Overtime – Episode #709: Van Jones, Thomas Friedman

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

All right, here we are in Overtime with the CNN political commentator and founder of DreamMachine.org, Van Jones, and the author and free time Pulitzer Prize winning reporter for the New York Times, Tom Friedman.

Okay,

here are the questions.

From the people first one, Van, for you, would you have agreed to debate Charlie Kirk?

I bet you I know the answer, and I bet you the answer is yes.

Because that's the kind of guy you are.

Yeah, listen,

Charlie Kirk and I were not friends

and we were in a big, big public fight the week that he died.

And

it turned out that the day before he died, he sent me a personal message wanting me to come on his show.

And he said, let's be gentlemen.

He said, let's disagree agreeably.

Let's disagree agreeably.

I'm going to carry those words with me because

he was a words, not weapons guy.

I disagree with his words, but he was a words-not weapons guy.

And we're getting away from that now.

And I was very frustrated at people in my party throwing rocks at the corpse before he could even be buried.

Blood's still on the widow's shoes, and people want to post every dumb thing he ever said.

He was a 31-year-old kid.

If you got me at 31 years old, I was on the left side of Pluto.

There is no telling what you would have had me say.

So let's give some grace and some space, even Gwynne, the laboratory.

Okay.

Speaking of Pluto, should the government be more transparent about the existence of UAPs?

UAP is UFO.

Yes.

Right?

I don't know why they think that's going to calm our nerves by changing two light.

It's a UFO.

And I mean, what I've been reading lately is that there's one heading toward the Earth.

There's something that's 13 miles long.

It doesn't apparently look like any other comet because the light is coming from the top, from the front and not behind.

And it's apparently making a trip through the solar system that is uncommon for comets.

It looks like it's doing a drive-by of all the planets.

I don't know, but I just think, and there was that thing that bounced off, that they fired at something, and

the Navy, the military.

I'm not sure, listen.

I am into it.

I think, first of all, the Pentagon now is, by law, has to give reports on this stuff.

And if I were in charge of, I don't know, a big,

I would do wall-to-wall coverage of these generals that have to sit there and say, there's weird stuff we don't know what is.

To me, that's news.

We've had that in coverage.

We shouldn't talk about it.

I mean, I just think people, there are certain people who just think this goes in the file with the nuts who think we didn't land on the moon and every other conspiracy theory.

And it's different.

I think there's no scientific reason.

Carl Sagan said it.

There's no scientific reason why we would necessarily be alone in the universe.

We might be, but increasingly it looks like we're at very least under surveillance.

Let's hope

that they're just observing and not

readying us.

You know, for it.

I don't want Keen O'Reeves to come down and say, look, we gave you the benefit of the doubt, but

you're just way too destructive.

I mean, that could be what's coming.

Should we be talking about climate change more as a national security issue?

What do you think?

That's for you.

Yeah, I mean, obviously,

you know, this,

just because Trump isn't talking about it,

what's really going on, Bill, it seems to me, is two things are happening faster than people think.

One is climate change and the other is AI.

I think both are coming at us much faster than people realize.

And the comet thing.

And so we're really get, if you listen to climate scientists, they don't just talk about extreme weather now.

It's really super extremes.

If you listen to the AI people, they don't just talk about AI, they're talking about super intelligence.

And I think that the next two years, we're going to see more instability driven by both than

at any previous time.

And Donald Trump is president.

What could go wrong?

Well, I don't know.

I don't know who could be president who could do anything about the fact that AI is just taking jobs.

It just can do, at first it could just do the menial jobs.

You know, we didn't, when I was a kid, there were no robots in car plants, and then you look what the floor of a car assembly line looks like.

It's all rope.

Now it's the white-collar jobs, too.

No wonder that, I think I read something like 92% in the first half of the year of all the investment

was in AI.

Yeah.

I mean it's part of the thing is there are two things that are happening.

One is

there's a massive disinvestment in the United States, but you can't tell because there's so much investment in AI, it looks like the stock market is doing well.

It's not.

There's a big sucking sound of capital leaving the United States.

People are

not coming in.

People are long on AI, but they're short on America, so that's not that very good.

The other thing that's going on is all the good kids, the ones that we told stay in school, stay out of trouble, go to college, learn how to code, blah, blah, blah, they're graduating off of a cliff into massive unemployment.

Now, that is very bad for any country.

When your best educated kids get thrown out onto the street with nothing to do, they don't tend to take that well.

And so you're talking about sources of instability that I don't think we're taking very seriously.

The young people who did what we told them to do can't get jobs, and that's very scary.

I'm telling you, a comedian, The last

job that AI can't do.

We all have to be comedians.

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Are we in a legitimate war with drug cartels, or is Trump just trying to justify the attacks on Venezuelan boats?

Well, yeah, I mean, there's so many scandals and news stories and breaking of norms every week.

We didn't even get to this week.

I mean, last week seems like a thousand years ago, and it was just the giant story that he went after Comey.

That was, oh my God, a president spoke out about a case that was, you know, in proxy.

No president ever used to do that.

What happened?

Three things happened bigger than that in the last five five days.

And one of them might be this.

We seem to be in a war with Venezuela.

He insists, I've said this, I said the first week this happened, Venezuela is not the drug country.

I know this.

It's not.

No one ever said,

let's get some Venezuelan marching powder.

It's not where it comes from.

It comes from Colombia and it comes from Peru and Mexico, the fentanyl.

I've never heard of Venezuela in that,

but somehow he got into his head that that's where the drugs are coming.

So we're attacking this shipping and shipping.

I mean, the size of the boat is not really.

But just a question you have to ask, because they do so much crazy stuff that is dishonest.

This may be true.

I have no idea.

You know what I mean?

But

basically, it's so hard to trust them anymore.

What's real, what's Memorex, what's for this week's headline, what's to divert you from Epstein.

I mean, it just, you never know, you know,

blow up a few ships, you know, whatever.

And they don't, you know.

It wouldn't be the first time America did that, remember the Maine?

Yeah, but it's also.

So really, remember the Maine?

Yeah.

The point you made is that there are just so many things that we thought were laws that are just norms.

Yeah.

And Trump has really highlighted that.

You know, that, geez, I thought there was a law against firing someone from the Fed, or I thought there was a law against all these things that he does almost every day.

They were just norms.

And when you bust through them,

then it's really hard to get them back.

Take it from someone who lived in Lebanon and watched the country unravel.

It's really hard to get it back.

All right.

What do you make of the conservative uproar over Bad Bunny performing at the Super Bowl,

given his criticism of ICE?

Yeah, I mean, I'm not that familiar with Mr.

Bunny's work.

I'd be more familiar if it was Eddie Rabbit

playing the Super Bowl.

But

I assume

there is at least

some racial element to this antipathy.

I don't know.

Look, I mean, I like the Easter Bunny better, but

yeah, listen,

he is a massively popular figure.

And the only thing that probably half the country knows about him is that he's brown and doesn't like ice grabbing people.

I don't think that should disqualify him from being able to be on air.

But I mean, here's the thing.

We do live in completely different countries now.

If you talk to people who are under a certain age, the people who they think are stars are people I've literally never heard of.

Apparently, there's somebody named Kai Sanat who gets like.

I thought it was Kai Schnott.

I heard that too, and then I saw it written, and I was like, that's better.

I agree.

He's enormous.

He's enormous.

15 million streams like that.

That's like the new talk show.

People just show up and

do all kinds of interesting stuff.

But I think with this Bad Bunny thing, it just shows.

I guarantee you, half the people who are criticizing him have never heard of him, but now they are overnight experts on how terrible he is because they saw it on TikTok.

Bill, I'm the worst person to ask because I've actually never looked at Twitter, never looked at Facebook, never looked at Instagram, never looked at TikTok, and never smoked a cigarette.

And my plan is to die saying all five.

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