Overtime – Episode #385 (Originally aired 04/22/16)

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.

All right, here we are, and these are the questions people have sent in.

Leslie, what inspired you to write your new book, Becoming Grandma?

Let me take a wild guess.

You became a grandma.

He's our audience.

Woo!

You can't keep up with it.

I will tell you how it happened, because the publisher first asked me to write an inside story of 60 Minutes.

And I knew that if I did that

and told the truth, I'd be out on my ear.

So then, this was the second idea.

Went with the second idea.

But really, what's going on with Steve Croft?

He was getting some, wasn't he?

I'm not going to tell you because I'm going to talk to you about being a grandmother.

The book...

Can I talk about the book for one second?

Of course.

All right, it's not just about being a grandmother.

It's about...

So misleading.

It's not just about the pleasure of being a grandmother.

It's about the science, the biochemistry, it's about the history.

It's about the tension.

It's about the tension with your daughter-in-law.

The history of grandmothers.

You have a child.

Grandmotherism was invented in the late 17th century

before that non-existence was concerned.

The grandmothers, the grandmothers,

human grandmothers are one of the few

humans are one of the few animals on the planet that have grandmothers who nurture and take care of babies.

Animals die when they are no longer able to reproduce, generally speaking.

So humans, that we live and live in long enough to take care of our children's children, is the very reason that humans even exist.

It's called the grandmother theory.

When I was a child, I even had a great-grandmother.

Oh, wow.

Yeah.

That's unusual for our.

Really?

But today, it's a little bit of a child.

When I was a child.

When you were a child.

Yeah, I was a child.

Not my great-grandmother.

She was old.

But people got married younger and younger, so that they were alive.

But grandmothers, going back to the caveman times, took care of the babies, and we've gotten away from that.

And I'm a grandmother.

You looked at your grandmother at 40.

Remember in the movie?

What was it?

The 40-year-old virgin?

40-year-old virgin.

There was like a hot grandmother in there.

Did you have a child at 16 and the next child has a child?

Sure.

Right.

Children having children, as Newt Gingrich used to say.

Van Jones, do you see hope for bipartisanship in the efforts to reform our criminal justice system?

You know, actually, I do.

And, you know, you just.

Fuck that.

What's your grandmother like?

She provides a lot of care and nurturing for the grandchildren

in the black community.

Exactly.

I think they're grandma.

And great-grandmothers.

However,

however, technically they are called big mamas.

We don't have.

Is that right?

That's true.

That's not just in the movies.

That's not just in the movies.

I had a big mama and a big daddy.

They were also played by Martin Lawrence.

So that is a thank you.

Sorry.

No, but

I do, you mentioned Newt, Gengrich.

Newt and I actually actually had a TV show together called Crossfire for half an hour.

And then afterwards, it turned out...

It was a reboot, of course.

It was a reboot.

Right.

But it actually turned out the only thing we agreed on was the idea that the criminal justice system has become, from the point of view of conservatives, a big failed government bureaucracy that grows and grows and gobbles up more money the worse job it gets.

And so we can actually work together on one thing, cutting that stuff out.

That's the only thing you agreed on?

And on everything else we just...

Handicapped on the moon?

Listen, whatever,

Oh, come on.

What?

Newt wants the handicapped on the moon.

Anybody know what I'm talking about?

I'm not making this.

Yeah, we build a nice little moon base forum.

Bunch of pillows.

They love it.

You're going back into your mafia character.

Newt's a mafia character, apparently.

No, he says because there's no gravity, and so it wouldn't.

It's

Newt Gingrich.

No, he's got great ideas.

I haven't read all of his ideas.

He's got great ideas.

Okay, Obama is in Britain today, your home country.

Does the UK-US special relationship still exist?

Yes, it always will.

How could it not?

Then the mother country.

Yeah, there's a lot of...

What about the grandmother country?

He's very popular.

He's very popular.

I was reading this morning.

Obama?

Yeah.

Absolutely.

As he should be.

79% or something.

But he has annoyed some people, and I think quite fairly they're annoyed by wading into the debate over the European Union.

Firstly, I...

He commented, didn't he?

Well, he went a bit further than commenting, I think.

And firstly, it's odd, given American independence, to get too involved in whether a country should stay with a larger political union.

It does affect us, though.

No, it does, it does.

Absolutely.

But I also think that

he sort of threatened the country today.

He said, well, we won't be too interested in a trade deal with you guys if you leave the EU.

And come on, I mean, Britain and America, the trade between the two countries is extraordinary at any given point.

So I don't think he quit.

And what is your feeling about the European Union?

Stay in?

No, I would leave.

I would leave.

For me, it's a matter of sovereignty more than anything else.

But don't they have the best of both worlds?

Because they're none on the currency.

I mean, they are quasi-independent from it.

Well,

to me.

As opposed to most countries who have to throw their whole lot in.

To me, it's just a question of basic sovereignty.

If you elect people, they shouldn't give away the power you've loaned them.

And that's what's happened with Europe.

You know, the parliament was elected by the people, and then the parliament gave it to people who aren't elected, and they can make laws within England.

I don't think America would accept that with another country.

I don't don't know.

The debate is going to be settled by ISIS, by the way.

Well, I think

actually a couple more attacks and they're not going to win.

Maybe.

I don't think Britain will leave.

I think they'll stay.

Do you think Obama's become a completely different person?

He was so careful for eight, seven, eight years, and all of a sudden he's saying things about Saudi Arabia.

Senioritis.

Is it senioritis?

Second high school, your last six months.

Senioritis.

Throw it up and

say anything?

Yeah, what's he got to lose?

He is so outspoken.

We call it swagger.

Yeah, that's right.

That's swagger.

That's right.

Okay.

How should the government combat the epidemic of prescription drug abuse?

Well, that's relevant because we heard the sad news about our friend Prince that apparently he was.

Yeah, we all love Prince.

But that's the news today that apparently he, you know, probably, and by the way, this is this is a common story in show business.

I can think of a lot of people, Jerry Lewis, Chevy Chase, comedians who did Pratt Falls hurt themselves, musicians who hurt themselves, and that's when you have to start taking,

they give you OxyContin, they give you Oxycodeine, these basic, it's basically heroin.

I mean, poor people wind up doing heroin because they can't afford the prescription drugs anymore.

But apparently.

Well,

it's not been confirmed, and obviously I'm somebody quite close to him and quite close to the family, and I'm wearing my rest in purple.

So,

anyway.

But taking him out of it, because that has not been confirmed, what I will say is that I'm glad that we were finally able to have a conversation.

When I watched the Republican Party hugging heroin-addicted folks, opioid-addicted folks, it makes me very happy, but it also makes me very mad.

Because those same Republicans and Democrats, when the problem was crack, showed no mercy, no compassion, no understanding at all, and locked up a whole bunch of people.

So

I do think that now that it's hitting everybody, hopefully we can come up with a more compassionate response.

Okay, Thomas Middleditz, do you find that to make it in comedy these days, you must be active on social media?

I think if you'll look at my Twitter feed, you'll find that I don't.

Come on.

I'm like one tweet about what my poo looks like a week, and then I'm out.

Ah, interesting.

Get a squatty potty.

Peace.

Later.

So you don't do a lot of tweeting?

I don't know.

Well, I mean here and there, but

I should be better at it too.

But when I do it, I enjoy it.

It's fun.

I fought it at the beginning, but it is what?

It's like epigrams, you know, like in the old days, you know, the old...

Victorian writers or some old writers, Francis Bacon, whatever that era was,

there was

an art to being very concise.

You know, a stitch or nut saves time, those kind of things.

Or being a moron like that orange guy running for president.

And part of the problem that we have...

Don't bring color into this man.

Come on.

But part of the problem we have is that the reason I think that Trump has been so successful is because this is a new media moment.

You know, FDR.

That's so true.

Right, FDR understood radio, he dominated.

Right.

JFK understood television, dominated.

So true.

Obama understood the internet, dominated.

This guy understands social media and reality television, and he's dominating.

And everybody else is playing by the old rules.

You're right.

So that's, you know, and I thought, and I think we thought he was going to leave the entertainment world and come over the wall into politics.

He's pulled politics over into the world of entertainment.

We're now living in his reality TV show, and I don't like it.

I don't like it at all.

That's good.

Lawrence Wright, your play, Cam David, is about the 1978 negotiations between Egypt and Israel.

I remember that.

You remember that.

I remember that.

You kids don't.

Do you see any reason to hope for further progress for peace?

Wow, that's a tough one.

That's a sad one.

I mean, if you look at Camp David, Carter, Bay, and Sadat, you had a failing president.

Anwar Sadat.

Carter was failing?

Yeah, I mean, you know, stagflation,

all the gas lines, farmers, when the tractors in the

future.

So

he started out with very high poll numbers and they just ski-sloped down.

And then Amar Sadat, we think of him as being such a noble, he was an assassin.

He'd been imprisoned twice.

He managed to kill one of the government ministers.

He was a Nazi sympathizer.

Menachem Begin was a terrorist,

one of the greatest.

So you had an assassin, a terrorist, and a failing president, and they made peace.

So don't tell me that you need the right people.

You just need people with political courage.

Now, Jimmy Carter gets shit on so much.

What a ballsy guy.

I'm the only president who didn't fire a shot ever in office.

And he brought the hostages home and they all lived.

They all survived.

Right.

Sounds like a pussy.

The Iranian home?

Yeah, Jimmy Carter.

Well, like they landed the second that Reagan became.

Well, they waited

deliberately, but he didn't, by just being calm and not taking any expenses.

Well, he tried to fire a shot.

He tried to fire a shot.

He just missed.

But anyway,

I love Jimmy Carthage.

I'm like, the helicopter crashed.

Yes, it did.

And you know, when Obama went to get bin Laden, he said, huh, let's send an extra helicopter.

Yeah, that was a good idea.

Pretty badass.

All right.

Thank you, everybody.

Ladies and gentlemen, 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.