Overtime - Episode #367 (Originally aired 10/9/15)

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

Here we are.

And the questions for Andrew: what are you working on now that you've retired from blogging?

I guess I'm working on a book on Christianity.

For or against?

Joke.

Just a little joke.

Patrick, would you ever consider running for public office again?

Well, with four kids, seven and under, that won't even be an option for another 15 years or so.

Why?

You can't run with kids in the house?

Well, maybe you can, but they won't ever know who you are, so I prefer to be around.

How many did Uncle Bobby have?

Well, that's a good point.

He had in double figures.

Well, you know, we learned from experience.

Right.

I think it's a good thing to wait around.

I'd love politics, but I think I could still run

Are you on good relations with all your siblings and

cousins and everybody since the book?

I've got a big family, some better than others.

How's Thanksgiving going to be this year after this?

We might have to miss that one.

I don't know.

Secretary, what would you say to Republican presidential candidates who say that the first thing they would do

By the way, everything is always day one

with these assholes.

Everything is.

Day one.

Do they need any other time in the whole administration?

On day one, they would rip up the Iran nuclear deal unilaterally.

Well, I'd say the first thing they should figure out is how they're going to deal with all of our allies who are going to leave the fold and leave us with the worst of all worlds.

We'll have no deal.

We'll have a big nuclear program.

Sanctions will probably erode.

And then we're stuck.

It makes no sense.

It's such a no-brainer because the alternative is sanctions, but the sanctions are not an alternative because the other countries won't go along with that.

Correct.

I don't know.

And in fact, people forget that the UN sanctions were put in place specifically to bring Iran to the table.

Well, it's happened.

And so the idea that they are going to somehow stick with us is pretty hard to fix.

I think Netanyahu is so against this deal.

I mean, obviously, nobody could have a stronger interest in keeping a nuke from Iran.

He's a smart man.

He must know this is the best way to do that.

Well, in fact, in the testimony he gave in Congress quite a few years ago, he identified exactly that point, that the nuclear weapon was the existential threat.

He was talking about Iraq at the time, incorrectly,

but it's also about Iran.

I think if you actually listen to a lot of the critiques now of the agreement, it's not about the agreement.

It's about what the agreement is not.

Right.

And what Iran is not.

And exactly.

And Obama made the point.

It's just about the one deal.

It's not about making Iran perfect.

Right.

And so

the deal is right now that we have to work with our Gulf allies, with Israel, to continue to push back really hard on all the other things we don't like about Iran's behavior.

You know, support for terrorists.

Do you think it has something to do with the fact that in the early 80s, Israel did attack a nuclear facility in Iraq and did knock it out?

And maybe they think, well, we did it once, we could do it again.

Well, today, you know, I sat at the witness table between Secretary Carter and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs at that time, Marty Dempsey.

They were asked the question, and they said, Okay, what about the military option?

And the answer was, Yeah, we could set the program back two or three years.

So that's great.

Set the program back two or three years, have it grow back with greater hardening against future attacks, have the program build up,

have no verification versus 15 years of rolling the program back, verification forever.

It's kind of like,

how do I choose between these two options?

And international support.

Pretty obvious.

And international support.

Exactly.

And by the way.

So it just, it's, you know, the fact is, from where we are, nobody has put forward a credible Plan B.

And this gets us 15 years of rollback of the program plus verification and international support.

The verification certainly forever, international support for a long time.

It would have been good, though, if we had been able to keep those sanctions on, because the reason they came to the table is that they knew that they were cratering at the moment.

We have kept the sanctions on.

First of all,

there's a lot of confusion.

The only sanctions relieved are those specifically on nuclear, not sanctions, on support of terrorism and other issues.

Number one.

Number two,

the UN sanctions on weapons and on missiles was pointed out by some of our partners, were supposed to go away when they came to the table.

We have extended those for five years and eight years respectively.

Not to mention that there remain lots of other sanctions in place on things like missiles.

The same thing was that the financial relief we gave them as part of the unfreezing of their assets basically gave them an ATM machine to fuel terrorism throughout the Middle East.

Well, we haven't given it to them.

I mean they only give it if they honor the deal, and if they get rid of their nuclear program, then we basically unfreeze what was their money.

And in fact, if I may add, in fact, on this program some time ago,

one of your guests talked about the $150 billion being freed up.

Well, first of all, that's a fiction already.

It's still a lot of money, but it's closer to $50 than $150.

Secondly,

they have,

it's hard to argue that the actions that we very much dislike

are today resource limited.

You know, there's all kinds of so-called asymmetric activities.

So,

furthermore, they have got a half a trillion-dollar hole to dig out of.

Now, we never say that none of these funds will go to support the revolutionary God and

some additional military support.

But we also firmly believe that almost all of this is going to go to start digging out of a hole.

It seems to me people in politics, especially conservatives, used to understand the concept of, well, the best of all,

we don't live in the best of all possible worlds.

We just take the best of things that are also bad.

That there is no great answer.

There's only the least shitty answer.

That's real politic.

That's Metternich.

That's Henry Kissinger and other ancient Germans.

It's

Bismarck.

That's what they understood, right?

The art of compromise.

The least awful option is what you do.

And it's also, if I may say, it's also, if you go back to Ronald Reagan, he had a lot of pressure to negotiate.

the master bargain.

There were issues of Jewish immigration, there were issues of proxy wars, but he chose to negotiate an arms control agreement and accomplish something.

And that, in fact, then led led to lots of other things down the road.

There's a certain analogy, at least.

It's also great to get this sort of off the table.

It was the one issue on which the opposition in Iran, the people who were gunned down in the streets, agreed with the regime on.

It was the nuclear program, having the right to enrich, was something that united all of them.

And the people that really didn't want this to happen were the revolutionary guards.

And if we had.

It's a wedge issue.

It was a wedge open.

And we finally did something smart.

And not only that, even though I think one has to be very, you know, very doubtful and certainly not optimistic, but one can hope that we've given some sort of opening for the people in Iran who really...

Iran should really be our ally.

Iran is our natural ally.

It could reach.

Absolutely.

And they are amazing people.

It's one of the great civilizations of mankind.

They love this country, so many of them.

So many of them are young.

And I saw that in the Green Revolution.

And I just felt, yeah, you're right, absolutely right, Bill, about the least worst, but there's also something quite hopeful here.

Yes, there could be.

For the first time, a glimmer of some kind of the only country that really could help the Middle East.

So, the question is whether we support that, though, Andrew.

It's like whether we actually do what we did, you know, as we did before, and support democracy there.

That'll be a big, you know,

they want to support.

I think they can do it on their own.

So, Anne-Marie, are you women getting any closer to having it all?

So,

you know, men don't have it all either.

Men definitely don't have it all either.

But

I don't like the frame.

I'm not talking about having it all.

I'm talking about equality, which is a much better way of thinking about it.

And yeah, we're getting closer to equality, but we've got a way to go.

I have to say, Patrick, listening to you and hearing you say, you know, you're not going to run for Congress because you actually want to see your kids and be with them while they're young, that's moving closer to equality.

So I think we're getting better.

But if every I mean,

certainly having children cannot preclude people from being in Congress, or else there'd be very few people in Congress.

Wow.

That might be okay.

Why can't you, you know, have a job and also have children?

You can if you have somebody else at home willing to take care of them.

But what he's saying is he wants to be there too.

He's not going to rely on his wife to take care of them.

And my point is that's great.

If more people said, you know, why you have kids, you're going to focus on your kids, you're going to work too.

Of course, you're going to work.

But, you know, that's a perfectly legitimate reason to say, I'm going to defer a big job until my kids are grown.

That's certainly not a character deficit, just to say you want to spend time with the people that you love and watch them grow up because those moments are going to go by and you're not going to get them back.

Most people obviously don't have the resources for two parents to stay home.

That's the biggest question.

No, they're both working.

That's not the point.

The point is.

Hello.

Rob Thomas, do you support artists who boycott digital streaming services like Spotify?

I don't see any use in it.

Do you know?

I mean, I think at some point you're going to be on one side of what's going to happen.

Like,

the state of the music industry, especially

the kind of the antiquated idea of it, is really shit.

But the state of music is really fascinating right now.

The ability to have the, I think, to have the closeness and to be able to have access to your favorite artists and to music and all kinds of, you know, like there was a while ago when you had three different ways Would you pay for it?

I don't get this.

I think you do pay for it.

And I think that, you know, there's artists out there now.

There's artists out there now that are getting money through publishing, getting fans to come see them play that wouldn't, through the three traditional ways that used to get music.

If they didn't play you on that radio station or didn't see you on VH1 or see you on MTV, they're really talented artists that never could have a career.

And now that there's a way for fans of music to go find them on their own, to go right from their house.

They're not making any money on Spotify.

No.

Spotify.

It's funny.

Record labels are making money from Spotify.

and I think, you know, I'm sure that I get a good one eighth of a cent off every time they play my song.

You don't get anywhere near that from Spotify.

You don't get anywhere near an eighth of a cent.

That's also happening

if you're a writer in this country at this point in time.

I mean,

the industry that I grew up into, it just doesn't exist.

And

the number of young people who can actually earn a living writing or reporting is banishingly small.

And

all the pressure downward is is is is is continuing on writers ability to simply live and pay their bills.

And after 20 years, like I've I was lucky enough to think to come in where I built a fan base.

Like for me,

everything I do is you can't do it.

You gotta have a good time.

I want people to come see me play live.

I want people to come like follow me with the home game.

I don't care if they're buying my music.

I don't care if they're stealing my music.

But that's easy for you to say because you came up at a time when you this time.

You didn't ask anybody me the question.

Right.

Well, I mean, you know, you got to think about the younger generation.

I understand it, and I think that right now

it's a lot harder for somebody, even when those fans can find them, it's a lot harder for them to really turn that into a business team.

All right, I got one last question.

It's not from here, it's from me.

It is playoff time.

Probably as we speak right now, the Mets are kicking ass against the Dodgers.

Hopefully.

I'm sure they are.

But there was another baseball story.

I wanted to ask you this.

Cece Sabathia, you're familiar?

He's a Yankee pitcher.

And on the eve of the playoffs, you know, the Yankees were eliminated, but this happened before they were eliminated.

It's Cece Sabathia said, I got to go to rehab.

And I thought, and everybody said, oh, hero, what a great thing.

Great.

I'm so proud of him.

And I thought, really?

Kind of selfish.

You couldn't wait a month?

Playoff time.

And his teammates were like, you know, I didn't even know he had a problem.

I mean,

huh?

It's a good laugh because that's what we do to understand this.

But the fact is, I mean, this could have been life or death.

We don't know because we weren't in his shoes.

And the bottom line is for...

One more day, one more month?

Well, tell that to his kids.

Let me ask you,

the night before he had to go to the house.

Yeah, you don't know what was going on in his family.

What if there was a vote for Obamacare and you were in the Congress and you were the deciding vote and it was happening the next day and you'd have to stay in Congress another few weeks?

Would you go, nope, I'm out.

Got to go take care of my rehab thing.

Such a rehab thing.

I'll say, are we equating a baseball game to that?

No, I'm just.

No.

But it's just about the Mets here.

I'm just saying.

If I were a Yankees fan, and thank God God I'm not, I'm a Red Sox fan.

If two of us could see where they might feel that way, I could see.

But, you know, everybody knows life is more important than a game.

Okay.

Thank you very much, everybody.

Thank you, audience.

Well done.

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