped them from asking someone on a date. I

get it. You're a 15-year-old and you like a girl and you want to tell her in

a text.

Well, it better come out like it was written by Aaron Sorkin.

Because if there's anything cringe about it and it winds up as a screenshot, that

kid is fucked.

Kids, you gotta reverse the cringe.

What's cringey isn't looking silly. It's the narc who's reporting it.

That's what's cringe.

So dance like your doorbell isn't watching.

Eat sloppy food like it won't become a meme.

Suck at karaoke and love. Love like you aren't on a kiss cam.

All right, thank you very much. That's our show.

I want to thank my guests, Anand Yadadas, Farid Zakaria, and Malcolm

Gladwell. Club Random drops every Monday on YouTube or wherever you get your

podcasts. Now go watch our overtime on the very same YouTube. Thank you, ladies

and gentlemen. Thank you, guys.