At 67, Bill Maher is reaching new comedy highs. Does he have marijuana to thank for that?

Bill Maher’s publicist alerted us, ahead of time, that the comedian, HBO show host and podcaster would have 15 minutes on Monday for a phone interview to promote his stand-up show in Charlotte next month.

So after the clock pushed past 15, then 20, we had to ask him: Do you have a few more minutes, Bill, or do you have to run?

“No, I got nothing to do, bro,” Maher said, the unapologetic admission touching off a chuckling fit that quickly unfurls into a bit of a belly laugh. “I’m, like, using you to vent all my s---. I’m gonna be keeping you on the phone. You’re gonna be like, ‘Christ, I can’t get rid of this guy!’”

Truth be told, the schedule he mapped out for himself earlier this year originally had included a July-long vacation from “Real Time with Bill Maher,” the HBO talk show he’s hosted for going on two decades. But in this case, his wisecracks about having plenty of time to chat with a random reporter are a nod to the fact that the Hollywood writers’ strike — now more than 10 weeks old — prompted “Real Time” to go on an unplanned hiatus for all of May and June.

So other than prepping for a comedy tour that will bring him to Ovens Auditorium on Saturday, Aug. 19, the only thing currently keeping Maher busy is his “Club Random” podcast. And as he’ll explain, the 67-year-old host does as little work on that show as he can get away with (and also pretty much always does the podcast while high).

In an interview that wound up stretching past the half-hour mark, Maher talked extensively by phone from Los Angeles about his podcast — which, as of a month ago, had generated 105 million views on YouTube since its launch in March 2022; about his relationship with marijuana, which is well-known but also perhaps a bit misunderstood; and more broadly about reaching new, ahem, highs as an entertainer in his late 60s.

The conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and brevity.

Q. What’s your stance on the writers’ strike in Hollywood? Do you take a particular side? (Editor’s note: The Writers Guild of America, which represents more than 10,000 screenwriters, has been striking over issues with pay levels for its members since May 2.)

I am torn. Because I treasure my writers. And I am one of them. And I get that they have legitimate gripes. But if you just watch TV — at least out here on the local news — it looks like they’re, you know, Che Guevara out there. They’re not lettuce-pickers, OK? There’s a lot of millionaires out there with picket signs. It’s a complicated situation, and unfortunately this country doesn’t really do complicated anymore. They just do, “If you’re with the strikers, you’re a good person. And if you’re not completely with them, then you’re Trump.” That’s just not reality. There’s a lot of people who are being hurt by this strike, who don’t make nearly the money that the writers do. My staff needs to work. People are losing their houses. The restaurant near the studio that no one is going to anymore — how do you think they’re doing?

I just know that at some point we’ve got to get back to work. And they haven’t even met yet. I mean, could we just meet?

Q. And are you genuinely missing doing the show?

Terribly!

Q. I guess the reason I ask is because — you’re not gonna remember that we talked in 2020, but — when we talked in 2020, at the time, you were moving your act away from being heavily politics and injecting a lot more personal stuff into it. And now you’ve got this podcast, where you sort of try intentionally to stay away from politics, and you’re talking to entertainers.

First of all, there’s still plenty of politics in my stand-up act. But I do remember that conversation, and you’re right. We did talk about that — that I enjoy now being more personal in my act. And I think the audience does, too. But (I started) the podcast specifically for that reason. By the way, sometimes the podcast bleeds into politics, too. I never know where it’s gonna go. I have no agenda, I have no preparation, and I’m stoned out of my mind. If politics come up, it comes up. But it’s much more like just having dinner or drinks with a friend and, you know, sometimes you talk about s--- like that, sometimes you don’t.

But my show — the HBO show — that is a political show. That is about the news. I do miss covering that. And people come up to me all the time and say they miss it, too. Because there aren’t a lot of things on television where you hear, basically, an honest brokering of what’s going on in the news. I don’t ever try to have a “team.” I try to just react to everything as I honestly feel it, and I try to have guests on who are not just repeating the talking points of one side or the other.

Q. Where I was going with that was I wondered, you know, Is he maybe getting just a little bit sick of politics, and this is why he’s doing some of this other stuff?

I was never sick of politics. I just thought that there was this entire other side that was worthy of (exploring). Because I’d be out to dinner with people, or with friends, and they would say, “You know, this whole dinner we talked about everything but politics. You should do a podcast, because you have other things to say.” And finally I just said, “Oh, you know what? You’re right.”

Q. Is the podcast more fun than the HBO show?

Well, that’s a little like asking, “What’s your favorite child?” ... I mean, it is just so different. One is all about preparation and trying to nail down — over the course of an entire week’s work — exactly what I want to present to the audience. I’m presenting on Friday night what I think people who are interested in the news — but don’t have time to follow it that closely — need to hear as a week-end catch-up to the week’s events. The other one is just me getting high with a friend. And it can just go anywhere, and it does go anywhere. But it depends on the guest. I mean, we had Robert Kennedy on a few weeks ago. Obviously, he’s running for president, there’s gonna be a lot of politics in there. But then Ice Cube was on last week, and I don’t know if we got into (politics). We talked about the police. Is that politics? I don’t know. And I don’t care. It’s just life.

Q. So you get high during the podcast. But you don’t get high before the HBO show, right? Or do you?

Oh, no. That (chuckling) would be a disaster.

Q. Do you smoke pot before a stand-up show?

(Laughing.) Yes. Not right before.

I did a bit in my last special about (the fact) that there are two times in my life that I had a bad experience with pot. Even me, who loves pot as much as I do. One was when I ate it with this stuff that they used to sell in the health-food store called Ephedra, which was basically speed. It was legal; it was natural. But that was a disaster. And the other time — I don’t know what happened that night, but for whatever reason, there was one night in my entire time doing this, which is going back decades, when yes ... I got out there and I knew, Oh, f---, I am just too high to do this show. But I knew that if I just kind of hung with it for the first 20 minutes, the high would recede and I’d be fine. ...

But other than (those two times, I haven’t had bad experiences). Pot works differently on different people. Some people it makes go to sleep. Some people it makes paranoid. I’m one of those lucky people who, it makes me better. It makes me more creative. My mind works faster.

I mean, people think I’m a huge pothead like Snoop Dogg, or Willie Nelson — (that) I’m smoking pot all day. I don’t even smoke pot every day. I save pot for when I really want to be at my best.

Q. So you think it makes the podcast better. Right?

Well (laughing), I hope so. I mean, I can’t imagine doing it without it. I said to myself when we started this: If I’m gonna do a podcast, of which there are 20 billion of them, I’m going to have to make it different. So I invested a lot of money in where we do it, building the cameras into the walls. I had a reality TV crew do this. Cost me a fortune. But I said, ‘All the other podcasts, they don’t look appealing to me. They’re bright. They’re glaring. They’re daytime. There’s a big, giant microphone in your face. There’s an engineer, or some other dude in the room who’s usually on a computer or something.’ So it’s very formal. I said, ‘There’s none that I’ve ever seen or heard that have a kind of a nighttime feel. That’s what I’m going to do.’ And I’m gonna have nobody else in the room. You’re not even aware of the cameras.

There’s (been) at least half a dozen guests who have said to me at some point during the podcast, “When are we starting?” And I’m like, “We started a half hour ago. This is it. This is the show.” And I feel like we have been successful in the combination of that: There’s nobody else in the room; the lights are low; it looks like a club; it doesn’t look like a podcast studio; there’s no mike in your face; and we’re getting high. I feel like that combination has allowed people to open up and be real in a way I don’t see anywhere else. I don’t know if I could quite pull that off if I wasn’t high. Because it is sort of my natural way to be, when I’m in that setting of just hanging out at home in the evening with a friend.

Q. You mentioned that you do no preparation for the podcast. So how much time in a week do you spend working on it? Are you doing a lot of work on the back end?

Nothing. That was my deal with the producers when we started. ...

I’m doing this podcast — when there isn’t a strike — during the week when I’m working on the HBO show. And I promised HBO — because I needed their permission to do this — I said, “This will not take one second away from my normal workweek.” Because I work a lot of hours on the HBO show. I said, “I’m just gonna walk over there” — (the podcast studio is) right on my property — “I’m gonna walk over there at 5 o’clock on a Wednesday, and I’m gonna be there for two hours, we’re gonna tape two different people in one day, like an hour each.” Sometimes they go over. Sometimes it’s three hours. Whatever it is. But I barely know who the guest is. I don’t want to know. ... So no. I do not want to be involved. I don’t have time.

I guess I have time now. I have time to do anything now. But normally I don’t.

Q. What’s interesting is that you’re at sort of quote-unquote retirement age for normal people who aren’t in the entertainment industry, and you’re adding to your workload. Maybe it doesn’t feel like work at all to you. But I wondered why you would want to take on more at this stage in your career.

Well, first of all, America has a terrible problem with ageism. They think you’re somehow decrepit when you hit 65, or that you need to slow down. But if you take care of yourself, if you eat right, if you stop drinking, if you’re not overweight, full of alcohol and sugar — there’s no reason why (you would need to). Now at some point, obviously, I will. And maybe the pot will catch up to me and I’ll have dementia or something. But until that comes, why should I slow down? I worked all these years to build up to this point.

In my profession — comedy and news analysis — I can actually be better than I used to be. It’s one of the nice compensations for a kind of career where you never really have that sort of rocket-ship trajectory that, say, a music star has. If you’re a music star, you’re very often peaking when you’re 22. ... Comedy is usually more of a slow evolution. Unlike the music stars, who are generally not peaking in their 60s, you can be doing better than ever in (comedy) at this age. So why would I give it up?

Q. You definitely seem to be peaking. I read recently that “Club Random” is now one of the most popular podcasts in the world.

It’s doing way better than anybody ever thought it would, and we are in the process of trying to expand it. We would like to have a number of other podcasts under the umbrella of “Club Random.” ... And look, the other thing about it that I think is really important, for me, is that there was another dimension to me. People had this impression of me, after all these years on television, that I really was just this guy who talked politics — and if you weren’t talking politics to him, you couldn’t really talk to him.

So many celebrities who we’ve had on the podcast would never do “Real Time.” Because you’d call them up and ask them to do it and their publicist would say, “Oh, no, no, he’s not political.” “Oh, no, no, they’re gonna look stupid.” I mean, I can count on two hands the number of celebrities who actually feel comfortable doing “Real Time.” Ben Affleck does. Alec Baldwin. Kerry Washington. John Legend. A few others. But not many. It’s just not something that celebrities feel good doing. Feel comfortable doing. But anybody can do the podcast.

Q. Are you as truly fascinated by — and interested in — celebrities and entertainers as you are by politics?

Uhh, I am when I’m high. (Laughing.) When I’m high and having a drink in my little “Club Random,” I can talk to anybody. It’s my little superpower. I can talk to anybody of any stripe for an hour or two, and have a good time, and we’re laughing — and it’ll go back and forth between laughing and then maybe we’ll get serious about something, and we’ll find out about each other. That’s a fun thing for me to do for an hour: to get high with somebody I don’t really know — or maybe it’s somebody I’ve known for years but never really got deep with them.

I mean, we just had Jon Hamm on. I’ve known Jon for years. But not like that. I never really, really knew him. We got so much closer in that 90 minutes, or whatever it was, than we did in the whole 15 years before that — when we knew each other, but didn’t know each other that well. There’s just something about sitting down with somebody, and sharing a joint — although I don’t think he smoked a joint, but — and just choppin’ it up.

Q. Will any of the stories from any of these interviews end up in your act?

I don’t remember anything that goes on in these interviews. Because they’re not interviews. They’re just conversations. It’s funny because the producers will say to me, like, two weeks after we did it, “Oh, that thing with Ice Cube the other day” — and I’m like, “What?” (Chuckling.) Because it’s just “of the moment,” which is what makes it good. I’m living in the moment, and — you know, marijuana, I’ll be the first to admit (chuckling): not the greatest thing for your memory.

Bill Maher will perform at 8 p.m. Saturday, Aug. 19, at Ovens Auditorium in Charlotte. He also has a show the following night at Township Auditorium in Columbia, South Carolina.