Rob Reiner | Club Random with Bill Maher

Rob Reiner swings by Club Random for a fast, funny hang with Bill. They dig into the long-awaited Spinal Tap sequel – 41 years later – recounting how both films were built from nothing more than an outline and pure chaos. From Johnny Carson to TikTok, they unpack the death of a shared audience, trade sharp lines on aging, health, and bathroom wisdom, and rewind to All in the Family, the groundbreaking show that changed television and culture forever. Subscribe to the Club Random YouTube channel: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/c/clubrandompodcast?sub_confirmation=1⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Watch episodes ad-free – subscribe to Bill Maher’s Substack: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://billmaher.substack.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Subscribe to the podcast for free wherever you listen: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://bit.ly/ClubRandom⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Support our Advertisers: Go to https://www.zbiotics.com/random and use code random at checkout for 15% off your first order Connect with quality therapists and mental health experts who specialize in you at https://www.rula.com/random #rulapod #ad Head to https://www.nakedwines.com/random click ‘Enter Voucher’ and put in my code RANDOM for both the code AND password for 6 bottles of wine for JUST $39.99 with shipping included Check out https://www.neilnaturopathic.com and use code RANDOM at checkout for 20% off Buy Club Random Merch: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://clubrandom.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices ABOUT CLUB RANDOM Bill Maher rewrites the rules of podcasting the way he did in television in this series of one on one, hour long conversations with a wide variety of unexpected guests in the undisclosed location called Club Random. There’s a whole big world out there that isn’t about politics and Bill and his guests—from Bill Burr and Jerry Seinfeld to Jordan Peterson, Quentin Tarantino and Neil DeGrasse Tyson—talk about all of it. For advertising opportunities please email: [email protected] ABOUT BILL MAHER Bill Maher was the host of “Politically Incorrect” (Comedy Central, ABC) from 1993-2002, and for the last fourteen years on HBO’s “Real Time,” Maher’s combination of unflinching honesty and big laughs have garnered him 40 Emmy nominations. Maher won his first Emmy in 2014 as executive producer for the HBO series, “VICE.” In October of 2008, this same combination was on display in Maher’s uproarious and unprecedented swipe at organized religion, “Religulous.” Maher has written five bestsellers: “True Story,” “Does Anybody Have a Problem with That? Politically Incorrect’s Greatest Hits,” “When You Ride Alone, You Ride with Bin Laden,” “New Rules: Polite Musings from a Timid Observer,” and most recently, “The New New Rules: A Funny Look at How Everybody But Me Has Their Head Up Their Ass.” FOLLOW CLUB RANDOM https://www.clubrandom.com https://www.facebook.com/Club-Random-101776489118185 https://twitter.com/clubrandom_ https://www.instagram.com/clubrandompodcast https://www.tiktok.com/@clubrandompodcast FOLLOW BILL MAHER https://www.billmaher.com https://twitter.com/billmaher https://www.instagram.com/billmaher Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:30Speaker 06

  What would you say to a white person? What do you mean? Don't order that pumpkin spice latte. Get out of here, whatever that thing is.

• 1:41Speaker 06

  We're talking about a man running for president that has that sensibility. It's just, it's disgusting.

• 1:47Bill Maher?

  I said my piece.

• 1:52Speaker 06

  I hear somebody.

• 1:53Bill Maher?

  Rob.

• 1:53Speaker 06

  I hear a voice that I recognize.

• 1:56Bill Maher?

  Your wife's already mad at me.

• 1:58Speaker 06

  What, for what?

• 1:59Bill Maher?

  She said, "You got a great place." I've never been invited here. And which has got a... I've been to your house.

• 2:06Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:06Bill Maher?

  I just don't have, you know... When you're a bachelor, you don't really like have dinner parties.

• 2:11Speaker 06

  Yeah, I know, I know.

• 2:12Bill Maher?

  You say it with such sympathy.

• 2:13Speaker 06

  Well, I used to be.

• 2:15Bill Maher?

  I know.

• 2:15Speaker 06

  At one point in my life. Never had a party when I was still... Never did that.

• 2:19Bill Maher?

  Well, not that kind of party.

• 2:20Speaker 06

  No.

• 2:21Bill Maher?

  When you're single, you tend to pal around with single people. And when you're married, you have couple... In a relationship, you have couple friends.

• 2:29Speaker 06

  Exactly, exactly.

• 2:30Bill Maher?

  It's just...

• 2:30Speaker 06

  And when you have children, you gravitate towards couples that have children.

• 2:35Bill Maher?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:40Bill Maher?

  Oh, I'm so glad you're wearing the spinal top.

• 2:42Speaker 06

  Well, I'm doing it's... It's a shameless promotion.

• 2:46Bill Maher?

  I've had half a chubby ever since I've heard that this is coming out. I mean, I am one of a legion of people who have been waiting for years for a spinal top.

• 2:55Speaker 06

  You've been waiting 41 years.

• 2:57Bill Maher?

  I understand.

• 2:58Speaker 06

  You know, nobody's ever done a sequel 41 years after the first one.

• 3:02Bill Maher?

  It's great that they're all still here.

• 3:04Speaker 06

  Yes. That's... It's a plus. It's a plus. Although we have a bit... We have a bit in the second one, which I hope you'll see at some point.

• 3:14Bill Maher?

  Oh, first day.

• 3:15Speaker 06

  Yeah, and there's a bit where the guy who's a promotion guy says to them, "Listen, it will help your legacy if at least one of you were to die during the concert." Because the, you know, the...

• 3:33Bill Maher?

  So true.

• 3:33Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 3:34Bill Maher?

  I mean, it's the best career move anybody ever makes.

• 3:37Speaker 06

  Right. And yeah, and then, of course, they say, "Well, Chris," you know, as Nigel says, "Well, I don't want to die." And then McKean, as David says, "Will you settle for a coma?" And he says, "Ooh, well, that's very good thinking outside the literal box, actually."

• 3:56Bill Maher?

  Oh, that's...

• 3:56Speaker 06

  So, what are you drinking here?

• 3:59Bill Maher?

  That's tequila.

• 4:01Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 4:01Bill Maher?

  This is sparkling water.

• 4:03Speaker 06

  Yeah, and is that your drink of choice?

• 4:05Bill Maher?

  Uh, yes. I mean, I only... And this is Jing, which makes the sparkling water into diet soda without chemicals.

• 4:12Speaker 06

  Really?

• 4:13Bill Maher?

  Yeah. I'm very into health, and that's why I drink liquor.

• 4:18Speaker 06

  I know you are. I know you are.

• 4:18Bill Maher?

  You look very svelte.

• 4:20Speaker 06

  Well, I'm trying, you know. I'm getting older and I don't wanna...

• 4:23Bill Maher?

  It's a smart thing. It's a smart thing.

• 4:25Speaker 06

  I'm trying, yeah.

• 4:25Bill Maher?

  But, you know, you lost the weight, but your face looks great. Some people who are heavy, they lose the weight and they look bad.

• 4:32Speaker 06

  Yeah, well, I have a fat face.

• 4:34Bill Maher?

  It's good. It didn't happen to you. You just look healthier.

• 4:37Speaker 06

  The other thing a fat face does is it keeps the wrinkles.

• 4:41Bill Maher?

  Yes.

• 4:42Speaker 06

  You know, the fatness takes the wrinkles away.

• 4:45Bill Maher?

  Absolutely. It's not all bad being a fat face.

• 4:47Speaker 06

  No, no.

• 4:48Bill Maher?

  But can I ask you an inside...

• 4:51Speaker 06

  You can ask me anything you want.

• 4:52Bill Maher?

  Okay, baseball question.

• 4:53Speaker 06

  Sure.

• 4:54Bill Maher?

  What percentage... I mean, you just told me a really hysterical scene from the movie. Was that written? Was that all in the script? Is that part?

• 5:02Speaker 06

  No script.

• 5:03Bill Maher?

  No script?

• 5:04Speaker 06

  No, just no script.

• 5:05Bill Maher?

  All that?

• 5:06Speaker 06

  Both movies, the first one and this one, all the dialogue is improvised. Now, we did have a, you know, we had an outline and we knew what we were gonna, you know, what the tour was gonna take. We have a basic outline, but every bit of dialogue is improvised. And this is a good little story. So, when we did the first one, we put billboard, you know, chalkboard, whatever. And if you had an idea for a scene, you put a card up. Harry, Harry Shearer, who plays Derek, he was dating a woman who worked at ABC News at the time.

• 5:43Speaker 06

  And do you remember Roger Grimsby?

• 5:45Bill Maher?

  Do I remember him, of course.

• 5:48Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 5:48Bill Maher?

  Cause I grew up local New York.

• 5:50Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah.

• 5:51Bill Maher?

  Roger Grimsby, here now the news.

• 5:53Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 5:53Bill Maher?

  That was his catchphrase.

• 5:55Speaker 06

  That's right.

• 5:55Bill Maher?

  Here now the news.

• 5:56Speaker 06

  And so, I don't know how he got a hold of him, but he had a stack of promotional cards that had a picture of Roger Grimsby on the front and the back was empty. So if we ever came up with an idea that we thought, hmm, this could be a good, interesting idea for a scene, we'd say to each other, does this warrant a Grimsby? In other words, should we put it up on the board? And so, and the second time we did it, the second movie, McKean comes in with a stack of Grimsby. So that, that's the way we do it.

• 6:26Bill Maher?

  That is a name that if it wasn't his real name, someone would have had to invent it. It's just perfect.

• 6:31Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah.

• 6:32Bill Maher?

  But that's so interesting, the way you just described making the movie, no dialogue is written in the script. You just have this outline.

• 6:40Speaker 06

  Right.

• 6:41Bill Maher?

  Eh, you invented that apparently. That's not, I mean, I think people think Curb Your Enthusiasm was the show that started that.

• 6:49Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah.

• 6:49Bill Maher?

  Apparently this then, you know, you're talking about 20 years before.

• 6:53Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah. No, this is in 1984. I mean.

• 6:56Bill Maher?

  That's your method.

• 6:57Speaker 06

  Yeah, and, and, and what's interesting is people have asked me over the years, they say, you know, it's your first film. Why would you do, you know, you make a film that has no script? I mean, there's, there's no. And, and I said, yeah, that made more sense to me than the other way. Because, you know, I mean, if you, if you, Chris Guest used to call schnaddling. When you schnaddle with somebody, you can either do it or you can't do it. And so you get people who can do it and then it's like jazz musicians.

• 7:24Bill Maher?

  It would not make sense if film wasn't cheap. I've been on sets before, back in the million years ago when I did acting and I remember more than one director's, you know, should we do another take? Film's cheap.

• 7:40Speaker 06

  Film, and this is even cheaper.

• 7:42Bill Maher?

  Right.

• 7:43Speaker 06

  Because, well, for film, you got ten minutes. This, you got an hour in a little chip.

• 7:47Bill Maher?

  If you don't get it the first five times, do it five times more.

• 7:51Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah.

• 7:52Bill Maher?

  And so, it's just, and then you just pick the best.

• 7:55Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah.

• 7:55Bill Maher?

  You have the best, the best of both worlds. You have the spontaneity.

• 7:59Speaker 06

  Yes, what's interesting about it, and this I learned in the first one, is you, we, you know, we shot each scene maybe two or three times, and Chris Guest, who's brilliant, he knows, he's in the moment, and he never remembers what he did before. So it's new every time. So you have to figure out, how do I stitch all this together to make it make sense? And what you discover is that you cut the audio, not so much the video, not so much you cutting to make sure that there's no mismatches. If the audio tracks, and they sound like they're, you know, talking in some kind of

• 8:39Speaker 06

  rhythmic thing that makes sense, the audience will forgive all of the visual mismatches. And that's what we discovered. So you're, you're essentially writing with the pieces of film.

• 8:52Bill Maher?

  Isn't that every film to a degree?

• 8:54Speaker 06

  Well.

• 8:54Bill Maher?

  Made in the editing room?

• 8:56Speaker 06

  Well, some of them are, some are, but, but usually, the editor has a script, you know, has a story, and it, there's this scene that goes into this scene, goes into this scene. We would move scenes around, you don't know, you know, take, there's a whole element, oh, that doesn't work, get that out of there, you know?

• 9:12Bill Maher?

  Right, but I'm saying, you know, if you shoot, I mean, how many hours of footage did you shoot to make?

• 9:17Speaker 06

  Oh, God.

• 9:18Bill Maher?

  A movie that runs for, what, an hour, twenty minutes?

• 9:20Speaker 06

  An hour, actually, they both run eighty-three minutes. An hour, twenty-three minutes.

• 9:26Bill Maher?

  I mean, you're just, you're, you're doing the audience such, you're squeezing out all the stuff that isn't awesome.

• 9:32Speaker 06

  That's right, and I, and I, I would always say, have in your mind, you're sculpting an elephant, whatever.

• 9:39Bill Maher?

  Right.

• 9:39Speaker 06

  Then, anything that doesn't look like an elephant, it goes, even if you love it, even if it's a funny bit, but it doesn't attach itself, you, you, you get rid of it.

• 9:49Bill Maher?

  But you do realize that even that idea, which people of our generation take for granted. That is not the way the younger generation necessarily looks at entertainment. And the proof of that is so much of what they watch on TikTok and so forth, YouTube, is just people doing ordinary things.

• 10:09Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 10:09Bill Maher?

  And I've said to younger people, like, how could this be more interesting to you? That everything is available. You could watch any movie. You could watch any TV show. People, uh, uh, shows with great acting, great writing, and that's not what they want.

• 10:23Speaker 06

  Yeah, no, they watch, they watch these, what they call, it's supposed to be reality. But in a weird way, it's not. Because they know they're putting themselves on TikTok. They know they're doing something on Instagram, and they're doing something to perform to do that.

• 10:40Bill Maher?

  Well, but I mean, there was this stage of a reality show, which is different than what we're talking about.

• 10:46Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 10:46Bill Maher?

  With scripting and good writing and acting. That at least was entertaining because it was never, of course, really a, you know, they were put up to it. You're gonna have a fight.

• 10:55Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah.

• 10:55Bill Maher?

  And then they do.

• 10:56Speaker 06

  Yes, yes, it's not reality.

• 10:58Bill Maher?

  But this is, this is a step removed from that. This is like watching people take their laundry out.

• 11:03Speaker 06

  Yes, yes. And here's what's interesting.

• 11:05Bill Maher?

  What is your analysis of that?

• 11:07Speaker 06

  Okay, well, here's the thing. I don't know if you ever saw this documentary years ago. It was called We Live in Public. You ever, did you ever see it? It was writ, it was about the guy who created MySpace, which was the precursor to, you know, Facebook. And he says at the beginning of the documentary, he says, Marshall McLuhan had it wrong. Marshall McLuhan said, everybody wants their 15 minutes of fame.

• 11:37Bill Maher?

  Now, that was Andy Warhol. Marshall McLuhan was the, no, Marshall was the one who said, TV's a cool medium.

• 11:44Speaker 06

  Oh, cool medium. Cool medium, right.

• 11:47Bill Maher?

  Warhol said 15.

• 11:48Speaker 06

  Warhol, right. You're right, you're right, you're right, you're right. Warhol says, everybody wants their 15 minutes of fame.

• 11:53Bill Maher?

  No, he said they'll get it. He said, in the future, everyone will be famous for 15 minutes.

• 11:57Speaker 06

  Right. So here's the thing. It's not that they want 15 minutes of fame. They want 15 minutes of fame every day.

• 12:04Bill Maher?

  Right.

• 12:04Speaker 06

  It's not, you know what I mean? It's not like, oh, they're gonna know me. No, I wanna be known every minute. They want people to, hey, look at me, look at me, look at me.

• 12:14Bill Maher?

  That's, that's so exactly right. They, they want it to continue. And, you know, we live in this.

• 12:23Bill Maher?

  Medium, this medium culture now where everything is so dispersed. Everyone almost has their own channel or their own place to sell something. We came up when there was like, you went on Johnny Carson, or you went on Merv Griffin, or Dick Cavett, that was it.

• 12:42Speaker 06

  And you got noticed.

• 12:44Bill Maher?

  Well, of course, because everyone was channeled and funneled into one of these two or three silos.

• 12:50Speaker 06

  Right, and you couldn't watch, and I mean, it's not like you, now you do, you know, whether it's Jimmy Fallon, Jimmy Kimmel, or, or, you know, Steve and Colbert. They don't watch those shows, they watch little bits and pieces of it on YouTube.

• 13:03Bill Maher?

  Well, one of those shows doesn't even exist anymore, or is going off.

• 13:06Speaker 06

  Well, Stephen, yeah.

• 13:07Bill Maher?

  Yeah, the other two, I mean, you can, they still exist and you can still do it that way, but the reason why they're going off and they're just watching clips is because everyone has their own talk show.

• 13:20Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 13:21Bill Maher?

  It's like if Johnny Carson was competing with Merv and four million other people.

• 13:26Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 13:28Bill Maher?

  And so like, when you try to get a guest for this podcast, very often it's like, well, you know, they, they're doing two other podcasts, who are they? Well, their brother and their best friend, because everybody, either they themselves, or someone they know or they're close to.

• 13:43Speaker 06

  It's very hard to find somebody who doesn't have a podcast. That's what I want to, who doesn't?

• 13:50Bill Maher?

  In our world, it really is.

• 13:52Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah. This is something that I've been thinking about for a while, and you, you, you hit on it a little bit. When I was on this All in the Family, and by the way, young people, they don't even know All in the Family, they, they never heard of it, they don't know what it is. I mean, this is a show that was number one for five years in a row, every single week.

• 14:13Bill Maher?

  Not just number one at the time, but a culturally groundbreaking show. It was a show, again, I'm saying this for the people who don't know.

• 14:22Speaker 06

  Yeah, no, I'm telling you, young people, they, they don't know.

• 14:23Bill Maher?

  But I'm just letting me set it up for them, to know what we're talking about. We're not just talking about a show that was a hit show on a grand scale, we're talking about a show that changed the game.

• 14:32Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 14:33Bill Maher?

  It wasn't just a difference of, of form, it was a difference of kind.

• 14:38Speaker 06

  Right, right.

• 14:39Bill Maher?

  And that was, that meant a lot.

• 14:41Speaker 06

  Yeah, but think about this. Here we were, a country of, at that time, nineteen seventy-one, about two hundred million people. Around that number.

• 14:51Bill Maher?

  Right.

• 14:51Speaker 06

  Every single week, forty to forty-five million people

• 14:57Bill Maher?

  Right.

• 14:57Speaker 06

  would watch All in the Family.

• 14:59Bill Maher?

  So a quarter of the country.

• 15:00Speaker 06

  And, yeah, and they had to watch it when it was on. There was no DVR, there was no TiVo, there was none of that.

• 15:09Bill Maher?

  No.

• 15:09Speaker 06

  You had to watch it when it was on. That meant that you were having a shared experience with forty to forty-five million people. That has an impact. You then talking to people, the, you know, the water cooler thing and all that. Now, we're a country of, what, three hundred and forty million or something like that? If you get a show that gets ten million viewers, that's a big hit, and they're not all watching it at the same time.

• 15:35Bill Maher?

  The ten million is already out of date, Rob. There's no show that gets that. I mean, those are numbers that you get for, like, special events, sports.

• 15:43Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 15:43Bill Maher?

  Sports is the only shows that get that. Nobody else gets that.

• 15:46Speaker 06

  But, but think about a show, you know, some series that, you know, White Lotus. I don't care what it is, a hot show. If it's six million, five, whatever the number is.

• 15:55Bill Maher?

  Right.

• 15:56Speaker 06

  That's in a country of three hundred and forty million, and

• 15:59Bill Maher?

  Yeah.

• 15:59Speaker 06

  they're not all watching it at the same time. Because you go to a dinner, you can't talk about the show. You go to dinner, you say, "Don't tell me, I only, I only saw the first two episodes." "I'm only on season one." You can't, "What? I don't, don't talk." So you can't even talk about the show you're on. You know?

• 16:16Bill Maher?

  No, it's, it's, it's just so different. I was having this friendly argument with my friend Harvey Levin recently because they showed a clip on TMZ of a pop star. I can't remember her name, which says a lot because I should, because everybody in her world knows her.

• 16:32Speaker 06

  No, she's huge.

• 16:33Bill Maher?

  Because she was on the Make, uh, I was gonna say, Make Room for Daddy. Not Make Room For Daddy, Call Me Daddy podcast.

• 16:42Speaker 06

  Call me, oh, well, that's a big podcast.

• 16:44Bill Maher?

  Make Room For Daddy, kids.

• 16:46Speaker 06

  Danny Thomas, and we don't want to go there.

• 16:49Bill Maher?

  And if you don't remember All in the Family.

• 16:51Speaker 06

  You're really not going to remember that show.

• 16:53Bill Maher?

  I can remember Make Room For Daddy. Was your father friends with Danny Thomas?

• 16:57Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah.

• 16:58Bill Maher?

  Danny Thomas was.

• 16:59Speaker 06

  Yeah, Danny Thomas and his production company and Sheldon Leonard produced The Dick Van Dyke Show, which was my dad's show.

• 17:06Bill Maher?

  Of course. Did you know Danny Thomas?

• 17:08Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah, yeah. I mean, I was friends with, you know, I mean, Marlo. I'm friends with, you know, Tony Thomas when dated my sister in high school and stuff like that, yeah.

• 17:18Bill Maher?

  Was that true, the rumor that always went around about Danny, that he was a plate man?

• 17:23Speaker 06

  You know, I don't want to go there, Bill, because I don't have, I don't have hard evidence or loose evidence.

• 17:29Bill Maher?

  Or evidence that makes, evidence that makes you hard, certainly.

• 17:35Bill Maher?

  Okay, but that was always the rumor.

• 17:36Speaker 06

  Yeah, who knows, you know, he, he had, you know.

• 17:40Bill Maher?

  He was, back then, Jerry Lewis, I mean, all those guys, it was a different era. People were weirdos.

• 17:46Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 17:46Speaker 00

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• 18:41Speaker 04

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• 18:47Bill Maher?

  Anyway, what I was saying is, she was saying to the, I think Alex Cooper's the host, that she did not know who Joe Rogan was, the James J. Rova.

• 18:58Speaker 06

  He doesn't even know who Joe Rogan is.

• 19:00Bill Maher?

  Right.

• 19:01Speaker 06

  Who's a big deal now.

• 19:03Bill Maher?

  Very big deal. I mean, in podcasting.

• 19:05Speaker 06

  He's number one.

• 19:06Bill Maher?

  By far, you know, he was one of the first to it, and he, you know, I think Joe does great. I don't always agree with him, and that's okay, but not to have heard of him.

• 19:16Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 19:17Bill Maher?

  And, you know, I said, "That says a lot," and Harvey said, "Oh, no, she knows." I said, "Then why is she lying?" And then he brought in two guys from his staff who were young, like 18, 19, but they were male. They weren't quite sure who Joe Rogan was either. And I thought, "If, if they don't know Joe Rogan, you know,

• 19:39Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 19:39Bill Maher?

  we are all in our own silos."

• 19:42Speaker 06

  Right, and by the way, it's very humbling, because it means that when we go, nobody's gonna remember any of this stuff. I mean, you know, I was walking out of Beverly Hills Hotel one day, and I run into Warren Beatty. Warren Beatty was as big a star in America as there ever was. And my kids, they're young kids, they don't know, they don't know what it is. I said, "Bonnie and Clyde," you know.

• 20:10Bill Maher?

  But why would they have, I mean, they may, how old are the kids?

• 20:13Speaker 06

  Well, now they know who he is, but they were young.

• 20:15Bill Maher?

  Right, but, of course, like, there were great movies that when I was 12, I wasn't aware of, and then I got to when I was 19.

• 20:23Speaker 06

  Yeah, but eventually you would watch them.

• 20:25Bill Maher?

  Well, I also think when I was, when we were younger, we looked up to older people, whereas now I think there's a tremendous kind of ageism in the country.

• 20:34Speaker 06

  Yeah, well, there's always been ageism.

• 20:36Bill Maher?

  There has always been ageism, but I feel like it's more hostile. Maybe it's just because I am older?

• 20:40Speaker 06

  Are people being hostile to you?

• 20:43Bill Maher?

  Yes.

• 20:45Bill Maher?

  Of course.

• 20:45Speaker 06

  You think it's because of your age? What do you think?

• 20:49Bill Maher?

  Partly, yes.

• 20:49Speaker 06

  Is your opinion, sir, something?

• 20:51Bill Maher?

  Well, that's probably part of it.

• 20:53Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah.

• 20:53Bill Maher?

  But they, but they will attack me, not on the merits of the argument. That's what I object to.

• 21:00Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 21:00Bill Maher?

  It's like, I've said it many times, I've said it publicly, I've said it on the air, like, if you have a problem with this, don't say you're old.

• 21:08Speaker 06

  Yeah, what is that?

• 21:09Bill Maher?

  That's not an argument.

• 21:10Speaker 06

  No.

• 21:10Bill Maher?

  In fact, that's a prejudice.

• 21:11Speaker 06

  It's an observation.

• 21:12Bill Maher?

  It's a prejudice.

• 21:13Speaker 06

  It's an observation.

• 21:14Bill Maher?

  Okay, but.

• 21:15Speaker 06

  No, you're right.

• 21:16Bill Maher?

  For the people who think that they're the most liberal, who absolutely hate any sort of prejudice, that is a prejudice.

• 21:22Speaker 06

  Absolutely.

• 21:23Bill Maher?

  Why should I even listen to you?

• 21:24Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 21:24Bill Maher?

  Or, you know, "Oh, he's just, get off my lawn." Well, again, that's just, that's just to cut off the debate.

• 21:30Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 21:31Bill Maher?

  Engage with the argument. See, you don't want to do that, because they'll lose.

• 21:34Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 21:34Bill Maher?

  So they just say, "You're old," and then immediately, you're just, you don't count what you have to say.

• 21:39Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 21:40Bill Maher?

  You can't imagine doing that to any other group.

• 21:42Speaker 06

  No.

• 21:43Bill Maher?

  I mean.

• 21:43Speaker 06

  No.

• 21:44Bill Maher?

  We are the last acceptable group, which you can mock, make fun of.

• 21:48Speaker 06

  But you're a lot younger than me, not a lot, but a little bit, a little bit. Um, but we, until there was the children of, the baby boom generation is the biggest chunk of people in, you know, in, in the population, so, you know, we have, we have strength in numbers, even if we're losing our strength.

• 22:10Bill Maher?

  Yeah, I, I saw this article when they canceled Stephen Colbert, and it said, "Ten years ago, the average Colbert viewer was 58 years old, today, they're 68 years old." I was like, "Yeah, it's the same guy."

• 22:27Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 22:28Bill Maher?

  Let me, let me, let me take a.

• 22:30Speaker 06

  He's got loyal fans.

• 22:31Bill Maher?

  Take a wild leap that this guy's gonna be 78 in 10 years.

• 22:34Speaker 06

  In 10 years, yeah.

• 22:35Bill Maher?

  I mean.

• 22:36Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 22:36Bill Maher?

  And, uh, you know, I, I am always open to everything anybody of any age says. When I criticize ideas that I think are dumb, with, if they come from young people, it's not because they're young.

• 22:50Speaker 06

  No.

• 22:51Bill Maher?

  You know? Uh, it's because I think your ideas are stupid.

• 22:54Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 22:55Bill Maher?

  You know, I mean, giving communism communism another try to me is a stupid idea.

• 23:00Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 23:00Bill Maher?

  Because people of our generation remember how evil and horrible communism was.

• 23:05Speaker 06

  But now we're at a different time. Now we're at a different time because it's not about like during the sixties. The, you know, with the Vietnam War, that was the whole idea was the creeping communism. And in the fifties was McCarthyism that there's communism under the bed everywhere you look is a communist. And what we didn't want was to be like the Soviet Union. We were basically saying, you know, protect America for democracy. And we fought against Hitler, you know, to to win the Second World War and.

• 23:37Bill Maher?

  Fascism, not communism.

• 23:38Speaker 06

  No, no, that we fought against fascism. As a matter of fact, the Russians fought on our side during the Second World War. So we fought against fascism and now that's the argument. Do, because America as, you know, as as ugly as it's been over the years, fits and starts. It moves towards hopefully better things. I mean, women couldn't vote, they can vote. Blacks couldn't marry whites, they can. Gays couldn't get married, they can. So we had a black president. I mean, things move along very slowly. And we certainly have an ugly past, slavery and all of that.

• 24:19Speaker 06

  But this is the first time that we've had another type of government. Form of government taking away that slow and awkward progress. And that is, we're looking at, you know, authoritarians around the world. And we have a guy who wants to be one of those guys. And so it's, it's, it's tough. It's a very tough thing because I don't know. Let me, you maybe you can tell me, you may be able to tell me. Because right after the First World War, Germany was a democracy for a minute.

• 24:56Speaker 06

  Before Hitler came in and then he said no.

• 24:59Bill Maher?

  The Weimar Republic.

• 25:00Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, so we're gonna do Third Reich and all that.

• 25:03Bill Maher?

  And Hitler was elected.

• 25:05Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, but but he was only he never had more than 25% of the of the electorate. But he figured out a way to do it.

• 25:13Bill Maher?

  Well, in a parliamentary system, very often people don't.

• 25:16Speaker 06

  Yeah, that's true.

• 25:17Bill Maher?

  There's many parties.

• 25:17Speaker 06

  Yeah, that's true. So but so he becomes fascist state and they do what they do, which is the horror. But and after the war, the Germany moves back towards a democracy. Slowly becomes a democracy, one of the best, strongest democracies in the world right now. But here's what's uncomfortable for us right now where we are. My wife, her mother was in Auschwitz. She was the only survivor of her whole family. The whole family died in Auschwitz.

• 25:55Speaker 06

  My Uncle Charlie was a part of the day and fought in 11 major battles and, you know, liberated camps. My second father, Norman Lear, flew.

• 26:08Bill Maher?

  Oh, yeah.

• 26:08Speaker 06

  52 bombing missions over Nazi Germany, all in service and millions and millions died. All in service of making sure that we would never become an authoritarian fascist state. And here we are, 80 years after that war, and we're moving towards that. It's scary.

• 26:29Bill Maher?

  It's very scary and, you know, on the, I said this on my show a few weeks ago. I think I was the first guy to use the phrase "slow-moving coup". I did it before he won the first time.

• 26:41Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah.

• 26:42Bill Maher?

  I never stopped. My big criticism of the people who were on my case or having dinner with him was just wait. See what I say after. If I change, if I start being complimentary or let it, no, I never changed. Never stopped saying what I've always been saying.

• 26:57Speaker 06

  Now it's not so slow-moving anymore.

• 26:59Bill Maher?

  That's what I said a couple of weeks ago. I said, this is act four of it. Like, the point I was making, and I don't remember anybody saying this before, I did see it get picked up a lot, so I don't think so, was that This thing about stopping crime by putting troops in the streets. Of course, you can stop crime with more troops in the streets. The problem is troops in the streets, once you get used to that, and once you have them in the streets, especially of our nation's capital. If there is a disputed election, you already have the private army in the street. They've been there for three, four years. This, to me, is textbook what you would do.

• 27:35Speaker 06

  Textbook.

• 27:36Bill Maher?

  And, you know, I, this is pessimistic, but I honestly don't see the Democrats getting power back, not for a very long time.

• 27:45Speaker 06

  You don't think, you don't think there's any chance that the Democrats could take back the House?

• 27:51Bill Maher?

  They could win the vote, but out, and so what? Congress, I was saying today, we should do something in January about, let's get rid of the State of the Union address, because it leads the country into a very bad thought, which is that the president is the one who suggests what should be done. That's not what the Constitution says. Congress does that. The president just is supposed to execute the laws. We have switched it completely, where people think he's the fucking leader, and because they don't know anything, because the education system fell apart.

• 28:22Speaker 06

  And most people, most people are not directly, at this point, directly affected. We have people who are thrown out of the country. Those people are directly affected, who shouldn't be. In many cases, there's no due process. We understand. That's a horror. That's a horror. But they, but the, you know, most Americans don't feel the pain of it yet, whether it's economically or their rights being taken away. And they will feel it, and the time they'll feel it, unfortunately, might be too late, when it's already taken over. Now, I, here's what I think.

• 29:00Bill Maher?

  I think it's already too late.

• 29:01Speaker 06

  Well, you may be right, you may be right, but this is what I'm thinking. You could stop, you could slow the thing down to a point where you might be able to uh, stop it because there's still going to be, hopefully, an election in, in, in 2026.

• 29:22Bill Maher?

  There'll be an election.

• 29:23Speaker 06

  Well, well, wait a minute.

• 29:24Bill Maher?

  Russia has elections.

• 29:25Speaker 06

  No, no, I'm saying, a, a, a, a fair election. We don't know if that will be. If there isn't, then you're right. Then, then, like the Vegas guys do, like that, it's over. But if there's an election where the Democrats are able to regain the House, then they have the ability to hold hearings and stuff like that and not gonna change everything overnight, but it slows the thing down.

• 29:50Bill Maher?

  Yeah.

• 29:50Speaker 06

  It slows it down.

• 29:51Bill Maher?

  This, yeah, that's possible, but it's still about...

• 29:55Speaker 06

  You don't think, you don't think there will be a fair election in 2026?

• 29:58Bill Maher?

  First of all, the way the Democrats are now, I just don't think they, I don't know if they would even win an election. Because they're very unpopular and for very good reason. Now, I didn't vote for Trump. As I always say to my woke friends, "We voted for the same person. You're just why she lost." I'm not saying that to you. I'm just saying, that's my line to them and I will stand by that. And every, everything Trump is doing, and by the way, a lot of the things that he would say he's straightening out, uh, almost all of them, I would say he's doing it in the wrong way, colossally wrong. But not wrong about like a lot of things that did needed straightening out. The border, for example.

• 30:38Speaker 06

  Yeah, but he's not really straightening it out.

• 30:40Bill Maher?

  I just said that. I said he doesn't do it in the right way, but, but the, you know, that instant, and, and I could...

• 30:45Speaker 06

  And there was, there was a bipartisan bill that called for stronger border security, all of that. And the Republicans said, "We don't want it."

• 30:54Bill Maher?

  That's politics.

• 30:54Speaker 06

  And by the way, it was, it was, uh, developed by, uh, a bipartisan group in the Senate. And they're, you know, very conservative Republican senators who were in favor of it anyway.

• 31:06Bill Maher?

  Yeah, I know.

• 31:07Speaker 06

  We're, we're far gone from that now. I mean, we're so far from that.

• 31:10Bill Maher?

  Right. I just don't see them, you know, giving up power. They, they...

• 31:17Bill Maher?

  Have all the levers of power and power begets power. You know, once you have it, it's easier to get more of it.

• 31:24Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 31:25Bill Maher?

  Like rabbits breeding.

• 31:26Speaker 06

  Well, especially, especially if you have no, if you have no compunction for

• 31:32Bill Maher?

  No.

• 31:32Speaker 06

  thumbing your nose at a, at a court ruling.

• 31:35Bill Maher?

  And

• 31:35Speaker 06

  or the rule of law.

• 31:36Bill Maher?

  Right.

• 31:36Speaker 06

  If you, if you don't care about it.

• 31:38Bill Maher?

  And if the people don't like the Democrats, again, often for very good reason. They don't seem connected to reality in a lot of ways. And they don't seem to be on the same page, common sense wise, with a lot of people. So there's a lot of people in this country who just go, yeah, I don't love Trump. He's crazy, but these people are even crazier. They have to get rid of that first. They, they don't even have a chance unless they do that. And, and they themselves are saying that now. I see that third, third way is that the group, the, it's a, it's a left-leaning

• 32:19Speaker 06

  Well, that was during the, during the, during the Clinton years, they had the, the, the third way.

• 32:24Bill Maher?

  I think that's what it's named after. Anyway, they put out a list trying to help the Democrats of 44 words and phrases they should never say again.

• 32:32Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 32:32Bill Maher?

  That like just lost people. Patriarchy and privilege and all stuff like

• 32:37Speaker 06

  Yeah, which bathroom you go into, does it, shouldn't be at the hill that you die on.

• 32:41Bill Maher?

  Right. Yeah, right. And people who are age, you pee a lot.

• 32:47Speaker 06

  Yeah. Really, I just, if there's a room, I can open it up and go in. I have that joke, I put it in bucket list, you know. I was making this movie, American President, and they had a, they had a, they had a consultant on it. He was a retired Secret Service guy. And he was telling me, because he was an older guy, he said, the three things you gotta remember when you get old. And I, I put it right in bucket list. I had Nicholson say it, says, never pass up a bathroom.

• 33:20Speaker 06

  Never waste a hard on and never trust a fart. That was, that was the three. So, yes, if there's a bathroom there, we want to be able to access it.

• 33:30Bill Maher?

  See, there's one you could redo.

• 33:32Speaker 06

  The bucket list?

• 33:33Bill Maher?

  No, the American president.

• 33:34Speaker 06

  Oh, the American president. Yeah.

• 33:36Bill Maher?

  I mean, God, when you think of, now, this is Michael Douglas in 1990 something?

• 33:42Speaker 06

  Six or, yeah, something like that.

• 33:43Bill Maher?

  I mean, that's 30 years ago, and you think about what the presidency was.

• 33:48Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 33:48Bill Maher?

  And, you know,

• 33:52Bill Maher?

  and, you know.

• 33:53Speaker 06

  And the, see, the issues are still the same. We still have a gun. We still have too many guns and people getting, you know, murdered every day on the streets, and we still have problems with the environment. Those were the two issues that we focused on.

• 34:05Bill Maher?

  Right, she was a lobbyist.

• 34:07Speaker 06

  She was a lobbyist for an environmental group, and, you know, you know, that was the thing that I was interested in at the time, and Aaron Sorkin, who wrote The Screenplay, he was interested in gun control.

• 34:19Bill Maher?

  Yeah, and, you know, it was the, as I remember the film, the crux of it is like, politics is about making deals. It's about bargains and like, of course, somebody can always get butthurt about you're not pure enough. Again, this is a big problem with the left.

• 34:36Speaker 06

  Perfect is the enemy of the good.

• 34:37Bill Maher?

  Right, but that's why, like, Obama, he was great at that. I mean, he was, he was that guy who thought that and said that, perfect is the enemy of the good, and let's get, what can practice, what can be done practically?

• 34:49Speaker 06

  But nobody's willing to do that now.

• 34:51Bill Maher?

  Nobody is.

• 34:52Speaker 06

  Both sides are not willing to

• 34:53Bill Maher?

  Exactly.

• 34:54Speaker 06

  do anything like what is the old, you know, the days, you know, you talk to Chris Matthews who worked for Tip O'Neill, and he said, he, Tip O'Neill, and, you know, and

• 35:04Bill Maher?

  Right.

• 35:05Speaker 06

  which is, they would talk all the time.

• 35:07Bill Maher?

  Exactly.

• 35:07Speaker 06

  The opposite.

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• 36:39Bill Maher?

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• 37:18Bill Maher?

  proteins. No sulfates, no parabens, no fake perfume that makes you smell like a spa exploded. And also important to me, they never test on animals. Dr. Neal formulates naturopathic tonics that focus on removing debris, supplying nutrients, and calming inflammation. A whole scalp approach. There's even a hair tonic tea to support scalp health, plus tonics and shampoos for dandruff, eczema, and regrowth. All of my guests on this show get these products, and a lot of them truly love it. I use it daily, and I'm doing pretty good. Now, you can too. If you care about ingredients like I do and want real results, check it out.

• 38:03Bill Maher?

  Check out neilnaturopathic.com. Use code RANDOM at checkout for 20% off. Again, that's N-E-I-L. Naturopathic.com. And use code RANDOM at checkout for 20% off. Then sit back, sip your tea, and enjoy the compliments.

• 38:25Bill Maher?

  This is why it's... This would make some sense for the Democrats if they had any power. But the idea of we don't talk to you when we don't even have the power? Of course you have to talk to people. I mean, there was an article somebody wrote. He was...

• 38:42Speaker 06

  But here's the thing. You're right, but here's the thing. Let's say we're gonna have that argument. You're gonna try to talk to somebody, and you have a point of view. The other person has a point of view. Before you have the exchange, you have to agree on certain facts.

• 38:56Bill Maher?

  No, you don't. You can't. Once you start down that road...

• 38:59Speaker 06

  Well, no, no.

• 39:00Bill Maher?

  It's like, you just have to talk to people.

• 39:02Speaker 06

  No, no, you talk to people. But if somebody says 2 plus 2 is 4, and the other guy says, "No, it's not", how do you begin a discussion?

• 39:11Bill Maher?

  Because it's... Because, Rob, that's a slippery slope. It just... I agree, there are certain things that we all think. And then there are people... I'm sorry, they... Everybody... I know this from doing this show. So many people who've sat here, and they're like, "Oh, this is a smart person. This is a rational person." This is... And then there's like one thing. They don't believe we landed on the moon. And you're just like... No, if you start down that road of, I can't talk to you if you believe this crazy thing. Because maybe.

• 39:41Speaker 06

  Okay, but, okay, so let's say you're. Let's say you're having a conversation with that person, the, I don't believe.

• 39:46Bill Maher?

  Oh, I have.

• 39:47Speaker 06

  Okay, so, so what do you do? What do you say after that?

• 39:52Bill Maher?

  What do you do in a marriage if?

• 39:53Speaker 06

  No, but if I says that, and you say what?

• 39:56Bill Maher?

  No, I'm serious. Same thing what you would do in a marriage.

• 39:59Speaker 06

  And who would know better than me?

• 40:01Bill Maher?

  Yeah, yeah, you're an expert. No, but in a relationship.

• 40:05Speaker 06

  But it says that, he says that, and you go what?

• 40:07Bill Maher?

  Okay, I'm, I'm answering you, just answering in the way I wanna answer.

• 40:10Speaker 06

  Okay, go ahead.

• 40:11Bill Maher?

  It's very like a relationship. I, and now, I have not been there, but I've been in long-term, serious relationships. And I know there are moments where the person is believing something. And you just, every fiber of your being, of your being wants to be like, I gotta get this person not to see it that way. Cause I just think it's fucking nuts.

• 40:33Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 40:33Bill Maher?

  And if you want that relationship to last, you're gonna have to learn the three little words that are most important to any relationship. And they're not, I love you. They're, let it go. Sometimes you just have to let it go. I mean, let's take our friend Bobby Kennedy. Now, I think they should let him go. I do. I mean, I've had extraordinary amount of patience with circumcision.

• 40:59Speaker 06

  I think you, you, I have to let him go, and you pull, and you pull out a, a scissors. And I'm, I, what do you say? He's not circumcised? What are you saying? Because he doesn't believe in it? Because there's too much thimerosal in that, in that scissors?

• 41:15Bill Maher?

  Exactly.

• 41:15Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 41:16Bill Maher?

  But we both like him. We both know him well.

• 41:18Speaker 06

  I've known him for a long time.

• 41:19Bill Maher?

  I know you have.

• 41:20Speaker 06

  He, he married the woman who used to be our assistant.

• 41:23Bill Maher?

  Is that right?

• 41:24Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, Cheryl.

• 41:26Bill Maher?

  Cheryl?

• 41:27Speaker 06

  She worked for us for a couple of years.

• 41:29Bill Maher?

  He's still his wife?

• 41:30Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah.

• 41:31Bill Maher?

  Cheryl Heinz?

• 41:32Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah. She's not our assistant, she's his wife. Yeah, no, she, she's still his wife, but not our assistant anymore.

• 41:38Bill Maher?

  But she was your assistant?

• 41:39Speaker 06

  Yeah, and she would, you know.

• 41:40Bill Maher?

  Before she was an actress?

• 41:41Speaker 06

  She was an actress. She was going out for jobs, you know, and interviews. And she got curb your enthusiasm while she was working for us.

• 41:49Bill Maher?

  Well.

• 41:50Speaker 06

  So we had to let her go.

• 41:51Bill Maher?

  Oh, of course.

• 41:52Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 41:53Bill Maher?

  Oh, I didn't know all that. Well, I mean, look, I tore Bradley Whitford a new asshole about this about a year ago because.

• 42:04Bill Maher?

  He, this is again what I really don't like about the left. Cause he was just so abusive in a tweet yelling at her for staying with her husband. Staying with her husband?

• 42:15Speaker 06

  No, well, that's not fair.

• 42:16Bill Maher?

  It's, and it's not.

• 42:17Speaker 06

  That's not fair.

• 42:18Bill Maher?

  It's a marriage.

• 42:19Speaker 06

  You know, you want to attack Bobby Kennedy for believing, you know, that let's, let's put the bear in the trunk and drop him off at Central Park. That's something you could talk about.

• 42:30Bill Maher?

  No, it's, look, there's, there's a great amount of disappointment I personally have. And a lot of people have. Because I've always been on the alternative side, shall we call it, of Western medicine. Not that I don't appreciate Western medicine, I'm glad we have it. But I think that the emphasis has always been on the wrong things, like pills and surgery instead of prevention. Stuff like that, that Bobby was all over. The idea that what really makes us sick is...

• 43:00Speaker 06

  Eating bad food, eating processed food and all that stuff. I understand. That part of it's good.

• 43:05Bill Maher?

  Exactly.

• 43:06Speaker 06

  But we do know that they eliminated polio.

• 43:10Bill Maher?

  Yes, I mean, that's...

• 43:11Speaker 06

  I mean, that's a thing.

• 43:13Bill Maher?

  It is a thing. It's a little more complicated than just the vaccine. It also had to do with, at the time, you know, there was bad sanitation, that got better. But look, I, I'm a vaccine fan. I just don't want you ever to force one on me.

• 43:27Speaker 06

  No, no, no, that's true, but, you know, my, my wife's pointed this out many times. I can guarantee you, his children had have been vaccinated when they were little. I'm sure they were, I'm sure he was vaccinated.

• 43:38Bill Maher?

  He just, I gave him every amount of slack I could because I like him. And because the general idea of it, I thought was good. But he just has proved himself to be someone who won't listen to any science. He's just a kook now. And he's fucking up the CDC. I mean, I could name, just by using letters, so many things.

• 44:03Bill Maher?

  CDC, EPA.

• 44:05Speaker 06

  FDA.

• 44:06Bill Maher?

  DOJ.

• 44:08Speaker 06

  FDA.

• 44:09Bill Maher?

  The Department of Justice, the scariest one, going after your political enemies.

• 44:16Speaker 06

  There you're going back to their authoritarian playbook.

• 44:19Bill Maher?

  No, no.

• 44:19Speaker 06

  That's authoritarianism.

• 44:21Bill Maher?

  My list of things that are bad about this administration is a long one, and I get into it every week.

• 44:28Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 44:29Bill Maher?

  I also think the reason why Trump does so well is because he identifies places where the Democrats did fuck up, and I could go down that list too. Like the border, like DEI was out of control, colleges completely out of control, elite universities where the kids are raised to be these anarchist, America-hating antisemites, and there is zero diversity of opinion. You know, the hypocrisy of diversity is the greatest thing in the world, except of what we think, which is where it's also very important.

• 45:07Speaker 06

  Right, but the point is, you can't force people, you know, it's a university, what he's trying to do is force the federal government onto the universities and forcing them to, they're gonna withhold certain things and let you do this.

• 45:23Bill Maher?

  Well, I mean, if they're getting taxpayer dollars, and they're supposed to be therefore in the service of this country to a degree, yes, I think then you have some right. Now, of course, the way he does it is always a bull in a china shop. He goes in there with a club and just starts breaking shit.

• 45:39Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 45:39Bill Maher?

  I mean, what does taking away cancer funding have to do with the antisemitism on campus?

• 45:45Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 45:45Bill Maher?

  But again, Harvard has an endowment of $50 billion. Really? They couldn't make that up? They can't find that $500 million themselves somewhere?

• 45:55Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 45:55Bill Maher?

  So there's a lot of bullshit and hypocrisy.

• 45:57Speaker 06

  Well, right now, you know, the UC system is also gonna be under attack, and Newsom is trying to fight back and say, you know, let's hold your line here. I mean, you know, and law firms are, you know, some cave, and a good friend of mine, Ted Vutros. You know, is with a law firm that is holding firm. Gibson Dunn is holding firm. So, you know, you pick your, you know.

• 46:21Bill Maher?

  I have been trying to make Gavin Newsom president for 15 years. People, I'm still on that page that he'd be a great candidate.

• 46:29Speaker 06

  He would be.

• 46:30Bill Maher?

  Even though he has a lot of California baggage.

• 46:32Speaker 06

  No, but he would be. It's not about California anymore. It's about, it's about who, who is articulate, who is smart, who knows how to govern. And in this case, who's pushing, who's strong in pushing back. So I, I'm, I'm with you on him. I mean, I'm, I, listen, I've known him since he was the mayor and I known him before that. He was supportive of.

• 46:51Bill Maher?

  Yeah.

• 46:51Speaker 06

  Ballot initiatives that I've done and I like him.

• 46:55Bill Maher?

  I do, that's what I say. And I've just had discussions with him to his face about, because Gavin's good like that. He'll come, he'll talk.

• 47:04Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 47:04Bill Maher?

  Uh, he could take a punch. Most of the Democrats can't, they won't even come on. We invite them every week, they won't come. Uh, the Republicans always.

• 47:11Speaker 06

  What am I doing here?

• 47:12Bill Maher?

  The, the Republican, the Republicans always come.

• 47:15Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 47:15Bill Maher?

  And they take their beating like a man. It's awesome.

• 47:18Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 47:18Bill Maher?

  Um, but the Democrats, but not Gavin.

• 47:21Speaker 06

  No.

• 47:21Bill Maher?

  And I've said, there are lots of things, I think, we went way too far and he's, and that is going to be his biggest liability. But as you say.

• 47:28Speaker 06

  Well, they're fourth, they're now the fourth, California, the fourth largest economy in the country. It just surpassed Japan. So.

• 47:35Bill Maher?

  Yeah.

• 47:35Speaker 06

  He, you know, not that you're gonna, if there's no secession or anything like that. But he's representing 40 million people.

• 47:42Bill Maher?

  Yeah.

• 47:42Speaker 06

  And they're not all liberal Democrats.

• 47:44Bill Maher?

  Rob, he's gonna win the state.

• 47:46Speaker 06

  No, no, no. He's finished, no, he's not, he's not running anymore for the state. He's finished.

• 47:50Bill Maher?

  No, I'm saying, I'm saying in the general, he's gonna win the state.

• 47:53Speaker 06

  Oh, no, no, no, I understand that.

• 47:55Bill Maher?

  He's gonna win those 40 million for sure.

• 47:57Speaker 06

  I understand. But I think he can, when you look at Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, which are the swing states, he would win those too.

• 48:04Bill Maher?

  But in, in key ways, he has recently, in the last six months, moved to the center on, on different issues.

• 48:12Speaker 06

  He's never been, he's never been wildly liberal.

• 48:16Bill Maher?

  Yes, he was.

• 48:16Speaker 06

  But, well, when he married gay people when he was the, the mayor of San Francisco, yes.

• 48:22Bill Maher?

  He officiated it.

• 48:24Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah.

• 48:25Bill Maher?

  He wasn't marrying.

• 48:26Speaker 06

  No, no, he was marrying a gay person.

• 48:28Bill Maher?

  He wasn't that liberal.

• 48:29Speaker 06

  He was officiating over gay marriage.

• 48:32Bill Maher?

  Which is great. He was out ahead on an issue that even Republicans now agree with.

• 48:36Speaker 06

  Some do. Oh, well, they're trying to undo a lot of that.

• 48:39Bill Maher?

  They're not going to do that.

• 48:40Speaker 06

  I don't think they can, but they're gonna try.

• 48:43Bill Maher?

  They're not. Sean McCrease just wrote a great article in The Times about how much of Washington now is gay Trumpers, who are, you know, staff positions and so forth, but they're very, they're well-accepted and they're, and they are, and you know what? You can't, again, you can't start not talking to people or hating people because part of them is something you don't like or don't agree with. And he quoted Trump had a great thought quote in the article about his view when he was asked about gay, and he said,

• 49:21Bill Maher?

  "I go to a restaurant, some people like the spaghetti with red sauce, I like a steak, that's why they have a menu."

• 49:30Bill Maher?

  That's why restaurants have menus.

• 49:32Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 49:33Bill Maher?

  And we should, we have to focus on like what to be worried about and that you start.

• 49:39Speaker 06

  Well, what we have to worry about is.

• 49:40Bill Maher?

  Troops in the streets is number one.

• 49:41Speaker 06

  We have to worry about destroying a democracy.

• 49:44Bill Maher?

  Yes.

• 49:44Speaker 06

  Of 250 years.

• 49:46Bill Maher?

  Oh, yeah.

• 49:47Speaker 06

  That's what we have to worry about.

• 49:49Bill Maher?

  And what is the plan? There's this terrible asymmetry we have where when the Democrat loses the election, it's over in a matter of hours and we concede and go home and that's that.

• 50:00Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 50:01Bill Maher?

  And if the Republican loses, you just know it doesn't end that day. It could be a landslide.

• 50:07Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 50:07Bill Maher?

  And it won't be, it never is. But if it's, if it's, it doesn't matter how close or unclose it is.

• 50:14Speaker 06

  They're gonna say they. Well, that's what Carrie liked it. They're gonna say they won. In Arizona, she did that and she lost pretty bad. She still said.

• 50:21Bill Maher?

  He still hasn't conceded 2020.

• 50:23Speaker 06

  No.

• 50:23Bill Maher?

  Publicly, anyway.

• 50:24Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 50:25Bill Maher?

  Wink, wink.

• 50:26Speaker 06

  Yeah. So you think they'll, do you think they'll be a 2028 election?

• 50:33Bill Maher?

  There's always an election, even the dictatorships have elections.

• 50:36Speaker 06

  No, I'm saying a real election.

• 50:38Bill Maher?

  Yes, I do. I just think. That they will find a way when the votes come in if they lose of contesting it, just like they did in 2020. The only difference is in 2020, they had people like Raffensperger in Georgia. Who wouldn't go along with the scheme.

• 50:58Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 50:58Bill Maher?

  Well, they've had all this time to replace those people.

• 51:01Speaker 06

  Right.

• 51:01Bill Maher?

  The head of the FBI, you know.

• 51:03Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah.

• 51:04Bill Maher?

  Now, all the people who you would need to go along with the scheme and you already have the army in the streets.

• 51:10Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah.

• 51:11Bill Maher?

  Are there. I, I just, you know, I just don't see it. I, I don't see.

• 51:16Speaker 06

  Oh, I hope you, you know, you may be right.

• 51:18Bill Maher?

  I just don't.

• 51:19Speaker 06

  And if you're right, that will be the end of American democracy.

• 51:23Bill Maher?

  I just don't.

• 51:24Speaker 06

  And I don't know of any country that has had a democracy for as long as we have has gone to authoritarian rule and has ever had a democracy come back. I don't see that happening. So we have to hold on to it. We have to hold on to it.

• 51:40Bill Maher?

  I don't see on November 10th, 2028, 20, yes.

• 51:46Speaker 06

  2028.

• 51:48Bill Maher?

  Donald Trump sending out a truth, saying, I'd like to congratulate President-elect Klobuchar.

• 51:55Speaker 06

  Yeah. Which, do you think he'll try to run again in the third, a third time?

• 52:00Bill Maher?

  I don't, I think he's gonna do the Medvedev move, which is what Putin did between 2008 and 2012, when Putin was technically, by their constitution at the time, prohibited from running. So he had his prime minister and him switch jobs, but nobody was fooled that he wasn't really.

• 52:18Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 52:18Bill Maher?

  I mean, if it's J.D. Vance, you know, and Trump is still around, you don't think. First of all, Trump can destroy anyone with social media. So if he, if the person who's running the country, quote unquote, gets out of line, he could just blast out his social messages. That's where all the power is. He does it now.

• 52:36Speaker 06

  Yeah, well, this is the, this is the thing that I.

• 52:39Bill Maher?

  Yeah, he might run.

• 52:39Speaker 06

  This is the thing I talked about with some friends after we.

• 52:45Speaker 06

  You know, we lost this past election. And we lost 2016 by a very small amount. It was 79,000 votes in three states. It was, you know, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. And what they did, and they were smart to do, from an electoral standpoint, is they suppressed the vote in Milwaukee, Detroit and Philadelphia, which is predominantly black populations in those areas. And if you suppress enough, you know, it's not that many votes, 79,000 in three states aggregate.

• 53:17Bill Maher?

  Yeah.

• 53:17Speaker 06

  That's what they did. And they knew because, you know, Putin was playing with the farm in St. Petersburg and had all of that, you know, working. But it didn't have to cost them very much money either. And then we won and we lost again. And I've said, the only way we are going to be able to compete is to have the kind of grip they have on the media. And it's not just the regular media, television, news, social media, AI, all of this stuff that they have control of. Unless we have something to come up, bounce up against.

• 54:00Speaker 06

  You remember when Air America came on?

• 54:05Bill Maher?

  Of course.

• 54:05Speaker 06

  Because at the beginning, when they had talk, talk radio.

• 54:08Bill Maher?

  What became MSNBC.

• 54:10Speaker 06

  Yeah. Remember talk radio. When talk radio first came into being, the shows that got huge ratings was Rush Limbaugh and right wing talk. That was predominantly what there was. And the idea for Air America was to try to combat that. And I was at a meeting at, you know, when Clinton was in the White House and they had a meeting at J. Rockefeller's house in Virginia, was a senator at the time. And Gettler was there and Tom Daschle and Barry Diller and all these people there, talking about trying to create some kind of forum where we could compete.

• 54:48Speaker 06

  Using media with them. And the Democracy Alliance came out of that. And Soros was one of the funders, I funded, you know. And what came out of was, you know, Center for American Progress, CREW, which was a, you know, a legal group to, and Media Matters, you know. Well, those are the big things that came out. It's nothing compared to what they have. They have a juggernaut. You know, when you have, you know, American Enterprise Institute, and you have American Heritage Foundation, and you've got Cato and all these things, and they are behind you with well-funded like crazy. It's hard to push your ideas through.

• 55:32Speaker 06

  Because our base, yeah, we have our billionaires, but they have way more billionaires. And our, most of our constituents are not as rich.

• 55:44Bill Maher?

  It's not the money that worries.

• 55:45Speaker 06

  No, no, but you have to build something. Listen, I ran into Rupert Murdoch. And I ran into Rupert Murdoch, I said, I wanna, you know, thank you.

• 55:53Bill Maher?

  Well, you run into a lot of people.

• 55:55Speaker 06

  Well, I didn't, well, who else did I run into?

• 55:58Bill Maher?

  Warren Beatty.

• 55:59Speaker 06

  Oh, that, yeah, but they're 20 years apart.

• 56:01Bill Maher?

  Oh, okay.

• 56:03Speaker 06

  No, I'm not running into them the same day. Hey, Warren, hey Rupert, I'm not doing that.

• 56:07Bill Maher?

  I'm just saying you're a popular guy.

• 56:09Speaker 06

  Anyway, I see him, and I say, I wanna, you know, thank you for standing up and letting your, you know, your network come out and say, say these things. But there's very little, I mean, you know, he's, who knows where he is at this point? But we don't have the infrastructure. We don't have a media infrastructure the way the other side does. And we don't, we don't, we can't.

• 56:29Bill Maher?

  That's bullshit.

• 56:30Speaker 06

  It isn't bullshit.

• 56:31Bill Maher?

  The New York Times, NPR, MSNBC.

• 56:36Speaker 06

  Nobody reads these things.

• 56:37Bill Maher?

  Nobody reads the New York Times?

• 56:39Speaker 06

  No, no. Nobody reads the New York Times. And nobody watches MSNBC, and nobody.

• 56:45Bill Maher?

  Not anymore. But people do read the New York Times.

• 56:48Speaker 06

  Yes, a group, a small group of people read the New York Times.

• 56:52Bill Maher?

  Well, first of all, the New York Times been doing very well financially. Also, they're a national.

• 56:58Speaker 06

  I know they're doing well, I'm talking about.

• 56:59Bill Maher?

  They're a national paper. And they would, I would, in my view, they would do a lot better if they weren't so ideologically captured. They, they're a very different paper than they were when, I mean, I've been reading it since.

• 57:11Speaker 06

  Listen, I've been reading it since I was a little kid too.

• 57:14Bill Maher?

  A kid.

• 57:15Speaker 06

  But, but, but here's the thing. When I say Rush Limbaugh and those kinds of right-wing shows dominated talk news, Fox is the one that does better than MSNBC, CNN on the cable side. So that's what you have. You don't have parody. And then when you took it social media, Twitter. I don't know, you still on Twitter?

• 57:41Bill Maher?

  Well, it's X now.

• 57:43Speaker 06

  X, yeah.

• 57:44Bill Maher?

  Am I on it? You know, I have a... Personally, not really.

• 57:51Speaker 06

  Okay, so I, you know, I was not on any social media. My wife says to me, you know, when Trump first emerged in, when he was running for president, back in 2015, I guess it was, 2016. She said, "You should talk, you know, get out there." So I got onto Twitter and I built, you know, a good following. You know, I had like two and a half million followers, whatever. It's not, nothing compared to, you know, Dua Lipa, you know, whoever.

• 58:19Bill Maher?

  Dua Lipa.

• 58:20Speaker 06

  I don't know, I pulled Dua Lipa out of my ass.

• 58:22Bill Maher?

  You did, and it was a perfect reference.

• 58:24Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Or, you know, Selena Gomez or whatever. But the point is, I had this following, right? Then Elon Musk buys this, takes it over, and it changes, whatever. And I'm saying, "I don't want to be this. I have enough of this stuff." So I get off. Now I can't get back on. They can't get my name because apparently if you give it up, you can't get back. So I said, "I tried to get back on." And it says, "You can't say Rob Reiner." It says, "Actual Rob Reiner," which was the hell of... And, you know, from two and a half million followers, I had 48 followers. And so it was, you know, it's like... But the point is, they have all these followers. They have Truth Social. He has his own, you know, platform.

• 59:07Bill Maher?

  What happened with X was Twitter was a mess. My line about Twitter was always, "Anything I want to say on Twitter, I can't say on Twitter." Because it was so full.

• 59:17Speaker 06

  What did you say? What did you want to say you couldn't say?

• 59:20Bill Maher?

  I'm gonna tell you.

• 59:21Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 59:21Bill Maher?

  This is back, this is before Elon bought it.

• 59:23Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 59:24Bill Maher?

  It had got so overtaken by left... Wing scolds that they were just looking for something to catch you on. Another obnoxious trait of the far left. They just, they don't look to uplift, which is what traditional liberals. Like myself believe in uplifting. It was just catching people and putting a scalp on the wall because we caught something you said. So I stopped tweeting and it was too bad because it used to be fun. He said, oh, I had a brain for it. I could say it. But then they were just so.

• 59:52Speaker 06

  But if you say something that you really believe, and I've put a lot of things out there. If you know, if you look at my old Twitter feed. There's all kinds of stuff.

• 1:00:00Bill Maher?

  Yeah, but nothing that offends the far left.

• 1:00:02Speaker 06

  Well, I don't know what it who it offends. What all I know is. They, you know, the right would call me a libtard, you know, which is that's par for the course. But it got way worse than that. They had me. Living on Epstein's island and I'm and I took a summer home there. And I'm, you know, I'm the Mr. Pedophilia. I mean, it's like crazy.

• 1:00:25Bill Maher?

  Oh, it is crazy.

• 1:00:25Speaker 06

  Crazy stuff.

• 1:00:26Bill Maher?

  Were you ever on the plane?

• 1:00:27Speaker 06

  No.

• 1:00:28Bill Maher?

  Okay.

• 1:00:29Speaker 06

  No, I don't. I never met the guy. I don't even know the guy.

• 1:00:31Bill Maher?

  Because some people were on the plane, but they didn't go to the island. The island, I mean, the plane.

• 1:00:36Speaker 06

  Were you ever on the plane?

• 1:00:38Bill Maher?

  No.

• 1:00:38Speaker 06

  The island?

• 1:00:40Bill Maher?

  Well, how would I get the island?

• 1:00:42Speaker 06

  You gotta get. You gotta get on the plane to get to the island.

• 1:00:45Bill Maher?

  But the plane went all over the world. Now, the island was like a hub. It was kind of like. You know what Atlanta is for Delta, but. But it was still like Clinton was on the plane a lot. I don't think he was ever on the island. Okay. But my point was that Elon took over claiming that what he was gonna do. Was get rid of this one sided and it was completely one sided.

• 1:01:09Speaker 06

  But he didn't do.

• 1:01:10Bill Maher?

  And then he did the opposite.

• 1:01:11Speaker 06

  He went the other way.

• 1:01:12Bill Maher?

  It just went.

• 1:01:13Speaker 06

  He went the other way.

• 1:01:13Bill Maher?

  And it's a perfect paradigm for the world we live in. Nothing ever stops in the middle. I call it pendulumism. The pendulum just got and all he did was turn it into a place where now nobody, unless you're super right wing feels comfortable there.

• 1:01:27Speaker 06

  Then you can't be there. Yeah.

• 1:01:28Bill Maher?

  And so like, how do we get back to a place where we do that? And I would say job one, don't stop talking.

• 1:01:37Speaker 06

  Yeah, well, that I agree with that. I agree with that.

• 1:01:39Bill Maher?

  I mean, I was gonna tell you before I was reading this article about a guy who was in the Obama or no Biden administration and. He cut off his brother who voted for Trump. Or maybe brother-in-law. And then he wrote this article, I forget for who. And it basically said, yeah, you know what? I re-looked at that issue. He's my brother-in-law. He's a good guy. He voted for Trump, you know. There are, it's more complicated than that. And then there was a backlash to that, you know.

• 1:02:07Speaker 06

  They got mad at him for.

• 1:02:08Bill Maher?

  Yeah, New York Magazine was like.

• 1:02:09Speaker 06

  For giving him.

• 1:02:10Bill Maher?

  Well, New York was like, it is perfectly okay to unfriend and, and cut off. I forget the word they used for like disengage with your fa- talk about family. Like, like the advice is don't go to Thanksgiving if they're. And we just, that is just never going to make this country better. And I know it's terrible to have to like suck it up and talk to people who, uh, yes, hold views that, uh, you know, you think you're morally superior to. And sometimes you actually are morally superior to. You still have to talk.

• 1:02:43Speaker 06

  No, you have to try to talk, but it is very frustrating when, uh, and, and, you know, the truth is, is, is, uh, ephemeral for sure. But there are certain things that are true. Like two and two is four, like there's a man on the moon.

• 1:03:00Bill Maher?

  I know.

• 1:03:01Speaker 06

  Like a man landing on.

• 1:03:02Bill Maher?

  I know.

• 1:03:02Speaker 06

  Those, you have to at least agree to that. How do you have the conversation then?

• 1:03:07Bill Maher?

  Okay, well, we just had, we had this discussion before and I told you my answer. And I think.

• 1:03:11Speaker 06

  And your answer is just let it go.

• 1:03:13Bill Maher?

  My.

• 1:03:13Speaker 06

  Let it go.

• 1:03:15Bill Maher?

  If you demand ideological purity about everyone you want to talk to, you're gonna have a very small group of friends. You can find.

• 1:03:22Speaker 06

  I'm not saying ideological purity. I'm just saying a basis for conversation. You can come at it different ways, but you have to agree that there's, that's, there's certain realities.

• 1:03:35Bill Maher?

  Okay, but, but, you know, there are certain realities. And, and what they would. Like, for example, they would say, and one of them is biological sex. So, you know, I was talking.

• 1:03:45Speaker 06

  Biological sex, what do you mean?

• 1:03:46Bill Maher?

  Boys and girls.

• 1:03:47Speaker 06

  Oh, oh.

• 1:03:48Bill Maher?

  Penises and vaginas.

• 1:03:49Speaker 06

  Yeah, they, they, yeah.

• 1:03:50Bill Maher?

  X and Y chromosomes.

• 1:03:51Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:03:51Bill Maher?

  Okay. Well, that wasn't the left position for a long time, certainly not the far left. Now, I was, you mentioned Epstein. I was having this discussion with somebody, uh, about Epstein like a month ago when it first hit. And, you know, we're talking about Trump and Epstein. And I said, you know, Trump is on, I don't know what he did with Epstein, but he's on tape saying he grabs pussies. That's on tape.

• 1:04:18Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:04:19Bill Maher?

  You know what his answer was? He said, "Okay, he's on tape doing that, but you want to talk about doing bad things to vaginas?" And then he went into lots of facts and figures about transing kids who are younger than where they would do it anywhere else in the world, based on self-diagnosis. So if you want to get on your high horse about who's crazy, it's gonna be a fight.

• 1:04:43Speaker 06

  Yeah, but you don't want to get into a question of what-about-ism and that. We have to agree that it's not a good thing for a man to just grab a woman.

• 1:04:54Bill Maher?

  We do.

• 1:04:56Speaker 06

  We have to agree on that. We have to agree on that.

• 1:04:58Bill Maher?

  He wasn't saying that wasn't a good thing. He was just saying, "What about this other thing?" That, he, first of all, it's just this...

• 1:05:05Speaker 06

  We can say, "That's not good either." But the point is, we have to...

• 1:05:09Bill Maher?

  But it's valid. And what he was saying...

• 1:05:11Speaker 06

  It doesn't justify the first thing, though.

• 1:05:13Bill Maher?

  Like, Trump saying that...

• 1:05:14Speaker 06

  Bill, it doesn't justify the first thing.

• 1:05:16Bill Maher?

  No one's saying it justifies it.

• 1:05:18Speaker 06

  Yeah, what are you saying?

• 1:05:18Bill Maher?

  Where's your sense of nuance? What we're saying is, what this person was saying, and it's a valid argument, was like, "What Trump did, okay, conceded, wrong." But it didn't actually, that comment itself, if he did it, it was wrong. But is it actually worse than taking a child who perhaps shouldn't be having this kind of life-changing surgery? Kids are very confused. Should we really be this gung-ho?

• 1:05:47Speaker 06

  We can have that discussion. But we can talk about that. But that's not, it's not part of the discussion of this. They're two different things. And we can have both of those discussions. But we shouldn't conflate them and say, "Because he did, because this is bad, that that's okay."

• 1:06:04Bill Maher?

  No one is saying that.

• 1:06:06Speaker 06

  I thought you were saying that.

• 1:06:07Bill Maher?

  I'm not saying that. You're just missing the point.

• 1:06:10Speaker 06

  I'm missing the point.

• 1:06:10Bill Maher?

  You are.

• 1:06:11Speaker 06

  As usual, right?

• 1:06:12Bill Maher?

  Not as usual, but you are, there is a point to be made. People who write into the show, "Back me up on this." No, we're not saying what Trump did was right. We're not saying it shouldn't be condemned. We're just saying, if the subject is, "Who's crazy about vaginas?" The subject is vaginas, and craziness is the issue.

• 1:06:34Bill Maher?

  We think that what you're doing in this area is crazier and actually affects people more than him grabbing wuzzy.

• 1:06:44Speaker 06

  I'm gonna say that may be true. That may be true. But that person isn't running for president.

• 1:06:51Bill Maher?

  Right.

• 1:06:51Speaker 06

  And this, no, but I'm saying, we're talking about a man running for president that has that sensibility. It's just, it's disgusting.

• 1:07:00Bill Maher?

  I said my piece. You either get it either.

• 1:07:02Speaker 06

  So you want that guy to...

• 1:07:04Bill Maher?

  I did, no. Can you not pause before running immediately right to all the way over here? This is not where the argument is, and straw man didn't show up to this party. That's not what I'm saying, and that's not what the issue is. I don't want Trump. I would have voted for him if I did. But I didn't.

• 1:07:23Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:07:23Bill Maher?

  And I would, you know, have paused.

• 1:07:26Speaker 06

  No, what you're saying is, you should be able to engage anybody in any discussion about something that they are passionate about, and I agree with that.

• 1:07:36Bill Maher?

  Part of the reason why the right is so butthurt about the left, it's not always just policy. It's like they feel very disrespected, like, "I won't even talk to you? I won't even sit down and break bread with you? Really?" They don't like that. Remember the deplorables comment Hillary made? They just think that they're looked down on.

• 1:08:00Speaker 06

  Well, that's a bad thing to be saying if you're running for president, to call some people who are voters deplorable. Even if you think that, you don't say that's bad politics. But Trump doesn't have that problem. He says whatever the hell he wants, and nobody, he doesn't worry about that. He doesn't worry about what he says about people.

• 1:08:19Bill Maher?

  He's such an instinctive politician. You know, he talked about it back from the 80s that he was gonna run. He kinda knew that in himself, and he... He just flipped the script. Everybody had become so press sex spokesman. I just say the exact right thing and try not to offend anyone. And he was like, I'm just gonna let my interior monologue out. I don't think he, I don't know if he can help himself.

• 1:08:47Speaker 06

  No, I don't think he can.

• 1:08:47Bill Maher?

  He just says.

• 1:08:48Speaker 06

  This is what he really thinks.

• 1:08:50Bill Maher?

  And that's in many ways refreshing, even when it's awful.

• 1:08:53Speaker 06

  But it's also, you know, listen, I made a movie with my wife called God and Country, which was all about Christian nationalism.

• 1:09:01Bill Maher?

  I know, I saw it.

• 1:09:02Speaker 06

  Yeah, and, and, and the idea was that, and we had a lot of very conservative Christians on the show, talking about, you know, what they feel was not only a danger to the country, but a danger to Christianity. And because they felt that this, this Christian nationalism was going so far afield from the teachings of Jesus in their, in their minds. And the idea that, and, and this is something I remember back in 2004, when Bush was running for reelection and ran against Kerry.

• 1:09:43Speaker 06

  And I remember Karl Rove saying that we could win this election with just Christian evangelicals. We, if we get all of, because they weren't getting them all to the polls. I mean, the Ralph Rees of the world and the Turning Points and all that had not galvanized at that point. They started to, and they were able to, and they've been successful since then. But this whole idea that Donald Trump is the guy that they think is the second coming or is sent by God to, to represent them, it, it can't be further from, I mean, if you read it, than the teachings of Jesus.

• 1:10:28Speaker 06

  It can't be further from it.

• 1:10:29Bill Maher?

  But there's one word.

• 1:10:31Speaker 06

  And they like, they love him.

• 1:10:32Bill Maher?

  There's, they love his dirty drawers. There's one word that explains this.

• 1:10:37Speaker 06

  Which is?

• 1:10:38Bill Maher?

  Cyrus.

• 1:10:39Speaker 06

  Well, yes.

• 1:10:40Bill Maher?

  Of course Cyrus.

• 1:10:41Speaker 06

  Yeah, Cyrus, I understand.

• 1:10:43Bill Maher?

  Can you explain to the people who Cyrus is?

• 1:10:45Speaker 06

  No, you can explain it.

• 1:10:47Bill Maher?

  Okay. So it's in the Bible and it's in, uh, it's the, it's the forty-fifth chapter and he was the forty-fifth president. So, I mean, you can't argue with science.

• 1:10:57Speaker 06

  You'll do the math, yeah.

• 1:10:59Bill Maher?

  But Cyrus was a king of Persia, or he fought the Persians. No, he was the king of Persia. Anyway, he freed the Jews accidentally. He was like going to war against.

• 1:11:10Speaker 06

  I didn't mean that.

• 1:11:11Bill Maher?

  It like, as a sideshow, it turned out very well for the Jews. That's who they think Trump is. He's a Cyrus figure. In other words, he's very flawed.

• 1:11:21Speaker 06

  He's flawed, he's faulty, but he's, but he's our guy.

• 1:11:25Bill Maher?

  But we're the Jews in this scenario.

• 1:11:27Speaker 06

  And most, most, most of these Christian conservatives like David French and, and, uh, uh, Russell Moore, they feel that he's, that this movement has gone so far afield from, you know, love thy neighbor and do unto others and all of those things that are part of the Jesus thing. So, and if you looked at what happened in nine, uh, you know, January sixth, there was a lot of Bibles and crosses and, and they were all storming the Capitol.

• 1:11:58Bill Maher?

  QAnon and Christian nationalism are absolutely a Venn diagram that looks like a circle.

• 1:12:06Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:12:07Bill Maher?

  No, it's all part of it.

• 1:12:08Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:12:09Bill Maher?

  Um.

• 1:12:10Speaker 06

  This is scary, that's scary, you know?

• 1:12:11Bill Maher?

  You know, Bush, you mentioned Bush, he was a super duper Christian.

• 1:12:16Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, but he didn't push it on others.

• 1:12:19Bill Maher?

  Exactly. I mean, I, I remember reading.

• 1:12:22Speaker 06

  There was a separation of church and state at one point.

• 1:12:25Bill Maher?

  There was, and that's, and that's what I'm gonna get to, or I wanna ask you. Because I, I do remember reading that, um, like a sly dig during the Bush administration was, uh, mischievous Bible study.

• 1:12:41Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:12:41Bill Maher?

  So they were full in on the Jesus.

• 1:12:44Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:12:44Bill Maher?

  But do you think, given what we now see in the Trump administration and things that are just so unprecedented, do you think we were too hard on George Bush? He was, I, I wonder, and it's hard to remember because it was 20 years ago.

• 1:13:00Speaker 06

  To me, the prob, the biggest.

• 1:13:01Bill Maher?

  But I was very hard on him, and I'm still not a huge fan.

• 1:13:04Speaker 06

  No, no, but, but.

• 1:13:04Bill Maher?

  But it was a normal sort of Republican.

• 1:13:07Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, he was, and so was Reagan, and yeah, I understand that.

• 1:13:09Bill Maher?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:09Speaker 06

  But to me, the, the, the big thing with, uh, Bush was, uh, going to war in Iraq. And that, to me, made him somebody that I.

• 1:13:19Bill Maher?

  But I still think.

• 1:13:20Speaker 06

  It was a lie.

• 1:13:21Bill Maher?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:21Speaker 06

  It was a lie, like when we went into war in Vietnam and the Spanish-American War. They're lies, and we understand how they, they, they get people galvanized to go to war. That's when I had the problem with him.

• 1:13:31Bill Maher?

  Oh, me too.

• 1:13:32Speaker 06

  Reagan didn't do anything like that.

• 1:13:34Bill Maher?

  I also think Bush going into Iraq, the, the reason they gave to get people behind it was a lie, true, but I think it was sincere, him thinking that was the correct response, even though it wasn't Iraq who did it. He understood.

• 1:13:50Speaker 06

  Forget it wasn't Iraq who did it. The Iraq didn't have weapons of mass destruction.

• 1:13:55Bill Maher?

  I, I understand.

• 1:13:56Speaker 06

  And they knew it. They knew it. We had, we had, uh, and I made a movie about that, too, shock and awe. There were, there were, you know, observers on the ground.

• 1:14:06Bill Maher?

  Oh, no, no.

• 1:14:07Speaker 06

  We had a, uh, a, a, a no-fly zone around, and it was contained like crazy.

• 1:14:12Bill Maher?

  I agree. I, I mean, look, I was not for the Iraq war, but I do think Bush, this guy, you know, he's not a genius, he's from Texas, and he was like, you know what? When they, uh, when they punch you, you punch them back. Doesn't have to be exactly who did it.

• 1:14:27Speaker 06

  Well, then go get.

• 1:14:28Bill Maher?

  I'm a big thinker, big picture war. You figure out where.

• 1:14:31Speaker 06

  Go get Bin Laden, then.

• 1:14:32Bill Maher?

  No, I understand. I'm, I'm not.

• 1:14:34Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:14:35Bill Maher?

  I'm not arguing with you on these points.

• 1:14:37Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:14:37Bill Maher?

  I'm just saying, I wonder if, looking back, if I was too hard because, for example, I could think of two things that Bush did that I, uh, three, if you count, uh, sitting with Michelle Obama and them seemed to get along well. But he also had the opportunity to pardon Scooter Libby.

• 1:14:59Bill Maher?

  And he didn't?

• 1:15:00Speaker 06

  No, no, I listen.

• 1:15:01Bill Maher?

  Didn't?

• 1:15:02Speaker 06

  I don't.

• 1:15:02Bill Maher?

  And he was like the, he was like his, his bottom bit.

• 1:15:05Speaker 06

  Which was the right thing to do.

• 1:15:06Bill Maher?

  Exactly, I'm saying.

• 1:15:08Speaker 06

  But this guy, we have his pardoning people who beat the crap out of cops.

• 1:15:12Bill Maher?

  Exactly, I understand, that's what I'm saying.

• 1:15:14Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, there's a difference, yes.

• 1:15:16Bill Maher?

  The other thing I love, the moment with Bush is that when Obama took office, they had all the ex-presidents there, and Bush stood next to Obama and said, "We want you to succeed."

• 1:15:27Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 1:15:28Bill Maher?

  I mean, it was, it's just, it's such a different time.

• 1:15:32Speaker 06

  And, and Trump did not do that.

• 1:15:34Bill Maher?

  He did, of course not.

• 1:15:36Speaker 06

  Did not do that.

• 1:15:36Bill Maher?

  He still hasn't conceded the election.

• 1:15:38Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:15:39Bill Maher?

  Again, these are people who we didn't vote for 20 years ago, and yet, when they took over, we just didn't have the worries we have now. It just wasn't where, it just wasn't where we are. It wasn't at this existential, it was like, okay, when the Democrats are in office, for us personally, for example, how are we affected? Well, the top bracket goes from paying 36% under Republicans to paying 39% under Democrats.

• 1:16:10Speaker 06

  Yeah, no, no, you pay a little more.

• 1:16:11Bill Maher?

  We switched.

• 1:16:12Speaker 06

  You pay a little more.

• 1:16:13Bill Maher?

  We've had giant elections over 3%.

• 1:16:15Speaker 06

  Yeah, no, no, I understand.

• 1:16:17Bill Maher?

  So, it just wasn't that, sort of like, you go from here all the way over to, you know.

• 1:16:24Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:16:24Bill Maher?

  I mean, you have a.

• 1:16:25Speaker 06

  Well, that's why it's really scary, because, you know, you talk about Bush, but I was, you know, I campaigned like crazy for Al Gore, went all over the country with him, and, you know, I was actually with him the night that the Supreme Court ruling came in, and I was having dinner at this place, and we were working on an op-ed piece that was supposed to be in the New York Times the next day, called "Consent of the Governed," and. They came down with this ruling and we're all sitting there watching CNN. And the guy on television says, I'm on the phone. He says, oh, he says, I understand that the vice president is in his residence.

• 1:17:08Speaker 06

  And he's on the phone talking to his advisors, trying to understand this ruling along with the rest of us. It was like a Truman Show moment where, because he was on the phone with David Boies and Ron Klain. Trying to, because basically what the Supreme Court said was, we want to remand this back to the Florida Supreme Court. But there's not enough time because of the December 12th ruling to be able to change and make it one way of counting all the votes. So we can't do it. So, so, you know, Bush is president. And they said that and that, and I see, I'm sitting right next to him.

• 1:17:49Speaker 06

  And Gore says, all this is, he says, bullshit. That's all he said, just one word. And his daughter was there, his son Albert was there, and the daughter started crying hysterical. And, and he says, over. And, and she started crying. He went and hold her. He give her hug. And he said, don't worry, it's gonna be okay. It's gonna be all right. And at that moment, I said, wow. We lost a great man that could have been a great president.

• 1:18:19Bill Maher?

  I love that, yeah.

• 1:18:20Speaker 06

  Because he had the decency and he had the calmness to be able to say that. And then, of course, he conceded right away.

• 1:18:28Bill Maher?

  He took one for the team.

• 1:18:29Speaker 06

  He did, yeah, conceded right away. And think about, think about 20 years' jump on climate change.

• 1:18:39Speaker 06

  Think about no going to war in Iraq. I mean, the things that change when you do things like, and you know, that was 500, what is it, 34 votes in Florida?

• 1:18:48Bill Maher?

  We don't know how he would have handled 9/11. I mean, Hillary voted for the Iraq war.

• 1:18:55Speaker 06

  Yes. No, no, I agree. How he would have handled 9/11?

• 1:18:59Bill Maher?

  We don't know.

• 1:19:00Speaker 06

  No, no, but I don't think he would have gone to war in Iraq.

• 1:19:03Bill Maher?

  I don't think so, but you don't, you just don't.

• 1:19:05Speaker 06

  I don't think.

• 1:19:06Bill Maher?

  No, I don't think so either.

• 1:19:07Speaker 06

  No.

• 1:19:07Bill Maher?

  I don't think so either, but you know.

• 1:19:08Speaker 06

  But the point is, we're at this point now with a guy who's so far off the charts in terms of but normal governing, that it's frightening.

• 1:19:18Bill Maher?

  So how do we get the Democrats so united?

• 1:19:22Bill Maher?

  Because, you know, you and I can't keep arguing if we're gonna like ever.

• 1:19:27Speaker 06

  Well, we're trying, you know.

• 1:19:30Bill Maher?

  No, it's good to talk, isn't it?

• 1:19:31Speaker 06

  I guess, yeah, it is. It is. I'm, listen, I'm happy to talk to anybody.

• 1:19:37Bill Maher?

  More information is always better than less information is how I look at it.

• 1:19:40Speaker 06

  Listen, I had dinner with J D Vance years ago over at

• 1:19:46Speaker 06

  David Frum's house.

• 1:19:47Bill Maher?

  Ran into him.

• 1:19:48Speaker 06

  No, no, he was invited to dinner. I didn't run in. He was there.

• 1:19:51Bill Maher?

  You're just always running into people.

• 1:19:53Speaker 06

  I didn't run into him.

• 1:19:53Bill Maher?

  Okay.

• 1:19:54Speaker 06

  So I'm having dinner with him and he had just written this book, Hillbilly Elegy.

• 1:19:57Bill Maher?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:58Speaker 06

  It was just pretty good.

• 1:19:59Bill Maher?

  Ron Howard made it into a movie.

• 1:20:00Speaker 06

  I thought it was pretty good.

• 1:20:01Bill Maher?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:01Speaker 06

  Yeah. And talking with him and couldn't be more reasonable. Couldn't be, no, we didn't agree. I mean, he's, you know, what he is.

• 1:20:09Bill Maher?

  No, he's a nice guy.

• 1:20:10Speaker 06

  Yeah. Couldn't have been more reasonable. And then he becomes this sycophant and they all are.

• 1:20:17Bill Maher?

  Yes.

• 1:20:17Speaker 06

  All of them.

• 1:20:18Bill Maher?

  Oh.

• 1:20:19Speaker 06

  So what am I gonna do there? I mean, what are you, you know, this is like, you know, this is insanity.

• 1:20:24Bill Maher?

  What you're gonna do there is make them hate you less. Their whole policy is based on make them cry their liberal tears. They think they're so fucking superior that they won't break bread with us. Just break the hate. No, you're not gonna convince them to go against Trump on an issue. But Trump famously is like a guy who sort of like follows whatever the last thing he hears. Now he's surrounded by askers. The last thing he hears is usually something stupid. He got out of, he got out of the meeting with Putin. And he said, we should get rid of mail in voting because Putin thinks mail in voting is why our elections are rigged. Now that's, that's just.

• 1:21:09Speaker 06

  Oh, he's always been saying that.

• 1:21:10Bill Maher?

  I know.

• 1:21:10Speaker 06

  Trump's been saying that for years.

• 1:21:12Bill Maher?

  But the fact that he, he was like quoting Putin on electoral politics.

• 1:21:16Speaker 06

  Well, listen, he sat, he sat in Helsinki next to Putin and said, I don't think he did it.

• 1:21:22Bill Maher?

  That's not the point. The point is, the point is he just sort of listens to and repeats the last thing he hears. So let's get more people in there who's saying things. Because I'm telling you, he doesn't, he didn't object to any time I contradicted him. You know, I said to him, you're scaring people. They're your people. Why do you want to scare people so much?

• 1:21:43Speaker 06

  What'd he say to that?

• 1:21:46Bill Maher?

  I don't remember, but it wasn't. I don't, I don't, but it wasn't.

• 1:21:49Speaker 06

  So it was, it was, it was a good conversation.

• 1:21:52Bill Maher?

  It wasn't.

• 1:21:52Speaker 06

  It was, it was, it made an impression on you.

• 1:21:54Bill Maher?

  Well, did you watch my report on it?

• 1:21:56Speaker 06

  No, no, but I want to know what he said to you.

• 1:21:58Bill Maher?

  I don't remember, but it wa- it wasn't all stop. Because I would have remembered that.

• 1:22:03Speaker 06

  And I didn't. Okay, from now on, I don't.

• 1:22:04Bill Maher?

  And I didn't expect it to be.

• 1:22:05Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:22:06Bill Maher?

  But just the fact that something gets in there.

• 1:22:08Speaker 06

  Yeah, maybe.

• 1:22:09Bill Maher?

  It's not the worst thing in the world.

• 1:22:11Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:22:13Bill Maher?

  It may be the best thing in the world, or best you can do. But, you know.

• 1:22:17Speaker 06

  Race is there's a blind spot they can't see.

• 1:22:19Bill Maher?

  Yes, of course.

• 1:22:20Speaker 06

  They can't see. So how do you discuss, how do you talk to that?

• 1:22:23Bill Maher?

  There's also blind spots on the other side with race. You think everything that comes out of the left on race makes sense?

• 1:22:30Speaker 06

  What, like, give me an example?

• 1:22:33Bill Maher?

  Anything in Robin DiAngelo, Ta-Nehisi Coates.

• 1:22:37Speaker 06

  What, but, but, what, give me specific.

• 1:22:39Bill Maher?

  Uh, for example, I mean, he says, or maybe it's Ibram X. Kendi, says, uh, I'm not quoting word for word, but it's very close to word for word. The only solution to past racism is future racism. In other words, being racist in reverse.

• 1:22:54Speaker 06

  Yeah, but that's ridiculous.

• 1:22:55Bill Maher?

  Okay, then, that, but my point is, that's what a lot of.

• 1:22:59Speaker 06

  But that's a, that's an argument. That's not saying I, you know, a black person could say, I don't like any white people. That's racist. White person says, I don't like any black people. That's racist. You can't argue with that. How do you argue that? You can't discuss that.

• 1:23:17Bill Maher?

  Who's arguing? What, I mean.

• 1:23:19Speaker 06

  No, I'm saying you can't discuss, uh, those things with somebody who's going to say that.

• 1:23:24Bill Maher?

  If the issue is Trump and racism, I think it's more nuanced than that. I mean.

• 1:23:29Speaker 06

  Oh, I'm not saying him. I'm just saying generally speaking, you know, a racist is somebody you can't really argue with. It's hard.

• 1:23:36Bill Maher?

  But, I mean, I could show you, like, many TikToks of, what?

• 1:23:42Speaker 06

  I don't know, I don't know where you're going to go with this.

• 1:23:44Bill Maher?

  I know, of like, young, usually black women saying some variation of, I just can't deal with white people today. And you could hardly imagine that in reverse. No, I'm not mad at it. I'm just saying.

• 1:23:59Speaker 06

  We can understand.

• 1:24:01Bill Maher?

  Exactly.

• 1:24:01Speaker 06

  What is built into a black person's experience. Why they would say something like that.

• 1:24:07Bill Maher?

  Maybe not that person in particular, maybe.

• 1:24:09Speaker 06

  Well, I don't know that person, but.

• 1:24:10Bill Maher?

  I don't know that person either.

• 1:24:12Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:24:12Bill Maher?

  But it could be possible that they're just, uh, somebody, uh, who was it? Oh, Thomas Chatterton Williams is on my show a couple of weeks ago was talking about microaggressions and the idea, I said, let's, it's funny because there's, there's sometimes it seems like there's more anger now racially, and yet things were so much worse then. You know, you and I.

• 1:24:33Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, it is.

• 1:24:35Bill Maher?

  And he said, yes, he said, there's an interesting human psychological factor where like the better things get, the tinier the offense.

• 1:24:45Speaker 06

  That's right.

• 1:24:46Bill Maher?

  Makes people angrier.

• 1:24:47Speaker 06

  That's right, that's right. And you also forget where you were and you forget the progress that's been made.

• 1:24:53Bill Maher?

  Or you've never, you weren't alive for it.

• 1:24:55Speaker 06

  Because you're only focusing on the inequity right then and there.

• 1:24:59Bill Maher?

  And again, to your point before about they don't know anything in the past, like they don't know your show.

• 1:25:04Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:25:05Bill Maher?

  They also, they also don't know about the people, the civil rights.

• 1:25:09Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:25:10Bill Maher?

  Pioneers who actually endured horrible things.

• 1:25:13Speaker 06

  Died, died to try to get the right to vote.

• 1:25:15Bill Maher?

  So, you know, you know, could it be that a 20-year-old goes out in the world today and has a terrible experience with white people? It could, but, uh, you know, I don't think, if you're in Los Angeles and you're black and you walk into a Starbucks, they're gonna say, we don't serve your kind here.

• 1:25:35Speaker 06

  No.

• 1:25:36Bill Maher?

  You know, okay, so, you know, I don't know what the white, I don't know what you're doing, white people out there are doing that you can't deal with today. I'm just saying you could never say that in reverse and you shouldn't say that in reverse.

• 1:25:47Speaker 06

  What would you say to a white person?

• 1:25:49Bill Maher?

  What do you mean?

• 1:25:49Speaker 06

  Don't order that pumpkin spice latte. Get out of here.

• 1:25:54Bill Maher?

  Whatever that thing is.

• 1:25:57Bill Maher?

  Well, it's the season of pumpkin spice.

• 1:25:59Speaker 06

  It is, getting there, getting there.

• 1:26:01Bill Maher?

  Believe how fast the time goes. So the movie opens.

• 1:26:04Speaker 06

  The movie opens September 12th.

• 1:26:06Bill Maher?

  Okay.

• 1:26:07Speaker 06

  And in theaters around the town. And I wanted it, I wanted it to be in the theaters because

• 1:26:14Speaker 06

  you gotta watch a comedy with people. You want, you want that shared experience. If it's a comedy or it's a thriller, horror, you want people to be there and enjoy it with them.

• 1:26:25Bill Maher?

  It's.

• 1:26:25Speaker 06

  Not sitting at their home, going to the bathroom, getting something to eat or whatever.

• 1:26:30Bill Maher?

  You are not the first director.

• 1:26:32Speaker 06

  I know.

• 1:26:32Bill Maher?

  Who's been making this argument.

• 1:26:34Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:26:35Bill Maher?

  And it's a valid argument and it's just really hard.

• 1:26:39Speaker 06

  It's hard.

• 1:26:40Bill Maher?

  You're fighting it.

• 1:26:40Speaker 06

  No, no, I know. It's very hard.

• 1:26:42Bill Maher?

  I mean.

• 1:26:43Speaker 06

  It's very hard.

• 1:26:43Bill Maher?

  I, I don't often get my ass out to the theater either.

• 1:26:47Speaker 06

  Yeah. No, no. I mean, I've only gone a couple of times.

• 1:26:49Bill Maher?

  But this one I would.

• 1:26:51Speaker 06

  Oh, good.

• 1:26:51Bill Maher?

  This one I would. I mean, I cannot wait to see.

• 1:26:54Speaker 06

  I can't wait. You'll like it. There's some good laughs.

• 1:26:57Bill Maher?

  I mean, what I loved.

• 1:26:58Speaker 06

  There's some good laughs in it.

• 1:26:59Bill Maher?

  Besides what I loved everything about that was in the first one, which is LOL, like ultimate LOL kind of movie comedy, was that there were people who did not understand it was a comedy.

• 1:27:11Speaker 06

  A lot of people at the beginning. They came up to me at the first screening and, and they, in Dallas we had, and they said, I don't understand, why are you making a movie about a band I, nobody's ever heard of? And one, you know, why did you make, why are you doing? And I felt bad because we got the worst cards, you know, they sign these cards and they give you the thing. The worst cards ever. The only thing I felt good about is I counted five different ways they spelled the word movie.

• 1:27:42Bill Maher?

  Really?

• 1:27:42Speaker 06

  Yeah. There was M O V I E.

• 1:27:44Bill Maher?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:44Speaker 06

  There was M O V E Y. There was M O V Y. M O V E E, and my favorite, M O V E. Move.

• 1:27:58Speaker 06

  So.

• 1:27:58Bill Maher?

  So you're saying.

• 1:27:58Speaker 06

  So I'm saying, maybe they weren't geniuses. I don't know, but it took a long time for people to catch on to the movie and like it.

• 1:28:08Bill Maher?

  Well.

• 1:28:10Bill Maher?

  I don't think that's an accurate appraisal. What it is was like, and look, this is gonna sound like I'm making fun of half the country. Half, or however many, I'm sorry, but people are nuance impaired. This is a movie that's a mockumentary about a man. You don't have to be a genius to get the satire and the parody of everything about rock and roll that is so paradiable, if that's a word.

• 1:28:38Speaker 06

  But we played it close to the bone. It was satire is very close to the bone.

• 1:28:43Bill Maher?

  Yes, but I just gotta say you're a little fucking dim if you're one of the people.

• 1:28:48Speaker 06

  That spells it, M-O-V-E. The M-O-V-E person is not gonna get it.

• 1:28:54Bill Maher?

  You didn't get that this was parody, they took it seriously.

• 1:28:58Speaker 06

  Yeah, I know. Well, some rockers, some rock and roll people took it seriously and they got mad. Like Steven Tyler was upset and.

• 1:29:04Bill Maher?

  Really?

• 1:29:05Speaker 06

  Yeah, oh yeah, and then Axl Rose from Guns N' Roses and, you know, God bless him.

• 1:29:10Bill Maher?

  Musicians are.

• 1:29:12Speaker 06

  Ozzy Osbourne didn't love it too much.

• 1:29:14Bill Maher?

  They're so talented, but thinking ain't their thing, Rob.

• 1:29:17Speaker 06

  No.

• 1:29:17Bill Maher?

  You know.

• 1:29:18Speaker 06

  It's not high on the list.

• 1:29:20Bill Maher?

  No.

• 1:29:20Speaker 06

  Well, we try to make fun of that too.

• 1:29:22Bill Maher?

  Of course, that's part of why it's so funny if you have this built in.

• 1:29:26Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:29:27Bill Maher?

  And the thing is about musicians, especially rock stars. What it is about music that gets to us, gets to us on such a deep.

• 1:29:36Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's on a very emotional level, yeah.

• 1:29:38Bill Maher?

  I remember when I visited Amsterdam and I had a friend who lived there and I said, what's it like here? And he's telling me everything about it. And he said, and I said, the people are, they're polite, but they're not warm. He said, right, he said, they don't get excited about anything except pop stars. Just like everywhere else in the world. When Michael Jackson was there, they went fucking nuts. It just gets to us.

• 1:30:03Speaker 06

  It does, it's a very versatile thing.

• 1:30:05Bill Maher?

  The people who are the rock stars get to live in this world of their own. And we see it, I could mention a million names and just who've lived in this bubble of just like, I'm the greatest, I don't have to know anything. Assistance and everyone's glory. And, you know, that's what you're.

• 1:30:23Speaker 06

  But most rockers did get it eventually. They all got it and they dug it. It was like a staple on the tour bus. They'd had the thing. Sting, when the first time he met him, he said, I've seen this movie a hundred times, 50 times. Every time I see it, I don't know if I should laugh or cry.

• 1:30:38Bill Maher?

  No, because he's smart.

• 1:30:40Speaker 06

  Yeah, he is smart.

• 1:30:41Bill Maher?

  There's millions of smart musicians. Paul McCartney's in the.

• 1:30:44Speaker 06

  Yeah, he's in the movie and he's really funny, too.

• 1:30:47Bill Maher?

  So who do you have in the, as far as like the cameo?

• 1:30:51Speaker 06

  Well, they got Paul McCartney, Elton. Elton John.

• 1:30:53Bill Maher?

  Wow.

• 1:30:53Speaker 06

  Uh, Garth Brooks. There's, uh, Questlove, you know. There's a whole thing where they're trying to find a new drummer because the drummers are always dying, you know. They had 12 drummers.

• 1:31:04Bill Maher?

  Which is true.

• 1:31:05Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's true, it's true. Uh, the last drummer, this guy, Skippy Scuffleton, he, he died, uh, because he, he sneezed himself to death. He just couldn't stop sneezing. Uh, he had a fit and he dropped dead. So we have to get a new drummer. And they put out, they put out a word to try to get a new drummer. And they talked to Questlove. They talked to, uh, Chad Smith from Red Hot Chili Peppers and, uh, Lars Ulrich from Metallica. And they get, they all turned him down because they'd rather stay alive. They don't want to die. They, they, they love them, but they don't want to die.

• 1:31:37Bill Maher?

  All right. Well, thank you.

• 1:31:39Speaker 06

  Yeah, thanks for having me.

• 1:31:40Bill Maher?

  I had the time of my life. I hope you did.

• 1:31:48Speaker 06

  I had the time of my life and I owe it all to you. Okay.

• 1:31:54Bill Maher?

  All right, buddy.

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