Ep. #606: Chris Cuomo, John McWhorter, Sam Stein

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 Ma.

Start the clock.

Appreciate it.

Thank you very much.

How are you?

Thank you very much.

Great to be back.

Thank you.

I appreciate that.

Oh, I appreciate it.

Thank you very much.

All right, please, we got a big show.

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

I know.

I'm happy to.

Oh, Lord.

Thank you.

I appreciate that.

Thank you.

Thank you so much.

I know I'm happy to be back with you, too.

I am.

We've been off for a month, but the other reason I'm very happy is we were going to have a mask mandate reinstated here in L.A.

County, and today they said, no, we're not going to do it.

Great to see your face.

Yes.

What I really love is City of Beverly Hills, you know what they said?

They said, even if you have a new mandate, we're not going to comply.

Yes, Beverly Hills.

They said,

our citizens have spent too much on their faces to cover them up.

We just...

And come on.

Masks, I hate to say, but cloth masks, it's an amulet.

It's a St.

Christopher medal, okay?

Really?

And especially I see guys with big beards.

You know, if you have a mask over a big beard,

it looks like a woman in the 1970s wearing a bikini, you know?

It's a terrible look.

Also, I mean,

come on, Biden, 79, he got it, he's fine.

Fauci, 81, got it, he's fine.

The queen is 110.

She got it.

You could come out from behind a door and yell boo to those people, they died, but COVID, nothing.

And also, we have a new one we have to freak out about.

Monkeypox.

Everyone's freaking out.

This is why I say, never let monkeys order the bat at a wet bar.

No,

and apparently America is now leading the world in monkeypox.

They say it's mostly within, I love this, the news, they say it's mostly within the men having sex with men community.

We forgot the name for this community.

We can't, the men having sex with men, if you're in this community, please remember to wipe down your packages.

And you know who has a monkey problem over in Yamaguchi, Japan?

Not monkeypox, monkeys.

Actual monkeys have been, I don't know why they're terrorizing this town,

but they are going into nursery schools, snatching babies, clawing people.

I know, it's completely disrupting drag queen story hour.

It's

terrible.

Oh, did you see?

Trump basically declared he's running again.

He was talking about drag queen story hour.

He's got a whole new act.

He was in Washington, D.C.

like a couple of days ago for the first time since he left office and doing some of his greatest hits,

working in some new shit.

He's got a new hunk about he wants to execute drug dealers.

Wow, I just don't think drug dealers should be killed unless they're very, very late.

And you know what was interesting when Trump was in D.C.

a couple of days ago, you know who else was there on the same day making a speech?

Mike Pence.

Awkward.

Yeah,

for old time's sake, Trump invited him to hang.

Also, Trump had a golf tournament a couple of days ago at his New Jersey golf.

Did you you see this?

With the, you know, the Saudi Arabians have a new golf league.

Everyone has shunned them.

Trump, of course, invites them in.

I played in a Saudi golf tournament once.

My handicap was they beheaded my caddy.

But,

yeah.

So he has this golf tournament with the Saudis, and 9-11 families thought it was a little tacky.

They were very pissed off about that.

And here's Trump's quote.

He said, nobody's gotten to the bottom of 9-11.

Yes, it was probably Antifa, I imagine.

Then he said, okay, so the Saudis did finance terrorists who crashed planes into the Pentagon.

But who hasn't sent in a mob to attack the

building in Washington is where I was going with it.

And listen to this, the DOJ, the Department of Justice says, oh, we're getting closer.

I think we're going to maybe see a grand jury.

They may put Trump.

How about this for an idea?

We put Trump in jail and then trade him to Russia for Britney Griner.

All right, we've got a great show.

We have John McWhorter and Sam Stein.

But first up, he hosts a new podcast, the Chris Cuomo Project, which recently became the number one political podcast with its second episode.

Please welcome Chris Cuomo.

There he is.

How are you, pal?

Good to see you.

All right.

All right, well, congratulations on your podcast.

That sounds great.

Sounds like it's off to a great start.

Are you happy being back in the saddle doing what you do?

Happy?

Probably not the right word.

You miss CNN.

I feel like I lost a sense of purpose

for a while because of how things ended.

And I really became kind of clear, and you know, we've talked about this.

Bill, just so you know, is not just good on the show, he's good off the show.

Wow.

And I thank you for that.

We're just friends.

I mean, just so people don't.

You know, when you say that, now they don't believe it.

Right.

Well, that's.

So I just, you know,

I just, I want to help.

I want to get back into

a way of

doing a form of what you do, breaking through the toxic twosome of partisan politics.

and speaking to the vast body of people in this country who are just regular and they want things to be done.

And you did that on your CNN show, which I saw recently in the paper that there, I mean,

there was a struggling network while you were there, and you were one of the success stories they had.

Now the ratings in that time slot, I think, are down 53%.

Got to feel good.

No.

No, come on.

No, honest.

It's a great organization and there are great people there.

I don't do

that Schaudenfreude thing, you know, where I like to see things aren't going well.

If to the extent that's true, I think the whole environment is down right now, numbers-wise.

But I want good things for people there.

I don't like how it ended.

I had a great team I didn't get to say goodbye to.

I just want to move on.

That's really what I want.

So I want everybody to do well.

Just leave me alone.

For people that don't know who you are,

your brother.

I'm Bill's friend.

I mean, they may recognize you,

but your brother was the governor of New York, and your father was the governor of New York.

Yes.

Okay, how is your brother doing?

How is Andrew Cuomo?

Now, I have never seen a fall quite that steep.

I mean, he was about to be the next nominee for the Democratic president of the United States.

When COVID hit, he was like put up there as the poster boy who did the best job with COVID.

He was on TV every day.

They made an exception so that you could interview your brother again.

And then he had this giant fall.

How is he?

Is he okay?

I'm supposed to say, oh, he's great.

But that would be what we call bullshit, right?

This has been hard.

And,

you know, you learn a lot about the people in your life when you watch them struggle.

It's true, when you struggle, you learn who your friends are.

I've always known who my friends are.

I've had them for a very long time.

But he has been in a struggle.

And I have watched it.

and I'm proud of how he's handling himself.

It's his job to tell his own story and figure out what he wants his future to be.

But he has dealt with a lot, and

he's doing well.

Did you ever think that his downfall would be women?

I never pictured him as that guy.

I mean, the Kennedys, okay, sure.

That would not

be up with a feather.

Bill Clinton, come on.

Even Hillary once said he's a hard dog to keep on the porch.

I never thought that would be Andrew Cuomo's downfall, women.

Yeah, me either.

All right, hold on.

Did you have it wrong, Bill?

No, look, you know, you don't foresee these kinds of things.

You have to deal with life on life's terms.

And

he's no different than anybody else that way.

So here's the thing I don't understand about why you had to leave.

Apparently they were mad at you, whatever, their story.

I don't know that you were advising him when he was going through this scandal.

I was.

Okay, but.

Oh, you were?

Yeah.

Oh, okay.

Like I said, on TV.

Yeah.

To all of you.

This is my brother.

Right.

Obviously, I'm not objective.

Right.

Obviously, I'm going to help him.

Right.

Not going to cover it here.

We've got 23 other hours.

And they covered it plenty.

But what, no, CNN said it violated their journalistic standards.

And I said, CNN has journalistic standards.

No, I'm kidding.

They did.

I didn't mean that in a snarky way.

What I meant is,

although it did come out that way.

What I meant is that they made a conscious decision to move more toward opinion than just giving the straight news,

which is sort of the Trump dilemma.

You sort of had to do that.

You couldn't pretend the kind of things Trump was doing were neutral.

So I think that just, you know, for the sake of counter position, I don't see that as a move to opinion.

I think that is addressing the need of serving people's interests.

We were faced with something that the media has never seen in this country before.

Yes.

Where somebody weaponized the truth and won pretty much every fight he got into.

by ultimately blaming a system that people have rejected, including the media.

And unprecedented risk is going to require an unprecedented effort.

I don't think it was about moving to opinion, meaning not relying on facts and analysis, but they had to take it on.

I felt very much that way.

Not everybody did it to the degree that I did.

It was very risky to do what I did.

You are better off keeping your head down and say you're playing it straight.

I say that's not why I do this job.

That I'm not here for convenience.

I'm not here to hide.

I'm not here just to get the check and the stardom.

You've got to take the risk when it matters.

And it was rough.

It is still rough for me to be seen as like an enemy of the former president, which is nonsense.

I'm not an enemy of any person.

I don't wish him ill.

I just want leaders to lead and to tell the truth and to do what they put them to do.

So I don't see CNN that way.

I saw a lot of brave men and women deciding to take somebody on who had a tremendous amount of power and who would come at them by name.

And that's a scary thing.

Okay, but just for the reason why they canned you, this advising,

I've read many times that Sean Hannity

from Fox, Laura Ingram, were texting Trump all the time.

You want me to fire them or something?

I just don't understand.

But isn't that the same thing?

I mean, we're at this place in society now where apparently the media has merged.

It's kind of like the way we're merging with robots, with politics.

There's no separation.

I mean, look who the White House press spokesman is.

It's always somebody, the Democrats are going to hire somebody from MSNBC.

The Republicans are going to hire somebody from Fox.

We each have our official places.

CNN was supposed to be the middle.

Now the new boss at CNN Adigas said he's trying to restore that.

Is that possible in this partisan country that we live in to have the one place?

I would love to see that.

The one place where I don't feel like I'm getting anybody's narrative.

I just feel like, just give me, just tell me, just tell it to me.

First of all, that's called your show, right?

I mean, that's why you found an audience.

And it's why I'm a fan of the show.

I've had a lot of time on my hands recently, so I've been able to watch back episodes and the podcast, which I love because it's such a different feel.

It's why I'm doing the Chris Cuomo project, frankly.

I believe people do want an alternative.

I believe the majority of people in this country are what I call free agents.

They have open minds and open hearts.

They're not about party.

They're about

respectful conversation.

And you can get after it.

You can disagree.

You just don't.

have to surrender to hating a person that you don't agree with.

And you're open to the idea that maybe they know something you don't.

Right.

Or they just see the world differently.

Yeah, that's fine.

Yes, it is.

I don't think it's about middle.

Okay, here's why I don't like middle, and I don't like independent.

I don't like independent because in America, we have to be interdependent.

We've got to care about each other here.

You can't just be out for yourself.

That's why I believe in free agent as a term instead of independent.

It may be a semantic difference for some, but it's not for me.

The other one is, it's this toxic twosome.

Everyone's been forced to the fringe and to pick a team.

It's like being a Jets fan.

The Jets suck.

And I am a Jets fan.

You know they're going to suck.

Oh, but look at this draft pick.

This is the year.

You don't believe it.

Nobody believes it.

But you say it because it's your team.

Our politics is not supposed to be that.

And I believe that there's a great chance, and we are at a time in our history where there is an exhaustion of being forced to play a game that people don't want to see played.

And you've had people in this chair, I've watched them, speak to this.

You know, most people in this country, they agree on about 80% of the things.

You know, most people, this, but we never speak to them.

We don't address it that way.

We get forced into the game.

And that is the problem for the media as well.

My defense of the media, though, is this, even though it didn't end so well for me most recently, is this.

You can't expect.

the men and women in the media to not play a game that everybody else is playing.

You are watching because of the game.

You are allowing yourself to be put on teams or in tribes or any way you want to designate it.

But they're supposed to somehow break away from that when it's what you want, when it's what resonates with you?

No.

I think that culturally, we have to end the two-party system.

It's not in the Constitution.

It's not in the law.

President Washington took most of his farewell address to say, avoid parties and the men who will seek advantage in them.

We didn't listen.

We need more parties.

We need ranked choice voting.

And we need a shame campaign on purple states to apportion their elections.

Thank you.

And then you'll have more choice.

And that's what we need.

Your father, who I adored, I thought such an elegant guy.

He agreed with none of this, by the way.

That I just said.

Really?

He believed in the Democratic Party, but it was a different party when he was in it.

Exactly.

Actually, I think he would, because I think what you're saying would resonate with him as more of the party that he knew.

He would have said, shut up, you've been talking too long and not saying enough.

But my last question to you was, I mean, your brother was a governor, your father was a governor who, I don't know why he didn't run for president.

I thought he could have been.

You want to know the answer?

He could have been the Adlai Stevenson of the 80s.

He could have lost twice to Reagan, but nobly.

First of all, Pop wasn't afraid of losing.

He had come from nothing.

He had lost a lot of races.

He didn't want to run for president.

This is the God's honest truth.

You don't have to believe it.

And it wasn't because we're in the mob.

You know how often I hear that?

It's really nice.

Como.

Mafia, right?

No, no, not mafia.

Not nice.

He didn't run.

And I think that this will resonate.

He didn't run because he didn't think he was good enough to be president.

I sat at the table, I listened to my mother, to my brother Andrew, and to other people in the family and friends saying, no, Mario, you can beat this guy, you can beat this guy.

He said, that's not my measure.

I don't believe I am the man for that job.

He respected it.

He respected what it means.

And he didn't just see it as an article of his own avarice.

And I really think we can get back to that if we start empowering people.

He would have been such a better precedent than almost everybody who's coming after him.

But okay, I thought that's just my opinion.

But my last question, why not you, the father, the brother?

You seem, you got the crowd with you like this.

Why did you choose this instead of politics?

You seem like such a natural.

You seem like that.

I see all of that as insults, by the way.

I just want you to know.

Really?

You see TV as higher than politics?

TV?

No, of course not.

I see.

Well, you were on TV.

I see the politics.

You chose broadcasting.

Yes.

Why is that better than?

Because I think that I can make a difference, especially now, more than ever before.

More than a politician?

Absolutely.

And I'll tell you why.

Because they are stuck in a game that I don't have to play.

You probably heard,

I recently decided I want to do the Chris Cuomo Project.

I want to grow.

It's free.

I want to grow it as a place.

I think that matters, right?

I won't pay for podcasts.

Anyway, so

I...

Mine's free, too.

Yeah.

And really good.

Really, really good.

Anyway, but I...

I want to build that community.

And I'm going to News Nation because I believe in insurgent media.

And I think News Nation has a chance to not be seen as groupthink and you to be just a fresh appraisal of who's in front of you.

I believe in that.

I believe our political culture, as long as it stays two parties, is all about you figuring out how to bring me.

I agree.

And you will find a way, because I am flawed, and you will beat me with my own flaws, and that will be good enough.

And it isn't.

So I don't want anything to do with that.

Chris Bromon not running for president, but he should.

Great to see you.

You did great.

Congratulations, Diane.

I will do the podcast, and you will do mine.

I will.

In person.

I will.

Let's meet our back off.

Okay.

Hey, guys.

All right.

He is the White House editor for Politico and

MSNBC contributor.

Sam Stein is back with us.

Sam Stein.

He is the author of the New York Times newsletter and contributor to the Glen Show podcast.

John McWhorter is over here.

All right.

So

I didn't mention this in the monologue, but it's is the big story of the week.

Now, Joe Biden, before he was president, was known for basically two things.

Hair plugs

and one saying, big fucking deal.

That's it.

Big fucking deal.

Well, this week he actually signed a big fucking deal.

We thought

this era was over where people could make deals.

If you haven't been following this, Joe Manchin finally signed on.

I want to show you what's in this deal.

This is what they finally came up with.

Now, it's not quite signed, sealed, sealed, and delivered, but we probably will get this.

There's $369 billion for climate.

That's electric vehicles.

That's methane controlling that.

Solar panels, industrial pollution reduction.

This means a lot to me.

I don't want to breathe pollution, okay?

Medicare, why is this in the same bill?

I don't know.

We'll answer that on a different show.

To me, this is like completely different.

It's like it with cable TV.

Why can't I just get HBO and not these six channels I don't want?

Okay.

But it's better, but you know, this was originally the Build Back Better bill, which was a $1.7 trillion bill.

Now they got it down to like $450 billion, which used to be a lot.

Negotiating prescription drug prices, a no-brainer that they should have had a long time ago.

Okay, then we have Medicare.

I mean, Obamacare, shoring off that, 15% corporate minimum tax on companies that make a billion dollar profit or more.

This is kind of a big thing.

Sorry, Amazon and GE, you're going to have to pay something.

IRS, funding of the tax police.

Yes, it's funny, the Republicans defunded the tax police.

$600 billion a year goes uncollected.

And deficit reduction, so there's something for the conservatives.

Okay,

this is what...

mature governing used to look like.

So I guess my question is, Where are we on Biden now?

A week ago, he was dead in the water.

Is this savable now because of this?

I think it's a beautiful thing.

It's like we're, you know, in this Robert Carroll, Lyndon, Johnson era where things actually happened because of compromise.

But what I don't get is why we had this bait and switch.

What was this surprise where first Manchin is for it and then he's against it?

Has history changed on the basis of somebody who's basically just a boob?

You know, was he just not

paying attention?

It went from 1.7 trillion to 450 billion.

Okay, so

is that just 1.2 trillion is nothing to you?

It seems like they pared it way down to something much more practical.

Yeah, Manchin's imprint is all over this.

Now, there were bait and switches, I will grant you that.

A lot of the times the left felt like they were the victims of it.

In this case, the right feels like they're the victims of it because he was against the climate provisions, then said he was formed only after the Senate passed a totally different bill.

So McConnell looks a little bit silly.

But to your point, which is the more important point, this is a huge deal.

I mean, if this gets passed, any one of those provisions passed under a prior presidency, a Democratic president, would have been historic, right?

The prescription judging has been a thing that they've wanted to achieve for decades.

They will get that, and in addition to that, $370 billion in climate investments, I mean, that's sort of a historical marker for a presidency.

The problem I think Biden has is that expectations were made so high, and partially his own fault.

He set them so high that when they go to this logical compromise, the left feels like it's a letdown to some degree.

Right.

Well, it's not.

No.

That's how government used to work.

It's how government does work.

It's the only way it works.

I still can't get past, though, that two weeks ago we thought that nothing was going to happen at all in terms of climate change.

And then all of a sudden, it was.

And it almost almost seems as if Manchin wasn't paying enough attention or that he saw how upset people were and therefore changed his mind.

It seems unstatesmanlike that he changed so abruptly and for no little explanatory reason.

All right.

I'm not going to go back there with you.

I'm going to go by.

I feel like Ernie Janet.

You got a heart on for Joe Manchin.

I don't know why.

All right.

So the cloud that's hanging over this country is still Donald Trump, okay?

He was making this speech in Washington.

He said this,

I don't know if we have this on the screen, but this is the end of his speech, which I really think.

He said, if I renounce my beliefs, if I agreed to stay silent, if I stayed at home and just took it easy, to you, Donald Trump, taking it easy,

the persecution of Donald Trump, third person, would stop immediately.

It would stop, but that's not what I will do.

I can't do that.

I have to save our country.

This scares me.

It's messianic.

I have to save our country.

So to me, he's back in the the race.

Yeah, 100%.

It really is a matter of when he wants to decide that he's going to declare his candidacy.

But yeah, there's something weirdly ironic with him saying, I could just stay at home.

And then like two days later, playing in the pro-am at the live golf tournament at his country club where he, you know, that's what he does most of the time.

I thought the speech was really peculiar.

Especially for a Trump speech, too.

I mean, the big policy idea was to take homeless people and create tent cities outside of cities where you can store homeless people, essentially.

But I think

I don't want to get off on this topic too much, but just but the compassionate view from the left is keep them on the sidewalk.

Right,

I don't get that either.

Like, we're the most compassionate people.

Stay on the sidewalk.

Because

that

there's got to be

a middle ground, you would think.

That's what makes them boring and leave it to beaver to want to actually have a home.

That's too conformist to put them in houses.

Hey, Wally just died.

Oh, I forgot about Tony Dow.

That's right.

But wonderful shit.

Too soon.

Too soon.

Too soon, John.

Too soon.

I shouldn't have brought it up.

It's tragic.

Okay, but can I read this?

This is from a guy named Jack Wilenczik.

This came out.

And by the way, these January 6th hearings, I got to say, I was skeptical.

They've been pretty professional.

They've delivered, yeah.

They really have delivered.

I know a lot of people weren't watching, but if you did, it's pretty impressive because, you know, the other side is going to say, it's all political.

It couldn't possibly be all political because all the people who are witnesses and prosecuting it are Republican.

And Trump age.

It's an interdocine war going.

Okay.

So this guy, this is a Trump lawyer.

They're playing the emails now.

Listen to this one.

We would just be

sending in fake electoral votes to pens so that someone in Congress can make an objection when they start counting votes and start arguing that the quote unquote fake ones

should be counted.

And then he sent a follow-up email saying,

you know, alternative votes is probably a better term than fake votes.

Adding a smiley emoji.

You should go to the linguist on this one.

Plotting a coup to seize power.

Hand clap emoji.

You know?

Wait, what's the proper emoji?

You know, actually, if you want to be quote-unquote compassionate, it seems to me that the only way to explain all of that as the actions of rational, cognitively sound human beings is that they really do believe that we need a complete revolution in the same way as the United States broke away from Britain.

The idea is that we need to just blow it all up and start again, except that really it was all just the megalomaniacal notions of Trump personally and craven people following him.

So the compassion doesn't really work, but I'm trying to make it clear in some way that these are actual human beings and try to understand them.

And nevertheless, it simply doesn't work.

Is it a revolution or is it just all about dealing with that baby and trying to base your career on that?

And we're seeing all these memoirs coming out where people try to explain why they did it.

Well, but when we, when we have,

my thing when I read that, because like when you have these,

the words, the phrase smoking gun is always what comes up.

I mean, what do they want?

They have them on tape saying, can you find me 11,000 votes?

They have this guy with the smiley thing.

I mean,

and I understand.

You know, Merrick Garland has a big decision here as the Attorney General of the United States, whether to call a grand jury.

I just,

I get the argument, why not to?

Because they're going to be crying their magateers if their boy is in jail.

Let me ask you this.

Just imagine this scenario and tell me your reaction.

What happens if they actually do go to court, which they should, in my opinion, because yes,

what will happen if we don't, if we prosecute him?

What will happen if you don't?

I mean,

there will be subsequent attempts.

How do I know this?

Because he's already attempted it subsequently.

Right.

He's already doing it again.

Yeah.

Okay.

So what if they did this and won the case?

Because if you guys bring this, you've got to win the case.

He's in jail.

My theory, the Republicans would secretly love it.

I think they would fucking love it.

Because he's out of the way.

Not our fault.

The way Arab countries secretly loved it when Israel would bomb Iraq or Iran.

Right.

I mean,

there's something to it.

There's a lot of Republicans who, just, if you talk to them privately, can't stand the guy.

I wish he would just go away.

I don't know if they want him shackled, but they wouldn't be totally disappointed.

No, they can pretend that they're persecuted, which is what they love to do more than any other.

They would fundraise well off of it.

Absolutely.

And meanwhile, it'd be like when he was off Twitter.

I think, you know, but to the substance of this, it's like

he's got Truth Social now.

Not in jail, he doesn't.

he'll have he'll have he'll have someone send out his truths for him um i think like poll servino oh

too soon for that

i didn't i did this

i didn't mean that it's been a tough week so don't talk about that

we really should take a moment

i think on the substantive point though you know the merit garland situation is really It's crazy complex, right?

I mean, like, first of all, I don't know if it's as solid a case because obviously evidence is not permissible in a criminal trial versus a congressional hearing.

And then, of course, all the political factors that come with it.

The real remedy for this is our Constitution.

And they had a second impeachment trial around this issue.

And Congress, frankly, punted the issue.

They said they didn't want to deal with it.

They didn't want to pursue necessarily the remedy of prohibiting him from running from office again, which they could have done in an impeachment trial.

And so that's what the system's checks and balances truly are.

That said, Garland can go forward with this.

He will have to, because Congress can't charge someone with a crime.

Congress can't do that.

They're laying out the case.

They're showing the blueprint.

But if only the Justice Department can do this.

And Merrick Garland, his statement was the Justice Department is moving urgently

to

I get it why we're having the hearings first to bring to justice everybody who's criminally responsible.

This is the key phrase, criminally.

Now,

obstructing a joint session of Congress,

I think that would be fairly easy to prove in court.

Now, of course, if you get someone on the jury who's just a dyed-in-the-wool Trumper,

that's the problem that Chris was talking about.

Yeah.

That's the problem, but that's also our system, right?

And you have to go with the system.

You've got to try.

But it's sad that the importance of all of this is probably more for history and just for the matter of principle than in affecting who would vote for the man if he ran again and how people who are aligned with him feel.

It seems to me that no matter how this comes out, including Trump winding up behind bars, that actually he would still have the same amount of fans.

It would not affect who would vote for him because this belief in him has become a kind of religion.

I don't know what that is.

Would it really affect the way people felt about him and whether or not people voted for him if this came out?

Yes.

Exactly the way you were hoping.

Elections are one on the margins.

Exactly.

And we see this.

There is a certain, it is not a large percentage of Republicans who have been affected by the January 6th hearings, but it could be enough.

It's like 6%.

And more than that of independents.

You put that together, that's an election.

But do you mean them saying that they hope that he won't run or that they wouldn't vote for him?

Because they're not going to be able to do that.

No, no, no.

That's a thing.

They say they hope he won't, but they still will.

But they would vote for him if it was a

binary.

They hate the Democrats.

Yeah, it's a binary choice for a lot.

But no, I think Bill's right, though.

You have to look it through a couple of different prisms, right?

Like, one is you sit on the, you watch these focus groups of Trump voters, people who vote for him, who say, I'm just so tired of it.

Like, they watch these hearings, I don't want to deal with this anymore.

Let's move on.

So that could potentially hamper him in a primary.

But let's say he does win a primary, which

he's probably the favorite to do it if he runs again.

Choices between him and the choice between him and Biden.

I do think on the margins, I mean, look, 2020 was a test run of this.

On the margins, there are enough people in the middle who will flip to Biden.

But more to that, there are a lot of people on the Republican side, in 2020 specifically, who voted for down-ballot Republican candidates but did not vote for Trump.

And when you're talking about an election that's decided by 10,000 votes in one state, 20,000 in another, that matters.

And I think Trump is...

inherently a weak general election candidate for Republican voters.

All right, well, these elections are coming up in three months as the midterms.

One of the candidates in Georgia is Herschel Walker.

People know him as

some Herschel Walker fans.

Yeah,

he was a great player, but I got to tell you, football is a rough sport

because this guy,

I mean, the Republican ability to nominate people who have zero interest in how government works, or really, in Herschel's case, anything.

Herschel has been commenting on scientific matters this year.

This is what he said

this month.

He said, since we don't control the air, our good air decided to float over China's bad air.

So when China gets our good air, their bad air got to move.

So it moves over to our good airspace, then now we've got to clean that back up.

That's him on climate change.

And?

This is what he said about evolution a few months ago.

He said, at one time, science said man came from apes, did it not?

If that is true, why are there still apes?

Think about it.

And notice it's at one time science said that.

It doesn't say it anymore.

Well, Herschel has a new book called Think About It.

You've heard of Bill Nye, the science guy?

This is Herschel Walker, the science talker.

Would you like to hear some of the things that he's...

Oh, I mean, some of these.

For example, on alien life, the planet Pluto must be populated with animals, otherwise, why is it named after a dog?

Think about it.

On the Earth, anyone who thinks the Earth is flat has never seen a mountain.

Think about it.

Fossils.

These are the remains of animals from a long time ago who died after turning into a rock.

Time travel.

Time Time travel is possible, but you can only go one way into the future, and you can only do it one second at a time.

Think about it.

Pollination.

Pollination.

Flowers can't have sex, so they make bees carry their load to the sexiest sunflower and bust a nut in its face.

Think about it.

Oh, the human reproductive cycle.

It could take up to six days after sex for the sperm and the egg to join up and start a baby, thus allowing the male time to get away.

Think about it.

Molecules.

Molecules are made up when two atoms come together.

Oh man, I just realized molecules are gay.

Think about it.

Oh, and the equator.

The equator divides the earth into a top and a bottom.

Oh man, I just realized the earth is gay too.

All right, so.

John,

I partly did that because I read what you said about Herschel.

You said it's hard to imagine Republicans backing a white candidate so profoundly and shamelessly unsuited for the role.

Really?

Marjorie Taylor Greene?

No.

Sarah Palin, Donald Trump.

I honestly think that two of those people, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Sarah Palin, could at least fake it, or in Sarah Palin's case, were on their way to being able to fake it in a way that Herschel Walker shows no sign of being able to.

Well, Donald Trump is actually directly comparable, and he's the one who seems to have been primarily responsible for giving Walker the tap to be a kind of sepia version of him.

And I think it's really

tragic in that I really can't help thinking that part of it was the idea that his blackness would take a certain number of votes away from the black Raphael Warnick.

And it's a shame because if anybody feels that it's wrong to call Walker out for being profoundly unqualified for the office out of a sense that it's racist, then I must say that I worry.

I imagine that there's going to be this black person standing up there in the role of a senator, and he would lose an argument with a box of hair and nevertheless, is being proposed as a serious person.

And he's black.

The optics of that would be truly awful, and I would hate for people to use kid gloves with Walker out of a sense that it would be wrong to zero in too much on his flaws because he's the member of a previously oppressed race.

I just think that it's a shame.

You have to call it as you see it sometimes.

And you, Drew, so well.

And we do seem to always be these days pretending things

are not true out of racial sensitivity.

Or, I mean, I see with monkeypox, you know, it's, I think 99% is, what do we call it now?

Men.

Men having sex with men community.

But they don't want to make it a gay thing.

Didn't we see this movie with AIDS?

Shouldn't we protecting people from the disease and not the language?

Still sort of grappling.

I'm still grappling with the image of a bee busting a nut on a flower.

But I do agree that you kind of lose,

you do lose a little bit of the public policy importance, the communication importance, especially in a complicated and harrowing health crisis if you can't use just simple direct language.

And I think our health professionals particularly, and this is not just about language,

if you look back at just the handling of the COVID pandemic, they've been so consumed with trying not to offend

or trying to not dissuade certain communities from doing certain things and being overly cautious when all people really want is the goddamn truth.

Tell me like it is, and I can protect my care.

You know, it's interesting.

It's interesting about history.

We say we're supposed to learn from history.

If you read a little bit of history, and I don't mean in any sophisticated way, just read a biography of Franklin D.

Roosevelt, read a biography of Thurgood Marshall.

There's a dog that doesn't bark, there's something missing.

Those very earnest people were not concerned with what the names of things are the way we are.

And looking at this stuff that's going on now, you'd think that we're missing something now, that they were missing something.

There's something that we could teach them, that you need to shift the language around in order to make life better for people.

But notice that there's no indication that that happens.

You change the names of things, you shame people for calling things certain things, and life goes on, and it doesn't help anybody that you change the name.

What were those people missing?

I think we need to go back to what they did, which is do things rather than talk about the names of things.

But you, more than anyone,

write so beautifully on the idea that

words do shape ideas.

And ideas shape actions.

This is the problem.

They shape ideas for about 10 seconds in the sense of giving things different names.

If you don't like what is thought of something, and then you give it a different name, well, after about 10 minutes, the gnats that had settled on this come and they go

and they settle back on that name.

So you have crippled, handicapped, disabled, differently abled.

Next year, it'll be something else.

Let's go back to what we were talking about five minutes ago.

The B?

No.

No.

I just can't get up.

No.

Dead TV stars.

No.

No.

Insurrection.

Okay?

The Democrats want to call what happened at the Capitol an insurrection because that word, and I think it was an insurrection, leads you to criminality.

Trump is suing CNN because he doesn't want them to keep calling it the big lie.

They call it stop the steal.

See, these are all the words that you put.

What do we call people?

Now, I read 538, yes,

has counted all the governors, the the people who are up, senators, congressmen, secretaries of state, all the people who are up for office in three months.

120 are election deniers.

We have all these terms.

Is it the steal?

Is it the lie?

Is it the insurrection?

Is it, what do we call people who are, I think election denier, I think that is the right term.

But they're going to say that's just your language

when you can't agree on the.

I mean, it's tough, right?

Like, I'm in an industry where these things really do matter.

I mean we want to be able to convey a story

in a sense that the readers can trust it and feel like we're not putting our fingers on the scale in any sense.

And you know I take Chris's point in the earlier panel, like we have to earn reader trust back.

It's an existential crisis that we don't have it and we've lost it.

I will say, you know, these are common editorial debates.

Like how do you actually properly define the people who stormed the Capitol?

And do all those people who were there fit that common definition?

It's not so easy.

And And I think that sometimes is why we end up struggling to find the right terminology.

But yeah, I mean, it would be nice and convenient if we could all agree on certain words to describe certain things.

It's just, it's difficult.

There are always going to be competing terms.

And just the idea that the term that you use is going to change the way people think about something is overblown.

It doesn't work for long.

And so one now that I'm actually adhering to out of one, caution, two, the fact that I have bigger fish to fry, and three, I kind of understand.

Slave, enslaved person.

So, slave implies that it's this person's permanent state as if you're reading Aristotle.

Enslaved person shows that it's a human being who is in the condition of being enslaved.

I am quite sure that in 20 years, we will be teaching young people that an enslaved person was not inherently enslaved.

It's the concept that has to change, not the name of it.

I just think that we need to pay a little less attention to it because, very quickly, it's easy to talk about, no offense, Sam, Sam, but it's easy to talk about names of things, and it's easy, and I'm not accusing you of this of shaming people for using the wrong words.

It's easy.

You've got Twitter, boop, you suck.

It's very easy to do that.

It's harder to actually change the world, but life has always been harder.

It's so stupid

to make it what they call homeless or person experiencing homelessness.

What does it matter if you're living on the sidewalk?

Do something about that.

Yeah.

It's so silly.

What a stupid country.

Anyway, great to be back.

Time for New Rule, everybody.

New Rules.

Okay.

New Rule Democrats must admit that while this picture makes Joe Biden look way too old to be the 24 nominee, it also makes Mayor Pete look too young.

New Rule, now that the hipster tech company Shopify is laying off 14% of its workforce, they have to tell me who's getting the axe.

Is it these guys playing foosball?

Or the ones in the room full of stuffed bears?

Or the ones in the wooden teepees?

What about the guy in the hammock room?

The guy in the employee jam room.

The guy riding around the office on a go-kart.

Where are these poor laid-off workers going to find another work environment like like that?

All right.

Preschool.

New rules, now that Russia says that relations with America are so bad it doesn't want to be with us anymore and is going to move out of the International Space Station, fine, whatever, go.

And don't let the docking module hit you in the ass.

You know what?

Enjoy your new space station with your whore girlfriend because I found a younger, hotter astronaut on Tinder and I'll be zero gravity banging her in our old bed.

Call it a rebound if you want.

I don't give a shit.

They're twice the cosmonaut you'll ever be.

I know.

For a best performance in a dramatic

new rule, the airport smoking lounge must be renamed the Shame Zoo.

Go ahead, kids, tap the glass.

They can't hurt you.

Some of them will even eat knickered gum right out of your hand.

New rule, Sylvester Stallone has to come up with a second thing to do in a picture besides, I'm going to punch you.

Robert Downey, punch.

Arnold, punch.

De Niro, punch.

Stapham, punch.

Bruce Willis, Travolta.

Michael Douglas, Michael Jordan, Kevin Spacey, Rod Stewart, some guy, some baby, a statue.

And here he is punching Don King, but not Chris Rock, because...

Chris is such a great guy.

No one would ever...

Oh, okay.

And finally, New Rule, the recent report that informed us that in November of this year the population of the Earth will hit 8 billion is not good news.

And those who regard it as such should be treated for TikTok brain.

The Secretary General of the United Nations, of all people, said that welcoming our 8 billionth person was an occasion to celebrate our diversity.

Yes, what a comfort that people of all races will be contributing to an already unsustainable carbon footprint and choking and starving equally.

Have you seen what has been happening with the climate in recent years?

Did you see England last week?

England is pretty far north, but the runways are melting.

Our farmland is shrinking due to scorching temperatures and drought.

One out of four people on earth is food insecure, what we used to call hungry.

There's another one.

And billions face some form of water scarcity.

Water isn't the only thing we're running out of.

Clean air, quality soil, rainforests, wetlands, the precious metals that make our phones work.

We're even running out of sand.

Sand.

Which may not seem important, but without it you can't make concrete or glass, like for windows, so so you can look outside and see the world ending.

And

all of this is not unrelated to there being ever more people on Earth who tend to use things.

Tracy Stone-Manning is our director of the Bureau of Land Management, and she said, if there were fewer of us, we would have less impact.

We must consume less, and more importantly, we must breed fewer consuming humans.

Yes, I thought this was a duh.

And

until very recently, it was.

But now there's a growing movement of people more worried about population decline.

Decline.

That's what we should be celebrating.

But Elon Musk says...

The biggest problem the world will face in 20 years is population collapse.

Oh, come on, of all the excuses not to wear a condom.

That one said.

Population collapse?

Has he been to Disney World on a Saturday?

The only thing that's collapsing is the Dumbo ride under the weight of all those obese eight-year-olds.

I'm not worried about the population collapsing.

I'm worried about the glaciers collapsing and the food chain and the electrical grid.

Look, I'm a big Musk fan, but I have no idea what he's talking about when he says Earth could sustain many times its current population and the ecosystem would be fine.

It's not fine now.

Nature World News just reported an unprecedented global extinction crisis with more than a million species expected to die off in the next few decades.

The bees are all dying, and the coral reefs, fish populations in the ocean are collapsing.

What the fuck are these people talking about?

America's population is now about 335 million and there's a supposedly smart guy named Matthew Iglesias who wrote a book called One Billion Americans, arguing there should be a billion of us, a billion Americans.

Insert your own traffic on the 405 joke here.

His argument is basically that the country with the most people has the most power and that should be us and why not we have plenty of space.

Okay.

For the millionth time, and let me repeat for the thinking impaired.

Yes, we do have space.

Point conceded.

It's not about space.

It's about resources.

Didn't we just run out of baby formula?

Was the problem not enough babies?

Yes, there's space on Earth for more people, but somehow they all seem to want to get on this train.

You can make a billion Americans, but they're still not going to want to live in North Dakota.

And even if they did, where are all these new residents of the greater Bismarck metro area going to eat?

Soylent Greece?

The famous theory put forth in 1798 by Thomas Malthus that population grows exponentially, but water and food do not,

has not really changed.

We've improved food growing, yes, but it's still finite, and you can't grow water.

The planet's resources are finite, but our predilection to always be down to fuck apparently is not.

Scientists say it would require almost an entire other Earth to produce the resources we need to sustain the population we have now.

It would take five Earths.

to support the population if everyone consumed like the average American, which most of the world wants to do.

To deny these facts makes you, I don't know, some kind of a flat earther of population science.

There just is no there there to the argument that we can keep adding people with no consequences.

The argument, as far as I can tell, is the same one people use for Bitcoin.

We haven't thought it through, but who cares?

It seems like it'll be good for business.

And business is affected by declining birth rates.

Japan is often cited as a frightful harbinger of things to come in other countries.

You see, for some reason, some years ago in Japan, the men decided to stop having sex and just masturbate on the subway.

The ensuing decline in birth rates was routinely called a population crisis, but A, it's not a crisis.

Japan is doing fine.

And B, the crisis is really just one of GDP growth.

Yes, a falling birth rate does cause some problems because we need fresh new participants entering the workforce to fund the retirements of the previous generation of workers.

And yes, if birth rates decline too much and people keep living longer, the result is a society of the aged and enfeebled, or as it's known today, Congress.

But isn't running out of water an even bigger problem?

Finiteness, as a concept, has not been repealed.

We've forced upon ourselves an economic model where businesses need ever more customers, but more customers means more carbon, more waste, more plastic in the ocean, more mouths to feed.

Let's figure out a way to be happy without always having to grow and grow and grow and always keep growing.

Go to to be a fucking alien on a spaceship.

Stop spawning, people.

Climate activists shouldn't be chaining themselves to trees.

They should be blocking couples from entering restaurants where they play the violin.

All right, that's our show.

I'll be at the Chicago Theater in Chicago.

September 10th at the Uptown Theater in Kansas City, Missouri.

September 11th at the Fox in Detroit.

October 8th, I want to thank Sam Stein, John McWhorter, and Chris Cromo.

Now go to YouTube and join us on Overtime.

Thank you.

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.