Sam Harris | Club Random with Bill Maher

PLEASE NOTE: THIS EPISODE WAS RECORDED BEFORE THE AWFUL EVENTS IN LOS ANGELES. Bill Maher and Sam Harris on why young women are dating older men, fashion & manufacturing in China, the nine-hour documentary Bill never saw, brands complicit with the wrong side of WW2, the banality of evil and how humans can rationalize horrific acts, how worldviews can make people do extreme things while feeling virtuous, Bill’s previous controversies, the recent report on the you-know-what virus, Bill’s raw milk theory, how once liberal media voices like Joe Rogan and Elon Musk were driven away by extreme politics, and the true equivalence of Elon’s wealth, which will blow you away. Try ZipRecruiter for free at https://www.ziprecruiter.com/random Get 15% off OneSkin with the code RANDOM at https://www.oneskin.co/ #oneskinpod #ad Follow Club Random on IG: @ClubRandomPodcast Follow Bill on IG: @BillMaher Don’t forget to subscribe to the podcast for free wherever you're listening or by using this link: https://bit.ly/ClubRandom Watch Club Random on YouTube: https://bit.ly/ClubRandomYouTube Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This episode of Club Random was filmed prior to the devastating fires in Southern California.

• 0:05Speaker 01

  Elections worked.

• 0:06Bill Maher?

  They're thinking so logically. That's Sam.

• 0:09Speaker 01

  He won everything. He won, he ran the table.

• 0:16Bill Maher?

  Don't put that on the poster. I can put up with that. Sam Harris raves.

• 0:25Bill Maher?

  You all tucked away? Sam? You here?

• 0:29Speaker 01

  Happening, Bill Maher.

• 0:31Bill Maher?

  What'd you expect at Bill Maher's house? How are you?

• 0:34Speaker 01

  Good to see you.

• 0:34Bill Maher?

  Oh, look, we're wearing the same thing.

• 0:36Speaker 01

  Are we?

• 0:36Bill Maher?

  That's embarrassing.

• 0:37Speaker 01

  Was your made in China?

• 0:40Bill Maher?

  Why? Isn't everything?

• 0:42Speaker 01

  Yeah. It's, uh... Was that still true? I'm amazed at the brands that do not take the step to, to make their clothing in America when they're spending, when they're charging many hundreds of dollars for something that costs $14 in, in China.

• 0:56Bill Maher?

  Well, why, why would you if your margin could be larger, no matter what it was?

• 1:01Speaker 01

  I would think it would, it would, I mean, it would, it would make consumers feel good, you know, at least in America.

• 1:06Bill Maher?

  Well, the fact, I mean, the whole fashion industry is

• 1:10Bill Maher?

  the most made up industry in the world. I mean, all you have to do is walk into any department store or clothing store and, and it says, you know, 80% off from the number you made up to begin with.

• 1:21Speaker 01

  Yes, which you've never seen, yeah.

• 1:23Bill Maher?

  We made up a number. We said it cost $2,000 and now we're selling it for $2.50. What do you think about that? And, and people fall for it. I mean, just, if everyone was...

• 1:34Speaker 01

  This podcast is 80% off.

• 1:39Bill Maher?

  Wish.

• 1:41Bill Maher?

  If, if everyone really was as altruistic and good a person as they say,

• 1:48Bill Maher?

  the whole industry would go away. We, I mean, every penny we spend on fashion would really, in a more, you know, altruistic world, if we're just gonna be completely El Machanary about everything, would just go to the poor. Who have, don't, can't afford to change styles every year. Like, the collars get big, the collars get small. You know, all they do is like, there's only so many variations on clothes.

• 2:18Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:19Bill Maher?

  Even when you see movies that 10,000 on another planet, they're basically wearing the same thing.

• 2:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:26Bill Maher?

  They're just slight variations in the cut.

• 2:29Speaker 01

  Although there are periods in history, I mean, you look back on photos of yourself. There were decades where you, it's just, what the hell was happening? There was some brain virus that, that translated into bad style from

• 2:41Bill Maher?

  The Aiden's especially.

• 2:43Speaker 01

  It's incredible. It's really.

• 2:45Bill Maher?

  And also, I would say that

• 2:49Bill Maher?

  the, the cut of things from previous centuries, so much more impressive often than today.

• 2:58Speaker 01

  Right.

• 3:00Bill Maher?

  Not necessarily the fops of the

• 3:04Bill Maher?

  court of King Louis.

• 3:05Speaker 01

  Wearing a powdered wig is where I draw the line.

• 3:07Bill Maher?

  The wig, and anytime they somehow etoliate their faith. You know, like somehow that geisha girls, this extreme whiteness, I don't get, I've never got that. But the cut on, on the jackets is fantastic on some, in some of this.

• 3:29Speaker 01

  Well, the Nazis too, the Nazis.

• 3:30Bill Maher?

  Nazis were very sharp dressers.

• 3:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:33Bill Maher?

  I mean, those.

• 3:34Speaker 01

  Was that, was that Hugo Boss or is that just a meme in my, that, an Aaron meme in my head?

• 3:38Bill Maher?

  Yeah, it was Hugo Boss. He was the Volkswagen of clothing.

• 3:41Speaker 01

  Actually, we, we need a list of the brands that went all in on the Third Reich. Because, I mean, there's some great brands, like Mercedes and, and, yeah, and Brown.

• 3:50Bill Maher?

  Oh, and also the.

• 3:52Speaker 01

  I think Prupps, I mean, like, all these German brands were.

• 3:55Bill Maher?

  And who, who was the Luftwaffe?

• 4:00Bill Maher?

  Messerschmitt was the name of the German fighter plane.

• 4:04Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 4:05Bill Maher?

  But I think that was also a company or somebody. It's amazing the way it was a deal breaker for the, for the company to go away.

• 4:15Speaker 01

  I mean, there were, there were, did you ever see the documentary Shoah? The nine hour Holocaust documentary that.

• 4:22Bill Maher?

  Um, I did, I did not, but I certainly was aware of it.

• 4:25Speaker 01

  You've got, you've got nine hours left in the day, in your day, you could, you could, after this podcast.

• 4:30Bill Maher?

  I seem to remember there being a joke in my act about it.

• 4:34Speaker 01

  Well, it is, it's been some years since I've watched it, but it is well worth watching. But one of the amazing documents they unveil in this documentary. First of all, it's all modern footage, all shot in the 80s. There's no Night in Fog, you know, actual Holocaust footage. It's all footage from when the documentary was shot, interviewing survivors and SS guards.

• 4:58Bill Maher?

  Oh, it's not archival footage?

• 5:00Speaker 01

  No, there's no bodies in pits or crematoria or any of that. It's just shot in the 80s. But they find the competitive bids for the gassing vans that were designed to gas. Before there was the concentration camps and the crematoria, they had the bright idea of creating vans where the exhaust system doesn't exit, but enters the cargo space of the van. And they got competitive bids from, forgive me if you get a lawsuit, but I think Mercedes was one of these companies. And they have these euphemisms just in the bid.

• 5:44Speaker 01

  It's like, we understand that the cargo has a tendency to rush to the back. When the doors close, it has a tendency to rush to the back of the van. Right? It was just, yeah, and these brands still exist. It's quite amazing.

• 5:59Bill Maher?

  What's amazing is humans and just how awful they are. Are you familiar with the Wannsee Conference?

• 6:05Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. Yeah. Have you seen, it's Conspiracy, the Kenneth Branagh film?

• 6:13Bill Maher?

  I don't think it's called that, but it may be. I know what you're talking about, and I saw it years ago. It was an HBO movie. Right.

• 6:20Speaker 01

  It's based on the actual transcript?

• 6:22Bill Maher?

  Yes, it's a conference, for people who don't know, that took place in Wannsee, which is a suburb of Berlin, on my birthday, although I wasn't born yet, January 20th, 1942. And it's just, it's the banality of evil.

• 6:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, and with a little topspin with its kind of, it's not just banality. I mean, it's like, Heidrick was legitimately evil.

• 6:46Bill Maher?

  Well, they were all evil, but the way they perfunctorily talk about, I mean, this thing you mentioned about the cargo has a tendency to rush. You know, the ability for humans to forget that the other guy is also a human is just unbelievable to me.

• 7:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 7:04Bill Maher?

  That, you know, you're just two feet away from a guy who you could be suffering like that, but there's zero empathy. It's just not, I mean, some humans, of course, do have it, thank God, but, but not, but many, many just do not, or they even enjoy, obviously, statistically, other people suffering in a way that they can't even imagine themselves doing it. It's just amazing, humans.

• 7:32Speaker 01

  It is amazing that there are, I mean, so there, I think there is, I think evil is a word which is still used, right? It's not all banal, right? I mean, there's like, there's like, there's real, there's real sadism, there's real pleasure taken at the suffering of others, but then there's just, then there are the people who are imagining that they're doing something good, they're not actually even thinking about the suffering they're causing, and yet they're part of the machinery that produces the evil.

• 8:03Bill Maher?

  Well, I mean, the people, for example, not to pick on any.

• 8:07Speaker 01

  Any of our friends?

• 8:10Speaker 01

  Any of our fellow podcasters?

• 8:11Bill Maher?

  Who already hate us. No, no, I'm talking about the people who flew planes into the buildings on 9/11, for example.

• 8:18Speaker 01

  Right.

• 8:18Bill Maher?

  You know, you've talked about it. I have also, I'm sure not as eloquently, but they certainly thought they were doing the right thing.

• 8:27Speaker 01

  I seem to remember you thought they were courageous.

• 8:30Bill Maher?

  Right?

• 8:33Bill Maher?

  I walked into that one, didn't I? Which they were.

• 8:36Speaker 01

  Who were the, was it the good people at ABC who didn't like that?

• 8:38Bill Maher?

  Yeah, the good people of America thought it was a little too early to make that point.

• 8:42Speaker 01

  If hitting the wall at 400 miles an hour doesn't entail some courage, I'm not sure what does.

• 8:48Bill Maher?

  Yeah, the only thing that slightly undercuts that is, I've heard, I don't know if it's true, somebody I'm sure will be out there vetting it, that three of the four did not know they were on a suicide mission, that they thought they were just hijacking a plane, and then when the lead dude was like, "All right, comrades, take off your clothes, because you know you have to die naked or some shit like that," and they were like, "Okay, I'm sorry to take off." It's a, it's a what kind of mission?

• 9:18Speaker 01

  Can I call my agent?

• 9:20Bill Maher?

  What mission did you say? I'm sorry, I, this is a...

• 9:25Bill Maher?

  I can see Woody Allen. There's been a mistake of some sort. I don't mean to be facetious or didactic, but I need to land and my baggage went to different cities.

• 9:36Speaker 01

  I'm actually better at landing the plane.

• 9:40Bill Maher?

  But, but yeah, that's, you know, they think they're actually doing good. That's the scary part that I think we both see in religion, is that people do evil things and are encouraged to do evil things and do them in great numbers, that there's nothing else that really is the same kind of motivator that we've ever seen in human history, right?

• 10:04Speaker 01

  Well, the thing that people are just simply not tracking is that once you get, once you absorb that worldview and that is your, the lens through which you're looking at just life on Earth,

• 10:18Speaker 01

  basically, everything changes. I mean, there are, it's true to say that you can have people who, I mean, obviously, there are some prototypically evil people a part of, you know, any jihadist movement and they're sociopaths and they're bad guys, but there are also people who are absolutely convinced that this is the appropriate use of their genuine compassion. It's like they feel, they're feeling real compassion, that what we would recognize as compassion. And they just think that the most important difference of outcomes hangs in the balance. I mean, there's paradise on the one hand and there's hell on the other, and they have the right answer

• 11:01Speaker 01

  for how to navigate toward one and avoid the other, and nothing else matters, right? And so, and literally, under that framing, you can't kill the wrong people because, you know, anyone you kill who was destined for paradise is just gonna thank you, right? They're just, you know, you blow up, you know, a bunch of non-combatants and if there are good Muslims among them, there's no, they're just waiting in the bottle room with you and seventy-two virgins.

• 11:29Bill Maher?

  No downside. Yeah, I blame misinformation.

• 11:36Bill Maher?

  Which I know you do a lot.

• 11:37Speaker 01

  Yes, you did. That was a joke. You know, so that there were scare quotes around that word. So you don't like, you don't like misinformation, the idea of misinformation.

• 11:47Bill Maher?

  Obviously, sometimes it's true. But sometimes it's just, you know, one, one day's misinformation is tomorrow's information. You know, I mean, I mean, COVID could have.

• 11:58Speaker 01

  But not for everything.

• 12:00Bill Maher?

  No, but you know, COVID could have started in a lab was misinformation.

• 12:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, although, I mean, honestly, I think there are people who

• 12:11Speaker 01

  could see even then that

• 12:15Speaker 01

  I mean, for instance, you and I are on, on opposite sides for a few of these questions, but that's not one of them. From the, from the first possible moment, I thought that's a totally valid hypothesis. And to call it racist was idiotic. And, and I still don't know what happened, but it's, it's a coin toss.

• 12:32Bill Maher?

  But I would venture to say that in 50 years, what people will be saying about this is, wait a second, you're telling me that in 2020, there was this disease that started in the one city where the lab was.

• 12:46Speaker 01

  That was named after the disease.

• 12:48Bill Maher?

  That was studying it and doing gain of function research. And yet they debated whether it came out of there and even said it couldn't possibly have come out of there. Really? That's what people were doing in 2020? That's what I think they will be saying. That it wasn't obvious to them that this, there's a connection here. Now, it could have been the, the bats in the wet market.

• 13:09Speaker 01

  I mean, the problem is that there are still, it's been at least a year since I looked at this. I did a podcast on it and, but I now kind of ignored it, but when I did that podcast, there were still credible scientific arguments to, to argue for a, that the wet market origin thesis.

• 13:27Bill Maher?

  There still are.

• 13:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, so it's, it's.

• 13:29Bill Maher?

  But less and less so, it seems, over time.

• 13:32Speaker 01

  But the crucial point is that it was never crazy to have worried about this. And the truth, I mean, we should still be worried about it. I mean, lab leaks happen continuously.

• 13:42Bill Maher?

  Yeah.

• 13:42Speaker 01

  And it's just, this is something, this is gonna, this could well kill us with something far more dangerous than than COVID.

• 13:51Bill Maher?

  Well.

• 13:52Speaker 01

  And we're not, you know, we don't have it locked down the way we should.

• 13:55Bill Maher?

  And again, you don't have to ascribe any sort of nefarious machinations to this. It's very possible that sincere people thought the best way to deal with future viruses is to get ahead of it, study it in a lab. Isn't that what gain-of-function research is, to see where it's the virus?

• 14:15Speaker 01

  So there are two steps here that are, neither of which, in my view, make much sense, but it's sort of easy to see how they did make sense to people early on. Happily, I think we've, we've pulled the brakes on much of this, but.

• 14:30Bill Maher?

  Have we?

• 14:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:31Bill Maher?

  Oh, good.

• 14:32Speaker 01

  And that was, yeah, USAID was, so you had this tea, this, this, this notion of, you know, virus hunting, where you would send out your virologists into, into bat caves and in search of possible pandemic pathogens, right? And so, so you're, there, there's an uncountable number of viruses out there to be discovered. I think they outnumber any other species of life, like 10 to 1, you know? So it's like, yeah, I mean, just, just.

• 15:06Bill Maher?

  We're reading them right.

• 15:07Speaker 01

  Millions upon millions of uncharacterized viruses.

• 15:09Bill Maher?

  You're soaking it in right now.

• 15:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, no doubt. In this room, I don't doubt it.

• 15:15Bill Maher?

  It's on the furniture.

• 15:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, when I go home, it's like, you saw Silkwood, right? I've got, I've got a stage when I enter my house where I just get, I get showered.

• 15:25Bill Maher?

  I made you healthier tonight, is what I did. You're lucky.

• 15:28Speaker 01

  You boosted my immune system.

• 15:29Bill Maher?

  I did.

• 15:30Speaker 01

  Well, I would like to know the names of, of, of the women who I've, who helped in that, in that effort.

• 15:37Bill Maher?

  I must tell you, I was watching the news last night, I hadn't done that in a while. And there's Lester Holt and he's talking about bird flu.

• 15:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:45Bill Maher?

  And it's like a three-minute package and the whole time I'm going, oh, fuck. We're all gonna die. This is the, it's just made to make, meant to make you shit your pants. You know, pictures of chickens and they get to the end of it and I'm like, oh, this is, this is death. This is, this is another one. It's gonna be worse. And then they bring on the expert and there's a question or, and the very last thing she says after three minutes of shitting your pants is, uh, and the only way you can get it is if you're direct.

• 16:16Speaker 01

  If you fuck a duck on top of a cow.

• 16:18Bill Maher?

  Right. I mean, you'd have to practically fuck a chicken, like Larry Flynt says he's lost.

• 16:23Speaker 01

  Well, no, I think, I think raw milk is, is suspect, specifically for bird flu. And the cows got it in, in California and.

• 16:32Bill Maher?

  Oh, I see.

• 16:32Speaker 01

  And you can get, and I, at least theoretically, I think there's, there's some cases that they think are attributable to, to raw milk.

• 16:38Bill Maher?

  What about raw, uh, goat yogurt?

• 16:41Speaker 01

  Uh, I, uh, raw anything is probably in, in the, in the dairy, on the dairy aisle, I think is probably just not worth.

• 16:47Bill Maher?

  Well, I've been eating raw goat yogurt for 20 years and never got sick from it. So what would you say to that?

• 16:54Speaker 01

  Well, the birds are flying over the goats and now shitting on them. And the, the goats might get bird flu. I mean, the cows are, so.

• 17:02Bill Maher?

  Well, maybe it'd be a good time to take a break from it.

• 17:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 17:05Bill Maher?

  No, but it's, I mean, seriously, I'm, I'm not unreasonable about anything. I don't think.

• 17:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:10Bill Maher?

  That makes sense to me, but in general, I mean, obviously you understand the reasoning why people, people don't do it just for shits and giggles.

• 17:19Speaker 01

  Right.

• 17:19Bill Maher?

  Eat raw. They do it because they want the probiotics in there that pasteurization and homogenization kills.

• 17:27Speaker 01

  Right.

• 17:28Bill Maher?

  Uh, it kills the, just like in our body with antibiotics.

• 17:31Speaker 01

  If you lick any of the surfaces in this room, you'll get a lot of probiotics.

• 17:39Speaker 01

  There's a remote control that I got from Best Western that I would like.

• 17:43Bill Maher?

  First of all, I've calmed down a lot. Okay, so.

• 17:46Speaker 01

  Okay, good. Well, that's.

• 17:49Bill Maher?

  But not.

• 17:49Speaker 01

  Everything, everything has a season.

• 17:51Bill Maher?

  Not complete. Well, I don't know about that. Like.

• 17:55Speaker 01

  This is Ecclesiastes.

• 17:56Bill Maher?

  That's why I never got married is because I was like, I like this season. Why can't I keep this season going?

• 18:04Bill Maher?

  You know.

• 18:05Speaker 01

  This calmer season or the.

• 18:07Bill Maher?

  No, the, the season of like.

• 18:08Speaker 01

  Molly Crew season of, of yesteryear.

• 18:13Bill Maher?

  Yeah, where I was snorting a column of ants off the floor. That's right, Sam. That's what I was doing. Snorting ants and eating the heads off of bats. No, um, the season of, uh, you know how people look back and they, they kind of look back fondly on that, that, you know, falling in love era. I'm like, well, if you're looking fondly back on it, why don't you do it? Is it, is it a law that you have to stop it? That's, that was always.

• 18:39Speaker 01

  Right.

• 18:39Bill Maher?

  But, you know, I understand that I'm also, we can't have kids and, you know, lots of.

• 18:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's, there are trade offs.

• 18:47Bill Maher?

  There are trade offs. That's life's all of trade offs. One of the obvious things I feel like the younger generation doesn't understand. I feel like besides not teaching them like how to do math anymore or write or read. Uh, I think I heard you say that your kids don't even.

• 19:06Speaker 01

  They can't read cursive. Also, I knew, I knew. I knew they couldn't write cursive, right? So I knew that, that that was just, that skill was atrophying and it was just not being taught. And I mean, they were taught it in, in a completely perfunctory way and they, they spent like two weeks on it and they never got it. And so obviously it wasn't happening.

• 19:23Bill Maher?

  Why is it important? It's not.

• 19:24Speaker 01

  But I, but then I, I didn't realize, you know, idiot that I am, I didn't realize that that would translate into them not reading it. And so literally they're handed a, a, a birthday card from their grandmother. And it's like, it's like the fucking Rosetta Stone. I mean, it's, they cannot decode.

• 19:40Bill Maher?

  Which oddly is the name of their grandmother. Rosetta Stone.

• 19:45Speaker 01

  They cannot, I mean, they can't decode a single word, right? It's not like, I mean, and this is pretty counterintuitive because, you know, I don't, I don't write, I spend no time writing cursive, but obviously I can read it. It seems, it seems strange that that's.

• 19:57Bill Maher?

  I do sometimes use it because it's faster.

• 20:00Speaker 01

  Right, it's not faster for me, I'm, I'm, I'm just behind you enough to have.

• 20:04Bill Maher?

  If you're signing a lot of books or something?

• 20:06Speaker 01

  Oh, well, signing, having a signature is, is one thing, but actually writing in cursive.

• 20:10Bill Maher?

  Signature is always in cursive.

• 20:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:12Bill Maher?

  Who prints their signature? Frankenstein?

• 20:14Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 20:16Bill Maher?

  Just X, you know?

• 20:17Speaker 01

  Morons, morons print their signature.

• 20:18Bill Maher?

  But if they, if they can't read cursive, how can they read a person's autograph?

• 20:23Speaker 01

  They can't, no, they, they, they know.

• 20:25Bill Maher?

  Really? They just have to take your word that it says Frank Stallone?

• 20:29Speaker 01

  Yes, but I, they should not become famous because neither of my daughters have autographs. Yeah, they can, they, they will, they will struggle.

• 20:36Bill Maher?

  But I must say, among the things we've lost, I cry the least for this one.

• 20:43Speaker 01

  Yes, right, yes, I'm not gonna lay awake at night.

• 20:46Bill Maher?

  I mean, cursive, it can, that one can go. You know what else could go? Daylight savings.

• 20:55Speaker 01

  Yes, I'm, I'm with you there, that's just a hassle.

• 20:57Bill Maher?

  And President Trump says he is fully behind getting rid of it. It's part of the.

• 21:05Speaker 01

  He might do something good.

• 21:06Bill Maher?

  The MAGA agenda.

• 21:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:08Bill Maher?

  I've said that I am not going to pre-hate anything.

• 21:12Speaker 01

  So, yeah, so you and I are taking a similar line there. I, I've, what I've been saying is that I'm not going to react to anything.

• 21:20Bill Maher?

  Right.

• 21:20Speaker 01

  That hasn't already happened.

• 21:21Bill Maher?

  Right.

• 21:22Speaker 01

  So, so all my whinging about Trump and Trumpism relates to stuff that's already happened. And I'm not talking about hypotheticals.

• 21:29Bill Maher?

  And I'm, I'm also not gonna react to if he talks about Arnold Palmer's dick. Or, or some other silly thing.

• 21:37Speaker 01

  No factor.

• 21:37Bill Maher?

  He's a, he's a talker. Okay, he just talks. So he's one of those people who talks a lot. And he kinda like just uh.

• 21:45Speaker 01

  Have you ever met him?

• 21:46Bill Maher?

  Of course.

• 21:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, and so like what was your, there's actually, there's a, there's a photo, yeah, you showed me a photo of you and him at one point.

• 21:54Bill Maher?

  Oh, that was at the Emmys. I forgot about that time. Yeah, that's a, that's a classic photo.

• 21:59Speaker 01

  Do you have any?

• 22:00Bill Maher?

  No.

• 22:01Speaker 01

  Like a di- different experience of him in person versus his public persona?

• 22:07Bill Maher?

  Of course. I have the same experience every single person who's ever met him has, which is, oh my god. Not only is he not a monster in person, but he's actually was very nice and charming and. You know, he's one of those guys who's always looking to make connections and network and maybe someday this guy, I don't know, but I'm gonna like. Flatter him and, and give him like two minutes of my attention and make him feel like an important person. That's a skill that a salesman like him. And a con man like him has to have, and he does have it. I met him twice. Once was at the Playboy Mansion.

• 22:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, you're, you're meeting on a kind of area of common interest.

• 22:50Bill Maher?

  It was, it was the Midsummer Night's Dream Party. Are you familiar?

• 22:54Speaker 01

  Uh, I can imagine. No, I have, I wasn't there.

• 22:56Bill Maher?

  You've never heard of that?

• 22:57Speaker 01

  No, I, I think I've heard of it, but I don't.

• 22:59Bill Maher?

  It's, it's iconic. It's.

• 23:01Speaker 01

  Is it a costume? I mean, does everyone show up in costume?

• 23:04Bill Maher?

  No, it was a party, it was in the middle of the summer, and so it was hot out. And you had to wear bedwear. Of course, it's an excuse to get the women to wear lingerie.

• 23:15Speaker 01

  Right, but do you show up in pajamas?

• 23:16Bill Maher?

  Yes, you'd either show up in, you know, guys had different, you know, muscle guys would just like have pajama bottoms and no shirt and. You know, or you have a classy smoking jacket. I thought was a good look. You know, but it was just to get the women in them.

• 23:30Speaker 01

  Right.

• 23:31Bill Maher?

  But, so everyone is in their pajama wear and he's walking around the party. He did a lap in his.

• 23:38Bill Maher?

  Just what he always wears.

• 23:39Speaker 01

  In his magus.

• 23:40Bill Maher?

  His power suit with the red tie. And I remember he just went around the party and I talked to him there. And yes, he was quite charming and attentive. And then I saw him at a club in New York in the nineties. We were both at a club. Again, I know, common interest. I think it was called Mumba. It was, uh, it was one of those places at that era in my life I would be at and. I think he talked about it on Howard Stern once and I asked him about it and he was like, "Yeah, he's with a girl. She was, uh, not bad." I got the approval from Donald Trump that she wasn't a seven.

• 24:22Bill Maher?

  You know, that so, but I've matured and he hasn't. That's the difference between how you get to be president and why you're sitting here in this lickable furniture room.

• 24:33Speaker 03

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• 25:17Speaker 03

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• 25:33Speaker 01

  Well, there's one thing I am skeptical about.

• 25:36Bill Maher?

  Come on.

• 25:37Speaker 01

  I haven't said anything about this. I'll give it to you.

• 25:42Speaker 01

  I actually just, I mean, this just could be based on a faulty intuition about ballistics, but I would be, I'm surprised that a rifle round making any degree of contact with an ear wouldn't do more damage. I think, I think a shattered piece of shrapnel from a teleprompter is far more likely to have done that to his ear than a rifle round.

• 26:05Bill Maher?

  That's so silly.

• 26:07Speaker 01

  Well, have you seen what rifle rounds do to human bodies?

• 26:10Bill Maher?

  I know, but like, if it just hit it by the slightest possible degree, it just, you know, it makes much more sense. The guy behind me-

• 26:19Speaker 01

  Well, no, but I do, no, there's no question there are rifle rounds flying. I mean, someone was killed. I'm not, I'm not debating that at all, but just to-

• 26:30Speaker 01

  If in fact, a teleprompter was hit by the rifle round and we know there was shattered glass, that makes more sense to me.

• 26:36Bill Maher?

  Oh, that he didn't get hit at all, it was the teleprompter.

• 26:39Speaker 01

  He got hit by flying glass.

• 26:40Bill Maher?

  Yes. But that doesn't change the basic narration.

• 26:44Speaker 01

  No, no, no, zero change.

• 26:45Bill Maher?

  No, I completely agree that it could be that McLovin just missed him completely.

• 26:52Speaker 01

  McLovin?

• 26:52Bill Maher?

  That's what I call him. And shot the other guy, and he got hit by the, but you know.

• 27:00Speaker 01

  Yes, no, no, that does not take anything away from him having survived a legit assassination attack, I'm not disputing that.

• 27:07Bill Maher?

  And by the way, thank God he did, not just because even people we don't like, we should not wish their death, but it's a bad place for your mind to be, I think, but also because the country would just have gone nuts. I mean, we would be in the middle of a civil war now.

• 27:25Speaker 01

  Well, so I think we sort of nodded toward this truth, but I'll just make it explicit. I do think that one of the silver linings of him having won this election and having won it decisively, is that it has discharged all of that pent-up rage and conspiracy thinking. I mean, like, so in Trumpistan, well, they got, they've gotten everything, right? So now they've got four years to just...

• 27:56Bill Maher?

  They believe in elections again.

• 27:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, so like, our election system works, right, apparently? And the elites couldn't keep the man down?

• 28:03Bill Maher?

  But again...

• 28:04Speaker 01

  And there's no conspiracy, the Jews didn't do the thing that they're worried about?

• 28:09Bill Maher?

  You know, again, and I don't think you're gonna disagree with this, we didn't cure the cancer, we just pushed it further into tissue.

• 28:15Speaker 01

  Well, but I think it's different, but the counterfactual is scary. I mean, so a Harris administration with all of these right-wing QAnon-addled nutcases thinking that it was, the fix was in and elections don't mean anything, and all of that's bad, from my point of view. So the fact that half of the electorate is that crazy... Is, I do think they've been mollified and then now they get to see what it's like to govern with all of the tech bros they love and we'll see what happens.

• 28:47Bill Maher?

  Well, I don't know what will happen with that. I do know what will happen with the next election, which is why as much as we're living in a wonderful time now, where America is great again.

• 29:00Bill Maher?

  Whatever the next election is. If the Democrat wins it, they're just going to be ever more suspicious and it's just going to be. We're putting off this day where where something has to give with the people who don't believe in elections unless we win them. That's intolerable.

• 29:18Speaker 01

  Why would you say that if this time we, the mustache twirling plutocrats couldn't fix the election?

• 29:27Bill Maher?

  You're thinking too.

• 29:28Speaker 01

  Elections works.

• 29:29Bill Maher?

  You're thinking so logically, Sam.

• 29:33Speaker 01

  He won everything. He ran the table.

• 29:36Bill Maher?

  Yes, because there because there was no cheating. But if he had lost, there would have been cheating. You have it backwards.

• 29:44Speaker 01

  Absolutely, but no, but like, but now, but we've proven that you could, you could have a fair election in the year 2024.

• 29:51Bill Maher?

  You're living in the world where you're encountering people like you.

• 29:54Speaker 01

  Right.

• 29:55Bill Maher?

  And that's not the world we live in.

• 29:57Speaker 01

  Well, I'm a bad judge of character.

• 30:00Bill Maher?

  That is not going to happen. What's going to happen is the next time a Democrat wins, there's going to be

• 30:08Speaker 01

  It was rigged.

• 30:09Bill Maher?

  A fucking shitstorm. And I don't know how that ends. And it depends also on who is in positions of power that are being put there now. I mean, I did an editorial once about power begets power. The more power you have, the more power you get. So now they have-

• 30:29Speaker 01

  What are you actually, what are you worried about? And what are you agnostic about? And what are you hopeful about?

• 30:34Bill Maher?

  I'm worried about that now that they have a lot of power controlling all the levers, they do what all countries do where the people who want to stay in power forever, put the people in place who are just total loyalists. That's the courts.

• 30:51Speaker 01

  But are you worried that we're not gonna have a valid 2028 election? Because he's gonna run for a third term? Or something insane?

• 30:58Bill Maher?

  It doesn't really, that's, I mean, he could and that would be awful. I, I, I don't know. It's a very sort of Prince Charles situation, you know, like where Don Jr. is like, "Mom, would you, would you please die, Queen Elizabeth?" So I, I mean, how old was Prince Charles when he finally got it? And Don Jr. is gonna be chomping at the bit. But we are heading toward that where like North Korea and the Assad regime and many other places in the world, that they have elections, wink, wink. But really, it's just the scion of the ruling family that takes over. And of course, their fans love this.

• 31:39Bill Maher?

  So, you know, I think J.D. Vance is just a placeholder for Don Jr. I think the fact that they look alike makes it easier. They just put Don Jr. in there and they tell them it's the same guy.

• 31:52Speaker 01

  So you think Trumpism continues without Trump?

• 31:55Bill Maher?

  Absolutely. I think Trump-

• 31:57Speaker 01

  I have no intuitions about that.

• 31:59Bill Maher?

  Very often with a person named Trump.

• 32:03Speaker 01

  Right. Yeah, so I, yeah, I would, that feels like a coin toss to me.

• 32:06Bill Maher?

  Don Barron, I could see doing this.

• 32:09Speaker 01

  He's eight feet tall, so, yeah.

• 32:12Bill Maher?

  So was George Washington for his day.

• 32:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:14Bill Maher?

  You know? I, yes, but even without them, Trumpism to me is a response to something we both talk a lot about, which is the insanity of the left. As long as one half of the country feels that-

• 32:31Bill Maher?

  Even if they don't like Trump so much, we just can't let these crazy people take over. The people who don't know what a woman is.

• 32:37Speaker 01

  Right.

• 32:38Bill Maher?

  You know, those, that kind of stuff. The people who think we are living in this racist patriarchal nightmare of a country, which we're not, we have issues, we have problems.

• 32:51Speaker 01

  Do you think the pendulum is swinging back on that now?

• 32:54Bill Maher?

  Um, you know, we've heard this for the last few years and there are bits of evidence that it is.

• 33:00Speaker 01

  But I mean, but in the aftermath of the loss, do you think this, the reckoning is happening?

• 33:05Bill Maher?

  We've actually had a test case that can answer this question. Although we don't have the full answer yet, but Seth Moulton, you're familiar?

• 33:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:13Bill Maher?

  Congressman, okay. He said after the election, something which you and I and any reasonable person in America would find not only benign, but completely uncontroversial. He said, "I don't want my, I think, 12-year-old..."

• 33:29Speaker 01

  My daughter being run over by a man.

• 33:34Bill Maher?

  Yes, "I don't want my 12-year-old daughter, who played, what it was, field hockey or soccer or some girls' sport in school, to be on the field with a biological male."

• 33:45Speaker 01

  Right.

• 33:45Bill Maher?

  Who couldn't do a lot of damage, it's true. And immediately, I think it was his press secretary, or maybe campaign manager, or maybe both, resigned.

• 33:54Speaker 01

  Right, yeah.

• 33:55Bill Maher?

  And there's where we are. That's, that is, that is the picture.

• 34:00Speaker 01

  But he's still okay, right? Like, so he hasn't been canceled, right?

• 34:03Bill Maher?

  No, but I don't, maybe I missed it because I'm on vacation, but I don't hear him saying, "Good, let the door hit you in the ass."

• 34:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:14Bill Maher?

  "You are what lost this..."

• 34:15Speaker 01

  That's the necessary piece.

• 34:16Bill Maher?

  "...this last election, and I'm glad you're going, and you're what's taking down this party, and you're nuts, and I'm here to say Democrats are not nuts."

• 34:26Speaker 01

  Have you seen Richie Torres speak?

• 34:28Bill Maher?

  Yes, I've had him on the show.

• 34:30Speaker 01

  Oh, okay, so I missed that.

• 34:31Bill Maher?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 34:32Speaker 01

  He seems great to me, and he seems like he's kryptonite to the far left.

• 34:38Bill Maher?

  Uh, I've seen him be great on some issues, frankly, on the one-on-one. We had him once and I liked him a lot, then he was on the...

• 34:46Speaker 01

  This is on real time or on the podcast?

• 34:47Bill Maher?

  Yeah, real time. And then he was on the panel, and I thought he was... He looked green, young, way too careful.

• 34:57Bill Maher?

  But, you know, he's very young.

• 34:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:00Bill Maher?

  But I like him and, you know, any Democrat who stands up for Israel, that takes guts.

• 35:05Speaker 01

  Right.

• 35:06Bill Maher?

  And he did it, and does it, and, yeah, I think he's got a big future. I think he's really smart.

• 35:12Speaker 01

  I mean, he's, he's black, Latino, gay, and wants nothing to do with identity politics, which...

• 35:18Bill Maher?

  Well, it's easy to say when you're all that.

• 35:20Speaker 01

  That's right, yeah, but I mean, that's like, you know, having the twenty-sided dice, you know, yeah.

• 35:26Bill Maher?

  It's like the rich guy who says, "Money really doesn't matter." Yeah, because you have it.

• 35:29Speaker 01

  Exactly, yeah.

• 35:32Bill Maher?

  Well, that's one of the Democrats' biggest problems in electoral politics, is that one side doesn't give a shit at all about diversity, and one side is way too beholden to it and has to check boxes before they even think about who's gonna be on the ticket. I mean, I said this, just, I think it was Eric Holder, but I said, "Can you even imagine a Democratic ticket without a person of color?" He said, "No." Now, maybe that's a good thing, but it is limiting.

• 36:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:06Bill Maher?

  It is very, very limiting. It means you are pulling from half the pool of talent, and maybe not the pool...

• 36:14Speaker 01

  Well, not even half, well...

• 36:16Bill Maher?

  Right.

• 36:17Speaker 01

  It depends what you mean by color in that case, but if you're talking about black, you know, fourteen percent of it.

• 36:21Bill Maher?

  Right, I see what you're saying, yeah.

• 36:25Bill Maher?

  But in politics, probably a little more is that number, but just in general, you're, you're limiting yourself, and the other team just doesn't care. I mean, look at Trump, he just, although he did a, one, one of his people is gay. Who was it, these, um, some important, was it the Treasury Secretary, I think?

• 36:47Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 36:47Bill Maher?

  It was a very un-Trump-like pick. He wasn't necessarily a loyalist, gay, and a former George Soros contributor.

• 36:55Speaker 01

  Right, right, that surprised me.

• 36:57Bill Maher?

  But I think he's Treasury.

• 36:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, and, and, I mean, I gotta imagine there are conspiracy theorists getting a hold of that, because, I mean, because Soros is enemy number one over in Trumpistan.

• 37:07Bill Maher?

  He is, but, you know, but I don't think, in the Trump administration, I don't think enemy number one, or enemy at all, is gay.

• 37:14Speaker 01

  Not gay, but.

• 37:15Bill Maher?

  I don't think it's black. I just don't think they don't kowtow. And maybe they should a little because we do need remedial steps still. We do have to take account of our horrible past. We just need to live in the year we're living in is what I always say. As opposed to pretending that we need to be doing what we were doing in 1960 or something. Now, Trump people, maybe they go a little too far. I mean, I don't think there's any, maybe there's one person of color that he picked. But it's just not the way he thinks and, you know, I don't know. One side is on too far one way. He's too far the other way, but generally merit does need to make a comeback.

• 38:00Bill Maher?

  Not that the people he picked have anything to do with merit.

• 38:05Speaker 01

  It's really not.

• 38:06Bill Maher?

  I mean.

• 38:07Speaker 01

  To a degree that is fairly.

• 38:10Bill Maher?

  Did I say bad example?

• 38:12Speaker 01

  Oh, God.

• 38:13Bill Maher?

  I mean, Pete Hegsmith.

• 38:15Speaker 01

  Hegseth, yeah.

• 38:16Bill Maher?

  Hegseth.

• 38:18Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, it's like, can we get more rapists in here? I mean, like, how is it that you?

• 38:23Bill Maher?

  Okay, well, that's a very strong word.

• 38:26Speaker 01

  That's, yeah, sure.

• 38:26Bill Maher?

  You know.

• 38:27Speaker 01

  Well, we'll find out. We'll find out what this person, I don't think this person will come forward because.

• 38:32Bill Maher?

  Oh, the Pete Hegseth woman, yeah.

• 38:35Speaker 01

  I think he's given the woman freedom to come forward.

• 38:37Bill Maher?

  Would I be shocked? I would not. But I also think in these instances, since Bill Clinton has been credibly accused of doing the same thing as Trump has done. I mean, past, just being handsy.

• 38:55Speaker 01

  Right.

• 38:56Bill Maher?

  That since the Democrats never really seem to care about that, you've already lost the high ground on this issue. You know, you apparently only care.

• 39:06Speaker 01

  There's a lesson in that. Don't lose the fucking high ground. I mean, like, actually have integrity. You know, I mean, it just seems like. You know, I mean, where you start the clock is is a judgment call, but like, okay, from this moment forward, whatever your party, like, if we're going to reboot the Democratic Party, let's practice sane politics, and sane politics is not reverse racism, right? It's not, it's not just, you know, hating Whitey all the time, right?

• 39:38Bill Maher?

  That's the key.

• 39:40Speaker 01

  At a certain point, you have to stop apologizing for how fucked up the past was, and just find the people who are capable of moving forward with real integrity.

• 39:51Bill Maher?

  That's the key. I mean, race is the original sin of this country, and, you know, it's still with us in a, in a big way, in every way.

• 40:00Speaker 01

  It's with us, but, but I think we can, we can solve the problem without focusing on race.

• 40:07Bill Maher?

  Right.

• 40:08Speaker 01

  So, for instance, if there's, so, I mean, I think there really is, there, there are profound inequalities that are highly correlated with race in America, like, you know, wealth inequality, you know, health outcomes.

• 40:20Bill Maher?

  Mostly money.

• 40:21Speaker 01

  Mostly money. I mean, everything that comes with money, right?

• 40:23Bill Maher?

  Because of, you know, for years, they couldn't have any money, and we've had generations of wealth.

• 40:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, so, so I think this, I think it is still true to say that it's something like an eightfold difference in the, in the average amount of familial wealth between white and black in America, right? So, that's, that's so serious, right? So, if you, if you were going to focus on class, if you're going to focus on wealth inequality and all of its entailments, you know, education, health, et cetera, then you would be disproportionately benefiting people of color without ever focusing on race as the, as the variable.

• 41:07Bill Maher?

  Right, and there's some things that the people who just want to make headlines don't acknowledge about this argument. One is, this cannot be-

• 41:18Bill Maher?

  An eight to one disparity in wealth cannot be addressed in a short period of time.

• 41:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:24Bill Maher?

  It's going to take a century.

• 41:25Speaker 01

  Well, you're not, yeah, you're not gonna cut a check.

• 41:26Bill Maher?

  It's going to take a century. Some things just do. I'm sorry about the past. I personally didn't do it. And you're not gonna get white people to, and it would bankrupt the economy if you, if you, if you actually gave what black people in general deserve, yes. But again, the people-

• 41:48Speaker 01

  But also, it's unworkable in all kinds of other ways.

• 41:50Bill Maher?

  And the people alive today-

• 41:52Speaker 01

  Aren't the people.

• 41:52Bill Maher?

  Very often get conflated.

• 41:54Speaker 01

  They're not the culpable people, yeah.

• 41:56Bill Maher?

  The woke like to conflate the past with the present. The past was despicable. And the present has parts of it that are still needing remedial work. But it's not despicable. We have racists in this country. I don't think we're a racist country, in general. I said it in my last editorial, that the Democrats appeal to the voters as if they don't actually live here. As if they don't actually go out in the day.

• 42:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, you don't go to a CVS and have to get your shaving kit under lock and key. A jailer comes by to get you some razor blades.

• 42:35Bill Maher?

  But I mean racially, they, they, they seem to think Americans live in this country where they go out in the day and they're seeing racism.

• 42:44Speaker 01

  Right.

• 42:44Bill Maher?

  You know, like-

• 42:45Speaker 01

  Cross burnings in front of Starbucks.

• 42:48Bill Maher?

  Starbucks is saying, "We don't serve your kind to people." You know, it's just like, we have issues to work out, but basically, we're a fairly successful multiracial society.

• 42:59Speaker 01

  Well, here's a, I mean, maybe this won't be provocative to you, but it's, in, in woke-istan, this is provocative. I think if we could just magically remove every racist from our society-

• 43:13Speaker 01

  Virtually nothing would change of substance. It's like there'd still be the same number of murders in Chicago this weekend.

• 43:20Bill Maher?

  Right.

• 43:20Speaker 01

  There'd still be the same wealth inequality, there'd still be educational disparities. We still have lots of problems to solve. And we would recognize that that for virtually nothing was the problem, that there was a racist standing in the way anchoring that problem.

• 43:36Bill Maher?

  Yes, and of course, there are people listening to this now saying, how dare two white men talk about, even talk about it, let alone say-

• 43:44Speaker 01

  To that, I can say, go fuck yourself.

• 43:45Bill Maher?

  Me too, because we're speaking the truth, you know? And, and of course, the people who know this better than anybody are black people. Like, I've heard-

• 43:56Speaker 01

  Who, who voted in record numbers for Trump, because-

• 43:59Bill Maher?

  Still not a lot.

• 44:00Speaker 01

  No, but-

• 44:00Bill Maher?

  Just record, yeah. I mean, he got half of the male Latino vote.

• 44:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:05Bill Maher?

  But, but no, I mean, I've heard woke people say things like, you know, black people are hunted when they leave their house. That, somebody has to stand up to that kind of thing, like, the implication being by racists, as you're talking about, or the police-

• 44:21Speaker 01

  Racist cops, yeah.

• 44:22Bill Maher?

  Racist cops. And it's true, there are some black people who are hunted when they leave their house. They're gang members-

• 44:28Speaker 01

  Hunted by other gang members, yeah.

• 44:29Bill Maher?

  Or being hunted by other gang members because they insulted their sneakers or something. You know, that's, or they're on their drug territory. We could make so much progress in this racial area if we would just do three things. John McWhorter talks about them. End the drug war. Better schools and teach, actually teaching kids something, especially in shitty schools where a lot of black kids go. And more daddies.

• 45:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:02Bill Maher?

  Family.

• 45:02Speaker 01

  That's also completely incendiary, you know, Candace Owens level point, you know?

• 45:07Bill Maher?

  What, what, what did she say?

• 45:08Speaker 01

  Just, I mean, just, just putting the onus on single parent households. I mean, I think it's something like 70% of the births in the black community are to, to single moms, right?

• 45:18Bill Maher?

  And she's-

• 45:19Speaker 01

  She's just like, that's your fucking problem, fellas.

• 45:22Bill Maher?

  Oh, I see.

• 45:23Speaker 01

  And that, but that, I mean, well, Candace is black, obviously, so she's, she doesn't quite have the problems that you and I are now going to inherit, sort of, to this conversation. But, uh, uh-

• 45:35Bill Maher?

  But it's-

• 45:36Speaker 01

  It's, but it's, it's obviously so, right? It's like, it's, it's just not, I mean-

• 45:40Bill Maher?

  And it wasn't always so.

• 45:43Speaker 01

  It wasn't always so.

• 45:44Bill Maher?

  In the black community. So, something did change.

• 45:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:48Bill Maher?

  Um, I think some people think that it was always thus, or that maybe it's even gotten better. But no, that number was not nearly that high.

• 45:59Speaker 01

  That did get worse, yeah.

• 46:00Bill Maher?

  And then, so maybe we should just look at that. But I think that's kind of anathema to the left, because it implicates like the Great Society and, um...

• 46:12Speaker 01

  My feeling now is that as a heuristic, I just think that any mention of race in virtually any context is, is almost always, these are all these modifiers, counterproductive.

• 46:27Bill Maher?

  And paradoxically, they want to make everything about race.

• 46:31Speaker 01

  Right, yeah.

• 46:32Bill Maher?

  Everything's about race, but don't mention it.

• 46:34Speaker 01

  There's no one who cares as much about race in, as progressives in American society, other than, if you have to, if you, Margaret, right to look for your, your, you know, your colleague in this racial fixation, you have to go all the way to the Ku Klux Klan, all the way to white supremacists and neo-Nazis. That, those are the people who care about race as much as the woke progressives.

• 46:57Bill Maher?

  It's a, it's a little like how much Republicans care about gay. You know, some of them think about gayness a lot. You almost have to be a gay man to think about it as much. It's kind of the same.

• 47:08Speaker 01

  Yeah. Although I think that's probably not so much the case. I think we've won, I feel like we, we did win that battle and, and that's not getting walked back, but who knows? I mean, there, there are theocrats who are still waiting to, to win that argument, but...

• 47:22Bill Maher?

  Well, Trump...

• 47:23Speaker 01

  What's amazing is that, for you and me, what is amazing is that we have not had the bandwidth to even think about Christian fundamentalism and theocracy in, in, in, in the last decade, given all of the... The political mishegoss that Trump has brought in. I mean, like, he has empowered the theocrats and there's been this kind of quiet, you know.

• 47:46Bill Maher?

  He went on as a.

• 47:47Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, there's all kinds of.

• 47:48Bill Maher?

  Quasi.

• 47:49Speaker 01

  The theocrats are getting what they want, but we're, we're not talking about them or, or even thinking about them in most cases.

• 47:57Bill Maher?

  But I worry that when he's gone, they're still there.

• 48:01Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 48:01Bill Maher?

  And they like, he gets a pass, he got a hall pass from the theocrats.

• 48:06Speaker 01

  He's not even, I mean, not even remotely, plausibly a Christian, and yet he's their instrument.

• 48:13Bill Maher?

  Excuse me, Sam, have you read your Bible? He's a Cyrus figure.

• 48:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, right.

• 48:18Bill Maher?

  Do you know who Cyrus is?

• 48:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:20Bill Maher?

  Who?

• 48:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:21Bill Maher?

  Who, Mr. Smarty Pants?

• 48:23Speaker 01

  Cyrus the Great?

• 48:24Bill Maher?

  Yes, Cyrus the Great.

• 48:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:26Bill Maher?

  What did he do?

• 48:27Speaker 01

  Uh.

• 48:27Bill Maher?

  Freed the Jews. He wasn't a good person himself, but he did a good thing. He was a vessel of God, okay?

• 48:33Speaker 01

  Instrument of the Lord, yeah.

• 48:35Bill Maher?

  He was an instrument of the Lord, so we, we don't care that he wasn't even a Jew.

• 48:39Speaker 01

  I think I told you, I asked Ralph Reed about this the first time around, like, this is like 2016. That was at a conference I ran into, to Ralph.

• 48:47Bill Maher?

  Yeah, I had him on the show.

• 48:48Speaker 01

  As people remember, he's, he was a, in good standing among evangelicals, evangelical thought leader.

• 48:55Bill Maher?

  Oh, yeah.

• 48:56Speaker 01

  And.

• 48:56Bill Maher?

  Thought leader.

• 48:57Speaker 01

  So, so, so this was at the moment where they had completely gone all in for Trump. And I said, Ralph, you know, I mean, I mean, he had just, he had just stood up there and said, you know, Corinthians 2 and like, and, and, and it was asked for his favorite book of the Bible. And he said, oh, I wouldn't want to say, I wouldn't want to offend anyone. Like, it was clearly, it was clear that he didn't know any of the books of the Bible. And, uh, so I asked Ralph, like, Ralph, you know, he just, he, he doesn't know anything about Christianity. He's, he's not thought about this at all. He's not a Christian. He's like, how are you, how are, how are you supporting him? And he just went immediately to, you know, I, I don't know what's in another man's heart, you know, and it's just, it's, they, they rationalized it.

• 49:41Speaker 01

  You know, they knew they, they knew they had to kind of deal with him.

• 49:44Bill Maher?

  Sam, you're such a cynic.

• 49:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:46Bill Maher?

  First of all, Trump was the 45th President of the United States. You know what passage King Cyrus is? King's 45.

• 49:56Speaker 01

  Oh, I didn't know that.

• 49:57Bill Maher?

  You can't argue with science, Sam.

• 49:59Speaker 01

  Exactly, yeah. Damn, well, I stand corrected. It's all, it's all going according to plan.

• 50:05Bill Maher?

  How much do you remember about the Babylonian captivity?

• 50:09Speaker 01

  Uh, personally?

• 50:11Bill Maher?

  No, from history? What year?

• 50:15Speaker 01

  Uh, I'm gonna put that at

• 50:19Speaker 01

  600 B.C.

• 50:20Bill Maher?

  586 B.C., pretty good.

• 50:21Speaker 01

  That was close.

• 50:23Bill Maher?

  And the king was?

• 50:26Speaker 01

  Nebuchadnezzar.

• 50:27Bill Maher?

  Nebuchadnezzar.

• 50:30Bill Maher?

  I'm gonna name my dog.

• 50:31Speaker 01

  That was, that was Diaspora number one. And then we had Diaspora number two and about 600 years later.

• 50:39Bill Maher?

  What do you think about all the Jew hunting that's going on in the world? I, I see in Amsterdam, they're now calling it Jew hunting. Which, uh, has faint echoes of the war. Is it not? Am I wrong? Am I reading into that? Between the lines, Jew hunting?

• 50:56Speaker 01

  Again, I mean, this is one of these situations analogous to what I just said about race. I do feel like we can get virtually everything we want. Not focusing on antisemitism and focusing on a defense of Western values. It's like, so again, the analogy is, so with race in America, I think if you, if you focus on wealth inequality, I think you, you, that tide lifts all boats. Or the boats you wanna lift. I think with antisemitism, I mean, I, I, this is perhaps there's, there's some serious caveats here. Uh, perhaps, but generally speaking, everything that's wrong with antisemitism is a symptom of this larger problem where

• 51:41Speaker 01

  everyone left of center can't figure out how to defend Western values from.

• 51:44Bill Maher?

  I couldn't agree more. Absolutely. It all springs from that.

• 51:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:48Bill Maher?

  That somehow Western values themselves are tainted again because, you know, to me, the root of this is the kids don't know anything because they don't teach anything in school. So if you don't know anything, what's the one thing you can know? Black and white.

• 52:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:03Bill Maher?

  Literally, black and white.

• 52:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:05Bill Maher?

  That's as deep as they get. So in that world, where there's black and white, white bad, black good. Um, one's the oppressor, one's the oppressed. Everything has to fit into that. And Israel, rich, white, even though like half of them are not white.

• 52:22Speaker 01

  The only, literally, the only black people are Ethiopian Jews fighting for the IDF in that context.

• 52:28Bill Maher?

  Yeah, that's true. But I mean, um, Jews that are Sephardic are-

• 52:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, they're, I mean, they're indistinguishable from the Arabs.

• 52:39Bill Maher?

  Right, indistinguishable.

• 52:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, and they're, and half the, I mean, the Mizrahi Jews have, I mean, you're talking about Jews who are kicked out of all the neighboring countries, Iraq and Syria and Lebanon and Morocco. I mean, like, you've got, that's probably half the population of Israel.

• 52:59Bill Maher?

  Right.

• 52:59Speaker 01

  And no one's worried about their right of return.

• 53:02Bill Maher?

  Again, my thesis, black and white. That's all you know. In that worldview, where white bad, where they don't, like, sometimes teach, they don't teach a lot of stuff that they used to teach because it was written by white people. Even though maybe it would be worth reading Thomas Locke.

• 53:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:21Bill Maher?

  Maybe he did write some, or John Locke, whatever.

• 53:23Speaker 01

  John Locke, yeah.

• 53:24Bill Maher?

  Okay. Um, Thomas Hobbes.

• 53:26Speaker 01

  Thomas Hobbes, yeah.

• 53:27Bill Maher?

  I'm sure there are other people, Rousseau.

• 53:29Speaker 01

  Thomas Kuhn.

• 53:30Bill Maher?

  You know, yes, people who, whose ideas became the Enlightenment ideas, which are the actual ideas that make marginalized people's lives better, like equality and protection of minorities and democracy and scientific inquiry and individual liberty. You know, sorry that white people thought of some of this stuff, but in that world, where you don't even teach that, of course, they're not going to defend Western values. Because values is a concept. You have to think a little above the immediate black and white. So that's what we're dealing with. We're, we're working on not what used to be considered such a lofty level, the level

• 54:14Bill Maher?

  of concepts as opposed to just identity. Anyone can see the identity. But really, that's why I don't think they value Western concepts anymore and Western values, and they don't defend them. They just defend the people who are oppressed. Even if the oppression is coming from those people. Who is more oppressive in this world? As long as we're getting in trouble anyway.

• 54:39Speaker 01

  The theocrats and Islam.

• 54:41Bill Maher?

  Muslim men in general. Like in their personal lives, with their relations with women.

• 54:47Speaker 01

  Well, that's the thing that's so crazy making about it.

• 54:51Bill Maher?

  And certainly not the ones in America, but that's why people come to America. But around the world, you know,

• 54:58Speaker 01

  Theocrats, yeah.

• 54:59Bill Maher?

  Women are not considered equal.

• 55:02Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, the thing that's so crazy making about it is that it's not, it doesn't, it's not like it's logical within its context, and therefore it's easy to see how people are so confused. It's completely illogical, even within its own context. Like, if what you care about are the rights of women, right? You want women to be treated as equals to men. Like, that's your starting, like, the Women's March, right? Let's get a million women to march on DC, and you want equality, right? Totally understandable. I'm with you, sisters. How is it that you imagine that having one of the three people who are anchoring this march,

• 55:47Speaker 01

  you have a veiled woman who's this theocratic bully and anti-Semite and friend of Louis Farrakhan, right? And you imagine that the veil is a symbol of female empowerment, right?

• 56:00Bill Maher?

  Yes. It should be worn with the Queers for Palestine t-shirt. Just as a visual of like, how ass-backwards these people's thinking, how confused they are.

• 56:15Bill Maher?

  But of course, they're just going to hate us for saying that and not really see what we're saying.

• 56:20Speaker 01

  They more likely will not hear, even hear us saying it.

• 56:22Bill Maher?

  Yeah. Do you ever worry about that, that you're just preaching to the converted, or you feel like you are converting? I feel like I'm converting some.

• 56:32Speaker 01

  I feel, I mean, it, the, the idea is certainly spread. I mean, I think, I think the time course of their spread is smeared out over time. I mean, you, you don't know when people are gonna stumble upon the thing you said five years ago. But it does, it does, I mean, I, you know, I wouldn't, if, if it felt pointless, I, I wouldn't do it. But it, it, so it doesn't, it certainly doesn't feel pointless.

• 56:52Bill Maher?

  No.

• 56:53Speaker 01

  I constantly meet the people who, who's thinking, has changed.

• 56:57Bill Maher?

  Me too. It's valuable. And I also think that if I would analogize the media to politics, there's often a call for a third party in politics.

• 57:08Speaker 01

  Which I have never felt anything but skepticism about. It just seems like, it's, it just seems like too heavy a lift.

• 57:15Bill Maher?

  But here's where I'm going with this. In politics, it doesn't really work, not in this country, the way it's set up. If we were a parliamentary democracy, it'd be different.

• 57:23Speaker 01

  Right.

• 57:23Bill Maher?

  You could have multiple parties. In this system we have, one of them is always, one, a third party, if it becomes successful, will then be co-opted by one of the two parties. It always happens. Your ideas are popular, we'll just steal them.

• 57:38Speaker 01

  Right.

• 57:39Bill Maher?

  And it just doesn't work. But media-wise, yes, the two parties, the MSNBCs over here, and the Fox News over there, with all their other, New York Times on that side, and, you know, Sinclair or whatever on that side. They both have huge bastions and lots of people who just wanna hear what they have to say, because they just want their preconceived ideas confirmed. They want everything to be chewed for them and then spit back in their mouth in a way that they can just swallow.

• 58:13Speaker 01

  Right.

• 58:13Bill Maher?

  Okay. But there is like a third party in media and that's you and me and Barry Weiss and Andrew Sullivan and you know, I could name other people.

• 58:23Speaker 01

  It's really just the four of us.

• 58:24Bill Maher?

  No, it isn't. Don't say that. There's more, right?

• 58:28Speaker 01

  I hope, yeah.

• 58:29Bill Maher?

  Come on. Douglas Murray.

• 58:31Speaker 01

  Well, Douglas, yeah, Douglas, well, I mean, well Douglas is, Douglas is fantastic on his issues, but he is, he's hated by everyone left of center.

• 58:41Bill Maher?

  So are we!

• 58:42Speaker 01

  No, no, well, not, not as much.

• 58:44Bill Maher?

  Pointlessly.

• 58:45Speaker 01

  We're not hated as much as Douglas is.

• 58:46Bill Maher?

  But pointlessly, and that's the thing.

• 58:48Speaker 01

  The great thing about Douglas is he has, he doesn't care, he's never cared, he has no reason to care because he's on the right.

• 58:54Bill Maher?

  Neither do we!

• 58:55Speaker 01

  Well, no, but he's never, he never experienced this whiplash of like, wait a minute, these people who

• 59:00Bill Maher?

  Right.

• 59:01Speaker 01

  understand everything that I understand and also subscribe to the New York Times now hate me.

• 59:04Bill Maher?

  Right.

• 59:05Speaker 01

  He never had, he never had any of that.

• 59:06Bill Maher?

  Yeah, same, and Jordan Peterson I would add to that list. I don't feel like he-

• 59:09Speaker 01

  Jordan, Jordan's got

• 59:10Bill Maher?

  What?

• 59:11Speaker 01

  user interface issues that, you know, he's-

• 59:14Bill Maher?

  What is that?

• 59:15Speaker 01

  I, I like Jordan a lot

• 59:17Bill Maher?

  Me too.

• 59:18Speaker 01

  as a person. I mean, but Jordan is definitely out there in, not quite Trump-istan, but he's, he's definitely Trump-adjacent and messaging into the, he's in, he's in conspirastan. He's, he's talking to the, he's out there with Russell Brand and people who are talking to the, the, the contrar, the contrarian audience all the time and-

• 59:43Bill Maher?

  Well, what's something he says that I would object to?

• 59:46Speaker 01

  Um-

• 59:48Bill Maher?

  No, I know, I had him here for the book on-

• 59:50Speaker 01

  It's been a while since I watched his stuff, but I mean, well, first of all, he's, he's, he's genuinely, well, he's, he's religious in a way that's hard to pin down.

• 1:00:00Bill Maher?

  Oh no, I had him, I had him here, we talked about the Bible for two hours.

• 1:00:03Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:00:04Bill Maher?

  Because that's what his book is about.

• 1:00:05Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:00:06Bill Maher?

  Um, so, we don't agree on that. And if, if he'd voted for Trump, we don't agree on that.

• 1:00:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't, well, he, he's actually said some critical things about Trump, so he's not, as has Douglas, so they're, they're not all in on that front, but, um-

• 1:00:22Speaker 01

  No, I mean, so what I've noticed with a lot of people, I would not put Douglas in this category, but I think I would put Jordan there, is there's this phenomenon of audience capture, which, you know, is a phrase, I don't know if it's in your brain, but it's a, Eric Weinstein came up with this phrase that now everyone uses because it's so useful, but it's just names this phenomenon of people who, especially in alternative media, who detect a signal in their audience, like the person who starts talking about, you know, did Jeffrey Epstein really kill himself, and they, all of a sudden, they've done 40 podcasts

• 1:01:02Speaker 01

  on that topic because that's what their audience wants, and they've monetized that idea, and

• 1:01:09Bill Maher?

  And you see it happen.

• 1:01:10Speaker 01

  You see that happen to people.

• 1:01:11Bill Maher?

  Yeah, absolutely, and you see it also in broadcast, people like Nicole Wallace, who I like.

• 1:01:18Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:01:19Bill Maher?

  But she was a pretty hard right Bush Republican, and then she went over to MSNBC, and it, you know, at first, it's just like, well, we all hate Trump, there are good Republicans who hate Trump, and we love them for it, Liz Cheney, and Mitt Romney, okay, blah, blah, blah, Chris Christie, we've done the list, but then it slowly becomes every issue, and you're like, okay, you know, maybe it's a, maybe it's a sincere conversion.

• 1:01:49Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:01:50Bill Maher?

  Or maybe it's like, I see who signs my paycheck every week, and.

• 1:01:53Speaker 01

  So your opinion about guns and climate change, like, it all changed, all those styles.

• 1:01:59Bill Maher?

  That's when suddenly, she's like, brown people, brown people, what did you ever care about brown people? I mean, I'm not picking on her, there are other examples of that.

• 1:02:08Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:02:09Bill Maher?

  Where you just feel like, wow, you know, I get it, whoever's signing your paycheck, we all gotta eat, you know, man's gotta make a living. But I don't know, I know I'm lucky. I've had a very generous employer for a long time. So, and, and you're lucky because, you know, you don't have sponsors. You talk about it all the time at the beginning of your show. I do this, I'm asking, you know, for money to do this because it gives me the freedom. And you're right, you are beholden to nobody. And that's a rare thing these days.

• 1:02:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:02:44Bill Maher?

  In broadcasting, beholden to nobody.

• 1:02:47Speaker 01

  No, I mean, I felt it, uh, this, this may sound like a Nvidia's thing to say about, uh, but did you see my, um, debate with Ben Shapiro on, on, for Barry for, on, on Honestly?

• 1:03:00Bill Maher?

  I did not.

• 1:03:01Speaker 01

  Okay, so we do, this is pre-election.

• 1:03:02Bill Maher?

  Oh, maybe I did.

• 1:03:03Speaker 01

  Maybe like 10 days before the election.

• 1:03:04Bill Maher?

  Was there a transcript?

• 1:03:05Speaker 01

  They might have produced a transcript.

• 1:03:07Bill Maher?

  Yes, I read it.

• 1:03:07Speaker 01

  So anyway, we did a debate, but, um, I realized, and you know, I'm sure Ben would disagree with this, but he would, I think he would be wrong. Um, that there was a freedom I had, like, in having this debate with him. Uh, and I, I like Ben and it was a totally, you know, open-hearted debate. There was no, nothing wrong there, but I realized I was free. Like, whenever he made a good point against Kamala Harris, I was free to agree with it.

• 1:03:37Bill Maher?

  Right.

• 1:03:38Speaker 01

  It's like, I, I got no, I mean, you know, I, I know, I'm, I'm beholden to no one, not even my audience on some level.

• 1:03:46Bill Maher?

  Me neither.

• 1:03:46Speaker 01

  And it's just like.

• 1:03:47Bill Maher?

  Right. Priceless.

• 1:03:50Speaker 01

  He knows his audience is Trumpistan. He knows he can't actually say, he, he can't wake up tomorrow morning and realize, okay, all this stuff has gone too far. Trump is a fucking Nazi and I don't agree, like, I, I want no part of this. He, his business is predicated, tomorrow's business is predicated on him not doing that. He can't have that epiphany. And I can. It's it's an amazing freedom.

• 1:04:17Bill Maher?

  I'm I'm even luckier because I can with an employer.

• 1:04:21Speaker 01

  Right. I mean, that's that's unusual. That's.

• 1:04:23Bill Maher?

  Very unusual.

• 1:04:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:04:25Bill Maher?

  And and I I, you know, if I don't say it enough, I appreciate it from HBO because they don't have to be that way. And I mean, it could end tomorrow, but I mean, they they've never told me what to say, what to think, where to come down on an issue. That's rare.

• 1:04:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:04:41Bill Maher?

  So I am extremely fortunate, but.

• 1:04:44Speaker 01

  Nice. When Elon buys them next week, then the the regime might change, but.

• 1:04:49Bill Maher?

  I think Elon and I get you're the one who has serious beef with Elon.

• 1:04:53Speaker 01

  Don't inherit my problem with Elon.

• 1:04:55Bill Maher?

  I'm not. I I would. If I felt that way, I would because I always say what I think. I don't feel that way. I feel like he is a genius. Um, and he's done a lot. We seem to like forget about this, the, you know, short list of amazing things he's done that make the world better. And I want to see. He hasn't been there. The I don't think he's in it for the money.

• 1:05:20Speaker 01

  I would agree, yeah.

• 1:05:21Bill Maher?

  Right. Um, I think he's sincere. He likes to fix things. And, okay, you know, how do we have an electric car? I'm gonna fix that. And then how do we get to Mars? I'm gonna fix that. And how do we have the internet everywhere? I'm gonna fix that. And how do we get people who are paralyzed to pick up a pen from across the room? I'm gonna fix that. And, oh, yeah, Twitter, I'm gonna fix that. That's fucked up. What else is fucked up? Honey, bring in the bring in those short list of fucked up things. Oh, yeah, US government, super fucked up. I'm gonna fix it. I think that's what gets his juices flowing, you know, um.

• 1:06:02Speaker 01

  But the the the caveat to that is he's actually behaving in a way that is reckless and unethical and fucking identifiable people over massively, and he doesn't care. Right. So he he's a very Trumpian character.

• 1:06:16Bill Maher?

  Give me specifics on that.

• 1:06:17Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, he'll tweet, he'll he'll put a identifiable, you know, civilian on blast in front of 200 million people, knowing that that's gonna completely fuck over their lives.

• 1:06:28Bill Maher?

  Like who?

• 1:06:29Speaker 01

  Like Yoel Roth, the the head of trust and safety for Twitter, who he called a pedophile based on no fucking evidence. And the guy had to like flee his house because he was getting so many death threats and.

• 1:06:39Bill Maher?

  From kids?

• 1:06:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So he's, so I mean, but he'll do that and he'll do that again and again. And he knows the consequences. He's not dumb. He knows what he, you're talking to 200 million people, 1% of whom are crazy, right? He, and, and he insists on playing this game. He doesn't have to do it. He's addicted to Twitter. And he's deranging his personality and it's undermining his ethics. And he will even fuck over a former friend. Who was just trying to be a friend, helping him when he was starting to use these tools in.

• 1:07:15Bill Maher?

  Is he trying to attack you?

• 1:07:16Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. Yeah. And no, I speak as one who knows. Oh, yeah.

• 1:07:19Bill Maher?

  On that level?

• 1:07:20Speaker 01

  Yeah. Oh, yeah.

• 1:07:21Bill Maher?

  Like by sicking who on you?

• 1:07:23Speaker 01

  Well, no, just attacking me on Twitter. I mean, it's not compared to what happened to you, El Roth, that's not bad, but he will, he will, a pizza gate lunatic. Like literally one of the people who gave us pizza gate. You know, I'm not going to name them because they would be happy to be named in this context, but it's a couple of guys who gave us pizza gate. You know, you remember what pizza gate was?

• 1:07:48Bill Maher?

  Of course. That Hillary Clinton was running a pedophile ring out of a pizza parlor.

• 1:07:53Speaker 01

  Out of the basement of a pizza parlor that doesn't have a basement.

• 1:07:55Bill Maher?

  In their defense, the pizza was fantastic.

• 1:07:58Speaker 01

  Yes, okay. So, um, the people who gave us that are people who are in very good standing with Elon. Who Elon will talk to them in Twitter spaces and like, you know, give them the mic and boost them and just high five them like, and he knows, like I've pointed out how crazy these people are to him. These people will send him a clip from my podcast or some other podcast. Maybe this podcast, maybe we'll do it here, right? Making it seem like I've said the opposite of what I said in context. Like they, what they sent him one where I seem to be saying that I didn't care about the chaos at the border. Whereas I have exactly Elon's view of the border and in context, you could hear that. But they'll send me, send the opposite and Elon will react to that.

• 1:08:43Speaker 01

  He doesn't have time to listen to the podcast, obviously. So he'll just react to the clip saying, you know, Sam Harris is a total moron, right? Like it was something like that. But amplify this to, to millions of people.

• 1:08:58Speaker 01

  And I will email him and say, Elon, you're being gamed by right-wing trolls who gave us pizza gate. This is, this is not what I said in context, right? And he will tell me to go fuck myself. And he knows, so he knows.

• 1:09:13Bill Maher?

  But he read the email.

• 1:09:14Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. He will respond to the email. Go fuck yourself. He does not care if he's defaming someone in public who used to be a friend. So, I mean, it was, and this is why we're no longer friends. So, I mean, he's, he's, listen, the guy is snorting ketamine and on Twitter all day long. I mean, it's dysregulated.

• 1:09:34Bill Maher?

  There is no defending, no defending that, and I wouldn't try. But, um, you know.

• 1:09:39Speaker 01

  So, so, and, and that's not to dispute anything you said about it. I mean, he's, he's the greatest entrepreneur of his generation. I think that's, that's not disputable. But there's no reason to not, to, to ignore the downside of his personality and the way, and the way he's treating people.

• 1:09:58Bill Maher?

  But also to take advantage of the upside, I guess, is, you know, that's the complication of human life. I mean, do we listen to R. Kelly and Michael Jackson? I say yes, but even though we know that they did things in their private life that are very not admirable. So.

• 1:10:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, well.

• 1:10:18Bill Maher?

  Is that not a convincing analogy? The R. Kelly.

• 1:10:24Speaker 01

  No, I'm not sure it's as exculpatory as, as Elon fans would, would want, but, yeah.

• 1:10:30Bill Maher?

  Yes. I guess what I'm saying is, sometimes you're peeing on a teenage girl, and sometimes you're figuring out.

• 1:10:36Speaker 01

  Sometimes it's a rocket.

• 1:10:37Bill Maher?

  How to get satellites into space and recatch a rocket. I loved it when Trump went, did the Chinese do it? When the rocket came down, they hugged it like a baby? Can, can the Russians do it? It's like, you know what? I, I, I'm not, I'm not really against that. Uh, America's pretty great in a lot of ways. Talk, you know? We've had so many years of shitting on this country, and this is part of the problem with not getting behind Western values, is that America is this, you know, irredeemably racist, horrible place, and we're obsessed with what happened 400 years ago. And, you know, it's, uh...

• 1:11:17Bill Maher?

  If you read the paper every day and you see what's going on in the rest of the world. Man, I just saw this movie. It's fantastic. It should get an Oscar nomination, but I won't because I don't have the money to promote it. But it's about how in the early 90s, kids in Cuba were purposely giving themselves AIDS. Because it was the one place in Cuba you could go. Because they were very afraid of AIDS breaking out. And it was like, you got good food, and ice cream.

• 1:11:48Speaker 01

  Wait, what do you mean? So what was the one place? Like, the hospital was one place?

• 1:11:52Bill Maher?

  It was like a sanitarium, but it was outside. So, life was so unremittingly awful in Cuba.

• 1:11:59Speaker 01

  Tell Michael Moore, didn't he write, didn't he, in one of his documentaries, didn't he basically just show us how good life was in Cuba? The medical care was so great?

• 1:12:09Bill Maher?

  This is part and parcel of that. It's that, like, because they were a socialist heaven, they took, yes, healthcare very seriously. The people were miserable and emaciated, but their health was quite good. Because, you know, usually obesity does.

• 1:12:27Speaker 01

  Intermittent fasting.

• 1:12:28Bill Maher?

  No, I remember when Katrina happened, and they were very late in getting the aid there. Do you remember when Fidel Castro had that press conference? With a bunch of doctors? He had all, he was flanked by like eight guys in white suits.

• 1:12:40Speaker 01

  Will help you.

• 1:12:41Bill Maher?

  And he was like, "Some president in this hemisphere must do something about this situation. I'm going to step in, Fidel." But the idea that it would be preferable to give yourself AIDS, to get to a place where you could live freely, the police didn't come because they were afraid of them because they had AIDS. So, and they wanted them to be happy.

• 1:13:08Speaker 01

  I hadn't heard that story.

• 1:13:09Bill Maher?

  Oh, yeah, I hadn't heard it either. It's just this, I'll send you the movie. It's fantastic. But, I mean, or just read about what went on in Syria the last 10, 15 years.

• 1:13:20Speaker 01

  That is, that is an unfolding story that is, uh, I mean, quite astonishing.

• 1:13:25Bill Maher?

  We're so fortunate, you know?

• 1:13:29Speaker 01

  Well, this is so I'm ringing ringing the bell of our of how fortunate we are. I think the other people have noticed this, but we've got this 250th anniversary of the country coming up in in 2026. One landmark I want to put on the calendar is that the Democrats have to get their shit together by July 4th, 2026 to not just be whinging about Trump. It can't be a MAGA birthday party. It's gotta be.

• 1:13:57Bill Maher?

  You're so.

• 1:13:58Speaker 01

  The Democrats have to find their their patriotism gear by 2026.

• 1:14:04Bill Maher?

  It's gonna be tough since the other party's in power.

• 1:14:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, but like we have to figure out how to be.

• 1:14:09Bill Maher?

  Right.

• 1:14:09Speaker 01

  The attractive party with with people you want to listen to.

• 1:14:13Bill Maher?

  And the.

• 1:14:13Speaker 01

  Talking about how good this country is.

• 1:14:15Bill Maher?

  And the we love the country, we're asking to rule.

• 1:14:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:14:20Bill Maher?

  That little thing. We like the place where I did.

• 1:14:24Speaker 01

  As opposed to you're all racist assholes.

• 1:14:26Bill Maher?

  Yes.

• 1:14:26Speaker 01

  Now vote for us.

• 1:14:27Bill Maher?

  Yeah. I shot a video once that somebody had sent me did a whole editorial on it. This woman who was actually running for office or had run for office and she was asking people, I guess on TikTok where you do everything nowadays, if they knew a place they could go in the world because they had to get out of this place.

• 1:14:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:14:46Bill Maher?

  You know, these people who think, I guess, because they don't read or watch anything that there's some first of all, they don't want you. Where are you gonna go? Canada doesn't want you unless you can do something for them. They have stricter immigration laws than we do. Where are you going? Finland or Denmark or Sweden or whatever you think is the paradise that isn't here.

• 1:15:10Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:15:10Bill Maher?

  The grass that's so green.

• 1:15:12Speaker 01

  What language are you gonna learn? American.

• 1:15:15Bill Maher?

  I mean, there are plenty of places in the world that are, I'm sure, very pleasant to live, but they're not home and you won't feel like you're home.

• 1:15:23Speaker 01

  Except you do have the odd billionaire who's preparing the compound in New Zealand and trying to figure out how to hire bodyguards who will not, you know, kill him and take his his all of his wealth in the in the aftermath of the apocalypse.

• 1:15:37Bill Maher?

  Right.

• 1:15:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:15:38Bill Maher?

  That's the bodyguard you always have to watch out for.

• 1:15:40Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:15:41Bill Maher?

  I mean.

• 1:15:42Speaker 01

  How do you incentivize the bodyguard, you know, post apocalypse? So.

• 1:15:46Bill Maher?

  Well.

• 1:15:46Speaker 01

  Trust protect you.

• 1:15:47Bill Maher?

  I mean.

• 1:15:48Speaker 01

  Money is worthless.

• 1:15:49Bill Maher?

  Indira Gandhi.

• 1:15:51Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 1:15:52Bill Maher?

  Killed by the bodyguards.

• 1:15:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:15:54Bill Maher?

  Anwar Sadat.

• 1:15:56Speaker 01

  Was that the bodyguards, I said that, I don't remember.

• 1:15:58Bill Maher?

  Totally.

• 1:15:58Speaker 01

  Huh.

• 1:15:59Bill Maher?

  Well, it was, it was inside the, I mean, he was at a parade.

• 1:16:02Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:16:03Bill Maher?

  Which did not go well.

• 1:16:05Speaker 01

  No, yes.

• 1:16:05Bill Maher?

  First of all, two of the floats.

• 1:16:07Speaker 01

  The last parade, yes.

• 1:16:08Bill Maher?

  Two of the floats didn't.

• 1:16:11Bill Maher?

  And then, yes, he was in the reviewing stand and his own military turned on him and.

• 1:16:16Speaker 01

  I thought, huh, I, I forgot the details there. I thought it was just jihadists who had infiltrated, but.

• 1:16:22Bill Maher?

  No, it was, it was the people in uniform. They were in his guard. I mean, there was an.

• 1:16:26Speaker 01

  No, but there's the other version, yeah. In Pakistan, this has happened, yeah, it's.

• 1:16:30Bill Maher?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:31Speaker 01

  It's, it's ideas spread, you know, you can't keep the ideas out, right? So it's like, it's like you convince the, you know, the bodyguard of something and all of a sudden you've, you've hired your own assassin.

• 1:16:43Bill Maher?

  Well, on that happy note.

• 1:16:45Speaker 01

  Happily, we have no bodyguards. We don't need bodyguards here.

• 1:16:48Bill Maher?

  So everything good in your personal life? You, Sam Harris, we were all on subjects that are important, but I care about you, the person.

• 1:16:57Speaker 01

  It's, I mean, ironically or happily, it's, it's, this is just a a great time of life. I mean, the things I'm worried about in the world, but I feel immensely fortunate.

• 1:17:07Bill Maher?

  It is a weird cognitive dissonance, is it not? That like you can be so worried and the world can seem to be falling apart, but then you look around and you go, yeah, but our life is pretty good. And I understand that half the country, as you point out, are gonna get pitchforks because, and, and they are, and we, we should do something about that. But I don't know what. But for a lot of people, when you just drive around, you know, people are just living their best life and, you know.

• 1:17:35Speaker 01

  Well, the, the difference between online and in the real world is, is so enormous. I mean, again, it's, it's, it's not true, like it used to be that people could just say, you know, Twitter's not real life. But obviously, you know, the revolutions can start on Twitter and like, like things that happen online are real in some, in some important sense, but it's just also true that in real life. People are very different than they are online. And online, you reliably just see the worst face of of normal people. And it's pretty ugly.

• 1:18:07Bill Maher?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:08Speaker 01

  In real life, people are better. And so it's like, it's it's good to recalibrate and recognize just what people are like face to face.

• 1:18:17Bill Maher?

  And more connected.

• 1:18:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:18:19Bill Maher?

  I read in the paper the other day, I think this comes from a Pew survey, that it's almost two to one, the number of young men versus young women under thirty who are in a relationship. Like sixty four, completely single, like sixty four percent of males under thirty, completely single, only thirty four percent of women.

• 1:18:39Speaker 01

  Right, so all these women under thirty are hooking up with older guys? That's what's happening?

• 1:18:43Bill Maher?

  I don't, I certainly hope so.

• 1:18:46Speaker 01

  Yes, that's what the math suggests, yeah. Or they're gay.

• 1:18:50Bill Maher?

  Well, but, I mean, this was a article about OnlyFans. Which, the level of patheticness, I can't even fathom. That you are so lonely, and I'm not saying this in any snarky way. I'm really sincerely feeling for these people. Because I remember when I was that lonely, like in college. But to be so lonely and desperate that you would have this fake girlfriend who you must know is fake, and you're paying her by the minute to text or talk to you? And you think this is some kind of a relationship? Or this is, like, there's not a better solution than this? And yet, this is millions of people.

• 1:19:34Bill Maher?

  And I think they quoted one OnlyFans model who was quite popular. And she said, yeah, when I, when I'm recognized on the street, it's usually by somebody like younger, chubby.

• 1:19:48Bill Maher?

  That was her words, you know? And, yeah, it looks like everyone's getting laid in this country in the media, but like... This is not gonna end well. This like young generation that grew up on the phone. And therefore does not know how to talk to a girl. You know, cuz girls have not changed that much. I know some people think they can rewrite anatomy and history and just reality. But they're basically probably the same as they were when we were kids. They they're communicative creatures who need to be talked to and wooed. And like these incels who can't get laid. And they blame the women and they wonder why.

• 1:20:30Bill Maher?

  And it's because you you can't even go up to a girl and just talk to her. And I feel like this is going to be an army of frustrated, angry.

• 1:20:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, the technology has not helped in so many ways. I mean, so just remote work is as good as it has been for so many. I mean, like for my business is fantastic. I've got a team of of. I don't know now. Now it's like maybe 15 people, but like everyone's remote. And it's great, but but. Young people need to go into the office to meet people. I mean, like it's to be to be siloed. You know, in a different state from everyone you work with for your entire career. It's like I don't see how that's good.

• 1:21:12Bill Maher?

  They go out to a bar and then they're on their phone in the bar.

• 1:21:16Speaker 01

  Right, yeah. The virtualization of of everything again, it's like if you're if you're at the right point on the wave. And you've got your friends, if you've got all your friends from high school. And, you know, in my case, if you're happily married and you've got you've got a great life. Well, then the virtualization of everything is just perfect. But if you're trying to start your life and you're isolated and you don't know how to meet people. And everything is a fucking video on your phone.

• 1:21:41Bill Maher?

  I I feel like that the singularity that Ray Kurzweil talks about when we meld with the. I feel like it's already here. Did you watch the Taylor Swift errors movie?

• 1:21:53Speaker 01

  I saw it, Pete. I went to the concert with my daughters.

• 1:21:55Bill Maher?

  You did?

• 1:21:56Speaker 01

  It was fucking awesome. Yeah, that was really.

• 1:21:57Bill Maher?

  It was fucking awesome?

• 1:21:58Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, just to take your, oh, so you gotta. Put on some parent goggles here. You take your two daughters who are into Taylor Swift.

• 1:22:07Bill Maher?

  Right.

• 1:22:08Speaker 01

  To a, to the temple of Taylor Swift with seventy-five thousand other girls.

• 1:22:14Bill Maher?

  Yes.

• 1:22:14Speaker 01

  Like, I mean, I mean, the ratio of guys to girls there was, I mean, it was just, like, you could get, you just have a vision of like, what the, what the girls are doing. It was amazing. It was so fun. Yeah. And it was, it was.

• 1:22:27Bill Maher?

  But the music?

• 1:22:28Speaker 01

  Listen, I'm, I can, I can put up with anything for two hours.

• 1:22:33Bill Maher?

  Don't put that on the poster. I can put up with anything for two hours. Irish Raves.

• 1:22:38Speaker 01

  It's not my favorite music, but I, I, it took, it took us an hour to park. And in, in the, in the, in the hour it took to park, I had been, I, I went to school on her whole catalog with my daughter's, you know, program in Spotify. And then we went in and it was, it was, honestly, it was a fantastic experience.

• 1:22:53Bill Maher?

  Well, my point was, I watched the thing because Nikki Glaser made me.

• 1:22:58Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:22:59Bill Maher?

  And, uh.

• 1:23:00Speaker 01

  Nikki's, Nikki's great, by the way.

• 1:23:01Bill Maher?

  I love Nikki. And everyone is watching the whole thing through their phones. I mean, when you see the shots of the crowd.

• 1:23:07Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:23:07Bill Maher?

  It's only, it's no, it's no faces.

• 1:23:10Speaker 01

  Right, yeah.

• 1:23:11Bill Maher?

  And it's like, wow. Not only is that completely stupid because they're making a movie of this anyway, so you don't need to.

• 1:23:17Speaker 01

  They never go back and watch it on.

• 1:23:19Bill Maher?

  You'll never go back and watch it. Also, everyone else is doing it. And it's like, they really want to experience this secondhand through the phone. That is a fundamental difference, it seems to me.

• 1:23:32Speaker 01

  The, the way more disturbing case for me is all of these moments of, of public violence where everyone's, rather than the impulse is to actually solve the problem and actually help somebody. No, what you want to do is, is, is take out your phone and record.

• 1:23:49Bill Maher?

  Yes.

• 1:23:49Speaker 01

  This innocent person being beaten within an inch of their life by some lunatic. Like how

• 1:23:55Bill Maher?

  You're so right.

• 1:23:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's

• 1:23:56Bill Maher?

  It happened just recently in Beverly Hills in broad daylight. They, a gang just attacked some old guy and trying to rip the shopping bags out of his hand.

• 1:24:10Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:24:10Bill Maher?

  And he wouldn't let go. And so they beat him to the ground. And yeah, everyone is just either honking their horn in the cars that go by. Like that's gonna stop anyway. Or filming it.

• 1:24:21Speaker 01

  Let's record this, yeah.

• 1:24:22Bill Maher?

  I mean.

• 1:24:23Speaker 01

  I mean, in, to be totally charitable, you, you can imagine someone who feels otherwise totally powerless to intervene. Thinks they might be doing something good by just documenting the crime and like, oh, this is like, I'm, we're gonna, I'm gonna help catch these guys. But there's so many cases where it's just, it's just so obvious that these are people who could help. And they're just not doing it because they, they've, they have virtualized everything and like, everything is a reality TV show. And now they're, you know, a part of the crew. It's, um, yeah.

• 1:24:54Bill Maher?

  All right, Sam, well, I see that your mood ring is telling you that you're getting annoyed with, is that, uh, when it turns black, what is it, what does that mean?

• 1:25:03Speaker 01

  Oh, this is the, uh, this is the aura ring that tracks your sleep and all it does is tell me that my sleep is shitty. Yeah.

• 1:25:10Bill Maher?

  Really?

• 1:25:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:25:11Bill Maher?

  You wear that and you think it's helpful?

• 1:25:13Speaker 01

  Well, it's, it's, I occasionally look at the data and I respond to it. Yes. I, I, I will, if, if I see that my

• 1:25:20Bill Maher?

  Can you see it on that little thing?

• 1:25:21Speaker 01

  What was that?

• 1:25:23Bill Maher?

  Can you see it on that little thing?

• 1:25:25Speaker 01

  No, this reports to the phone.

• 1:25:26Bill Maher?

  All right. Thank you.

• 1:25:28Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:25:29Bill Maher?

  I appreciate you doing this.

• 1:25:30Speaker 01

  Always great to talk to you.

• 1:25:31Bill Maher?

  So, so much fun.

• 1:25:39Bill Maher?

  All right.

• 1:25:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, man.

• 1:25:40Bill Maher?

  We'll take a, yeah.

• 1:25:43Speaker 01

  What are these? Oh, these are great. Look at those.

• 1:25:45Bill Maher?

  Oh, those are

• 1:25:45Speaker 01

  Hilarious.

• 1:25:47Bill Maher?

  Yeah, right. Criminals, like.

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