Bill Maher Discussed Los Angeles and Elon Musk on "Real Time"

“99% of us just want to know: is it safe to pick someone up at the airport?” That was one of several times in his opening monologue when Bill Maher reflected on the current situation in Los Angeles. One takeaway from the monologue was that things were far less bleak than they seemed; on the other hand, Maher rarely misses an opportunity to make a quip, which he did towards the end of said monologue.

“You know things are tense in L.A. when you read news about the Middle East to relax,” he said — and shortly thereafter introduced his first guest, Senator John Fetterman, for a discussion on foreign and domestic policy.

Maher and Fetterman are both outspokenly heterodox Democrats with several strongly-held beliefs in common. It was a largely friendly conversation, with Maher giving Fetterman plenty of space to defend himself and respond to, among other things, a recent New York article critical of his recent behavior. Maher made the implicit kinship between the two men more clear with an allusion to his dinner with the president earlier this year. “You talk to Trump,” Maher said. “We all know that’s bad.” The roll of his eyes that followed was almost audible.

Their rapport was also relatively light in tone, despite the gravity of some of the matters discussed. At one point, Fetterman declared, “Parts of my party want to try to turn me into Colonel Kurtz.” Maher responded with the obvious: “You look like you could play the part.” (There was also a Chinatown reference later in the episode, for anyone who likes their talk shows with multiple references to great films from the 1970s.)

The one place where Maher seemed to push Fetterman came when Maher asked about former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s recent statements about the need to end the war in Gaza. Had that changed Fetterman’s thinking on the subject, Maher wondered? Fetterman’s response, however, didn’t allude to Olmert’s comments at all. It was an interesting line of questioning, but the response felt far less specific.

That said, for all of Fetterman’s talk about holding true to some of his beliefs, whether or not they’re popular with his party’s base, one line of his that was far more in line with his party’s overall beliefs got the loudest cheers of the night. “The Big Beautiful Bill? I’m going to vote that down,” Fetterman said.

For the panel discussion, Eurasia Group president Ian Bremmer and Moral Ambition author Rutger Bregman took to the stage. The former is a regular Real Time guest; the latter was making his first appearance on the show. Bregman was pretty charming, alluding to his Dutch background several times. “You call this mass protest?” he said early on. “This is nothing.”

Maher got more specific about the political ramifications of what’s happening in California, including asking his guests if this was Gavin Newsom’s moment. Maher brought up his earlier support for the governor. Bregman’s analysis of the situation was bleak. “The one thing that relieves me is that it’s all so incompetent” he said of the Trump administrationś recent actions. “If Viktor Orbán would be in charge right now, I would be much more worried, because that guy is generally smart.”

Bremmer threw cold water on the idea that Newsom could use this moment as a way of winning higher office. He pointed out that the Harris/Walz campaign hadn’t turned “protecting democracy” into a winning issue in 2024, and that Newsome wasn’t likely to do much better.

Conversation eventually turned to AI, with Bregman proposing a universal basic income as a bulwark against its effect on the job market; he also cited John Maynard Keynes. Bremmer pointed out that “learn to code” has gone from good career advice to its exact opposite in five years’ time. And Bregman struck a note of relative optimism, saying, “I think we shouldn’t underestimate capitalism’s ability to come up with new bullshit jobs.” (Of this, Maher was unsure: “Oiling the robots?”)

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At episode’s end, Maher reflected on Elon Musk’s call for a new political party representing the political middle. “If the recent past is any indication, Elon is, like, the worst guy to do it,” he said, and launched into a lengthy critique of Musk’s ownership of Twitter and time at DOGE.

“You just switched it from a place conservatives felt supremely unwelcome to the reverse,” Maher said of the former. “That’s not what it looks like to appeal to 80%.” It was a highly focused argument, and while Maher seems more optimistic about the better angels of Musk’s nature winning out, it was also a mostly compelling one.

Other notable moments from this week’s episode:

This is almost entirely coincidental, but that’s two weeks in a row now where Maher’s first guest was the recent subject of a not-entirely-flattering New York article.
Maher on definitions: “We don’t even know what these terms mean. Woke, progressive — everyone has a different definition in their head.”
Maher on Donald Trump: “He does listen to a lot of people. What sticks, I don’t know.”
The next Real Time episode will be the show’s 700th.