Overtime – Episode #682: Jesse Eisenberg, Stephen A. Smith, Rep. Ro Khanna

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.
Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO Late Night series, Real Time with Bill Maher. All right, he wrote, directed and co-starred in the Oscar animated movie, A Real Pain, Jesse Eisenberg.
It's fantastic. Go see it.
He hosts the ESPN's First Taken and Stephen A. Smith Show on YouTube.
Stephen A. Smith.
And he's a Democratic congressman from Silicon Valley. Ro Khanna.
Okay. All right, here are the questions from the people.
What does the panel think of Doge, that's Elon Musk's reforming the government operation, pushing to eliminate the penny in order to cut federal spending? Well, this is the kind of thing I'm talking about. Like, I was advocating for this over 10 years ago.
Put it in editorials. It's funny because it's so stupid that we still make pennies.
And it costs, of course, costs way more to make a penny. Right.
Yeah. A nickel costs 14 cents.
So I'm not going to hate it now that they are doing it. I'm for it.
I've said, look, if he has cuts on pennies, nickels, bloated defense budget with five prime contractors, fine. Let's work with him to do that.
Some people have said, oh, why are you saying that when it's Elon Musk? I said, look, I'll oppose him where he has a bad idea and work with him where he has a good idea. So you do want to work with him? On things like this? Yeah.
I just think that if... We have to work on bigger things in the panic.
If you're... I don't mean this alone is going to do it.
If you're universally recognized by a lot of people as weird but a genius, right? My attitude is, well, let's find out what he's talking about and let's see if it works. If it's beneficial for us, we can deduce that based on the information we receive and decide whether it works or not, as opposed to just automatically dismissing anything he comes up with because he's on the side that we don't like.
Maybe the penny is the gateway issue for bipartisan

stuff.

You joke, but...

Now, are you going to play him, Jesse?

Do you think you can play Elon Musk?

I'll play anything.

You can do it. But yes, I mean,

that's how you build trust, little by

little. Little by little.
Okay.

Jesse, how did the story for A Real

Pain evolve from being set in Mongolia and then went to Poland? What does that mean? Oh, yeah. No, my script, I mean, you saw the movie.
It takes place in Poland. It was originally set, like, in Mongolia.
It was based on a short story I wrote. There was Jews in Mongolia? No, they were doing something else there.
Oh, what? They were going to visit their friend who had started this, like, yurt farm in a mountain. But anyway, that's not important.
So wait, you were going to play the wrong character, and you had the wrong country. Yeah.
This is the artistic process. I see.
This is how things work, you know? But can you imagine if... What would the story have been in Mongolia? I wrote it.
It was a short story. I wrote it for Tablet Magazine.
It's like, it was a story about these two guys who, kind of one guy envied the other's political purity, and when they got to Mongolia, the guy who they both idolized had kind of sold out to this other company. And so, like, it's about the disillusionment of your childhood ideas.
That's not important. Well, here's the question.
I just have a simple question. I mean, why the hell does that have to be in Mongolia

instead of right here?

It sounds like it's stuff that goes on right here in the United States.

Right.

Because it was awesome to think about

when we were shooting a movie in Mongolia, Stephen.

How come when an actor says

that's just the artistic process?

If I said something like that

on how I do a bill, you know, I'd get booed.

You're right. You know, Casablanca was originally called San Diego.
That's not true. That's not true.
Is it appropriate that the Trump administration is asking government employees to turn in their co-workers if they are engaged in DEI efforts. I'll start with a no.
Turn in. I'm not loving, again, I said I wouldn't pre-hate.
Hating. Hating.
The difference between prejudice and Judas. I'm hating.
Hating. More than inappropriate.
It's scary. I mean, it's like a surveillance state.
Turn in. As a libertarian, you should be...
What do you want me to do? I just said I hate, I hate, I hate. That's good.
I just want me to cut off a finger. The problem with the Democrats, it's never fucking enough with these people.
The complaint that I have over this whole DEI issue is that everybody thinks about diversity, equity, and inclusion, and it automatically connotates in a lot of people's eyes, particularly on the right, that somebody that's in that position must have gotten there because of a level of incompetence and what have you. It's not merit-based.
My attitude is similar to the Rooney rule with the National Football League, similar with affirmative action. What the hell was the policy necessary for to begin with? Because we had a power structure in the United States of America that was unfair, that was unequitable or inequitable.
They didn't give a damn. And somebody had to compel them to do the right thing conscientiously.
And nobody is talking about that in regards to DEI. But also things change.
You're talking about the past. But they haven't changed enough.
Look at tech. Look at how many African-Americans, Latino-Americans are in tech, which is producing all the wealth.
But is it because they're barred? I heard the same story. You would understand this better than anybody because you're a sports genius.
Baseball. I've heard there's only 7% players in baseball who are African-American.
That's right. Well, this would be a problem if they were barred from baseball as they were before 1947.
There's only 7% because they want to play another sport or no sport at all or do something else. They're not barred.
It's not a problem. It's not a problem.
But what they're trying to do on the right, and I've been getting on them about this, is that, again, when you're talking about DEI, anytime you bring that up, oh, you're a DEI hire. You didn't really deserve it.
You didn't really earn it. You just got it because of that policy.
And I'm like, but you're just going to bring that up but ignore why the policy was there to begin with. That means there was a whole bunch of white people before there was DEI.
There was. They were getting jobs that they didn't deserve.
I know, but there was, I think, the University of Michigan, one of the schools like that, had something like 200 DEI officers at a college, the most liberal place. Yeah, that's disgusting.
No, it was disgusting. Okay.
And who's ever going to give up that job and go, well, this situation is better now. I guess I better fire me.
Right. I'm just saying, I'm just saying.
I'm just saying you want to do away with it. Just don't act like, don't forget what brought it back.
That's all I have. And it's when people look for talent.
If you look at these tech companies, they go to Stanford, Harvard, Berkeley.

You think they're going to the HBCUs and looking for talent there? If they're not pushed to go outside their networks, they're going to hire the same people from the same schools and replicate the same wealth gap. We've got a 10 to 1 wealth gap in America.
And instead of talking about that, we're beating up on DEI. But we had this in your industry, or the way you represent.

Women were like, they started two programs, big programs, like 20 years ago, to get more women in engineering positions, and I think in 20 years it went up 1%. I don't think it's because they were barred from doing it.
I just think people choose to go into different avenues of... There's the studies show that African American young men and women are more interested in tech than even white kids.
But they don't have the same pathways. We are denying reality if we think that someone young...
They're being denied? I'm saying if you graduate from Stanford, I taught at Stanford, you get funded before you have an idea. You literally just email a venture capitalist, you get funded.
If you're at Morehouse or you're at Spelman or you're at Claflin University, you think you could just email someone at Kleiner Perkins and get your company funded? No. I think companies that want to make money hire the best people to make it for them.
I don't disagree with you. I just think that we have to keep a watch a watch for lying.
Of course, for example, with the eradication of a lot of these DEI programs, right, is let's say, for example, hypothetically, there's 20 jobs that were that are available and DEI has been shoved aside. Now, when you fulfill those 20, when you fill up those 20 jobs and all of them are white, you got a problem because what you're saying is, oh, they're the ones that are qualified and nobody else is.
And that's a system that used to exist in this country that you see a lot of people clamoring to return to. And we can't ignore that.
Those 28 jobs would not go to white people. They'd go to Asian people.
Okay. Okay.
Okay. Just not blacks.
Well, really, I mean, this is one of the... And Asian Americans wouldn't even be in this country if it weren't for the civil rights movement.
Okay, but we're talking... Well, if you want to bring that up, bring up the fact that whether it's affirmative action or DEI, the biggest beneficiaries of both programs were white women.
Let's not forget that. But can we live in the air we're living in? Yeah.
Yeah, because I think it's 2025. I mean, this is one of the most liberal parts of the country that you represent.
So you're saying in one of the most liberal parts, maybe you're right. I don't know.
I'm just questioning it. That there is this prejudice against...
I don't think it's formal. I don't think people there at Apple or Google are saying, oh, let's not hire black people.
I think it's easy when you're building a company to just hire the people you know, the schools you know,

and it takes extra effort to reach out beyond your networks. We all have that.
Is Trump's meme coin a scam? I read about this thing. I mean, oh, my God.
I mean, what? What, me? I put my money in a mattress. It's so simple.
He wakes up one day. This is a man, like, remember, he wanted to buy an NFL team in 2014.
That was the last time I spoke to him. He wanted to buy an NFL team, the Buffalo Bills.
Right. The price tag for them was $1.4 billion.
He had $1.1 billion, according to my NFL sources. You know, they say, is he a billionaire? Is he not? Whatever, whatever.
Here we are years later, and they're talking about because of this meme coin, in about a week it's made up 89% of his total wealth. What that says to me is that, oh, it's an easier legal way to funnel money to him when he needs it.
And that's what it really comes down to. It's like literally having a Swiss bank account.
Because what you can do, they've tracked the transactions. The biggest transactions are from overseas.
And none of us can see who it is. But if you put in a billion dollars in the Trump coin, you can have it in your crypto wallet.
You can just show it to them. Hey, look, I got a billion dollars.
And no else knows it and you could curry favor with them. I mean, the term for this that people use on the street is shit coin.
Because it didn't exist Friday afternoon. I don't even understand what it is.
But I don't understand OnlyFans. I don't understand.
Unfortunately, there are far too many people who do understand what only people do. Okay, but I mean, what I'm saying is we can argue about race and gender.
The great divide in America is people who grew up in the virtual world and people who didn't. That's, I think, going to be the great divide.
People who don't live in the world I live in. I don't understand this.
It's a picture of Trump, or you're just imagining it. I don't know.
Don't forget Melania. She's got one too.
Melania. And somehow it made him $58 billion.
In a week. There's no complicated tech to it.
It's like if you opened a Swiss bank account and said deposit the money there and you don't know who's depositing the money. But that's a bank.
It's still your money. This is not.
Let's speak on behalf of the streets. Could you tell us how to do it? $58 billion in a week.
Could you let us in on the scheme?

We'd like to know.

We'd like to know. I mean, they said Putin was worth $40 billion from stealing over, like, he's been president since 2000.
This guy did it in a week. I'm sure he was like, top that bitch.
I bet. Okay.
Netflix announced its raising raising prices again, despite adding 19 million new subscribers over it. Do you think movies like this, moves like this, from them and other subscription services will backfire? What do you think? You're in show business.
My movie's on Hulu. I don't know.
Is it really? Yeah, it really is, you know. But I mean, not because I'm...
You know, these kind of things are always in flux, and they have more data than we can possibly imagine any media company ever having data, and you know, so they're going to be changing probably their prices minute by minute. I know the answer.
What happens is that Netflix is venturing in to live sports. That's the new king.
You got live sports. You got sports rights.
You got league rights and whatever. You got league rights, particularly with the NFL, which is a cash cow, to a lesser degree, the NBA and what have you.
If you have rights with that and you can carry live events, then you can charge exorbitant prices because you know people are going to flock to it because they want to see the games. And that's really what it comes down to.
So it might end up backfiring, but that's down the road. That doesn't negate what's going to transpire now, which is fattening their volatility.
But streaming has ruined football. I wouldn't say that.
I would. Why? Well, first of all, when you watch it, you can't, if you watch it not when it's live, you can't zip through it like you can with the commercials on a regular game.
They won't let you do that. You have to guess where the play resumes.
Am I wrong? You know what I'm talking about? I was alluding to the quality of the broadcast. When they did the Tyson fight, that was bad.
That was bad because it crashed for a little while. But when they did the NFL game, everybody flocked to it.
Because it's on there. You have to.
But I'm saying, it was a good broadcast. It was a really good broadcast.
If I want to switch between two games, if I'm watching a game on old channels, like Fox and CBS, I can do it with one button, previous. Right.
Well, I can tell you this.

This I have to, like, sign in.

Well, let me...

It's like this is a button issue, not a political issue.

It was a button issue.

My hot button issue.

You got to sign in, you got to get the account.

But I will tell you this.

On YouTube, for example, I mean, I love the fact that I can see four games on one screen.

And I can double-click and get it on the one game, and then I can go back and double-click and see the four games again and I'm watching the action. I like that and a lot of people like that.
I think that is the future. If they can charge a lot of money, they can pay the writers and the actors and the screenwriters enough.
That's what that whole. All right.
Let's leave it there.

I think you're a great panel.

Guys, a little bromance never hurt anybody.

We'll see you next week.

Thank you.

Catch all new episodes of Real Time with Bill Maher

every Friday night at 10.

Or watch them anytime on HBO On Demand.

For more information, log on to HBO.com.