Penn Jillette joins Joe Rogan to debate war’s decline, citing Steven Pinker’s Better Angels while mocking cultural negativity fetishes. They clash on cultural appropriation—Penn defends empathy-driven exploration, Joe cites Rick Bayless and hoop earrings as flawed examples. Epstein’s jail suicide sparks conspiracy theories, with Penn nodding to intelligence ties but Rogan pushing skepticism over NASA’s moon landing claims. Education reform emerges: Penn slams college costs, advocating free online learning; Joe counters with the need for expert faculty. Both agree progress exists despite horrors, wrapping up with Jillette’s annual return promise and a jab at Twitter-driven topic policing. [Automatically generated summary]
Shane Against the Machine is the gentleman's name.
He's made me another sculpture, and he started making sculptures out of these World War II helmets with a lamp underneath it, and an actual real World War II bayonet as well.
And that's, you know, everything I will say is redundant to Pinker.
I mean that Better Angels of Our Nature is one of, I think, the most subversive books of our time.
You know, people are – there's such a – it's a fetish to suffer.
It's a fetish to say how bad things are.
People are getting really off on it.
And when you start saying, you know – After you say, one death by violence is too many, and we've got to clean up the environment, and da-da-da-da-da, you say all that stuff and it's all true, but you can also take a breath and say things are getting better.
No, I completely agree, and I think that we're coming very close to a time where technology allows us to understand what's true and what's not true.
We're not there yet, but I think we're really close to being able to have some sort of an ability to read minds, to decipher information, like, really clearly.
And she said, go on and show that atheists can be kind.
That'll be your only goal for the whole show.
Because they're going to jump on you for being an atheist, and they'll jump all over you for that, and just show that you're the one that gets mad the least.
Show the one that you're the nicest guy on there, and you're the hardcore atheist.
And I went, okay, that's a good goal.
But then you sit in the room, and I don't know how well you know the President of the United States of America.
And they want a little piece of you so you can't lean out of the camera.
So then you've got about two hours where you sit up straight and you can't move side to side and you can't put your hands at the table and you listen to someone speak for two hours that they're going to try to edit out to get three minutes where he sounds okay.
I mean, things obviously have changed, but he would talk about...
I was reading this blog on the internet that said I didn't sell my property for enough, and I bought it for $3 million, and I sold it for $4 million.
Isn't that a profit?
Isn't that a profit?
What do you think?
Isn't that a profit?
Yeah, that would be a million dollars profit.
Well, they said I sold it for too little.
Okay.
Who was this?
It was somebody on the internet!
Okay.
So, you know, he'd be arguing in front of us with perhaps a 18-year-old guy on the internet who thought that Donald Trump should have made more from a real estate deal.
And I thought, and I want to say this very clearly, I thought he was wonderful at his job.
If you had someone who was actually a business person on that show, it would be the worst show in the world because Bill Gates would make proper decisions and there'd be no surprises.
You want someone capricious and crazy with no filter.
So he makes arbitrary decisions that you try, you know, the human brain tries desperately to make those make sense, and that ends up being some kind of entertainment.
And so I actually, actually Donald Trump Jr. said to me, you know, of all the people we've had on the show, you seem like the only person who's ever liked my father.
And I said, you know, I have a fascination and a respect and an affection for people who are able to get out of their filters.
And I said, some people do that with pure genius, like Bob Dylan.
Some people do it with bravery, like Lenny Bruce.
Some people do it with drugs, you know, Neil Young, perhaps, Jimi Hendrix, perhaps.
And most people do it with a mixture of stuff.
But I said, Thelonious Monk said, the genius is the one who is most like himself.
And I said, with some sort of mental problems coupled with greed and a lack of compassion, your father has somehow found a way to throw off the filters.
And I will listen to Tiny Tim talk on tape for hours because I like that little bit of Asperger's and all that other stuff.
I'm not qualified to, but I'm saying that's possible.
You know, Hal Wilner has those hundreds of hours of him just ranting under his tape.
I think I don't like people on drugs that much, but boy, I do.
And I listen to Lenny Bruce talk forever, and Donald Trump had the dark side of that.
You know, it's almost like when I was hitchhiking around the country and, you know, homeless and shit, and you'd end up at a biker place and, you know, some clubhouse and some guys just holding court and ranting.
I've always been interested in the people who are out on the margins, you know?
And What Donald Jr. took as affection, I guess was a bit of affection, but it's also that if you have thrown off some filters, I'll listen to you talk.
And so that was that.
It was very, very strange.
And then I really did spend a lot of time kind of sticking up for Donald Trump saying, yeah, there's interesting stuff there.
And yeah, he's crazy and he's venal and he's empty.
You know, really weird stuff that you've never seen before.
You have never seen someone who has never laughed sincerely and never made a joke.
When I lost all that weight, I lost over 100 pounds, and I read a lot, and also, more importantly, four years and kept it off.
But when I was reading about taste, I read this book, and it's awful that I can't bring up the name, but a woman wrote this wonderful book about preferences in food.
And she was trying to set up a dichotomy.
Let's talk to those people who think there's a natural taste and desire in food and those that think it's all environment and memory and so on.
And you just can't find scientists on the other side.
All of our food preferences are habit, and there's nothing else.
But how does it make sense when you have two kids that have radically different tastes and they grow up in the same household and they have essentially very, very similar food experiences?
But when I became plant-based, vegan, for health reasons, and I wrote in my book, I wrote a lot of stuff about I am an unethical vegan.
I'm not doing this for any sort of lack of animal cruelty, nothing.
Strictly health.
That's why I'm doing the plants.
End of story.
And this has happened to a lot of friends of mine who changed that.
After whatever it takes, and people are guessing like three months, four months of no animal products, those little critters eating shit in your guts die that like the meat stuff.
And they're not giving that feedback loop.
And I just found a real emotional change where all of a sudden I went, I don't want to be part of the suffering.
It was really strange how that changed.
And it really felt to me, I so want to, you know, hardcore atheist, as you know, and I don't believe in a mind-body separation at all.
And yet, I seem to believe that when I was 350 pounds, that none of that affected my emotion.
And then I lost all this weight and found there were so many changes in me that seemed to be intellectual and emotional.
And actually, I had a lot of evidence we're physical.
And it really fucked me up on the mind-body separation.
And it was so amazing how, I mean, I completely believed that, and yet I wasn't living that.
I was like thinking that I was living this, you know, 2,000-year-old idea of little homunculus who's kind of living inside me, who's this pure pen, and then the body is just the vehicle it's driving around in.
I think knowing you as long as I've known you, you're an intense thinker, and your mind is something you – I mean, you cherish your thoughts, and you embrace them, and you're a very intelligent guy.
And I think you just probably rejected the idea that there was anything outside of the mind that had any influence on you.
And I think, I wish people taught that in school, the dangers of being involved in teams.
Because we get involved in teams in terms of like, you know, you're playing basketball or whatever, but teams in terms of like what I believe versus what you believe.
And I think we're experiencing that politically right now with the most polarizing time in my lifetime that I've ever been experiencing.
And I also know, that's why I said, you know, I try to go with the Velvet Underground and the Eagles because that's where I can really see where I'm wrong.
He books us to be on a cruise to do a show for his friends.
He's got like 200 friends, and he's bought this fucking cruise ship.
He's rented this fucking cruise ship.
Thrown off all the chefs and everything, bring on his own people, and they're going to go from Kobe to Shanghai, and he wants the entertainment to be Jay Leno, Penn& Teller, and Ringo Starr.
Okay, that's what it's going to be, on the China Sea, on a cruise boat, for like 200 people.
And he books it.
And as I said to my friend, Piff the Magic Dragon, I said, do you know how much it costs to shut down Penn& Teller in Vegas and fly us all to fucking Japan to be on a cruise ship to do a fucking Penn& Teller show and then come back?
Do you have any idea how much that costs?
And Piff said, no.
And I said, me neither.
But it must be a lot.
You've got to talk to my managers or something because that must have been a shit ton of money.
So he books this whole thing and then Paul Allen dies.
Right?
Dies.
So, you know, Glenn, who you met out there, the long-suffering Glenn, our manager, he calls up after a few days and says, really sorry for your loss, and we'll trade in the tickets and get you the money back, and we can probably rebook those weeks so it's not going to cost you anything.
It's so sorry.
No, no, no, we're still doing it.
And Glenn goes, we're The person that booked us is dead.
We're still doing this gig?
And they go, yeah, yeah.
We went, okay.
And I said to Glenn, you know, now that we can work for dead people, our career's going to take off.
You know, because that opens up the market, right?
Right.
So, it turns out that his friends, you know, Paul Allen's friends, were people like Joe Walsh and Billy Gibbons and all these food scientists and all these great people.
So, there I am in the middle of the China Sea with Joe Walsh on stage just at 3 in the morning playing piano for like 15 people.
And, you know, singing Desperado and those kinds of things and talking to Joe Walsh and stuff and going, now, why exactly was I on a different team from Joe Walsh?
Why exactly was I on the Lou Reed team instead of the Joe Walsh team?
And then when you start to realize that when the clash was hitting in the U.S., There were people sitting around a boardroom going, how do we get 20-year-old assholes to buy this shit?
It was all being done and laid out, and that's fine.
That's their job, and that's great, and God bless them, but I've got to be aware that they're doing that.
You know, the idea that stand-up comedy was going to go from what, to me, was the Smothers Brothers to Yeah.
way that made people laugh, but who cared?
And of course, then Andy Kaufman turns that entirely inside out.
But the idea that that form was created, you know, created here in the US when you went from being a, you know, Parky Carcass, you know, Albert Brooks'father doing the Greek dialect and even throw in Amos and Andy and all of those people that did joke-joke-joke joke, jokes and character stuff.
And then all of a sudden a guy coming out as himself.
And talking about his real life is just mind-blowing to me.
And so the idea that instead of doing parody, being able to get your laughs stating what you believe.
no way to learn when you get when you get pushed out of there but it's it's just uh uh that that whole idea that you've got to um this i mean my life is so heavily affected By drugs.
Even though I had this whole, you know, I'm not going to do any drugs.
And you know I was very close to Lou Reed, and I was a very good friend of mine, and Lou said, speaking on behalf of the people of Earth, which I often do, we don't want to see you high, motherfucker, don't do it.
Well, Joe, this is interesting because I wanted to talk to you about this because we had a conversation a long time ago about this and you said, and I'll remember this very clearly, I may paraphrase this, but you said, I think we've learned all there is to know and I don't need to do it.
And that's good if you're trying to win an argument, but sometimes it's bad to take in ideas.
And I remember when I had that conversation- Exactly right.
Thank you.
When I had that conversation with you, I remember saying, I'm going to revisit this someday.
And one day, I want to get Penn fucked up on mushrooms.
That's what I remember thinking.
Like, it might be a good thing for, well, the best thing for you would be something that doesn't take very long, just so you can, like, DMT is the best one because it takes like 15 minutes and it's over.
And then your body brings it back to baseline almost immediately.
So you literally travel to another dimension and then you're back and you don't have to worry about any overdosing because it's an endogenous chemical.
Your body knows exactly what to do with it.
It's one of the quickest chemicals that your body can break down and bring back to baseline.
I have a zillion answers to why I've never done drugs.
And none of them are, of course, true.
Because we don't have access to that stuff that we really do.
But my parents and my whole family and back generations, teetotalers.
So there was never alcohol in the house.
Ever.
I never saw my parents take a drink.
When it was on TV, it was a totally different thing.
It just didn't happen.
They never preached about it.
They never said, don't drink.
They never said, don't do drugs.
It just never was in the house.
And that statistically has a huge effect on people.
And then the first people I fell madly in love with, Lenny Bruce, Jimi Hendrix, had been, in my mind, killed by drugs.
And I kind of said, ooh, people that have this kind of personality, when they get into drugs, they sometimes have trouble.
And I think that maybe being 19 years old and trying to get into show business, that maybe being the sober one allowed the dumber guy to do a little better, you know?
As everybody else kind of got out of my way, as they were fucked up some of the time, I could get other stuff done.
Well, there are, I mean, I've never done coke, and one of the reasons why I never did coke, and I've talked about this many times, my friend growing up, his cousin used to sell it, and I watched his life fall apart.
They were just doing coke all the time and lost a lot of weight and looked like a vampire.
I don't and I think that's also you know one of the accusations against Trump that he's on some sort of speed, you know, which is why he's so inexhaustible, you know, and also why he has this inability to be affected by criticism in terms of like he doesn't is no reflection.
And that's something that is a symptom of people that are on speed.
And this is the Adderall generation that we're living in.
Goddamn, there's so many fucking people that are on Adderall.
I mean, it's so goddamn common.
You know, I was having this conversation the other day, and someone was telling me about this guy they know who's really brilliant, but he won't stop talking.
He's got ADHD, and he just can't stop, and he won't stop talking, and this and that.
I'm waiting.
I'm just waiting while this person's talking to me.
I go, he's on Adderall.
And they go, yeah, he is.
It's a medication.
I go, no, no, no, no.
It's fucking speed.
That guy's on speed, okay?
And you can call it a medication, because you can buy it at the pharmacy.
But that fucking guy's on speed all day long, every day.
And there is a giant number of people in this country that are medicated and that are on speed all the time.
There's a speed mindset, and it's a go, go, go, get everything done, more, bigger, faster, accumulate shit, I'm the fucking man, I'm the fucking man!
That's a speed mindset.
It's a dangerous mindset.
It's a real weird one.
And it's not one that laughs at itself.
It's not one that self-deprecates.
It's all me, me, me, me, me.
I'm the shit.
And that's what you get out of Trump.
I mean, there's a guy who's a journalist who wrote a story about how he knows the very Duane Reade pharmacy in Manhattan where Trump was getting diet pills way back in the day, where he was supposed to take it for like six weeks, he took it for years, and this guy is saying, "This is what you're dealing with." Like, many people have called him the Adderall president.
You know, we had a guy in here who wrote a book on Hunter Thompson.
And one of the things he was talking about was that he needs Adderall to write.
And I was going into it with him because one of the things, a dirty little secret about journalism, is a tremendous amount of journalists are on Adderall.
Maybe that was true for 2012. I think it probably was true for 2012. I think we live in a whole new world now.
I don't think it's anywhere near 4% or 5%, whatever the fuck the real number is.
I bet it's about 10. I bet it's 10% of people in this country are on Adderall, if I had to guess.
I bet it's around 30 million.
I bet it's around there.
I wouldn't be shocked.
I know a bunch of people that are on it.
A bunch.
And some people tell me they have to take it.
That's what my favorite one is.
I have to take it.
I don't take it.
What happens?
You die?
You disappear?
What happens if you don't take it?
It's fucking speed, man.
And a lot of the people that take it, they're not healthy otherwise.
They're not exercising.
They're not drinking a lot of water.
They're not meditating.
They're not eating healthy foods.
Why do you need that?
What happens if you get rid of all that other stuff?
Cut out the shitty food.
Cut out all the sugar.
Start drinking water.
No booze.
Let's get you exercising three times a week.
Let me see if you really need that Adderall shit.
How many vitamins do you take?
Do you take vitamins?
Do you eat healthy?
Are you drinking fruit juice and vegetable juice?
What kind of nutrients are you taking into your system, man?
You're wondering why you don't have any fucking energy.
So you're just pouring jet fuel into your tank and lighting the whole fucking thing on fire But, on the other hand, it's like things get done when you take speed.
You know, we were talking about Hitler the other day that...
But we were talking about how Hitler, there was a time where Hitler had come back from something, and he was supposed to meet Mussolini, and he was physically exhausted.
So his doctor injected him with a combination of steroids and liquid cocaine.
And he was just fucking filled with energy.
He's like, give me another one.
And the guy's like, no, I can't give you another one.
He's like, fucking give me another one.
And he gave him another one.
And then he went to Mussolini and ranted at Mussolini, just fucking talked at him for five hours.
And Mussolini just never got a word in edgewise.
And apparently Mussolini's plan was to talk to Hitler and go, hey, man, Italy wants to get the fuck out of this.
If I can't spend any more time than an hour, but I have a tape recorder that's voice-activated, and it's Velcro, and so I can stick it up inside the thing.
So if I have an idea, which I do sometimes, sometimes I have this temptation, fuck, I've got to get out of here.
I've got to write this down.
I can just say it, and the tape recorder will pick it up.
He had this sound-activated recorder that he got by the side of the bed and his guitar, and he went to sleep one night, woke up the next morning, there on the tape recorder, oh, there was some voice activation in the night.
But the solution to this team thing and the separation of America and getting more polarized, that's going to be solved by Joe and the tank at some point.
I think we're going to solve it ourselves through just time.
I think as we're getting back to Pinker, we were talking about Pinker earlier that he gets so much shit for saying that things are better now than ever.
It doesn't dismiss horrific acts that take place or terrible things that are going on.
If we don't blow everything to Kingdom Come, and if we don't destroy the environment, if those two things, the two enormous ifs, we're in very good shape.
The thing that blew my mind about Pinkert in that book, Better Angels, blew my mind, is that there's this line that's been obsessing me with a cracker in teen angst.
I don't know what the world may need, but I sure as hell know it starts with me, and that's a wisdom I've laughed at.
All this shit that I've laughed at that turns out to be true for me now, it just makes me smile and fills me with joy.
You know, early part of the 20th century, all these authors and artists and all these guys were saying, Hemingway and stuff, we're going to stop war by writing about war and writing about how bad it was, and we're going to give empathy for other people and we'll understand this.
and we're going to really, with our art, make an effort to make humanity better.
What a jack-off bullshit thing to do.
I mean, can you imagine something more that's just twiddling your dick than saying that, oh, I'm going to do art, I'm going to write, and it's going to change the world.
It's also what, I don't know if this is, this is not Pinker, this is Noah Harari, who talks about, when you're talking about cultural stuff, how far back you going?
There was a great, you know, Paul Simon got so much shit for Graceland, you know?
And David Byrne got so much shit for stuff.
And there's this wonderful thing in David Byrne's book, How Music Works, which is a fabulous book, where he doesn't ever address this Picking things from other cultures?
Ever.
But he talks very strongly about the African kinds of music and the influences they have from other places.
You know, because there is not a culture other than the whole world, especially not now.
You might be able to have made the argument 200 years ago.
I have no worry because I think that me loving Sun Ra, even though I'm not African American, and me loving Lenny Bruce, even though I'm not urban and identify as Jewish, I think that loving these kind of cultures should not be based on an accident of birth.
I think the real fear of cultural appropriations is that people will take on those things as their own.
Like, there's a gentleman, I'm trying to remember his name, he's a famous Mexican chef, but he's not Mexican.
But he cooks Mexican food.
He cooks it in Chicago.
Walt Bayless?
Is that his name?
Something Bayless?
Rick Bayless.
Rick Bayless.
This guy has an undeniable passion for Mexican cuisine.
I mean, he fucking loves it.
He has a couple different restaurants where he cooks Mexican food.
And he was getting protested.
And people were furious at him because they had just decided at one point, if this guy's had like, you know, a 30 fucking year career of being in love with Mexican cuisine and being like a real historian of Mexican cuisine, where it comes from, the regions, the ingredients, like where's the best ingredients, where's the best places to cook these things, how they do it, why they did it this way.
And, I mean, speaks with incredible passion about this.
They were deciding that he's a white guy.
And he shouldn't be able to do this.
shouldn't be able to sell this, shouldn't be able to...
Like, you fucking assholes...
Like, this is the guy.
He's helping everyone recognize the beauty of this much maligned food.
When people think about Mexican cuisine, he is one of the rare people in Western culture that talks about it like it's five-star cuisine.
So many people talk about oh, I love street tacos and fucking I'm a big fan of quesadillas No, this guy's talking about the very best Mexican cuisine in the world and trying to interpret that and sell it to people And trying to turn people on to how good this food is and yet he was taking so much shit when a person that wasn't born in that the accident of birth to be there falls in love with another culture I I don't see why that isn't more beautiful.
I'm going to completely change the subject, if I may.
I want to talk about when you came on my radio show with Phil Plait about the moon landing.
What I think is fascinating about this, about clubs and stuff, is I know, I've read here and there that you've gone back on a lot of that and your conspiracy stuff.
I don't know anything about whether or not it's possible to put people on the moon.
I do know fuckery, and I do know teams, and I do understand when people are bullshitting people.
And I think there's a lot of that.
With a lot of the NASA stuff, a lot of the older stuff in particular.
There was a lot of manipulation of images and putting things online that may not have actually really happened because it was press releases.
There's an image of Michael Collins from like Gemini 15 that's a very clear image of him doing a simulation like in a studio with straps and harnesses.
And then someone from NASA or someone put that exact same image, blacked out the background, and used it as a photo of a spacewalk.
It's not real, you know, but they sold it as real.
There was some overzealous shit like that, that if you're conspiratorially minded, you might say, ah.
So Joe Rogan believes this crazy shit we didn't go to the moon.
I know Joe Rogan.
We're on a radio show together.
He's a good guy.
We did Fear Factor, but he believes this shit.
Let's have him talk to someone who's real.
So I call Phil Platt, who I don't know that well, right?
But he's the bad astronomer and he knows this shit.
And I say, I really want you to come on my radio show and just talk to Joe Rogan about moon landing.
And Phil says, no problem.
We'll just go on there.
We'll set them straight.
And I go, I just want to warn you, have your ducks in a row because Joe's really good.
And he goes, well, Joe's a comic, right?
Yeah.
And that's your problem because Joe's better at talking than you.
Joe knows when the commercials are coming.
Joe knows how to make a joke and Joe knows also how to set you up and take you down.
Oh, no, no, no.
It'll be no problem.
I said, you understand that he's smart.
He's a comic, right?
Yeah.
Not an astrophysicist, but you understand that he's smart and he's also, you are going into his form.
We're going to be on radio.
This guy has done a lot of radio.
This guy's talked to a lot of people.
So just have all your facts in line.
And then we're sitting there, because, you know, you were on the phone, and Godot, who's on my podcast with me too, sitting across from me, and we're listening.
And you come in, and you come in humble, and charming, and sexy, and with perfect timing on everything.
And Phil Places, I go, oh man, Joe is wrong, and Joe is gonna fucking win!
My whole thing of doing this, the way I billboarded it was, I'm just going to have two guys talk from two points of view.
I'm not supposed to commit that.
I don't know if you remember, but the whole show ends, and I go, oh, by the way, we did land on the moon.
And just try to do this final authority thing.
And Phil said afterwards, I said, yes!
And it's just that idea that you can't, you know, his idea was there's the science team that's right, and then there's this goofy comic.
And trying to get Phil Plait to understand that a goofy comic was not a goofy comic, and I believe that the only thing that the SATs truly test is how good you will be as a comedian.
That kind of verbal, it was a wonderful thing to listen to.
It was wonderful to listen to someone who I believe absolutely was 100% wrong, who was just so skilled and so moral and so thoughtful and so humble.
You had everything going for you that I respect, except you didn't happen to be right.
And I'm also, the idea, there's a thing that's changed.
There was an article in the Times about this, and you might have even been mentioned in it.
There's a playful space of conspiracy theories.
It's taken me a long time to understand.
My daughter is 14. And she talks about, you know, her father did a show called Bullshit.
And she talks about how she loves conspiracy theories.
And this is from Paul McCartney's Dead, to We Didn't Land on the Moon, to all those things.
But she sees it, which is so hard for me to understand.
She sees it as not impacting reality.
But it's a playful intellectual exercise.
I don't know what's going on, but there's this wonderful article in the Times, and you were mentioned there too, but there's also another guy who does it, who will do this, to use a cliche, I can't think of a better one, going down the rabbit hole of conspiracy stuff, playing around.
With the logic that almost feels like a mathematical thing or a pure philosophical thing or angels dancing on the head of a pin thing.
And there's a quality that you have learned that my daughter has learned indirectly, I think, from you through other people doing this of there is a playful space We discuss how we share our reality that is happening in the conspiracy theory art form.
And the conspiracy theory art form is now seeming to me to be more like rap or rock and roll.
or it's just a form a thing where you play around with this kind of thing and I am so literal minded I'm so verbal-minded.
You know, Bob Dylan's easy for me.
The stones are hard.
You know, zap is easy, 20th century classical is easy, but just funk is hard for me.
And it's the same kind of thing here.
It's really easy for me to say we are doing the old-fashioned scientific inquiry, and this is the way falsifiable.
But there is something happening in our thinking that's really interesting that I had to have my daughter explain to me and the New York Times after I already knew you and watched you do it.
And there's an area where conspiracy theories are exercising the muscles of logic, exercising the muscles of skepticism, Playing around with the haiku of if, then, if, then.
playing around with what we feel about the government and other people and stuff like that.
And you're playing around with all of that in kind of a semi-safe zone.
And even watching you just do it here, where you bang out that stuff and say, this is the stuff I question, what's coming out of that poetically, and let's not even talk about whether we went to the moon or not.
What's coming out of your style of inquiry on that kind of thing, your style of skepticism, is just fascinating and beautiful.
And I see the conspiracy thing as not so much a breaking down, which I used to see it as, a breaking down of science and reason, but I see it as rather a creation of a new form of poetry.
And I'll tell you the exact moment that happened to me that was so great.
It was in the 80s.
We were on Broadway.
And the Coen brothers were just starting to do movies.
And I was really interested in them.
And I had like an hour free, which when I was doing Stern and Letterman and Saturday Night Live and on Broadway, I never had an hour free.
And there was a magazine, like Vanity Fair or something, who cares the fuck what it was, and it said what the Coen brothers are really like.
What it's like to work with the Coen brothers.
And I said, I never read magazines.
I'm going to buy this.
I'll learn a little bit about the Coen brothers.
I'm up to our office, you know, it's like the Brill Building, you know.
Lorne Michaels, sit in my office, open it up, what the Coen brothers like, turn to that page and said, if you want to know what the Coen brothers are like, it's like hanging out with Penn and Teller.
I closed the magazine, put it aside, and they were going on comparing it, and I went, I have no information on this.
None.
There's no way I can access it.
And in that moment I went, oh wait a minute, when it says Penn Jillette in an article or in a book, There's no way I can understand that.
Maybe others can.
So when it says in the article, when Joe Rogan does conspiracy stuff, you can't understand that.
It's like Mike Nesmith said to me, the major problem with talking to Jimi Hendrix was he never heard Jimi Hendrix.
He never saw Jimi Hendrix on stage.
He couldn't.
So you are the one person That using Joe Rogan as an example, you know, well, you know, kind of a broletariat, kind of a, he does this bro culture, this is Joe.
You can't understand that.
You have no idea what that means because you're an individual.
Part of your job, one of the things you've created is you've created something in the culture that means the New York Times can say Joe Rogan and their people reading that know what that means.
But there's no way Joe Rogan can know what that means.
Well, there's many people that feel like he was an agent and that he was trying to compromise people.
And that's one of the things about this whole Lolita Island thing is that they would compromise people.
They would compromise people by having a bunch of young girls who are very sexy, who were hired to go and flirt and maybe even have sex with people, and that these people were young.
These girls were like 17, underage, perhaps underage some places, perhaps not underage other places, but incredibly embarrassing for the people.
I've talked to people many times that work for intelligence agencies, and there's a lot of weird shit that they do.
And one of the things that they do to compromise people is they get them involved in weird stuff that could be very bad for them.
If it comes out, and then they have influence over this person, and if you got a guy with a voracious sexual appetite, I mean, there's a few of those fellas out there, and you know, hey man, I'm out of office now, I'm just fucking hanging out, having a good time with Jeffrey, and we're just flying around.
I mean, come on, man.
It's highly likely.
One of the guys that I know that knew him was also a freak.
Like a sexual freak.
And I'm like, okay.
I think I see a pattern here.
It's very likely that that's what was going on.
This guy was compromising people.
And probably absolutely a sex addict himself.
And I believe all the women that say all the horrible things that he did to them and hired them for things and had underage girls do sexual things with him.
It's probably true.
It's probably true.
He's probably a fucked up, twisted dude.
But many people that are involved, even in good things, get compromised.
Like, there's many people that work for the CIA that were legitimate CIA operatives who wound up selling drugs.
A lot of this happens.
People go sideways.
People get involved in shady activity that are cops.
There's cops that wind up doing illegal things.
They signed on to be a cop, to be a person who's going to serve and protect, and be involved in the community, and slowly but surely they get compromised, and they get involved in illegal activity, and the next thing you know, they're corrupt.
Well, I was going to say that he absolved all the student loans for disabled veterans.
Fantastic.
I love it.
You don't hear a word about it.
A word of praise.
Look, we should absolve student loans for fucking everyone.
We're crippling kids.
We're crippling the 17, 18-year-old kids who sign up for these fucking loans and they get compromised to the point where we have people to this day right now that are getting their social security money Their social security money is getting docked because they owe student loans.
It's definitely not 17. It's definitely not 18. So you're taking on these fucking loans.
You can't be trusted with money or your future or thinking about what the fuck you're doing in terms of taking on a debt of hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Here's the problem with the student loan thing in terms of, it's the only loans that you never get exonerated from.
You can get bankruptcy, right?
And you can get exonerated.
You can escape the loans of credit cards, the debt of mortgages.
You can escape a bad business collapsing and owing millions and whatever.
You can escape that through bankruptcy.
You cannot do that with student loans.
It's a corrupt system.
You take a child who's trying to learn a trade or trying to learn a profession and you acquire insane debt that's gonna track you and cripple you for the rest of your life and no matter what happens to you, you owe that money.
But don't you think that, I mean, when you read the paper, there's always one whole thing about colleges getting too expensive and people can't go to VD.
And then you turn 20 pages later in the paper, and there's an article about how online learning is happening and how all this stuff is going to happen.
Do you think that that idea of college is going to hold up for another 10 years?
I think there's an experience that people have where they go away.
I mean, did you go to college?
I did, but I went to college in my town.
I went to UMass Boston.
And I really only went because I didn't want to be a loser.
That was really all it was.
I was doing martial arts and fighting and traveling all over the world, or all over the country, rather.
And thinking about doing stand-up at the time as well and then transitioning to doing stand-up while I was also still taking classes, I was learning nothing.
It was a complete waste of time.
I was only doing it so I could say, yeah, taking classes at UMass Boston, barely paying attention, barely showing up.
And it was just a thing that I didn't want to tell people that I wasn't going to college.
That was the number one reason why I did it.
But I had a unique life.
From the time I was graduating from high school to the time I started doing stand-up, I was obsessed with martial arts and competing.
And that's all I wanted to do was make the Olympic team for Taekwondo.
That was my goal, and that's what I was trying to do.
So I wasn't a normal person.
I wasn't going to go to Ohio and fucking travel over there and take a full course load and not be able to pursue what I wanted.
unidentified
What I wanted to do was- And also you've got a window, I think- Athletically, yeah.
There was a dude- I think his name is Clay Barber.
He's this really talented guy who was a fighter who was on the U.S. team at one point in time, I think.
And he was competing through the Army.
They had subsidized his training somehow or another.
And I was thinking, maybe I should join the Army.
Like that was the other, the only other thing that I was thinking about doing.
But, um, for people, I think there's a thing about getting away from your parents, getting away from them, getting away from their influence, being wild and crazy and be with a bunch of other kids and trying to find yourself.
And I think that comes from traveling to a place and going to college.
And I think there's some benefit in that.
I have friends that have had great benefit in that sort of transformative experience of being on a campus, a physical campus in a place that's outside of their hometown, where it gives them this new experience where they get to try to reinvent themselves.
High school is this torturous affair where you're being a square peg.
They're trying to shove into a round hole.
Then you get out, and then they fly off to wherever the fuck you're going to go to school.
And you go there, and you're forced with this overbearing workload of school and then social things.
You're trying to figure out what's okay and what's not okay now.
Where's the safe space?
Am I allowed to say this?
Am I allowed to say that?
And what are the new rules now for this new generation?
Are we really going to change the world?
And then all of a sudden you're out in the world and you realize that fucking money that you spent or that loan that you got is not getting you a job and you're fucked.
And you can't get a job and you're also massively in debt and severely depressed and trying to figure out your future.
At And Frank Zappa, one of his records, I forget what it is, I think it's Freak Out, but it might be absolutely free, says on the back, do not listen to this song until you've read Franz Kafka and the Penal Comedy.
I got the record, opened it up, it said that.
I listened to one side, got to that song, got on my bike, rode down to the Greenfield Public Library.
Kafka, I got this written down, Kafka, in the penal colony.
Sat there, read it, went back, listened to the record.
My entire education starts with Mike Nesmith of the Monkees, who said, listen to Zappa, listen to Hendrix, from Zappa to Lenny Bruce, from Lenny Bruce to the whole world.
And I believe that that is available to everybody all the time.
I mean, I don't know, as I would say, taxpayers should pay for college.
Why isn't it possible for you, For a few bucks to go and be in a room with a brilliant person I think that would be a thing that would be beneficial to almost anybody at any point in time instead of the rigid structure of like You know this is you know you have to get all this work done by X amount of time That's the other thing that happens to kids too.
They're they're taught about Having no sleep and about beating your body up and about cramming and about getting all this work done in a short period of time They're really we're really preparing them for a horrible job and all this shit that doesn't work and You know, all that weird kind of hazing shit that we do for medical professionals.
And you just made the argument about the frontal cortex and you're not really ready until you're 25. One of the huge advantages I had in my life was a shitty, shitty education.
Horrible education.
You know, I went to a bad, bad, bad public school that had an influx of hippies from UMass that came in and experimented on us.
So we had no education whatsoever.
I graduated from high school on a plea bargain.
I had very good SATs, so I had scholarships to wherever I wanted to go, but I chose not to because I misunderstood Bob Dylan.
I didn't know he was lying, so I went and hopped trains and hitchhiked around and lived homeless for a couple years.
And I never read Moby Dick until I was 45.
If I'd read Moby Dick when I was supposed to at college age, I wouldn't have gotten it.
But I was able to get it at the right age.
And now it's my favorite book because I was ready for it.
There's so many things that are on the curriculum that are very, very important.
And you can also, they're doing this weird connecting thing where, I've not experimented with this, but I'd love to, where people take courses online and then find people who are also taking courses online in their communities and then meet at like a fucking Starbucks to discuss what happened before in the class.
which is mind-blowing that that can happen.
So you can take one of my huge...
I mean, one of the things I wanted to do was I wanted to learn to play jazz.
I wanted to learn to play upright bass.
I took that up at 45, and I learned to play upright bebop bass passively.
A huge accomplishment.
And now I really want to learn a language, you know?
So I was looking a little bit because I figured maybe there's a government watch list I'm not on, so I should learn Arabic.
That's going to give me everything if I just learn Arabic?
So I started looking into how I can learn Arabic.
And it's amazing the kind of network that's developing all over the world to be able to learn anything.
So my argument with you on the Bernie thing of paying for everybody's college is I think we can get college so fucking cheap you can go to college your whole life.
And I think that locally, this was always a problem that I never figured out.
You know, when I was in Greenfield, Massachusetts, town of 20,000, I would say to all the other, by other high school students, I would say, you know, if we didn't give our money to the Rolling Stones and the Beatles and Dylan and all these other bands...
We could pool our money together and have a really good local band.
We could have a great band right here in town.
And I think that if you thought of education that way, can't we get in our little area really great teachers who can teach this stuff?
Getting out and getting that certificate and getting your diploma, holy shit, I graduated from fucking university, I'm a man now, I'm a grown up, I have a degree, I'm a woman now, I have a degree, I'm an adult.