Overtime - Episode #344 (Originally Aired 2/20/2015)

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

Okay, Rob Reiner, who do you think should win Best Picture?

Who do I think should be?

Put you on the spot right away.

Who do I think should win?

Yes, who was your choice?

I was, I, like others, was very upset about Selma not

getting the nomination because I feel that that was at least an important movie about real subject you know what I thought I liked boyhood I like you know about you know what I thought was the best one what no nominations night crawler

didn't get yeah

it's creepy there were a lot of people fucking awesome with an awesome performance

and from whatever what Jake Jillenall it's and it says a lot about America it's just it's there's a lot of great

performances this year with not great movie I mean you know Eddie Redmane is sensational in theory of everything but I didn't think the movie worked as well as it could have.

But he was.

Let me ask you about that.

I watched that movie,

Eddie Red, and it's terrific about Stephen Hawking.

And all I could think, because we were talking about how recently on the show, about how, like, you know, medical science, still a great mystery.

So much is a great mystery in that kind of science, much more than climate science, for example.

And I thought, the whole time, I'm being facetious or flippant about this, but the whole time I'm watching a movie, I'm thinking Stephen Hawking every day must get up and go, I can figure out the universe, and they can't fix

this because they're not him.

But he can't even do it.

He's not that kind of doctor.

I think it just says a lot of doctors were busy with the human body health.

It's a complicated thing.

But watch this Vice episode.

They got good news about cancer.

All right.

All right.

In 100 years, it'll probably all be done.

A hundred?

I cannot wait that long.

No.

You got to do better than that.

We've got the drought happening.

I know.

We got the pig.

Hey, seriously, you you know, if money were thrown at climate change the way money is thrown at cancer, there would be a different outcome.

Yeah, look how they cured cancer.

Really?

Well, but people

can actually do something.

My whole life they cured one thing, polio.

My whole life.

I went to elementary school.

Nobody's making money off of that anymore.

We don't have a polio anymore.

You can get a vaccine for polio.

Right, so we don't get it.

The same thing.

Do you think technology is ruining our culture?

No, it was already ruined way before that.

Technology.

What do you mean?

The culture was ruined far before this technology.

But you're famously anti-technological.

I'm not anti-technology.

I just don't use it.

It's a cell phone.

That's right.

But it's not a political stance.

It was just,

I never had a typewriter.

I didn't have the old machines.

It's a machine thing.

So you counted on somebody else to type your writing, though?

Yes.

This begs the question that there was a culture to begin with.

That's what I just said.

You didn't understand when I said it.

No,

no, no.

Where's the culture?

What was the culture?

I think all of these forms of technology have removed the idea of gatekeepers in a way where there used to be the idea of a public square and a certain, everyone kind of listened to the same songs, watch the same movies.

And technology is a tool.

People can use it how they want, right?

Yeah, but we've gotten to a point now where everybody knows everything about everybody at all times.

And there's a great documentary, if you ever see it, it's called We Live in Public.

And it's about the guy who was like, who created Before

MySpace.

This was even before, you know, Facebook or any of these things.

And he said, Andy Warhol had it wrong.

People don't want to be famous for 15 minutes.

They want to be famous 50 minutes every day.

And so you have all this social media, which basically is all about, look at me, look at me, look at me, look at me.

And we are now looking at each other constantly.

And you've got...

people being able to hack into banks and steal a billion dollars or 80 million dollars from ATMs.

And everybody has access to everything now.

And that's not, to me, nothing.

You can create the Arab Spring, too, though.

Absolutely.

And look, yeah,

what a resounding success that was.

We think of this idea of citizen journalism, too, which has definitely its faults, but this idea that you have a few people who control the narrative completely, whereas you can have people out in the streets contributing and generating something that otherwise wouldn't be out there.

So more people can be wrong now.

Well, it cuts both ways.

It's a tool.

You can use it for good or bad.

It's a gatekeepers.

Yeah.

Tell me a little bit more about that.

What do you mean by that?

Like before when everybody wasn't able to weigh in, you think this is better now?

I don't think it's necessarily better.

It's different, which means there's going to be good things that are better now, and there's obviously going to be things that are bad.

I mean, I'm a journalist, and all the time I'm trying to figure out whether something that's being perpetuated and swept up in social media is actually true and legitimate.

I feel like it's a little like the Saddam Hussein thing.

The gatekeepers, a lot wrong with them, but it's still better than like what we have now.

But they also might be stifling voices that are very legitimate and aren't being represented of that class.

Like if you think of a class of editors, who are the people at the top, for instance, controlling media?

Is that mostly well-to-do people?

Are those people mostly white?

Are they mostly male?

So this is kind of what I'm referring to as well.

Well, in the internet, the skill you have to teach students now is how to sort through more information.

But in general,

in other words, in the old days, you'd go to the library and look it up and you would find the atomic number of rubidium and it would be correct.

But now, or you'd look in the history book, and somebody had written the history book, and that would be, but now there's literally millions of sources of history, and so the student, the kid, everybody has to learn to sift through that.

I just think we're living through a transition.

People will get used to people

in the recycling book.

I think we're less informed now than we were.

I believe that.

I don't think we've really learned how to use technology to our best advantage as a culture, as a society.

I think that's what we're waiting for.

We're still, as adults, we're still kids with technology.

Was the Encyclopædia Britannica better than Wikipedia?

Well, I would say...

Yeah, I think so.

Yeah.

Well, I got to disagree, kids.

So really?

Really, Wikipedia?

Wikipedia.

I'm not saying more accessible.

We get it.

Wikipedia is easier.

But more accurate.

It's continually being updated.

So it's not.

But certain facts

are stable.

Isn't that true?

Certain facts are stable.

There are certain things that are changed.

Science, for instance.

But science is changing all the time.

Of course.

Everything can be challenged in real time and should be intended.

By everybody.

Look, we're on television now, or we're on the internet.

Before we were on television, and Fran, even though you don't have a cell phone.

I've heard of them, though.

I know you've heard of them.

But

a camera is taking our picture at an average of 17 to 18 times a day.

What?

Yeah, whether it's in a store or a place you go, you're on camera.

People are seeing you.

So this is one reason why crime is down.

They can see you doing everything now.

It's in the park.

Yes, and they still do it.

After every crime, they show you a movie of the crime.

Right.

Yeah, but

the crime changed.

The crime has changed.

It's not about going to the store and stealing something.

It's about using the tool of the internet and hacking and stuff.

That's why street crime is down.

It's so 1998.

You can't rob a bank with a gun.

Right.

You don't need to.

All you got to do is hack into

the bank account.

Yeah, yeah.

You've got to take internet security seriously.

You can't just use your dog's name for a password.

You've got to get in there.

You've got to take systems.

But think about this for a second, Bill.

You know, all these big multinational corporations, they hire people to hack their systems so that they can develop software to prevent hacking.

And they get the most sophisticated people to do.

Who says that those people are not going to be criminals and doing so and so?

I mean,

how many short stories are written about the safe cracker hired to crack the safe?

Yeah.

Okay, it's the same.

Yeah, you know.

But now it's really scary because they have access to everything.

Well, so you've got to be even more careful.

Okay, I'll do it.

Change your password.

You have to be sophisticated about that.

Will the Republicans' efforts to roll back Obama's executive action on immigration come back to haunt them in the next election?

Well, it's probably not going to get them a lot of votes in the Hispanic community.

It potentially could.

come back to get them.

I mean, but if you look at the 2013 government shutdown when the American public,

by a majority, blamed that on Republicans and everyone thought, oh, this is going to be their downfall in the midterm.

By the time the midterm rolled around a year later, people kind of forgot.

So I don't know if that's still going to play out, but this could be a big problem for them because, you know, after the 2012 election, when they had that autopsy, the GOP had the autopsy of what went wrong, which is a very lovely thing to call the document, the only policy recommendation within that is that Republicans have to do something on immigration reform.

reform.

And this is still a big problem for them and a big issue.

Well, they are doing something, they're just doing the opposite of what they should be doing.

That's right.

Well, and there are people within the GOP who are.

They're very interested in immigration.

They're interested in stopping it.

Well, there are people in the GOP and lawmakers on the Hill who

they want to do something on it.

But the problem is, is when you have a bigger tent of people, you have a lot more diverse opinions.

And you have a lot of people on the very far right and also conservatives, hardliners on immigration, who don't want anything to happen that could be perceived as amnesty.

And we should appreciate that.

We should deport those people.

But you're going to find that the lawsuit that they filed, that federal lawsuit, is not, it was ruled on a procedural issue and it's going to make its way through the courts and they're going to lose.

I mean, Obama's going to win, I believe, on that because it's like Obamacare at this point.

They're trying to stop Obamacare.

They file a lawsuit and at a certain point you've got 11 million people signing up.

So what's going to happen to those 11 million people?

You're going to just, all of a sudden they're going to lose their health care?

It's a practical disaster if the courts rule the other way.

And I think it's going to be a disaster for the Republicans if they don't decide that this is something they should be doing.

The problem with this though is that it's an executive action.

It's not a law.

So if this gets delayed and all of these immigrants who are waiting to do this and get this protection aren't actually able to, this also affects Obama's legacy.

And Democrats could take some of the blame as well.

Getting to the point we were making before, you said they had an autopsy.

They did right after the election.

And I remember Bobby Jindal said the Republican Party has to stop being the party of stupid.

I'm not paraphrasing.

Those were the same.

That's what he said.

There's no volcano.

But he doesn't abide by this himself.

Ran back to stupid.

Yeah.

Ran back to stupid.

He's comfortable at stupid.

Well, the party is comfortable.

Yeah, they're very comfortable.

It's a very nice thing.

So, guys, what if

we were able to redistrict?

voting districts.

Well, there we go.

That's a big thing.

In 2012, 2020.

Would that keep absolutely...

Would it change things?

Of course.

They don't have to cater to minorities because there are no minorities in their district.

What if Abraham Lincoln had let the Confederacy go?

Wow.

Because that's the Red States.

Okay?

When you look at that election map, that's the Red States.

And who's so eager to keep them?

You know what?

No.

Jeez, man.

I'll drive you to the airport.

You know, some of my best friends, as they say.

Yeah, I'm in the South all the time.

It's not like that in the cities.

I mean...

No, it's a whole nother.

I played Birmingham, Alabama last year.

I played Mobile, Alabama.

I was just in someplace in Georgia.

Macon, Georgia.

It's not a regional thing.

It's a city-country thing.

When you're in the cities, they look, at least my crowd, looks like anywhere else in America.

Well, it's a city-country thing in the South, but not, for instance, say in Connecticut.

No.

Okay, so

there's a southern aspect to this.

Come on.

I know.

But come on, we can't let the South go.

We have to bring them along.

I admit they are bringing up the rear.

I mean,

did you see our basket full of NASCAR?

All right.

Thank you, everybody.

Thank you, panel.

Peace.

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