Ep. #631: Ben Mckenzie, Rep. Katie Porter, Piers Morgan

Charlie Sheen is an icon of decadence.

I lit the fuse and my life turns into everything it wasn't supposed to be.

He's going the distance.

He was the highest paid TV star of all time.

When it started to change, it was quick.

He kept saying, no, no, no, I'm in the hospital now, but next week I'll be ready for the show.

Now, Charlie's sober.

He's gonna tell you the truth.

How do I present this with any class?

I think we're past that, Charlie.

We're past that, yeah.

Somebody call action.

Aka Charlie Sheen, only on Netflix, September 10th.

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

Start the clock.

Hey, everybody.

Thank you very much.

Thank you, people.

I appreciate it.

How are you?

All right.

Thank you.

Oh, please.

You're only gone for a week.

Thank you.

I appreciate it very much.

Wow.

Such an interesting

thank you, people.

I appreciate it.

Such an interesting

week in the news.

A big mystery was solved this week.

You know, someone a couple of months ago was that leaking

very sensitive national security information on the internet.

Well, this week, ladies and gentlemen, we got them.

The FBI arrested a 21-year-old

National Guardsman in Massachusetts who was doing this.

And I had so many questions.

I want to know why a 21-year-old had access to our most secret national security stuff when

most of them need to Google how to write a check.

And wait,

it gets more Gen Z than this.

He was living with his mom.

And where did he post this sensitive stuff?

In an online chat room for video gamers.

So we know one thing about the motivation.

It wasn't to impress girls.

But really.

Show the picture of this kid.

This is who did.

Look at this.

And my generation is the problem?

That's him, the Intel Intel.

Jason born yesterday.

What the fuck?

Looks like someone used the de-aging filter on Mayor Pete.

The Dalai Lama sucks tongues that are older than this.

This kid got carted at the Super Mario Brothers movie.

When they asked him for a plea, he said, not guilty by reason of anxiety.

I'm telling you, these kids today,

and here's, I love this part of the story.

The person who identified this leaker, this 21-year-old leaker, was younger, a teenage boy, which makes sense because all the people in the chat room were teenage boys.

The 21-year-old was known as the OG.

I'm not kidding.

He was trying to impress them.

You know what he named the group they were in, this little clubhouse?

The Thug Shaker Central, Thug Shaker Central.

Also will be the name of his ass when he goes to prison.

Gentle, good humor.

That's what we do here.

And I love this wrinkle in the story.

Marjorie Teller Green is siding with the leaker,

with the kid.

He said he's white, male, and Christian.

Yeah?

So he can't do anything bad?

She said, ask yourself who's the real enemy.

You, Marjorie.

You.

You are the real enemy.

I mean, in this,

it's so hard to wrap your head about what goes on in the minds of these self-styled patriots.

They love America so much, they absolutely fucking hate it.

Marjorie's going to open a new chain of grocery stores called Trader Hose.

I mean, it's all funny, haha, but the stuff that was revealed with this leak is super serious.

We find out that this looks bad, that America has been spying on our own allies.

which might be good because one of our allies, Egypt, sort of, their president, we found out from this,

wants to send artillery to Russia, probably artillery we paid for.

We found out there's an informer that we have at the highest level in the Russian military.

So expect a bunch of people to be falling out of windows in Moscow next week.

Oh, and I love this.

We found out that Iran, Iran, wants to start a space mission.

Wow, they want to land on the moon, gather some moon rocks, bring them back, and throw them at Israel.

And

again, this is superstitious.

This thing revealed that Ukraine, that war is not going as they told us, all that well.

They said Ukraine is very low on ammunition, and we were going to send them more, but Kid Rock used it all to shoot at Bud Light.

Oh, did you see that?

Oh, boy.

That's the, we got to talk about this.

This is big news this week.

Apparently, Bud Light included a transgender woman in their advertising campaign.

This was not okay with MAGA Nation.

All the country stars are very upset.

Kid Rock is shooting at it.

Travis Tritt, he took it out of his writer when he's on tour.

John Rich, he took it out of his bar in Nashville.

Somebody has to explain to these dumbasses the point of being rich and famous is you don't have to drink Bud Light.

Hello, we got a great show.

We have Piers Morgan and Katie Porter.

But first up, she is an actor, writer, and director whose forthcoming book, Easy Money, Cryptocurrency, Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud, comes out in July, and it's available for pre-order now.

Ben McKenzie.

Ben?

How are you, sir?

Great to meet you.

Great to meet you.

Okay, I was

very excited to have you here, knowing that you wrote this book, because I've been a frequent critique of

you've seen this, I'm sure.

Boy, when I've been at dinner parties sometimes with some of these, I know they're big crypto guys, and boy, do I get the side eye.

Oh, my God.

I'm sure you get it even worse going.

It's crazy, yeah.

So, but here's the thing: I was not subtle, these guys.

They don't say anything outright, but I can tell.

I just get that dirty look, and they trip me on the way to the bathroom.

So, I thought a few months ago, whenever it was when the FTX thing crashed and crypto was way down, I thought, oh, okay, this is the end of it.

Thank God we won.

Now, I read it's the market's

runaway success story.

Right.

It's up like 80% versus the

NASDAQ, which is 20%.

What's going on?

Apparently, it's not going away.

Well, it's an economic narrative, right?

It's a story or a collection of different stories.

And so it'll last as long as people believe in it.

But as we know, as storytellers, just because it's a story doesn't mean it's true.

So people will continue to do it.

I mean, what's interesting about the market is that, of course, as you see with FTX, this stuff is really run through

overseas shell corporations.

So,

you know, you can put your money in.

It's the getting it out part that's the hard part.

So you can look at the numbers on the screen and they can tell you, you know, whatever it is, but unless you're using a U.S.-based exchange, I would be very careful.

What do you mean you can't just take it out like you do from a bank?

These exchanges shut down all the time.

Binance, the biggest exchange, my colleague Jacob and I wrote an article about Binance.

And that's what FTX was.

That's the Sam Blankwin-Freed one, the guy.

FTX was headquartered in the Bahamas.

Yep.

And an exchange, it's so interesting.

Crypto started so that we could get rid of banking, right?

Right.

But

isn't these exchanges really what a bank is?

It's someplace you're parking your crypto money.

Wink, wink, money.

Money.

So that's.

Let's talk about the money thing, because that drives me crazy.

They're not currencies.

They are not currencies.

Words have meaning.

You know this.

Currencies in economics, they do three things.

things: they're a medium of exchange, you can buy shit with them, they are a unit of account, you can run your books with them, and they're a store of value.

Their value stays relatively consistent over time.

Cryptocurrencies cannot do any of the three well, and they have no hope of ever doing so for reasons I outlined in the book.

So, what are they?

They're investments.

You put real money into them, you try to make real money out of them.

That's an investment contract, that's a security.

We've had securities, federal securities laws in this country since the 1930s, because in the 1920s we didn't.

And there was this massive bull rush, right?

A crash of 1929 that led to the Depression.

And we realized, oh shit, we need some laws about this.

Yeah, I was going to say.

It's crazy.

It's nuts.

You're preaching to the choir, man.

No, I know, but.

And as long as you have to use this exchange and it is a bank, wouldn't it be better to have the kind of banking flawed as they are that we have that when there was a problem, like in 2008 or 1932, yes, shit hit the fan, but not completely.

Right.

People were protected.

We have a government behind it.

Because I heard one of the big arguments I hear from the crypto people is like, well, real money isn't real either.

It's not like they have the $31 trillion or whatever we supposedly have right sitting in the bank.

We just take it on faith.

If we ask for that money, it's there, but it's not really all there.

Wait a minute,

they figured it out.

Yeah, they figured it out.

Money is trust.

We made money up.

It's not real.

Money evolves over time.

Different civilizations use different things to,

what is money?

Money is basically an elaborate system of IOUs, right?

I give you this piece of paper that has green markings on it, right?

And you can take that and then you can buy whatever you need, right?

So crypto says they want to create a trustless money.

Well, if money is trust, you're speaking nonsense.

It's like saying you want to create a governmentless government or a religionless religion.

The words you're searching for are anarchy and cult.

These are not currencies, they are securities.

It drives me absolutely crazy.

So what crypto did, ironically, it was birthed in the wake of the financial crisis, right?

The Bitcoin white paper came out in October of 2008.

It recreated the subprime crisis and then it collapsed.

Because they did all the same thing.

It was shadow banking.

It was these complex derivatives, all this stuff.

But since it's not going away and people are putting more and more money into it, does it have the the capacity to bring down the economy someday the way the economy was not brought down in 2008 because we did have governments and banks, which they are bypassing with crypto?

That's the whole point, is we need to bypass, which Paul Krugman said, it's unclear why anyone but a criminal would want to do this.

Yeah, criminals.

Criminals and gamblers.

It's gambling.

I mean, economically speaking, these are zero-sum games.

You may notice something about cryptocurrencies.

They don't do anything.

There's no, they're weird securities, right?

Usually a security is like a share of a stock.

Well, there's no product.

There's no good.

There's no service.

So zero-sum games are strictly competitive.

For someone to win, someone else has to lose.

It's like playing poker in Vegas.

We could sit around a table.

You might win a hand.

I might win a hand.

But we didn't create value.

We didn't put capital to productive use, right?

And by the way, the casino every every hand, there's the rake.

They're taking a cut every time.

So if you play long enough in Vegas, you're losing.

Like, that's how they keep the lights on in the casino.

Would you describe it as a Ponzi scheme?

Yes.

It's a Ponzi scheme.

But Ponzi schemes always do collapse.

Yes.

And this will too?

I understand the argument that it hasn't collapsed, but the numbers in crypto are not real.

A million people lost access to their accounts at FTX.

1.2 million Americans.

Lost access.

They can't get their money out.

Because he was running a Ponzi scheme.

Because he stole it.

Because he stole it.

Also,

if you lose your pin number, basically, you're just fucked.

Yeah, you're just fucked.

And they say.

And there's nothing you can do.

Right.

It's a D-Y-O-R.

D-Y-O-R.

Do your own research.

And that's kind of why they use exchanges, right?

Because this way somebody else is responsible.

So you don't.

Theoretically.

Right.

Yeah, I mean, it's just lie after lie after lie.

I mean, you know, the exchanges are much more, most of them, especially the overseas ones, I don't want to get in trouble here in America, are like bucket shops.

Bucket shops existed until the 20s.

They're fake exchanges.

They take your real money, and then

they don't make the trades.

And Sam, allegedly, Sam Begman Fried of FTX, allegedly, you know, he kind of admitted to this in like a Twitter spaces or something.

Like, oh, yeah, we didn't actually even buy some of that.

Well, if you think I don't understand this, I really don't understand NFT.

Oh, NFTs are wonderful.

What's

the matter?

We have a picture of some MFTs of people don't know what NFTs are.

Like there's something there's what, okay, this is something, I've seen this a million times.

Oh, yeah.

What is that called, stupid?

Board ape.

Board ape.

Yeah.

Tell me what that is.

Pretend I'm 67 years old.

And I don't understand.

It's looking good.

Just go with me, Ben.

Go with me on this crazy scheme.

And pretend.

And I just don't understand this from get-go and explain it.

I think that you do.

I don't.

I really don't.

Well, it doesn't.

You're selling a picture.

I feel like you're selling a picture that I could also just find online.

You could right-click and save it.

It's a JPEG.

Right.

So what am I not getting?

Nothing.

It's a scan.

I told you.

I told you I wasn't crazy.

It's.

But people are paying hundreds of thousands and millions of dollars for this.

Well, yes, and except there's what's called wash trading in crypto and in especially in NFTs.

Wash trading is fake trading.

You basically can set up as many accounts as you want.

The pseudonymity of the blockchain obscures what accounts you control.

So I basically take a dollar from one hand and I put it at the other and I just keep doing that over and over and over again.

And you think this thing is worth money.

But then as soon as you actually give them the money, try reselling your board ape.

It's not the buying.

It's the reselling that's the hard part.

But even even if you wanted to impress, if this is going to get you laid or something.

Oh, God, no, that's not.

That's not happening.

Well, okay, then I don't.

Then I really don't understand the motivation.

It's not because you know art, because it's not art, and it's not for the money.

It must be some sort of bragging rights.

Like, look, I own this, but why couldn't I just say that and show a picture of Bored Ape, which the guy who really has it also has exactly.

Well, what's also really funny is that, technically speaking, they're not even the art, art loosely defined, itself.

It's actually the receipt for the art.

So what you bought is a receipt for a link to a JPEG of a board.

Okay, so finally, just the thing that

really pisses me off about this is, and this was the front page of the New York Times this week, the amount of energy that this stuff takes, which just really pisses me off about the generation that thinks it's, first of all, so environmentally superior.

My generation ruined the world.

But they're perfectly happy.

They want regulation of every other thing over the top.

But this thing, let's have a Wild West that, show the picture of this.

This is just one town in Texas.

You know what these buildings are?

They are all housing computers.

The amount of energy that takes,

that's what, that's how you, I don't understand this part either, that you have to mine Bitcoins.

These supercomputers.

Explain that to me.

So I went there.

I went to that.

I grew up in Austin, Texas.

Oh, okay.

That's an hour and a half.

Yeah.

Keep it weird, man.

Keep it weird, man.

Well,

things got weird there.

I talk about it in the book.

I went to, this is a tiny town, Rockdale, Texas.

I hadn't been there.

It's only an hour and a half from Austin.

Because it's tiny, it...

They took over an Alcoa aluminum smelting plant that had shuttered in the 80s.

And so that's, like you said, warehouse after warehouse of computers.

And what are they doing?

What is this mining?

They're guessing at random letters and numbers over and over and over again.

And in 2021, Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies used the energy equivalent of Argentina,

the entire country,

to mine, guess at zero-sum bullshit.

Like,

I don't know how to express how utterly useless it is.

And And I can't express how mad I am at the younger generations for embracing this.

Yeah.

You think you're environmentalists and you think you care.

You just want to get rich like everybody else.

All right.

Thank you, Ben.

Great book.

We'll look for it coming out soon.

Ben McKenzie, let's meet our panel.

Hey!

Hi, you too.

All right, she's the California Congresswoman who recently announced she'll be running for Diane Feinstein's Senate.

Her new book, I Swear Politics is Messier Than My Minivan, is out now.

Katie Porter is back with us.

Hi, Katie.

And he is the New York Close columnist and host of Piers Morgan Uncensored on Talk TV and streaming on Fox Nation.

Piers Morgan is over here.

Piers Morgan.

Okay, so

I don't know if you've had

time to process the story about the 21-year-old who sold our national secrets out online.

But I just want to ask one very basic basic question because I'm reading about this.

We're all just learning about this, but these are serious things that are going to get out there.

People are probably going to die from this.

So it's not like it's nothing.

And

I'm mad.

Who do I blame?

Our second question has to do with...

No, I mean, look, I think we all should be mad.

I think we should be able to count on our secrets being safe.

But I think this is a reminder that intelligence is only as good as the people who are running it.

And,

you know, we spend a lot of money in Congress, a lot of taxpayer dollars, trying to invest in intelligence gathering and in building these kinds of systems and relationships.

But ultimately, there is always a person or people at the end of the day making the decisions.

And I think in this case, that person did, you know, sadly, I think, irreparable damage.

Is that more systemic than that?

Why a 21-year-old?

No, I read he, you know, most of the secrets came out they were from the pentagon joint chiefs of staff so the 21 year old is on an email chain with the joint chiefs of staff it's sorry it's completely insane isn't it thank you it's insane yes it's i i mean look

this guy

and bearing in mind he comes after edward snowden chelsea manning this is not the first time the u.s agencies have been on this rodeo this guy's 21 his name was jack the dripper That was the name he used in the online chat.

Jack the Dripper.

Well, his name is Jack.

Yeah, but he called himself the Dripper.

He's literally dripping secrets, right?

And he has all this highly classified stuff, really classified, like you just said.

And he posts it for months and months and months on an online group named after a gay porn meme.

Yes, I said there's a it's a it's a reference to a gay porn video featuring a young black man twerking.

Yeah, I mean it all of this all of of this is incredible.

But what do we make of that?

Well what we make of it is it took the New York Times to bang on his door before the FBI.

No I mean the gay black man twerking.

What do we make of this group of teenage boys?

What if it gets you through the night, Bill?

I mean

whatever gets you through the night.

Let's understand the technology he was using.

I mean he was using Discord which is a system of servers and you have your own server.

So it wasn't that he was putting this he wouldn't he didn't put it in the the Pentagon newsletter and somebody missed it.

He was dripping, to use his own moniker, these secrets within a smaller group, a Discord server.

And so, I think one of the lessons for me is this drives home something we've seen again and again and again, is which would be nice if people in Congress understood technology.

It would be nice if our government officials didn't talk about Tic Tac, instead of TikTok.

It would be nice if, you know, so I have three teenagers.

I am well aware of Discord and what it works.

And,

you know, as a government official, I just said to my staff, maybe, maybe we should get a Discord server.

And they were like, no.

So I think that

we have to understand where this came from.

It was being shared in a private group.

So there was not the ability of the FBI to spy on it.

And I personally don't think the FBI should be spying on our private group.

Actually, I think they should be made aware of a guy called Jack the Dripper who's leaking really big secrets.

I mean, intelligence agencies, it seems to me, they have two jobs: be intelligent and keep secrets.

That's it.

And on both these levels, they have failed.

And it is systemic, I think.

And I've read today that 1.3 million people in America have access to high-level secrets.

That seems to me a staggeringly large number.

And why is it we only ever get leaks from the American agencies?

It's never the Chinese.

It's never the Russians.

It's never the British.

who have very good record on secrecy.

It's just again and again, it's US intelligence agencies.

Does it occur to you that maybe if you leak a secret and you're Chinese, we just, you know, you don't, there's no press coverage of you and we don't learn about you and you're not held accountable anymore?

I don't know that we should, we can say that in other countries in which there are authoritarian regimes in which they come in the dark of the night and kill you if you give your, you know, if you like a twerker discord group.

I don't think we can compare ourselves to that.

No, no, right.

I don't think that's comparable.

In terms of the number of people who have secrets, look, we have a huge military industrial complex.

Is anyone concerned in this story about the aspect of the level of maturity of American youth?

That's what bothers me.

I mean, he's 21.

He's sort of in the military, the Air National Guard, right?

I mean, it is the military.

And the motivation for this is to impress other teenage boys.

It's a flex.

But

that has been the motivation of teenage boys.

since time immemorial.

Not to tell you two who were teenage boys how it goes, but teenage boys boys from Time Memorial have tried to compress either teenage girls or teenage boys.

Okay, first of all, I was not trying to impress teenage boys at 21.

You're right about girls, and I failed.

But not boys.

And I wasn't in the military.

Okay, to do something for the likes,

you know, that disease that happened to America?

that every kid has to do something for the likes.

I just think our kids are not mature.

Well, I think they're constantly seeking affirmation.

This is because of things like Instagram.

It's affirmative.

You post something and people validate you.

But to use national security secrets for that?

Well, because we have

a level of bad judgment.

Right, but the real scandal is not that he wants to do it.

He's kind of old.

What?

And wonky

right now.

I mean,

let's make sure.

Sorry?

Yeah.

Are immature.

That's why they're kids.

Not at 21.

Not all over the world.

21, you're different and mature.

That's why we don't

drink until they're 21.

That's why some of us don't think that 20-year-olds or 19-year-olds ought to be able to go get AR-15s.

They can go fight.

I think there are arguments.

They can be in the Army.

Well, I think that's a discussion we should have because I think the more we know about it.

I thought if you're a vote, you should be able to have a certain level of maturity.

They're deciding whether you should be in Congress or not.

Well,

and by the way, I win those votes.

What?

And I win those votes, and I'm proud of it.

But when I think about it.

So you just said you win win the votes of the immature.

Well but the immature, first off, immaturity is not necessarily an age thing.

You can be immature well.

And you just played the age card.

You were like, our argument sucks because we're old, which is something.

I didn't say that.

I said, that's getting so boring.

And by the way, I'm only 58, just for the record.

Shouldn't we critique each other on the content of our ideas, not on those identity politics, things like, you're old, you couldn't possibly have the right ideas.

But no, your whole complaint is that they're young.

I mean, if I said that about women or something, that wouldn't be right.

But your whole complaint is that this person was young.

Yeah, but isn't the point of that?

My complaint is that our young are immature.

Right.

That compared to other countries and other times in history, we raise very immature people because we coddle them,

we give them a sense of entitlement, they don't have to learn anything in school.

Bill, I've had three sons who've gone through teenage years and got to 21 and passed, and they're all in their late 20s now.

None of them had access to this kind of highly classified material.

And the real scandal of this story is that this young kid, who's clearly got a lot of issues,

is that he had this extraordinary access to really massive international secrets.

And that is, I just cannot understand how you can have a situation where someone like this, at that age, with that immaturity, with all these issues he's clearly got, has got the ability to do what he did.

Well, speaking of kids being awful, abortion is a big issue these days.

And

there's a drug called

Mifepristone.

Mifepristone.

Boy, I didn't realize how important this drug was.

53% of legal abortions in the U.S.

were done with this medication in 2020.

So this is the abortion pill.

Okay.

So a federal judge in Texas, right, Northern District of Texas, Matthew Kismarik,

He ruled, I don't understand how this works in America.

One single judge can rule, and he did a few weeks ago, right, that we can't have this drug.

Okay, so now another federal judge overruled that.

It's going to go to the Supreme Court.

Is that correct?

But it looks like, and in the meantime, in the Wisconsin Supreme Court race, Janet Protoziowitz, I hope I'm pronouncing that right, won by 11%.

She's the Democrat there, and this was, they said,

an election that took place completely on this issue.

The people of Wisconsin, as the people all over America, do not want this draconian abortion system put into place.

So she was the person who was pro-choice, and she won.

And this is sort of an alarm bell for the Republican Party, as it should be, because they are now the party that is not pro-democracy and not pro-choice, and America is pro-democracy, and it is pro-choice.

And

DeSantis in Florida just signed a bill

Thursday, approved a bill that would ban most abortions after six weeks.

Women don't even know they're pregnant.

You have to have the abortion before you know you're pregnant in Florida.

Good luck with that.

So what do you make of the politics here for the Republicans moving on?

Well, I think it's really fascinating to see what's going on internally there because clearly what they're all trying to do is win the Republican nomination.

But there's a report that came out in the last couple of days that Donald Trump has recognized that abortion may actually be a massive vote loser in a general election.

So they're all under pressure from the Christian right to say, right, go harder and harder.

Why DeSantis is doing what he's doing in Florida?

He wants to be the Republican nominee.

He's not popular.

No, but he thinks.

Even with the Republican nomination.

I understand that, but he thinks he can get through to the nomination that way.

So they all battle to go lower and lower and harder and harder and more and more draconian.

But I don't think they can possibly win a general election with that kind of draconian.

view of abortion in a country where 63 or 4% of the population support a right to abortion.

But how do they back out of this?

They tried to have this happen for 50 years.

This was their big call to arms that we're going to do this, and now they caught the car.

And it's just going to get worse because there's going to be a lot of ugly stories because there's already women who cannot get the services they need.

I'm not even talking about regular abortions.

I'm just talking about health matters.

You know, or doctors who are just because the law is changing and they don't want to go to jail.

They're threatening that in some states that they're just not going to touch.

They're just going to, and

of course this also was a cultural issue when it was Roe versus Wade was legal.

Now it's an economic issue.

It is an economic issue always,

but we've always seen

because it's been legal and we've been able to talk about it more, I think we understand more about the economic issue.

But for me, fundamentally, this is a freedom issue.

It is a very joyful and tremendous responsibility to have a child, and it should be up to every single person to make that decision for his or herself.

And so with their partner, with their doctor, with their faith leader, and you know, I don't think the people of America want Ron DeSantis up in their vaginas, so to speak.

Like I just

want that.

I thought what was interesting on this particular issue of this particular pill, Mifopristone, is that it causes apparently five deaths per million users.

Now, penicillin causes 20 deaths per million users.

But there's another drug which causes 10 times as many deaths.

And I thought, Kenny, you might agree with me here.

Don't say part.

No, no.

It's not part.

You're okay, Bill.

But one thing they could do in revenge, the FDA, they could actually ban this drug, which is Viagra, which is 10 times more deadly.

Which I would imagine, if they did that, would probably have a direct negative impact on the sex lives of judges over 60.

So there we are.

I thought about it, and there you are.

That's

very interesting.

All right, so there's a new social media star I learned about this week, and her name, Dylan Mulvaney, she's a transgender social media star.

And I found this very confusing because there's already a Dermot Mulrooney and a Dylan McDermott, and that was confusing.

And now I have to have Dylan Mulvaney in the mix.

Anyway, she's the one who got Kid Rock so excited, apparently, because she's got

10 million followers there, I think, on TikTok.

And so Bud Light was like, hey, you know what?

I bet you if we, there she is.

So if we send her a case of Bud Light with her picture on it, that's 10 million people who are going to see our ad.

Well, like I said, this did not go over well with Magination.

So this was Kid Rock's reaction to this.

Fuck Bud Light.

And you wanted to talk about immaturity?

I'm not defending kid right.

And by the way, that's half of the, when I traveled the country, or at least last fall when the elections are going, that's half of the Republican ads that I see shooting at some shit you don't like.

It's just shooting, shooting, or I'm in a truck.

Gun truck.

Me like these things, you like, vote me.

You know, that's their ad.

Anyway, so then they dug up this.

Jack Daniels had an ad a couple of, I don't know, this is like two years ago, I think this is 2020.

Teams up with RuPaul, drag race alums at Small Town, Big Ride Camp.

You know, this was just, you know, again, reaching out to everybody.

And of course, this guy did this.

Fuck your woke-ass company.

Pours out as Jack Daniels?

I mean,

yeah.

Anyway, I hate to tell these people, but it's going to get worse because

there's a lot of companies that are reaching out.

And just to save you some

add you to

kid rock, we got some of the new ads that are coming out from some of other companies.

You might want to take a chill pill.

Would you like to see some of them?

Because it's going to get worse.

Southern Comfort, like it in the bottle?

You'll love it in the can.

Okay, then that's...

It's not going to go over well with

a Ford Motor Company, F-150, built Trans-Tough.

We're not going to like that.

Capital One, what's in your man purse?

Jim Denny, quick rich, just like your birthing person used to make.

Walmart, always low prices on puberty blockers.

Well, that is.

That's not, they're not gonna lie.

These are their beloved brands.

Wonderbread, we apologize for our whiteness.

Skittles, you'll taste the rainbow and you'll like it.

And Marlboro Reds, come to where the flavor is.

Okay, that's...

So

a lot of people are saying, and I would agree, why the overreaction to this?

I mean, so what if trans people drink Bud Light too?

And there are certainly a lot of bigots out there, just people who, I remember that Jim Hoff guy in Oklahoma, used to talk about, God's still up there.

That was his answer to global warming.

So the people who, that's their answer to things like this, God's still up there,

I can't reach them.

But

is there something else to this story?

Because apparently this really did have a big backlash on sales of Bud Light.

Apparently a lot of America feels like they've had an agenda shoved down their throat on this issue that they feel has real-world consequences for them and their children.

Do they have a point?

I don't think so.

This is advertising.

If you don't like the advertisement, if it doesn't appeal to you, don't buy the product.

But I mean, on the general issue there, do they have any gripe about the idea that when it comes to trans issues, there seems to be no room for debate.

I mean, trans people seem just to want to have you, you have to accept lockstock and barrel, everything they say, or else you are a bigot and you are shouted down.

Well, yeah, I think it's a good idea.

And it is new, a lot of this stuff, and we are going in the opposite direction, for example, of Scandinavian countries and the UK, which have pulled back on a lot of this transitioning.

So it's not like we are

to the left of everybody.

I think it is a more complicated issue.

And I think the issue around Dylan Mulvaney is that until very recently, like a year ago, Dylan Mulvaney was identifying as a gay man.

and then decided to identify, I think, as non-binary and is now identifying as a woman and talks in these ads about her journey to womanhood and about being a girl and so on.

And I didn't really care about the Bud Light ad.

Bud Light want to market themselves like that.

They'll reap the consequences, good or bad.

At the moment, it doesn't look very good, but that's entirely a commercial decision for them.

Where it got more complicated, I think, was on the Nike ad that came out at the same time, also featuring Dylan Mulvaney, who was in women's sportswear, including a sports bra,

despite not having any breasts.

And she's had no surgery.

And a lot of women got, I think, and I understand this, they got, I think, pretty exercised and offended by the way that Dylan Mulvaney goes about selling herself on TikTok, himself, their self.

I don't want to use the wrong pronoun, I can respect that.

But actually, Dylan Mulvaney, in my view, when I watch these TikToks, is often mocking what a misogynist view of how a woman behaves would be.

And you see her, Dylan Mulvaney talking about, you know, trying on dresses, spending too much money on dresses, crying, telling people they're fine even if they aren't.

And a lot of women are like, hang on, this person is mocking us whilst making themselves now the poster girl for womanhood,

but remains, for all intents and purposes, a biological male.

And it comes at the same time as the whole debate around sport.

And we saw this week Riley Gaines, the swimmer, being attacked, literally physically attacked for trying to stand up for women's rights.

So it's not just as simple as somebody saying, hey, I'm now a woman and I'm going to make millions of dollars marketing myself with these big brands, which Dylan Mulvaney is.

It is more complicated.

And a lot of women are like, hang on a second, what is actually happening to us in this process?

Dylan Mulvaney is free to express herself and to live her gender identity.

There's no one right way to be a woman or to drink Bud Light for that matter, or apparently even to shoot at it.

I think the issue that this all gets tangled up in that it's really important to put on the table is while the right is waging these kinds of culture attacks, culture wars, trans people are being murdered.

So trans people deserve the right to have jobs, to have housing, to get health care, to walk the streets freely.

And they are being attacked.

But nobody's questioning trans rights to fairness and equality.

What I would question, and by the way, I'm not on the right, but what I would question, and I think legitimately, is where trans rights to fairness and equality begin to erode or even destroy, as we're seeing in women's sport, for example, the rights of women to fairness and equality too.

And it's that is the problem.

That, I think, is.

What are the numbers on how many people are trans people are being murdered compared to people people in other groups?

They are disproportionately likely to be murdered and assaulted and harmed.

And so they're one of the groups that suffers highest crime rates, and they are not protected by discrimination.

You have people actually egging on acts of violence toward them, toward trans people.

So I think that, again, going back to the idea of freedom that we started with here, if Dylan Mulvaney wants to dress up like Holly Golightly or Kid Rock for that matter, I don't care.

I don't think this is mostly about Dylan Mulvaney.

I think you guys are off on a tangent here.

It's not about that.

That's my point.

I think this would tap the reason why this had such a backlash with the Bud Light drinking crowd, because it tapped into something else.

It tapped into, I've seen videos.

Male insecurity?

Is that what it tapped into?

Oh, it's always about that.

It's not male insecurity.

It's always identity politics.

Why can't we just...

Let me give you an example of what happened in Scotland recently, because it cost the First Minister of Scotland her job.

She was a trailblazing woman in British politics, been in that position a number of years.

And it was an extraordinary case of of a male rapist who, as a male, raped two women.

And then, at his trial, suddenly put his hand up and said, I identify as a woman.

And as a result, he was sent to a female prison, to a woman's prison.

And there was such an outcry that the First Minister, Nicholas Sturger, came under huge pressure and incredibly doubled down and defended what had happened.

And women, understandably, went nuts and went, what are you doing?

Putting effectively male rapists into women's prisons just because limitless self-identity now means this is what this this person can do.

And it's that that when women talk about infringement into their safety and fairness and equality, it's that they're talking about.

And people have to stand up for women.

And if every time a woman stands up for women's rights at the moment, whether it's J.K.

Rowling or Riley Gaines or whoever it may be, they get shamed, they get vilified, they get hounded, they get death threats, it's completely disgusting.

You've got to be able to promote fairness for trans people, many of whom I think really suffer in this debate because a lot of it is so inflammatory on both sides, but you've also got to protect women's rights.

But to be clear,

nobody should fear being raped in prison, whether that rapist was put in a male prison or a female prison.

So the goal here is to make sure people are safe in custody.

And that's really the focus of that debate.

But

where you allow limitless self-identity, you allow people to abuse the system.

And that's exactly what's now been happening.

And we see it in sport.

Leah Thomas, a six-foot-four-inch, former biological male swimmer who competed unsuccessfully against men, then transitions to be a woman, says I'm a woman, and destroys women, wins NCAA.

And I believe still has a penis.

And still has a penis.

And that's the bottom line.

Which helps when you're swimming.

It's like a rudder.

I don't know.

It is.

I don't know.

what I'm doing.

I do.

I believe aerodynamically on the bottom.

But

physiology definitely helps to beat women in a pool.

And we've seen that.

But when you see her in the locker room, it is kind of a ridiculous.

It's ridiculous.

It looks ridiculous.

And the fact that we can't debate these things, I mean, they just seem so dogmatic about it that if you even bring it up, and if somebody says, and I've seen, I was going to say a minute ago, I've seen videos of teachers saying, I tell my kids there is no such thing as a boy or a girl.

I can understand why someone out there who is a Trump supporter who says, You know, you're always attacking Donald Trump because he gets rid of norms, and he does, and it's awful.

Norms about government and democracy, really fundamental stuff.

But this is like norms about life itself.

When you start talking about there's no such thing as boys and girls, to a lot of people, it's like, I need a Bud Light.

You know, I mean, that's.

Actually, no, I have to say, coming from Britain, nobody ever really needs a Bud Light.

I mean,

look, I'm aware I'm in the wrong room for this, but it's basically fizzy urine.

And if you want a proper beer,

if you want a proper beer,

come back to London.

I'll give you a pint of ham-pump Harvey's and you'll love it, Bill.

Going back to Pierce's point, I mean, we should be able to have a civil discussion about these things.

I think, you know, some people have trans people in their lives that they know and they love and they're concerned about their safety and their well-being other people it's a new or unfamiliar topic and we should be able to have a civil debate nobody including Riley Gaines who I disagree with strongly should be should

you disagree with out of interest

I I think that it should be up to sporting bodies to make the decisions about who

I think that what she has done is try to turn this we talked about people you know becoming using things to kind of get likes and get clicks That's not what she's doing.

I mean, I've got no truck for right against personally, but all I've seen her do is stand up for women's rights to fairness and equality.

She actually competed against Leah Thomas, and it was obviously unfair.

Leah Thomas won one of the races in the NCAA championships by 50 seconds against a bunch of biological females who simply couldn't keep up.

That cannot be right.

It cannot be fair.

That is something

that I trust, I think our sporting bodies should be dealing with.

And by the way, Riley is speaking up for herself, and that is her prerogative, and I respect her free speech.

I think she's speaking up for pretty much every female athlete in the world.

I mean,

wasn't that the point of Title IX,

Title IX in the early 70s?

It was something that was

a major event in feminism, that we finally have this law that says at colleges, right, and I think high schools do, but definitely colleges,

women's sports have to be given equal to men's sports so that women aren't getting, you know, and this led to the WNBA and lots of other stuff.

This seems to be the opposite of that.

It seems to be so many instances, I think, where wokeness is the opposite of what I grew up as liberalism.

Liberalism was let's give the women an equal shot.

This is let's put a male in the swimming pool with the women.

I don't get it.

It's crazy.

And meanwhile, trans people who genuinely want to compete at athletics and swimming or whatever it may be,

they're the ones who are suffering here.

They need to be found a way to compete fairly and justly.

Well, what's your answer then?

I think there's one of two answers.

I think they either compete against their biological sex, as many of them did before, or you create an entirely new category for a transgender athlete,

and then they're able to compete fairly.

But what you cannot do is continue to allow more and more trans athletes to start decimating women's records, in some cases, irrevocably.

It's just not fair.

Okay, I gotta end it there.

Thank you very much, but it's time time for new rules.

Okay.

All right.

New rules.

Someone has to tell Jackie Miller, the Ohio school bus driver, who stopped her bus and unleashed a viral tirade on the kids who'd been disrespecting her for years, telling them, I'm sick of all this shit.

And my foot's going to be so far up your goddamn ass, it's going to dangle out your goddamn nose.

That one, that's a good way to lose a shoe.

And two, you have my vote for president.

Neural, the guy in the cure who has to find a new look.

Because let's face it, goth is a young man's game.

At 23, you look mysterious and vulnerable.

But at 63, you look like my aunt Mildred.

Nural, now that it's come out that the Dalai Lama asked a young boy to suck his tongue, we have to find out if he meant his whole tongue or just the tip.

Well, because we know from every tip jar in every coffee shop, tips are good karma.

Nural, these Japanese gay activists have to try and look a little more gay.

Their sign says pride, but their attitude says staff meeting at H ⁇ R Block.

Their slogan is, we're here, we're queer, here's your tax return for the fiscal year.

Neural, I can accept that there's no such thing as God or fate and the universe is governed by random chance, but you can't tell me it's an accident that Rupert Murdoch is going through a breakup the same week as Taylor Swift.

What part of you belong with me don't you two crazy kids understand?

She sings bad blood, he has no blood.

She has champagne problems, he always has to pee.

She knew he was trouble when he walked in, and he can't remember what he came in the room for.

It's a love story, baby.

Just say yes.

Okay, and finally, new rule: there's a price to pay for forgetting history, which actually is a very old rule.

Those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it.

I know millennials in Gen Z were raised to believe that anything that happened before they came along isn't worth knowing, but in the case of people of the state of New York versus Donald Trump, it just might be.

Because this whole going after the president for fucking around thing,

I've seen this movie before.

It was called Kill Bill.

And America did not like it the first time.

You see, back in the 90s, President Bill Clinton had a fling with a White House intern named Monica Lewinsky, and the Republicans exposed him as a dirty, filthy, disgusting sex doer.

And when they were done with him, he had an approval rating of 73%.

This despite every Republican on every TV station for two years saying, what do we tell the children?

And those children are today's millennials, who, according to polls, don't know anything about it and don't care.

So I guess you didn't tell them anything, parents.

Good job.

It's funny how the Republicans now don't care at all when their kid asks, mommy, what's up with Donald Trump and the lady who starred in Titsigal?

Yes, that is real.

And as I watch the circus around our latest horny ex-president who loves fast food and hung out with Jeffrey Epstein,

it seems worth asking the Democrats, having gone through this yourselves, what don't you get about sex scandals don't work on presidents?

Because no matter what the underlying legal reasons are that underpin a sex scandal, to the average person, it's just always going to be about sex.

Nothing can compete.

Law is boring.

It's the constitutional equivalent of golf.

I remember what people were talking about during the Clinton scandal, and it wasn't the finer points of perjury law.

It was about how one of his blowies happened during a phone call with congressional leaders and how he came in the sink and how they did it on Easter Easter, and that thing he did with the cigar.

Spoiler alert, if you're too young to know, don't ask.

Same thing with Trump today.

Joe Sixpack is not going to take the time to wrap his head around how the statute of limitations applies to a misdemeanor of falsifying business records if it involves a violation of state election law in a second crime involving a federal campaign conditional on the residential status of the defendant.

My head hurts just saying it.

There's a reason every news outlet in the country recently ran the headline, how strong is the case against Trump?

It's their way of saying, don't get your hopes up.

Yes, Trump fucked Stormy Daniels at a charity golf event while his wife was home with their newborn.

The kind of thing we all assumed Trump was doing.

What's your next bombshell?

That his hair is a comb over?

The shocking part wasn't the sex, it was that he was involved in a legitimate charity.

And to at least half the country, it looks like you tried to get him on Russia and you tried to get him on Ukraine and you tried to get him on classified documents and you didn't.

So now you went for the old reliable.

Congratulations, you found out powerful men have an Achilles heel.

They're balls.

It was the same thing with Clinton back in 98 with the positions reversed.

An Arkansas land deal called Whitewater became something, something, Paula Jones became why is the president testifying about what the definition of sex is?

Oh yeah, because sex is fun and it works.

So don't come on my dress and tell me it's raining.

Back then, Republicans were always telling us how much they hated, just hated having to investigate Clinton's sex life, but their hands were tied by the rule of law.

Oh, yes.

The rule of law.

It's a sad day for America, but for the sake of the Constitution and the honored dead of Gettysburg, Gettysburg, my conscience leaves me no choice.

And like Monica, most people found all that a little hard to swallow.

Of course, Clinton's situation and Trump's have important differences.

Clinton was in office and Trump is not.

Trump's case hinges on an NDA and Clinton's was more about DNA.

One involved a naive, young ingenue who had genuine feelings, the other an older, more to say the least sexually experienced bottle blonde with big tits.

But there are also important similarities.

Monica was an intern, and Stormy wanted to be an apprentice.

Neither wife could stand to hold their husband's hand.

And both men claimed they lied to protect the person they really loved.

In Clinton's case, Hillary, and in Trump's case, him.

But

the element that most vitally sets these two cases apart is this.

Republicans went after Clinton on sex because they didn't have anything else.

They had combed through his life like a school nurse looking for headlights, and all they ever could come up with was the blowjob.

But Democrats didn't have to do this.

Trump commits real crimes.

He commits them on TV.

He obstructed justice.

He pressured state election officials to fix an election on tape.

I only need 11,000 votes.

Fellas, I need 11,000 votes.

Give me a break.

He asks other countries to interfere in our elections publicly.

Russia, if you're listening.

If Russia, if China, if someone else offers you information on an opponent, should they accept it or should they call the FBI?

I think you might want to listen.

He sides with our enemies.

He just said it's not Russia.

I will say this.

I don't see any reason why it would be.

He refuses to concede elections and thereby incites insurrection.

Look, I understand how cathartic, bordering on ecstatic it is to see Donald Trump get hauled from his retirement home to stand trial with his meathead goomba lawyers like the slumlord from Queens that he is.

It just feels right.

But now when the real indictments come down for the really serious offenses, we'll have shot our wad on Stormy Daniels.

We'll be so used

We'll be so used to seeing Trump hauled into court.

It'll be no big whoop just like how we got used to watching him get impeached.

And that's a real shame because I was saving my good drugs for Georgia.

All right, that's our show.

I'll be at the MGM National Harbor in D.C.

on the 22nd.

The Durham Arts Center, April 23rd, and my club random podcast is celebrating 420 all year long on YouTube or wherever you get your podcast.

I want to thank Representative Katie Porter, Piers Morgan, and Ben McKenzie.

Now go watch Overtime on CNN tonight at 11.30 or catch it Saturday morning on on YouTube.

Thank you, folks.

Catch all new episodes of Real Time with Bill Maher every Friday night at 10.

Or watch him anytime on HBO On Demand.

For more information, log on to HBO.com.