Real Time with Bill Maher - Overtime – Episode #678: Michael Douglas, John Heilemann, Sarah Isgur

Episode Date: November 12, 2024

Bill Maher and his guests answer viewer questions after the show. (Originally aired 11/8/24) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Saving those children is how we all go home. From binge all episodes exclusively on Paramount Plus. Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO late month series, Real Time with Bill Maugh. Okay, we have a two-time Oscar-winning actor and producer who now read the documentary America's Birding. Vailed on Apple TV. Michael Douglas, like I have to tell you, came back to see us. And he's Cox Chief Political columnist, a national news on us for MSNBC, and NBC News, John Heilman, is here.

And she is the senior editor of dispatch and host of their legal podcast, Advisory opinion, Sarah Isgar. Okay. I'm going to get right to the most important question. People asked, Michael, what's been your experience with intimacy coordinators? There it is. Now, if you don't know what it is, what is an intimacy coordinator? Intimacy coordinators came along with the Me Too movement was to have,

in terms of sex scenes or intimate scenes, have somebody there to control the... You can say fuck on this show. Okay. It wasn't just that. But we never had that when I was... And was there any problem? No.

There wasn't. I've never had any problem in that at all. But it's a little... It's a... It's a... I never did. Well, we were going to work things out. I remember with, like, failure traction.

You know, we had Glenn close up on the kitchen. Oh, I remember, yeah. And on the kitchen counter and this and that. And Adrian said, do you have any ideas? And Glenn said, well, what about if I lean back and turn the water on? Yeah. And then my fingers to the water, get my fingers all wet, let's stick him in your mouth. That might work.

See, that might. The secret I always found is you just don't surprise the actress, the leading lady. So if you tell them before, I'm going to touch you here, kiss, kiss. Right, right. Do you ever learn one of those things like the water thing and then bring it home? Every chance I get.

Because every time I hear an actor talk about sex scenes, they always say the same thing. It's the least sexy thing you could ever do. Which makes sense. You got all these bright lights, all these people watching. I mean, George Scott had the great line. He supposedly said to the actress,

I apologize if I get an erection, and I apologize if I don't. No, I agree with me. All right. Do the Democrats need a social media platform, this is for you, John, of their own, to combat the Republican influence on Twitter? Well, I mean, I don't know,

but Twitter, it's funny. It used to be completely left. Then Elon said, I'm going to take it over, so it's going to be 50-50 right down the middle. He didn't do that. It just switched completely. So, I don't know. It's terrible that I think that we have our own media silos.

We need places where, like this show, but there's not enough of them, where everybody comes, and everybody hears everybody else from all points of years. I'd like to steal a line from Dave Chappelle, who said at some point how he doesn't know very much about what goes on Twitter, because he doesn't go on Twitter because Twitter's not a real place. That's sort of how I feel about Twitter. And Twitter, not only is Twitter not a real place, but it's become a toxic cesspool filled with nothing. Not about right. It's not about conservative.

It's just filled with misinformation, disinformation, and conspiracy theory. So I would rather not have the left replicate that if that's what's required. I think the deeper question that the question's getting at is that if you look at the data in this election, the amount of reach of all of these alternative, I'm talking about the whole podcast space mostly, but also social media. The interviews that Trump did, not starting with Rogan, but Theo Vaughn and all of these other things he did, incredible reach compared to old mainstream media, right? Where, you know, a number of people that Kamala Harris reached by going and talk to Brett

Bear is a tiny fraction of if you look up the, and they'll look at the average, not just the number of downloads, but then the social media plays on YouTube and other places that Trump did by hitting all of those mostly bro-friendly male, skewing young male podcast platforms. I think the issue is not so much that the left quote needs a platform. There are a bunch of people on she went on Harris went on color daddy, right? All the smoke, a few of those things. What the left has to, what Democrats have to figure out is the fact that the way to talk to voters who are not our age and the large swelling number of the segment of young voters and middle age voters is that they have to start talking to them on platforms that are not 60 minutes and Fox News or MSNBC or any of these, I hate to say it, dying legacy media, media,

platforms when the way to reach the growing parts of the electorate is through... But isn't that another way of saying Twitter is real? The Internet is real. Somebody just wrote a big article about this. That is where reality is now. And this is perfect for the movie you're going to do. No, really, this is exactly... I hope you're taking notes.

I'm taking notes. In a place of bipartisan agreement, remember Congress actually passed a ban, so to speak, that TikTok has to divest from China. for instance. Basically, by the end of this year, it's withstood court scrutiny so far, but I fear that we're heading towards a real clash between, you mentioned, various social media platforms rat-fucking our kids, minds becoming incredibly addictive, and the First Amendment in free speech, which I know you also care a great deal about. And how do we deal with this? We have not done anything to deal with it.

We've just been like, it's partisan, this science for me, and that science for me. Forget all of that. The problem is that we have kids committing suicide, because they're on these social media platforms and AI that's talking back to them and they think it's a person. Right, yeah. Those are their relationships. Those are their relationships.

I also think everything the candidates, especially the Democrats, do, to get voters annoys them. The constant texting. Did you get the texts, like, from Tim Moles every five minutes? And, like, always begging for money. And knocking on doors. We've got people knocking on doors.

people don't want knocking on your door. Who in this day and age once someone knocking on? Kids don't even like it when you... A phone call? That's like too much of an invasion of their privacy, which they don't care about. Who might emerge as the strongest democratic opposition leader in the next Trump era?

Oh, well, that's a good question. I mean, like Adam Schiff, he won, right, big and... He won, but I like Westmore. Westmore's fantastic. He's in Maryland. But who's going to be the one? Gavin Newsom we have here in this state. He's already, like, called the legislature to...

Trump hasn't done anything yet, but I understand the... I understand the... This was the problem. You know, there was a 2014 study that showed that Fortune 500 companies were more likely to pick a female CEO if the company was struggling, basically setting women up for the big job, but to also fail. If they did, well, fine. But if they failed, like, look, we have a female CEO,

while failing. And that's what I feel like they did to Kamala Harris. When Biden refused to step aside and not run again, he was supposed to be that bridge. He backed off on that promise due to arrogance. And then he drops out after a catastrophic debate performance, and they set Kamala Harris up to fail. That was a three-month campaign,

and she was supposed to introduce herself to the American people. No wonder people were Googling, did Joe Biden drop out? And so... No. No. You're saying three months wasn't long enough? It was too long. It was long enough, though.

If they had a primary. It's not that they didn't have time to introduce. They met someone and didn't like them. If they had had a primary, they wouldn't have picked her. And if they had she would have been able to rough out those edges, that then she basically has to start from scratch with a campaign team. She didn't hire that didn't like her, right? It was his team.

And so I wonder if that next Democratic person, maybe someone's not even on our radar yet. Because frankly, when you look at the history of who's, you know, there's two types, the one who waited in line, who was next in line, and then there's the one who comes out. That's Obama. That's Clinton. That's Reagan, to some extent. Lazzang sur-gillet, power, power and put on 15 minutes. We're like to dojo. Live the pleasure with Leo Joe.

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Senator Connecticut. Pennsylvania. Senator. Wilmingthal? No. Chris. Chris Murphy? Chris Murphy?

Yes. I'll just tie with Sarah about this one thing. If you're the sitting vice president for a president who has throughout his entire term in office been sitting at about somewhere between a 35 and 40 percent of rating. Countries on people view the Biden administration as a failure. We can have a long discussion about whether they are right about that, about the economy, but the perceptions of the economy were that people thought inflation was too high, people thought we were on the wrong track, 75% wrong track numbers, and this huge inflation overhang. You're the sitting vice president, and you get, you get put on the, elevated to the top of the ticket, 107 days ahead of the election.

I think that that is a very high degree of difficulty put on anybody. And I do not think she is the perfect candidate, I tend to agree with Sarah that probably in a fully litigated primary, she probably would not have been the Democratic nominee, but we never know that. But I will tell you that, like, there's never been anybody who's had the difficulty of that situation, elevated that late in a campaign. Why? A Democrat would have needed to run away from the Biden administration. How do she? How is she's supposed to do that? How is she supposed to do that? I know. You couldn't.

She was more popular in there. Yes, well. I mean, this idea that in a mass, the idea in a mass media age that 107 days is not long enough to know somebody? You are. You are way overestimating the American people in terms of what they are. No, no. You have, someone like Donald Trump has become a universally known, understood, loved by some, hated by others over the course of being omnipresent. Yeah.

Decades. Okay. Barack Obama. becomes president in the United States after running for two years as president, runs a 50 state primary, is on television, does dozens of democratic debates. And by the time at the end of that, most people knew who he was. Most people. You put, drop somebody into the middle of you, at the top of taking out, three months out,

you are going to have to spend a lot of time trying to introduce yourself to the country while also digging a steel cage death match with Donald Trump. Okay, but I don't know if you ever watched this show, but I had Michael Douglas on this week. At the top, we were talking about this, and he made a very good point that every other country in the world can do it in months, sometimes weeks. Why can every other country do it in that short-up area of time? Are they all so much brighter than America? I don't think so.

Mostly parliamentary. I mean, there's like literal reasons, right? We don't have a parliamentary system. We also have a First Amendment. We don't make people campaign this whole time. the American people want to give them 20 bucks and so they can afford it. I mean, small dollar donors are arguably the worst thing that's happened to our politics

as it turned out. I, I, it's a small dollar donor didn't make $20 billion. No. A lot of it. Some of it. There's a few special packs in there that saw $100 million plus. Those are bad too. I think you can believe that you

could have shorter elections in America, but it's not like we don't know in Britain, for instance, when you have a short election, it's not like you don't know who the leader of the party is for months and years before that. But you're either the person who's Googling the day before, did Biden drop out, or you know in a week?

You know, did anyone in this audience not know enough about Kamala Harris pretty much after a week to make a decision? Yeah. It's just, people, it's ridiculous. They just, we just get sicker of them. What? So, you're going to tell people that they can't talk about politics.

What? How, with free speech that I know you love? Yeah. How are you going to limit people's ability to run for office? I'm not limiting. We're not making a law. Bill, are you? Of course.

Are you trying to get rid of super PACs by making it no limits, full disclosure. 24-hour disclosure. We could fix democracy in a minute. Get rid of gerrymandering. Get rid of money in politics. We get rid of it. We get rid of it. It's water.

No, none of that is. We're going to keep working with this constipated system that we live with. So, is it? Just as, forget about what the system, about what system is the right system. Your contention is that no people were late deciders in the election. No, no, they were. I talked about them last week.

Right. So those people apparently needed longer than 30 days. No, they would have been undecided. They always would be. Exactly. They were always going to decide. That's why I called them. I called them, John, I said this last week.

I called them Christmas Eve shoppers. My father was one. People who don't buy their presents until the Christmas Eve night he would go into the store. And he wouldn't feel like he could do it until he was fully in the spirit. You had to be in the store on Christmas Eve

with Santa and all the fucking elves and everything else. And then he would make his decision. You can give those people 10 years. Really? Okay. I'll tell you, the Lego store already had their Christmas This ornament is out. I went today. I've got them. It's not a Christmas Eve shopper.

Why have to make all these excuses for her? Like I said, all this was this week was people who said, oh, she ran a flawless campaign. How ridiculous. Or it's sexism, it's racism. This is an old playbook. Yes, I didn't say any of those things. I know, I know, but I've heard a lot of these things. And, like, I think America's perfectly willing to elect a woman. They just didn't like the last two that were put up. I mean, there's some sexism. I'm not. I'm not. You can't you elect a woman where she's the best candidate. That they're offered. That's that simple. I think they are not, I think they were very unlikely to delect a, whether the vice president to Joe Biden, who had a, that's what they didn't like.

The vice president to Joe Biden, whether it was a male, female, black, white, or anything else, was going to have a giant political albatross around their neck, and they could perform perfectly or perform imperfectly. But that person was going to be at a disadvantage. She didn't make a good case. Well, she didn't denounce the past stuff that people didn't like. She just tried to ignore it. What would you do differently than Joe Biden?

I can't think of anything. And she was offered a redo on that. That was terrible. That would hurt. The focus on democracy was a little high, thinking that the abortion thing was the thing, but Trump neutralized the whole abortion thing, so the women didn't make a difference.

And then the guys, the men, geez, it was unbelievable debt that Trump put into them. Several female voters said they were actually pleased that they could divide the decision. They could vote for Trump and vote for a ballot measure that was pro-choice, so they felt like they could have their, you know, Trump cake and eat it, too.

That metaphor went off. But does anybody on the panel think, given the size of Trump's victory, right, he won, improved his performance in almost every county in America, right? Proved from what we saw before is a 47% ceiling. He's now, it's sitting at, like, 50, a half, 51. Does anybody think that a better, anybody else, if you had had a different candidate replacing Joe Biden in August,

that that person would have turned back that tide on election night, would have suddenly, that all of those Trump gains would have gone away and they would have won the election. Yes, if they had been a change candidate who ran away from Biden and could distinguish themselves from Trump. And it said Joe Biden's administration has been a disaster for you, and I'm going to have a third way, that yes, a new voice could have done that. But Kamala Harris could not, because she could not, would not, distance herself.

She wanted to have it both ways, not lose to woke people who have the energy in the party. You know. All right. One more question. wake of Donald Trump's victory, some American women say they are turning to a movement that advocates no sex dating or marriage with men and no children. Wow. No sex dating marriage or children. Then the conservatives will outbreed you. Right. That's a dumbest shopping thing I've heard. But we are getting to this place where because of politics,

the men and the women are moving further and further apart. and if they don't want to be together, what's going to happen to the species? We can replace y'all so easily. Why? Well, I don't know. There always are men, women seem a little separate there. The women are always in the men are going off,

dill and dally around with one person or another. Yes. Well, the men are all gay there. They're not all gay there. There's many strapping heterosexual, like Hugh Grant, great leaders. And that's it. Right.

No, I know. Well, I'm just going to remember, since we have a movie star here, that it was a movie star George Clooney, who really affected this election. I mean, Biden might still be in there if George Clooney, you know, talk about celebrities and how important they are. I don't think they're important in getting the voters to do something, but they sure were important in getting the party heads to finally do that. This was another part, I think, of why people didn't trust Harris,

because at the same time she's saying, hey, these things I said in 2019, that we're kind of like left-wing crazy. I don't mean them anymore. Also, Joe Biden was totally fine, and I have no idea why he dropped out, and I never saw any problem the whole time I was in the White House. Either you weren't in the room, you weren't paying attention, or you were lying to us, and the gaslighting is so frustrating.

Right. And, you know, I called him, I said, you know, like a year before he dropped out. I said, you're going to be Ruth Bader Biden. That's what I kept calling. You're going to be the Ruth Bader Ginsburg of the party. And people just would come up to me, you know, the liberals, the ones who I'm not good enough for anymore because I'm just too concerned.

Bill, stop making jokes about Biden's age. You're going to help Trump. Right. Like if I didn't mention it, no one would have noticed. All right, we've got to go. Thank you very much. Michael Douglas, thank you for joining this. With a nice surprise.

Okay. Oh, I forgot to plug my book. Oh, well. Catch all new episodes of Real Time with Bill Maher. night at 10 or watch them anytime on HBO on demand. For more information, log on to HBO.com.