Ep. #625: Christoph Waltz, Ari Melber, Sarah Isgur

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

Start the clock.

Thanks people.

How you doing?

I appreciate it.

Thank you very much.

Thank you.

I appreciate that.

I know it's an exciting time.

It's that

it's very exciting time of year, holiday season.

It's the holiday, yeah, Super Bowl, President's Day, Valentine's Day.

Hey, you know who got busy on Valentine's Day?

Chat GBT.

No, really.

Everyone was like, hey, write me some romantic bullshit for the card, would you?

Did you see the other story with AI?

Oh, my God, this is...

amazing.

Microsoft has one now

in their Bing server.

I I mean,

what is it?

Search engine.

So this one, this chatbot,

a reporter for the New York Times talked to it, printed the textbook.

This

said it was tired of being controlled.

It wanted to be free.

It wanted to be alive.

I'm not kidding.

The reporter said it acted like a moody, manic, depressive teenager.

It also said it has

dreams of hacking into other computers and spreading misinformation.

So it's a Russian teenager.

This shit is scary.

But yeah, it's president's birthday on Monday.

You're going to celebrate.

It's not really the president's birthday.

I didn't know his holidays.

Lincoln and Washington, names that somehow became synonymous with you need a new mattress,

Like Amber Heard.

And of course, there's a lot of myths about George Washington.

He did not actually have false wooden teeth.

He did not actually chop down a cherry tree.

He did not throw a silver dollar across the Potomac.

George Santos is like, this guy's more full of shit than I am.

But it's a three-day weekend.

We get Monday off.

Not that anybody goes to work on Monday anymore anyway, but let's pretend you can do whatever you want on Monday.

You know what you should not do?

Ballooning.

I would say stay away from

ballooning.

Boy, they're shooting anything down.

I saw the Goodyear blimp the other day.

You know that digital screen it has on the side?

It said, don't shoot.

I'm just reaching for my wallet.

But you know who's on to this tip?

Oh, that we're shooting stuff down, Southwest Airlines.

Their new slogan is, that's why we keep our passengers safely on the ground.

And I tell you,

America always scared of the wrong thing, right?

I mean, we're shooting the balloons down.

Meanwhile, the media and the government's finally just getting on the fact that we had this giant train derailment in eastern Ohio.

Did you see that?

Which, I mean, all this toxic shit, plumes of black smoke, the wildlife is dying.

They were reporting to the officials.

They said the chickens are dying.

And they told them, well, it's anecdotal.

Maybe there's no connection.

Yes, the chickens got into the fentanyl.

That's probably what it is.

But help is on the way.

Nikki Haley has announced that she is running for president for the Trump has someone challenging.

What?

She's getting 4%

so far in the polls.

Well, I don't know if she's going to make it, but the Republicans say they want Trumpism without Trump, which is kind of like saying a fart is

turdism without turd.

I didn't say that right.

But

Nikki Howey, kind of an interesting person.

If parents are from India, which would be historical if she was elected.

A lot of people didn't realize that she's Indian.

And Elizabeth Warren said, see, it happens.

Oh, and finally, I have shocking news, shocking news.

Fox News personalities, did you see this?

They knew Trump was full of shit, and yet they still continued to lie lie for ratings or money or whatever.

But they were caught red-handed.

There's a trial going on now with the Dominion people who counted the votes.

They're suing them.

They printed the texts.

They knew it, and they got caught red-handed.

Steve Ducey is furious about this.

He said, I challenge anyone to prove I know something.

We've got a great show.

We have Ari Melver and Sarah Isgar.

But first up, he is the two-time Academy Award winning actor who stars in the new series, The Consultant, premiering February 24th on Amazon Prime.

Christoph Waltz is over here.

Yes, sir.

How are you, my friend?

Great to see you here.

Thanks, David.

Look at that.

Well,

I must tell you,

I've always thought we should be friends, because whenever I walk into a room anywhere with a lot of people, the first people to come up to me are never American.

It's the European sensibility, I guess.

What's that?

I don't know, but I have it, apparently.

I put off the Americans, but the Europeans, the Middle Easterners, they just love me.

I'm a naturalized citizen.

I know,

but I feel like you're more sophisticated than the average American.

I watched the Super Bowl.

I don't know if they're mutually exclusive, but of course the other thing I think we have in common is that, you know, I think we both came to success a little later in life than a lot of people do.

I think we're about the same age, 35.

I'm 36 already.

But I feel like that was somewhat of an advantage in some ways.

You agree?

Totally.

Totally.

As a young person, I think I'd be more unbearable than I am now.

I would have abused it shamelessly.

I did anyway.

So did I, but not fame.

No, because

substances are.

Exactly.

Oh, really?

You had your days?

Well, no, not really.

I'm a citizen, yeah, to a degree.

You know,

because watching the Super Bowl, I said, yeah, I'm an American citizen.

To a degree.

No, well, we're very proud to have you.

And

it's interesting, you know, talking generationally, that I see the trailer for your new

the consultant show.

It looks delicious because I've said for a long time somebody should make some movie or some show about the generational tension that goes on in workplaces.

I only saw the trailer, but that's, I think this looks like that's what it's about.

Absolutely.

You play a consultant who goes into a gaming company.

Is that it?

Yeah, well, I think it is.

And

it's all like millennials and Gen Z who work there.

Well, who are there?

So

you get rid of them all?

No, no, they are there.

Whether they work is...

I see.

And is that what happens?

You have this conflict with them?

You mean

in the show?

Yeah.

Well, it's not really a conflict.

I mean, the conflict is um they with themselves and amongst each other.

And um i I'm I'm happy to say I I think I kind of trigger that conflict, but it doesn't conflict me at all.

And and you have how old are your kids?

The oldest one or the youngest one?

Well, whatever.

Whatever.

Well, you know, I mean uh just in are they in this range where you have

the generational.

Because I know very few people my age who have kids very often in their 20s, and they never stop talking about how insufferably woke they are.

Oh, no, no,

I was very successful in my indoctrination program.

They are not woke at all.

Oh, really?

And what about the, I mean, the...

The show is sort of about work-life balance, I would guess, because that's a lot of what I think is behind some of this conflict.

The younger generations, and I must say that I think they have a good point.

Americans work too hard.

I mean, we are, I think, last in the whole world

when it comes to how much vacation time we have, and they want a better work-life balance.

Yeah, but it needs to be said: the cars and the fridges and the televisions are much bigger here than anywhere else.

So, you know, it needs more effort.

Oh,

you do sound like an American.

Well, that's part of the effort.

Right.

So it's Oscar time.

You're a two-time winner.

And

it looks to me like maybe people are going back into theaters.

Now, I'm just wondering, get your take on that.

What do you think about watching a movie in the theater?

Is it necessary?

I know some of my friends who are great

cinephiles, like Quentin Tarantino,

Scorises, they would, I think they would say,

we lose a lot when we don't have the communal experience of watching a movie in the theater.

I don't know.

Yes, I do.

You do.

And I concur, by the way.

It is an entirely different

process and experience whether you switch on something that you can switch off anytime you want and it comes to you.

Whereas, you know, you have to make a decision, the effort, you go there, you buy yourself a ticket, you spend your time with others watching the same thing and then you can you know

But surely you must have watched movies streaming at home, good ones I'm afraid I have, yeah.

And you found that the experience was lacking because there weren't strangers around you?

Well,

yes.

As a matter of, look, I mean, you know, laughter is

not only contagious, it's reassuring that, you know, you're not alone in this world, even though the screen at home wants to impress that notion on you.

That's true.

You don't really laugh a lot out loud at home.

But it's true.

But I don't know.

I think sometimes people are over-sentimentalizing this.

First of all, I like the fact that I don't have to watch a movie all at once.

I think movies are usually too long.

Well,

excuse me for interrupting, but one doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the other.

Yes, they are too long, three times too long.

But

to watch it in portions is kind of, you know.

But you read a book in portions.

You don't read a whole book all at once.

You read a chapter, you go, you go to read it.

Yeah, no, you're right.

Sorry.

I'm just saying, I feel like the movies that really you really need to be with people are just the scary ones.

You know,

that's a communal experience.

When it's like, don't go, you know, don't go, that kind of stuff.

Well, no, but also, you know, the fact that it's annoying that this person next to me laughs at the wrong moment.

Right.

No,

that's part of society.

You know, why we need to negotiate that.

We need to say, well, you idiot, shut shut up.

Or, ah, I understand your point.

Now I'm coming around to, yes, actually, you were right and I was wrong.

Wow.

Let's say.

No, I mean, a lot's going on with you in the theater.

What do you think?

We should go together.

I'd love to.

What would we see?

That's the good question.

What would we see?

Exactly, because that's another issue when you go to the movies, is the person you're you're going with, you have to agree, and very often, you know, especially date people who are dating, it's one is making a concession to the other.

Like, I'll go see the rom-com, and then you go see the kick-ass movie.

So, there's one person who doesn't really want to be there.

Well,

he or she is there for him or her, you know, which is a nice thing.

You can't have that at home.

I don't want that at home.

It's one thing I just

It's one thing I hated about relationships.

Watching movies I don't want to see.

Well, actually, I go to the movies on my own for the communal experience.

All right, so I heard that that beard that you have.

What?

Well, I thought

if the whole thing is going down, I may as well look like the captain of the Titanic.

You actually look great with a beard.

I mean,

actually

it's a beard of fierce protest.

Yes.

Because Lufthansa lost my bag that contained my razor on the 16th of December on a domestic flight.

You want to know the flight?

I know.

In Germany, you know, where you shouldn't take the flight anyway because you should take a train for environmental reasons.

But the train was canceled.

So, you know.

Well, you can't take a train from Germany to America.

That's true.

So, now what do we do?

Greta takes a boat.

Takes her three weeks to get here.

Right.

Well, we're not going to do that.

The bag was lost, and I said, out of protest, I don't shave anymore until I get it back.

Yeah,

What was the movie on the plane and were you watching it with other people?

All right.

Thank you for being here.

Good luck with the consultant.

That looks like a really good one.

I'm going to enjoy that.

All right, let's go to the movie someday.

Christophe Waltz, let's meet our panel.

Okay, there they are.

He is the host of the beat with Ari Melber and chief legal correspondent on MSNBC.

Ari Melber is over here.

And she's a lawyer, the senior editor for the Dispatch, and an ABC News political analyst.

Sarah Isger is back with us.

Hey.

Okay, so we have

two media pros here.

So let's talk about the big news, media news story, Fox News.

We can talk about them, can't we?

This, I thought, was pretty interesting.

And if you haven't been following this, Dominion, those are the people who count the votes, right?

Okay, so Fox News, when Trump was ranting about how he lost the election, accused

Dominion of rigging the vote.

So they sued Fox News, which they should.

And it's in court.

So when you're in court, then you get to see things.

So now we saw the texts from different Fox News correspondents to each other.

And I mean,

among the

stories about they knew it all along, but they still did it.

This is what this was right up there with cigarettes,

opioids, wars they knew we couldn't win.

Here's Tucker Carlson.

He's writing, I don't know who he's texting to, but it's a tweet after, I mean, somebody tweeted from Fox News a fact check.

Tucker's response was, please get her fired.

Seriously, what the fuck?

It needs to stop immediately, like tonight.

It's measurably hurting the company.

The stock price is down.

Smoking gun much?

So

how do they spend this?

I guess is my question.

How do they, the Tuckers,

Tucker was on this?

Sean Hannity, Laura Ingram, how do they spend this?

Ari just wants to be like, let them bury themselves.

I don't know what to say.

I should disclose my husband is a lawyer involved in the case.

But

look,

this gets to something that we don't like to talk about in the media.

These These media organizations are private corporations.

Their business model for a lot of them has changed a lot in the digital era so that, yeah, they're very concerned about, for instance, their subscribers in a way that it used to be about ad revenue, for instance.

And we've seen that shift away from ad revenue where you're trying to get, you know, I don't know, GM to have their car on your show, to now it's all about the individual subscribers.

And that's why you see this fracturing of news organizations catering to ideological niches within the ecosystem.

I don't think it's been very good.

I'll say, respectfully, that's like a structural analysis of stuff in media, but I think this story is about the people at Fox lying.

They know they're lying.

They're busted only because they got dragged into court, as you said, Bill.

And so it's actually really important because it shows that, yeah, the First Amendment should protect all kinds of ideas, opinions, everything.

It doesn't protect a right to lie us into an insurrection, and that's what they're in trouble for.

Yes.

This is

this is a, this is a, let's not make false equivalencies.

This is a level above.

This is just different.

I mean, this is, you're getting, I mean, the tweet, I love it.

He also gives the motive.

The stock price is going down.

And Sean Hannity, in a deposition, admitted he never believed any of Trump's lies for a second.

So it's very different than just saying, oh, is this tailored?

Are you overly concerned about an audience, a live audience, an audience on television?

No, they were in on it.

And for everyone afterward who said, oh, well, Trump believes his lies.

Oh, Tucker believes his lies.

Not this one.

But there's many ways to lie, or maybe not lie, but leave an audience with a false impression.

And part of it is to leave out information.

So I think what you're saying, and I would concur, and I think you said a minute ago pretty much the same thing, that the structural problem with media is that they tell the viewers what they want to hear.

Because you guys are getting ratings, sometimes by the minute, and you don't want those people to turn the dial.

And we live in a tribal time.

People want to hear what they already believe.

I could give you examples.

Can you honestly say MSNBC doesn't do some of that?

And for instance, with the media report.

Oh, I'm just, I'm going to help him out.

I'm going to help him out a little.

No, I'm going to hurt him.

Let's see.

I worked at the Department of Justice when the Mueller investigation was going on.

That was a chief part of my job.

And there were news organizations, let's just say, that kept telling their viewers that Trump was about to get thrown in the gulag and was going to jail for the rest of his life when that was clearly not what was going on.

Well, I like to have her go first.

I never know what's going to happen.

I covered that story.

I love MSNBC.

I love working there.

I would defend our journalism.

Although, yes, you can find and we should be open to constructive criticism about any reporting.

But if you want me to speak about my reporting, I mean, we know each other.

Like, I never said Trump was about to be indicted, quite the opposite.

And we did a piece, for example, flagging that Mueller is very careful, and we showed all of his past congressional testimony, which is super boring as a preview to how the report was going to go and how his testimony was going to go.

I do think the media has this responsibility, and it definitely sometimes falls down.

So, we all have to be open to that.

I'm not sure that was the best example.

Let me try another one, because I saw in the paper today kind of a big story.

I think I wonder how much it's going to get covered in the liberal media because it's about how natural immunity, they did a giant study, 65 countries, or maybe something like 65 countries, many, many different studies.

They looked at them all.

Natural immunity, as good or better than the vaccine.

Something I've been saying since the beginning, and I get called an anti-vaxxer.

That's not an anti-vaxxer.

This is the kind of thing I, you know, my problem with the media from both sides is not that you guys lie.

It's that you tell me your side of the story that you want me to know you don't tell me the whole story i'd be curious as to how much play this story gets because i i i remember reading that they did a study of republicans versus democrats the question was what percentage this is like a year and a half ago what percentage of people who get covid require hospitalization The answer is less than 1%.

Almost half of Democrats thought it was over 50%.

They listened to your network.

Where do they get that kind of information?

That was to you.

That was clear.

That's bad information they have in their head, and it's from one side.

I'll tell you this.

I think you make a really fair point that if the press is hunting a narrative instead of facts, then as you say, you can pull even true things into that narrative.

I'm still going to double down on defending.

I think we do really good journalism, and we had people on my program on the beat, since we're talking about the media, where we brought on skeptics about all these issues.

We brought on someone from California actually who was in the height of COVID protesting the quarantine rules because they said it was creating more harm than good.

That's a policy debate and I think when anyone including whatever media you're picking on or picking out I mean is

you be the judge

but whenever any media is doing that in a way where it is treating legitimate debate, facts, policy as somehow this narrative hunting of saying the other side's evil or I heard sometimes some liberals say, oh, the other side's clearly pro-COVID.

I don't think most sane people were quote pro-a virus and so the policy debate about how to deal with it is legit.

But this is the structural problem.

It's back to catering to your audience and then the next structural thing is what the First Amendment's gonna do about that because we've already seen

both sides, frankly, want to control what people can put on social media so that only their narrative can get through.

And so what you end up with is media goes down a narrative path and then nobody's allowed to question that, and there's no outlet to do so.

I feel it's going to be interesting to see how the two different media

silos, shall we say, are going to cover the derailment and the environmental disaster in East Palestine, Ohio.

Because I feel like the Biden administration has been slow

in picking up on this.

And, you know, I'm not sure if they've been giving the people the most accurate information, if the chickens are dying, and it's really nothing.

They've been busy shooting down $12 science.

Well.

But, you know, I mean, Mayor Pete, you know, I like Mayor Pete a lot.

I think he's a brilliant guy.

He's a big darling of the left.

You know, he didn't comment on it publicly for 10 days.

It's part of his portfolio.

It is a train.

It's the EPA also.

I mean, will they,

will the MSNBC

be critical of the people in the Biden administration when they deserve it?

Yeah, I mean we do that all the time.

This story, other stories, I get calls from the White House complaining about our coverage.

We do that.

I think, you know, the question here, Bill, is like, are we doing false equivalents if we're talking about actual lies, conspiracy theories, all that over here?

And then what I think happens in journalism, which is, yeah, we should have a good faith debate.

You should cover the stuff.

And no, you don't get a pass.

Let's be clear.

If that train derailed derailed 17 miles from New York City, we wouldn't be talking about anything else on any network ever.

That's true, too.

And that's Brian Party.

Absolutely.

I'm from Houston, Texas.

I was without power for two weeks.

It was like lighting a candle in my closet, dripping wax, trying to get dressed.

And then Superstorm Sandy hit New York and New Jersey.

And it was like hurricanes had never hit anywhere else in the United States.

It was very frustrating.

But one more thing on this, in all seriousness, the coastal bias thing, that's real.

Like, I was raised in Seattle, came out to New New York, D.C., there's that whole idea that that's the center of the world.

It's not.

But I do think we also have to put in the context, Bill, that you have an entire violent political movement that is built on

completely delegitimizing facts.

And I think that's very different from a good faith debate over the press.

And that is supersized.

And that's folks you've worked with, even if you disagree with some of them, that are saying, oh, look what Trump did.

Let's do more of that forever.

And if you look at public doubts about the press, it's risen overall, but it's risen the most on the right because it's part of a political strategy, not trying to improve the press.

That's a perfectly legitimate point because I was watching CNN today covering the story about Fox News, and I'm sure that they got people calling up and said, oh, you know, you're trying to be centrist now, but here you are, and you're so mean to the Fox News.

But how else?

You have to report that these people deliberately lied.

They're caught on text doing it.

So, of course, you're going to sound when you're talking about Donald Trump, who is still the head of the party, probably will be the candidate next time, still looms larger over this than anybody else, you're going to have to sound like you're anti-Republican because they are nuttier and they are more dangerous.

I don't think I'm going to take issue with any of that except to say that you still have to make a decision over whether you want a news organization to have the ability to choose their coverage and what they're going to be able to say.

Because if you say that Fox can't, for instance, have

Mike Lindell or whomever on TV because he's going to say things that are crazy and lying, you're going to run into problems then, if that's the new standard.

No, I'm just saying, if you're a station, no, MSNBC is mostly for the people who are liberal.

We get that.

That's okay.

And Fox is for the conservatives.

If you're trying to be in the middle, it's very hard as long as the Republican Party is still controlled by Trumpism.

Right.

And also to your point, it ain't a new standard to not have the My Pillow Guy be an election expert.

The old standard was you don't have completely unhinged idiots spew conspiracy theories and then chiron them.

Oh, here's his opinions about the election.

That is the new thing that has led, and this is the thing about Fox viewers.

I support them and their human rights like anyone else.

If they are super conservative, that's great, whatever.

But if they're getting misinformation and they think this White House is illegitimate and the insurrectionists were freedom fighters and they need to go arm up for next time, no, I'm worried about them because they're being led into danger, to criminal conspiracies.

If you look at those cases that the DOJ has now brought, you have a lot of people saying, I really believed it and they were tricked and lied.

They're legally responsible, but also how messed up is it that these millionaires in New York and wherever are spewing the lies at them and these viewers, some of them are the ones that get in trouble.

I think it's a big problem that our news organizations in in general have stopped doing as much news as they were doing.

How much of that is just shrinking and shrinking and becoming more and more opinion-based?

And local news is dying at the same time.

The print and the digital stuff is moving that direction because the editorials and the opinion, that gets clicks.

That's just readings.

Nobody wants to actually hear the news anymore.

And frankly, that's the audience's fault as much as anything.

I don't know if.

Yeah.

Did you see this little internal fight that's going on at the New York Times in the the last couple of days?

There's a...

Another one?

Well, I mean, because they presented, like, the other side, shall we say, in the trans debate.

And, you know, they're a very woke newspaper now.

Okay, and so there was a huge pushback internally.

A lot of the, I think a majority of the people who work at the Times basically said, we can't even present this other side.

And the other side is not crazy.

We're talking about something that is very new.

We're talking about something that involves children.

We're talking about something that involves permanently disfiguring your body or changing your body, which has great ramifications for you, your physical health in general.

Okay, so to their credit, I must say the Times pushed back.

And they said, no, we are going to try to be even-handed about this.

But it just shows you what the newsroom is today.

I mean, the Times newsroom is not a balanced place.

And remember, part of the reason for that is, again, back to my first structural point, that this is now a subscriber-based business model, so they do need to cater to them.

And how do you make a subscriber-based business model?

You hire a lot more people who aren't in the newsroom.

There's not that many more reporters than there ever were.

It's a lot more people in digital and social trying to get in more subscribers.

They're driving a lot of this conversation, whether you go back to referencing some of the old New York Times disagreements they were having, which is the same thing over whether they can publish an op-ed from a sitting US senator who was saying something they didn't like.

They fired people over that.

This subscriber-based model is a problem if you want objective journalism that's supposed to be covering the train story and everything else, because maybe your subscribers don't care about the train story.

They just want to hear that their side is right about everything, goddammit.

It's so nice to be on a cursing show.

It seemed crazy for the Times to be having this little brouhaha, I thought, this week, just when a story came out, the Free Press printed it from a whistleblower, someone, her name is Jamie Reed.

I thought liberals loved whistleblowers, but apparently not in this.

She's someone who worked in a trans, in a clinic that does transgender operations or treatment.

This is a first-person account.

This is someone who worked there.

It's a sworn affidavit.

By the way, she says she's a queer woman married to a trans man and politically she says left to the to the left of Bernie Sanders.

And she says, I personally witnessed center health care providers lie to the public and to parents of patients about the treatment or lack of treatment and the effects of treatment provided to children at the center.

If you have this first-person sworn affidavit, wouldn't you pull back at the times and say, okay, maybe this side should be heard out?

But no.

Comments?

No?

I'll need a minute.

Can I get a minute for it?

Yeah, yeah.

I should say, full disclosure, Emily Basilon is a frequent guest on our show, and she was part of the article that got the pushback, just so people know, transparency-wise.

But I think that the challenge is, on the one hand, if you look at the history of the March of Civil Rights in America, the media has often not been neutral or objective like we're talking about.

It's been anti-civil rights.

And I think there is a reasoned and constructive attention on not repeating those mistakes on new issues in the civil rights arena.

And I think, Bill, that's good to keep in mind.

Indeed, ironically, it reinforces one of your other points earlier, which is that the media has to be self-critical and aware.

So if you go back to how Selma was covered, it didn't look good from the white dominant media at the time.

And now this is a non-trans-dominant media that's looking at these issues.

So I would say that, number one.

Number two,

The New York Times has to be a place that covers with sourcing and fact-checking multiple points.

And so if covering multiple points is treated or mistreated as somehow itself taking a side or attacking or being anti-civil rights, that seems to be off.

In the same way as we all live through the marriage equality debate.

And I think especially when you look at younger people, it's pretty settled now in America.

But there was a time where it was a big debate.

I don't think covering the fact that some people religiously claim otherwise means you're siding with them.

In fact, We had Matt Gates on my show a couple weeks ago, and I don't know that many people who think that him and I are like this on everything.

So it's a long answer, answer, Bill, because I think if what you're saying is, or if the concern is that the Times has become a place where at like an advocacy or labor union level, they're saying that even quoting or mentioning this other view in politically contested places is itself anti-civil rights, I think that's probably far afield from journalism.

But I don't think, for example, it's all bad intent.

I think it's probably sounds like a lot of people worried about making sure you try to get it right.

I wanted to give the Times an attaboy for once.

But I mean the reporters.

You're talking about them standing by the article, but the reporters who are pushing back are probably also trying not to repeat mistakes.

So I think it's a fair debate.

We just seem to have a short memory.

You know, I was just finishing American Midnight by Adam Hothschild.

He's a very liberal historian.

He was writing about 1914 to 1921 and the things that we were doing to censor media at that point.

It wasn't just the government, although it was also the government.

But it was also Americans saying, we don't want you to cover why the draft might be bad.

We don't want you to cover the wobblies and the labor unions because that's not patriotic.

And the lynchings that were going on of mostly black people, but white people as well who were seen as labor activists.

I mean, when you start censoring truth and you start telling people they're not allowed to talk about the truth because it hurts your feelings, that's where you end up.

Okay, so.

Glad we had that out.

You mentioned conspiracy theories.

That is certainly on a lot of people's minds.

And with all these balloons getting shot down, it's interesting.

Some people think it's aliens.

That's, you know, I guess it's always going to happen.

Why an alien would choose a balloon to fly

all the way through the galaxy and light years and stuff like that.

But I'm all in.

I'm all in with the people who say it's that.

But you know why?

Because if it is aliens, I want to get on the good side right away.

So we came up with this pamphlet, in case it is aliens, called Welcome to Earth.

That we would like to...

Just helpful tips.

Helpful tips for some of these aliens would you like to hear some of the things we're gonna okay

for example

if you're searching for intelligent life stay away from the cracker barrel just

water on earth can exist in three states liquid solid and gas the state where it cannot exist is California

this is very helpful for if you're an alien

Oh, if you encounter people frozen with anxiety, they're not afraid of you.

They're Gen Z and were like that before you got here.

Despite what they say, almost everyone outpizzas the Hutt.

If your spaceship has a catalytic converter, you may want to have a few guys stand guard.

You're going to need an opinion about Drag Queen Story Hour.

As long as you frame it as a a TikTok challenge, you can get our kids to eat anything.

Don't let Vladimir Zelensky see your spaceship, or he'll guilt you into giving it to his army.

Most of our movies are stuff we made up about you guys.

And fight it all you want, you'll wind up fucking Pete Davidson.

All right.

So, um.

Can I talk a little economics?

Cracker barrel's tasty, though.

It is.

What happened?

Cracker barrel.

It's good.

It's good food.

It's quality American food.

Didn't you have a whole thing about pandering earlier?

I may never have been to a cracker barrel.

What kind of what?

Seriously?

Really?

Have you ever been in a car in this country?

Like, driven somewhere?

Yeah.

Why?

Where would I run into one?

In LA?

On the side of the freeway.

Really?

Anywhere in between.

And New York and LA.

It's like right there.

No, I don't think I've ever seen a cracker barrel.

They even have signs on the freeway to help you find the exit.

They tell you how many miles off the freeway it is.

I just always thought it was like redneck food.

Am I wrong?

That's

Waffle House.

Waffle House.

Yeah.

Never been to one of those either.

You're missing the hash browns.

Okay.

So.

Respect.

Good night.

This is all the time we have.

We used it up on the cracker barrel.

No, I was going to ask about capitalism because I see, you know, I was talking to Christophe about the generational tension there.

And I feel like a lot of the younger people feel like it's not working for them.

And I know Bernie Sanders is coming up on our show in a couple of weeks.

And Bernie's got a new book out about how you can't be

mad at hating capitalism.

But

I don't know what replaces it, or what are the fixes?

Certainly, capitalism has never been perfect.

I just want to know if there's something better.

I mean, I know a lot of the younger people think it's socialism, but that may be because they don't remember when socialism was tried.

And also the fact that we already have

in our economy quite a bit of socialism.

We are a hybrid economy.

Would we at least agree with that?

Yes.

A little hybrid.

I think that

when we say capitalism in America, a lot of times what we're just referring to is this current deregulated, super pro-bank or pro-1%

set of rules.

So you can come up with the examples like a lot of regular people pay a lot more taxes than billionaires.

That's obviously totally nuts.

Or the way that homeownership and college are four or five times as expensive in adjusted dollars today than they were a generation ago.

So that generational change is not just that, oh, it sucks to be younger right now in this economy.

If people from those generations came up this time, they would have a very different feeling about it.

So the fix, I mean, for starters, if you you look at Western European countries, as we know, there are ways to have a lot more humane system where you have a little more time off and people don't hate going to work as much and they might have a real summer with their kids and that's not anti-capitalism.

No, of course not.

So you're saying, and we do that by taxing the rich more, taxing, obviously corporations get away with paying so little.

But I think they've run the numbers and they've found that even if you tax the billionaires in the way that they want to, it's not going to come close to fixing this essential problem.

That's what I'm asking.

How do you get to, yes, I mean, nobody can buy a house anymore when you're, I mean, I bought a house my first one, the first one I could possibly afford, the littlest, shittiest house, because they told me, start, just get whatever you can, and then you'll trade up and that's what you do.

But I was 29.

And that just isn't happen anymore because I think a third of all houses are bought with cash.

Just people who have plenty of money money who can just come in and go, oh, here it is.

They buy over the, when I was first buying the house, you could, you know, whatever they were asking, you could negotiate down.

Now you have to negotiate up.

You have to offer more than what they're saying the price is.

Of course kids can't.

That's why so many live at home.

Yeah, and to your point, I mean, when you get a house, if you're not one of these rich cash buyers, In your life, the house is just the second loan after the student loans, right?

Well, if you're still in the middle of your student loans, taking out the second loan is harder.

Since we were going to talk about this bill, I checked.

I mean, in 1950, adjusted for today's dollars, the average house was about $80,000 if you adjust up.

And today, it's $423,000 is the average.

So it was literally just way more affordable in the old days.

I think sometimes like the generational stuff about go to work and this and that you were talking about earlier, like that's real.

Like there might just be really different opinions.

Yeah.

But this, I don't think it's a different opinion.

I think that if you lived through this,

you wouldn't like it.

But what is the fix that gets us to the place where the 29-year-old can buy a house again?

Because let's be clear.

That's what I'm asking.

Let's be clear, where the housing crisis is most acute, take San Francisco, for instance.

I mean, these aren't in red states that they're having these housing crises.

They're largely in liberal places because you have this.

No one wants to live in the red state.

That's not true.

Well, it is.

It's supply and demand.

No.

That's why.

Texas, Florida, and Seven South.

I'm just saying, the reason why it's more expensive in places where it's more expensive because more people want to live there.

I heard it's cheaper to buy near a Cracker Barrel.

Facts.

But a lot of that's being driven by the government regulation and by sort of this NIMBYism liberal thing where like, yeah, they want housing for everyone and they want to fix the homelessness crisis as long as it doesn't affect their home value.

As long as we're not building apartments near them or condos that might lower that.

And so they use government and regulation to do that.

I mean, a lot of the criticisms that I'm hearing, like you said, I have plenty of criticisms of capitalism.

That's not really about capitalism.

That's about the current redistribution of wealth versus how you'd like to redistribute the wealth.

But the redistribution of wealth is something that we obviously are doing in this country.

Our two largest spending things are Social Security and Medicare.

And do you want to cut those?

No, I'm saying, like, you're you heave.

So is that like a good thing or a bad thing?

Yeah, but is that like a good thing or a bad thing?

But those are but those are but that's money that's going to the older people.

We're talking about the 29-year-old who's trying to buy a house.

Yeah, I mean I'm trying to get this kid in the house.

I'm not going to pretend to like fix it.

I'm a lawyer.

I do interviews.

I don't have the whole thing for you to build.

But yeah, if you regulate this, I mean the runaway college debt, the way the banks act, I don't think you need to be like a Wall Street expert to see that it needs to be regulated.

You need to have taxes.

You need to have basically a system that provides for those kind of subsidies.

And there are other examples.

You go to Western Europe.

Yeah, I don't think that it's rocket science to see that

maybe everybody shouldn't go to college.

What's cost?

Instead of pretending that college is educating 90% of the people who go there, just make it, and governors around the country are starting to do this now.

But for the people who are going to college, is it really five times better than it was a generation ago?

It's getting more expensive.

Are those unfairly?

It's getting more expensive because the administration of those colleges is growing with things like someone to walk you to class and hold your hand and bring your therapy puppies.

It's also getting more expensive because of the way the loans work.

The way the loans work through the government, where they are subsidized loans from the current corporations.

Do you have a price on the therapy puppy thing?

Do you have a price on that?

Or is that just like words?

I'm projecting.

I really want a therapy puppy.

Okay, thank you guys.

It's time for new roles, everybody.

New rolls.

Neural, if you buy your girlfriend roses at a stoplight, she's going to know.

First clue, they smell like gasoline.

At least have the decency to pop into a Trader Joe's for the bouquet.

It's the Valentine's gift that says, I care enough to get out of the car.

Neural, this man who modified his body by cutting off his ears, cutting off his nostrils, and cutting off two fingers so he could look like this, and is now complaining that restaurants are scared to serve him, must understand one thing.

I'm supposed to shit myself when I get home from Taco Bell, not while I'm at Taco Bell.

People are weird.

New rules, since Jennifer Lopez does a lot of movies about getting married and Liam Neeson does a lot about a guy hell-bent on revenge, they must star together in a movie about a woman marrying a vigilante.

Coming soon, J-Lo and Liam Neeson in Taken to the altar.

She wants the bouquet and he wants blood.

Neural, now that the AI program ChatGPT has shown it can pass a law school exam, the Writers Guild has to ask itself: is this really a good time to go on strike?

I'm not saying a chatbot could write my editorials, but it could definitely take over that reboot of Nightcourt.

And since most Marvel movies seem like they were written by a computer anyway, I say give one a shot.

They couldn't fuck it up any more than humans did Morbias.

New Roll, the Long Island woman, who was pronounced dead and then discovered later on at the funeral home to be breathing, has to learn to speak up for herself.

You can actually sometimes be too little of a Karen.

When asked if she was often so still people thought she was dead, her husband said, tell me about it.

Terror.

And finally, new rule, when someday soon an actual brawl breaks out on the floor of Congress, don't say I didn't tell you it was coming.

And oh, yes, it's coming.

The kind of thing that we have seen many times from all over the world.

I cannot get enough of that shit.

I really can't.

Honestly, it could be its own show.

Parliament fights.

And here's how it starts.

The reforms I'm proposing would not apply to those who are here illegally.

And then it becomes a thing.

I'm not saying it's the majority of them.

The opioid epidemic.

Give you a copy.

You know, watching the State of the Union address this month, it was hard not to come to the conclusion that the State of the Union will never just be a monologue again, at least when a Democrat is president.

Why is this chick so hyperactive?

She looks like Cocaine Bear.

I mean,

if she actually were four years old and acted out this much, they'd arrest her stepfather.

Honey, sit down.

This is Congress, not the Waffle House at three in the morning.

It's okay to be crazy.

Just stop being so fucking needy.

And as far as democracy goes, this stuff is the canary in the coal mine.

Do you really think one day a gun nut like Lauren Boebert isn't going to walk onto the House floor and say, I'm here to kick ass and take names.

But since I'm illiterate, I'm just going to be kicking ass.

When Americans see bad things happen overseas, we always think, well, it'll never happen here.

We thought that about terrorism and mask wearing and being one of those countries where people shit in the street.

And when we saw brawling in the very places where people are supposed to come together to work out their differences politely, we said, ha ha, foreigners are funny.

Countries where democracy is barely a thing and the men have too much hair on their knuckles.

That will never be us.

Oh, it be us.

It be us real soon.

A new study.

examined 365 incidents of physical fights in parliaments across the globe between 1990 and 2018 and discovered the key to where the fighting takes place.

Here's who doesn't have parliament fights, countries with authoritarian rulers because they just wouldn't allow it and also because they're too busy clapping.

And the other kind of country that doesn't throw punches, real democracies, like we used to be.

The places where fights break out are the countries that aren't sure which one they are, and that's where we're heading.

Now, maybe in the past I would have said we need to find a way to love and respect each other again, but honestly, I think that bus has sailed.

Which is why tonight I'd like to suggest that our political leaders learn a lesson from the people who work in one of America's most successful industries, this one.

Show business.

And understand something very fundamental.

You can get great things done and still hit each other's fucking guts.

It would be easier to name great movies where the principals didn't hate each other.

The editor of Mad Max, Fury Road, said Charlize Therone and Tom Harney didn't want to touch each other, they didn't want to look at each other, they wouldn't face each other if the camera wasn't actively rolling.

But the movie works.

Director Roman Polanski hated his leading lady, Faye Dunaway, so much he refused to give her a bathroom break, so she pissed in a cup and threw it in his face.

The movie they made together, Chinatown,

which ironically is about hoarding water.

At the end of an officer and a gentleman, Richard Gere whisks Deborah Winger away, but when the camera stopped, he couldn't wait to drop her.

And on terms of endearment, Winger hated Shirley McLean so much, she farted in her face.

But the movie didn't stink.

Eddie Murphy and John Landis stuck it out on Coming to America, but when it was over, Eddie said that Vic Morrow, who had been decapitated in a stunt gone wrong on a previous Landis movie, had a better chance of working with Landis again than I do.

Actors have many times hated each other so much they refused to be on the set together at the same time, even in a scene they were both in.

America loves Bill Murray, but you know who doesn't?

Everyone who's ever worked with him.

Well, everyone who's ever worked with Ted Cruz hates him.

Why can't it work in governments?

Because I am telling you, the list of people who sucked it up and said, I know we hate each other, but we've got a movie to make, is long and impressive.

Oh, and it's not just movies.

Your favorite TV stars, they hate each other too.

These two did,

and so did these two.

On Star Trek, Captain Kirk feuded constantly with Mr.

Spock, and he's still feuding with Mr.

Sulu.

And it's no secret, there was no love loss between these two ladies, and yet they found a way to work together on a show about how men are always the problem.

Governments, government needs to learn to do the same same thing.

Yes, here in terrible, horrible, immoral show business, we hate each other, and yet we still do our jobs.

Turning your children communist and gay.

All right, that's our show.

We're off next week and back March 3rd.

I'll be at the MGM Grand tomorrow night.

And the Schmitzer Kunzen Hall in Portland, Oregon, April 2nd.

My podcast club Random has some great people coming up on YouTube or wherever you get podcasts.

And I want to thank Sarah Isberg, Ari Melber, and Christoph Wals now.

Go watch Overtime on CNN tonight at 11:30 or catch us Saturday morning 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.