Real Time with Bill Maher - Overtime – Episode #719: Jonathan Haidt, Stephanie Ruhle, H.R. McMaster

Episode Date: February 17, 2026

Bill Maher and his guests answer viewer questions after the show. (Originally aired 2/13/26) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO late-night series, Real Time with Bill Maugh. All right, here we are with a social psychologist and the best-selling author of The Anxious Generation and the Amazing Generation, Jonathan Haidt, former National Security Advisor, host the podcast today's Battlegrounds,

former Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster and the host of MS now is the 11th hour, Stephanie Ruhl. Okay, here are the questions from the people. Are we at an AI? tipping point, well, I don't know, I read this week that there's a new generation. First of all, the new generations of AI seem to come faster and faster. I don't know, this is not my area, but it was basically saying it's gotten to the point where it's writing the code for itself. Is this a real thing? I mean, I'm sure it's really happening. Is this a real tipping point?

Oh, yeah. I mean, any technology that we're told is increasing on an exponential scale means that it is a tipping point. And it will always be a tipping point forever. Okay, so what are the implications? I'll say one of the things that's interesting, a year ago, you had lots and lots of CEOs talking about how excited they were about AI and it was going to transform their business. And about six months ago, they went completely silent.

That doesn't mean they don't believe in AI anymore. It's that their PR department said, you better stop talking because we're going to lay off so many people. You don't want to be touting the beauty of AI just before. we have massive layoffs across the board. A.I. is coming. Even the head of Anthropics said that. Did he not?

Yes, he said, he's talking about 10 to 20% in the next five years. Because even the coders, the people who wrote the code, they're out of a job. People in medicine, people in consulting, people in... Accounting, finance. All these white-collar jobs. You know, it's not just coming for the people at the factory. He used to do the bolts, and now the robot does that. It's everywhere.

And if we're talking about 20%, that's the... That's what we have in the Depression, 20% unemployment. Yeah, there are going to be huge transitions in the economy, for sure. And like all these big changes, some people are going to be left behind. I mean, I think the last time we had such a big shift was really after China's entry into the World Trade Organization and the associated loss of so many manufacturing jobs across the Midwest. And I remember George Packer's book about the effect on people at the time, called The Unwinding, right? And, man, I'll tell you, I mean, you know, we're going to have a similar situation.

That's why it's important to get ahead of it and to make sure that, you know, people are adapting to it, using it now, you know, to figure out how it can make them more productive. The people, the first people we left behind are those who don't adapt to using some of these large language models and the capabilities it can give you. And we need the government to be thinking about how are we going to address that, and we don't seem to have any unified force in the government addressing it, at least not yet. Yes, sir. I just add that dealing with the economic changes, the law. their jobs. This is an incredibly hard problem. I don't think anybody knows how to deal with it. But here's an easy problem. AI is coming for our relationships. Social media came in, hacked kids' attention, took it away with disastrous results for the education and their thinking.

Now there are chatbots in teddy bears. Children are literally going to get attached to this very responsive chatbot rather than to their parents. So here's something easy we can do. Say, this is incredibly threatening to human development. Can't we just keep it away from the kids? Can't we just not let Silicon Valley do another experiment on the next generation? It's funny. You're always talking about kids, which is certainly the most important part of this. But it's not like social... I know, but I'm just saying it's not like social media hasn't fucked up adults too.

I mean, you know, the guy who bought Twitter... Come on. There was some drugs there, too. Yes, I agree. But, you know... So the problem was, if you have a technology, that is competitive in nature. You need all parties to the competition

to sign up for regulation. This is where AI becomes particularly dangerous in the realm of war and warfare. Because if you try to regulate yourself, you can lose a competitive advantage that's important to deterring conflict or being able to respond if you're threatened. And so what you're seeing is a lot of automated decision-making.

You're seeing, I think, in this next generation, you will be able to go from one person controlling one autonomous system to one person controlling many, You have computing power at the edge, you know, sort of networks that self-heel, and so you can give a mission to a fleet of drones, undersea or aerial drones, to accomplish a mission, take out that enemy's air defense and so forth. And so I really have concern about giving machines the decision to take a human life.

And that's what I think we have to be in our military profession, always keeping somebody on the loop of making these kinds of decisions. But it's not a surprise. it's not a surprise that these AI giants don't want to face regulation, right? Nobody wants to be regulated, even if it's to do the right thing. And so when people are saying, why are all these tech guys, you know, kissing the president's ring? Why would they do that? Because it's brilliant for them, right?

And imagine you are this small group of people who are now more powerful than any oligarchs we've ever had in this country. And they are creating a new frontier without any rules. That's certainly worth a quick butt kiss at the White House. And they were supposed to be the good people. What was the motto of Google, don't do evil? Don't be evil. And Facebook's was move fast and break things. Okay.

They did. Well, they sure did. And they did. But they were Silicon Valley hippies. They were California. They were supposed to be these liberal guys in the hippie land. And they turned out to be just, when they smelled the money, it was just completely all thrown out the window.

But we have to be able to compete, too, though. For sure. What you don't want is you don't want the Chinese models to be what's adopted internationally. And you don't want to become Europe. What Europe's done is regulated these tech companies and engaged in kind of rent-seeking behavior from the U.S. tech companies that are succeeding. So there has to be like everything. How about something in the middle here where you have regulations that make sense,

but you don't constrain innovation in a way that seeds markets and seeds, especially, for my view, military advantage to the Chinese Communist Party. If we, for example, had these super fast chips here, and we said, let's make sure we don't sell them to China. And the Biden administration said, we're not going to sell them to China. And then four days before the Trump inauguration, Jason. Correct. Someone adjacent to Middle Eastern royalty, does it deal with the Trumps invest $500 million in their crypto business?

And poof, suddenly, we're selling those AI chips. There's that pattern again. And this is what's important about that. These H-200 chips are really increasing, can increase compute power in China significantly. And if you look at how quickly these models are learning and improving, the machine learning that occurs in the next few years is really critical. So why on Earth would we have done that? What they found out this week is that when they're testing these robots or whatever they're testing,

they act differently on the test than they do when they're actually using. them, which means that they, the robots understand and they're deliberately fooling us. And, you know, we're talking about the START treaty and we certainly have to worry about Russia and we have to worry about China, we have to worry about India and Pakistan, we have to worry about some rogue actor getting hold of a loose nuke. We also have to worry about the robots doing it. What if they got it into their precious head? They could.

One thing people need to understand about AI is that it is not a lot of the United. not program. Nobody wrote the program, as the head of Anthropics says, they are grown. And so it's kind of like we've summoned an alien intelligence. We've got these little gods. They're like baby gods now. When we first met them, they were very nice, and they could compose limericks. And now they're sort of adolescence, and now they're like getting smarter than us. And they're on their way to becoming gods much more powerful than us. And we're just running pell-mell into this with no insistence on guard race. You know, the next chapter is they're going to write that mommy porn about them.

There is an upside, though. There's an upside. The upside is, I mean, certainly in bioengineering, certainly in the development of pharmaceuticals. I mean, the medical field, I mean, it could deliver, I think, tremendous benefits. No one is denying that. No one's doubting that. Absolutely, especially people who are getting older. I don't know who they are.

But they definitely want these medical advances. Well, we just want to be sure we keep developing those pharmaceuticals, because last I checked, RFK is not interested in them. Well, maybe they'll have something for, you know, pattern baldness, and next time I'm on the show, I look like Elvis. All right, you mentioned RFK. I'll end this with just what I read in the news today, that RFK said on a podcast.

Oh, God, don't do it. Don't do it. You know, I was afraid you were going to bring it up. I was breaking out. I'm like, please don't, please. You brought it up. I'm just reacting. Oh, he's not this.

Look, it's not even the worst thing he's ever said. But, like, why can't he, like, develop an impulse not to reveal everything? I mean, we heard about killing the bear and eating them, whatever. And now he said when he was at his worst, as a drug user, he used to snort cocaine off toilet seats, which made it very tough for the guy who was taking a shit. I'm kidding. All right. Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen.

There, you're ready to have to answer. Catch all new episodes of real-time with Bill Maher every Friday night at 10. Or watch them any time on HBO on demand. For more information, log on to HBO.com. Lazzang sur-gillet, puissance-moyance-moyant for 15 minutes. Oh, dear to play? Vive the pleasure with Leo Jo.

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