Real Time with Bill Maher - Overtime – Episode #743: Andrew Huberman, Jonathan Swan, James Kirchick

Episode Date: September 29, 2026

Bill Maher and his guests answer viewer questions after the show. (Originally aired 9/25/26) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This family is on the brink of Civil War. Mobland, the hit original series is now streaming on Paramount Plus. The other Harrogans don't know than it? In Google us. From the underworld of Guy Ritchie. Do you want to step up the matter? I won't comment. Dead.

Starring Tom Hardy, Pierce Brosnan, and Helen Mirren. Do I have to do everything myself? You want to want! I'll give you a... Moblad. New season is now streaming on Paramount Plus. Welcome to an HBO podcast. podcast from the HBO late-night series, Real Time with Bill Ma. All right, he's the host of the Huberman Lab podcast and author of the new book,

Protocols, Andrew Huberman. He's a New York Times White House correspondent who will tell out the best-selling book, Regime James Jonathan Swan, and he's a contributing writer for the Atlantic and author of Secret City, Jamie Kerchick. All right. Here are the questions from the people first. It's for you, Andrew. A new study found that people who drink more coffee had less body fat and more lean

muscle. Wow. Coffee? Okay. With the biggest benefits at five or more cups a day, coffee has a great publicist. I got to say. I like that. But I mean, five, that seems like a lot. Is coffee actually that good for us? Yeah, what is your thing on coffee? Yeah, the data say it's really good for longevity as well.

So, provided you're not drinking so much that you have anxiety or can't sleep at night, so drinking it for most people in the early part of the day, for you starting at noon. Right. It can appear to offset some of the effects dementia, but that doesn't mean you should drink caffeine if you don't like it or it doesn't agree with you. But five cups a day is a lot. I think for most people, 400 milligrams, so two to

three strong cups of coffee, a couple cups of tea, that's good. I imagine they lost weight because they were moving around a lot more. I mean, it isn't. Right? No, really. One of the major ways that this is interesting, actually, we burn a lot of calories with spontaneous movement. It's called meat, non-exercise-induced thermogenesis can burn up to like 1,500 calories a day. The knee bouncers, they're generally pretty thin. You mean, they're so jittery that they're burning calories? Well, that can't be the way to do it. This is a real thing.

Okay. I'm sure it's a real thing. I think it's a good thing. But I mean, it is a bean, coffee, right? I mean, a bean. It's like something that grows in nature. There's no reason why we would think it is bad for us. Right. I mean... Is no true of cocaine, though? Yeah, okay. Most all medicines come from plants.

Plant alcohol. Yeah, yeah. Okay. Yeah. I'm not a... I had one bad year on cocaine. A long time. I'm not... I don't...

It's the worst drug I've ever been on. But I wasn't on cocaine. I was on some shit. It was cut up with stuff. Of course. If you actually... This is what I've heard. I've never been to Peru or Colombia or Bolivia.

I heard... If you actually just do what the natives did for thousands of years, you know, you're just chewing on the leaf. It's not a... It's not like a... This kind of high. Hey, hi, Johnny, how to do you know. It's not that.

It's kind of a cool, a buzz, but it's, I don't know if pure cocaine, just chewing on the leaf is really that terrible. Do you know, Jamie? Well, I was going to say, I think the people at the... Come on, Jamie, you're gay, you must know. I'm not talking about my history. I do think that the ladies in Massachusetts with their queer bar,

it might be a little more exciting if they were to introduce that into the... You know, they actually said, you know, the masks. How would you do it with my... I was going to say. They said they told you it was right on the website. You lower the mask, sip, and then put it back up quickly. Because the disease doesn't come in? No, never. Right. I mean, didn't we learn this during COVID what stupid theater this was? I remember eating in parking lots. Nice restaurants and now we're in the parking lot at Craigs. Really?

And, you know, this whole thing where you could keep the mask off while you're eating at the table because the germs would never come to the table. Certainly they never bother celebrities. But when you got up to go to the bathroom, he had to put the mask on. And then we keep doing it again. Okay.

John, you said that Trump losing the 2020 election was the best thing that happened to him, to him. What do you mean by that? Oh, I don't even think it's disputable. I mean, if he had won, if he'd eeked out a narrow victory in the 2020 election, he would have been hobbled by COVID. He would have, every major economy around the world,

had inflation. There were supply shocks. He would have had to manage that. I mean, he says it wouldn't have happened under his leadership. Impossible to disprove, but, you know, hard to believe as well. And he also wouldn't have had the time to assemble the team that he wanted. So for all those reasons, it would have been a pretty reactive term, whereas he lost, he was out of office, he was built up as a almost mythological figure through the indictments. I mean, we wrote a story in the Times. After that first indictment, his fundraising was like Mount Everest, every aspect, attention on him, media coverage, it all went up. The assassination attempts, he was enlarged through that period, and his team had time to really prepare for the second term. So, I mean, to me, it's not even

a question. I would agree with that. Yeah. I mean, I brought this up kind of with him when I talked to him because we were kind of having a friendly argument about whether he lost 20, I said, you know, it's actually better because if you've ever seen a superhero franchise, you always have to have, you know, it's a trilogy. Yeah. Even a movie itself is, you know, act one, act two, act three. The hero has to go down in act two so we can, a hero rises in act three. What did he say when you said that?

I don't know why I was drunk. No, I wasn't drunk. You were a nervous wrecked, right? I was nervous, right? Bounding them all night long. No, no. No, I mean, he was friendly. I mean, I told the people.

He just never got mad at anything. He took it in, you know. I don't know if he is a big fan of superhero franchises. I'm not either, but I know that about them. That you have to have, like any movie, you have to have that middle act where you go down or else the third act is. Or it's really when, you're,

You think the villain is dead. Right. And then he's not dead. He comes back alive. Okay. That's more apt. This family is on the brink of Civil War. Mobland.

The hit original series is now streaming on Paramount Plus. The other Hortigans. Don't know than it? And Google us. From the underworld of Guy Ritchie. Do you want to step up the ladder? I won't call him dead. Starring Tom Hardy, Pierce Brosnan, and Helen Mirren.

Do I have to do everything myself? You want to want! Mobland, new season is now streaming on Paramount Plus. Navity CEO, Jason Huang, says AI may make us worse at basic skills like math, but it won't matter because we'll learn new skills. Do you agree? I think he was saying that kids don't know how to do long division anymore. They don't know, right.

But does it matter that they don't know how to do long division? If we have calculators and all, you know, the AI technologies, I'm not sure. I don't actually. I think I forgot how to do. do long division. So I don't know how important it is. The problem I have with this, I don't know if you've had this experience. When I learn to drive, for example, I could find my way around because I had to use a paper map.

Now, because of GPS, that part of my brain just doesn't work. And I worry about the more things we offload, the more cognitive tasks we offload, we just become blobs incapable of logical thinking, reasoning, deep thinking. I mean, I just, it worries me, especially writing. Writing to me is the one where writing is the purest form of thinking. I can't think without writing. It helps me clarify my thoughts on paper. And the notion that you would outsource that, what's left?

I mean, what do we have left? I agree. I mean, the latest good news I read about AI is that maybe we'll just be like pets. Yeah, right. Have you read that? It will be the pets. It will be the pets. The good news.

The AI is definitely not the pet. We're not in charge. There's no way. No, the good news, it won't kill us all. That's the best scenario. But we will just be pets. But, you know, if you want to be the pet, I mean, that's what? What?

I mean, wolves chose to be. What about our former Homeland Security Secretary, the cabinet official? Christy, what was her name? Christy Nome? Yeah, who killed her dog. I mean, you don't want. No. We don't want Christy Nome in charge.

Yeah. I mean, dogs come from wolves. and they have a much better life than wolves who are out there, you know, they're thugging it out there, those wolves. I mean, it's not cool out there in nature. It's dog-eat-dog, and, you know, my dog is a thousand years old, and he's still alive. You know. Or he's a great life. Yeah. I have to feed him his medicine with, like, the most expensive ham in the world because he wouldn't even eat hot dogs anymore.

In fairness, in the eye. That's what that wolves. got for becoming a pet. So maybe it is a good thing. Yeah, in fairness, AI, I acknowledge there are a lot of huge potential risks. In terms of science and medicine, the power is immense. I mean, I can give an example. David Faganbaum at University of Pennsylvania cured cured his own Castleman's disease, figuring out what's that. It's a cancer-like disease. He was basically on his deathbed. He's a physician.

Figured out using AI that you could mine for all the existing already approved drugs that don't make companies money anymore. they found the right combination of drugs, and he's alive 11 years later. And he started a not-for-profit. I have no relationship to it. It's called Every Cure, where people who are dying essentially do this, using AI to take novel combinations of already existing approved safety-tested drugs, and many of them are living.

Without AI, that's not happening. Because you can't do it. But you said it was 11 years ago. Did we have AI? So 11 years ago, he used a system that he's now, with every cure, is implemented into AI. But kids are surviving, and people are surviving. So your dermatologist now can look, you can get 25 dermatologists to look at your skin scan, right, and get all those opinions.

The notion of a second opinion with AI, you can get a thousand opinions, and you can say what your risk tolerance is in terms of treatments. So AI is going to do a ton there and for self-testing in kids. So to learn it's not great, but to self-test, like generate a test, test my level of ability at so-and-so, calculus, algebra, history in a certain era. It can tweak it so that you're just getting the right amount. correct and incorrect so that you're actually learning. So there are a lot of ways in which you can be used for good as well as bad. But do you really want to crowdsource your diagnoses with a thousand people? No, but I want to show up to my doctor who's recommending certain things

and be able to hand him or her a panel that says, you know, somebody at a completely different institution thinks that there's an alternative method and it's been backed by, you know, a number of different physicians in a different country where this is approved. Should I travel there and get this treatment? You know, are we behind the times? You know, so I think, and it's free. I mean, in some sense, it's free, right?

So I think as long as people are good filters on the information, I think AI has tremendous medical. There's no doubt about that. Of course. There's no doubt. No one is saying that. No one is saying there isn't this awesome good side to it. Well, our obsolescence wouldn't be a thing if it wasn't good, right?

If it wasn't amazing at all these tasks, we wouldn't even be having a conversation about human obsolescence. Right. That's true. I mean, I might trust an AI doctor more than a human doctor in a lot of instances. Well, they talk about radiology. I mean, you know, it's already performing astonishingly well.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, my doctor is Dr. Conrad Murray, and I trust everything he tells us. Why? Do you know? Remember who that was? Hospital? Michael Jackson's time.

Oh. Okay. They knew. I love it to describe new Dr. Conrad. Final question. Have you heard about the Palestinian, Rachel Dahlazol? Yes. What do you make of this? No. You haven't? Okay, there's this woman, her name is Hannah Gann.

She's pretending to be Palestinian? She's Jewish. She came forward. She's a white Jewish lady. And she has admitted that she was darkening her skin and basically cosplaying as a Palestinian. I mean, this is, to your point, to your point

also, about Gaza being the issue that a white Jewish lady wants to be a Palestinian. Well, there are these radical left-wing Jews who see it as their role to condemn Israel and say that it's committing genocide, and it's as bad as the Nazis. And, you know, Hannah Einbinder and Susan Sarandon, Wallace Sean, all these people. And this girl seems to have taken it for the next level, right? Which he's now actually pretending to be a Palestinian. I think it's actually really insulting to Palestinians.

I mean, they should be able to speak for themselves, not have some left-wing Jewish ladies. It just shows, as always, with these kind of people. It's so much more about them than the cause. The cause is them. The cause is just a vehicle for them to be showing you what good people they are. Their number one agenda is to let everyone know, I am a better person than you. I am morally superior to you, and I will do whatever I have to. But this is, I thought that was pretty funny.

A white Jewish lady is now a Palestinian, and she's chanting from the river to blue. Bloomingdale. Oh, I get off on that book. All right, thank you. 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. My name is Siyaya, and I live in the most beautiful place on Earth.

Seven months ago, I blew up my life, and a lot has shifted since then. Everyone is moving forward. I'm still working on. And that's me. Welcome to Ice Cove. Where are the penguins? That's Antarctica. We're the other one. North of North. Stream all episodes. Available on CBC Gem.