Real Time with Bill Maher - Overtime – Episode #709: Van Jones, Thomas Friedman

Episode Date: October 7, 2025

Bill Maher and his guests answer viewer questions after the show. (Originally aired 10/3/25) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO late-night series, Real Time with Bill Maugh. All right, here we are. Over time with the CNN political commentator and founder of Dreamachine.org Van Jones, and the author and three-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 weapon. I disagree with his words. He's a word's not weapons guy.

And we're getting away from that now. And I was very frustrated 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. Right. If you got me at 31 years old,

I was on the left side of Pluto. There is no telling what you have had me saying. So let's give some grace and some space, even through our enemies. Even to our enemies. What an advocate. 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 too... 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... There was that thing that bounced off. They fired at something. And it's in the Navy.

Military... I'm into it. Listen, I am into it. I think, first of all, the Pentagon now is, by law, has to get reports on this stuff. And if I were in charge of, you know, 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. Yeah. That's, to me, that's news. We've had that in Congress. We should be talking about it.

We are, 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 it's different. There's no scientific reason. 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 I don't want Keanu Reeves to come down and say, look, we gave you the

benefit of the doubt. You're just 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? When 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 are realized. And the comet thing. Yeah, and that's it. 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're not just talking about AI.

They're talking about superintelligence. 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? 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. And not coming in. People are along on AI, but they're short on America, so that's not 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. Right. 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 beat the comedians. Okay. 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, it 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 campaign. that was, you know, in prox? No president ever used to do that. Whatever. Three things happened bigger than that in the last 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 that's happened. Venezuela is not the drug country. I know this. It's not. No one. 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 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 it's been, it basically, it's so hard to trust

them anymore. That 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, 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... But 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 a country unravel. It's really hard to get it

back. All right. What do you make of the conservative uproar over Bad Bunny performing up 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 any 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. Yeah. 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. Right. Apparently, somebody named Kai Sinat, who gets, like... I thought it was Kai Snott. I heard that, too, and then I saw it written, and I was like, oh, that's better. I agree. He's enormous.

He's enormous. He's enormous. 13 million streams, like that, and down... That's, like, the new talk show. People just show up and... And they 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. We'll leave it at that. I'm a happy note. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. Catch all new episodes of Real Time with Bill Maher every Friday night at 10.

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