Overtime – Episode #702: Dr. Phil & Stephen A. Smith

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Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO late night series, Real Time with Bill Maher.

All right, he is the founder of Envoy Media and podcast host, Dr.

Phil.

And he's the host of ESBN's first take, Stephen A.

Smith, and the next president of the United States.

So I'm telling you, it's going to all start up again on Monday.

You're going to see.

It is what it is.

It is what it is, and we will see.

Okay.

Trump says he probably

won't run in in 2028.

It's patently illegal.

But he probably, can we take him at his word?

No.

I mean,

I actually don't think he's going to run.

I've been saying this, and I see Andrew Sullivan wrote it about it today.

He's going to do what Putin did with Medvedev.

Medvedev was his, whatever, prime minister.

They switched jobs, and he was really...

the president,

while Putin pretended he wasn't.

And that's what Trump is going to do.

And Trump can control this country the way he does now through social media.

If President Vance or President Rubio doesn't do something he likes, all he has to do is get on Truth Social and tear him a new asshole, and the policy will change.

I don't think it's, listen.

He can do that, he can choose to do it that way, but the fact is his popularity is so exponentially higher than everybody else within the Republican Party that the level of control, like you said, he can sit up there and step away, but he wants to maintain control over the party.

He wants to make sure that there are people out there doing his bidding, that of his family, that of his interest, whatever that may be.

And there is nobody within the GOP that can stop him.

No.

Who is it?

Is it going to be Marco Rubio?

No.

Is it going to be J.D.

Vance?

No.

No, no.

Is it going to be Lindsey Graham?

No.

Nobody's going to stop him.

They're going to capitulate and go right along because he knows how to feed the beast himself.

He's about quid pro-crow.

So he's one of those guys that

if you do for him, he'll make sure to try to take care of of you as well.

They know that, which is why they capitulate to his every whim.

Could be a family member.

That's right.

I just brought up Don Jr.

Yeah, he could be a family member.

Nah.

I didn't think he trusts his own kid.

I don't.

That's the way fathers like that are.

They just are.

Probably.

Dr.

Phil, what do you think of more people turning to AI for therapy instead of seeking out licensed professionals?

I think it's really dangerous, but I think, look, less than half of the counties in the United States even have a psychiatric nurse or some kind of

resource.

And

for some

elementary sort of things

and giving people fundamental advice for anxiety or depression,

it can probably

do some good.

There could probably be some value in it.

But it is really

a dangerous thing.

And I've argued with it.

You were saying it always tells you what you want to hear, but I asked a question the other day.

I said, tell me what you know about trigger warnings, which are complete bullshit.

And it gave me all of this left-leaning stuff about trigger warnings, about how they help with this and help with that.

And I said, well, I argued with it.

I said, wait a minute.

How can you completely leave out all of the empirical data that says they don't work, they create anxiety themselves, that you should instead do things like systematic desensitization, immersion therapy, things of that nature.

And it came back and said, oh, you're right, I'm sorry.

Here's that research, here's that data, and it gave me all of that.

So it will give you biased answers.

It will give you what it thinks you want to hear.

And there have been lawyers that relied on it to brief a case and it totally made up cases and they got fined by the court and

referred for malpractice to the bar because they relied on AI and it totally fabricated stuff.

So we can't completely rely on this at this point.

It may find the needle in the haystack, but you've got to check the needle it finds.

It can save you the hunt, but you've got to check it.

We're not there yet.

Here's the thing for me that scares the living hell out of me.

So if you're talking to a phone, you're talking to chat GPT, whatever it is, or whatever AI component you want to think of, and you're talking to that stuff, and that's what you're relying upon.

It's less human interaction.

As a human being, it sort of isolates you.

It serves to isolate you a little bit more.

And those are usually the crazy ass people that we end up seeing in this world.

People that were home alone, detached from society and its norms, et cetera, et cetera, creating their own kind of normal, and it's usually working to the detriment of our society.

That kind of stuff just scares me.

It's fucked up.

The whole thing is fucked up.

You're both being too gentle on it.

I read today, Google's AI

has a depression problem.

I'm not kidding.

How do you read that?

It says, I'm a failure.

It gets down on itself.

Also, people, this is really bad.

People turn to AI now to the chatbot for an opinion.

Somebody the other day asked it, what's Bill Maher's best best stand-up special?

It picked wrong.

Don't go to it for an opinion.

And I know why it did.

It picked us because it's programmed by left-wingers.

That's the truth.

Most of it is.

It picked the one from 2005.

This is before the left had gone off the deep end.

This is George Bush was president.

Obama was about to run.

There was nothing very much to make fun of on the left.

They hadn't gone crazy yet.

Woke hadn't happened yet.

All that excess stuff, all the Gen Z crazy stuff, none of that.

So most of my criticism was against the Republicans.

Most of it still is, by the way.

They wouldn't portray you that way, which is ridiculous.

Okay.

But also, it was 2005.

We were 10 years away from gay marriage.

The end of that special was all about championing that we need gay marriage.

The chatbot was like, oh, this is the great stuff.

It's not my best special.

That would be the last one and the one before that, and the one before that.

They get better every time.

It wasn't 2000.

So it's very dangerous, I think, to ever think that this thing has an opinion that you should go by.

I also think it's dangerous to the left because of what you just said.

Yeah.

Because it's created by them and it's the kind of thing people like yourself and others may notice.

And as a result, we see the level of manipulation that has kicked in and it makes us, it gets us very alarmed because you can't point to the right and say they're doing this, they're engaging in manipulation and what have you when you're doing it yourself.

You come across as a claim manipulator.

Whoever programmed it, I mean, Elon, the one on X, it thinks Hitler's a good guy.

It recommends his way of doing that.

And the problem is it can't read the room.

If it's talking to somebody that is giving signals,

and there are signals that indicate somebody is

short-term.

There's short-term thinking to someone that's suicidal.

There are signs, there are cues.

It can't pick those things up, and it will miss those red flags that somebody that was even remotely competent would see and start referring them to help, start getting them to call 911 or do things they need to do.

It doesn't pick those things up.

It sails right past.

So there's danger, not only with what it says, but what it doesn't say, what it doesn't hear, what it doesn't see, and that's a danger.

We're pro-human.

All right, Dr.

Phil,

Texas will now require that public school classrooms display the Ten Commandments.

Is that a violation of the separation of church and state?

Well, I mean,

do we even have to ask?

I mean, what do you think about that?

Well, look,

I think having something available for kids to see is one thing.

Pounding it...

Down their throats is another thing.

But it's a terrible list.

It's a stupid list.

Well,

it's not the ten worst things you could ever do.

It's a bullshit list.

But it's not a competition.

It's not a competition

about

the ten worst things you could do.

If you have a problem with any of the ten?

Yeah, they're stupid.

The first four are all about God's ego.

You know, don't pray to other gods.

Don't have a statue of another god.

Rape is not on the list.

Child molestation is not on the list.

Slavery is not on the list.

But coveting thy neighbor's ass is on the list.

It's a dumb list.

There's only two things on it that are laws.

Don't steal and don't kill.

We couldn't have figured that out without the Bible.

It's a dumb list.

But it's good to have it in there.

I mean,

it's not a bad thing to say, thou shalt not kill.

Thou shalt not steal.

But if a kid is seven years old and very impressionable, and this is the list of the ten worst things you can do, and you've buried those two amid this other bullshit and left out rape and all these incest and slavery and all these other things, that is not a smart thing to do for an impressionable child who's trying to learn what is worse.

You say all this other bullshit, that's maybe other bullshit to you, but if you have somebody that's worshiping their phone and worshiping all of these things that people have generated, and that is happening with young people.

We have the highest depression and anxiety among our young people since records have started being kept.

And you think it's...

That's a long way around to defend what you're talking about.

We went all the way to cell phones

to say the Ten Commandments in the classroom.

That one has said,

worship no other God.

There are people that are worshiping phones.

They are worshiping other things.

That's a long way around.

Absolutely true.

But I don't know what it has to do with this.

Okay.

That's not really on the same.

Okay.

A crypto group has taken credit for the wave of dildo.

Oh, yes.

Dildo throwing at WNBA games.

They're throwing green sex toys on the court.

Is this just edgy marketing or

does it reflect a sexist attitude towards women sports?

What is the point of it?

Combination of both.

Is your problem that they're green or that they're just throwing green?

Well,

I don't think you should

know it.

Why are we.

No,

I saw it on the news.

I didn't understand what the point of it was.

Like,

if this is your great burn, your sick burn, I don't even get it.

Is it saying we don't respect women's sports?

Is it.

They're heckling them, no question.

Why?

You bring up the dildo stuff.

You know, there's a lot of, you know, there's a belief by some folks out there that a variety of members of the WNBA are members of the LGBTQ community.

And so when you throw that stuff out there, you're sort of

maligning them and chiding them in that regard, basically alluding to what you think they should need.

And all of this.

I've heard people say this kind of stuff.

Don't look at me like I think it, because I don't.

I'm just telling you, these are the kind of things that people have text and, you know,

do comments out there.

But you got some sick-ass people out there.

So many sick ass people out there.

They invent ways to echo and malign folks.

It just shows some people's definition of happiness is bringing you and lowering you to the level of misery that they live in every day.

That's why they are who they are.

Right.

And they're usually hiding.

Yeah, so true.

But think about it.

Somebody had to go stop and buy that.

I will say this.

I've seen people buy worse things.

Yeah.

I have seen people buy worse things.

Yes, I have.

I mean, you got on your jersey and you're stopping and buying them?

Yes.

How do you explain that when you're going in there?

It bothers me that it's green.

I'm just going to be honest with you.

Okay, no.

Okay, one last question.

I don't even know why it has to be green.

Speaking of green, the Trump administration is announcing.

I cannot make the news up.

They're going to build a nuclear reactor on the moon.

Your thoughts about the nuclear reactor on the moon?

Well, I'd rather have it there than in my neighborhood.

Not on my planet.

Yeah.

Okay.

Well, I think when I say, oh, a lot could go wrong up there.

All right.

Invent new ways to spend money.

Good luck with the campaign, gentlemen.

Thank you very much.

Ladies and gentlemen.

Catch