Ep. #489: Irshad Manji, Larry Charles

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Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO late night series, Real Time with Bill Ma.

Start the clock.

Thank you very much.

I know.

I appreciate it.

Thank you.

I know, I know, I know, I know.

I know, I know, I know.

Please, it's a lot of show to do.

We have a big night.

It's a big news day.

I know why you're happy.

The Mueller report finally came out.

For liberals, this is like Christmas

if it was based on real events.

But wait, nobody knows what's in the report.

Everybody at TV is giving an opinion on this very important report that they have not read.

I just saw a graphic on MSNBC breaking speculation.

What we do know for sure is that individual one is in deep number two.

Great.

But will it matter?

Because no matter how damning it is, Trump for the last two years has poisoned the well, constantly saying Mueller is the crooked one, right?

And it's all been written by angry Democrats and it's the deep state.

That's what I used to do when I knew a bad report card was coming.

I'd be like, Mom, keep in mind the teacher is an asshole who has it out for me.

Trump has tweeted over 170 times that this is a witch hunt.

And yet, there's criminal charges against 34 people, six Trump associates, Manafort, and Cohen, and Flynn, and Stone, and Papadopoulos, and Gates.

That's a lot of witches.

And Trump himself, he's a whiny little witch, you know.

But hey, it's spring this week.

Can we at least be happy about that?

Finally, this winter is over.

And spring break, the time of year when drunk, entitled American kids

head to Cabo and Tijuana and the Mexicans chant, build a wall.

But I love spring.

I mean, the days are longer, and the flowers are blooming, and the president's mind is melting.

Really, he is not colluding with reality.

I mean,

this week began with the most voluminous Twitter storm we've ever seen.

And then, when he ran out of living people to fuck with, he started to

some shit with the cadaver.

John McCain, all week long, every interview, every rally,

standing on the driveway, just hurling insults at a man who's been dead for seven months, and McCain's widow, Lindsey Graham, says nothing.

I mean,

Trump, I swear to God, this week was blaming McCain for the Russia investigation and for people not having great health care.

Not a fan.

He kept saying, not a fan.

You have to tell me about it.

Today, Trump asked his Russian hookers to pee on McCain's grave.

I mean,

it's wrong.

I'm just testing your sensitivity like this.

But the other stupid feud that the press covered this week, like it was the Cuban Missile Crisis, was Trump going after Kelly Ann Conway's husband.

You know, Kelly Ann is one of his key advisors, and she's married to a Republican, a fellow Republican, but one with integrity, George Conway.

And George Conway is always criticizing Trump, and this week, I guess he went too far, and Trump was like, he's a loser.

He's a whack job.

This guy, he's a husband from hell.

And Kelly Ann comes out and defends Trump.

Not her husband.

She defends Trump.

Blondes, they always stick together.

What is that about?

And then he did an interview with Fox News.

This is where it gets scary, not just funny, but scary, talking about how if the Mueller report is bad, the people won't stand for it, whatever that means.

And then he launches into, for the zillionth time, his great historic electoral victory.

He said, they came from the valleys, they came from the rivers, they came from the cities, they came all from all over.

Wait, back up.

They came from the rivers?

There's a trout vote in Wisconsin.

But my favorite story of the week, Trump ass kisser and justice obstructor Devin Nunes.

You know, Devin from,

he represents Fresno.

Well, that's not accurate.

He represents Russia.

He lives in Fresno.

Devin Nunes is suing Twitter for $250 million Twitter because they hurt his feelings.

because there was a parody Twitter account.

You know, you're allowed to do parody in America, I hope still.

Called Devin Noonan his cow because he was a dairy farmer

and an idiot.

He was not a good dairy farmer.

He once tried milking a bull all morning.

He said, it didn't give much milk, but it sure was creamy.

Okay.

We got a great show.

Congressman Eric Swalt is here.

Kristen Soltis Anderson and Evelyn Farkas.

And a little later we'll be speaking with my good friend Larry Charles at backstage.

But first up, she is the founder of the Moral Courage Academy.

His latest book is Don't Label Me, an incredible conversation for divided times.

Ershad Munji.

How are you?

Great to see you again.

Thank you.

You look great.

Thank you, right back.

And I love your book.

And tell me the title.

I love the title, Don't Label Me.

But who who are you talking to let's get right to that when you say don't label me who are you aiming that at I'm actually aiming it at everybody who in this us versus them era is hurling labels and categories at each other

and they do it to you and they do it to me but also they do it to you as you know right boy if I ever read it I would know

and you do you read your Twitter

well I don't just read the Twitter I contribute to the Twitter yes yes I do tweet

But it's hard to label you.

I mean, you're Egyptian, right?

That's part of your heritage.

Heritage.

Hair heritage.

Egyptian, Indian,

lesbian, Muslim.

So it's really not that hard to label people,

as it turns out.

Okay, so go see.

So given everything you've just said, of course I've been treated for most of my life like a poster child of multiculturalism.

And so from that unique position, I've been able to see how diversity gets practiced today.

And it's being practiced as labeling.

So, cisgender white male,

you know, me, Muslim, queer, somebody else, woman, somebody else, Jewish, somebody else, black.

Now, all of this pigeonholing, all, you know, kidding aside, actually does worry me.

It troubles me because that's just the flip side, Bill, of what the early American colonists did.

You know, they would slice and dice individuals and stuff them into categories and then assign value to those categories, you today being kind of at the the bottom, I'm sorry to say.

And

yes.

And

what, you know, if we're going to revive that kind of a mentality of creating this hierarchy based on labels, how is that progress?

That's what I'm asking in the book.

Judge people by their character, right?

So

content of their character.

Right, but that's not happening today.

And I have to say, though, I think that that civil rights covenant that you just talked about, right, judge people by the content of their character, not by the color of their skin.

I'm going to say something a little provocative here.

I hope you don't mind.

That

I think it's because during in the Black Lives Era, Black Lives Matters era, so many white folks do feel judged first and foremost by their white skin that So often these days they're saying, why should I give a damn about the content of my president's character?

In other words, it's you progressive people who are violating that whole civil rights covenant that you fought or your people fought so hard to get my people to adopt.

So there's a table, a turning up the tables these days that we can get.

You're going to get it on Twitter.

I can feel it already.

Right.

And fuck them.

You know what?

Fuck them.

I mean, you can't say anything.

Where's this?

I have it up my ass here somewhere.

Oh, here.

Kelsey Clinton,

who is not a controversial person.

Right.

You know.

Really.

Really.

Her mother's a centrist and she's even more of a centrist.

She, when Elon Omar, who is the

freshman congresswoman, okay, so she's had some controversy lately.

Some people think she's anti-Semitic, some people don't.

But

Chelsea wrote, uh, tweeted, we should all expect our elected officials, regardless of party and all public figures, to not traffic in anti-Semitism.

Wildly inflammatory, wasn't it?

Let me show you the reaction that Chelsea got when she was speaking recently for some people who were reacting to this after the New Zealand killing when 50 Muslims were gunned down, and these people blamed Chelsea Clinton.

This right here is the result of a massacre stoked by people like you and the words that you put out into the world.

And I want you to know that, and I want you to feel that deep inside.

49 people died because of the rhetoric that you put out there.

I'm so sorry.

I don't think that's a good idea.

We mean what does that mean?

So, 50 Muslims get gunned down, and Chelsea Clinton is apologizing.

If that's a snapshot of everything that's wrong with the left today, I don't know what is.

Yeah, I can't disagree with you on that.

And, you know, one of the other questions I would have for activists like this, meaning the women who were, you know, screaming at Chelsea Clinton, is, how do you expect people to come on board and see your social justice as justice if this is the way you're going to treat people?

But just the insanity of connecting Chelsea Clinton's quote about don't be anti-Semitic to a couple of weeks later, a guy gunningstem.

Yeah, what happened to Bill?

What?

What?

Is college really educating these days, or is it more indoctrinating?

There you go.

I get it.

No, I'm with you.

And also, what I find so disturbing about this, that says a lot about the DNA of the left these days, Chelsea Clinton, instead of saying, what are you talking about?

Get out of my face, you nut,

says, I'm sorry.

First thing, it's so in the democratic DNA now to just automatically to apologize for everything.

And when you apologize for stuff that's stupid, you give it credence.

Well, yeah, although, I mean, she could have said, as she did, you know, I'm sorry you feel that way, but...

Do you really think that lambasting and insulting and ridiculing me is the way to, you know, to speak to the holdouts here.

I mean, what exactly do you want?

Do you want the conversation?

One of the things I've noticed is that so many diversity activists, among whom I count myself, say, we got to have that conversation, whatever that means.

But what they don't mean in terms of a conversation, they're not actually talking about a dialogue.

So often they're talking about, I will deliver a monologue to you, and you will agree.

And that's the definition of their conversation.

No wonder they get so much.

And if you don't agree, then you have to apologize.

And the apologies are becoming very Soviet.

Thank you for the opportunity to recognize what a douchebag I am.

Right.

Right.

So, New Zealand, okay, this is another example of a guy who probably can't get laid.

An incel.

Yeah, an incel, which, if you don't know the term, involuntarily celibate.

This is a movement now.

You know, I've said this before, when I couldn't get laid, I kept it to myself.

But these assholes, they were.

That phase is over.

That phase is over.

Yes.

No, I had a.

That's right.

I went to FreakNick 92 and I stayed till 2012.

But my gosh, when you look at that, Trump supporters, I think there's some incel stuff going on there.

Charlottesville, those look like guys who can't get laid.

Their solution is the government should provide prostitutes.

I'm not kidding.

Have they actually said that?

Absolutely.

Yes.

Of course, because they think the government should provide things.

They're not getting sex, so prostitutes.

Right.

So actually, they're socialists.

Because

I get it.

They're socialists.

Right.

I say they go to Robert Kraft in the private sector, but that's just

anyway.

But what do you make of that?

How do we deal with this problem?

Yeah.

Well, look,

obviously it's easy and sometimes necessary to make light of it.

You know, have they ever thought that maybe they are the reason they're not getting laid?

So, you know, some introspection might actually be necessary here.

But they've examined that and they've ruled it out.

They've ruled it out.

Okay, very good.

The diagnosis has been, you know, has been laid down.

They've ruled it out.

So the more serious side of it, though, Bill, is that there are a lot of young men today who are feeling humiliated.

And that's a big word I know.

BH-bomb, right?

Humiliated by all of the changes that are happening in society that they feel is being imposed on them.

And for example, the kind of the culture of casual cruelty and sometimes not so casual cruelty that we're living in today means that

people like me who were once thought to be marginalized, but now effectively have these great platforms in our culture.

If we continue to tell white men, you are an idiot, you are stupid, you are, you know,

you rule it over, you're right, all of that, right?

That

you are the exemplars of white privilege, of white supremacy, of white fragility.

Okay.

Well, I'm just, I'm

bad.

We get it.

I love you.

It's all the other white guys I'm talking to.

But the the point, of course, being that that kind of bullying is going to strip people of dignity, regardless of what privilege they come from.

So don't be surprised when the people who are being shamed, blamed, and gamed don't follow your rules.

Don't be surprised when you get backlash.

This is the alt-right recruits

from guys who get it from the PC police, right?

That's right, that's exactly right.

And so, you know,

my team certainly ain't helping matters very much.

Your team?

I think I know what you mean.

You mean you're.

No, you're not.

There are so many labels to choose.

No, I get it.

And my final question is, this book you wrote,

it's really to your dog.

Well,

this is

a conversation.

What is that about?

And why dogs are a problem in the Muslim world?

Well, culturally they're a problem.

Why?

Why don't they like dogs?

Many Muslims are raised, not all, but many of us, myself included, have been raised to believe that dogs are toxic to the human soul.

And so,

let's not go there just yet.

But my point is, is that I overcame that fear.

I adopted lovely Lily, who, by the way, was old and blind, but those labels did not capture accurately who she was.

She was the feistiest human being you ever had the pleasure of hanging out with.

You know, I once lathered peanut butter on my lips just to try to lure a kiss from her.

The moment she came up and sniffed out that this is actually a ploy, she pivoted and walked right away.

Okay?

Point being that, you know, she was able to keep her dignity in the teeth of my pathetic scheme to manipulate her.

And that's what we human beings do.

Wow,

I've learned a lot tonight.

Dear Shaq Munji, you're always a great pleasure to have on our show.

Thank you very much.

All right, let's meet our panel.

Okay.

There they are.

She's a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund and National Security Analyst for MSNBC and NBC.

Please welcome Evelyn Farkas.

Hey, Evelyn, great to see you.

She's a Republican pollster and columnist for the Washington Examiner, our returning champion, Kristen Soltis Anderson.

And he is the fourth-term Democratic Congressman representing California's 15 district, who serves on both the intelligence and judiciary committees.

Representative Eric Slarwell.

Okay, so

it finally happened.

The Mueller report dropped today.

We don't know much.

I'm just going to go by what we do know, and I must say, I don't think it looks good.

No further indictments, which means not Don Jr.

Even after I Love It memo, really?

Not Jared, not Mattafort or Stone for working with the Russians.

Did the Democrats put too much trust in the Mueller report?

Because I don't need the Mueller report to know he's a traitor.

I have a TV.

Yeah.

And people are on their way to jail, have gone to jail.

There's probably a farming out of other investigations.

But yes, if you have a TV or a Twitter account, you've already seen obstruction of justice.

And so I think the team has seen that.

But here's what's important: is that the public sees the report contemporaneously with the president.

He should not be allowed to edit.

He should not be allowed to restrict or sanitize.

And Mueller has to come before Congress and tell us its veracity as far as what Barbara.

Do you want to make that happen?

Yeah, we're going to subpoena him and Adam Schiff.

You subpoena Mueller?

Okay.

You have to hear it from him.

Can I, though, add something?

I don't think we should be all doom and gloom.

We don't know what's in it.

We don't know.

And he might actually paint a really fulsome picture of obstruction of justice, but say he's the sitting president, so I can't indict Congress.

You do with it what you will.

There's no law that he can't indict.

That's just a thing that they say.

It's like you don't order, you know, white wine with...

Well, how about this?

If you did nothing wrong, it's not a law.

If you did nothing wrong as the president, why don't you say, I'm the president, I'm going to get rid of that law if I committed a crime indictment.

No, good luck.

I don't think it's a law.

I think it's a Justice Department according to the right.

But bear in mind, there's also the Southern District of New York that's continuing its investigation into a lot of things that were outside of the scope of what Mueller was allowed to look into.

So this is not over for the president.

But I think in terms of the report coming out today, I'm glad that it is finally filed because the public opinion on this issue had really begun trending in, I think, a bad direction.

About a year ago, you had wide majorities of Americans, including Republicans, saying let Mueller do his job.

But those numbers had started to fall off.

By the time you got to the midterms, more Americans disapproved than approved of the job Mueller was doing.

I'm glad that this is done.

Because Trump, every day, he knows how to do that, to hammer the same thing every day, month after month after month.

Mueller's dirty.

I'm clean.

Imagine getting people to believe that.

Mueller, oh yes.

Man, if he's not fucking a porn star

or running

a screwy charity, that Bob Mueller, he's the dirty one.

And yes, you're right, it worked.

But you know who's also dirty?

Vladimir Putin.

So the other thing I feel like we shouldn't let get lost in all this, that this report was about what the Russians did to America.

So one part of it is Trump, but the other part is Russia.

But I also hope that we don't allow him to criticize a report where he refused to testify when he was given the questions.

He has no credibility.

This report will be full of people who raised their right hand, went under oath, and it will not include him.

So he has no credibility.

The state of the evidence does not include him.

And I think that's important, and that goes to a consciousness of guilt.

Okay, so what worries me is he said a couple days ago when the...

before the report came out, he said, if it's bad, people won't stand for it.

Now, this is another one of these veiled threats.

Last week we heard, I have the tough people.

And he went into the military.

He's got them on his side.

And the police, bikers.

I wondered about that.

And then I read.

Russia has them.

Yes.

Putin has a biker in deaf.

Yes.

So he has his own deaf squad.

Okay.

So

I have the tough people.

People won't stand for it.

Then I see Steve King, the most racist congressman.

You know, Steve King must be a.

He was born in his district.

You were born in his district.

We're trying to change that.

We're trying to change who represents that district.

He was putting up this meme this week.

Can you show it?

Look at this.

The civil war, the next civil war he's talking about, not the one we already had, that everybody's talking about, and our side has 8 trillion bullets.

Okay,

you know, again,

I got the police on my side.

I got the military.

We have the bullets.

For the folks who say it can't happen here, they're telling us it can happen here.

Political violence is not hypothetical.

Steve Scalise cannot walk without assistance because someone came and shot a bunch of congressmen

within the last two years.

You had the guy sending out pipe bombs whose van was covered in political paraphernalia.

And the Coast Guard.

Political violence is a tale as old as time, but we are in a particularly fragile moment where rhetoric from either side buttons

is a lone nut.

This is a congressman.

This is the president.

These are the people in the government.

This is saying, we have the bullets and we have the people on our side.

So rhetoric from leaders is not helping an already bad situation.

Well, he has a lot of time on his hands.

He's been been taken off of all the committees because of prior statements.

He also barely won, he won by just 10,000 votes in a really Republican district.

He doesn't have 10 trillion bullets behind him.

And finally, I've been through that district, Bill.

Well, it's an insult to Republicans.

It's an insult to Republicans.

But I've been through that district.

And in that district, I saw...

hollowed out candy jars with flyers of people who had catastrophic diseases because that's their health care plan.

They don't want him focused on this shit.

Well, okay.

And can I make one other point?

So,

not to sound too wonky like a political scientist, but there are these two guys who wrote this book called How Democracies Die.

Oh, yes.

And they said there are four things that you look for in a potential autocrat.

And the third one is when they excuse Charlottesville and when they actually encourage violence, that statement you just read.

Oh, I read the dictator list like every two months.

There's like 12 of them.

But there's something else I think everyone should see.

This is from March 12th.

There was a rally.

Steve Bannon was holding it, Build the Wall rally.

It was in Cincinnati, Ohio.

And a woman, looked like a town hall.

She had the mic.

She said, never in my life did I think I would like to see a dictator, but if there's going to be one, I want it to be Trump.

Show it so we can see her say it.

Never in my life did I think I would like to see a dictator, but if there's going to be one, I want it to be Trump.

Well, we cut off the part I wanted to see more, which is the people erupting into applause.

That's kind of important.

It wasn't met by, what are you talking about, a dictator?

That's crazy.

It was all...

So, you know, when they talk about the bullets, I don't know.

She's outnumbered, and so is the guy who's our president who wants to be a dictator, and we proved that this past November.

But Rand Paul once said...

Rand Paul said the purpose of the Second Amendment is not to shoot deer, it's to shoot at the government when it becomes tyrannical.

I've asked this question before, and now that the shoe's on the other foot, maybe liberals won't be so hard on guns.

I know you have a gun bill you're presenting in Congress, and I think it's to confiscate guns, right?

You said we should criminally prosecute any who choose to defy

taking away military-style semi-autica weapons by keeping their weapons.

So you're saying we are coming for your guns.

I'm saying that we should ban and buy back 15 million assault weapons, just as Australia did after.

But you say you're

going to get this straight.

We should criminally prosecute any who choose to defy it by keeping their weapons.

That, to me, is coming for our guns.

You're going to lose a lot of people on that one.

Actually, people don't like you coming into their home and taking...

No one's coming into your home,

like any other banned item that's out there.

But I believe that Americans love their kids more than they love these weapons of war and I I'm confident that the NRA is a paper tiger and so ban buy back restrict assault weapons to hunting clubs and shooting ranges and have sensible laws like background checks and community violence gang intervention programs we can do that New Zealand just did that six days after

New Zealand is there are a million reasons why New Zealand is very different from the U.S.

their form of government is different their form of government government is different in that they don't have the same type of constitution.

They have the Treaty of Waitangi, which is a cool document between the Crown and the Maori people.

They don't have a Second Amendment.

So it's easier for them to say, we're going to snap our fingers and change our laws.

The other thing that's different in New Zealand is the culture around gun ownership.

I had a chance, I visited New Zealand about a year ago on a political delegation.

We toured a prison there.

And what was fascinating is there were no guns on the prison guards.

There were no guns anywhere in the prison.

They had pepper spray and they said, well, we had to use it a couple times, like five years ago.

But that was about it.

I mean, the culture there, I mean, New Zealand is a wonderful and magical place, which is part of why this Christchurch shooting is so astonishingly tragic and heartbreaking.

Like, this stuff doesn't happen there.

But there, it's easier to tell people, give us back your guns, because they didn't have as much of an attachment to them in the first place.

But I don't understand why the right to bear arms means that you can have a military-style automatic or semi-automatic weapon.

And

in New Zealand, they basically said, let's come together across a political divide.

Maybe it's not as deep as ours but let's come together and ban these things and I think we need to we need to just wake up and decide what those guns are semi-automatic you know look I'm not for guns I'm not a gun net I'm a gun owner and as long as you say

coming for my guns although it does sound like you kind of are okay

I just think when people want to kill with guns, they will find a gun to do it.

It's like they think the AR-15 is their Ferrari.

They love it.

I'm not sure why.

But if they can't drive a Ferrari to the massacre, there's a hundred other cars they can drive to that.

So to like make this such a big issue about this one kind of gun when most guns are semi-automatic and it's been shown before they kill with any different kind of, if they can't get this kind of gun.

So to make this the issue about that, I don't know if that does more harm than good.

I've talked to the kids.

One applause.

Yeah.

I've talked to the kids.

And 100% of the fear that children have in their classroom today is of an assault rifle.

And their right to learn, their right to go home and be hugged, your right to dance at a concert, worship at a synagogue, I think is greater than any other right to.

Again, that doesn't answer what I just said.

Like, you can't get shot at a concert or a synagogue with a different kind of assault.

Dancer doing nothing?

No, it's not.

No, not doing nothing.

No, no.

For every kind of sensible gun.

You can't limit what kind of cars you can drive to.

It would be the equivalent of saying, they can have the station wagon of guns, but they shouldn't have the Ferrari of guns because you can do more damage more quickly before the police can come to the table.

So, if I may, the

these are not, speaking of casualties, the casualties from last week's college admission scandal.

Are you over that yet?

It's

Laurie Laughlin's daughter, Olivia Jade, may lose her career as an influencer.

And, you know, for a while I have referred to.

She didn't need to go to college, probably.

That's right.

She's making money already, but no more.

But there's always a sex tape.

Anyway,

I have for a while been referred to.

doing a bit.

Don't just guess.

They never get that in a memo.

For a while, I've been referring to these entitled type of kids as the fuck you, mom generation, because I've seen on too many TV shows and movies, and a couple of times in real life, kids actually say, unlike in my generation, fuck you, mom.

Well, apparently this got around because now there's a magazine called Fuck You Mom.

There it is.

I have it.

I have it in both places.

Fuck you, Mom.

And would you like to hear some of the articles articles in this month's issue?

Okay.

Fuck you, Mom.

For example, college admissions issue, picking the right imposter to take your SATs.

Oh, that's.

Mom's Purse, which pills are right for you.

Seven easy-to-prepare summer dishes to throw during a tantrum.

Fuck you, Mom Exclusive, one reader's chilling encounter with the word no.

Our travel team takes you somewhere you've never been, the laundry room.

Ears, proof humans are also meant to listen.

Fuck you, mom investigates.

Three new sighs for spring.

I didn't even expect that much for that one, but I just like it.

Today's horoscope, you'll get whatever you want because you're perfect.

And who's the guy mom's been talking to and other ways to fuck with dad's head?

Okay.

Larry Charles is over here.

I got to tell you.

If you like Seinfeld, other than Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld, he was the fifth Beatle.

If you like Borat,

Bruno, and he made a little movie called Religilous.

He is a comedy legend.

He's got a new one, Larry Charles, dangerous world of comedy on Netflix.

Larry Charles is over here.

Larry, look at you all cleaned up.

I've never seen you with a tie.

We wouldn't let me in otherwise.

Well, Larry, I watched your thing.

It is so awesome.

I brought back so many memories of us making religionistic

fun.

I always was saying to you, are you trying to get us killed?

Yes.

And I was.

You were, and you didn't succeed, but this is so much more dangerous.

I mean, you go and see Mogadishu, Somalia, you went to.

Yes.

Liberia, Iraq, Saudi Arabia.

And the big takeaway is, what?

You're alive?

I'm alive.

That was a good thing.

My family's happy about that.

But their war zones and the stakes in those places are so different.

We're talking about the Muller report coming out.

These are places, we are complacent.

in this culture at this point.

We have taken our freedoms for granted.

And I've traveled to these countries like Somalia and Iraq that are in the midst of horrible wars or Liberia recovering from a horrible civil war and those people are ready to fight and die for their freedom for the right to vote.

People die there.

And to joke.

And to joke.

Because they find it so healing.

Yes, and the comedians there have much higher stakes than American comedians for that reason.

It's like here you have a career path.

You do a stand-up special, you do a sitcom, you get a show.

In these countries, there's no career path.

You You know, it's like prison, torture, or death.

That's the career path for these comedians.

My takeaway from this was that it is so primal.

Like after eating and fucking, laughing.

I agree.

It's unbelievable that when you see these people in these places, and I'm watching, these are former child soldiers.

Yes.

Women.

In Saudi Arabia, you interviewed.

Women, that's got to be a tough gig.

Well, they are all tough gigs.

And there's no, again, there's no remuneration.

So these people do it as a calling.

They use laughter as a healing tool.

And I learned, as you observed, that laughter is as crucial as breathing and eating and sleeping.

Without laughter, the society would collapse on itself.

And they will make bits.

It's so funny, like any comic in this country.

You make bits around what's around you.

Yes.

You know, dog and cat material, and the airlines are crazy these days.

Yes.

And when you're in Liberia, the jokes are about Ebola.

Exactly, exactly.

And that's how they got through it.

And war, and

getting killed.

Well, we're familiar with dark humor, and the dark humor there is real.

We don't have to use our, we use our imaginations to take these wild leaps.

Right.

But in Liberia, you could talk about Ebola as happening right in front of you.

Your family is dying.

Right.

So, in order to deal with that and have some kind of sense out of it, because it's so absurd and so overwhelming, humor becomes an important tool.

And you did a long thing about in Nigeria.

Yes.

Rape jokes.

Yes.

Not verboten.

No, no, encouraged.

In fact, Nigeria is the only country I went to that has a burgeoning comedy industry.

The comedians are superstars in Nigeria, and they have big audiences, and they are laughing at these rape jokes, and it's part of the rape culture.

And if you look back 10 years in America, 10 years ago, we were doing very similar stuff also.

It was okay, it was considered outrageous, you know.

And now we've kind of come to a place where it's not so cool to do, but there there's still encouragement to do that sort of humor.

We were doing rape jokes 10 years ago?

You and I, no.

I don't remember that at all.

No, no, no.

I'm talking, well, like in Borat, for instance, quite honestly, there's a lot of rape humor in Borat.

Now, it's anti-rape rape humor.

Right.

But there was a lot of casual jokes using rape to make some kind of point, to be outrageous, just like a lot of subjects that were dealt with back 10, 15 years ago are not really subjects that you would do today on the show.

And I noticed a lot of these comedians, they really respect you.

Because you went there.

Yeah.

Because

they love Seinfeld also.

And they love Seinfeld.

They love Seinfeld.

It's amazing.

And that got you.

I mean, you use that almost like a bartering tool.

Yeah, well, first of all, when we did Bruno, and we did, we shut a lot of Bruno in Jordan.

And we used to, I would walk down the street in Amman, and there'd be street sellers there selling stuff on the ground, bootleg DVDs and stuff like that.

So I would walk down the street, and every day it was the same thing.

I would see Seinfeld bootleg,

curb your enthusiasm, bootleg DVD,

Borad, bootleg DVD, and then a copy copy of Mein Kampf.

Why those were always

together?

Because of the soup Nazi, that's right.

Yes, exactly.

And then checkpoints, like in this show that we did, we had to go from Palestine into Israel and back and forth.

Very difficult to do.

And so we got stopped constantly.

I was pulled out of the car.

I was told I had to drink my Diet Coke in front of them to make sure it wasn't an explosive device.

And then somebody whispered to the soldiers that I was with Seinfeld, and they were like, come on through, come on through.

And that was it.

Everywhere I went, they just dropped Seinfeld and I got in in anywhere I wanted to go.

So it was pretty amazing.

But I also, if I may, I interviewed a guy in Saudi Arabia named Fahat al-Battari, who's known as the Seinfeld of Saudi Arabia.

And he's married to one of the female driving activists.

And after our interview, he was jailed.

He and his wife have been jailed, and they've disappeared.

Yeah.

So that's

the Seinfeld of Saudi Arabia.

Some of these people,

there's a couple of the ones you said were already assassinated.

There's been a number of assassinations amongst the communities.

You can get assassinated for Congress.

Yes, yes.

So I don't know if you saw Mike Pompeo, our Secretary of State, was in the press today saying that he thinks God did appoint Trump to save the Jews from the Iranian menace.

And it just made me think, like when we were making Religilist, there was like a story every day that you could have put in the movie.

Yeah, it's never stopped.

It fortunately.

It never stopped.

We've reached the point, look, humanity is like in a death race between logic and madness, you know?

We're like, we're relying on saviors.

Why are we relying on Trump or even Mueller or the SDNY or, you know, we don't need saviors.

Saviors are disappointments.

We need reality, you know?

And so this battle between

the craziness and the logic is going to result in some sort of conclusion at some point.

Who's going to win that?

Is humanity going to survive that battle, basically, is what's going on.

Who do you want in the 2020 field?

You're not in yet, right, Eric?

Getting close.

Getting close.

Getting close.

Yeah.

Hold tight.

Hold tight.

Future president.

Yeah.

Future president.

There's only 15 in, so you figure, you know.

And thank you for fighting the good fight because I agree with him that, in my opinion, as a layman, Trump is a traitor, and I'm yelling at, arrest him, arrest him.

And meanwhile, I feel like I'm an invasion of the body snatchers.

Nobody believes me except for you.

So I appreciate that.

So who do you want?

Have you had to pick now, or how do you see the field?

I'm very impressed with,

again, I don't like the concept of savior.

Like, I think Betto O'Rourke's a great guy, but I don't need a savior.

I need people who have policies.

Elizabeth Warren, not that I'm supporting her, but at least she comes out with policies, specifics, that you could debate and discuss.

But, you know, it's not so generalized.

I mean, I was in Texas

at the beginning of the month.

I was in El Paso.

Beto came to my show.

We talked for a long time after.

I like him a lot.

I know maybe your competition.

But he started off the campaign doing nothing but apologizing.

You know, I remember saying to him, I'm not telling us out of school, but I said, you know, how about a sister soldier moment where you stand up to the crazies on the left who were always, because, you know, we saw the tape of the lady saying she welcomes a Trump dictatorship.

And there are people on the left making Bedouin Rook apologize because when he was 15, he wrote a story, just like I was saying about Chelsea Clinton.

What is it with the Democrats that they can't stop apologizing for nothing?

He apologized for a story.

He was 15.

We should be applauding him for writing a story.

Imagine Trump writing a story.

You know, you can't imagine.

But can I say something in defense of an apology?

Because I do think there's something nice about apologizing.

It's how you do it.

You can say, I'm sorry I didn't mean to be anti-Semitic in the language I chose, but I wanted to make a point that the Arab people living in Israel and living in the Middle East,

in what will be Palestine, hopefully, someday, you know,

have rights as well, right?

I mean, you can stand up for what you believe

and show some humility.

But

yeah, but because the

Trump doesn't want people to apologize, this is the thing I worry about, is he gets into this don't apologize because it reminds me of Hitler in the 1930s.

How did he come to power?

He said, we're done apologizing.

Those Westerners, they want us to apologize for World War I and pay reparations, and we're not apologizing for that.

Okay, we have to close the apology gap.

One guy apologizes for nothing, and the Democrats apologize for everything.

Excuse me, it's not just how you apologize.

Yes, that's important.

It's what you choose to apologize for or not to.

So far, you know who has my vote?

Amy Klobuchar.

Because she ain't apologizing.

She's a tough boss.

And he said, you're right, I'm a tough boss.

I get shit done.

Can I read what Betto said?

Because, I mean, again,

this is about something he wrote when he was 15.

He said, I'm mortified to read it now, incredibly embarrassed.

Whatever my attention was as a teenager doesn't matter.

Yes, it does.

You were a teenager.

Then there's the one about he said about his wife.

He made a joke that two years ago he would have been clapped on the back for a self-deprecating comment, giving credit to the wife.

He said, she raised the kids mostly.

I helped out a little.

Not only will I not say that again, I'll be more thoughtful going forward in the way that I talk about our marriage.

My ham-headed attempt to try to highlight the fact that Amy has the lion's share of the burden of our family.

He said, I hope I have been in some instances part of the problem.

I can also be part of the problem.

You've just been married, by the way.

Just married.

Yes, exactly.

Well, let me just say, as someone who knows the two of them, she is an amazing person.

One, I think we all agree on that.

But two, my rule when it comes to apologizing is apologize if you're wrong, not if you're unpopular.

And there's a difference.

And yeah,

and this is something that I think Joe Biden, should he jump into the race, is going to have to deal with because he's got decades and decades of things that he has said and done and voted for that are not where the Democratic Party is today.

Does he spend the next 12 to 18 months apologizing for that?

I hope he doesn't.

I hope to the extent that there are votes he took that he now regrets, he says, hey, look, crime rates were different in the early 90s than they are now.

Maybe I I would have voted.

But don't feel, don't spend the next 18 months if he's watching.

And I mean, offer some advice.

Apologize him for everything.

I heard you say that when you do focus groups with Republicans, and when they know it's just Republicans in the room, family, they're not shy about talking about the many things they don't like about Trump.

So they're not blind to his myriad flaws.

It's just that what's the other alternative?

When they look at stuff like this, they go, the Democrats.

They're weak and ridiculous.

It looks weak.

It doesn't look like someone who you want or think can stand up for you as leader of the country.

And what you were talking about at the beginning of the very beginning of the show about how there's this idea that whether it's white Americans, men, that they sort of feel like they are told by society that they need to apologize, part of Trump's power, the way he's got this grip on his base, is he says, you don't have to apologize for who you are.

I think you are a good person.

There is nothing more powerful you can do to win someone's loyalty than pay them a compliment and tell them they're wonderful.

And that's why so many people feel like Trump is the first person that has seen them and told them they are okay.

And they feel like the Democrats think that they are a bad person just outright, which makes it harder for Democrats to ever win them back.

And I'll say that to Kristen's point, we cannot dismiss the Trump voters.

We can dismiss the guy that's not delivering for them.

But I can tell you from former fraud cases that I prosecuted, I had a slam dunk case.

I thought it'd be really easy to get the victims in.

And then I realized their reluctance because they felt guilty, like they were being blamed and it was their fault.

And so the case to make to those voters is he was right on what he promised and better jobs, higher wages, lower health care costs.

He just didn't deliver.

If you insult them, we lose them.

Right.

You know,

I saw, I mean,

I certainly get the idea that we need to make up for the past.

I mean, I believe in reparations to some degree, certainly in affirmative action.

But also, if I may, you have people who believe in reparations and also people who don't even want to take down Confederate statues and flags.

This is the divide that we're in right now.

So apologizing is not working when you have people arming themselves, refusing to even take down the Confederate statues.

This is the divide that's being created right now.

This chasm that's going to be very, very difficult, I think, to reconcile.

I mean, Charlemagne the God asked Bernie Sanders, do we need another white man?

Is that an appropriate question?

Because it sounds like we're judging people by the color of their skin.

He change who he is and he shouldn't apologize for the color of his skin.

He didn't.

He should see other colors and if there's an issue that he can't talk about, he should pass the mic to someone who can.

But is that an appropriate question?

Do we need another white man?

Is that how we want to judge?

I don't think that's an appropriate question.

No, we want another, we need a good leader.

Right.

And I think, again, seeing people's.

But if you're a minority, not to interrupt, and I'm sorry, but if you're a minority, I think and you put yourself in that person's shoes, you can see a white patriarchy that's controlled the country from the the very beginning.

So, the idea of after we've already had Obama to go back to yet another older white man like a Biden seems like the wrong direction.

It just doesn't seem like what we're capable of.

But then we're judging a person by his age and his skin color.

That can't be right.

There are victims in all revolutions, you know.

And

they may wind up being the victims.

I got it.

Stop it.

I'm so sorry.

No, no.

Because we're live and we don't want to run into the next show.

New rules, everybody.

New rules.

Sorry, Ellie.

Okay.

New rules: since President Trump just called Kellyanne Conway's husband a total whack job, and half of all CBS sitcoms are about skinny blonde women married to fat guys.

CBS must make a show called The Total Whack Job

tonight after an all-new Make Room for Daddy.

New rules, now that a homeless eight-year-old Nigerian refugee has won his category at the New York State Chess Championship,

Hollywood must give the movie that's going to be made about this kid the Oscar right now.

But first, give Christian Bell the chance to get down to 45 pounds.

New Roll Albania must rethink its new tourism slogan, be taken by Albania.

I'm not kidding.

That really, that is their slogan.

And I agree, everyone should be abducted by Albanians at least once in their life.

Because between that and buying your way into USC, this is how you find out how much you're worth to your family.

Neural Mama June's mugshot for

drug possession must become the emoji for, uh, I have to go to a wedding this weekend.

Yes, Mama June was arrested for crack cocaine possession after a domestic dispute at a gas station.

She's Mama June.

What do you expect her to get arrested for?

Insider trading?

Plus, it all makes sense.

The crack, because she has substance abuse issues, the domestic dispute with her boyfriend, because she's a woman of strong opinions, and the gas station, because they were out to dinner.

There I go, making fun of the rednecks again.

It's terrible.

New role, presidential candidate Andrew Yang doesn't need to tell us that he's against circumcision.

I don't mean to be snippy, but I can...

But I can see the attack ads already.

Andrew Yang says he's against circumcision, but why is he so interested in your babies, little pee-pee?

Tell Yang to keep his hands off your wang.

Andrew Yang, just another liberal who won't cut anything.

And finally, new rule, Trump derangement syndrome isn't a real thing, so don't make it one.

Republicans accuse Democrats these days of hating Trump irrationally, like everything he does is awful.

Except everything he does is awful.

So

on the rare occasion when he says something not stupid, don't act like you have Trump derangement syndrome.

It happened last weekend when Trump weighed in on the second MAX 8 air crash by tweeting, airplanes are becoming far too complex to fly.

I see it all the time in many products always seeking to go one unnecessary step further when often old and simpler is far better.

And who knows better about old and simple?

But TV pundits were all over that tweet, saying it proved that Trump wanted to go back in time to our racist path.

Okay, he does want that, but this wasn't about that.

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

And he's right.

We do overengineer shit all the time.

And designing a plane where the autopilot software sometimes steers it into the dirt is just the most tragic example.

The second most tragical example is my old vape.

My old vape, the PAX.

I liked it a lot.

I mean, I would have if I was a pot smoker.

No, Pax and I shared a lot of good times.

But then it fell victim to the upgrade bug.

The model doesn't have a mouthpiece,

which is an odd thing to get rid of for something you stick in your mouth.

You can't suck it and that sucks.

It was perfectly fine the way it was and now it's so hard to use this thing, I'm so close to watching Morning Joe not stoned.

This is what I call reverse improvement, making an upgrade that nobody wants, needs, or likes.

They do it with vape pens too.

Press five times to turn off.

Press three times.

Listen, I'm here on earth to have a good time, not to read instruction manuals.

And

the last thing you want to do when you're high is figure shit out.

Never get stoned before assembling IKEA furniture.

You spend the whole time thinking, who is Alan and why is this wrench named after him?

Cars these days have more useless features than Jared Kushner.

Why was replacing the car door handle with a button an improvement?

It's not.

Because it's not better if everything in the car is run by a computer because the shit is always glitchy.

Once while I was driving a voice activated rental car, I said, car, turn on headlights.

The car said, would you like to open the trunk?

I said, open the trunk, fuck no.

Opening trunk.

No, close trunk.

Turn on lights.

I don't know what's stupid.

A feature where you can verbally open your trunk at 60 miles an hour?

Or getting into an argument with a car.

Last weekend, I was in Dallas.

The faucet in the sink in my dressing room looked like this.

Now, I needed hot water to shave and cold water to wash my face.

And I never found out how to make that happen.

Really?

The black thing in the middle makes the water go on, but hot and cold, I call it the fuck you sink.

Because when I say I want it hot, it says,

I'm sorry, Dave.

I'm afraid I can't do that.

There's even a smart toilet now, although, let's be honest, if it was really that smart, would it be a toilet?

Now, they are working on a toilet that analyzes your pee as it hits the side of the bowl and gives a readout of all your vital functions, that's fantastic.

I'm always for real progress,

but that's not this.

This toilet says it's a quote fully immersive experience because who doesn't want to be immersed in a toilet?

I'm not kidding, it has Bluetooth, Alexa, built-in speakers, and mood lighting.

So you can pretend you're taking a dump in the middle of Studio 54.

In 2017, Apple unveiled facial recognition technology for opening your phone because remembering four digits, what is this, an IQ test?

So this is what happened.

Unlocking it is as easy as looking at it and swiping up.

And, you know, let's try that again.

Ho, ho, ho.

Let's

go to backup here.

Apple itself can't get the shit to work at their own show.

What shot do we have?

There's always a glitch.

Like last week when Nike, get this, ran into a problem with their new self-lacing sneakers.

Yes, self-lacing for people who literally can't tie their shoes and chew gum at the same time.

So instead of tying your shoes on your own, you know, like a loser,

You simply put on your shoes, pull out your phone, find Wi-Fi, open the app, enter your password, password, find the button that says tie shoes, close the app, return the phone to your pocket, and catch up to your friends who left 15 minutes ago.

All right, that's our show.

I'll be at the Sanger Theater in New Orleans, April 6th.

The grand in the Foxwoods Resort in Nantouchett, Connecticut, May 25th, and at the Fox in Detroit, June 22nd.

I want to thank Evelet Parkinson, Kristen Soltis-Anderson, Eric Swolell, Larry Tove, and Irshan Menji.

Stay tuned for Overtime on YouTube.

Thank you, folks.

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

For more information, log on to HBO.com.