Real Time with Bill Maher - Overtime – Episode #710: Mark Cuban, Andrew Ross Sorkin

Episode Date: October 21, 2025

Bill Maher and his guests answer viewer questions after the show. (Originally aired 10/17/25) 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, he is co-ancher at CSNBC Squawk Box. His new book is called 1929 Andrew Orsorgant, and he's a minority owner of the Dallas Mavericks and co-founder of Crosst Blast Drugs, Mark Cuban. Okay, these are the questions from the people. Leaked texts from a group of young Republican leaders. Oh, I mentioned this in the monologue. the young Republicans. By the way, young Republicans, they're up to 40. They're up to 40. You can be in the

young Republican club. I mean, you know, in Congress, you're young if you're 40, but... 28,000 offensive messages with racist, sexist. Yes, praise for Hitler. What are your thoughts on this? Well, I mean, we all condemn it, obviously. I would have two questions about this. One, how representative is it of Republicans as a whole? And two, is it crucial? Is it crucial? Is it cricket to read other people's mail even when it's gross. Ooh. I mean, everybody's going to get hacked at some point. So you've got to know that your stuff is going to be read at some point.

So should you read it, particularly if you're a news organization? Probably not. But it's inevitable your stuff's going to get read. Yeah, but, I mean, it'll be illegal to read my mail, to go into my mailbox. Right. And take a letter. Well, if you do the hacking, that's illegal, too. Okay, so here's the thing.

We were talking about this offstage. Do you fire these people? So you see the message. It's not the, you can't unsee the message. Can't unsee it. You've seen it. Right. This person's working for you.

Are they still working for you? I think they're not working for you. I mean, it may be on a case-by-case basis, but I think... You've got to fire them. It's a complicated one. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, if somebody's saying, I like Hitler, I don't have a real problem with that.

I mean, even... It didn't matter how it got under my transom. But my bigger question, like, how representative is this of the Republican Party? Because all the Republicans I know would say, this is not us. Right. And I used to say this, you know, like, to be a Republican, we certainly shouldn't say they're all racist. But if you're a racist, you probably are a Republican. Right. Is that not right?

I don't know what to say. You know, what's interesting to me, I'm in some chat groups where I'm the only mom. moderate, right? And they're far, far, right. And they always talk about systemic racism being dead. And if anything, if there's a positive from all this, this is just the proof, systemic racism is not dead. I don't know if this is systemic, though. This is not systemic. This is not, this is people. This is asshole people. That's different than what's in. Yeah, but we're not talking about two or three of them, right? We're not even talking about five or ten of them. But systemic would be if it's in the law. No, it's systemic. In my mind, I could be wrong. Or corporations. Right. Companies and if it's widespread.

Right. Right. I just don't think you get to these guys in these young Republican groups, and it's not widespread. Or you can't just dismiss the fact that it happens a lot. What percentage would you put at? I don't know. You want to extrapolate?

I mean, that's the thing. Are you going to extrapolate from this and say it's more than it is? But it doesn't take everybody to be racist for an organization to be racist. There will always be racist, just like they'll always be criminals. Right. They're just, you know, people, there are a certain percentage who are always going to be assholes. We don't want them on this. show. All right. When will the government shutdown end? It's amazing. There's so much news that comes out of

Donald Trump every week. This would ordinarily be a rather big story that the government has been closed now for two and a half weeks. Are Democrats right to insist on guarantees on health care subsidies before to shut that? Well, that's the big issue. They're holding out for health care help. To me, this is back to the leverage story. So who's got the leverage? in this game of chicken. And you look at what the judge said earlier this week, effectively saying, you know, you can't fire these people.

That was something that I think Trump was trying to use effectively as leverage. So do the Democrats now have more leverage? I don't know. I mean, I think that the truth is I think that Trump can actually hold out for a pretty long time before the entire country blames him or the Republicans. And the question is, the flip side is, are you going to blame the Democrats?

I think what's happened is you're starting to see the new ACA rates, premium rates, come out now. And the Democrats were betting that as people saw what their new premiums were going to be for the 12.5 million that are affected by the subsidies, they're going to get mad. Because in a lot of cases, it's one thing to tell them your rates are going to go up. But when you're getting ready to renew and it's open enrollment in a couple weeks and seeing it and feeling it and understanding the impact on your budget, that's going, I think, favor the Democrats over the Republicans. All right.

Gold prices hit records high this week. Oh, they did? Yes, they did. Oh, and that, bleh. That didn't sound good. That's not a good sign. Usually gold goes up. It's good if you're decorating the White House.

Gold goes up when you're worried about the value of the dollar going down. That's the equation. What is the dollar done? But people go to gold when they are scared, right? Yes. It's so crazy. Gold. I mean, it's so antiquated.

I mean, what are you going to do with gold, right? Walk around with a bar and hit somebody over the head? No. And then we say, no. And also, like, I mean, I think I have some gold in my portfolio. I don't actually have it in my, right? It's just still something just right on. Right, still digital, right?

Right. It's still like, I own gold. Okay, but are you a Bitcoiner? Because people say that's digital gold. I understand that. I'm in the Warren Buffett camp of you'd be much happier owning, you know, a little piece of, you know, a little piece of, you know, of land that you could farm because it actually produces something

whereas if you own gold... I have a little piece of land and I'll tell you what I produce. I'm going to have something right after the show. Oh, yeah. I'm going to make you farm. I'm all down on the farming thing. So have a little stand on your farm. Okay.

Putin and Trump are going to meet in Hungary and Putin is apparently going to suggest a Putin-Trump tunnel from Alaska to Russia what do you make of this? Why? As a show of friendship, we're going to have a... Right.

So Sarah Palin will have some place to go and look at that. I don't know. It's like, you know... You don't know. We're going to... I prefer to cruise around that area. Right.

Well, that's how our ancestors got to America. Would they cross the Bering Strait back when? Back in the day when it was a land bridge. Now we want to go back to that. I'm just looking for positive. Okay. Is philanthropy really a public good, or is it becoming a way to buy influence and policy power,

as Lauren Powell Jobs suggested in a Wall Street Journal article today? that Steve Jobs, I thought that was the most fascinating piece because you had one of the billionaires in America publicly say that what all of this philanthropy in this country has been about, in part, has been about buying influence. But there's two sides to this. I think that there has been a lot of philanthropy

that's been about buying influence. There's a lot of people trying to sell influence. And so when you think about all of the philanthropic institutions, universities and others, what have they been selling the whole time? they're selling influence too. And so I think it's a two-way street here. And as much as I love philanthropy, we all should be giving.

But the question is, why are people giving and what's everybody really buying? When I give money and try to give money, I try to do as much as possible anonymously. Sometimes, you know, the recipient will say, no, you can help us, you know, build our cause more and help our cause more. But you're right. You know, why would you put your name on a building or a hospital, if not for less? leverage for power for influence. What's something you give to anonymously? I have an organization, literally, that when you get denied pre-authorization for surgery

and it's done incorrectly, we'll go figure it out. So I've got a group of people that's all they do is try to overturn pre-authorizations. And you'll never know it's me because you don't know the name of the organization, and I want it that way. I like getting the emails from somebody saying, thank you, but I don't need it to tell, you know, this is the group and here's why. It's just not the right thing to do. It's like the star is on the wall at the CIA.

Right? Yeah, exactly. If you're a CIA agent and then you get killed in the line of duty, your name doesn't go on the wall. You just get that white star. Just the star. I'll take, yeah, hopefully I don't get killed in the line of duty. Mark Cuban. White star. I just thought you were a great white star. All right. Thank you, everybody. I appreciate your time.

Catch all new episodes of Real Time with Bill Mar every Friday night at 10. or watch them anytime on HBO on demand. For more information, log on to HBO.com. Lasagne sur-gillet, puissance-moyance-moyerned 15 minutes. Oh, you're like to dojo?

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