Real Time with Bill Maher - Overtime – Episode #731: Neil deGrasse Tyson, Kevin McCarthy, Katy Tur

Episode Date: June 2, 2026

Bill Maher and his guests answer viewer questions after the show. (Originally aired 5/29/26) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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free of charge. BetMGEMGEMP operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming, Ontario. Welcome to an HBO podcast. from the HBO late-night series, Real Time with Bill Maher. He is an after physicist and author of Take Me to your leader, Neil deGrasse Tyson. He served with the 50s hit speaker of the House, Kevin McCarthy, and she anchors Katie Turr reports on MS Now, Katie Turr. All right, first one is for you, very topical again.

This happened last night. A rocket belonging to Jeff Bezos Blue Origin exploded on the launch pad. How much failure should we expect when it comes to rocket development? I would guess a lot, and hopefully not when the people are in it. Yeah, yes. And so I don't know what next gen that rocket was. If it was an old gen, it should not have blown up, and some heads will grow. But if he's experimenting with something new, some new design, you expect some failure.

And if you never fail, that is evidence you are not on the frontier. Right, absolutely. Same in the arts. Oh, yes. Absolutely. Yes. But the first thing I thought was, is this the same rocket that Katie Perry was in? No, I'm not being facetious about it, but you know it's not.

Yeah. I mean, SpaceX had the same thing. The question, NASA had the same thing. The answer is that you don't give up, that you learn from each one. I'm sure they learned quite a few things from that, and they correct it on the next one. And the beauty of it is that it's a private company, so they have the money to spend unlike NASA. You can't blow that amount of cash. If NASA did it, they'd go study it for a year.

Why? Private sector gets back in it and does it again. That's why private space is doing better. But what an engineer says a rocket launch that blows up, they say it is an experiment rich in data. Well, when we're better than that SpaceX. SpaceX just had their launch, and they literally blew it up after they calculated all the data they wanted. But you guys used to always be up Obama on,

the fact that he was like picking winners and losers because they were, you know, Solindra. Remember Solindra? Yeah. It was one of your big scandals. It was dumb to do that, or Slinder was dumb? Solinder was a dumb investment. But when you're in these new fields, some of them aren't going to work out. That's true, and you should accept that.

Tesla did work out. Exactly. So why were you so critical about cylinder? It wasn't that expected that some of them would work and some of them wouldn't, but it was worth the effort to try to bring us into the green energy era? I agree. from that perspective. Next question.

Who's out of office? No, no, no. He's out of office. That's right. I'm not dying. I'm not dying. I'm not dying. No, but you wouldn't know

him slendered it, but I'd tell you this. When I was in office, I authored the Space Act. And they didn't want to fund Elon. And they were funding and buying them from Russia.

It was really McCain and I who forced us to do that, knowing it would cost more at the beginning, but long term, we could build it in America then. So you do want to take risks. But there's a better way to do it than government directly funding.

You give them the incentive and the companies will rise up. Some will fall off, but the most efficient ones will rise better. All right. So, Kevin, what are the chances of California electing a Republican governor? Very slim. Exactly. But Massachusetts did it many times. You know why?

You can't get bluer than Massachusetts. Okay, you know why? And in Maryland. Yeah, so it's not an impossible thing. But it is for this reason. Structure dictates behavior. have been elected here for governor? A long time ago, yeah.

The top two system has failed us. Yeah, but that was a... The top two system has failed us. Right now, I don't believe any of those candidates running for governor are qualified to be governor, okay? I think we're losing on both spectrums. Massachusetts did it, and Baker was the most popular one. Yes, and Maryland.

Yes. Blue states with Republican governors are the most popular because they're in a blue state, so they can't be Ken Paxton. You know what happened? But they're not crazy ones. You'd get a socially moderate, a fiscally conservative Republican,

and the state would like a check and balance, and you could no longer do that. Why can't the whole country do this? Because we have a system that stops us from doing it in the top two. If we had a system that each party put out their very best, they would have better candidates, and we'd have a better choice. How could we get there? We have to change it.

How? Well, we can do it with a referendum, or we can make an initiative and have the people vote on it. So you want to go back to you a close, is what you're saying. I'm not saying closed primary. I'm saying let the party select. You could have an open primary,

but the independents can join Republicans or Democrats, their choice, but Republicans get to pick the nominee. Okay. Neil, if first contact happened tomorrow, who would you trust most to serve as Humanities Ambassador? Probably you. Well, you say that, you say it's got to be somebody. You say the universal.

language is math. Yes. By the way, this is what Mr. Politi told me in high school. He said, that's the universal language. Was he a teacher of your own? There was some other person in your life. He was my priest. I don't want to tell you what happened next. Anyway, no, he was my math teacher.

But it would have to be someone who speaks math. You speak math. I don't. Yeah, I do speak math. And so math is a language of the universe. You want to commune with the cosmos. You become fluent in math. And alien comes. They would not have come here without some understanding of math. That is a certainty. So whoever's in the room,

when it happens, you got to at least have someone who's fluent in math. I don't mind. There's some politicians that want to jump in on this, the ones that are more diplomatic, because maybe there's a tense negotiating point that's neat. You've got to bring in a diplomat to solve. You can use Steve Whitkoff. Scientists have no experience. So it would definitely be the scientist at front. What I would do, it's not an individual. I'd be delighted to have a first encounter, but I take them immediately to the National Academy of Sciences. And then we have the biologists, the chemist, the engineers,

and then we will do right by that encounter. National Academy of Sciences written to law by a Republican president. It was Abraham Lincoln. Okay. What is the panel thing? I'm giving a shout out across the aisle here. What is the panel think of the idea that was put out today

that maybe the Iran war will end because there's a talk of a $300 billion rebuilding fund. In other words, we're going to rebuild Iran. We're going to make it into like, you know, remember Gaza was going to be? Yeah. Okay. What do you think?

Now, it sounds a little like when Obama gave Iran money, and that was like the worst thing that could ever happen. No, this is totally going to be different. Okay. Yeah. That's that old story, the mouse that roared. Yeah, but wouldn't there have to be regime change first? You would think.

Okay, so why are we even talking about giving them money until we know that the people who... Because the street of Hormuz is closed and we need it open. That's the only way to get it done. I see. I don't see Congress authorizing the money and I don't see this administration giving them that money. So at the end of the day, how this ends is very important for the world.

The uranium cannot be there, and they cannot come. control the open waters. That's how it has to end. Can Donald Trump get there? I believe so. How? I mean, we've already played all the cards. You know, it's easier to get war to get out. It's a greater threat to use military force than when you're already in it. Look, I think at the end of the day, Iran has some severe pressure on their point too, but this is a regime that likes to kill their own people. They'll sit and wait it out, and they'll try to wait until after the election. I like the idea of the other

countries joining the Abraham Accords, and that this becomes a bigger solution than just the straight. But, Kevin, I was sympathetic to the idea. I know, I know. But, you know, I just feel like we went into Iraq and Iran won that war.

And every time we go there, it seems like Iran wins the war. Do you think that he has another option other than boots on the ground if he wants to meet those goals? Yeah, I don't see what the other option is. And we don't want to do that. And plainly he doesn't want to do that. I don't think he ever will do that.

That's a much different battle. Do we have evidence that we've actually destroyed the capacity to purify uranium? Because that was the whole point. No, we don't. The whole exercise. And everybody's now focusing on the straits and oil prices and the like. But if you purify uranium above certain levels, it's weapons grade. And no one should lose sight of that fact.

All right. You don't want to end until you have that. Final question for you. Do you think missions to the moon like Artemis are worth the money the government spends on them? I saw a picture in the paper yesterday, a diagram of what it's going to look like when we have a base on the moon. Yeah, so yes, what is it worth? If it's exploration, you're doing something that's never been done before. You are not in a position to judge the value of that to our future.

Do you realize we're in the centennial decade of the discovery of quantum physics? And at the time, you would have said, why are you studying that? I'm a carpenter. I got wood atoms. That's all I care about. And we learned about how atoms work and molecules. And it is the foundation of this creation storage and retrieval of digital information. It is 40% of the world economy exploited by knowing what the quantum is and how and why it works.

So if you were around back then, would you say, don't study this. This is a waste of money. Go build another railroad or go build something else. Somebody's got to be on the frontier because that's what pulls civilization into. to the future. So what did... You say quantum... It's an example.

It's an example. Okay, but like, connect that to somebody like a layman like me who, like, how did that affect my life? What did that bring to... I have a better example. My physics professor at college, he studied molecules in space, and he discovered a new phenomenon where the nucleus responded to electromagnetic fields, and he got a Nobel Prize for it.

Sheared a Nobel Prize. This became the founding principle of the magnetic resonance imager. Ah. It's based on a principle of physics discovered by a physicist who had no interest in medicine. It was a frontier. MRIs. It's an MRI. Technically, it's an NMR, nuclear magnetic resonance imager, but that's one of the two N-words you're not supposed to use.

So they took away the nuclear, because you're not going to go into a cavity. This is the nuclear. They're not going to do that. So they took away the word MRI. word MRI, this is an example of a frontier disc, and you can't pre-select that. So you have to allow, this is what made America great, is that we funded curiosity-driven research, and that had a pathway through creative engineers directly into our economy. And so, so our economy is the envy of the world.

You know, I've heard our guy say this, that if England, the U.K. were a state of the United States? Yeah, it'd be 51st. Fifty-first in GDP per capita. Oh, my gosh. Don't take it for granted that we live in this country and the investments in science that has occurred over the century. But also, private space is doing so much. And look what you live now, too. If you want to have the Internet and you're sitting in Ukraine, thank Elon Musk for that. I mean, a lot of it which the return on the investments are so great. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And, and Yeah. So, yes, so private enterprise gets you so far, but there's the research that does not feed the quarterly report or the annual report. The government invests in that. That creates the industries that the government then draws tax-based funding.

Think about how many young kids got so excited when they saw that Artemis go around the new young astronauts. And what did they go back in class and study? I mean, I think the return on the investment is more than we'll ever spend on. And while if we were only going to do science, I would say, yes, just send robots. But when you come back and describe what the far side of the moon look like, you realize I don't think anyone ever gave a ticker tape parade to a robot. I don't think everyone ever named a high school or middle school after a robot. There's something about the human element of discovery that we, that's been with our civilization from the beginning, that we cherish the accounts of what people have. have for seeing something that no one has seen before. There was also an amazing coming together of people in this country to watch the launch,

to, they were invested in the journey, and it was not partisan. And it was not partisan. And it was not partisan. And they watched the landing as well. They were rooting for him. When Congress was listening to the whistleblowers and the accounts of aliens in the back closet, it was Republicans and Democrats are sitting there together, you know. And I said, wow, I haven't seen this.

I haven't seen this. So if aliens and bring us together and the moon brings us together and the moon brings us together, space is our frontier. Thank you very much. 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.