Bill Maher had Elon Musk on his show last night and it was pretty much a love fest for the full 20 minutes. But Maher explained one of the reasons he was so fond of Musk. “I love it that you have a sense of humor because a guy as important as you who makes changes could use your powers for evil and not good,” he said. He added, “As opposed to somebody like Zuckerberg who I’m not even sure is a real boy.”

The love fest was mutual with Musk saying he’d been a long time fan of Maher’s show and that he’d even been in the audience once. Maher seemed really pleased by this.

One of the first topics they talked about was the “woke mind virus.” Wokeness is something that Maher has been talking about for quite a while now. So he introduced this question by giving Musk a chance to define it. What is the woke mind virus?

Musk replied, “I think we need to be very cautious about anything that is anti-meritocratic and anything that is—that results in the suppression of free speech.” He continued, “Those are two of the aspects of the woke mind virus that I think are very dangerous.”

He added another element which is that you can’t question anything because the woke explicitly see questioning of their received wisdom as evidence of racism.

From there the conversation focused on free speech for several minutes with Musk noting that this had once been a left-wing value but that now there were people (on the left) who wanted to suppress speech. Musk also noted that the First Amendment was not universal and needed to be protected.

Maher jumped in by agreeing and pointing to England as a place where speech laws are not nearly as open as they are here in the US. Musk said with a grin that he wasn’t going to single out any particular countries to which Maher replied “England, why are we protecting them?” It seemed obvious that Musk would like to be able to sell some cars there and insulting the country’s free speech laws on television would not be a good way to do that.

The segment wrapped up with Musk saying that those who would advocate censorship should remember “at some point, that will be turned on you.”

Maher asked where all of the wokeness had come from. Musk suggested that it had been brewing for a while and said that “the amount of indoctrination at colleges and universities is, I think, far beyond what parents realize.”

Maher asked if parents weren’t part of the problem and Musk said that might be true in some cases but returned to the idea that many parents weren’t aware of what their kids were being taught. He offered an example, something a friend had told him about his daughters experience in school in the Bay Area. The father was asking his girls about the first presidents of the United States. The girls brought up George Washington and the father asked what they knew about Washington. “Well, he was a slave owner,” they replied. Asked what else they knew about him, they drew a blank.

“That is the woke mind virus, exactly,” Maher replied.

There’s more to the conversation, including a discussion of Twitter and why Maher doesn’t tweet anymore. Here’s the full interview which is about 20 minutes long.