Real Time with Bill Maher - Overtime – Episode #689: Ezra Klein, Andrew Sullivan

Episode Date: March 25, 2025

Bill Maher and his guests answer viewer questions after the show. (Originally aired 3/21/25) 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. All right, here we are with the host of the Ezra Klein show podcast and the co-off with the book Abundance, Ezra Klein. And he writes the weekly dish newsletter and hosts the podcast The Discatch with Andrew Sullivan. Andrew Sullivan. Okay, here are the questions. Andrew, what do you think of news that British intelligence knew COVID was a lab leak in 2020, and officially ignored their report? Not just new, added a 95% certainty.

Same with the German intelligence service. March 2020. There's a new book out called COVID's awake. I was reading it this last couple of weeks. And the core paper that killed off any idea that this was a lab leak in China, the proximal origin paper, which was produced with Fauci and Collins of the NIH and NIAID, helping it along was a lie,

a conscious lie, that the people who looked at it, we now have their emails, are saying in the very first days of looking at the virus, this looks very man-made to us. This is so frigging obvious, this is man-made.

So friggin-obvious, one of them said, and then they wrote the report saying there is no evidence that this was made in a lab. The question is why? Why would they lie to us about that? And they did. Well, I can give you one answer, the New York Times.

The New York Times said any questioning of this being from a lab was racist, which always struck me as odd because it seems much more racist to go, wow, these people are eating bats. I know. I mean, it's just one example, but a good example of why people lost faith in the left, because they do stupid things like that. Not to be, and I told you so, but from the very beginning, I was saying, this shouldn't even be political,

but it's at least a 50-50 it came from the lab, and that in 50 years, I can't imagine people going, wait, you mean in 2020, there was this thing that escaped from a lab in Wuhan, that started in Wuhan, and there was a lab in Wuhan that was studying it, and they didn't think that was connected, and they blamed it on bats, really?

It just doesn't make any sense. Well, it makes a little bit more sense. It's a little bit more sense. It's just like, I don't think the Democrats are so much as forth as scientists, who went along with this, knowing better. It's their integrity I'm concerned about to actually lie and distort what they could see with their own eyes

because they were afraid of politics. The other question is this. This lab was a gain of function. That means they were creating viruses, dangerous viruses, to figure out how to protect you from them. This gained of function was research was always dangerous.

Everyone knew it was dangerous. Long time ago, you go back to 2015, you will find a big meeting in London where they say there's one lab in the world most likely to have a problem with this, Wuhan. Do you know who was the biggest supporter of gain of function research for the last 30 years? Anthony Fauci. Anthony Fauci. Now, remember that name. There's a reason he was given a pardon back to 2014. There is something very wrong going on here.

Yeah, I also don't think he... did it for nefarious reasons. There's an argument to be made. There's an actual intellectual debate to be had. Should gain of function research be done? We want to get ahead of viruses. The other answer is, the other response would be, it's too dangerous, because if it gets out, it's going to be bad.

And that's what happened. But it is a, I don't think he's an evil guy, like some people do, who was trying to get rich off this. No, no. Okay, he just made the wrong call. No, he knew from the get-go, that the Wuhan lab had security levels that were the average of a dentist office.

They should have been at the highest level imaginable. He knew that. Not only that, he made the wrong call. The NIH and NIH had helped fund it. Right. So you don't want to go down in history as the person who helped develop the virus that killed millions of people.

You want to go down to the one who saved millions of people. That was at stake of reputational matter. A piece of a lot of this that seems insane to me is we are now years after whether man-made or not, one of the worst disasters in human history. And we are genuinely less prepared

for the next one than the last one. It's not one of the worst disasters in human history. I could name it a hundred worst ones. Fair enough, but it was bad. I didn't enjoy it. I mean... Let's not be purple about it. It was a bad pandemic.

Let's put it a lot worse. As pandemics... It's genuinely not my point on this. I'm happy to see that the Holocaust was worse than the pandemic. It's fine. But in other things, other countries in this country, right, after something terrible happens, you often have these big bipartisan commissions that come up with a bunch of recommendations

and try to create preparedness for next time. I sort of agree with you that we've gone way too far on airport security for too long, but we did a lot on things like biosecurity that made sense and actually did make us safer. And we have learned, we have anti-learned lessons, right? On the one hand, we had amazing success with things like Operation Warp Speed, and now you got RFK Jr. run in HHS. On the other hand, a bunch of huge mistakes are made on things like lockdowns, and we're just arguing about them.

We haven't put out, say, a new best practices, right? Gain of function research, which y'all were just talking about. It is just an argument. It's something I try to keep paying attention to, and they haven't come out with strong new guidelines. Bird flu, everybody I read who knows what they're talking about says we're in a terrible position on bird flu if it actually begins to mutate and make the jump.

We just have never figured out a way to find a policy equilibrium here as opposed to sort of keep rehabbing the argument. The arguments are important. Because everything gets politicized. But everything gets politicized. We don't have the capacity to come to agreements. It's really bad that we're this unprepared now. But that's why the integrity of science is so important.

I agree with you on that. If we don't trust the scientists who on earth are we going to trust. And I really want to trust them. I want to trust them. I trusted Fauci during eight. I'm really upset that I don't think I can trust him on this. We need to have empirical, good, objective search for truth. Right.

And we have to all agree on it. What I hated was when he said, I am the science. That is so not what science is. You're right. We need to trust the science, which means we need it to hear all of the scientists and not shut out the people who weren't on the page. That would bother me about this.

Okay. Should we expect to learn anything, Rev? revelatory from the JFK files just released. Well, what do you mean expect? We saw them and we didn't. Is it time to move on from this conspiracy theory? Well, I mean, do you think it's conspiracy theory? I mean, I mean, plainly, there was not a single gunman, right?

We all agree on that, no? I mean, that, you believe... I have such weak opinions on this. I decided not to have an opinion. It's a long time ago. I mean, such an effort to not... But the magic bullet. There could not have been a bullet that went through a guy or went around.

He came back, went through the other guy, got lunch at the diner, came back, shot him in the back of the head. I mean, it's just, come on. Everybody heard a shot from the grassy knoll. I don't think we care. I mean, honestly, I'm done with it. I mean, I don't, I just never quite got more time. I don't think we'll ever know for sure because this was the final news dump. And if they don't know now, they, you know, they don't know.

But, you know, the idea that the CIA is going to now. suddenly go, you're right, we had something to do with it. If they did, I'm not saying they did, but a lot of people wanted them dead. The idea that in the files somewhere, in all of these files that they were going to release, and it was going to be this one page, it says, oh, we actually knew the whole time. Right. It was always a little fanciful. Yeah.

That's why it's a little cruel to actually give them everything, right? Because they could always hope that some mystery was there. Well, what was cruel is to promote it, like it's going to be great, and then it's Al Capone's vault. The Epstein files came out all redacted. What? The redacted FSTFiles are the ones I've always been more interested in. Was a lot redacted from the Epstein files? A lot redacted in the Epstein files.

And what do you think? I mean, I didn't go through and read them. I was seeing other people who cared more about this, and I did talk about this on social media, but so long as we're talking about conspiracies, I've always thought that one's pretty weird. And they, like, the Trump administration came in with this big show of releasing the files, and then a bunch is blacked out. and they made that one look yet stranger. Because Trump knew him, you mean you think?

I'm not making any suppositions on this. I'm just saying that when you come in he makes such a big show of decossification and you're going to tell everybody everything, then it comes out and you don't. It's a little weird. Right. Well, I always say whenever there's a guy with a lot of money and you don't quite know how he got it, he's probably some kind of a pimp. I've seen this before. I mean, that was Epstein's magic power.

It's like rich guys want to get laid. And sometimes it's like, it's hard because they're famous or they have a wife or, you know. So, I mean... But really, it's like, honey, I'm just going to have dinner at Epstein's house. He's a big philanthropist. Yeah, not on the third floor, he wasn't. The U.S. ranked 24th in the world's happiness index

behind much poorer countries like Lithuanian Costa Rica. Why are Americans so happy? Well, go ahead. Take a shot at it. I mean, you got an outside perspective. Why aren't we happier? I find the whole idea of happiness a little silly. I mean, happiness is not.

And how do you measure it? I know, it's bullshit. These are polls they do of people that create news stories and fill in for bad news days. I mean, that's what this is. I think so. I don't want to live in Finland. Right.

Right. It's fucking dark and cold. You can't see it about the whole. It's freezing. Well, right. I know. It's so true. They're all blissfully happy, but fine.

All right, good. Look yourselves out. I think they're just fucking with us when they take the pole. You're right. It's dark, like pitch black for like two months of the year. I mean, every meal is fish. It's a whole.

I've watched all those seasons as well I mean I've been in the Nordic countries you know like I mean you think oh it's going to be the Swedish bikini team and you know if you're there on a Tuesday it looks like Cleveland I swear to God I mean they're lovely cities but I was in Oslo

on a Tuesday and it was just they weren't even blonde they weren't even blonde most of the people I was very I wanted my money back but it was very disappointing where all the blondes Okay. Do the controversies surrounding Disney's Snow White remake show that we are still in the thick of the culture wars? Oh, have we been following the Snow White?

Actually, the first I'm hearing of this. Really? No. Yeah. Okay. Good for you. Well, the two stars are Gal Godot. She was in the Israeli Defense Forces. She's Israeli.

And then Rachel Zegler plays Snow White. I think Gal plays the... I don't, I was not a child, so I don't follow them. I don't know fairy tales. I never read comic books. Is this the one with the poison apple and the, whatever it is? Yeah, it's the rich in the actor. And Rachel Zegler, being 23 or whatever she is, like so many kids raised on TikTok,

she's all for infatata is the only global solution. So the two stars hate each other. And then they couldn't put dwarfed. because this is just so typical of the left. The progressives always finding a way to find their way back to doing something not progressive. You'd think the most progressive thing would be get people jobs, and dwarfs want to work.

He's just like an honest golden employment opportunity for dwarves. There's not that many scripts that come down the pike. Only seven of them. That has, oh, and there's seven dwarf jobs here, but because I think it was Peter Dinklage said this is, you know, this is not right. This is demeaning. And they were like, what?

We just want to work. We're dwarves. So, ho, ho. Anyway, that's the, all right. Does SpaceX rescuing the astronauts mean that we will privatize space travel? Didn't we already? I thought we did, yeah. What the fuck question is that?

This guy's really out of it. Do you agree with that? Bernie Sanders that progressive should shed the Democratic label and run as independence instead? Is that what he's saying now? Should they aim to be angry moderates? I think it would be good not for all Democrats

to shed the label of Democrats, but I think more people should run as independence in more places Dan Osborne in Nebraska. That was a great race. And it makes sense. And I mean, one of the ways that we've destroyed party competition in this country is that in a bunch of states,

they either find the right so repugnant, think at the moment for me, understandably, or the left so repugnant, there actually is no competition. So having people run as independence and be able to make an argument outside of the party label, it makes sense.

It would be good. I would like to see, I think a lot of political donors are functionally counterproductive. I think creating the infrastructure for independent competition in states that are otherwise one-party control.

would actually be a great use of political philanthropy. Okay. The thing I'm like, just... Yeah, go ahead. And we're just about to get it in D.C. is ranked choice voting. One, two, three. You actually show people that you don't like this nutter, but you'd rather this nutter than that one.

So you give them a little priority, and as the people, as the candidates fall out, when they get... Look, they then contribute their vote to the next one. So you get a consensus candidate. Is that a jungle? That's how we got Eric Adams in New York, and it's really...

Well, he's... Well, you... Can't blame no ranked choice, buddy. Is that a jungle primary? Is that what they call a jungle? No, jungle primary is different. California's jungle primary, right? What does that mean? Jungle primary, I think, is that you have a bunch of people running,

and the top two vote getters, no matter what party they are, then have a runoff. So that's how you get a general election in California. We have two Democrats running against each other. Ranked choice is that the general election, you can have a lot of different candidates going, or in a primary, you can have a lot of different candidates, and you're ranking through them.

So if you have people who are a consensus, like if everybody has kind of the same second choice, but people are split between like three more extreme first choices, might get that second consensus candidate as the winner. For all the, for the Eric Adams joke, rank choice voting is a good idea. We should do it. Okay, Eric.

Thank you, everybody. I appreciate it. 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. Lazzang sur-gillet, Pucance-Moyerned for 15 minutes.

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