Episode #366 (Originally aired 10/2/15)

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Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO Late Month series, Real Time with Bill Maher.

Afternoon, I will be

real time.

Thank you very much.

Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Thank you.

Awesome.

Thank you very much.

Oh, what a crowd.

What a beautiful.

Thank you.

I have to say,

thank you very much.

I appreciate that.

Let me just turn up and say something.

I cannot believe that it's already October.

Let me tell you, folks, when you get to my age, life goes too fast.

October?

I turned on the TV the other day.

I thought, oh, they're advertising jack-o-lanterns already.

It was just Trump.

Every time I think he's going to go down in the polls, he goes up in the polls.

This guy, I think, really thinks he's going to be president.

He could be.

And you know how I know this?

Because now the wife has started to do interviews.

Did you see that?

His Slovenian wife, Melania, did her first interview because she might be the first lady.

And you know, when you're the first lady, you always have to have a little first lady project.

Right?

Like Maura Bush had literacy and Michelle Obama has childhood obesity.

And

Melania said, she wants to make sure that young girls know how to work the pole.

I mean.

I meant walk the runway.

I misspoke.

But then they asked Melania what she thought about her husband, you know, wanting to deport all the Mexicans.

And she said, look, I'm from the Balkans.

I know ethnic cleansing.

I think he can do it.

But speaking of that, someone has started a pointless military operation in the Middle East.

And for once, it wasn't us.

That's right.

Russia is bombing.

Vladimir Putin would like to take Syria off off of our hands, and I have one word for him.

Sold.

Sold.

Let's get him to sign the papers before he sobers up.

I mean,

that's like selling a diesel Volkswagen with blood on the tires.

I am for it.

But of course, we'll never do that because it would make too much sense.

Instead, America and Russia Russia are fighting over Syria like it's a girl.

Meanwhile, neither one of us wants to have anything to do with Afghanistan.

We're like, that bitch is crazy.

But this is serious.

I mean, if Russia shoots down one of our planes, or vice versa, you know, this could be World War III.

It could go nuclear.

And then we will never get to the bottom of what's in Hillary's emails.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

Did you see this this week?

Russian hackers have tried to hack into Hillary's emails five times now.

You know what?

She is the most boring person in the world, and everyone wants to read her emails.

I don't understand this.

And here's the weird thing about, you know, running, as she does, the Clinton Foundation Global Initiative and also getting spam.

When a Nigerian prince emails you and says he

says he's never met you and wants to move millions into your bank account, he actually means it.

Now,

now I'm sure you saw we had another horrific school shooting this week, and of course, as it always happens, every Republican in Congress said this is awful, but we cannot politicize tragedy.

Now, if you'll excuse us, we'll have to get back to our Benghazi hearings.

The irony of getting back to the Benghazi hearings.

Okay, all right, sure.

All right,

I'll restate it over there in case the folks who missed that one.

And then Kevin McCarthy, you're familiar with this guy.

He's the one who's going to replace, he's from California, he's going to replace John Boehner as the Speaker of the House.

And he was kind of pulled a boner.

He was on

Hannity.

And Hannity was asking about, you know, what are your accomplishments?

And he said the words.

He said, well, everybody thought Hillary was unbeatable.

And then we put together a Benghazi committee.

And what are her numbers now?

Dropping.

And his fellow Republicans are a little upset that he let their true motives out of the bag.

And Fox News was furious that he broke with their format and said something true.

So.

But here's some good news for liberals.

They got the Pope back today.

You know, they thought they lost the Pope this week because it came out that he had a private meeting with Kim Davis.

And Francis must have gotten an earful from the gay community.

And when I say the gay community, I mean the guys back at the Vatican.

But all is well today.

The Vatican totally walked it back.

They said, first of all, it was a very, very brief meeting.

It was a wham, bam, bless you, ma'am.

And he doesn't endorse, the Pope doesn't endorse what Kim Davis stands for.

And most important, they said, for a holy man like the Pope, it's important that he spend time with a woman like Kim Davis to remind him that a lifetime of abstinence isn't so bad.

Reasonable.

Okay, now three more women have come forward to accuse accuse Bill Cosby of assaulting them, bringing the grand total to North America.

And

I don't know what to say anymore about this guy, except he has tranquilized more women than scented candles.

All right, we got a great show.

Adam Gopnik, Angela Rye, and Matt Welch are here, and a little later we'll be speaking with everyone's favorite astrophysicist, Neil deGrasse Tyson, is backstage.

But first up, he is a world-famous evolutionary biologist whose latest book is Brief Candle in the Dark, My Life and Science.

What a perfect metaphor for a man who's brought so much illumination to a dark world.

My friend, Dr.

Richard Dawkins.

Wow.

How are you, sir?

Great to see you.

It's science night here.

We have Neil deGrasse Tyson and you, are you going to stay for overtime?

I will indeed.

I'm so pleased to have Neil coming.

Yes, well, I'm going to grill both of you on science, and if it's real, after the show.

But I loved your book, as I love, this is the second installment of your autobiography,

because

you talk about the wonder of science probably better than anybody.

And of course, it's a little bit of a difficult mission because the more you explain how wonderful and amazing science is, the more the other side says, well, yeah, because God did it.

Whatever you say, they just turn it against you and say, well, fucking God did it.

What do you expect?

You're right.

I have no question.

I realized at the end of that sentence.

Okay.

I think that the wonder of science, above all, is precisely that God didn't do it.

The wonder is that we do understand how it came about.

We do understand how

life in particular came about with nothing but the laws of physics, nothing but but atoms bumping into each other, and then filtered through the curious process that Darwin discovered.

It gives rise to us and kangaroos and trees and walruses.

What's truly wonderful is that it came about without being designed.

If it had been designed, anybody could do that.

I mean, it's the fact that it came about just through the laws of physics, naturalism, is what's so wonderful about it.

And there are things about us that are still not intelligent in the design, right?

You can say that again, yes, yes.

Are you thinking specifically of the prostate?

Because as I move into my,

I'm getting ready to be 60, and that's a strange little organ.

You really want to keep that one in good shape, or else.

So far, I'm okay.

Yeah, no, me too, but you know, I pray to Jesus every day about it.

Well, I mean, you say we know how life began, but we don't know how it all began.

That is still a...

We'll leave that to Neil Tyson, I think.

Yes, but even he don't know.

That's true.

We don't know that.

But one thing we do know is that it won't help to postulate a designer because you've still got the problem where he came from.

That's right.

Or she came from.

Right, okay.

Oh, politically correct.

Smart for this crap.

Okay, so another thing I love about your book is that you go after the idea that atheists are humorless and somehow angry, which, yes, I hear that too.

And it's so silly because to me it's the religious people who are angry.

They're angry and they're humorless as well.

I mean,

we have a lot to laugh at when you think about it.

Right.

Oh.

People say to me all the time, you know, Bill, you're such a meanie.

It's so easy to make fun of religion.

And I always say, yes, because it's fucking stupid.

It's not a coincidence that it's a comedically rich target.

That's true.

Also, if you think about, I mean, the number of comedians who are atheists, and aren't we all pretty much?

I mean, can you think of any who aren't?

Oh, there are many who aren't.

Yes.

Well, there's Tim Minchin, Stephen Fry,

Hugh Laurie, Bill Maher's, pretty good.

Yeah.

Ricky Gervais.

Ricky Gervais.

Probably Sarah Silverman.

Charlie Chaplin.

Well, he's a silent atheist.

Really?

I didn't know that about Charlie Chaplin.

I always thought of him as the thinking man's pedophile.

Really?

A hundred years after Charlie Chaplin was fucking 14-year-olds, you're booing that?

Oh,

I tell you.

The liberals.

I fucking hate them too.

I really do.

Let's talk about that because our friend Sam Harris coined an interesting word this week, a phrase, regressive leftists.

You know, the people who don't quite get it about being liberals in the world.

I know you were championing somebody named Maryam Namazi,

and you and

our great friend Salman Rushdie got her reinstated.

She was going to speak, as so many people have at universities, and then they get disinvited because she's an ex-Muslim and was just speaking her mind, but apparently that's hate speech in this world.

So what did you and

I shocked about the way at un on university campuses the principle of free speech, when I think that the old university I went to, University of California at Berkeley, the free speech movement in the nineteen sixties, what a betrayal we're seeing now.

Right.

With campuses all over the Western world, all over America and Britain are denying people the right to come and speak at campuses.

If you can't speak your mind on a university campus, where can you?

I mean, that's what universities are about.

It's about free speech.

It's about being

brought.

It's about being exposed to ideas that you haven't met before, perhaps you're hostile to.

If you only ever get exposed to ideas that you agree with, what kind of a university would that be?

But also this notion that somehow Islam and Muslims are this protected species, that if we talk about them at all or criticize at all, it's somehow hurting or humiliating Muslims.

And it's a ridiculous thing.

And it's confused with racism as well because an incredible number of people think Islam is a race.

Yes.

Oh, I've heard that.

Yeah.

Right.

And so they think that if you criticize Islam, you're being...

you're being racist.

Right, or

and you're absolutely right that the regressive Muslims give a free pass to Islam whereas they kind of write about everything else.

I mean, they write about misogyny and all the other good

bad things in that case.

You talk about repressive leftists, liberals, yeah.

Yes.

But in the case of Islam, it just gets a free pass.

Yeah.

And I think it's because of the terror of being thought racist.

Right.

Or at worst, an Islamophobe.

Islamophobe.

Yes.

A silly word that means nothing.

Yes.

I mean, it's so dumb because, you know, all the people who are accused of being Islamophobes, like you and me and Sam and Ian, we're liberals.

We're liberals about everything.

I mean, from the time I was a child in my home, I was seven years old when my parents told me we're for Kennedy and him trying to let black people go to college in the South.

I didn't even know who black people were.

There weren't any in my town.

I knew we were on their side.

And then we were on the side of Cesar Chavez and the lettuce pickers.

And then we were on the side.

then we were on the side of the women's movement and poor and the minorities whatever it was gay people

the disabled the abused the molested whatever Caitlin is up to we were for it

and they applaud that and if you say something about a woman who's forced to wear a beekeeper suit in the hot sun all day

Oh, that's their culture.

You have to respect it.

That's right.

That's what they say.

It's just insane.

Yes, it's just the one exception, Liberal about everything else, but then this one exception, it's their culture.

Well, to hell with their culture.

There you go.

Dr.

Richard Dawkins.

All right.

We'll see you on Overtime with Dr.

Neil deGrasse Tyson.

Thank you, as always.

All right, let's meet our panel.

Okay, hey, how are you?

Here they are.

He is the editor-in-chief of Reason Magazine, Matt Welch.

Hey, Matt, great to have you back here.

She's a Democratic strategist and CEO of Impact Strategies, Angela Rai.

Welcome to our show.

And he's a staff writer for the New Yorker, Adam Gopnik.

Read you all the time.

Always enjoy it.

Adam.

All right, remember to follow me on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, and send us your questions for tonight's overtime so we can answer them after the show.

on YouTube.

Okay, so I think the word of the week was politicize.

I heard it a lot.

We certainly heard it yesterday from the president talking about guns, but I think it was also relevant.

The planned parenthood meetings that were, or hearings that were going on in Congress,

and also I think the Benghazi hearings might be a little political.

But let's start with the guns and then throw it all on the table together.

I heard the president say two things I've never heard a president say.

First, he said we should politicize.

this issue.

He said this is a political choice we make to allow this to happen every couple of months.

And then he he said prayers are not enough.

Wow.

A president saying prayers are not enough?

It was a brave thing and he's been a while getting there.

I think the reason that the president said that, Bill, is exactly because this is one of those problems where we know the solution.

We see those parents grieved, we see those kids dying, we read about cell phones ringing still in the pockets of dead kids because their parents are still trying to reach them because they've heard about the shooting.

And we know what to do about it.

We know from this huge body of social science and research that gun control works on gun violence as effectively as antibiotics work on bacterial infections.

If we had gun laws

like the gun laws...

No, no, I don't know about that.

Which is to say, not perfectly, but overwhelmingly, and almost all of the time.

Overwhelmingly?

Well,

this shooter, wait, this shooter yesterday didn't have assault weapons.

He didn't have any weapon that the Democrats want to outlaw.

He had 17.

He didn't pass any background check that you can imagine, like most mass shooters would.

They pass background checks because they generally haven't committed crimes in the past.

But Matt, this is exactly like saying, you see,

we give sick kids aspirin and they don't get better.

That proves medicine doesn't work.

What we do know from the experience of Canada, what we know from the experience of Australia, where they had a horrific mass shooting and then they cut down, they brought in really stringent and effective gun control laws, and there hasn't been this.

Yeah, but that's

Yeah, but that's not what even the Liberals are talking about in this country doing what they did for Australia.

That's the difference, is that they're still not getting at the root of the problem, the Second Amendment.

Well,

the Second Amendment, I don't think, is a root problem.

You have to remember, Billy.

Yes, you have to remember, Bill, that the interpretation, the radical misreading of the Second Amendment that we live under now, which says the Second Amendment guarantees rights to individuals to own guns, is extremely recent.

It only took

seven years ago in Scalia's Heller decision.

Before that, for almost 200 years, the consensus, the consensus of constitutional scholars on all sides and of the Supreme Court, was that the Second Amendment, which after all begins talking about a well-regulated militia, referenced a well-regulated militia, that it only protected the rights of the states to form militias.

Now, you may disagree with that, but that was the consensus view until seven short years ago.

And all we need to do is to have the sanity of the...

Before that, no one was was dying of gun violence.

No one was dying with the same regularity of gun massacres as they are today.

So let me just chime in here.

I think the first thing we have to acknowledge is that there have been almost a thousand mass shooting deaths since Cindy Hook, and that's December 2012.

We have a major problem on our hands, and so what we need to think about is what the president means by politicizing this.

This isn't a partisan exercise.

To politicize something in the terms that he's using it, it is to ensure that we're using the public policy veins of Congress, of executive orders to make something happen.

We cannot afford to do that anymore.

People are dying.

He even challenged the press yesterday to compare what's happened in terms of terrorist attacks and deaths by terrorist attacks versus gun violence in this country.

Gun violence is overwhelmingly the cause.

People, that's what I thought was different.

You don't often hear a politician in America say, hey, it's back on you people.

Politicians say the people are perfect.

If only we could live up to their standards, blah, blah, yada, yada, bullshit, bullshit.

He was like, you know what, I can't do this all alone.

He actually said, you have to be a one-issue candidate on gun control.

That's even too far for me.

Michael Bloomberg tried that this past election cycle.

He created a group that was going to fund single-issue candidates on this, and they pretty much failed across the board.

Michael Bloomberg, big gun controller, let's remember what

applied gun control looks like.

Stop and Frisk was an anti-gun program.

It was.

That was the goal of it, is to disarm people in poor communities.

In the federal system,

if you are in the federal system for gun crime, 47% of them are black.

These are things that you have to think about when you're going to be giving police more power.

To your point about sort of what magic wand we can wave to make this better, the actual policy on the table is usually in the wake of these shootings is let's expand background checks.

Because that's the only thing they can get paid.

Okay, but let's talk about.

And they can't even get that paid.

But let's talk about that policy of background checks.

There are two problems.

Wait a second.

There's two problems with it.

One is that the mass shooters will pass the background checks, which we talked about before.

But the second problem is a Bill Maher problem, which is to say if we suddenly...

We have a lot of Bill Maher problems.

If we suddenly...

I'm a stoner.

I never shot anybody.

That's a problem.

That's a problem?

Yes.

Because...

Because every single federal background check says you can't have a gun if you have used a controlled substance.

Well, I could have to give my gun up then.

Exactly.

No, that's the thing.

What you're going to do is you're going to disenfranchise people on purpose from the Second Amendment rights of owning a gun if you have been a farm worker, if you've committed a nonviolent felony, and if you've smoked pot.

I mean, know that.

One more thing before we move on from guns, which is that I hear all the time when these things happen, it's a mental health issue.

And of course,

they're talking about individuals.

And of course, any individual who does this is mentally ill.

They don't seem to ever talk about the collective mental aberration that

every country, every nation has some core irrationality that it seems unable to escape.

And what you're saying, Matt, is basically it's a council of despair.

These kids are going to continue to die.

We're going to continue to see these regular massacres because, well, what are we going to do about it?

The overriding reality is that we have this irrational fixation on guns.

We have this sense of

guns.

A love of guns.

And I want to show you this street sign I saw a couple of years ago.

It was in the news.

I grew up not far from Wayne, New Jersey.

It says, warning, if you hit one of these kids because you are speeding, you will not need a lawyer.

Texture of a gun.

That's the problem right there.

That's the American mindset.

Guns are awesome.

They fix all problems just like in movies.

Guns are this incredibly potent symbol of autonomy for a lot of Americans.

And I understand that.

The problem is it's not an effective form of autonomy because the one thing we know is that possession of a gun makes it much more likely you're going to kill someone in your family than you're ever going to confront an intruder or a bad guy.

It all exists in the realm of fancy.

Now if I can get back to the politicization.

Is that a word?

Am I saying that wrong?

Okay.

For them to talk about don't politicize guns the same week that we found out that the Benghazi, this is the ninth, by the way, Benghazi Committee.

The other eight turned up nothing.

It's the longest, it's the longest investigative committee ever, just surpassed Watergate this week, 72 weeks.

So, and then of course we had the Kevin McCarthy moment that I just mentioned in the monologue.

How can I say?

I mean, this is the most politicized thing ever.

Highly.

So the thing that is very interesting to me is that people were surprised that it was political.

Of course, it was political.

They never wanted to get to the bottom of what happened in Benghazi.

They wanted to figure out a way to make Hillary Clinton look like a horrible, terrible person.

So once they couldn't find anything squarely in her lap for Benghazi, then it was like, well, let's get to the bottom of these emails.

Maybe we can at least tarnish her image for the election.

This has always been political.

And now they don't want him as speaker anymore because he told the truth.

By accident, mind you, he's cleaning it up today.

Right, well, but from the beginning, don't you agree that Benghazi has always been a tragedy in search of a scandal?

That it began as a horrific tragedy, and they've been searching for a scandal to attach to it.

And they failed in every attempt, so they're going to do one more.

The only thing I'd add to what you'd say, Angela, is that McCarthy wasn't committing a gaff in the sense of unintentionally saying something true.

He was making a campaign promise.

He was talking to Sean Hannity, and Sean Hannity said to him, What are you going to do for us?

He said, Well, look what we've already done with Benghazi in driving down Hillary.

But he forgot that's not his role, and that's actually against the law.

And he's

$4 million worth of taxpayer care money into this.

He shouldn't be doing it, but he wasn't sorry that he's doing it.

There are two scandals associated with Benghazi.

They aren't necessarily the ones they bring up.

One is that why did we depose a dictator in Libya without congressional authority, without any kind of approval like that, and then left a god-awful mess in its place?

That is scandalous behavior.

You might not pin it on Hillary Clinton above everybody else, although she definitely.

So then, by those standards, Iraq is scandalous.

Iraq is totally a scandalous.

Of course it is.

All right.

Just as long as we agree.

All right, so, but what's interesting to me is that it was not really even the worst politicized scandal of the week, which was the hearings on Planned Parenthood.

They had Cecile Richards, the head of Planned Parenthood, and they called it a hearing.

It was just a yelling.

They were just

screaming at her.

And I want to know what was it for?

Because abortion is legal in America, okay?

Planned Parenthood already prohibits any federal funding for abortion.

So you won that one.

The Sting video that got all this brouhaha going has been discredited.

It wasn't real.

And seven states have investigated this selling of body parts.

They find it doesn't happen.

And yet Carly Fiorina, the Baghdad Bob

of abortion, still repeats this.

Here's what she said at the debate.

I dare Hillary Clinton to watch these tapes, watch a fully formed fetus on the table, its heart beating, its legs kicking, while someone says we have to keep it alive to harvest its brain.

Okay,

that wasn't an abortion she's talking about.

It wasn't at Planned Parenthood.

It probably wasn't in America.

And that baby wasn't viable.

Other than that, it's completely true.

So

the thing that I find interesting, not only about the hearings, but in what you kind of see unfolding, is the fact that this is a complete disaster for them.

It's a perfect example of partisanship and not politicizing something.

This is partisanship in action.

I think, again, when you go back to what the president was referencing, this is about how to make the political process to affect change that helps people.

This is just a witch hunt.

It's yet another example of what the Republican Party, especially in the House, is up to.

They are all about trying to

create lies, tell stories with Carly Fiorina telling that god-awful sob story on the debate stage, and then they're trying to act that out.

in a congressional hearing.

But I don't think also, Angela,

there's something else at stake, too.

People who are passionately against abortion should be the people who are most passionately for contraception.

Right.

Because contraception.

Which is mostly what Planned Marriage does.

That's exactly right.

They do much more contraception than abortion.

And we are the no money.

It's an abortion reducer.

Exactly.

And they also didn't spend, I don't think, enough time talking about what fetal tissue research benefits, how it benefits us.

So just for example, I just lost my grandmother to Alzheimer's in June.

That is the type of things that are coming out of fetal tissue research is all Alzheimer's research, ALS research, Parkinson's disease, all the vaccinations that we've ever had come from that type of research.

I don't understand how that's coming from.

Anyone like Carly Fiorina who's against it should take a pledge to say, I am so against this, I will not benefit myself, I pledge, from any further medical advances that come from fetal research.

And, you know, one more thing to remember.

When the fetal tissue is donated, it's always done with the consent of the mother.

In other words, a woman who's facing about as

horrible.

You see as horrible a tragedy as they could say, there's one good thing that could come out of this tragedy is I can see that if this tragedy will help somebody else.

And to use that very positive step in a tragic context to make it horrific is really wrong.

Okay.

So it was the annual meeting of the world leaders this week at the UN.

It's been going on all week.

Vladimir Putin was in a very lecturing mood.

I love the way they talk about each other in these speeches at the UN without ever mentioning the name of the country.

Putin said, after the end of the Cold War, those who found themselves at the top of the pyramid

were tempted to think that we are so strong and exceptional, not saying any names,

that we know better than anyone what to do.

He said, and they're talking about the mess in the Middle East.

I cannot help asking those who have caused the situation, unnamed,

do you realize now now what you've done with your policies based on self-conceit and belief in your exceptionality?

So he was really giving us some hard truths, and we found more of the speech.

And I don't know if you know this about me, but I speak fluent Russian.

And

he was giving America some other hard truths, and I'm going to translate for you now.

Okay, here it is.

Okay, your so-called Russian dressing is just ketchup and mayonnaise.

You used to put men on moon, now you just remake Spider-Man every two years.

You're a nation of fat people in workout clothes.

The irony amuses me.

If American women are so hot, why does Trump keep ordering brides from Slovenia?

Just to make sure I didn't hear wrong, you pay fortune for health care, but porn is free?

You could solve deficit problem if you'd just sell me Katy Perry, the dancing girl.

But will you not?

Don't be so proud of Caitlin Jenner.

Russia invented transsexual athletes.

The food here is poison, and trust me, I know poison.

All right, let's bring out Dr.

Neal.

He is an astrophysicist and director of the Hayden Planetarium.

My old job, the rock star of science, Neil deGrasse Tyson is over now.

Hi.

How are you?

Take it to you, Doc.

All right.

So very exciting to have you and Dr.

Dawson here at the same time.

Dawkins.

Dawkins, that's right.

On overtime.

Stay tuned for overtime tonight.

We'll be there.

It's going to be a science audience.

Tear a new one.

Yeah.

Wherever a new one needs to be torn.

And also, I'm happy to hear, because I read this week that Matt Damon discovered water on Mars.

He did.

You mixed a couple of storylines there, I think.

But yeah,

mildly mixed it.

But there is water on Mars?

Yeah, well, we've always known there was once water, given all of the record of dried riverbeds and meandering pathways of waterways and

river deltas and all of this.

Ice.

I thought there was ice on Mars.

Well, there's ice at the poles, yeah, but we're talking about about water that is shaping.

So they might have room service.

That's possibly.

Yes, ice on Mars.

That's fine.

So they found direct evidence of liquid water in it now.

And so

that's important.

And you know, I must say, in the past, I would have said, oh, this is exciting to you, I roll.

But I saw you, I can't remember where, one of your podcasts or somewhere, because you're ubiquitous in the media.

And you know what?

I have to say, you convinced me.

Really?

Yes, because you did your spiel about how things that, when they first were being discovered, electricity, atoms, we were like, what's the use of that?

Right.

So do your spiel about that.

Well, do your hunk.

Do your hunk.

You want me to go there?

I want you to go there.

Okay, so.

And I'm admitting, you know, I changed my mind, as scientists do.

New evidence.

I'm honored and flattered that I could bring you to a new place intellectually.

But now that you wore that vest,

I'm

rethinking my position right from

the middle.

So

here's a good example.

In 1917, Albert Einstein publishes a paper called

On the Stimulated Emission of Radiation.

An obscure paper with an odd, complex derivation.

At the time, he is not thinking, nobody is thinking lasers.

But that is the intellectual foundation of the laser.

He's not thinking barcodes or anything else or LASIC surgery.

Nobody is thinking that, but it is an intellectual frontier on how matter behaves on its smallest scales.

And if you were around back then, say, why are you wasting your time?

You can't even see atoms.

Do something productive, like, you know, to stop the First World War from unfolding.

And so you can't get in the way of research that is going to new places because you never know how that will come back with us.

One other point.

Just in the next decade.

I'll go fast.

In the 1920s.

You made your spiel.

This is even better.

In the 1920s, people were further probing the atom and they discovered quantum physics.

It would take four or five decades, but in the 60s and 70s, quantum physics would become the foundation for the information technology revolution.

And by some measures, the IT revolution is responsible for a third of the GDP of the world.

And so, but if you were around back then, you're going to say, what do you care about?

And then, what would we take pictures of our food with?

All right.

So, one more thing about Mars, which I thought was very fascinating: that maybe life on Earth

is because it was seeded from Mars.

Yeah.

Because, like, an asteroid or something like that.

Yeah, so all evidence tells us that Mars was sort of wet and fertile?

Before.

Wait.

I was going to say moist, but I said no, I just said wet.

Talk like that with that vest.

You will charm the ladies tonight.

Mars was wet and fertile before Earth was.

And computer simulations tell us that in the early solar system, there was heavy bombardment because the solar planets were still forming from all the debris that was left over from when the largest bodies had taken shape.

And so if you have a large impactor on a surface, it can fling surrounding rocks into space.

And if they have nooks and crannies on those rocks that contain microbes, then you have interplanetary microbes.

Not all of them will survive.

Most will die.

But those that do survive will be the ones that have resistance to radiation, high temperature, low temperature.

They can be freeze-dried.

The tardigrade.

Exactly.

Well, you know, I love, yeah.

And by the way,

the tardigrade, the water bank.

I learned about it on Cosmos on your show.

Oh, thank you.

Thank you.

Do we have a picture of the tardigrade or a video?

Oh, there you go.

And I know it is the funkiest thing.

It is the ugliest thing.

I mean, and this is not microscopic.

You can actually see.

Yeah, it's tiny.

To get the detail, you need the microscope.

Right, but it's not.

It's otherwise called a water bear, and it survives

everywhere.

Everywhere.

You can't kill the thing with any normal way that you would kill every other life form.

And so there is no...

Like what?

Super cold, super hot.

Yes.

Like no oxygen.

Here's the best one.

You could dry it out.

It would go into like a suspended animation, add water later, and it'll come back to life.

And so

these are the kinds of...

Roaches have nothing on this.

Yeah,

exactly.

Yeah.

So there's no known reason why any life form on Earth should have that kind of resistance.

Right.

Because there's no drivers of natural selection that would give you that.

But we do know something that does, and that is an interplanetary stowaway trip of microbes from Mars to Earth.

So it may be that all life on Earth was seeded by Martian life.

Unbelievable.

Now, you're...

That's called panspermia.

I'm going to have to convince Dr.

Ben Carson of this.

Oh.

Now, wait, let me bring in our political people here.

Dr.

Ben Carson keeps rising in the polls.

Now, somebody said this is only because conservatives can win the battle at Thanksgiving by saying to their liberal relatives, I'm for a black man for president.

And as soon as they win Thanksgiving, it's over.

I think it's a bit unfair.

I mean, I think he's, if you've seen him speak, he's actually a great inspirational speaker.

If you're into that type of thing, listen to me, listen to me.

Actually, watching.

If you're into what?

If you're into inspirational life speeches, not about politics here.

I'm talking about his life as someone who came and this very self-made man.

Not that he's intentional.

He's a neurosurgeon.

He's separated conjoined twins.

I know.

And this is the question of...

I read Gifted Hands.

I don't know what's happened since then.

Exactly.

But Gifted Hands produced this this whole structure.

You can separate conjoined twins, but he can't separate fact from fiction.

This is the problem.

It's the craziest thing.

And I want your opinion on this, especially.

I identified this phenomenon a couple of years ago on the show as the smart, stupid person.

The person who somehow can do something like Dr.

Ben Carson, be a brilliant neurosurgeon, but he took on the Big Bang theory.

You know, he said,

ridiculous.

Our solar system, not to mention the universe outside of us, is extraordinarily well organized.

Except for when asteroids come and render life extinct.

But other than that, it's organized.

Yeah, okay.

Now, except for when stars explode.

Now that's generating the nearby.

Other than that, it's organized.

Now, that type of organization

to just come out of an explosion, talk about fairy tales and also evolution.

He said, I personally believe that this theory that Darwin came up with was something that was encouraged by by the adversary.

They did.

I've never heard that.

That's Seventh-day Adventism, though.

I mean, that's what I'm saying.

But how can someone be so brilliant and so stupid?

Maybe he's smarter than you think because he's rising in the poll, so it's working.

So you're arguing with a politician as though facts matter to what a politician says.

There's another thing going on here.

He's running for president, and you're not.

So, what a luxury it is to sit here and and and attack politicians who are trying to be our leaders when if you have the better idea you run for president and if you're not gonna do it then do something else so I don't I don't I don't beat politicians on the head you know what I did I'm an educator so my task is not to beat people trying to lead us is to educate the electorate so that at the end of the day

the rest of us are assholes

because we're not running for president no but you're you're you're attacking

rising in the polls.

So maybe you should be attacking the people who are voting for him rather than.

I do.

But you know, this strikes me as a classic case of a false equivalence.

There's no shortage of politicians who accept the truths of science.

We have plenty of them.

The President of the United States is a good example of what.

Wait, there's only two scientists in Congress.

Two scientists in Congress.

But there are plenty of people who understand enough and have respect for science.

The problem is if you're standing up in a Republican presidential debate and someone says to you, do you accept the truth of biological evolution?

and you raise your hand, you're off the island.

You're off the stage.

And that's the problem.

I wish it were widespread, but it's actually highly particularized in one political movement and one political party.

And isn't this a test for your religiosity that the Constitution prevents?

Precludes?

What do you think?

It can't be a test.

No,

at every debate, somebody asks,

who is your Savior?

No, it's Jesus.

Somewhere they find a way to talk about God.

So you know that box got checked by the end of the debate.

Okay?

And so, but yet in the Constitution, if I remember my Constitution, isn't there a place in there that says

no test for your...

Ben Carson is someone who has said that he doesn't want a Muslim to be president.

He would apply that test, not as a constitutional question, but he thinks that there should not be one because they might be engaging in takiyah.

Well, actually, when he was asked to clarify, what he said is, I just want someone who will put the Constitution above religiosity.

He was saying even a Christian, he said that explicitly, and he's a super duper Christian.

He said, I would not even want a Christian.

He wants taxpayers to tithe, though.

I'm just saying, I'm a Christian too.

Yeah, he basically is saying, I want you to pay 10%.

So his new tax plan is for everyone to pay 10% because that's what you do at church.

And I'm all for it at church.

You know what spooks me a little bit about that?

He's using religious

language in reference to our tax system, which would imply that if we pay our 10% to the government, it's like the government is God.

I think that was the best tax plan he could come up with, though.

But we wouldn't want Kim.

You know, I'm glad you're...

Let's talk about tax plan.

The Republicans are all bringing out their tax plans.

Donald Trump, I never thought I would say this, but has disappointed me.

Because

for a while we thought he was going to be pretty good on this issue.

He talked about taxing hedge fund managers.

We thought, oh, this guy has thought of Nixon to China China on this issue.

He's one of them.

He's a rich guy.

Okay.

Now that he's running for president.

Well, now that he might be president, he wants to cut the bottom 50% to zero.

Real brave, since, remember, 47% don't pay taxes anyway already.

Wants to cut the top rate, which is now about 40%,

to 25%, cut the estate tax altogether, cut the corporate rate down to 15%.

Okay, this is the same old bullshit.

Grover Norquist likes this plan, so you know it's insane.

This is what they've all been feeding us.

But you would think there would be political room, that the smart political thing to do would be to at least bring forward a tax plan, to which he has absolutely no obligation if he ever were to be elected, that at least would look as though it would address issues of inequality and would soak the rich.

But he can't even do that.

He can't even do that.

The hold of the plutocratic class is so overwhelming that, yes,

another planet, right?

Not as moist or as fertile.

It's a good week for Pluto.

But I couldn't miss that opportunity.

But I interrupted.

Go on.

But no, no, but the whole...

It was not a planet now.

It's not.

It was demoted, yes.

We used to leave in the meritocratic class.

I interrupted.

We're talking about the plutocratic class.

Even when you think there would be political advantage in it, it can't be done.

It's one of those taboos I was talking about before.

My problem with it is just that no one's talking about, on the Republican side, about cutting government.

They're pretending that the size of government is the size of taxation and the revenues from that.

That is not true.

The size of government is what you spend money on.

And if you get rid of all taxes and continue spending even more money, then you're actually going to be spending much more money on servicing the deficit and servicing the debt long term, which is stacking up like crazy right now.

So unless you're going to talk about what you're going to cut, cutting taxes is pointless.

Tax cut and spend.

Tax cut and spend for me isn't.

Exactly.

That's a problem.

Tax cut and spend and tax and spend are both spending, and Republicans have been doing that for too long.

Let me introduce one more bullshit thing, they all say, like Jeb Bush and his plan which would cut his own taxes by $800,000 a year.

And he said, well, I'm simplifying it.

And everybody goes, oh, great.

I'm going to just cut it to three, three tax

brackets.

And you know what?

We actually need more tax brackets.

Somebody who

makes $250,000 a year pays the top rate.

So does somebody who makes $250 million.

So does Warren Buffett, who last year made $13 billion.

Now, he's one of the good billionaires.

We're not attacking him.

But if he paid $50 instead of $40, he'd still eat, right?

Shouldn't there be another bracket for not just the rich, but the obscenely rich?

But they're not trying to solve for the tax code challenges.

What we know is that them saying simplifying the tax code appeases maybe not Donald Trump because he's funding his own campaign.

He's made that abundantly clear.

But for the others, it helps to ensure that they're doing exactly what their donors want.

The larger problem is as the republican party continues to shrink they still have not figured out how to reach out to low-income communities to black and brown folks they should be talking about the wage crisis in this country and not the tax code the folks that can get around the complicated tax code have tax preparers everybody else doesn't need them so that's not really an issue under nixon wasn't the top i was just

what i was about to say under eisenhower

right and then your hero at age seven jfk said that we would actually do better better if we cut the highest marginal taxes.

But we all remember.

I mean, France, as you know well know, had a millionaire's tax three years ago, 75%.

Didn't work out so well for France.

They had to retreat.

People leave.

Maryland came up with a lot of people.

We all remember, Matt, how America suffered during the Eisenhower years.

We still think about the poverty and suffering and the decimation.

We used to

use the Eisenhower years.

You mock, but back in the 70s, a lot of people were talking.

I mean, I grew up with your liberalism that spent all day long mocking the 50s and the organization man and all that kind of culture and suddenly there's this big they weren't mocking it because it wasn't a prosperous time they were mocking it because the prosperity was so overwhelming that it produced conformity a very different thing yeah really

well it definitely it definitely produced a middle class yes a thriving middle class which we no longer have anyway we gotta wrap things up thank you panel overtime coming out but first new rules everybody new rules

all right new rule.

Someone has to explain to the man on a flight from Scotland to Amsterdam who tried to open the plane's exit door at 30,000 feet because he thought it was the door to the restroom that that's the kind of stoner move you make on the way back from Amsterdam.

New rule, don't leave a brother, Hank.

That's it.

New rule, Google's Nelf's new self-driving car has to emasculate us a little less.

I mean,

I want to tune out while getting there safely too, but not like a little bitch.

I mean, look at this thing.

It's like a Volkswagen beetle and a Mentos had a baby.

Honestly, the only way this car makes sense is if I'm chasing jewel thieves through Paris in 1992 while it makes this noise.

Neural, the man at a Michigan gas station who lit his car on fire when he tried to kill a spider on his gas tank with a cigarette lighter,

has to assure us he's not the same guy who thought the exit door on the plane was the rest of the way.

New Rule, coming out of a blackout with no memory of getting a tattoo

isn't really appointment television.

It's what alcoholics do.

But

if you like watching Blind Spot, you'll love Wet Spot about getting up at 4 a.m.

and pissing in the hamper.

And finally, New Rule, Catholic conservatives who don't like the Pope have to stop lying about his record.

Remember Bob Dole?

Stop lying about my record.

They talk about the Pope like he's gone rogue.

He's off the reservation inventing his own brand of socialist Christianity.

No, he's just quoting Jesus.

Sell everything you own and give it to the poor.

Be on your guard against all kinds of greed.

When you give a banquet, invite the poor even though they cannot cannot repay you.

And of course, here, have a fish.

I made enough for everyone.

That's not a real one.

Because let's face it, Republicans, this is not really the face that best reflects your party's values.

This is.

Yes, by now most of you have probably heard the story of Martin Shkrelli, the 32-year-old financial wondershit and

massing gill spokesman who

bought the rights to a life-saving drug called Daraprim, which is used by AIDS sufferers, cancer patients, and infants, and then jacked up the price of a single pill from $1,350 to $750.

Even Ticketmaster was like, oh, come, home.

I'd say, how do you sleep?

But I guess you just hang upside down in your cave.

And now that skrelly is,

not that skrelly is unusual for the pharmaceutical industry.

15 years ago, cancer drugs cost an average of $10,000 a year.

Now it's $10,000 a month because this cartel owns the U.S.

government every bit as much as Mexican drug lords own theirs.

And to all the conservatives who still parrot the line that Obamacare is a government takeover, please then explain why guys like Martin Shkrelli are still calling the shots.

He's not a bureaucrat who works for the government.

He's a hedge fund manager who works for the devil.

And here's his rationale.

And if there's a company that was selling an Aston Martin at the price of a bicycle, and we buy that company, and we ask to charge Toyota Toyota prices, I don't think that that should be a crime.

Yeah, except that owning an Aston Martin is not a matter of life and death.

I mean

at least until it's bought by Volkswagen.

And the fact that this story played out last week during a papal visit exposed just how little the so-called Christians of the far right believe in what Jesus actually said.

How could they?

There is not a tent in the world big enough to fit under it, both Jesus and Anne Rand.

In order to be both Republican and Christian, they had to create an entirely new Jesus.

We don't only have two Americas, we have two Jesuses now.

It's true.

Liberals have the traditional Jesus who hated rich assholes and wouldn't shut up about how they should give away all their money.

And conservatives made up a completely new Jesus.

A small businessman from Galilee

whose main gripe is big government and who wants to make Nazareth great again.

I call him supply-side Jesus.

He'd love to help the less fortunate, but he's got investors to think about.

Like the time Supply-side Jesus performed a miracle and created a bounty of loaves and fishes, and then gave them all to the top 1% so they could trickle down to the takers.

Or the time Supply-Side Jesus came upon a leper who asked to be healed, so Supply-Side Jesus bought the company that makes leprosy medication and jacked up the price.

Jesus may have said it's easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven.

But it was supply-side Jesus who said, did I ever tell you about the time I shot a camel?

In conclusion, I would just like to say that Donald Trump is actually the perfect candidate for today's Republicans because he says, he does, that his two favorite books are the Bible and The Art of the Deal.

Trump says one is about a perfect God who teaches humanity the right way to live, and the other is the Bible.

All right, I'll be at the Virginia in Champaign, Illinois, November 8th.

Madison Square Garden in New York, the 14th, and at the Providence Art Center, Rhode Island, November 15th.

I want to thank Matt Welsh, Angela Rye, Adam Gopnik, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and Richard Dawkins.

Join us now at Overtime on YouTube.

Thank you, folks.

Catch all new episodes of Real Time with Bill Maher every Friday night at 11, or watch him anytime on HBO on Demand.

For more info, log on to HBO.com.