Matt Gaetz | Club Random with Bill Maher

Bill and Matt Gaetz on the accusations against Matt, Bill’s preconception of Matt, Matt’s fandom of Politically Incorrect, how Matt supports both the NRA and the humane society, Bill’s take on hunting (not a fan), the economy of lonely, desperate men, Matt’s relationship with Joel Greenberg, and much, much more. Shop SKIMS Mens at https://www.skims.com/billmaher #skimspartner Go to https://www. RadioactiveMedia.com or text RANDOM at 511511 to save up to 50%, today!  Follow Club Random on IG: @ClubRandomPodcast Follow Bill on IG: @BillMaher Don’t forget to subscribe to the podcast for free wherever you're listening or by using this link: https://bit.ly/ClubRandom Watch Club Random on YouTube: https://bit.ly/ClubRandomYouTube Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:30Speaker 01

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• 1:01Speaker 02

  Did you think I was not bright?

• 1:02Bill Maher?

  Yeah.

• 1:03Speaker 02

  And what gave you that impression?

• 1:05Bill Maher?

  Like, everything you've said and done.

• 1:11Speaker 02

  Anybody who can't point out where their side is wrong is just a vessel through which others are...

• 1:15Bill Maher?

  Well, where's your side most wrong?

• 1:20Speaker 02

  You know I'm like one step away from PETA membership. I'm a total animal lover.

• 1:23Bill Maher?

  Well, I'm a board member for many years, so...

• 1:27Speaker 02

  Really?

• 1:28Bill Maher?

  Yeah.

• 1:28Speaker 02

  I was like the only...

• 1:30Bill Maher?

  There's an interesting thing about you I didn't know. You're an animal lover?

• 1:33Speaker 02

  Uh, yeah. I think I was the only member of Congress when I first ran endorsed by the Humane Society and the NRA. That's usually not a group... That usually isn't a coalition that teams up frequently.

• 1:45Bill Maher?

  Well, I mean, you can be... You can be for gun ownership without wanting to murder animals with it. And also, you know, look, I talked a lot to people who hunt and shit, and, um, you know...

• 2:02Bill Maher?

  They convinced me, like, I was a little naive about some of that stuff. First of all, farming actually kills a lot of animals. To plow a field, you gotta kill everything in that field. Every mouse, every vole, every chipmunk. Everything that lives there has gotta go, so you can till that soil. And also, like, when you go to the supermarket and you're buying chopped meat, I mean, like, somebody killed it.

• 2:31Speaker 02

  And sometimes, well, I just learned, sometimes you'll go there and get, like, a pack of hamburgers meat, and it came from, like, thirty different cows. It didn't come off of one animal.

• 2:41Bill Maher?

  Yeah, pink slime.

• 2:42Speaker 02

  The, uh, the one that gets me when it comes to that, that scale of farming is what they're doing with the palm oil in Indonesia, in South Asia, where it is just desec- You and I will live to see the last orangutan die. The thing that is most like humans on the entire planet Earth will be extinct because of palm oil, as if that's some great need-

• 3:07Bill Maher?

  No, it's not. It's not even good for you.

• 3:10Speaker 02

  No. Are you, are you here? So, I, like, our origin story for me goes back to Politically Incorrect. What I still believe is one of the, I'm not just kissing your ass, one of the best shows that was on TV.

• 3:20Bill Maher?

  Thanks.

• 3:21Speaker 02

  It's way better than your show now, but it's-

• 3:23Bill Maher?

  What, what?

• 3:23Speaker 02

  Politically Incorrect-

• 3:24Bill Maher?

  It's so insulting.

• 3:25Speaker 02

  Politically Incorrect was so good.

• 3:26Bill Maher?

  That's so insulting.

• 3:27Speaker 02

  It's not, I'm just for the OGs.

• 3:29Bill Maher?

  You're saying to me what I did twenty-five years ago is better than what I've done the last twenty years. That's insulting. I'm not gonna be mad at you for the rest of the interview. I just wanna tell you, that's just a fucking stupid way to start a conversation.

• 3:41Speaker 02

  So, you think-

• 3:42Bill Maher?

  You peaked twenty years ago, Bill. Let's be friends.

• 3:45Speaker 02

  No, it's not peaked.

• 3:46Bill Maher?

  That's what you just said.

• 3:47Speaker 02

  It's a better artistic presentation of your work.

• 3:49Bill Maher?

  First of all, you're wrong. So, you, I, I, you know, you could say to me, I like that show too, but it's certainly not better than Real Time. It just isn't. It was, it was what it was. It was a design train wreck. People from different walks of life, maybe you were young, it appealed to you more than. What don't you like about the current show?

• 4:08Speaker 02

  I like, I think it's good. It's not a criticism of the current show. Look, I like, uh, you know, uh, Taylor Swift's current stuff. I don't think it's better than her initial album.

• 4:18Bill Maher?

  Well, don't compare me to Taylor Swift. I'm not a big...

• 4:21Speaker 02

  No, but in terms of artists, you can have better presentations of your art.

• 4:27Bill Maher?

  So, but I mean, you know, Real Time, we have on actually intellectual people and people who are expert in talking about the subjects we're talking about. Politically Incorrect, we had, you know, Carrot Top and Paulie Shore on.

• 4:42Speaker 02

  No, but what I liked about it is that you would interface those folks with lawmakers, with art, with authors, people like that. And you do that on Real Time as well.

• 4:52Bill Maher?

  No, but not Paulie Shore. You have to be knowledgeable about what we're talking. It's a much more adult show. You know, again, I invented it, sweetheart. So, you know, I love Politically Incorrect. The sign is right behind you. But it's not better than what I do now. I mean, the game went up. It didn't go down. But, you know, everybody's like their opinion.

• 5:15Speaker 02

  Do you think part of that is attention span is so fleeting now? Like, when we would create content in my congressional office, like, the young staffers would come in and say, "If it's above, like, eight seconds, you're losing audience at such a rapid pace."

• 5:32Bill Maher?

  It's, I mean, it's so interesting that we're doing a podcast, which, if you do just an hour, the audience thinks that's too short. I get what you're saying. I've asked this question many times. I don't get the attention span of the American public. It seems to be either eight seconds or two hours. They want podcasts to be long. When I just did an hour, there was always screaming at me, "No, more, more, more." What do you make of that?

• 5:59Speaker 02

  I look at what happened in the sports space where ESPN has to go and fire all of these expensive on-air talents in order to go put Pat McAfee on streaming multiple hours a day in service of that long-form audience.

• 6:20Speaker 02

  But then, again, like, the way that Instagram is driven now by the Reels, or the, you know, whatever it is, their stories, and then YouTube has their short-form content. Yeah, I guess it's either short or long, and the middle is losing.

• 6:37Bill Maher?

  So, are you happy to be free of Congress and all this kind of stuff?

• 6:41Speaker 02

  Well, I don't-

• 6:42Bill Maher?

  You seem very relaxed.

• 6:44Speaker 02

  As relaxed as one can be under these conditions. I think that Congress is supposed to be temporary. I mean, I'd done it for eight years. I'd been in elected office six years before that in the state legislature. So, from age 26 to 42, I was an elected official. And I think that should be a season of life. I don't think it should be your whole life.

• 7:08Bill Maher?

  But, I mean, like, the things that people talk about when they get out of Congress, that they are so happy that they don't have to do anymore, like fundraising and that stuff.

• 7:17Speaker 02

  I never did that anyway. I mean, I am the only Republican, I was the only Republican in Congress, who took no lobbyist money, no PAC money. And I decided I would rather sink or swim on my own than be a valet for those people.

• 7:33Bill Maher?

  Well, how did you get away with that? I mean, how did you then get the money to run your elections? Because why do they all, why does everybody else do it?

• 7:39Speaker 02

  Before Donald Trump, there was no small-dollar infrastructure on the Republican side. Obama had created that. He used the Chicago Ward-style system, put it on the Internet, scaled it to the moon, and there was-

• 7:53Bill Maher?

  Wait, wait, wait, go back. I don't know what you're talking about. What's a Chicago Ward style?

• 7:57Speaker 02

  Democrats invested in the Internet before Republicans, politically speaking. And so, they did this list building. Traditionally, that list building, you know, your ward boss would know, this person needs a little help with groceries, this person's son needs a job, this person cares about issue X or the park, whatever. And that was managed very locally. What Obama understood is that you could digitize that and scale it to the moon. David Plouffe wrote a great book about, one of the best books on politics, Audacity to Win.

• 8:28Bill Maher?

  Yeah, in 2008, they definitely- Had the technological advantage.

• 8:32Speaker 02

  It took us until. Yeah, it took us until 2016 to really catch up because the internet was the only thing that could harness all of this interest in politics that was Trump, Trump was generating among low propensity voters. And I rode that way. If I had like over a hundred thousand active donors throughout the country. I think my average donation was around eighty eight bucks.

• 8:54Bill Maher?

  But also you do. I mean, look, again, I'm glad we're meeting and talking because I feel like I already know you

• 9:02Bill Maher?

  better than what I've known for the whole time I've been, you know, seeing you just on TV and in the news. Because I don't trust anything in the news.

• 9:12Bill Maher?

  So, so, I mean, that's, that's kind of interesting right there. But, um. Okay, first of all, were your parents, where do you get your politics? Like, is it from your parents? Were they Republicans?

• 9:24Speaker 02

  Uh, my mother was a Southern Democrat who voted Democrat her whole life until Jimmy Carter gave away the Panama Canal. And then, for some reason, that was the issue that turned my mother into a Republican.

• 9:37Bill Maher?

  She must be thrilled that your boy is gonna take it back.

• 9:40Speaker 02

  Uh, she can't wait. Uh, she's real pumped about the Mount McKinley change as well.

• 9:45Bill Maher?

  What do you think about that? What do you think about us, um, becoming an empire again and just annexing places? You know, I did not see that coming. And when I say I did not see that coming, I'm gonna spell it for you. I D I D N A Z I. I did not see that coming because, uh, we really shouldn't be annexing. Should we? Anexing? I mean, doesn't Greenland have to actually sell it to us if they wanted to? Isn't it their choice?

• 10:17Speaker 02

  I care a lot more about whether or not we're gonna annex. Features of the Panama Canal or Greenland than, you know, whether or not Russia annexes Crimea. Like, I, look, I think that, that you can do-

• 10:30Bill Maher?

  But are you for it?

• 10:31Speaker 02

  Huh? Annexing Greenland and parts of the Panama Canal? Sure, if it's a deal that makes sense.

• 10:37Bill Maher?

  But we don't own them. So you're saying-

• 10:39Speaker 02

  It's a real estate transaction, Bill.

• 10:41Bill Maher?

  It's not a, an invasion is not a real estate transaction.

• 10:44Speaker 02

  Well, we don't say anything about an invasion.

• 10:46Bill Maher?

  Well, how else do you take something?

• 10:48Speaker 02

  A real estate transaction.

• 10:50Bill Maher?

  So they would have to agree to it?

• 10:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, we could buy it.

• 10:53Bill Maher?

  Okay, that's different than annexing.

• 10:55Speaker 02

  Well, but I think-

• 10:56Bill Maher?

  But you, so you would agree that Denmark has to agree to it? We're not just gonna take it?

• 11:02Speaker 02

  The people of Greenland, I think, would be the most dispositive voice.

• 11:04Bill Maher?

  Yeah. Okay, so we can go over the head of the government? What about, can we do that here? If some other foreign country came and asked the people of this country, "Do you want free blowjobs?", we, we could just do that?

• 11:15Speaker 02

  It would be a compelling offer. More, some would say-

• 11:20Bill Maher?

  Well, there's the Matt Ditz I'd heard about?

• 11:23Speaker 02

  It would be more compelling than what a lot of people feel like they're getting from the government now.

• 11:26Bill Maher?

  I don't know what you've heard about me. I don't know what you heard about me, remember that one?

• 11:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 11:31Bill Maher?

  "But a bitch can't get a dollar out of me." Well, that doesn't apply to you. Oh, I'm kidding, sorry, I didn't mean to go, I didn't mean to go there. I just sang this song and put it-

• 11:39Speaker 02

  Way less than Skip Bayless, I would suggest.

• 11:42Bill Maher?

  What, oh, boring, I saw that story.

• 11:44Speaker 02

  1.5 million.

• 11:46Bill Maher?

  It's so typical, though, isn't it? Guys who are of a, certainly of a certain age, but they can be young, who are just so desperate for any, you say they're married, I'm not knocking marriage, but, you know, and it's just been so long since they'd have any sort of affection, or anyone touching them, or laughing at their jokes, that they make such fools of themselves with, they just want something from someone of the opposite sex that makes them feel alive again.

• 12:14Speaker 02

  You're so right, and what, what is so, I think, undertold in the sugar daddy, sugar baby dynamic that we see play out pretty regularly across society now, is like, who's taking advantage of who? Because what you just described, a lot of these guys that fit that archetype, they get in to some young pussy that they, that they hadn't been in before, and they will do anything. They'll give up their family, their house, their, their money. It, it is, so like, oh wait, are you saying that they're the person utilizing leverage in the power dynamic more than someone who quite literally has them by the balls?

• 12:51Bill Maher?

  Well, when you put it that way Congressman, I mean

• 12:54Speaker 02

  Former Congressman

• 12:55Bill Maher?

  Former Congressman

• 12:57Speaker 02

  Don't demote me

• 12:58Bill Maher?

  I won't. But, okay, so like I brought my book in This book you'll love, I think. Maybe not as much as my old one since that's your pattern, but

• 13:08Bill Maher?

  I want to read you, this is a chapter on this subject that we're talking about, it's very apropos for what you went through and I just Because it does get into economic issues and also I've never done this on this show, but I want to get the quotes right. I have quotes from people And yeah, I've never, never brought anything on like this, but

• 13:23Speaker 02

  I didn't know you were allowed to like bring homework and notes

• 13:25Bill Maher?

  I never have done it, but you're, you're a little different. I gotta get this right. It's for your benefit, as much as anybody, and it's not against you. I'm, I'm an honest broker, more than anything else. Okay, so, and that's why the left hates me too. The far left really hates me. And, and I welcome their hatred, because it be, because I just will not carry the water

• 13:47Speaker 02

  Why do you think it is?

• 13:48Bill Maher?

  Of all their insanity, or yours.

• 13:50Speaker 02

  Well, and by the way, no one's asking you

• 13:52Bill Maher?

  Anaxx in Greenland.

• 13:54Speaker 02

  Or buying it.

• 13:55Bill Maher?

  Buying it is different. See again, let's just be honest, come on, we're just guys talking here. Those are two different things. Just look me in the eye and tell me you understand that. They're two different things. Buying something that they agree to sell to us Or just taking from another country. That's what Hitler did and that's Putin. We're not, I know you guys like to be like flirting with authoritarianism, But what, well, let me ask you that question. You're a married man now, right?

• 14:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 14:21Bill Maher?

  Okay. So, and your wife is lovely.

• 14:23Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 14:24Bill Maher?

  You did well. And, okay, so, sometimes in a marriage,

• 14:31Bill Maher?

  The, the couple, I've heard both sides, I've heard couples say, yeah, I'm a big flirt, but it's okay, because he knows I'll never cross the line. But, and so that's just okay in the marriage. That's like they've decided that's okay to flirt, or the guy does it. Then I've heard some marriages where it's like, no, that is crossing the line. Okay, I bring this up because you guys are really flirting with authoritarianism. You know what I mean? He admires.

• 15:00Speaker 02

  Like, we didn't try to throw our political prisoners in jail. We talked about it, but we didn't actually try.

• 15:05Bill Maher?

  Oh, you did try.

• 15:06Speaker 02

  We never indicted Hillary. We never indicted our enemies.

• 15:10Bill Maher?

  Yeah, because they blocked it.

• 15:11Speaker 02

  Who blocked it?

• 15:13Bill Maher?

  The Justice Department. There were actually some people there at the beginning who were a little more fair-minded. It's not going to be that way in the second term, although that's the job you were up for.

• 15:23Speaker 02

  I was, and honestly, I was.

• 15:25Bill Maher?

  If you had been there in 2016, would you have indicted Hillary?

• 15:28Speaker 02

  Only if that's what the facts and the law commanded. I wouldn't have done it as some get back politically, because, look, that doesn't end. And what I understand is, if you do that to them and they do that to us, then you don't ever get out of the cycle. And as someone who has held some power, it's a pretty frightening concept that when you get out, the people who take power then can utilize the apparatus of the state to deprive you of your freedom.

• 15:53Bill Maher?

  But of course, you went right to what aboutism. You didn't really answer.

• 15:57Speaker 02

  Well, I reject the premise that we flirt with authoritarianism.

• 16:01Bill Maher?

  Come on, man. Seriously? Using every possible lever to stay in office after he lost the election plainly. Just always being friends with Putin. He likes him. He likes Viktor Orban. Always like pining to be with Team Strongman and not really being that, not really that, you know, into our allies. You don't think that's flirting with authoritarianism? And if you flirt with it. He also makes jokes about, you know, maybe after this term, if it's so good, we should have another one, which would be, again, an obligation of the basic tenet of the Constitution, two terms. You know, that's flirting.

• 16:46Bill Maher?

  That's flirting. To even make a joke about it is flirting with authoritarianism. My question, like in a marriage, can you just flirt and not cross the line?

• 16:55Speaker 02

  Of course.

• 16:56Bill Maher?

  Most don't, but okay. I'm telling you, most guys, if they flirt, what they're doing is they're seeing if the girl flirts back. If she doesn't, I was just flirting. If she does, yeah, I'll fuck her.

• 17:07Speaker 02

  So you think flirtation only goes as far as your options at that moment?

• 17:10Bill Maher?

  Eggs, well put.

• 17:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 17:12Bill Maher?

  For a man.

• 17:13Speaker 02

  For a, well, yeah, it might be different for women. But I, I think that, uh, in Trump's case, he looks at four years of a pretty peaceful world. You have to concede that. And when I got elected, the places where I would come in some conflict with Trump would be where he would seek powers of war that I thought were reposed in the Congress. And now, and I had all these Democrats really eager to work with me. Now, no war with Iran. We should stop Trump from having that power. But then, as soon as Biden is cheerleading this war in Ukraine, all the anti-war Democrats became pro-war. There are no anti-war Democrats left.

• 17:53Bill Maher?

  That's an interesting point. It's off the point. We're talking about a little bit. It's a good.

• 17:58Speaker 02

  Well, if you're talking about.

• 17:59Bill Maher?

  You haven't lost all your skills as the Congressman. Come on, man.

• 18:02Speaker 02

  If you're talking about the use of force to achieve your political goals, I think, I think it's somewhat on topic.

• 18:06Bill Maher?

  Yeah, it's not like the, the left doesn't do aversion. I mean, they should not have been bitching about Trump is not a legitimate president. He's a, that was wrong. I agree. It's very different than actually trying to stay in power. We just had January 6th. It went off smoothly without a hitch. Places, everyone places, okay, the rehearsal went great. And now we do it and we go home. But you, that's not what have happened if you guys had lost. And you know that.

• 18:35Speaker 02

  Bill, you understand.

• 18:36Bill Maher?

  That isn't, that isn't asymmetry you have to address.

• 18:38Speaker 02

  Okay, let me address it. The la, you're right. This, this past week, we had a wonderful January 6th. The last time we had a Republican president elected and Democrats did not object to the electors. Do you know when the last time that was?

• 18:54Bill Maher?

  See, this is the kind of bullshit.

• 18:57Speaker 02

  No, no, look, it was 1988. It was 1988, the last time they didn't object to Trump. They objected to George W. Bush winning Ohio.

• 19:05Bill Maher?

  Objection is different than calling the Justice Department and pressuring them to do things that even his own Justice Department wouldn't do. It's different than calling the guy in Georgia and saying, "Find me 11,000 votes." It's different than going to court with all these ridiculous cases that were laughed out of every courtroom. It's different than actually sending fake electors. "Don't give me bullshit and we'll be friends." Bullshit me? No, we'll still be friends, but I, I, but I'll think you're a hack. Instead of someone who could actually have an honest conversation and admit this asymmetry exists.

• 19:39Speaker 02

  I don't believe it's asymmetrical at all. When you look at the way the Democratic Party used, like, an authoritarian, uh, bum rush to get Joe Biden out of the race and replace him with, with Harris? What was, was that, was that the great, uh, you know, uh, sacrifice to the virtue of democracy? And the great rejection of authoritarianism was swapping her out for him like it's some Mississippi square dance?

• 20:03Bill Maher?

  I'm just gonna end this part of our discussion by saying, uh, you know, I think you're, I, I, just looking in your eye, talking to you, not the media guy I saw, you're a lot brighter than I thought you were.

• 20:15Speaker 02

  Did you think I was not bright?

• 20:16Bill Maher?

  Yeah.

• 20:17Speaker 02

  And what, what gave you that impression?

• 20:19Bill Maher?

  Like, everything you've said and done. No, and also because the media is, but I just never, like, talked to, I could say, and by the way, this is only a semi compliment, because what I'm saying is, I think you're absolutely bright enough to know what I'm talking about. I understand why you have to carry the water for the other side, because you are, you know, your, your career is just beginning. Trump loves you. Um, that's a good thing in this day and age. And so, I get it. I get what you can and cannot say, and, and we can put that aside. Let's get back to Horace.

• 20:52Speaker 02

  Pardon me?

• 20:54Speaker 01

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• 21:36Speaker 01

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• 21:54Speaker 02

  I didn't even know we were on that subject.

• 21:56Bill Maher?

  No, because I'm sympathetic.

• 21:57Speaker 02

  Were we talking about Congress or the other time?

• 21:58Bill Maher?

  I want to read this, because this really gets to the part about, um, this was really about economics.

• 22:03Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 22:04Bill Maher?

  Because it's a, it's an essay, it's, we did it on the show, the one that you don't think is so great, but it's actually way better.

• 22:11Speaker 02

  Just because I said the first show was better does not mean I said the second show wasn't great.

• 22:16Bill Maher?

  You're so right, I'm acting like a wife.

• 22:17Speaker 02

  You are, you are such a whiny bitch sometimes.

• 22:19Bill Maher?

  I'm usually not. You just hit a nerve. You're right, I'm acting like a wife who will not let it go. And what about the remote? Matt, you never let me have the remote.

• 22:29Speaker 02

  And you say you don't understand.

• 22:30Bill Maher?

  I'm going to my mother's.

• 22:31Speaker 02

  Marriage.

• 22:33Bill Maher?

  All right, so this is about, um, it's about the gig economy, you know? The economy, or they also call it the remote, uh, economy. Okay, so you can call it remote work, but what's really remote is any chance of getting health insurance. What are Uber and Lyft but Americanized rickshaws? It's not like it's, uh, it's what anyone wants to do. No one ever had a friend throw up in the backseat and said, "Gosh, I hope someday I get to make a career out of this." And then there's OnlyFans, which in 2021 swelled from 12 million to 85 million users. And if you're a little behind, you don't know what OnlyFans is, don't worry. It's the side hustle your daughter is using to pay off her college jet debt.

• 23:17Bill Maher?

  It's just a platform where you can share recipes or maybe your poetry. Yeah, you can do that on OnlyFans, but no one does. It's women showing their vaginas to men who are masturbating. That's what we have, a kind of a masturbation economy. And that's my question is, women have become so cynical about men and the economy is so bad for them that so much of this economy revolves around horny guys. And women who are, I don't think they really want to be on OnlyFans doing that. Would you? No. But that's sort of where our economy has sent young women, who combined with the fact that they're for very good reasons,

• 24:01Bill Maher?

  so cynical about men that their idea is kind of, look, men are shit, so I'm going to get paid a little bit to begin with. That's only fair. Now, here's the the crux of it to me. Prostitution is a term we apply across the world. It doesn't just apply to sex. You can prostitute yourself in business, in politics, anything. It means doing something you hate for money. That's what it means. Um, it didn't sound to me like the women you were with hated it that way.

• 24:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think there's a difference between sex for money and sex and money. And if you start to blur that line, we're going to need a lot more fucking prisons in this country.

• 24:47Bill Maher?

  Right.

• 24:47Speaker 02

  Now, but I want to make a point about what what you just read, that passage, because I think there's something that supersedes the horniness economy. And I'm being serious about this, and it's the loneliness economy.

• 24:57Bill Maher?

  Yes.

• 24:58Speaker 02

  I I think that we are in a we are in a true epidemic of loneliness.

• 25:01Bill Maher?

  But they go together horny and lone.

• 25:03Speaker 02

  But I think one is actually more powerful and it's not.

• 25:06Bill Maher?

  You're correct. There are many guys who just want the prostitute to talk to them or the stripper.

• 25:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I I have a friend who she's a female creator on OnlyFans and we're having lunch and I was inquiring as to like what it's like. Like, what are these superficial relationships? And she described having multiple AI chatbots running at all times just to like interact with these people over text. And that was as economically productive as some of the on-camera activities. And I was amazed by that and she ascribed it to the deep loneliness that these schmucks are feeling and the fact that it created that connection.

• 25:52Bill Maher?

  Don't call them schmucks. They're down on their luck enough. Don't you feel some sympathy?

• 25:59Speaker 02

  I think that we wallow in our own, like, you know, expressions of sympathy. And so I'm just on the other side.

• 26:08Bill Maher?

  Yeah, you know what? You're right. Incel's is what they. You've heard that term?

• 26:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 26:12Bill Maher?

  It stands for involuntarily celibate, which what I used to just call, I can't get laid. But my strategy wasn't to like join a club with other fucking losers who can't get laid. My strategy, like in college, when I never got laid, was to masturbate and plot. Plot how I could get laid.

• 26:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, but that would have to be before the masturbation because afterwards you'd the the brain cells wouldn't be all that firing.

• 26:38Bill Maher?

  I I was a champion.

• 26:40Speaker 02

  Go hang out with your friends who are out getting laid.

• 26:43Bill Maher?

  Right.

• 26:44Speaker 02

  And then there's gonna be somebody in the group that doesn't end up with one of them. And you know, you could be that second option.

• 26:51Bill Maher?

  So people want to know two basic things. One, was he ever with an underage girl?

• 26:57Speaker 02

  No.

• 26:57Bill Maher?

  Okay, I know you said that and if, if the Justice Department had any evidence, and again, people are gonna attack me, what are you doing, you know, defend, I'm not defending Matt Gaetz, I'm telling the truth as to what it is, and if you don't wanna hear the truth, you're the hack. The Justice Department, this was Biden's Justice Department, declined, I can't believe Biden's Justice Department wouldn't have wanted to get you if there was something. So the fact that they said, we got nothing, tells me something, that they had nothing. Now, I don't know what anybody does behind closed doors, there's lots of scandals about lots of people, but I gotta go with what, so.

• 27:37Speaker 02

  No criminal.

• 27:38Bill Maher?

  So I put that aside.

• 27:39Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 27:40Bill Maher?

  Okay. Second thing they wanna know is, what was what he was doing considered prostitution? So that's what we're talking about now. And I couldn't agree with you more. Like, the Beverly Hills housewife, who really hates her husband now, but sticks around and fucks him a few times a year because she doesn't wanna give up the big house. To me, that's much more prostitution. That is textbook doing something you hate just for the money. Same thing if he stays with her, for the same reason, because he can't afford to get divorced. That's prostitution. But, okay, I wrote down the quote, there is this, okay? Well, first of all, you said giving someone money, uh, you're dating, that they didn't ask for, that's prostitution now?

• 28:25Bill Maher?

  So, yeah, okay, that's your exact quote. But, there's this in a text, I guess this is from your girlfriend at the time, talking about you and your wingman. Uh, the guys are a little short this week. Uh, if it can be more of a customer appreciation week, Matt. Now, were there coupons involved? I just have to ask the tough questions, were there coupons?

• 28:49Speaker 02

  Bill, this is a text message I neither sent nor received. Another person is sending this message presumably about me to tell other women that they shouldn't ask for money. It sounds like the person who sent that message really wanted to be the great recipient of any generosity and didn't want her friends to also be the recipient of that generosity. You're telling me that makes me some sort of criminal? I didn't send this message, I didn't receive this message. I'm referenced in it because one woman is telling other women, hey, there's no generosity for you.

• 29:21Bill Maher?

  So the phrase customer appreciation week, you never knew that before you saw it in this text?

• 29:28Bill Maher?

  Okay, what about this one? Add to cart. Oh, I'm joking.

• 29:33Bill Maher?

  It does not, it does not say that. Drive by, there's something about something was just a drive by. What's a drive by?

• 29:40Speaker 02

  Was that a message I sent?

• 29:43Bill Maher?

  I don't know, I was stunned when I wrote this. Okay, but there was also, they said you met women on Seeking Arrangements.

• 29:50Speaker 02

  No, actually.

• 29:51Bill Maher?

  And Sugar Dating.

• 29:52Speaker 02

  Okay, so I've never had a dating profile on any website, on any dating app. When this came out.

• 29:59Bill Maher?

  Why does it say that in the story?

• 30:01Speaker 02

  And by the way, the reason I can tell you it's false is when the media was reporting that I was meeting women on Seeking Arrangements, no less than Seeking Arrangements came out with a statement that said Matt Gaetz has never been on our site. He's never had a profile here. He has never met any women on our site. So if Seeking Arrangements themselves are saying this is false, I have to combat these things in the media that are not true. And nobody loses their reporter license for saying stuff that's false. It's just the information ecosystem.

• 30:32Bill Maher?

  Well, here's what I'm gonna say to that. One, I never read that in the stories about you. You just tell me, wait? Which absolutely could be because they left it out because they do it all the time. It's one of my biggest complaints about the media is that I never, you know, you say you're not lying. Well, you know what? You can also lie by omission. You cherry pick, both sides do it. You, I have to read both sides to feel like I have any knowledge of anything. And that just sucks, except for my show, which is always even handed. Okay, so. I didn't know that, so that's either because the media lied to me, or somebody on the internet, if they're gonna say that this contradictory information, you're gonna look bad, but I assume you wouldn't say that.

• 31:17Speaker 02

  I'm willing to live by those terms.

• 31:19Bill Maher?

  If it couldn't be backed up, okay. Also, this is in your defense. This is another thing from an article, again, in, I think, the Washington Post. "The committee found two women, 27 and 25, who did not consider the relationships transactional." So, that's a direct quote, again.

• 31:38Bill Maher?

  Hacks. I'm just reading what I read. Did you read that one?

• 31:41Speaker 02

  I did, I did. Sounded scandalous. Me dating a 25-year-old woman and a 27-year-old woman, and having a non-transactional relationship.

• 31:50Bill Maher?

  Look who you're talking to, you don't know the half of it. Um, okay, so, the other, um, this is an interesting quote. Um, the committee, this is the Ethics Committee, okay. "Typically refrains from releasing the findings after a member's resignation." I did not know that until I read it in the article. "The committee typically refrains from releasing the findings if you've quit already." So, why did they make an exception for you? What is your, what is your, you must have bitterness about that?

• 32:25Speaker 02

  Well, I don't, actually, because I know in Washington.

• 32:28Bill Maher?

  Oh, come on, just admit that.

• 32:29Speaker 02

  No, everything goes out in Washington, anyway. If you think that this document wasn't gonna be released in one form or the other, then you don't understand how the leak ecosystem works in that place. Every, yeah, sure, everything leaks. So, other people were more worked up about that than I was, to be honest. I have a lot of enemies on the Republican side, more so than most Republican members, because I killed the golden goose. Kevin McCarthy raised a billion dollars in special interest money, and distributed that among a couple hundred Republicans. That makes you a lot of fucking friends. And the Ethics Committee is one of only three committees in the whole Congress that the Speaker appoints directly. It doesn't go through the steering committee process. Ethics, Rules, and Intelligence.

• 33:13Speaker 02

  And so, everybody on the Ethics Committee were Kevin McCarthy's asshole buddies, one of whom, who voted to release it, the Republicans, was donating to my primary opponent. So, I wasn't exactly being judged by some non-biased arbiter. These were people with an axe to grind against me.

• 33:32Bill Maher?

  Well, um, yeah.

• 33:34Speaker 02

  That's life.

• 33:35Bill Maher?

  Yeah, I mean, I, it's, it's hard to like, Kevin McCarthy, I really want to defend that guy. I mean, I always thought he was a huge asshole and not that bright.

• 33:46Speaker 02

  Did you, you thought, see, because I actually always found him to be a gregarious person.

• 33:50Bill Maher?

  I don't know. If he was here talking to me, I'd have a different opinion too.

• 33:54Speaker 02

  I bet you'd like him.

• 33:55Bill Maher?

  Yeah, but I, okay, but I feel like he's much more of a square than you are.

• 34:00Speaker 02

  Well, that would, that would encompass a lot of people, I think.

• 34:04Bill Maher?

  Hey, you know.

• 34:05Speaker 02

  But where you get me wrong, man, where I took exception with you, and I was always a huge fan of yours because when I got to like, you used to always have Joe Scarborough on and Joe Scarborough

• 34:14Bill Maher?

  Just had him on.

• 34:15Speaker 02

  was my congressman.

• 34:16Bill Maher?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 34:17Speaker 02

  I was a huge Joe Scarborough fan. We were really close, even when I was like 12, 14 years old. And so I would be able to stay up late at night and watch like content that otherwise would have been deemed too irreverent for me. Because Joe Scarborough was on.

• 34:32Bill Maher?

  Sure.

• 34:33Speaker 02

  And then that created a permission structure for me to continue to watch your show. Because, oh, well, Joe has been on that show. It can't be too bad for me to watch. So, uh, he, uh, yeah, was, was our guy for a long time.

• 34:47Bill Maher?

  I still like him. I mean, you guys went ape shit when he like went to Mar-a-Lago like two days after you.

• 34:55Speaker 02

  I think that's great, by the way.

• 34:57Bill Maher?

  Yeah, of course you do, because he's, look, I mean, the, the criticism was that he was kissing the ring. Um, I think two days after the election was a little early. It did give that signal, like, give it a week, you know, Joe. Okay, but I like Joe. You know, my problem with people who like take media jobs is that, you know, they start out, very often on MSNBC, this happens. They start out as the conservative. Now, of course, on MSNBC, you can be only so conservative. They don't really have like your type that wouldn't be on it. But they have the Nicole Wallaces and the people, Michael Steele, the people, usually they hate Trump.

• 35:36Speaker 02

  It's the country club conservatives, not the hunting club conservatives.

• 35:39Bill Maher?

  It's the, it's the non, it's the, it's the. Anybody but Trump conservatives, right? Which is not, doesn't that, look, I, I'm an everybody, anybody but Trump guy too. But like, it doesn't represent the country or the party, so it's bullshit. But, okay, so they start out as that, but they're also conservative. Nicole Wallace was like, Bush is like.

• 35:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, oh, Mrs., she was out there, you know, cheerleading the Iraq war.

• 36:02Bill Maher?

  Right, and the longer they're there, and the more MSNBC on the paycheck, the more they become not just anti-Trump, but now they're just totally in league with, and I said, you know, look, I don't want people to become more conservative generally, but when you're, looks to me like the paycheck is dictating your politics, I do have a problem with it.

• 36:26Speaker 02

  Well, they're enslaved by their audience because they see what.

• 36:29Bill Maher?

  Everybody is, yeah.

• 36:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, what turns off their audience, what turns on their audience, and that becomes the thing that turns them on as well. But like, even when we say conservative, liberal, right, left, we are in a time of realignment right now. I think unlike any other time you've been in the media.

• 36:46Speaker 02

  The, who is the pro-war party? Who is the pro-free speech party? Who is the pro-free trade party?

• 36:54Bill Maher?

  Who's the stick up their ass party?

• 36:56Speaker 02

  Right.

• 36:57Bill Maher?

  That's the biggest one in my world.

• 36:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 36:59Bill Maher?

  Because, you know, the, the, the stuff that used to get laughs because it was the moral majority doing it, stick up their ass stuff. You know, Pat Robertson, who's the other, Jerry Falwell.

• 37:11Speaker 02

  This was your thing.

• 37:12Bill Maher?

  All those, purple Teletubbies, you know, are gay.

• 37:16Speaker 02

  Well, the Clinton thing.

• 37:17Bill Maher?

  And then who became the stick up their ass people?

• 37:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, the left.

• 37:19Bill Maher?

  The left.

• 37:20Speaker 02

  Well, and, I mean, you're who taught me about oral sex, because.

• 37:24Bill Maher?

  You're welcome.

• 37:25Speaker 02

  The Clinton.

• 37:26Bill Maher?

  You're welcome, Mrs. Gates.

• 37:27Speaker 02

  The, uh, the, the whole Clinton, Ken Starr report really, uh, put your critique of the stick in the mud, stick up your ass, contingent of politics in, in the forefront. But like, right now, there are times I see the political landscape where I have more in common with the populist leftists than I do the centrists in my own party. You know, on, on matters of like surve, government surveillance. I team up with Ilhan Omar more than I team up with the Republicans on the Intelligence Committee. On war powers.

• 38:02Bill Maher?

  You're talking about Ilhan Omar?

• 38:04Speaker 02

  Ilhan Omar, yeah.

• 38:05Bill Maher?

  Oh, you said it funny.

• 38:06Speaker 02

  Well, she's, yeah, you'd be surprised how often.

• 38:09Bill Maher?

  Ilhan Omar.

• 38:10Speaker 02

  Ilhan.

• 38:10Bill Maher?

  I know like a, oh, is that how, am I saying it wrong?

• 38:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's Ilhan.

• 38:14Bill Maher?

  My bad.

• 38:16Bill Maher?

  I'm sorry, and sorry to the prophet, peace and blessings upon him. I meant no disrespect. Phew, that's getting out of hand, that shit.

• 38:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, I would probably cut that, but I think, I don't know where that's gonna lead you, bro, but could be dicey.

• 38:30Bill Maher?

  No, I mean, I've been down that road before.

• 38:32Speaker 02

  Do you con, yeah, that was your big fact?

• 38:34Bill Maher?

  You have to be, I mean, Zuckerberg just made a big deal about free speech and I'm behind him on it because I think he's right. He's doing a kind of a mea culpa, like we, we fact check too much and look, is there a lot of misinformation? Yeah, but also misinformation has become like a code word for just stuff we don't like. You know, COVID started in a lab, well, we just don't think that should be out there, so that's me. Well, it wasn't misinformation, shit like that, not to have to tell you.

• 39:01Speaker 02

  And the stuff that's true, like this, like when people were posting the true side effects of some of these vaccines, you had folks in the White House pressuring social media platforms to get that taken down. And it wasn't even false, but it was just derogatory to the narrative that they were trying to spin at the time. That should not be allowed, and I think the more you decentralize that away from the fact checker model to the community notes model, the more you make it durable to that type of, of government influence.

• 39:31Bill Maher?

  Yeah, so if you were in the Justice Department, like what would be your number one?

• 39:40Speaker 02

  Number one?

• 39:40Bill Maher?

  Yeah, what would be?

• 39:41Speaker 02

  Would be defang the weaponization. Stop the whole, they go after us, I really mean that. Because if I'd have gone in there and done that stuff.

• 39:50Bill Maher?

  You really think the, the FBI is that partisan? Because I always thought of the FBI as mostly Republicans, mostly squares, guys who iron their underwear. You know, real straight arrows. The idea that it's infiltrated with all these like super radical left wing types who are out to get Trump. You don't think they had a reason with all the, all the communications that were unprecedented between Trump and Russia? You don't think they had a reason to start that Operation Crossfire investigation? I mean, his, his fucking campaign manager, Manafort.

• 40:30Bill Maher?

  Was completely in bed with Russians. His Michael Flynn and the combat, all these people in the administration who had all these discussions with Russians, Russians, Russians. And then she's always Russians, we don't know any Russians. They picture him with like eight Russians.

• 40:46Speaker 02

  It sort of feels silly to talk about.

• 40:48Bill Maher?

  At least merited an investigation.

• 40:50Speaker 02

  It feels silly to talk about now that like Trump was some asset of Putin when it was only Trump in the White House where Putin did invade another country. But in terms of when, in terms of when the investigation turned illegitimate, like, okay. I, I guess you have reasonable suspicion around anything. But once they were applying for surveillance based on information that the FBI already knew was coming from Russian intelligence sub sources. That's when they jumped the shark for me. They were signing FISA renewals when they knew that Steele was relying on people who were Russian intelligence people.

• 41:29Bill Maher?

  There was a report, was that the Horowitz report or was that the Durham report?

• 41:33Speaker 02

  That was Horowitz.

• 41:34Bill Maher?

  Okay, one of them was about the FBI and it did find errors. Yes, it did. Absolutely. No, no, no.

• 41:40Speaker 02

  And like, doesn't it bother you when an FBI lawyer is pledging fidelity to the resistance while changing an email?

• 41:46Bill Maher?

  That doesn't mean that there wasn't something there also. I mean, to go back to politically incorrect days, OJ Simpson did kill his ex-wife and the police were also corrupt. Sometimes both things can be true.

• 41:59Speaker 02

  They framed him? Like, do you think they?

• 42:01Bill Maher?

  OJ?

• 42:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, they took active steps to frame him.

• 42:03Bill Maher?

  No, I don't. That's what I'm saying. I'm saying.

• 42:05Speaker 02

  They were, they had their own problems, admittedly.

• 42:07Bill Maher?

  Yes, and that's, and that's, that's the analogy with the FBI. They did, there were problems and the FISA thing was the most glaring of, of those errors. But also he was having contacts. Just to say publicly, Russia, if you're listening, I mean, nobody ever did that. George Stephanopoulos said, you know, if a foreign power sent you intel, oh, well, I think you should look at it. No, you shouldn't. You should go to the FBI and say, a country who is not called America is trying to influence our elections. That's what you do. You go to the FBI, you go look at it.

• 42:41Speaker 02

  You know what? That would be nice. But Bill, as everything else in our world has become globalized, trade, information, our elections have become globalized too. And the notion that the way we're going to be resilient to that is tattling to the FBI every time. It may work, but when I see the way these. Global corporations that rely on sovereign wealth funds of other company countries are pouring cash into super funds for Democrats and Republicans. It's like, oh, oh, but Don Jr. met with some lady in Trump Tower. There is such a foreign influence factor in our elections now. It is such a high level. I don't know that there's anything.

• 43:21Bill Maher?

  Especially on your side.

• 43:23Speaker 02

  Oh, come on, man. You don't think, you don't think that the Chinese were funding the whole Penn Center, the Biden Center at Penn.

• 43:31Bill Maher?

  Manafort was trading polling information with a guy in the GRU. And then the Democrats didn't do that.

• 43:40Speaker 02

  Paul Manafort, despite a lofty title, was a very bit player in what was going on with Trump. You know why?

• 43:48Bill Maher?

  How do you know that?

• 43:49Speaker 02

  Because he had one specific task. We were dealing with a faithless electors problem at the Republican convention where we would win a state and then Ted Cruz was effective at using the party apparatus to substitute his delegates for Trump's delegates. And it wasn't like we'd had a recent convention fight. And one of the only guys around from the 80s that ever planned for a convention fight was Paul Manafort. So he demands this lofty title, then he works the convention problem, and at the same time is trying to showcase to the oligarchs on whatever side in Russia, Ukraine, that he was this made guy in Trump world. And that was messy and should not have happened. But I think, talk

• 44:31Speaker 02

  about what aboutism, to say that that's a parallel to the tens of millions of dollars that flow into our elections from foreign sovereign wealth funds through US companies and super PACs.

• 44:43Bill Maher?

  It's both sides.

• 44:44Speaker 02

  It is both sides.

• 44:45Bill Maher?

  Based on a ruling from a Republican Supreme Court.

• 44:50Speaker 02

  I think the ruling in Citizens United was wrong.

• 44:54Bill Maher?

  Great to meet you. I'm having a good time.

• 44:59Speaker 02

  I'm glad, man. I'm glad.

• 45:00Bill Maher?

  You don't smoke pot anymore, right?

• 45:02Speaker 02

  I won't with you. It would mess with like all the molly I took on the way here.

• 45:08Bill Maher?

  Weren't you, uh, weren't you one of the most, um, forthright ones to wanna put forward legalization for pot laws?

• 45:19Speaker 02

  I'm very pro marijuana reform. I wrote Florida's first, second, and third marijuana laws.

• 45:25Bill Maher?

  But it just failed there.

• 45:27Speaker 02

  Well, the, the vote on going from medical to adult use. Now, in Florida, you have to go.

• 45:32Bill Maher?

  But it did, it was on the ballot. It just.

• 45:34Speaker 02

  Well, it didn't fail.

• 45:36Bill Maher?

  How could fucking nutty, crazy, bath salt, alligator.

• 45:40Speaker 02

  Oh, stop, don't let Florida try.

• 45:42Bill Maher?

  Not be legal for pot.

• 45:44Speaker 02

  Well, yeah, we, we get, we don't allow the homeless to degrade infrastructure to the point where it hurts the firefighters.

• 45:49Bill Maher?

  Different issue.

• 45:50Speaker 02

  Different issue.

• 45:50Bill Maher?

  And, and the liberals have completely fucked up that issue. It's in my brilliant special that's on probably now or just was. Is anybody else seeing this? I talk about it, liberal versus woke as far as homeless goes. No, I mean, the, the, trust me, the liberals have a lot to answer for. And I call them on all of it, which again is why they don't like me. And I don't give a fuck.

• 46:11Speaker 02

  You talk a lot, you know what? I wonder if you give a fuck because you talk about it a lot.

• 46:16Bill Maher?

  I do.

• 46:16Speaker 02

  You advertise how much it affects you by talking about it.

• 46:20Bill Maher?

  Well, no.

• 46:20Speaker 02

  Cause I don't even view you as a libertarian.

• 46:23Bill Maher?

  No, all I'm doing is reminding people of my brand. My brand is almost unique, not completely, but like, I'm glad that everybody is like so in their echo chamber because it leaves this big space in the middle for someone who will do that. People will watch this, if they watch the whole thing, they'll go, wow, what an honest conversation, like, not like anyone I've ever seen with any politician. Like, that's what just two guys talking. And Bill was open. He didn't fucking hate that guy.

• 46:54Bill Maher?

  But it wasn't about politics. And then we got over it, just like a married couple does. And then we just.

• 46:59Speaker 02

  And then you kept nagging me about it, just like a married couple does.

• 47:01Bill Maher?

  And when I think you're full of shit about stuff on your side, I call you out on that. And I'm also admitting, and I hope you are, I think I do it more than you, when my side is wrong, and they are wrong a lot, and that's why they lost this election. And I tell them every day, you're just digging the hole deeper.

• 47:19Speaker 02

  Anybody who can't point out where their side is wrong is just a vessel through which others operate.

• 47:24Bill Maher?

  Well, where's your side most wrong?

• 47:27Speaker 02

  My side's wrong on marijuana reform. My side is wrong on some elements of climate change. My side is wrong when they try to extend the surveillance state at any cost. My side is wrong when they try to go and build Jeffersonian democracies out of sand and blood and Arab militias in the Middle East and convert every Central Asian cave.

• 47:48Bill Maher?

  I gotta give that to Trump. He really doesn't like war.

• 47:51Speaker 02

  No.

• 47:52Bill Maher?

  And that's not a bad thing. It's ironic. Like, who was the last president who really didn't like war? Jimmy Carter, the one they just buried. He never fired a shot. It's funny that they have that in common, isn't it?

• 48:05Speaker 02

  It is.

• 48:06Bill Maher?

  Two guys who have nothing else in common.

• 48:08Speaker 02

  And it's not that Trump doesn't have militaristic tendencies. Like, I don't think he has any problem with torture or a really powerful, strong military. But right now, like, one of the reasons we should be anti-war is because I'm not sure we would win very many of them. And that's not a criticism of the amazing men and women in the military, but the shit we build doesn't work. I was on the Armed Services Committee for eight years, and I saw the way what we spend money on is driven by what general is leaving to get what board seat or what contract with Raytheon, Lockheed, L-3. We've allowed all this consolidation in the defense. Okay, the F-35.

• 48:45Bill Maher?

  I loved it when Musk went after the F-35. I had said on my show two days earlier, I said, you know, they're talking about cutting shit. Let's see what happens when they go after the Pentagon. And then he did it two days later. I was like, okay, you know what? I'm not pre-hating anything you guys are gonna do. Not pre-hating.

• 49:02Speaker 02

  Well, and Hegseth is uniquely critical of those things because these millennials who went and fought these wars and believed they were righteous and meaningful, who came more to the anti-war side, like Tucker was a big pro-war guy, came to an anti-war guy.

• 49:22Bill Maher?

  He's just cray now. Come on, bro. He's... Come on, the Moscow stuff, defending Syria, defending Assad. I mean, you gotta be kidding. But Hegseth, he looks like he's having a good time. Let's get him over here.

• 49:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, he'd be a good hang.

• 49:38Bill Maher?

  I bet he would.

• 49:41Speaker 02

  But...

• 49:42Bill Maher?

  Yeah. What?

• 49:44Speaker 02

  Don't get me started on the accusations against Hegseth because they are so ridiculous. But I want to get back to the point about the military spending.

• 49:50Bill Maher?

  He seems like a guy who does not know how to treat women.

• 49:53Speaker 02

  Bill, you're telling me-

• 49:55Bill Maher?

  You treat them nice. You take them to Broadway shows.

• 49:58Speaker 02

  You're telling me some-

• 49:59Bill Maher?

  You do the and money thing, which is great.

• 50:01Speaker 02

  Some lonely housewife fucks Pete Hegseth in a hotel, then has to explain something to her husband the next day, alleges rape. I, I, I just, I can't on that. But back to the, the military spending. The F-35 costs a hundred million dollars a copy. You know what percentage of them are fully operationally capable today? Twenty-nine percent.

• 50:24Bill Maher?

  They don't work in the rain.

• 50:26Speaker 02

  If something costs a hundred million dollars, it should definitely work more than twenty-nine percent of the time.

• 50:31Bill Maher?

  But also, the great thing Musk said was, "They're obsolete. We're in the age of drones, assholes. We're in the age of drones. Why are you building fighter planes? If you guys can go in and really do that kind of shit, and like, wherever this country is really constipated, just rotor-rueter this kind of shit away, I will have great respect for it."

• 50:55Speaker 02

  I hope we achieve that. When I was sitting around Mar-a-Lago with Elon, talking about how we were gonna do that-

• 51:00Bill Maher?

  Name dropper.

• 51:00Speaker 02

  Elon says the way that we save the military and win the future wars is by designing a mechanism to get drone operators laid. Because the whole culture of the Air Force is the like fighter pilot, you know, macho. Yeah, the Navy Top Gun. And so like, if you had that same archetype for the two-hundred-and-forty-pound guy-

• 51:26Bill Maher?

  Right.

• 51:27Speaker 02

  -who like, lives in his mom's basement but knows how to operate a drone, if we can get that guy some pussy, we are gonna smoke China.

• 51:34Bill Maher?

  Okay, well, we've got the OnlyFans situation. I feel there's a-

• 51:38Speaker 02

  The loneliness situation.

• 51:39Bill Maher?

  I feel like there's a, a way to combine the OnlyFans ladies with the drone operators and make this happen. Because there's really nothing more pathetic-

• 51:49Speaker 02

  For America.

• 51:49Bill Maher?

  I mean, I, I, I, like, I'm not a technological guy. So like, I wouldn't even know how to get on OnlyFans. I mean, I don't really know how to get on- You know, I don't know, I'm chatty BT, I just not, I'm just of a different.

• 52:01Speaker 02

  You don't use AI?

• 52:02Bill Maher?

  No, I'm just not, I'm just of a different generation, okay, I'm old school, like, you know, pad and pad, sorry, that's who I am. But um, what I've read about OnlyFans is just, it's like, I can't believe what I'm reading, that these guys must know that this girl is not really their girlfriend and doesn't really give a shit about them, and very often isn't even that girl. It's some fat guy in the Philippines.

• 52:27Speaker 02

  Some chatbot that's running.

• 52:29Bill Maher?

  Well, it's a, they call them chatters, like, that's the person who's communicating. The fact that they willingly, willingly convince themselves that this is some sort of actual relationship? Where they're like tipping them by the minute, you know, another five minutes and it's.

• 52:46Speaker 02

  Just for the chat sometimes.

• 52:47Bill Maher?

  Just, and of course, you're not there in the room with them. It's not a pro, you're not fucking them in any way.

• 52:54Speaker 02

  They're fucking you.

• 52:56Bill Maher?

  They're fucking, the fact that so many millions of men are satisfied that this is some sort of actual relationship? This, this generation, somebody told me a scary story about, um, she was telling me about her younger sister who's like seventeen and has a boyfriend for the first time, and they were like, I'll bring him over for dinner, no. The kids just wanna be on the phone together all the time, FaceTiming, and when the girl goes to sleep at night, she leaves the phone on FaceTime all night, and so does the boyfriend, and they're sleeping together virtually with the phone on all night. And I said, you have to pay for this? And she said, you know, they made a big mistake when they gave these kids unlimited data.

• 53:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, because that shit wouldn't have flown in my day, because your parents would have been like, you are on your roaming minutes.

• 53:45Bill Maher?

  You have kids yet?

• 53:46Speaker 02

  Uh, I've got a, sort of an adopted son.

• 53:48Bill Maher?

  Oh, yeah, okay, how old?

• 53:50Speaker 02

  Right now, he's twenty.

• 53:52Bill Maher?

  Okay, so he's a little, he's a little pad, a little past this. But what do you make of a generation that is doing that, that can't even turn off the phone when they go to sleep?

• 54:02Speaker 02

  I think it's worse than that, I've been reading the literature on the people who get the AI boyfriend or girlfriend that they know is AI, that they know is not an actual human, and they, they did these studies, and when you allow the person to interact with that bot, and then you cut off the bot, they have. Sincere feelings of remorse over a breakup with a being that never existed. It's like Manti Teo shit.

• 54:31Bill Maher?

  I mean, it's not that different than OnlyFans where the girl isn't really, really there. But you're right.

• 54:35Speaker 02

  That's a great, that's a great point, actually.

• 54:37Bill Maher?

  It is, it is one small level past.

• 54:40Speaker 02

  Right.

• 54:40Bill Maher?

  But it's basically this.

• 54:41Speaker 02

  Are we getting that, though? Aren't there gonna be the AI relationships that?

• 54:46Bill Maher?

  I don't know.

• 54:47Speaker 02

  Define human romance?

• 54:49Bill Maher?

  I'm so glad I'm in the generation I'm in, really. Even being almost sixty-nine years old, which obviously has its bad parts, like you're not gonna be around this long. Uh, is, it's, I still would not trade it. I mean, I was sure wouldn't wanna be what, what these kids are going through. I mean, and, and their sort of virtual existence.

• 55:10Speaker 02

  When, when we, my generation, you met people.

• 55:14Bill Maher?

  You're Gen X or you're millennial?

• 55:15Speaker 02

  I'm like the first millennial. I'm not Zenial. You, you typically met people at bars. But this generation doesn't even really drink that much.

• 55:24Bill Maher?

  Even when they're at bars, they're on their phone.

• 55:26Speaker 02

  I, yes. You couldn't spend that much time on your phone because you were having to hit, you know, the button three times to get to the right letter to send a message. But where did, like, where did your generation, where did you typically go to meet a romantic partner? What was that typical hunting experience for you?

• 55:42Bill Maher?

  Okay, well, you know, I mean, I was just so bereft of knowledge. I would love it if it was here. I mean, no, I mean, I was, uh, I was a late bloomer. I mean, it's really good I never got married because, like, I needed time to catch up to what a loser I was when I was. I had, I had one girlfriend in high school. And when she dumped me, it was like the worst thing that still in my life ever happened. I was like, like a wreck for a year. Uh, and then, so.

• 56:08Speaker 02

  When she break up with you over? Was it another guy?

• 56:11Bill Maher?

  Um, no, I was just being a dick. I was just being complacent. You know what it was? I got bored. Like we all will do to a certain degree at all times. And it's just how you handle it. And I handled it because it was the first time like a dick. Um, so, uh, then I went to Cornell, which had, it was like the worst possible atmosphere to ever try to get laid. It was like the Ivy Leagues had just started even admitting girls. So it's like a five to one ratio and I didn't know how to get laid. So it was just.

• 56:43Speaker 02

  It's not like the Cornell atmosphere had a whole lot else going on in the town.

• 56:47Bill Maher?

  Cornell is a shit place to go to school. Anyway, you get a great education, but it's cold and competitive. It's just, it's just a bad vibe up there. It really is. I never went back. Um, so that was terrible. Then when I finally got out, then I went and moved to New York City and being poor at a pot dealer, trying to be a comedian, also not a great formula to get laid in New York.

• 57:12Speaker 02

  Being a drug dealer wasn't a good formula to get laid?

• 57:14Bill Maher?

  Not pot or like I was selling small amounts to like guys at the club and the band. Um, but when I came out here at 27, it was like, oh, I always say this town sucked my cock on the first date. I just loved it from the beginning and I got along better with the girls and had a little, little game. And, uh, and then I just, yeah, you would go to bars. That's what it was. And I was still such a loser. I remember I had a friend who I didn't really like that much, but he was good at talking to girls.

• 57:46Bill Maher?

  That's really one of the key signs of a loser. You gotta have a guy, a wingman. Oh, I was gonna mention this guy, Joel Greenberg. I'm very curious. He comes up in the articles. And I saw Megyn Kelly talking about him. Again, I had not heard this because again, you only get one half of the story. First of all, what was your relationship with him? He sounds like you guys are asshole buddies.

• 58:12Speaker 02

  It was someone I deeply regret having spent any time with, but he was in politics in central Florida. Uh, he became a social acquaintance of mine and, you know, he had.

• 58:26Speaker 02

  He had, you know, a vision on crypto and he had a vision on all these different things. He was the tax collector. He became the first tax collector in the country to take crypto. So I was, I was sort of enamored with the cutting edge nature of how he was going about things. And what I sort of learned through this is

• 58:45Bill Maher?

  He's in jail.

• 58:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, he's in jail. He's in, he's in jail. And before, before anything would be, one of the things he's in jail for is lying about another person, about having sexual contact with someone who was underage. But what I learned is if you're around people and they're doing stuff, and even if you're not doing that stuff, if you're the most famous person or you're the most powerful person, if shit breaks bad, then everybody's gonna point the finger at you. And that's what happened with Joel Greenberg. By the way, if, if, if the way I go down is drinking with Bill Maher at Club Random, I'm, I'm comfortable with that. Ginger, if you can hear this, you should go.

• 59:20Bill Maher?

  Well, you just made up for that gaffe at the beginning. That's a very sweet thing to say. I appreciate it.

• 59:25Speaker 02

  No, I, I, I, you're one of these boomer, not boomer, you're Gen X, right? You're a boomer?

• 59:31Bill Maher?

  Gen X, oh, thank you. That is so kind of you. No, I'm, I'm totally

• 59:36Speaker 02

  There's a whole echelon of you guys who became cult heroes to my generation. It was like you, Lewis Black, Norm MacDonald, rest his soul, one of the funniest people to ever live. You, it, it, it was the calling out of the mores of the time that developed a really, like sincere following.

• 59:59Bill Maher?

  Yeah. No, I love it when I have fans in your, every generation, but especially as it gets younger. Because I do

• 1:00:07Speaker 02

  Your liberal fans are older and your conservative fans are younger would be my guess.

• 1:00:11Bill Maher?

  Yeah, probably. I know, I never looked into it that much, but that's probably what it is. But I also, you know, I hear a lot about, you know, the guys on the golf course love you. Because again, I'm not, I never have been afraid to like speak truth about what's going on in the left. And what's going on in the left, you know, I get it. I, I do not like Trump, but I never hate anybody who votes for him. I totally get it. I get why people go, you know.

• 1:00:42Speaker 02

  Would you agree that like the two, the two greatest politician, well Clinton might have fit in there, but Obama and Trump had-

• 1:00:48Bill Maher?

  Oh, absolutely.

• 1:00:50Speaker 02

  Right, and I do believe-

• 1:00:51Bill Maher?

  As a politician-

• 1:00:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:00:52Bill Maher?

  He's, he's, he's non pariah, but so was Hitler. As a politician, I'm not saying he's Hitler, he's not.

• 1:00:58Speaker 02

  Well, you're also not saying Obama's Hitler, you're making a point about-

• 1:01:00Bill Maher?

  Exactly, I, I, but Trump, you know, let me just be clear, cause this is a thing that people do say, Trump is not Hitler. Hitler fought the Russians.

• 1:01:10Bill Maher?

  Okay, I'm thinking now that maybe your days as a party animal, connected you more with who the American people really are. Is that, is that a fair statement?

• 1:01:23Speaker 02

  Look, I was never a holier-than-thou politician, I never-

• 1:01:26Bill Maher?

  We know that.

• 1:01:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, but you know what, some people who had personal foibles and follies, would then go and be in great moral judgment of others. And for, for whatever problems I've had in my life, I've never tried to represent that I'm a better person than my constituents. I just try to be a vessel-

• 1:01:46Bill Maher?

  I'm saying-

• 1:01:47Speaker 02

  For them, for their goals.

• 1:01:49Bill Maher?

  I think, you know, I think you're more like them. I mean, you know, I don't consider you, I, I mean, especially having talked to you now, like, there are some dirtbags in your party. I mean, George Santos, give me a break. I mean-

• 1:02:02Speaker 02

  Oh, George.

• 1:02:02Bill Maher?

  What?

• 1:02:03Speaker 02

  But every, every, every generation gets the Princess Diana they're deserved, and ours was George Santos, taken from us too early.

• 1:02:10Bill Maher?

  Okay, well, that's not really a good analogy, Princess Diana. Well, Princess Diana, wasn't, was she a charlatan?

• 1:02:17Speaker 02

  No, I'm, it's a joke.

• 1:02:18Bill Maher?

  A very funny one, too. Okay, so, but then like, who, Lauren Boebert?

• 1:02:24Speaker 02

  She's a patriot. Lauren Boebert's terrific.

• 1:02:26Bill Maher?

  Okay, but she gives handjobs during musicals.

• 1:02:29Speaker 02

  So what?

• 1:02:29Bill Maher?

  I agree.

• 1:02:30Speaker 02

  So, oh, you're against handjobs now?

• 1:02:32Bill Maher?

  You're taking girls to musicals.

• 1:02:34Speaker 02

  Well, none that I had give me handjobs, but I'm not entirely sure I would have turned one down.

• 1:02:40Bill Maher?

  But you know, that's what they said, and my joke was like, they said, well, Matt Gaetz, he took prostitutes to musicals. I'm like, really? If you're taking to a girl to a musical, isn't that payment in itself?

• 1:02:50Speaker 02

  Well, but by the way, think about how fantastical that sounds. That I was bringing prostitutes to Broadway shows. They were my dates.

• 1:02:59Bill Maher?

  Right. I'm not upset. That is not a... See, there's a... I don't think people know what a prostitute is. A prostitute is someone, first of all, who has a pimp. Okay, who gets hit with a car antenna. You know, who gives blowjobs behind dumpsters. That's a prostitute. And of course, there's high end. But, you know, but they're... But they don't get taken to Broadway shows. That's a black point.

• 1:03:22Speaker 02

  Well, let me offer a defense of some of the people that you've criticized. I served with a lot of... I served with a lot of congressmen and women who live perfect family lives. Never looked the other way. Never done anything other than live a purpose-driven, holy life. And they get that congressional pin on, and they go and sell out the country. And they vote for whoever gives them money. And they vote for whatever lobbyists give them attention. And then there are people who are flawed and irreverent and have tough moments that are caught on TV. But they sincerely do what they think is best for the country. And that's why I had friendships in Congress that a lot of people wouldn't realize. I was friends with Ilhan Omar.

• 1:04:06Speaker 02

  She and her husband and my wife and I have had dinner together and spent social time together.

• 1:04:12Bill Maher?

  I would not have guessed that.

• 1:04:13Speaker 02

  Right. And you know why? Because while I disagree with her strongly on matters of policy, and she would say the same of me.

• 1:04:19Bill Maher?

  Right.

• 1:04:19Speaker 02

  I at least knew she fucking believed it. Okay? And say that about... Say what you want about AOC. She believes what she says. And for like way more than half of them up there, they don't even believe what they're saying. They are just reading scripts that are written, produced by others. And I resent that more than a substantive disagreement.

• 1:04:40Bill Maher?

  I do too.

• 1:04:42Bill Maher?

  Well, um, it's been a pleasure, before I evacuate, to talk to you.

• 1:04:48Speaker 02

  I sincerely hope that-

• 1:04:50Bill Maher?

  It really has.

• 1:04:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:04:51Bill Maher?

  It's been a pleasure.

• 1:04:52Speaker 02

  One more beef, man, I had... You've called me a bully more than once on your show.

• 1:04:58Bill Maher?

  No, I think what we did was we showed you a picture of you and said, "He always looks like he has a look on his face like, 'Eat it nerd.'"

• 1:05:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, but I am the nerd.

• 1:05:08Bill Maher?

  No, but you look different- First of all, you look different in person.

• 1:05:11Speaker 02

  More like a nerd?

• 1:05:12Bill Maher?

  No, less. Normal, more normal.

• 1:05:14Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, that always bothered me about your coverage of me because-

• 1:05:17Bill Maher?

  I mean, like, you've seen the way they do you on Saturday Night Live?

• 1:05:20Speaker 02

  I know.

• 1:05:20Bill Maher?

  I mean, that's what they think you look like? It doesn't, it doesn't what you look like to me right now, looking at you in person. Maybe it is on TV, you know, people just present differently on TV sometimes.

• 1:05:32Speaker 02

  I, I'm a weird-looking guy, I don't-

• 1:05:34Bill Maher?

  But you're not.

• 1:05:35Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 1:05:35Bill Maher?

  That's the thing. You're not. But I was expecting one. Really.

• 1:05:40Speaker 02

  The molly must be kicking in right now.

• 1:05:43Bill Maher?

  All right. Well, thank you for coming here.

• 1:05:45Speaker 02

  I appreciate it.

• 1:05:46Bill Maher?

  And, you know-

• 1:05:47Speaker 02

  We should do real time.

• 1:05:49Bill Maher?

  I would love to. Would you do it?

• 1:05:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, if, you know, I-

• 1:05:52Bill Maher?

  Would you do a panel?

• 1:05:53Speaker 02

  I, uh, I got, I got no fear of your panel, your audience, but sometime, sometime you gotta do, uh, do my podcast, too.

• 1:05:59Bill Maher?

  I will.

• 1:05:59Speaker 02

  All right. I got a podcast coming up and would love to have you, bro.

• 1:06:02Bill Maher?

  I appreciate it.

• 1:06:10Speaker 02

  I got a podcast-

• 1:06:10Bill Maher?

  You mentioned your podcast. It's so new, it doesn't have a name?

• 1:06:14Speaker 02

  "Over the Line" with Matt Gaetz is gonna be the name.

• 1:06:16Bill Maher?

  Oh, "Over the Line," I will be on it.

• 1:06:18Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 1:06:19Bill Maher?

  All right. Thank you. Appreciate you.