Ep. #458: Ronan Farrow, Ross Douthat

Charlie Sheen is an icon of decadence.

I lit the fuse and my life turns into everything it wasn't supposed to be.

He's going the distance.

He was the highest paid TV star of all time.

When it started to change, it was quick.

He kept saying, no, no, no, I'm in the hospital now, but next week I'll be ready for the show.

Now, Charlie's sober.

He's gonna tell you the truth.

How do I present this with any class?

I think we're past that, Charlie.

We're past that, yeah.

Somebody call action.

Aka Charlie Sheen, only on Netflix, September 10th.

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

Thank you very much.

Let us pray.

No, I know why you're happy today.

You feel safe.

Ladies and gentlemen, we got him.

Bill Cosby has been found

guilty of sexually assaulting dozens of women, and he's been sentenced to 10 years in the White House.

So that's,

no,

he's going to jail, and he would best heed the advice that he always gave younger black men in America.

Pull up your pants.

Now,

Mr.

Dr.

Cosby, still doctor?

Maybe not.

His lawyers are arguing for very lenient sentencing, they say, because he is completely blind.

No, you're thinking of the wife.

He's good.

Now, our president, the president who knows the best people,

another,

must be bad luck, huh?

Because he knows the best people.

Another appointment went sour.

Dr.

Ronnie Jackson, you know Dr.

Ronnie Jackson, yeah.

He's the physician to the president.

We have one of those in this country.

And he's been that way for a long time.

He was there for Obama, George Bush.

We didn't know a lot about Dr.

Ronnie Jackson before, but then when Trump became president,

Dr.

Ronnie gave him his physical, remember that, and said he was in great shape and not obese at all.

And we all said, Is this guy high?

And

yes,

he apparently has been very

Apparently he has been handing out drugs so indiscriminately his nickname was the candyman

Okay, A, how does a guy like this get to be the physician to the president and B is he still accepting patients?

I'm asking for a friend.

But Dr.

Ronnie said these false allegations, he's stepping down.

He's not going to take the job at the VA, which what he was put up for.

He said these these are allegations are false, and they become a distraction to the president.

A distraction to this president?

All he does is golf, watch TV, and eat.

How can there be a distraction?

Unless you're a sand trap, a commercial, or a chicken bone, you're good.

A distraction?

Yeah, a distraction.

He's calling Fox and Friends in the morning.

Did you see that?

Did you see him prank call fox and friends yesterday?

Oh my God.

He babbled like Rain Man ate a bag of Coke.

I mean, the three.

This is where we are in this country.

The three hosts of Fox and Friends

looked very worried.

Really.

They were like, this is too stupid for us.

And we're the hosts of Fox and Friends.

But hey, let's not forget the good news.

North and South Korea, did you see this?

The presidents of North and South Korea met

Look at them

look like the before and after if you a slim fast and super cuts commercial

and

And what is with all the handholding these days?

You know, these guys are doing it and these two could not

stop doing it.

The only people we can't get to do it are these two

Now, they've had a lot of visitors there to the White House lately.

The Japanese prime minister, the French president, the German chancellor's there.

Now, Melania loves these state visits.

She now knows how to say, please take me with you in 16 languages.

Oh, poor Melania.

It was her birthday this week.

Trump, they asked him about it on Fox and Trends.

Maybe I didn't get it too much.

But then they had a little ceremony at the White House, and Trump said, make a wish, and his dick fell off.

It is a strange White House, you have to admit, when the president and his wife have no contact, and the American president and the French president, half his age,

cannot keep their hands off each other.

I mean, they were all over each other these two.

The hugs, the handshakes, the two-handed handshakes, the hand-holding, the cheek kissing.

I thought he was going to

I Thought Trump was going to take him furniture shopping.

I mean

at one point Trump said call me by your name.

What the hell?

But it all came out.

It all came out.

Okay, they had their first state dinner.

The Trumps did at the White House.

And, you know, it was France.

So they wanted it to be really classy.

so they took the chicken out of the bucket.

All right, we've got a great seat.

We've got

Anna Marie Cox, Ian Gremer, and John Pederitz, and a little later will be speaking with author and columnist Ross Douthett.

But first up, he is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist, writes for the New Yorker, whose new book is War on Peace: The End of Diplomacy and the Decline of American Influence.

Ronan Farrow.

Great to see you.

Thank you to be back.

You have had quite a year.

You're very tired, man.

You got a Pulicha Prize.

Are you 30 yet?

I am 30.

Just 30.

That's old and teachers.

You still got your...

Oh, fuck you.

You got your first Pulitzer Prize.

That's pretty great for your work in the Harley Weinstein stuff and the MeToo movement.

And now you've got this book about a completely different subject, which is really well received by very serious people about foreign diplomacy.

I noticed that the president spoke to Congress and really echoed a lot of the thoughts in your book.

Unfortunately, it was the president of France.

And, well, first of all, what do you think of this eight-play that I was just talking about between him and what was going on there?

This power moves of yanking each other.

Dusting the

imaginary dandruff off the shoulder.

I mean, this is not diplomacy.

And you have Macron get up before Congress and talk about Voltaire and Ben Franklin in the 1700s.

And everyone's like, yes, please, more of this.

We want professional international relations.

And it's just not happening here right now.

Trump thinks Voltaire is a Harry Potter character.

So I don't know how that landed.

But, okay, it seems like the Europeans are playing good cop, bad cop with Trump, because they have Macron come in and they have make-out sessions.

And then

now Merkel is here who he doesn't like very much you can see she's a little spicier

and she said something really interesting she said you know we can't depend on the United States to be the leader anymore and I guess that's where the world is well you know we have actual metrics on this there was a Pew survey of G20 countries just in the last few days and what they found is people do trust the United States less than Germany now yeah and why not what I mean what why do we have to be in that position?

That was not something that was thrown down by Thor.

Why can't it be somebody else's turn?

I mean, we're not still holding the Germans responsible for, you know, what, are we?

Look, fair, I'm not going to touch the Holocaust stuff tonight.

However.

I'm just saying, it was a very long time ago.

How long did

Germans have to say we're not those people anymore?

I think the problem is not that Germany may be taking the place of the United States in terms of international relations leadership.

It's that China is filling the spaces we're leaving behind.

So everywhere around the world, we are slashing our diplomatic spending.

We do not have ambassadors.

We do not have assistant secretaries of state who can actually embed things like this upcoming North Korea meeting in long-term strategy.

And what's happening with China is they are spending more and more on their diplomats in places like Sudan, where once they were this rapacious interloper, didn't give a crap about human rights, stole all the oil, and then got the hell out of there.

Now they've got a regional envoy doing shuttle diplomacy, trying to get political settlements in these difficult spots.

They've got big, big-scale development projects.

They're building a building all over the world.

They're building everybody's roads and hospitals and power plants.

And every kid in every corner of the world sees that.

And increasingly, they don't see a U.S.

embassy there.

Yeah, I mean, Napoleon said, China's a sleeping giant, let her sleep, and they're woke.

Figuring awoke.

They are woke as hell right now.

Yeah.

But unfortunately, not on human rights or the kind of leadership that I think we all value and hope is.

It seems like our problem is the problem that happens with every empire.

First of all, we were never supposed to be an empire.

And I don't think we use that word enough.

America is an empire, unlike any other country now.

We have troops in

over 100 countries, bases all over the world.

Some of these places that we fought in World War II, we still have 40,000, 50,000 troops.

I don't understand why.

But whenever you have an empire,

the thinking tilts toward the military as the people who can solve everything.

And it seems that is where diplomacy suffers, is because Americans, they just never stop voting for more money for the military, let the military do everything.

We put them on a pedestal, and everything else

is not what it used to be around the world.

It's a vicious cycle.

We no longer have diplomatic capacity.

We don't have negotiators.

We don't have peacemakers.

And so people do trust the military more.

We do run everything through the military.

And politicians get on the campaign trail every time and they denigrate, I think, people who are really brave men and women serving the world everywhere as diplomats.

You know, these people get characterized as dusty bureaucrats.

They're not.

They are in difficult, dangerous places right alongside our military.

No, it's a part of the encroachment that Eisenhower talked about all those years ago.

It's the military-industrial complex.

It slowly takes over everything.

And you know, one of the things I write about in this book, War on Peace, is I was a little guy at the bottom of the totem pole at the State Department in Afghanistan.

If you wanted to build a well or reach out to a community in rural Afghanistan, you had to do it through the Pentagon if you wanted it done this year.

And that's a real problem because the Pentagon is thinking tactically.

It's not thinking about our long-term strategy necessarily.

Okay, so let's switch subjects to your other big area, which is you wrote the article about Harvey Weinstein.

It was supposed to go on NBC, right?

It was.

But it wound up at the New Yorker because NBC, now they're dealing with a story about Tom Broca and Matt Lauer and, gosh, what's in the water over there?

And Bill Cosby.

It's very fitting you're here right after he gets

sentenced, or not sentenced, but found guilty.

These were the big fish.

These were the really bad people.

Do you think there's an excess in the movement that is causing a backlash, that's hurting it?

I'm thinking about people like Al Franken, Aziz Ansari, Garrison Keillor.

You know, I was reading a story about him and it said, well, he had a reputation of bullying in the workplace.

That could just be somebody's opinion.

And then it said, and on several, on one occasion, I thought, oh, here it comes.

The penis came out at the Christmas party.

Everyone had this pent-up desire to show their penis that we just didn't talk about for years and years.

Not everyone, but

well done.

But

a shocking number of people.

I don't get the MO.

But it said on one occasion he posted an off-color limerick.

And I thought, maybe we've gone too far here.

So I would just point out, I think that our culture has actually been pretty good on the whole about self-regulating.

So you mentioned Aziz Ansari.

You know, that blog about Aziz Ansari came out.

It was clearly a single source narrative about a date gone wrong, and there was a debate about how far gone wrong it was.

But I don't think anyone saw that and said, oh, he's Harvey Weinstein.

This is a multiple rapist.

No, but he lost a lot.

Clearly.

But he's not around anymore.

Is that true of Zizan Sori?

I think so.

I think his.

I guess we'd have to ask him how he's doing these days.

Well, I think we could find that out.

I don't think we have to ask him directly, but I don't think his show is on it.

I just think that that reporting was regarded exactly as it should have been.

People saw it for what it was.

There was a debate about it.

There was a lot of criticism of it.

There was some.

I think people are divided.

I think a lot of people are, yes, you're right.

There was backlash.

and I think he suffered a lot also from it.

And I would say that those cautionary tales, I think, have been pretty well received by fellow journalists.

Overall, what I've seen is the vast majority of the reporting that's actually broken through has been very meticulous, has referred to very serious crimes.

And, you know, this separate discussion of the gray areas and how far it should go, I think we're sorting that through just as we should be.

Al Franken, you think he should have quit?

You know, I didn't do any reporting on the Al Franken story.

I know.

I don't know if you can.

You can have an opinion.

Yeah, you know, I do think that it's correct to distinguish between these kinds of violations and these kinds of behavior.

But I would also just make a point.

This whole conversation, Bill, was under wraps for decades.

There is so much pent-up anger and heartbreak and lack of accountability that I do think it is understandable that it's coming out in torrents right now.

Okay.

Well, you're doing amazing work on a number of fronts.

You obviously have your mother's incredible compassion

and

your father's steely ambition, whoever that may be.

Great to see you, Ronan Farrow.

Thank you very much.

Thanks, everybody.

All right, let's meet our panel.

Hey.

Hi, everybody.

All right.

He is president of Eurasia Group and author of Us versus Them, The Failure of Globalism, Ian Bremer.

He is the editor of Commentary Magazine, contributed to MNBC News and MSNBC.

Uh-oh, watch out.

Please welcome John Podaritz.

John, how you doing?

Great.

I have you back in so long.

Decades.

Always get them back.

It may take decades, but we do it.

She's a political columnist for Sci-Fi Network and host of the Crooked Media Podcast with friends like these.

Ana Marie Cox.

Great to see you.

Don't forget to send us your questions for tonight's overtime so you can answer them after the show on YouTube.

I want to first start with that Fox and Friends thing because it was very disturbing to me.

And I just want to hone in on the lies because he broke his own record for lying within a sentence.

He's done that many times.

But he's,

I swear to God, he was saying that he

was talking about CNN and he said I don't watch it at all.

I watched it last night

You did it within a breath within a breath

and okay, that's the kind of lie we just accept from him now.

It's casual, but we we normalized it, but he also said this week that

Iran

We gave

well, we gave them $150 billion,

which is not true.

You know, he says James Comey released classified information, really important things that are not true.

And I was reading about these two lawsuits, one from the Sandy Hook parents, who are suing Alex Jones, who says Sandy Hooks was a hoax.

And then

Summer Zeros, I think is her name, suing Donald Trump, says he lied about

saying that what she was saying about him was false.

And I thought, this is the most important thing we have to do in America right now, is start penalizing liars.

because we are drifting further and further away from a place where truth matters.

I think you've got to separate out the Summer Zervos story from the Sandy Hook story because Summer Zervos has a case that she was slandered by Trump, who said that her story is not true.

If, in fact, it can be documented that the story is true, that is slander, and though I'm not sure that she can get this done during the presidency.

After the presidency.

I'm just saying that Comey should sue Trump.

Obama should sue Trump for saying that he wiretapped you.

I'm just saying that

I don't think we can leave this in the court of public opinion anymore.

I think part of the problem

is that Trump lies authentically.

It's who he is, right?

Where, like, when Hillary was lying, you could tell that it wasn't, she had to kind of architect it, right?

It felt fake to her.

So it was clearly.

She actually cared whether she was lying or not.

I think one of them has a common moment.

One of them doesn't.

Trump in the moment doesn't actually have a sense of whether he's lying or not.

I don't believe that.

I don't buy that at all.

I think he knows perfectly well that he's lying, and his entire career has demonstrated to him that he can lie without consequence.

That's the story of Donald Trump.

He doesn't care if he's lying or not.

It's not whether he knows he's lying or not.

But Ian was saying, and you know, he can go bankrupt without consequence.

He can, you know, he can say, yeah, he can say that there was no birth certificate without consequence.

And who can say he's wrong?

Look at him.

Look, he's sitting there in the White House.

There were no consequences.

There are no consequences.

And that's why I'm saying we have to start.

Is that going to work?

I mean, seriously, will it work?

Something has to, because we're drifting further and further from the shore of truth to the point where we're not going to be able to see it anymore.

Do we want to empower lawyers more in the United States?

This is a problem.

Yeah, I was thinking, I would expect to hear from you that we should be more litigious.

That that would be like the lawyers in courts are the answer.

Okay, otherwise, we just, we, you know, we just seem to be accept this, you know, we're in this post-truth world.

People say that term now, like, oh, well, it's a post-truth world.

What are you going to do?

Trump lied to the FBI director.

That's a felony.

I wonder if, like, the way we're looking at this a little bit wrong, which is to say, like, we're looking at the problem as one of public figures lying to each other and people not caring.

Maybe the people not caring is the problem.

I mean, you can't make people care if other people are suing each other.

I would say that people do care.

That Donald Trump is locked at 40% support, around 40% support, because 60% of the people think that he's a liar and a person of bad character.

Then you have to ask yourself, the 40%, who are they?

And I think it's very clear that people have now decided that they are on teams.

And they're

on the right, they're on Trump's team.

And so when a pollster is going to ask them how they feel, they're going to go with their teammate and not somehow vague it up.

But we have a deeper truth, right?

Which is that if you feel like for a generation or more that the establishment has facts, but they don't care about you, they're lying, they're not helping you, whether it's the mainstream media media or it's the politicians in the establishment or it's the business types, then somebody else comes around and says they're going to break things, you don't care so much if they are getting caught or fact-checked by the Washington Post.

Your book is called Us versus Them, right?

And you say, you know, it's Trump that causes that, not the other way around.

Because it's not just the United States.

We see the same exact thing happening in Europe, too.

I mean, Brexit happened despite all the facts to the contrary, because a bunch of people said, yeah, I can vote with your facts.

You're not going to help me in the slightest.

So let me go another way.

But aren't we letting the voters off the the hook, his voters off the hook a little bit?

I mean, I really do think there is an element there that's more about what they think they're going to lose in the future.

Yeah, no, it's actually all about perception.

Like self-identified people, self-identified poor people who were white has twice as like to vote for Hillary, I think, than for Trump.

They voted more for Hillary.

Yeah, they were self-identified as poor.

Right.

It was people who were worried about losing something that voted for Trump.

I think something like all of the rich people without college degrees voted for Trump.

Like 20% of his voters were earned more than $100,000 but didn't have a college degree.

So really, the striking difference about Trump voters isn't that they were literally left behind.

It's they're fearful of left behind.

They weren't the people that were left behind.

They're the person who are worried about losing something.

The people who actually lost something voted for Hillary.

Okay, but think about this.

So in 2008, John McCain got 45.2% of the vote, and in 2016, Trump got 46%.

There isn't much difference there.

Some of it

was constituted a little differently, but I think it's very clear that we have this very divided country.

And again, if you think about it as teams and don't psychoanalyze the voters that much, there are people who are going to vote for this team and there are people who are going to vote for that team, and they're pretty close to being even.

But the people who are not going to be able to do that.

But

except you have to psychoanalyze them because

the most significant predictor for voting for Trump was racial animus and racial resentment.

And if that's one of your teams,

you need to know who that is.

The one advanced industrial democracy in the world where you're not seeing

Right?

Right.

And they believe just as much in their business community and their political establishment and their media now as they did 20 years ago, the United States and Europe.

Nowhere is that actually true.

But again, again, I just don't think that you can dismiss, you can say racial animus is the reason for it.

Trump got 63 million votes.

Hillary got 65 million votes.

That's pretty close to being even, even though obviously 2 million more is 2 million more.

And those are the same, same, no, but those are the same,

those numbers break down the same way over the last three elections.

But I think that's the same thing.

And doesn't racial animus motivated the McCain voter?

No,

no, no, but it's the biggest predictor.

And I think if our teams are being divided across racial lines, I think that's a cause of concern.

It's not so much like, oh, we're about even, but half of them are in the Klan.

I mean, like, you have to be concerned

about half of the city.

Yeah, but I do think the left got bullied into saying, to not saying you're racist.

Yes.

Because

that offends us.

It's worse than anything else is to call me a racist.

Right.

Yeah.

But they obviously were okay with voting for a racist.

I mean, there's a small

kind of a small difference between being a racist and being okay with...

Voting with the protest vote.

They were okay with voting for anyone who's going to break things down.

We're not saying that.

Bernie Sanders is also okay with the...

But it was white people voting for Trump.

The people who were actually hurt by globalism, the people who were actually whose jobs were at risk, they largely voted for Hillary Clinton.

It was people who were scared.

And I was looking at a study today because I knew I was going to be talking to you, that you can break down support for globalization along racial lines.

It is white people

who are fearful of it.

And it's people who are not...

And by the way, it's not...

Even though it's their job to do it.

Such as race.

It's change in general.

Certainly race is a big party,

but they still hate Hillary Clinton.

We should hate it.

And that is new, to be still running against the person from the last election who's now just sitting as a grandma at home in Chappaqua, right?

But that is the animating force still of the Republican Party.

That's getting close to stalking.

They hate,

they hate, no, it is.

They hate Hillary.

They hate Nancy Pelosi.

She's still a...

The Republican Party ran against Jimmy Carter for three elections after Carter left the White House.

That's

Reagan's speeches in 84.

It was, do you want to go back to that?

Do you want Carter?

I mean, he didn't mention Carter by name.

The reason that Republicans are running against him.

I don't remember them saying saying lock him up.

Right.

Well, there was nothing to lock him up for.

But in the middle of the day, and there's something to lock up Hillary for?

Well, there was not really, but, you know, she was under FBI.

She was under FBI investigation.

But how right was that?

And I mean, there's been a couple of Mia couples now in the press, Jeffrey Toobin and Amy

Josek of the New York Times, both said, you know what, we paid way too much attention to these emails, and we were actually doing Russia's bidding.

And it's very noble of them to now say,

I'm glad they said that.

Yeah, I'd like to hear, I'd also like to hear President Obama talk about the fact that he really needed to have said a lot more at the time.

And the presumption was, well, Hillary's going to come in and she's going to take care of it, but actually, she didn't.

And he was commander-in-chief, not just running a party.

And we needed more from him at that point.

A lot of people, including Obama and Comey, were too concerned about the election results and not concerned about the election itself.

And we've seen that from Comey all

along.

Speaking of lying, it has been bothering me a lot lately that conservatives, they have these publications where they lie, and I think they know they're lying, but they do it to make themselves feel better.

Like, this is this week, look at the cover of The Globe this week.

This is a conservative publication.

Clinton's caught in double murder investigation.

Now, they must know that that's.

What is the globe, a conservative publication?

It is.

They publish

BMF Buckley Jr., like that's the globe.

That's a little bit of byline in there, man.

And they've seen it.

They're in Trump's pocket.

You know that.

I know, but that doesn't make them a conservative publication.

That makes them a corrupt for Trump publication.

I'm just saying.

And the difference will be.

Okay.

Well, here's Fox News.

Will California secede from the United States?

Dream on, assholes.

International arrest warrant issued for George Soros.

Not really, but it makes them feel good.

Hillary, always.

Look, horrific Hillary Clinton snuff film circulation.

Yes, she's got a snuff film announced.

So I thought, you know what?

Why don't liberals have our own fake news?

We might know it's fake, but it'll just make us feel good.

So we're starting liberal fake news.

These may not be exactly true,

but for example, Oprah, I'm doing a bit here, John.

Just move back.

For example, Oprah changes mind.

We'll run in 2020 alongside Black Panther.

See?

Human trafficking ends thanks to Whole Foods petition.

Melania is set to file for divorce.

I'm in love with Rachel Maddow, declares First Lady.

Study listening to public radio, Regrows Hare.

Harvey Weinstein, sentenced to be kicked to nuts by cast of Ocean Z.

Gun Nuts Bullet dropped by Good Guy with a tote bag.

Study, Wakanda is Real, Indiana is made up.

NASA finds Earth-like planet covered in kale.

Wow,

liberals are going to love that.

Networks to announce all four shows will be about transsexuals.

Star-Spangled Banner to be replaced with something by Beyoncé.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg to run marathon.

So healthy she could live another 50 years, says Doctor.

And real secret of Obama birth certificate, he's twins, and now the other one can run.

All right, sorry for yelling.

He's a New York Times op-ed columnist whose latest book is To Change the Church, Pope Francis and the Future of Catholicism.

Our friend Ross Douthett is here.

Ross.

How are you, sir?

How I see you.

Okay.

Yes, I know you've been busy, and, you know, you know I have to pick a little bone with you here.

Only one?

Well, we might have a couple, but a couple of days after Hugh Hafner died, who was a friend of mine, he wrote a column which, for someone who's so

Christian, seemed very unchristian to me.

Very uncharitable.

First of all, he was barely cold.

He was, but I waited until he was barely cold, at least.

Yes, you waited until he was dead.

Right.

That was an act of charity.

Right.

I mean, people usually get

seizing the opportunity, one of the two.

Okay, so let me just read a couple of things you said about him.

You said Heff was the grinning pimp of the sexual revolution.

He wasn't a pimp.

I knew him, you didn't.

With Quelludes Quelludes for the ladies and Viagra for himself, a father, the things you lay at his feet, a father of smut addictions, eating disorders,

eating disorders,

abortions, divorce, and syphilis.

Yeah, I'd stand by most of that.

He's created in the New York Times, so it has to be true.

I'll leave that alone.

A pretentious huckster who published updike stories no one read.

How the fuck do you know how many people in 1950s were reading the updike stories no longer?

That is creative license.

You're right.

Oh, creative license.

It's creative license.

Okay.

They credit it for our time.

Well, you know.

16 people read the updike.

While doing flesh procurement for celebrities.

No.

You said, then you say late half was a lecherous low-life Peter Pan playing at Perpetual Boyhood,

ice cream for breakfast, pajamas all day.

I thought conservatives liked freedom.

But apparently if you

if you want to wear pajamas, well wait, well, bodyguards shooed male celebrities away from his paid harem.

So what, was he procuring them or shooing them away?

Well there were stages.

There were the mid-half parties and then there was late half who didn't

like because

I just don't understand people who are so mad at people who live differently.

Walk me through how Hefny is doing.

I wouldn't be mad at Heff

if he lived differently.

You were going to defend my sex life.

I was going to say, if anything, I bet it's consensual.

Which is all it needs to be.

And Hugh Hefner's was not?

There was congressional testimony, I believe, from people from former playmates who talked about things like drugging them and forcing them into acts.

I don't remember.

I mean,

from the playmates themselves, they testified at the Mies Commission.

Remember that?

I remember the Mies Commission.

Yeah, I don't remember that thing.

That's what I watched late at night.

I mean, you were in the middle of the day.

And this is a.

But look, we can, I mean, we should have this out, right?

I don't have a problem.

You know, Hugh Hefner's private life was Hugh Hefner's private life, but Hugh Hefner was a public man, right?

You could watch his entire, you know, the last five or ten years of his life in a reality TV show, The Girls Next Door, and his whole thing was, I'm Hugh Hefner, I'm selling my life as a model for young young men the country over.

And I think it's totally reasonable after a life lived 50 years in the public eye, hugely successful magazine, he's a rich man, to look at that arc and say, you know, where did the mainstreaming of pornography end up?

And it ended up somewhere kind of gross and squalid, don't you?

First of all, he was...

It's a little squalid.

But why does he get blamed for that?

That's like blaming nuclear weapons on the inventor of the musket.

I mean, he hated that.

Do you know what Playboy looked like?

I mean,

it was was not really pornographic.

In the 50s, yeah.

No, I mean,

heff started out short.

The original Playboy looks totally tame.

It's tame now.

It's girls in shorts, shorts at a car wall.

Right.

But the Hefner credo was

the pursuit of sex is, if not the most, close to the most important thing in human life, and all censorship has to follow it.

It's the pursuit of sex by men that's the most important thing in life, and that's the problem I've had with you, Hefner.

if it was about like the equal pursuit of sex by everyone and it was all sensible

it was you know people don't think particularly

people don't remember that it's like the one thing he and I agree on so we're kind of like from

in 1953 but wait a second in 1953 when this magazine started I mean women had no choices they were in the home They didn't work generally.

They sometimes went from their father's house to their husband's house.

That's where they were.

I thought feminism was all about...

Wait a second.

I thought feminism is all about choice.

But Heff's

complaint was choice.

Nobody forced you to be a forced anybody to be a plain.

Well, it wasn't Heff's early complaint that this 50s culture didn't give him enough choice, right?

I mean that he, you know,

he didn't like his wife anymore and so on, and so he moved on to a world of perpetual advertisements.

And also the stop between, if you make the stop between living with your parents and living with your husband to like you can take your clothes off for me, that's not much of a choice either.

Then don't buy the magazine.

Why do you hate people who don't don't live the way you live?

People have different libido levels.

I don't hate people who don't live the way you live.

This is pretty hateful.

I'm not, look, again, Bill.

That's a hateful thing.

If you want to take your friend seriously, as you should, as an important figure in American history, as someone who unleashed a revolution in how we think about pornography and everything else, you have to look at where that revolution ultimately took us.

Because Heff won, right?

Like the idea of a world where

it's a conservative culture and there's a pornographic magazine behind a paper bag in the store and people look at it and so on.

That's not the world that Heff built.

Heff built a world of, I mean, you know what pornography is like now, right?

Now, again, that's not what he was doing.

And also the way you gloss over it, you say porn and everything else.

The world of 1953

was a real iceberg in this country, very repressed.

And because Playboy was kind of the tip of the spear of saying, look, there can be an alternative way to live.

It was the tip of the spear.

It really was.

It was just the gift.

Is that what you're saying?

It really was for

gay rights, for civil rights.

I mean, he was ahead of all these issues.

And you just have to.

I guess the question is,

but what is he actually famous for, right?

I mean, yeah, you know, Hefner was on the right side of a certain number of causes, and I would give him credit for that.

But he's not remembered as a civil rights pioneer.

He's remembered because he was America's first really successful pornography.

Well, Einstein was on the right side of a couple causes.

I mean, that didn't.

I don't think we want to get into that.

He was into the women's parts.

We have a different definition of pornography.

See, if I just see a woman naked as God made her,

to me, I'm getting to you.

To me, that's not pornography.

But I would agree with you

that I never saw pornography on the computer until a couple of years ago because I grew up on Playboy.

And I was afraid to go on there because, ooh, they're going to put a cookie in there.

They're going to find out what I'm doing.

So really know what it, I didn't really know what it was.

And I'll tell you something: when I saw it, it is not benign.

You're right.

What's on the computer now, it's rapey, it's demeaning to women, and that's a lot of the problem with the youth in America.

They got that on their phone when they're 12 years old.

And it's not ethically produced.

But that's not Hugh Hefner.

Let's move on to the church.

And I'm right.

Okay, so

you have a book.

I mean, I've heard the term, you are, you know, someone's more Catholic than the Pope.

Yeah.

I went there.

I know, I know.

You kind of went there.

And here's the, now I was raised Catholic, so I remember all the sacraments and that stuff.

And the big thing, I didn't realize this was such a big thing with conservatives like you, and maybe Emel Gibson's on your side with this.

He's even, he's even

further.

Okay,

what this Pope did was that he changed the rule.

And by the way, they're always just changing the rules.

So the fact that you're upset about this one just amuses me.

You know, I mean, everything with the church is this just in.

We can have meat on Friday now.

Okay, but

okay.

Put that aside.

Communion for remarried divorcees.

That's...

Yep.

Tell me, explain why that's such a big deal with the Catholics.

It's a big deal with the Catholics, or at least the weird ones like me,

because,

you know, it goes all the way back to the New Testament, right?

And Jesus says a lot of weird things in the New Testament, some of which I think you agree with, right?

He says a lot of radical things about poor people and rich people and sharing wealth and things that we're doing.

That's the one part of it that's actually new.

Right.

You do know his biography is old.

No, but the other part that's actually new, right, in the New Testament, is that actually he says radical things about

sex too.

Sex that are radical even by the standards of the times.

So

he gets in an argument with

the Pharisees and Sadducees.

Thanks very much.

I'm the Jew here.

I mean, I mean,

I'm being preemptive.

I'm killing him.

I'm driven from whatever I'm about to do.

Why does he get this?

Why is he the same?

That's right.

There's a lot of apologizing.

I'm sorry.

Preemptive apology.

So, and I accept your apology on behalf of the entire Jewish people.

That's what I was hoping for.

Okay, and please.

Thank you.

So he gets in these arguments with these wonderful Jewish people.

Okay.

That's huge.

Who totally did not kill him.

Totally didn't kill him.

Yeah, and that was the Romans.

And

they say, well, Moses said we could divorce our wives.

And Jesus says, well, yeah, God lets you do that because your hearts were hard, but in the beginning, God made them male and female, blah, blah, blah.

And everybody, and you can't get divorced, basically.

And the Catholic Church is, for all that it has changed a few rules here and there over the years, from time to time, meet on Fridays, it's the only church in Christendom that has held on to that crazy radical idea that if you make a vow that marriage is forever, it should be forever.

And the church has already compromised in various ways.

It made annulments easier to get and so on.

And so my view is basically that Francis, who is a wonderful pope in many other ways, has gone too far towards, you know, saying basically the Bill Maher worldview is cool now, right?

And I love you.

I love you.

It's like if you were the Pope, you know what I'm saying?

Right, it's going to be

real time with Pope Francis VI.

But, but,

okay, so

you can't get divorced, right?

No, you can get divorced.

In the Catholic Church?

You can get divorced.

You're not supposed to get married again.

You can get divorced.

But you can't get communion if you're divorced?

If you're remarried.

Okay, but if you can't get communion, you can't get into heaven.

No, you can get into heaven.

This is like an Abbott and Costello, Roots.

So you can get into heaven.

Who's in paradise?

You can get into heaven, yeah.

Okay, so why is that such a big deal?

I mean, it's a big deal because people understandably feel like they're cut off.

I mean, I get the feeling from your book that you think this is such a cornerstone in stopping the big comeback of the Catholic Church.

You're looking for the Catholics to make a comeback.

They've been losing market share.

I mean, they have.

I mean, this Pope knows he's got to put a lot of money.

He's got to put crosses and keys, or he's out of his job.

But I got to tell you, that's not going to happen.

The trend is never going to go back toward refilling churches and religious.

I mean, it's just not.

I mean, I used to be a lonely pioneer on this watch.

Just because we're 400 years past the scientific revolution, we know things now.

We don't need this.

Sponsored in Catholic and Protestant universities all over Europe.

You know, Sir Isaac Newton, noted Christian,

also had a lot of astrological theories that neither of us should talk about.

Right, I mean, he was a cool guy, otherwise.

It does seem like imposing more rules is not a way to open up the church to people.

I mean, if you're looking to increase market share, let's have more rules.

I mean, no,

I don't think my argument...

Well, in a certain way, I think Bill is right, right?

I think liberal Catholics and conservative Catholics and liberal Christians and conservative Christians and liberal Jews and conservative Jews.

I got a liberal Christian for bang over there.

Have been having these arguments ever since, not since the scientific revolution, but since the sexual revolution, right?

Which Which basically came along and thanks in small part to your friend Hugh Hefner, sort of separated from the New Testament.

No, I'm saying I'm giving

it away, right?

Yeah.

So it separated sort of middle-class morality, normal American morality, and what the New Testament and the Torah had to say about sexual ethics.

Can I ask you?

And that and the churches have to say.

Ian, what's your religion and what's your sex life?

I'm a lapsed Catholic.

You're a lapsed Catholic.

Yes, for now, for now.

Wait till the after party.

No,

the after party.

When I get into the after party.

Well, well, since we call it purgatory, and you know.

No, I feel like the Catholic Church is one of the more retrograde institutions in the world, and I'm delighted that despite all of that, someone like Pope Francis can inspire us.

Right?

I mean, Jeff, when you look around the world today, there are no leaders, right?

There are no leaders in the United States, there's no leaders in Europe, there's no leaders in.

Suddenly, you've got the leader of the Catholic Church, right?

I mean, anti-science, Catholic church, anti-gay change, anti-all this stuff, and yet he's the person.

Come on.

But you know what?

Read them on climate change.

Religions on one century you're talking about.

I visited the Vatican for doing religious.

I talked to some of the people in there, and I'm telling you, the people at the high levels, they know it's bullshit.

No, really.

They do.

They just know.

Can I give you a thought about market share?

You're saying people don't like rules.

So here's the thing.

Religions change sometimes in order, in theory, to appeal to people who are either no longer practicing or never practiced.

And when they do that, they are in danger, in terrible risk, of alienating the people who do, who go to church, who go to synagogue, who make up the

core.

No, no, it's not.

You have to retain, if you change your show to get people who don't watch, the people who do watch may stop watching because they don't like the change.

But Bill has, you have, your point about the people at the Vatican is actually, I think, crucial to the danger of the Francis approach, right?

Which is that you can get into a dynamic in a church where, I mean, Francis' approach has been, we're not changing the teaching on the indissolubility of marriage, but, you know, it's okay.

And that's basically your sort of, aversion of your sort of winking thing, right?

It's like saying, well, we've got this teaching, and it's still on the books somewhere in the Vatican, but come on, we know it's okay.

And that, to someone like you, makes it look kind of like bullshit.

Well, right?

Pardon my language, but it's HBO, you know, I mean, right?

I mean, certainly with the bullshit starts well before that.

But

you would be surprised at the people in the hierarchy, I think, who do not really believe in the stories.

They just know that the people have to, so they keep that fiction up and they're doing good things.

That's what they do.

They want to actually...

And also, let's be honest, the Pope himself said it's a gay lobby.

And he wasn't talking about the building.

You know, I mean, they've got a thing going on over there in Rome.

And they don't want it to end.

Oh, come on, you're telling me it's not.

I saw spotlight.

I lived outside of Boston.

Can they stop having

young boys?

Yes.

How tall I am.

I think that made a point.

I think we can say

that 15 years after the fact that as horrible as the sex abuse crisis was in the church, it's not a distinctively Catholic problem.

No.

I think we have at least a lot of people.

I'm talking about what goes on on among the priests in Rome.

Covering up seems to also be a general problem.

Right.

All right.

Well, on that note,

it's time for new roles, everybody.

Okay.

New roll, no offense to the Spanish woman whose photograph went viral, but we must admit she really does look a lot like Donald Trump.

The hair, the pout, the ruddy complexion, and geography likes hoes.

New world, the National Geographic has to stop telling everyone that the koalas have chlamydia.

It's hard enough already to get Australians to go home.

New world, don't take acid and try to assemble a dresser from IKEA.

That's what these people are literally doing for a YouTube channel called Hikea.

I know, white people, huh?

But you can't argue with the results.

New rules, if the happiest we've ever seen you is at a funeral because your husband's not there,

Get a divorce.

Don't worry about the money.

His lawyer's Michael Cohn, trust me, you'll get everything.

New rule: don't name your hand soap fragrance after strippers.

Jasmine and mint, they're the reason I have to wash my hands in the first place.

And finally, new rule: well, actually, tonight it's not a new rule at all.

It's It's an open letter to a dear friend of mine, Roseanne.

First of all, pal, congrats on having what all the haters want more than anything, a big fat hit.

Yeah.

I hear you're getting ready to stick it to the execs at ABC again.

It's like 1993 all over.

That's the year politically incorrect went on the air on a fledgling network called Comedy Central with minuscule ratings.

You had the biggest show on TV, but you still came and did mine.

And when I was down on my luck a few years before that, you put a guest star's payday in my pocket.

Arch your back, stick out your chest, and smack your lips.

That's much more embarrassing than any you Heppner ever did.

One of my favorite memories of you, Roseanne, is 2010.

I made a Christmas video all about how our real religion wasn't Jesus, it was materialism.

This is our real religion, greed.

Oprah's show purports to be a lot about spirituality.

If it was, then wouldn't she tell her worshiping flock to sit down and stop losing your shit over material stuff?

Yeah, some famous people were among those gathered in my living room to be in the closing shot, but when they saw Oprah was being critiqued, suddenly they didn't want to be seen.

But not you.

You're not afraid of Oprah or anybody.

There you are and I will always love you for it.

But now it's 2018 and we have to talk about Trump.

Because like it or not, you're now the face of the Trump supporter because you really do speak for a certain kind of American who knows they're being screwed by someone.

They just don't know who.

But here's what you're missing about Trump.

When he says he's looking out for the little guy, he's talking about his dick.

And as your friend, Roseanne, I must remind you of something very important.

You're a socialist.

You've been one for 30 years.

You said most billionaires are violent pedophiles.

You said all of my ideas are based in socialism.

How does that intersect with Trump?

All his ideas are based on national socialism.

I'm kidding.

He doesn't have any ideas.

But you do.

You said that you wanted there to be a maximum wage of $100 million, and if they're unable to live on that, they should go to re-education camps.

And if that doesn't help, then be beheaded.

You're not Archie Bunker, you're Bernie Sanders.

When I travel the country, people ask me about you.

They're confused.

So, Roseanne came back to TV, but she's now a Republican?

It's like if for the reboot of Will and Grace, Will was into women now.

Or if they brought back cops and everyone had a shirt on.

You had it right back when you said there is a serious class war going on in our country, a war on poor people by rich people.

Well

Trump is the guy who during the campaign said the hedge fund guys are getting away with murder.

They have to pay taxes.

Yeah, then one week after the election when he was dining at the 21 Club, you know, home to the common man,

told his rich friends when he didn't know he was on camera, you can get your taxes down, let you take care of it.

Yeah.

And did he ever?

He made their tax cut permanent and everybody else's temporary.

So the top 1% walked away with 83% of the benefits.

The elites he rails against on Twitter got billions forever, and Roseanne Connor got peanuts with an expiration date.

He cut the corporate tax from 35 to 21 percent.

I don't remember the forgotten American clamoring for that.

This is what his fans have so much trouble seeing, the constant bait and switch.

You said you liked Trump because he talked about jobs.

So did Hillary.

So does every politician.

You might as well say he wore a suit.

But I'll give you one where he is unique.

He said wages were too high.

Our taxes are too high.

Our wages are too high.

Everything's too high.

We have to compete with other countries.

Yeah, but not Bangladesh.

He was a landlord who thought your rent was too damn low, and now he's a president who thinks your wages are too damn high.

He talked tough.

Yeah, talk tough to the pharmaceutical companies.

He said, we're going to get drug prices so far lower than they are now, your head will spin.

Is your head spinning, Roseanne?

Because in the first scene of your new show, you and Dan are trading your meds because you can't afford all the ones you need.

Because Trump sold out to big pharma and sabotaged Obamacare, the program designed exactly for people like the Connor family.

Yes, Trump says things.

He says a lot lot of things.

He never stops saying things.

But what he does isn't the solution to your problems.

It's the cause of them.

He's not a champion of the common man.

He's a Koch brother in Rip Taylor's wig.

So here's the deal.

I get that you were mad as hell and wanted to throw a monkey wrench into the whole works, and I won't judge that.

But if in the next six months you don't see Trump's magic starting to work for you, if you're still trading pills and driving an Uber,

wouldn't the more realistic plot line for season two be your disillusionment with Donald Trump?

There's no shame in it.

You saw a miracle product on TV and you ordered it.

You impulse purchased a trump.

It promised to drain swamps, build walls, and make things great again.

But you got it home and it flooded your basement, maxed out your credit cards, and dropped your phone in the toilet.

All right, that's our show.

I'll be at the Mirage in Vegas May 18th and 19th at the Temple Horn View in Denver, May 26th, and Pikes Peak in Colorado Springs, the 27th.

I want to thank Ian Brema, John Pedarix, Anna Marie Cox, Throst Doubtless, and Robin Cairo.

Join us now for overtime on YouTube.

Thank you, ladies and gentlemen.

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.