Call it an occupational hazard of hosting a political talk show: sometimes the careers of your past guests will veer in unexpected directions. That was one of the themes of an episode of Real Time With Bill Maher that debuted earlier this month, and it cropped up again on Friday night.
The context? In his opening monologue, Maher addressed U.N. Week: “There’s something stirring about 133 different nations all coming together — different governments, different economies, different goals — and they all have one thing in common: they’ve all bribed Eric Adams,” he said.
It wasn’t his only observation on the New York City mayor. “I’m amazed — not that politicians can be bribed, but that they can be bribed so cheaply,” Maher said.
The evening’s first guest, author Fran Lebowitz, mentioned that she hadn’t voted for Adams. “I did not want to be one-millionth responsible for Eric Adams,” she said.
Later in their conversation, Maher and Lebowitz disagreed on whether the charges brought against Adams were too harsh. Maher pointed out that this was more severe than some politicians have gotten for being complicit in “trying to overthrow the government,” a sentiment with which Lebowitz agreed.
Lebowitz wasn’t done with criticizing Adams – in this case, for the controversy about where he lived that came up during the last mayoral election.“You’re a public servant,” she said. “What do you mean, your ‘primary residence’? Who are you, Barry Diller?”
The two shifted gears from there to bring up the charges facing Sean Combs. This prompted Maher to bring up #MeToo and the music industry — specifically, why there hadn’t been as much of a reckoning there as in other industries. “I think it’s because this is a capitalist country, and the music industry is much more lucrative than NPR,” Lebowitz said.
The U.N. came up again when Maher was joined by Eurasia Group founder Ian Bremmer and Nexus author Yuval Noah Harari for the evening’s pane;. Maher brought up President Biden’s warnings about AI made in a speech to the U.N. this week.
“The big problem of humanity, especially with AI we tend to solve problems and then figure out we solved the wrong problem,” Harari said. Maher asked, essentially, what is the problem, then? Harari argued that AI is “not a tool, it’s an agent” — which means that it will need to be handled differently than past technological breakthroughs.
Bremmer brought up the idea of there being “two types of governance,” and argued convincingly that the U.S. and China need to discuss “AI arms control agreements,” and soon.
Harari then made an impassioned defense of the importance of editors, and expressed his frustration that algorithms had become so prominent in that line of work.
There were interesting panel dynamics this time out, with Harari and Bremmer standing up for the U.N. and Maher calling it a “joke” (though he did clarify that he doesn’t think it should cease to exist). Both guests made a convincing argument about the importance of institutions — and, in Harari’s case, the fact that institutions take a long time to build. All told, it made for an episode that was both wide-ranging and unexpectedly focused.
Past Guests Loomed Over This Week’s “Real Time With Bill Maher”
With the election two months away, there was plenty to discussSome other notable moments from the episode:
- Maher on Trump’s rhetoric around women: “Are you a dictator or a deodorant?”
- Lebowitz on the Supreme Court: “It’s an insult to Motown to call it the Supreme Court.”
- Lebowitz alluded to her experience with “writer’s blockade,” because it’s lasted for 45 years.
- Maher on autumn in California: “When our leaves turn brilliant orange, it’s because they’re on fire.”
- Going to take exception to Maher’s comparison of slavery in 1776 to “flying private today,” given that there were in fact abolitionists in 1776.
- Real Time is off next week and will return on October 11.
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