Ep. #698: Whitney Cummings, Stephanie Ruhle, Jonah Goldberg

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Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO Late Night Series, Real Time with Bill Ma.

Start the clock.

Come on, thank you so much.

How are you down there?

Thank you.

Thank you, people.

I appreciate it.

Thank you, ladies and gentlemen.

Welcome to the show.

Oh, thank you.

I appreciate it.

Thank you.

Please, there's so much going on.

Thank you so much.

Thank you very much, and thank you for putting on a brave face because I know you're all probably upset.

You know what happened with Elon

and Donald Trump.

It's all over.

And even worse, it's Pride Month.

It's just,

well.

Are you having a good Pride Month?

Are you out there priding it up?

Oh, wow.

That's fantastic.

Well, you know, I got to tell you, it's a little less pridey this year because, you know, ever since Trump and the administration has been on the warpath against anything DEI, now corporate America is a little skittish about going, oh, Trump, all fried stuff.

So, you know, a lot of these companies, the Gap, Nordstroms, Macy's, they've all kind of pulled back.

No more ostentatious displays.

At Home Depot, they won't even let you get wood.

But I'm not going to pretend I can really think about anything other than the Trump Elon thing.

Well, I mean, when you think about it, the richest men in the world and the most powerful men in the world, it's like Godzilla versus King Kong.

If Godzilla was on ketamine and King Kong had a comb over.

I mean, these guys were so close, it was like Brangelina or Benaford.

No, you know that.

Elon and Trump, they had their own couple name, Elonp.

And, you know,

what happened this week, this has been brewing for a while, okay, people?

The first sign was last week at Elon's little going away party.

Remember that in the Oval Office?

And Elon showed up with a black eye.

No, it's not that.

No, he said it was because he was rough housing with his kid, and the kid clocked him.

And yeah, I believe that.

And so Trump said, I offered him a little makeup.

This is what happened.

This is serious, people.

He said, I offered him a little makeup and he turned it down.

And then Trump said, which was interesting.

Yeah, weird Elon.

What sort of man turns down makeup?

But then

it just

see what really

put it over the edge is that, you know, Elon came in there to reduce the government bloat and all that stuff.

And then they have this big, beautiful bill that's nothing but government bloat, which Elon tweeted out.

He said it was a disgusting abomination.

And then Trump said, well, he has Trump derangement syndrome.

And then Elon said, well, your tariffs are going to cause

an erection.

All right.

Oh, boy.

A recession is what I meant to say.

I don't know where I am.

And then Trump said, he's just mad at me.

Elon's mad at me because I took away the mandate for his electric vehicles, which nobody really wants anyway.

And then Elon said, you know, without me, he wouldn't have even won the election.

And then the shit got real.

And Trump said, well, you know what?

Mars is a shithole planet.

And Elon said, oh my God, you are not the same man I used to hile.

Now.

For those keeping a score at home and who watch the show for the news,

I made the last two up, but it's very hard to tell which of the ones that I made up.

Just the last two, the other ones are real, and now it's gotten even nastier.

They asked Trump yesterday about the fight, and he said, I don't think about him.

And then Elon put out, well, you know what, think about this.

Trump is in the Epstein files, and that's why they haven't released it.

And now this is just a war that is going back and forth and back and forth, and the stakes are so high because the winner faces Blake lively.

So

that's where we are with this.

The latest update is tomorrow, apparently, Elon is going to be coming by to the White House to pick up his CDs and the

mixtape they made together.

And

he said, for the both of us, Trump, maybe it's better if if you're just not there.

But it looks like it may go from a war of words to other stuff because Trump is now saying he might cancel Elon's subsidies and Elon's contracts.

Whoa, so I guess in the end, Elon did save the taxpayer money.

And...

Let's enter this coda to the whole situation.

Elon now says he might start his own political party.

Wow, that could be interesting.

I don't know if we're ready for a party from a guy who's on ecstasy, mushrooms, and ketamine.

Although the convention does sound like a blast.

All right.

We have a great show.

We have Stephanie Rule and Jonah Goldberg.

But first up, she is one of my favorite people, one of my favorite comedians, writer, producer, host of the Good For You podcast.

She's currently touring nationwide with her latest stand-up show, Big Baby.

Whitney Cummings is here.

Hell you.

Hello.

Wild News Day.

Yes.

Wild News Day.

Yes, Wild News Day.

Yes, there's so much to be upset about.

I'm good.

If you grew up in an alcoholic home, this is your comfort zone.

Yeah.

I know, but listen, I wanted to send out the bat signal for you because, I mean, yes, we're going to talk about debt, and that's really horrible, and the environment's horrible and this is horrible but I am obsessed with robots

lately.

They're taking over.

I have a sex robot.

I'll give it to you for a steal.

I will negotiate with you.

$10 final offer.

No, I heard.

I'm telling you, I want you here because the last special, maybe not your last one, but one of the recent ones,

it was a lot about robots.

And you did a lot of deep diving into this subject.

And I thought, oh, I got to get her here to talk about this because it's the only thing I can think about because it's happening.

It is changing so rapidly and I don't think people are like onto it.

So where were you with what's going on with robots?

Now you were, especially, you had your own robot.

You have Robot Whitney.

I do, I do.

There's Robot Whitney.

So can you tell which is which?

Look, I had a robot made in my likeness for a stand-up special when I was talking a lot about robots and sex robots and the implications.

A special called Can I Touch It?

It is on Netflix now.

Um, and I

did learn a lot.

I thought that it would end up looking like a crappy, like, scarecrow.

Like, I thought it was gonna be like a joke, and I went down there, and the technology was so good that I ended up just putting her in the special.

What year is this?

This was maybe five years ago.

Okay, so a lot's changed.

I would say a lot's changed.

Well, especially.

This is before ChatGPT.

This was before all of it, right?

But here's the deal.

I do still have the robot, and this is what nobody warns you about.

If you do get a robot in your likeness, what happens is that you age and they don't.

So you end up having,

you just have this bitch

in your podcast studio that's just your former face

before the life was drained out of it.

And

so I don't really know what to do with her now.

Do I age her up or do I, I'm not getting Botox.

I quit getting Botox, by the way.

I just, I, you know,

I find it odd that we're all like I want to look as young as possible like why are we trying to bait pedophiles with our face you know I don't want

no one's gonna think that I'm 20 you know I so I also can I thank you I also want people to know when I'm mad at them and I think it's helpful but I wonder with the robots I guess I'm not as scared because I feel like humans are already turning into robots in a way.

Like, I think we're behaving in such a robotic way.

We're, you know, saying things we're sort of programmed to say without thinking.

Like humans right now look like glitching robots to me.

And I wonder sometimes, like half the time I take that quiz on a website that asks me if I'm a robot or not, half the time I get the quiz wrong.

I'm like,

does a shadow of a bike count as a bike?

Like I don't even know.

Why am I looking?

Why am I looking at a grainy photo of a crack house?

Like, am I a robot?

Like, we might already, you know, and all the people, you know, that complain about being online and trolls, half of online activity, I guess, now is trolls.

So we're engaging with them and talking to them and, you know, acting as if they're human.

So it's sort of hard to tell.

We all know someone,

me, who just scrolls like a robot.

And you're sort of like, are we already there with our own flesh bodies at this point?

It's hard to tell.

All right, I see you're not taking this seriously.

I am.

Okay, so I'll tell you what I'm really worried about.

It's okay.

I'll tell you what I'm really worried about with the robots is that we will anthropomorphize them and start to have compassion.

I'm not so worried

that the robot.

People have boyfriends and girlfriends.

That, you know, they have AI boyfriend.

Oh, totally, yes.

And it's fascinating because, you know, I'm one of those people, when you see a room bug get like stuck under the couch, you're like, oh, buddy.

You know, like.

And I have this robot, and everyone's like, where is she?

I'm like, I would love to throw her away, but I can't.

You see a face and even when I leave the room, I'm like, do you want me to leave the TV on?

Like, I feel bad.

It's like,

so I think we we project.

So I, of course, worry about the robots are going to do, but I also worry about what humans are going to do to each other trying to protect robots that they've projected onto.

I'm afraid to insult it.

I mean, I used to, you know, swear at my car.

I'm not proud of it, but I would talk to my...

Well, a car is a she.

Fair.

I think that's why guys yell at their cars so much.

Well, the voice is a woman.

Why does it have to be a woman?

I didn't make the car.

No, I didn't.

But I mean, and I would talk to it in a way I don't, because I have the inanimate object, in a way I don't in real life.

Like, because it would say, you left your phone in the car.

And I'm like, no, you dumb bitch.

I did not.

And now I'm literally afraid to do that.

I treat my car very politely.

That's sick.

I get out of that car, and it's like I treat the car like

I'm on a date and its father has money.

It is wild, though, because, you know, looking looking at this whole thing with Elon taking these drugs like I kind of like maybe this is good because the robots are going to be as compassionate as the people making the robots right so I'm like take all the mushrooms you need to take you know whatever you need to do we need to make sure that the basically the people building robots aren't robots.

Okay, so you had a baby.

How does the baby fit in?

Why are you looking down here?

What were you looking at?

You look great.

You don't look like you had a baby.

Thank you.

You look thinner than ever actually.

Okay, thank you.

So how does the baby fit in in with the robot?

Does it the baby fit?

My robot breastfed the baby, which was a big part of why.

There's already microplastics in our breast milk.

I figured it's probably safer.

You know, it has been a very sort of enlightening experience.

I'm really glad that I did it.

I didn't have a child till way later in life.

I never thought it was going to happen for me.

And, you know, I just had a kid with a stranger out of nowhere at 40.

White trash till I die.

And

we'll never take the West Virginia out of this one.

And, you know.

So you're raising it alone.

I'm co-parenting with a complete stranger.

Well, then they're not a stranger.

If they're co-parenting, you must have to make arrangements.

Yeah, it's someone, yeah.

That's where the robot comes in.

I don't want to pry.

No, please.

And also, it's been fascinating because I've been on this sort of journey through motherhood where, you know, I've always been a very liberal person, maybe even a lived hard.

But once you have a kid, you start like having thoughts that have been characterized as conservative.

As soon as I had a kid, I was like, I need a gun now.

Not for myself, because I've got coyotes in my yard.

I've got coyotes everywhere.

And before I had a kid, I was like, they coexist with us.

Coyotes were here first.

Like, I'm in the coyote's home.

Now I'm like, let's make hats out of them.

Let's make hats.

Let's make coyote boots, coyote earrings out of their eyeballs.

Like, it's just...

Do you take the kid on the road?

I take him on the road sometimes.

It depends.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It depends on where I'm going.

How old now?

He's a year and a half.

A year and a half.

Thank you.

I don't know why I get applause.

It's literally the least impressive thing I've ever done.

All I did was lie there.

Usually an audience applauds when you're very old.

Like, I'm 92.

Oh, that's fantastic.

That's like a year and a half.

Oh, he made it to a year and a half.

That's very.

I think it's because maybe I'm older.

They are shocked I survived childbirth or something, but I don't know.

I had a kid naturally 40 years old.

I'm convinced it was a vaccine injury.

So you're in a hotel?

How does that work?

How can you have a kid on the road?

Who watches it when you're on?

Well, his biological mother, my nanny,

takes very good care of him.

This is why he's not supporting people.

Okay.

So yeah, so I have someone that helps, but it's just been kind of like a wild way to sort of like see things from a different perspective.

Like once you have a kid, you're just, you know, you start looking at everything differently.

Like I used to be obsessed with scientific studies.

You know, I think that's one way that people like us feel like we have some control in the world or are getting some facts.

But I look at things so differently now.

Like, you know, the study, like girls mature faster than boys?

Yeah.

Like, I've always kind of been like, okay.

You need to study to know that.

I don't know.

I have a girlfriend who's 43 years old.

She's still a Coachella.

It ended two months ago.

So are they, she's looking for her charger and she says it's because Mercury's in retrograde.

I don't know, maybe girls mature faster than boys, but I now look at it now that I have a kid, I'm like, who's putting boys and girls in a cage to study them?

Like, who's maturing faster?

Like, what are you,

like, I don't know if we need this study.

Like, you just start seeing things like slightly differently.

Well, I know you have said, I'm too left for the right and too right for the left,

which is such a great saying because I feel like I'm in the same place.

And, like, when people disagree with people like us, they say we're conspiracy theorists.

You get that a lot.

You know, you've changed.

I hope I changed.

By the way, I hope so.

Yeah, right.

I really hope I don't have the same thoughts I had when I was 20 years old.

You know, but that's fascinating to me that people come at you and say conspiracy theorists.

Like I had this journalist from

the New York magazine, and she just wanted to hate me so bad.

Like she just after I did this thing on CNN New Year's Eve where, you know, it was live and I basically just like rattled off a bunch of things that I just thought the establishment media would never cover.

It was just, you know, more for comedy.

And I said, you know, how come two chefs drowned, you know, presidential chefs, how come two presidential chefs chefs drowned?

And she came over and she was like, you know, because you said that conspiracy theory about the chefs.

And I was like, oh, I'm so sorry.

Is that a conspiracy theory?

Because I had researched it, you know, pretty hardcore.

I called Joe Rogan and asked.

And so

I was like, do you want some time to look it up?

And she was like, oh, I didn't know about that.

Because there was the guy, Walter Schleib is his name, I believe.

He was, you know, Bush and Clinton's chef who drowned in Taos.

And then there was the Obama chef recently that drowned.

And she was like, oh, I didn't know about that.

And it's like, just because I knew it before you doesn't make me a conspiracy theorist, right?

And so there's this new thing where I guess if we're in different algorithms, you know, we're going to think different things.

I called a girlfriend of mine that is one of my oldest best friends, and Avra Levine has a new song out.

And I called her, and I was like, Avra Levine has a new song out.

You know, going to her show is like one of our things.

And she goes, Whitney, Avra Levine's been dead for 10 years.

It's like, I feel like our algorithms are tearing us apart, you know?

So it's fascinating, but after I did that on CNN, conspiracy theorists do think I'm like their leader.

And this is still the way you talk on the phone?

You know, I guess

it's actually a banana.

As long as we're comics, we will do this.

Well, what should it, what else?

What is the

robots will have taken over?

It'll be the 29th.

And we'll still be doing this.

It's fascinating, but I don't know.

I just, you know, people come up to me now and, you know, they'll be like in the airports, and they'll just be like, hey, wouldn't you love to go on CNN?

You know, pandas are fake.

Like,

it's a little far from me, you know, pigeons are drones.

Like, I, I, you know,

that one is true.

Have you ever seen it?

Have you ever seen a baby pigeon?

Fuck.

All right, you.

Thank you for coming by.

Thank you so much.

Whitney Cummings, everybody, new mom robot owner.

All right, I'll see you soon.

Thank you so much.

All right, let's meet our panel.

Hey!

Hey, everybody.

All right.

He is the co-founder of the Dispatch and host of the Remnant podcast, Jonah Goldberg, back with us too long away.

And she's a senior business analyst and host of MSNBC's The 11th Hour with Stephanie Roll.

Stephanie Ruhl, of course.

Okay.

Well, welcome.

Like I said, there's just so many problems to think about.

The robots are taking over.

I'm going to dwell on it until you realize it, which will be about four weeks when it happens.

And we are going into debt, and of course, mommy and daddy are fighting.

And this is terrible.

I just want to say, and you can comment as you will, I feel like the upshot of the whole Doge thing and the Elon era is going to be, when all the dust clears and all the silly fighting is over, that we did get some closure about government.

We sent in a guy who was as mean as he could be about it to look for all the bloat.

And I see in the paper today, they're rehiring people.

You're unfired.

They're sending out the, you're unfired.

The money is where it's always been.

Not with the post office, not with the people who are just doing their regular jobs.

It's the Social Security, it's the Medicare, it's the service on the debt, and it's the Pentagon.

It's where it's always been.

It hasn't changed.

And now that Trump has his big, beautiful bill, we're seeing no one ever has the guts to attack where the money really is.

Am I wrong?

So that's why Doge was a colossal wasted opportunity because the American people would say the government doesn't work for me.

We do waste a tremendous amount of money.

So there was a chance to go inside the government with actual experts, right?

People to look agency, agency.

We know we have too much regulation and actually work on it.

But instead, Elon Musk rolls in rough shot.

He has tremendous business experience and absolutely no government experience.

He said he was going to cut $2 trillion.

Then it was $1 trillion.

Then we were down to $150 billion.

And he didn't even show the receipts.

And you made the point.

Now they're rushing to hire people back.

And firing scores of people that work for the weather service or scientists that study black lung in West Virginia was pennies.

It was a colossal waste of time.

And if you actually wanted to take a swing, it is at the big giant things like Medicaid, like Medicare, like Social Security.

And the truth is, Elon Musk, and I'm not saying I want to cut those things.

Elon Musk would have been happy to cut those things.

He's the guy who considers Social Security to be a Ponzi scheme.

The problem was Republicans can't, we can debate that, but Republicans can't get elected if you want to cut those things.

And that's where the rubber is.

No one can get elected if you cut them.

Well, that's a big part of the problem.

And I basically agree with you.

I think part of the problem was that,

look,

I actually think there's a lot of, there is cost savings to be done in reforming and streamlining and modernizing.

But like, take the the buyout thing.

Al Gore tried that in the 1990s too.

The problem is if you're the kind of person who can get a better job on the free market, you take the buyout because your skills are competitive.

If you're the kind of deadweight that knows the only thing you're useful for is this job, you don't take it.

And so you end up firing talented people or losing talented people and keeping a lot of deadweight people.

The basic problem, which I think you're right about, is that Musk didn't know anything about government.

And the real lesson here is people have been saying since the 19th century,

we need to run the government like a business.

The problem is government isn't a business.

And when you come in like a Silicon Valley guy, where you say, we're going to break everything and then rebuild it and all that kind of stuff, that doesn't work for large government bureaucracies.

And you're absolutely right that the money, the real money, is in these big entitlement programs, that they do need to be reformed.

We have, you know, But they're not going to.

I mean, that's the thing.

The debt is now $29 trillion.

I I think the service on the debt is either the most expensive thing in the budget or very soon will be.

Like the second most.

With the most.

Just servicing it.

Just servicing the debt, right?

Which gets you nothing except paying banks off.

Okay.

And Social Security going to go insolvent in 11 years, is that right?

Early 30s.

Okay.

And Medicare also.

Yeah.

And if you think about Social Security, think about the divide.

Senior citizens are saying, I worked my ass off all these years.

I paid into the system.

You're damn well going to pay me those benefits.

And young people are saying, and those senior citizens are all showing up to vote.

And young people are saying, this system doesn't work for me.

I'm never going to get paid out.

I want to break the system.

And now you've got politicians in the middle.

They cannot get elected unless they address this system.

And if we don't address the system, we're going to have a huge problem.

One of the problems.

And the people who vote are older.

That's right.

So they're never going to vote for that.

Right.

And what is it like when Social Security started?

how many workers paid in, like 42.

Yeah, it's over 40, yeah.

And now it's 2.7?

Something like that.

Okay, so we went from 42 paying in to 2.7, and we live longer.

People used to live to see.

And when Nikki Haley even raised the idea of raising the age, people, and I'm not saying she's right or wrong, but people, even Republicans, you know, went ballistic on her.

So how do we address our problems?

The issue is we don't want to.

And that's why so many people said, I'm going going to vote for Trump.

He's an original G.

Let's break the system.

And now all the things that he's broken aren't solving the Medicare or Medicaid or Social Security issues.

Look at tariffs.

Yeah, so look,

my big problem with Doge is, first of all, it proved that this run government like a business thing was always horseshit.

But more importantly, look, the idea that you were going to bend that cost curve, that debt curve, by getting rid of woke basket weaving at the NEH was always sort of ridiculous.

I'm for getting rid of the woke basket weaving or that kind of stuff.

But that's fractions of a penny on a dollar.

And at the end of the day, the way you got to fix this is by doing something that Paul Ryan was demonized for.

They showed ads of him pushing old ladies off a cliffs where he said, anybody over the age of 50 will get the benefits that they get.

And by the way, the benefits you get on Social Security are far more than you pay into it.

That's one of the reasons why it's going broke.

But he said, anybody below 50, we're going to change the structure of this so that we can extend the life of this thing.

And it was demonized.

The problem now is that the Democratic Party, which is completely bought into this mythology that these entitlement programs can go on forever and that there's no problem with them, that's now a bipartisan thing.

Donald Trump does not give a rat's ass about trimming entitlement.

They never did.

That's not just Donald Trump.

They never did.

At least they lied about it.

At least they lied about it.

Yes.

At least they lied about it.

You're right.

And I'll say this, look,

Paul Ryan's a friend of mine.

Paul Ryan really believed it.

He just couldn't close the deal.

And now neither party is actually interested in fixing it.

And that's the real dilemma.

And we're going to look back on Doge that was supposed to be there to cut.

And the only thing it did was hurt.

It didn't cut anything

significant.

I mean, remember we were all going to get $5,000 checks?

Give me a break.

It was Bill Gates who took a look at it and honestly said, the richest man in the world is killing the poorest children in the world.

And what does that get anyone?

It only hurts humanity.

Well, I have more bad news.

So

it will also be no one left with a job to pay taxes, to have anything left in the budget.

Are you taking us to the robots?

I am taking you to the robots, yes.

The CEO of Anthropic, that's one of the world's most powerful creators of artificial intelligence, he said the government needs to stop sugarcoating the possible mass elimination of jobs, which that's completely understandable to me.

I mean, we see it already.

He says, AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs.

Now, we know it's been going on with blue-collar jobs.

In fact, I saw last week some trucking company, I think they were called Aurora, they have a truck already that drove 1,200 miles.

It didn't.

Waymo did.

Yeah.

And this is, you know, there's like three and a half million truckers, and this is also going to be Uber drivers, and they're all going to be Waymo, and is it going to be Waymo misery?

One or two, no one's going to have a job.

Well,

I actually agree with something that Whitney alluded to earlier.

It's like the thing that scares me most about the AI stuff isn't that AI is going to run our lives.

It's that the people who think AI should run our lives will make the case that AI should run our lives, right?

The people who want to turn it into a cult thing and hand us over to robots are going to get too much power.

That said,

it's...

I don't trust anybody who runs an AI company who says that it's going to have this radical effect because that's them talking up how great their own company is to a certain extent doesn't mean they're entirely wrong but they hype there's a lot of hype that comes from people in the AI business about how transformative it is that we haven't seen yet that said no it can do a lot of jobs it can do a lot of jobs

never want to be disruptive but the history of technology has always been disruptive this country not like this and I think it's different and by the way there were going to be guardrails I mean Biden had a program called the AI Safety Institution Howard Luttnick, he's the Commerce Secretary, he says, quote, we're not going to regulate it.

He's changed the title.

Now it's the Center for AI Innovation.

You see, they're just going to whistle past the graveyard.

I think we're doing the same thing, the environment, the debt, fucking robots, yes.

We're all doing the same thing.

And the argument, of course, is always, well, we can't let China win.

Is that really the argument?

I mean, does that, if I get the

rationale for this,

it's an arms race of sorts.

But

what if not letting China win makes us all lose?

What is that a victory?

Having no guardrails serves no one but these AI innovators that want no rules.

This is like my sons saying, we want no rules and we want an unlimited allowance.

Great, they're going to want that for two weeks, and then in two weeks, all the furniture is going to be in the pool and there's no food in the house.

But boy, did those boys have a great experience like these AI innovators.

Right?

And these AI innovators

and Elon Musk and others will get on their rockets and go.

What we need is smart regulation.

There's this idea that it's regulation stands in the way of progress.

We need no regulation.

We need smart, good regulation.

I'm fine with for some regulation of AI.

I'm not a huge AI booster.

I think most of the, I think you said before about it being too far left for the right and too far right for the left.

I am much more skeptical when I listen to people who are huge AI boosters and I'm much more skeptical when people totally dismiss AI.

The quote you read I think is right.

Entry-level jobs, a lot of like scut jobs, if you are a paralegal, if you do that kind of, like document review kind of thing, AI is coming for your job.

That doesn't mean that that increased productivity doesn't translate into new jobs and new things being created.

It is going to be really disruptive for a while.

This country, someone pointed out in the Wall Street Journal the other day.

give me an example of that.

AI goes through this company.

It takes all the programming jobs, the entry-level jobs,

consultant.

That bullshit job is definitely going away.

I mean, I see people do it already, just chat GPT on their phone.

Okay.

These companies are adopting AI to produce something, right?

That is meaningful.

Money.

That's money.

Fireworkers make more money.

That's what they're producing.

Yeah.

And that money money gets spent on things for services.

The jobs that require petrol.

But no one has any money to buy anything with.

You're not going to be replaced by AI.

We're not going to have a robot that's going to be available.

We're going to do another robot, right?

This is not a typical job.

Okay, let's not put me into the mix here.

You're right.

I hope I will not be replaced by AI.

I mean, but

it already can write jokes.

They're just not fucking good.

I agree with that.

That's one of the reasons why I'm underwhelmed by what AI is about.

Let me give you this quote.

This is a guy, the cybersecurity platform Huntress.

The CEO said, you know, when it comes to decisions of how we have to implement it or secure against it,

six-week basis.

In other words, we can't plan anything more than six weeks because that's how fast it's changing.

That's the problem.

But what we need is the smartest people working on it.

And I want to go back to Howard Luttnick, who's saying we're not going to regulate it.

In 2022, half of the graduates in the United States that received doctorate degrees in an AI field, do you know what they were?

Immigrants.

We are now saying we don't want international students here.

We're defunding universities, research universities.

If we want to have the smartest and the best, let's have those people here working on it because half the people who start AI companies are immigrants.

Let's don't

agree with that.

Going to get to that issue in a minute.

But let's get all the bad news out of the the way now.

I have one more bit of terrible news.

Uh-oh.

In Touch Magazine.

This is the last issue.

I mean, I saw this.

It's going out of business.

We all grew up on it.

Just go with the premise.

But yeah, I mean, the age of magazine is really dying.

And, you know, we're in the TikTok age and social media.

So too bad I loved In Touch Magazine.

But there's a new magazine coming out called Out of Touch.

I don't know if you've heard about.

Which is really leaning into the fact that it is not the age of magazines anymore, and they're leaning into it.

Would you like to see some of the articles that are in.

They're right on the cover, 25 must-own DVDs.

That's pretty bad right there.

Ellen Page, fun, flirty, short hairstyles for summer.

Okay, well, that's

very out of touch.

Planning your plantation wedding.

Oh, this is.

These people are out of touch.

Three easy egg recipes for under $5.

That's.

Win an internship with P.

Diddy.

Oh, what else?

Does Jared from Subway still want kids?

Out of touch.

Sexiest man alive, Bruce Jenner.

Wow, that's.

Oh, something political.

Can anything stop Beta Roark?

Wow, that's.

New York, New York, perfect destination for healthcare CEOs.

Wow,

out of touch.

And Gene Hackman, where is he now?

Okay.

Too soon.

Everything I do is too soon.

It's the brand here.

Hang on.

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But let's go back to what you were saying about immigration, because I couldn't agree more.

We're having a brain drain in this country.

It could wind up being one of the worst things with all the things that we don't like that are going on in this administration, that we are having having a brain drain.

We used to, our secret sauce was always, we steal the best brains from all around the world, and now a lot of the best brains are bugging out.

And, you know, for the Democrats,

the immigration,

they really did not do their brand a favor by having open borders, because I'm sure you saw this week a guy named Muhammad Solomon yelling free Palestine and kill Zionists, turned a garden hose into a flamethrower, and and attacked elderly Jewish people.

Boy, when these people do heinous, they really do heinous.

Because the global intifada is coming here.

You know, you say this often enough, as they have on campus, bring the global intifada here.

Let's have it all over the world.

People are going to do this kind of thing.

So that's the reason why idiots then look at something like that and say, let's get everybody foreign out of the country.

And this is where we are.

Yeah, so the only place I agree with you entirely, when people say globalize into the fata that's what they mean.

I agree with that entirely.

What I disagree with is the metaphor of brain drain because a brain drain is like something that you try to fight.

States have brain drains of young people and all kinds of stuff.

This is a brain flush, right?

This is a deliberate attempt to push out foreign students,

professors, all that kind of stuff.

I mean, look, I'm very much in favor of fighting anti-Semitism at Harvard.

I don't get the flex of canceling cancer research to fight anti-Semitism.

And this is sort of a Stephen Miller thing, which is they basically have, they're trying to claim that we are in the middle of a civilizational crisis and that anybody who is an immigrant here is a threat to the society.

And I think it's gross.

Not any, of course that's what they're saying, but some people are.

For sure.

But it's like we can make distinctions, right?

But is there a case to be made for asking someone before they come into this this country, what are your values?

Are they so far afield from where America is?

I mean, this guy said something about how he didn't think, oh, a jihad, he said, was more important to him than his wife, his mother, and his children.

That should have been a red flag.

Gotcha.

Clearly, that should have been a red flag.

But this news is...

So you're saying we can say you can't come into our country if you believe.

You know what it reminds me of is the 9-11 guy who went and talked to the person at the aviation school and said he didn't want to know how, he didn't want to learn how to land.

Right.

He just, you know, like, that should have been a red flag too.

So I think you can draw these distinctions, but this idea that the gardener down the street or the French cancer researcher should get lumped into all this stuff.

And that's, I mean, if we're going to have big, large government bureaucracies doing things, it's to make distinctions for those kinds of things.

And the system is just broken on that.

But now we have become, sorry.

But now we have become so divided and so angry, we're meeting hate with hate, and one could reasonably argue a guy like Stephen Miller shouldn't be the one deciding what decency is.

And we should be able to come together and say,

rather

than just fight more hate, how do we get to being pro-decency, pro-compassion, and actually love?

Because when you talk about patriotism, patriotism is about love of country and when i hear this administration talk about the things that they it's all about grievance and anger and if you get us back to a place of common decency and loving thy neighbor it's not about anti-immigrant it's about but i hear people i can just imagine people out there hearing this and saying

well the guy with the flame flower he wasn't exactly full of love no

he wasn't full of love but that's somebody who's rolling their eyes and dismissing the idea of love and the actual idea of love, there's nothing more powerful.

It's what starts wars.

It's what ends up.

Flamethrowers are very powerful.

Flamethrowers are very powerful.

But we're not going to set government policy based on what one horrible individual and a terrible act.

What we should be thinking about is those victims and what do we need to do to protect them?

Well, it's not just one.

I agree with the thrust of what you're saying, but at the same time, you have lots of college campuses, including these elite schools that do not teach patriotism and love of country it's this narrative of colonial oppressors you have schools bending over backwards to say to police speech where if you say

men can't get pregnant you get kicked out or thrown into re-education but if you say gas the Jews you gotta have well you gotta hear both sides free speech and all that kind of stuff that stuff matters too

Right after the attack

right after flamethrower man did what he did, the Boulder, this is Boulder, Colorado, very far-left city.

I've been there, loved it.

I did.

It's a great place to play.

The police chief said, we are not calling it a terror attack at this point.

It's way too early to speculate motive.

Speculate motive?

He was screaming, kill Zionist.

What the fuck do you need to deserve?

He also wrote down and recorded videos confessing what he wanted to to do.

Like Emerson has this great line.

He says,

some circumstantial evidence is very persuasive.

Like when you find a trout in the milk, right?

When you have a dude,

when you have a dude shooting flamethrowers at Jews saying he wants to burn all the Zionists, you don't need to have a debating society about whether or not you call them a terrorist.

But you know what we should do?

Stop defunding.

We're no longer funding or staffing the groups in our government that study domestic terrorism.

We just gutted the Office of Civil Rights that actually studies and goes after anti-Semitism.

So the actual groups that work on this, let's continue to work on it.

Yeah, okay.

Well maybe now that Elon's on the win.

Elon as we're back to that subject.

I've got one more thing to say about the whole budget thing is that I thought when I saw the drone strike from Ukraine last week, if you missed this drone, the Ukrainians did something that was just way cooler than the Mission Impossible movie that's out now, which is pretty cool, I hear.

But they, remember the beeper attack with Hezbollah?

That was pretty cool about a year ago when they killed all the terrorists with beepers.

Well, this really upped the game.

They hid all these drones inside a truck, had a guy did not know it was in his truck, drove it into Russia, and then they came out the roof all on their own and destroyed the planes that Russia was using to bomb Ukraine.

Not all of them, but plenty of them.

And I thought, this really,

this

puts the lie to the other big part of the budget, the Pentagon, which I've been saying forever here.

And Elon said he was going to go after it with Doge.

They never did.

Trump said, oh, we could find Billion.

They never did anything.

That never gets touched.

And it just puts the lie that we need all that defense contracting.

Obviously, this is where the game is.

Drones.

They cost like $2,000 a piece.

And we're spending a trillion dollars on tanks and submarines and other things which we'll never use because they're already obsolete.

But the game is also about being an ally and being a trusted ally.

The fact that Ukraine didn't trust the United States enough to tell us about that, what does that say about our position in the world?

I don't think any ally would.

That's just not the thing you tell other people.

The more people know,

I mean, they don't trust us and they shouldn't trust us, but I don't think they would do it under any circumstances.

Why would you?

Why would you have more people knowing about it who are not involved?

Why would you just take that risk?

But my question here about this is, does this change the game?

Because, you know, up until this moment, I think a lot of people were coming over to the idea, the Trump doctrine, which is, you know, look, this, his thing was, I don't like war, and this thing is going to end up with Russia getting its peace anyway.

Why are all these people dying for something that's going to be inevitable?

Russia is going to get its little bite of Ukraine.

Now, I don't know.

Yeah, no, I think that's right.

I think the, you know, foreign, the so-called foreign policy realists, they're basically ideologues who lose an argument and they say, oh, those people are crazy.

I'm the realist here.

The so-called realists, the J.D.

Vance crowd, have been saying that Ukraine cannot win and that it's not in our interest

and that we shouldn't put boots on the ground when not a soul was ever saying American troops should be on the ground in Ukraine.

The idea, Russia just hit the mark of a million casualties.

The idea that it is not in our cult, I think it's in our interest for idealistic reasons.

I'm for the underdog, wanting to be an independent democracy and all that kind of stuff.

But as a matter of cold realism, having Ukrainians degrade and destroy the Russian military for a decade,

that is the real realist argument.

They're willing to fight for their own country and all they're asking from us is a little help to do it.

It is saving us pennies on the dollar.

And the only reason why I think these guys are against it is because they, you know, like Trump has always had this man crush on Putin.

He loves his musk.

And that's putting it like that.

And I think that, like, they just got it in their head that Ukraine was on the wrong side of the first impeachment, and therefore Zelensky didn't play ball, and Russia, Russia, Russia, and Putin's my guy.

And they just

have let Trump's weird

personality drive foreign policy.

And why do you think they got it in their head?

Because Vladimir Putin said, Donald Trump, this is what I'd like.

And Donald Trump said, yes, sir, thank you.

But last week.

But last week, unlike this week, which was all about Trump's feud with Elon Musk, last week it was all about Putin.

He was feuding with Putin.

Was he, though?

He's crazy.

I don't know what.

I thought I knew the guy.

He was saying, I thought I knew him.

And, you know, you think you know a guy, and then he turns out to be a vicious dictator.

And tell me one sanction Donald Trump has put in place.

He's tariffed tariffed the whole entire world, except guess where?

Russia.

So I'd love to say yes.

He said, I think Putin's being crazy, but show me one thing he's actually done to hurt Vladimir Putin, and I'll throw apart.

I think the reason why Trump, I think Trump was legitimately angry and pissed off at Putin.

I do.

I think the reason for it was Trump lives in this world where he's surrounded by these sycophants and yes men, these sort of head past the

sphincter ass kissers who

tell him he's the greatest, smartest guy in the world and he has this transactional relationship with him.

It's like that old dictator phrase,

for my friends anything, for my enemies the law, right?

And he's being really retributionist and that kind of thing with the law, going after his enemies.

They came into office and made concession after concession after concession to Putin without asking for anything in return.

And then what happened was Trump discovered that Putin is not actually Trump's bitch.

No.

And that

stole a Super Bowl ring off a guy's finger.

Yeah.

And he was like, I thought he was my guy.

I thought we were all in this working together and we're going to hang at Mar-a-Wago.

And Putin's like, no, I want to reconstitute the Russian Empire.

And it pissed Trump off.

And so now he's like, I don't want anything to do with this because I'm not getting my Nobel Peace Prize.

But the problem is, he's only got a pair of deuces in his hand and he has no other tricks to play.

Putin is sitting there going, Great, what do you want?

I'm negotiating with Steve Witkoff, who has zero experience in foreign policy or government, but gosh darn it, he's a great real estate developer.

All right, I gotta stop it there.

Thank you, guys.

Time for new rules.

Okay.

All right, new rules.

Stop trying to help me understand how Kim Kardashian both is and isn't a lawyer.

It's like how light is a particle and a wave, or how Jesus is his own dad.

You win, I give up.

Last month, Kim had a one-student graduation ceremony for her homeschool law degree, but she still hasn't passed the bar, so she still can't practice law or what's left of it under Trump, and yet

somehow she's now the head of the Justice Department.

New world, not everything needs an Instagram.

I don't know what's more depressing: the fact that there's an Instagram page dedicated to reviewing sticks,

or the fact that it has 3.2 million followers

who make comments like, nice stick, bro.

And

that's a good stick.

And

best stick I've seen in the last month.

Congratulations, official stick reviews.

Somehow you made social media even bigger waste of time.

New world, the makers of skinny, confidential bamboo toilet paper, who boast that it's chlorine and formaldehyde-free, BPA, PFA, and plastic-free, non-toxic, 100% sustainable with no inks or dyes.

Can't stop there.

I need to know if it's carbon neutral, non-GMO, low-salt, free-range,

cruelty-free, not manufactured in a plant that also processes peanuts.

and kosher.

I can't take any chances.

This is the paper I'm going to use to pick up a dead dune bug.

New rules, someone has to tell Lorde, who just told Rolling Stone that she received psychedelic drug therapy, has an eating disorder, and is gender fluid.

We get it.

You have a new album coming out.

It's okay.

Spelling tea is how people promote new projects, so good luck.

But you're never going to be, I'm a Nazi and I suck my cousin's dick.

New rule celebrities have to stop writing children's books Look we get it you need to feel like a good parent because you're never around and your kid has started calling

Your kid has started calling the nanny mama

But look on the bright side if your nanny is deported then your kid might finally get the love of the person who's forced to take over the parenting your

assistant Enrique

And finally, new rule, it's never too early to strategize.

Democrats have been having a lot of donor retreats lately where liberal strategists hold ideathons where they try to figure out why they keep losing elections.

You know, apart from using words like ideathon.

And now one idea that's getting a lot of attention is the Dems need to find their Joe Rogan, a liberal Joe Rogan, because that's why Kamala lost.

Republicans have a podcast.

Okay, maybe.

Or you could consider this.

Instead of conjuring up a new Joe Rogan, ask yourself why you lost the old one.

Because he used to be on your side.

He smokes pot on the air.

I don't think he's that much of a far-right ideologue.

I don't think his mind is completely inflexible.

His neck, yes,

but not his mind.

And he's expressed unease with some things Trump is doing, as has a certain disgruntled former employee named Elon Musk,

who, like Joe, is another guy who five years ago was thought of as a liberal, but got driven into the other camp by bad attitudes and bad ideas.

A reversal I completely understand, although I would never emulate.

I also see the woke mind virus.

I just don't jump from frying pans into fires.

But I watched the evolution of both these guys.

This didn't happen overnight.

In 2022, before he owned Twitter, Elon tweeted this chart depicting how he felt about the liberal side having shifted so much that it left a basically liberal centrist like him now labeled a conservative.

I related.

I related to the kind of mean girl shit you get from the cool kids in Wokeville when you're perceived that way.

They tried real hard to cancel Rogan a few years ago.

And when Elon hosted Saturday Night Live in 2021, well before he was a Trumper, some of the cast members gave him the cold shoulder for the sin of being rich.

You think people don't remember when you do this shit to them, that it's not going to have blowback?

Now me, again,

you don't have to win me back because I never left.

But all the guys in America, like Joe and Elon, yeah, you do have to win them back.

The good news is you can.

Elon has gone from saying, I love Donald Trump as much as a straight man can love another man.

To a week ago, saying, I'm a little stuck in a bind here.

I don't want to speak against the administration, but I also don't want to take responsibility for everything they're doing.

And now,

I have proof he's in the Epstein files.

Okay.

I think we call that a gettable voter.

Someone who's mulling at change.

Maybe this will put quietness to the nonsense that Elon and Rogan II went to the dark side.

I hear that all the...

They went to the dark side.

Yeah, like they got that the last of us fungal infection and became zombies.

No,

they just got driven away.

Because that's how politics works these days.

One side gets elected precisely because the other side was just in power and pushed their agenda way too far and drove people in the opposite

direction.

The pendulum swings back and forth with people not voting for anything, but just to get rid of the latest extremist assholes who tried to remake America in their image instead of just governing.

Well, right now, it's the Republicans who are the very definition of drunk with power,

and also sometimes just drunk.

But

But the drunk with power part, that's what Democrats should pay attention to, because you know who's easy to beat in a fight?

A drunk.

Really, I've done it.

Now, I was also drunk, so it was a draw.

But the point is, Trump owns the lowest 100-day job approval rating of any president.

Only 39%

approve of his handling of the economy, which was always his forte.

You know, it's not like anyone was asking for tariffs.

Do you think the bros and the bras

you think they want to pay $150 more for a PlayStation?

You think they want the government to ban abortion and ban pornography and do lots of other far-right stuff that's in the Project 2025 blueprint?

Please, their project for 2025 is trying to get laid.

Yeah,

it's not just Democrats who aren't really digging Trump too.

Adding trillions more dead is not sitting well, and even the likes of Tucker Carlson and Ben Shapiro have called out the corruption.

Even the deporting of illegals, which America generally supports, is pissing people off now.

I read a story last week about this town of Kennett, Missouri, where just about everyone voted for Trump, but now is pissed because ICE removed their favorite waitress, a beloved local mother of three named Carol Hui, currently facing deportation back to Hong Kong.

One local woman said, no one voted to deport moms.

We were all under the impression we were just getting rid of the gangs.

This is Carol.

Yeah.

Well, yeah.

When you elect a bull to run through the china shop, sometimes the china that gets broken is you.

Republicans have taken full advantage of how snobby and out of touch Democrats have become to claim the title of party of the working class, but Trump's big, beautiful budget cuts Medicaid by $723 billion.

Steve Bannon says a lot of MAGA is on Medicaid.

Yeah, it is.

42% of MAGA voters say Medicaid is important to them.

Let's see if they miss it.

All right, that's our show.

I want to thank Jonah Goldberg, Stephanie Ruhl, and Whitney Cummings.

Pog Random drops every Sunday on YouTube.

We're listening every day to your podcast.

Now go watch Overtime on YouTube.

Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen.

You are terrific.

Thank you, guys.

Catch all new episodes of Real Time with Bill Maher every Friday night at 10 or watch him anytime on HBO On Demand.

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