Name: Joe Rogan Experience #2029 - Bill Maher
Uploaded: 2023-09-02T00:00:00.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #2029 - Bill Maher' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2023-09-02. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #2029 - Bill Maher' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2023-09-02. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #2029 - Bill Maher

Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out.
The Joe Rogan Experience.
Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.
Hello, Bill Maher.
Hi, Joe.
Good to see you.
Great to be in Austin.
What's happening?
Look at you.
You're all comfortable and shit?
I asked you before if I could put my, I don't know.
Of course.
We want this table as dirty as possible.
It's not like I'm messing it up.
Let's be honest.
I like it lived in.
I like it stained.
Yeah.
And ashes and all that jazz.
How you doing?
I'm good, man.
What's happening?
In town to, you know, do my thing.
Doing a show tonight at ACL, right?
Telling jokes to strangers, what we do.
Nice.
And, of course, when I got the invite, how can you turn down the king?
I know you hate being called the king, but you are, Joe, so bask in it a little.
Thank you very much.
Yeah.
It's always good to see you.
Yeah, you too.
How are you enjoying doing your podcast?
You know, I love it, especially since I've been thrown out of work by the
strike, you know,
so it's what I have left plus the touring.
But that, you know, touring is a couple of weekends a month.
Podcasting doesn't take that much time either.
I don't do it every day like you, but it's nice to have an outlet.
It's also nice to be able to talk to people in a non-political way.
I mean, my show is for, let's say, people who know things, my HBO show.
Right.
You know, you just can't really enjoy that show or watch it if you're clueless.
It's like I'm speaking in Chinese.
Right.
So, you know, and that's okay.
You know, that's a lot of the people in this country that would describe.
They just, they're not involved in politics or what goes on in the world or,
you know, don't
ask them what the ACLU is or NATO.
These things are just not on their radar.
And that certainly also describes a lot of celebrities.
You know, their intelligence is artistic intelligence generally, I would say.
You know, it's a different kind of intelligence.
It's not worse or better.
It's just different.
So to be able to talk to a lot of people on Club Random in a setting where I
can just be
high as a kite and constantly blowing pot smoke in their face, first of all, it's
just a joy.
It's a sign of the progress that this country has made.
To think that I used to sweat bullets going through every airport in this
country because
I had this much little pot that I was hiding under my balls.
Right.
That's really where I hid it.
Yeah.
So that if the dog sniffed it, you know, they'd be embarrassed, I hoped.
To look there.
And now I can freely smoke pot in a nationally aired program is kind of amazing.
So I'm enjoying the fuck out of it.
That's beautiful.
Yeah.
It's also nice to have like a completely open format so conversations can
really air out.
Right.
You know, when you don't have to worry about running out of time.
Right.
You also can kind of let them breathe a little because sometimes you really
want to let someone
talk for a long time to try to, before you try to interject and pick apart
their conversation,
their argument.
You really want to, I want to know what you're really thinking.
I don't want to be confused.
Again, that's kind of what you pioneered.
Yeah.
And we're grateful for it.
And, um, I, I do like that.
I also find it's interesting.
The setting makes a big difference as to what arouses the furies on the left.
If I said so many of the things that I've said on Club Random, on a podcast, on
real time, on HBO,
they would have had my head.
Yeah.
But somehow when I say it in the setting of the podcast, in my own home,
blowing the pot smoke,
somehow it's okay.
And I find that very interesting.
I think they look at you like a guy who they're worried about because you don't
toe the line.
They should be.
You're like a nineties liberal.
You're like liberals back when they were more reasonable before they became
leftists.
And now every liberal kind of has to be a leftist.
It's not, it's not, if you want to be on the team, you got to subscribe to the
most fringe ideas that the team is promoting.
And I get in trouble with that too.
It's just, it's such a, I mean, there's so many, like Joe List has talked about
that recently.
The comic Joe List, very funny guy.
He was talking about like, he's like, I'm a nineties liberal.
He goes, what?
I didn't change.
It's like everybody else kind of changed.
It just got real weird.
Like what you're allowed to disagree with and not to disagree with.
You know, it's strange.
I'm always trying to make the case that liberal is a different animal than woke.
Yeah.
Because it is.
And you can be woke with all the nonsense that that now implies.
But don't say that somehow it's an extension of liberalism.
Right.
Because it's most often actually an undoing of liberalism.
So you can have your points of view and your positions on these things, but don't
try to
piggyback on what I've always believed.
I have always believed as liberals do, for example, in a colorblind society,
that the goal
is to not see race at all anywhere for any reason.
Yes.
That's what liberals always believed all the way through Obama, going back
Kennedy, everybody,
Martin Luther King.
That's not what the woke believe.
They believe race is first and foremost the thing you should always see
everywhere, which
I find interesting because that used to be the position of the Ku Klux Klan,
that we see
race first and foremost everywhere.
Yeah.
So, again, you can have that position, but don't say that's a liberal position.
You're doing something very different.
I think the idea behind it, I think I understand their idea.
The idea is that the society is imbalanced.
And so in order to address that imbalance, you're going to prop up as many
minorities as possible,
make as many opportunities for minorities as possible, and get it to a position
where they're
all, like white people are minority, and so that's not a concern anymore, and
that through that
somehow or another, you'll achieve equality.
I think the way to achieve equality is your way.
I think the colorblind way is the way to really truly achieve equality and to
truly judge people
just on their merits, but also recognize that if we don't address the problems
in this country
as far as like how disenfranchised some people are and how horrible some
communities are that
people grow up in, and people find themselves stuck in with no recourse, no way
out, no role models,
no nothing, no financial opportunities, that's what our real problem is in this
country, more than it is race.
It's extreme poverty, extreme poverty and extreme crime, and that these things
don't get addressed
over and over and over again, and in fact, a lot of the policies that you see
coming from places like
San Francisco and Portland, they just exacerbate it.
You're just seeing stores closed because like, okay, you can't just steal, you
can't just have
everybody just walk in a Walmart and steal.
I was watching a video where they were showing a Walgreens, and they had
everything chained up,
chained.
Oh, yeah.
Chains.
Even minor little things.
Yeah, little things.
Like frozen food dinners.
Yeah, yeah, they had the frozen food section chained off.
No, again, that's not, liberalism was never shoplifting as progressive.
Right.
Yeah, and we weren't interested in legalizing shoplifting, or I guess we should
call it justice
shopping.
But, you know, in Minnesota, for example, I think it was Minneapolis, after the
George Floyd
murder and the riots, I think there was a movement to disband a lot of the
police, and they did.
I think a lot of the police were let go, or somehow the police force was a
lesser force
than it was.
And what happened was, of course, crime went up in certain areas, and a lot of
the officers
fired, or let go, or quit, or for whatever reason, they weren't on the force
anymore, they were
hired as private security.
By who?
The rich people.
Who could afford to do it.
Who could afford to do it.
So their neighborhood stayed safe.
So that wasn't exactly, I thought, a victory for liberalism.
No, it's the opposite.
Yeah.
It's unfortunate.
Austin defunded the police, and then refunded it.
And refunded it by far more than they defunded it, because they just course
corrected.
They went, "Okay, this is not working, we have to do something to fix it,"
which makes me
very happy, because I was really shocked that they wanted to do that.
Because there's a lot of crime.
And where my club is on 6th Street, that's a wild place.
6th Street gets wild, and there's a lot of crime there.
And there's a good police presence there.
And we have a lot of police at the club.
We hire off-duty cops to work the club, and a lot of security.
We want to make it as safe as possible.
But the streets in the city, like, you know, from pandemic on, it's just, it's
not good.
You know, it's sketchy.
And I'm glad they recognized it and did something.
Because so many places just aren't course-correcting.
Chicago.
Yeah.
I mean, not just the places where, I mean, murders have been happening way out
of control
in Chicago, among the African-American community for far too long, and not
really reported in
the same way, in the way that they should be.
It's amazing how black lives don't seem to matter when they're taken by black
lives.
Right.
But, I mean, now, Chicago, my friends who live there say it's not safe anywhere.
Yeah.
It's very sketchy.
Very sketchy.
And that's Chicago.
Yeah.
Chicago used to be great.
It used to be easy.
It used to be a great city.
I mean, it always had problems in some areas.
But, I mean, even, you know, even those areas.
I had a conversation once with a driver who was a former cop, and what he told
me is that
they arrested all the key drug players, and then there was a power struggle,
and things
got way worse.
And he's like, their idea was like, go in, arrest the big kingpins, and then we'll
clean
up the city.
It didn't work at all.
The opposite had an effect.
It was the opposite effect.
It was just...
There was way more crime.
He said it just got way more violent.
Well, I mean, I think a lot of the murders that happen are over nonsense.
Sure.
You know, somebody dissed you on social media or made fun of your sneakers or
some shit.
I mean, some of it is drug turf and that kind of stuff.
Yeah.
Um, but I think some of it is just bullshit.
And I don't understand why there isn't a more concerted effort to shine a
spotlight on that.
And where are the leaders of the community, the people who would have such cachet
among
those young African-American men, because that's who's killing each other,
young African-American
men to say, cut it out.
What the fuck are you doing killing each other?
If there was a concerted effort by people in the music industry, people in
sports who they
look up to, wouldn't that have an effect?
I don't know.
You know, at this point in time...
Worth a try?
Sure.
Worth something.
Something needs to be done.
I'm not the guy to figure out what needs to be done.
But something needs to be done that should have been done a long time ago.
I don't know what that answer is.
But no answer is not the answer.
And continuing the same policies that got in the same problems and just defunding
the police
officers and making things far worse and then not course correcting, that's not
the answer
either.
Right.
It's nice to talk about politics.
It's great.
I would hate to be one of those fucking people.
To be an actual politician and have to be responsible for all this shit and
also to come in now.
You know?
Yeah.
I mean, they are the easiest people to target because, of course, they have to
kowtow to what
the voters want.
And the voters are completely contradictory.
So I do have some sympathy for politicians.
Because if you ask the voters what they want, they will basically say they want
every sort
of goody that the government can provide on an Arizona tax base.
They want a Swedish social net on an Arizona tax base.
And that's just not possible.
And then the answer is always tax the rich, which is, well, that doesn't help
incompetent government