Overtime – Episode #609: B.J. Novak, Catherine Rampell, Noah Rothman

This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance.

Fiscally responsible, financial geniuses, monetary magicians.

These are things people say about drivers who switch their car insurance to Progressive and save hundreds.

Visit progressive.com to see if you could save.

Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates.

Potential savings will vary, not available in all states or situations.

CRM was supposed to improve customer relationships.

Instead, it's shorthand for can't resolve much.

Which means you may have sunk a fortune into software that just bounces customer issues around but never actually solves them.

On the ServiceNow AI platform, CRM stands for something better.

With AI built into one platform, customers aren't mired in endless loops of automated indifference.

They get what they need when they need it.

Bad CRM was then.

This is ServiceNow.

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

Thank you.

Such a great crowd we get now.

Okay, here we are with our questions.

This is for you, Catherine.

You originally went on a tour of an IRS office in Texas.

Is that true?

Yes.

All right, next question.

No.

What is the most surprising thing?

Oh, Texas?

Look, what a connection.

You just did a movie about Texas.

You went on a tour.

What was the most surprising thing you saw?

Do you think the Inflation Reduction Act's investments in the IRS will remedy?

First of all, why did you go on a tour of the IRS?

Because I had heard for years.

Fun day.

It was wild.

I am telling you, it was wild.

It was like going on the weirdest Willy Wonka tour.

Because, like, this place is usually locked down.

Everybody knows about the IRS, obviously, but they don't let people in there.

They don't like them in Texas.

No, they don't.

There was a lot of security.

So I had heard all these stories about how old their software is, and I had been hearing these anecdotes about how crazy it was, like, you know, that they don't scan in your tax return.

They have someone manually type in number by number into their computers the numbers from your tax return if you file by paper into the system, which is like...

mind-blowingly stupid.

And then they have people who have to re-number renumber with a red pen every line on your tax return if you filed last year's instead of this year's.

Because the computer system is, again, it's literally from the 1970s.

It's so old it can't process more than one return at a time.

So this is why there are 10 million tax returns that are in a backlog.

People can't get their refunds.

This bill that Biden signed this week has $80 billion to the return.

That's why.

Right.

That's what that's for, right?

Well, about.

It's $80 billion to the IRS.

Now, of course, the Republicans are saying you're going to use this money to blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

To audit middle-class textbooks.

But some of it will.

Well, it's being used to replenish their enforcement capacity, yes, which has been completely depleted over the past 10 years.

And who is benefiting from that?

It is negative corporations and the very rich.

Will it be buying new computers for the kids who...

Okay.

Well, not for the kids, but

for the people who are like manually stamping stuff and and typing things in.

Some of it, yeah.

But $80 billion doesn't

cover software alone.

It's mostly child labor at the IRS.

No, it's

a single person is like a 60-year-old woman, more or less.

BJ, do you think Hollywood is partially responsible for promoting rural stereotypes and the conception of a disparate America?

Rural stereotypes.

Your thoughts.

Look, Hollywood perpetuates every good and bad thing and exaggerates it and makes it also more subtle and beautiful.

Hollywood does everything.

So I don't know.

Well,

I would say this.

When I was a kid, there were these shows called the Green Gene shows.

Some of them were taped right in this building because this is CBS.

I'm talking about the Beverly Hill Billies.

Applaud if you remember these shows.

Beverly Hill Billies?

Green Acres.

Petty Goat Junction,

The Andy Griffith Show,

and then spin-offs from that.

Remember Mr.

Drucker?

I don't know what my point is, except CBS lived on shows about rural America in the 60s and 70s.

That was like their bread and butter.

And that's where I, as a kid in New Jersey, got all my knowledge of the southern part of the country:

the Beverly Hillbillies and Mr.

Drucker.

A documentary.

Yeah, I mean, that was it.

So, I mean, I live in western New Jersey now.

It's pretty rural.

It still feels a lot like the Beverly Hillbillies by Pennsylvania.

Western New Jersey?

Really?

Yeah, you get really in touch with your roots.

There is a, yeah.

People, yeah, I know.

I mean, wasn't it James Carville who said Pennsylvania is Pittsburgh and Philadelphia with Alabama in the middle?

A lot of America is like that.

Sure.

In the Northeast.

Noah, as an anti-Trump conservative, could you get yourself to vote for a Democrat if it meant keeping Trump out of office?

I can't imagine that New Jersey would ever be that competitive.

But if that's the hypothetical scenario, that it has to, it's a razor-tight race and you have to vote for the Democrat, that's not Trump.

I really don't know what I'd do.

I might, but it would be the first Democrat I've ever voted for.

Democrats don't represent my values.

They don't advance policies I support, so I don't support them.

I also don't have to vote for the Republican if I don't support the Republican.

There's such a thing as just writing in Mitt Romney, which I've done several cycles now.

And we'll probably continue to do.

But isn't that just a cowardly dodge?

Maybe.

Maybe.

Trump is a special category of someone who doesn't believe in our system.

So no matter what the Democratic, you really think Joe Biden or Hillary Hillary Clinton or any of them, I know they don't, your values, blah, blah, blah.

Hillary Clinton, no, I don't think that's a problem.

But isn't there number one value, America, and what it is?

That the Democrats, democracy and America are inextricably linked.

That's what the Democrats still believe, but the Republicans don't believe that anymore.

I share the assumption on your part that I think is at the root of this question that the foundations of democracy would be under threat in the event that Trump somehow managed to win a second election.

If that was, my gun pointed to my head, if that was the situation, then yeah, I would vote against that.

That situation is highly unlikely to unfold.

Trump running again?

No, the notion here that he's, that it'll come down to my vote.

But if it did, I most certainly would vote against Donald Trump.

All right.

I've prosecuted you as much as I can.

I feel like I will leave it to the jury at this point.

Our final question.

Japanese officials, worried about shifting demographics and a decline in tax revenue, are now encouraging young people to drink more.

Should we be doing something similar, given your belief, oh, this is you again, but I guess we can all

that young people aren't having any fun anymore.

Well,

trust me, they're still having fun.

I mean, when you're young, it's hard to avoid it.

But

I read that, too.

Japanese officials are encouraging drinking.

Well, I don't know.

Yeah, the overconsumption of alcohol can sometimes be fun, but not always, and I don't necessarily think that the two are directly.

Well, they didn't say overconsumption.

It's a social lubricant.

Precisely.

Sometimes a lubricant lubricant.

No, I don't know what that means.

PJ, you were on the office.

What do you think?

I think it's sort of like your dad coming down to the basement with a six-pack.

It's suspicious.

You don't want the government telling telling you

encouraging you to drink.

Right, it takes all the fun out of it.

I don't know why it's the government's job to decide the optimal amount of drinking.

You know, it's just like a weird...

I think what it is is the Japanese government is worried about population.

I talked about this a few weeks ago.

I don't understand this world that's worried about less population.

We need less population.

They're all worried about population is declining.

I'm throwing a party.

Population is declining.

Japan has like...

Japan has serious demographic challenges.

Demographic, okay, the world has the biggest.

No, they're all really old.

There's like no one.

They're not all old.

They have a very high share of old people in Japan.

Mainly working-age people who pay the taxes to support the old people.

The population bomb theory is kind of bunk.

It's really never been supported, and it's justified just about every eugenicist abuse of the human species since 1968.

Okay, so you're saying we can just continue to have more people on Earth, which has limited resources.

But this was the theory in 1968, and we've subsequently invented ourselves out of the problems associated with overpopulation.

We've created newspapers.

We also have a crisis.

We've created new methods of feeding and transmitting goods across the planet.

And every person as an economic unit has contributed to that.

But like our river here that supplies the water to the west, the Colorado River,

it's got 28% left in the reservoirs.

All the states around here are going to have to stop using water.

It's going to be mandated.

I'm okay with that.

I don't need a lawn.

But water, people, I mean, these are just basic facts.

I don't know.

I don't get this argument that we just keep having more people because

it's an economic problem.

It's a water problem.

It's more basic than economic.

It's a resource problem.

Israel faced a very similar problem.

And

desalination was the answer and that's an engineering problem and that is not necessarily a problem of too many people.

The more people who contribute to that solution

better from the ocean.

Precisely, yeah.

Good, because those waters are rising and we will need to be doing something with it.

Let's drink it.

Once again, we solve everything here on Real Time.

Thank you, ladies and gentlemen.

Thank you, Pamela.

Catch all new episodes of Real Time with Bill Maher every Friday night at 10 or watch him anytime on HBO On Demand.

For more information, log on to HBO.com.