Overtime – Episode #690: Rikki Schlott, John McWhorter

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Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO Late Night series, Real Time with Bill Maher. Okay, here we are with an opinion writer for New York Times.
His newest book is called Pronouns Rebel, John McWhorter. And the New York Post columnist and author of The Cancelling of the American Mind, Ricky Strauss.
Okay. All right.
Look how good we must have done in the real show. All right.
Here are the questions from the people. What did the panel think of Democratic Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett calling Texas governor...
Okay, she's from Texas. The governor, Greg Abbott, who was paralyzed and uses a wheelchair.
She called him Governor Hot Wheels. I mean...
What do you think? Congressperson Crockett is part of the new trend where informality is okay, where formality used to reign. Okay, fine.
That's been going on since the 60s. So her routine is that she wants to bring a little bit of what I might quaintly call the ghetto catfight into these spaces.
I get it. You know, bring a blaxploitation movie or something into Congress.
Great. Work it.
But you do not make fun of the fact that somebody lives their life in a wheelchair. That doesn't work.
If she thinks that being black and fabulous gives her a pass on that, then she's got a really unfortunate sense of what black is. Well, what do you think, Ricky? I mean, I think this is just an example of when they go low, we go lower.
And the Democratic Party is going to lose if they try to use kind of MAGA world tactics back at them.

I think that if the Democrats want to succeed in the future,

they need to be the party that is normal, that are stand-up people,

that do not take the cheap shots back.

But I don't know. I'm not that upset about it.
I'm really not. You know why? Because I'm a big fan of Family Guy.
And they have... Am I wrong? Every week.
I mean, one of the characters, Joe the Cop, is in a wheelchair. And every week there's 20 jokes about him being in a wheelchair.
And nobody died. And, like, I just think everybody has to, like, lighten up a little.
Yeah, it's terrible to be in a wheelchair. But, you know, it's not like it's news to him.
And, you know, I don't know. I'm a free speecher.
I adore Family Guy. I've seen every episode.

But that wasn't a cartoon.

This is real life.

And she was saying it with dismissive hostility as opposed to the cartoonish,

we can get away with it because we're drawn.

Jasmine Crockett is not drawn.

And neither is Abbott. I see a distinction, although I see what you mean.
Yeah, okay, all right. The heads of NPR and PBS testified before Congress this week amid accusations of liberal bias.
Should the government continue to send taxpayer dollars to public broadcasters? Well, a little background here. I mean, they've been after them for...
The Republicans have wanted to get rid of PBS for as long as I can remember. This crowd will probably do it.
I mean, I also read my namesake, Catherine Marr, was head of NPR. And, you know, she said, we're completely unbiased.
Give me a break, lady. I mean, they're crazy far left.
So, I mean, I think we're past, my view, we're past the age, really, where the government, first of all, they don't, why do we need to subsidize? Why can't we have outlets like this? And we're so polarized. These outlets became popular at a time when Republicans and Democrats didn't hate each other and weren't at each other's throats and didn't think each other was an existential threat.

In that world, you can't have places like this, I think, anymore.

They have to be private.

Yeah.

I think Yuri Berliner, ex-NPR employer, his piece this week, where he said that they should just let go of the funding. I love NPR.
I listen to NPR almost every day, have since 1975, when my parents used to play it in our Chevrolet Caprice when I was like nine years old. I love it for its point of view, but since 2020, it has no longer been general.
I remember in 2021, my then nine-year-old asked me, and of course, she has no sense of context. I don't pump her full of things like this.
She said from the backseat, in a very different car, she said, Daddy, why is it that NPR is always playing the same thing? And I said, what do you mean the same thing? And I swear she said, now she doesn't have a vocabulary, but she said it's always about how somebody can't do something. And what she was getting at was that.
I wouldn't have said that about the NPR that I knew back in the day, and I wouldn't have said it 10 years ago, but that is what it is now. I will listen to it daily, but it's no longer a general audience venue.
They just give up national funding. Yeah.
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Okay. Ricky, why are more and more women giving up on marriage?

Really?

I swear to God, that's what it says.

Why is that directed to you?

Are you giving up on marriage?

No, you're not.

I mean, I think so.

I think there's a massive disconnect

between the genders in my

generation, and young men are going to the right,

young women are going to the left. It's hard to kind of meet in the middle, and there's a lot of hostility between the genders at the moment.
And so just, like, functionally, finding a mate is difficult for a lot of young people. And then you add in dating apps and Internet culture and incels and trad waves, and it's just a very confusing time.
So I think maybe there are some people who are just

dipping out. I'm not one of them.
I know a lot

of young women who are not

against marriage but are finding it very

difficult to find a mate and young men too.

Yeah. Well, there's

also the fact that they can't look each other in the

eye. Yeah.

That's true.

I am not upset about being in

the I am not upset about being in the older generation.

I'm really not.

The fact that I can look at a woman in the eye gives me a huge advantage.

I've come to enjoy no longer being young.

I like this age.

This is good. I like it.

I'm only 39.

Yeah.

I mean, there are things about it that suck.

Like, you know, you're older.

Those things.

Yeah.

But I wouldn't go back if I had to have my brain that I had when I was 30 there, making all those mistakes.

Hell no.

And I certainly wouldn't want to be in this era with, like you say, the incels and everything happens on the phone. Oh, no, no.
Yeah. No, no.
It was better back then in some ways. By the way, I was reading my news feed today, and like 20 stories down, this is the 20th story that's apparently important, Bill Gates.
Bill Gates says in 10 years like AI will probably do what doctors and teachers do. And then said, humans won't be needed for most things.
It's like the mean, I think there is something really concerning when you look at the Silicon Valley world and a lot of these unelected tech leaders, a lot of them are kind of antisocial. They're not particularly pro-human in any way.
And somehow these people are in control of this technology that's going to radically shape our future. And it's extremely disturbing to see them now kind of cozy with the White House, cozy with politicians in a way.
And I mean, I think a lot of young people are very nihilistic because it's impossible to even know what jobs are going to be realistic in the future. At first, they were saying truck drivers are going to be the first ones at risk.
And now it's like, no, actually, the knowledge economy people and the journalists are going to be the first ones. Yeah, Zuckerberg said, you know, the coding, a lot of that will be done very shortly by AI.
Okay, but that's a lot of people. And two seconds ago, they were telling everyone learn to code.
Right. Yeah.
You know, I don't... Teaching is hard.
And teaching well is hard. And there are always some people who are really devoted to it and are very good at it.
But it's hard. We never have enough of them.
We could never pay enough of them enough, frankly. I don't know if it would be such a terrible thing if AI could teach well,

and we didn't have to deal with the teacher shortage, the fact that it's so hard to do it,

the fact that ed schools are a mess, the fact that it's hard to agree on how to do it right.

It never seems to really get better how to teach. And the people who are really good at it often are

unique people where there's no way to build up to scale what it is that they're

uniquely gifted at doing. Teachers out there, I'm sorry to say this, but I think all of you know what I'm talking about.
I'm not sure if it would be such a bad thing if there were a dependable way for AI to impart information to every child. To be honest, that doesn't scare me.
What about the high school boys in Florida who are having sex with their hot teachers? What are they going to do?

All right, we got to go.

Thank you very much. high school boys in Florida who are having sex with their hot teachers.

What are they going to do?

Alright, we gotta go. Thank you very much everybody.

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