Bono reveals how U2’s rebellious punk roots and spontaneous performances—like the Super Bowl post-9/11—fueled their art, blending vulnerability with swagger. He credits Warren Buffett’s bipartisan PEPFAR strategy for saving 26 million lives but condemns USAID cuts causing 300,000 deaths and rotting food. Comparing politics to EDM chaos, they praise music’s power to unite, like U2’s shared songwriting (526 fragments from Edge) or Paul McCartney’s chocolate-bonded collaboration. Bono ties "the way" of humility and service—inspired by Springsteen and Musashi—to overcoming America’s tribalism, where AI-driven conflicts replace collective progress. Evil, they agree, is subtle but faith and art offer tools to confront it, from Gaza to Houston’s hunger crisis. [Automatically generated summary]
It's like a documentation of your career, but in this very unique way with talking about things and explaining these moments, and then the music plays, and it's all black and white.
So I thought it was dull, self-indulgent, here you are.
I mean, all these things are a version of...
No.
I was calling it a memoir.
Me book, what I wrote myself.
It's the memoir.
And look, there's something narcissistic.
But it's your material.
That's what you get.
It's not just your body, your psychology is the canvas.
And, you know, I grew up, John Lennon, you know, the Beatles were everything for me.
And, you know, John Lennon made a sort of performance art out of his wedding to Yoko and he did a bed-in for peace and he was ready to look ridiculous for peace.
And, you know, I do ridiculous quite well, I'm told.
But the thing that being in U2, which has given me everything, took away, if it took away anything, was, you know, people don't come along to our shows for a belly laugh.
If someone sees your act too many times, like if someone's traveling with you, like if my wife went to see my shows all the time, There's parts of it she'd be like, oh, don't do that.
Oh, don't do this.
You get too close to it.
She's too close to you.
But to see it with fresh eyes, to see it in front of that audience, the joy that they have when the music starts playing, when some of the songs that they love, it's amazing.
You can feel it in the show.
It's like the pure joy.
The people that came to see it were hardcore fans.
Well, what happened was Andrew Dominick, Australian director, and he did some of the shots without any audience.
Just he cleared them out on a day off.
And then some of them came in which were hardcore fans, as you say.
And that was, in a way, that was the most terrifying.
Because I, as a performer, I was a performer.
I'm drawn to spontaneous acts.
That's what, when we started out as a band, I was attracted to performers who I thought might leave the stage and follow me home, mug me, or, you know, tell my friends Wild people.
Well, just, yeah.
I mean, and I'm still a track.
Iggy Pop, when I was growing up, was the, you know, Patti Smith.
Patti Smith used to enter the stage elbowing her way through the crowd myself and Larry Mullen drummer and you two we left stage one night when we were And we felt a liberation.
Breaking the fourth wall has been everything for our bands.
trying to smash it by surfing it, you know, by jumping into the crowd.
I had the...
The non-violent white flag.
The same flag that I'm still on about, the flag of surrender, right, in that show.
But back then I'm 23 or whatever and I'm going into the crowd and I see people who are, you know...
The next thing, I'm throwing a punch.
Somebody in our own audience.
That's how much non-violence meant to me.
You know, but I'm attracted to feral performers, I suppose, is a word for it.
It's just, you're in it and you're not fully in control of it.
Because we did a duet together on his first duet album, I've Got You Under My Skin.
Although we had a management received...
I hope this is not...
I'm not being...
It was a fax back then from Nippon EMI saying, we hear that Bono has done a duet with a Mr. Frank Sonalta called I've Got You Under My Chicken.
And that's just the great surrealist anthem of all time.
But yeah, for me, that was an unusual relationship.
and I if I ask myself why I would go after these great singers that perhaps people of my own generation had moved on from but I hadn't there was a part of me that wanted the blessing of an
I didn't really, by now, the bit of age, I realized I didn't have the sense to go after the same with women, but I was looking for my father in them, you know, whether it was Willie Nelson, you know, whether, you know, Bob Dylan, Frank Sinatra, Pavarov, all these people.
I mean, I...
I would...
I kind of...
And the band would be like, yeah.
And I'm going, yeah.
And there's so much for me to learn from these people, so much for all of us to learn.
These are extraordinary for a reason.
Sinatra had, you know, an incredible sense of humor and great timing.
What I learned from him was he...
So he would learn it as an actor would learn a part.
Then he would, on the piano, he'd kind of roughly, with his pianist, he'd figure out where to be in the bar and all of that.
And then when he went into the orchestra to meet them, you know, Nelson Riddle or whatever, you actually hear him.
You hear Frank Sinatra hearing the song in its full arrangement for the first time as he's singing it.
And that's fresh paint.
It's like any painter will tell you.
It's like Francis Bacon.
It's just that first stroke or first touch football.
The great players where the ball lands at their feet.
They don't stop it and pass it.
they pass it as they stop it it's really a very high level of artistry and he had that, I learnt that from him, I learnt lots of other things, I also tried to drink with him on a few occasions, which did not work out well, a
And he was constantly trying to make relationships that would cross the divide and make sort of opera popular.
And so, to the point where, yeah, he did, he used to call our house and say, you know, at first it was with me, but then when he would haunt our housekeeper, Teresa, and say, like, is God at home?
We'll tell God he is late on the song or, you know, he'd do this kind of carry on.
And I, again, these figures in my life, I knew that I was in...
I knew this.
But the band, they didn't have the relationship with opera.
Well, actually, Edge's dad was into opera.
But my dad, I was using Luciano Pavarotti to get to my dad.
That was the real thing.
So, as you see in the film, I play my father just by turning my head.
And I become him.
And I was trying to impress him.
I'd be in Finnegan's pub where we'd be sitting, not speaking to each other.
And I'd try something and I'd go, what do you think about Luciano Pavarotti calling the house?
It's the weakest inclination of the human spirit, you know, to pick on the weak.
It's terrible.
It's a terrible instinct that humans have probably from the time where you had to ostracize weak people because you lived in a tribe of people barely surviving and you couldn't tolerate any weak links in the chain.
I mean, that's essentially probably where it came from.
And I, you know, as an activist, which we can talk about later, You know, I remember going to, it's only a few hours from here, but I was in Lincoln, Nebraska, and Warren Buffett came to one of our, it's called Heart of America Tour.
We were raising awareness on this pandemic, this AIDS pandemic that was killed, just, you know.
30 million people at this point.
And why might America be interested?
And I'm very Irish and given a lot of that.
And afterwards, I asked the sage of Omaha for any advice.
And he gives me two pieces of advice.
Well, the one was, don't ask people to do something simple because they won't trust you.
He said, ask them to do something complicated.
What do you mean by that?
He said, what are you asking people to do here?
And I said, well, I'm asking them to, we're asking them, the one campaign, we're asking them to send a note to their local congressperson.
And they'll, I mean, Omaha Beach, the heroism of Omaha Beach, the lives poured out, you know, and to save Europe from tyranny.
And that's who America is.
And, you know, I gave it the Joshua Tree because I, you know, it's not just as an Irishman but probably more because I, as an Irishman, fell under the spell of America.
Even as kids, you know, coming here, We'd just play the coasts, you know, the cooler UK bands or European bands.
I wanted to be all over America.
I mean, we played, we opened for a wet t-shirt competition in Dallas.
But the mythology of America, I was reading, you know, Sam Shepard.
I was reading, you know, On the Road.
I was reading, you know, all these great writers and just opening up my imagination.
That's where the Joshua Tree came from.
And, yeah, it's a mythology that then, can you imagine, I get to discover that in my case, it's not just a mythology.
I was part of something that was extraordinary.
So former governor of this, Texas.
George W. Bush, conservative, starts to lead the world in the fight against the AIDS pandemic, the greatest health crisis in 600 years since the bubonic plague.
And I'm like, people say, that's impossible.
It's just not going to happen.
And he does.
And it becomes a bipartisan thing, and 26 million lives are saved.
So it's strange, the way you see things.
I had this, it wasn't a naive sense of America, but it was a sense that everything could be possible here.
Somehow the landscape of America was a little more magical than everywhere else.
And it wasn't just a country America, it was an idea.
The line in that, when I'm singing it, is a line that doesn't just apply to America, but applies to us personally.
Wherever you are, is, you know, we need new dreams tonight.
And we can't be living on secondhand dreams.
And that's, I think, the renewal, I think, is what we're all looking for.
and yeah it's it's something to be protected and and I not protected that sounds like it's it's like I think you're right though it It feels like America's fallen out of love with the rest of the world.
I don't think the world wants to fall out of love with America.
It just feels like...
And, you know, I've had 25 years, and I'm just a tiny cog in, I suppose, you know, people look at...
But social movements always change things.
And what happened back then with that Heart of America tour was mind-blowing because I learned a few things that I wasn't expecting.
Like, I had grown up With a couple of, more than a few bumps with evangelicals.
You know, it's like, whoop!
Because, you know, you can't approach the subject of God without metaphor, right?
So literalism is by its nature anti-metaphor.
And Jesus, all we know is that he spoke in parables because it's...
How do you explain these?
It's poetry.
It's music.
And I found it really difficult to be around evangelicals because they were so, you know, just literal about everything.
And then on that same tour where I met Warren Buffett, I ended up at a college called Wheaton College, which is like a big, in Chicago, it's a big evangelical thing.
And they were like, they were really helpful.
And there was like, I realized that these were kind of, and this is not to be at all dismissive of some incredible people, but it was like, I felt there was sort of narrow-minded, sort of, what would I say, just sort of narrow, the vision, if I could just open the aperture of their vision, just a little bit wider, that they could be.
The most incredible force for good because they just worked harder.
They didn't tell lies.
They were just great people.
And I think they led part of this movement that ended up saving 26 million lives, you know, and it's called PEPFAR that George Bush started and Obama continued.
Then I'd go to Catholics.
I'd end up in Notre Dame.
I've had a few bruises with the Catholics over the years too.
And I'm meeting these people and they're like, no, no, we believe in the value of human life.
If we can do this, how much does this cost?
And I'm like, well, you know, all of foreign aid is probably just less than 1% of government spending.
But the part that keeps people alive is half of that.
So it's like half a percent.
Now, it's not my money.
It's up to you if you want to do that.
But they did.
And lots of people came together.
It was priests and punks.
It was the wildest collection of people.
And just recently, like in the last three months, And this is not about politics because I've worked with conservatives, I've worked with liberals.
I don't care, you know, I don't have those.
I'm Irish, I don't have a chance to vote.
But all of that was torn down without a heads up, without any notice, because people thought foreign aid was like 10% of the budget or 20% and it was doing things that it shouldn't have been doing.
And I'm sure there was some waste.
But I can tell you as a person who saw what the United States was doing around the world and saw this...
And I remember being in the Oval Office with President Bush and these antiretroviral drugs.
I said, paint them red, white, and blue, Mr. President.
These are the best advertisements for America they'll ever be.
Looking at me thinking I'm taking the piss, but I'm not.
And he wasn't, as it turns out.
And he spoke about the least of these, which is a wild concept.
I don't know if you know this, but it's like the...
It's in Matthew, I think it is.
It's the only time that It's not like what's going on in your pants.
It's not like what's going on over here or over there.
The first time Jesus Christ speaks in kind of force of judgment is the way we treat the poor, the poorest of the poor.
And he says, well, in the way that you're treating these, the least of them, the sick, the blind, the people.
Who are suffering from malnutrition.
That's how you treat me.
I am them.
And so now when we cut to the people like you went to Boston University and you taught at Boston University.
So just recent report it's not proven but the surveillance enough suggests 300,000 people have already died from just this Cut off, this hard cut of USAID.
Well, they're throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
This is the problem.
The problem is, for sure, there have been a lot of organizations that do tremendous good all throughout the world.
Also, for sure, it was a money laundering operation.
For sure, there was no oversight.
for sure billions of dollars are missing, in fact trillions, that are unaccounted for, that were sent off into various The way Elon Musk described it, he said if any of this was done by a public company, the company would be delisted and the executives would be in prison.
But in the United States, this is standard when Biden left office and And there's no oversight, no receipts.
The whole thing is, there's a lot of fraud, a lot of money laundering.
But also, we help the world.
And when you're talking about Making wells for people in the Congo to get fresh water when you're talking about food and medicine to places that don't have access.
Like, no way that should have been cut out.
And that should have been clear before they make these radical cuts.
Like, there's got to be a way to keep aid and not have fraud.
And you can't say we're going to kill everything so that there's no fraud.
But then you're killing all the good and you're doing it without letting anybody know it's going to happen.
So it's not like they had three years to prepare.
Let's build a new infrastructure.
Let's make sure that everything's set up.
They want to change and they want to change quickly.
And due to the nature of American politics, they have about two years before the midterms, right?
So everything has to get done as quickly as possible.
You have to show a growth in GDP.
You have to show that the economy is booming again under these ideas, make America first, tariffs for the world, bring back American manufacturing, and this mad rush to do it all as quickly as possible while cutting out as much waste as possible.
But the ironic thing is, even though Elon Musk has proposed all these things and the Doge Committee has proposed all these things, they've made no cuts in terms of the budget.
I mean, it felt like, with glee, these life support systems were being pulled out of the walls.
And I was reading today, you know, it's like, I think it's in Christianity Today, and they're just talking, I think it's called Christian Relief, one of these organizations.
And they're dealing with malnourished kids.
And they are having the conversation now about, we don't have the funds, we have to choose which child to pull off the IVs.
And it just seems to me like a kind of...
you know, the squandering of human life, particularly children.
The argument about free speech is that it seems to be sponsored by a lot of people who you sense don't really respect it so much, but it is very economic for them to not have to live with the consequences of a story.
Is it the communication?
It was 1996, this was a long time ago, Communications Act, Decency Act.
That meant the internet did not have to apply by the same rules as the rest of the media.
And at first that felt like liberation, but I'm not so sure anymore.
And so, I mean, you can tell me more about this.
I'm...
I'm...
But I'm nervous that the people who are supporting free speech and using their bots and their own activists are people from countries who would not at all respect our, you're, mine.
Ability to express ourselves.
And that's what I worry about is I think the old interweb is being played like a...
I worry, and this has been substantiated by data, that more than 50% of the interactions going on on the Internet and social media are not real.
There was a former FBI analyst that said it might be as much as 80%.
It's bots, as you said.
And this is a problem with the concept of free speech.
Completely wholly in favor of free speech, just like the ADL was back in the day when they let the Ku Klux Klan march.
The way to combat bad speech is with better speech.
The way to find out whose arguments are correct is to let them debate in the marketplace of free ideas and expose these people for what they are and have the people that are on the sidelines that are letting these great thinkers have these discussions say, okay, this guy makes sense.
This guy is clearly a grifter.
This guy has ulterior motives.
This guy has an ideology that's very toxic and he's trying to push this on the whole world for control, for power, for money, to benefit the special interest groups that he's a part of or whatever it is.
Free speech is you're also going to get a lot of ugliness because there's a lot of ugliness in the world.
You're going to get a lot of people that say horrible things.
And I think the only way we sort through all that is you have to let them.
And then you have to let people rise up that oppose those horrible ideas.
Gives up his membership in the KKK, renounces his membership and gives Daryl the ropes as I want you to have this.
Daryl has done that personally.
The last time I talked to him was a few years back.
He'd done this personally to over 200 people just by being an amazing human being, by being a brilliant artist and hanging out with them, just being kind and as an example of just a great human.
And they were like, I guess I'm wrong.
I guess I'm wrong.
This idea that black people are inferior and the white man is a superior race, that can't be true because I love this guy.
Yeah, there's a real problem with ideology and there's a real problem with fundamentalism and there's a cowardice in it.
And there's a cowardice in I'm the only one that's correct.
There's a cowardice in not listening to any other ideas, not listening to any other positions.
And we're being played against each other in this country.
The thing about the bots and the social media stuff is it just accentuates this divide between the left and the right, which I think is mostly bullshit.
Most people are good people.
Most people just want...
Most people aren't trying to victimize people.
Most people aren't trying to destroy other people's lives and destroy society.
They just want to live their life, but they're being sucked into one side or the other, which is radically opposed to each other.
I mean, the argument in the White House of, like, you don't have the right hand of cards, and just the fact that this is all being done publicly is very strange, right?
There's cameras and photographers.
I don't like...
That's what I think I think that's the ones that resonate with me the most Yeah, this is I just think it's the best way to do it the way that resonates the most I think the kind of conversation that you're gonna have the world leader shouldn't be performative and it certainly shouldn't be with a bunch of People snapping photographs and pointing cameras and then pushing each other back and forth.
You know, you don't have the right hand of cards.
This is not cards.
You are playing cards.
It's a crazy way, and each calling each other disrespectful.
Well, because if you can mock something, like you can have a position or an opinion on something and someone can disagree strongly.
But if they make everyone laugh at that position, now you're – Because it's actually an opinion that you might not have even agreed with has caused you to belly laugh.
Like, oh, God.
Like, that's how you really get it.
Because if you go on stage and just have a bunch of opinions and just lecture people, there's people in the audience that go, well, fuck you.
I feel differently.
But if you could go on stage with that opinion and make people laugh at something they know they shouldn't be laughing at, like, oh, my God.
And you're like, then you're introducing ideas into a person.
And also the contradictions of the world and how bizarre things are.
It's just ripe with humor.
And if you don't ever pick up on it...
Like, you don't ever see the hypocrisy and the ludicrousness of just this existence, this temporary existence on a spinning orb hurling through the universe and concentrating on who gets to use what bathroom?
Like, is this like, you know what I mean?
It's like, we're weird.
We're very weird.
And if you don't see that, you're not paying all attention.
That album, you know, a lot of the songs on that were, you know, very vulnerable, you know, and I don't know if you know, Brian, you know, produced it.
He invented ambient music and worked with David Bowie, Talking Heads, you know, and recently Coldplay and other people.
But he had a profound influence on us.
Because we didn't go to art college.
All, like, the Beatles, the Stones, they all went to art college.
We went to Brian Eno.
And he had this incredible musician in partnership with him for the production of that album called Daniel Lanois.
One of the greatest musicians you'll ever meet in your life.
And some songs come really quickly.
But some are just like what you're saying.
They're like the foal.
The legs are going around.
And the one that was like that was where the streets have no name.
And so we were working on it for what felt like weeks.
Brian came in and he just said, I am not having us to spend one more minute on this song.
And he went to wipe it.
So he was literally going to wipe it.
And so there's no other copies.
And Pat McCarthy, who was our engineer, went on to produce R.E.M.
and Madonna, great dude.
He physically blocked Brian from it.
And...
But that song, for me...
Because it's, Brian was just saying to us, just go with your first sketch.
Just, that's what you said, that's what you meant.
And it's the strangest thing, Joe, because we go on stage.
And I sing that song.
We sing that song.
We play that song.
And it's like, what the fuck?
We're the streets of Nolene?
What's that about?
I started it in Africa when I was with my wife when I was a kid.
And you were 25?
Something like that.
Maybe 26. She was 24. And it was about the devastation that was happening in the Ethiopian famine.
And I just couldn't explain it to myself.
There was other inferences about the song.
But none of them matter as much as this question to your audience, which is, do you want to go there to this place, a place of imagination, a place of soul, a place of that other place?
Do you want to go there?
Do you want to go there together?
And everybody feels it.
Because we all want to be outside of ourselves at a certain time.
And we all want to have that experience, that meeting with some call it the universe, some call it God, some call it themselves, whatever.
But it's music now.
I think all art aspires.
To the condition of music.
But I was saying, we go to church in the dark.
You know, that's what rock and roll is.
And we're just looking for little shards of light.
We find it in an audience.
We find our transcendence together.
With the movie.
We also go to church in the dark.
In cinema.
You're in a dark space and you're And somebody said cinema is like being born.
you know, when we were kids, the tunes weren't that great in the church.
And I said to my I agree.
But, you know, I was like, I said to our kids, you know, and they were all, none of them were baptized Protestant or Catholic because my father was Catholic, my mother was Catholic.
I just said, you want to be Christian, you want to be Christian, but you decide.
I never got religion rammed down my throat.
I'm certainly not going to put it down yours.
So we'd go, and sometimes you just get a feeling in a place.
I said, just trust that feeling.
And they might say, well, tunes aren't that good.
And I'm like, it's okay.
But I remember when I was really young, walking in and hearing the Salvation Army band and people singing, and I remember getting the shivers, just thinking, these are...
And I miss that.
And I think people would return to religion if religion wasn't so fucked up.
And I think people, you know, the church has to serve the people.
And not the other way around.
And, you know, the church presently, I don't know how many churches you'd have here in Austin, Texas, but I'd probably say if there's 276 different kinds of churches, you know, it's just one church.
What you're talking about, confinement for the talk show format, that's also what makes that moment so much greater.
It's the pop song.
Yes.
It doesn't belong there.
That format is for hollow platitudes and selling a new television show and getting in and out before the seven-minute commercial break.
It's the worst way to have a conversation where you're going to get the most out of people.
Because when you have time constraints on conversations, you immediately feel under the gun.
So you're kind of like tense and you're pressured and you don't know when.
And then the audience is staring at you and then there's bright lights.
Everything is wrong.
Everything is opposed to the way normal, comfortable human conversation and connection works.
It works with silence around you and just people talking or in a pub or wherever you're at, you know, in a living room with friends at a party.
Like, that's the real human connection where it's open-ended and you're just talking.
As soon as you, like, lock it down, and then, you know, you have to lock it down for commercials, and you have to button this up, and there's a new person coming in in five minutes, so they've got to shuffle you out the door and hold up your album and tell everybody to buy it, and then you leave, and like, was that good?
I guess it was good.
It's like, you know what I mean?
I never liked doing them.
I always felt confined, and I would never do stand-up on them.
I was always asked to do stand-up on them.
Like, that's not where stand-up belongs.
But if someone can pull it off, like there's been great comedians that pulled off incredible Tonight Show sets, like Richard Jenny and George Carlin.
Well, when I was a child, I was probably, I guess I was 15 or 16. My parents took me to see Live in the Sunset Strip in a theater.
And it was Richard Pryor.
He performed.
and he did a concert special in the theater, and I think it's his greatest performance.
And when I was in the theater, I was laughing so hard, and I remember very clearly looking around at all these people, and they were falling out of their chairs laughing.
People were just falling back, slapping each other, going, "Oh, my God!
Oh, my God!" Like, they couldn't breathe.
And I remember thinking, "This guy is doing this just talking." And I remember all the funny movies that I'd seen, like "Stripes," and all the great comedies, "Animal House," funny comedies.
You know, because everybody else had been like telling jokes or with prior, it was like these stories of life that was so like revealing and so vulnerable, but also hilarious.
Deeply fun, just like so accurate in the caricatures of people.
And then there was Kinison.
I was like, okay, this is comedy too?
And the first thing I ever saw of him, I was actually introduced to him by a girl that I worked with.
A girl that I worked with at a gym.
I worked at the Boston Athletic Club.
I was a trainer.
I was teaching people how to lift weights.
And there was a lady who was a volleyball player who I was friends with that worked there.
She worked the front desk.
And she was like, I saw HBO last night.
This comedian was so funny.
And in the parking lot of this gym that we worked out, she did Sam Kinison's bit of homosexual, Necrophiliacs paying a bunch of money to be with the freshest male corpses.
So the bit is the guy, he goes, imagine this, you're at the end of your life, you know, you're lying now, you're like, well, I guess I'm dead now, I'm going to be alone with Jesus, and that's going to be great, I'm going to be in heaven, and hey!
I still didn't think I was going to do stand-up until I saw Kinison.
When I first saw Kinison, that was when I was like...
Because I had friends telling me to do it.
But it was friends that I did martial arts with.
from the time I was 15 until I was like 21, 22 all I did was travel around the country competing and I was with this such a wild combination, if you don't mind me saying.
So when it's terrifying like that and everyone's nervous, that's when gallows humor comes in.
And I was the guy who – I always needed attention when I was young.
So I was getting my attention from being really good at fighting.
But then I was also getting my attention around also the people that were really good at fighting at being funny.
So when we were all like – A bunch of fucking crazy people.
Their hobby was to travel around the country trying to kick people unconscious.
So this is the group that I'm hanging out with.
And most of them were older than me.
I was the youngest because I was in high school at the time.
Most of these were grown men.
And I was competing against grown men while I was in high school.
Which is another crazy thing.
My instructor was hardcore.
and he threw me to the grown men when I was 16. It was terrifying, but because it was so terrifying, And so my way of releasing steam, I'd make fun of different guys that we trained with, having sex, like how he probably does it, and this and that.
I was just always trying to crack people up.
And I had one friend that I'm still really good friends with to this day, my friend Steve Graham, who talked me into doing stand-up.
I never thought, I'm like, you think I'm funny because you like me.
I go, but you're crazy too.
Like, you're a fucking psychopath as well.
Like, you think I'm funny because you're doing the same thing that I'm doing.
But I knew once it started, I wouldn't be scared at all.
Because you don't feel fear when you're fighting because you're so in the moment.
You're in the moment.
You're zen.
You almost don't exist.
You have to, to operate at the highest level, to have instantaneous reactions, and to be able to manage your pace and all these different things.
You can't think about yourself or how you look or how you feel or whether your girlfriend's mad at you or whether you're going to fail out of high school.
And it's not becoming of, to be kind So I'm learning to put my fist down.
I'm learning to spend those times in the morning thanking God that I'm alive because I had a heart surgery, as we talked about earlier, and just waking up is great.
Just like, wow, I've just woken up.
What a thrill.
And I'm trying to get to that place with, not with the world, But with myself, I've not made peace with the world.
I certainly have not.
But I am making more peace with myself, which is sometimes a bit harder.
And the family, and listening to them more.
And yeah, that's it.
this combat thing is interesting.
Were you in the neighborhood, I asked you earlier, but were there people were there Sure.
No, I'm just, when you're fighting, I mean, obviously what we do in music is we try to turn rage into something beautiful, and that's what rock and roll is, the sound of, you know, I think it was Neil Young who said it was something like The Sound of Revenge.
Whatever, it's rage, for sure.
There's rage.
That's what separates certain bands.
You want to know what the difference between a pop band and a rock and roll band?
And, you know, I had this guy named Yuri Prohaska on the podcast recently.
He's a brilliant fighter who's in the UFC, who was the light heavyweight champion at one point in time.
And it's still one of the top light heavyweights in the world.
And we were talking about anger and rage, and it leads you down a bad path of decision-making when you're fighting.
It interferes with the flow.
It interferes with the way.
And like I was saying before, when you're competing, you know, and I've never competed at that level.
When you're competing at a world championship level, anything that fucks with your mind, anything where you're doubting yourself or talking to yourself, all that is resources.
That is being allocated towards something that's completely useless as opposed to being, like, completely in the moment and in the zone.
If you get taken out of it for a moment, if they feel for a moment that you're thinking, like, you're looking for a way out, you're looking to quit, you're gone.
You're done.
Like, when your friend was saying that his son didn't want to be a fighter anymore, this is my advice always.
Whenever someone says, I'm thinking about stopping fighting, I go, quit.
Quit right now.
Because somewhere out there, there's someone who's not thinking about stopping at all.
They're going to fuck you up.
They're going to come for you.
It's going to be terrifying.
You're locked in a ring with Mike Tyson and you've been thinking about getting a regular job?
Like, yeah, you're fucked.
You're fucked.
Because there's all-in people, in my opinion.
I love fighting, but I think only all-in people should be fighting.
And the moment you're not all-in, get out.
You gotta get out.
Because the difference between an all-in person and a one-foot-out-the-door person is enormous.
It's enormous.
Even if skill level is similar, All they want to do is this one thing, and they're completely focused on it, just being the best in the world, this one thing.
They're going to find holes in you.
They're going to find your weaknesses.
They're going to push you in a way that maybe you didn't push yourself as far in the gym.
So come the second round, come the third round, you start breaking down.
And they're not breaking down at all.
They're breaking you down.
It's a terrifying place to be when you know you're not all in and the other person's all in.
So anybody, if that was my son, he's like, I'm thinking about quitting.
I'm like, good, quit.
That's what I'd say.
Quit.
Find something else you love.
Find what you love.
You don't have to do this.
But if you're going to do this, you've got to only do this.
I'm not that interested in Nietzsche, but he's written some aphorisms that I like and whatever.
But in our summer place where we go to, there's a little trail called the Nietzsche Trail.
And he apparently came up with this line, which is, for anything truly great to take place, there requires, and this would be my tattoo, a long obedience in the same direction.
And we had a manager, Paul McGuinness, for most of our life, and it was one of these things.
He said, "Just don't ever be fighting about whose song it is." Because in the background, it's like, "I want my song on the album." Just share everything and make sure that you all feel like a stake in each other.
But there might be something to do with the fact that the four members of that band feel equally involved in that song.
There might be.
And the democracy, which is such a pain in the hole.
Is actually one of the reasons that when U2 walks onto a stage, people tell me, even if they're not bands, you know, they just come along as guests, the hairs come up on the back of their neck.
And I explain, actually that happens to us too.
It's a strange thing when we walk out.
And it seems to me, that I haven't figured this out, that the You fall in love, it's romantic.
This is families now.
This doesn't have to be your partner in life, your wife, your husband, your families, kids, everything.
It's just the whole world just seems set against them.
Surviving.
It just pulls at us.
Like gravity itself, you're resisting.
And so when you manage to get through it, and you're standing there, the forest, and there's something going on that feels like you've resisted gravity or whatever the force is that pull you apart.
There's something about it, and some nights it's really not easy.
But, I mean, not the music, but the friendship.
But we're through it right now, and you'll feel it in these recordings.
And you'll feel us, in a way, rediscovering each other.
Well, there's also the fact that you guys continue to create, because one of the things that happens to great bands is they become a prisoner to their old songs.
I'm not sure the past is done with me, but I'm doing my very best to deal with the past in order to get to the present.
Make this the sound of the future.
So the songs on the next album, when you are, or whomever you're with, or your kids, or whatever, are out at the Joshua Tree, or wherever it is, park, or at the lake here in Austin, Texas, and you're listening to our new album.
That we will take you somewhere.
Because it has to be, these songs have to be, they have to be everything, or what's the point?
But you did say on one of your recent podcasts, you were saying, hold on a second, still more people got access to water and heat and air conditioning than in the history of the planet.
So we just don't want to lose that.
perspective.
And we don't want to, you know, this incredible thing.
Some of this is China.
Some of this is capitalism.
Some of this is that.
But I don't want to lose the sense of the next chapter could be our best.
But that is part of it because art changes the collective consciousness of a civilization.
And songs that really deeply resonate with young people that have a...
It shifts consciousness.
It shifts consciousness in a positive way and those young people may grow up to become people that aren't corrupt politicians, that aren't corrupt congressmen, that don't.
Give in to the lobbyists and the special interest groups, but really look out for their constituents and they get into it for the right reasons.
Because everybody's going to be co-opted if you don't.
And I had this moment where Paul McCartney picked me up.
At John Lennon Airport, he was driving the car and brought me and kind of showed me the different neighbourhoods of the Beatles, which was an amazing experience.
And he'd stop and he'd say, oh, this is where this happened.
And he'd say, do you mind me telling you this?
And I'm like, are you kidding me?
And then he stopped at the traffic lights and he said, oh, yeah, that's where I had our first real kind of conversation, you know, with me and John.
I said, hold on a second.
I'm a bit of a Beatles student.
Didn't you have that when you were in the Quarrymen?
He says, no.
No, no, no.
It was a different level.
He bought a bar of chocolate and after the war, you know, chocolate was really hard to come by, you know.
It was kind of a real luxury.
And he bought the bar of chocolate and he didn't give me a square.
He broke it.
Cadbury's milk chocolate broke it in half.
And I said, oh.
So you're into sharing too?
He said, yeah.
And he says, I don't know why I'm telling you that.
And he drove on and I just thought, oh, I know why you're telling me that.
Greatest collaboration, not just in music, in the history of music, maybe the greatest collaboration in the history of culture started with Hath.
You know, one of the things I do like about some of these churches is not the ones that put pressure on you, but, you know, people will give some cash every week to help with what's going on.
You know, in faraway places or whatever, and they tithe.
I think they call it tithing.
And it's just part of the blessing of America.
It's this...
Okay, so it's less than...
It's half of one percent of the government budget to keep all these people alive all over the world.
They love America because they love America.
They're not going to be a problem for America.
It takes them away from terrorism, takes them away from anti-Americanism.
It takes them, puts points in the direction of freedom.
That's a blessing.
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So if you count your zeros and you say, that's mine, that's ours.
Yeah, and the concept is he was the greatest samurai that ever lived.
He killed 60 men in one-on-one.
Combat with swords.
He got to the point where he was killing people He was killing people so easily he decided to stop using swords and he would like fashion a Wooden sword out of an oar from a boat on the way over to go kill a guy.
He It was an extraordinary human being, but he wrote a book on strategy called the book of five rings Yeah, and go read no show the book of five rings.
It's this book is all about where's he from?
Japan.
All about how you—from the 1400s.
You had to be balanced in everything.
To be a great warrior, you had to be great at calligraphy.
You had to be great at poetry.
You had to be an artist.
You had to be able to meditate.
You had to be balanced.
You had to know the way.
And don't let any bullshit— This is the modern interpretation.
Don't let your ego, don't let other people's perceptions, don't let insecurities in, don't let any of these things in.
Stay on the way.
And the way is like this way of thought.
Everybody says, how you do anything is how you do everything.
Once you understand the way broadly, you will see it in all things.
it's that Nietzsche this path to greatness once you fit really Like, oh, this is this intense focus and dedication to something that could be applied to anything.
You could apply it to being a better father.
You could apply it to being someone who writes books.
You could apply it to music.
You could apply it to anything.
But that's what it is.
It's like finding what the thing is and throwing And to do that correctly, you can't have, you know, macho issues.
You can't have insecurity, things that you're compensating for.
And this Jesus is a long way from the one that you meet on these kind of sales programs.
But it is humility.
And it is service, and it is discipline, and it is not my will, thy will.
It is indeed surrender.
And anyone, wherever they are in the world, Japan in the 1400s or the 15th century, wherever, anyone anywhere, scientists, you know, the pursuit of truth, it just gathers.
Yeah, there's something about, I'm trying to think of the word, this sort of gathering where we will all end up in the same place if we're really, and I'm not talking about life after death as if to enter a competition, but we're in the same, consilience, I think is the word.
I think it was, I don't know who wrote, I wrote a book called Consilience, but it's the idea that all disciplines, all art forms, everything comes together on a point, a kind of convergence.
We're hoping for that one speech, that one JFK speech, where you just go, "Oh my God, yes." That's the prayer.
Clinton when he was young, he had some bangers.
Obama when he was young.
They had these speeches that made us feel better as human beings, better about the country.
That's the danger of the conflicted times that we're in, is that people don't feel good even about America.
There's people that think That the American flag is a symbol of injustice.
That's a crazy thought.
Like, America's U2.
It's not just U2, man.
But it's us.
It's all of us human beings, regardless of your political ideology.
And we've got to think of that first.
We're a community.
We're a neighborhood.
We should think of ourselves as a giant neighborhood.
And we don't.
We think of ourselves as opposing tribes that are in this battle to stay in control of whatever the direction of the country is.
Orchestrated by artificial intelligence bots that are constantly battling with people online and state actors and intelligence agencies and money and all this shit is together.
And it's all confusing everybody as to what is the purpose of being a human being that's alive with other human beings.
The purpose is community.
Communing.
We're supposed to be a United States.
We're supposed to be a community.
All the differences that we have, the political differences, they should be so fucking secondary that it should be a small part of the elections.
A small part of the election should be policy.
Because we should just all agree that we should figure out, you want to have a good use of AI?
Figure out what's the objective best use of resources to support the collective whole.
And how does that get accomplished?
How does that get accomplished without fraud and waste?
And what's the best way to navigate?
We're looking to clean up the lakes.
We're looking to stop pollution.
We're looking for clean energy sources.
We're looking for education.
We're looking for health care.
We're looking for housing.
We're looking to get people off the streets that have mental health issues and get them help.
And don't just give them fentanyl and give them money for needles.
That's stupid.
Don't let them camp on the street.
That's stupid.
Also stupid ignoring them.
That's stupid too.
Some real resources.
And once we do that, we could all do better.
The whole country can do better.
We'll be less at each other's throats.
There'll be less anxiety.
It can be accomplished.
But we have to address the primary factor in this country for crime and horrible behavior.
It's completely disenfranchised neighborhoods.
It's areas that have been fucked.
Since the 1940s.
And they're not doing anything to change them.
And no one's pouring any resources.
There's no plans to try to revitalize these communities and elevate these people out of, like, dire poverty and gang violence and drug use.
There's a way to do it.
It's not impossible.
But there's no resources put at it at all.
That should be another thing.
That shouldn't be a Republican thing or a Democrat thing.
You know, the Polish people, if two million Ukrainians staying with them and never complain, these are the most remarkable people you'll ever meet.
There's all that money that was invested in by guess who?
George C. Marshall, an American general who became Secretary of State, who had the cleverness to say after the war, the Second World War, and I think it was like 4% of the GDP was invested in the rebuilding of Europe.
And the idea was we have to make Europe succeed, and that's how we will defeat communism.
And so when Ronald Reagan, you know, pronounced a death sentence on the Soviet Union, and the reason Mikhail Gorbachev threw his hands up and said, we've got to, this project is over, is because he knew that people could see it was dysfunctional.
He knew there was a better life across the wall, the other side of the Iron Curtain.
And sometimes it takes putting your money where your mouth is to show what freedom is.
America did that.
We owe America.
And we need you.
That's all I want to say.
We need you and together.
Wow!
There's 450 million people in Europe.
It's like, you know, You put all this together, this is formidable.
And these boring people who are listening to you, probably tuning in, what they think?
We need religion to suggest that it exists and how we might deal with it.
And in ourselves, first, I would suggest, you were talking about fighting.
The biggest opponent, it would appear, is indeed yourself.
You're up against yourself.
I've got to that place, and I'm not a sportsman competent, but just in my own walk, I realize, wow, all these people I thought I was up against in my head.