Real Time with Bill Maher - Overtime – Episode #494: Jay Inslee, Moby, Bakari Sellers, Bret Stephens, Kara Swisher

Episode Date: May 4, 2019

Bill Maher and his guests answer viewer questions after the show. (Originally aired 5/3/19) 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 Maher. Okay, here we are. I'm about a hand for my partner here, Mulvey. Didn't I have to do that, but we pressed him into service. Okay, you had a question for the governor you said you wanted to ask. Oh, climate change, which is going to destroy everything we know and love. Animal agriculture is the third leading cause of climate change. But when I asked Al Gore about it, he said that the role of,

animal agriculture and climate change is the true inconvenient truth. And I hear almost no one talking about it. Like COP 21, not mentioned it. Yeah, listen, I did my part. Today I had an excellent impossible burger. Yeah. They're getting good. Yeah.

Food that's protein from sweet. Yeah, absolutely. And we got to look for new options scientifically to look at those things. It is an important issue. I think we need to engage the agricultural industry to figure out if there's a way to sequester carbon in topsoil and trees. so that we can get carbon out of the atmosphere to do it. And then we got to cheer up Bill, who seems to be a little down right now.

Bill, I just want to give you some good news. I've now sued Donald Trump 21 times, and I'm 21 in 0. So I just want to give you that time. He sued me once, and I'm 1 in 0. Okay. What are your thoughts on Trump's recent attacks on abortion? Will Rowan v. Wade be upheld if challenged? That's kind of a bummer.

Kara, why is the EU more willing to take action against big tech than the United States? Because the person doing it is a woman who has a lot of backbone. That's all it is. They also have different ideas about privacy in Europe as opposed to here. Same thing in Australia and New Zealand and other places. So we'll see. Brett, why do you find Bernie Sanders so threatening to democracy? Is he as bad as Trump?

Well, I think a guy who took his honeymoon in the Soviet Union praised Castro, praised Ortega in Nicaragua. Those guys are dictators who've been repressing human rights in their countries for ages. Shouldn't be president? Shouldn't be the standard bear for the Democratic Party. And this isn't... Nobody says capitalism is a perfect system. Nobody says that we can't fix it.

But the idea that we want to go to something that looks like the economies of Europe, today where unemployment is 10%. I don't think that's a winner for the United States at all. To answer the question, though, bluntly, no, Bernie Sanders is not as bad as Donald Trump. No, no, of course, no one thinks that. No, no, no.

Okay. Moby, do you, musicians have a responsibility to use their platforms to influence politics. It depends what type of music they're playing. If they are inbred Republicans playing country Western, then by all means they should not be politically I'm engaged. Otherwise, yeah, of course.

I mean, it helps that I'm like similar to you, like single income, no kids, no family. So like the fact that I have no accountability to anyone gives me a sort of like, like, I'm at liberty to be involved in politics where like if someone had like kids and family, I can understand them wanting to sort of like protect their career more. But it does seem like in a different era, more musicians felt the responsibility to speak about matters that matter in the world, as opposed to now when you don't hear a lot of it. You don't hear, I mean, it's very light, and it's very...

It does seem odd to me that people prioritize selfishness. I feel like the music is low energy. I feel like it's all sounds like... All those young people. No, it's good. It's the ASMR and the Xanax. Okay. Who would you have wanted President...

What would you have wanted President Trump to say to Putin during their phone call today? Oh, well, like... anything a traitor would. What would you like? Like this, we just got a big report from the Mueller team. It took over two years and the one thing that they said that was the big headline

was you definitely interfered in our last election. If you do it again, there will be serious, serious consequences. That's what I would like. That's what any president would say. You don't go far enough. It's not if you do it again. You did it. Right. And we're going to go after your assets and we're going to go

after the assets of your oligarchs and we're going to put a squeeze on your entire financial so that things actually hurt you for a change of their consequences. Governor, what would you do if you were running against anybody in a Democratic field or a Republican opponent and China or Russia came to you

and said, we found them with a baby goat or they've had some incriminating evidence against them doing something? What's the thing that you should do? I would put down the phone and I would call the Federal Bureau of Investigation. That's what I would do. And there's no excuse for otherwise.

And I think the fact that here is we got hung up and Donald Trump is hid behind this word of collusion. And it is a false camouflage for the fact that he welcomed, wanted, and asked for the intrusion of the Russian nation in our interference. He did it on live television. And he is now hit behind this word.

But you know, wait, just the one rule of traitor club is you're not mean to your handler. And by the way, besides doing great things for the environment if we got off oil, a little side beneficiary of that, what would it do? Kill Putin. He gets all his money from oil. Russia's got a whole fuck ton of oil.

We get off oil, Russia has no money to fuck around in the world. You know, the governor made such an important point. Look, the problem isn't what Trump may have done behind closed doors. It's what he does in public every single day. It's like you don't have to go and get a room when you're having sex in a convertible on Sunset Boulevard in broad daylight. Like, everyone can see what is going on.

Well, it's just aspiring. Mrs. Robertson, this conversation is getting awkward. Thank you very much, everybody. 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 H. H.B.O.com.