Culture
Overtime – Episode #709: Van Jones, Thomas Friedman
In this episode of Overtime, Bill Maher engages in a thought-provoking discussion with CNN political commentator Van Jones and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Thomas Friedman. They explore pressing issu...
Overtime – Episode #709: Van Jones, Thomas Friedman
Culture •
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Interactive Transcript
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Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO late night series Real Time with Bill Maugh.
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All right, here we are.
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On our time with the CNN political commentator and founder of Green Machine.org Van Jones
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and the author and three time Pulitzer Prize winning the quarter for the New York Times
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Tom Friedman.
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Okay.
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Here are the questions.
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From the people, first one, Van for you, would you have agreed to debate Charlie Kirk?
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I bet you know, the answer when I bet you the answer is yes.
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Because that's the guy to kind of guy you are.
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Yeah.
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Listen, Charlie Kirk and I were not friends and we were in a big, big public fight the
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week that he died and it turned out that the day before he died he sent me a personal
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message wanting me to come on a show and he said, let's be gentlemen, let's disagree
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agreeably.
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Let's disagree agreeably.
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I'm going to carry those words with me because he was a words not weapons guy.
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I disagree with his words.
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He was a words not weapons guy and we're getting away from that now and I was very frustrated
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people in my party throwing rocks at the corpse before he could even be buried.
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A blood still on the widow's shoes and people want to post every dumb thing he ever said.
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He was 31 year old kid.
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Right.
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If you got me at 31 years old I was on a left side of Pluto.
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There is no telling.
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What?
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You have had me say it.
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So let's give some grace and some space.
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Even if you are in it.
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What an opportunity.
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Okay.
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Speaking of Pluto, should the government be more transparent about the existence of UAPs?
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UAP is UFO.
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Yes.
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Right?
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That's I don't know why they think that's going to come on nerves by changing too late to
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UFO.
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And I mean what I've been reading lately is that there's one heading toward the earth.
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There's something that's 13 miles long.
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It doesn't apparently look like any other comet because the light is coming from the top
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from the front and not behind.
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And it's apparently making a trip through the solar system that is uncommon for for
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comet.
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It looks like it's doing a drive-by of all the planets.
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I don't know.
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But I just think and there was that thing that bounced off that they fired at something
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and it's in the Navy.
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Military.
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I'm not sure.
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I'm the other thing.
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I am into it.
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I think, first of all, the Pentagon now is by law has to give reports on this stuff.
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And if I were in charge of, you know, I would do wall-to-wall coverage of these generals
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that have to sit there and say, there's weird stuff we don't know what is.
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Yeah.
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That's new.
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We've had that in.
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We should be talking about it.
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We are.
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I mean, I just think people, there are certain people who just think this goes in the file
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with the knots who think we didn't land on the moon and every other conspiracy theory.
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And it's different.
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I think there's no scientific reason Carl Sagan said it.
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There's no scientific reason why we would necessarily be alone in the universe.
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We might be.
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But increasingly, it looks like we're at very least under surveillance.
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Let's hope that they're just observing and not readying us.
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You know, for it, I don't want Keanu Reeves to come down and say, look, we gave you the benefit
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of the government.
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You're just way too destructive.
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I mean, that could be what's coming.
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Should we be talking about climate change more as a national security issue?
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What do you think that's for you?
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Yeah.
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I mean, obviously, you know, just because Trump isn't talking about it, which really
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going on, Bill, it seems to me as two things are happening faster than people think.
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One is climate change and the other is AI.
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I think both are coming as much faster than people realize.
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And the comment thing.
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Yeah, and that's it.
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And so we're really get, if you listen to climate scientists, they don't just talk about
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extreme weather now.
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It's really super-extremes.
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If you listen to the AI people, they don't just talk about AI, they're talking about super-intelligence.
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And I think the next two years, we're going to see more instability driven by both than
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at any previous time.
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And Donald Trump is president, what could go wrong?
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Well, I don't know.
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I don't know who could be president, who could do anything about the fact that AI is just
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taking jobs.
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It just can do, at first it could just do the menial jobs.
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You know, when I was a kid, there were no robots and car plans and then you look at the
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floor of a car assembly line, it looks like it's all rope.
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Now it's the white collar jobs too.
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No wonder that I think I read something like 92% in the first half of the year of all
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the investment of what was in AI.
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Yeah, I mean, part of the thing is, the two things are happening.
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One is there's a massive disinvestment in the United States.
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But you can't tell because there's so much investment in AI.
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It looks like the stock market's doing well.
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It's not.
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There's a big sucking sound of capital leaving the United States.
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People are not coming in.
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And not coming in.
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People are along AI, they're short on America.
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So that's not that very good.
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The other thing that's going on is all the good kids, the ones that we told, stay in school,
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stay out of trouble, go to college, learn how to code.
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They're graduating off of a cliff into massive unemployment.
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Right.
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Now, that is very bad for any country.
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When your best educated kids get thrown out onto the street with nothing to do, they don't
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tend to take that well.
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And so you're talking about sources of invincibility that I don't think we're taking very seriously.
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The young people who did what we told them to do can't get jobs and that's very scary.
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I'm telling you, a comedian.
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I'm not the last.
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I'm the last one.
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I'm the last one that AI came to.
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We all have to beat the comedians.
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OK.
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Are we in a legitimate war with drug cartels or as Trump just trying to justify the attacks
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on Venezuela and both?
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Well, yeah, I mean, there's so many scandals and news stories and breaking of Normandy
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every week.
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We didn't even get to this week.
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I mean, last week, it seemed like a thousand years ago and it was just the giant story that
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he would want after he'd call me.
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That was, oh my God.
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A president spoke out about a case that was, you know, in prox, no president ever used
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to do that.
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But what happened?
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Three things happened bigger than that in the last five days.
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And one of them might be this.
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We seem to be in a war with Venezuela.
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He insists, I've said the first week that's happened, that Venezuela is not the drug country.
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I know this.
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No, no one.
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No one ever said, let's get some Venezuelan marching powder.
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That's not where it comes from.
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It comes from Colombia and it comes from Peru and Mexico for the Fentional.
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I've never heard Venezuela in that.
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But somehow we got into his head that that's where the drugs are coming.
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So we're attacking this shipping and shipping.
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I mean, the size of the boat is not really.
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But just a question you have to ask, because they do so much crazy stuff that is dishonest.
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This may be true.
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I have no idea.
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But it's basically, it's so hard to trust them anyway.
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That what's real, what's member acts?
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What's for this week's headline?
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What's to divert you from Epstein?
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I mean, you never know.
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Blow up a few ships, whatever.
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And they don't.
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It wouldn't be the first time America did that.
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Remember the main.
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Yeah, but it's also really remember the main.
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The point you made is that there are just so many things that we thought were laws that
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are just norms.
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Yeah.
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And Trump has really highlighted that.
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You know, that, geez, I thought there was a law against firing someone from the Fed, or
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I thought there was a law against all these things that he does almost every day.
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They were just norms.
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And when you bust through them, then it's really hard to get them back.
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Take it from someone who lived in Lebanon and watched a country unravel.
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It's really hard to get it back.
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All right.
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What do you make of the conservative uproar over bad bunny performing up the Super Bowl,
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given his criticism of ICE?
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Yeah, I mean, I'm not that familiar with Mr. Bunny's work.
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I'm more familiar with who is any rabbit doing the Super Bowl.
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But I assume there is at least some racial element to this antipathy, I don't know.
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Yeah, like, I mean, I like the Easter Bunny better, but yeah, listen, he is a massively popular
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figure.
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And the only thing that probably half the country knows about him is that he's brown and
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doesn't like ICE grabbing people.
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I don't think that should disqualify him from being able to be on air.
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But I mean, here's the thing.
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We do live in completely different countries now.
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Yeah.
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If you talk to people who are under a certain age, the people who they think are stars or
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people I've literally never heard of.
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Right.
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Apparently, somebody named Kai Sinat, who gets like, I thought it was Kai Sinat.
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I heard that too.
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And then I started ringing.
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I was like, that's better.
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I agree.
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He's enormous.
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He's enormous.
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Right.
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A few million streams.
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Right.
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Quite a lot of people were on the look.
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That's the like the new talk show.
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People just show up and do all kind of interesting stuff.
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But I think with this bad bunny thing, it just shows.
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I guarantee you half the people who are criticizing him have never heard of him.
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But now they are overnight experts on how terrible he is because they saw it on TikTok.
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Bill, I'm the worst person to ask because I've actually never looked at Twitter, never looked
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at Facebook, never looked at Instagram, never looked at TikTok and never smoked a cigarette.
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And my plan is to die saying all five.
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So we're going to leave it at that.
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I'm happy now.
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Thank you.
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I love you.
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Catch all new episodes of Real Time with Bill Marr every Friday night at 10.
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Or watch him anytime on HBO on demand.
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For more information, log on to HBO.com.