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

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Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO late night series, real time with Bill Maher.

Back now, look at this.

This is like when I was a kid, I had a baseball card with Willie Mays and Hank Aaron together.

The science equivalent of that.

Yeah.

Okay, so first question for both of you guys: is it worth engaging with people who deny facts like evolution and climate change?

Is it worth just engaging?

He's got more patience for that.

We have to do it.

We have to do it.

It is worth it because we've got to.

I mean,

if we don't, we're screwed.

I agree.

We're screwed.

Yeah, but I think, but we have different tactics regarding that.

And I think there's a way to...

He blames me.

That's all.

It's all your fault.

No,

I think you want to offer them this way of thinking about the natural world.

And then they come to it on their own.

Can't we?

Rather than sort of attack them

and make them feel stupid.

What about the the way?

I read that biography of Don Reagan about Ronald Reagan.

And like, you know, Reagan was not very engaged about stuff, but they would get him engaged.

They'd be like, he'd go into Reagan's office and say, do you know what three companies in America have in common?

They all don't, and then Reagan would be like, you know what?

Well, here's a jelly bean.

They draw a little soldier and then they draw a great big soldier.

I wish I was making that up.

Well, it was anecdotal.

He didn't care about AIDS until Rock Hudson got it.

And it was like, oh, Rock Hudson, I know him.

Yeah.

Yeah, so he came through.

So

the circumstances were set up so that he came to the problem rather than beating him overhead to force him to.

Sometimes you've got to leave the breadcrumbs, is all I'm saying.

But if I may, wouldn't you agree, Richard, that when you think about Darwin, who I know is a hero to both of you guys, right?

He sort of broke up the labor.

Darwin himself was very non-polemical.

He never made those kinds of arguments, but he let Huxley, he let his father.

I mean, Huxley did a good cop.

Yeah, exactly.

And

Neil's the Darwin.

I'll be the Huxley.

Exactly.

Good divisional labor.

So you're the Lenin and you're the Trotsky.

You're the bin Laden and you're the Tsar Hero.

You're Willie Mays and you're Hank Aaron.

Well, why mustn't we be other people?

I can be ourselves.

Why must you wear that vest?

Okay.

We could ask why.

All right.

Wait,

wait, I had one for Angela.

Okay.

Well, the Democratic debate, there's a Democratic debate.

We forget all about the Democratic debate because the Republicans so suck up all the art.

When is it?

October 13th.

I was hoping that.

I was ready to say my mother's birthday.

Oh, sorry.

No, no.

You're okay.

You're good to go.

You followed it that closely.

No, it's just information.

It's knowledge.

He's just mad at the folks running for office

and not the electorate.

Right, right.

Well, you know, I'm not, I must defend myself.

I'm the one guy in TV who's consistently said the American people are fucking stupid.

And like, I've gotten so much shit about it over the years.

I remember once Wilf Blitzer, like, berating me, are you really saying Americans are stupid?

I'm like, yes, Wolf, I am.

So

don't tell me.

But the task of the educator is not to tell their students that they're stupid.

I'm not.

The task of the educator is to have them come to a point of enlightenment where they embrace.

Hand it off to you.

Hence why you're the good guy, right?

Will the Democratic debate help candidates like Jim Webb or Martin O'Malley?

Good luck with that.

What I would say,

honestly, what I would say would help them is,

I don't really know what would help them at this point, actually.

I think that...

Well, they're not doing it for this year.

They're doing it for the future.

Yeah, but I think Martin O'Malley had a good run as governor of Maryland.

He's had a very hard time getting any traction in this election.

I think Hillary Clinton came in as very formidable, and now folks aren't looking to Martin O'Malley as the challenger.

They're really looking at Bernie Sanders, who has kind of been a strong challenger.

And I think others who aren't even appeased by Bernie Sanders' candidacy are looking to see when Joe Biden enter the race.

Is he going soon?

I don't know.

The jury's still out.

I heard he was.

I haven't seen anything yet.

If you had to bet your own money, what would you say?

I would say yes.

Really?

I would.

Really?

I would.

Wow.

$5,000.

You know what?

You're right.

You're right, because why would he, you know, all this came from him.

It had to.

Why would he stir this pot?

This is the first time in his life that he's ever registered a pulse in a national political poll running for president.

Right.

He started running for president, I think, when I was 12 for the first time and never even had like 1% anywhere.

But now suddenly the Biden trial balloon gets him like at 20.

So yeah, he's got to be looking for it.

Wow.

Okay.

Should we be wary, guys, of the developments in artificial intelligence?

Speaking of the Republican party.

No, that's natural stupidity.

So the

this is something

that Elon Musk is worried about.

I think Stephen Hawking is worried about.

I'm actually quite surprised that artificial intelligence hasn't advanced further than it has.

I mean, looking back to the 1970s, when I first started taking an interest in it, I thought it would be much further advanced by now than it is.

But when you look at so many of the things that were in science fiction movies back then, we thought we'd have flying cars now.

We kind of do.

They're called helicopters.

Yeah.

That is not a flying car.

Well, it goes up and it goes down.

It's the kind of noise a flying car would make.

So that's why we don't have flying cars, because it would be really noisy and

blow all kinds of things off of the street when it came up and down.

That's all I'm saying.

But I disagree with Elon Musk and

Stephen Hawking.

I have no fear of artificial intelligence because we're already exposed to artificial intelligence.

A computer beat us at chess.

A game we invented.

We put our best chess player, the computer smoked him.

Our computer, our best Jeopardy player got smoked by another computer.

And so, was that the end of civilization?

Did people say, oh my gosh, what will happen to us?

And this has been going on since the Industrial Revolution.

But we've got machines replacing our body.

Computers replacing our mind.

We've been doing it ever since the beginning.

All right, Leo.

But you're cherry-picking an easy example, the chess game.

I mean, come on, that holds no threat to us, but there are other things that would.

The thing about chess is that it's a domain which is very carefully defined, and it's much more difficult to have an artificial intelligence which can handle anything you throw at it, anything in real life.

But it will come, I'm sure.

Let me ask you, Richard,

with artificial intelligence mimicking the human mind, we have a lot of neurological baggage from our evolutionary past.

Is that baggage, which most of the time is not functioning rationally or logically, is that the source of our creativity?

And if that's the case, now you program a computer as complex as ever you do, but it's still according to a prescribed code.

So can a computer ever be as inventive as a human being?

You could build in a certain random element.

I mean, that would do it if it was filtered through the system.

You have to program in the randomness.

Yeah, but randomness filtered through some interesting

circuitry

could come out as imaginative curiosity.

You guys ought to do a buddy cop movie.

Solve crime, mystery.

And the problems of the universe

in succession.

Matt Welcher, as a libertarian, are you disappointed by Rand Paul's performance in the campaign?

Very much so.

I didn't expect that his floor would be as low as this has been.

I thought he would have like 10% going in, which he was polling at three, four months ago.

But

he

didn't stand up for what he believed in.

I think he had a twin daddy problem, and I don't mean that in sort of the George Bush psychological sense, but in that Ron Paul's most

passionate followers don't like Rand Paul.

They think he's a big sellout.

I do.

You do.

I mean,

he opened his campaign in front of an aircraft carrier.

His father would have never done that.

His father was saying, we've got to get rid of this shit.

And this guy was saying, saying,

I'm embracing it.

And so then what's his constituency?

Now he's just like one of the other 12 dwarves.

I think there's something to that.

I mean, in the last debate, you saw him actually bring the only kind of foreign policy critique there on the stage of saying, hey, we can't just keep going to war every single time.

He also made some really good discussion about marijuana, put Chris Christie rightfully on the defensive about the kind of monstrous application of the drug war that he and basically most everybody else on that stage used.

And there was a little bit of a pickup in the Paul universe.

The question is: can enough people kind of finally quit in this race

so that there can be, you know,

why is Bobby Jindal still running?

We don't know.

There's a path, but the path is pretty small, I think.

All right.

What is currently the most exciting area of scientific development?

The origin of life is something we don't know anything about, and we want to know something about it.

And I would love to know how life actually got started, the origin of the first self-replicating entity.

I'm not a biologist, and that's my top three things as well.

Just how do you go from organic molecules to self-replicating life?

That happened in the early Earth, and it happened relatively quickly, very shortly after it could have possibly happened.

It happened.

Maybe this has been brought up before, but lightning hit it?

Well, you know, that was a...

Have you guys thought of that?

That was an idea.

Sometimes the layman, you know, fresh eyes on a problem.

You know, years ago they did that experiment.

They built a bowl.

You already knew that, right?

A primordial soup.

Yeah, they built a bowl of primordial soup and they put an electric charge through it, and then they found that actually you got organic soup.

Oh, but that wasn't necessarily

we now know how yes but that the meteorites contain that those very same organic molecules which which Miller made by his lightning strikes yeah so that you get them for free but it's still just organic chemistry at the end of the day you want to have self-replicating life and that's a mystery also we don't know what was around before the Big Bang That's kind of fun.

We have some ideas, maybe a multiverse and with one of multiple bubbles of universes coming in and out of existence.

We didn't just pull that out of an orifice.

That's a cogent

extrapolation of the marriage of quantum physics and relativity.

Also, is there life elsewhere in the universe, especially in a backyard, like in the subsurface soils of Mars?

I got a good question for you.

My question, because

interstellar.

Yeah.

You saw that one.

Yeah, of course.

Okay.

Okay, so it scared me.

By the way, the five lead actors all have starred in their own film, and they all played scientists and engineers.

And they're fully fleshed out characters rather than the weird, wire-haired, lab coat-donning person that you don't care anything about except will we survive this attack.

They were fully, and I think that was a first in blockbuster films, that scientists could be treated as just ordinary characters that just happened to know more about something than others did.

But Matthew McConaughey was really not that credible as a scientist.

I mean, it was still like,

we have to go through the black hole.

All right, all right.

But here's my question.

Because, I mean, the reason why they have to find a new place to live is because there's a horrible drought on Earth.

Nothing's growing anymore.

And we've had a horrible drought here in California, and I look at it, and, you know, we don't really know when the tipping point for global warming is going to get to that point where maybe California is the whole world.

So if that happens...

But here's the problem.

If you find another planet, any planets we have any record of, they're very unlike Earth.

So you're going to have to learn how to terraform other planets, turn them into something like Earth.

And then you're going to have to ship a billion people there.

So Stephen Hawking wants us to be a multi-planet species so that

the species doesn't go extinct by something bad happening in one place.

My rebuttal to that is: if you have the power to turn another planet into Earth,

then you have the power to turn Earth back into Earth.

Thank you very much.

Brilliant.

All right.

Thank you, everybody.

We're way late.

We gotta go.

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