HBO’s Real Time With Bill Maher isn’t generally a regular stop on the promotional tours of musicians with albums coming out, and there’s a reason for that. The show doesn’t host musical performances, and musicians can get a bit swallowed up when they’re thrown onto a panel full of experienced pundits. That happened, sort of, to Nas, one of our smartest rappers, on this past weekend’s episode of the show. Nas didn’t exactly look comfortable on the show, but we did get to hear him use the term “gang-signologist.” He did better in a one-on-one interview with Maher about the coming 20th anniversary of his album Illmatic, in which Bill Maher called him out for naming a song “Black Republican.” Watch that below.

Watch more of Nas’s appearance on the show at Rap Radar.