The Beat With Ari Melber 12-8-23 - Breaking News Dec 8, 2023
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00:00 court another procedural victory tonight.
00:02 It goes to questions of accountability and whether Trump will, through the course of
00:06 this process, be treated like other defendants or be allowed to use and abuse the following
00:11 and the power he has to undercut this important method of holding him accountable, of trying
00:16 to have accountability for the coup he's accused of as he runs for power again.
00:20 And the headline you may have heard, and we're going to get into it, is this powerful appeals
00:24 court siding with Jack Smith and upholding most of the gag order that he had sought and
00:28 won at the lower court level.
00:29 This limits what Trump can say in the case.
00:32 The three judge panel barring defendant Trump from, for example, publicly attacking potential
00:37 witnesses and court staff and many of the other government employees and staff involved
00:42 in this prosecution of Trump.
00:45 If you follow the news, you probably know he has tried these antics in other cases,
00:48 including some with lower stakes.
00:49 This is the big case that is currently on a schedule to begin next year in March and
00:54 which could result in his conviction or imprisonment.
00:57 Donald Trump is a defendant is legally presumed innocent.
00:59 Now one difference though is the court did revise the order and allows Donald Trump as
01:04 a defendant to publicly criticize special counsel Jack Smith himself.
01:08 The ruling says that some aspects of Trump's public statements pose a significant and imminent
01:14 threat to the fair and orderly adjudication of the ongoing criminal proceeding against
01:19 defendant Trump.
01:20 Now, in the initial argument and request for the order, which Jack Smith won, he cited
01:26 the fact that Donald Trump had all but made it legally likely that this would stick because
01:31 this wasn't a close call.
01:32 And if it were any other defendant, as we've noted, they might actually have their bail
01:36 revoked.
01:37 They might be held in prison awaiting trial in jail because of the type of things that
01:41 were done, including attacking innocent people, court staff and others.
01:44 It was also the accusation that General Mark Milley who served in the Trump administration
01:50 actually should be killed or assassinated or executed for quote treason.
01:55 The judges wrote that while there's a strong public interest in what Trump has to say because
01:59 he's a former president now running again, he still has public, of course, first amendment
02:03 rights to talk about many things.
02:05 Trump they write is also an indicted criminal defendant and must stand trial in a courtroom
02:09 under the same, I underscore that tonight for you, quote, under the same procedures
02:14 that govern all other criminal defendants.
02:16 That is what the rule of law means.
02:19 This is a late breaking end of the week news story here and I want to bring in one of our
02:22 experts right away as we get into it.
02:24 Former federal prosecutor Renato Mariotti.
02:26 Renato, that's just the highlights.
02:28 This is a big breaking news story.
02:30 It's a big win for Jack Smith, as I mentioned, with one carve out, which is that even as
02:34 a defendant, Donald Trump is still free to sort of publicly attack, and we know his style
02:38 of attack, Jack Smith as the official.
02:42 But it significantly limits what else Trump can do given what he'd already done.
02:46 Do you see this as an important victory not only for Jack Smith, which is the back and
02:50 forth of it, but for what everyone is supposed to care about, which is a fair trial without
02:55 fear or favor by the participants in the jury?
02:58 Absolutely, Ari.
03:00 This is, I think, a court, the prosecutors of the case.
03:03 When it comes to witnesses who have specific testimony that's going to be introduced against
03:10 him at trial, he does not have the right to attack those witnesses and essentially stick
03:14 a mob on those people via his public statements.
03:18 Right.
03:19 And sometimes our jobs these days, as we head into 2024, is to just clearly face what we're
03:26 up against here.
03:27 He is on trial for exactly what you just referred to, the fact that he could say and do things
03:32 that would cause other people to commit crimes.
03:35 Some of those crimes are huge and convicted, sedition, convicted.
03:38 Legally, though, we take, of course, great care to note that he has not yet been convicted
03:43 of anything from that day criminally.
03:46 And Jack Smith isn't pursuing a direct incitement case, which, as we've explained to viewers,
03:51 is actually more complicated.
03:53 He's looking at some of the other very clear plots to overthrow the election.
03:57 Even if you don't say that his words and deeds incited the riot, people can debate that.
04:01 And so what you're reminding everyone is that's what he's already being adjudicated.
04:05 Right.
04:06 And then the question is, will he get away with trying to do that to undermine this very
04:10 trial?
04:11 And so as one example for your reaction, the court found he can no longer and could be
04:14 punished for.
04:15 He could theoretically be jailed in advance of trial for this kind of comment that he
04:20 previously made about Attorney General Barr.
04:22 Take a listen.
04:24 Guys like Bill Barr, he was a stiff, but he wasn't there at the time.
04:28 But he didn't do his job because he was afraid.
04:30 You know what he was afraid of?
04:31 He was afraid of being impeached.
04:33 He was petrified to be impeached.
04:35 And he's how do you not get impeached?
04:37 Don't do anything.
04:38 Bernardo.
04:39 >> Yeah, that's a great example of something that's meant to incite anger against Barr.
04:48 It's meant to sort of rile up his followers against Barr, turn their opinion against Barr.
04:53 And I think that's exactly the sort of comment that this opinion prohibits, while at the
04:59 same time carving out, I think, really important political speech that otherwise would potentially
05:04 create issues in front of the Supreme Court.
05:08 >> Yeah, really interesting.
05:09 It's a case we've been following, especially this specific gag order.
05:12 So getting the final ruling on that, which we don't have any reason to think the Supreme
05:16 Court would be intervening on that basis, means here we are.
05:19 That Trump is gagged.
05:20 And if he wants to test it, he'll be testing the federal courts of Washington.
05:24 Former prosecutor Mariotti, we thank you for your counsel tonight.
05:27 We are moving fast because we have a lot going on tonight.
05:29 It is the end of the week here.
05:31 We have something very special.
05:33 Another installment of our Summit series.
05:34 We're joined by a man who a writer whose books are global bestsellers, who has changed a
05:38 lot of how we think not only about history, but our future in technology.
05:42 Professor and historian Yuval Harari joins us.
05:45 He is the one who, you may recall I mentioned, was on Obama's recommended reading list.
05:49 He's our special guest in the Summit series by the end of the hour.
05:52 But first, House Republicans have a huge problem as they end their first session of Congress.
05:56 Howard Dean is here, and I'm going to show you their problem and how it stacks up against
06:00 Biden's record when we're back after our shortest break, just 60 seconds.
06:04 Got a lot of news tonight, and right now I want to turn with you to the federal government's
06:09 record as this year ends.
06:11 If you keep track of these things in terms of the government calendar, the first session
06:14 formally of this Congress is ending.
06:17 So what has it achieved?
06:19 Well, recently one Republican actually blurted out the Republican Congress's problem in a
06:24 kind of public exasperation.
06:26 It was on the House floor, no less.
06:30 One thing, I want my Republican colleagues to give me one thing, one, that I can go campaign
06:38 on and say we did.
06:40 One.
06:42 Anybody sitting in the complex, if you want to come down to the floor and come explain
06:45 to me one material, meaningful, significant thing the Republican majority has done.
06:54 Well, that lays it out, and that is Republican Congressman Chip Roy, who is not some GOP
07:00 critic.
07:01 He's a pretty hardline conservative.
07:03 He's broker deals with the MAGA wing.
07:04 That moment there came amidst the chaos of replacing Speaker McCarthy.
07:09 And the facts and the numbers back up the story.
07:12 This Congress spent about 132 weekdays skipping work in Washington, a large number, even as
07:17 members say, well, they also work when they are back in their districts.
07:22 Washington's narrow majority spent more time fighting with itself over picking its own
07:25 leader than any party or any Congress in history.
07:29 You see there about three weeks just haggling in votes to pick the first and second speaker,
07:35 to pick two different speakers in under a year.
07:38 So Congress is ending a year that began with McCarthy's humiliating march through 15 votes
07:43 just to get the gavel, remember that.
07:45 And then, of course, those clashes are more than a spectacle because they actually show
07:49 something we want to get into right now as we end the year and take stock, that those
07:53 House Republicans did not respond to their midterm fizzle with humility or some kind
07:59 of reassessment.
08:00 Remember, the reason that a small number of hardliners could make all that trouble was
08:04 because voters, Americans, people like you who might be watching the news right now,
08:10 really rejected many Republicans and the usual historical trends.
08:13 But the party largely ignored that judgment and that very disappointing sort of red fizzle
08:19 to just push harder to the right.
08:21 And that is what brought on this fall's unusual three-week quest to find their new speaker
08:26 when they settled finally on a more Trump-friendly, more conservative leader in Mike Johnson.
08:33 A speaker has not been elected.
08:35 This dramatic day that is not turning out remotely the way Kevin McCarthy had hoped.
08:41 Look at somebody holding somebody back.
08:43 Look at that.
08:44 Oh, somebody just held somebody back.
08:45 Kevin McCarthy celebrating a victory that almost didn't happen.
08:49 Kevin McCarthy going head to head with Congressman Matt Gaetz after the House speaker worked
08:54 with Democrats to avert a government shutdown.
08:58 Promising he will move this week to remove House Speaker Kevin McCarthy.
09:01 Kevin McCarthy was ousted from his role as Speaker of the House by fellow Republicans.
09:08 And on and on it went.
09:09 The Republican chaos did not help, of course, Congress to get things done.
09:13 In the periods between that infighting, we can show you the record.
09:16 Congress did pass some of the kind of things that are really easy to pass, some ceremonial
09:21 bills, naming government sites, some commemorative coins.
09:24 But as the nation faced these challenges from the post-pandemic adjustment to inflation
09:28 to whether they're going to regulate new technology and artificial intelligence, a lot of things
09:33 just didn't get touched, let alone passed.
09:35 It's only about 40 bills that the House passed.
09:39 Half of those became law through the Senate, which is less than other Congresses.
09:44 Now some of those big must-pass items did happen.
09:48 We should note, for example, Republicans were able to get a debt suspension bill, which
09:51 avoid a default.
09:53 They got government funding done.
09:54 They got some foreign funding for Ukraine.
09:56 Those kind of big ticket items.
09:58 Beyond the basics, we can say here as we wrap up the year, this Congress has been noisy
10:04 and chaotic and unproductive by any objective measure, including comparisons to recent Congresses.
10:11 And then there's the politics.
10:12 Republicans managed to draw attention to their thin margin, which as I mentioned is a product
10:16 of the disappointing midterms, and their weak speaker, and then their hardliners and outcasts.
10:23 In fact, for many Americans, the GOP expelling George Santos is probably one of the main
10:27 headlines about Congress in the last few weeks as this first session ends.
10:32 That's the Congressional record, as it were.
10:35 And the Republicans have used their control of the House to thwart a lot of the Biden
10:38 agenda, including all that stuff that's not in the must-pass items like spending.
10:43 So you might say, "Okay Ari, that's the House.
10:47 Kind of fits what you'd heard or gathered, but those are the actual numbers.
10:50 But is that the whole story in Washington?"
10:52 No.
10:53 President Biden is finishing what is his third year in office, of course, and he has some
10:57 problems that cannot be blamed solely on that uncooperative House.
11:01 In fact, it's the House, of course, that is why, if you look at the numbers, President
11:06 Biden's only signed about 20 bills into law, but his efforts to use executive power have
11:10 also hit turbulence recently.
11:12 Biden's program for student loans hit that wall with the Supreme Court this past summer.
11:17 And look, voters we know judge presidents more by results than excuses.
11:22 Blaming the court doesn't get you that far.
11:25 That may be a factor in the public turning on Biden's economic record.
11:28 Look at this, just 32% of Americans approve of him on that.
11:32 His overall job approval is also at a low 37%, which is first-term Trump territory.
11:40 Now if you check, it's also lower than other presidents at this point in their first term,
11:48 including the ones who were in their first term and got re-elected.
11:53 So that is a warning sign that can't be just minimized or blamed when it comes to what
11:58 the Biden White House is up against.
12:00 Now as president, Biden has led a very inclusive cabinet, efforts to diversify the federal
12:04 bench, which is an area where he can just make appointments.
12:07 And he's really tried to embrace what by historical standards would be a pretty liberal coalition,
12:12 apart from the more moderate reputation that he had decades ago.
12:16 But critics still say he has not electrified a new sort of post-Trump coalition or found
12:22 ways to do more than parry the Republican Party's authoritarian creep.
12:26 In other words, some liberals say Biden is competent, but not exciting.
12:31 That he is far better than Trump, they argue, but not building towards the future in a way
12:37 that they think confidently brings the party together, the young people together, and a
12:42 coalition that they think can win long-term.
12:45 That's some of what we hear.
12:46 Now if that sounds a little vague or even like unfair criticism for these high-stake
12:52 times when we hear so much about a possible dictatorship, well, that's exactly what the
12:56 White House and Biden allies say.
12:59 And they vow that Biden's numbers, based on a lot of trends from the local elections
13:03 we've seen where Republicans underperformed in the midterm fizzle to issues around women's
13:07 rights, they say when there are actual elections, they're doing just fine.
13:11 And when there's an actual contrast with a GOP nominee next year, they'll do great.
13:16 They're also touting America's economic rebound right now, which they dub "Bidenomics."
13:22 And I have news on that front tonight as well.
13:25 Inflation's been falling, and now U.S. jobs continue surging, nearly 200,000 new jobs
13:30 in November.
13:31 So the once-high unemployment rate is now down at historic lows, under 4%.
13:37 And then you get to the question of where politics and facts meet or don't.
13:42 We all kind of know we're in a time of relentless, turbocharged lies and a lot of right-wing
13:47 propaganda, and the job market is a question of whether people are going to feel that or
13:52 not.
13:53 Well, it might be different than the big lie in the election, because it's hard to lie
14:00 about things like jobs or the weather because people can see and feel it.
14:05 One political analyst once put it quite simply, contrasting oppressive hate with the reality
14:11 people can actually see for themselves.
14:15 He said, "Better stay away from those that carry around a fire hose.
14:21 You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows."
14:26 If you remember that one, you know Bob Dylan was advising avoiding the racists with fire
14:30 hoses and trusting your own eyes over the weathermen on TV or, well, or the political
14:36 weathermen, double entendre, or even a little reference to the man who actually wrote "Blowing
14:41 in the Wind."
14:42 I don't want to get too lost in lyrical analysis.
14:45 The point is Biden allies think most people will know which way the economic winds are
14:51 blowing.
14:52 And some of those facts are getting out.
14:55 Today, these numbers, I think they're great.
14:59 It is a strength in the labor market.
15:01 It's a resilient labor market.
15:03 On a good path towards low inflation and a cooling market.
15:09 Overall, you've got to look at this report as a big positive.
15:12 We've got more jobs created than expected.
15:14 And you might see there some of those jobs numbers breaking through even on the financial
15:20 channels, Fox Business, and people can feel it themselves.
15:23 And if you go beyond just today's news, those numbers are out today.
15:26 Overall, the United States has added about 15 million jobs under Biden, far more than
15:32 this same point under his predecessor and potential future challenger, former President
15:37 Trump.
15:38 So, if this is where the wind is blowing, do people know?
15:43 And is it a contrast to a Republican Congress that spends as much time fighting some weeks
15:48 as it does legislating?
15:50 We have someone who has done the work, a former governor and party chair, Howard Dean.
15:54 We'll get into the record when we come back.
15:59 We are back looking at what Congress and the White House achieved this year.
16:03 And we also touched on what President Biden has to do eyeing re-election next year.
16:06 And for context, first term presidents also often face the challenge of selling winds
16:11 while acknowledging unfinished business.
16:15 The march to war affected our economy.
16:17 Tax relief is working.
16:19 Things are positive.
16:22 But there's more that Congress should do to keep the momentum alive.
16:26 Recovering from the crisis of 2008 has always been the first and most urgent order of business,
16:33 but it's not enough.
16:35 Our economy won't be truly healthy until we reverse that much longer and profound erosion
16:43 of middle class jobs and middle class incomes.
16:48 We are joined by a former presidential candidate, governor and chair of the Democratic Party,
16:51 Howard Dean.
16:52 Welcome, Howard.
16:53 Thanks.
16:54 Thanks for having me.
16:55 Absolutely.
16:56 Good to have you.
16:57 You know your way around this and a lot of these people.
16:59 Your thoughts on the records of Congress, President Biden, and as we took pains to show,
17:06 some positive numbers, but some headwinds.
17:08 It's not all good news politically or otherwise.
17:11 Well, the Congress, as you pointed out earlier, is basically the ruling party in the House.
17:17 It's a collection of right-wing authoritarians and whiners and complainers and people who
17:24 don't have a backbone to stand up against what really is authoritarianism.
17:29 So we will dismiss the Congress.
17:30 They've done nothing.
17:31 In fact, if you want a good barometer of what a miserable failure Congress has been, all
17:36 the Republican congressmen are going to the events that Biden's having around the country
17:40 to celebrate the Inflation Act after they voted against it.
17:43 So whenever somebody tries to take credit for something that they voted against, they're
17:47 in pretty desperate shape.
17:49 So let's dismiss the Congress.
17:52 I think the Senate is a much more reasonable body.
17:55 I certainly disagree with the far right of the Senate, which has its practitioners, but
18:00 they are getting things done.
18:02 But let's look at Biden for a second.
18:04 Now this is the president I know the least well going back a long, long time.
18:09 And I have to say, if you just look at his record, Biden has probably accomplished more
18:15 than any Democratic president since Lyndon Johnson.
18:18 That's a shocking thing to say, but he has appointed more women and people of color to
18:24 positions that really matter.
18:26 OMB, for example, run by a black woman, who's one of the most articulate people I ever saw
18:32 in explaining the budget, which nobody can understand, including me half the time.
18:36 I mean, with the Supreme Court, the bench, and all that, that's very important.
18:41 But there are some really serious people in charge, including in the Defense Department,
18:47 that nobody has ever put people at that level before.
18:50 So that's a major issue.
18:52 We're about to have our first woman Joint Chiefs of Staff, head of the Joint Chiefs
18:56 of Staff.
18:57 This is an incredible thing that Biden gets no credit for at all.
19:00 He needs to get that credit.
19:02 We have done more on climate change than we have ever done before, and Biden's not even
19:06 through his first term yet.
19:08 We have done more on turning the economy around, more for rural areas, putting all those chip
19:12 plants and things like that in there.
19:15 It's an extraordinary record that Biden's got to run out.
19:17 Here's my suggestion.
19:18 Okay, he's 82 years old, young people want somebody younger.
19:23 Fine.
19:24 Go get yourself, not yourself, get your influencers out on TikTok, get them out on all the...
19:32 People don't listen to Twitter anymore because it's owned by a right-winger.
19:36 But there's plenty of places that you can get out on, and don't do it yourself.
19:40 You've got a whole lot of really young, attractive people that look like the rest of America,
19:44 especially this new generation that's coming up.
19:47 Get them to talk to the American public about what's really happening.
19:51 Look what Biden has done for this generation with his single-handedly strong, I think heroic,
19:57 forgiveness of student loans.
19:59 Even though the court threw this, the right-wing Supreme Court threw it out, he went back with
20:03 another program, and I think something like $300 million has been forgiven in student
20:07 loans.
20:08 This is a president who's getting the job done, and we just need to do a much better
20:12 job, particularly talking to people who are under 35, who are totally grossed out by the
20:17 right-wing of the Republican Party.
20:19 Well, it's interesting to hear you say that, and Governor, I'm old enough to remember your
20:24 receptivity, your openness to all the new digital and internet organizing that at that
20:30 time, back in '02, '03, the beltway was not keen on.
20:33 So you were sort of cutting against the aspects of the Democratic Party, foreign policy, but
20:38 also on the internet.
20:39 So hearing you talk about TikTok, which recently supplanted Google as the most used app, period,
20:45 is interesting on the political side.
20:47 On the economy, I'm curious, who do you think is the better side of that political argument?
20:51 Because I mentioned Bob Dylan.
20:54 The weatherman argument is people will feel it, and if they keep delivering the numbers,
20:57 they'll get there.
20:58 The counter is a lot of, as I mentioned --
20:59 I think that's true.
21:00 Yeah, go ahead.
21:01 You know, I do think that's true.
21:03 I think the feelings about the economy always lag the actual numbers.
21:08 If you look at the numbers in the economy, they're phenomenal.
21:10 We haven't seen this kind of turnaround, I think, since Obama took over in the greatest
21:14 financial crisis we've had since the Depression.
21:18 So I think that's absolutely true.
21:19 It does take the public a while to feel that.
21:22 But it's exploited by the right-wingers.
21:25 And you know, this is not a United States problem.
21:27 This has been going on.
21:28 Brazil elected a right-wing fascist, and fortunately, the voters threw him out.
21:33 The voters threw Trump out.
21:35 Now we've got to make sure we hold on to those gains.
21:37 And we've got this going on all over the world.
21:39 It's going on in Europe.
21:40 You would think people like Viktor Orban.
21:42 Well, the polls just threw out their authoritarian government.
21:45 So there is hope here.
21:47 We've just got to fight back harder, and we've got to be smarter about it.
21:51 You cannot appeal to a generation of people who are under 35 without talking their language,
21:56 and only they talk their language.
21:58 People like my age are going to look ridiculous if I go out on Twitter and all these other
22:01 things.
22:02 That's why I brought up Dylan.
22:03 Yeah, well, even that.
22:04 I mean, I think Dylan's wonderful, but they barely heard of him, right?
22:10 So we've got to get a whole bunch of 30-year-olds and 25-year-olds out on social media talking
22:15 about this president and what they've done, what they've had done for them, particularly
22:20 themselves.
22:23 Personal stories make a big, big difference.
22:26 And that's what we've got to get out there for the under-35 crowd.
22:31 That is something special.
22:33 We know American politics has been roiled by Trumpism since 2015, but these new elections,
22:37 as mentioned, from Argentina to the Netherlands, are reinforcing the global trend of the right-wing
22:42 surge and, separate from ideology, also tactics used of an authoritarian nature against immigrants,
22:50 the rights of citizens, against democracy itself, including the coup and other sort
22:55 of efforts to steal the vote from Brazil to the Philippines.
22:59 One difference between classic conservatives like, say, Reagan and today's new right is
23:03 how these crises, these set of crises, have pushed the new right-wing figures into embracing
23:08 really what can only be described as radical change, like overthrowing a 200-year-old democracy,
23:15 whatever its imperfections.
23:17 And that means now we have some liberals standing up as the voice of protecting traditions,
23:22 a bit of a reversal or a shift, and it's something historian Noah Yuval Harari studies.
23:28 He just told us about it in this new interview.
23:32 What you see in a lot of modern politics is this delicate dance between conservatives
23:38 and liberals, which I think that for many generations they agreed on the basics.
23:46 Their main disagreement was about the pace.
23:49 That both conservatives and liberals, they basically agree we need some rules and also
23:56 we need the ability to change the rules.
23:58 But the conservatives prefer a much slower pace, like somebody comes with a new idea,
24:03 like allowing women to go to university or allowing two men to get married.
24:08 And the conservative instinct is let's wait.
24:12 It's dangerous.
24:13 And the liberal instinct is let's try it out and see what happens.
24:16 Could be good.
24:18 And I think part, and you see this kind of delicate dance that when things are going
24:24 too slow, so people vote in a more liberal administration that will speed things up
24:31 and will be more creative, bolder in its social experiments.
24:36 And when things go too fast, then you say, okay, liberals, you had your chance.
24:40 Now let's bring the conservatives to slow down a little and have a bit of a breath.
24:48 Slow down, have a breath.
24:50 So to apply that there, what Harari, the historian, is arguing is that liberals were associated
24:56 with pushing the new social projects and then potential blowback if they were deemed to
25:00 be moving too fast.
25:03 And now he sees this shift where conservative movements, both here like MAGA and Unite the
25:08 Right and their tiki torches of racism, as well as abroad, are doing something else.
25:16 The right gets so radical that it's moving too fast and far.
25:20 And then the center and left respond with the emergency project of trying to protect
25:24 institutions.
25:25 And Professor Harari calls that both an important step but also a challenge for liberals, even
25:33 as conservatives like MAGA underperforming find that the radical right is hurting their
25:39 own long-term political viability.
25:43 In recent years, in many parts of the world, you see a kind of conservative suicide.
25:51 That conservatives are abandoning their kind of traditional role to slow down and conserve
25:59 institutions and traditions and so forth.
26:02 And they still call themselves conservatives, but they become this kind of new radical party,
26:08 which is more about ignoring traditions and destroying institutions.
26:14 And then it becomes the job of liberals to be the guardians of the institutions and they
26:20 are not good at it.
26:22 That's a historical argument.
26:25 If liberals spent many years on social change, they're not as good or experienced at turning
26:30 their energy towards guarding these institutions.
26:34 The professor just told us that in a new interview for our Summit series.
26:37 If you recognize the name, it might be because Obama himself touted Professor Harari's macro
26:42 history book, Sapiens, saying it was a sweeping history of the human race that was provocative
26:48 and offering an important sense of perspective.
26:52 Now we called on Harari for our series here because Sapiens has this really broad history
26:56 of all of humankind.
26:58 And when we talk about reaching the summit, well, this is a rare summit for a non-fiction
27:01 book.
27:02 It's actually sold over 20 million copies.
27:06 We also discussed how this world has more information, really more access to education
27:10 than ever before.
27:12 And if so, if we are actually more evolved than before, why do conspiracy theories seem
27:17 so resilient?
27:19 You may have thought about that as we face problems in American politics.
27:21 Well, his answer is the tendency for people to seek simple answers for everything.
27:29 If you try to explain a war, a revolution, an economic crisis, and there is a single
27:37 reason that explains everything, it's more akin to a conspiracy theory than to science.
27:44 I mean, at least in, I don't know about physics or biology, but at least in my field of history,
27:50 history is always the result of a lot of causes coming together.
27:55 You know, you have this metaphor of the chain of events, and this is a terrible metaphor.
28:00 There is no chain of events.
28:02 A chain of events imagines that every event is a link connected to one previous event
28:09 and to one subsequent event.
28:11 So there is a war, there is one cause for the war, and there will be one consequence.
28:16 It's never like that.
28:17 People are looking for simple explanations.
28:21 This is why the attraction of conspiracy theories, which usually try to explain not just a war,
28:28 they try to explain everything that is happening in the world with a single cause.
28:33 There is this one conspiracy that if you know about it, you understand everything from the
28:38 COVID pandemic, the war in Ukraine, the crisis in the US, everything is explained.
28:43 Now, this is again, very simple, so very attractive, but always wrong.
28:49 Always wrong.
28:50 So the tip there is we should be wary of those oversimplified explanations of narratives.
28:55 Now, it wasn't all gloom and doom in our New Summit Series interview.
28:58 Here are some other fun highlights.
29:02 We now have an entire menu to choose from of how we might destroy ourselves.
29:08 History is not the study of the past.
29:11 History is the study of change.
29:12 We live our lives trapped inside the dreams of dead people.
29:18 If you really want to make a change, you cannot do it as an isolated individual.
29:23 Human beings, we don't think in facts.
29:26 We don't think in statistics.
29:28 We think in stories.
29:29 I come from Israel.
29:30 We play football.
29:31 The best way to stay grounded in the modern world is...
29:37 Stay in touch with your body.
29:39 Failure means...
29:41 An inevitable part of life.
29:42 The key lesson of sapiens is...
29:46 Humans are good at gaining power, but not at translating power into happiness.
29:53 That is some of what we heard, the interview airing here now in clips for the first time.
29:57 You can see the whole thing on YouTube.
29:59 Go to msnbc.com/ari where we have our playlist or just search "Melber and Harari."
30:04 You see there, search my name and his, Harari, and you can find the hour-long in-depth Summit
30:09 Series interview.
30:10 Up next, we turn to new developments out of Merrick Garland's...
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