Bill Maher

Bill Maher opens by describing the podcast as one of the few outlets he has left after the strike put him out of work. Touring takes a couple of weekends a month and podcasting does not take much time. He sets Club Random against his HBO show, which he says only works for an informed audience. To a viewer who doesn't know what the ACLU or NATO is, he says, "it's like I'm speaking in Chinese."

my show is for let's say people who know things

Maher says many celebrities aren't politically engaged. He calls their intelligence "Artistic intelligence", which he describes as different, "not worse or better." He also treats being able to smoke pot on a nationally aired program as a sign of the country's progress, and contrasts it with the years when he hid a small amount of pot while going through airports.

Both men like the open format because conversations aren't cut short and a guest can lay out an argument before being challenged. Maher credits Rogan with pioneering this. He also observes that the setting changes how his views are received. He says statements he has made on Club Random would have drawn far harsher reactions on Real Time, but in a relaxed home setting they somehow pass.

the setting makes a big difference as to what arouses the furies on the left

Rogan calls Maher a "90s liberal" and argues that being on the team now means signing up to its most fringe ideas. He cites the comic Joe List, who has said he didn't change and that everybody else did. Maher's main argument is that wokeness should not be presented as an extension of liberalism.

liberal is a different animal than woke

Maher's test case is race. He says liberals, from Kennedy and Martin Luther King through Obama, held up a colorblind society as the goal, meaning not seeing race anywhere for any reason. He says the woke see race first and foremost, everywhere, and he points out that this used to be the Ku Klux Klan's position. In his view, wokeness is "most often actually an undoing of liberalism."

Rogan offers what he takes to be the reasoning on the other side. Society is imbalanced, so opportunities for minorities should be expanded until equality follows. He still sides with Maher that the colorblind approach is the real route to equality and to judging people on merit. He then shifts the emphasis. He argues the country's real problem, more than race, is extreme poverty and extreme crime in communities where people have "no Role Models" and no financial opportunities, and these problems go unaddressed over and over.

Rogan argues that policies in places like San Francisco and Portland have made these problems worse, and points to stores closing. As an example he describes a video of a Walgreens with goods chained up, including the frozen food section. Maher replies that liberalism never held that shoplifting is progressive, and jokes that it should be called "justice shopping."

Maher gives an example, with explicit uncertainty ("I think it was Minneapolis"). He says that after the George Floyd murder and the riots, the police force shrank, crime went up in certain areas, and some former officers were hired as private security by rich residents who could afford it. That kept their neighborhoods safe. He calls the outcome the opposite of a victory for liberalism.

Rogan contrasts this with Austin, which he says defunded the police and then refunded it "by far more than they defunded it." He speaks from his own experience. His club is on Sixth Street, which he describes as a wild place with a lot of crime, and the club hires off-duty cops and security. He says the city's streets have been "sketchy" since the pandemic.

Both men describe Chicago as a place that has not course corrected. Maher says murders in the African-American community have been out of control for too long without proper coverage, and that friends who live there say it's not safe anywhere. Rogan passes along a secondhand account from a driver who was a former cop. In that account, arresting the key drug kingpins set off a power struggle, and the city became more violent.

Maher thinks some killings are about drug turf, but many are "over nonsense," such as disrespect on social media. He asks why community leaders and figures in music and sports, whom young African-American men look up to, don't make a concerted effort to tell them to stop. He hedges his own proposal ("I don't know you know at this point worth a try") and says he is "not the guy to figure out what needs to be done." Rogan agrees the answer is unclear. He insists that continuing failed policies is not the answer either.

no answer is not the answer

Maher says he has some sympathy for politicians because they have to answer to voters whose demands contradict each other. He also rejects "tax the rich" as a complete answer, arguing that more money does not fix incompetent government.

they want a Swedish social net yeah on an Arizona tax base and that's just not possible

Maher suggests taxes were why Rogan moved to Austin. Rogan says no. He moved because the city he lived in was locking down, it didn't seem safe, and he disagreed with the policy.