Real Time with Bill Maher - Overtime - Episode #354 (Originally aired 5/15/15)

Episode Date: May 18, 2015

Overtime - Episode #354 (Originally aired 5/15/15)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO late-night series, Real Time with Bill Maugh. 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 all together. 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 that 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. Well, 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 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 herodermic needle that were 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 that 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 bumrap 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... Another way.

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 kind of a hawk. And I would... A smattering of putting green

flaws for that, yeah. Ayon, what is the status of campus debate on Islamism? Oh, 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.

You've been disinvited. You had disinvited to... How, we've all been disinvited. Yeah. Isn't that great? In fact, there's now... Mike, have you been disinvited? From America, as a black guy.

I'm the opposite. A volcano picked us up, work for a few hundred years in there. All right. You're always at the top. 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 every school ever went to. You're like Bill Clinton. In the 90s, like he was the awful guy who killed Vince Foster and got 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. You stick around long enough and you're respectfully. 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 ever get there, or did that stick? Because I shamed them into actually rescinding the band

and actually letting me speak. I think Brandeis has been punished enough. 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? Right. 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 about it? All right. Who was 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 of it. He didn't say that. But it did get a... 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? So you do read the news stories. Though I stopped after the first paragraph. It is very arcane. It is a little hard to get into it.

But I am in, you know... One thing... 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 coal. Right, exactly, clean coal. 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. 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's a piece about this about China that is geopolitical, that is not about, you know, jobs and economics at home, but this is actually about showing our... 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.

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 picks 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. You know, the people have a whole different set of questions in the media. The media always asked me about the guests on the show. People I run into ask me about the issues. Where they talk about their lives, you know, which I was much more interested in hitchhacking. I didn't feel like doing an interview in every car. I wanted to hear what they had to say. Right.

So it was amazing to me, even if they knew, nobody said, what's Johnny Depp like? You know, they, which in real life, in New York or L.A., they do. I always want to ask you, what's Johnny Depp. Actually, people ask me what Bill Maher's like, you know? What do you say? I say basically, I tell them the same thing that we said to each other after the 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 couple of charmers. Does George Stephanopoulos' donation to the Clinton Foundation compromise his journalistic integrity? I don't know if you heard this story. George Stephanopoulos gave $75 grand to the Clinton Foundation, and he had to apologize.

I think this 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. I can't either. It's ridiculous. It would 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, but this guy, more than most, we have to admit, we know, is in the tank. Yeah, no, he's got his start in his career, working with 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 an entity. was started in the late 60s, early 70s.

A bunch of kids were in the burnt-out gunner called the South. Yeah, I'm about to give it to you. I'm going to give you some gang. Check this out. I know you didn't have like Jay. I thought it was a little later than that. No, no, I got you. Check me out.

There's going to be a movie comes out called Rubble 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 New York and the Bronx that were just essentially burnt out.

At some point, very late 60s, early 70s, these kids were like, we're going to 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, Bambata, cool hurt. Google these. I'm telling you, is way bigger than any of the rap as 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, 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. JZ has provided hundreds of jobs and created dozens of millionaires and 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 violence 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 violent scale of all the things that create real violence to get to music, it'll be easy to get hip hop because people in hip hop want to do the same thing you do.

Talk shit about politics, smoke weed, and date, don't black women. That's it. Stop using the Google, Mike. But Mike, wasn't rappers' delight in 1979? The first record record? I thought it was Carla Thomas and Otis.

Yeah, 79 was rapper's delight. But hip-hop's birthday is November the 12th, 72 or 73. The official birthday is older than me. I remember 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 was on... Throw your hands in the air. Why can't we get back to that, everybody? 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. 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 and 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 aging, 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 mic. Not because you kill. Now I'm killing them. Thank you, everybody. Thank you, panel. Catch all new episodes of Real Time with Bill Maher

every Friday night at 10. Or watch them anytime on HBO On Demand. For more information, log on to HBO.com.