Real Time with Bill Maher - Overtime – Episode #706: Ben Shapiro, Tim Alberta

Episode Date: September 16, 2025

Bill Maher and his guests answer viewer questions after the show. (Originally aired 9/12/25) 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 Maher. All right, here we are. He's an author and a staff writer for the Atlantic in Alberta, and he's the Daily Wire co-founder's new book that's called Lions and Scavengers Ben Shapiro. Okay, here are the questions from the people. What does the panel think about a West Point alumni group canceling an award who was planning to give to Tom Hanks? Oh, yes, I have all this information on this. an actor that Trump has called Woke and Destructive. Yes.

Well, let me read you. I actually have the... They were going to give Tom Hanks an award from West Point the Sylvanus Thayer Award. It said, Tom Hanks has done more for the positive portrayal of the American service member, blah, blah, blah, which is so true.

I mean, when you think about... I mean, my favorite movie of all time is saving private rights. All time. But, I mean, he's played, you know, from the earth to the moon. I mean. Grayhound.

I mean, a million things where he's a patriot. For the military alone. I mean, he used to be a big part of bringing these honor flights of vets to D.C. every year. Well, Trump says, we don't need destructive woke recipients getting our cherished American awards. So, you know, it's just so typical of how things are probably not going to get better in this country. Because it's like, wait, Tom Hanks. Oh, we forgot. He's on the blue team.

Fuck him. No. Do not like. Okay. This is disapproved. By the way, I will also say this. I didn't like it when Tom Hanks went on Saturday Night Live and did a sketch where he was wearing a MAGA hat and wouldn't shake hands with a black person.

Not helpful. I disagree. I thought it was a great sketch because it was a continuation of the earlier sketch where he's dug. But you think that's a fair portray of MAGA? No, that's not what the point was, though, Bill. The point was that that sketch was meant to show that Doug, in the continuation of the original sketch, that Doug, on Jeopardy, as a working-class, rural white guy with his MAGA cap on,

actually had a tremendous amount in common with the black panelists that he was competing against. And that was the entire idea of the skit was that actually whatever... But why would he not shake hands? Right, that's the moment that Bill's objecting... No, I understand. Well, it's Saturday at Live.

I mean, I don't know. We should overthink it necessarily. No, but I can totally see why that would piss them off. I think in the spirit of the sketch, it was plain enough. It's a pretty volatile area to be saying that, you know, it's one thing to have differences about how we should handle racial matters in this country. To take it to that level, I just think it's not helpful. I mean, listen, when it comes to actors,

Charlie is like the most sane actor there is. Charlie Sheen? I think so. Have you met many of the actors? Yes, he may be one of the more sane ones now. And so I'm not going to start removing prizes. from people because... Right. But I mean, other than that, Tom Hanks,

you know, impeccable record of service. It's silly. It's silly. And also a genius actor. He survived on that island all those days. All that, you know. She's a guy great, you know. What is the panel think of CBS News announcing that it's Sunday show Face the Nation will no longer edit recorded interviews with newsmakers?

Okay, this is obviously coming from some pressure from Trump. Christine Nome was on there and complained about, you know, you edit me. I mean, I don't think this came from a good place, but as someone who's been edited... It's a good result. Honestly, it's a good result. I can't be too mad at it because I know that feeling of like, or even in a print interview where they just print, they don't print the question they asked you. They just print part of your answer, and they can make you look completely different than what really went on.

But I don't know if this is the answer, but... Oh, well, look, I mean, Gallup this summer. in the most recent survey they do on institutional trust. I think it was television news, was down to 15% among all Americans. So any step you can take towards transparency, it's not going to hurt, right? Yeah, okay. Let's ask about 9-11, because that was yesterday, and a lot of people are too young to even remember,

and so it's not really a big deal to them. But it was a big deal for the country. were almost a quarter century out from there. You mentioned it during the show. Like, we didn't handle it right, going into Iraq. I mean, that's my view. Some people maybe think we did, and maybe in the future there'll be revisionist things.

Oh, boy, we missed it at the time. What a great idea that was. I don't think so. But, I mean, Afghanistan is well on its way to being in the 9th century. So there's $2 trillion. well spent. I mean, what lessons do we have from a quarter century away? I mean, the number one lesson, which actually was the lesson of 9-11, which we should have learned

at the time, is that we have, in the West, a capacity to project our own values onto other countries and other people that is just false. The reason that many people thought you could just project democracy into Afghanistan or Iraq is because they're just like us. They have the same priorities we do. President Bush gave a speech where he said, but every human heart seeks freedom. And so, well, does every human heart seek freedom as, like, the ultimate objective in the way that we see it?

And the answer, of course, is no. And we should have known that from 9-11 when people flew planes into buildings and killed 3,000 people. It turns out that cultural differences make an awfully big difference. And we ought to know that going into conflict, and it ought to shape our war-fighting goals

and our foreign policy more generally. I just talked about institutional trust a minute ago. I think maybe the great lesson that we've learned or perhaps not learned is that trust really, really matters. If you think about Iraq, if you think about Afghanistan, if you think about really in the decade that follows, Hurricane Katrina, the financial collapse,

we have all of these moments now that plot points, and as we go along, we see the ways in which, by the time we get to the COVID-19 pandemic, that collapse of trust across the board, confidence across the board, in all of these governing institutions in this country. I mean, higher education, the media, law enforcement, government, major league baseball, for crying out loud. I mean, Americans have reached a conclusion that no one is looking out for them

and that they can't trust any of these people in charge. And I actually think that in some way, we can trace a lot of that back to 9-11. Lazzang sur-gillet, puissance-moined, for example. We're saying that's their dojo. Pre-a-jou? Live the pleasure with the Ojo. The casino in-line who proposes the more recent machine-assed and some years of casino in direct.

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exluent in Ontario. 50 tours gratis on the machine a sub-bik-bas-Bonanza. Deppos minimum of $10. Veye to be in a responsible. The conditions apply. Okay, Ben, is Trump a scavenger or a lion? This is your book.

First, I'll explain basically what you're saying when you're talking about. We're divided into scavengers and lions. So this is not a left-right thing. And one of the things I really tried to do in the book is not use the words right or left because I don't actually think that the division between lions and scavengers

is predominantly political. I think that lions are the good guys, right? Yes. Lions are the people who want to build, and scavengers are the people who want to tear down, who see the institutions of society as things that need to be predominantly removed, their threats to them, they are violent. Louis-Gi Mangione is a good example of somebody who's a scavenger.

And again, I don't think that it's predominantly about policy. I even think that we all, inside of us, have both those tendencies, right? Sometimes you get up in the morning, you're ready to tackle the day and be productive and do something good, and sometimes you're bitching about the world and you want to tear things down.

And so when I look at political figures, I try to say, are they more of one than the other? And usually it's a combination. So I see aspects that I think are lion-like in President Trump. I mean, obviously, I think that his policies on foreign policy are excellent. I think they're much more aggressive than a lot of people thought they would be in a lot of ways. He didn't quite get it how hard it would be to solve wars, though. Well, I mean, that's true, but the thing about President Trump just as a politician, and this really isn't to the lion scavenger point, is that he is heterodox but responsive, is the way that I would put it. He tries things, and then, because he's not actually ideological, if they fail, he tends to untry the same thing. To say the least, yes. Yes.

Definitely. No, no, he's definitely flexible. He's not always a bad thing at all. Yeah, exactly. The main is very lion-like. But I must say, Zormamantani would be an example of a scavenger, somebody who's a complete lifelong loser, who has, he was a rapper with less successful record than I have as a rapper.

That's not even a joke. That's real. Well, we all, okay, all of us in our 20s try things that don't work out. Do we become mayor after doing nothing? Literally nothing? Well, obviously, his forte was not in rap. It may be in politics. I mean, it seems like his forte is destroying the real estate market in New York, increasing crime rates and importing the intifada.

It's not my kind of candidate either. say reading your book, which is really interesting. I mean, it's not quite that Page Turner Charlie's is, but, you know, there was, it did put me in mind of two authors that I don't know if you would want to be compared to, Nietzsche and Anne Rand. So I quote both of them critically, actually, in the book, particularly Nietzsche. Yeah, but, but I mean, it's, the theory is a little Nietzschean. Yes. I mean, in the sense. sense that there are people who are more creative in buildings, they ought to be rewarded,

and the people who tear things down ought to be not rewarded. But I think that's also baseline morality. I mean, he also went into the fact that, you know, he or the fact, his theory about Christianity is really a religion of losers. Right. Because, you know, you're saying, I don't want this world. So what? I didn't do good in this world. My kingdom in the next world. The meek shall inherit the earth. Right. That's when God says, when I die, you'll inherit theater. Yeah, that is his obvious critique of religion is that he basically says that biblical religion upholds the virtue of poverty and failure as opposed to upholding the strong. That's his critique. I think that's an unfair critique of religion, but I do think that virtue, one of the

things that I would hope that people who believe biblically, and I know, you know, that's not everybody, but I hope that good people who believe biblically, which is not everybody who believes biblically, believes that virtue should lead to better results in life than non-virtue. That, to me, as a believing Jew, that is one of the central points of the book of Deuteronomy, right? You're supposed to choose life so you and your children shall live. That doesn't mean they have to agree with everything in Deuteronomy, or Leviticus. I'm not going to make you.

I know, but like, that's always such a silly argument, because if God wrote the book, how could there be things we don't agree with? It either got to be perfect because it's written by, you know who, or it's just not perfect. I'm written by people, which it was, obviously, and it's full of nonsense and wickedness, and things that are everything but virtuous.

Bill, you and I agree on morality. I'd say, like, 87%, 70%, but not from the Bible. I have a question. Why? Because it's for slavery. No, no, no, no, no. Why do you and I agree on morality, like 87.5%? I'm a religious Jew, you're an atheist.

Why do we agree on those things? I'll tell you, I mean, I can give you my answer. Yeah, please. Because we probably grew up a few miles from each other in a Western society that has several thousand years of biblical history behind it. And so you can think that you hit that triple and you formed your own morality,

but the reality is you were born morally on third base. No, we... We... Okay. We got that morality from the Enlightenment, which was an anti-religious movement. The founding fathers, they weren't religious people. They were deists.

They weren't particularly Christy. Thomas Jefferson, used the morality of the Bible when he was ripping all the miracles out of the Bible. Yes. He literally the order of virtue of the Bible without the miracles. I mean, that is... Last time I was here, and you were talking about all of Jesus' teachings and how this was really radical new stuff, right, and how it changed the world.

His basic philosophy, yes. And how without that, I mean, I think it's worth understanding that the pivot point in history when we talk about Judeo-Christian ethics, but more specifically Christian ethics, what a turning point in history that represented within the Roman Empire and beyond, in terms of medicine, in terms of care for the widow and the orphan, much of what we would consider to be sort of good, moral, ethical behavior was not, in fact, a commonplace or mainstream thing several centuries ago. And so I think to Ben's point some of that is...

Why do we still do it? Why do we still admire it? Because cut flowers die, meaning that if the flower is the result of the root, and then you cut the flower, you can live on with a secular humanistic morality, be a moral person, be a good person. But it does not systemically maintain. there's no actual outgrowth from a basis of belief that this is fundamentally demanded of you by a higher power, because you can't get from atheism to reductive morality just by pure reason, right?

Every atheist will acknowledge this. The values that you believe are not things that can just be reasoned to, because they assume things that are not in evidence, like the inherent value of humanity. I mean, pieces of meat wandering through space. What's the inherent value of that? These are all religious faith-based premises. You don't have to believe in God to believe in those things, but they are logical jumps. there are leaps of faith is what we would call that in religion.

And so at least acknowledging that, recognizes that we're all living in a world of faith, whether you believe in God or not. I'm just saying the book, the wellspring from where you're getting this morality, is so deeply flawed, even if it was just the slavery thing, and it's not just that.

I mean, if you rape a woman, it's a property crime. We're talking about bronze age people who had a whole different way of looking at things, which was not as advanced as we are. And it's like, well, you know, have these things. It's like saying, well, jump in the pool. There's only one turd in there. It's more like saying that as a religious person, the basic idea is that God has to speak to humans of the time, and then human beings have to apply their reason. This is why the relationship

between reason and faith is not just you take it on faith and you do whatever the Bible says. I mean, this is why there's a developed oral tradition in Judaism, or this is why there's a developed natural law tradition and Catholicism. I mean, the idea is that it's an admixture of human reason and those faith-based principles. But here, you know, Here's the real question. If the sort of reasonable morality that you espouse is universal, then why is it not even remotely universal on planet Earth? It is only found in Christian-based societies.

You will not find it unless it was grafted on later by us conquering something. Christian-based? You're saying this with the Amokane? Yes, because Christians believe the first half of the Bible, which is mine. I'm working on them, though. I'm working on it. This is the point where I remind all Christians, first of all, I appreciate all these to convert me, and, yes, you get infinity heaven points if you're the one who does it,

is what I have heard. All right. Final question. What does... Kamala Harris, well, she doesn't have a lot of luck. Like this week, her book comes out. She was trying to do the press, and then, of course, all this news buried it. The book is called 107 days, wink, wink, that's all the time I had to win, just 107 days.

Only there were 108. Yeah. She only had a billion and a half dollars. I don't know how she got to cut in and get a message on. But what does the panel think of Kamala Harris's admission that it was reckless to let Joe and Jill Biden decide on his re-election bid? Yes, this is the big takeaway from the book is that she says, Joe, we kept saying she says like a mantra, it's their personal decision.

And now she's saying after the fact, well, actually it wasn't really just a personal decision. it did have some effect on the country. What if there was an amendment to the Constitution? Say like the 25th Amendment that allowed the Vice President of the United States and the other cabinet officials to recognize that the president was brain dead and actually do something about it.

And what if you then just sat there and did nothing until Joe Biden had his head cave in, basically, on national television and debate with Donald Trump and stare into the great maw of death off screen with a frozen grimace? And then you still waited a month for him to drop out. It wasn't that bad. Let's not

Let's not rewrite the history It was a terrible debate performance From an elderly man Excuse me Who in the quiet of the Oval Office Had not lost his marbles And was still able to make decisions

Among his staff, okay? That's how we were dealing with. Was he able to run? Was he able to do the job? Or bike, by the way. Or bike, yes. Well, we don't know if he lost his marbles because he doesn't know how many there were

or how many he had to find. Again, this is why the country will never heal because nobody's never just come. But the tough thing about the Harris book, right, is that she writes this as though she was some backbench low-level staffer without agents. I mean, it's not dissimilar to what my tense did.

towards the end of the Trump presidency, and then he comes out after and says, oh, shucks, you know. It's like, you were the vice president of the United States. If it was reckless for him to do this, Madam Vice President, did you not have a responsibility

to the country to say something about it? I mean, Trump does the same thing. Last week, he tweeted out, I guess we've lost India to try it. It's like, who did that? Who did that? All right. Thank you, guys. Thank you, all the others.

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