Real Time with Bill Maher - Overtime - Episode #366 (Originally aired 10/2/15)

Episode Date: October 5, 2015

Overtime - Episode #366 (Originally aired 10/2/15)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. 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. Back now, look at this. This is like when I was a kid, I had a baseball card with Willie Mays and Hank Aaron. Science equivalent of that. Yeah.

Okay, so first question for both 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. Yeah, but we have different tactics regarding that. And I think there's a way to... He blames me. All of your fault. No, I think there's... 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 do it yet? Rather than sort of attack them and make them feel stupid. What about the way? I read that. of Don Regan 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. You know. They draw a little soldier and then they draw a great big soldier. I wish I was making that out. Well, it was anecdotal.

He didn't care about AIDS until Rock Hudson got. And it was like, oh, Rock Hudson, I know him. Yeah. So the circumstances were set up so that he came to the problem rather than beating him overhead to force him to think that way. 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, I know as a hero to both of you guys, right? He sort of broke up the labor. Darwin himself was very non-prolemical.

He never made those kinds of arguments, but he let Huxley, he led his post. Huxley do that work. Yeah, exactly. And Neil's the Darwin. I'll be the Huxley. All right, okay. The division of labor. So you're the Lenin and you're the Trotsky.

You're the Bin Laden and you're the Zahua hero. You're Willie Mays and you're Hank Air. Well, why must we be other people? You 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 Democrats because the Republicans so suck up all the year. When is it? October 13th. I was getting ready to say my mother's birthday.

Oh, sorry. You're okay. You're good to go. 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.

Well, you know, on that, 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.

The task of the educator is to have them come to a point of enlightenment where they embrace. End it off to you. Hence why you're the good guy, right? Against you're the good guy. 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. And 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 candidates here are looking to see when Joe Biden will enter the race. Is he going to? 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. Wow. $5 bill. 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. He started running for presidents, 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 going to be looking at. Wow. Okay. Should we be wary, guys, of the developments in artificial intelligence?

Speaking of the Republican Party. That's natural stupidity. Oh, I'm so mean. Well, this is something I've heard it warned about. I think 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. 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. Well, but when you look at somebody 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. 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 what I'm saying. But I disagree with Elon Musk and Stephen Hawkins. 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 them. All right? We, our computer, our best Jeopardy player got smoked by another computer. Okay? 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.

We're machines replacing our body. Computers replacing our mind. We've been doing it ever since the beginning. All right, Neil. 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 answer it, Richard, can, 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. 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.

The solved crime, the truth. And the problems of the universe in the intercession. Matt Welchry, 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 had like 10% going in, which he was polling out three, four months ago. But he, he, you know, didn't stand up for,

what he believed in. I think the problem, 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. I mean, he did us, 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, I'm embracing it. And so then what's his consent? 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 in that stage used. And there was a little bit of a pickup up 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. Yeah. It happened. Maybe this has been brought up before, but lightning hit it. Well, you know, that was...

Have you guys thought of that? I mean, 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 surely knew that. Right. Didn't you?

A primordial soup. They built a bowl of pot, primordial soup, and they put an electric charge through it, and then they found that actually you got organic. That's true. But that wasn't necessary to do it. We now know how, yes, but I... The meteorites contain those various same organic. molecules which Miller made by his lightnings.

Yes, exactly. So 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 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-dawning 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 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... Here's a 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. 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.