Ep. #570: Quentin Tarantino, Max Brooks, Dan Carlin

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

Thank you, people.

How you doing?

Thank you very much.

Hey,

thank you.

What a night, our last show before our July break.

Thank you.

I appreciate that.

No, I know.

I know it's summer this week.

Summer started.

It's not popular here in the fire state, you know.

But I'm excited because, you know, you can tell it's something.

The blockbusters are out, Fast and Furious is out, Fast and Furious 9.

Well,

if you haven't seen it yet, trust me, you have.

But,

you know what else is hot?

The housing market.

Don't try to buy a house now.

Off the hook.

It's so hot.

Listen to this.

People are putting their homes up at ridiculous prices.

They don't even want to sell.

They're just doing it to see what they can get.

I'm serious.

They're doing, I saw a sign on a homeless tent that said, shown by appointment only.

It's out of control.

Okay, so

here's the bad side of summer.

It is, for some reason, bringing Donald Trump out of the woodwork.

Really, he's been pretty quiet for the last six months, hasn't shown his face a lot.

That is ending next week.

First, he's going to go to the border in Texas, gonna do a town hall.

He wants to discuss a nation's decimated southern border.

If only he had four years to do something about it.

But

that's not all.

He's also going to do town rallies again, MAGA rallies, and he's writing a book.

He said he's writing like crazy.

Exactly.

And he said it's going to be the book of all books.

Now, maybe he's got this bug in him because he's also going to be touring with Bill O'Reilly.

And Bill O'Reilly is one of the best-selling authors of all time because he wrote all those killing books.

You know, those books, killing Kennedy, killing Lincoln, killing Patton, killing Jesus.

And Trump's going to top him.

He's got killing Mike Pence.

Oh, and did you see that?

There was a report this week.

I knew this.

I called it it.

Apparently, Trump was a lot sicker than we thought.

And he got COVID, and that was bad, too.

No, he was

no, I kind of knew that at the time.

A lot of people said it, I think, that he was playing it.

But no, he was a lot sicker than we thought.

His blood oxygen levels were very low at one one point.

He was on the verge of being put on a ventilator.

Doctors at one point were in such a panic because all the orange had drained from his face.

Scary stuff.

Oh, and his

Trump's concigliary, Rudy Giuliani,

he had a bad week.

New York.

New York State, listen to this, suspended Rudy's law license.

Is that personal for you, sir?

It seemed very personal to this man over there.

No, Rudy cannot practice law in New York.

And to add insult to injury, from now on, all of his personal and financial decisions have to be made by Britney Spears' dad.

So that's bad.

But

Brittany.

Now, I don't usually comment on these pop culture stories, but Brittany Spears was, was, you know, a lot of people were looking at it, was in court this week speaking for the first time.

She's 39 years old.

She wants to be free of her father, who controls every aspect

of her life.

You know, I mean, going back to 2008, yes, she did go, we all remember that with the shaved head and the umbrella, she did go a little nuts, but who hasn't shaved their head and attacked people with an umbrella at one point?

You know, it was a long time ago.

And now, 39 years old, and the father, everything, she can't spend money to decide when to go out, decide who to see.

I mean, fuck, we let someone completely unstable run the country for four years.

I think she could get a credit card.

And, yes, freedom.

This week's all about freedom.

Free Brittany.

And there was a cheer, I love this story.

At the Supreme Court, no less.

A high school cheerleader named Brandy Levy

wrote on Snapchat a couple of years ago, fuck school, fuck softball, fuck cheer, fuck everything.

And for some reason, as this is a free speech case, it reached the Supreme Court.

They had to decide, and the Supreme Court did the right thing in a case of Brandy versus whatever, I guess, was the name of this trial.

They said, yes, Brandy can get out there and say, fuck cheer, fuck softball, fuck school, fuck everybody.

So Brandy was thankful.

She thanked the court and then told the bitches at the Girl Scouts they can shove the cookies up their ass.

Freedom!

Oh.

And here is...

Here is some more freedom.

The state of Connecticut became the 19th state now to legalize recreational marijuana this week.

I'll tell you,

if this stuff gets any more popular, I'm going to have to try it.

I hear good things.

And another freedom, we have the first out-gay NFL player.

This is apropos.

Yeah, I mean,

apropos of what I was saying a couple of weeks ago about, you know, we're not there anywhere.

We still have work to do in things, but a lot of progress has been made.

We've come a long way, baby.

And other, you know, he came out, and even five years ago, this wouldn't have happened.

All the other players congratulated him.

They said they were proud of him.

The teams did.

The coaches did.

The NFL did.

And this player, Carl Nasebi, said he was living a lie.

It was just too difficult.

And it was hard enough having every week to appear with 10 other guys in the same outfit.

I think the team did know that he was gay because one time he went into that tent for the

concussion protocol that they do, and the trainer asked him, what day is it?

How many fingers am I holding up?

And what year was the Wizard of Oz made?

I think they knew that.

So

that's the plus side of the freedom ledger.

On the bad side, yeah,

too bad.

Senate Republicans have done it.

They blocked the voting rights bill that the Democrats were putting forward.

Mitch McConnell said it was a thinly veiled ploy for free and fair elections.

Democracy dies in darkness, they say.

No, it dies in the Senate.

All right, we've got a great show.

Max Brooks and Dan Carlin are here.

But first

First up, I would say after 30 years in the game, the jury is in.

He is one of the great American filmmakers of all time.

His new novel is Once Upon a Time in Hollywood based on his Oscar-winning film of the same name.

Please welcome Quentin Tarantino.

Hey, you.

Hey, how you doing?

The Bob Koskis.

All right.

How you doing?

I'll do, mate.

It's been too long.

So anyway, this really brought me back to my youth.

That was the idea.

Yeah, well, the whole movie did, and we'll get to that.

But it just, look, I remember when these kind of came out.

A bovie.

Yeah, yeah.

A A book.

A book after the movie.

Well, imagine me going to a publisher and saying, look,

I know the money is in hardbacks,

but can we come out with a paperback first?

Yeah.

Well, it's just, first of all, I just got to say, this movie, before we get to the book, I cannot, there are no words to tell you how much this movie delighted me, tickled me.

I hadn't heard that on the show yet, so I didn't know how you felt.

That's pretty much it.

I'm not a movie reverse.

No, I know, I know, Cisco.

I don't say that.

But I got the impression, even though

there was one time you kicked Django to the curb, but then you refer to it all the time, the next movie, the next thing.

I like Django.

I see parallels with this one in Django.

It's kind of a buddy movie.

Dalton is a bounty hunter character.

No, man, no.

Django, they are bounty hunters.

Yeah, uh-huh.

You know, and Django has to be an actor.

Yeah.

I mean, there's a.

I love Django.

I love all your...

There is not one frame of your movies that I have not seen multiple times.

But I have to say, I'm getting to a point here.

Thank you, thank you, man.

No, it's true.

To me, this is your, your latest one is your peak.

This is my favorite of all time.

So what is this nonsense about you're only going to make one more movie?

Well.

Come on.

Yeah.

You know, well, okay.

Look,

it's.

You're too young to quit, and you're at the top of your game.

That's why I want to quit!

How do you know it's the top?

Because I know film history, and from here on end, directors do not get better.

That's a terrible idea.

First of all, you're judging yourself by other people.

How do you fucking know?

You're 58?

Yeah, yeah, uh-huh.

58's the new 57.

No, no, no.

Okay, I mean, plenty of people have.

Well, one, I haven't retired yet.

I still have another one to go.

What?

Why Why just one?

Okay, but the thing about, look, look, one, 30,

I don't have a, look,

I don't have a reason that I would want to say out loud that it's going to win any argument in a court of public opinion or a Supreme Court or anything like that.

But it is just, you know, at the same time,

working for 30 years, doing as many movies as I've done, which is not as many as other people, but that's a long career.

That's a really long career.

But why did it happen?

And I'm giving it everything I have.

Every single solitary thing I have.

You'll be bored.

You're going to want to do it.

No, really.

But first of all, but I do look, but I look, okay.

But it's a way of doing it.

Okay, this is just a random example.

This is a random example.

But then I, you know, you look at a director like Don Siegel, who actually had one of his best decades in the 70s.

Yeah, exactly, with his collaboration with Eastwood.

Oh, my God.

If he had quit his career in 1979 when he did Escape from Alcatraz, what a final film.

What a mic drop.

But he dribbles away with two more other ones.

Stop Siegel, who they don't even know who he is.

Yeah.

But you know who he is.

I do, but there's other Clint Eastwood, you mentioned.

Clint Eastwood.

That's why

you always bring up like two or three guys.

Oh, I mean, Bran Torino when he was 110, and it's one of my favorites.

He's still making movies.

Okay,

let me just say one more thing about it.

Okay.

To me,

we started around the same time.

Yeah, you absolutely started around the same time.

And of course, I'm at the top of my game.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So I didn't quit.

Other countries helped you.

I haven't given you shit to talk about.

All right.

Anyway, but you accumulate skills as you go forward.

You get better.

That's why I'm telling you, I think your last one was the best one.

Would you have made, if you were making Reservoir Dogs Tomorrow, would you make the exact same movie?

No, of course.

Do you think you could make it even better?

That's kind of a captured time in a moment kind of thing, but I actually have considered doing a remake of Reservoir Dogs as my last movie.

I won't do it, internet.

All right, but I considered it.

See?

All right, but you know, I understand.

Your life has changed a lot.

Yeah.

You know, I mean, a real lot.

I mean, I still think of you as the guy who's sitting in swingers

right in your screenplay in the booth by yourself.

Well, I kind of still think of myself that way and have the rude awakening when it's not that.

But you're married, you have a kid, and you live in Israel.

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, what's.

The one.

Did you become a Jew?

No, of course not.

Well, don't say it like that.

No, no, no, I'm not going to be that guy that marries an Israeli.

And then, like,

does the conversion.

Okay, I know.

It was not an unreasonable question when someone moved to Israel.

No,

my wife didn't become a Christian either, all right?

But I'm not a Christian.

I'm an atheist.

Right, great, me

And

so I'm going to convert to another god I don't believe in.

So what's it like over there?

Do you miss LA?

Yeah, of course I miss LA.

I mean,

oddly enough, actually, Tel Aviv is very, very similar to Los Angeles.

The weather is almost exactly the same.

And it's a very little bit of a ball.

You're sweating balls here, you're sweating balls there.

But the thing is,

but it's like LA if LA was really, really tiny.

If Los Angeles County, you could ride around on a bike in like about four hours, it would be like what Tel Aviv is like.

But they have like magnificent restaurants and cool bars and cool clubs.

Yes.

All the, I mean, a lot of the stuff that Los Angeles,

I'm not even talking about New York, Los Angeles in particular, all right?

They have, they have, there's a very similar vibe.

Except tiny.

Were you there during the recent unpleasantries with the rocket?

Really?

Yeah, no, I was there through the whole time.

You had to go into bomb shelters and stuff?

Yeah, no, it was like

you get a,

you know, I remember

it happened for about a week or so, but

the first one was like, okay,

there's a citywide siren,

rah, rah, going on.

And that's letting you know the Hamas missiles are on their way.

And then you go and I take my 15-month-year-old son and my wife, and we go down into a a bomb shelter.

We were lucky enough to have something like that.

We go down to a bomb shelter and close the door and then

you hear this boom,

boom, boom, boom, boom.

And that's the missiles being blown out of the sky.

By the Iron Dome.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So would you make a movie about that?

Well, I mean, Israel would be, I mean, a lot of your movies center around the idea of revenge.

Yeah, yeah.

One reason we love them so much.

I mean, you have a great way of pulling the arrow back.

Right, yeah.

And when you fire it, it is just so satisfying.

I mean, this is

the

revenge capital of the world.

Yeah, yeah, right.

I mean,

yeah.

It looks like it could be a great area, and you could make one over there.

Yeah, movies there, too, you know.

Yeah, no, I'm very aware.

I don't know if I wouldn't make a movie about the political climate there.

I'm just not

connected enough to it.

However, having said all that, though, I mean, if you actually shoot a movie movie in Jerusalem, there's no place you can put the camera that you're not capturing something fantastic.

I mean, you have literally a rooftop, a rooftop restaurant scene, and you just see this, like, you know, sea of domes and sea of just like magnificent architecture just going on for miles and miles and miles.

So,

one thing I, before we run out of time, I have to say to you, I have, besides the great entertainment,

I have always really appreciated the way you pushed back when anyone tried to stifle you, shut you up, shame you, bully you,

corral your artistic license.

They tried it with the last one, with Once Upon a Time in the Hollywood, some bullshit about Margot Robbie doesn't have enough lines.

And you do what I wish other people would do.

Instead of apologizing like a little pussy,

you say,

I don't agree with your assessment.

Yeah, yeah.

What's so hard about that?

Why

teach that to others because it's your movie?

I agree.

Look,

if even like when we're like a pressure situation where it's like, oh, okay, your movie's opening next Friday.

So that's kind of a pressure situation

in some of the things.

So

whatever,

you don't want to make noise that's not the noise you want to make on the day your movie opens or something like that.

But nevertheless, if somebody brings up something that actually is legitimate, I'll even have a conversation with them about it because I'm actually into interesting thought and I don't have have to even agree with you.

Oh, but that's an interesting point.

Right.

That's an interesting point.

And I'm

able to talk about that.

But when it's just BS, when it's just bullshit, and you know.

Well, it seems like criticism in the recent years has gone to this place of

not just, okay, you can criticize a movie, but they seem to be saying, this isn't the movie I would have made.

Oh, no, no, that's well, that's definitely

because you can't.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Because you can't make one and you didn't make one.

It's like.

I had a situation like that where somebody asked me about something.

Well, why didn't you do this?

This?

I go, oh, would you have done that?

Yes, I would have done that.

Okay, well, they were asking me something about the Conn Film Festival.

Why didn't you do this at the Conn Film Festival?

Oh, are you saying you would have?

Yes, I would have.

Okay.

But you never would have written that script and you never would have made the movie and thus you would never be at the Conn Film Festival in the first place.

So it's a mute argument.

Cool.

So, are you.

But no, But there has become a thing that's gone on, it seems like in this, especially this last year, where

what's the word I'm looking at?

Ideology is more important than art.

Way more.

Certainly to the awards.

Yeah.

And it's just, you know, it's like, you know, ideology trumps art.

Ideology trumps individual effort.

Ideology trumps good.

Ideology trumps entertaining.

There's two kinds of movies, virtue signalers and superhero movies.

So, I mean,

you're always, you know, lauding, we both know the 70s as kids.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So we idolize it.

We grew up in it.

We idolize it.

We lived through the new Hollywood.

But that was a golden age.

Whenever you catch a 70s movie, whether it's Three Days or the Condor, it's like, oh my God, what a, you know, the Godfather.

And are you bullish on the future of movies?

Because...

Well, look, you have to always look at it.

Are we going to get back to that place?

Look, this happened.

This comes in waves.

This absolutely comes in waves.

All right.

So it's like,

okay, just looking at the 40s, all right, that was during the wartime, but that's also the time that you had film noir, where you actually, even though with the haze code, you had these dark, dark stories that were being told.

But then after the war was won, then you had the 50s, which was the first of the completely homogenized decades.

You couldn't say shit if you had a mouthful.

All right.

And

every bestseller, every play that was turned into a movie, if there was anything sexual about it or anything,

that's all going to be drained out of the movie.

It's going to be weaned out of the movie.

It's just the way it is.

It's just the way it is.

You just always knew that going in.

And then to me, it was one of the worst decades in Hollywood, the 50s.

And then, and the 60s, pretty much from like 1960 to 1966, was the 50s part two.

But then what we think of as the 60s starts in about 67, and that's when New Hollywood comes out.

And that's an absolute positive response to the homogenized 50s.

So it's going to come back again.

Okay, and then it goes into the 70s, but then we go and went into the 80s.

And that's why you came up with politically incorrect, because that was the first, this is basically the 80s part two, what we're living through right now.

Well, I'll just take one more go at it.

There's going to be a new golden age.

Please be there and part of it.

All right.

Great to see you again, Quentin.

I can't wait to read it.

I can't wait to read this on my summer vacation.

All right, Quentin Sarantino, let's meet our panel.

Okay, hey.

All right, here they are.

He's a senior.

It's a senior resident.

Not a senior.

He looks young, but he's older than that.

He's a fellow at the Atlantic Council and a non-resident fellow at the Modern War Institute at West Point.

Max Brooks is back with us, Max.

Maxie.

And he's the host of the podcast of Dan Carlin's Hardcore History, an author of the New York Times bestseller, The End is Always Near.

Love that book.

Dan Carlin is over here.

Okay,

so

this is a Friday where we have breaking news, and the breaking news is Derek Chauvin got 22 years.

Some people are...

Some are applauding.

I also saw people on TV saying that wasn't enough.

Right, and this should be a lesson to the extreme wokesters on our side who want to do away with prisons, right?

Because what do you give chauvin?

Art therapy?

I have heard of, well,

I have not heard of abolishing prisons, but I wouldn't put it past them.

But I have 15%

of Democrats want to abolish the police, which is crazy.

I mean, look, I mean, people throw around the term systemic racism a lot nowadays for everything, but the criminal justice system really has been full of racism, and it has been systemic.

I mean, that is the

epicenter of the problem.

If the goal here is to have this be a deterrent, though, and to send a message to people who might do what that police officer did, I think 22 years in prison to a police officer sounds like a pretty good deterrent.

I was a peon at a news station here during the Rodney King trial in Simi Valley, and that's pretty much an open and shut case.

And when those officers were acquitted and the cameraman turned to me and said, we're going to have a riot tonight, I mean, that's more likely, historically, what you get in these situations.

An officer getting 22 years, I mean, this is a pretty historic change when you look at

the trends normally.

I mean, this is a change.

No.

And I think we have to be careful because the cops are demoralized.

And they don't all want to be Derek.

They are not all Derek Chauvin.

And they don't want to be fought that way.

Also, I saw on the front page of the New York Times today was a story about a gay police officer, I forget the city she was in, quitting because tired of being spit on, tired of being yelled at, tired of being branded a racist assassin.

You know, I mean, the people who want to abolish the police, these must be fans of the Purge movie series.

Right.

Because you're not going to like it.

And I see that the Democrats have finally caught on to this idea because crime is going to be the big issue

because it's way up.

And I see Biden now is saying, defund the police I said refund

refund he's literally

literally doing that all bit refund the police because you don't want to be on on a

place on this issue where you look like a Johnny come lately I'm talking about all the Democrats and people don't trust you on this issue that oh now now they get the message now they're coming over to crime is an important issue this cuts across race

age everybody nobody wants to get mugged or shot.

And this is the onus is on us because we're in power now.

So it's put up or shut up.

So when someone like Rashida Talib tweets out, no more police, no more incarceration, the system is unreformable, okay, well then come up with an alternative idea and try it out in your district and give us a working model or else shut up before you lose us another election.

Now that's where you got

abolishing prison.

She said it.

Right, she said no prisons, really.

So then what do we do with the Aryan nation and those pieces of shit that killed that black guy who was jogging?

What do you do with all of them, right?

Kumbaya?

No, concrete and steel.

There's some bad people.

But defund the police is the worst marketing political slogan I've ever heard.

I heard somebody else say, why can't you just say improve policing, better policing?

I mean, there's a lot of ways to sell.

Reform.

Yes, there's a lot of ways to sell this that make it sound like you're actually going to make the lives of police officers better too.

Defund the police is a political loser from a marketing standpoint.

Well there is a reason for this.

There is a reason for this.

And we can admit this now, that the Democratic Party has a Department of Self-Sabotage.

Right.

And they meet.

Always have.

They do.

They meet at Oberlin over a cup of kombucha and white guilt.

And they think, well, how are we going to fuck everything up?

Well, let's see, defund the police.

How are we going to lose Florida?

Oh, a Jewish communist named Bernie Sanders who's anti-Israel but pro-Fidel Castro.

Perfect, we've lost.

But both parties have the sabotage wing, don't they?

Not with language like that.

The Republicans are the opposite.

They're geniuses at languages.

When they were losing on the estate tax, they changed it to the death tax.

And nobody likes death.

All right, suicide of death, let's talk plague.

I've been waiting for you two guys to

know really because you're historians.

And I was a history major myself, and I want your perspective on this.

I mean, your book has a whole chapter on plague.

It's fantastic.

And, you know, I don't think people, first of all, have any perspective about the plague we just went through.

It was, I mean, it was a bad thing, but, you know, it killed less than half a percentage point of the pop, less than one-half percentage of the population.

Bad.

I'm against death.

I don't care who knows it.

It's sad when anyone dies, and we don't want people to die, and it's worse when it's people we know or ourselves.

But, you know.

But Earth is a timeshare.

We can't all be here at the same time.

That's just the way it works.

So compared to the plague of Athens, a quarter of the population, of the whole population, which would be like 85 million people,

the plague of Justinian, which you all remember these.

540.

That was in the 6th century AD.

Athens, which, of course, ancient Athens, we know them.

That was half the population.

And the Black Death killed two-thirds of England.

Right?

The population, I don't think, recovered for 300 years.

And kept coming back.

That's the part people forget.

So, I mean, what really killed you is you go through it, you live through it,

you survive, and then two or three years later it comes back with a vengeance.

And so if we had this...

Yes, and if it came back, if we had this four times in the next 20 years, imagine how much more traumatic that would be than just going through it once.

Right.

Well, how is it going?

I mean, the Black Death changed everything.

Barbara Tuchman said it was really the father of modern man

because it created an immense labor shortage.

For the first time, the peasants had some leverage in the market and also changed people's attitudes.

They didn't believe in things anymore.

The church took a big hit.

There was orgies because they were just like, fuck it, we're probably going to be dead tomorrow.

It's like a Star Trek episode, right?

Where they all go.

Yeah.

So.

What about

this plague light that we had?

How is that going to permanently change

things?

I think there's a parallel with the peasants in the Middle Ages who had more leverage, because we see it right now.

Nearly half of all small businesses can't find enough workers.

For the first time, workers have some leverage.

Not because people died so much, because they got money from the government.

I think there's going to, I think it's wrong to assume the entire population will go in one direction.

I think we are so divided.

People will respond to a post-plague America differently.

I think there's a portion that's going to stay in the cave no matter what you tell them.

I think there's going to be a portion like me that is slowly and cautiously coming out and ready to run right back in when things get bad.

And then there's going to be another portion that's going to make sure the next

pandemic is syphilis.

Yeah.

I tend to be a little bit of a devil's advocate, though, and there's a chance that we partner things.

I mean, if we have to do this again in a couple years, there's a chance that we know better what to do.

You know, if you get another, I mean, Bill Gates was talking about variants and all these kinds of things hitting us in the future.

I have a feeling it's not going to seem so weird if we have to put on masks again and go through this all again.

I don't know that we're going to not be traumatized, but I have a feeling it's maybe hardened us a little bit and maybe given us a little taste of what human life throughout most of the eras and still in a large part of the non-developed world is like.

I mean, pandemics and diseases are a reality for them that we've been able to avoid.

It's only very recently that people are able to feel as safe as they do.

The pandemic of 1918-1919 was a disaster, the Spanish influenza.

Yes, another bad, that killed about 5%, I think.

But yeah, no,

we're generally living in good times, but

let's not.

It also hit us at

the

worst time because we've also lost so much of the living memory of pre-vaccine America, right?

The last generation that grew up before vaccines, they're mostly gone.

And so there isn't a gut gut fear of microbes the way there used to be.

20 years ago, if you'd have told your grandparents you're not going to vaccinate your kid, they'd smack you in the back of the head because they know what it was like to grow up without polio.

And back then, the only medical insurance was a big family.

And that was it.

So now we take this all for granted, and maybe it will bring respect back to the invisible enemy.

And what about

the fact that a lot of people don't want to leave home now?

I mean, I think they probably didn't before.

They didn't really, it turns out they don't really like the office.

10% of, no, 44% are willing to take a 10% pay cut to never have to go back to the office.

They really didn't like the break room.

Or the commute.

Or the commute.

But they never, it didn't ever cross their mind that they could get away with not going.

Now, of course, that has become the norm, and they don't want to go back.

Now some of that's good.

We'll save on polluting the air with some, less commute.

I don't know if it isolates us.

I don't know if it'll be terrible.

I happen to like coming to a communal place.

I don't have a family.

This is my family.

If I never do another Zoom call, it'll be too soon.

I'm just fucking with you.

are.

They really are.

It's a, you know, we'll miss them at the next, and we're going to come back to the office and I'm all for that.

I think that's terrific.

But, you know, not everybody likes it that way.

And with not having to commute, people can live in different places.

The cities are going to be probably not emptied out, but people can move far away.

They don't have to live in the city center anymore or anywhere.

You can live in the middle of nowhere as long as you have Zoom.

The technology's made it possible, right?

I mean, you couldn't do this in the 70s.

So, okay, one last thing about the plague.

It took a lot of the belief people had in the Catholic Church away because the church was there to protect you and then people saw nothing could protect you.

And

this is probably

one reason why the Protestant Reformation started.

This is what Barbara Tuchman meant by the beginning of modern man.

I noticed that our church, well, this week they said they are going to to deny Biden communion.

I mean, the American church is going in a completely opposite direction of the Vatican itself.

The American church is like Mel Gibson's dad territory.

Oh, yeah.

And the Vatican is much more modern.

And the court is not going in the same direction as the people in this country.

They voted against gay parents can't adopt.

This is the recent court that we have now with six and a half Catholics on it.

COVID restrictions on churches, they would not put that into effect.

Employers can deny contraception.

The country's getting much more atheistic, much more anti-religious, and the court is getting more religious.

What's the upshot of this going to be?

Well, I can tell you, I'm half Catholic.

My father is Jewish.

My mother was Catholic, so I know that church pretty well.

And I can tell you, certainly when it comes to Biden's stance on abortion, children in general.

When it comes to children in general, I think the Catholic Church has about as much moral authority, right, as Bill Cosby's marriage books.

Yes, marriage.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, fatherhood.

You're done.

You're done.

Right, okay.

All right, so anyway, it is our July break coming up now.

We're going to be off for a month.

We do this every year.

Don't panic.

We know that people depend on us to know what's going on in the news.

So what we do before we take a break every time is we do future headlines.

We will, even though we're not on for the next month, you're going to know what's going to happen.

Future headlines, ladies and gentlemen.

This is our edition here for 2021 summer break.

For example, Trump Presidential Library to be first containing KFC franchise.

Texas GOP passes bill making voting voting booths in black communities invisible.

That will happen.

Red Lobster admits bay shrimp, cicadas, same thing.

Kirk Cameron asks Siri for directions to Christian cinema.

Ends up at home of Kirsten Cinema.

That one may not happen, but it's possible.

Matt Gates announced a scholarship program for teen girls ages 15 to 17.

That will happen.

Adems to counter GOP voter restrictions with a series of angry tweets.

Russian cyber attack cripples Pornhub, war to begin Monday.

And of course, Hasbro reverses position.

We'll give Mr.

Potato Head massive cock.

I don't know if that one's going to happen.

And

I just want you to know, we bragged about this once before, but I'm going to show it again.

Once in a while, when we do these, we actually do get it and predict it, and it happens.

Look at this.

We did this before it happened.

Trump declares end of coronavirus as he is hospitalized for coronavirus.

Yep.

Well,

as I mentioned in the monologue, we found out this week that he actually was very, very sick.

And I read all the things they gave him.

I remember this at the time.

There was like three major things, an anti-clone, what is it you would know?

Anti-micro, something that it was something heavy, and then remdisivore, that one, and then something else.

And it just made me think, because he was not a healthy man at the time, I mean, he's not now.

He just, I mean, he's overweight, he paid no concessions to health.

I mean, he eats, you know, steak with ketchup on it.

It's just, he's just,

really, I mean,

okay.

It just says to me that they do know how to cure this.

That if they throw the fucking kitchen sink at it, they could even even save him, and they did.

So it's really just a matter of our will and I guess money.

You know, if this

if they have these drugs, I don't know why everybody, they couldn't get them in anybody.

But what I really wanted to ask about was the lab leak theory.

Yeah.

Because you guys would be great to ask about this.

I have been saying, and I'll just reiterate what I've said from the beginning, this should never have had a political dimension, how this disease started.

There is nothing political about it.

Nothing.

Whether it came from somebody eating a bat or whether it came from a lab that was studying bats, not a nefarious plot.

It's just hard to keep things in a lab.

You know?

Where are you on this?

But we will never know where it came from in China because we will never get answers from them and they will get away with it.

And it will happen again because it is indicative of our toxic, whoring relationship to the People's Republic of China.

And the tragedy is that

because we initially invested in them thinking that our money would make them more like us.

And the tragedy is the reverse happened.

Their money has made us more like them.

We now kowtow to them, we apologize for them and to them.

Did you see John Cena's apology?

Yes.

The biggest, toughest guy in the world who could kill us all with his thumb had the most groveling, heartbreaking apology for what?

For calling Taiwan a country.

Yeah.

That was it.

Yeah.

Instead of a rebel province that one day the PRC hopes to crush and absorb.

Right.

No, China does bad things.

I mean, they just closed the newspaper, the last standard newspaper in Hong Kong.

I mean, I remember when the Hong Kong was passed over in 97.

It's like oh no, Hong Kong's going to be its own enclave.

We're not going to interfere.

And now there's pretty much no democracy in Hong Kong.

I mean, just what they do with the Uyghurs, gathering up this minority and putting them in camps.

Right, we will.

And liberals don't want to say anything because they're Asian and they don't think very clearly about this.

And they conflate it with anti-Asian hate crimes here.

It has nothing to do.

One has nothing to do with the other.

I don't want to defend China here, but I can think of about 20 countries and maybe us under the President Trump leadership also that would have been very careful or maybe even obfuscate where things came from, disease went.

Oh, yes.

I mean, you think the Russians are going to say, oh, yeah, it came from here, sorry.

I mean, and there's liabilities, there's all kinds of things.

There was a legal

anthrax.

Well, yes.

You remember this from the 1970s?

1979, there was a leak from a Russian.

They covered it up for years.

Yeltsin finally admitted in the 90s.

A leak of anthrax.

Sferdlos.

So there's a communist country that's denying a leak from a lab.

It's happened before.

Right, and the Soviets made the unpardonable mistake of not making cheap crap that we needed.

Because

if they did, we would have forgiven Chernobyl.

Right.

If somehow crap was made there by their slave labor, we would have said, Chernobyl, Shernobyl, what?

I need my sneakers.

And that would have been it.

But Max, how do you know?

How do you know if the Russians don't tell you or if the Soviets don't tell you?

It doesn't matter what you owe them.

You don't know.

And that's all the influence.

And that's the problem, is that we thought that we were attaching human rights to commerce.

But the Chinese have an alternative model, which is commerce without human rights.

And we are giving that to them.

Just wait.

Wait till Disney makes the next movie where Mulan fights the Dalai Lama.

Let me back it up.

Under what circumstances do you think the Chinese would have released this information?

Turn it around and let's take a look at it.

It would have been very simple.

We have legislation over our own corporations where we say, you're an American.

You will not build your factories in a country that will not release data on viruses that will kill Americans.

There was a wonderful movie, Tarantino, I'm sure he's seen it.

It was called Destination Tokyo.

It was a World War II movie

where a bomb hits an American sub, it doesn't go off, and they pulled the bomb out and it says made in America because we were selling scrap iron and oil to the Japanese before.

And that oil and scrap iron came back as weapons to kill us.

So they.

Okay, go back to plague just for a second.

They have smallpox in Russia and here.

Yes.

We keep a each country keeps a small amount alive we could wipe out smallpox forever and smallpox is one of the bad ones yeah

they found the virus by the way several times they found vials where they just didn't even know they were yeah no we do this I assume because we don't trust each other because yes we have to just like they're like might need it they're like German nukes right we don't trust and it's much less than we used to we used to have in the Cold War massive biological weapons factories and stockpiles and we talk about how the Nazi scientists helped get us to the moon we actually actually did that with the Japanese.

They had a huge biological weapons program.

We don't know how many Chinese they killed.

Unit 731.

Yes.

And after that, we took their scientists here to help us design our biological weapons.

And after the Cold War ended, we have reduced the stockpile, but we still need to know how it operates.

We cannot start from scratch if, God forbid, we get hit with a biological weapon.

All right, let me ask you about the media aspect of this, because I find this outrageous.

Facebook banned any post for four months about COVID coming from a lab.

Of course, now even the Biden administration is looking into this.

Google, a Wall Street Journal reporter, asked the head of Google's health division, notice that they don't do auto-fill searches for coronavirus lab leak the way they do it for any other question.

And the guy said, well, we want to make sure there the search isn't leading people down pathways that we would find to be not authoritative information.

Well, you were wrong, Google and Facebook.

We don't know.

The reason why we want you is because we're checking on this shit.

He said, we want to ensure the first thing users see is information from the CDC, the WHO.

That's who I'm checking on.

The WHO has been very corrupt about a lot of shit, and the CDC's been wrong about a lot of shit.

This is outrageous that I can't look this information up.

And now they're doing it with this drug, Ivermectin.

They threw Brett Weinstein off YouTube or almost.

He's one strike away.

YouTube should not be telling me what I can see about ivermectin.

Ivermectin isn't a registered Republican.

It's a drug.

I don't know if it works or not and a lot of other doctors don't either.

This dovetails into the monopoly thing though.

If you didn't have such control over over,

I mean searches for example this wouldn't be as much of an issue because if you didn't go to Google you could go somewhere else.

And you can go somewhere else.

But when you have a market, what what is it, 90% Google controls and searches?

Yeah, I mean, at that point, this is a function of the monopoly.

When it becomes the word for doing it, you have a monopoly.

Yes.

Yeah, and it's like if you're not going to be able to do that.

People don't say, I'm going to bing something.

No.

It's like if you only had one newspaper, right?

And then that newspaper has all sorts of responsibilities if they're the law of the land or the official word.

So, yeah, it's a function of the monopoly.

All right.

We're running out of time, but I wanted to talk about cyber hacking.

Yes.

I know that's a big thing with you.

Yeah,

this goes to something much deeper, and it affects all our lives.

And it started with one historical moment.

And Dan's going to do a wonderful 72-hour podcast about it.

I know.

But I'm going to give you the quick and dirty one.

Good.

1991, we fought a war called Desert Storm, and it was about Kuwait and oil, but it was also about deterring future aggression with massive overwhelming force, which is why we put it on 24-hour cable news.

We wanted to show future aggressors, if you mess with America on the battlefield, we will atomize you.

But that's not the lesson lesson the enemy took.

The lesson they took was: if you're going to mess with America, don't go anywhere near a battlefield.

And so they've been developing alternative, asymmetric ways to kill us.

So cyber.

I mean, it would have happened anyway,

but they are doing cyber information, economic warfare, and doctrine to hurt us without firing a shot.

And they're a generation ahead of us.

Biden knows this.

A generation.

They're a generation ahead.

If you thought Sputnik was something,

try what we used to call the Gerazimov Doctrine or read a book called Unrestricted Warfare by Choose Two Chinese Colonels, which you can buy on Amazon, in which they call the heroes of Desert Storm dinosaurs.

They know this.

If the British Navy rules the waves, guess what the Kriegsmarine does?

Go underneath them in U-boats.

That's what they're doing.

I don't think this is.

I don't think this is as good.

Sorry.

We're going to run over time.

You guys were great, but it's time for new rules.

Sorry.

Okay.

Neural, now that the Olympics has added skateboarding as an official Olympic sport, they must change their drug policy so that athletes are banned if they don't test positive for drugs.

Neural Louise Fisher, the Danish radio journalist who broadcast a story about a swingers club by interviewing a man while she was having sex with him,

must be nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.

Lots of reporters come across a great story, but how many let the story come across them?

Neural, it's not cool to break up with someone by text.

It's taking the coward's way out.

Leaves your partner with no sense of closure.

And it's super rude if you do it while you're lying next to them.

That's really.

Neural high school yearbook photos need to go back to the way

high school yearbook photos used to look

Look as you age you get worse looking your only consolation is that in high school you look like this

Neural someone must tell me why robots in science fiction movies are always so sarcastic.

You're lost in space and the robot's like, nice going, Magellan.

Fuck, robots are the very last thing on the list that should be sarcastic, and I hope that extends to sex robots.

Who wants to finish in here?

That's 90 seconds, I'll never get back.

My robot boys.

And finally, new rural Americans need to rewatch Ken Byrne's great documentary on prohibition because people are starting to notice America has a drinking problem.

Now, I can't believe that we would be ever so stupid as to outlaw booze again, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't take notice when the nation goes through one of its periodic binge drinking phases like we are in now.

Since the turn of the millennium, alcohol consumption in this country has risen steadily and alcohol-related deaths have doubled.

Even millennials, who used to be the more sober generation, are now dying of cirrhosis of the liver at record rates.

And that was before COVID hit, when lockdown nation really hit the bottle.

The pandemic was an excuse for people to drink more, drink in the day, and drink alone, a condition psychologists call melania.

We're kidding.

We lost all sense of time and the rules went out the window.

Restaurants were delivering cocktails with hard liquor.

I know this because they were delivering them to my house.

Because as long as I had liquor, I didn't care there was no toilet paper.

But just as a historical trend, this can't be good.

There is a word for when everyone in society gets drunk just to get through the day.

and that word is Russia.

And I do mean through the day, because even before COVID, we started putting liquor everywhere.

Every month, you could see some viral video of an all-out brawl at Chuck E.

Cheese,

because even this children's restaurant serves beer now.

United, Southwest, and American Airlines have all either cut back or stopped serving alcohol because there have been so many recent incidents where the passengers act like Mel Gibson at a traffic stop.

The flight crew has to treat us like children now.

I will turn this plane around and no one will go to Dallas-Fort Worth.

Grocery stores now serve beer on tap.

For the first time ever, husbands are asking, honey, you need me to pick up anything at the market?

Supermarkets also invite customers to shop and sip from their open wine bars.

Belly up, mom.

Leave your troubles in the produce department

and your baby in the car.

You'll get over it.

But hey,

if you get drunk at Whole Foods, please remember, vomit in a reusable bag.

Movie theaters now also serve beer and wine and sometimes hard liquor.

So does Taco Bell and Disneyland and Starbucks.

You thought they had trouble spelling your name on the cup before.

And of course, what's the point of living large if you can't get offered a drink when you shop

and get your hair done?

Book clubs have long been just an excuse to guzzle wine the way fishing is really just drinking on a boat and

hunting is drinking in the woods and bowling is drinking with rented shoes on, you know?

Aquariums serve alcohol now.

And zoos.

Zoos?

Who gets shit faced at the zoo?

When did people start saying, you know, if I'm going to to stare at a polar bear taking a nap, I'm going to need a couple of stiff ones.

Alcohol is everywhere on TV now.

Hosts of The Today Show have it on their desk.

I've seen guests on Watch What Happens Live have it in their hands.

And of course, stars of The Real Housewives have it on their faces.

Now,

maybe you recognize yourself in some of this.

Ask yourself, do I drink in the morning?

Do I drink alone?

Do I receive mystery packages from Amazon that make me ask, when did I order snowshoes?

This is all eerily familiar.

In the Prohibition documentary, the first episode is called A Nation of Drunkards.

And it describes how on farms in the 19th century, there was a barrel of hard cider by the door, which you dipped into every time you came and went.

Ken Burns writes, Americans routinely drank at every meal, including breakfast.

In many towns, a bell rang twice a day to signal what was called grog time,

so that men could stop whatever they were doing in factories and offices, mills and farm fields, and drink.

Well, here in the now times,

We seem to be heading back in that direction.

And I think the reason is this.

The COVID epidemic may be subsiding, but the epidemic that preceded it, the anxiety epidemic, is not.

And usually when people drink, it's to alleviate some form of anxiety.

As we re-enter society, half of Americans say COVID has been so stressful they worry they'll never fully recover.

We're using liquor as a crutch for our pandemic exacerbated problem of being socially impaired.

We call it social media, but really it's the opposite of social.

And our increasing detachment from one another in real and dependence on screens and online relationships makes us ever more vulnerable to the lure of liquid courage when it comes to really interacting with people.

But drinking, my friends, is not the answer.

Okay, it's part of the answer.

I'm not going to lie.

It's part of the answer.

Yes.

Taking the edge off a bit, yes, I myself have a long history of using liquor to take the edge off.

Usually off some other drug, but still.

But not at two in the afternoon, not at the Piggly Wiggly, and definitely not at the zoo.

We have got to get a handle on our anxiety, and it can't be through the bottle.

Everybody needs to just get a grip.

Now, if you'll excuse me, my vacation just started, and there's a cool one waiting for me in the dressing room.

All right, that's our show.

We're off until July 30th.

I'll be at the Toyota Music Factory in Irving, Texas, July 11th, the Buddy Holly Center in Lubbock the 31st, and at the Pap Theater in Milwaukee, August 14th.

I want to thank Max Brooks, Dan Carlin, and Quentin Sarantino.

We'll see you in a month.

Have a good July.

Thank you, folks.

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

For more information, log on to HBO.com.