The Josh Innes Show - Maher v. David

Episode Date: April 25, 2025

Bill Maher had a meeting with Donald Trump and came away thinking that the President was likable. He didn't agree with everything he said, but he found him charming. Larry David feels that meeting with Trump and coming away even remotely impressed is akin to having dinner with Hitler. These people are insane. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Well, here's a story for you. So if you don't know, Larry David essentially compared Bill Maher meeting Donald Trump and saying, you know, he came out of it not thinking he was a terrible guy to someone having dinner with Hitler and thinking he was a decent guy, which is it's really lazy and you know how i feel about that like all these dipshits that are like trump is hitler trump is hitler these people are batshit fucking crazy lunatics that's not a pro trump thing it's possible to dislike someone without calling them hitler although it's not possible for some of these liberal people to do that because they are uh pretty much lunatics about this kind of stuff it's funny i was walking down the road today and uh i was walking ross down the street and you know i'm in this neighborhood where you'll see like the uh in this house we believe things you know well this one had a a sign that says hate has no home here and it's got like all these hands these little different color hands like

rainbow hands and shit raised on it and i'm like well then you're not in america because hate this is like the breeding ground of hate and hate is gigantic business like you know you want to know the reason why like hate is always going to be out there because if not like 90 of the media people would be out of business because they they they hate. They feast on hate. That's what we do. I don't believe that most people actually hate each other. I don't believe the internet. I believe, and this is going to sound lame and hokey, but it's true. I believe that most people just like people and they might dislike you for whatever reason, but it ain't because you're black. It ain't because you're white. It ain't because you're Mexican, whatever. Most people are just decent folks. And, and most,

honestly, most people just don't give a fuck about what's going on in your life. They care about their world. And that's okay because that's honestly the way you should operate in life. Like, unless it's your friends, family, whatever, like honest to God, when I see a story on the news about something and something happened to someone, I'm like, maybe this makes me a bad guy. I got my own fucking problems. Sorry that that happened to you. I got my own problems. You wouldn't give a fuck if this happened to me. Let's be honest. We move on. But hate is such big business in this country. That's how we operate here. If there weren't hate and division, how many people would still have their standing in the media?

How many people would still be the stars they are? People are dependent upon it. Websites are dependent upon it. Hate is a powerful thing here. Division is a powerful thing. That's why it's never going to change. You want to get rid of hate tomorrow? Get rid of social media. I know at least once a week I tell you this. If you want

hate and the idea that everybody hates everybody to go away, get rid of social media. Social media is the greatest poison that we have ever been delivered in this country, at least in the modern era. It's not Fox News. It's not CNN. It's not go down your list of things that are bad and divisive. Okay. It's not Rachel Maddow. It's not Tucker Carlson. Like those people are what they are. But for the most part, they have their audience. Their audience sees them. Now imagine a universe where if you wanted to see a Tucker Carlson or I'm using him as an example or someone, angry person on Fox News versus angry person on MSNBC or whatever, and you wanted to see those people, you'd have to go to those channels to see them. Now you can see tiny little snippets of them

and you can see them right there on the internet and just enough of it to get you riled up and to make you believe that all white people are terrible or that all liberals are terrible or that all black people are terrible. And then these people continue to exist and you are fanning their flames and you are feeding that beast. And that continues to happen. If you got rid of social media, which we never will because we're all addicts and there's too much money and it's driving the hate and all the political shit. If you got rid of it, I believe people would be happier. I believe that kids would be happier. I believe that kids wouldn't be dealing with like record numbers of anxiety and all this other shit that you hear about, about people dealing with.

People would just be happier. Like imagine like to see hateful shit, you actually had to turn on a cable television to see it. You know how many people would see it? None. No one even watches fucking cable anymore. No one gives a shit, right? Like, but no

you can just flip on the internet and there it is right there there's your phone bam showing you all the hate and then you're of the belief that this group hates you and you hate this group and then the wheel keeps spinning that all goes with this point about you know comparing trump to hitler which i think is so fucking stupid it's dumb it's lazy guess what? The next time there's an election, whoever the Republican is, it's going to be called Hitler. And that's just the way this cycle is going to go. It's bullshit. It's stupid. It's divisive. Nothing's ever going to get any better. We are fucked. I try to elevate and lift once a week. I try. I try to come in with something positive. Maybe I should force myself to do that at least once a week. Even once a day, have a segment that's about something positive. Maybe that'd be good. Let me know in

the email and whatever if you guys would like me to start doing just one positive story a day, if that would make you feel better. Or if you'd go, Josh, that's totally out of character because you know that everything sucks. So that could be it too. But the whole thing about Hitler and Bill Maher and Larry David. So Larry David compared Bill Maher's meeting with Trump to basically saying that Hitler isn't such a bad guy. I actually really enjoyed the way Bill Maher broke that down. But Bill Maher and the way he's not transitioned so much. But first of all, let me play a couple of commercials and then we'll dive a little bit more into that. All right.

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and then there's leftists. The leftists are like the wackos of the bunch. Like, liberal people, generally speaking, aren't bad people, and for the most part, have decent views, just like I think a lot of right-wing people have decent views on shit. Like, I don't believe that one side is 100% perfect on either thing. That's why, as a human, you should take one thing you like here, one thing you like here, one thing you like here. And honestly, just don't put a fucking label on yourself. You're a person, you're a human, you like what you like, you don't like, you dislike what you dislike. And that's it. That's the way it should be. But people have to put a label on themselves because we live in this fucked up world where you either have to be liberal or

conservative. And those are the two fucking options you have. Oh, but Josh, there's always a third party. That third party is going to get 11 votes. And if you vote for that, you might as well set it on fire or wipe your ass with it. It's pointless, right? So, but we all, I think, look at different things, right? We all pick and choose. So because of how absurd so much of what has happened on the leftist side of things has gotten, and it has you can

dismiss it all you want but people are fucking lunatics and some of this stuff not everything but certain aspects of it have gotten so crazy that like just remember Trump is president mostly not because there's a bunch of fucking bigots and racists out there there are some but he's not the president because of that he's because these people are so batshit crazy on the other side that they have driven some people who are kind of center left over to that way, just because your side is too fucking crazy, right? That's why that happened. That's why a lot of people have done that. And that's kind of been Bill Maher's point is Bill Maher is liberal in the old school sense of liberal, but he's gotten it now. And by the way, he didn't vote for Trump, but his whole thing is that you've

driven him so far that anytime he says something that's even remotely common sense or centered, you come after him and call him a racist and call him a Trumper and all that. And again, that goes to the point about these people being fucking lunatics, not liberals, but the extremists, just like the extreme right. They're fucking nuts but anyway the story is that uh bill maher met donald trump at the white house during an april 24th interview on piers morgan uncensored the comedian and tv host got candid about his response to david's satirical essay in the new york times which appeared to skewer maher's recent meeting with the president at the white house the april 21st article is a

fictional piece written from the perspective of a person who had dinner with Adolf Hitler in 1939 and came away impressed with the Nazi leader was so personable despite having a vocal critic of his on the radio from the beginning. This wasn't my favorite moment of our friendship. I think the minute you play the Hitler card, you've lost the argument, Marr told Piers Morgan. Marr, a longtime critic of Trump, met with the commander in chief on March 31st and gave a full recap of their encounter during an episode of his talk show Real Time with Bill Maher, which if you haven't seen that was actually really good. I don't really watch a lot of Bill Maher shit, but I did see that. And I was like, that's fine. Like, these are the way that people need to think. But we've created a world where this one guy is so evil that there's nothing good that can come out of it. And it's stupid.

Maher said that while he maintains his criticisms of the president, Trump defied his expectations with his gracious and measured demeanor. David, who is Jewish, never mentioned Maher or Trump in the essay, but the language he used closely mirrored the way real-time hosts spoke about the dinner with Trump. Maher on why the Larry David essay was insulting. In his interview with Morgan, Maher criticized the inappropriateness of David's Hitler comparison. First of all, it's kind of insulting to six million dead jews mar said look maybe it's not completely logically fair but hitler has really kind of got to stay in his own place he is the goat of evil and we're just going to leave have to leave it

like that i think that's fair he added i don't need to be lectured on who Donald Trump is just the fact I met him in person didn't change that the fact that I reported honestly is not a sin either Maher also shared that he hasn't spoken with David 77 since the publication of his essay USA Today has reached out to representatives of David for comment I don't want to make this constantly personal with me and Larry. We might be friends, Mark included. I can take a shot and I also can absolutely take it when people disagree with me. If I can talk to Trump, I can talk to Larry David too. It's wild that somebody like Bill Maher, who, like I got to the point where I would get so

annoyed by Bill Maher. Like I used to really dig him. He did a documentary called, was it called Religious? Religious? Religious? And it was a documentary basically making fun of organized religion. And I think some of it was really mean spirited shit, but it was funny and I laughed at it. I'm not a really religious person, so I'm not really offended by such things. Like I don't get worked up over the idea of somebody making fun of religion because I think religion is like if you like, I want to be clear, believe what you want to fucking believe.

I don't care. I'm not going to judge you. I'm not someone that walks around and says, hi, you believe in religion and God, whatever you dummy like. That's not how I operate. Please believe what you want to believe. It's just something I don't get down with, right? It's just not my thing. So this movie was very good.

It was a documentary just satirizing all of this. I think towards the end of it, it got kind of long. And at certain times, I just think it was kind of mean spirited. It kind of went from, I guess my problem with it was is it went away from skewering the religious leaders to just skewering people who believe in religion. Like, I believe there was some scenes in there where he goes to like a trailer, like a church that's like a mobile home church or something and a trucker church or something. And ha ha, we're making fun of them but it's also kind of like these people believe this and while it might seem absurd maybe focus on the people that are are kind of like balance it out focus on the people who are the people shitting and like okay let me put it this way focus on the

people who create this religious universe and then you can also make fun of the other people too now in my in defense of that i haven't seen this movie in a while i just remember i watched the first 45 to an hour of it and thought it was great then i thought it kind of slowed down and got dumb on the other side of it and just kind of boring and too long but like i liked it and like i'm not a very religious person but outside of that like i've tried to watch real time but part of the problem is I don't follow politics closely enough to understand half of the shit that's going on or to even care about half the shit that's going on on the show it just doesn't interest me it's just not something I'm I'm locked into or engaged in all that much so take that for what it is but I I like so this isn't me like oh boy I'm rushing to the defense of of some guy because I like his political views.

I know nothing really about the show except that I don't watch it and I don't care. But with that said, like, I don't see something wrong in a guy going and meeting the president of the United States. I do see something wrong with a group of people who've hammered into the minds of a bunch of idiots that the president is hitler that is stupid it is dumb but it is what it is i don't know what to tell you but either way uh and it's also funny because like i like what's acceptable in hitler stuff right like some of the best material on curb your enthusiasm was like larry david doing hitler shit there's one there was one episode i think it was the michael j fox episode Some of the best material on Curb Your Enthusiasm was like Larry David doing Hitler shit. There was one episode. I think it was the Michael J. Fox episode where actually there's been multiple episodes that this has happened.

But one of them, actually they may have been in the same episode in the same season. I might be either combining two episodes or what but there was an episode where Larry was just like grabbing magazines in people's houses and just drawing Hitler mustaches on them because he likes drawing Hitler mustaches on things and one of them was when he was in Michael J Fox's apartment because he went up to see Michael J Fox because he believes that Michael J Fox was purposely clomping on the ceiling on the floor so it would bother Larry David at one point I'm doing the episode backwards but he was I don't know why he was in in Michael J Fox's apartment but he's sitting there and he starts like drawing a Hitler mustache on this magazine and Michael's

like what the fuck are you doing that's my father-in-law or whatever he's like I draw Hitler mustaches on people in Hitler hair and and all this, it's great, but it's just like, why would it be like, like to me, you're kind of humanizing Hitler when you do that, right? Like if you want to like get into the battle of, well, that's like saying that you sat down with Hitler in 1939 and said he wasn't that bad of a guy. There's an argument to be made.

It's an argument I would disagree with, but there is an argument that like in a movie like jojo rabbit where hitler was kind of this wacky character that the kid like that was his imaginary friend was hitler there's an argument to be made that that's offensive and that that humanizes hitler there's an argument some people would make that i would not and it's the same thing i would say to larry david about humanizing hitler in those episodes of curb your enthusiasm either way stop the hitler shit it's stupid