Overtime - Episode #354 (Originally aired 5/15/15)

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.

Yeah, 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 Maher.

Okay, we're here on Overtime.

Did the Saudi king slight Obama by not coming to Camp David this week?

That's right.

The Saudi king was supposed to show up at his Gulf Council conclave, and he snubbed us.

I say good.

I say let's break up with Saudi Arabia altogether.

Why can't we do that?

I agree with that.

That's actually my biggest fear about another Jeb Bush in the White House is one of those pictures of a Bush just holding the Saudi prince's hand and just knowing that we are just marching straight into something.

All presidents have held their hands, whether they held their hands or not.

But you know what's happening right now?

It's time for us to stop.

It is time for us to stop.

To snub those thugs.

I remember articles in the 70s when I was in college about how we have to get off the oil with the cartoon of the oil pump as a

hypodermic needle that we're hooked on the oil.

Remember Jimmy Carter?

We have to have energy independence.

Oh, no, no, no, but that would require regulation and government spending on infrastructure, and we can't have that.

Or a,

I mean,

an energy carbon tax.

That would be the best thing.

Oh, the third thing, a tax, right?

We can really have that.

But why don't we tax bad shit that hurts us, like

oil, instead of good things

like work.

Is that crazy?

Is that a crazy idea?

Pass.

Yeah.

All right.

Heather, which candidate for president will have the most aggressive anti-party poverty agenda?

That's a very good question.

So I think that Secretary Clinton actually gets a bum wrap on issues like these.

I don't think that she is necessarily the most progressive when it comes to challenging corporate power, but I think when it comes to, I mean, her first job was at the Children's Defense Fund, right?

When it comes to these issues of poverty, these kitchen table economic issues, I think she's got a Crusader's heart on this.

I actually do.

Well, I don't.

No, they're not.

I don't know about Crusader's heart, but yes, I agree.

I think I don't worry about her on domestic issues with the left.

I worry about her being too right on foreign policy.

That's where I worry about her, is that she's a kind of a hawk.

And I would.

A smattering of

putting green laws.

Oh, yeah.

Ayan, what is the status of campus debate on Islamism?

Whoa, wow.

Yes, you were disinvited.

You were supposed to speak at Brandeis, right?

I was supposed to speak at Brandeis.

I was disinvited this year, too.

Look at that.

We have that in common.

We've been disinvited.

We're the

only one.

You had disinvited Chelsea, yeah.

We've all been disinvited.

Yeah.

Great.

In fact, this is a lot of people.

Mike, have you been disinvited from America as a black guy?

I'm the opposite.

I'm vote came and picked us up and worked for a few hundred million there like you.

You always have the top design.

I'm the opposite.

I just got asked to be a commencement speech or speak.

There's hope for anybody.

You are so funny because, you know, you started out as the person that nobody wanted to be near.

I got thrown out of every school ever went to.

You're like Bill Clinton in the 90s, like he was the awful guy who killed Vince Foster and had a blowjob.

And then as time goes by, he's like the old building of the old whore.

He's respectable now.

I'm totally right.

Nobody ever gets mad at anything I say to him.

You stick around long enough and you're respectable.

You become an insider instead of an outsider.

That's right.

Anyway, I'm sorry.

I think that we should be worried about what's going on in campuses and not all campuses,

but students need to go to college to learn how to think, not what to think.

If we don't give them a chance.

That's a great way to see it.

Yeah, thank you.

Did you go to Brandon?

Did you ever get there, or did that stick?

Because I shamed them into actually rescinding the ban and actually letting me speak.

I think Brand

has been punished enough.

And

it's a campus culture.

It's this whole thing about protecting minorities against what?

Against learning how to think, minority students.

Don't you trust minority students with

it's so patriarchal, right?

It's so patronizing.

It's patronizing, and I'm more worried about that really than about,

and I'm also worried about radical Islam on campuses.

But I think if students learn how to think, they'll see for themselves the difference between the ideology of Sharia versus the ideology of liberalism.

And they need to be able to differentiate that when they graduate.

They need to have that chance.

What would you know about it?

What would I know?

What would I know about it?

All right.

Who is right about the Trans-Pacific Trade Partnership, Obama or Elizabeth Warren?

Yes, the liberal fight between themselves got a little nasty this week.

Obama said Elizabeth Warren was just another politician, and he called her Elizabeth, and then Sherrod Brown, the Democratic senator from Ohio, was like, hey, Obama, that's patronizing to use her first name.

And Obama was like, hey, I'm not on the rag you are.

I made that last part up.

He didn't say that.

But it did get a trendy.

He has to paraphrase it.

Does anybody understand this treaty?

No.

I mean, I'm in favor of free trade, but

darned if I can figure it out when I read the news stories.

What's in the thing?

See, so you do read the news stories.

No, I stopped after the first paragraph.

I said, this is done.

It is very arcane.

It is a little hard to get into.

But I am in, you know,

one of the few things that almost all economists I know of, and the left and right, agree is free trade is a win-win.

There's no such thing as free trade.

Like, that's just a slogan.

That's like saying the death tax or something like that.

Clean and cold.

Right, exactly.

Clean cold.

There are.

Trade is a win-win-win.

Right.

Trade is great.

We're trading all the time.

We're trading barbs, you and I.

It's great.

Free win.

It's just what

matters is the rules and how you write them, and frankly, who gets to write the rules.

And the problem has always been with our version of free trade that corporations and their lobbyists get to write the rules, and it's cost American jobs every single time.

And it's not made life better in the manufacturing countries where they're, you know, dying in sweatshops.

So why do you think Obama is so for it?

So I actually think that there is a piece about this, about China, that is geopolitical, that is not about, you know, jobs and economics at home, but like this is actually about showing our biggest competitor that we have relationships with these nations in its area.

That's a big piece of it that I don't think he can sort of say and lead with, but I think that is a major piece of it.

Maybe he had to make this bargain to get the climate deal with China.

You know, presidents do things behind closed doors we don't know.

And sometimes we're glad they do.

Anyway, okay.

Ross is saying trade needs something else in my world.

Right.

So does water.

For John, how do you explain our obsession with celebrity?

Oh, God.

I don't know.

When I hitchhiked across the country and everybody picked me up, no one asked about that.

No one said to me, even if they knew who I were or anything, it was so amazing.

Nobody wanted to talk about celebrity.

That's so true.

You know, the people have a whole different set of questions in the media.

The media always ask me about the guests on the show.

People I run into ask me about the issues.

Or they talk about their lives.

You know, which I was much more interested in hitchhiking.

I didn't feel like doing an interview in every car.

I wanted to hear what they had to say.

So it was amazing to me, even if they knew, nobody said, what's Johnny Depp like?

You know,

which in real life, in New York or LA, they do.

I always want to ask you, what's Johnny?

Actually,

actually, people ask me what Bill Marsh is like.

What do you say?

I say basically,

I tell them the same thing that we said to each other after our first show.

Oh, yeah, I thought you were an asshole.

I thought you were an asshole.

You aren't as much of an asshole as I thought you were.

And you said to me, and you aren't as much of an asshole as I thought.

It was just love at first sight.

Yeah, isn't that

a good idea?

A couple of charmers.

Does George Stephanopoulos' donation to the Clinton Foundation compromise his journalistic integrity?

I don't know if you heard the story.

Yeah.

George Stephanopoulos gave 75 grand to the Clinton Foundation, and he had to apologize.

I think this is is preposterous.

You gave a million to Obama.

I know, but George Stephanopoulos was the guy in the war room with Clinton in 92.

We knew from the get-go where his politics were.

So he gives to Clinton's charity so that they fight AIDS and malaria in the third world?

I don't get it.

I cannot get excited about this one.

I can't either.

It's ridiculous.

It'd be one thing if we didn't know where George Stephanopoulos stood, but we knew,

and we somehow were okay with the fact that he's now an impartial newsman.

There's no sense.

No, but this guy, more than most, we have to admit, we know, is in the tanks.

Yeah, no, they got his start in his career working for Clinton.

Okay.

Mike, what do you say to people who link crime and violence to rap music?

After I say you're stupid?

Rap music.

hip-hop as a entity was started in the late 60s, early 70s.

A bunch of kids were in the burnt out

yeah I'm about to give you a check

I know you had like Jay and I'm not sure

no no I got you check me out

there's gonna be a movie comes out called Rumble Kings so in the late 60s all these kids that were kind of the fallout kids of the black nationalist movement civil rights poor white people's movement Puerto Rican nationalism movement they had street gangs in in New York in the Bronx that were just essentially burnt out at some point very late 60s early 70s these kids were like we're gonna come up with our own peace treaty.

Came up with their own peace treaty, decided that we aren't going to engage in violence.

Well, what's the alternative to violence?

The Zulu nation was born out of that.

Africa, Bambada, cool hurt.

Look, Google these, I'm telling you, it's way bigger than any of the rappers you think now, and the story is way more interesting.

These kids, they were children, got together in the park, stole public electricity, which I strongly support,

and decided to do park jams as an alternative to violence.

So hip-hop is not rap.

Hip-hop is the thing that houses rap, graffiti, breakdancing, and DJing and entrepreneurship.

And what it did,

what it did was give poor kids the opportunity to organize as an alternative to violence.

Now, fast forward 40 years, it worked.

A lot of money came into it.

Guys bought big chains and tigers and lions and bears and shit.

And we got off course.

But at our core, hip-hop, every time you see a successful rapper, you're seeing a job creator in a community.

Jay-Z has provided hundreds of jobs and created dozens of millionaires and has has changed the economy in places that it wouldn't have been.

Outcast in Atlanta, personally changed the economy in the last 20 years.

So I would say that people who say hip-hop is violence, I would say let's start with the real violent starters.

Let's start with the three major Abrahamic religions and let's do away with their books.

Let's start with governments and geo-war and politics.

Let's do away with our leaders.

So after we get down the violence scale, of all the things that create real violence to get to music, it'll be easy to get hip-hop hip-hop because people in hip-hop want to do the same thing you do.

Talk shit about politics, smoke weed, and date dope black women.

That's it.

Stop confusing the Google, Mike.

But Mike, wasn't Rapper's Delight in 1979?

I thought it was Carla Thomas Otis.

Yeah, Sam 9 was Rapper's Delight.

But hip-hop's birthday is November the 12th, 72 or 73.

It's the official birthday.

It's older than me.

I remember the the birthday because it was my daughter's birthday.

Hey, Anaya.

But

it started way before then.

It just broke.

People figured out how to sell it.

The kids started it as an alternative to violence.

That's what disturbed me about Baltimore.

When I got, when I was on Throw Your Hands in the Air.

Like you just said.

We get back to that.

They said it wasn't that.

But they said in Baltimore, Crips and Bloods have united with the BGF to kill cops.

But on my timeline, on my social media, I saw gang members saying, we're going to be about peace.

We aren't warring with each other anymore.

They didn't say anything about killing cops.

They didn't say anything about that.

It was the first time in my young life that I saw gang members say, since 1992, say, we're going to invoke our own peace treater.

And what government should have done is what we do when we go to a foreign land, get all the people who were rebels, then sit them down together and say, let's do some

truth and reconciliation.

Let's fix this thing from the ground up.

And I think we need to start engaging hip-hop and young people in that way.

And I think things will change.

We'll see systemic change.

You get the last word, Killer.

I love you, brother.

And Killer Mike is because you kill the Mike.

Not because you kill.

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