Overtime – Episode #390 (Originally aired 06/03/16)

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

All right.

Neil, what do the recent reports that the universe is expanding at a rate 9% faster than we thought mean for life on Earth?

Nothing.

Right.

You mean I have an appointment next Tuesday.

I'm safe.

It solves no earthly problems other than to reflect on the fact that our several pounds of gray matter in our brain has the power to even figure that out.

When will it mean something?

How many billions of years later?

That's a great question.

We don't know.

And we didn't know what studying the atom and molecules in the 1920s would have any effect on our future at all, because you can't even see atoms.

50 years later, it is the foundation of the IT revolution.

Knowledge Knowledge and understanding of the atom, it's quantum physics.

So never stand in denial of what something that whose value to society we have no clue what it can be might ultimately become half a century later.

Right.

Fuck.

I'm just saying.

Right.

I mean, especially about the human body.

We don't know shit about that.

Right, or especially the human mind.

I read recently an article that said, we don't know how much water is appropriate to drink.

Really?

We don't know how much fucking water we should drink.

Nick, is there still a place for

labor unions in America?

Oh, well, absolutely.

I mean, you know, look, all economics is, is

how human beings decide who gets what and why.

And in the absence of a way for ordinary people to have power,

a few of us are going to get everything and everybody else is going to get nothing.

And labor unions, for all their imperfections, are the only way we have ever found to balance the power of ordinary people and owners.

And so

we have to find a way to make it work.

Boy, that's coming a long way back.

I mean, the percentage of workers who are in unions now.

No, for sure.

And there's all sorts of...

Yeah, yeah.

And there are all sorts of reasons why the labor movement has unwound.

And it is certainly true that we're never going to go back to you know how it was.

So

we have a big bunch of work to do to reimagine how

labor constructs will work in a 21st century economy.

You have the gig economy, the 1099 economy.

We need a whole new labor construct to allow, I mean, what we have to do is find a way to make all of the benefits that go into making somebody a middle-class person universal, portable, and prorated.

You mean earthwide, not universal?

No, yeah, earthwide, but earthwide.

That's the thing.

I mean, government has a role in strengthening the middle class, right?

Our country is as strong as our middle class, and they've been getting screwed for decades.

But the problem is, if unions, for example, need to also, as they recalibrate, figure out why they fell out of favor in the first place.

What went wrong in the mid-20th century?

What went wrong in social democracies in Europe in the 1970s?

Because you got to learn from those mistakes.

And there were a lot of mistakes made.

This may be ignorant, but isn't it just that the jobs that people have are changing?

Like

people in advertising, people in writing, like a lot of the new social media jobs, like there's no unions for that.

And I know a lot of young people being taken advantage, like writing news posts for $50 on some of these websites.

But there's a reason why there aren't unions for that, and that has to do with power.

And that has to do with the ability to organize.

Right?

I mean, look, fast food workers don't have unions.

And look, there's no difference between the amount of value a fast food worker creates today and a manufacturing worker did 40 years ago.

The difference is, the reason fast food workers are poor and the folks working in factories 40 years ago weren't is power, right?

They had a union to represent them.

They don't create less value.

The companies aren't smaller.

They're not less profitable.

It has everything to do with power.

Is Amazon unionized?

Hell no.

Have you ever belonged to a union?

Have you been a union?

Well, I've

companies that have been unionized, but I've never personally been in one.

I think that's part of it.

After you busted the union.

A lot of our conversations about the problem.

No, no,

no, a lot of our conversations about unions are kind of mythical.

I mean a lot of people who have

never been

and wouldn't even imagine their own workplace as being unions.

You're not sag for this show?

That's right.

I don't know if I'm sagged.

But it's a very complicated problem.

Matt, what is the likelihood that an alternative third-party candidate emerges as a real possibility in this election?

It's as likely as it has been, certainly since Ralph Nader in 2000.

And it's a black swan year in so many different ways.

You won't lose money by betting against third parties in America.

That's always been the rule.

But we've never seen unfavorability ratings this high of two major party candidates.

People kind of hate them both within their own political tribes, right?

Democrats and Republicans do.

And the Libertarian Party, which is the only party that's going to be on all 50 ballots, that's not one of the major two, they've never pulled this high at this point.

They always pull high early, but then they will go.

They're going to be well because they have two Republican former blue state governors who got re-elected, which is exactly the kind of Republican that the GOP currently is rejected.

And if they get 15%, they get in the debates, and the duopoly keeps trying to keep out more choices from our elections, and they really better stop getting in that way because the number of independents has doubled in the last 25 years.

The parties have flatlined.

That's people sending a message about dissatisfaction and dysfunction.

I think that there's a lesson here that I

if you really analyze it, what

if you step back and analyze it, I think Trump is in fact the third-party candidate.

He might be breaking up the Republican Party.

Exactly.

If he's running as a Republican and hardly any Republican supports him, he's a third-party candidate.

So he's what happens when you rise up looking like you're part of the establishment, but you're not, and then he appeals it.

Now you have people voting for what would have been a third-party candidate that wouldn't have because they would fear that the third-party candidate wouldn't get elected.

He kind of frozen horses the Republican Party.

Yeah, I mean, which Bernie Sanders would love to do in his own way in the Democratic Party.

I mean, Bernie Sanders is is not a Democrat, right?

He's a legitimate challenge to the existing Democratic Party structure, making the race a hell of a lot more interesting as a result.

It could be that in our hearts, we're a four-party country that's been having two parties.

Yeah, I actually think the real divisions in politics are not liberal and conservative.

I think that's actually, and they used to think this way: it's radicals, reactionaries, and reformers.

You get people on the far right, you get people on the far left, and you get people in the center who want evolution, not revolution.

I think that's a much saner way to think about our political voting.

Well, the two kinds of voters.

Informed and underinformed.

But that

two-party system.

That's your term.

But that path lies a lot of liberal condescension.

To say that the people liberals are often uninformed as well.

They are also getting their voters

from their Facebook folks.

I didn't attach one word to one party or the other.

I know, I know.

He just said,

but you did kind of earlier when you were talking about Trump voters that we need to educate them.

If you don't like Trump, it means you don't like the people voting for Trump.

That's all I said.

And so if you don't like it because you think they should think about data differently, then you need to educate them.

But we need to separate out the support of the USA.

For advancing Trump.

No, but look, the Republican Party has brought this on themselves, right?

The Republican Party is cracking up because

it has been a coalition between basically two groups of people, a tiny number of urban economic elites and a giant number of mostly rural

social conservatives.

And what happened over 30 years is that the Republican Party massively over-delivered to that tiny group of urban economic elites

while

exporting the jobs, suppressing the wages,

and destroying the lives of the 99% of

their party.

He turned the table upside down with his whole thing about

starting a trade war.

No, no, no.

None of them would ever even consider that.

That was economic.

Exactly.

But he called the question on economics.

He called the question on economics.

And the thing is, if you are part of the 99% of the Republican Party, you have been economically savaged.

And the Republican Party that was supposed to deliver everything on all these social issues that you care about, whether it's abortion or gay rights or whatever it is, they delivered nothing, nothing, because we won on all those issues.

But to his point, they did it by fooling people.

Yeah, absolutely.

Joe the Plumber was a great example.

Joe the Plumber did not have any money, did not have a plumber's license,

but was very angry at Obama because Obama was fixing to raise taxes

a year.

The biggest conjobs in his head that was where he was going.

Right, the biggest conjob in his head.

And this is also the politics of economic and cultural resentment, right?

And this is the problem when our politics end up being, our political identities end up being very little than the collection of our grievances.

And when we start focusing on hating the other guy, what we're against, rather than what we're for, and then you get these massive conjobs pulled by politicians like Donald Trump and other folks who end up trying to stoke anger and fear and resentment in the absence of any positive ideas.

That way lies.

And there's this other very, the reason that economic inequality is so important is that,

look, here's the thing.

Prosperity won't eliminate racism, but it is one hell of a distraction.

Right.

It is one hell of a distraction.

And when people are feeling like there's a future and they're doing well,

when there's hope for their children, they have a lot less energy for hating on people that don't look like them or who are different than them.

But that is why we have to.

This is why we have to fix this problem.

Final question, Neil deGrasse-Tyson.

This guy's going to be a politician.

What is the greatest natural threat to humanity that we can do absolutely nothing about?

An asteroid, a super volcano?

So, yeah, it would definitely be a super volcano.

Because an asteroid, we have the power and the knowledge and the engineering wisdom to deflect an asteroid.

Bruce Willis, that thing?

Yeah,

exactly that way.

No, no, no, no, no, that's the go up there.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,

that's the let's blow the sucker out of the sky approach.

And in America,

in America, I've said it before, we're really good at blowing stuff up and less good at knowing where the pieces fall when we're done.

So the kindler, gentler solution is in comes the asteroid and you deflect it from its intended path and then it misses Earth entirely.

There's still there to harm you in another day, but if you have that power, you can just keep doing that and it'll be like a deflection machine.

So are we funding that adequately?

No, at all, not at all.

Let's check it out.

No, no, the question is.

After Zika,

the Earth itself was deflected a little, right?

When it was being formed?

Well.

It's in Cosmos.

Yeah.

No, no, no.

So what you saw was an asteroid that was deflected that would later become the asteroid that took out the dinosaurs.

That's what you saw.

You mixed up.

Yeah.

Sorry, that's fine.

That's fine.

It's understandable.

It's okay.

So,

so.

That's fine.

You want to implement it?

Wait, wait, don't finish it.

Now I'm going to get a B.

But a super volcano is really bad.

We have the knowledge and power because we have a space program to solve it, even though there's no funded program to deflect such an asteroid.

But we know how, intellectually.

We have no freaking idea what to do if Earth gurgles up and sends a super volcano.

Kiss your ass, because it because we don't have the power.

It would just choke us, right?

We don't have the power of

engineering to stop a volcano.

And it would block out the sun.

It would kill us all ten different ways.

Have a great week.

Have a great week.

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