Episode #349 (Originally aired 4/10/15)

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Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO Late Month series, Real Time with Bill Maher.

Starts o'clock.

Good afternoon.

Afternoon, time will be

real time.

Thank you very much, thank you, thank you.

Thank you very much.

I don't

I don't know where we're getting the crowds lately, but it's a lot better than where we got them for the first 12 years.

But,

you know, I say this every week, so I know my credibility is thin when I say I know why you're happy, but I think I really mean it this time.

I know why you're happy.

Hillary Clinton said today she has a big announcement on Sunday.

What could it be?

Oh my God, I'm not going to get any sleep Saturday night.

Wondering.

No, no.

We know what it is.

She's playing Spider-Man one more time.

It's going to be great.

Now, she's going to announce that she's she's running for president, of course.

She's going to do it interesting, first in an email blast, which,

yes,

Republicans found this very ironic because email, as we all know, is the tool she used to kill everybody in Benghazi, so that's very funny.

And then

she's going off to Iowa to film a very sexy spring break video

called Girls Gone Inevitable.

It's really something.

But you know what, folks?

You look at the polls, it's going to be Clinton and Bush again.

It's so funny because everybody says, Oh, God, we want somebody new.

And then they look at the new people running like

Ted Cruz and Rand Paul and Marco Rubio, and they go, you know, we need more Clintons and Bushes, I think.

It's going to be the 90s all over again.

I'm embracing it today.

I put my Spin Doctor CD into my

into my disc man.

I went over to the oxygen bar and I called my friends.

I said hit me up on Pager

But the other

The other candidate who threw his hat in the ring this week, of course, is Rand Paul.

Kind of hit the ground sucking.

Yeah, he kind of did.

I mean, he was supposed to be the one guy who was forecutting defense.

That's why I liked him.

And now he's standing in front of an aircraft carrier.

And they asked him on NBC News why he was flip-flopping on all the issues he used to be good on.

And he had an interesting answer.

He said, Well, you know, when I was young, I experimented with integrity.

And

No, you know what he was when he was, you know what he did before he went into politics, Rand Paul?

He was an eye doctor.

He was an ophthalmologist, which that training has come in handy because every time he switches positions, he says, better like this or better like this.

So,

yeah.

I mean, take a ran, please.

No.

He was the one guy who was kind of sensible on that in the Republican Party.

No, he's like every other Republican, which is such a shame because, you know, we're finally making progress there.

After years of tough negotiations to get Iran to give up their nuclear program, we finally got a framework.

We got Iran to agree to a framework.

Well, of course, now comes the hard part, because before that can become an actual treaty,

you got to get the approval of a faction within the government of super-religious, hard-line medieval fanatics.

And of course, it's not going to be an easy sell in Iran either.

All right, domestic news: this is a little scary.

A study at Abduke University came out this week that said, get this: 9%

of Americans have both anger issues and a gun.

Yeah, they're called cops.

Well

Yes, in the category of things I never thought I would see the police this week admitted they got one wrong First time I'd ever seen them do that and we've all seen this video, right, from South Carolina what what happened was a black man was driving a Mercedes or what the police call probable cause

So

the cop pulls him over.

The guy was late with his child support payment.

So he panicked and ran away, and the cop shot him in the back eight times.

And then, of course, the cop claims that, like they always do, that his life was in danger.

This was the worst excuse in the world.

The cop said, I had to shoot him.

I thought he was charging at me backwards while shrinking.

That's a terrible excuse.

And

finally, I'm sure you heard the big verdict came in, the Boston bomber case, Sarnaev guilty on all 30 counts.

Now they just have to decide whether he gets the death penalty or life in prison.

Now, I have no problem with killing this guy, but he wants to be a martyr.

So we're kind of giving him what he wants because he wants to collect the 72 virgins.

I say put him in prison and let him be the virgin for 72 other guys.

All right, we've got a great show.

Fereed Zakaria, Christina Bellentoni, and Ross Doukad are here.

And a little little lady we're speaking with the very funny Dave Barry is backstage.

But first up, she's the senior senator from Massachusetts whose bestseller, A Fighting Chance, is now in paperback.

Senator Elizabeth Warren.

Hey.

How you doing, Senator?

I'm doing good.

So you are the senior senator.

I feel like you just got there.

There's a lot of

turnover in that state, huh?

You know?

Women on the move.

Yeah, okay.

So now the Senate is the part of our government that changed hands in the election.

Of course, they already had the House, the Republicans did.

Now they have the Senate.

How has it changed there?

I mean, like the workplace itself.

Are they nicer?

No.

No.

It's a scary place.

And it's a scary place because the Republicans are out there, you know, trying to make changes.

And I'll give you an example.

The largest financial institutions in this country, remember back when we talked about this in 2008, they were too big to fail?

Sure.

They're now about 30 percent bigger.

than they were back then.

In last summer, the FDIC and the Federal Reserve Bank issued a report and said 11 of them, if any of the 11, started to fail, they would bring down the entire economy unless they got bailed out by the taxpayers again.

So the Republicans are now trying to move a bill through the Senate.

They're trying to move changes in Dodd-Frank just to blow holes in it so that there is less protection against the big financial institutions taking the economy down again.

And yet what I hear from so many Republicans these days is that they have a new issue they're very concerned about, which is income inequality.

Oh, yeah.

Here's Ted Cruz.

He says, it's true that the top 1% are doing great under Barack Obama.

Today, the top 1% earn a higher share of the national income than any year since 1928.

And Paul Ryan said, they're practicing trickle-down economics.

Rand Paul has said similar things about those two Americas, even Mitt Romney.

There's just no shame in their game.

You know, the way I look at this, talk is cheap.

And these guys are out there there talking about income inequality, but they don't want to do anything that would actually make a difference.

You know, right now, we could reduce the interest rate on student loans, put money back into the pockets of people who work hard, and the Republicans say no.

Right now, we could raise the minimum wage and lift millions of people out of poverty and help them support themselves.

We could do these things and the Republicans no, no, no, no, no.

Well, it was in the paper last week that Walmart Walmart is raising the wage to $9.

Gee, can you spare it?

But I saw the city of Seattle is going up to 15.

That's really more where it should be if you really want to not.

What do you think the minimum wage should be?

You know, I supported the 1010 an hour, which all the Democrats were behind last year, but I think it's got to be higher than $10.10 an hour.

Yeah, you can't live on $10 an hour.

And let me say on this one about minimum wage.

This one is personal to me.

Back when my daddy had a heart attack, I was about 12 years old.

Family lost the station wagon.

I talk about this in the book.

We come close to losing our house.

My mother was 50 years old, a stay-at-home mom.

She put on her best dress, her high heels.

She walked to the Sears and got a minimum wage job at a time when a minimum wage job would keep a family of three afloat.

Those days are gone.

America used to say, if you work full-time, you won't live in poverty, but that's not true any longer.

And we can change that.

Raise the minimum wage, lift families out of poverty.

But I mean, the Republicans do seem to have a fantasy that you can not only live on a minimum wage, but I noticed they all talk about how when they were working their way through college, Rand Paul this week, what he was talking about, he said, two of my sons work minimum wage jobs while they go to college.

I'm not saying he's saying that they work their way through college, but I've heard that before.

College, I think, is six times more expensive than it was in 1980.

It would be impossible to work your way through college working at McDonald's.

You know, and that's the real point.

We have really caught young people in the bind here.

We've said college is is more important than ever, but the state schools, the place where you could really get a good education at a price that you could afford, that has really gone away too.

And again, I'll say this one is personal for me.

I went to a commuter college that cost $50 a semester.

How can college cost $50 a semester?

Well, because America said we're going to invest in our public universities and make that education available to any kid who works hard and wants to try to get an education.

Today, that support for public education has gone away, so that it's much, much more expensive for young people to go to school.

And at the same time, the U.S.

government says we'll lend you the money for college, but we're going to make a profit off your backs while we do it.

That's an America that's just not working for real people.

And that's why we talk about we got to make changes, we got to take it back.

Okay, so.

Now,

I wasn't going to ask you about Hillary Clinton because everybody does, but the announcement was today that she's going to announce on Sunday.

So, you know, are you ready?

And what are you going to wear for the announcement?

I'll have to think about that,

about what to wear.

That was a question no one's asked me.

That's right.

That's right.

Okay, well, let me ask a further question.

Somebody from her camp was on record today saying that they're going to raise, in his words, an insane amount of money.

And I've said, and I think you probably agree, that Citizens United was a terrible ruling that allowed pretty much unlimited money into politics.

We seem to have

We seem to have policy now that is driven by Citizens United in that candidates just want the money from one guy.

Sheldon Adelson gave about $100 million.

I think this is what is driving the anti-Iran rhetoric, the incredibly pro-Israel, I mean, we're both pro-Israel, but not like the Republicans.

I mean, it's just crazy.

That's all because they want Sheldon Adelson's money.

Same thing with the environment.

They want the Koch brothers' money.

Somehow, as bad as we thought Citizens United was, it's actually even worse.

Yeah.

No, I think you're exactly right about that.

you know sheldon adelson is out there he gets to pick the candidates and then he gets to put his money behind them and see if he can't get those offices the senators the white house right this is just crazy it's madness yeah you know it's madness and it's scary um yeah i mean look when i gave the obama pack a million dollars in 2012 i did it because you know i wanted to show that we got to get in the game it's on the million dollar level now and unfortunately since then every democratic candidate in the world is always hitting me up for money, you know.

And I tell them, you know, it's the

BuzzFeed today, there's a headline that says, Hillary has my vote, but not the million dollars.

You know,

however, there is one candidate who, if they got the nomination,

He said if they got the nomination,

I'm not made out of money and I might have to take a job as an Uber driver, but

if you choose to run and you are the candidate, I will find a way to give you a name.

So does.

Does that change your thinking at all?

I'm not running for president.

But I do want to say this when we talk about money.

I get it about money, and I get it about what's happening with Citizens United, but there's another half to this, and that is on the other side, we may not have the money, but we have our voices.

And if we get out there and get organized and use our voices, I truly believe in grassroots.

I believe in what we can do by linking up together.

I believe in the power of what we can do to build a country together.

One that works not just for the top 1% or even the top 10%,

but a country that works for all of us.

That's what it's got to be about.

Our country's on the line, our democracy's on the line, our future's on the line.

We've got to use our voices.

We've got to take it.

Thank you for your time tonight, Senator.

I really appreciate it.

And, you know, think about the money.

Okay, Elizabeth Warren, let's meet our panel.

Can't give away a million dollars.

All right, here's our panel.

He hosts CNN's Fareed Zakaria, GPS, and his new book is In Defense of a Liberal Education.

Fareed Zakaria.

Hey, Fareed.

She is the editor-in-chief of Roll Call magazine Christina Bellentoni.

Hey, Christina.

And he's a New York Times columnist and author of Bad Religion, How We Became a Nation of Heretics.

Oh, if it were only so.

Ross doubted that.

Hey, Ross, welcome back.

Good to be back.

Okay, now, remember to follow me on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, and send us your questions for tonight's overtime so we can answer them after the show on YouTube.

Okay, so before we get to the heavy stuff, I understand you got married today.

This is a real first for us.

We haven't told any of our friends yet, but now we have.

Wow, and then you came right to our show.

This is your honeymoon?

A few hours ago, yeah.

What will be my role?

Well, that's that's congratulations.

That's true.

That's absolutely amazing.

We've never had that.

Well,

you could give her a million-dollar wedding present.

Yeah,

it's true.

You have it lying around.

I don't have it lying around.

Okay.

Well, congratulations.

Now let's talk about police shootings.

Be perfectly.

Salamander is a lovely place for a honeymoon.

Yeah, that's right.

You could go there and not get shot.

You're white.

Okay, so has anyone not seen this video?

Okay, then let's not show it because it's so ugly.

And one of the ugly things about it is that it seems so routine and so nonchalant, the way this cop shoots this guy in the back eight times.

It kind of reminds me, remember the Ray Rice elevator video?

It was awful that he punched his girlfriend, but it was like almost more chilling than when I was like, oh, here's what I do.

I punch her, then I drag her, I go, oh, get the purse.

And it's sort of the same thing.

How do you explain a police officer who, up until that moment, doesn't seem like a crazy person, who then just goes to, hey, this is the United States of Saudi Arabia.

And if you run from a cop, I shoot you.

Well, and if you look at the numbers, you know, what they've been trying to do, the Justice Department has been trying to figure out how many of these kind of shootings are there.

And it turns out they're massively underreported.

So the Bureau of Justice Statistics pointed out it's probably something like 950 or 930 a year, which means you're 50 times more likely to be killed by a cop than a terrorist in the United States.

If you add to that, you know, the way that cops are now armed to the teeth, you look at the criminal justice system,

95% of

all prosecution is won by the prosecutors, 90% without a trial.

It just feels like we've gotten away from the Anglo-American system of justice, which was all about the rights of the individual.

You know, that was meant to be the heart of what the Anglo-American system was about.

Think about how technology has changed this conversation, though, because there have been so many cases.

Think about things that have been reopened after new evidence was found, or that you can't reopen because of the statute of limitations.

Now, everybody has a camera.

It completely changes the conversation of criminal justice in a way that was probably scary to a lot of people.

And you think about whatever happened many years ago, you just never know.

You mean this is not a coincidence that cops didn't start shooting unarmed black people when we got iPhones?

That's interesting.

Well, then there's the prison population.

We're 5% of the world's population.

We have 25% of the world's prisoners.

Right.

And I mean, the reality is that 20 or 30 years ago, the U.S.

was in the grip of a historic decades-long crime wave, basically.

And so at that point in time, spending more money on prisons made sense.

And in giving cops the benefit of the doubt in situations where you're dealing with real, you know, spikes in crime and so on makes a certain sense.

But we're in a totally different moment now.

Crime has been falling for 15 or 20 years.

It kept falling even into the Great Recession and through.

And I think that people, you know, this isn't just a left-right issue.

I think younger people on the right, people my age and younger who didn't have the experience of the 60s and 70s 70s, look at stories like this and say, yeah, you know, we've reached a point where the police are not.

Okay, but the right definitely thinks racism is over in America.

I mean, the Supreme Court basically ruled that.

Politicians have said that.

Polls of Republican voters say that.

They think the big problem is reverse racism.

So it kind of is a left-right issue.

Well, but in a sense...

I mean, if you look at the people who are actually working on criminal justice reform right now, and as far as I know, Rand Paul has not betrayed or disappointed you on that issue in the last 24 hours.

You said this announcement speech, in fact.

Yeah, so I mean, what you actually do have is a left-right coalition.

And you have people on the right.

You do have some people who will say there is racial disparities here that we have to take account of.

But you also have people who say, regardless of what the racial dynamic is here, the reality of mass incarceration is something that we have to deal with.

And you don't have to read it through a lens of race to

have reform.

What about gun culture?

I mean, mean,

what that video shows is, you know, it's just like the gun is always the tool of first choice in America.

I don't think that policeman is that different from a lot of people who think, yeah, I got a gun, that's how you solve your problems.

We see it in movies, we see it in videos.

It just seems like the gun is too ready and available.

And also, why do cops always have to empty the whole clip?

As if he wanted to stop the guy?

Well, no, actually, I mean, they're,

I mean,

you know, stipulating that you don't empty the whole clip into a man running away in the back, right?

But the reason that cops are supposed to empty the clip is that you're supposed to shoot to, you know, in police training, you're supposed to shoot to take down the person coming at you.

This is why people say, oh, cops should be trained to shoot somebody in the ankle and so on.

That doesn't work.

It's not, if you're actually in a life or death situation, you're supposed to aim for the center center of the colour.

But if that would work on me,

I think if you get shot in the leg, it works.

What bullshit is that?

Probably can't keep going.

Police culture has to change.

I'm so tired of hearing all this.

Somebody always has to say, Mo's cops are good.

Yeah, I guess they are.

But you know, that second cop came over and he was black and he was helping the guy cover it up.

If you're helping to cover up this police culture, they're not all good.

There's something wrong with the whole barrel.

It's not just a few apples.

Congressman Jim Clay.

Congressman Jim Clyburn said yesterday he's actually advising people to keep your cell phones charged all the time and be at the ready because you just never know.

And perhaps if everyone had a camera phone ready, it would encourage people to think twice before pulling out their gun.

Okay.

Let me move to the other unpleasant story, the Sarnaev trial.

Interesting that, you know, the Conservatives always want to try terrorists as a military combatant, and yet, even though our criminal justice system sucks so often in so many cases, the one place where it's really good is convicting terrorists.

And we see it again with Sarnaev.

Juries pretty much get it when it's a terrorist up there.

So

I don't think the concern of conservatives is that you're not going to convict the terrorist.

I think it's an issue about intelligence gathering and sources and

obviously interrogation issues, which were probably less of an issue with the Sarnaevs because they did seem to be more lone actors than it would have been in a case with somebody out of al-Qaeda or ISIS.

But in general, I think conservatives assume that if you get Khalid Sheikh Mohammed or Osama bin Laden in front of a jury, the trial might end up being a circus, but they are going to get convicted.

Well, I've heard an awful lot of conservatives favor military tribunals over civilian courts.

Right.

I'm just hoping it's because,

mostly because of intelligence gathering issues, I think.

Well, the conservatives I know.

These are not the conservatives I know.

Okay, but so now we come to the part of what are we going to do with this guy?

Are we going to kill him?

Now, I've always been okay with the death penalty.

Not if there's any doubt, but this is one of those no-doubters.

I mean, his own lawyer said he did it.

But I have a problem with giving this guy what he wants.

You know, they kept saying that he looked arrogant and he looked indifferent.

I think they're misinterpreting that.

What he looked to me was confident.

Confident because he knew where he was going, up to paradise, which gets us back to the idea of Islam as the mother load of bad ideas, Fareed.

Well,

as you know, Bill, I've written a lot about the problems in Islam.

In fact, I wrote about them well before you were talking about it because I was focused on that stuff.

My problem with the way you approach it is I don't think you're going to reform a religion by telling 1.6 billion people, most of whom are just devout people who get some inspiration from that religion and go about their daily lives.

I don't think you're going to change the religion by saying your religion is the motherload of bad ideas.

It's a terrible thing.

Shape it up and change it.

I think...

I think, frankly, you're going to make a lot of news for yourself and you're going to get a lot of applause lines and joke lines out of it.

But if you really want to change those people, if you want to change that religion, then what you have to do is push for reform, but also with some sense of respect for what the spiritual values that people take.

I'm not a religious guy, but all I'm telling you is I know that world, and if you tell everybody you suck, your religion sucks, clean it up, it's going to get their backs up.

So let's

let's say it's not even a religion.

Let's say there's a social club that believes women are second-class citizens, gay people should be put to death, you should be put to death.

But that's not all 1.6 billion people.

Not all.

If they did, if they did not, not all, but

you'd have a lot more than a few terrorists.

You do know, Fareed.

Come on, you do know.

I've seen that same Pew survey that you quote every time this comes up, and I'm not disputing it.

You're not disputing it.

I'm not disputing it.

One time, four years ago, Pew did this survey, and they got those.

So you're saying in the West

it is not a widespread belief that death is the appropriate response to the.

I don't know because I didn't conduct that poll.

All I'm telling you is that you go to those countries, you go to Indonesia, the largest Muslim country in the world, and they have lived happily with minorities.

Women are given respect.

Yes, is it as advanced as the West?

No.

But you don't have a huge problem of jihad there.

The biggest problems you have are in pathologically dysfunctional Arab societies, which have had 40 or 50 years of repressive dictatorships in which they have driven all dissent into the most extreme places.

But I began by saying, I have always said there is a, the word I've used is there is a cancer within Islam.

Our difference is, how are you going to fix it?

Do you really think you're

persuading people with honesty?

You're not persuading people with what you're doing.

You're getting applause lines in the West.

You know what?

You know, that's insulting, that I'm doing this for applause lines.

Well, I'm telling you, the reality is you're not changing those people.

You're not

my average Egyptian.

Let's think about it.

We started with Sarnav, right?

I mean, I think one interesting way to look at this is if he had had his life experience 30 or 40 years ago, and this is a point that Freed has made in some of his columns, he probably wouldn't have decided to become a radical jihadi.

He would have become some kind of more secular terrorist.

If he'd been in Germany in that era, he could have joined the Bonner Meinhof gang.

He could have done all kinds of things.

The reality is that in the West, with guys like the brothers, with the people who did the Charlie Hebdo killings in Paris and so on, radical Islam has become

the one remaining alternative in a world where communism is dead, fascism is dead, nobody really wants to start a Putinist movement.

I mean, you know, there are some people who do, but

so

while, I mean, and I agree with you and Farid on your point of common ground, right?

There is a real cancer in part of Islam right now, and that's part of the reason that these people are attracted to it.

But it's also true that these guys are, it's a mix of sort of people who are losers and people who are dissatisfied with modern society and don't have any other way to act out against it.

And our society doesn't offer alternatives to those people, and some of the crazy ones and stupid ones go and join ISIS.

It gets back to the bad apples issue.

Very few bad apples.

Okay, I have to move on a second, but let's not pretend that the things that ISIS believes are not things that many millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions of Muslims believe around the world.

To pretend that is just...

But to say that hundreds of millions of people believe what ISIS does, you would have a lot more problems than

the terrorist beliefs.

I'm not saying they believe that you should burn people alive.

I'm saying they believe that if you make fun of the Prophet, death is what comes to you.

You don't agree with me?

Because I look, I grew up in this world.

What people feel, you know, they feel like their religion is being insulted.

And so if you ask them on a poll, the point is, do they go around burning people?

Do they go around stoning people in Indonesia, in India?

These are places where hundreds of millions of Muslims live.

Right?

And all I'm saying is you don't see that.

And the people who do that,

if they know that there are hundreds of millions of people who support that idea.

No, I'm not myself going to kill Salman Rushdie, but I think it's a terrific idea.

Somebody does.

You can't deny that those are fellow travelers.

All I'm saying is

you don't have any operational reality there, which is those countries, those societies are not actually stoning people to death.

Okay.

Right.

We had some other controversy on this show last time we were on two weeks ago, and I promised I would address it.

Two weeks ago, I did a new rule on our Internet Overtime segment about someone named Zane Malik, who I'd never never heard of until that day,

but who apparently had just left the boy band One Direction.

Well, the PC Police, as usual, read way more into the joke than was actually there, so tonight we're unveiling a new segment called Explaining Jokes to Idiots.

So I'm going to re-show the joke in question and we'll stop the tape periodically to explain what's going on.

Roll up.

Neural Zane Malik.

Stop right there.

Let me say about this: new rule is merely a framing device for the purposes of comedy.

New rules are not legally binding, are not actual regulations, and do not carry the force of law.

Back to the tape.

Neural Zane Malik can just go ahead and quit one direction for all I care.

I mean, whatever.

You see, the audience is laughing here because I'm taking on the attitude and dialect of a 12-year-old girl.

When clearly I'm not a 12-year-old girl, I'm a 28-year-old man.

Role tech.

But I think after everything we've been through, I at least deserve the common respect of being told face-to-face.

Okay, for you comedy students out there, this is called Milking the Premise.

You see, now that I have the audience believing I care deeply about what happens to the band One Direction, me a 28 year old man,

I take it even further and imply that Zane and I have a personal relationship.

Oh gosh, what am I going to do next?

Let's see.

Just tell me two things, Zane.

Which one in the band were you?

Okay.

Here we get to what we in the comedy business called the old switcheroo,

where my previous sentiments are revealed to be sarcastic and we unveil that in reality, I have no idea who this guy is, nor do I give a shit.

And I don't.

I was a teenager in the 70s.

My idea of a boy band is Crosby Stills and Nan.

In fact, I was calling Zane Zion in rehearsal because we had it spelled wrong.

But our staff caught it before showtime.

It's called Fact-Checking Rolling Stone.

Look into it.

All right, now here comes the final punchline of what we call the topper.

Which one in the band were you?

And where were you during the Boston Marathon?

Now,

notice how the crowd was shocked at first, but in just a few seconds they were cracking up and applauding.

That's because they're not idiots and they understand or get

what the joke is, that they look alike.

That's it.

They look alike!

Their facial features are quite similar, which is humorous because one is a murderer and the other is in a boy band where they only murder the music.

Now,

it turns out Zane Malik is a Muslim, but neither I nor anyone on our staff knew that.

How could we?

The whole joke is I don't know who the fuck he is.

I don't know his religion or his birthday or his favorite food because I don't spend every waking hour obsessing over teenage boys like a Catholic.

I mean a 12-year-old.

Like a 12-year-old girl.

And by the way, if you are a 12-year-old girl, you have every right to be upset because you're 12.

But for all the respectable media outlets who covered this story when you could have spent time and space on real news that needs reporting, you are not only traitors to journalism, you are in the truest sense of the word, 12-year-old girls.

All right, he's the Pulitzer Prize-winning humorist whose new book is Live Right and Find Happiness, although beer is much faster.

Dave Barry is over here.

Dave!

How are you, sir?

Great to see you.

Dave, you are what I call RF, reliably funny.

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

You always are.

And your new book, I'm going to hold it up right here, Live Right and Find Happiness, although beer is much faster.

Funny on every page, and I love the subject you have chosen, happiness, because I'm going to cut right to the end.

What's the secret?

For people who are not going to buy buy the book, come on.

Just give it.

And what is the secret to happiness?

Probably

the one essay I write that really is about happiness, the main conclusion I drew is that the people that were, the happiest people I knew turned out to be my parents, which was supposed to be our generation, right?

The baby boomers, sex, drugs, rock and roll.

And my parents, who were, you know, the greatest generation, the Depression, World War II,

I now realize had way more fun than we did.

They were happier, especially after they became parents, because they didn't, when they became parents, do what we did, the boomers, which has become obsessively parenting.

You know what I mean?

All we did was parent the way we do, because we were the first people to ever think of parenting.

I love that you point out that parenting is a verb.

Right.

We never used to say that.

They were like,

they had kids, but they figured that everyone else had done that too before them.

It was not that big a deal.

And they

said they didn't like,

they were like, go play, you know, be back by September.

Yes.

I'm not justifying this.

I'm not saying it's a good thing.

More than once I went downtown to Armonck to buy cigarettes for my parents when I was like.

Sure, I did that too.

Yeah.

And my father.

Bought cigarettes for my parents?

Fuck you, man.

No, and my father taught me when I was very young how to make his martinis.

Drinking.

I mean, again, we're not saying drinking's a good thing, but

when the weekend came,

they partied.

They had parties that went all night long.

You know, you'd come out in the morning, there'd still be people lying on the living room floor.

I'm not kidding.

I know I'm making my parents sound bad.

I'm making them sound awesome.

But they were like good parents.

They really were.

And all the parents were kind of like the same way.

They didn't,

somebody put it really well.

They said,

we always worry about if our kids were having fun.

And they worried about whether they were having some fun on the weekend.

They were working pretty hard, and you know, they were due to have fun.

Well, I've never had kids.

Everything I know about kids.

Thank God.

Everything I know about kids comes from what I see in movies or on airplanes.

Or

the very good sources.

And sometimes movies I see on airplanes.

Yeah.

But they just look like real assholes.

I mean, they really,

they really do.

And

always.

And all children look like that, but then they get to be like you when they grow up.

So then it's worth it.

He's

bitter about being wrong on the Muslim thing.

So

I want to quote here.

This is from the Journal of Marriage and Family, which I love the way we all cite journals that we've never heard of before they come out as like they've been around forever.

Oh, I never miss an issue of it.

No, I never heard of it, but I never miss an issue.

And they said the sheer amount of time that a parent spends with a child has virtually no relationship to how they turn out, either with academic achievement, behavioral stuff, emotional well-being, especially from 3 to 11.

I think if anything, the parents are spending too much time.

Right, I was going to say, it's much worse.

I mean, I think now

parents are obsessive following their kids around, you know, in case, God forbid they should ingest gluten, you know, or some

Or a peanut.

And my daughter plays soccer, so we see the soccer parents,

they just, they're insane.

They're literally, they're literally crazy about, you know, watching their children, controlling their time, making sure the children play a certain amount.

Are the children getting the coaching they need, whatever?

My parents didn't, you know, they didn't go to Little League.

Right.

You know.

Yeah, they just didn't.

They let us go.

There was a case in, I think it was the the town of Silver Springs, Maryland.

I know that name stuck in my mind because my cousins used to live there, where these two kids, I think they were like 10 and 6, were walking home alone from the park.

Somebody saw them.

They called the cops.

They went and, you know, the parents are now having to go to court, child services.

That's, my parents get to school.

Get your ass to school.

And that was it.

I have this memory.

My mom was a very funny lady.

And again, you're all going to think that my parents were horrible.

They were great parents.

But there was a pond near our house.

And we used to go to this pond and swim.

And my mom used to open the kitchen window.

She'd be doing, she was busy.

She had a lot to do.

Four kids.

And she'd wave to my sister and me.

It was, we were heading off to the pond to swim and go, don't drown, kids.

And we'd go, we won't.

You know,

that was how she parented us.

You know, I'm sure that out there right now there are people who are like horrified and could tell me horrible stories and whatever, but we didn't drown.

You know, we learned to get to the pond and back on our own.

And I don't know of any kid, you know, my daughter's age now who could do that.

You know, they just

can't anymore.

Nobody lets them.

I don't let them.

You don't let them trick-or-treat.

You follow them around in case they get, God forbid, an apple.

They don't have time to apple.

Do you know what could be an apple?

I have to have violin lessons next, right?

While they're trick-or-treating, they're practicing the violin, just so they don't fall behind.

So let me ask you one more question about happiness, because I think it's something who doesn't want to be happy?

That's why it's a great subject for a book.

Who doesn't look at that book and say, that applies to me?

But I feel like there's a sweet spot

of being happy where you're not doing so well that you have the time to think about whether you're happy.

I think that's your issue, right?

You're a writer, you have a lot of time to think about whether you're happy.

So you don't want that.

And of course, you don't want to be like before the 20th century where people were wiping their ass with bark and you know, they get

diseases.

And that was for pleasure.

You think there's an end to that theory that there's a sweet spot there for being happy?

I think, I don't know.

You're basically saying if you don't know too much, you'll be happier.

Is that what you're saying?

Well, I think if you have too much time to think about whether you're happy, you're never going to be happy.

So smart people can't be happy?

Is that what you're thinking?

Well,

ignorance is bliss, is like the oldest saying in the world, right?

I mean, the novelist John Irving once said the title Great Expectations,

he was so sorry that Dickens used that because he said, there's not a great book in the world that wouldn't better be called Great Expectations.

And I think that's part of our problem.

We have great expectations that we can never live up to.

Well, and we've become obsessed with being happy, which makes it almost impossible to achieve it.

And we also have become so unable to see what's good around us.

I mean, I don't think.

Do you think money buys happiness or can?

Is that a question?

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

Really?

But I think we've...

I'm not going to give that million to Elizabeth Warren that I'm going to save happy.

I better save that.

That will not make her happy.

No, that will not make her happy, and it could make me miserable.

All right.

So let me ask you about your Florida.

I mean, why do you live in Florida?

You're not from there.

I live in Miami.

And I like Florida.

I moved to Miami in 1986 from the United States.

And I...

But, you know,

it is kind of a train wreck state.

It is, but it is comedy gold.

It is comedy gold.

I mean, you don't need

any kind of imagination at all.

When I knew you were coming on, I wanted to ask you about this.

This is from last month, that the Florida Department of Environmental Protection officials have been ordered not to use the term, and this is in the Department of Environmental Protection, not use the term climate change or global warming.

And there was a guy who did.

He's in the land management plan coordination.

That's his job, Bart Bibbler.

He used it in a meeting he was suspended without pay for mentioning this and they said he couldn't go back to work until he had psychiatric evaluation

so you're crazy now if you think global warming has happened in Florida apparently yeah

my my house is 12 feet above sea level so if it goes up 12 feet I am waterfront property.

Right.

So you're good.

So I'm good with this new policy.

Well, for at least 12 more feet.

This is an idea that's spreading.

Pennsylvania and North Carolina, same thing.

And in Oklahoma, I noticed their geological survey, they have an interesting take on fracking.

In the last five years in Oklahoma, they've had a lot more earthquakes than they used to, and I mean a lot more.

Before the fracking started, they had two a year.

Now they're on track to have 875.

That seems like maybe there's a causal relationship, and yet their geological survey says insufficient evidence, oddly the same view as the oil and coal companies.

I mean, the oil and gas companies.

But 23 peer-reviewed studies have said, no, of course, it's the fracking.

At what point does shame kick in for the people denying this?

This is a complete lack of leadership on behalf of every politician, right?

This has to shift out of being a game about rhetoric and partisanship.

Like, the planet is crying out, California is in this catastrophic drought right now.

You know, it's the fifth largest economy in the world, provides so much of the world's food, and people aren't talking about this in real terms.

It's not an honest conversation.

You have to recognize there are just consequences.

And it's not a political debate.

Sometimes it's a regional debate.

You know, there's

political debates.

Three in ten people that are in like Midwestern working class

counties in America don't believe that global warming is something that is caused by human activity.

And then you look at the the big cities and the numbers are completely different.

And so you just need to change the conversation and somebody needs to be a leader and end this kind of partisan rhetoric on it.

You know, the tragedy in the Oklahoma case is

Of course it's happening because, I mean, as far as we can tell, it's happening because of the fracking.

It's happening for a specific reason, which is the injection of wastewater, which they've been injecting right along fault lines, geological fault lines, which turns out to be a very bad idea.

But the truth is that all this stuff can be better regulated.

I mean, I really do think if you are serious about climate change and global warming, you know, one has to keep in mind that the ability to get natural gas has allowed us to stop using coal or to use less coal, which is the single most, you know, the dirtiest thing we do.

40% of electricity generation in the United States comes from coal.

The more you can do that substitution, and there are ways to do fracking that are highly regulated, by the way.

I mean, you have to

do a lot of stuff to make it work.

But if you can do that,

there is a win-win scenario.

We have cut down.

Don't just say, let's get on green energy, because that's possible.

That's not like science fiction.

No, I'll tell you why, but if we wanted to do it.

Because

in the next 10 to 15 years, and again, if you think this is urgent, which I know you do, so if you look at electricity generation, 40% is done by coal, 0.4% is solar.

So even if you ten-tuple solar, you get to 4% right now.

Right now, the bridge, the transitional technology that we have is natural gas.

It's why the United States has cut its CO2 emissions faster than Europe over the last seven years, because we've been able to use natural gas.

They still use coal.

Insurance, earthquake insurance in Oklahoma has gone up by 500%, people applying to get earthquake insurance.

So it's helping the economy, you know, in that sense.

All right.

Well, thank you, panel.

I have to go to new rules Now, New Rules.

All right.

New Roll, Rand Call either has to lay off the anti-gay rhetoric or stop standing like this.

New Roll, I'm glad that cities are finally taking the bicycles seriously and creating special lanes for cyclists, but they have to make them look a little less like crime scenes.

I want to see where I'm supposed to ride, not what my chalk outline is going to look like after I get flattened by a texting teen in a Ford Focus.

New Roll, now that the Republicans have returned to run the show in Congress, Wall Street bankers have to start wearing the asshole shirt again.

And when they do, they also must immediately bring back cigar bars, credit to vault swaps, and not telling your date you have herpes.

New rule Joe Biden has to admit that this is not what he signed up for.

It's humiliating to be dismissed as some ridiculous comical character, but then to have to put on the bunny suit.

Oh, come on.

New rule Apple must admit that if the eye watch meticulously measures heart rate and motion to log your exercise, it's going to be giving credit for marathon runs to lots of fat guys who are just jerking off.

New Roll, now that Chinese pandas Lulu and

Lulu and Ji Mei have set the world record for panda sex endurance at 18 minutes, three seconds, they have to tell us their secret.

I mean besides the fact that it's hard to get off while this guy's watching.

And finally, new rule conservatives have to admit they've lost the culture wars when they're reduced to demanding the right to not serve wedding cake to gay people.

That's the biggest problem facing America, not climate change or terrorism or the wealth gap, but gay cake.

It's not like gays are asking bakeries to make a giant penis cake that goes from soft to hard and squirts out buttercream.

Which reminds me the big party is tomorrow.

Now, ever since Indiana Governor Mike Penn signed his Religious Freedom Restoration Act, he and like-minded conservatives have been trying to have it both ways.

They hate discrimination, but they love the Bible, a book that commands you to discriminate.

That's what it says.

Gay is an abomination, and we must destroy it by denying it pastry.

Of course, the root of this problem is that more than half of all Americans still believe the Bible is the actual or inspired word of God.

But now 55% also support gay marriage, which must be very confusing.

On the one hand, clearly, God God has spelled it out.

He hates fags, but you like your gay neighbors, Rob and Larry.

But the Bible tells you to kill them.

Yes, it literally says kill them.

What to do?

Well, if you're Christian attorney Matt McLaughlin from nearby Orange County, you write a ballot initiative which calls for killing all the gay people in California because, to quote Mr.

McLaughlin, better that offenders should die rather than that all of us should be killed by God's just wrath.

Now I know you're saying this guy is so far out on the fringe, but that's the scary thing.

He's not.

And this is what never gets discussed in these religious freedom issues.

The reason fundamentalists are so stubbornly anti-gay is they truly believe that condoning homosexuality will bring on God's wrath.

This is what Jerry Falwell used to preach.

He said AIDS was God's punishment for a society that tolerates homosexuals and that gays and lesbians helped 9-11 happen.

John Haiti said God caused Hurricane Katrina to wipe out New Orleans because it had a gay pride parade the week before.

Pat Robertson warned Orlando

Home of Disney World, that if they went ahead with the gay themed promotion, it'll bring about terrorist bombs, earthquakes, tornadoes, and possibly a meteor.

Possibly a meteor.

He's not a coop.

Just two weeks ago, Bob Jones III, founding scion of Christian Bob Jones University, apologized for a comment he once made, which was, it would not be a bad idea if gay people were stoned as the Bible commands.

Take fundamentalists at their word.

They literally believe this stuff.

And if you believe that God wiped out Sodom and Gomorrah for being too gay, then yeah, he must be itching to hit West Hollywood.

Now,

is California really going to consider Mr.

McLaughlin's gay killing bill?

Of course not.

But as batshit as this asshole is, just imagine if there was a whole country of Matt McLaughlins.

Well there is.

It's called Saudi Arabia.

It's called Iran.

It's called Pakistan.

I could go on, but suffice it to say that in many Muslim countries you wouldn't have to work hard at all to get signatures on your Kill All the Gays ballot initiative.

In 10 such countries it's already the law

because

Because they have crazy scripture too.

Muhammad says of sodomy, kill the one who does it and the one to whom it is done.

Especially him, because he probably likes it more.

He didn't say that part.

People say ISIS hijacked Islam.

No, actually the opposite is true.

Religions do have hijackers, but the hijackers are the moderates.

And I thank atheist God for them.

They're the ones who took a sharpie to the Bible and redacted all the crazy parts until there was almost nothing left to read, like an email from Hillary Clinton.

And now someone in Islam needs to do that with the Quran.

You know, there's so much wrong with America these days.

Take pride in the one thing that is legitimately better.

We don't let fundamentalists rule our shit.

What's the proof?

Our gay battles are over cake.

And even then, not once has one of these religious freedom laws been used to deny a gay person his wedding cake.

It just doesn't happen.

What happens is there's a lawsuit, it goes to court, and the judge always says, Bitch just make the cake.

That's our show up here at the Kiva in Albuquerque, May 2nd at the Bayou in Houston.

May 3rd at the Sands Bethlehem Center in Bethlehem.

PA, June 7th.

I want to thank Fareen Zakaria, Christina Bell and Tony Ross, Douthen, Jade Barry, and Senator Elizabeth Warren.

Join us now on Overtime on YouTube.

Thank you, folks.

Catch all new episodes of Real Time with Bill Maher every Friday night at 11 or watch him anytime on HBO on Demand.

For more info, log on to HBO.com.