David Mamet | Club Random with Bill Maher

David Mamet and Bill Maher cover a lot of ground this spirted conversation, discussing Mamet’s recent film Henry Johnson, his upcoming projects including a novel on education and a film about Abraham Lincoln, the 2020 election, media bias, foreign interference in U. S. elections, Trump’s leadership style, gender policies in sports, the state of California governance, conspiracy theories surrounding the Kennedy assassination, the Zapruder film controversy, UFO sightings, AI and technology’s impact on society, parenting and discipline in education, the decline of common sense, streaming platforms and the film industry. Go to https://www.ffrf.us/freedom or text "CLUB" to 511511 and become a member today Go to https://www. RadioactiveMedia.com or text RANDOM at 511511 to save up to 50%, today! Upgrade your wardrobe and save on @trueclassic at https://www.trueclassic.com/random! #trueclassicpod #ad 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.

• 0:01Speaker 00

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• 0:31Bill Maher?

  I know, I know you think liberals want to destroy the family.

• 0:33Speaker 02

  Liberals want to... No, I don't think they want to destroy the family. I think they have destroyed it.

• 0:37Bill Maher?

  I'll bet.

• 0:41Speaker 02

  You know, I don't know. I think he's gotten into the...

• 0:43Bill Maher?

  But that's your, that's your business.

• 0:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, he's gotten into the wrong pew.

• 0:51Bill Maher?

  Calling the roll?

• 0:52Speaker 02

  Hey darling.

• 0:52Bill Maher?

  Mamet!

• 0:53Speaker 02

  How are you? Thanks for having me.

• 0:56Bill Maher?

  Excuse the laughter.

• 0:58Speaker 02

  Nothing to it, nothing to it. What's new?

• 1:01Bill Maher?

  I love the way you're amusing yourself.

• 1:04Speaker 02

  Oh, this is a great pool table.

• 1:06Bill Maher?

  Yeah. It's amazing nothing's ever spilled on it because like, there's so many drunks around it all the time. I'm not naming names.

• 1:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, I got a couple of extra rooms in my house, but both of them, three of them, but all of them are just like six inches too short for a pool table.

• 1:23Bill Maher?

  I, uh, I never saw you in a hat like that. Is this because you're coming off a directorial... Oh, and you have a book? I mean, my God.

• 1:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, I know. Well, since I got retired and blacklisted, I've been like a swine.

• 1:39Bill Maher?

  Well, we're going to talk about all of it, but first,

• 1:46Bill Maher?

  I read in here

• 1:49Bill Maher?

  that at a dinner party, the conversation always lapses 20 minutes after the hour and before the hour. So say you, so say the French.

• 2:01Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 2:03Bill Maher?

  Okay. Can we put that to the... Does this count as kind of a dinner party? Or is this not counting because we're drinking and smoking?

• 2:10Speaker 02

  No, it doesn't quite count as a dinner party because we have, because we aren't convivial here. We're actually having a structured conversation.

• 2:18Bill Maher?

  You think this is structured?

• 2:21Bill Maher?

  Boy, did you get the wrong email? It's definitely not.

• 2:26Speaker 02

  No, okay.

• 2:27Bill Maher?

  Is that what you got from our other times here? That I'm structured? That I have like an agenda? That I know where I'm going with any of this?

• 2:35Speaker 02

  No, no, I think you're doing fine.

• 2:37Bill Maher?

  This is club random. This is random.

• 2:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:40Bill Maher?

  So, but what, I mean, I find this hard to believe that. And what is the reasoning this? Why does conversation lag? You say there's like seven minute increments when people are talking? So then like after three, they stop?

• 2:57Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, yeah, that's about the length of an old style vaudeville turn. It was about seven minutes. And that's about the length of a guy who's telling a story at a dinner party. And.

• 3:12Bill Maher?

  But we're not all telling stories.

• 3:14Speaker 02

  Say what?

• 3:15Bill Maher?

  We're not, there's always telling a story.

• 3:18Speaker 02

  That's about the length of one story. If you look at it, you'll see it. And the way that I first came to notice it was people quiet down at the theater. They come to the theater at eight o'clock. And at six or seven minutes after eight, there's a hush.

• 3:34Bill Maher?

  Because they're waiting for the play to start, no?

• 3:36Speaker 02

  But why at six or seven minutes after the hour?

• 3:40Bill Maher?

  Because, I don't know. My guess is because they think, oh, well, we've been here for a few minutes. The play's supposed to start at eight. I bet you it's gonna start right around now, because.

• 3:50Speaker 02

  It's exactly my point. Why at that point? Why not after two minutes or after 20 minutes? Because that's built into the human consciousness. That at a certain time, we start to look around to reassess our situation. Because we're basically animals. And I don't mean just the Democrats.

• 4:12Bill Maher?

  Yeah, I mean, man. Each book you get more right wing, I have to say. You get like the last one. I remember you were on my show and it was like one line in it that was, and I said to you on the air. Like, um, are you implying that, that Trump? That election was stolen by Biden and you're, no, I didn't. You were kind of like hedging it and now you're like.

• 4:38Speaker 02

  You don't, you don't happen to be the next morning. You don't know what happened to me the next morning. I was on your show and you said, are you implying that the Trump, that the election was stolen? And I was kind of iffy on it, right? Next morning, eight o'clock, the phone rings.

• 4:52Speaker 02

  Woman on the phone says, Mr. Man, will you hold for the president? I said, we said Biden is calling, it's Trump. It's during the Biden administration and he says, David, it's Donald Trump. I say, oh, oh, Mr. President, thank you for calling to what, the way or the honor. He said, I saw you on Bill Maher yesterday, you were great. He said, but you were stowed on the question of the stolen election. And then he talked to me for like 20 minutes about how the election was stolen.

• 5:20Bill Maher?

  But it wasn't.

• 5:21Speaker 02

  Well, I think it was.

• 5:22Bill Maher?

  But, but they've adjudicated this, they've looked at this. Republicans have looked at this. It was tested in court like 60 times. It was thrown out every time. The Trump's own commission, appointed by his own commissioners to look at the election. The, the cybersecurity commission, it's called, or, or agency. Uh, there's two of them. One of them is within the Department of Homeland Security. They all said the same thing. It was the most fair, honest election we've ever had.

• 5:53Speaker 02

  I'm not talking about the votes. I'm not talking about counting the votes. That the Hunter Biden laptop was suppressed, the COVID information was suppressed. The Zuckerberg said himself that the White House pressured him not, not to bring forward the information on the laptop.

• 6:10Bill Maher?

  Those things.

• 6:11Speaker 02

  As Muzon said, had that come out, there would have been a 17 point spread.

• 6:15Bill Maher?

  Those, oh, please. Those, that's so ridiculous. Those things are true and they did suppress the Hunter Biden, the press did do that. They, I've said this many times myself and COVID. Nobody was more out there about fuck you on, we weren't allowed to hear about, or we wanted to hear about COVID than I was, but. Would it have swung the election? Every election, some things are suppressed. It's not a very fair game, politics. But we do play within a certain type of rules. One of them is no ringers from the outside.

• 6:53Speaker 02

  Wait, wait, we play within a certain amount of rules?

• 6:55Bill Maher?

  Yes, we always did before. Like, we're not gonna have other countries involved in our elections. That was, we'll do whatever we want to each other. But we're not gonna do that. And Trump...

• 7:07Speaker 02

  Who did it?

• 7:08Bill Maher?

  Well, Trump publicly said, Russia, if you're listening, could you get into Hillary's emails? That kinda stuff.

• 7:15Speaker 02

  Dude, he was joking about...

• 7:17Bill Maher?

  Oh, boy, you swallowed the whole...

• 7:18Speaker 02

  So, wait a second. Are you saying that he would not? Okay, you wanna adjudicate the last eight years? Were you saying he was a Russian spy?

• 7:24Bill Maher?

  I did not say that.

• 7:25Speaker 02

  Do you say he...

• 7:26Bill Maher?

  I said he invited... It's a ringer. You know, Dave, when I used to play in the Broadway Show League, and maybe you have. You've had many big, successful shows on Broadway. Maybe they had you on the team. Did you ever play in the Broadway Show League?

• 7:37Speaker 02

  No, I didn't. I have no eye-hand coordination.

• 7:40Bill Maher?

  Well, okay. Well, okay, so, you know, it was, you know, you'd play Annie, or, you know, Man of La Mancha. And the comedy club had a team. We were sort of in the Broadway world. And once in a while, a team, you know, would be like, batting third for My Fair Lady, and it was Jose Canseco. You know, it was like some bartender's friend who, like, would hit the ball a million. That's a ringer. That's called a ringer. You're not really supposed to be in that game. And Trump invited that in a way nobody else ever did in American politics. I'm not saying he's a Russian spy. I don't think that. I even think he really wants to make America great. I do.

• 8:25Bill Maher?

  I just, I don't agree with how he's doing it. And he certainly feathers his own nest in a way no president has ever even come close to doing. What he's selling, the Bitcoin, you know, have dinners with the open bribery that goes on? Okay, people don't seem to care about that. But he certainly invited another country to do things, and they took advantage of it, of course. Would it have made a difference? I don't know.

• 8:55Speaker 02

  How did they take advantage of it?

• 8:57Bill Maher?

  Well, Trump's campaign manager was sharing polling data with a GRU agent.

• 9:06Speaker 02

  Maybe.

• 9:07Bill Maher?

  Well, okay, that's something that, I mean, even Nixon didn't do that.

• 9:12Speaker 02

  Wait, that's the first that I've heard. A, and B, if it's true, and I'm not saying that it is, how did that influence the election?

• 9:20Bill Maher?

  Well, I, I, I, we know that Russia would put things on the internet that weren't true just to get people fighting, you know, that kind of stuff.

• 9:29Speaker 02

  Like what?

• 9:31Bill Maher?

  You know, they would say like, you know, the Pope, they would put up some meme about the end of the Pope is backing Trump. It wasn't true, but people believed it, and then they started to fight over it.

• 9:41Speaker 02

  Here's my question. When last we spoke several years ago, you were stuck on this issue, you're still stuck on it. How come?

• 9:50Bill Maher?

  Because it's not been resolved.

• 9:52Speaker 02

  So how, wait, wait, what is it that hasn't been resolved?

• 9:56Bill Maher?

  The asymmetry of American elections. The fact that if one party, the Republican Party, wins the election, the other party goes, okay, some, you win some, you lose some, and they go home. Hillary Clinton went home, Kamala Harris went home. You can't imagine Trump ever going home.

• 10:14Speaker 02

  Wait, wait, wait, excuse me now, what you're doing is injecting metaphysics into what might be a matter of, so the question, the question is not what he did, the question is not even what he might do. What you've just said is, one can't imagine what he would do, but on the other hand...

• 10:30Bill Maher?

  No, no, I can, I don't have to imagine what he did in 2020, which was never concede the election.

• 10:35Speaker 02

  Dude, he didn't have to concede the election he lost. If somebody is beaten in a prize fight, and the other guy gets the belt, the person who's beaten does not have to concede. It's not necessary, he's lost.

• 10:48Bill Maher?

  Well, it is necessary, the analogy falls down, because that, if a prize fighter loses, it doesn't inspire people to riot.

• 10:57Speaker 02

  How did he inspire people to riot?

• 10:58Bill Maher?

  By not conceding the election.

• 11:00Speaker 02

  Oh, come on. Oh, come on. Come on, so wait a second, he didn't say the words "I concede" and so that meant people rioted?

• 11:08Bill Maher?

  Yes, what do you think January 6th was about?

• 11:10Speaker 02

  What do you think January 6th was?

• 11:12Bill Maher?

  It was about people who did not hear their leader say, as every other leader in this country has said after an election, "Okay, I lost, we welcome the new guy, we had disagreements, but now we're all Americans." When Obama took over, George Bush stood by next to him and he said, "We want you to succeed, because when you succeed in America..." Trump didn't do any of that.

• 11:35Speaker 02

  Okay, so what?

• 11:36Bill Maher?

  So what? It inspires half the country to not accept the basic democratic principle, that we have elections and when you lose, you go away and then you become the loyal opposition. They don't see themselves as the loyal-

• 11:51Speaker 02

  You like me have built a career out of nothing except talent and a little bit of luck and a lot of hard work, which you're full of shit. I don't understand when you say that he did not say the words "I concede", cause half the country, which you just said, to riot.

• 12:06Bill Maher?

  No, I didn't say half the country rioted. A lot of people rioted, and it was less than half the country, because he got less than half the votes and still won, that's okay, that's our system. But a good deal of the country, approaching half, the people who are MAGA, the people who love him, at least a third of the country, will now in the future never accept any electoral results, and a democracy can't continue in that way. You have to have this situation we've always had, where the one football coach walks across the field and shakes the hand with the coach, who just beat him in the game, as tough as it is-

• 12:42Speaker 02

  What do you think we'd be today if Kamala Harris had won?

• 12:44Bill Maher?

  What's that?

• 12:45Speaker 02

  What do you think we would be today if Kamala Harris had won?

• 12:49Bill Maher?

  Well-

• 12:49Speaker 02

  What would happen? Would Israel still exist? I don't think so.

• 12:52Bill Maher?

  Still exist, of course, why wouldn't they exist?

• 12:55Speaker 02

  Why wouldn't they exist? Because the Obama Marxist Leninist Islamists that were taken up during the- Here's a good question that I would ask you. Is who was running the country during those the four years of Biden was out of his mind and demented?

• 13:11Bill Maher?

  Well, he wasn't out of his mind and demented for four years. He probably wasn't out of his mind or demented even on the last day. He just did the view. Uh, did the Democrats do a horrible thing in propping him up and keeping him in office and trying to run him again? Yeah, they did. Of course. I am never easy on the Democrats or the left. And I'm totally with you on Israel, but they would of course still exist because they can defend themselves. But you've said things like, you know, liberals have never done anything for Israel. That's bullshit. Harry Truman recognized Israel when many people told him not to.

• 13:46Speaker 02

  Excuse me, I never said that.

• 13:47Bill Maher?

  Yeah, you did.

• 13:48Speaker 02

  Show it to me and I'll, I'll tell you what, show it to me and I'll give $10,000 to the charity of your choice. No, wait, no, I'm serious. No, wait a second.

• 13:56Bill Maher?

  I'll find it.

• 13:56Speaker 02

  No, no, you're pretty good.

• 13:57Bill Maher?

  I'll find it.

• 13:58Speaker 02

  Good. I'm gonna give 10,000, you show it, you show it to me and I will give $10,000 to the charity of your choice.

• 14:04Bill Maher?

  Okay.

• 14:05Speaker 02

  Cause you're throwing a lot around a lot of generalizations and I have a bigger question.

• 14:09Bill Maher?

  Generalization?

• 14:10Speaker 02

  Oh, really?

• 14:10Bill Maher?

  What's, what's the generalization?

• 14:12Speaker 02

  That half the country would have rioted?

• 14:14Bill Maher?

  If I got that, if I got that quote wrong, I apologize and I will take it back.

• 14:21Speaker 02

  I got another question. I sit down and all of a sudden you're attacking me about I gotta come up. I have to come up with new idea about Trump and I have to talk, what the hell do you care? Let me ask you a question. Wait a second.

• 14:33Bill Maher?

  First of all, I was not my plan to attack you and I'm sorry if you think I'm attacking you.

• 14:38Speaker 02

  Well, okay, I'm sorry that you're doing that.

• 14:39Bill Maher?

  We just got on to this and I'm sorry that I'm not going to pretend that I agree with you.

• 14:44Speaker 02

  Well, I'm asking you to agree to me that I got a good question. How you, you, you started off with a very, um, um, a very difficult question and a question which you have very uh, strong views and I do too.

• 14:58Speaker 03

  How would you like this part of the conversation to end? So that we can move on to something else? What would end it to your satisfaction?

• 15:06Bill Maher?

  Well, we're at the 20 minute mark, so we could just end it.

• 15:09Speaker 03

  What would end it to your satisfaction?

• 15:11Bill Maher?

  When you want it to end? I don't want to piss you off? I'm your biggest fan? I don't, the fact that we don't agree on something so fundamental is still completely okay with me? I don't, I don't get it the way you don't get me. You just said, "I'm completely full of shit." And of course, people who disagree to this level, they think that of the other person. And what we have to do is, of course, learn to live harmoniously with people. We just don't agree with that much. So we can just get past this. You're right, we should, and I'm happy to. And there's a million things in here and in the movie that I think are great and I would love to talk about. So if you, okay.

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• 16:51Bill Maher?

  Well, let's, let's, there's two places in this book. Is it out already, The Disenlightened?

• 16:57Speaker 03

  I think it just came out.

• 16:58Bill Maher?

  Just came out. Politics, Horror, and Entertainment. I mean, it's two places where you like to say in a sentence what the book is. One is, you said, it's an attempt. To connect, I think, or identify things that are connected that don't seem to be, but actually are part of a single disease.

• 17:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 17:21Bill Maher?

  Okay, that's one. And then another one is like you said, um, this book is about how government is like Hollywood, and they're both like myth.

• 17:34Speaker 02

  I said they both run out, because that's, that's right. They will, they both run on the, on the, on the power of myth.

• 17:40Bill Maher?

  So.

• 17:41Speaker 02

  That's correct.

• 17:41Bill Maher?

  You wanna, either one of those as the, as the way you describe the book itself?

• 17:47Speaker 02

  So what's the first one that you suggest?

• 17:48Bill Maher?

  Single disease.

• 17:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, so single disease. So I was looking at the horror of the Biden years and at the, um,

• 17:58Speaker 02

  absolutely, a, a, a bunch of events and actions which were in themselves incomprehensible, but in total were absurd because I, I couldn't understand a, a common theme. What was the common theme between saying, boys have to play in med sports?

• 18:18Bill Maher?

  Agreed.

• 18:18Speaker 02

  And saying that, uh, Israel is a terrorist state? And saying that we have, that the, the schools have.

• 18:25Bill Maher?

  Well, the Biden administration didn't say they were a terrorist state. The administration didn't. People on the left do.

• 18:32Speaker 02

  Well, the Biden administration withheld the arms, um, congressionally mandated aid to Israel. The Biden, Biden and Kamala Harris refused to meet with, with Netanyahu. And they refused to condemn the World Court for calling, um, Netanyahu a terror, a, um, a war, a war criminal.

• 18:52Bill Maher?

  I'm with you on all this.

• 18:53Speaker 02

  Okay, I know, I know you are. So, boys and men's sports, open borders, which is completely indefensible. Why? It's, uh, it's in the constitution.

• 19:03Bill Maher?

  Why?

• 19:03Speaker 02

  If you don't have a border, you don't have a country. Uh, uh, rights for illegal immigrants, um, climate change. These are all of these things which are at best debatable. And I said, but more than that, they, they don't seem to be part of a program. They don't seem to be part, say, if we say the left has a, a, a program, whether it's overt or covert, to do something. These things don't add up to a combined program. They add up to a lot, I said, okay.

• 19:42Speaker 02

  I know what they look like. They look like an open city. That is to say, Paris in 1944, or Naples in 1943, 44, or Moscow in 1812. The inhabitants have left, the attackers have left. The city is open. So it's open to marauding gangs, each of whom is going to prosecute its own program. So I said, ah, that's exactly what the Biden years look like. There's a bunch of people, each prosecuting their own programs. It sounds to me, this is before the real information about his senility came out,

• 20:24Speaker 02

  like a bunch of people sitting at a conference table, and one of them says, you know what I'd like to do? I'd like to get out of Afghanistan today. Somebody else says, well, you know, getting out of Afghanistan is a good idea, but all the joint chiefs have said, if you get out today, people will die. No, fuck it. Guy says, I want to get out today. Well, a guy says, I don't want to vote for that. So this guy says, I tell you what to do. You want to open the borders. I want to get out of Afghanistan today. I'll sign your auto pen thing and you sign mine. Somebody says, wait a second, wait a second, wait a second. What about me? I don't, I think that men should play in women's sports. Well, fuck, okay, you want to vote for that. What will you do for me? I'll vote for men and women's sports. What do you want to do for me?

• 21:08Speaker 02

  Okay, I tell you what I'll do for you. I will vote to not meet with the Prime Minister of Israel. So what, the, looking at the facts, that's what one does when one tries to make a, write a play. I'm going to look at the facts, which seem unconnected, and saying what connects them. And what connects them is the idea of a committee. Of brigands who've taken power and they're each going to prosecute their own um agenda because no one's going to call them on it, the cats away in the mice's play. So that's, that's, that's, that's what led me to a large, to a large extent.

• 21:48Bill Maher?

  You do know that there are people listening to this who are hearing you say a bunch of brigands took over prosecuting their own agenda and they're going to think he's talking about the Trump administration, right?

• 21:59Speaker 02

  Okay, well, I'm not.

• 22:00Bill Maher?

  I know, I know you're not, but you understand why some people would think that?

• 22:04Speaker 02

  Sure, because they watch the legacy media and they, and they watch CNN news.

• 22:08Bill Maher?

  But they're going to say, and it sounds to me like you may watch a lot of Fox, dude.

• 22:13Speaker 02

  Sure, okay, let him say it.

• 22:15Bill Maher?

  All right.

• 22:17Speaker 02

  The question is, if you read the Constitution, which I do, which is pretty easy, about 20 pages, what is the Trump administration doing that's unconstitutional? The answer is nothing.

• 22:28Bill Maher?

  Well, they're not obeying judges' orders. That is unconstitutional.

• 22:33Speaker 02

  What, you're talking about the one district judge who said bring the guy back from El Salvador?

• 22:37Bill Maher?

  There have been many judges' orders about the immigration issue, yes, that they're just ignoring.

• 22:42Speaker 02

  Well, no, I don't know that they were, I think your information there is wrong. I think that what they're doing is, in some cases, they may be, um, they may be slow walking it, but I don't believe that there's any, any, here's what they're doing, is that all these rogue district judges are issuing restraining orders against the president in his performance of his constitutionally mandated duty. It's his constitutional duty to take care of the border, it has nothing to do with the judiciary. If someone, someone feels wronged, they have the opportunity to sue, but the court does not have, the district courts do not have under the Constitution.

• 23:26Bill Maher?

  What's very clear in the Constitution, because it's in both the Fifth and the Fourteenth Amendment, is that they could have said the word citizen both times, and they said the word person. A person has a right to a trial.

• 23:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, they do have a trial, they do have a right to a trial.

• 23:40Bill Maher?

  They purposely didn't say citizen, that's why it's, it's, yes, unconstitutional, illegal to take people off the streets without any hearing at all and send them to a foreign prison.

• 23:53Bill Maher?

  Well, that is not in the Constitution.

• 23:55Speaker 02

  No, but you're wrong as to the facts again, because here, let me explain it this way. Say that you have a fellow who is, hates you, okay? And he is throwing stuff at your, at your car, throwing stuff at you, blah, blah, blah. And he gets sent to prison, okay? He gets convicted, right, of harassment, or he gets convicted of assault, or whatever, whatever, whatever. Say, okay, he's in prison and he gets out, he's got a parole. But one aspect of the parole is he has a restraining order. He cannot come within 1,000 feet of you, or your house, or your place of business.

• 24:35Speaker 02

  If he comes within 1,000 feet of you, your house, your place of business, his parole is violated. It's exactly the same situation as the people who have been convicted of crimes, and who have been deported, and have then re-entered the United States. They have the right to due process to find out whether or not that's the same guy. But prior to that, their crime under sentence has been adjudicated.

• 25:00Bill Maher?

  So can I use the topic of prison to seg into a plug of your movie?

• 25:05Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. If you must.

• 25:08Bill Maher?

  I loved it. Henry Johnson, I know it was a-

• 25:11Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 25:11Bill Maher?

  I know, it was a, yeah, well, of course, the first thing I thought was, you know, you have said, I think, now, don't throw another 10 grand at me if I get the quote wrong, but I think you were even here maybe talking about it, that movies almost don't need dialogue.

• 25:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, they don't.

• 25:28Bill Maher?

  And yet, this movie is all dialogue.

• 25:30Speaker 02

  Well, what am I gonna do, you know? As John Wayne said when he was playing Coriolanus, "Listen, I didn't write this shit," right? But I did write that shit.

• 25:39Bill Maher?

  But it's, I thought it was delicious. It's three scenes, really, and Henry Johnson is in all of them. And he's with a different person in each of the other ones. I don't want to give too much away. The first is someone at a firm he was working out with. And then, then he's in prison, and that's the one with Shia LaBeouf, who has never been better than in that role. He's amazing. And then the prison guard. And, you know, to me, the through line, not just through there, but a lot of your work is- You you do feel like people are always conning people. I mean, a lot of your work is about con artists and different ways of conning.

• 26:20Speaker 02

  Aren't we?

• 26:21Bill Maher?

  Yes, I, yes, I'm not, I'm not saying you're wrong, but I'm saying that to me is like this, the through line. If I had to think of like so many of the David Mamet stuff that I love is like you. You're just getting into that subject of people conning each other in all the different ways we do it. I mean, some of them are direct cons, the Spanish prisoner and things that are like classic cons that are people are actually doing as a con like. Those are fun. And then it's just the more subtle ways. I mean, Shia's whole speech is really about that, is it not?

• 26:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, it's, it's, uh. I'm not quite sure what the play is about, the movie is about, but I think it's about a guy who is so, um, accommodating that he not only gets taken advantage of by everybody he meets, but causes havoc around him constantly by his goodwill. Somebody said that there are old fools and young fools, happy fools and sad fools, but there never was a fool who wasn't cruel. So this is a guy who is so good willed and so wants to please everybody. He's a fool.

• 27:32Speaker 02

  That A, everybody takes advantage of him and B, ends up getting everybody killed. The same old story.

• 27:40Bill Maher?

  Uh, yeah, I can't help but see a little, um, politics in that, like between the lines.

• 27:48Speaker 02

  I don't think so.

• 27:49Bill Maher?

  No? Okay.

• 27:50Speaker 02

  No, listen, I, I, I think I've been fairly clear. I've written a whole bunch of plays and movies and should not and fiction and so forth, but then independently, I've written a bunch of political stuff, but I'm pretty clear about keeping the two, um. Uh, uh, uh, in fact, I'm dedicated to keeping the two separate.

• 28:08Bill Maher?

  But I, I think a lot of people would be surprised if they heard a playwright of your magnitude say, I'm not sure what the play is about. Is that the way it's supposed to be? That it's a mystery even to you to a degree?

• 28:20Speaker 02

  Well, here's the thing of it's, if something is a work of art, which I think that if you're, if, if you're a creative person, you aspire to.

• 28:33Speaker 02

  There's mass entertainment, right, then there's entertainment. And then there's, at some point, it's possible to have, for it to be art. And at some point, you aspire, however popular your stuff may be, and I wanna be popular, you don't do. But at some point, you say, I would like to aspire to the realm of art, which means something beyond the ability of the consciousness to quantify, right? You say, oh, again, I laughed, so obviously that's a comedy, or I cried, so obviously that's a drama. But art is something beyond the ability of the consciousness to quantify. So if somebody said of the Chopin, "A-2d," what does it mean? What Chopin was, "Fuck, I don't know, I do it the best I can."

• 29:17Speaker 02

  So I'm trying to aspire to have my stuff beyond, which is to say, beyond the human capacity to encapsulate. Because if you encapsulate, you stop thinking about it. Oh, I get it, right?

• 29:31Bill Maher?

  See, maybe I'm not that bright.

• 29:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 29:35Bill Maher?

  Because, like, one reason I enjoyed it so much is because when it got to the end, I said, "I get it." What I thought you were aiming for, and in your artistic way. And maybe I'm just too one-dimensional, and I should be thinking about it more, and maybe I could never get it. But I really took it, you know, and I relished in it. That, you know, do-gooders are people who try to do the right thing. Sometimes they wind up hurting the people even more. Not always, I mean, we shouldn't end do-gooderism. But there's a certain level to this guy that he keeps, in all these iterations,

• 30:18Bill Maher?

  being taken in, and it's, you know, a fool, whatever your quote was.

• 30:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, but see, it was great that you said, "I get it," but that, to me, means differently than, "I understand it." "I get it" means, "Oh, yeah," which is what craft is in playwriting. With you with the end, someone says, "Oh, my God, it was in front of me the whole time." Everything that I thought, "This doesn't make sense, this doesn't make sense." Ah, now it makes sense.

• 30:42Bill Maher?

  Yes, I must say, and maybe we talked about this, but, you know, to me, great art, movies, anyway, or plays, like, the ending, that's the hard part. Anyone can think of a movie, how do you end it? And to make the ending both surprising and...

• 31:02Speaker 02

  Inevitable.

• 31:03Bill Maher?

  Inevitable.

• 31:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 31:04Bill Maher?

  That's the trick, and I felt like you dug the landing on that one.

• 31:08Speaker 02

  Well, that's what Aristotle said. He wrote the book called The Poetics a little while ago. He said the ending has got to be surprising and inevitable.

• 31:14Bill Maher?

  Oh, really? He said that?

• 31:15Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. He said that's it. So if we know that as dramatist, it's no different than a joke. The ending's got to be surprising. Oh, aha, and inevitable.

• 31:26Bill Maher?

  And make sense enough to, yeah.

• 31:27Speaker 02

  I didn't see, I didn't see where you're getting at. That's why we laugh.

• 31:31Bill Maher?

  That's right.

• 31:31Speaker 02

  Right, because it, it, it, it, uh, re convinces us happily that we really aren't that fucking smart. Right? So, uh, uh, uh, uh, the joke and the good play frees us from our self-absorption. I'm so smart, or why am I not doing better, or someone's trying to fuck me over? No, no, no, it's because I, I'm too lazy, I'm too this and that. No, I'm not, and da, da, da, da, da. That's what we do in our stupid minds all day long. Right? So a joke frees us from that.

• 32:01Bill Maher?

  Yeah.

• 32:03Speaker 05

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• 32:46Speaker 05

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• 32:52Bill Maher?

  But, okay, so you say you separate the political from the other. And yet, like, did you not say last time that you were working on, uh, JFK?

• 33:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 33:06Bill Maher?

  Okay, and also Lincoln gay?

• 33:08Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, that's coming up.

• 33:10Bill Maher?

  Okay, so if you're doing, uh, Lincoln and Kennedy, how can you separate the political?

• 33:16Speaker 02

  Well, because it's like, well, there's the question. Listen, it's the same thing as saying, I want to do a movie about doctors. That doesn't mean I want to operate on people in the fucking audience, right?

• 33:29Bill Maher?

  Okay, so what's going on with with Lincoln Gay? I'm anxious to see this.

• 33:34Speaker 02

  No, no, no, I'm working on this, working on this movie now about these two con men who um.

• 33:39Bill Maher?

  See, con men.

• 33:40Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 33:41Bill Maher?

  You love your con men.

• 33:42Speaker 02

  I do too, we all do.

• 33:44Bill Maher?

  They're fun, they are great. It's, it's, it's always interesting to watch a con and someone being con.

• 33:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, I was just writing about today, like we just. Please screw me over. Please lie to me. There's so much a, a, a, a, a part of our human condition is Ricky J, the great magician, said that the more intelligent person is the easier they are to con because they believe in their own intelligence. So they're trying to beat you to the punchline and I know what you're doing. So while they're trying to beat you to the punchline, their attention is, is over here, where, where you're picking their pocket.

• 34:23Bill Maher?

  So was Lincoln gay?

• 34:26Speaker 02

  I mean, probably.

• 34:29Bill Maher?

  Because?

• 34:31Speaker 02

  Well, the, the, uh, the question to me, a, a different question, what, who, right? It, it became part of an American culture and it started with biography to say, oh, who did what with his, who did what with his dick? Right? As if that was important, as if that were important. Whereas we see now, now it's become part of the culture. Thank goodness, the fuck difference does it make? Right? So all of the, like, the, the, Oscar Wilde was sentenced to two years in prison.

• 35:03Bill Maher?

  Oh, yeah.

• 35:03Speaker 02

  For homosexuality by a section of society, which is the, the, the British, uh, uh, aristocracy, the British upper class, all of whom were homosexual, practiced homosexuality in some form or another. But he broke the taboo about talking about it.

• 35:19Bill Maher?

  Look, look at the hypocrisy about homosexuality in the Muslim world.

• 35:24Speaker 02

  Well, yeah, sure.

• 35:24Bill Maher?

  I mean, anytime you cover the women and, and segregate the women to that degree, you're going to have rampant hetero homosexuality, which I guess is, I guess is hotter because if they catch you, they throw you up the roof.

• 35:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's right. I mean, but no, see, that's why a lot of the Muslim countries, they, a lot, a lot of the time, they will not build a story that's more than, a, a house that's more than two stories tall.

• 35:49Bill Maher?

  Is that true?

• 35:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, because if they catch you fucking another boy, they throw you out the roof.

• 35:55Speaker 02

  I'm kidding with you.

• 35:56Bill Maher?

  Oh, I, but you know what? That's the thing. It could be true. I mean.

• 36:02Speaker 02

  It could be true. So the question to me is not whether or not Lincoln was gay. Who knows? But what, whether somebody who's that, these con men find a guy who's that interested in the subject that they say, wow, I can take advantage of this guy. Right? He's so interested in being right about the subject that I can sell him this letter that proves that Lincoln was gay.

• 36:25Bill Maher?

  Right. Because at the end of it, he asked for Streisand tickets? I mean, what, what was in the letter? I'm very curious that that would like lead one to.

• 36:34Speaker 02

  Well.

• 36:34Bill Maher?

  Because I know that people did not, uh, write letters in that era where they would be explicit about it.

• 36:42Speaker 02

  Well, quite the contrary. Actually, um, when Oscar, well, Oscar Wilde's a little bit later. Oscar Wilde's 30 years later, but they passed this rule law in 18, like 1893 that made a, as they said, sodomy, a crime in, in, uh, England. They made it a crime for the first time. And somebody said that in Chelsea, which was the artistic, um, bohemian era area of London, after they passed it, the era in Chelsea was black with the smoke of burning love letters.

• 37:20Speaker 02

  So, uh, he had a very good friend, a Lincoln named Joshua Speed, who he lived with for many years.

• 37:25Bill Maher?

  Yeah, but didn't everybody on the frontier have to bunk together because they were on the frontier?

• 37:30Speaker 02

  Hey, as we say, let me finish. So anyway, he wrote a lot of letters to Joshua Speed, which are in the Lincoln Library somewhere. And they're very loving letters, right? And so some guys who were, who were, um, interested in gay history have always said, oh, the letters might say this, or letters might say that, but I'll bet you there's another letter where the whole thing comes out of the closet.

• 37:54Bill Maher?

  Why, why were you attracted to this subject of all the things you could write about?

• 37:59Speaker 02

  I don't know. I mean, you know, what are you drinking?

• 38:03Bill Maher?

  Tequila.

• 38:03Speaker 02

  Well, why not vodka?

• 38:05Bill Maher?

  Because I like this better.

• 38:06Speaker 02

  Okay, there you go.

• 38:07Bill Maher?

  I know, but, okay. I mean, you could fill in the, this is, your thing is a little deeper than what liquor I like. You could fill in the details a little, like, no? The muse just strikes you that way.

• 38:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, sure, like, somebody asked me a long time ago where I got my ideas, and I told him, and I'll tell you, that there's a little Mexican guy, he's got an old Camino, and he parks in a Vans parking lot in Encino every Saturday, and he sells ideas off the back of the truck.

• 38:37Bill Maher?

  Really? And you take advantage of that, huh?

• 38:40Speaker 02

  You better have.

• 38:41Bill Maher?

  All right, so what about the JFK one?

• 38:43Speaker 02

  Oh, that kind of fell apart through, uh, the people who were making the movie ended up suing each other, and, uh, I ended up going wee wee wee all the way home. But some very good things happened, uh, from it, one of which is I cast Shia, who was gonna play Oswald.

• 38:59Bill Maher?

  Oh.

• 38:59Speaker 02

  And Louis was gonna play.

• 39:00Bill Maher?

  Perfect casting.

• 39:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, Louis was gonna play Louis, was gonna play Jack Ruby.

• 39:05Bill Maher?

  Louis?

• 39:06Speaker 02

  Louis C.K.

• 39:07Bill Maher?

  Was gonna play Jack Ruby?

• 39:08Speaker 02

  The cast went on forever, it was great.

• 39:11Bill Maher?

  Oh, wow.

• 39:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, John Travolta was in it.

• 39:13Bill Maher?

  I think I finally understand the assassination.

• 39:18Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 39:19Bill Maher?

  You know, uh, this guy Marcelo, the mob boss.

• 39:23Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 39:24Bill Maher?

  He was pissed, there was three wings that were very pissed at Kennedy. One was the mafia, they felt they were double-crossed because they helped Kennedy win, and then Bobby Kennedy prosecuted them when he was Attorney General. Okay, then there was like the standard right-wingers that are always here in this country, I, let's not get into that again. They're wonderful people, you know, they were the John Birchers back then, then they became the Berthers, they're now they're MAGA. They're always there, it's about a third of the country, very far right-wing, that was that guy Guy Bannister.

• 39:58Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 39:59Bill Maher?

  He just hated Kennedy because Kennedy represented everything that was just horrible about America. And then there was Ferry, Daniel Ferry, played by Joe Pesci in the Oliver Stone movie. And he had run, uh...

• 40:15Bill Maher?

  Guns to the Cubans, you know, they were trying, Castro took over in fifty-nine, they were trying to oust him, so he felt double-crossed by Kennedy, the Bay of Pigs. So you have three people here in this Agatha Christie story who really want to kill John F. Kennedy. And then Oswald, I mean, what's so weird about the Oswald thing that we just gloss over is the time he spent in the Soviet Union, our desperate enemy at the time. It's treated in the press as if it's just another interesting fact about Lee Harvey Oswald. Oh, and did you know he spent some time in the Soviet Union and he was a stamp collector? You know, it's, yeah, he was there in the Soviet Union. And then came back to America and shoots the president.

• 41:00Speaker 02

  If he, if he shot the president.

• 41:03Bill Maher?

  Oh, you don't think he shot the president?

• 41:04Speaker 02

  No, I don't think so.

• 41:05Bill Maher?

  Well, I mean, he, I, yeah, I, I think there was a conspiracy and there were other gunmen. I mean, you, you.

• 41:11Speaker 02

  I, I think there were, there's certainly other gunmen, I don't know, I don't know that he was one.

• 41:15Bill Maher?

  But he was the perfect patsy.

• 41:16Speaker 02

  He was a perfect patsy, so the perfect movie about the Kennedy assassination is The Parallax View. Where Warren plays this, this, it's a wonderful talk about everything coming together in the last ten seconds. Warren is this investigative reporter trying to investigate blah, blah, blah. And at the end, we find out ten seconds ago in the movie, they'd been leading him on to the point where he's up on a catwalk with a rifle. And, and he's going to be the patsy. But, did you know that one of Marcello's girlfriends was Lee Harvey Oswald's mother?

• 41:51Bill Maher?

  I did not.

• 41:52Speaker 02

  Check it out, he was, he was all over Oswald, he was part of a whole crew with the, at the Jack Ruby's uh, bar.

• 42:00Bill Maher?

  Yes, there's lots of witnesses who saw them together, I mean, it's, it's just passing strange to me that we just gloss over that part of like, if you just wrote a script and said, okay, well, there's these two bitter enemies and one of them defects to the other country and then comes back and kills their leader. You would think that that was a little suspicious.

• 42:21Speaker 02

  Well, I think he was fairly obviously a CIA low-level throwaway. Then he went over, they said, fuck it, okay, go over to Russia and they put him in assembling radios over there.

• 42:32Bill Maher?

  In, in the book.

• 42:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 42:36Bill Maher?

  The Disenlightenment.

• 42:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 42:38Bill Maher?

  Sorry, I forgot the title. You, I think you say you don't believe in there's a Prude, the Pruder film is, is faked.

• 42:47Speaker 02

  I know it's, everybody knows it's faked.

• 42:49Bill Maher?

  I didn't.

• 42:50Speaker 02

  Well, if you look at it, there are several frames missing. Every frame is numbered, right? And several films are just missing. In fact, in one-

• 42:59Bill Maher?

  And there's no other explanation for what that could be than foul play?

• 43:02Speaker 02

  No, there've been a couple of explanations, one of which is that they were too brutal. Another one of which is right around-

• 43:08Bill Maher?

  But they would have to be deliberately taken out?

• 43:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, they've been taken out. Another one of which is the, um, blood spatter is painted on. How do I know it's painted on? Because they've been making movies for 40 years. You can see it. In one frame, it doesn't exist, and the next frame, it does exist, and in the next frame, it doesn't exist. So what would actually, the film goes by 24 frames a second. If it were actual blood spatter, you would see it grow, and then you would see it dispersed. But it's just, it's just painted on, as if it's very, very, um-

• 43:43Bill Maher?

  So who did it? Who faked the Pruder film?

• 43:45Speaker 02

  Well, I wrote that movie too, which has yet to get made, about the guy who faked the Zapruder film.

• 43:50Bill Maher?

  Well, see, that's a different movie, that's interesting.

• 43:52Speaker 02

  That's a good movie, yeah.

• 43:54Bill Maher?

  You wrote it?

• 43:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 43:55Bill Maher?

  It's already, but it's just-

• 43:56Speaker 02

  I was gonna do it with Cate Blanchett, and that fell apart the last minute. Maybe I'll do it some other time.

• 44:01Bill Maher?

  Oh, I would have jumped on that one.

• 44:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, me too.

• 44:05Bill Maher?

  No, I mean, the, I mean, getting her for the movie.

• 44:08Speaker 02

  Oh, she was great. I went down to see her, and she said, "Yeah, I'll do it." She was gonna do it for nothing, gonna do it for, she just loved the part. And the financier pulled out the rest of it.

• 44:19Bill Maher?

  What part is there for a woman there? I don't, there's none in the story.

• 44:22Speaker 02

  Uh-huh. So the movie is about this woman whose grandfather made a lot of money in the movie business. Then it turns out he was working for the, um, Air Force during the Area 51, uh-

• 44:43Speaker 02

  Alien incursions, right, in Roswell, New Mexico? And that he was altering the, doing the same thing with the UFO footage. So she chases that down. And that, that's not true either. And then people start trying to kill her because she's getting too close, too close, too close. Then it turns out, he was the guy who altered the Zapperator film. That they were shot in, shot by Zapperator, who'd been in the OSS. The precursor to the CIA. It was shot, obviously, in Dallas, but instead of giving it to Kodak in Dallas to develop, they shipped it to Los Angeles.

• 45:23Bill Maher?

  But what's the part they took out and why?

• 45:26Speaker 02

  The part they took out and why was they were shot from the front. He was, you know, he was, he wasn't shot from the back. He was shot that this, they blew his head apart from the front with several shots to the face.

• 45:36Bill Maher?

  Well, that would have been Oswald.

• 45:38Speaker 02

  No, because it wasn't from that angle. It was, it was from the street angle.

• 45:43Bill Maher?

  But the, but the way the Zapruder film is, as we have seen it, only makes you more suspicious. It doesn't like cover up the crime. It makes it look more ridiculous.

• 45:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 45:57Bill Maher?

  And was that their intent?

• 45:58Speaker 02

  Well, no, no, no, I don't know. Also, Dershowitz was, Ellen Dershowitz, I know pretty well, was clerking for one of the guys on the warrant commission, who told Dershowitz, who told me, da, da, da, that the whole thing was a cover up, but that we had to do it for national security reasons.

• 46:15Bill Maher?

  That I believe in general, yes, I do think.

• 46:17Speaker 02

  So the other thing is, how did they know that this guy, they said, oh, we, we determined in one hour, that this, A, that this guy is the shooter, and B, that there are no other shooters? They didn't know.

• 46:28Bill Maher?

  No.

• 46:28Speaker 02

  And the other thing is the single bullet theory.

• 46:31Bill Maher?

  Of course.

• 46:31Speaker 02

  Is nonsense.

• 46:32Bill Maher?

  It's so ridiculous. There's just no way to talk your way out of it.

• 46:37Speaker 02

  Except, except, except everybody shut up and anybody, anybody who says, anybody who objects as a conspiracy nut.

• 46:46Bill Maher?

  Well, I mean, you mentioned UFOs. I happen to think UFOs get lumped in with conspiracy nuts unfairly because there is nothing unscientific about thinking that there could be other life in the universe and/or they could be watching us right now or could be in the next room, and we don't know. That's not unscientific. That's not a conspiracy theory. Is that where you are with that?

• 47:13Speaker 02

  Well.

• 47:19Speaker 02

  My wife and I saw the UFO. We saw him, and I saw him twice in my life.

• 47:23Bill Maher?

  I know lots of people who are not crazy people who have seen what some people would call a ghost and a few people who have seen something that you would call an alien. Now, I've quizzed them very closely, trying to ascertain, were you drunk? Were you dreaming? And like, if somebody put me through that, and like, I would be very frustrated because I know when I'm drunk or dreaming. So, I don't know what to say about that, except I gotta think that whatever stations we're tuning into on our radio, there are other stations we're not receiving. I don't know what exactly they are.

• 48:03Speaker 02

  I agree. But here's the other thing, I think, that if the front page of... Does people read newspapers anymore? If the front...

• 48:11Bill Maher?

  I do.

• 48:12Speaker 02

  The New York Times still publishing?

• 48:13Bill Maher?

  Of course, and it comes out, and I get the actual dinosaur print edition.

• 48:17Speaker 02

  Oh, that's great.

• 48:18Bill Maher?

  And it pisses me off as much as it pisses you off. So, I'm not the horrible person who you thought I was when we sat down and you said I was attacking you. I'm not. The New York Times, I understand, is a slanted, and it's full of shit. I think that too. But I still read it because I wanna know what that side is thinking. Also, it's not all full of shit. They have some great writers, some great columnists who I still love. And they also have reporters everywhere in the world. And even though what I'm reading even now from overseas, I feel like, okay, this is... Everything has to have your kind of Times slant to it. I still can get the information. I wanna know what's going on in Mogadishu, and nobody else is there.

• 49:02Bill Maher?

  So yes, it's still Prince.

• 49:04Speaker 02

  I would love to know where Mogadishu is. Where is it?

• 49:07Bill Maher?

  Come on, man.

• 49:07Speaker 02

  It's where I left it, right? You know. My, my, my, my point, it's always, oh, it's gonna be in the last place I look. But my point about the New York Times, it's funny that they're still publishing, is that they came out with the big scare head tomorrow, Aliens land in New Jersey. Everybody would say, yeah, oh, yeah, okay.

• 49:28Speaker 02

  Don't you think? They're gonna say, yeah, what else is new, right? Not that they'd seen your post, but I got, I got my plate full already, okay? I gotta deal with this, I gotta deal with that, so does Aliens here. The gig is on the hate.

• 49:43Bill Maher?

  Well, I mean, they could make things better. I mean, look.

• 49:48Bill Maher?

  AI, let's go, I mean, I'd love to know what you think about that. Like, what, this has changed so much. I was at dinner in November of twenty-two? Okay, I think that's when it was, maybe twenty-three even. Uh, and I remember, it's right after the season ended, somebody first had ChatGPT and showed it to me on their phone. This is only a couple of years ago. And they said, uh, write a scene where Bill Maher is on the show Succession and Logan Roy wants to hire him away from HBO. And like in two seconds, it had printed out this scene,

• 50:29Bill Maher?

  which was not genius and not what a real playwright can do, but was, would be a start for a lot of people. And I thought, well, life is different than it ever has been before.

• 50:41Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 50:41Bill Maher?

  And we are now accelerated it and, you know, everybody I know has it on their phone. They, they, I mean, we do have like a, a robot butler. It may not be a physical one yet, but they use it for every possible thing. Sometimes valuable. I hurt my finger playing ball and the person I was playing with looked up right on GP, ChatGPT and showed it a picture of this and then the thing was able to identify it and tell me what to do. And, I mean, I just, now, some of this is good, but instinctively, I feel this is gonna be very bad.

• 51:23Speaker 02

  Well, the big changes in civilization.

• 51:28Speaker 02

  Well, everything changed. First one was the Industrial Revolution. And the second one is the Computer Revolution. So we're in the midst of being... Everybody in the Western world is undergoing a certain kind of moderate cognitive dissonance because nothing makes any sense anymore. So because they're undergoing cognitive dissonance, they do what somebody does. They lose their mind and start looking for people to blame. Whether that's Biden, or whether it's Trump, or whether that's the transsexuals, or the transphobes, whether it's Israel, or etc., etc., whether it's tariffs or lack of tariffs. People want, rather than having cognitive dissonance and being, in effect, basically catatonic,

• 52:13Speaker 02

  by the change, they want to be able to become phobic. And say, "Okay, I get it. It's that." It's right. It's just like crazy people say, "It's that guitar that's trying to kill me." Right? Because they're nuts. So to a certain extent, we're nuts.

• 52:28Bill Maher?

  Again, this is what a lot of people think of the right. You're describing exactly what a lot of people would say about MAGA Nation.

• 52:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, and it's exactly what 51% of the people would say about the left.

• 52:41Bill Maher?

  And it's true. I'm one of the ones.

• 52:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 52:44Bill Maher?

  I'm always there with you on that. They're just aggressively anti-common sense people. People who just want to... And this is what loses them elections. People just look at them and go, "Why are you obstinately trying to be so counterintuitive?"

• 53:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 53:02Bill Maher?

  "And I can't let people like that control the levers of power." I get why Trump wins. And I'll give you something else about your boy.

• 53:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 53:12Bill Maher?

  Like, I don't think he's read Spengler, and I don't think he's read Toynbee, and I don't think he's read a lot, but he gets, on a whatever level, basic level, that Western civilization good.

• 53:26Bill Maher?

  And I'm on that level too. But I know it because I actually read this shit. And I know what happened in history and blah, blah, blah. Western civilization, good. The ideas of Western civilization, good. And the ideas of, well, let's keep the women covered up. And people don't have, you know, you have to have a two-story home because you're gonna throw the gays off the roof.

• 53:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 53:48Bill Maher?

  Like, I did this on my show a couple of weeks ago. I was talking about the college kids. I was like, not only do they hate America, not only do they hate the civilization they should adore because it's given them everything, including their rights, as well as their material comforts, but they love the wrong one.

• 54:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 54:04Bill Maher?

  They love the wrong.

• 54:05Speaker 02

  They're having fun.

• 54:06Bill Maher?

  They wanna globalize the Intifada. They hate the right one, the one of free speech and free elections and women are equal and gays, all this stuff they supported left. And they embrace this other one that is so anti-liberal. So I get why it's very appealing if you just look at the big, big, big picture to have the guy who goes, I get it. Western civilization, good. Although those Qatari planes that are free, that's sweet. And Western, yeah. And that, to me, is probably what's gonna be the issue of the next election again. Because the Democrats, they cannot seem to divorce themselves

• 54:49Bill Maher?

  from this, we're with the Palestinians.

• 54:53Speaker 02

  Well, the problem is there's no party anymore. There's no Democratic Party anymore. It's completely fragmented. It might reform, but when they keep saying, we have to find a message, we have to find a message. Well, if you don't have a fucking message, what are you doing being a political party?

• 55:08Bill Maher?

  That's not the issue. They always say that. We didn't, nobody heard our message. They have a message, people just didn't like it.

• 55:13Speaker 02

  That's certainly true.

• 55:15Bill Maher?

  Right.

• 55:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 55:16Bill Maher?

  Yeah. Their message again is that we will always, count on us to always go against the grain of common sense. We will back the thing that doesn't really make any sense. Here in California, if someone breaks into my home and I shoot them, I could go to jail. You see how counterintuitive that is, people? But we will back that.

• 55:40Speaker 02

  But why are we living here? As Elon said, it's the most expensive weather in the world.

• 55:45Bill Maher?

  That's a great line.

• 55:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 55:47Bill Maher?

  It is to, it is to this. State sunshine, what oil is to oil-producing countries. It corrupts them. It allows them to get away with things they never would be able to get away with if they didn't have the oil. And that's what sunshine is out here.

• 56:04Speaker 02

  You're absolutely right.

• 56:05Bill Maher?

  Yeah. But yet we, I mean, do you know how important sunshine is?

• 56:09Speaker 02

  I love it.

• 56:10Bill Maher?

  Who doesn't love sunshine?

• 56:12Speaker 02

  But you know, my, my wife grew up in Scotland, and like anyone who comes from the British Isles, the moment they see California, they say, I'm, I'm, you know, everything I left behind, fuck it, I'm, you can't get me out of here. You know, it's nice, it's beautiful weather 400 days a year.

• 56:27Bill Maher?

  I fuck Scotland, I felt that about New Jersey.

• 56:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 56:30Bill Maher?

  And New York. I came from New York, and I moved here on New Year's Day, and, you know, I was zipping up my jacket a little bit, and I'm coming from the freezing cold, and I was like, fuck, why did I do this three years earlier?

• 56:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, indeed.

• 56:46Bill Maher?

  Um, but are we overtaxed? Yes. Are we overregulated? Yes. And the tragedy is that it doesn't have to be that way. You could have the sunshine and the common sense.

• 57:00Speaker 02

  Because the problem about being overtaxed is, A, it's confiscatory. Is that because I got a couple bucks? Probably, but it's also because what's the money being used for?

• 57:09Bill Maher?

  Yeah.

• 57:10Speaker 02

  Because it's not being used for the cops, it's not being used for the fire department. The schools are the, schools are the worst in the, in the nation.

• 57:16Bill Maher?

  Terrible.

• 57:16Speaker 02

  So why, why, why are the taxes going on?

• 57:19Bill Maher?

  No, I mean, I've confronted our governor about this many times.

• 57:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 57:24Bill Maher?

  And, I mean, I know this guy is probably not your cup of tea, but at least we see, I mean, Gavin Newsom was like the poster boy for the far-left California government, blah, blah, blah, and he's come around on women in sports, he's come around on getting the homeless off the streets, he's come around on free Medicare.

• 57:45Speaker 02

  Well, I know how to fix that, is elect him.

• 57:48Speaker 02

  Elect him to go back to the left.

• 57:51Bill Maher?

  Maybe, but I think he wants to be president. And I think to be president, you have to move to the center. I mean, at least we see a movement. I mean, you would agree that we need two parties, right? We need a choice. Okay. So it's good that there are voices on the democratic side who are coming more to the middle.

• 58:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, but some of them are and some of them aren't. I mean, I really, Fetterman is doing it is extraordinary because he's a Democrat who's actually has self-respect, the opposite of which is shame. They'll say any fucking thing in order to get a vote or money or airtime. I don't, I don't, I think that's a concept which is kind of foreign to Gavin Newsom. I get it. You know, as the collect, the collect, the election time comes closer, the liars are gonna come closer to trying to lure more people in. The funny thing to me is that anyone still, anyone still listens to their pronouncements rather than looking at their, looking at their record. Have you driven through the Palisades in Malibu?

• 58:50Bill Maher?

  No. Why would I purposely, I'm not a ghoul like you.

• 58:55Speaker 02

  No, no, I got it because I was over there visiting somebody and they gave me a pass to come back through. It's, it's, it's beyond anything. I mean, it's out miles and miles and miles. And then you, you get off of the PCH and drive up Sunset into the Pacific Palisades, where the richest, most beautiful communities in the United States, which burned down because they didn't have any water in the, in the reservoir.

• 59:18Bill Maher?

  Right. I mean, I'm thinking back now to January and what I was saying about that shit, which seemed to me like the, the reasonable middle position, uh, which I always think of myself. Maybe, I don't know, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe everybody else is right. I just think, was wokeness a part of it? Yes. But there was also a hundred mile an hour winds. They also built the city in a stupid place to build a city. So if you ask me, that was eighty percent of it. But when you're living in a disaster zone like this, you can't afford to make any errors. And they made plenty of errors. And.

• 1:00:02Bill Maher?

  The police chief, I think the top three spots in the police department, the fire department, I think were lesbian, something like that. And it's like, I, I think lesbians can do the job, of course. I just don't think you should pick among lesbians when you're looking for a, for a chief. And I think that's what they did. It was like, they checked, that's the Democrats' problem. They checked the identity box first.

• 1:00:28Speaker 02

  Well, sure.

• 1:00:29Bill Maher?

  I think they decided they wanted a lesbian. And, and like, that's not right.

• 1:00:36Speaker 02

  Well, here's what I think. I mean, I, you know, whether they're a lesbian or not, doesn't, I, I couldn't care less. And it certainly doesn't affect their ability to do, do the job. But the woman who I believe is the fire commissioner issued a statement when she first got the job, saying that her first priority was going to infuse equity and inclusion and D I.

• 1:00:55Bill Maher?

  Yes.

• 1:00:55Speaker 02

  I, I would have thought it was to put the fucking water in the, in the fire.

• 1:00:58Bill Maher?

  Right. Put out the fires. Another one said, um, when, when there's a disaster, be it a fire or something else, when their first responder gets there, people want to see someone who looks like them.

• 1:01:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's cute.

• 1:01:14Bill Maher?

  And it's, what?

• 1:01:15Speaker 02

  That's cute.

• 1:01:18Bill Maher?

  That, in a nutshell, is what's wrong with the left, right?

• 1:01:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, they're crazy.

• 1:01:23Bill Maher?

  Well, okay, but come on. Okay, so, so if we agree on that, what, what drove them to that place? Can, can you take me on the journey? Because I always try to make the distinction between liberal, old school liberal, which is what I basically think of myself, and woke, which is this kind of shit. To me, this is not the, this is not the liberals that my parents were, that I grew up with. That maybe, maybe you were in the eighties or some shit like that. Maybe not. I mean, you were always out there.

• 1:01:55Speaker 02

  I mean, I don't know. I mean, all, you know, as, as Lenin says, it always starts in the schools. Right, that the schools got taken over by this, by the.

• 1:02:05Bill Maher?

  Horrible.

• 1:02:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, terrible. And so now we have people like Randy Weingarten and so forth.

• 1:02:09Bill Maher?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:10Speaker 02

  Clumping for the right of the schools to teach whatever they fucking want. In contravention to the wishes of the parents and common sense. So if you get the kids young, those kids are going to become the teachers. And if you get them young at the, and. You get them into the elite institutions, they're going to become the levers of government. And then you're in a lot of trouble.

• 1:02:36Bill Maher?

  Yeah, I mean, you have a line in the book there about, I'm forgetting how it says it, you said it so well about today's liberals like relish the odor of sanctity.

• 1:02:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:02:48Bill Maher?

  As if it was courage, something like that.

• 1:02:52Speaker 02

  Oh, it's a good line. I hope I said it. That's a good line.

• 1:02:55Bill Maher?

  You don't remember?

• 1:02:56Speaker 02

  No, I don't, but thank you. I like it.

• 1:02:58Bill Maher?

  But, I mean, and again, if I had to encapsulate the problems with the left, it would be, it would fall under that category. It's so important to them always to be the good people. And, you know, to have the lawn side. In this house, we believe, and of course, they're always very hypocritical, which is the infuriating thing about them, about so much of this. They're so obsessed with privilege while they live these very privileging lives. I call them liberals in theory, you know, they're liberals in theory, but they actually treat their housekeeper like shit. You know, they treat their assistants like 24/7 slaves. They just do things that are so, to me, un-liberal.

• 1:03:42Bill Maher?

  Things that my father and mother would never do, because they were old school liberals, who like treated people really well.

• 1:03:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, I believe in treating people well.

• 1:03:52Bill Maher?

  No, no, I know, but I'm just saying that is there. To me, that's the thing that bugs me most about them when I think about them is that you're only liberal in theory. Yes, your politics are liberal, but I actually see the way you act.

• 1:04:07Speaker 02

  Well, exactly so. I don't understand how any, not a good person, but a rational person wants to run for reelection, can say we have to have men and women's sports and expect people to vote for them. And maybe they're right. I don't know. I just, I don't get it.

• 1:04:28Bill Maher?

  There's a clip I saw the other day that's just LOL about it's like the the steeplechase like the highway where they did you know they run and then they jump over a thing whatever they call that race and it's like these you know like beautiful life women and then there's this like one just tree trunk leg person who's just and it's just like come on man like again we can't vote for you if we think there's a worm in your brain of some kind you know we can't vote for you if you just obstinately want to die on these hills that make no sense you know It's all good. Men can get pregnant and so forth. Yeah.

• 1:05:12Bill Maher?

  And that but that's what opens the door to you know we don't need to get into it but what I think is a greater threat and but you know what can I say if somebody sent me a very sad email the other day about a very dear friend of theirs who was unfairly I think like frog marched out of the country for being a migrant and all I could answer back was you shouldn't have lost the election that's what happens when you lose elections elections have consequences you went way too far with your crazy left wing bullshit and and the people said no he's less crazy than this and you just you did it to yourself

• 1:05:54Bill Maher?

  so I'm real sorry about your migrant friend and that isn't right but it's predictable and you could have stopped it if you really thought Trump was the existential threat he was then you know to your point earlier why put up Biden if it was really that important I mean Democrats will never be able to answer that question if that election was really that important you couldn't summon the courage to confront an old man that your time has passed? That's a good question.

• 1:06:23Speaker 02

  That's a good question and and part of the answer is who as always who benefit.

• 1:06:29Bill Maher?

  Who you bueno.

• 1:06:30Speaker 02

  Exactly so and the answer is uh the the the the mice who could play while the while the rats away the mice the cats away the mice could play. So a lot of people have a very good time having a lot of power with absolutely no responsibility and thinking that they were uh secure from any oversight uh because of the press and they were but now now we'll see.

• 1:06:56Bill Maher?

  But since there's been this vibe shift like it hasn't helped you in the business. I mean, you said before when you sat down blacklist it and blah, blah, blah.

• 1:07:05Speaker 02

  No, the business is over. You know that it's uh.

• 1:07:07Bill Maher?

  Oh, but it's more that the business is over.

• 1:07:10Speaker 02

  Well, no, no, the A, the business is over, B, I'm real old and and C, I'm working a lot. I'm just, you know, I'm not working as I was working forty years ago in the last uh decade of the studio system. That's all gone.

• 1:07:25Bill Maher?

  Right.

• 1:07:26Speaker 02

  But I'm making movies, I'm doing plays, I'm writing books.

• 1:07:29Bill Maher?

  What about streaming? Do you think that that is helpful, hurtful? Is that could that be good for you? Could that be a?

• 1:07:36Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 1:07:37Bill Maher?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:37Speaker 02

  Sure. Why not? Why not? I mean,

• 1:07:42Speaker 02

  the worst thing in the world for me was have to sit in in a in a room with a bunch of idiots, right, who knew nothing about movie making and explain to them uh

• 1:07:54Speaker 02

  what the script meant, right? And so to a large extent, I you know, I didn't I didn't do it. I said, you know, make the movie or plenty or trade me. But the only worst thing that is to sit in a room with a bunch of idiots who don't know what the script meant and have no idea who I am. Right? It's like Joe Mankiewicz. He came in when he's an old guy and the and the studio executive said, what have you done? And Mankiewicz said, you first.

• 1:08:21Bill Maher?

  Well, you know, the Shelley Winters story, right?

• 1:08:23Speaker 02

  Well, what's that?

• 1:08:24Bill Maher?

  Shelley Winters had three Oscars and she was asked to audition. And she walked into the office and she put her Oscars down on the guy's desk and said, maybe you don't know my work.

• 1:08:34Speaker 02

  That's good.

• 1:08:35Bill Maher?

  So uh what are you? What are you writing now?

• 1:08:41Speaker 02

  Well, I got this movie, Henry Johnson.

• 1:08:43Bill Maher?

  But you wrote that?

• 1:08:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:08:45Bill Maher?

  What are you writing now?

• 1:08:47Speaker 02

  Well, I'm writing now, I'm working on that, um, the confidence movie. And I think I've got somebody's gonna make it. And we got some really interesting people involved in that. And, um, I got a couple of the little books coming out that over the years, especially during COVID, I did so much stuff that now it's all jammed up. And I made a huge mistake, many decades ago, I realized that, because I like to write a lot, that I needed to create other identities and names, and I should have done it, but I never did.

• 1:09:20Bill Maher?

  You mean, like, um,

• 1:09:23Bill Maher?

  who is the one who wrote all those French mysteries? And it wasn't really the person's name, because they

• 1:09:28Speaker 02

  Oh, Semenow.

• 1:09:29Bill Maher?

  Semenow.

• 1:09:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:09:30Bill Maher?

  George Semenow.

• 1:09:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:09:31Bill Maher?

  Yes. Yeah, it's a way to be more prolific. I mean, you're so prolific as it is, but yeah, I guess you could write other things. Or it could be like the front. It could be like the blacklist era, because you're blacklisted, you know.

• 1:09:45Speaker 02

  Exactly so.

• 1:09:46Bill Maher?

  Of course, your style is, you know, very often distinctive. But somebody could be like, you know, as long as they had the cover. But I think that's gonna change. I, I do. What about overseas? I would think you would have like a Woody Allen kind of thing, Jerry Lewis thing, like overseas, like they would adore you in ways that this country sometimes is too provincial.

• 1:10:08Speaker 02

  Oh, I don't know. It seems to like my, my, my work a lot in Italy, and I got a lot of supporters. In fact, that Henry Johnson movie premiered at the Tamiina Film Festival. That was a world premiere.

• 1:10:21Speaker 02

  Other than that, uh,

• 1:10:26Speaker 02

  I've always been very interested in education. And I wrote this novel that was coming out soon called Some Recollections of Saint Ives, which is a false memoir of a guy teaching for 40 years at a New England prep school. I'm very, very happy with that. So that's coming out next month.

• 1:10:44Bill Maher?

  And do you know what that's about? Or is that one where you

• 1:10:46Speaker 02

  No, I wrote, that's all written already.

• 1:10:47Bill Maher?

  I know, but you said before, you don't always know what it's about.

• 1:10:51Speaker 02

  Yeah. That's, uh, it's, it's about education. It's about A fellow looking back and saying, really, what is education? What did we do at this school that's different than other schools? What have I, what have I learned? And so I will, years ago, I said to my wife, I want to write a book about education. She said, please, please don't. So instead, I wrote, I wrote a novel about, about a school.

• 1:11:15Bill Maher?

  It is, I mean, you could easily write a series of books on how the downfall of education is the source of all our problems in this country.

• 1:11:25Speaker 02

  Well, I think so. But see, the other thing is the contributory factor is the internet. Because kids are addicted to these, you know, I got a bunch of kids and they came into the end of the addiction. They're addicted to this stupid fucking machine, which means that they don't see the world. And you walk around my neighborhood, you see not only teenagers on the stupid fucking machine, but guys pushing a baby carriage and the fucking babies on the stupid fucking machine.

• 1:11:51Bill Maher?

  No, not a baby.

• 1:11:52Speaker 02

  Yes, indeed, indeed, I have pictures.

• 1:11:55Bill Maher?

  Babies have, babies don't have cell phones. You're saying babies have cell?

• 1:12:00Speaker 02

  On whatever they, not a cell phone, wherever they are, the little, little games, right? So the thing about all these machines is that they're hypnotic. So they're just like cigarettes, right? They get you all jazzed up. And so they make you wanna smoke more cigarettes because you're jazzed up. The, the periodicity of the machines is hypnotic. You can't look away. So you have to give yourself a reason that you've been hypnotized. And you say, oh, it's because I like secession rather than the game of thrones or because I need to take, stay involved or because I need this, because I need the da, da, da, da, da. But to me, the giveaway phrase, I think I put it in a book, is I just have to. What are you doing?

• 1:12:42Speaker 02

  There it's ten o'clock and I just have to do this, right? You don't say, I just have to have a drink of water.

• 1:12:50Bill Maher?

  But I mean, I, yeah, I know. I, maybe, I'm sure it's just that I'm from a different generation, but I can look on, I mean, I'm barely on these sites, but I must be on Instagram, I have it. And if I go on it, all it is, is dogs doing funny things. Because it must have been that the only thing I ever clicked on.

• 1:13:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was dogs.

• 1:13:13Bill Maher?

  Was dogs doing funny things.

• 1:13:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:13:15Bill Maher?

  So it was just an endless scroll and I could. Uh, uh, watch it all day. It's endlessly amusing. But I don't. But I say to myself, because I'm a sentient being, after two minutes, "Well, that was great, but I do have a life to live." You mean, that's beyond the ken of the younger generation? They can't just discipline themselves enough to do that?

• 1:13:40Speaker 02

  Well, they can't discipline themselves to do anything, because why should they? If their parents don't discipline them, the school doesn't discipline them, the church doesn't discipline them, the Boy Scouts doesn't, the military doesn't, why should they learn discipline?

• 1:13:51Bill Maher?

  Yes.

• 1:13:52Speaker 02

  People, we learn discipline, we have to, not before.

• 1:13:55Bill Maher?

  Yeah. I mean, that was one of the themes of my last stand-up special, was that I really placed it back on parents. If you indulge your kids, uh, if you kiss their ass so much when they're kids and tell them they're really just shorter adults, and that their thoughts are just as valid as that of an adult. I mentioned the time, or it actually wasn't the time, it would have never been a time, but I would often see my parents, when I was a kid, discussing personal, I'm not personal, but political events in the living room with their friends. The idea that I would have walked into that room and said, "You know, I have some thoughts about Vietnam."

• 1:14:39Bill Maher?

  And yet, I see, I've been to people's houses where their kids are, invite themselves into adult conversations and are not reprimanded for doing so. So if you bring up a child that way, and of course, they're not, you know, the, the brain is not even fully developed. If you bring up a kid that way, and then they start saying, you know, "Well, men can get pregnant," and whatever the latest crazy thing is, um, of course, that's what's gonna be the, the downstream upshot of have, bringing up kids that way. That their stupid ideas are just as valid and should be taken seriously.

• 1:15:22Bill Maher?

  It kinda reminds me of the way, uh, you know, sometimes in medieval times or Renaissance times, any time when they were still having kings, um, and the king would die, and a four-year-old would take the throne. The dolphin, the dauphin, right? And then there would be a regent. But, you know, at a certain point, the kid would make pronouncement.

• 1:15:45Speaker 02

  What are you saying, are we talking about Hunter Biden?

• 1:15:50Bill Maher?

  See, took the, you saw me lower my left and you put in, and you got the hook in.

• 1:15:56Speaker 02

  You calmed down and I drilled in.

• 1:15:59Bill Maher?

  But, but it is kind of like that, you know, when you have to take the rantings of a child seriously, because that's what would happen, is that the five-year-old would say something ridiculous, and then the whole court would have to pretend that it was something that we should, that the council will meeting on the idea that we should examine his poop twice a day.

• 1:16:19Speaker 02

  See, that's why we have to have school choice. Because if the government's going to tell you where you must send your kids, and you don't like what they're teaching you in school, you've just given your kid to the government.

• 1:16:31Bill Maher?

  Did you take your kids out of school?

• 1:16:33Speaker 02

  I took, I had a, I had a couple of kids from a previous relationship who went to a impossibly elite, loathsome, woke seminary in Santa Monica. And then I had my daughter Clara, who dropped out of school when she was 14, because she just couldn't take it anymore, and she became an emancipated minor.

• 1:17:00Bill Maher?

  Really?

• 1:17:00Speaker 02

  And went to work on a Disney show for two years. And she was great, so she didn't have any school. And then my son went to a couple of schools and he got into, just this thing extraordinary. He's, um, he's 25 and when he started to be 20, he says, Dad, I want to create a video game. I said, okay, good, good, good. You may not know, every young kid of that age wants to create a video game. That's their dream. Five years later, he's taught himself code, he's created this video game. It's just released, and it's on the internet. I said, how'd you do? He said, it's been out for a week, oh, it just made $5,000. I said, what? This is a kid, you know, sitting by himself, so I should maybe um cool my jets

• 1:17:45Speaker 02

  because he spent all these years sitting on his computer. He made this gorgeous video game, now he's gonna make another one.

• 1:17:52Bill Maher?

  But was that enough to make a living? I mean, is it?

• 1:17:55Speaker 02

  It's enough to start. I said, you know, dude, you're doing much better at your age than I was at your age. You know, I was just starting to write, I was driving a cab for a living, right? He's working on a straight job too. I said, you know, one thing at a time. So what are you gonna get out of going to school? Also, why are these parents, these idiots sending their kids, especially the Jews, sending their kids to these quote elite universities? It's it's it's insane.

• 1:18:22Bill Maher?

  Well, I think because when the parents went to those elite universities, they were elite. People don't understand that it's not your dad's college.

• 1:18:31Speaker 02

  That's true, that's boy, that's true, but because these colleges are living on fumes now.

• 1:18:37Bill Maher?

  Well, I mean, your boy's going after them hard.

• 1:18:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, good, good.

• 1:18:41Bill Maher?

  Okay, but you know what? Look, I'm again, everything is always over the top. Like, was I with him that I said it for years about Harvard and these places, especially after October 7th, that they're they're just asshole factories and

• 1:18:59Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 1:19:00Bill Maher?

  They're asshole factories and they don't understand, they have no perspective on anything, which is how they wound up on the wrong side of what's liberal. They cannot figure out who the good guys are in this battle. As you say in your book, Israel is really the leader of the free world now. I think that's kind of true.

• 1:19:18Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 1:19:18Bill Maher?

  Um, but to ban all foreign students? I mean, most of the foreign students who come here are not for the globalizing, the infinitada. They're Chinese and they're

• 1:19:33Speaker 02

  How do you know? I know you'd like to believe it, I would too. How do you know?

• 1:19:35Bill Maher?

  You think most of the foreigners do? No, some, because they're coming to America for the same reason many of them have always come to America. Because it's a beacon of hope and it's a place where you can study and where you can learn and where the labs are good. And that's why we have kicked ass in the world with 4% of the population. Because we stole ideas and good people and good brains from all over the world because they wanted to come here. And he is fucking with that. People are not going to want to come here and already have stopped coming here. And we want, we don't want to have a brain drain out of the country, which is also happening. We want to have a good.

• 1:20:14Speaker 02

  We're here.

• 1:20:15Bill Maher?

  What?

• 1:20:15Speaker 02

  We're here.

• 1:20:16Bill Maher?

  We're here because we're too old to leave. Uh, we want to have a, a place that attracts the best brains. That was always one of our big secrets. Uh, this is.

• 1:20:28Speaker 02

  Here's the thing.

• 1:20:30Speaker 02

  I don't want my tax dollars to go to give an endowment to Harvard.

• 1:20:35Bill Maher?

  I don't either.

• 1:20:36Speaker 02

  Okay, so Trump says, wait a second. You have to do away with the anti-Semitism. They say, fuck you. They say, wait, no, no, no, you really have to. It's against the law. It's against the Civil Rights Act. You have to stop.

• 1:20:48Bill Maher?

  They made some concessions.

• 1:20:50Speaker 02

  What, what were they?

• 1:20:51Bill Maher?

  I do, do I have it written down?

• 1:20:53Speaker 02

  Exactly, so they said they were going to make some concessions. I don't know if they made any, but here's the thing. If it were blacks or gays or women, you wouldn't say.

• 1:21:01Bill Maher?

  Absolutely.

• 1:21:02Speaker 02

  Oh, you, uh, they made some concessions.

• 1:21:04Bill Maher?

  Oh, my God.

• 1:21:05Speaker 02

  So the Trump says, you have to fucking stop it. And they say, I'm not going to. So they say, so he says, okay, guess what? I'm going to have to raise you back. We're going to play hardball. That's what he's doing.

• 1:21:16Bill Maher?

  Yes, I understand that.

• 1:21:17Speaker 02

  Did you ever play poker?

• 1:21:18Bill Maher?

  No.

• 1:21:19Speaker 02

  Okay, when you play poker, you have to dominate the table. You can't just say, I'm going to call your bet and see what happens. You have to raise people. You have to put people in the back, put, you have to make them respond to you. So that's what he's doing.

• 1:21:32Bill Maher?

  What if you don't have the cards to do that?

• 1:21:34Speaker 02

  What?

• 1:21:34Bill Maher?

  What if you don't have the cards to do that?

• 1:21:36Speaker 02

  Then don't play the hand. But if you do have the cards, you have to make, you have to make people fear you and wonder what you've got. So that once in a while, when you don't have the cards, you, um, you muscle them and either you win or once in a while they call you and they find that you're bluffing. So that the next time you can win, it's playing the long game.

• 1:21:58Bill Maher?

  Is that what he's doing with tariffs? Is that?

• 1:22:00Speaker 02

  Sure, of course, that's what he's doing.

• 1:22:01Bill Maher?

  That's, okay.

• 1:22:02Speaker 02

  Of course, that's what.

• 1:22:03Bill Maher?

  What do you think about tariffs on foreign films he wants to put on?

• 1:22:06Speaker 02

  Fucking, I don't know. I, you know, I don't know. I think he's gotten into, he's gotten

• 1:22:10Bill Maher?

  But that's your, that's your business.

• 1:22:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, he's gotten into the wrong pew, right? The, the, the point, listen, the thing about somebody in a position of great power is that they are enthralled to the people that they choose to advise them about the people that they just choo- they should choose.

• 1:22:27Bill Maher?

  Right.

• 1:22:28Speaker 02

  Right? So, we're the same thing. You go buy a house, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You're gonna say, mm, I want this. Who am I gonna pick for the architect? Who am I gonna pick for the designer? Who am I gonna pick to do the permitting? And then you're fucking fucked. You better hope you guessed right, right? So, somebody is advising him about getting into the film, ma- making, uh, uh, uh, making our films better here by putting tariffs on foreign films. That's not gonna make our films better here. The reason that films aren't better here is Hollywood, right? Holly- right? So, the, the, the, the way to make the films better is to let the market work.

• 1:23:03Bill Maher?

  Yeah. I mean, you're the guy who says, you know, they should make popcorn and not diversity rules, and I agree with you.

• 1:23:13Speaker 02

  Yeah. Also, it's just it's-

• 1:23:14Bill Maher?

  But I like popcorn movies and you don't.

• 1:23:16Speaker 02

  I lo- I, I love popcorn movies.

• 1:23:18Bill Maher?

  Yeah, Titanic.

• 1:23:20Speaker 02

  Oh, that's a garbage shit. But, uh, uh, I went to a movie just the other day and I ate a whole bunch of popcorn. But then I, um, but I think there was something in it.

• 1:23:30Bill Maher?

  What are some popcorn movies you like?

• 1:23:32Speaker 02

  Popcorn movie that I like? Well, I, you know, I like old movies.

• 1:23:37Bill Maher?

  Most people wouldn't consider those popcorn.

• 1:23:39Speaker 02

  Say what?

• 1:23:39Bill Maher?

  Most people would not consider that a popcorn movie.

• 1:23:41Speaker 02

  They aren't a popcorn movie.

• 1:23:42Bill Maher?

  I mean, I just watched a bunch of old movies. I like them too.

• 1:23:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, but I have really good popcorn that we cook at home in a, in a, in an air popper.

• 1:23:50Bill Maher?

  But, okay. I mean, you said the mi- the business is dying. They just, the, the, they just had their best box office weekend ever because of Lilo and Stitch, whatever the fuck that is, and, um, Mission Impossible. Mission Impossible is the ultimate popcorn movie.

• 1:24:08Speaker 02

  Yeah. So exactly so.

• 1:24:12Bill Maher?

  So do we hate it?

• 1:24:12Speaker 02

  What comes after the ultimate?

• 1:24:15Bill Maher?

  Ultimate two, still ultimating.

• 1:24:20Speaker 02

  So you're absolutely correct. You know, it's, he lived to be forever. At some point, Tom Cruise has got to shuffle off this mortal coil.

• 1:24:26Bill Maher?

  He says he's gonna do action movies when he's a hundred.

• 1:24:29Speaker 02

  Good, God bless him. But how many other people employed here are doing, doing movies?

• 1:24:34Bill Maher?

  No, I'm just saying the communal experience of going to the movies is not dead.

• 1:24:40Speaker 02

  Well, I went to the communal experience of a movie to see this movie on the Third Street Mall, which is dead with a couple of friends. And the two of us were there with one other person.

• 1:24:51Bill Maher?

  The mall is dead, not the Third Street Mall. I love the Third Street.

• 1:24:54Speaker 02

  When's the last time it's dead? There's nobody there.

• 1:24:56Bill Maher?

  Why?

• 1:24:57Speaker 02

  Because, because it got closed down through, because of COVID. And then it closed down because of the riots. And then it closed down because of the homelessness. So 90% I think of the stores are empty. There's nobody there.

• 1:25:09Bill Maher?

  Holy shit.

• 1:25:10Speaker 02

  It's terrible.

• 1:25:12Bill Maher?

  Okay, well, that is not a good argument for Californiaizing America.

• 1:25:17Speaker 02

  No, no, no.

• 1:25:19Bill Maher?

  That's gonna be a tough one to get around.

• 1:25:21Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:25:23Bill Maher?

  Well, I can't tell you how much I appreciate you coming by. I, sorry I pissed you off at the beginning. I adore you and I hope you don't hold that against me. I didn't, I did not intend to, like, immediately get onto that subject. We just did, I told you, there is no agenda here. It just happened.

• 1:25:44Speaker 02

  I appreciate it. Also, you know, I like what you said about, about your meeting, your meeting with Trump. Because you were just telling the truth.

• 1:25:51Bill Maher?

  Just told the truth.

• 1:25:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:25:53Bill Maher?

  I'm, I want everyone to keep talking.

• 1:25:55Speaker 02

  I do too.

• 1:25:56Bill Maher?

  And especially for the Democrats who have no power. How ridiculous to think you can get away with not talking to people when you have no, to your poker thing, you have no cards.

• 1:26:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's no, there's no.

• 1:26:11Bill Maher?

  You have no card.

• 1:26:12Speaker 02

  Plus, some things, things died. The Whig Party died. It was replaced by Republicans in, in, in 1860.

• 1:26:18Bill Maher?

  Parties can die. And the Repub- the Democrats, they will either go to the middle and stop being the party of, "I can't trust you because you're always counterintuitive," or they will die. And I think they will go to the middle. I think they will survive because, like, things want to live.

• 1:26:37Speaker 02

  Well, I hope that they do. I mean, people like, like, I don't, people like Josh Shapiro, they're great, but, I mean, you know, Pocahontas, the governor of Maine, who says, "I, I insist on, on, on boys in the girls' bathroom."

• 1:26:49Bill Maher?

  Right.

• 1:26:49Speaker 02

  That's crazy. It's just frickin' crazy.

• 1:26:52Bill Maher?

  Right.

• 1:26:52Speaker 02

  It's not just wrong. It's crazy.

• 1:26:56Bill Maher?

  I know, I know you think liberals want to destroy the family.

• 1:27:00Speaker 02

  Liberals want, no, I don't think they want to destroy the family. I think they have destroyed the family.

• 1:27:04Bill Maher?

  Oh, that's, okay.

• 1:27:07Speaker 02

  But they haven't destroyed my family.

• 1:27:09Bill Maher?

  But they didn't really do it on purpose. That's the thing.

• 1:27:12Speaker 02

  What you're saying is, I didn't know it was loaded, right?

• 1:27:15Bill Maher?

  I, oh, and that, and, yes.

• 1:27:16Speaker 02

  That's what Lee Harvey Oswald could have said, right?

• 1:27:19Bill Maher?

  Okay, but they, they, they, they actually, liberals actually think they're doing good. I know a lot of times, it's really just about making them feel good, which is what's so obnoxious when they do that. But they, but they're not actually trying to.

• 1:27:32Speaker 02

  Yes, but what we understand as dramatists is that nobody ever did something for a bad reason.

• 1:27:39Bill Maher?

  But see, this is why I think I understand Henry Johnson.

• 1:27:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:27:42Bill Maher?

  Because I think that.

• 1:27:43Speaker 02

  He thinks he's doing everything for the best reason.

• 1:27:44Bill Maher?

  I think that's what I think the movie's about.

• 1:27:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:27:46Bill Maher?

  I got you.

• 1:27:47Speaker 02

  Oh, good.

• 1:27:49Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 1:27:49Bill Maher?

  It is political.

• 1:27:52Speaker 02

  Thank you so much. You okay?

• 1:27:54Bill Maher?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:55Speaker 02

  Have you hurt yourself?

• 1:27:56Bill Maher?

  Basketball, rebounding.

• 1:27:58Speaker 02

  Jam it?

• 1:27:58Bill Maher?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:59Speaker 02

  Oh, that's terrible. Okay.

• 1:28:04Speaker 04

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• 1:28:46Speaker 04

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