Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO series Real Time with Bill Maher. Thank you so much. Wow, we got people back, we got real people, real people. Thank you. Real people. Marsden's based and tested and oh my God, the robots wouldn't be safer here. But thank you so much for doing this and going through all that. And we're going to have a good show. We're going to be happy tonight because the Super Bowl is Sunday.

That's a big thing in America.

Super Bowl weekend, the. The Buccaneers versus the team somehow still called the chiefs eye. How did they slide on that poor Washington team?

They don't even get a name. They're just the team, you know, just like, fuck it, we're not even going near that shit. But the chiefs were still OK. But this is going to be a great game. You know, Tom Brady versus Patrick Mahomes a 20, almost a 20 year age difference between them, what we in Hollywood call marriage.

Now, of course, this here is going to be different because of the pandemic, you know, some fans say they're going to be they're going to watch listen to this with blowup dolls and then in a tribute to Tom Brady, deflate them.

Oh, right, kid, Tom Brady. And who am I kidding? You know why it came out today? 25 percent of Americans say they're still going to go to a Super Bowl party. And it's going to be very confusing this year when someone says pass the Korona.

Ask your doctor of getting in a room with a bunch of drunk screaming is good for you, but cases are down, though this is good news, you know.

Forty five percent. Well, that's the. Let's not go crazy there, they're down because we're over the spike from the holiday season when Americans just, of course, didn't follow the rules and fucked up and with each other. So that's why it's down. But now we're coming up on Valentine's Day. I tell you, for once, being a loser with no love, life is a good thing. So, well, what else is in the news?

Oh, yes, ex government employee Donald Trump is in the news.

He's getting impeached for the second time this was going on. How brave of you. But this was going on exactly this time last year, right? It's like an annual event now. It's like groundhog, it's like Groundhog Day, except with a weasel. Yes.

So, you know, a second and so anticlimactic, you know, no one's going to be watching, Lindsey Graham said there's going to be so few viewers not even getting his hair done.

Lindsey. But I tell you that the Republican Party, they are they're in trouble, they have a real identity crisis, which is kind of encapsulated in these two women now that they had they were debating whether to censure this week.

Liz Cheney, you know her right to say we love her now, daughter of Dick Cheney.

OK, and then you know all about Marjorie Taylor Green, Liz Cheney daughter, Dick Cheney, Marjorie Taylor Green, who and, you know, Liz voted to impeach Trump. So they were mad at her for that. Margery's the anti somebody who, of course, likes to make literal death threats against Democrats for their execution. They had a five hour meeting about these two women and then the two women spoke. Guess which one got a standing ovation? Oh, I guess you can't.

OK, well, it was it was the crazy one. It was Margaret Green and the Democrats today. They stripped Marjorie Pelligrino of all her committee standings. And but, you know, she's.

Oh, should we. Is it. Is it.

But, you know, Marjorie Taylor Green is now one of the standard bearers of the Republican Party. She's one of their faces. It's like having Marilyn Manson hosted the Grammys.

And so listeners, you know, they do have a leader there in the House. Kevin McCarthy is the minority leader and he is so afraid to get near this, he said about majority telegraphing he doesn't even know what Kuhnen is.

Really, it's not his job to know things that are happening in America. What else doesn't he know?

What's what's in all these people wearing masks but a. But really, a five hour meeting they had on this where they defended themselves, Liz Cheney laid out her strong anti-terrorist credentials and then Marjorie Taylor Green laid out her strong pro terrorist credentials.

So but Liz Cheney did survive.

She is going to still be the number three in the House, but only after promising to never again do the right thing.

And my favorite part was when Marjorie Taylor Green, who, you know, believes in every conspiracy theory, she said she thinks Satan runs the government.

And Liz said, no, my dad's retired.

All right. We've got a great shot. We have Matt Welch in Charlotte Altor. And first up, he is the host of ABC's Jimmy Kimmel Live. Can you guess who it is? Jimmy Kimmel.

Hi, everyone. Oh, thank you. I should have brought that hand, but to you, that's a funny thing.

Is it a funny thing that we're not allowed to shake hands? Because before I come here, they say, don't worry, everyone has been tested. Everything is perfect. There's nothing to worry about at all.

And the athletes shake, not only shake hands, they practically kiss each other.

I mean, speaking of athletes, I pull into your parking lot, I pull into my spot. It says Jay Kimmel on it right next to me. It says De Strawbery. And I'm very excited. Very excited because Daryle, it's not Dave Strawbery. Darryl Strawberry is here. Yeah. That was a fake name we were trying to use so people would know it was me. Yeah.

Yeah. Thanks for that to me. Like an idiot. I'm sitting in the dressing room going, boy, nobody's mentioned Darryl Strawberry. And I thought, Oh, it's Bill is Darryl Strawberry.

So well, that's when I was a part owner of the Mets. Yeah. Yeah. Well, yeah, but you did well with that, right?

I eventually. Did you get the check. I did think.

But first I was writing checks for this whole last year I was shooting in my pants like I've never shit in my pants.

You had to write checks. Yes. You're in for a penny. For a penny. I was one of the minority owners. There was capital calls when they're losing money and we didn't play baseball for one hundred games. And then when we did, we weren't selling hot dogs. All I was doing was right. This is my problem.

We should not really be talking about this anyway.

Thank God they give you your advice. When you told me about the situation with the Mets, I was offered a piece of the Las Vegas hockey hockey team, the Golden Knights, the NHL team, and they said, we'd like to sell you one percent of the team. It's a great honor. And I said I thought about Bill and I thought he didn't seem that enthused about owning the Mets.

And I yes, I did that to you. I did until the pandemic came along. And then, by the way, I still made out like a fucking bandit. Even with all that, I was right.

It's the best investment, not the fucking Vegas hockey team, but they went to the Stanley Cup in their first year of shit. It's hockey and even America. But but baseball, the New York Mets, the National League franchise in New York City.

I knew that could not lose money and it didn't. Why didn't they ask you to stay with the ownership group?

Well, there was, first of all, after the near-death experience, a pandemic. Twenty. I was writing those jokes. I didn't want to. And then that wasn't I. Who gives a shit? I don't know. I'm out. It was a great ten years at a parking spot at Citi Field. I went to see any game I wanted to that we got to the World Series. Your parking spot at Citi Field, say D Strawbery on it.

Maybe that would have been confusing because he probably hasn't. Exactly. Yeah. So speaking of sports, what about the Super Bowl?

You know, is that this weekend, if I have to listen to any more. Sportscasters, all people on TV sucking Tom Brady's dick for the. Right, I think I get it, he's the greatest, the goat, whatever, it's just like, please, Mahomes beat this motherfucker, please.

I'm so tired of listening to how great Tom Brady is. I, I am I you know, listen, Mahomes is it seems like a nice guy, Tom Brady has certainly won his share of everything. But I am rooting for him because I think and I think this maybe is true for a lot of these sportscasters is this is a guy who was told by his employer, by the way, this reminds me a little bit of you and I'll explain why.

Stay with me here. When you were at ABC, they said, all right, that's it, we're we're done. You went on to become tremendously successful here at HBO.

Well, like the Tom Brady Show and what. Wow, Jimmy, I think you want the accolades. So but I think everybody everybody who's been fired from a job goes, I love to see this guy leave his job.

They go in the toilet. He goes to Tampa, which is also a toilet. Let's be honest.

I live there. I know. And and and then he's, you know, in the Super Bowl again, who knows?

He might win it. But I was going to ask you, you grew up in Vegas. I grew up in Las Vegas. You know, one thing, I'm the thing I miss the most in twenty twenty. And now they canceled a bunch of dates. Again, is touring. You don't really tour like I do. No, but I do go to Vegas.

I have a comedy club in Las Vegas right now. I enjoy going there and I miss Vegas. I mean, that's one of the main stops. Obviously I'm there six or seven times a year at the Mirage. I was I hope it resumes again. I missed it, but I mean, I couldn't live there. I love Vegas for the weekend. I don't you know, you grew up there. I don't know. What was that like? What was I mean, how did that how did that shape you growing up in Vegas?

Well, in a weird way, I guess, I you know, it's funny people, when they ask you about growing up in Las Vegas, it's as if you grew up on a pirate ship or something.

It's like, was it was it scary? Where are you drunk all the time? And I didn't you hear the clanging of the one armed bandits when you woke up? Because that's my image of Vegas. I wake up, I go down to breakfast and all. I hear it and. But that's not really. You grew up in a house? I grew up in a house my dad worked for. My dad worked for this company. They did math and my mom was a hooker.

It was just a normal upbringing.

Right. Justin are no different than anyone else.

Vegas is still though.

It's different. You know, people think we need it. We need one place in America that will be the bastion of political incorrectness. It really is. Because, I mean, it's there's a billboard you can, like, drive a tank and fire a machine gun and a ventriloquist out of it. And then there's another guy in another billboard holding up a lobster the size of an eight year old.

Yeah, well, I'm home.

Yes, but I mean, the way the direction the country is going someplace has to be a place where we don't have to conform and be perfect. Right.

Audience Thank you. I love, by the way, I get a kick out of watching you. I watch you every week and I've enjoyed because I can relate to the fact that you are doing your show for your own staff. And I'm doing my show for my own staff. I did it. I did your show when it was your staff or a great crowd. They were great for you.

That's why I'm thinking I have an idea. Quite frankly, my staff is sick. Short short-staffed, let's trade, let's trade stamps. It will be like swinging, but for shows.

Right. You know, I also have another plan and I think this is a good plan.

Who is? Because I'm tired of doing the show for my staff and they're more tired than I am of it.

So who is the group that has been vaccinated and has nothing but free time?

Old people, old, too. I want to start bringing groups of like tell them the bus is headed to Loflin or something, put them on. They come, we'll have bingo. We'll do the whole thing. I'll get a bunch of old people that everybody used to have a talk show that did that.

It was called The Merv Griffin Show.

I really love you, remember?

Oh, you didn't ever. You were too young. No, not no, not. That is not true. In fact, I once Merv Griffin, Mike Douglas, these are like the your home sick from school shows, right? Yes.

But Merv hosted three tapings in a day three. Yes. Well, you know, he wanted time off. Had he had other activities. Yeah.

In Vegas. But Danny Trejo anyway, it was like three thirty four.

Thirty five thirty. Or the tapings. If you got the three thirty, I'm telling you there was nobody there under one hundred and twelve years old and I was like twenty eight and try to do comedy to these people anyway. So I had problems. Not really. I shouldn't do this.

What you're saying is OK, all right. But you know, I was watching you, you were talking one night about how you took this trip to Idaho. Oh, yeah, I did. Yeah. Which now is the number one destination, I think one of the top destination people leaving California, which is a big thing. You know, there's a big exodus. I read it in the paper last week. Now they're going to Miami.

All the tech guys to Miami. Yes. Oh, and why wouldn't. OK, yeah. I'm not going to get into California, hopefully tonight, maybe a little later. I do have something at the desk which I want to show. I have my problems with California. Yeah, the regulations and the taxes and the fires.

But Idaho, let's talk about Idaho, OK? I once went on vacation to South Dakota. Which is not a place you'd think you'd find me and I had a great time. Oh, yeah, again, I wouldn't want to live there. But there is something about those states and the people in them. You tell me what it is. Well, for us, we're just the reason we went there and by the way, I bought a place in Idaho, that's how much I like it there.

But for us, we'd been in the house with the kids for too long.

And so we decided I bought an RV. We decided to put them in a smaller house that would make them throw up.

And we wanted to just kind of get out and see the country and breathe the air and eat at Chili's. Although we didn't really stop anywhere along the way, we kept it very self-contained. And but it is funny because we went up to Idaho and it was a great time. We got to go. We saw Mount Zion and the kids got to look at YouTube on their iPads in Mt. Zion and then we got back in the RV. The trip back is no good because, you know, you're headed home.

You know what's in store. We get back. It says something right there. Yeah, you're right. That does say something. But we get back in the RV and we stop at this campground. They have these nice tents set up and we get the kids in the bed and we're laying in the tent and it's hot, really hot. And of course, there's no air conditioning.

Did you know tents don't have air conditioning tents in the tent.

And I'm laying there and I say to my wife, let's drive to Vegas.

We pack the kids up. We got an RV and we drove to Caesar's Palace and they have parking for our visit, Caesar's Palace. Of course they do. And that's where we spent money over the Snake River like Evel Knievel did.

Jimmy, it's great to see you guys make me laugh. I see tears in my eyes. I can't do this. Sorry about the parking spot thing. I'll go and change it through. You know, I'll change it to Keith Hernandez or Jimmy Kimmel, everybody.

Jimmy Kimmel and. OK, here they are. He is the host of the reasoned roundtable podcast and co-host of the Fifth Column podcast to podcast, Matt Welch, too, to podcast, OK, and she's a senior correspondent at time and author of The Ones We've Been Waiting For How a New Generation of Leaders Will Transform America. Charlotte Alter Charlotte, how are you doing?

Before I let you two talk, I just want to show this thing, this is days waiting for solar people who watch my show. No, I have been. I have been bitching I'm not going to lie, it's bitching, I've been bitching about the fact that I've been trying to get the solar turned on at my house for over three years. I mean, we are supposed to want solar, right? And it's supposed to be good. And I did everything right.

And OK. I read and George Will's column this week, the Pentagon was built in six months during war, 500 days, 500 days. Empire State Building. Four hundred and ten days during the Depression. That little shed, I did get a little shed to house the solar because it comes in on a pole now, but the poles not good for solar, probably bullshit too, but OK, the shed just got built like two or three months ago.

I finally got the shed and now we just have to turn on one thousand eighty two days. No. If you're watching this tomorrow, and I just want these people to know I'm going to leave this here, and I just think this is a terrible advertisement for it for Democrats.

California used to the neighborhood. I grew up in California down in Long Beach and Lakewood area is the neighborhood that houses like.

Ah, you grew up here. Yeah, like sixty thousand people. It was built in a year and a half, essentially in the nineteen fifties.

Granted, there are you know, there was land back there, but California doesn't build things and then gets really surprised when it has tons of homeless people. Like if you don't allow things to get built, if you drag out approval processes forever, what happens. You don't have enough housing and everyone is perpetually surprised as if this sort of magic supply demand thing. You mean that that applies also to housing? It does, sadly. And the approval process is is the main culprit of that.

But also so much of this is because we haven't decided it's a national project to get people solar. It hasn't been a priority for any real administration, except possibly this one, which has only been in office for like two weeks.

But it's a priority in theory.

But in practice, I guess that's the thing. It is they talk about it like it's a priority. But then when you go and do it, you can't actually get it done.

Have they told you yet about how you have to clean it every 18 months or else it stops working?

I'll lick it because it's OK, but OK.

So like so and this week I'm also reading about the fact that 44 San Francisco high schools did you see this or change having to change their name because the school board had a blue ribbon committee who just basically went on Wikipedia and looked up everybody's name, who was on a high school, and if they found anything, you know, who can't be named, can't be out of high school. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson. Abraham Lincoln is Lincoln. Dianne Feinstein, who was the senator, still is a senator.

Wow, she's been a senator a long time, but in 1984, she was the mayor of San Francisco and there was all these like cultural historic flags in front of the building.

And somebody took down the Confederate flag and then Dianne Feinstein either replaced it or didn't stop it. When someone who gives a fuck.

This this is not affecting anybody's life, it's just like this virtue signalling if I'm going to disappear this person, because in nineteen eighty four they didn't replace the right flag. This Namsan, this is an important issue. I'm saying when you can't put out the fires and you can't build a house, it just looks like this is what you spend your time doing. It looks to a lot of the country. This is what the left is obsessed with, not real progress.

This nonsense. There's a way in which this is an important issue, which is to say there are 50000 thousand kids in San Francisco who haven't set foot in a school for three hundred and twenty nine days.

Think about that. That's appalling.

Your school district, you basically have one job. Your job is to provide education to kids. They are not doing that job. The people who are suffering from that job surprise are poor and minority kids most of all.

And instead of spending every bit of time and every bit of money, because you've got to you've got to change the names of schools that's going to cost money instead of doing that, to open the schools, to do the one job you're doing this bad Wikipedia virtual signaling where like Paul Revere gets canceled for the wrong reason or ReverbNation.

And when he do, he didn't ride fast enough.

I don't know why, but the other part of this is that, you know, this is one of the this kind of virtue signalling in this kind of political correctness is one of the only things that's driving young people to the right on all of the issues on climate change. Young people. Right. Not all young people, of course, but the young people that I've spoken to who are who are moving to the right, who are becoming conservative. It's often because of stuff like this.

It's not because they don't believe in climate change. It's not because they have a difference. They're not driven by taxes. Right. Not because they have a small business. It's because they're frustrated with this type of leftwing virtue signalling. And we even see that in the Republican Party right now, where almost all the rising stars of the Republican Party have defined themselves in opposition to cancel culture. They haven't to find themselves in any with any kind of real policy agenda.

Look at the standing ovation for Marjorie Taylor Green. Right. So the quickest way to at this point that we're in the quickest way to make a hero on the right is to cancel them on the left.

And they're coopting that term. You know, I have my issues with cancer culture like I think a lot of sane people do, just like I had me my issues when Trump was talking about or rather when people were talking about Trump using fake news. And within weeks, Trump took that term and made it his. That started out with them calling his ass on that. You're doing fake news. And soon it was him saying no fake news, everything was fake news.

And now I think this is happening with cancer culture.

I mean, Jim Jordan literally used it about Marjorie Taylor Green. Right. That's that's OK. We can't we just going to have to come up with a different phrase to describe. And it's not I mean, one of the better definitions of it just has to do with are you ganging up on someone who doesn't hold power? It's not just a consequence of their actions. Did they did they make a minor slip up that at the time didn't feel like it and suddenly they're out of a job?

Happened to a New York Times reporter today just before the show. He got canceled. He got fired from his job because he used the N-word in a context of racist, like talking about racist language, not as a slur towards anybody fired. Done one strike and you're out. And what does what does every single conservative on Twitter say about that today? The New York Times is crazy. The left is crazy. They've got to stop it. And that is an attractive I mean, cancel it.

Lincoln, I want to ask you're a millennial, right? You know, the most of the people I hang out with now are millennials, especially in the pandemic, because talk about it.

You know, I love my millennial friends. I do.

I thank God for them because the people my age, they're afraid to go out or I don't know what the fuck their problem is, but that's not they just don't hang, you know?

I mean, they're married. I get it. You know, they can't keep up with me. What can I say? OK, but here's the difference.

When boomers and millennials boomers are not like they don't have issues with their own generation so much. My millennial friends all have issues with their own generation. They talk about their own generation like I mean, maybe I'm with the same ones, but what what's your generation? And I'm guessing that this is coming from millennials. They would they would take the name Lincoln off a high school. What is it with this that nothing is good enough for them? I mean, nothing is Lincoln.

Lincoln is not good enough for you. What the fuck? Why?

Because, I mean, where does this come from? So I think there's a couple of things happening here.

One is Matt's great point about one strike you're out that is actually has history in the way millennials were raised. So in the nineteen eighties and nineties, that was the first time that people were even talking about bullying. As a problem in school, so you can have this zero tolerance policies in schools where people my age, you know, grew up and those zero tolerance policies meant that if somebody called someone a name on the playground or got in a fight when they're nine or, you know, like you're somebody on the swing, they could get suspended or expelled.

One strike, you're out. That's what zero tolerance meant. So actually, this whole idea that there would be a draconian punishment for a seemingly innocuous one time thing is something that boomers created because they were so afraid of their kids being bullied in school because, heaven forbid, their precious children ever, ever get to have a minute of discomfort.

You're right. They raised their kids wrong. To put it bluntly, they did. But was it really boomers who raised millennials? Why? Why does Gen X, which is in the middle, why are they why are they just completely they slide on the whole generational battle? We were slackers originally and really had no children. We do have children.

And when we see this every single day, and especially it's reinforced by the schools nonstop.

And it and what the effect is, is that it makes all parents.

And I live in Brooklyn where they voted like one hundred and three percent for Joe Biden, probably at and and but parents are all just aggressively rolling their eyes at the nonstop messaging.

That's very, very super woak and politically correct.

But they dare not say a word because they don't want to be tarred as racist.

And this is being used again in the school opening context in Cambridge, Massachusetts. They say we're not going to reopen the schools because it's an artifact of white supremacy in Chicago, which is there's teachers are not showing up to work right now. They say they're doing this because the reopening drive is an artifact of racism, sexism, misogyny. It doesn't make any sense at all. But there are these words that they could be used as a weapon to cow people into silence.

And that's where it's the most prominent. That is so true. And it's OK. So I want to say this about parents, OK? I feel for parents today because you can't raise your kid in a vacuum. If all the other kids are doing it, you know, you can't tell your kid, you can't have a phone, so I get that.

But they're also little bitches for their children. They let the kids run there and it ruins both their lives, ruins the kid and it ruins the parent.

And that's one thing. The other thing, I think is phones. Your generation, right? How old were you when you first got it from there was I was actually like, I don't know, maybe 14. Yeah, that's ridiculous.

That's when we got clocked and now they probably have 10 or even younger. And I think phones make you a bad person. I do.

I think that they make you they make you shady. Wait a second. How many people have forgotten? We all do.

But if they do shady, they make you passive aggressive. They make you fake, cowardly and bullying. You know, you can when you're anonymous, you can be big an asshole as you want. You know, everything is not real.

With the phone, the filters and the pandemic has really goosed that negative aspect because we haven't been around each other when we're in a room together and I'm sure you found this during your show remote, like you just can't read the room.

You can't like so much of an asshole.

You just can't get away with it because you're going to get immediate negative feedback. You're going to feel weird about it in person. There's generations of kids right now who haven't been able to see their peers for a long time. And so how this flattening kind of digital communication and that's where it gets bad.

I think once people start actually seeing each other and picking the nets out of their hair and doing the normal chimpanzee stuff that we do when we're around each other, then we're going to stop being so sort of focused on on on these flat communications where you can't really understand what people are saying or cherry pick something bad that they did and try to ruin their lives.

But then, you know, the other side of this also is that any time there's a new technology, people are always saying, oh, this is going to ruin, the kid's TV is going to ruin the kids. I'm sure people thought that the radio would ruin the kids.

And I know I mean, I listen, I think but this one really is.

I really, really I mean, I get your point. Yeah, it's true. The old guy never says that's right.

I'm always I'm always asking that question. My heading this just because I'm sixty five now or but I check myself like, no, I'm looking at this objectively. It really is bad. It really does make you a coward. That phone ghosting people not not having no ability to confront. You know, that's not a good thing. I read something where eighty one percent of millennials have anxiety just to make a phone call, let alone get one when you don't know who it is.

I mean, we used to just go, hello, who is it? You know, get to? Hi, it's Billy Mark and I talk to Michelle.

OK, well, now you get a phone call and you think someone died. That's what that's what. That's why it's scary to get a phone call. You think it's like the hospital can't tell you someone died.

But listen, I'm I, I don't think it's better or worse. I just think it's different. I think that all of these ways that people communicate with each other and they have confrontations and they experience rejection and they have arguments, they do it through the phone. And I certainly think you're totally right that there's a lot that's lost with in person communication. And this is something that's been especially true with conspiracy theories. I mean, conspiracy theories spread much more easily in digital communities than they do in in real world.

You know, real interesting conversations because somebody said something crazy and they can see on the other person's face like. That's not but but ironically, the people who are actually most most susceptible to that are the older people who don't actually know and understand technology that well and aren't actually that fluent in how information moves across the Internet.

So I think you're right that the Internet is ruining society to some extent. But actually the younger people who grew up understanding it and using it are more equipped to surf.

It also makes them more equipped to be more squirrelly. Maybe, maybe. But it's also really it's also a really creative tool, sketchy.

I have a 12 year old daughter who is does all kinds of crazy creative stuff on Tick-Tock, as do all of her peers. That's a positive thing to write. So like all new things, you have to sort of figure it out. You have to monitor it or or, you know, make sure that people emerge from their rooms more than once every four months. But it can be a source of creativity and staying in touch with people like her grandparents who are many thousands of miles away.

OK, so it's a new era now. We have a new president. We thought it'd be a good time to do one of our favorite refillable is called. I don't know it for a fact. I just know it's true.

Now, people know about this because, I mean, you don't know. It's just there are things in this world which I freely admit I do not know for a fact.

I just know they're true.

For example, I don't know it for a fact. I just know it's true. I don't know for a fact that Keith Richards got covid and didn't care. I just know it's true.

I don't know for a fact that when you throw out Chef Boyardee, the raccoons who eat it hate themselves. I just know it's. I don't know for a fact that Armie Hammer joined a dating site called eHarmony. I don't know for a fact that there are now a dozen garage bands called Jewish Space Laser. Yeah, I don't know for a fact that most of the anti Wall Street GameStop crusaders will be stockbroker's in 10 years.

That's actually true. That isn't not even a joke. I don't know for a fact that kombucha is the Japanese word for pond water.

It's OK. I don't know for a fact that Justin Trudeau moonlights as a tantric yoga instructor, Felix. And I don't know for a fact, Sears and J.C. Penney will merge into a mega chain called SUCC Mart.

I just know it's. That was pretty fun at Armie Hammer there, this may seem frivolous to bring him up, but I keep hearing about Armie Hammer and I think we could talk about this in relation to where feminism is, because I apparently Armie Hammer has a predilection to tell his dates. He wants to eat them. And who wouldn't want to be eaten by Armie Hammer?

Exactly my point. Thank you. One honest woman. If Armie Hammer says I want to eat you, you're going to say yes. But apparently this is something called ethical human cannibal fetishism.

No actual women were eaten in the making of this movie. We're just talking so that they have his text where he's saying things like, I want to take your rib out and boil it and eat with barbecue sauce. I don't know. I feel like this is just a subway stop pass. You know, I want to spank you and but we're in such a porn centric society. People have been watching really hardcore porn for so long that spank you doesn't really cut it anymore.

Now, I got to take your rip out and e part of you.

So anyway, the point is that the women who were objecting this now, who went out with Rihanna willingly and stayed in willingly, and then apparently there was it wasn't you know, there wasn't physical bad stuff happening, OK, that would we wouldn't have a discussion that we'd all just agree that's intolerable.

OK, but if there's no physical coercion, why isn't this just filed under that?

Seemed like a good idea at the time to let Armie Hammer eat me, but it really wasn't what it seems like. We don't have any ownership anymore of our own choices.

But there was some physical stuff, right? Some of the women have alleged that there was sort of some slapping around. One woman said he carved his initials into her body.

I mean, he tired down and do that. I don't know. That's a good question. I don't think so. I'm just kind of, you know, like like how how consensual. Are we sure that this was really consensual? If these women are now coming out and saying it wasn't? Well, they're not saying.

They're not saying it was. And that's the thing that they're saying it was creepy, which I mean, I don't want to invite the dude over for barbecue.

It just doesn't sound right. I clicked on the the length about the cutting stuff because I think cutting, which is a whole culture, I think it really creeps me out. It's it's wrong.

And I was expecting to be horrified. And it's a tiny little bit letter A down here. And weird enough, right. But it looks kind of like a tattoo gone slightly wrong in the person wasn't trying to get free when that thing was done. So what do you do with that as an outsider, as a society? What do you do with those people in that moment? Decide it's a great idea to get like a pen knife and carve in a into an abdomen and then afterwards feel bad about it.

And I think as a society is at least something a place with laws. There aren't laws for that. Right. Like press charges when something is not voluntary, press charges when when.

Right. Committed violence against you. But that doesn't seem like what this is.

But this is exactly one of the things that I think happening now, which is relates back to the school thing, is that essentially, you know, like you said, we have a criminal justice system, right. That if you steal a candy bar and you robbed ten banks, you're going to have different punishments because those two things are different crimes. Now, we have this concept of of social justice, which I think me too. And the conversation around feminism and consent would come under this umbrella.

But there isn't a system for adjudicating, you know, the difference between A and Aziz Ansari or Harvey Weinstein. But one of the things that happens when you have that is that men, for very understandable reasons, are now tremendously anxious. And I completely understand why there is a tremendous amount of anxiety that their sexual behavior could get them completely shunned from society.

But guess what women have had to deal with? Yeah, that's that that particular anxiety that the way they behave sexually could ruin their life for literally millennia.

Of course, literally like the idea that, you know, that that sex has consequences.

You know, obviously the biological consequence of getting pregnant, but until, what, maximum 70 years ago women could be. And still in some parts of the world, women could be ostracized, murdered, tortured, forced into some horrible marriage for talking to the wrong person, for having sex out of wedlock, for showing their ankles, all kinds of ridiculous stuff. So the idea that there is now suddenly consequences that might feel, and I agree are very.

Er, for the way for, you know, given that you're right, it's possible this was consensual, but I think you have to look at it in a broader context of of women have had to ponder the extraordinary consequences of sex for all of human history.

And now men are getting a taste of it.

But I mean, that is all true. I don't know what it has to do with what happened in the last year with Armie Hammer. She she's not bearing that whole history on her shoulders. She was born 25 years ago. She probably doesn't even know all that. I think what I'm saying is that. Sorry. No, you go. I think what I'm saying is that is it such a huge crime now that some men have to have to think about the way they behave sexually, as if it could have tremendous and unfair consequences for them?

Because, no, that's when this first happened.

That's what I call it, playing with five fouls, you know, if you follow basketball, but you're allowed six fouls in the game. So when you have five fouls, you have to think about who you're going to foul. Right? You have you're playing with five fouls. You can stay in the game, but you better be careful. And that was a great thing that happened to men.

Kind of ironic in this conversation that Wilt Chamberlain never found out that he had to care for twenty thousand. Didn't he say he had twenty thousand conquests, something like that? Yeah, well, no.

I think the thing that is happening now that I am alarmed of as part of this is that in some places laws are changing. They changed college campus adjudication and then he changed it back. But for about four or five years there, you could easily just get kicked out of your college through accusations of a sexual assault without being able to defend yourself like they literally just threw due process out the window in the name of believing women more strongly. I think that's wrong.

In New York, Governor Cuomo said that we need to close what did he call it? Something like the intoxication loophole of sexual assault law so that if you got drunk on purpose and then consented and had sex on purpose, but then regretted it some time later, you could still classify this as sexual assault, saying that you couldn't have been in your capacity.

I think down that path is where injustice is going to lie. And I mean, you're going to get the government involved in, like, how drunk were you? How much did you consent? And that's just kind of a squirrely place to be. The other places and the Aziz Ansari example is a good one, as is the hammer one.

There's this thing now where you can just go on to medium and do, I guess, with the dude's are doing, you know, four decades ago, just like, oh, she's you know, she's loose or she's a slut or the way that men used to talk a lot about women, that was terrible. You can do that as a woman now or as anybody and do it on medium.

And you can have, like your post facto regret, a discussion about a person.

And maybe that is warning future partners that he's going to talk about your Rebe in a way that's going to be a little bit unsettling. And so maybe that has uses. But I think sometimes and I know this that's happened to actual human beings, that it's ruined their jobs and livelihoods based on scenarios that weren't clear.

But in that case, I mean, as many people have said, it was just a bad date. She had many opportunities to leave. He's five, four. He didn't drag her to his apartment.

So I think we're in it. Sorry, I didn't know. So I think you make a lot of great points. And I agree with almost everything you've said. I think that what we're talking about here is this kind of spasm of moral purity that has really taken root over the last five years. Right. And guess what else has been happening over the last five years? Donald Trump has been president of the United States and GenZE and it's generation.

Sure, sure. But I I think that what's happening here is that Donald Trump was president and Donald Trump got away with everything. And so nobody else could get away with anything.

I think that there was this kind of cultural and societal need to purge ourselves of all of the wrongs that Donald Trump seemed to embody, whether that's assaulting women, whether that's racism, whether that's any number of things that we've seen in the last five years had these fever spasms about. I think that there's been this push towards accountability. And it's because he's been this big symbol of all the ways in which those things are still tolerated in our society.

But then I think it becomes a self reinforcing thing, right. As these kind of zero tolerance and sometimes just kind of insane sounding, you know, justices or mob justice are meted out. That said, that does has the effect, like you mentioned earlier, of people saying screw this and screw the people who are doing that. I'm going to go over for this team here.

So that makes that more popular. The question is like, how do you get out of that cycle?

And for me, granted, I'm coming from a civil libertarian point of view. You get out through civil libertarianism, through due process, through caring, actually, about being careful.

In the way that you tracked down the bad guys and you make them punish, and if you and you go after the guy actually committing the crimes in this case and not people who are not as a way to sort of symbolically dealing with your feelings about that.

I also must say one more thing about Armie Hammer. I think he is exactly the guy in the book, 50 Shades of Grey, which was the most popular book ever. I think with women, Oprah said, I hope the movie is filthier than the book. Oprah said that.

I mean, he's this rich, right, handsome movie star guy and he's got a kink. And, you know, the women said at first he love me. It was great. Yeah, well, if you're going to swim with the alpha sharks, it's not going to come out well in the end. Shouldn't you know that, I mean, is that is it really that hard to figure out without the law getting involved? But then the other side of that is Armie Hammer hasn't been under a rock for the last five years.

Shouldn't Armie Hammer know that if he's got a really weird kink like this, he better be really sure that the person that he's dealing with is super on board with it and have a real amount of trust with them. You know that they're not going to go to the press immediately afterwards like you have dated them for and know that, well, he did date them.

That's the problem, is that while they were love bombing him, the tattoo was all good. And then when he dumped them, it was not.

Are you going to sign an NDA like before you get he's a cad.

He's like he's it is if if I let's just say I'm Armie Hammer and I have this predeliction.

Right. I would sort of make sure that I'm with somebody that I really trust that I really know is definitely on a guy.

You want to eat your rib cares about that. He doesn't care about trust. He cares about the taste of blood in his mouth. He's like Spinal Tap taught us that we should all think about the majesty of rock and the mystery of role.

And there's a whole lot of mystery of role when it comes to sex and what turns people on and not. And and holy crap, we don't really want to get too close in there. We just want to make sure that everyone's safe and not committing crimes. Right.

OK, all right. Thank you, panel. Time for news. OK, know now that D list celebrities are recording cell phone messages for money, we should make politicians do it too high time, right. This is your boy, Chuck Grassley here saying, yo, yo, yo, it's your birthday, sister. You got to do it up, right. Put your foot in it. Also, abortion is murder. Thank you for your support.

Now it's time to officially retire the line. Of course, it rained, I just washed my car the last time that was funny. The car was a model T and the person who said it was Henry Ford. And his daughter was in the back seat saying, stop it, dad, you're embarrassing me.

Neuro sociologists have to explain how smashing food in a person's face went from being the sign of an abusive relationship to a symbol of undying romantic love. When people ask me why I never married, I tell them I have too much respect for cake.

No, since sex is a real thing that happens in real life, every porn video should open with the words based on actual events.

Then at the end, do that thing where we're told how the lives of those depicted in the film turned out. Tammy went on to work in a vape shop and is the proud owner of a lizard she stole from a petting zoo. Derek Dig's broken jet skis out of landfills and rents them to tourists in Florida panhandle. They both still fuck. Thank you know, let's be real, Nostradamus has to admit he really dropped the ball in the last 12 months.

I mean, a little heads up would have been nice. And I'm not talking about the pandemic or Trump trying to end democracy. I could have bought GameStop at 12 bucks a share.

And finally, new rule, as long as we're going to go to the trouble of another impeachment trial, we might as well be honest about what it's really about. The events of January 6th were a faith based initiative, and Trump ism is a Christian nationalist movement that believes Trump was literally sent from heaven to save them. It's right there in Senator Tommy Tuberville, whose campaign that God sent us, Donald Trump, because God knew we were in trouble.

There's a lot of talk now in liberal quarters about how Republicans should tell their base who still believe the election was rigged, that they need to grow up and move on and stop asking the rest of us to respect their mass delusion. And, of course, it is a mass delusion. But the inconvenient truth here is that if you accord religious faith, the kind of exalted respect we do here in America, you've already lost the argument that mass delusion is bad.

It's fun to laugh at Kuhnen with the baby eating lizard people and the pedophile pizza parlors, but have you ever read the Book of Revelations?

That's. That's that's the Bible, that's your holy book, Christians, and they've got seven headed dragons and locusts that have the face of men in the teeth of lions and other stuff you only see after the guy in the park sells you bad mushrooms.

Last week, the big story was Marjorie Taylor Green believing in Jewish space lasers, which answered the question, will there be comedy after Trump?

But the Book of Revelations will tell you exactly where the world ends, Megiddo, Israel, I've been there.

Yeah, that's where all of the armies of the world will gather and Jesus will come down on a flying horse, shooting swords out of his mouth, Jesus not the horse, and have a thousand year cosmic boss battle with Satan, the Beast and the Antichrist.

It's like 10 Avenger movies plus 10 Hobbit movies times a night out with Johnny Depp.

Spoiler alert Jesus wins, after which he will rapture up all the good souls, plus one hundred and forty four thousand Jews who were grandfathered in by Oskar Schindler.

But space lasers from Jews plays magical religious thinking is a virus, and Kuhnen is just its current mutation.

That's why megachurches play Cupid on videos. It's the same basic plot. It was a prophet. Trump is the messiah. Is an apocalyptic event looming the storm. There's a titanic struggle of good versus evil. And if you want good to win, just keep those checks coming in. We need to stop pretending. There's no way we'll ever understand why the Trump mob believes in him. It's because they're religious. They've already made space in their heads for shit.

That doesn't make sense. When you were a kuhnen fanatic, you're also a fundamentalist Christian. They just go together like macaroni and cheese or chardonnay and Valium, just me.

OK, that insurrection looked like a revival meeting with people praying around wooden crosses, waving the Christian flag and Jesus Saib signs yelling Jesus is my savior. Trump is my president. Jesus. Twenty twenty banner hung near the gallows that was erected for Mike Pence because I guess he's Judas in this version of the story, which makes this guy Pontius Pilate.

It's not a coincidence that every senator who objected to certifying the electoral vote in Arizona is an evangelical Christian. When Ted Cruz defended his vote to overturn a legitimate election, he said recent polling shows that thirty nine percent of Americans believe the election that just occurred was rigged. You may not agree with that assessment, but it is nevertheless a reality for nearly half the country. In other words, we have no proof the election was stolen and you may have verifiable evidence that it wasn't.

But that doesn't matter. It only matters that we believe it. And that's when you're at religion that you. That you have to respect something just because people believe it. Does that include professional wrestling?

The founding fathers were pretty adamant about building a nation based on reason instead of faith. Thomas Paine wrote a whole book about it, The Age of Reason. And it was a big hit. It was the white fragility of seventeen ninety four.

So respectfully, I direct you to your own t shirt.

Fuck your feelings. All right. Thank you very much. That's our show.

I want to thank my guests, Matt well, selling author and Jimmy Kimmel. They will see you next week. Thank you. Catch all new episodes of Real Time with Bill Maher every Friday night at 10:00 or watch him any time on HBO. On demand for more information, log on to HBO Dotcom.