Neil deGrasse Tyson | Club Random Classics with Bill Maher

On Club Random Classics this month, Bill and Neil deGrasse Tyson on whether Neil is wrong about outer space, science vs. opinion, why Neil turned down a scholarship offer from Carl Sagan, how many astrophysicists exist in the world, Neil tries to change Bill’s mind about the youth of America, Neil’s Tonight Show experience, the gender spectrum in sports, why the Vegas Sphere would be the perfect TED talk setting, and the existence of aliens. This episode first aired Nov. 5, 2023. Support our Advertisers: Head to https://www.squarespace.com/CLUBRANDOM to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain using code CLUBRANDOM. Subscribe to the Club Random YouTube channel: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/c/clubrandompodcast?sub_confirmation=1⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Watch episodes ad-free – subscribe to Bill Maher’s Substack: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://billmaher.substack.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Subscribe to the podcast for free wherever you listen: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://bit.ly/ClubRandom⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Buy Club Random Merch: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://clubrandom.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices ABOUT CLUB RANDOM Bill Maher rewrites the rules of podcasting the way he did in television in this series of one on one, hour long conversations with a wide variety of unexpected guests in the undisclosed location called Club Random. There’s a whole big world out there that isn’t about politics and Bill and his guests—from Bill Burr and Jerry Seinfeld to Jordan Peterson, Quentin Tarantino and Neil DeGrasse Tyson—talk about all of it. For advertising opportunities please email: [email protected] ABOUT BILL MAHER Bill Maher was the host of “Politically Incorrect” (Comedy Central, ABC) from 1993-2002, and for the last fourteen years on HBO’s “Real Time,” Maher’s combination of unflinching honesty and big laughs have garnered him 40 Emmy nominations. Maher won his first Emmy in 2014 as executive producer for the HBO series, “VICE.” In October of 2008, this same combination was on display in Maher’s uproarious and unprecedented swipe at organized religion, “Religulous.” Maher has written five bestsellers: “True Story,” “Does Anybody Have a Problem with That? Politically Incorrect’s Greatest Hits,” “When You Ride Alone, You Ride with Bin Laden,” “New Rules: Polite Musings from a Timid Observer,” and most recently, “The New New Rules: A Funny Look at How Everybody But Me Has Their Head Up Their Ass.” FOLLOW CLUB RANDOM https://www.clubrandom.com https://www.facebook.com/Club-Random-101776489118185 https://twitter.com/clubrandom_ https://www.instagram.com/clubrandompodcast https://www.tiktok.com/@clubrandompodcast FOLLOW BILL MAHER https://www.billmaher.com https://twitter.com/billmaher https://www.instagram.com/billmaher Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

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• 1:26Bill Maher?

  From this month's Club Random Classics, we rewind to Neil deGrasse Tyson, "The Professor," one of my favorites, from "Are We Alone?" to Carl Sagan's influence on his life. That's "Are We Alone in the Universe," if you weren't following. He's an astrophysicist. You know, things like a surprisingly heated debate about college kids. Nothing's ever off limits here, you know that. We laugh a lot, and it's pure club random. So grab something cold, or green, or both, and hit play.

• 2:02Bill Maher?

  Very.

• 2:03Speaker 04

  The man himself. Do I genuflect? What do I do?

• 2:08Bill Maher?

  Doctor Dine Mites?

• 2:09Speaker 04

  Come here, give me a hug.

• 2:10Bill Maher?

  Absolutely.

• 2:12Speaker 04

  How you doing, man?

• 2:12Bill Maher?

  Professor of personality.

• 2:16Bill Maher?

  How are you? Look at you, I got you in my lair.

• 2:19Speaker 04

  I'm in your, in your.

• 2:21Bill Maher?

  And look, you're already.

• 2:23Speaker 04

  Man cave.

• 2:24Bill Maher?

  You're, no, that's for a married guy. This is a discotheque. Well, you can't tell without the music, but, and you've already leaned on your prop. I love authors who aren't shy.

• 2:40Bill Maher?

  Well, we will get to this. I've been reading this, you know what?

• 2:42Speaker 04

  You have? Yeah, okay.

• 2:43Bill Maher?

  It's much more pop culture-y.

• 2:45Speaker 04

  Yeah, very pop culture, very pop culture.

• 2:47Bill Maher?

  So you dumbed it down for me personally?

• 2:50Speaker 04

  No, I provided scenery along the way while you're learning your science.

• 2:54Bill Maher?

  Right.

• 2:54Speaker 04

  You can capture some pop culture moments.

• 2:57Bill Maher?

  So what are the scientists talking about these? What's new in outer space, Doc?

• 3:01Speaker 04

  No, I feel like half of me is, is tending to scientific diversions in the public. You know, aliens or UFO sightings.

• 3:14Bill Maher?

  I know, we'll get to that, but, but I want to know actually, like when you're, when you're in the coffee clutch with your other egghead.

• 3:22Speaker 04

  What are we talking about?

• 3:23Bill Maher?

  What's the gossip out there? What's putting a tingle in your anus?

• 3:26Speaker 04

  Okay. That's not where I get my tingles, but.

• 3:31Bill Maher?

  You know I was gonna work that.

• 3:33Speaker 04

  Yeah, I don't know about your anus, but.

• 3:34Bill Maher?

  Okay.

• 3:35Speaker 04

  My anus, yeah.

• 3:36Bill Maher?

  What is going on with Uranus? You must know, like, do planets like that change?

• 3:41Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, they, they have lives.

• 3:43Bill Maher?

  We could get.

• 3:44Speaker 04

  No, not from Uranus. That would be Uranus, obviously, okay?

• 3:48Bill Maher?

  Oh, really? Is that the way you're supposed to?

• 3:49Speaker 04

  If you're older than age eight, yes, you say Uranus.

• 3:53Bill Maher?

  Do you have, do you have a drink?

• 3:55Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 3:55Bill Maher?

  Do you want a drink?

• 3:56Speaker 04

  I'm doing a Grand Marnier here.

• 3:57Bill Maher?

  What do you, a Grand Marnier?

• 3:59Speaker 04

  Yeah, I'm a wine guy, but when I have wine, it's with food. And generally not otherwise, but if I'm just chilling, as I am with you.

• 4:05Bill Maher?

  Excuse me, a wine guy?

• 4:07Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, and I can hang with the snobbiest among them. So, just.

• 4:14Bill Maher?

  Really, I mean, you mean like you know about wine?

• 4:16Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 4:16Bill Maher?

  You do?

• 4:17Speaker 04

  Academically, yeah. I mean, I know, oh, yeah.

• 4:19Bill Maher?

  So that's like a hobby?

• 4:20Speaker 04

  Yes, that's a right way to say that. So if you had like an Australian Syrah, a California Cabernet, a California Zinfandel, a French Bordeaux, French Burgundy, a Spanish Rioja, I would just go right on down and tell you which one they are. The brain, the human brain, barely works.

• 4:40Bill Maher?

  But enough about Matt Gaethje. Good night, everybody.

• 4:44Speaker 04

  It barely works. You know, two people viewing the same thing give a different account.

• 4:49Bill Maher?

  Right.

• 4:50Speaker 04

  We've known that psychology, psychologists have known this forever. And we have books of optical illusions where, oh, is the line, one line bigger or smaller? I don't know, I can't tell, is it in the page? Simple line drawings can confuse the mind.

• 5:06Bill Maher?

  That one is very confusing. It just is. All of these are, or else they wouldn't put them in a book.

• 5:12Speaker 04

  This is my point. So, so.

• 5:15Bill Maher?

  Don't look down on us.

• 5:16Speaker 04

  If the brain barely works.

• 5:20Bill Maher?

  Right.

• 5:20Speaker 04

  Cannot convince me that stirring in other chemicals will make objective reality more apparent to you.

• 5:27Bill Maher?

  Oh, but it does and has.

• 5:28Speaker 04

  No.

• 5:29Bill Maher?

  Of course it has.

• 5:30Speaker 04

  Here's the difference, here's the difference.

• 5:31Bill Maher?

  More artistic, you're right.

• 5:32Speaker 04

  Fine!

• 5:33Bill Maher?

  I know.

• 5:33Speaker 04

  Fine!

• 5:34Bill Maher?

  But I am sure.

• 5:35Speaker 04

  If it unlocks creativity, fine.

• 5:37Bill Maher?

  Right, well, there's no creativity in your field?

• 5:39Speaker 04

  There is, however, however, in my field, nature is the judge, jury, and executioner of my creativity.

• 5:49Bill Maher?

  Right.

• 5:50Speaker 04

  Whereas to an artist.

• 5:51Bill Maher?

  Correct.

• 5:51Speaker 04

  Uh, there's room there.

• 5:53Bill Maher?

  You're right.

• 5:54Speaker 04

  That's the difference. If Van Gogh did not paint The Starry Night, or Beethoven didn't compose the Ninth Symphony, no one ever born after them is gonna do that. Whereas if Einstein wasn't born, somebody or some combination of people would have eventually found relativity. No doubt about it. So, our creativity is on a landscape where there's only gonna be one answer there.

• 6:22Speaker 04

  Not for the artist. So, yeah, stir in the chemicals for the artist and you'll see the world in whole new ways.

• 6:27Bill Maher?

  Okay.

• 6:28Speaker 04

  Create art, music.

• 6:29Bill Maher?

  You know what?

• 6:29Speaker 04

  And with the microdosing, that's a whole frontier right there, right?

• 6:34Bill Maher?

  This is not a hill I'm gonna die on with you because I'm basically of the same mind because I know, especially through relationships, you know, being in show business. I always say I'm in show business, I'm not of it. So, I'm not over there with the, I know what you mean. But I've known people who were artists, you know, in a relationship level. And they just come at a truth a different way. You know, it's not linear, it's not rational. We call these people women. No.

• 7:05Bill Maher?

  No, not just women. But there is an artistic way of perceiving reality and it can be very frustrating. Like if you are, I'm much more of the logical type, you know.

• 7:18Bill Maher?

  And...

• 7:19Speaker 04

  Do other people think that about you?

• 7:20Bill Maher?

  Yes, they do.

• 7:20Speaker 04

  Okay, just checking.

• 7:23Bill Maher?

  I know, the fact that you and I disagree on a number of things makes me sometimes question like, well, maybe he's wrong about the outer spaceship. Because normally what I do...

• 7:35Speaker 04

  Wait, is someone who disagrees with you means they're wrong and you're right?

• 7:38Bill Maher?

  No, it just makes me...

• 7:39Speaker 04

  That's what you just said implied that.

• 7:40Bill Maher?

  Well, it does question. If you disagree with someone on like A, B, C, D, and E.

• 7:45Speaker 04

  Right.

• 7:45Bill Maher?

  And then F. See, F for us would be like your field, which I know nothing about and I know you're a genius in. I know that. So like when questions about, you know, astrophysics come up, I always just go, whatever Neil deGrasse Tyson says. I'm down with that. If he says the Big Bang Theory happened and the whole universe fit into a marble.

• 8:06Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 8:06Bill Maher?

  It sounded a little fucking weird.

• 8:08Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, the universe is under no obligation to make sense to you.

• 8:11Bill Maher?

  No, I understand that. And I understand that what I have faith in, and of course, everything is faith even though we're both atheists. What I have faith in is that even though I can't understand that, how that happened, you do. You really do.

• 8:24Speaker 04

  However.

• 8:25Bill Maher?

  You put in the 10,000 hours.

• 8:27Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 8:27Bill Maher?

  You have the big brain. You figured this out.

• 8:30Speaker 04

  Mm hmm.

• 8:30Bill Maher?

  And I trust you on that subject. I don't trust you on everything else.

• 8:35Speaker 04

  But you don't have to.

• 8:35Bill Maher?

  I know.

• 8:36Speaker 04

  Of course, but if I have a view of something that is factual, it's because the evidence I've seen supports that view. My, I don't have beliefs in things that are not otherwise supported by evidence. And I would ask you, what does it take to change your mind? Because I know exactly what it takes to change my mind. It's the, it's the weight of evidence.

• 9:01Bill Maher?

  Right.

• 9:02Speaker 04

  Brought to bear.

• 9:02Bill Maher?

  Right.

• 9:03Speaker 04

  On a, on a, on a, on a question or.

• 9:05Bill Maher?

  Right.

• 9:06Speaker 04

  And my, my, my belief in it, if we use that word, is proportionate to that evidence.

• 9:11Bill Maher?

  Right. So, but people look at the same evidence. I mean, we're really talking about medicine now, even though we're not saying it for some reason. And people look at the same evidence. That's why they say about doctors, get a second opinion. Because in medicine, it is still an opinion. And the experts disagree. Thousands and thousands of doctors and medical experts have disagreed about how we handled COVID. There was just a very big court case called Missouri versus Biden, which decided in the favor of these doctors because they said they weren't allowed to get their point of view across because the government colluded with the tech companies. So we only heard one point of view. So, you know, the science, there's no the in science

• 9:56Bill Maher?

  for things like a new virus that we're still studying and still don't know a lot about. And that's why there is dissenting opinion, lots of it. You don't even hear all of it because they're so intimidated. So like something like that.

• 10:09Speaker 04

  I'd like to address that.

• 10:10Bill Maher?

  Yeah, go ahead.

• 10:10Speaker 04

  Okay. So with the Monday morning quarterback, you know, as we all are, after the facts, we could go back and restructure how the rollout would have and should have been done. There's no question about it. Okay. About, you know, the discovery of the virus, the development of the vaccines. The rollout of the vaccines, the progress of the virus, the mutations of the virus, the lethality of the virus, the, the, the, the comorbidities of the virus. All of that could have come out better. And I'd like to think somebody made a book of recommendations from this. So the next time we have another pandemic, which is not, we don't have to wait a century for that,

• 10:55Speaker 04

  that we're prepared in a way that people are properly informed. That's my first thought.

• 10:59Bill Maher?

  Well, we're making that book as we go because lots of stuff we know now that we didn't know. And, and a lot of it is like, oh yeah, no, that, that wasn't a good idea. Or, oh yeah, the virus actually.

• 11:09Speaker 04

  Correct, correct. But people were not honest enough about the uncertainties at the time they made their declarations. And part of it, this other half of this is, when you learn about science in school, what do you think science is? And most people think it's what's in a book with bold faced words that you memorize and take the test. And you don't realize it's a process.

• 11:29Bill Maher?

  A process.

• 11:30Speaker 04

  Of querying nature.

• 11:31Bill Maher?

  Yes.

• 11:31Speaker 04

  And understand, coming to an understanding. So now here's my point, more relevant to what you, what got you into this. Um, science is not the word of any individual. Science, the objective truths of science are established only when there's multiple tests, multiple tests, on a level where the individual no longer matters. Because it's the collective body of evidence.

• 11:59Bill Maher?

  Totally agree.

• 12:00Speaker 04

  What we have in this world is, and you've seen this in all manner of categories. You're channel surfing on YouTube and somebody says, the establishment thinks this, but I have the real answer. And they're trying to suppress it. This is irresistible to go listen to that one person who's opposite the establishment. And here's the thing, just because the establishment doesn't agree with you, it doesn't mean you're correct. So you can say this expert and this, I don't care about the expert.

• 12:30Bill Maher?

  But you're setting up a dynamic between the establishment, you're to say Dr. Fauci and a crazy person who thinks there are chips in the vaccine.

• 12:39Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 12:39Bill Maher?

  I'm talking about Fauci versus Dr. Martin Coldor.

• 12:43Speaker 04

  No, but I'm saying Fauci.

• 12:44Bill Maher?

  Fauci versus Jay Bhattacharya, these are.

• 12:46Speaker 04

  Hold on, okay. Fauci, Fauci.

• 12:50Bill Maher?

  So that's, so don't pretend that.

• 12:52Speaker 04

  I'm on it, Fauci.

• 12:55Bill Maher?

  I'm on it.

• 12:56Speaker 04

  Fauci.

• 12:58Speaker 04

  Fauci, in principle, should, and most of the time does, represent the mainstream understanding of the drugs, the disease, the reactions, and the like.

• 13:10Bill Maher?

  The mainstream, which has been wrong about so many of it.

• 13:12Speaker 04

  Well, then, that's a separate conversation.

• 13:14Bill Maher?

  But it is a true conversation.

• 13:16Speaker 04

  Hold on, so then, he represents a mainstream. It's not because he's an expert. It's because, not only is he an expert, but that's not the issue here. It's that ideally, he is conveying a community understanding of what's going on. Now, you want to put him against another person who has pedigree, Harvard, Cornell, whatever, and you're gonna say, this is one expert against another. That's not how science works.

• 13:43Bill Maher?

  So, why didn't you go to Cornell?

• 13:45Speaker 04

  Oh, you know, it never really came out in my biography.

• 13:48Bill Maher?

  I mean...

• 13:49Speaker 04

  Yeah, that never really came out.

• 13:51Bill Maher?

  It seems like...

• 13:52Speaker 04

  I tell you, I have this reason.

• 13:53Bill Maher?

  I mean, we both have a connection. I took his course, Carl Sagan.

• 13:57Speaker 04

  His, capital H.

• 13:58Bill Maher?

  He was there, like, for one class.

• 14:00Speaker 04

  Yeah, I'm told he was...

• 14:02Bill Maher?

  Well, he was a star. I mean, I only took it because I saw him on The Tonight Show. And I was like, wow, I could take a course with this guy?

• 14:08Speaker 04

  Yeah, you're Carl Sagan for anyone who's not knowing who he's talking about.

• 14:11Bill Maher?

  Yes, and he's your, you know, your hero, your mentor.

• 14:14Speaker 04

  Yeah, he was, he's, by the way, he's a mentor, not one-on-one, just by example. I mean, I saw what he did, how he said things, how he interacted with people, the patience that he had for people whose brains were just somewhere completely off the rails. And so, I've learned a lot from that, but not because he was a direct mentor, but because he set an example that I found valuable to follow. So, he, just to catch people up, in case they didn't know, I was in high school, applied to a bunch of colleges. Cornell was one of the ones I was accepted to. And, unknown to me, the admissions office must have sent my application to him, saying, here's someone we want to attract, can you do anything about it? He sent me a letter.

• 14:56Speaker 04

  A letter, I'm a seventeen year old high school kid in the Bronx, said, "Dear Neil, I understand you're considering colleges, considering Cornell. If you want to come visit, come by, I'll give you a tour of the labs. You can find out what you make a decision."

• 15:10Bill Maher?

  But how did he know that you were this prodigy?

• 15:13Speaker 04

  My application to college was dripping with the universe.

• 15:16Bill Maher?

  Okay, right.

• 15:17Speaker 04

  And it wasn't because of him, I was natively-

• 15:19Bill Maher?

  So he wasn't, it wasn't just like a shot in the dark? He was like, "I see that this kid is the one."

• 15:26Speaker 04

  I had telescopes since I was-

• 15:29Bill Maher?

  But you put it in the application?

• 15:31Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah!

• 15:31Bill Maher?

  Okay, so he read something of yours and went, "Whoa, who is this?"

• 15:34Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah, I was in the astronomy club. Yeah, I was on an expedition to study Stonehenge. I had all this stuff in my, it was, it was, it was- My engagement with the universe was so thorough that it was a separate identity outside of whatever I was doing in a classroom. And so this, I had energy for it. And so he saw that and sent me this letter. Right, so the letter was not completely out of the blue. There was, there was justification there from within the application. It was dripping with the universe. So, I showed it to my mother, and she said, "Yeah, this is like legit, all right, let's do it." So, got on a bus in December, okay? Went up to Cornell, five hour bus ride that is.

• 16:18Speaker 04

  And he met me outside the lab. We went in, met him and talked to him in his office. And what I, I'll never forget this, he did a no look reach. He went back like this. And it was one of his books. And I said, "Wow, that's badass."

• 16:35Bill Maher?

  You learned that, and here it is, ladies and gentlemen, to infinity and beyond.

• 16:41Speaker 04

  He did a no look reach, and it was one of his books, and he signed it to me. Of course, I still have it. He says, "To Neil, future astronomer." Okay? Then, the day ran long, and we, he drove me back to the bus station. It started to snow, not uncommon in Ithaca, New York. And he was wondering, he said, "If the bus doesn't come through, here's my home phone number."

• 17:02Bill Maher?

  Did he touch you inappropriately?

• 17:07Bill Maher?

  Where is this going?

• 17:08Speaker 04

  Yeah, come and spend the night, right? No, so.

• 17:12Bill Maher?

  A tent. It's in the winter.

• 17:14Speaker 04

  So, I, so, yeah, I got on the bus. It still came through. I've had people tell me afterwards that I should have just said the bus didn't come through and then spend the night.

• 17:24Bill Maher?

  Right.

• 17:25Speaker 04

  But, but anyhow, so I, I didn't end up going to Cornell because here's what I did. At the time, I, this is like inside baseball here, but I had subscribed to Scientific American. And my favorite part was about the authors. And people write for Scientific American, scientists, they're not journalists. So about the authors, it tells them where they went to college, where they got their masters, where they got the PhD, and where they were on the faculty. This is total information. I got all the articles on astronomy and physics that I loved. And I made a grid for which of the schools I was admitted to had checkmarks from these authors.

• 18:04Bill Maher?

  Wow.

• 18:05Speaker 04

  Where they'd gone to college, where they were. And Harvard.

• 18:10Bill Maher?

  Wow.

• 18:11Speaker 04

  Won hands down.

• 18:12Bill Maher?

  Okay.

• 18:13Speaker 04

  And I didn't know at the time that the Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, which is a government installation, was co-located with the Harvard Observatory. And so the, the numbers I was looking at was the sum of those two. But that's fine, because if you're looking for summer jobs and stuff, you know, it's all one complex of buildings. So I said, if I go to Cornell and he leaves, I knew enough to know that professors move around. Then I went to Cornell for a reason that then evaporates.

• 18:40Bill Maher?

  Right.

• 18:40Speaker 04

  Whereas at Harvard, there's the num, the sheer number of people doing astrophysics, I thought was a stable, a stable, a community to walk into. And so I went to Harvard.

• 18:53Bill Maher?

  Is it a community of, do you, are most of your friends?

• 18:56Speaker 04

  We all know each other. There are not many of us.

• 18:58Bill Maher?

  Not many astrophysicists?

• 19:00Speaker 04

  No, there's, there's.

• 19:01Bill Maher?

  How many?

• 19:02Speaker 04

  In the world, ten, eight, 10,000.

• 19:04Bill Maher?

  Yeah.

• 19:04Speaker 04

  And there's, you know, eight billion people. So you divide those two numbers, we're literally one in a million human beings on Earth.

• 19:12Bill Maher?

  But.

• 19:13Speaker 04

  So if you have an astrophysicist in the room with you, you better ask all your questions because you might not see another one for the rest of your life.

• 19:20Bill Maher?

  But isn't there things that you would-

• 19:21Speaker 04

  Unless you're Bill Maher, you could just summon them up out of the ether.

• 19:23Bill Maher?

  Well, there's no such thing as ether. Okay, so, um, so-

• 19:28Speaker 04

  I'm being artistically poetic.

• 19:31Bill Maher?

  I know.

• 19:31Speaker 04

  Is that allowed?

• 19:32Bill Maher?

  Well, you're... We're both in the other category.

• 19:37Speaker 00

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• 20:32Bill Maher?

  But, well, we're both, we're combinations. You're a very creative guy in your field. I try to be.

• 20:37Speaker 04

  I, I, but- In fact, just a few days ago, I went back and saw your 2003 stand-up.

• 20:42Bill Maher?

  Oh, wow.

• 20:43Speaker 04

  In Hudson Theater in New York. It was very 9/11-focused.

• 20:47Bill Maher?

  Yeah.

• 20:48Speaker 04

  But just, just to remind myself of you

• 20:50Bill Maher?

  Oh.

• 20:51Speaker 04

  when you were a young tyke.

• 20:52Bill Maher?

  Yeah.

• 20:53Speaker 04

  20 years ago.

• 20:56Bill Maher?

  Man, what are you, now, 60?

• 20:58Speaker 04

  Oh, tomorrow!

• 21:00Bill Maher?

  Yeah?

• 21:01Speaker 04

  I turn 65.

• 21:02Bill Maher?

  Oh! Tomorrow?

• 21:04Speaker 04

  That's my big day.

• 21:05Bill Maher?

  Oh, I wish I knew.

• 21:06Speaker 04

  No, I'm not, no, I'm not saying it now, but no.

• 21:09Bill Maher?

  I would've baked you a cake or something.

• 21:11Speaker 04

  No, no!

• 21:12Bill Maher?

  You're, and that's a big-

• 21:13Speaker 04

  Tomorrow, it's a big, it's a mouse. I'm getting all the mail from Medicare and, you know, and-

• 21:18Bill Maher?

  Right.

• 21:18Speaker 04

  old, you know-

• 21:19Bill Maher?

  ARP.

• 21:20Speaker 04

  ARP.

• 21:20Bill Maher?

  Yeah.

• 21:21Speaker 04

  AARP.

• 21:21Bill Maher?

  But, you know, it doesn't matter, because look at you. You're robust, you look healthy, you look generically middle-aged. That's as good as you can do for 65.

• 21:31Speaker 04

  And keep that for a long time, yeah, I see.

• 21:33Bill Maher?

  For 65.

• 21:34Speaker 04

  Uh-huh.

• 21:34Bill Maher?

  That is as good as you can do.

• 21:35Speaker 04

  You look in old movies, all the old people are 65 in the old movies.

• 21:40Bill Maher?

  Yeah.

• 21:40Speaker 04

  A reminder that people didn't live long back then.

• 21:42Bill Maher?

  Well-

• 21:44Bill Maher?

  I'm not gonna lie, it is old. You know, it's a thing, among old people, we're the youngest.

• 21:51Bill Maher?

  That's what we got.

• 21:52Speaker 04

  Okay, you tell yourself that, alright. No, but I don't feel like my behavior is not old. Like, at important meetings, I still tell jokes and I spin in the board chair. You know, because they're very low friction and they're fun to spin in. And I, you know, I drink a lemonade when everyone else is having a beer. I'll drink a milkshake when everyone else is having some. I just, I do.

• 22:17Bill Maher?

  I mean, the reason why you're such a great communicator is because like, most people who know what you know, they're deadly dull communicating it. You, it's like James Brown. Went to Harvard and got his degree, you know, you're just, you know.

• 22:34Speaker 04

  I feel good.

• 22:37Bill Maher?

  Well, the audience feels good when you.

• 22:39Speaker 04

  Well, thank you, thank you.

• 22:40Bill Maher?

  No, it's true.

• 22:41Speaker 04

  It's because I'm feeling, I feel the content.

• 22:43Bill Maher?

  I mean, you became a brand, you know, you got.

• 22:46Speaker 04

  Yeah, not on purpose, but it just is.

• 22:47Bill Maher?

  Your podcast is huge. I mean, Cosmos was, remained one of the, my favorite television shows of all time. And this is going back to McHale's Navy.

• 22:56Speaker 04

  Oh, McHale's Navy. Ernest Borgnine, McHale's Navy.

• 23:00Bill Maher?

  Yeah, do you remember that when you were a kid?

• 23:02Speaker 04

  I always saw, they always show him leaning over the edge. But I said, but if it's flat, that's not the front of the boat. Wouldn't he be looking to the front of the boat? The boat would be pointing. I was had issues with that.

• 23:14Bill Maher?

  What is this obsession you have?

• 23:16Speaker 04

  I have issues, like.

• 23:17Bill Maher?

  This is your mind, like, you're not the creative mind. I mean, you are, but you're not the, the, uh.

• 23:22Speaker 04

  Like, in, like, in, in, in, what's the one, Lost in Space? In Lost in Space, they're in a flying saucer.

• 23:28Bill Maher?

  I know.

• 23:28Speaker 04

  And this flush is spinning, but they're looking straight out a window at one thing in front of them. Why aren't they spinning around?

• 23:34Bill Maher?

  Because we don't care, because we, the people.

• 23:38Bill Maher?

  We the people, not the geniuses. We don't care, we don't see it.

• 23:41Speaker 04

  If they come here and spinning flying saucers, they'll walk off dizzy.

• 23:44Bill Maher?

  I know. And Captain Kirk, you know, when he kissed the green chick. I mean, of course, we know that if they're green on another planet, they're probably not gonna be hot also. You know, the odds.

• 23:58Speaker 04

  He didn't get mail on kissing the green woman, but they got, he got mail kissing, kissing Uhura.

• 24:04Bill Maher?

  He kissed, but not like on the cheek, I believe.

• 24:07Speaker 04

  No, no, it was a lip kiss.

• 24:08Bill Maher?

  It was?

• 24:08Speaker 04

  Yes, it was the first white, black interracial kiss on television. You didn't know this? Star Trek.

• 24:14Bill Maher?

  I guess I did, but.

• 24:15Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, he got ma- oh, here's, here's the, here's, here's one from the South. You ready? It's, I totally object to this, you know, this miscegenation there. But if I had to kiss a black woman, you'd be the one.

• 24:33Bill Maher?

  Who said that?

• 24:34Speaker 04

  That was just some random guy.

• 24:35Bill Maher?

  Yeah.

• 24:36Speaker 04

  Who's complaining about the interracial kiss.

• 24:38Bill Maher?

  Oh, I mean, trust me, there are still.

• 24:40Speaker 04

  So it was a compliment mixed in with the insult.

• 24:43Bill Maher?

  There are still plenty of idiot men today who say things like that. Like, uh, I'm not really usually attracted to a black girl, but you're different.

• 24:53Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 24:54Bill Maher?

  Like, they think that's a compliment or that it's going to get you, I mean.

• 24:58Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 24:59Bill Maher?

  That kind of ignorance will take longer to eradicate.

• 25:03Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 25:04Bill Maher?

  But the other one I remember from that era was Petula Clark. Do you remember who that was?

• 25:08Speaker 04

  Yeah, sure, but what about her?

• 25:11Bill Maher?

  Nothing, I just wanted to know if you remembered. No, no, she kissed, or Harry Belafonte kissed her on the cheek.

• 25:18Speaker 04

  Just on the cheek.

• 25:19Bill Maher?

  Like in a 1967, something like that.

• 25:23Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 25:24Bill Maher?

  Special, and, uh, the affiliates in the South, like, they, I think they dropped the network, you know, like. That, like, it was just like, you know, and we're talking about a peck on the cheek.

• 25:36Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 25:37Bill Maher?

  And it was, I mean.

• 25:38Speaker 04

  Real human beings.

• 25:39Bill Maher?

  The changes you must have seen in your life.

• 25:41Speaker 04

  Yes, in my lifetime, now that I'm a 65-year-old man, yeah.

• 25:45Bill Maher?

  Can you describe that? I would love to, because I heard you on a podcast once talk about getting pulled over with a bunch of, I don't think you were talking about other African-American.

• 25:54Speaker 04

  Yeah, no, what it was, was I was at a conference. Where, you know, in conferences, there's the banquet night, which is the night before the last day. And usually, there's a bottle of wine, you grab it off the table, go to a, go to a common room or something, you just chill and chew the fat. And I'm there, and we're going around the circle, and somehow it got talked about police and police stops, right? So, we went around the circle, and every person is sharing their story. But we're all PhD physicists, okay?

• 26:26Bill Maher?

  Right.

• 26:26Speaker 04

  And sharing stories about police stops. And just went around multiple times. And the only thing we have in common, other than being PhD physicists, is that we're all black.

• 26:38Bill Maher?

  How many?

• 26:39Speaker 04

  Well, there were eight of us in the circle.

• 26:41Bill Maher?

  Eight of us in the room.

• 26:42Speaker 04

  Just in that one circle. And the stories had a very similar tone to it. We were stopped and not given a ticket. So the stop was on some suspicion that was not then fulfilled.

• 26:52Bill Maher?

  What year is this?

• 26:53Speaker 04

  Uh, this is 1992, 93.

• 26:57Bill Maher?

  Okay, so now it's 2023.

• 26:59Speaker 04

  So that's 30 years ago, I'm happy to say.

• 27:01Bill Maher?

  On a scale of how much that has changed?

• 27:03Speaker 04

  Oh, very, you know, it's an excellent question, Bill, because...

• 27:06Bill Maher?

  It's what I'm always asking.

• 27:07Speaker 04

  Bill, Bill, Bill.

• 27:08Bill Maher?

  Where are we now?

• 27:09Speaker 04

  Bill, Bill, Bill, people don't want to admit how much better things are today.

• 27:15Bill Maher?

  I'm always making this point.

• 27:16Speaker 04

  Than at any time in the past.

• 27:17Bill Maher?

  I'm trying to tell the kids this.

• 27:19Speaker 04

  I, I...

• 27:20Bill Maher?

  I am, always, I'm trying to...

• 27:22Speaker 04

  And here's what you do. Here it is, you set up a time machine, okay? A time machine. Watch. And then if you are female, on the gender spectrum, or a person of color, you put them in the time machine and say, "Pick a time in the past where you were treated better..."

• 27:43Bill Maher?

  Right.

• 27:44Speaker 04

  "...than you are today." And if you really think that through, I don't think there's a single time you can pick.

• 27:50Bill Maher?

  But the kids.

• 27:50Speaker 04

  At all.

• 27:51Bill Maher?

  See, the problem with.

• 27:52Speaker 04

  Well, because it's what they know. They, they, so here's the problem.

• 27:54Bill Maher?

  Well, the problem is education. If you don't teach kids history, if they don't know what happened, they think everything is just the present.

• 28:01Speaker 04

  With the present, and everything bad in the present is the worst that ever happened.

• 28:03Bill Maher?

  You know.

• 28:04Speaker 04

  Right.

• 28:04Bill Maher?

  I try to tell them, I don't even need history books to know something like this. I was alive.

• 28:09Speaker 04

  You lived it. You lived it.

• 28:10Bill Maher?

  I saw America like you did.

• 28:12Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 28:12Bill Maher?

  But not like you did. That's why I'm asking you, because I can't know what you know.

• 28:16Speaker 04

  Here's what I'm telling you. So, so for me, yeah, I'm choosing the future. Because that's, that arc looks better to me than any time in the past. But the reason why there's value to this exercise is, rather than, not rather than, in addition to complaining that things aren't what they should be progressively, if you look at the past and realize how much it has changed, what you can ask is, what did we do right to get to where we are today? Let's do more of that. Rather than only look at what's bad today and then try to eradicate that. There, there are lessons that we learned, and my father was among them. He was active in the civil rights movement, worked under Mayor Lindsay in New York.

• 28:57Bill Maher?

  Really?

• 28:58Speaker 04

  He was a commissioner, right?

• 28:59Bill Maher?

  Mayor Lindsay.

• 29:00Speaker 04

  Manpower, career, you know, you know what news article was not written in the, in the 1960s about New York? Um, New York had no major riots. Largest ghetto in the country up in Harlem had no, the skirmishes here, nothing like Wox, nothing like.

• 29:18Bill Maher?

  Newark.

• 29:18Speaker 04

  Newark, nothing.

• 29:20Bill Maher?

  Right across the river.

• 29:21Speaker 04

  Right across the river. And so, no one writes articles about that. My father was there at the time, and what is a riot if not the last desperate act? When you know there is no other path of hope.

• 29:35Bill Maher?

  Right.

• 29:35Speaker 04

  And so, he was a commissioner of Manpower and Career Development Agency. That was an agency in New York where youth in the inner city would realize they might have a job, there's a career for them, there's an opportunity in arms reach. So, it was never a powder keg. So, yeah.

• 29:52Bill Maher?

  Our fathers may have crossed paths.

• 29:55Speaker 04

  Oh.

• 29:55Bill Maher?

  Well, my father was in radio news. We lived in Jersey, but he. Muted every day into Manhattan.

• 30:01Speaker 04

  Oh, okay.

• 30:02Bill Maher?

  And maybe your father was.

• 30:03Speaker 04

  He might, he was interviewed every now and then.

• 30:05Bill Maher?

  That's what I'm saying.

• 30:06Speaker 04

  Well, no, he died a few years ago. I checked my mother. My mother's still alive.

• 30:09Bill Maher?

  No, but this would be in the sixties, seventies.

• 30:11Speaker 04

  Yeah, yes, of course. I can't ask him. I'm saying, yeah, it would be in the sixties, early seventies. Yes.

• 30:16Bill Maher?

  Isn't that funny?

• 30:17Speaker 04

  So you, you've been in the business, you parents?

• 30:19Bill Maher?

  Well, I would hardly call that the business, but radio news, yes, he, I mean, that was what.

• 30:26Speaker 04

  It's a thing. That was an important thing back then.

• 30:28Bill Maher?

  It was, it was the era when radio, every radio station had news at the top of the hour. And you would have five minutes of news. And, you know, even us kids listening to W A B C, Cousin Bruce.

• 30:39Speaker 04

  W A B C, ding.

• 30:40Bill Maher?

  We had to like, sit through five minutes of news.

• 30:43Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 30:43Bill Maher?

  We don't, I feel like we don't ask kids.

• 30:45Speaker 04

  Cousin Bruce, you didn't say it right.

• 30:48Bill Maher?

  Oh, you remember W A B C?

• 30:49Speaker 04

  Yeah, of course.

• 30:50Bill Maher?

  Dan Ingram?

• 30:51Speaker 04

  Dan Ingram.

• 30:54Bill Maher?

  Ron Lundey, I mean.

• 30:58Speaker 04

  No, but I would listen to W B L S.

• 31:00Bill Maher?

  Yes.

• 31:01Speaker 04

  The Total Experience and Sound, one oh seven point five.

• 31:05Bill Maher?

  Wow.

• 31:06Speaker 04

  In stereo.

• 31:07Bill Maher?

  You could have been a voice guy.

• 31:09Speaker 04

  You're saying I have a face for radio? Is this what you're saying?

• 31:12Bill Maher?

  No, really, you have that, you, you could do that.

• 31:15Speaker 04

  No, I, you know what happened was, this, nobody knows this, I was on the roof showing the night sky to like forty people. And there's a tall building that had these big air conditioning ducts. And I was just speaking over the volume of that. And then at one point, my voice cracked. Then I tasted blood in the back. It was like, what the?

• 31:34Bill Maher?

  From what?

• 31:35Speaker 04

  What that? And so, so I went to the doctor, the E N T, and all these people. And they wanted me to learn how to send my voice out from my chest more than from my throat. I think opera singers know this, right? They know how to do that. But I didn't, I didn't know anything about it. So I did all these voice exercises. And what, as I did this, my voice got more and more chest resonant.

• 31:57Bill Maher?

  Yes.

• 31:58Speaker 04

  And I, so it was, it was a, it's a way to protect my throat is really what's going on.

• 32:03Bill Maher?

  Do you remember the record, Rainy Night in Georgia?

• 32:07Bill Maher?

  Do you?

• 32:08Speaker 04

  Yes, I do, of course. There's even the sound of rain.

• 32:10Bill Maher?

  Who sang?

• 32:11Speaker 04

  Yes. Yes, yeah.

• 32:12Bill Maher?

  Who sang it?

• 32:13Speaker 04

  Uh, oh, no, uh, that wasn't Billy Preston.

• 32:16Bill Maher?

  Rick, Brooke Benton.

• 32:18Speaker 04

  Oh, no, I would never remember that. I don't know.

• 32:21Bill Maher?

  I feel like you could cover that song.

• 32:23Speaker 04

  Rainy night in Georgia. Yeah, so, so, so now, so I was, I was being interviewed on CNN. And I miss our boy's voice doing the, this is CNN, you know, um, Darth Vader.

• 32:36Bill Maher?

  Right.

• 32:36Speaker 04

  Did that for years.

• 32:37Bill Maher?

  Yes, he did.

• 32:38Speaker 04

  Yeah, and then he stopped doing it. It's like, hell, I could do that.

• 32:41Bill Maher?

  Right.

• 32:41Speaker 04

  This is CNN. I got, I got that. So I, I laid a few tracks for them. I don't know what they'll do with it.

• 32:48Bill Maher?

  Huh, talk a plot a place that's not too scientific, though.

• 32:53Speaker 04

  So, Bill, how come nothing makes you happy?

• 32:55Bill Maher?

  Nothing, what are you talking about?

• 32:57Speaker 04

  You're the grumpiest, you know what I feel like right now?

• 32:59Bill Maher?

  Grumpy? Why am I grumpy?

• 33:00Speaker 04

  I feel like, now I'm gonna turn 65. I feel like we're on, on your porch in the rocking chair. Get off my lawn, you yuck, you.

• 33:09Bill Maher?

  I'm not the grumpy one.

• 33:10Speaker 04

  Let me ask, can I ask, I know it's your podcast, but I've been carrying questions within me for you.

• 33:15Bill Maher?

  Yeah, I'm pleased. Carrying them.

• 33:17Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 33:17Bill Maher?

  Wow.

• 33:18Speaker 04

  So you don't, as I heard you say, maybe you dotted here and there, but you've abandoned college campuses in your stand-up.

• 33:26Bill Maher?

  Every comedian has.

• 33:27Speaker 04

  Okay, so.

• 33:28Bill Maher?

  Literally everyone.

• 33:29Speaker 04

  Let me, let me ask you. If you came up today, would you just read the landscape and develop a whole other comedic repertoire that does not end up having people pick it outside your thing? Are, are, are you just transposed and you're not adjusting to the shifting terrain? So is, why is it their fault and not your fault?

• 33:55Bill Maher?

  Well, you're, you're being so broad about the whole thing.

• 33:57Speaker 04

  Yeah, I am, I am.

• 33:58Bill Maher?

  Well, but that doesn't work because that doesn't ever explain anything. If you want to talk about specific issues, I, it's funny, you know, this subject comes up a lot of times with, like, people who are, you know, my friends who are around my age, 40. No, and they have, like, kids who are, like, super woke and drive them fucking nuts.

• 34:20Speaker 04

  I got woke kids. I will never be as woke as my kids would want me to be, ever.

• 34:25Bill Maher?

  Yeah, but you're a little too, still. And, you know, woke does not automatically mean better. Newer does not automatically mean better. So that's why I say to talk broadly is bullshit. You have to like, talk about what specific, you know, issue are we talking about? You know, the, the ones that get people's attention are gender issues.

• 34:47Speaker 04

  Yeah, I know, but why?

• 34:48Bill Maher?

  Things like that, that were, okay, this is very different.

• 34:52Speaker 04

  You cut your teeth in the seventies.

• 34:54Bill Maher?

  What I'm saying is-

• 34:55Speaker 04

  And you read the, you read the room.

• 34:57Bill Maher?

  Okay, but I'll answer you-

• 34:57Speaker 04

  You read the politics.

• 34:59Bill Maher?

  I didn't read the politics.

• 35:00Speaker 04

  Yes, you did.

• 35:01Bill Maher?

  I, how the fuck do you know what I did?

• 35:03Speaker 04

  Cause you, I know, I know your jokes of the era, they were great.

• 35:07Bill Maher?

  Well, a lot of people think they're great now.

• 35:08Speaker 04

  Okay, they're still great.

• 35:10Bill Maher?

  I don't, I don't know if you don't, I mean-

• 35:12Speaker 04

  No, no, what I meant was-

• 35:13Bill Maher?

  Am I not woke enough for you?

• 35:14Speaker 04

  Jokes that would work on a college campus, okay? Surely there is a portfolio of jokes that would still work on a college campus, surely.

• 35:23Bill Maher?

  I would hope not, from what, maybe some college campuses. The ones you read about are fucking insane.

• 35:30Speaker 04

  You've given up on an entire generation and you don't know how to make them laugh.

• 35:33Bill Maher?

  I have given up on any place that doesn't even remotely attempt to believe in free speech. And thinks that anything that, that they hear, that they don't like, that they don't agree with, is violence. These people are fucking nuts and you should be calling them out. Somebody like you, who has standing with kids, should be not joining them.

• 35:52Speaker 04

  I do when there's a science objectivity to it, yes.

• 35:54Bill Maher?

  You're doing what parents do, you're taking the path of least resistance. And therefore hurting the kids and yourself. Parents ruin both their lives, they ruin their fucking spoiled kids' lives, and they ruin their own lives because the kids rule the roost. So that's what you're doing on a national level.

• 36:09Speaker 04

  I'm feeling more like on the porch. Get off my lawn.

• 36:13Bill Maher?

  Really? I feel like we're in the barber shop.

• 36:15Speaker 04

  That works too. Barber, in the, in the inner city, it's the barber shop. We don't have porches in the, well, there's the, the stoop. There's the stoop. So I just, so here's my point.

• 36:25Bill Maher?

  That's my point.

• 36:26Speaker 04

  I'm trying to get through to people on my social media and the like. And I see what pisses people off, what they react to, and I say, alright, these are the landmines, I'm gonna navigate that. I'm gonna navigate.

• 36:38Bill Maher?

  Okay, you're, you're-

• 36:39Speaker 04

  So I navigate it so that I can, because my father's greatest- Bit of wisdom to me, several nuggets. One of them was, it's not good enough to be right. You also have to be effective. And if you reject the college campus, then you have no influence on them. They're not gonna say, oh, we're not gonna get built, maybe we should change. Then you have no influence on them.

• 37:01Bill Maher?

  Sweetheart, I can wait till they grow up a little. Okay, I can wait. You don't know what you're talking about. You don't know what you're talking about with comedians.

• 37:10Speaker 04

  You gonna put age rank on me?

• 37:11Bill Maher?

  Comedian, no, you don't know what I'm talking about. You know the, you know outer space.

• 37:15Speaker 04

  But I will tell you.

• 37:16Bill Maher?

  I know fucking doing comedy shows.

• 37:18Speaker 04

  I'm a huge consumer of your trade.

• 37:20Bill Maher?

  Thank you.

• 37:21Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 37:21Bill Maher?

  Well, I mean, thank you on behalf of all the comedians in my trade.

• 37:24Speaker 04

  I'm a huge consumer. I'm just letting you know that.

• 37:26Bill Maher?

  You mean of all comedians?

• 37:28Speaker 04

  Yes, of all comedians.

• 37:29Bill Maher?

  Okay, yes, well, on behalf of all of us, I thank you.

• 37:31Speaker 04

  A fast Jay Leno joke, not joke, you know, observation when you have a.

• 37:35Bill Maher?

  Please, let's not let the moment pass. I wanna hear this.

• 37:38Speaker 04

  Oh, you wanna hear it now?

• 37:39Bill Maher?

  Absolutely.

• 37:40Speaker 04

  Oh, okay.

• 37:40Bill Maher?

  Leno?

• 37:41Speaker 04

  Okay, yeah, okay, so.

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• 39:09Speaker 04

  I watched Leno every night, his monologue. I didn't care about the guest.

• 39:12Bill Maher?

  Me too.

• 39:12Speaker 04

  Watched the monologue every night.

• 39:13Bill Maher?

  He was the best.

• 39:14Speaker 04

  And he has the longest monologue of all the guys at night, okay?

• 39:17Bill Maher?

  Genius comedian.

• 39:18Speaker 04

  Okay, and so I knew his timing, I knew his rhythms, I knew on the possibility that I would ever end up on his show, I would be in lockstep with him. Then the call came.

• 39:30Bill Maher?

  Yeah.

• 39:31Speaker 04

  Okay, now he doesn't typically do scientists, so this was, I think, new, was unusual for him. And he's a literate guy, science literate guy, but it wasn't like Johnny Carson, who had scientists on all the time.

• 39:41Bill Maher?

  But that's a credit to you. You rose to the level of pop culture translator of science, which is a great place to be, and only a few people get to do that.

• 39:51Speaker 04

  Thank you, but it's a lot of work, just learning what the hell's going on out there in pop culture.

• 39:55Bill Maher?

  Bullfucking hell.

• 39:56Speaker 04

  So here's what happened. So what show is it? It had Jimmy Fallon on it. Why? Because two weeks later, he's taken over for, so this is like the last week

• 40:07Bill Maher?

  Right.

• 40:07Speaker 04

  of Jay Leno's tenure.

• 40:08Bill Maher?

  Yeah, right.

• 40:09Speaker 04

  And I'm on the show, okay? But then I realized, I know why I'm on the show. Because that night was the night, that day Obama was inaugurated. 2008, that 2009, January 20th. So that evening, all Hollywood is not available, but Neil is available. Okay, so I fly out to California, okay? So now watch. And he had a great joke about the inauguration in a minute. But watch what happens. He says, "Oh, it's Neil. What's the latest in the universe?" I said, "Oh."

• 40:41Bill Maher?

  That's a terrible Leno impression. Thank you. So, Neil, what's the latest in the universe?

• 40:48Speaker 04

  And so, so I set him up for a joke, okay? This is like dangling fruit. I said, "On Mars, we just discovered that there's gaseous effluences coming from the ravine." Wait a minute, wait. And so then I wait like three quarters of a second to see if he picks that up.

• 41:08Bill Maher?

  Right.

• 41:09Speaker 04

  If he doesn't, I keep going, and he didn't pick it up. So I said, "And we analyzed the gases, and it's mostly methane."

• 41:18Speaker 04

  So, there was a pause. No, he's still in peace. He says, "Oh." He's like, listening and learning rather than being active.

• 41:26Bill Maher?

  Well, in his defense, I don't know what the joke is about methane either. Maybe this is something you astrophysicists know. Methane.

• 41:33Speaker 04

  Such as, such as what you'd find in the lower intestines of farm animals.

• 41:39Bill Maher?

  Yeah, cow farts.

• 41:41Speaker 04

  Still, he doesn't say that. Meanwhile, Jimmy Fallon says, "I can see it now on Mars." The cow dad's saying, "Pull my hoof." Jimmy picked it up.

• 41:51Bill Maher?

  Wow.

• 41:52Speaker 04

  And, and.

• 41:53Bill Maher?

  That's good.

• 41:55Speaker 04

  And so I, I was like, what am I gonna, I can't do, what am I gonna do here?

• 41:59Bill Maher?

  Well, I don't know what the point of that story is.

• 42:01Speaker 04

  No, no, no, I was saying, I followed the comedic thing. So the next day, do you remember Aretha Franklin sang at the inauguration? And she had this big, like, hat. I don't know if you remember that. But it was a huge hat. So the next day, he says, "Last night," in his monologue, "last night at Neil, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse," okay, I won't imitate it, fine. "Last night I had Neil deGrasse Tyson on, and he told me there's only two things visible from space. The Great Wall of China and Aretha Franklin's hat." That's just good. So I made it into two nights there, that's all.

• 42:32Bill Maher?

  Oh, really?

• 42:33Speaker 04

  And I have a keepsake from that day. My cup, which is from the Today Show, I mean, from the Tonight Show. Okay, this is nice. On my side, it says, "Guest number two."

• 42:42Bill Maher?

  Yeah. I was on the Tonight Show that week too, his last week.

• 42:46Speaker 04

  Seriously?

• 42:46Bill Maher?

  Yeah, Seth MacFarlane and I sang in tuxedos.

• 42:50Speaker 04

  What? I missed that.

• 42:52Bill Maher?

  Yeah, YouTube it. And we sang, I rewrote, with the help of my writers, I recall, "Thanks for the Memories."

• 43:01Speaker 04

  Oh, nice. Very nice.

• 43:03Bill Maher?

  And we fucking rehearsed it and memorized it and sang it together like two crooners.

• 43:08Speaker 04

  Very good. Give me a quick bump on that.

• 43:10Bill Maher?

  I thought Jay should get a send-off like that. Bette Midler serenaded Carson when he left.

• 43:17Speaker 04

  Right, with "Wind Beneath My Wings."

• 43:19Bill Maher?

  Something like that.

• 43:19Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's what it is.

• 43:21Bill Maher?

  But she didn't return my calls when I tried to get her. No, I'm kidding. No, I wanted to, no, I wanted to rewrite the song and do it for him. Yeah, it was really funny.

• 43:30Speaker 04

  But I've been on his car show.

• 43:32Bill Maher?

  Yeah.

• 43:33Speaker 04

  He had a jet, a car with a jet engine. And so he wanted me on there to comment on aerodynamics of jet engines.

• 43:39Bill Maher?

  So, um.

• 43:41Speaker 04

  So obviously, I, I respect what you guys do deeply.

• 43:43Bill Maher?

  I know. I appreciate.

• 43:46Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 43:47Bill Maher?

  Look.

• 43:47Speaker 04

  And so I'm wondering, how do you, how do you navigate? You know, I have on, you know, the Sirius XM, you got comedy from the nineties, two thousands, two thousand teens, they decade them.

• 43:56Bill Maher?

  Yeah.

• 43:57Speaker 04

  And I listened to comedy from the two thousands.

• 43:59Bill Maher?

  But.

• 44:00Speaker 04

  Half the jokes you can't tell today.

• 44:01Bill Maher?

  But just, exactly. And just, just to put this in perspective. Uh, we did a piece on this, cut like, and this is going back seven or eight years. This has been going on, it's only gotten worse. But Chris Rock, Jerry Seinfeld, and Larry the Cable Guy, all at the same period of time, announced they are not doing colleges anymore. And, you know, we did.

• 44:23Speaker 04

  Chris Rock too.

• 44:24Bill Maher?

  We did jokes like, a Jew, a black guy in a redneck walk into a college, and they all go, fuck you, I'm getting out of here.

• 44:31Speaker 04

  Right, right, right. So they don't work anymore.

• 44:32Bill Maher?

  If Jerry Seinfeld's act, which can whiten teeth, it's so clean.

• 44:37Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's a pretty, that's, he's a pretty clean humorist.

• 44:40Bill Maher?

  Brilliant.

• 44:40Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 44:41Bill Maher?

  But like, if, if you're upset at Jerry Seinfeld's act, I'm sorry. The problem is you and how you were raised, spoiler alert, wrong. You were raised wrong. That's the key to everything, is the kids were raised wrong. And it doesn't make me the bad guy, because I noticed this. I don't know why you want to join this.

• 45:02Speaker 04

  I want to navigate it so I can still be effective in communicating with them.

• 45:05Bill Maher?

  Yeah, me too.

• 45:06Speaker 04

  But, but no, you've given up. You're, you're on the rocking chair.

• 45:10Bill Maher?

  No, I have not given up.

• 45:12Speaker 04

  Get off my lawn.

• 45:13Bill Maher?

  But you have, but you have a, uh, no, that's, that's stupid.

• 45:16Speaker 04

  That's real.

• 45:16Bill Maher?

  That's stupid. It's so fucking, it's, it's demeaning and insulting.

• 45:20Speaker 04

  No.

• 45:20Bill Maher?

  Quite frankly, because it's, it's reducing what I do, which is really subtle.

• 45:24Speaker 04

  Yeah, go ahead.

• 45:24Bill Maher?

  And a lot of smart people like it.

• 45:25Speaker 04

  It's a lot of subtle stuff.

• 45:27Bill Maher?

  That's what they would say on Fox News. Oh, you know, he's just saying, he's just old, get off my lawn. It's prejudiced. It's not accurate. It's not cool.

• 45:35Speaker 04

  You're not allowing my free speech.

• 45:37Bill Maher?

  I, I'm allowing it. I'm just calling you out on your bull, calling you out on your bullshit.

• 45:42Speaker 04

  Just because it doesn't agree with you, doesn't make it bullshit. It could be just a different point of view. I'm just saying.

• 45:49Bill Maher?

  Get off my lawn is not a point of view.

• 45:51Speaker 04

  But it's a fun reference. Come on, you know it's a fun.

• 45:53Bill Maher?

  Yeah, but it's pretending, it's not accurate. And it's not honest, because it's pretending that all I am is a primal scream against the future coming. I'm not a primal scream. I love the future when it's good.

• 46:06Speaker 04

  Do you want to influence that generation?

• 46:08Bill Maher?

  If you want to bring back.

• 46:09Speaker 04

  Then you navigate it.

• 46:10Bill Maher?

  If you want to bring back communism, which like a third of them do. No, I'm not gonna go, oh, that's new. Isn't it great? You know, I could say, hey, let's shit in the kitchen and eat in the bathroom. It's new. But is it smarter? No, this is what I always tell my friends when they're like, I can't talk to my kids because whatever I think, they go, that's old thinking.

• 46:30Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 46:31Bill Maher?

  And it's like, yeah, but is it, is it better thinking? Is it better thinking? I know you think that like, you had a thing with Martina Navratilova.

• 46:40Speaker 04

  What do you mean I have, I have nothing? What do you mean?

• 46:42Bill Maher?

  A beef, she has beef with you.

• 46:44Speaker 04

  Why does she have a beef with me?

• 46:45Bill Maher?

  Because you think like, guys with dicks should get in the women's swimming pool, basically.

• 46:51Speaker 04

  No, no, I, oh, no, I, well, whatever got clipped and reposted, I don't know. But what I said was, that, the, um, in this emergent space, where you have people expressing themselves on a gender spectrum, and you want to now compete in sports, that's still a frontier to be solved. And I don't have the answer, but I can suggest one, whether or not it'll work. Maybe we don't compete by gender anymore. We compete on hormone ratios, okay? Is it testosterone? There was a woman who had uncommonly high testosterone levels. And they wanted to disqualify her because of how manly she was.

• 47:35Speaker 04

  When she was born a woman and competing as a woman. So if we're, that's how we're gonna do it.

• 47:39Bill Maher?

  You know, there's, again, this is.

• 47:40Speaker 04

  Because what you really want, wait, Bill, no, I've thought this through more than you might think I have. So what you really want is an interesting contest between people who are similarly talented.

• 47:52Speaker 04

  The least interesting Super Bowl you could ever watch is a blowout by halftime.

• 47:56Bill Maher?

  See, what we agree on. Is that there are anomalies in human nature, whereas.

• 48:01Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 48:02Bill Maher?

  You know, the vast majority of people, I'm sorry, are still male or female. And certainly every cell in our body is dictating one of those other sexes. I mean, obviously.

• 48:13Speaker 04

  The hormones are.

• 48:13Bill Maher?

  Obviously, that's, well, also, I make sperm and other people make eggs.

• 48:19Speaker 04

  That's what hormones do.

• 48:20Bill Maher?

  You, you can't deny that. Okay. So this, but we, as liberals, we, I think, agree that, you know, there are anomalies in nature. And they should be respected and protected. But this attempt to reorganize all of society around what a very tiny percentage, who, again, we can protect and respect without pretending that every baby is a jump ball, like penis. What the fuck? I don't know. That doesn't mean anything. We have no idea what this child is. I mean, that, that seems to be where you want to go. I mean, like, how many people fit this description? That we should reorganize sports around? Sports is, we have men's sports and women's sports.

• 48:59Bill Maher?

  And if the best team in the WNBA played the worst team in the NBA, the score would be a million to zero. Can we organize society around that basic point with that, with this, of course, proviso? That we protect and, and respect people who do not fit into it?

• 49:19Speaker 04

  Let's segregate society because dark-skinned people and light-skinned people. Because that nature made it that way, and that's how it is. So.

• 49:28Bill Maher?

  Well, nature did make it that way. And it's not segregating. It's not segregating anything.

• 49:33Speaker 04

  That attitude 150 years ago was, was.

• 49:37Bill Maher?

  I did, two years ago. You act like this was, yes, right, Lincoln, this was a big issue in the Lincoln-Douglas debates. Trans people, that's right. I remember that from 1861. Yes, I remember those debates.

• 49:51Speaker 04

  It was 1860, I think.

• 49:52Bill Maher?

  Lincoln was all about getting trans. Oh, for fuck's sake. You're ridiculous.

• 49:58Speaker 04

  No, no. So here it is. Just, all I'm saying is that, how about this? I'm looking at schools in Manhattan. And there's a school there, and there's a, old from, like, built in the 20s and 30s. And there's a doorway. That says, "Boys," in a separate doorway on the other side of school that says, "Girls."

• 50:17Bill Maher?

  Oh, God.

• 50:18Speaker 04

  Why are we doing this?

• 50:20Bill Maher?

  Because people are mostly boys and girls?

• 50:22Speaker 04

  But why split them entering a school building?

• 50:26Bill Maher?

  Because they pee differently? Jesus Christ, that, I have to explain this?

• 50:31Speaker 04

  No, because, you know what I thought when I saw that? It's colored fountain over here, white fountain over here. That's what I thought, when I saw that.

• 50:39Bill Maher?

  That's not the same thing.

• 50:41Speaker 04

  Well, it's not exactly the same thing, but that's what I thought. It's not exactly, I agree.

• 50:44Bill Maher?

  Okay.

• 50:45Speaker 04

  I agree.

• 50:45Bill Maher?

  But, this is what I always say about these kind of issues. Like, there's two ways that you can be benighted about something. One, you can be too far from it.

• 50:55Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 50:55Bill Maher?

  Like, I would be too far from certain issues, racial issues, of course. How could I ever know?

• 51:00Speaker 04

  Right.

• 51:01Bill Maher?

  You can also be lost, sort of, thinking-wise, as I am, because I'm too far from it, if you're too close to it.

• 51:09Speaker 04

  Yes. You miss the elephant.

• 51:12Bill Maher?

  Well, you miss the elephant. It's the fly on the Mona Lisa.

• 51:15Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm.

• 51:15Bill Maher?

  Why the fly wants to be on the Mona Lisa, I don't know, and I can't even appreciate all it, but, okay, you get my point. And, so, like, I think when you see that, I totally understand why a man of your age does, but I don't think it's accurate.

• 51:31Speaker 04

  So, I used to wrestle, high school and college. Okay? It's relevant to this conversation, believe it or not. So, I was captain of my high school team, undefeated, although...

• 51:42Bill Maher?

  Wow.

• 51:44Speaker 04

  But, it was in New York. The real wrestlers are in, like, Iowa, you know, in Oklahoma.

• 51:50Bill Maher?

  Oh, I'm sure there's some wrestlers.

• 51:51Speaker 04

  There's some, but if you really balance it out, it's not...

• 51:54Bill Maher?

  New York has no tough guys?

• 51:55Speaker 04

  We got tough guys, but they'll shoot you or punch you in the face. They're not wrestling with wrestling moves. But anyhow, what you want is a match that's interesting to observe, not where one person dominates the other. In wrestling, they know this. There are 10 weight categories. In high school, I was 190 pounds, that was 50 pounds ago, or more. I was 190 pounds, very good incentive to stay there, because if I went one pound over, the next category was unlimited. So, I was there at 190 pounds. I'm not wrestling someone 127. No. They find somebody else at 127 to wrestle 127. That makes the match more interesting for the viewer. So if we can split wrestling into ten categories and that becomes the wrestling match.

• 52:40Bill Maher?

  But all men against each other.

• 52:43Speaker 04

  Correct, so now, I get that.

• 52:46Bill Maher?

  Sort of key point.

• 52:46Speaker 04

  Okay, okay, so all I'm saying is, what is it that makes the man the man? Is it the hormones? Okay, if it's the hormones and you decide to give yourself a different cocktail of hormones, I'm making this up by the way, I'm not saying it should happen this way. It's a way to start thinking about it.

• 53:06Bill Maher?

  It would be.

• 53:07Speaker 04

  Maybe the track meets have hormone categories.

• 53:10Bill Maher?

  And maybe giving yourself the wrong hormones is deleterious to your health. Would you not admit that? Do you think we can just safely do things like this?

• 53:19Speaker 04

  So you feel this way because you're concerned about, you're so deeply concerned about the health of the people who are trying to find their place on the gender spectrum? You care about their health so much that you don't want them to go through that?

• 53:29Bill Maher?

  It's not something that keeps me up at night, but when the subject comes up, I care about them like I care about all people. So if there is something.

• 53:37Speaker 04

  You do, by the way, you think about all people.

• 53:38Bill Maher?

  Of course.

• 53:39Speaker 04

  Yeah, I give you that.

• 53:41Bill Maher?

  Okay, you're being sincere.

• 53:42Speaker 04

  Think about all people, no, I'm being sincere.

• 53:43Bill Maher?

  I do, yes, yeah, old school liberal.

• 53:46Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 53:46Bill Maher?

  Okay, so I want all people to have, you know, make this very challenging world that we live in better. So that's why there's honest debate about this issue. And why don't we cut it off?

• 54:00Speaker 04

  Keep the debate honest, yeah.

• 54:01Bill Maher?

  Why don't we cut it off now? Because like, we're not gonna solve this, we set our pieces, we get it. I wanna plug your book, because I know you have to run to your film, what are your things?

• 54:11Speaker 04

  Oh yeah, I got a thing coming.

• 54:12Bill Maher?

  Yeah, but don't leave me before I have my full time with you. But to infinity and beyond, I do wanna, see, often I'm too stoned to remember to do the plug and tonight I'm so proud of myself because I'm like a fucking pro. But I think it's because I was reading it myself and I was really enjoying it. And it's got pictures, which I really like.

• 54:33Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's published with National Geographic books.

• 54:35Bill Maher?

  Almost on every other page.

• 54:37Speaker 04

  They only know how to make a beautiful book.

• 54:38Bill Maher?

  Psychologically, it's a lot easier to get through scientific material, which it also has a lot of. I got a picture. I look at it as a pretty one of that big ball in space with the one with the ring around it. How was that?

• 54:51Speaker 04

  That's Uranus right there, right there. Yeah, that's what Uranus looks like.

• 54:54Bill Maher?

  Really? I just, I just picked the right page?

• 54:57Speaker 04

  And you have a ring on Uranus.

• 54:58Bill Maher?

  I got a real talent for this. Okay. Anyway.

• 55:03Speaker 04

  So it's written by a co-author who's my, who's my senior producer, Lindsay Walker. This is a collaboration between my podcast, StarTalk.

• 55:12Bill Maher?

  Right.

• 55:12Speaker 04

  Which has been around for like 14 years.

• 55:13Bill Maher?

  One of the biggest. I aspire to be at your level.

• 55:17Speaker 04

  Oh, no.

• 55:18Bill Maher?

  Really? No, your podcast is one of the hugest.

• 55:20Speaker 04

  Okay, and what we do is we got three DNA strands, science, pop culture, and humor.

• 55:25Bill Maher?

  Well, did you see the big thing they have now with that Bono?

• 55:28Speaker 04

  Oh, the sphere. I got a call from the guy. He wants me to do something in the.

• 55:32Bill Maher?

  You're the natural.

• 55:33Speaker 04

  The animated exterior of the sphere.

• 55:35Bill Maher?

  But couldn't you use that sphere to do like the greatest TED Talk ever?

• 55:39Speaker 04

  Yeah, probably.

• 55:42Bill Maher?

  Mr. Monis, well, you probably.

• 55:44Speaker 04

  No, no, I mean, I mean, I could probably, I wasn't saying probably to give the greatest ever, probably. There are talks that befitting that space. The guy was in there. He runs the Madison Square Garden.

• 55:52Bill Maher?

  We should do a talk, a public talk together. I bet you we could sell a lot of tickets.

• 55:57Speaker 04

  Oh, man.

• 55:58Bill Maher?

  Right?

• 55:59Speaker 04

  In that sphere?

• 56:00Bill Maher?

  You like money. I like, I like money. You like money, right? We all like money. Yeah, I'm telling you. I think we could do, I think we could do some business.

• 56:09Speaker 04

  Knock out that theater?

• 56:10Bill Maher?

  We can, uh.

• 56:12Speaker 04

  So, and my people call your people.

• 56:16Bill Maher?

  I, when I, but I, I was in Vegas last weekend and I drove by it and it's, I don't know, either love it or it's creepy. It looks like AI has landed and taken over. Like, that's the first thing I thought was like, oh, these people.

• 56:33Speaker 04

  In the movie, in the remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still with Keanu Reeves, the aliens land in Central Park, not in Washington DC.

• 56:41Bill Maher?

  Right.

• 56:41Speaker 04

  And it's a big sphere in the middle of Central Park.

• 56:44Bill Maher?

  It's always a big sphere in those movies. And, and as long as we're on that subject, I know we've argued about this before. I don't have a dog in this fight. I hope we're not taken over by the aliens, but I'm not gonna make, I'm not. They're not gonna make a big fight about it if they come. But I feel like, and I don't know for anything for sure, nobody does. It just feels like more and more, it's getting harder to make the other case that there are not people who are watching us. And again, I don't know if there's anything unscientific about the idea that there would be other life in the universe. I don't know if you saw, if you watched the Hard Knocks show on HBO, where they go to the training camp of the football teams. But Aaron Rodgers, who's a super smart guy, he sat in that chair, love him.

• 57:28Bill Maher?

  He told a story about, I don't know where he was, somewhere in the South, and his friend walked out in the porch together. They were not drunk, they were not asleep, two people. And they saw a giant, it could only be described as a flying saucer. Just a giant big thing that then left like at the speed of light. And then a couple of minutes later, two US jets flew over. I believe him. I can't, am I 100% that this was a flying saucer, aliens? No, but it just seems likely.

• 57:59Speaker 04

  Was this 20 years ago?

• 58:00Bill Maher?

  This was, no, I don't think so.

• 58:02Speaker 04

  Then the dude has a smartphone. And he has a smartphone that can take high resolution video and stills. NASA is-

• 58:09Bill Maher?

  Maybe it was 20 years ago.

• 58:10Speaker 04

  Well, that's my point, so-

• 58:11Bill Maher?

  No, they were gobsmacked, they were like-

• 58:13Speaker 04

  Okay, so in the day, you only had cameras when you were on vacation. So everything was eyewitness testimony. I got abducted, I got this, I saw that. Now everybody's got a camera. NASA's setting up a clearinghouse. You take your smartphone, take a picture of your UFO. And the metadata has your location, the angle of the phone, the direction. You send it in and they can collate this.

• 58:34Bill Maher?

  I just want to ask this on a more philosophical level. Just, why wouldn't they? And I think we should just be happy that they're monitoring and not attacking. But what, it makes sense to me that, first of all, there could be other people in the universe, other beings.

• 58:50Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 58:51Bill Maher?

  And there's an awful-

• 58:52Speaker 04

  No problem there.

• 58:53Bill Maher?

  Awful lot of people who have similar stories about similar sort of looking creatures. You know, that book Communion, I don't know.

• 59:01Speaker 04

  Yeah, that started it. That, that set the standard for what an alien should look like.

• 59:04Bill Maher?

  Okay.

• 59:05Speaker 04

  With the triangular face, big almond eyes.

• 59:07Bill Maher?

  Yes, people seem to have the same story. Now we have military people, Navy fighter jets testify in Congress. We've seen things we cannot explain. It could be China has a technology we don't, we don't, obviously, we don't know. But it just seems like it's not unscientific to think that the aliens would be like, you know, these assholes are very self-destructive and we just need to keep an eye on them. And yes, we might have to send Keanu Reeves down there to say, look, we are so sorry about this.

• 59:40Speaker 04

  Remember the movie?

• 59:41Bill Maher?

  We tried not to wipe you out.

• 59:43Speaker 04

  Day the Earth's.

• 59:43Bill Maher?

  But you assholes are just, you're, we may need this planet and you're fucking it up.

• 59:47Speaker 04

  I'm glad you remembered.

• 59:48Bill Maher?

  So we're going in a different direction.

• 59:50Speaker 04

  So my reaction is, I, I want to meet the aliens. I just need better evidence than what has been presented.

• 59:58Bill Maher?

  Right.

• 59:58Speaker 04

  So if they are aliens, I would like better evidence than simple eyewitness sworn testimony. In science, what you swear on is not the measure of what is true. It's just the measure of what you think is true in your mind. I need better data than that.

• 1:00:13Bill Maher?

  But what do you think Aaron Rodgers saw? What do you think happened that night?

• 1:00:17Speaker 04

  The universe brims with mysteries and I don't know.

• 1:00:21Bill Maher?

  Yeah, but this one seemed kind of obvious. A giant.

• 1:00:24Speaker 04

  So that must be why. I met him at a Rangers game in the Garden.

• 1:00:27Bill Maher?

  I just feel.

• 1:00:27Speaker 04

  I met him at a Rangers, and he's new to the city. He's a small town guy.

• 1:00:31Bill Maher?

  Boy, did he take that.

• 1:00:32Speaker 04

  I know. So I said, look, this is my, I felt very, very, this is my town, you know?

• 1:00:38Bill Maher?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:38Speaker 04

  Director of the planetarium.

• 1:00:39Bill Maher?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:40Speaker 04

  Come by? I told him this. And now, why should anyone ever act on that? But he did.

• 1:00:45Bill Maher?

  Of course he did.

• 1:00:46Speaker 04

  So in the two week gap between the last, the last exhibition game and the first game, I got a call from his agent who said he wants to come by and visit the planetarium.

• 1:00:56Bill Maher?

  Cool.

• 1:00:57Speaker 04

  I said, bring him by. And then they said, oh, but can he bring 25 of this?

• 1:01:00Bill Maher?

  Right, he does that. He goes to Broadway shows like that.

• 1:01:03Speaker 04

  With, with his whole crew.

• 1:01:04Bill Maher?

  Yeah, with like 25 jets.

• 1:01:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. And so then they canceled at the last minute and then he tears up his Achilles heel. So I think I could have given him some physics advice so that wouldn't have happened.

• 1:01:15Bill Maher?

  I know, but what a badass. A guy who goes, gets the job in New York and goes, you know what? I'm so macho, I'm going to take a bunch of fucking football players out to every show on Broadway and Taylor Swift show. It was brilliant because, you know, New York is-

• 1:01:30Speaker 04

  I would have had fun with them. They didn't come by.

• 1:01:32Bill Maher?

  New York is Broadway too.

• 1:01:33Speaker 04

  Yeah, it is Broadway totally. It's especially Broadway.

• 1:01:35Bill Maher?

  You know, you want to embrace the city?

• 1:01:37Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:01:38Bill Maher?

  I mean, he's more popular on crutches than any athlete that has been walking in 20 years.

• 1:01:46Speaker 04

  I'm latter date friends with his ex-girlfriend, the race car driver.

• 1:01:51Bill Maher?

  Race car driver?

• 1:01:52Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. He dated, not to get all gossipy, but-

• 1:01:59Bill Maher?

  Who did? Oh, oh, I think I know. Danica Patrick?

• 1:02:01Speaker 04

  Yeah, Danica Patrick, yeah.

• 1:02:03Bill Maher?

  Really?

• 1:02:03Speaker 04

  Yeah, she's got a home podcast. I've been on a podcast twice. And we talked about Aaron Rodgers in the last interview. And I told her that so. He said he's a very fun-loving guy and he would, would have, because I was going to tweet, had he come by, I would have given him some physics advice so he wouldn't tear his ankle. But I thought that was insensitive. She said, no, he would have totally dug it.

• 1:02:21Bill Maher?

  Totally on my page with the medical stuff. So, but let's not go back to there.

• 1:02:26Speaker 04

  So, let me just say, I need eyewitness testimony without independent-

• 1:02:32Bill Maher?

  Okay.

• 1:02:33Speaker 04

  -data obtained by something that is not your brain. Okay?

• 1:02:37Bill Maher?

  Right.

• 1:02:38Speaker 04

  The human sensory system is rife, as we said earlier in this conversation, about optical illusions and you don't know what you're looking at. So-

• 1:02:46Bill Maher?

  But two guys saw a giant spaceship hovering above them at the same time?

• 1:02:52Speaker 04

  Maybe it was aliens. I just, now, what happened to all the people who were abducted, as they told their psychiatrist?

• 1:02:58Bill Maher?

  Their assholes were sore. They, no, no, they were. They testified to that.

• 1:03:03Speaker 04

  That, does that make it objectively true? No, it just means that they believe they're telling the truth. What I'm saying is, all of the abduction stories-

• 1:03:12Bill Maher?

  So they're all-

• 1:03:13Speaker 04

  -that were filling this in the 1970s, but you're old enough to remember all this. Back when in my day-

• 1:03:20Speaker 04

  So all these abduction stories, they all went away in the era of the smartphone because we can record that and we don't. There are no-

• 1:03:28Bill Maher?

  Well, maybe the aliens know that.

• 1:03:30Speaker 04

  Okay, so that was the excuse for when someone claimed to have taken regular cameras and the film was blank. So now, because of the ACLU and cops beating up black people, you can stream whatever is in your phone to the internet, to their servers, while it's happening. And we don't have any shots inside the- so here's what you do. Next time you're abducted, steal an ashtray off the shelf. And then when you're- if you don't get a picture, then you have an artifact of alien manufacture, and then we can analyze it and say, hey, you had a real encounter.

• 1:04:05Bill Maher?

  I- again, I am not dying on this hill because I don't know. I'm just saying, that's what I'm saying. We don't know. I find-

• 1:04:14Speaker 04

  Correct. We don't know, and the evidence put forth-

• 1:04:17Bill Maher?

  I'm just-

• 1:04:18Speaker 04

  The weight of that evidence is not magnified by someone swearing to tell the

• 1:04:22Bill Maher?

  I know, but 200 simultaneous sore assholes is something-

• 1:04:31Speaker 04

  Okay, that's hard. That's good evidence, right?

• 1:04:34Bill Maher?

  I think I like better than making you laugh like that. Nothing.

• 1:04:40Speaker 04

  The asshole defense.

• 1:04:42Bill Maher?

  So, AI.

• 1:04:47Speaker 04

  AI what?

• 1:04:49Bill Maher?

  AI.

• 1:04:50Speaker 04

  Yeah, what do you want?

• 1:04:52Bill Maher?

  What do I want?

• 1:04:54Speaker 04

  We've had AI for decades, and all of a sudden, AI can now- in science, and it's all around us at all times, what do you think Siri is? It's not a human being-

• 1:05:03Bill Maher?

  I know, but it's gotten to a new level.

• 1:05:05Speaker 04

  I'm getting there. So I'm saying, so now AI can compose your term paper, and now you poop your pants, okay?

• 1:05:13Bill Maher?

  What happened? What?

• 1:05:16Speaker 04

  AI can compose your term paper.

• 1:05:17Bill Maher?

  Why did I poop my pants?

• 1:05:18Speaker 04

  Because, well, everyone thinks that AI is gonna take over their lives and their jobs and their livelihood and all the rest of it.

• 1:05:23Bill Maher?

  Right.

• 1:05:24Speaker 04

  But AI has been with us for decades. It, of course, is getting better at all times.

• 1:05:28Bill Maher?

  Right.

• 1:05:29Speaker 04

  But what I'm saying is, I think it may start to making headlines because it started touching the lives of liberal arts people.

• 1:05:34Bill Maher?

  Well, also because they made it mass, for the masses. ChatGPT didn't exist a year, I remember it was almost a year ago, about a year ago. That I first was at a restaurant with someone and they said, you have ChatGPT? I said, no, I just read something. What is that again?

• 1:05:49Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:05:50Bill Maher?

  I mean, that was only a year ago, and now it's a household word.

• 1:05:53Speaker 04

  Household.

• 1:05:53Bill Maher?

  And everybody use it, yeah, for everything. That's a quantum leap from where we were a year ago. So, you know, it's like, yes, was there TV in 1939 or something? Yes, no one had it, and then everyone had it, and it changed.

• 1:06:07Speaker 04

  Quantum leap.

• 1:06:08Bill Maher?

  And it, yeah, changes things.

• 1:06:09Speaker 04

  Okay, yeah. I agree.

• 1:06:11Bill Maher?

  So.

• 1:06:11Speaker 04

  So you wanna watch out? You don't want it to become our overlords, any more than you want nuclear weapons to destroy the world. So you put in some restrictions. But what happened is, people started seeing AI, and then they lump all of AI into this one concern. If they had any clue how much AI is influencing their lives at any given moment, they wouldn't possibly say that.

• 1:06:33Bill Maher?

  Well, I don't know. I don't know why those.

• 1:06:35Speaker 04

  Who do you think is flying your airplane? You think a pilot is actually making important decisions up there?

• 1:06:41Bill Maher?

  He's landing it, yes.

• 1:06:42Speaker 04

  Well, yeah, they choose to, but they don't have to.

• 1:06:44Bill Maher?

  Landing is so important to me. I, I don't know.

• 1:06:47Speaker 04

  Landing softly.

• 1:06:50Speaker 04

  That, yeah, they choose to, it keeps them, keeps them, keeps the, the blood flowing.

• 1:06:55Bill Maher?

  Yeah, I know. Okay, but, I mean, you're setting up an opposition that I don't think is real.

• 1:07:00Speaker 04

  No, it's not an opposition. I agree, AI can be abused, especially if they have deep fakes that are videos and things. They can listen, they can sample your voice and say, invent five jokes that Bill Maher has never told, but in the style of Bill Maher.

• 1:07:14Bill Maher?

  Yeah, they've, they've tried that. They suck. They're, they're not there yet.

• 1:07:19Speaker 04

  I was interviewed by an AI chat program on a podcast.

• 1:07:24Bill Maher?

  And?

• 1:07:25Speaker 04

  And I said, they were perfunctory questions, and I wasn't very interested. I said, can I ask, I asked the guy, I wanna ask the thing back a couple of questions. They said, sure.

• 1:07:34Bill Maher?

  Was it as fun as this?

• 1:07:38Bill Maher?

  Come on.

• 1:07:39Speaker 04

  It was very, it was very.

• 1:07:41Bill Maher?

  I don't want to live in that world, do you?

• 1:07:44Speaker 04

  Okay, no, so we'll put restrictions on it.

• 1:07:45Bill Maher?

  Well, okay, I mean, that's been the big argument is like some people like Elon Musk have saying from the beginning, this is an existential threat. I think he's right because I think I've seen too many movies where this happens.

• 1:07:59Speaker 04

  All the movies, it happens in all the movies.

• 1:08:01Bill Maher?

  Everything that happens in movies eventually happens in life. That's the theory I go with because it's true.

• 1:08:06Speaker 04

  I don't want to agree with that, but I kind of have to agree.

• 1:08:09Bill Maher?

  They imagine it first. I remember in Minority Report, the Spielberg movie with Tom Cruise, the future crimes.

• 1:08:14Speaker 04

  And they have that. This facial recognition for everybody.

• 1:08:17Bill Maher?

  Right, and the screens, like he was moving, we had no screens that do it. That was like science fiction. And then three years later, we were all doing.

• 1:08:25Speaker 04

  Then they had the eyeball.

• 1:08:27Bill Maher?

  Yes.

• 1:08:28Speaker 04

  The retinal scan, and then they needed a retinal scan if someone.

• 1:08:31Bill Maher?

  Right.

• 1:08:32Speaker 04

  Who had access, but they just killed him. So they carved out his eyeball in a plastic bag and put the eyeball in front of the thing.

• 1:08:38Bill Maher?

  And he walks into the mall and there's all those, you know, the ads are all moving. Like, we didn't have that then, but now we have all that now. Yeah. So I feel like we could have robot overlords.

• 1:08:50Speaker 04

  Okay, so maybe.

• 1:08:51Bill Maher?

  I mean, it was 1968 when Crew Brook made, I can't do that, Dave.

• 1:08:58Speaker 04

  Sorry, Dave. I can't do that. Okay, 2001, it's space science, 1968, you remembered it. Before we went to the moon.

• 1:09:06Bill Maher?

  Before we went to the moon. Okay. Or as some of my audience would say, if.

• 1:09:13Speaker 04

  That's your audience? Okay, you're proud of that?

• 1:09:15Bill Maher?

  No, but.

• 1:09:16Speaker 04

  You're proud of that?

• 1:09:17Bill Maher?

  There are people, no, not many, but I've had people.

• 1:09:19Speaker 04

  I'll work on them. We can double, I'll tag team them.

• 1:09:23Bill Maher?

  I don't know why that one, that's a strange conspiracy theory.

• 1:09:28Speaker 04

  It's not strange in the flat-earthers.

• 1:09:30Bill Maher?

  We, that's even sillier.

• 1:09:33Speaker 04

  Yeah, I can watch a football game in the winter in New York City and the sun has set, yet it is still up in the Rose Bowl in California. There's no way to explain that unless Earth is curved between New York. There's some very simple explanations here.

• 1:09:48Bill Maher?

  Again, you're speaking to the people.

• 1:09:52Speaker 04

  You want to end on a positive note?

• 1:09:53Bill Maher?

  Yes.

• 1:09:53Speaker 04

  So Ray Bradbury, great science fiction writer. He was once approached by a fan and said, "Mr. Bradbury, why do you write these stories with these apocalyptic futures? Is that the future you think we're gonna occupy?" He says, "No, I write about those futures so you know to avoid them." So maybe those movies have inculcated us

• 1:10:15Bill Maher?

  No, I truly believe that.

• 1:10:16Speaker 04

  With the fear factor that needs to be there to make sure that doesn't happen.

• 1:10:20Bill Maher?

  Right. The other thing that has been depicted in a zillion movies is the apocalyptic post-nuclear war landscape. The Book of Eli and oh, there's so many of those kind of movies.

• 1:10:34Speaker 04

  We know the famous quote from Albert Einstein. "I don't know how World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stone."

• 1:10:42Bill Maher?

  Right. And it's always the same thing. There's gotta be 10 movies where, you know, before the war, and then the war comes where humans wipe out everybody because they're so stupid. This is why we need Keanu Reeves to come down. But then it's like the council, you know, always headed by a pantsuited women. It's either Kate Winslet or a...

• 1:11:09Speaker 04

  Pantsuit, you've noticed what they're wearing?

• 1:11:11Bill Maher?

  Yeah, because we did a bit on it once. There's like eight movies where they're all like in the pantsuit and they're the head of the council.

• 1:11:19Speaker 04

  Does HBO put it on YouTube or I gotta like subscribe?

• 1:11:22Bill Maher?

  HBO Max, my show?

• 1:11:24Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:11:24Bill Maher?

  Is on HBO Max or HBO?

• 1:11:26Speaker 04

  No, but the clips, do they make it to YouTube?

• 1:11:29Bill Maher?

  Uh, yes, absolutely, always. Yeah, whatever you do, don't watch the whole show. Anyway, great to see you too. Anyway.

• 1:11:38Bill Maher?

  But it's always like, you know, the world was ended because humans were stupid. And now we cannot allow humans to be human. We cannot allow emotions, except for this band of hot teenagers who are gonna take back the world by being hot. And they do. You know, that's always, there's a little band of resistance that fights.

• 1:12:03Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:12:04Bill Maher?

  Because we can't allow humans to have emotions. But you started this conversation by saying, what scares you, kind of, maybe I'm paraphrasing, but what scares me is a very similar thing. Like, how can we survive when we see the way people think? The things that people do and what they believe.

• 1:12:21Speaker 04

  My version of that is...

• 1:12:22Bill Maher?

  And what you can convince them of is crazy.

• 1:12:25Speaker 04

  My version of that is...

• 1:12:25Bill Maher?

  That we're still here.

• 1:12:26Speaker 04

  I fear that we are not wise enough to be the shepherds we need to be for the future of civilization.

• 1:12:34Bill Maher?

  Well said, Grasshopper. All right.

• 1:12:37Speaker 04

  No, go to us.

• 1:12:37Bill Maher?

  I know you gotta go.

• 1:12:39Speaker 04

  Gotta go, dude.

• 1:12:40Bill Maher?

  Love you always, even when we fight, right?

• 1:12:50Speaker 04

  It's very matrimonial when we fight, you know?

• 1:12:52Bill Maher?

  I love it.

• 1:12:52Speaker 04

  You realize this, you've never been married, but it's right out of the marriage.

• 1:12:56Bill Maher?

  Well, I think right away you said, which one of us is smarter?

• 1:13:03Bill Maher?

  I didn't mean that at all. Wait, we're gonna...

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