Ep. #604: Danny Strong, James Kirchick, Krystal Ball

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

Start the clock.

Thank you, people.

Thank you very much.

How are you?

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

Please,

I know why you're happy.

It's Father's Day this weekend.

Is that exciting to me?

Really?

Oh, God.

I've always avoided it, but no, I'm.

It's Sunday.

You know, and since mothers are now called birthing persons.

Are fathers ejaculating persons?

Is that where we're going with this?

No, it's a big day for a lot of people.

Nick Cannon over at Hit.

What?

Very sweet story.

No, his kids, they all chipped in $5

and they got him a Lamborghini.

A lot of children.

Oh, you know who's excited about Father's Day is Herschel Walker.

You're following him

in Georgia.

He's the candidate.

He's the Republican candidate down in Georgia for the Senate.

And they keep finding out that he has more and more secret children.

At least we know who's using all the baby formula.

No,

it's true.

On Tuesday we found out he had a secret son.

Then on Wednesday we found out he had another secret son with a different woman and also a secret daughter with another woman.

And Trump said, you know, when I called that guy in Georgia and said, I need you to fine me 11,000 votes, I didn't mean make them.

You know.

And

it kind of looks bad for Herschel because, you know, he spent a lot of time talking about how bad it is to be in a fatherless home.

But he says, you know, he is protecting the sanctity of marriage by avoiding it altogether.

Well, he's one of those, he's a strong right, you know, he's strongly anti-abortion.

He

believes life begins when your date falls asleep and you grab your clothes and walk out.

That's

I kid.

He did get, Herschel got some good news today.

He is being endorsed on Turk Biden's laptop.

So that

the Bidens, that's that's, oh, Joe's in trouble.

Low ratings.

But well, the economy is in the shitter.

You know this.

I mean, you're in a good mood.

I'm very glad to see that because stock market crashed, or is crashing.

Inflation

off the charts.

Shortages and everything.

Are we sure it's not Russia who's putting the sanctions on us?

Now, on the bright side with the economy, that guy at the office who will never stop talking about crypto has stopped talking about crypto.

So

I mean you know the economy is bad when Johnny Depp breaks up all the furniture in a room and then spends the rest of the night carefully putting it back together.

So

we also had another week of the hearings about January 6th and

I hope that means you're against it, but not the hearings, January 6th.

And yes, amazing stuff here.

A lot of it was about how the kind of pressure that Vice President Pence at the time was up against.

On the morning of January 6th, Trump called him and said, you better do this for me.

And Pence said he wouldn't.

And Trump called him a wimp and a pussy.

I cannot wait for the movie version of this.

When the movie comes out, I don't know who will play Mike Pence.

But there's going to be a scene where Mike Pence is like, yes, maybe all my life you're right.

I was a wimp and a pussy,

but not today.

Yeah, it's going to be big.

Well, you know,

it's primary season.

It's getting nasty out there with the political attacks.

You know Lauren Boebert?

You know this one?

She's a beauty.

She's Marjorie Taylor Greene's wingman

in Congress.

She's a gunnut from Colorado.

And a PAC is now saying, running an ed, I guess, that says that before in her life, she was at one time an escort.

We don't know exactly when this was,

but Lauren Boebert says there was a time in her life when she was stupid and immature.

So that doesn't help much.

I'm kidding.

I kid.

Legal department, she's denying this.

This is just what the PAC is running, okay?

All right.

But I don't think she was a good escort if she was, because

a guy once asked her for around the world, and she said, are you crazy?

We'll fall off the end.

All right.

We've got a great show.

We have Crystal Ball and James Kurchik.

But first up, he is a writer, actor, and director known for the films Recount and Game Changes.

Lettuce Project Dopesick is an acclaim limited series on Hulu about the opioid epidemic starring Michael Keaton.

Please welcome Danny Strong.

Danny, how are you, sir?

So glad we're back to shaking hands.

Oh, that's nice.

Yes.

All right.

Well, listen, I just first want to say to you, your ability to turn serious subjects into grand entertainments is very impressive.

Thank you.

Because you don't take on easy things.

You take on elections.

Now you're the opioid crisis.

And I just want to ask you, first of all,

everybody should see this because it's about something that's still going on big time in this country.

Sometimes movies, TV shows inspire real change in the real world.

Has the light you've shown on this done that at all?

Yeah, it's been really rewarding and exciting to see that there's actually been some impact here.

I mean I've done projects where you thought they were going to have impact and they ended up having no impact.

But in this case, we've seen the names come down, the SACCWAR name come down from multiple museums right after the city.

Okay, so the SACWAS, if people don't know, that's the people

the head of Purdue Pharmaceuticals who were selling mostly OxyContin is the opioid we're talking about, right?

Yeah, they're the family that owned and micromanaged Purdue Pharma,

which brought the country OxyContin, which was all based upon a lie.

The whole drug was a con, that it was non-addictive, when in fact it was highly addictive, and this drug is what created the opioid crisis.

It wasn't a lie that it was fun.

Well, that's, you know, it was fun.

It's fun for some, but for others, I don't know.

I mean,

the reason always, I mean, the bottom line, I'm not saying these people are innocent, they're not, they probably should be in jail, but the reason why, you know, drugs are popular is they do work.

I mean,

let's just say drugs, you know, kids don't do drugs.

In the case of OxyCotton, it was,

you know, marketed as a non-addictive narcotic.

And so drug, or doctors, were prescribing it to patients thinking it was safe, that it was revolutionary, when in fact it was the opposite.

It was highly addictive.

So you think the doctors didn't know?

I think some did for sure, but I don't think it was doctors knew in this widespread way.

I think there were corrupt doctors.

At some point they did.

When people started begging and robbing drugstores for it.

I would say these doctors should have known.

If they were feigning they didn't, you know, especially when you've got a plan at a certain point where he's clearly addicted.

But in your show, the doctor, Michael Keaton, himself gets hooked on it.

Yeah.

Okay, well, that's the thing He knew.

Well, I mean, doctors,

they have a lot of access to drugs.

You know, you don't have to beg anybody prescription.

Sure.

You write your own name.

It depends on the state you're in.

But yes, there were doctors that absolutely got addicted to this drug.

Yeah.

Or B, you know, it's really interesting.

Doctors do a lot, again, because it's right there.

Sure, and some.

genuinely just become addicted to it.

Yeah.

But there was also a push by hospitals to push doctors into prescribing opioids to make make sure patients didn't leave in pain so they wouldn't get bad reviews online.

So there's been a pressure from hospitals onto doctors to prescribe opioids.

Right.

So should the family, the Sackler family, I know they paid a $6 billion

fine fine.

Okay.

After they made $10 billion?

Probably more.

Right.

Yeah, probably more.

And corporations do this.

People dying, it's collateral damage to profits very often, and they write it into the, okay, well, $6 billion, will still make $4 billion, you know.

So should they go to jail?

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

There are members of the Sackwork family that absolutely belong in jail.

One of their big talking points is that, because Purdue Pharma, the company that they micromanaged and ran, has pled guilty to three felonies and $9 billion in fines.

But none of the individuals that ran that company, i.e.

the Sackworth family, none of them have ever been charged with a crime.

And, you know, crimes don't commit themselves.

There are people that are making these decisions.

It's a great injustice that's.

It's really a rerun of what we've seen with tobacco.

At some point, they knew.

Sure.

It was a story.

It's more outrageous than the tobacco story because they knew immediately out of the gate it was a con.

They created fake blood charts, fake studies, fake slogans.

And let's be honest, none of this is possible without partners in government.

You know?

Absolutely.

A great part of this show is the revolving door, showing the revolving door.

Yeah.

Well, it's one of the most egregious things that I think we see in this show is how members of the government that are supposed to be overseeing and regulating Purdue Pharma, in fact, give them everything they want and then go work for them at a higher salary.

I mean, that literally happened.

The gentleman's name was Curtis Wright.

He should be in jail, too, in my opinion.

I believe he's committed a great crime on the American people by what he's done by

permitting this label that said the drug was less addictive.

It wasn't.

And then he goes and works for Purdue Pharma 18 months later.

Yeah.

And they approve things.

I mean, a senator in this country once said, you can get any result you want from a survey, from a testing of drugs and so forth, if you write a big enough check.

And also, I think most people don't, sound like Trump, most people don't know.

Most people don't know this.

But this is a real one.

Most people don't know that there's only two countries in the world that allow

direct to consumer advertising for prescription drugs.

New Zealand, I don't know why that's the other one.

But we're the other one.

Two countries out of the whole world think this is a great idea to tell people in ads on television, tell your doctor, well, then he's just a pusher.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You know, hey, Doc, I saw something on TV that makes me want to just walk through a wheat field with a smile on my face.

Can I get that?

You know?

So

I'm just saying, so like when people have questions about the way we handled COVID and the pharmaceutical industry, we're not crazy to have questions.

The corruption in this industry is all, I'm not saying they're all corrupt or that we all, everything we did was wrong or that it wasn't a real thing.

Of course it was.

But you know, questions are valid in this industry.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, especially when you've got the history of this drug that created this national crisis, people were lied to, cities were devastated, communities devastated, ravaged, and it's going to create massive distrust when you find out, oh, wait, what we were lied about was actually approved by the government, and then some people took jobs at the place that were lying.

So, yes, of course that's going to create a level of distrust, particularly in the case of the opioid crisis that created such devastation.

And you talk about that devastation, and you presented very well.

What do you make of the fact that most of that devastation, I mean, I could read you chapter and verse the stats, but

you know this, and

take my word for it.

It is overwhelmingly MAGA country.

It's Trump people, Trump counties.

That's who takes these opioids.

What is your assessment of why that is?

Well, a lot of it is just these communities, right?

That there are,

you know, relating the communities themselves to MAGA, to me, where I see the tie-in to to MAGA is these communities devastated by a lie that was condoned by the government.

So when someone like a candidate like Trump comes in and says, hey, tear it all down, they're the ones that are angriest at the government.

They've had their lives destroyed by this drug.

They've had their families destroyed.

So a message like that is going to resonate really well because that's how they feel.

And so, you know, you get into, did Trump create the Republican Party or did the modern day Republican Party or did that party, did he just follow what they wanted?

And in this case,

it makes perfect sense that one would lead to the other when you see the progression of what the opioid therapists did.

But again, people are in pain everywhere.

But like West Virginia was Trump's best state and the most addicted to opioids.

Don't you think it has something to do with the fact that they're like Elvis?

You know, they didn't think they were drug addicts because a doctor was prescribing it.

You know, it was like the American way to be a drug addict.

Not these hippies smoking pot in the park.

Yeah.

The doctor wrote this restructure.

And that's, I mean, that's really why it's more evil, because you don't even think you're doing something bad.

Well, you think it's right.

You think it's safe, right?

Now, in the case of Purdue, they specifically targeted these communities because these communities were filled with people with labor-intensive jobs, you know, coal mining, logging, farming, and they got hurt more on the job.

So it was very calculated by Purdue in those earliest days of OxyContin.

And that sort of prescribing habits in those areas and the propaganda that the drug was safe had its longest effect on them.

So it's not an accident that these were the neighborhoods that were initially targeted.

It was completely calculated.

And now we have fentanyl.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, opioid is, that's tired.

Yeah.

Fentanyl is a lot of fun.

It keeps spiraling into more dangerous, more dangerous drugs, right?

So the OxyContin.

I never even heard of fentanyl.

Yeah.

When Prince OD'd.

Yeah.

The first time I ever heard the word.

Sure.

Sure.

And that was only five years ago.

And now it's everywhere, right?

Yeah, now it's extremely dangerous.

You could die from taking one pill because it's laced with so much fentanyl.

You don't even know there's fentanyl in it.

And this is just where this all began in 1996.

And it keeps spiraling as these tentacles keep growing and growing into different directions.

And the destruction of it is truly staggering.

And it feels like it's never going to end because it keeps mutating into new things.

And now we're in the fentanyl crisis.

All right, Danny.

Sorry to be depressed.

No, no, no.

It has to be talked about.

I mean, the numbers are worse than ever.

Over 100,000 people every year.

I mean, it's not.

Yeah, well, and the pandemic exasperated everything because people were alone and relapsing.

I will say there is something that's hopeful, which is that there's an effective drug for helping people overcome opioid use disorder, which is Suboxone, a form of buprenorphine.

Then you're, yeah, it's like methadone.

Much easier to take.

It's a prescription.

Better not to start being a heroin addict than to be a methadone addict.

Sure, but better to be on Spoxone than be on heroin or to be on painkillers.

You know, it's very manageable.

You can also, some people can weed themselves off of it.

So there's a path forward, but we need greater access for that, for people to be able to even get treatment.

Just smoke paw.

Thank you, Danny.

Appreciate it.

It's a great show.

Good luck with the awards.

All right, let's greet our panel.

Always like to give the kids some good advice

before we start.

All right.

He's a columnist for Tablet magazine and author of the New York Times best-selling book, Secret City, The Hidden History of Gay Washington James Kirchik.

Jamie, good to see you.

And she's a co-host of two podcasts, Breaking Points with Crystal and Cigar and Crystal

Kyle.

Sorry.

You know.

And friends.

I'm bad at names.

Crystal Ball is over here.

Crystal Ball.

All right.

So

I'm going to talk about the hearings again at first because I know we talked about it last week, but I don't care.

I still don't think people understand how giant this thing is.

And to me, the headline was,

they knew it.

They all knew what they were doing was wrong, and they did it anyway.

And here's the stat.

54% of people now in this country, people, the people, remember them, think Trump should be charged with a crime, including

one guy in our audience does, so that's another one.

Including 21% of Republicans think he should be charged with the crime.

I don't even know what we're doing this for if he's not.

So the question that's in my mind is, gosh, if we only had some sort of Justice Department.

But the committee says they will not refer this to the Justice Department.

Why?

Why isn't that moving into that realm?

And if we don't, it will just happen again, no?

I think that there is a fundamental lack of seriousness from the Democrats when it comes to solving the problems not only that led us to January 6th, which I actually think is the deeper issue and the deeper question here.

How did we get to a place where a good percentage of the country is convinced the election was stolen, where they would listen to this maniac, where they actually think that they're patriots storming the Capitol to restore democracy?

How did we get there?

And then you can can see that they're not actually serious about how existential this threat is by the fact that they are propping up candidates who believe this nonsense.

I mean, in Pennsylvania, this is what's actually really scary.

That's not really my question.

I mean, yes, if a guy robs a liquor store, let's look into why he did that.

But also, he needs to be arrested for robbing the liquor store.

Let's look into why.

What was in his mind and like he was poor and

we could understand the consequences of this and I think that Donald Trump is a menace and he may may have committed crimes.

But let's think about the consequences of prosecuting a former president who might run again.

You know, Gerald Ford, I'm not saying Gerald Ford in 1975, you know, after 574, in the Watergate crisis, he did the right thing by pardoning Richard Nixon.

You know, that was a long national nightmare, and it ended.

And I don't, and I, and I, I would be very careful about how we approach this.

Nixon did not try to undermine democracy itself.

He was born in the break.

Well, he was breaking the law.

law.

Yes, he broke the Trump broke the law.

Here's a couple of things.

So first of all, I actually have no issue with Trump being prosecuted, and I have a lot of issue with elites being left unaccountable for the crimes that they commit, number one.

Number two, that's not going to solve our problem.

Do you think that Ron DeSantis is going to be way better than Donald Trump?

Yes,

he's not going to be the enemy.

That's why democracy in the same way.

I'd like to answer that.

Yes, I do.

I don't know how you could say that.

Because he's literally modeled himself in the footsteps of Donald Trump.

I mean, this is just the way that these are the same.

He hasn't shown contempt for Democratic processes.

He hasn't shown contempt for Democratic processes.

He's not certifiably insane.

That's a great one to start off with.

You know what Ron DeSantis won't be doing?

He won't be poop tweeting every day.

He won't be like having feuds with Bette Midler on Twitter.

He's not an insane person.

But I think you have to ask yourself the question, Bill.

How did we get to this place?

Well, we just went through that.

Trump is a symptom of a deep robot in our society also committed the crime symptom he robbed the liquor store that's like can we just how do we how do if we actually care about restoring democracy how do we do this it's not mutually exclusive we can address the underlying causes that led to Trump and if necessary prosecute him for what he did I'm not I remain unconvinced that that's necessary but there's two steps but if your question is why aren't Democrats doing that I think they're not fundamentally serious about this because you see the way that they're propping up

candidates who are you know all in nut jobs you know

they could be that you're making that we can't prosecute this guy for this serious crime that he committed because it would spark unrest or something that's a very dangerous road to go down and it's very faint-hearted I think and pusiles

we have to be scared of what the criminals will do if we charge them with being criminals that can't that's not really the way to go I've covered you know banana republic type countries well now this is one well

there are there are a lot of banana republicens, this is true, in our country.

But using the justice system to prosecute your political enemies, it's a very

important thing.

But it's not a political system

problem.

Whatever party did this, I would be saying the same thing.

What if somebody like Erdogan in Turkey did this?

What if we were reading about Erdogan and we knew that he had threatened the life of his own vice president in that country?

What if we knew that that vice president of Turkey had to be shuffled underground for five hours because the mob was after him?

What if we found out that he called up the state of Anatolia and said to the governor, I need you to find 11,000 votes in your state so that I can win this election?

What would we be writing and thinking about Erdogan or the guy in the Philippines or anywhere who did things like this?

The State Department would be condemning it.

Sure.

What if that guy still hadn't conceded the election, as Trump still hasn't conceded the last election?

What would we be saying?

I think you're 100% correct that.

Oh, good.

Look, people should commit crime should be charged with crime.

I just think it's a little delusional to think that's going to fix the problem.

I mean,

how does that fix the core problem of

the science?

But that's what I'm saying.

I'm just saying, look, it's not a magic bullet.

We have to delve into how we got to this place in the first place.

And so I would love to see the same energy that's being applied to the January 6th Commission.

I'd love to see that energy to, say, the people who have rigged our system, the monopolists, the price gougers, the Wall Street ghouls.

Where is that energy as well?

Right, okay.

Well,

you're right.

That should be in the mix, too.

But your premise here that

why should we prosecute people for crimes?

I said we shouldn't prosecute them.

I said,

I don't think that that's going to solve the fundamental problem in our system.

Would you say that about criminal justice in general?

Of course, sure, yeah.

That it doesn't solve the problem?

This is a symptom, of course, yes.

It doesn't.

That is dealing with a symptom.

Arresting criminals and putting them in jail does not help the problem of crime.

We have just a lot of people.

She should run for DA.

I don't know.

I just think it's

very fast

to look at everything going on in society today and say that it's just Trump.

And if we just get Trump out of the root way, everything will be fine.

Well, we should...

Does anyone have a doubt that he would do it again?

One of the people who testified this week, this Michael Luddig, Michael Slowtalker Luddig.

Excellent fair.

Well, he does talk slow.

He said Trump and his allies and supporters are a clear and present danger to American democracy.

He said, not because of what they did, although that's true and they should be prosecuted and prosecution does stop crime, but because they're going to do it again.

Does anyone have any doubt that Trump, should he run, and he will,

if he lost, and he very well might,

would do this again?

No.

And it's deeply concerned.

No, no doubt.

What's deeply concerning is, have you followed what's happening in Pennsylvania?

So the guy who is the Republican nominee for governor, Mastriano, who again, this is a guy Democrats ran ads for to help him in the primary, to help him get the Republican nomination because they thought he'd be easier to beat.

Okay, in Pennsylvania, kind of an important state,

he can appoint the Secretary of State.

This was a guy who was so intimate in the sort of election insanity in Pennsylvania.

He is coming up in the January 6th testimony.

He was at the Capitol on January 6th.

And this is a guy who, now in the latest poll, is within the margin of error.

So I think it's incredibly important to take these things seriously.

I just don't happen to think that only dealing with the symptoms of what happened on January 6th and even just removing Trump is going to solve those underlying issues.

We're in in a very chaotic and scary moment right now.

For years, you can hate Trump, you can't hate the people who like him because it's half the country.

And I'll give you an example of where I'm probably with you on something this week.

There was a football coach, his name is Jack Del Rio, okay, and he called the January 6th riot a dust-up.

Now, this is a very common view that he has.

I would like to, if I could talk to Mr.

Del Rio, I think I could probably hopefully convince him a little bit that it was more than a dust-up.

He also compares it a lot to the 2020 protests that were going on after the George Floyd murder.

Okay.

I think I could also convince him there are really important differences between those two things.

And actually, the attack on the Capitol was worse.

Nevertheless, he has a right to be wrong.

Yes.

In America, you have the right to be wrong.

They fined him.

The team fined him $100,000 for this opinion.

Fining people for an opinion.

I am not down with that.

And here's what the coach of the team said.

This is his, you know, his assistant coach.

So his boss said about the guy who got fined.

He does have the right to voice his opinion as a citizen of the United States, and it most certainly is his constitutional right to do so.

Apparently not.

You know what?

This is the don't pee on my shoe and tell me it's raining.

What the fuck are you talking about?

He doesn't have a right to opinion,

and it's obviously not his right to do so.

So you say you're against free speech, but don't tell me this.

No, it's absurd.

And he should be allowed to express his opinion and people should be allowed to criticize him for it.

People can have shitty takes.

Yeah.

You know, it's not a crime.

To have a shitty take.

To have a shitty take is not a crime.

I mean, you know, there's a backdrop there too at the Washington football team.

What are they?

The commanders now.

They have, they've been under investigation for, you know, sexual harassment, rampant, all the way up to Dan Snyder.

So I also think this is a little bit of virtue signaling on their part

as they come under scrutiny for those things.

There's another sports story that is a little bit of virtue signaling.

It's

Pride Month.

I think five or six.

Is it really Pride Month?

I didn't notice.

Well,

what is this Pride Month you're talking about?

I'm going to leave it to you to explain.

So the Tampa Bay Rays baseball team, they had the Pride,

I think the rainbow attached to their uniforms for the whole month.

There are five or six pitchers, I think they're all pitchers on the team who did not want to wear it.

They gave a religious reason, which is sincere, you know, me with religion.

I mean, I think it's super stupid, but okay, you know what?

For some reason, religions have a real thing about fucking in the naughty place.

They just don't...

They're all, you know, it's just, it's funny, they all do it on the sly, but they fucking hate it.

You know, it's methinks thou doth protest too much.

Anyway, for whatever reason, I'm not sympathetic to the religion aspect.

I am sympathetic to the idea of stop making me do things your way.

You know what?

It reminds me of Mean Girls.

We all wear pink on Wednesday.

Well, I don't.

Okay?

You know what it is?

This is actually life imitating Seinfeld when Kramer didn't want to wear the AIDS ribbon.

I mean, they're...

Oh.

Oh, yeah.

And.

Wait.

So what was...

They're forcing him.

What happened in that one?

Kramer's in the AIDS walk.

Right.

And they're asking him to wear the AIDS ribbon.

He's happy to walk.

He's happy to raise muskets.

He doesn't want to wear the ribbon.

And a bunch of guys, they corner him in an alley, and they demand to know why he's not wearing the ribbon.

This is actually what's happening now in real life.

And I just have to say, as an LGBTQ plus I plus person,

whatever,

my self-worth is not dependent upon somebody else wearing a rainbow on their shoulder pads.

And the whole point of the gay rights movement was to convince people and to persuade people that gay people deserved equal rights.

And we did that.

And now it's gone from persuasion to coercion.

Making people bake cakes for a wedding, making people demonstrate their support for the Gay Pride Month.

This is absurd.

We don't need this.

We don't need this.

I think it's fucking weird for your boss to force you to participate in pride.

And if, listen, if

If people want to opt out, I can think that their politics suck.

But ultimately, how meaningless is it if your boss is forcing you to wear the patch?

And there's been this whole corporate co-optation of a lot of social justice language to cover for some of their broader sins.

And I'm not talking specifically about baseball here, but you know, you see it with Amazon, they're happy to put the Black Lives Matter hashtag up on their screen.

Meanwhile, they're abusing black and brown workers in their warehouses every single day, busting their unions, using racial slurs against them.

So you can see in the actions how much these organizations actually support social justice.

Okay, so

exciting news from the world of science this week.

I don't know if you saw this, but there was an engineer at Google who says that AI has gone sentient, meaning chatbots, you know, and a chat bot of course being anything that we talk to that isn't really real, like Suri.

Or, you know, sometimes you call up a company and ask a question and you think you're having a conversation.

You're like, oh, I'm talking to a robot here

who apparently is more knowledgeable than the person they could hire, or certainly cheaper.

Right, there you go.

Anyway, this engineer said, well, now they have gone sentient, which is scary, because I've seen too many movies where the robots get sentient and then guess who dies?

Okay.

Now, Google said, he's not right, but maybe he is.

Anyway, I think he might be onto something.

And we sure smelled a comedy bit.

So these are some ways you know if your AI has gone sentient.

Would you like to hear them?

I think any of them.

For example,

your computer keeps sexting Neil deGrasse Tyson.

It's just

a sure fire.

You ask Alexa to play Christopher Cross, and she says, what is this, 1973?

When you eat Taco Bell in the car, it automatically rolls down the window.

Okay.

Oh yeah, you know how when your TV asks, are you still watching?

It then says, because this show sucks.

Your smart soap dispenser moans before it squirts.

Your washing machine accuses Ed Sheeran of stealing the little song it plays when the load is finished.

Play it again.

If they missed it, do you have the.

Thank you.

That is an enshrined song.

Wait a second.

You ask Siri if something is wrong and she says, I don't know.

Is there?

Your teleprompter.

It tells you to go fuck itself.

Hey, wait a second.

All right.

All right.

So let's talk a little politics because I see Joe Biden, oh boy,

I mean, every midterm, the party out of power usually gets creamed.

I mean, the party in power.

But this year, I mean,

Biden's approval rating with 18 to 34 is 22%.

Among Hispanics, this is part of the base, 24%.

49% among African Americans, that's the base base.

And that's what got him the job.

So, you know, he's calling himself Hunter's Dad now.

No.

I'm just.

But there's whispers now that are getting louder and louder.

that he needs to say, I'm not running again.

Okay, I did my job.

I removed the queen from the board, or however chess works, but

Mike is kind of a drag queen type figure.

He's a very camp.

What in units?

He's a real.

Yeah.

You're right on that.

He's totally camped.

He's totally camped.

Very camp.

With the hair.

He's spitting all that ridiculous, outrageous comments all the time.

A platinum buffon, like a diner waitress?

He's basically the first first gay president.

We should be honest about it.

So glad you said it because I've been thinking it.

We've all been thinking it.

So

here's my question about Joe Biden for you two.

Has he pandered to the far left, A,

too much,

B,

too little?

Not at all.

Because AOC would say not at all.

Well, if you look at the...

Other people would say he panders way too much to the far left.

If you look at the trajectory of his presidency, at the beginning of his presidency, he did some of the things that myself as a person on the left would like him to see.

He passes the COVID relief bill, and lo and behold, he had very high approval ratings.

You're not always on the left.

Then I am on the left.

I'm not a Bernie Sanders leftist.

There's the populist economic left, and then there's the local left.

These are two separate things.

In any case, let's talk about what he's actually done.

So in the beginning of the administration, he passes that.

Very high approval rating, doing extraordinarily well.

When he puts out the left agenda and the Build Back Better, and then it fails, and he stops delivering for the American people,

that's when he he falls.

What do you mean by the left agenda in the Build Back Better?

Well, there's universal pre-K.

It's not everything that I would want.

There's no Medicare for all.

There's no Green New Deal.

But you had universal pre-K, you had affordable child care, you had elder care, you had an expansion of Medicare.

You had things that would have delivered for the American people.

That falls apart, partly because of mansion, cinema, parliamentary, all of that.

That falls apart.

And since now the American people are feeling incredible pain with inflation and gas prices and unable to put food on the table and put gas in the car.

And he's basically seeded the ground and said, eh, there's not much I can do.

I just hope the Fed gets this under control.

Yeah, the approval ratings have fallen off a cliff.

That has nothing to do with the left.

I wish the left had more power.

In fact, I think the left is the only part of the political spectrum that has offered anything to deal with inflation, gas prices, and the current economic situation that doesn't just involve, hey, let's trigger a recession and kill people's wages.

Well, I mean, part of this inflationary problem is because we put too much money into the economy.

There's way too much government spending, and that's why we have inflation.

So that's a large part of that.

It's just basic economics.

That is not basic economics.

We had this thing called a pandemic.

We had a supply chain crisis.

And oh, by the way, there's a war in New Zealand.

It's played a role.

It's played a role.

So to act like the only reason we have problems is because people got a little bit of money in their bank account is just not honest.

A little bit of money, they got more than we spent in World War II.

So don't act like

you said don't act.

Don't act like we had to react to the pandemic exactly the way we did.

We had to, we had to spend six months.

Okay, but how about the trillions that the Federal Reserve shot at Wall Street?

For some reason, people don't get upset about that.

How much does that mean?

The trillions of dollars the Federal Reserve shot at Wall Street to stop the stock market and the bond market.

No one gets upset about that, even though that was a massive

factor in inflation.

What do you mean shot at Wall Street?

What are we talking about?

We're talking about buying assets, buying stocks, buying bonds, buying treasury bills so that they expand the balance sheet.

This is during the crisis, the coronavirus crisis.

When the stock market crashed, that is what the Fed did.

They went into action, they shot billions of dollars.

It didn't crash during

the Fed came in and backstopped it.

That's what happened.

It crashed and we never heard of it?

No, it crashed.

Go back and look at it.

It fell off a cliff.

The treasury bond market stopped functioning, and the Fed took extraordinary action it's never taken in history.

I don't know.

Somehow, no one gets upset.

It's the first week of the day.

Somehow, nobody gets upset about the rich people who got tons of money and tons of support, way more than working-class people did.

But, oh my God, people were able to feed their kids and they had a little bit of money in their bank accounts.

It was the worst thing in the world.

That is one small part of the inflation story, and it is, by the way, not the only thing that we can deal with to get out of this mess.

Well, gas prices are not a problem.

So, Biden has a small part just in the middle of the state.

Gas prices we can largely attribute to an administration that's been waging war on the fossil fuel industry.

That's ridiculous.

I mean, that's the topic.

U.S.

production is up.

It will be at record levels next year.

The fossil fuel companies themselves are flush with cash but will not invest in new drilling because they would rather give it to their shareholders.

That's the truth of what's happening.

Well, here's the truth.

I mean, I just read it today.

In 2020,

Biden said no more drilling on federal lands.

No Keystone pipeline.

Yeah, no.

And I'm not fine.

And also antagonizing Saudi Arabia.

Now he's going back to Saudi Arabia hat in hand.

Let us finish.

Just what we're saying.

And then you consider.

Well,

antagonizing the Saudis with his Iran deal policy, and now he's going back to them hat in hand to get them to increase their production.

But I bet you're in favor of the Russian oil ban.

Because

the Saudis are great

humanitarian.

Russia is raping a country right now.

And Saudi raises their amazing humanitarian.

No, I don't know.

I didn't say that.

There are allies.

of, let's just talk about why these things really happen.

It's because people think that they can.

Look, I wish we were all off fossil fuels forever.

Sure.

But the truth is that when people get off fossil fuels before they have a replacement, they wind up going back to even worse fossil fuels.

Germany said, we don't want nuclear power anymore, which is the cleanest.

That's true.

And what did they have to go back to?

Coal.

And Russia.

And basically the same thing happened here.

We said, Saudi Arabia, go fuck yourself, you killed a journalist, and now Biden is going over there hat in hand, begging them for oil because people want their gas.

Which is pathetic.

And by the way, the only issue with oil is not just supply and demand, because as I was just saying, we actually have a...

fairly significant amount of supply.

It isn't at extraordinarily low levels if you look at the recent past.

We don't have an extraordinary amount of demand.

We're not even back to pre-pandemic levels.

You do have a massive amount of Wall Street speculation that is also also causing an increase in gas prices.

So again, this is what I'm saying, that the only people who are talking about

gouging.

So you asked.

You can always depend on them to gouge.

You ask whether Biden is not pandering to the left enough.

The left are the only ones talking about those issues, about the fact that you have monopolies that have jacked up prices far above what they need to because they can, because they can use the excuse of inflation.

And CEOs are bragging on earnings calls about how they've lifted prices and gouged consumers, and we're not doing anything about it.

Can I ask another question?

Yes.

So I saw Andrew Solomon this week was talking about if, okay, if Biden does step down, or say he's going to step down, then the Democrats have, I mean, we've all noticed this, a problem, like, but who?

Right.

And he mentioned, who is there, Bill Clinton, who's going to come along?

And I thought, okay, well, Clinton and Obama, obviously the last two successful Democrats.

Is there a Bill Clinton or Barack Obama out there, or is such a broadly centrist Democrat no longer even really possible in that?

I don't think it's what we need.

I think it's absolutely possible.

And I think part of the problem is that there's a divide on the left, in the Democratic Party, between the people who want to win political power and the echo chamber in the media, in the academy, in the NGO sector, and the people on Twitter.

And their interests are not the same.

So there's the Democratic Party which wants to win power and then there are people who want to get clicks and they want to sell subscriptions and they want to bark very loudly.

Likes.

Likes.

Like me.

And I'll just give you a small example of this.

I'll give you a small example.

We know statistically, we know that the vast majority of Latinos and Latinas do not like the term Latinx.

It's been statistically proven.

Vast majority.

And yet.

And yet they persist.

They persist.

Well, I can't open up the newspaper without seeing it, or there's Alessandria Casio-Cortez demanding that they continue using this term, which now we're seeing.

Hispanics are now voting Republican.

Look at this woman who just won in Texas.

I'm the first Mexican-American woman.

No.

Is a Republican from a border district.

And that's why.

She's married to a border agent.

When you're losing the country.

So they're actively alienating the country.

And they don't care.

Because the Republicans accuse the Democrats of being soft on immigration so you can get more of those Latino people here.

And then they're voting for the other part of the party.

Well, I think it's really instructive what that that woman ran on.

She had great commercials.

They were all about the economy and inflation.

So I don't see a lot of evidence that Democrats actually are all that committed to winning because if they were, they would be doing something to address people's economic situation, which people overwhelmingly say is what they care about going into this election.

So that's why I said at the beginning about January 6th, good, let's have accountability.

Let's do that.

But where's that energy for the Wall Street criminals?

Where's that energy for the monopolists who are price gouging people?

Where is that energy for delivering people in McGee right now?

We need to do it.

Right here.

All right.

Thank you, Tu.

Time for New Rule.

All right, New Rule.

If you pose in front of such a low-level drug bus that you're laying out a bunch of vape pens, a few chocolate edibles, a tea strainer, and $1 bills, you have to give the drugs back.

Great work, crime fighter.

Somewhere in your town, there's one guy watching SpongeBob and not enjoying it.

New rules, stop telling me I should watch a TV show because it gets good in season three.

It's like saying, try this soup.

The first hundred bowls taste like a urine sample, but

you know, if I had two years to blow on nothing, I'd get half of a college education.

Neural, someone has to tell this tribal Hindu priest walking through burning embers, we're not impressed.

Please, we're from Southern California.

We do that just to get to work every day.

New Roll, now that Ford has recalled three million vehicles because they roll away when you put them in park,

they have to drop the slogan go further and change it to catch it.

Ford, if your car runs downhill by itself, it's not an escape, it's an avalanche.

New Role Special Father's Day Edition.

When one dad wearing a world's greatest dad t-shirt runs into another dad wearing a world's greatest dad t-shirt, they have to fight to the death.

With the winner retaining the title of world's greatest dad and the loser, well, you don't have to go to any more of those goddamn soccer games.

And finally, new rule, if someone knows of a story that more effectively captures what's wrong with today's journalism than the sad saga of what happened last week at the Washington Post, they need to keep it to themselves because it would be too depressing.

If you missed it, the Washington Post recently got embroiled in a self-inflicted shitstorm when one of their best reporters, David Weigel, retweeted, not tweeted, retweeted, this joke.

Every girl is bi.

You just have to figure out if it's polar or sexual.

Proving it is a joke.

Thank you.

The comedian who actually wrote the tweet called it a banal throwaway joke, which is exactly what it is.

Throw away, as in if you don't like it, throw it away.

For eons, both sexes have made jokes about how the other is crazy.

And no one but the perpetually offended thinks it means anything more than that the sexes get frustrated over how differently we each see the world.

And yes, we relieve some of that frustration with humor and scene.

Nevertheless, Weigel pulled down his retweet and wrote, I apologize and did not mean to cause any harm, and that was the end of that.

I'm joking, of course.

The unlicensed daycare center that is today's newsroom went ape shit.

You see, the Post has another writer named Felicia Sanmez, and she's a lot.

For example, she tweeted about Kobe Bryant's 2003 rape trial hours after his helicopter crashed.

And despite the fact that she says Dave Weigel is a good friend, she resurrected the tweet he had taken down with a screenshot and demanded to know what the Post was going to do about this unacceptable evil that must not be allowed to stand.

Sarcastically writing, fantastic to work at a news outlet where tweets like this are allowed.

Yes, can you imagine a world that allows jokes you don't like?

Of course, the leadership at the Post folded like a Miami condo and

suspended Weigel without pay for a month and denounced the offending retweet as a gross violation of their values, free speech apparently not being one of them.

Then a third Post reporter offered up the idea, of course on Twitter, because why do anything privately?

That hey, maybe everyone was overreacting and we should all just calm down.

And then it was really on.

Felicia demanded that the Post discipline him and tweeted about that.

I assume she's tweeting about this right now.

For days, she raged with the fire of a thousand burning bras,

sending a gazillion tweets calling for more to be done against Weigel, mocking her bosses, attacking colleagues, and letting the world know how much the Washington Post sucked.

And this endless bickering and infighting continued online in public view until the bell rang and they all went to seventh period.

Now note that I haven't yet told you what age Felicia Sonmez and her quarreling coworkers are.

Why?

Because I didn't have to.

Because you can't imagine someone my age acting like this in an office.

The New York Times just ran an op-ed entitled, Why Are We Still Governed by Baby Boomers?

This is why.

Because too many millennials

are overly sensitive, overly fragile, and have no sense of priorities.

You know, I'm sure many boomers would love to retire, but they can't.

They're like the grandmother who'd much rather be watching Judge Judy, but has to raise her grandkids because her own kids are too fucked up to manage it.

Funny, you think my generation is an eye roll?

Let me lit on a little secret about the younger generations.

No one wants to hire you.

Your sense of entitlement is legendary and, with notable exceptions, your attention span and worth ethic suck.

Here's a story you never stop hearing around Hollywood.

Unqualified little shit who has been here all of six months doesn't understand why he's not a producer yet.

This Washington Post story had such resonance because its behavior we all recognize.

There is a war going on within the millennial generation.

I know because I'm friends with the good ones.

But the crybabies, unfortunately, are still winning.

They complain they haven't taken over yet.

Well, stop complaining, because in many ways you already have.

The fact that the Post's initial response was to punish not Felicia, but one of their best reporters for a silly joke shows that the kindergarten is already in charge.

Today, today, June 17th, is the 50th anniversary.

of a very seminal event in American history.

On this day in 1972, the Watergate break-in happened.

And over the next two years, the Washington Post gave the world a masterclass in investigative journalism.

I have to wonder how the Post's newsroom of today would handle that story.

Or how they're currently handling any story.

All this time, blubber tweeting over a retweet begs the question, don't you have anything better to do?

Aren't you supposed to be reporters digging up stuff?

Are there no more vital issues going on in America right now?

This is why you're not in charge.

Because if someone named Deep Throat called the paper today and wanted to meet in a parking garage,

this crew of emotional hemophiliacs

would have an anxiety attack and

reported to HR that they didn't feel safe.

If there is a silver lining to this story, it's that eventually the Post did fire Felicia San Mez.

So maybe there is a line that's just too much nonsense.

But that generation needs to move that line much closer to sanity and find it much sooner.

Because democracy dies in dumbness.

All right, that's O'Show.

I'll be at the Soaring Eagle Casino in Mount Pleasant, Michigan, tomorrow, June 18th at the Mirage in Vegas, July 22nd and 23rd, and the Uptown Theater in Kansas City.

September 11th, I want to thank my guests, James Kurchik, Kirstal Ball, and Danny Strong.

Now go to YouTube and join us on Overtime.

Thank you, folks.

You were great.

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.