Overtime - Episode #498: Andrew Yang, Rep. Katie Porter, Charles Blow, Clint Watts, Bret Easton Ellis

This podcast is supported by Progressive, a leader in RV Insurance.

RVs are for sharing adventures with family, friends, and even your pets.

So, if you bring your cats and dogs along for the ride, you'll want Progressive RV Insurance.

They protect your cats and dogs like family by offering up to $1,000 in optional coverage for vet bills in case of an RV accident, making it a great companion for the responsible pet owner who loves to travel.

See Progressive's other benefits and more when you quote RV Insurance at Progressive.com today.

Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates, pet injuries, and additional coverage and subject to policy terms.

Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO late night series, real time with Bill Maher.

Okay,

here are the questions.

Katie Porter, what do you think of Mitch McConnell bragging that he will never bring up any House bills in the Senate?

So I have a favorite staffer.

You're not supposed to have a favorite staffer.

It's like having a favorite child.

But I have a favorite staffer and she said, I really want a pet.

And I said, absolutely no.

No fucking way no no we can't even find our way out of the emergency exit room like we no we cannot take care of anything we can't get and i she said but but

and i said what what she said i want a turtle and i want to name it mitch

so i got her a stuffed turtle it has a little tag on it it says hi my name is mitch ask me about my legislative agenda so this is a real problem i mean it's this is a problem that unelecting Donald Trump doesn't itself solve.

And so this is going to be with us potentially for decades to come, this kind of legislative roadblock.

Okay.

Andrew Yang,

who do you most look forward to challenging in the upcoming debates?

Well, I've said that I have an 8% chance of standing next to Joe Biden.

And that's the plan because I want America to Google Asian man standing next to Joe Biden.

He is the frontrunner.

He's got to beat the frontrunner.

Okay.

Brett, do you have any thoughts on YouTube announcing that we'll take down videos with extremist views?

Well, I don't know.

I mean, once you start opening that door, and this is what I've always said about

the censorous

media machine, is that then what's next?

It becomes this thing where you cancel one person out, and then who's next?

And it becomes just this endless maze that you fall into.

So I was not particularly,

I was kind of shocked by it and upset by it and I also know a lot of my friends on both sides of the aisle were as well.

I don't think it's anything that's going to move the needle forward or protect people or do anything of the sort that it thinks it's trying to do.

I hate to say it, but I think the big platforms are at this point begging for government help and regulation on figuring out what's free speech and what's not.

Because they're like, why are we making these decisions?

Right.

But they could be expected to do that.

I mean, there was a point when the press thought it was very much in danger of having government regulation.

And they stepped in.

The big media companies stepped in and said, we're going to do this ourselves.

We're going to make sure that we have some standards.

The big tech companies could do the same thing.

I'm not saying that we shouldn't have federal regulation.

But I'm saying the idea that they think that we are supposed to be pitying them, that we're so helpless, we can't do it on our own.

Yes, you can do something.

And I think that you can do something with morals and values

and that says that this is our value system as companies.

And that that is a first step.

And the signal.

The signal, though, that they get from the government is if there's a terrorist attack and we tie it back to any of these things or any other extremists, what are we going to do?

We're going to regulate you.

We're going to shut you down.

So their response then is what?

They try and move more towards censorship.

Once they move towards censorship, other people say, oh, you can't censor that content.

I can tell you, just having worked counterterrorism for a very long time, what brought people together was the internet.

And social media has really accelerated extremism across the board.

Whether it's al-Qaeda and ISIS or white nationalist terrorism we have now, they network online, they congregate online, they operationally plan online.

So there has to be a balance in there.

I do think the government needs to come up with some sort of middle solution where they work with the tech companies instead of scolding them both directions, depending on what it is.

Charles, do you think the 2020 census question will be shot down by the Supreme Court now that we have proof that Republicans designed it to intimidate minority voters?

It's a great question.

Not the question that's on the census, but the question you propose.

Because I have no idea, actually.

And we know both that by everybody who studies the census, and this is their job, that it is going to undercount.

blacks and minorities.

Not just that question, but other alterations to the census as well.

By one estimate, we could have the worst undercount since 1990, right?

We know from that leaked material that they intentionally tried to do it to have an undercount of blacks and minorities, blacks and Hispanics, particularly Hispanics.

But the Supreme Court has been very wobbly on this issue of whether or not racism still exists.

Well,

actually, they said it doesn't.

That was the voting rights issue.

The Chief Justice basically said it doesn't exist in the same way that, you know, know,

problem solved, is there a vote?

Problem solved.

Yeah.

And so I don't know how they're going to land on this, but we don't know exactly what the plan is and how this thing was going to be.

But it'll tell us a lot, because if they look at that evidence, which is pretty

smoking gunny, and still say, you know what, too bad.

That's going to tell us a lot.

Okay.

Andrew, should Amazon follow Venture for America's model and open its new headquarters in a city that could use the economic boost?

And also, I would add to that, what do you think about breaking up the tech companies?

That's a big issue.

Elizabeth Warren wants to do it.

Well, there are absolutely excesses in tech, and our antitrust laws are way out of date.

They're using price as the primary framework, which doesn't work for tech.

But the zeal to break them up is a 20th century solution to 21st century problems.

None of us wants to use the fourth best navigation app.

There's a reason no one is binging anything.

You know, so

saying that, like, hey, if we just break them up and make them compete against each other, it's going to solve the problem.

It's not going to solve the problem.

And it's, and some of the problems that are more fundamental to me are that social media is depressing our teenagers.

And if you break up Facebook into different

ownership groups, that actually doesn't impact

the impact on

in that context.

I think it's fine.

So we have to figure out what the actual problems we're trying to solve are and then move in that direction.

Not just say if we break them up, it's going to be.

Excuse me, I have to go cry in a safe space.

Thank you very much, everybody.

Appreciate it.

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

For more information, log on to HBO.com.