Maureen Dowd | Club Random with Bill Maher

On this episode, Bill sits down with New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd for a wide-ranging, personal chat about her new book “Notorious"—a collection of her incisive profiles of major cultural and political figures—and why she once went viral for a botched edible experience in Denver. The two swap stories about growing up in Washington, D. C. (her father was a detective), how “woke” culture may have dampened the fun on the left, and what still draws voters to Donald Trump’s brash humor. Maureen recalls the times she’s gone toe-to-toe with politicians across the aisle, and she and Bill debate whether Democrats need a showman of their own. Throughout it all, they reflect on the challenges of bridging America’s political divide, the strange alliances they’ve formed in the process, and how a good dinner party could be the real key to bringing people back together. Upgrade your wardrobe and save on @trueclassic at trueclassic.com/RANDOM ! #trueclassicpod #ad Go to https://www.ffrf.us/freedom or text "CLUB" to 511511 and become a member today Follow Club Random on IG: @ClubRandomPodcast Follow Bill on IG: @BillMaher Don’t forget to subscribe to the podcast for free wherever you're listening or by using this link: https://bit.ly/ClubRandom Watch Club Random on YouTube: https://bit.ly/ClubRandomYouTube Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:31Speaker 01

  Was that you?

• 0:32Bill Maher?

  It was you, fool.

• 0:33Speaker 01

  Oh, really? I was gonna say, great line.

• 0:37Bill Maher?

  You don't remember it?

• 0:40Bill Maher?

  Produced by Harvey Weinstein.

• 0:42Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, well, there's that.

• 0:43Bill Maher?

  But, go ahead, Maureen.

• 0:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 0:45Bill Maher?

  Keep liking it.

• 0:50Bill Maher?

  Hello?

• 0:51Speaker 01

  Hello?

• 0:53Bill Maher?

  It's around the corner. How are you?

• 0:56Speaker 01

  Good.

• 0:58Bill Maher?

  I know you have a little cold.

• 0:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00Bill Maher?

  And you still showed up.

• 1:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:04Bill Maher?

  Well, I love people who keep a booking.

• 1:07Speaker 01

  Thank God I'm in Bobby Kennedy's America. I don't worry when I get sick.

• 1:14Bill Maher?

  Well, let's not start fighting about that right away.

• 1:17Speaker 01

  All right, let's not.

• 1:17Bill Maher?

  Let's wait like 10 minutes before we get into... You look fantastic. I don't know what you're doing to get through this cold. What are you doing to get through a cold?

• 1:28Speaker 01

  Well, I had to cancel my first day on the book tour. I was supposed to be on CNN with Caitlin Collins. And, you know, I just slept. But when you're on book tour, it's hard to get enough sleep.

• 1:42Bill Maher?

  Man, you're a trooper. I mean, you go places in the world. I mean, I wouldn't go in the world. I don't.

• 1:51Speaker 01

  I know, you don't like to travel, right?

• 1:53Bill Maher?

  I'm done. I did it.

• 1:55Speaker 01

  Done.

• 1:55Bill Maher?

  Not like you did.

• 1:56Speaker 01

  Like Larry David is like that. I mean, Europe, what's the point?

• 1:59Bill Maher?

  No, he was in Europe recently because he officiated at Ari Emanuel's wedding in Italy.

• 2:05Speaker 01

  Oh, really?

• 2:06Bill Maher?

  Yeah. I think he married them.

• 2:09Speaker 01

  Oh, my gosh, I didn't know that.

• 2:11Bill Maher?

  Well, anyone can do a wedding, you know?

• 2:15Speaker 01

  I'll do yours.

• 2:19Bill Maher?

  So I'm not gonna pass you this joint.

• 2:21Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 2:22Bill Maher?

  Because, you know, you have a cold. And we also know that you once had a very bad experience with marijuana.

• 2:30Speaker 01

  Right, and then you gave me some advice on your show.

• 2:33Bill Maher?

  Publicly.

• 2:34Speaker 01

  But if they ran that advice on a loop in dispensaries, that would be good.

• 2:40Bill Maher?

  What was the advice? I forget, cuz I'm a pothead.

• 2:43Speaker 01

  Well, they didn't, I mean, the problem with when Denver.

• 2:49Bill Maher?

  Right, you ate it.

• 2:50Speaker 01

  But can I, can I just clear up something which I keep trying to clear up, but no one believes me? It was a five-square chocolate caramel candy bar. I had one half of one square. Everyone said you shouldn't have eaten the whole candy bar cuz that's like guzzling a bottle of Jack Daniels. But I didn't. But here's the thing. It was a bunch of hippies who suddenly became billionaires. And they didn't wanna put in a speed bomb for new people where they labeled it with instructions or had a thing on a loop like your instructions where they said, if you take an edible, you've gotta wait an hour and a half

• 3:35Speaker 01

  cuz that's how long it takes to kick in. So, but the funny thing was, they, um, they put up, they hired a model who looked like me and put up billboards all over Denver with the message.

• 3:51Bill Maher?

  That's hysterical.

• 3:52Speaker 01

  Something like, don't be like Mo, go slow. With, like, me with my head in my hands, but, yeah.

• 4:01Bill Maher?

  That's really kind of a cool feather in your cap.

• 4:03Speaker 01

  I have a picture of it in my office.

• 4:05Bill Maher?

  It's, it's kinda like, I have framed the flyer that the Westboro Baptist Church handed out. Remember them?

• 4:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:14Bill Maher?

  God hates fags, people.

• 4:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:17Bill Maher?

  It's one of my prized possessions.

• 4:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I actually got the laws changed there. Because all I thought was that they should give you better instructions. I didn't wanna slow them down, but they were all furious at the idea that they would be slowed down. You know, but a lot of new people were coming in and older people, and they just needed to tell them how to do it.

• 4:39Bill Maher?

  Well. Exactly, they need to, yeah, you're right, there's this.

• 4:43Speaker 01

  I still want you to tell me how to do it. I still haven't gotten back on the worst, so to speak.

• 4:49Bill Maher?

  Well, first of all, don't eat it.

• 4:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:51Bill Maher?

  Unless it, unless you can get it, I mean, there are people who do, I don't want to tell everybody how to do the wrong thing, but for me, eating it was always problematic. I wanted to eat it. Because it's better for you, I think, you don't have to put smoke in your lung.

• 5:04Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 5:04Bill Maher?

  But it's just too much of a commitment, and you know how I feel about commitment.

• 5:10Bill Maher?

  But it is. It's a giant commitment. Uh, uh, sometimes a terrible commitment, and it's like an acid trip sometimes, and that's what happened to you.

• 5:19Speaker 01

  Well, what happened was, yeah, so, um, I was with a girlfriend, Alessandra Stanley, and she and I did this tiny bit of this candy bar, and we were suddenly, you know, well, we were fine, then nothing happened for an hour and a half, so we figured we'd get a glass of wine and go to bed.

• 5:38Bill Maher?

  Well, that's.

• 5:38Speaker 01

  So then suddenly.

• 5:40Bill Maher?

  That's the big miss.

• 5:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, I felt paralyzed, but I also felt super paranoid. I was sure that the hotel officials were gonna come in and kick me out of the room. And then, um, we were sort of both paralyzed for 12 hours, and then when I got up, for some reason, I took a glass of water and walked over to my computer and poured it into it.

• 6:04Bill Maher?

  What?

• 6:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, I like killed my computer. I forgot to put that in my piece, but, um.

• 6:09Bill Maher?

  Well, that to me speaks of some sort of psychological thing that was lurking in you. Well, yes, wouldn't it, would, I mean, I don't, you'd be like Sigmund Freud to see that.

• 6:21Speaker 01

  But you know what I suspect, but I never proved, was that I think they were using a lot on medicinal level at that point, so you didn't quite know what you were getting. I think it might have been a little stronger even. It's, and also they were disguising it as candy. Remember, little kids were, and that was all I said. I said, don't, now you're in the game. Don't disguise it as candy and just give people instructions.

• 6:46Bill Maher?

  Well, of course, that certainly is, that, that's the low-hanging fruit that they could do. And I own a pot store with Woody Harrelson.

• 6:53Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, I wanna go over there.

• 6:54Bill Maher?

  The Woods, it's fantastic.

• 6:56Speaker 01

  Everyone, um.

• 6:57Bill Maher?

  It's amazing.

• 6:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, my researcher is here with me, and he's still upset he didn't take, Woody Harrelson was giving a gold, like, gold finger. Gold foil joints the night of your show in DC. Can you get him one of those?

• 7:14Bill Maher?

  Yeah, but you know CNN, I was gonna say it's a conservative organization, but they're not that conservative. I'm out there now. When I, when they asked me to, would you like to be, I was like, yeah, be honored CNN? Are you kidding? But what are you gonna do about all the fucks? We don't care. You don't care?

• 7:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:30Bill Maher?

  CNN doesn't care about fuck?

• 7:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:33Bill Maher?

  Wow. Things have changed. When I first went on the Tonight Show, you couldn't say ass.

• 7:38Speaker 01

  David Zaslove.

• 7:40Bill Maher?

  Well, you think he did it?

• 7:42Speaker 01

  No, I'm kidding. He's a looser guy.

• 7:45Bill Maher?

  He is. He's a great guy.

• 7:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, I love him too.

• 7:47Bill Maher?

  Yeah. No, he's a, he's a guy from Jersey.

• 7:51Speaker 01

  And Mark Thompson, our old CEO.

• 7:53Bill Maher?

  Not Jersey, but near.

• 7:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, Mark Thompson, our old CEO is now running CNN.

• 7:58Bill Maher?

  Yeah, I just had lunch with him.

• 7:59Speaker 01

  He's a great guy.

• 8:00Bill Maher?

  Yeah.

• 8:01Speaker 01

  Yeah. We have to trash someone soon.

• 8:04Bill Maher?

  Oh.

• 8:05Speaker 01

  We love everyone. Oh, you have my picture with Chico. I love that so much.

• 8:11Bill Maher?

  It's like that, if I had to take another thing out of my house besides the Westboro Baptist Church flyer saying that I am Satan and I'm praying to Obama like this, and he's got devil horns, which is awesome, I would save this. You got me this when my book came out last year and you interviewed me and Chico photobombed, if you're not watching this, if you're listening, Chico photobombed the picture and it's most, I'm in the background, which is perfect because, you know, when you're older, it's a great place to be. And, but Chico with his one fucking eye, just.

• 8:45Speaker 01

  I love that picture.

• 8:46Bill Maher?

  I do too. It is my prized possession, but no, there's plenty of, I mean, first of all, the book is fantastic. I, I very often get too stoned and forget to plug things, but I'm not gonna do that today, not to you, not to the awesome Maureen Dowd, who's been so good to me. I, I read, you know, Notorious, it's called, and it's a collection of all your pieces, your, your profiles of not just people in show business, but whoever's a big mocker. I mean, I love the ones you do about fashion. I love the ones you do about tech. Titans, that's a big thing, but anybody who's in the culture like that on that level. And some of these, I mean, I remember all of them. And I have a very, shall we say, selective memory.

• 9:31Bill Maher?

  But some of them came back like from the 90s. Like Al Pacino. And some of them are from like early 90s.

• 9:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:39Bill Maher?

  When you and I were both first kind of, when did you get your column? I mean, I remember the 88 election when you covered.

• 9:46Speaker 01

  I did in 95.

• 9:49Bill Maher?

  95 is when your column started, okay. So Politically Incorrect started in 93.

• 9:53Speaker 01

  Right. I did a story, it was more of a column, not one of those pieces, but about, remember I trashed Ari at the White House for, he was criticizing you for that comment. I trashed the Bush White House when they were criticizing you about, you know, during the Iraq war. When, or it was, sorry, it was after 9/11 when.

• 10:19Bill Maher?

  Oh, when they fired me?

• 10:21Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 10:22Bill Maher?

  It's so funny, Maureen, you know, like, here's the arc of my career. You could see it through that lens of Islam. Because I was a big hero to the left after 9/11. Because six days after the attack, we did our first show. And somebody said, Knessh De Souza said, you know, the people who were attacked, they were not cowards. And I wholeheartedly agreed and still do. You can be evil and not be a coward. I mean, they stuck with the suicide mission. You know, I've heard some of them on the plane didn't know it was a suicide mission.

• 10:57Speaker 01

  Right.

• 10:57Bill Maher?

  And they were like, wait, what kind of a mission?

• 11:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, but you came back.

• 11:02Bill Maher?

  But, but they did it. And I think they probably did know. So I was a big hero to the left.

• 11:11Bill Maher?

  Because I said, you know, terrorists don't necessarily, aren't necessarily terrorists, which was true. And then I became a big enemy of the left because I kept saying true things about Islamic extremism, which they didn't like because they think that's Islamophobia.

• 11:30Speaker 01

  Right.

• 11:30Bill Maher?

  So it's interesting the way it came. I stayed right where I've always been.

• 11:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:34Bill Maher?

  Keeping it real about both sides of that. But it just came around. I mean, and, and now we are, I'm not surprised that we've reached this place where woke-ism is somehow aligned with "infatata is the only solution." That the people that would look, that look and dress and admire terrorists and "infatata," which is not a benign word or concept, they're aligned now. That's the, that's the end of that cycle. Uh, and I, I'm very happy where I stayed despite all the people who, uh, you know, throw me out of their little club for it.

• 12:17Speaker 01

  Well, that's why people love you. People ask me about you all around the world when I travel.

• 12:23Bill Maher?

  World.

• 12:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:24Bill Maher?

  Know me around.

• 12:24Speaker 01

  Customs agents.

• 12:26Bill Maher?

  Really?

• 12:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:26Bill Maher?

  And where?

• 12:27Speaker 01

  Because people want someone to just tell it straight and not be

• 12:33Bill Maher?

  But they don't get that.

• 12:33Speaker 01

  spinning for one side or the other.

• 12:35Bill Maher?

  No, I get that in America, but where in the world do they know me? I mean, I can't.

• 12:38Speaker 01

  Ireland.

• 12:39Bill Maher?

  I, so they get, where they see it on YouTube?

• 12:41Speaker 01

  They're proud of you as the son of Ireland.

• 12:43Bill Maher?

  Really?

• 12:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:46Bill Maher?

  I remember when my, I visited there in 99. And I never really thought, oh, you know, I'm Irish, but I was always very unsentimental about it. And I truly believe in my heart that you can't be proud of something you didn't actually achieve. I'm not really proud I'm Irish, it just happened. You know, I, I'm, I'm not, I'm not proud I'm white, it just, it just happened. I'm proud that I stayed on the air after they tried to get rid of me. That's an accomplishment.

• 13:16Speaker 01

  No, nobody puts baby in a corner.

• 13:19Bill Maher?

  Well, but when my plane landed, I was crying.

• 13:23Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 13:24Bill Maher?

  And I don't know why. I mean, I didn't expect it or I just, maybe something in the earth. I don't know what it was, but when the plane was touching down.

• 13:36Bill Maher?

  I guess somewhere in me, I know what my roots are.

• 13:39Speaker 01

  That is a great story.

• 13:41Bill Maher?

  It's not much of a story, it just happened.

• 13:43Speaker 01

  Oh, I love that, though.

• 13:45Bill Maher?

  Yeah, yeah, and then, and then I had the best time driving around.

• 13:50Speaker 01

  Ireland has changed a lot, you know, they had a gay Indian.

• 13:56Bill Maher?

  Oh, they're super woke.

• 13:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, Prime Minister, yeah.

• 13:59Bill Maher?

  Oh, yeah, for people who don't know, there's like stupider woke in other countries even, in many places. I mean, New Zealand, I think, I've heard some things, they had a young woman Prime Minister, you know, who had said things during Covid, very much like, you know, if we are the only.

• 14:21Speaker 01

  Jacinda Ardern, I did one of these pieces on her.

• 14:24Bill Maher?

  We are the only truth.

• 14:25Speaker 01

  She was great. I mean, she was great when I interviewed her.

• 14:31Bill Maher?

  Yeah, I'm just saying.

• 14:32Speaker 01

  She did, yeah, she got in trouble over Covid, that's why.

• 14:36Bill Maher?

  Also, just this, this attitude that I do hate on the left of like, we own the truth.

• 14:43Speaker 01

  Right.

• 14:43Bill Maher?

  I mean, I think Fauci said almost goes, I am the science.

• 14:46Speaker 01

  Well, I think they took his mural down in Washington.

• 14:52Bill Maher?

  You, Trump?

• 14:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, uh huh, yeah.

• 14:54Bill Maher?

  What's it like, I mean, that's been your home your whole life, for people who don't know.

• 14:58Speaker 01

  Uh huh, yeah, I was born there.

• 15:00Bill Maher?

  Born and raised there, and your father was detective and sergeant at arms, what, in the Capitol?

• 15:08Speaker 01

  No, he was a DC police detective who was in charge of Senate security.

• 15:13Bill Maher?

  Got shot.

• 15:14Speaker 01

  For 20 years. He didn't get shot, he captured the gun of, he ran from the Senate to the House and tackled and took the gun away from one of the Puerto Rican terrorists, so.

• 15:28Bill Maher?

  Puerto Rican terrorists?

• 15:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, so he shot up the House, you can still see the gunshots on some of the deaths. And he took the gun, and then there was a trial.

• 15:43Speaker 01

  And the defense attorney asked him how he knew that his, it was his client's gun and my dad goes, because I carved my initials on it, which you can see if you look at it.

• 15:56Bill Maher?

  Holy shit, that's a story.

• 15:58Speaker 01

  He was, my dad was very magnetic and cool. And anyway, Washington is one big ball of stress. They need some weed there. I mean, they're ripping it, yeah, ripping it from the inside out.

• 16:18Bill Maher?

  You mean now it is?

• 16:19Speaker 01

  Now.

• 16:21Bill Maher?

  But it wasn't before? You're just saying it's worse?

• 16:24Speaker 01

  No.

• 16:25Bill Maher?

  It must be some people just getting fired. There's nothing more close to home than that. And the, he's tearing through the government, firing people.

• 16:33Speaker 01

  Right.

• 16:33Bill Maher?

  So that's really what I was asking is like, what is, I mean, do you see that in Starbucks when you go?

• 16:40Speaker 01

  Everyone's head is spinning. I mean, this wolf pack or brat pack of, of young Doge kids with backpacks and pizzas shows up. They, they had a confrontation today or yesterday at the US Institute of Peace, where they didn't want to let them in and they were trying to sneak in. And, you know, it's scary because it was, it, I think you said something. I'm elaborating on it. But it's like, if you want to get rid of your stomach, you don't use a Jean Bloushi Samurai sword to cut it off. You just use a Zimpek. Like, there's a more careful way to do it. I mean, it would be nice to save money and have a leaner government.

• 17:25Speaker 01

  But these kids show up and they're trying to get into agencies. It's very disorienting because there was no planning in the sense of there's no, you know, disclosure agreements. Nobody knows what they're getting. They're getting taxpayers' information and.

• 17:50Speaker 01

  A lot of it probably is illegal and, you know, it's just an insane situation. And Elon Musk, there's a piece about him in the book.

• 18:00Bill Maher?

  Oh, yes. But it's pre.

• 18:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:03Bill Maher?

  It's the old.

• 18:04Speaker 01

  When he didn't like. Yeah, when he didn't like Trump.

• 18:06Bill Maher?

  Funny, he also was a liberal hero.

• 18:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:09Bill Maher?

  Not that I'm a conservative hero now.

• 18:12Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 18:13Bill Maher?

  He fully went all the other way.

• 18:15Speaker 01

  Right.

• 18:15Bill Maher?

  As Joe Rogan used to also be quite liberal.

• 18:18Speaker 01

  Right.

• 18:19Bill Maher?

  But the Elon piece is from what, 27?

• 18:22Speaker 01

  Well, Silicon Valley was liberal and now it's very.

• 18:25Bill Maher?

  Yeah, and he did the Tesla, you know.

• 18:28Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 18:30Bill Maher?

  You know.

• 18:30Speaker 01

  And everybody in Hollywood had a Tesla.

• 18:32Bill Maher?

  And I remember when, it wasn't that long ago when he was just posting things before he owned Twitter that were fairly benign and similar to the way I thought were like you. I remember he, once he put like a graph of like, here I am and here's where, you know, common sense used to be, the middle, and here's its move, here's how it's moved. And, you know, he had the left abandoning it, which it has in many ways.

• 18:57Speaker 01

  Right.

• 18:58Bill Maher?

  So he's, you know, sees himself as in the middle while the, while the shift has happened. I see that too, but I didn't go all the.

• 19:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, he's gone, he's gone very far. But I think the problem is he does not believe in government. So he's perfectly happy to eviscerate government. And he's treating it like a business or something.

• 19:22Bill Maher?

  Yeah.

• 19:22Speaker 01

  And it's government, you know, you can't do that.

• 19:25Bill Maher?

  No.

• 19:26Speaker 01

  I'm not saying, I don't want to get rid of stupid and wasteful things.

• 19:32Bill Maher?

  Right, yeah, yeah.

• 19:33Speaker 01

  But the way they're doing it, you know, just imagine Washington and this crazy pack of kids running around getting everyone's information.

• 19:42Bill Maher?

  Even if you were going to metaphorically demolish a building, say a building does need to be demolished, wouldn't you go in first and take out whatever is valuable?

• 19:54Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 19:56Bill Maher?

  You know, you'd go into the--

• 19:57Speaker 01

  But they just show up. I mean, I can see--

• 20:00Bill Maher?

  And then blow it up.

• 20:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, Trump is treating it. I used to like this TV show when I was little called Treasure Chest, where Jan Murray would open the treasure chest every week. Remember that?

• 20:10Bill Maher?

  Vaguely, I don't--

• 20:11Speaker 01

  Remember?

• 20:11Bill Maher?

  Sounds vague.

• 20:12Speaker 01

  And so--

• 20:12Bill Maher?

  Was it a game show?

• 20:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, so there's that thrill of them getting into an agency and finding the things that are stupid to cut, but there's more to it than that, you know?

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• 21:26Bill Maher?

  Well, the thing I worry about the most, which now will probably get us on what we're going to argue about health-wise, is--

• 21:36Bill Maher?

  During, well, before Covid, we had a little group in China, a little group of like eight scientists and doctors who were supposed to monitor if anything was brewing over there. I forget what it was called. It was like a five-word name, a very long word. The Biomedical Research Council Committee. Whatever it was, it was just, it cost three cents, basically.

• 22:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, right.

• 22:03Bill Maher?

  And he got rid of that.

• 22:04Speaker 01

  Right.

• 22:05Bill Maher?

  And I don't feel like he's ever confronted with that enough. And now, that's what they're doing all over the world. And diseases start in other countries, and then they come here. How can these people who are, some of them are not stupid at all, how can they not see that that's the smart thing to do? And that if another virus comes here, it could be worse, Ebola? You know, stop it in Africa.

• 22:34Speaker 01

  Right.

• 22:35Bill Maher?

  I, I just don't.

• 22:37Speaker 01

  Well, like when he had this presidential address, you know, recently, he had a child there who he, he said had gotten cancer maybe from chemicals. But then they're cutting the things at NIH that are watching that. Like when he talked to Zelensky today, he said, "Oh, I want to help you with these children that the Russians have kidnapped." You know, they've kidnapped all these Ukrainian children. But then Doge cut a Yale program which tracks the children and tries to, you know, so this is what's going on. Everybody wants to get rid of waste, but this is a crazy,

• 23:19Speaker 01

  nobody knows what anyone's doing, everything's spinning.

• 23:24Bill Maher?

  So are people in Washington, how do you see it? Like when you go out drinking more? Are the, are the cars crashing off the side? Were there just people? Like, I want to know how you actually, what you actually.

• 23:38Speaker 01

  That's what it is.

• 23:39Bill Maher?

  Just like in a movie where the car is starting just driving off the road and people are just, there are guys running out, he's on fire, that kind of.

• 23:47Speaker 01

  That's it, that memory.

• 23:49Bill Maher?

  Yeah. Well, you know, on the, on the disease thing, I got to say. When I read the byline in your paper about these news stories, I can't help but remember that this is the person who said that any even hint that COVID could have escaped from a lab was racist.

• 24:11Speaker 01

  Right.

• 24:12Bill Maher?

  So you can't really blame me, and maybe she's your friend. I'm sorry if she works across the cubicle or whatever. But you can't blame me for being skeptical.

• 24:22Speaker 01

  I don't blame you.

• 24:26Speaker 01

  I don't.

• 24:26Bill Maher?

  Thank you.

• 24:28Speaker 01

  Go ahead.

• 24:29Bill Maher?

  Okay. All right, no, I'm glad because I know we've, I know you and I have slightly different views. And like, I mean, I know RFK is easy to, I said last week, he's like having a bipolar girlfriend. You know, sometimes he says crazy shit and you just, you know, he's the girl you're sorry you started to talk to at the party.

• 24:50Speaker 01

  Right.

• 24:50Bill Maher?

  You know?

• 24:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:51Bill Maher?

  But just from what I basically know, I mean, we used to treat natural immunity as a little more valuable than we do now. I'm not saying this is the pharmaceutical industry taking over America entirely. I'm not a conspiracy theorist like that. But like any industry, they're very influential. And the solution always seems to be more of their, what they're selling. And this is the first one, COVID, I recall, where we really didn't count natural immunity at all. Even if you had it, which is really usually the best kind, you still had to get the vaccine. That seems strange. And they fired medical workers who wouldn't do that.

• 25:30Speaker 01

  Well, I know that COVID was hard for all of us, but I do know it was hard for you because I feel like I kept sending you pink ties to cheer you up.

• 25:41Bill Maher?

  And I wore them here. We shot this show, I did the monologue there. We did the interviews right here. I did the editorial outside in the backyard. We did it once in the rain. I will treasure that moment. I did a monologue with, holding an umbrella.

• 25:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:59Bill Maher?

  I mean.

• 25:59Speaker 01

  You got through it.

• 26:01Bill Maher?

  I, you know, it was. It was terrible.

• 26:05Speaker 01

  I know, it was terrible.

• 26:06Bill Maher?

  You know what was the terrible part is I would do the show. The show, yeah, okay, it was still the show. We kept it pretty much like it was. We had a laugh track for the, you know, we tried that. We had old footage of people laughing from other eras. It was funny. People thought it was a good bit. Um, yeah, we got through it, but after we finished the taping, I would walk out that door and I'd walk the 50 feet to my house and I'd just be silently all alone again. And that's, you can't come down from a show like that.

• 26:39Speaker 01

  Right, I know, I was working, yeah.

• 26:41Bill Maher?

  And you just, it was like, it reminded me of the time, first time I took mushrooms and when the mushrooms wore off, when they had eaten all my serotonin, and I was just like.

• 26:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, I know. I was at my dining room table, working by myself for two years. I thought I would go mad, you know? It was, it was a horrible period for the country.

• 27:05Bill Maher?

  Did you go into the office every day?

• 27:07Speaker 01

  Well, I tried, but they just did a crazy six-month redecoration of our office. We haven't been there, but I will be going back after book tour.

• 27:17Bill Maher?

  But really, why would you need, in your job, to go into an office?

• 27:22Speaker 01

  You don't need to, but I don't like working alone. I mean, if I had known I was gonna be working alone so much, I would have become a cocktail waitress. I don't want to be a journalist enough to do it alone, you know?

• 27:37Bill Maher?

  So you like to hear the clacking of the other?

• 27:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's the whole point, the newsroom.

• 27:42Bill Maher?

  Right.

• 27:42Speaker 01

  You know?

• 27:43Bill Maher?

  His Girl Friday.

• 27:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, all these kids have not even experienced a newsroom. I don't know how they meet people to date. I don't know how they get mentors. I don't know how they imitate, you know? I used to like watch reporters and then I would know how to do it. I don't know who they modeled themselves on. I think it's horrible for young people. But some of them seem to not wanna be in the office, which I don't get at all.

• 28:13Bill Maher?

  Oh, most of them?

• 28:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:14Bill Maher?

  Well, I think when historians write of this era, they will say that the great divide was no longer the things that we obsess over. It wasn't economic, although these divides all exist. It wasn't racial, that certainly exists. It was virtual versus not real. Like, there is a, a, a, somewhere in the, in the chart of ages and generations, a place where people like you and I have so little, so little in common with someone who lives on the phone.

• 28:54Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 28:55Bill Maher?

  I, I was watching, re-watching, you know, I watch things in the bathtub, I watch things in the kitchen. I, I, you know, the news is.

• 29:02Speaker 01

  You have a TV in your bathroom.

• 29:04Bill Maher?

  I got a TV in my drawers. I got a TV everywhere. I love TV. But yes, uh, in the bathtub, I watch movies.

• 29:11Speaker 01

  Love that.

• 29:11Bill Maher?

  And I was watching one from, I think it was from 2011 called Crazy Stupid Love. Not a genius movie, but not bad.

• 29:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's fun.

• 29:19Bill Maher?

  Yeah, it's fun. Ryan Gosling.

• 29:20Speaker 01

  They do the Patrick Swayze leap, right? Don't they dance and, is that the one? Yeah, Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone.

• 29:30Bill Maher?

  Yeah, Emma Stone and Steve Carell.

• 29:32Speaker 01

  They do the, um, yeah, not Patrick Swayze.

• 29:35Bill Maher?

  I'm not up to that part. There is a part where he takes his shirt off and, of course, you remember that.

• 29:40Speaker 01

  Sorry, I didn't mean to ruin it.

• 29:41Bill Maher?

  No, no. No, no, I've seen it before.

• 29:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's fun.

• 29:45Bill Maher?

  I'm just saying, I'm watching this and it, it takes, okay, so here's my review or recap. Okay, I'm not gonna ruin it. It's, it's fucking 15 years old. If you haven't seen it, you didn't miss the great, it's not Citizen Kane, but it's cute. Okay. So, it's, uh, it, most of it takes place in a bar. Steve Carell is married to Julianne Moore, and in the first scene, she wants a divorce. Okay. And so he's like this, you know, schlubby guy who's out there now, single. So he goes to this, a singles bar. This is why I'm telling this story, because this singles bar, and I'm thinking, this is 2011. And this is like, it could be from the 1300s. This is so out of date.

• 30:30Bill Maher?

  That people go to, he's, that's the main set. He goes to a single bar where, where Ryan Gosling every night is scoring with hot chicks who go to singles bar to be. Chatted up by guys who have lines to and it's like, okay, first of all, today, guys can't even talk to girls. Not gonna happen. They'd all be on their phones. Women are afraid of places like that because they get roofied by the incels.

• 30:56Speaker 01

  Right.

• 30:56Bill Maher?

  Again, this is only twenty eleven and already, this is again to somebody who's just starting out going, you know, uh, in their dating life, eighteen, nineteen, seventeen, whatever it is. This is like, you might be in the Civil War. Why don't you just have a, um, something in the barn where we're sitting on barrels and churning butter.

• 31:20Speaker 01

  Right.

• 31:20Bill Maher?

  Before we meet somebody.

• 31:22Speaker 01

  Right.

• 31:22Bill Maher?

  And that's the dividing line, I think.

• 31:26Speaker 01

  And, and we're strangers in a strange land and they're cyborgs. I mean, you know, they have the phone. They're almost like part computer. And they don't, it's funny with journalism because they don't want to make calls. They'll text someone, but they don't wanna pick up the phone.

• 31:48Bill Maher?

  Even texting.

• 31:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:49Bill Maher?

  Sometimes.

• 31:50Speaker 01

  It's too much.

• 31:51Bill Maher?

  It's a challenge.

• 31:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, right.

• 31:53Bill Maher?

  Which is amazing and, and the idea of actually confronting somebody and saying, this is just not working out.

• 32:01Speaker 01

  Right.

• 32:04Bill Maher?

  That's, that would just never, in fact, even putting it in text, they just ghost.

• 32:09Speaker 01

  Now, have you dated someone where you had that divide, where they were very?

• 32:16Bill Maher?

  Whenever I not.

• 32:22Bill Maher?

  Yes, but I found one who isn't. But.

• 32:28Speaker 01

  Muzzle top.

• 32:30Bill Maher?

  Yeah, you have to kiss a lot of computers. But, I mean, it's a. Yeah, it's, that to me is going to be, and already people are identifying this, but I don't think they know how much, like you say, cyborgs, I was watching the Taylor Swift Endless concert. It's taken months to get through that.

• 32:53Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 32:54Bill Maher?

  Nikki Glaser made me do it, she said, okay, I've talked about Taylor.

• 32:59Speaker 01

  She's fine.

• 32:59Bill Maher?

  She, I like her, she's a sweet person, I don't get the music, enough said. But like everybody, when they cut to the audience, all you see are phones.

• 33:08Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 33:09Bill Maher?

  No one is experiencing this through their eyes.

• 33:13Speaker 01

  Right.

• 33:13Bill Maher?

  They have to put this artificial filter that somehow makes it better. And they're also recording it.

• 33:24Speaker 01

  Right, so, yeah, so when I'm covering, let's say, I was on Deadline writing about the Trump address recently, and my assistant is watching it through his phone. He's not watching the TV with me, and I'm like, let's both look at the TV, but no, that is not.

• 33:47Bill Maher?

  Even the TV is not real.

• 33:49Speaker 01

  No.

• 33:49Bill Maher?

  I mean, it's real, but you know what I mean.

• 33:51Speaker 01

  No, I know.

• 33:52Bill Maher?

  It's not like Lincoln, you know, where, oh, there's Lincoln.

• 33:54Speaker 01

  But I.

• 33:55Bill Maher?

  That's the motherfucker himself, right there, you know, that's.

• 33:59Speaker 01

  But there's some like filter in there, and I'm like, let's just, you know, pay attention to this, but no.

• 34:07Bill Maher?

  I don't know what my World War II parents would say, if they just suddenly ripped Van Winkle back to life, and I, I just can't imagine what they would think of anything. I mean, they were lifelong liberal Democrats, they put that in me, and I think I basically kept the faith, although I won't go to stupid woke town with you, but I don't know, they, I don't think they would either. I don't, I don't know. My father was as Irishy Democrat, loved Kennedy and Pope John.

• 34:41Speaker 01

  Mine too.

• 34:42Bill Maher?

  Dude, as you get.

• 34:43Speaker 01

  We had a huge picture of JFK.

• 34:45Bill Maher?

  I cannot 100% predict that he wouldn't be a Trumper.

• 34:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, I often wonder.

• 34:51Bill Maher?

  I don't know.

• 34:52Speaker 01

  My father wouldn't, but I wonder, I don't think my mom would, but I can see parts of Trump she would like.

• 35:01Speaker 01

  She did, she did feel we were sending too much foreign aid and a lot of the things he harps on, you know, and I think she would like, she liked, like, she liked, funnily enough, she was, she became a Republican with Reagan because she loved Ronald Reagan, especially in a tuxedo, she loved him, but then she loved Clinton because he was optimistic and talked to her. I think she would like the fact that Trump keeps talking to his fans, you know.

• 35:36Bill Maher?

  He talks to anybody.

• 35:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, but also he talks to them in a way Barack Obama or, you know, other, George W. Bush don't talk to fans the way they would talk to their wife or a friend, and Trump does, you know, it's very, he would tell people at rallies anything he would tell Melania, probably more.

• 36:02Bill Maher?

  If Trump and Obama were sitting here right now, they wouldn't agree on a lot, but you know what they would both say? Boy, that Marine job was hard on me.

• 36:12Speaker 01

  Well, it's my publisher.

• 36:15Bill Maher?

  Confirm or deny?

• 36:16Speaker 01

  Confirm, but my publisher, Trump called us after the 2016 election, he called the Times and he came over and we had a big meeting with him and he began complaining about me and the publisher said, Mr. Trump, or President Trump, it's not your fault, it's just your turn.

• 36:38Bill Maher?

  Wow. Now, that's a great title.

• 36:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, oh, I should have used that as the title. Well, I have another shot at it.

• 36:49Bill Maher?

  That's, there's the title. So, next time the title thing comes up and you email about the title, I'll forget this because I'm a pod, so you'll remember.

• 36:59Speaker 01

  I'm remembering, yeah.

• 37:00Bill Maher?

  You, yeah, so I have become, partly because of some things I've been reading in your columns, because you love to reference them, a big, like, classic movie fan lately.

• 37:14Speaker 01

  Oh, wow.

• 37:15Bill Maher?

  Yeah, I never did it. There are a lot of ones I had missed. I never, I saw Breakfast at Tiffany's. And I know you and I have talked about whores in movies.

• 37:24Speaker 01

  Yes, and I loved your editorial.

• 37:27Bill Maher?

  Oh, I thought that was.

• 37:29Speaker 01

  It's so funny, because when I was at Columbia.

• 37:31Bill Maher?

  Whores are having a moment.

• 37:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was at Columbia getting my graduate degree in literature.

• 37:37Bill Maher?

  You got it?

• 37:38Speaker 01

  A couple of years ago, yep, I got it.

• 37:39Bill Maher?

  Wow.

• 37:40Speaker 01

  And I was in a class of pre-Renaissance plays. And the teacher, this British guy, goes, um, what? This woman character, he goes, what is she? And I looked down at the footnotes. And I go, oh, she's a whore. And the whole class, all the students and the teacher were like, oh. And the teacher goes, Maureen, she's a sex worker.

• 38:02Bill Maher?

  Ah, just like I said.

• 38:04Speaker 01

  Before Shakespeare.

• 38:05Bill Maher?

  Right.

• 38:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 38:06Bill Maher?

  Can't say whore.

• 38:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, no.

• 38:07Bill Maher?

  So your degree is from Columbia?

• 38:10Speaker 01

  Yes, it was much more valuable, you know. I didn't have rich parents to pay for it, so.

• 38:15Bill Maher?

  So when you, when you go to Columbia, do they give you the kafaya when you first get there? Or is it when you go on the?

• 38:22Speaker 01

  Thank God, my.

• 38:24Bill Maher?

  Because Infatata is the only global solution, Maureen.

• 38:28Speaker 01

  My time there was, um, before that. And so it was very peaceful, thank God.

• 38:33Bill Maher?

  Oh, it was before that?

• 38:34Speaker 01

  Right before.

• 38:35Bill Maher?

  But Breakfast at Tiffany's, they're both whores. See, I never, I always.

• 38:41Speaker 01

  Well, that's the same with Pretty Woman, they're both.

• 38:44Bill Maher?

  He's not a whore.

• 38:45Speaker 01

  Well.

• 38:46Bill Maher?

  He's a businessman.

• 38:48Speaker 01

  Right, but he's.

• 38:49Bill Maher?

  Phil, listen to yourself.

• 38:50Speaker 01

  But he's, uh, it's funny.

• 38:52Bill Maher?

  He's a businessman.

• 38:53Speaker 01

  This is funny, you would like this, listen, they're cutting words out of, uh.

• 38:59Bill Maher?

  Oh, Jesus.

• 38:59Speaker 01

  You know, they're, they're saying we shouldn't use certain words, like there are eight different gender words. But one of the words that they're trying to cut out is prostitutes. And that's such a useful word in Washington, yeah.

• 39:12Bill Maher?

  Well, you, but prostitute, you know, is a word, if you look it up in the dictionary, the first definition doesn't mention sex, it just says.

• 39:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:20Bill Maher?

  It's doing something you hate for money.

• 39:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's so many men.

• 39:23Bill Maher?

  And you can prostitute yourself, but that's the.

• 39:26Speaker 01

  Politicians.

• 39:26Bill Maher?

  Okay, but that's, that's not, but in Breakfast at Tiffany's. No, he's a man whore. He's got this lady who you see in a few scenes. Like, and she writes him.

• 39:40Speaker 01

  Patricia Neal, she takes care of him.

• 39:42Bill Maher?

  Takes care of.

• 39:43Speaker 01

  He's a boy toy.

• 39:44Bill Maher?

  A boy, he's a whore.

• 39:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:46Bill Maher?

  There's nothing wrong with it.

• 39:47Speaker 01

  He's more of a.

• 39:49Bill Maher?

  But.

• 39:49Speaker 01

  Capt man.

• 39:51Bill Maher?

  Whatever it is, he's a writer who's not selling anything and he gets by.

• 39:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:58Bill Maher?

  But that's what I never, I always heard, oh, it's Audrey Hepburn. She's, she's a hooker. And it's like, oh.

• 40:04Speaker 01

  Oh, well, you know, originally Truman Capote wanted to be Marilyn Monroe, which would have made, well, it would have made more sense because she's supposed to be kind of a hillbilly and a singer.

• 40:17Bill Maher?

  Right, right.

• 40:18Speaker 01

  You know, and because it was Audrey Hepburn, they completely whitewashed what she did for a living. So you just thought she was a party girl.

• 40:28Bill Maher?

  No, no, no, no, no. That, no, whitewashed is not what they did. The times were just so different. Here's what it is. She goes out with gentlemen. Of course, this is a chaste era where you don't ever see any sex. She goes out with gentlemen who give her fifty dollars, which.

• 40:45Speaker 01

  To go to the ladies room.

• 40:46Bill Maher?

  To go to the wash, yeah.

• 40:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:48Bill Maher?

  Okay, well, fifty dollars in sixty one was what, a thousand?

• 40:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:53Bill Maher?

  Okay, so they give her.

• 40:54Speaker 01

  So you didn't believe the washroom thing?

• 40:58Bill Maher?

  We might go to the washroom. Broke, but you're coming back ready for action.

• 41:04Speaker 04

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• 41:25Speaker 04

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• 42:03Bill Maher?

  So I'm telling you, that's their way of saying she's a hooker.

• 42:09Speaker 01

  But tell me what other movies you've been watching.

• 42:11Bill Maher?

  Oh, um, okay.

• 42:19Speaker 01

  Any other romantic movies?

• 42:20Bill Maher?

  Oh, I did a, I did a triptych of the Double Indemnity. Had never seen that.

• 42:27Speaker 01

  Oh, I love that. Except for her wig. It makes her look like George Washington.

• 42:32Bill Maher?

  Talking about Barbara Stanwyze?

• 42:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, I love Barbara Stanwyze.

• 42:35Bill Maher?

  She's not cute.

• 42:36Speaker 01

  She was my dad's favorite actress. She has a sexy way about her.

• 42:41Bill Maher?

  I guess for the era. I mean, in the first scene where he sees her, I mean, she's got an ankle bracelet, which apparently gives him wood like you can't believe. And, and he's like, but it's so funny. Again, the sensibilities of different eras. This is like I think about the phones and like we're of different species from, from 2011, but from 1944 or whatever that movie was. I mean, okay, there's, he meets her, there's the first scene. She's married. This is the old one about the, the femme fatale who gets some stupid schlub to kill her husband for.

• 43:25Bill Maher?

  Right, that's that's that.

• 43:26Speaker 01

  It's always a sap.

• 43:27Bill Maher?

  And then I watched two other movies with the same plot.

• 43:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:30Bill Maher?

  Body Heat.

• 43:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, because it's always.

• 43:33Bill Maher?

  It's great. It's a great plot.

• 43:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, the woman's a vixen and the guy's a sap.

• 43:38Bill Maher?

  Right, so but and then I watched one, there's one that came out just a couple of years ago called Careful What You Wish For. Nick Jonas is the sap.

• 43:49Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 43:50Bill Maher?

  Right, okay, so.

• 43:52Speaker 01

  You've got to watch Out of the Past. That's my favorite.

• 43:54Bill Maher?

  Is that the same plot?

• 43:57Speaker 01

  Yes, but it gets a little twisted at the end. It's Robert Mitchum, Kirk Douglas, a friend, our old friend, and Jane Greer. It's the perfect film noir.

• 44:07Bill Maher?

  Oh.

• 44:08Speaker 01

  I base my.

• 44:09Bill Maher?

  Never heard of it. Out of the Past?

• 44:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, I base my whole, um, when I started in journalism, it was mostly men and I was terrified. So I would watch film noir to see how the women kind of dominated, you know, and take tips from them, not as a femme fatale, but as somebody, you know, they would always come in and say something like, "Quite the hacienda", or they'd say something that would put the men back on their heels. So I, I wanted to be coached by these very strong women.

• 44:43Bill Maher?

  There's, there's a lot of snappy dialogue and double indemnity. But of course, it does, I mean, it makes so little sense unless you lived in that era and you understood that things were so chaste on the surface, at least in media, that you just had to indicate things. So he meets her for five minutes in the first scene. He's an insurance guy. He goes to the house. She's married. The husband's not there. And he immediately is hitting on her.

• 45:14Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 45:14Bill Maher?

  Okay, nice ankle bracelet, baby, and, you know, it's, so there's an attraction. We see that. Then he goes back a second time and kind of gets it that she wants him to kill her husband.

• 45:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:27Bill Maher?

  So he's like, "I'm not the sap who's gonna do that. Get another sap in here. I'm not a sap."

• 45:32Speaker 01

  Right.

• 45:32Bill Maher?

  So goes to his apartment. Of course, that night, a knock on the door. It's her. Uh, by the end of that scene, they're kissing and saying, "I love you."

• 45:40Speaker 01

  Right.

• 45:41Bill Maher?

  It's like, it just, they're not.

• 45:43Speaker 01

  But she didn't mean it, Bill.

• 45:45Bill Maher?

  But they're not. They're just not concerned with realism. The way later decades were.

• 45:53Speaker 01

  Thank God. That's what I love about that.

• 45:56Bill Maher?

  I can't pass that.

• 45:57Speaker 01

  Oh, my God, wait. I love you giving the plot of classic movies. Do another.

• 46:03Bill Maher?

  OK, so that's that one. And, you know.

• 46:09Speaker 01

  This is like Masterpiece Theater.

• 46:10Bill Maher?

  Right, OK, so Body Heat is 40 years later and much better and hot. I mean, wow, I forgot like how much like nudity and like grabbing his Johnson on screen. It's for the early 80s. It was, you know, ahead of its time, I think. Maybe that's why it was such a big hit because that probably was taking it to another level. But it's the same thing. It takes place in Florida. It's super hot. The heat is like a character in the movie. They're always sweating completely. So he's this guy. He's a lawyer, but he's not doing great. He's kind of down on his luck, but, you know, hot, you know, gets laid a lot.

• 46:54Bill Maher?

  And she's the lady who wants to kill her husband, who in this one isn't bad. In Double Indemnity, the husband's mean. This one, he's just kind of like, it's Richard Crenna. Not that bad.

• 47:06Speaker 01

  It's like, it's like.

• 47:07Bill Maher?

  She just wants to kill him.

• 47:08Speaker 01

  This plot goes back to Macbeth. Macbeth had a nice boss, but the wife said, no, you've got to kill him. Take his job.

• 47:16Bill Maher?

  You're right. It is a little Lady Macbeth.

• 47:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, and also.

• 47:20Bill Maher?

  But she stayed with Macbeth, right?

• 47:23Speaker 01

  No.

• 47:23Bill Maher?

  Or she would have.

• 47:25Speaker 01

  No, she.

• 47:27Bill Maher?

  Because these ladies just want to, they want to kill two birds with one stone. They want to get rid of the husband and then get his money.

• 47:34Speaker 01

  Right.

• 47:34Bill Maher?

  And cut the, cut out the sap who helped them.

• 47:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, this is my favorite genre.

• 47:40Bill Maher?

  Oh, really?

• 47:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'll think of some more for you.

• 47:42Bill Maher?

  So Body Heat is much better and hotter.

• 47:46Speaker 01

  And there's that funny scene with the little girl.

• 47:50Bill Maher?

  Yes, I didn't quite understand that. Like, the little girl witnessed him. He comes over one night. He's been fucking the lady who wants to kill her husband, Catherine Turner. And he sees a woman standing there who looks just like her from behind. And because they've been fucking, he says, hey lady, you wanna fuck? And she turns around and it's not Catherine Turner. It's her friend who looks just like her, who we find out, I won't ruin the plot at the end. But that's very important to the plot. And he's embarrassed, but now somebody else knows about them.

• 48:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:24Bill Maher?

  And then, the little girl, who's her daughter? She sees Catherine Turner blowing him.

• 48:33Speaker 01

  And then she doesn't identify him because she said it was a bald man. Remember?

• 48:41Bill Maher?

  A bald man, why?

• 48:43Speaker 01

  Because she saw his.

• 48:45Bill Maher?

  Oh, she's talking about his dick?

• 48:48Speaker 01

  Yeah. See, just call me, I'll explain this movie to you.

• 48:53Bill Maher?

  They were joking about that. It's Ted Danson, by the way, who plays the friend.

• 48:57Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 48:59Bill Maher?

  Oh, yeah, I'm not good at doing that. I do really, that's one thing I've always needed a girlfriend for. When I haven't had a girlfriend, I just don't understand movies. I watch them, but I'm always the guy going, is that the same guy? Who was in the other, okay.

• 49:17Speaker 01

  What is your all time favorite movie?

• 49:19Bill Maher?

  Saving Private Ryan.

• 49:21Speaker 01

  Wow, so you didn't think Shakespeare in Love should have won the Oscar?

• 49:25Bill Maher?

  You know what? You could test me on almost any other year and I wouldn't know what the movies were. That year I remember vividly because I was so bitter.

• 49:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, see, now we're gonna have our disagreement.

• 49:37Bill Maher?

  You like Shakespeare in Love more than?

• 49:39Speaker 01

  I loved it. And I have an interview with Tom Stoppard in here.

• 49:42Bill Maher?

  Because you're a Shakespeare freak.

• 49:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I told Tom Stoppard how much I loved it. It's in the book and even he didn't seem to like defend it that much.

• 49:52Bill Maher?

  Well.

• 49:53Speaker 01

  I mean, yeah.

• 49:54Bill Maher?

  Maybe, maybe this has to do with the fact that my parents were in World War II. Met there.

• 50:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, my dad was in World War I.

• 50:05Bill Maher?

  No.

• 50:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, he was 61 when I was born.

• 50:09Bill Maher?

  Oh, right.

• 50:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:10Bill Maher?

  Oh, my God, that's.

• 50:10Speaker 01

  So there's still time, Bill.

• 50:12Bill Maher?

  No, I'm past 61.

• 50:15Speaker 01

  There's time.

• 50:19Bill Maher?

  There is not time, but that's okay. But that's, I find that liberating, but.

• 50:25Speaker 01

  So go ahead, your.

• 50:26Bill Maher?

  Yeah, okay, so like my father had died, I don't know, a few years before this.

• 50:34Bill Maher?

  Now, to say I was a puddle who couldn't get out of.

• 50:39Speaker 01

  How old were you then?

• 50:41Bill Maher?

  When we.

• 50:41Speaker 01

  When he died.

• 50:42Bill Maher?

  Oh, I was in my thirties.

• 50:44Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 50:45Bill Maher?

  You know, it was, it was not a.

• 50:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:47Bill Maher?

  But, you know, I mean, we all got to go sometime. I'm just saying that, you know,

• 50:55Bill Maher?

  you don't process something always right away. And in that movie, well, first of all, I love World War II movies and I love Spielberg. And it is just an amazing movie. But it starts with Private Ryan as present day. It's the nineties.

• 51:11Speaker 01

  Right.

• 51:12Bill Maher?

  And of course, he looks just like my father, like men look like that, that with the same exact kind of bad shirt my father would wear.

• 51:21Speaker 01

  Right.

• 51:22Bill Maher?

  So already I'm like verklempt, I don't know what the word, you know, schpilkis, there's one of those Jewish words that means you have an upset stomach and.

• 51:30Speaker 01

  Right.

• 51:31Bill Maher?

  And then the movie, and then it reverts back at the end. And so like, I think I stayed in, I think I, it took me like 20 minutes before I could leave the theater.

• 51:40Speaker 01

  Oh, my gosh.

• 51:41Bill Maher?

  I know, I was so, yeah, and I was like on a first date or something.

• 51:46Speaker 01

  Oh, my gosh, so how did that go over?

• 51:48Bill Maher?

  I know, that poor girl.

• 51:49Speaker 01

  How did that go over?

• 51:50Bill Maher?

  That era, I just took a.

• 51:51Speaker 01

  Well, she must have loved that, right?

• 51:52Bill Maher?

  I took a date everywhere.

• 51:53Speaker 01

  Did she love that?

• 51:53Bill Maher?

  I don't remember, because I mean, she was, she wasn't bad about it.

• 51:58Speaker 01

  Okay, so, so when I was 13, my brother took me to see Hamlet in, you know, our park in DC. And I immediately decided Hamlet was my boyfriend. And then it turned out that he was the worst boyfriend in literary history. Like a few you commit suicide and he treats her terribly.

• 52:23Bill Maher?

  And he's indecisive.

• 52:25Speaker 01

  I think that, yeah.

• 52:26Bill Maher?

  Which gives women the ick.

• 52:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that explains a lot. But, uh, but, uh, in the meantime, I did fall in love with Shakespeare. So I love Shakespeare in Love because of that.

• 52:40Bill Maher?

  Was it a good movie?

• 52:41Speaker 01

  I loved it. I just thought it was super clever. I love Tom Stoppard.

• 52:46Bill Maher?

  Produced by Harvey Weinstein.

• 52:48Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. Well, there's that.

• 52:50Bill Maher?

  But go ahead, Maureen.

• 52:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:51Bill Maher?

  Keep liking it.

• 52:57Speaker 01

  Well, I didn't.

• 52:57Bill Maher?

  First you tell us you're a drug addict.

• 52:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:00Bill Maher?

  Now you're supporting rapists.

• 53:02Speaker 01

  Shakespeare-loving drug addict. But, you know, I did one of these pieces on Judi Dench and I loved her. But I didn't use it because she had Harvey Weinstein's name tattooed on her bum. And I'm not sure she would want to read about that now.

• 53:19Bill Maher?

  Who did?

• 53:20Speaker 01

  Judi Dench.

• 53:21Bill Maher?

  Has her... Why?

• 53:23Speaker 01

  Because he provided her with a lot of great roles, including that role as the queen in Shakespeare in Love, where she was only on screen for 12 minutes and she won an Oscar.

• 53:36Bill Maher?

  She's probably the only girl he didn't try to fuck. That's why she's got his name tattooed on her ass.

• 53:43Speaker 01

  There's a story about Uma Thurman and Harvey in the book.

• 53:46Bill Maher?

  Oh, in the book.

• 53:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. And it's funny because a lot of guys.

• 53:49Bill Maher?

  Was that where that?

• 53:51Speaker 01

  And a lot of guys have told me they read it twice, which.

• 53:54Bill Maher?

  Well, I remember it vividly. Well, it was one of the more jarring ones. I mean, that's like a reporter's dream there when you get somebody to open up about.

• 54:05Speaker 01

  It was a complicated story though, because it involved Quentin also.

• 54:11Speaker 01

  But, you know, they're still friends, but she wanted, you know, she wanted to get out this story of how he had been careless in the Carmen Gia scene in Kill Bill. And she was hurt by that. But they, then he talked about it and said she was right. So.

• 54:28Bill Maher?

  Yes. I mean, I'm sure everybody could be more careful. On the other hand, he didn't cut off anybody's head with a helicopter. Remember that guy?

• 54:37Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 54:37Bill Maher?

  I mean, I'm just saying. Movies are

• 54:41Speaker 01

  It's all relative.

• 54:42Bill Maher?

  Dangerous places. It's all rela-, I mean, they really are.

• 54:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:47Bill Maher?

  I mean, you know, Tom Cruise.

• 54:49Speaker 01

  How many movies were you in?

• 54:53Bill Maher?

  I, well, let's see. I did my first Tonight Show in August of eighty-two, and it went well, so they asked me back in November. And then I did it New Year's Eve. This was a big feather in my cap, going into nineteen eighty-three, my third Tonight Show.

• 55:12Speaker 01

  What did that feel like?

• 55:13Bill Maher?

  It felt like time to move to California. That's what I did. I used their ticket because they would, you know, you had to pay. And then you could, and it was first class because that was the union, thank you, union, got that first. I would trade it in, as we all did back then. And it was like eighteen hundred dollars. I'd fly coach for two hundred and make sixteen hundred dollars on the ticket, which was four times what I made for the show.

• 55:36Speaker 01

  Right.

• 55:36Bill Maher?

  So I was like, oh, I'm moving to California. And I put three suitcases together and I moved to California. And that night, Joel Schumacher was watching The Tonight Show and cast me in DC Cab.

• 55:50Bill Maher?

  Which I've always thought was a horrible movie, but people still like it.

• 55:54Speaker 01

  Was that set in DC?

• 55:56Bill Maher?

  It was set in DC. I was there for six weeks.

• 55:59Speaker 01

  Oh, wow.

• 56:00Bill Maher?

  In a hotel room with Gary Busey. You try that. You think you had trouble with, you think you had trouble with the pot. Um, I kid Gary, but uh, he is crazy. But yeah, I mean, it was, it was fun. I mean, to be in a 27 years old and in a movie and you know. So that was my first movie. Then I did, you know, the classic uh, Cannibal Women and the Avocado Jungle of Death, which actually is a funny movie. Pizza Man, uh, same director.

• 56:27Speaker 01

  What was the plot of Pizza Man?

• 56:29Bill Maher?

  Donald, it's 1990 and but Donald Trump is in the movie as a

• 56:34Speaker 01

  Oh my god.

• 56:35Bill Maher?

  A lookalike with it, and yet he's like the punchline to the whole thing. It's about a cab driver who was just trying to collect his 15 dollars and it takes him on. It's a, it's a film noir, you should see it. It's a film noir.

• 56:48Speaker 01

  I am gonna see it.

• 56:49Bill Maher?

  Good luck getting it. It's a film noir parody.

• 56:52Speaker 01

  But you're not a sap.

• 56:54Bill Maher?

  No, I'm the, I'm, I'm bogey.

• 56:56Speaker 01

  Oh, you're a bogey.

• 56:57Bill Maher?

  I'm the hard boiled detective.

• 56:59Speaker 01

  Oh, well, you know, this is funny. When Trump was thinking of running for president um, in like 2015 shortly before he did, he was vying to play the president in Sharknado 3. True story.

• 57:14Bill Maher?

  Well, I'm sure. I'm sure.

• 57:17Speaker 01

  So it was one, you know, leader of the free world.

• 57:20Bill Maher?

  When was the last time you talked to him, interviewed him, saw him?

• 57:24Speaker 01

  He, well, when I promote, I had a book about Trump and Hillary in that election, the year of voting dangerously. And I was on uh, Michael Smirconish at CNN on Saturday morning at nine o'clock. And I'm thinking, who is up watching this at nine o'clock? And Trump was. And I was critical of him. And uh, afterwards I ran into Jared Kushner and Ivanka at a dinner party in DC. And Jared took me aside and he said, you know. My father liked you, but now he thinks you've gone crazy. And I said, well, I think he's gone crazy.

• 58:10Speaker 01

  And Jared said, well, if you do two tweets in a column, or two columns in a tweet, you can get back on his good side.

• 58:19Bill Maher?

  Oh, God.

• 58:19Speaker 01

  And I was like, no, that's not gonna happen.

• 58:23Bill Maher?

  Oh, my God. It's like a priest saying, three Hail Marys and

• 58:26Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 58:27Bill Maher?

  and two Our Fathers.

• 58:28Speaker 01

  Yes, which I often had to do.

• 58:31Bill Maher?

  Two tweets in a column.

• 58:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, we were bargaining over.

• 58:35Bill Maher?

  Everything is so transactional.

• 58:37Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 58:39Bill Maher?

  But I'm curious, what kind of dinner party is there in DC where you find yourself with the Kushners?

• 58:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, we have a journalist dinner. David Bradley has it, and it's, you know, he's a Victorian gentleman. He doesn't make his guests feel uncomfortable so they feel safe there. And they invite newsmakers, and it's a bunch of journalists. And then we talk to them and, you know, that kind. It wasn't, I don't.

• 59:13Bill Maher?

  But can you be in the same room with the enemy? I mean, I can. I pride myself on, don't fucking tell me who I can hang out with.

• 59:23Speaker 01

  Right.

• 59:23Bill Maher?

  You know, if I want to take Ann Coulter to the opera, I will, you asshole.

• 59:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 59:28Bill Maher?

  And I think we need more of that, not less of that. But, you know, you just don't see that. You know, that the Kennedy Center, which I'm sure is close to where you live.

• 59:39Speaker 01

  Right.

• 59:39Bill Maher?

  Okay, I get how awful it is, what Trump is doing to it, because it is an art center. But you know what? I know where that comes from. Now, maybe I'm wrong about this. Because I only getting it from watching the TV show, which I watched, I've watched every year.

• 59:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 59:58Bill Maher?

  Where they give away five Kennedy Center Honors to great people of the arts. And it's always a big movie star and somebody else you know. And then an opera singer and some dancer and you know, like culture vultures know, but I don't. So you skip through those and then you get to, and this year it was the Grateful Dead and Francis Ford Coppola.

• 1:00:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:20Bill Maher?

  Okay. I didn't see, again, maybe I'm wrong, but watching it, I did not see one face on that screen. Either in the audience and a lot of audience shots where you see, you know, and of course, it's a very uptight audience. I would hate to have to like, you know, there's always that announcer and you know,

• 1:00:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:41Bill Maher?

  here to present, you know, and please welcome Morgan Freeman. And then, you know, he comes out and they do a tribute. It's very polite and you really wouldn't want to be edgy. I would be like the totally wrong person to be in this room under any capacity and I'm sure I never will. Okay, but like I did not see one face either on the stage or in the audience shots that look like they might have voted for Trump. And I just thought, you know, invite Ted Cruz. Would it kill you? Don't you think he likes The Godfather too?

• 1:01:14Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:01:15Bill Maher?

  Don't you think somebody in the Senate is a Grateful Dead fan?

• 1:01:18Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:01:19Bill Maher?

  Who's, who's a Republican? You know, you just lost an election.

• 1:01:23Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:01:23Bill Maher?

  Maybe now's the time to reach out a little. I don't, I didn't vote for them either. But would that kill, so I get it a little bit.

• 1:01:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:33Bill Maher?

  When they get into office and they go, you know what assholes who stuffed our heads in the locker?

• 1:01:39Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:01:40Bill Maher?

  Here's what you get now.

• 1:01:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, but this is what is so crazy about watching Trump because he's got these two sides. So one side is kind of scary because it's authoritarian. He and Elon are trying to undermine the judiciary and Congress. You know, Congress is in charge of these agencies, not these Doge kids. And the press, Elon keeps saying that the people on X are the press now and legacy press is dead. So in a way, like Dick Cheney, they're messing with checks and balances. But on the other hand, Trump still has that wacky, kind of funny side where he goes down and takes over the Kennedy Center.

• 1:02:23Speaker 01

  And now he wants to give the awards to dead people. He wants to give the awards to Elvis, Babe Ruth, and paparazzi. And then he goes down, he starts making this speech about how he thinks they should do Cats, which was also George W. Bush's favorite play.

• 1:02:42Bill Maher?

  Really?

• 1:02:43Speaker 01

  Yes. And so he

• 1:02:45Bill Maher?

  You know, the movie is like a joke of all time, right?

• 1:02:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:02:48Bill Maher?

  Okay.

• 1:02:49Speaker 01

  But Trump says, at first he didn't get it, but then he began to look at the beautiful bodies of the men and women in gold tights. And he got mesmerized. He's giving this like kind of semi homoerotic. Then he did say, well, I like the women better. But then he's got that wacky side, so he's redecorating the Oval Office and making it like Mar-a-Lago. He hasn't brought up the gold, he has a gold thing with him on Mount Rushmore. But he has like a gold TV, wait, let me tell you, a gold TV remote. And he put gold leaf around the famous mantelpiece in the Oval Office that you know from TV.

• 1:03:34Speaker 01

  And he wants to hang a chandelier and they're trying to talk him out of it. And he's, won't be talked out of it, you know, he wants to make it like Mar-a-Lago. And, you know, I think that you see it actually, I think in the SNL impersonation, that that wacky humorous side is what makes people less afraid.

• 1:03:54Speaker 01

  Of the authoritarian side.

• 1:03:55Bill Maher?

  It is so human.

• 1:03:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:57Bill Maher?

  And not only less afraid, but yeah, less afraid because what we always fear about politicians is that they're not telling us something. They're, they're, they're, they're just, they're just not to be trusted.

• 1:04:09Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:04:09Bill Maher?

  Spin, what does spin mean? It means like there are people in this world who, when you talk to them, like when I talk to you, I know I'm getting the complete unvarnished truth.

• 1:04:17Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:04:17Bill Maher?

  And then there are people in this world who, when you talk to them, you never feel that.

• 1:04:21Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:04:21Bill Maher?

  You always, you can't put your finger on it maybe, but you just feel something is being elided, or it's being exaggerated, or it's being spun, but it's just not the complete truth.

• 1:04:32Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:04:32Bill Maher?

  And here's a guy who, I mean, as he sees the truth, it isn't often.

• 1:04:38Speaker 01

  Well, it's a mix of lies and truth.

• 1:04:42Bill Maher?

  Well, it's his, it's his impression of the truth.

• 1:04:44Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 1:04:44Bill Maher?

  If he, if he doesn't like Zelensky, his approval rating is 4%, but it's really 57. Okay.

• 1:04:50Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:04:51Bill Maher?

  But, you know, impressionistically, poetically, it's 4%.

• 1:04:55Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:04:55Bill Maher?

  And his fans accept that, but not just that. It's like, can we trust this guy? Well, he just voices his interior monologue.

• 1:05:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:05:05Bill Maher?

  The thing that we're all, we all edit. We, no one just says what's in their head, except him.

• 1:05:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:05:10Bill Maher?

  So you could, like, if he is thinking homoerotically about...

• 1:05:15Speaker 01

  Says it. Tights.

• 1:05:17Bill Maher?

  Or Arnold Palmer's cock, you know, he'll just, that'll dominate the news for a week.

• 1:05:22Speaker 01

  Well, it's interesting because, you know, I, I have my sister Peggy on book tour with me and she's a Trump voter and a Republican and...

• 1:05:32Bill Maher?

  And all the brothers, right?

• 1:05:33Speaker 01

  Yes, but it's interesting to see things from her point of view, but even she kind of rolls her eyes and says she wishes he wouldn't keep saying he won the election. She doesn't want him to sell gold sneakers and tacky things when he's president. So, you know, it's, it's, there are a few things she's objecting to.

• 1:05:53Bill Maher?

  You gotta put up with a lot, and they do.

• 1:05:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:05:56Bill Maher?

  They're like, you know, that celebrity spouse who always has to act humble on the red carpet.

• 1:06:01Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:06:02Bill Maher?

  Ah, she puts up with me. Shut up, you're George Clooney, it's fine, I'm sure she's fine.

• 1:06:08Speaker 01

  Right, yeah.

• 1:06:09Bill Maher?

  You don't seem like that much of a nightmare, you know?

• 1:06:12Speaker 01

  She said to tell you that she saw one of your early shows and it was the funniest thing she's ever seen. I mean, my family is in love with you because... You are not just on one side or the other. You just say it as it is.

• 1:06:27Bill Maher?

  Well, I, I, you know. It's funny that you really have to reiterate over and over again where you are because the side, each side wants to only like pick the things

• 1:06:41Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:06:41Bill Maher?

  that they agree with and then pretend that the other side of you doesn't exist, but it does exist and I have to always say it. But my big problem with liberals is that they basically, I mean liberals is one thing, but woke, okay. They basically forgot and don't defend and don't want to defend what liberalism is. I mean, all the things that I think make us great, like personal, individual liberty, rule of law.

• 1:07:12Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:07:13Bill Maher?

  You know, what we would call Western values, scientific inquiry, human rights, women's rights, gay rights, freedom of speech, trial by jury, all these things that were, I'm sorry, invented in Athens and Rome and Paris and London and Philadelphia. I guess they're bad because they came from white people. I don't know, but they want to turn their back on this.

• 1:07:40Speaker 01

  Well, also.

• 1:07:40Bill Maher?

  That's Western civil, that guy that they just threw out of the country and I, I'm against it because he didn't break any laws. It's just a freedom of speech thing. I defended him even though he's a dirtbag who I hate. But his, his slogan was, they want to tear down Western civilization. I mean, saying it out loud, the out loud part, tear down. Well, Western civilization, I think, is a good thing. And basically that's where the liberals lost me and lost their way. They forgot about Western civilization because woke is all about identity and not about ideas.

• 1:08:14Speaker 01

  Right. Well, so my dad was so excited the night Harry Truman was elected, he stayed up all night. My brother was so excited the night Trump was first elected, he stayed up all night. And Democrats weren't paying attention to what happened here with the working class.

• 1:08:30Speaker 01

  And also, they just stopped being any fun. I mean, they made everything, everyone feel that everything they said and did, and every word was wrong. And people don't want to live like that, feeling that everything they do is wrong.

• 1:08:47Bill Maher?

  No. You think we're over that era? You think that?

• 1:08:49Speaker 01

  No, I think, I mean, I think Democrats are just in a coma. They haven't figured out.

• 1:08:55Bill Maher?

  Right. But no, the woke are not giving up on that. I mean, we saw, we did Seven Dwarfs movie just came out.

• 1:09:01Speaker 01

  Oh, right.

• 1:09:01Bill Maher?

  And the, you know.

• 1:09:02Speaker 01

  There are no dwarves, right?

• 1:09:04Bill Maher?

  They, they, they thought about the dwarves. It's so funny, the, this is, again, my, one of my big problems with progressives. They just, they're so stupid so often about things that they find their way back to something that's very unprogressive. Like, you think getting jobs for people, very progressive. Not if you're a dwarf. Because like, there are dwarves out there who wanted to play these parts, who couldn't because it was somehow politically incorrect to portray dwarves as, I don't know, minors who know Snow White. It's a fucking crazy character that somebody invented for children. And you're, and you're arguing about whether it's right if the, if real dwarves play dwarves?

• 1:09:48Bill Maher?

  There are dwarves in the world. And there are jobs for them that you lost on their. And then, Snow White loves Palestine? Like, I wasn't gonna see this movie anyway. But, you know, that, people who get their news from TikTok, just, just please, shut the fuck up.

• 1:10:09Speaker 01

  It was, I think the Democrats just got to have a suffocating persona, where you just couldn't do anything or say anything that wasn't to be criticized.

• 1:10:21Bill Maher?

  Somebody once wrote, "The politics of purity makes people stupid and mean."

• 1:10:26Speaker 01

  Was that you?

• 1:10:26Bill Maher?

  It was you, fool.

• 1:10:27Speaker 01

  Oh, really? I was gonna say, great line.

• 1:10:32Bill Maher?

  You don't remember it?

• 1:10:34Speaker 01

  Not at the moment. I'm scared. I'm too scared.

• 1:10:37Bill Maher?

  Scared of what?

• 1:10:38Speaker 01

  I'm scared of TV and you and...

• 1:10:42Bill Maher?

  Me?

• 1:10:43Speaker 01

  Everything.

• 1:10:44Bill Maher?

  Well, I'm scary?

• 1:10:46Speaker 01

  Well, because I know if you chose to, you could eviscerate me.

• 1:10:50Bill Maher?

  I could say the same about you.

• 1:10:52Speaker 01

  Oh, that's true.

• 1:10:53Bill Maher?

  But mine will happen on Sunday.

• 1:10:55Speaker 01

  This is a good film noir. Yeah.

• 1:10:59Bill Maher?

  The last person in the world I would ever want to eviscerate, really, is you.

• 1:11:05Speaker 01

  That's how I feel about you too.

• 1:11:06Bill Maher?

  I know. So, why are we scared?

• 1:11:08Speaker 01

  I don't know. I can hear my heart beating.

• 1:11:13Bill Maher?

  But we basically agree.

• 1:11:15Speaker 01

  I'm gonna have a drink.

• 1:11:16Bill Maher?

  We basically agree. I've had like three. We basically agree. I mean, honestly, I wish you would write more. I wish you would turn your poison pen more on the woke. Because when you do it, it's great. I understand why there's so much more on the right. And, look, you know, I...

• 1:11:39Speaker 01

  And now the right is kind of getting like that. They're kind of getting into cancel culture. I told you about the words and...

• 1:11:45Bill Maher?

  They would never left it. They canceled Colin Kaepernick.

• 1:11:49Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:11:49Bill Maher?

  Nothing more quicker or cancelier than that.

• 1:11:52Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 1:11:53Bill Maher?

  Oh, they're total babies. There's total snowflakes about... I mean, please.

• 1:11:58Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:11:58Bill Maher?

  Except for one guy. The one guy who can get away with any insult and they all come running back is Trump. I mean, everybody who works for him, Lil' Marco, Steve Bannon, they are so...

• 1:12:11Speaker 01

  I'm shocked about that. I was watching Ted Cruz on TV today or yesterday. I was thinking, why did he come back, you know?

• 1:12:19Bill Maher?

  Ted Cruz?

• 1:12:20Speaker 01

  After Trump. In fact, my sister Peggy got one of the few apologies that Trump ever gave. Because I was interviewing him and he's like, how's your sister? He knew she was a Trump voter. And I said, "She is not gonna vote for you because you've been trashing Heidi Cruz and talking about women in these horrible terms."

• 1:12:45Speaker 01

  I said, why don't you just apologize to, you know, for that? That was horrible. And there was this long pause. And finally, he's like, OK. You know, I'm sorry I said that about her.

• 1:12:58Bill Maher?

  Really?

• 1:12:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:12:59Bill Maher?

  I had Ted Cruz on. And like, everything I ever read was like, the most disliked guy ever.

• 1:13:08Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:13:09Bill Maher?

  Like, just this, this cyborg who was like, programmed to be president when he was three years old and has never faltered. And I don't doubt he wants to be president. When he was on the show, and I just did not meet that guy.

• 1:13:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:13:23Bill Maher?

  Matt Gaetz sat there.

• 1:13:25Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:13:25Bill Maher?

  I did not meet a monster. That's my line now. Everyone's a monster till you talk to them.

• 1:13:30Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:13:31Bill Maher?

  I mean, I disagree with a lot of stuff, and there's some real deal breakers in there. But, I mean, Ted Cruz, he had a sense of humor.

• 1:13:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:13:39Bill Maher?

  He just, I, I, like, so you must have had more encounters with him than I do. And I have heard that a lot, that people, even in the Senate, even his own party, really don't like him. I just, I just couldn't find why.

• 1:13:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, but that's what I love. I love that you talk to these people. And that's what's horrible about being in Washington now, because everybody's in their trenches. And, you know, it's just like we picked up the Civil War where we left off or something.

• 1:14:09Bill Maher?

  Yeah. I mean, I was at a big party the other night. Michael Kivis' no secret, it was in the paper, 44th birthday party. And Bill and Hillary were there, and Oprah, and, you know, a lot. I mean, Michael Kivis is the most connected guy in the world, and he knows everybody. And, you know, David Geffen, and, you know, lots of billionaires, and Bezos. And like, in the past, Elon would have been there, too. I met Elon a number of times at Kivis' house.

• 1:14:39Speaker 01

  Right. What'd you think of him?

• 1:14:43Bill Maher?

  A pleasure.

• 1:14:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:14:45Bill Maher?

  I mean, this is before he went full on.

• 1:14:47Speaker 01

  My piece in the book is very.

• 1:14:49Bill Maher?

  Right, right. No, I mean.

• 1:14:50Speaker 01

  I still think he's gonna be the one, if there's killer robots or killer AI, he's gonna be the one to save us. I'm sure nobody wants to hear that, but.

• 1:15:00Bill Maher?

  To give him his due.

• 1:15:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:15:02Bill Maher?

  He was talking about how we need to be on our guard against AI.

• 1:15:07Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 1:15:08Bill Maher?

  Before I was, it was even on my radar.

• 1:15:10Speaker 01

  Right, he called it, he called it summoning the demon.

• 1:15:13Bill Maher?

  Yes, when many other people were saying, you're crazy, what is this?

• 1:15:16Speaker 01

  But he also wanted to be an advocate for carbon-based beings. He wanted to be humanities advocate. That's why he started this whole Mars thing. He said he wanted to die on Mars, just not on impact.

• 1:15:31Bill Maher?

  I mean, I'm, I'm, you know, I've done a number of things on how silly it is to go to Mars. I'll never understand that or his population thing. Um, but the Mars thing, I mean, I always thought Elon would be the one to save us from global warming, because we have to, we plainly have to invent our way out of it. But now I don't think we will, because he doesn't give a shit about Earth. He wants to go to Mars. He treats planets the way he does baby mamas. Next.

• 1:15:59Bill Maher?

  You know?

• 1:16:01Speaker 01

  So. He and, uh, Trump and Elon remind me of like, you know, people always ask me if they're Shakespearean. But I think they're more like Greek gods, you know? They're sort of capricious and cool and they do what they like. It's like watching Zeus and Dionysus, the god of fertility. You know, it isn't like watching Shakespeare.

• 1:16:22Bill Maher?

  But, but I can't, like, in times past, he might have been at this party.

• 1:16:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:16:27Bill Maher?

  No, he's in Washington, he was, you know. I don't know if he was invited. I don't know if like that is just a.

• 1:16:34Speaker 01

  Well, he's, he's very busy, Bill.

• 1:16:36Bill Maher?

  I know he's busy. No, I'm just saying.

• 1:16:38Speaker 01

  He's busy destroying the government.

• 1:16:39Bill Maher?

  I'm just saying, I don't know if he could be in that room. And it wasn't all, it wasn't all, Michael Kivas has friends on both sides. It wasn't all just liberals, but you know, it's, he worked for Hillary Clinton and they're very, he's very close to the Clintons.

• 1:16:53Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:16:54Bill Maher?

  So, yes, I mean, mostly, but, you know, I mean, he has friends, a lot of billionaires friends, and billionaires are very often Republicans, and, but could Elon Musk be there now and not feel unwelcome?

• 1:17:08Speaker 01

  No, I was talking, you were talking about movies that are out of date.

• 1:17:11Bill Maher?

  Maybe that's on him.

• 1:17:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, like advising consent, where you see both parties mingling at dinner parties and solving problems.

• 1:17:19Bill Maher?

  Right.

• 1:17:19Speaker 01

  And Gene Tierney's a lovely hostess, and, no, people do not do that, they're in their corners, no.

• 1:17:28Bill Maher?

  So, what's, what, how does that end?

• 1:17:32Speaker 01

  Well, I was gonna ask you, how do you think? I mean, do you think?

• 1:17:37Bill Maher?

  I think, I think we have to have the scene at the end of the movie where the Statue of Liberty's arm is just sticking out of the sand.

• 1:17:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:17:46Bill Maher?

  Where, I, I don't think it gets better before it completely crashes. I know that sounds pessimistic.

• 1:17:53Speaker 01

  But do you think?

• 1:17:54Bill Maher?

  But I don't know how to get back, because the hatred is so deep.

• 1:17:57Speaker 01

  But do you think that Democrats should fight fire with fire and get a showman? I mean, it's funny, because Elon Musk-

• 1:18:04Bill Maher?

  Well, Fetterman is who I suggested.

• 1:18:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, Elon Musk was, was known as the P T Barnum of sci-fi, sci-fi P T Barnum, and then Trump is P T Barnum. But, do you think, I mean, you know, I interviewed George Clooney, I had an interview with him, and I'd always heard people say he was charming, and I was like, ah, I'm sure he's not that charming. And he gave me a five-hour interview, so, day went to night, so, you know, yeah, the guy is charming. And I said to him, what do you think of running? Because basically, the Democrats need an attractive host body to stuff all their issues into that people will be drawn to.

• 1:18:45Bill Maher?

  I don't think George Clooney really suggests a regular guy, working class.

• 1:18:50Speaker 01

  No, I know. I know, but I still think, but people are drawn to celebrities. Oh, so your interview with Josh Shapiro was great.

• 1:18:59Bill Maher?

  Oh, thanks.

• 1:19:00Speaker 01

  I had never really heard him talk that much. He was so appealing. And that, you know, I was watching it with my sister today. And she said I would vote for him. I mean, that's what the Democrats need. Yeah, they need someone who could lure people back to their party.

• 1:19:19Bill Maher?

  Oh, yeah. I, I saw this thing, the, the number, they're gonna lose. Uh, California, New York, Illinois are all losing seats.

• 1:19:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:19:31Bill Maher?

  Because people vote with their feet.

• 1:19:33Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:19:34Bill Maher?

  And they're going to Texas, Florida, Utah. Uh, all red states, some other state, Arizona, maybe, or something. But, yeah, that's, and this is just because we're overtaxed, we're overregulated. We can't afford a house here. Um, they, and if that trend keeps going, even, even this many seats lost is, you know, that, that's, the house is very often 218 to 216, something like that. Okay, we're talking about six or eight seats that are definitely gonna be red now.

• 1:20:11Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:20:11Bill Maher?

  You're gonna have to do something drastic.

• 1:20:14Speaker 01

  And do you, you like Gavin, too, no?

• 1:20:17Bill Maher?

  Especially now. I always thought he was the guy because he's great at being a politician, looks great, you know, just gift of gab.

• 1:20:27Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:20:27Bill Maher?

  And also very smart, you know, has the facts in his head. He doesn't have to look up something. He, he does the work.

• 1:20:35Speaker 01

  Right. And unlike Obama, he was willing to go spar on Fox.

• 1:20:39Bill Maher?

  Yes. And now, I mean, you saw this, he, he, he, he name checked me, saying, I'm doing a podcast and I'm, I wanna do like Bill does, we'll talk to both sides. Not be ideologically captured necessarily by the left. Well, this is a big change. He's on the show next week.

• 1:20:57Speaker 01

  Oh, wow.

• 1:20:57Bill Maher?

  He's top of the show on the 28th. Yeah, so.

• 1:21:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I mean, there are people who think because of Kamala having Beyonce and then and Taylor and people on her side that Democrats should just stay away from celebrities altogether.

• 1:21:15Bill Maher?

  They should. I think it's a negative. I don't think it's far from working. I think it turns people off, turns me off a lot of the times. Like Rachel Zegler, not going to vote for her.

• 1:21:27Speaker 01

  But they've got to find someone who's alluring and, you know.

• 1:21:34Bill Maher?

  Arismatic.

• 1:21:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I thought Josh Shapiro and Gretchen Whitman would have been a better ticket.

• 1:21:40Bill Maher?

  Last week about Gavin, like the same things they say about him, they said about Clinton. He's too slick. Yeah, yeah, yeah, he's so slick, he wins.

• 1:21:49Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:21:49Bill Maher?

  You know, I see your paper, like already tried to shit on him for this and I'm like, you know, you know what you call a Democrat who infuriates the New York Times? Electable.

• 1:22:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, he was out front on a lot of things.

• 1:22:02Bill Maher?

  Yes, and he has the credibility. He has a kind of like, I did my time in the liberal trenches, mayor of San Francisco and all that. And it's like, if you can't understand about moving to the center and saving the party, yes, there will be so much carping about it and but that's the other reason why I think he'd be good because I think he'll take it. He's not a bitch.

• 1:22:24Speaker 01

  Who else do you like?

• 1:22:25Bill Maher?

  Well, I say Fetterman. I love that he just says that he is Trump-esque in a number of ways, minus the things I don't like about Trump. I mean, he seems like just a regular guy. He doesn't give a shit what he says. He's got a brand, you know? I mean, he's just, you know, he definitely has, I mean, that was my joke about it was like, if he ran with Pete Buttigieg, disability plus gay equals one person of color. You could get away with it, the Democrat Party.

• 1:23:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, the way he dresses in Congress is quite startling because it was only in the last few years they allowed women.

• 1:23:11Speaker 01

  Not to wear, like, they used to be banned for sleeveless.

• 1:23:16Bill Maher?

  Come on.

• 1:23:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, one of my former assistants, who's a big political writer, star now, Ashley Parker, Trump trashed her recently on social, his social.

• 1:23:31Bill Maher?

  Truth social.

• 1:23:32Speaker 01

  Social, yeah.

• 1:23:32Bill Maher?

  Yeah, he truthed it.

• 1:23:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, but she went in there one time, I forget if she had on cowboy boots or a sleeveless blouse or something, and they told her, you know, she couldn't.

• 1:23:44Bill Maher?

  But there, I feel like the Republican Party has, I mean, apropos of what you said before about, you know, the Democrats no fun anymore.

• 1:23:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:23:51Bill Maher?

  I feel like all the ladies who, you know, like, I'm not saying you really want to have relations with anyone in Congress or a politician at all, but if you were bent that way, I mean, the ones who, like, you know, Eric Idle is going, yeah, she's a Goa, she's a Goa, she goes, all right, nudge, nudge, wink, wink, she goes. I mean, they're all in the Republican Party. I'm not, I'm not saying they're, they're doing anything, but.

• 1:24:19Speaker 01

  So who is yours?

• 1:24:20Bill Maher?

  Well, the Kristi Gnomes.

• 1:24:21Speaker 01

  Who is yours?

• 1:24:22Bill Maher?

  The Lauren Boeberts. They all just seem, you know, is she a Goa?

• 1:24:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, Lauren Boebert.

• 1:24:29Bill Maher?

  Yeah, they have, whereas, like, AOC, you know, she's attractive, but you just, oh, my God, you know, you just wouldn't, I wouldn't want to be on a date with her. I know she's married and I'm not asking.

• 1:24:41Speaker 01

  I think she is married, yeah.

• 1:24:42Bill Maher?

  No, I think she is.

• 1:24:43Speaker 01

  Is she?

• 1:24:43Bill Maher?

  Yeah, no, she, she got married.

• 1:24:44Speaker 01

  Oh, I missed that. But, you know, yeah, Washington was very titillated recently because Lauren Boebert, after some big thing, got in a cab with Kid Rock. And also, I was going to ask you, do you have a crush on Christina?

• 1:25:01Bill Maher?

  No.

• 1:25:02Speaker 01

  Given how you feel about dogs? Yeah. I wonder.

• 1:25:06Bill Maher?

  In fact, Chico just lost his other eye when you said that.

• 1:25:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:25:11Bill Maher?

  No, but you know what I mean about the Republican, I mean, they're, they just.

• 1:25:17Speaker 01

  Well, Democrats kind of lost sex appeal, too, I think. They used to be kind of the sexy, fun party, and they're not.

• 1:25:27Bill Maher?

  Yeah, I mean, it's true.

• 1:25:30Speaker 01

  Maybe too sexy sometimes.

• 1:25:31Bill Maher?

  When I used to do jokes about, you know, where the punchline was something, something stick up your ass.

• 1:25:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:25:37Bill Maher?

  It was about Jerry Falwell.

• 1:25:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:25:40Bill Maher?

  You know, and now it's about the kind of prigs who are always up my ass.

• 1:25:47Speaker 01

  Right, exactly. Yeah, I know what you mean.

• 1:25:50Bill Maher?

  So, do you watch, um, or listen to, um, To Angry Men, Harvey Levin's podcast about lawyers?

• 1:25:58Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:25:59Bill Maher?

  Oh, it's him and Greg, uh, Gregos, what's his name? I forget.

• 1:26:03Speaker 01

  Oh, Mark Garagos.

• 1:26:04Bill Maher?

  Mark Garagos.

• 1:26:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, who was one of the, what, Susan McDougal's lawyer?

• 1:26:08Bill Maher?

  Because I'm watching this Trump thing, I'm thinking like, I mean, this is, I love this podcast because like, it's not just the bullshit people or whatever their opinion, it's like what the lawyers say.

• 1:26:17Speaker 01

  Oh, I love that.

• 1:26:18Bill Maher?

  Because like, I'm watching this thing going on between Trump now and the judges.

• 1:26:24Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:26:25Bill Maher?

  And, you know, do I want Venezuelan gangs out of the country? Yes. I mean, it's always my fucking dilemma.

• 1:26:33Speaker 01

  But that's like, that's, that's.

• 1:26:35Bill Maher?

  Like, living in this America.

• 1:26:36Speaker 01

  Exactly. So that's not the mountain anyone's gonna die on. We're happy to see them leave, but then you're unraveling the Constitution.

• 1:26:44Bill Maher?

  I know.

• 1:26:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:26:45Bill Maher?

  So like, I'm, I'm bringing the lawyer show up because like, I've said this for years, like, everybody talks about the law, like it's the, the law is whatever they say it is.

• 1:26:56Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:26:56Bill Maher?

  At any given moment. That's why like, when you see a lawyer, he's, he's always in a room with a giant wall of law books behind him. Somewhere, one of those fucking books.

• 1:27:08Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:27:08Bill Maher?

  Is something that will justify what I wanna do anyway.

• 1:27:11Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:27:12Bill Maher?

  So Trump is just like cutting out the middleman.

• 1:27:14Speaker 01

  That's another good film noir kind of thing, Double Jeopardy. Have you seen that? With Ashley Judd?

• 1:27:20Bill Maher?

  Ashley Judd. I bet you I have. What's, who else is in it?

• 1:27:24Speaker 01

  Her husband.

• 1:27:25Bill Maher?

  Yeah, I have seen it.

• 1:27:27Speaker 01

  Her husband frames her for his own murder and she goes to prison. But then one of the inmates tells her that it, because of Double Jeopardy, she can get out and kill her husband.

• 1:27:39Bill Maher?

  And she does, right.

• 1:27:41Speaker 01

  Well, not quite.

• 1:27:42Bill Maher?

  There's also one called I Have The Beholder.

• 1:27:44Speaker 01

  I love that.

• 1:27:46Bill Maher?

  Explain it. He's, he falls in love with her because he's looking.

• 1:27:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, I haven't seen it recently, but I thought it was really good and atmospheric.

• 1:27:57Bill Maher?

  I feel like it was a rip off of Sharky's Machine. Do you remember that movie?

• 1:28:02Speaker 01

  Vaguely, yeah.

• 1:28:03Bill Maher?

  Burt Reynolds?

• 1:28:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:28:04Bill Maher?

  He's like a, he's got a, he's in the, he's a cop. He's got to surveil this woman and then falls in love with her. Isn't that the basic thing?

• 1:28:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, I love that plot.

• 1:28:15Bill Maher?

  Yeah. By the way, if it's not Burt Reynolds, it's a stalker.

• 1:28:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:28:19Bill Maher?

  It's creepy. Even if he's a cop, you don't want to think about it.

• 1:28:23Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 1:28:23Bill Maher?

  But if he's a cute guy.

• 1:28:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:28:25Bill Maher?

  I mean, you wrote that in the Why Men Are Necessary book.

• 1:28:30Speaker 01

  Yes, I did.

• 1:28:32Bill Maher?

  Isn't it funny?

• 1:28:33Speaker 01

  My mom begged me before that book came out. She goes, please change it from a question to a declarative sentence. Men, she wanted me to call the book Men Are Necessary. I was like, Mom.

• 1:28:45Bill Maher?

  Men are?

• 1:28:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, she wanted me to call it Men Are Necessary. And I said, Mom, you know, they're, they're gonna be fine with it. They get the, um.

• 1:28:56Bill Maher?

  Right.

• 1:28:56Speaker 01

  Cheating them. And she's like, no, they'll have their feelings hurt. Sure enough, no man would pick up that book. And I realize now, always listen to your mother. I should have called it Men Are Necessary.

• 1:29:09Bill Maher?

  Wow, I, that's interesting.

• 1:29:11Speaker 01

  Because you are, especially you.

• 1:29:15Bill Maher?

  We are.

• 1:29:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:29:17Bill Maher?

  We are for, not just for procreation.

• 1:29:19Speaker 01

  For lifting, yeah.

• 1:29:20Bill Maher?

  Yes, I mean, Orwell had that quote, something like, "Most people sleep peaceably in their beds at night, knowing other men do violence in their stead."

• 1:29:31Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 1:29:33Bill Maher?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:33Speaker 01

  Phil.

• 1:29:34Bill Maher?

  What? I'm like, you thought, before that, I thought, you thought I was an idiot?

• 1:29:39Speaker 01

  No, I like all these weighty quotes.

• 1:29:43Bill Maher?

  But it's true. You know, I mean, we live cushy lives.

• 1:29:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:29:50Bill Maher?

  And it's another thing that the kids really piss me off about. They have no perspective on how good they have it. They think they, they somehow think they live in the worst time ever.

• 1:30:02Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:30:03Bill Maher?

  And they're so burdened by so many things.

• 1:30:07Bill Maher?

  And some of them are just, did you see the woman from Love is Blind who jolted her husband? No, you know, okay.

• 1:30:17Speaker 01

  I don't watch any of.

• 1:30:18Bill Maher?

  Oh, I don't watch.

• 1:30:19Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 1:30:20Bill Maher?

  Are you crazy? But I read about it.

• 1:30:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, okay.

• 1:30:23Bill Maher?

  Okay, so it's Love is Blind, it's some, you know.

• 1:30:26Speaker 01

  Are they on an island?

• 1:30:28Bill Maher?

  No.

• 1:30:31Bill Maher?

  No, they're, I guess they're, they're blind dates and then they're gonna get married. I don't know, some, it's, you know, one of those. Anyway, she's at the altar, she's about to marry this guy. And at the last minute says, can't do it. Why? Because she found out that he didn't really think that much about Black Lives Matter. When that, not that he said anything terrible, he just, she asked him about it and he was like, I don't know, I haven't read that much about it.

• 1:31:03Speaker 01

  Oh, my gosh.

• 1:31:04Bill Maher?

  That was the.

• 1:31:05Speaker 01

  That was the end.

• 1:31:08Bill Maher?

  And I just have this one question for her, which is, like, what have you actually done? Do you think that your, your coming up short husband to be, where you just publicly jilted? What, what do you think you've done to actually improve whatever the situation racially you're upset about? And I don't think she can answer that question.

• 1:31:34Speaker 01

  Did you ever have a situation like that where someone said one thing and you were just totally turned off?

• 1:31:41Bill Maher?

  You mean got the ick?

• 1:31:42Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:31:45Bill Maher?

  That's a really interesting question because it's so easy and so common for guys to give women the ick.

• 1:31:52Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:31:53Bill Maher?

  Guys who wanna get laid.

• 1:31:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:31:56Bill Maher?

  It's so hard to give us the ick. I used to do a joke about that, like I could, like if I was, when I was in my twenties, she could say anything. She could say, I'm a Nazi, and I'd be like, well, you always interested in Germany or was it more of a political?

• 1:32:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:32:10Bill Maher?

  Nothing would deter us, so it's, the older you get, one of the nice things is, yeah, you become more of a human being. You're less horny, so you can be more discriminatory, and yes, it's very easy to give me the ick now.

• 1:32:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, I remember this, I had this very, very good friend, Michael Kelly, and he had to move to Cincinnati for.

• 1:32:34Speaker 01

  A couple of years to be a reporter and he didn't know anyone. And he was trying to date and he finally went out on a date with this really cute girl. And somehow in the course of the evening, when he was ordering wine, he realized she thought that burgundy wine was burgundy because it was colored burgundy. And he said, he said to me, I had to decide if I was going to say anything or I was going to be very, very quiet because I really needed to go home with her. So he was very, very quiet.

• 1:33:07Bill Maher?

  And did it work?

• 1:33:08Speaker 01

  Uh huh. Yeah, but he was an onophile, you know? He loved wine, so I don't think it had a long-term future.

• 1:33:18Bill Maher?

  Onophile, I, I know that word from the New York Times crossword puzzle. I gotta give them credit for that. They need O E N O.

• 1:33:27Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:33:28Bill Maher?

  Or letters that you really need when you're doing a puzzle.

• 1:33:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's the right word, right?

• 1:33:33Bill Maher?

  I remember sometimes watching my mother do the Times Sunday puzzle with my father. And she'd say, they need the letters.

• 1:33:44Bill Maher?

  True, sometimes you just need the letters. I mean, I would try to write a crossword, it's not easy. They need the letters.

• 1:33:50Speaker 01

  That sounds like a Woody Allen line, like the end of Annie Hall, they need the eggs.

• 1:33:55Bill Maher?

  Yeah. But I'd say of all the decisions, I've made so many bad ones and so many stupid things. But never getting married, priceless.

• 1:34:07Speaker 01

  Do people?

• 1:34:09Bill Maher?

  Don't you think? I mean, you're one of the few people like me and Oprah.

• 1:34:14Speaker 01

  Oprah.

• 1:34:15Bill Maher?

  And the Pope.

• 1:34:17Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:34:17Bill Maher?

  Who have never gotten married.

• 1:34:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, I would love to be married. I think I would be really, I think I would be really good at it.

• 1:34:24Bill Maher?

  You would, I'm sure you'd be good at anything.

• 1:34:27Speaker 01

  Well, thank you.

• 1:34:28Bill Maher?

  But you know, I mean, the sacrifices just seem, it's very hard to.

• 1:34:35Bill Maher?

  Like make your life and another life. When you think about how hard it is just to get your life each day. Till now, it's like two dragonflies who have to fly in tandem every. You ever see them fly and everywhere they go, they're in tandem. If you get out of tandem, then fighting and, and you know, gunny sacking grievances that build up over the years. I mean, that's always what deterred me was that it just isn't. How do you avoid that?

• 1:35:10Speaker 01

  Well, there's a great part in, in the Al Pacino piece in the book where, you know, I'm pressing him and he did not like to talk about his love life. And I'm asking him why he never got married. And, you know, he said, well, if he could find someone who wouldn't mind living down the block, um, he might do it. Like, didn't Betty Davis or some, some of these people like Sartre and, you know, they had apartments next door or, but he, he wanted someone down the block.

• 1:35:41Bill Maher?

  The modern rich people have solved that problem by building houses that take up a whole block. And then you can officially live in the same house, but you're really living down the block.

• 1:35:52Speaker 01

  Well, there is one person in the book who's like you and does, has absolutely no interest in marriage or kids. And that's Ray Fiennes. And it was interesting to talk to him about that. He's, uh, he's a very interesting combination of, he's a real gentleman. Like I went to the wrong restaurant and missed half our interview. And, and he said, don't worry, we'll do it tomorrow morning at breakfast. And very few movie stars would do that.

• 1:36:23Bill Maher?

  So he made you breakfast?

• 1:36:26Speaker 01

  No, but he, you know, he is also has a kind of a hedonistic streak. He's a bit of a libertine. And he said he was the oldest and he raised, you know, Guy and Shakespeare in Love was his brother. And he said he got rejected for Shakespeare in Love because Julia Roberts didn't fancy him. But he just has, you know, just no interest. He likes, he likes.

• 1:36:58Bill Maher?

  It's funny you mention him because I just saw him. I never met him. I think I did meet him, but I saw him a couple of nights because it was just Oscar weekend.

• 1:37:06Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:37:07Bill Maher?

  And the Vanity Fair party and the party probably Friday night, the agency parties, the WME, CAA parties. And I'd only seen him in the movies where he very often plays a very serious character, a very serious actor.

• 1:37:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:37:22Bill Maher?

  And boy, not that guy out at a party.

• 1:37:26Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:37:27Bill Maher?

  You know, he always had a big smile on his face and he's a goer.

• 1:37:31Speaker 01

  You, you should.

• 1:37:32Bill Maher?

  You're right. I can see it. He is a goer.

• 1:37:34Speaker 01

  But you should have him on this show. He's a really fascinating guy.

• 1:37:37Bill Maher?

  I would love to.

• 1:37:38Speaker 01

  And Andy, you know, he's friends.

• 1:37:39Bill Maher?

  Please, hook it up.

• 1:37:39Speaker 01

  He's friends with Andy Cohen and Andy Cohen said he loves all kinds of women, whatever age, whatever shape.

• 1:37:47Bill Maher?

  Wow.

• 1:37:48Speaker 01

  You put a woman in front of him and he can appreciate her.

• 1:37:51Bill Maher?

  Oh, wow. That's a, that's a superpower.

• 1:37:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:37:56Bill Maher?

  And, yeah. No, he's a, he's a goer.

• 1:38:02Speaker 01

  He's fun.

• 1:38:03Bill Maher?

  Let's get over him right now.

• 1:38:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, let's have a party. But I did want to tell you that, you know, people keep asking me like what Shakespearean character Trump is like. And I finally found a similarity. You know how in Richard III, Richard is very malevolent, but he's funny.

• 1:38:23Bill Maher?

  He's the hunchback, right?

• 1:38:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, he gets the audience on his side because he's funny and he walks up to the stage and he tells the audience what bad thing he's about to do. He brings them in on it, but with humor. And I feel like Trump is like that, you know, and that binds him. Like a lot of audiences love Richard III, even though he's doing terrible things. He wants to kill his nephews and, you know, but. If you bring, if you make them feel like your confidants, you know, that can take you a long way.

• 1:38:59Bill Maher?

  Well, I could talk to you all night, but I have to pee.

• 1:39:04Speaker 01

  Good night, sweet prince.

• 1:39:07Bill Maher?

  I could lie and do a smooth, but that's really what it is.

• 1:39:12Speaker 01

  I'm so happy I didn't faint.

• 1:39:14Bill Maher?

  Two hours with you goes by like that.

• 1:39:17Speaker 01

  That was fun. Thank you so much.

• 1:39:20Bill Maher?

  I'll probably be in DC shortly, so if you'd like to have lunch, I will be around.

• 1:39:27Speaker 01

  Anything you want to do, that would be fun.

• 1:39:30Bill Maher?

  Really?

• 1:39:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:39:30Bill Maher?

  I'd love to go to one of those power restaurants where they powerful people. Is it, what was the place? The Grill or what was the place that's like the power? I want to go to the power place.

• 1:39:42Speaker 01

  It was like a place called Dukes of Birds and they were all steak houses.

• 1:39:47Bill Maher?

  Of course.

• 1:39:48Speaker 01

  We had a more.

• 1:39:49Bill Maher?

  Men are making decisions.

• 1:39:50Speaker 01

  Yes, they are.

• 1:39:51Bill Maher?

  I need steak at lunch.

• 1:39:52Speaker 01

  Yes, women are over.

• 1:39:54Bill Maher?

  Steak at lunch.

• 1:39:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:39:55Bill Maher?

  Steak and decisions.

• 1:39:57Speaker 01

  We had our day. Now men are in charge.

• 1:40:01Bill Maher?

  You're pretty fat.

• 1:40:02Speaker 01

  That was fun. It like went in five minutes.

• 1:40:05Bill Maher?

  I know.

• 1:40:06Speaker 01

  I was afraid to drink.

• 1:40:07Bill Maher?

  Two hours.

• 1:40:13Speaker 04

  Honey, that flu keeping you up?

• 1:40:15Speaker 06

  Yeah, I don't got this.

• 1:40:16Speaker 04

  You need Nyquil Intense Flu.

• 1:40:18Speaker 05

  Undo your flu symptoms with Nyquil Intense Flu. The nighttime sniffling, aching, aching fever, best sleep with a flu medicine. You do got this. Use as directed. Keep out of reach of children.

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