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

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.

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 on overtime.

What will be the fallout from the Rolling Stone retraction of its rape on campus story?

What?

Yes.

Well, it's a real unfortunate thing because rape in America is an important issue.

They somehow found the one fraternity on the one night where there wasn't a rape.

That's not how I would put it, but you know,

It's a collective failure in journalism, and it has to be built, journalism has to be built on trust, right?

The trust of the source, the trust of the reporter, of the editor, the trust of the people above that.

And every level of this, when you read the forensic account of what happened in that story, I can't understand how it made publication as an editor.

We make these tough decisions all the time, but it has changed the conversation about rape where it should actually be a conversation in this country.

But you can understand how it made publication because, I mean, it was the biggest story in just about anything for about two and a half weeks.

And clearly, I mean, I completely agree with you about, you know, that it was a complete shit show from beginning to end

in terms of what they were doing.

But

they thought

the lead for the story, it was just too good.

It was too good for the story.

The lesson is

you can't work backwards from the result you want.

That's what we did with Iraq, isn't it?

You know, they wanted to find weapons of mass destruction.

That was quite a segue.

So Dick Cheney was...

I gotta say, that was was really important.

Dick Cheney was like, find me a guy who thinks there's weapons of mass destruction.

And Rolling Stone was like, this is an issue.

And the difference is that this really is an issue, and there weren't really any weapons of mass destruction.

There were alarm bells, you know, that both the reporter and the editor had, and nobody was.

Well,

how can nobody be fired as a result of this?

That's what I don't understand.

I think because there's legal liability.

They're scared that if they fire someone, they're admitting that they're not.

Well, will they ever publish another story by that reporter?

Well, they have.

No, that's the thing.

If they don't publish another story, then they have effectively fired her, and that could be taken as evidence.

You can't put all the blame on her either.

I mean, really, it was layer after layer after layer where they had fallen down.

I can put a fair amount of blame.

Yeah, I see most of it.

I mean, right.

I mean, she was certainly culpable of lying.

But oh, I'm talking about the reporter.

Oh, the reporter.

And she specifically said, you know, no one pushed me to ask these three people for their real information or to track them.

But you're supposed to know.

I started out at a newspaper called the Daily Local News in Westchester, Pennsylvania.

Tiny paper, we once ran a headline, woman beats off would-be rapist.

That's how

that's the kind of newspaper it was.

We ran front-page pictures of Zucchini.

We would never have printed that story.

And I don't know of anybody who would have.

That's what I'm saying, though.

How can you not?

Anyway.

That's a great headline, Dave.

It's a true headline.

Really?

I didn't write it yet.

Woman beats off would-be rapist.

Nobody noticed it.

Bill, it was too late.

What is the impact of Obama's recent announcement calling for an end to conversion therapies?

The belief that you can pray away gay.

And the president, to his credit, is coming out and saying, come on,

this is crazy.

You cannot pray away the gay.

Hey, it worked for me.

Is that how you became straight, Dave?

I'm just trying to be a part of the panel.

It's only to participate.

Yeah, that's okay.

It comes at the same time.

The White House has a gender-neutral restroom.

I mean, the president is trying to set an example there, and the employees in the White House have actually said, you know, they feel like he is trying to lead there, and perhaps that will catch on.

I mean, you can liken it to the minimum wage debate or, you know, some of the other things he's trying to do.

But it's certainly a way to.

What is the view of the conservatives you know,

those conservatives

on praying away the gay?

Well, first of all, the conversion therapy stuff, some of it is

weak or bullshit Freudianism rather than

sort of prayer-based.

It's sort of a holdover from Freudian theories of homosexuality.

And I think the consensus is it doesn't work and it's not.

What was Freud's view on homosexuality?

Freud's view is this, how much time do we have on overtime?

Freud had a lot of views on homosexuality, but Freud.

Foil it down.

I mean, the Freudian take was, well, or at least the interpretation of the Freudian take

was that, that, you know, I think he called homosexuality inversion, and he, like everything with Freud, he connected it to issues with your mother here and your father there and so on.

And so the argument was, you know, you have a distant father and a domineering mother and so you grow up to be gay.

And this was sort of a strain in psychotherapy for a long time.

And it was picked up by some social and religious conservatives, I think, starting in the 60s and 70s.

Anyway, it's a longer story, but that's that's that's

a bit of it.

I mean, I'm a little skeptical about, I think there's a distinction here between what parents do to kids and what adults do.

It's a free country and there are gay adults who want to go to a therapist who can who talks to them about becoming straight.

And that's reality and it's a free country.

And I don't think it's the president's place necessarily to say, I mean, yeah, I don't think it's the president's place to say what consenting adults can do with their therapist in the privacy of his office.

I think what it's getting at is that under the radar of very very overt discrimination against gays, there is a lot of this kind of stuff that

gays have to put up with that

I think he's trying to change the culture, not so much propose a big new law.

And I think it is true that there is a lot of this kind of below-the-radar

stuff that is directed towards gays that

makes life hard.

And I think the government has always had a role in saying about any

health supplement that's phony, wouldn't they point that out and say there's just sawdust in this pill?

It's not real?

And there's no evidence that it works?

No, but wouldn't it be a problem?

There's no evidence

at all.

For any of the issues of like Freudian therapy, honestly, if you want to get into saying the government needs to start regulating whether talking

therapy works or not, then you're going to open like six layers of, I mean, there's no evidence that Freudian or Jungian therapy works generally, right?

I mean, that's, you you know, that's an extreme statement.

But if you had the FDA regulating

Jungian therapists, you'd

get into a ridiculous situation.

You and I both know.

You're going to get a lot of emails from psychiatrists.

You and I both know that Obama's really an atheist.

So, I mean, like, he could have said prayer doesn't work at all.

Am I going to get Scott Walker

if I don't say that I think Obama is a liberal Christian, but a Christian?

Okay, so Fareed, is our our recent obsession with STEM education misguided?

Oh, yes.

Now, here's something we agree on.

Liberal education.

I think that's fantastic that you're taking the banner for that.

I got a liberal education.

I was an English major.

I used English in my career.

And we have forgotten all these subjects.

And that's one reason why we're so in such a mess politically.

People don't take history.

They don't take civics.

They don't know anything.

And I think there's a mistake, the mistaken view that the only way you can get a job or do well professionally is to do this kind of STEM.

STEM is great if you're interested in science.

Of course, you should follow your passion.

But there are many, many ways to live a productive working life.

Lots of people who have English degrees,

history degrees.

And the truth of the matter is,

what your second or third or fifth or sixth job is going to have so little to do with what you trained for that what you want are these broad basic skills that can last you for your whole life in your working life, but also, you know, you have other lives as well as a parent, as a reader,

as a friend.

This is something that helps you with all of that.

But the most important thing I think people worry so much about is you can, these broad-based skills actually are more portable as the economy changes, because that's the stuff, you don't know what industry you're going to be in 20 years from now, but you know that you're going to need to think clearly, express yourself clearly, work with other people, you know, those kind of common skills.

And what happened to the idea of the Renaissance thing?

You know, the.

the most interesting man in the world, dude.

You know, don't we all want to be like him?

Yeah, and you know he's a history major.

Yeah.

Or philosophy, you know.

Well.

Okay, does the panel have any expectations for Obama's meeting with Raul Castro?

Farid?

Look, I think it's terrific that we are trying,

after

five decades of isolation, we're trying to see whether commerce and capitalism and trade will change Cuba more than isolation and sanctions and threats.

Because I tend to, in a way, I think I'm the capitalist here.

I think give the Cuban people a taste of the world that they have missed out on, and you will see

it will be the asset that will dissolve this dictatorship over time.

We could have done this 50 years ago, and

today Cuba would be St.

Bart.

Jay-Z would be partying this.

This was one of the presidents,

when he was a candidate,

was one of his issues against Hillary Clinton, saying, you know, it was a different Castro, but saying, you know, yes, I would sit down and talk to him and talk to Ahmedinejad, and this was sort of his point.

On the list of dictators that we have done business with, they're about a hundredth on the list as far as awfulness.

But do you actually, I mean, do you think, like, I don't particularly have a problem with the opening to Cuba, but I don't think we should kid ourselves necessarily that capitalism is actually a solvent of dictatorships.

I mean, we've been making that argument with China for the last 30 years.

30 years that

China is much freer than it was 30 years ago.

I mean, I've been going to China for 20 odd years, and people have the ability to own property, they can move, they can get the job they want.

These are all real freedoms.

You know that.

I mean, Russ,

the freedom to own property is freedom.

The freedom to work is freedom.

I'm just saying the dictatorship itself also benefits from managing the opening, right?

And this is...

Dave, you're near.

I live in Miami.

My wife is Cuban.

My wife is

actually Cuban-Jewish, Juban.

Yes.

That's what they call it.

They didn't come on rafts.

They parted the Caribbean.

But

my wife is Cuban.

Her family all fled Castro.

I know many Cubans.

Miami people,

they're viewed as fanatics.

They're not.

The second generation, third generation, like my wife, they're much more realistic but there's there's one thing they all agree on which is yes good let's you know open we're already Cubans are sending a lot of money down there anyway as it is but nobody in Miami believes that the Castros are going to give up any power whatsoever nobody believes that it's going to get any better politically for a long time and that the people who believe that are very naive but they're both very old the Castros but they've got all these thugs working for them they've got a whole apparatus

you know the thing about dictatorships is when they're in place you think that they go on forever.

And then when they collapse, you always think, God,

how was it able to stay so?

I mean, think about all these dictatorships we've seen.

What about China?

Gaddafi, people like that.

Mao died, and China is still.

China is the most successful economic development in human history.

Cuba is not.

Right.

True.

Okay.

Dave, what is the secret to your youthful hair?

Well, probably.

And do you worry about...

I've been wanting to ask that all night.

And do you worry about young guy hair, old guy face?

Is that something that you

is that a concern that you have?

Because that is a, and we know it's real.

This is very.

I get accused of not having real hair, but thank you for

giving me this opportunity on television to say, no, this is my fucking hair.

This is my haircut.

I've had the same haircut for you.

I know, I know.

It's amazing.

It is a freak of nature.

All right.

Thank you, panel.

Thank you.

Thank you, audience.

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