Ep. #511: Susan Rice, Neil deGrasse Tyson

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

Start the clock.

Right here with me.

Thank you very much.

I can see, I can see.

I know why you're happy today.

Because

the G7, that's the, you know, the big boy economies of the world, they have a meeting every year in a different country, and Trump announced that they're holding next year's G7 summit at the Trump Doral and Golf Resort.

No relation.

The headline on Fox News was, Trump finds the G-Spot.

I can't even keep up anymore.

Of course, this is such a ginormous violation of the emoluments clause in the Constitution, right, that says presidents cannot accept anything of value from a foreign country, like for example instance, large convention of rich foreigners in your hotel might qualify.

You remember the Constitution, don't you, Republicans?

That thing you used to hold up when you screamed at Obama for nothing?

And you know,

it's not just that he's Not just that he's always breaking the law, it's that he obviously wants you to know about it.

The Joker doesn't want to get caught this bad.

This is Trump's idea of three-dimensional chess.

I will distract you from impeaching me by committing more crimes.

It's like

he comes home and Melania says that lipstick on your collar, and he says, You should see my dick.

and

you know as his acting

chief of staff mick mulvaney had the nerve to say that you know they looked all over the world for the best all over the country for the best spot for the g7 meeting and you know it was just

perfectly logical that it would be there.

We didn't, it wasn't because he was Trump.

He said, it's almost like, he said, this Dural, almost like they built this facility to host this type of event,

he said

when he was reached for comment inside of Trump's ass.

And,

you know, of course, putting in a Dural was Trump's idea.

And once Trump gets an idea in his head, it never goes away.

Unlike his casinos, his wives, his hair, and the Kurds.

Oh,

the Kurds.

Good news, we finally found someone in the Middle East to greet us as liberators.

Bad news, it's ISIS.

We let a lot of the ISIS people out.

But if you haven't been following this story, Trump last week gave Turkey the go-ahead to invade Syria and kill all the Kurds.

And then he got mad that they went and did so.

So he asked Mike Pence this week to interrupt his busy schedule of standing in the background

and go to the war zone.

And you know, Mike Pence is not afraid of a war zone.

When he sees someone kneeling at a football game, he runs like a little bitch.

But

war zone doesn't bother him.

So Mike Pence was sent over there to the war zone to deliver Trump's message to the Kurds.

And that message was, you know, that war I just started.

Okay, we're going to skip to the end.

You lost.

And Mike Penn said, I'm declaring a ceasefire, which means you get to run for your lives while the Turks reload.

I'm sorry.

Did I say ceasefire?

I meant grease fire.

This has got to be the ultimate if Obama did it, right?

I mean, we are bombing our own equipment there in the Syrian desert.

We just lost Syria.

Syria is now being taken over by Russia, Iran, and ISIS.

Trump has created the only place in the world that is more anti-American than Berkeley.

And

so

Wednesday he has Pelosi and Schumer into the White House to talk about what the fuck are you doing in Syria.

And he has a meltdown because Nancy Pelosi said, all roads with you lead to Putin.

Trump said, How dare you accuse me of having a plan?

I'm telling you,

when your shit is too crazy for John Bolton and Rick Perry,

because that's who quit in the last week.

That's Perry today, Bolton about a week ago.

Bolton got wind of what they were doing in Ukraine and said, fuck that.

He said, World War III, I'm all in, but that's cray-cray.

And

the sad news today, Rick Perry is resigning as Energy Secretary.

No.

He said after almost three years on the job, he accomplished what he set out to do, finding the employee restroom.

So

he

said he'll miss everyone at the department.

He just wants to

spend more time locking his keys in his car.

He's not a bright man.

And then Mick Mulvaney, the guy I mentioned before, not up a good week, he's not quitting, not yet.

But he is the acting chief of staff.

You know this.

He's got an other big job.

He's the head of the Office of Management and Budget.

Running the White House is his side hustle.

So the whole defense of the Ukrainian scandal, which is why he's getting him, Trump is getting impeached, is there was no quid pro quo.

No quid pro quo is the new no collusion.

Mulvaney gets up there yesterday and says, Oh, fuck yeah, quid pro quo.

Oh, yeah.

We are total quid pro quo people.

That's all we do all day is quid pro quo, quid pro quo.

And then he says, but it was absolutely appropriate, so appropriate, he had to go out there hours later and say, I'm sorry,

you thought I said quid pro quro, that it was okay to do quid pro quo.

No, I said tic-tac-toe.

Tic-tac-toe is okay.

I said,

oh, it was a

taekwondo response.

They're the gang that couldn't do treason straight.

All right, we got a great show.

We have Danielle Kleptka, Danielle Kleptka, Sandstein, and Thomas Chatterton-Williams.

And here a little later, we'll be speaking with our good friend Neil deGrasse Tyson is here.

First up,

she was President Obama's National Security Director and United Nations Ambassador, whose new memoir is Tough Love, My Story of the Things Worth Fighting For.

Susan Rice.

Hey.

How you doing?

Great to meet you.

How are you?

Okay.

Okay.

Now,

first thing I wanted to ask you, you're Susan Rice, you know, in show business, everybody gets mixed up at some point with somebody else, right?

Everybody.

Okay, there are people who have thought I was Bill O'Reilly.

That's unfortunate.

I'm never going to that strip club again.

But I just have, some people must do, think you're Condoleezza Rice.

It happens.

It used to piss my mother off more than anything else.

My late mother, when she got asked, are you Condoleezza Rice's mother?

And we have...

Yeah.

We have ties to Stanford.

We were both national security advisors.

We're both black women named Rice.

And so, you know, it happens to me in airports.

It happens to me all over the place where people say,

you worked with President Bush.

You were President Bush's national security advisor and Secretary of State.

No.

But the funniest time was when I was visiting China for the first time as national security advisor on my own mission on behalf of President Obama.

And I met with President Xi and I'm setting up a summit and CCTV does a whole big

spread on the nightly news and they say, you know, Susan Rice is in China to see President Xi and they put up Condi's picture.

Oh.

That shit happens to black folks.

Well, I'm glad you could come here to HBO and say it for real.

And one thing I saw was very interesting in your book, you mentioned your mother.

You made your career partly as a mediator, and you sort of learned that because your parents were squabbling.

More than squabbling.

More than, but as a very young girl, you say seven years old, you were doing diplomacy at home.

Well, unfortunately, my brother and I were living in a house that was a tinderbox.

I had two really wonderful, extremely accomplished parents, but they had no business being married.

And their breakup was very ugly and sometimes even violent.

And I'd be trying to get to sleep upstairs as a little kid.

And if I couldn't, I'd run downstairs and sort of spy on them and see how bad it was.

And if it was really bad, I'd go in there and try to break it up, sometimes physically, but also sometimes mediating between them, trying to listen to each side and help them.

You did shuttle diplomacy.

Well, it wasn't even shuttle.

It was, you know, like proximity talks in my own house.

But I bet you that served you well in the.

Well, it turned out, but that wasn't the plan at the time.

I was just trying to keep my house from burning down.

Right.

Well, speaking of houses burning down,

I just have to, what you must think with what went on this week and the last week in the Middle East.

Now, I remember from decades people talking about who lost.

That was the, who lost China, right?

Who lost,

Who lost Syria?

You know, I saw the Turkish defense minister put up

the new map of Turkey with a big chunk of Syria he bit off, parts of Iraq, Greece.

You know, I remember when George Bush went into Iraq in 2003, the idea, embraced by some liberals, was we have to remake the Middle East.

We're going to put a democracy in the heart of the Arab world.

Okay, that didn't work out.

But Trump and Bush together, they have remade the Middle East.

Well, Trump especially in the last week.

It's amazing what you're doing.

Well, Iraq.

How much Iranian...

Yeah, Iraq.

Now Syria.

Where do you see this going?

It's going nowhere good.

I mean, what Trump has done in Iraq and now Syria is, in effect, to cede a portion of northern Syria, Kurdish homeland, to the Turks, and to

evacuate the Americans as if it's, you know, his Saigon.

We've left our Turkish allies homeless.

They're now going to scatter throughout the region.

We've given Assad and Putin and the Iranians a green light to take over that territory that they've been long wanting to take.

And ISIS is going to come back.

But Assad is going to be okay with Turkey biting off a chunk of his land?

Well, if you're Assad, last week you were missing a third of your country.

Now you're just missing a little sliver on the top.

Wow.

That's not bad for one week's work.

And watching Republicans not get get that upset about this, more than upset than we've seen, but not to the point of we should get rid of them, must infuriate you having lived through Benghazi.

That that was something that required hearing after hearing after hearing.

Eight congressional inquiries.

Yeah.

There's really no comparison.

I mean, look, it was not a good thing that happened in Benghazi, but the idea that anyone could have stopped that.

Well, Benghazi was a horrible tragedy, right?

We lost four Americans, including our ambassador.

But what we're going to lose as a result of what Donald Trump has done in Syria is we're gonna have a whole terrorist resurgence as a result of his pullout

so we'll see the the ramifications of that in American and allied lives I think I'm afraid for years to come you know what worries me is I think back to 9-11 and I imagine

after it happened bin Laden was saying to himself wow I didn't think they would destroy themselves this easily.

I knew this was going to be a win for us.

But we knocked down those buildings, they overreacted, they attacked the wrong country, they spent trillions of dollars.

Homeland Security Department, that's a big bloated bureaucracy, this whole mess.

Putin in 2016 spent a pittance and got Trump elected, or certainly helped.

What do you think about the fact, that idea that we're just it's just too easy to get Americans to destroy themselves?

Well, what is, I think, happening now and what Putin's genius is, is that he understands that we are so divided internally.

And that I argue in my book, Self-Love, that our domestic political divisions are in fact our greatest national security vulnerability.

We can't get stuff done.

We can't build infrastructure.

We can't invest in technology to beat the Chinese and artificial intelligence.

But we've also found ourselves so pitted against one another.

that all Putin had to do was jump in and exacerbate those divisions, pour salt in the wounds.

And we are now almost like a flesh-eating disease, eating ourselves alive.

I think we have the ability to fix it because it's a problem of our own making, our domestic divisions.

Well, we have to stop hating each other.

Absolutely.

You know, I mean, to me, the Rubicon was crossed when one party, the Republican Party, said, and you see the t-shirts at Trump rallies, I'd rather be with the Russians than the Democrats.

We never sort of went there.

Like, yeah, I don't like the other political party, but I'm not going to go over to a foreign country.

That's, to me, the big difference when we somehow went there.

How do you get back from that?

Well, Bill, I mean, it's horrible.

And to say you'd rather be with, you know, our enemy than your fellow American is, I think, a new low.

But you get back from it by what we do as individuals in terms of our personal relationships, listening, hearing.

It's what we do as a nation.

where we really need to change a lot of the rules of the game, which are inviting these extremes to be empowered.

I think we should stop talking politics to each other already.

Well, we can't.

That's part of it.

We didn't used to do it all the time.

We had no idea how much we hated each other.

I've got a very conservative son.

A conservative son?

I've got a very conservative son and a very progressive daughter.

And my husband and I are in between.

And one thing I've learned from having those differences in my very home at my dinner table is we can't talk about it all the time because we drive ourselves crazy.

But you can't not talk about it.

Yeah.

We've got to

hate each other.

And then we've got to do some stuff, I think, at a national level, level, like mandatory national service for all Americans 18 to 22.

Think about it.

If for six to 12 months,

if for six to twelve months, we all had to work together and we had to understand each other from some rural kid from Idaho having to work with some kid from the South Blanx.

Right.

It's hard to hate people when you actually know them.

All right, last question.

Edward Snowden.

Got a new book?

Trying to get him on this show?

Yeah, he's in my book.

I know.

I mean, you're not easy on him.

No.

You say he has done immeasurable damage.

Yes.

He says the opposite.

Well, I'm asking you.

I mean, and I usually side with people in your business.

I was never one of those liberals who said, oh, no, I don't trust the CIA.

I don't trust the APA.

I do in general.

I think they're patriots.

You're right.

So I don't think Edward Snowden is a traitor like Alden or Walker, people who did it for money, who were trying to sell out their country for themselves.

I think he really thinks he's doing a good thing.

But what say you?

You say he's a good person.

I call him a traitor, and I mean that with great sincerity.

I say that because I know what he did.

He stole the most sensitive information.

You know things we did.

He gave it to people who had no business having it.

He's sitting in Moscow living high on the hog.

Yes, we are.

You know that.

I do know that.

I know we are profoundly less secure as a result of what he did.

We're trying to recover, but that recovery is going to take a long time.

And let me tell you, the reason I'm so blunt about what he did in the book is because I know quite how bad what he did is.

And I'm not here to ascribe motives.

You know, maybe he did it for what he thought were benign reasons, but the impact of what he did is what I want people to understand and why I go so far as to use a word that I have not used

before.

I get it.

It's so interesting that the Democrats are the ones now who understand what treason and patriotism is.

We understand what national security is.

I know you do.

Susan Wright.

Thank you.

Don't ever say

Donald Lee today.

Great to meet you.

Thank you so much, and for your service.

All right, let's meet our panel.

Hey, how are you doing?

Thank you, Harold.

Okay.

All right, he is an MSNBC contributor in the Daily Beast Politics Editor.

Sam Stein.

He's a New York Times contributing writer and author of Self-Portrait in Black and White, Thomas Chatterton Williams.

I love that name.

I'm going to call you sir, Thomas Chatterton Williams.

She's senior vice president of the American Enterprise Institute and an NBC analyst.

Danielle Pletka's back with us.

How you doing?

Okay, I'm going to pick up with what I was saying there.

Who lost Syria?

I heard this word a lot growing up.

Who lost?

A country.

The Russians now are taking over that northern part of the country.

We're bombing our own equipment.

I've used this phrase before, patriotic immunity.

Why did the Republicans get this patriotic immunity?

Why can they do shit like this?

Can you tell me?

No.

There's no real answer to this.

It's a baffling foreign policy decision.

I don't know the motivation of it.

I can guess at the motivation is.

But in the end, the results are catastrophic.

There was no motivation.

He just wanted to get off the phone.

It's possible.

I really think that's all it was.

He was talking to Erdogan, the hot pockets were ready.

There's this.

And he said, really,

I think you...

Come on.

I mean, yes, that's possible.

Isn't that more charitable than saying you planned it?

No,

I assume that the hot pockets were, in fact, ready.

But you can't talk about.

It's not just about Donald Trump.

This is about Syria.

500,000 Syrians died from 2011

to now, most of them under the Obama administration, I should add.

Obama was the president of Syria at the time?

Donald Trump is not the president of Syria either, my dear.

No, but could any president have stopped that in Syria without a full-scale U.S.

invasion?

We could have done much more.

In fact, we didn't support the Kurds.

You know, we only turned and started supporting the Kurds a few years ago.

Before that, we were working with the Turks.

This strikes me as a deflection from what we're supposed to be talking about, which is a decision that was made two weeks ago to ultimately just abandon a position that we had in northern Syria.

And there's no rationalization for it.

And we're talking about civilian deaths.

Obviously, that's important.

But Amnesty International says 241 Kurds died in the past week because

they're not.

More important than half a million Syrians.

But I'm just saying, I don't know,

but it it just seems like a deflection to bring Obama into this when we're discussing Trump's decision.

But again, I'm not sure what Obama could have done short of a full military invasion when we were just in the neighboring country of Iraq.

We could have supported the Syrian people.

We could have done more for the people.

The Syrian people.

Who are the people?

Which factions?

There are so many.

Which are the moderates?

Well, who are the Syrian people that we were going to give guns to?

Because there was a lot of different factions there.

Those self-same Kurds we could have supported a long time ago and didn't.

We could have done a lot more for the Syrian Democratic Forces.

We could have done more for them when they were in the middle of the year.

The people who really fucked the Kurds before this was George Bush I.

Yes, that's true.

That's true.

Sorry.

I can't stop.

Speaking of

this 35-year-old Kurdish politician who was dragged from her car and she was

executed on the side of the road, Trump made this decision in between rounds of golf.

It reminds me of

what Fitzgerald said in

the Great Gatsby.

You know, he just smashes everything around him, and then he kind of retreats into his money and his vast carelessness, and he just lets everybody else clean up the mess, or not, or not clean up the mess.

But people are dying.

Well, I just want you to see, I put together a little mashup here of what Trump said about Syria.

Now, I think these folks are politically savvy, and they read the paper, they know what went on.

A lot of people in this country only listen to Donald Trump.

That's all the information they get, because the rest is fake news.

Here's his version of the week in Syria.

This is an incredible outcome.

The Kurds and other people, they're going to be taken great care of.

We've gotten everything we could have ever dreamed of.

This is a solution that really, well, it saved their lives, frankly.

I didn't know it was going to work out this quickly.

I didn't know it would work out this well.

So this was a great thing for everybody.

The Kurds are very happy.

Turkey is very happy.

The United States is very happy.

And you know what?

Civilization is very happy.

Tough to argue with that.

What a deal.

Are you happy?

I'm not happy I live in a country where half the people just see that and think that's what happened, huh?

I'm not happy I live in a country where he said it doesn't matter where the ISIS fighters go because that's Europe's problem.

I live in France.

They're coming this way.

Like fuck them.

Not their allies or anything.

So okay.

Impeachment.

A lot of people are saying that this doesn't really affect impeachment.

I don't know about that.

55% of independents are now for impeachment.

And I think the argument that Ukraine does not equal impeachment got a little harder to make this week, no?

Well, I think it matters to the degree that Republicans are finding a little bit of a voice to speak out against Trump.

Not many of them, but some of them.

And to the degree that they aren't admonished by the President and hit back, they get muscle memory.

They know that they can speak out against the President, and maybe that translates into something more related to Ukraine and the impeachment process.

Ultimately, though, this is a Pelosi-driven decision.

Does she want to expand it beyond Ukraine to include things like Trump Doral, for instance, which is a textbook example of an impeachable offense?

It's unconstitutional, blatantly.

That's her her call.

Right now, everything that I've heard from the Hill is they want to keep it very Ukraine focused.

And is that a bad decision?

I don't know.

I mean, I suppose you can make the case that people are getting it.

The polls look pretty promising for Democrats.

Tons of momentum and revelations every day.

But then there's like a moral argument that if you see corruption, if you see lawlessness, don't you have a moral imperative to actually expose that as well?

Shouldn't you put that in the grand process of the impeachment?

I mean, you talk about the politics of it, and that certainly is important.

And for a long time, Trump has been saying, you you know, they have to impeach me because they can't beat me at the ballot box.

But if that's true, why does he always need so much foreign help?

Why?

I think

the challenge for the Democrats in adding in the Durrell decision, which was, I mean,

really,

incomprehensible to me.

But the challenge for the Democrats is that the claim that a lot of people have been making is that, and that Trump has been making, and that Trump's allies have been making, is that the last few years have been their effort to find anything to tack on to that.

Anything, whether it's Stormy Daniels or it's his lawyer, or it's all about the level of the people.

They provide level content.

He does provide for that.

But all those things are impeachable.

But in fact,

maybe they are, and that's the decision of the House of Representatives.

The point here that I think we're trying to make is that if you keep trying to pile things on, it does diminish the credibility of the process.

It's amazing how that works for him.

There's a certain amount of the American population that no matter what he does is not going to budge.

The New York Times has countless articles on Trump voters that just won't give up on them.

They just get more cynical about the process.

Because they only see that thing I just want to say.

Because I do think part of his strategy is what you were alluding to early on, which is it's like a fire hose of controversy and you just don't know what to do with it.

And while you're focused on one thing, he acquiesces to Turkey and then decides, you know, Dural is the perfect location for the G7.

And you're three steps behind him as he's on to the next controversy.

I actually do think there's some madness and some strategy to him.

I think even for him this week, he had like a plethora of crazy, crazy quotes.

To me, the one everybody sort of missed that was maybe the most important, he met with Schumer and Pelosi in the White House

through a tantrum.

They walked out.

We heard all about, Nancy, you're a third-rate politician and this and that.

It's the thing he said last in that meeting,

see you at the polls.

See you at the polls is what he said to them.

In other words, you keep doing this shit.

We'll see how it turns out on Election Day.

Does he have a point?

Well, I think he thinks that impeachment isn't going to go anywhere.

I don't get your take on this.

He's saying, this is going to help me politically.

Go ahead.

Oh, he firmly believes it.

That wasn't the quote that shocked me, though.

The quote that shocked me was, he said, someone told me to call this meeting and show him here.

The White House had called the meeting.

Like, did you not?

Did you not know that?

No, no, no, he's not there.

All right, so everyone in D.C.

is talking about the latest it couple, Igor and Lev.

I mean, we've shown their picture.

There they are.

These are the two.

They are, I love this term, associates.

Whenever that word comes up, that's never a good thing.

Associates of Rudy Giuliani, they have a company called Fraud Guarantee.

It sounds like something from a Bob Hope sketch.

We'll call it Fraud Guarantee.

Okay, and they also, it came out this week, own a disco in Ukraine called Mafia Rave.

Again, I am not making, this is the website, this is the real thing.

Igor and Lev own Mafia Rave.

And wait, leave that up there, because I want to start the video.

You see there's a little arrow there?

I guess we don't.

All right, well.

Is that really the day?

There it is, you see?

You want me to push that arrow and show you the video?

This is it.

This is real.

This video is real.

I'm a little suspicious of the voiceover, but see what you think.

Welcome to Mafia Rave, Ukraine's premier fun-time, completely legit nightclub.

Whether you are in purple satin shirt or purple Velor tracksuit, we treat you like oligarch.

Rated five stars on Yelpski with music from Putin's favorite band, Poison.

Meet Girl of Your Dreams with Look and I that says, tonight is night I peon vet for you.

Come see her American President Trump meet wife twice.

Mafia Rave is number one club in Ukraine for collusion.

Ask Rudy what happens in Ukraine, stays in Ukraine.

But no pre quo quo, right, buddy?

All right, he is the host of Nachio Star Talk, whose latest bestseller is letters from an astrophysicist, Neil deGrasse Tyson, everybody.

Here he is.

Doctor, hello.

Dr.

Demento.

You never disappoint with the tie.

Yeah.

I'm glad.

You never disappoint with the tie.

Universe is vast.

How many universe ties do you have?

You're like, Trump has all the red ones.

You have all the red ones.

He occasionally wears a blue one, I have noticed, but not as often as he wears a red tie.

No, but

this tie, I have about 109.

Wow.

Yeah.

You know it, right?

About 109.

Sorry, yeah, yeah, okay.

Could be 111.

No, it was exactly 109.

Exactly.

You're a very exact person.

You know, your book is so interesting.

I noticed a lot of the letters that people write to you.

And this is a lot of the, you know, you care to, you're very good with your fans.

You want to know what they think.

Because what I was doing under the hood for decades, while I had this public persona of talking about the the universe, there's these personal private things, issues that people had, and they wrote to me about it.

Okay, and one of the big ones that you get is people are asking you to sort of mediate between,

gosh, I want to believe in God, but I don't want to not believe in science.

Is there a way we can square that circle?

What is that?

I get a lot of those letters.

And what do you tell them?

I like the way you said square that circle.

That's very mathematical of you.

Congratulations.

You know me, Doc.

I am all about the science.

So what what happens is I think people might be raised in one or another religious tradition, and then they start learning science.

Then they find places where the science conflicts.

And I think most people have never met a scientist, much less can claim one as their friend.

So they see me kind of as their friend, who could then offer perspective, or at least shine some kind of cosmic luminosity on what next decision they want to make about how to reconcile or not their religious traditions with science.

Enlightened religious people don't have an issue.

If Jesus is your Savior, no one is going to take that away from you in a country that protects the free expression of religion.

But if you're going to come around and say, my religious text tells me the universe is 6,000 years old, and I'm going to stick it in your science classroom, I have an issue with that.

Right, yeah.

Right.

Yeah.

Because

it doesn't really help that.

Well, no, no, it can't be.

You're basically saying I'm coming down on the side of science.

No, however.

Tough shit.

However, when people write to me, I see it as a contract of communication.

If I just speak and not care where they're coming from, then I'm just lecturing.

You're letting them down nicely.

It's like, you know what, people sometimes say, I love this in America, they say, everything happens for a reason, which I always think of you because I'm like, that is so fucking stupid.

Yeah, yeah, it's not.

Everything does not happen for a right.

Am I right about that?

That is so correct.

Thank you so much.

Most people

happens for a reason.

It is random.

Right.

And we create reason in it.

Also, it's elitist because it's something you can say when you live in an affluent society where you have a lot of

enough money to change jobs or meet new people.

You live in a city.

There's like a billion people who live on a shitpile every day, and nothing happens for a reason for them.

They're born into grinding poverty, and they die in poverty.

They die in it.

Definitely an elitist point of view.

But what I wanted to say.

I'm going to agree with you.

There you go.

So I just wanted to say that the contract I have, it's an unstated contract between me and those who write to me, is that I will care about where they're coming from and how they're thinking and what receptors they might have for arguments I might present.

So for example, in the case of the religious letters, I say there are three truths in the world.

There's your personal truth.

No one's going to take that from you.

Jesus is your Savior.

Muhammad is your last prophet.

These are truths.

No one is going to take that from you.

Then there's like a political truth.

That's just what becomes true when it's repeated enough times, okay?

But then there's the objective truth.

Those first two you just said.

There's the objective truth, which the methods and tools of science are invented and designed to establish.

Those are true whether or not you believe in them.

And so I say you can keep your 6,000-year universe,

but understand that that's a personal truth that you get from your personal religion.

If you rise to power and have control over laws and legislations in a pluralistic land, it is a recipe for disaster if you're going to take your personal truths and create laws that have to then apply to everyone.

So

the world is not 6,000 years old, right?

It is so not 6,000 years old.

So we used to just have to deal with that.

In the last few years, we've also had to deal with people who think it might be flat.

Yeah,

which is stupid.

So I've said this before.

I think the rise of the flat earthers is evidence of two things.

One, we live in a country that protects free speech.

Two, we have a failure of our educational system.

So I don't want to run after all the flat earthers.

I'm going to turn around back to the school system and say, where has it failed in such a way that a full-grown adult coming out of this system can think the earth is flat?

That's where I'm focusing.

I agree.

Right.

And so you're on the side of a fact is a fact.

Get over it.

I'm on the side that Earth is round.

Yes.

But I bring this up because...

Wait, wait, facts can be anywhere.

It's this collection of facts which when put together in wise and sage ways become knowledge.

So I'd rather speak of knowledge than facts.

But I bring this up because you got into some hot water recently.

There was a mass shooting.

You tweeted something about it, which was true.

Yeah.

Okay, if we're going to be facts or facts people.

I defended you, by the way.

Yeah, I did catch that online.

Yeah, I caught that.

Well, where was my thank you note?

You could have reached out a little.

Okay, anyway, my point being, what you said was true.

Yes.

Okay.

You weren't trying to hurt.

You even said

the USA horrifically lost.

You went out of your way to be nice about it and then said, but the fact is that on average, across any 48 hours, we lose 500 to medical errors, 300 to the flu, blah, blah, blah.

Our emotions respond more to spectacle than to data.

Now, I know what it's like to have the Twitter mob come after you.

I don't blame you for Apollo.

I get it to have to do that.

But you were right.

Facts matter.

They do matter.

However,

so do emotions.

We're an emotional species.

So were I to do that again, I would have put

some distance, time distance, between that tweet because people are bereaved.

Right.

And so I wanted to have some sense.

Retrospectively, that's what I would have done.

All right.

I want to ask about an explorer because I know you want to go to Mars.

We're not going to have that fight again as we always do.

Don't get me started.

Don't get me started.

I know.

I'm going to put Mars in the face right there.

Okay.

Well.

I bring Mars wherever I go.

Okay, what?

Talk about a shithole country, Mars instead.

I mean, honestly, if we're going to make...

All right, we're not going to have that argument again.

But

so you admire the explorers, as we all do.

We had Columbus Day earlier this week, okay.

An explorer extraordinaire, you would agree?

We would all agree as an explorer.

Important explorer, yes.

Sure.

Yes.

Or else we'd be doing this show in Barcelona.

That would be so much better.

For you, yes.

And I mean, the balls, to get on the ocean when they did, they thought it was flat, the world.

His crew, but not him.

He was smart enough to know.

Yeah.

That the world was not flat.

Was not flat, yeah.

But still, in that little rickety boat, it's less the size of the, it's like the size of this room.

And it took

audacity.

Unbelievable balls.

Of course.

So was he an asshole?

And gonads, yes.

You know, probably to have that kind of balls, you're not going to be Mr.

Nice Guy all the time.

So, of course, a lot of people say we should tear down his statues and blah, blah, blah, because he brought diseases, and he did.

I read in Jill Lapore's book, Haiti had 3 million people before the Europeans came, and then it was 5,000.

So, okay, disease, he didn't try to do that.

And then slaves, he took slaves.

But so did our founding fathers.

The Bible is cool with slaves.

Neither Jesus nor his dad, God, are against them.

What?

It's not his dad?

I'm not touching this one.

But I'm just saying he was a 15th century man.

The founders had slaves.

The Bible had slaves.

R.

Kelly still has them.

I'm just saying.

Columbus Day, weigh in, discuss.

I'm not touching this one either.

Really?

I think

we need to be aware of the past, of past atrocities, and we need to be sensitive to it.

But I think we're

almost overdosing on history.

We're mining the past constantly for fresh outreach.

I don't think Christopher Columbus should be canceled.

I think we have to have a society that's mature enough to handle moral ambiguity.

Nice to hear, Bob.

Yes.

I have an unorthodox perspective.

Columbus Day?

Yes.

You know,

Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand sent the man to the New World, okay?

And they gave him a satchel of flags that were Spanish flags and put them wherever you come.

So I don't know why Columbus Day to this day is celebrated by Italians.

They had nothing to do with his voyage.

And if they did, more people than just a few in Brooklyn would be speaking Italian in the Western Hemisphere.

It's a valid point.

I hadn't really thought that one through.

Yeah, I'm just trying to put that in perspective.

Okay.

All right.

What?

So can I ask about this democratic debate that we had the other night?

First of all, these debates.

Now it's 12 people.

Well too many.

It's like

I can't, there's too many characters.

It's like, you know, some of the things that we're talking about.

You can count to 12.

I don't understand what the problem is.

But I don't, it's like a Netflix shot, not that I ever watched Netflix,

where you have to binge it for three seasons before it gets good.

I mean, can we get it down to a reasonable number of people?

And also,

you know, Joe Biden, I don't know.

His whole thing for me was that he could be the one to beat Trump.

I don't know if that's true anymore.

I'm not sure that's true anymore either.

I think a lot of people have doubts about whether Joe Biden can do it.

That's why Elizabeth Warren's on top right now.

And what do you think about that?

If it was Trump versus Warren, what's your vote go to?

It doesn't go to Elizabeth Warren or Donald Trump.

So you'd sit it out.

I don't know if it's a good question.

I understand that, to be honest.

The Never Trump people.

I don't know if...

Are you technically a Never Trumper?

No.

Okay, well, putting you aside,

if you're a Never Trumper, if you're a Never Trumper, I hear this a lot, they really hate Trump, but they just can't bring themselves to vote for Elizabeth Warren.

It's like, well, then you're somewhat Trump.

You know, you're like, you either have to go all in or not.

And if you feel very strongly that Trump shouldn't be the president,

there are other ways to, you know, box in a President Elizabeth Warren, vote for a Republican senator, Republican congressman.

But if you want Trump out, you have to go fully in.

You can't have it halfway.

I think.

I have a question for the three of you.

I'm just a scientist.

But when I look at this field of 12,

the Democrats can get together, vote in a primary, and they take the polls of likely voting Democrats, and we might pick the one we like the best.

What would it mean if the one we like the best is not the one most likely to be able to beat Trump?

That's what we're dealing with.

That's right.

But how do we define who's most likely to beat Trump and where are we going to get it?

We don't know.

We never know what the dog wants until you put it on the floor.

But the point here is that...

What does that even mean?

I have a serious answer to this question.

My friends used to play this game called What Will Minnie Eat First?

No, at a party, they'd take four bits of food from the different food and they'd put it on the plate and everyone would bet on what the dog would eat first.

And I never won that bet.

You'd think the hot dog, he's going to go for that.

No, he ate the cracker first.

Every night bet on the cracker, and the next time he would eat the fucking ham first.

Never played a game up until you don't know what the voters want until that's how we got Trump.

No one thought he could win.

But that is

the reason that we got Trump is the same reason that we have this problem

with the Democrats, which is that the primary system used to be the closed door, back room, smoke-filled room, where guys tried to pick the one who was going to win.

Who would beat the opponent.

Right.

Now it's a very different system and the passionate, passionate people in the base are the ones who choose who's going to be their candidate.

So Joe Biden has a little Ukraine problem too.

You know, he didn't answer that question too well, I thought, in the debate.

He didn't own it.

His son was getting 50 grand a month to do nothing in a field he knew nothing about.

It's very swampy.

My question is this.

Al Franken had to go away for the Democrats.

Because they said, well, we have to be like Caesar's wife on the meat too issue.

We can't have any tainting tainting on that so that the Republicans can't say, oh, you guys are bad on that too.

Doesn't the same apply to Ukraine and Joe Biden?

I think they're different issues, but I get your point.

And I think liberals do a disservice if they just excuse what Joe Biden and Hunter Biden were up to.

I don't think it rises to the level of what Trump's.

No, it's not, of course.

But neither did Al Frank.

Of course.

Something clearly, there was a clear issue where Hunter Biden got a job primarily, almost exclusively, because of his father's time in politics.

There's no all-night.

Exclusively.

Exclusively.

And if you think that that's fine, well, it's not.

I mean, there's something unseemly about it, and it's access.

It's somewhat pay-for-play.

And I think that liberals, again, are not doing a real service to themselves if they just try to sweep this under the ribbon.

Who's Kennedy's Attorney General?

It was Roberts.

Yeah, okay.

Okay.

Robert

was at least qualified to be attorney general.

Thank you so much for saying that.

That's not your team, and you're right.

He was qualified.

It's not like a bunker.

It's not like Bobby Kennedy was a purse designer.

But isn't this a problem?

But isn't this a growing problem that we have that isn't just Hunter Biden?

Why is Chelsea Clinton

up at the front?

Why are any of these people?

Is this a conclusion that you can tell your fucking kids to get a real job?

All right.

Thank you, panel.

I got to go to New Rules, everybody, New Rules.

Okay.

New Rules to the woman who got vomit in her hair on a Spirit Airlines flight and had to wash her hair in an airplane bathroom.

What did you expect?

You're flying Spirit from Chicago to Baltimore.

You're lucky you're alive.

I'm just saying, when you book a flight that costs $89, you're subconsciously accepting the the fact that you may get a little vomit in your hair

you just happen to get a lot

new role if Kim Jong-un wants to be taken seriously on the world stage he's got to delegate the job of corn inspector to someone else here he is inspecting the corn here he is pleased with the quality Here he is realizing they keep showing him the same corn year after year.

Yes, Kim, that's the bad news.

That's all the corn there is in North Korea.

The good news is because of all these photo ops of you with corn, you've moved up to third in the Iowa caucus.

New old dispensaries need to stop acting like the highs from different marijuana are so radically different.

This one's good for being social.

This one's a mellow high.

You know, they don't do that at a liquor store.

Hi, what sort of drunk are you looking for today?

I recommend this one for calling old girlfriends,

and the Chianti is nice for sobbing about your father.

Of course, if you're looking to call your mother-in-law a whore,

I'd stick with brown liquor.

Same goes for if you're looking to let the gay guy in your building blow you.

And for anything like falling asleep on the kitchen floor or

putting a pizza in the oven and forgetting about it,

you have to try our malt liquor.

Now,

Now, if this is a really special night and you're thinking of walking up to the Taco Bell drive-thru window,

I would recommend a sweet wine.

And of course, vodka is always great for getting a tattoo of a rocket that looks like a dick.

Neural, now that we have Doritos with names like Flamin' Hot, Blaze, and Jacked,

how about a version for those of us with a more refined culinary palate?

I want to see something like Doritos subtly seasoned

or Doritos whiff of flavor or

Doritos light and unprepossessing.

Oh hell, let's just call it what it is.

Doritos Caucasian.

New Roll, the people who were shocked to see this Australian man jogging a popular trail in a ping thong and work boots must give the guy credit.

That's what we call an old school creep.

He could easily be at home on the computer, masturbating on chat roulette or sending dick pics, but he chose to put on his boots, go outside, and make people uncomfortable the old-fashioned way.

And finally, New Rule, it's time somebody called out Donald Trump for something he's doing that I don't think anyone has caught on to yet.

He's a big liar.

No, I mean it.

Hear me out.

Hear me out.

When he announced he was running the first time, he said.

I don't need anybody's money.

I'm using my own money.

I'm not using donors.

I don't care.

I'm really rich.

But he's not really rich.

And he's used plenty of other people's money.

90% of his 2016 campaign was funded by other people's money.

His whole reason for being there is a lie.

This notion of I can't be bought because I have so much money.

I don't care about money anymore.

No, the exact opposite is true.

The man is constantly for sale.

That wasn't toilet paper on his shoe, it's a price tag.

He grubs for every penny.

He wasn't above cheating his charity.

Trump University was a pyramid scheme.

He just put a G7 meeting in one of his golf clubs.

There is not a dollar he has ever left on the table since he took office.

He's worried about Ukrainian corruption?

The only time corruption bothers Donald Trump is when he's not in on it.

If your country pays in cash,

Saudi Arabia pays cash,

you can literally get away with murder.

You know

Even I have a little money history with this guy.

Remember, Mr.

President, 2013 when you sued me?

Because I publicly offered you $5 million if you could prove you were not the son of an orangutan.

You remember this?

It was a joke.

But when you heard $5 million,

like a bum who chases a dollar on the sidewalk tied to a string.

You could not resist chasing it into court.

Well, you lost that one.

But tonight,

hold a second.

Tonight, I want to give you another chance to get some money out of me.

Now, you and I have been going back and forth on whether you will leave office if you lose the election.

I mean, you have one guy on television.

I'm telling you, he's not leaving.

He's going to win, and then he's not leaving.

So in 2024, he won't leave.

I'm telling you, this is a serious person.

Thank you.

Yeah.

Serious person to serious person.

I will bet you a million dollars right now that if you lose the 2020 election, I'm right and you won't leave.

What am I saying?

This is Donald Trump we're talking about.

Like he'd ever pony up even if he lost a bet.

That would involve two things he's never done, admit defeat and pay a bill.

Okay, so

forget the bet.

I got a better idea.

How about this?

Just take my check for $1 million,

my check for a million, and I bet I could get another thousand people just from here to the beach, including Malibu, of course,

who would pay pay that much to see you resign

and

and to those out there who are saying my god Bill are you suggesting we pay this man to go away

yes that's exactly what I'm suggesting

In fact, I'm insisting

celebrities do do nothing but waste their money on

stupid crazy shit like castles and jewel-encrusted crucifixes and shark tanks and private islands.

Here's something they could spend on and know it was doing some good.

Let's speak to Donald Trump in the only language he has ever really understood.

My whole life has been money.

I want money, I want money.

Greedy, I was greedy, greedy.

I want more money, more money.

It's not like he was hiding it.

It goes back to his childhood, from the moment his father created his first teenage shell company.

Money,

money.

Money makes Donnie a winner.

Daddy loves good boy who gets money.

So,

Mr.

President, it's really very simple.

You love money, we hate you.

Take the money.

Take our money.

You could finally be the billionaire you always pretended you were.

Yes, I said billionaire, because the kind of money I could get from,

just off the top of my head, Oprah, Cher, Madonna, Gaga, Bono, Jay-Z, Beyonce, Pink, Rihanna, Usher, Pharrell, Eminem.

And that's just the ones with one name.

Singers,

actors,

athletes, everyone fucking hates you.

Here's a list of every single person in show business.

This is a list of every single person in show business with the names of those who do not hate you crossed out.

Finally, let us not forget the millions and millions of not so rich and famous people who despise you two.

Americans of modest means who would happily chip in five, ten, twenty bucks, or pawn their wedding rings, whatever it took.

And that's why tonight I am formally announcing the formation of my national crowdfunding platform to bribe President Trump to leave.

I mean, sir, win.

And we call it Prickstarter.

All right, that's our show.

I'll be at the Blaze Gal in Honolulu New Year's Eve and at the Paranormal in Seattle, January 25th.

I want to thank Sam Stein, Thomas Chatterson Williams, Daniel Pletka, Gil deGrasse Tyson, and Susan Rice.

Stay tuned for overtime on YouTube.

Thank you.

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

For more information, log on to HBO.com.