In this episode of the podcast, we discuss the concept of things getting better, and how technology is making things worse, and why we should be worried about it. We also talk about the dangers of information overload, and the benefits of having a perfect lie detector. This episode is sponsored by VaynerSpeakers. They are a high-end, high-performance audio-visual company that specialises in providing high-ticket audio and visual solutions to complex problems. They offer a wide range of services, including consulting, training, and consulting services to help solve complex problems such as terrorism, climate change, mental health, and environmentalism. They also offer a range of consulting services such as law enforcement, intelligence, and public relations. You can expect weekly episodes every available as Video, Podcast, and blogposts, and subscribe on Apple Podcasts, and wherever else you get your favourite shows. If you like what you hear, please consider becoming a patron patron of the channel. It helps spread the word to your friends and family about what's going on in the world, and helps them get the most out of their day-to-day lives. Thank you so much for your support, and we really appreciate it. Timestamps: 3:00 - Things are getting better? 6:30 - How can we improve? 8:15 - What's the point of view? 9:20 - What are we can control? 11:40 - Why do we need a better lie detector? 16:00- What's not true? 17:00 18: How do we know the truth? 19:00 Is there a better than the truth we can we know? 21:00 Can we be a better at reading minds? 22:00 Should we be better at it? 23:00 Do we know what we can be better than a lie detector ? 25:00 Are we all better than that? 26:00 What does it matter? 27:00 How do you know we could be more than we can see the truth that we can make sense of the world? 29:00 We can we have a better idea of what s not true, or are we better than we could we be more? 32:00 Would you like to be more honest? 35:00 Does it matter if we can discern the truth from the truth or not? 36:00 Could you be more objective?
00:00:14.000This concept of things getting better.
00:00:17.000We were talking about war, because there's a World War II helmet that...
00:00:22.000Shane Against the Machine is the gentleman's name.
00:00:24.000He'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.
00:00:35.000And you were saying war is a terrible idea.
00:01:02.000And 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.
00:01:17.000Yeah, I think we need to recognize that.
00:01:34.000I think calories in information are identical.
00:01:37.000You know, for millions, billion years, the biggest problem every living thing had was too few calories.
00:01:45.000And then for, what, maybe 75 years, a very small percentage of the animals in the world had this problem of too many calories.
00:01:56.000And there's nothing that prepares anybody for that.
00:02:02.000In one issue of the New York Times, then a 17th century peasant would have had in their entire life.
00:02:10.000So we have this glut of information that we're dealing with about as well as we dealt with calories.
00:02:17.000I talk about this quite often, but the way I describe it is diet and that most people have a poor diet and that most people's diet is not nutritious.
00:02:24.000And if you have a poor diet that's not nutritious, your body becomes unhealthy.
00:02:28.000Well, if you have a poor mental diet, and I've discussed, how many people do we talk about this with?
00:02:33.000Like three or four people have been talking about this.
00:02:34.000Like taking in information, you should almost think of it as a mental diet.
00:02:38.000Because if you take in bad information all the time, negative information.
00:02:42.000And I will speak for myself, but I don't think I'm in any way alone.
00:03:14.000And if you just pop around the web at random, you can't tell what kind of information you're getting.
00:03:20.000But I also want to add to this, it's exactly the way I feel about drugs.
00:03:25.000As much as I want to say, this is not right for me, information has to be out there.
00:03:31.000And all information, absolutely no gatekeepers.
00:03:34.000No, 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.
00:03:42.000We'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.
00:05:04.000And she said, go on and show that atheists can be kind.
00:05:08.000That'll be your only goal for the whole show.
00:05:11.000Because 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.
00:05:19.000Show the one that you're the nicest guy on there, and you're the hardcore atheist.
00:06:54.000I mean, things obviously have changed, but he would talk about...
00:06:58.000I 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.
00:07:24.000So, 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.
00:07:35.000And this is something he really concentrates on.
00:07:43.000And I thought, and I want to say this very clearly, I thought he was wonderful at his job.
00:07:51.000If 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.
00:08:03.000You want someone capricious and crazy with no filter.
00:08:10.000So 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.
00:08:18.000And 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.
00:09:41.000You know, Hal Wilner has those hundreds of hours of him just ranting under his tape.
00:09:45.000I think I don't like people on drugs that much, but boy, I do.
00:09:49.000And I listen to Lenny Bruce talk forever, and Donald Trump had the dark side of that.
00:09:58.000You 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.
00:10:08.000I've always been interested in the people who are out on the margins, you know?
00:10:13.000And 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.
00:11:11.000Did you see the thing he did on Twitter the other day where he put a picture of Trump Tower in Greenland and he said, I promise not to do this?
00:11:53.000But I do know that I don't believe that we see things the same way.
00:11:58.000Like, I don't think we taste things the same way, which is why some people enjoy certain kinds of foods and some people hate those exact same foods.
00:12:04.000Some people, music sounds different to people in terms of, like, what their emotional and psychological makeup is and what it does to them.
00:12:13.000Some people don't want to have none of it.
00:12:15.000When 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.
00:12:24.000But 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.
00:13:01.000It seems to be lots of studies with young children, lots of studies with people who they control their diet.
00:13:08.000But 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?
00:13:18.000Yeah, well, I don't know how they tease out that.
00:13:21.000I have one daughter who loves spicy food.
00:14:34.000And this has happened to a lot of friends of mine who changed that.
00:14:38.000After 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.
00:15:49.000Because a lot of people make these assumptions that, you know, you are not your body.
00:15:54.000And a lot of very intelligent people, they eschew working out and they don't want to exercise and they find it...
00:16:00.000Like, it's a vanity thing, it seems egotistical, they don't like it, and so they put it in this category of kind of knucklehead dumb things to do.
00:16:10.000But your body and your mind are all in the same house.
00:16:14.000Yeah, if your house is filled with shit, it doesn't help the way you think.
00:16:17.000And it was so amazing how, I mean, I completely believed that, and yet I wasn't living that.
00:16:25.000I 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.
00:16:39.000Well, if I could help you with that, I think knowing you as long as I've known you, you're an intense thinker, and your mind is something you...
00:16:47.000I mean, you cherish your thoughts and you embrace them and you're a very intelligent guy.
00:16:53.000And I think you just probably rejected the idea that there was anything outside of the mind that had any influence on you.
00:18:55.000And whenever you want that, you've got to say, well, you're one of the cool kids.
00:18:59.000That's the 108 billion who've lived on this planet.
00:19:01.000Yeah, that's a great way to look at things.
00:19:04.000And I think, I wish people taught that in school, the dangers of being involved in teams.
00:19:09.000Because 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.
00:19:17.000And I think we're experiencing that politically right now with the most polarizing time in my lifetime that I've ever been experiencing.
00:19:33.000And 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.
00:20:18.000Thrown 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.
00:20:37.000And 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?
00:20:53.000Do you have any idea how much that costs?
00:21:07.000So, 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,
00:21:22.000and we can probably rebook those weeks so it's not going to cost you anything.
00:21:50.000So, 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.
00:22:01.000So, 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.
00:22:12.000And, 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?
00:22:22.000Why exactly was I on the Lou Reed team instead of the Joe Walsh team?
00:22:26.000Maybe it was the big Lebowski influence team.
00:22:52.000And 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?
00:23:03.000It was all being done and laid out, and that's fine.
00:23:07.000That's their job, and that's great, and God bless them, but I've got to be aware that they're doing that.
00:23:13.000When you think about someone selling Sex Pistols merchandise, you're just like, oh, well, there's Sex Pistols slot machines.
00:23:22.000When I was first in the hard rock, you know, and there's a big sign.
00:23:25.000The only notes that really count are the ones that come in wads, and that's over the door of a casino that you're walking in, and then there's a Sid Vicious slot machine, and you go, okay, okay, so this is...
00:24:49.000When The Onion did the headline when Steve Jobs died, which said, Nation mourns the loss of the last person to do what the fuck he was doing.
00:25:59.000And it was completely life-changing for me.
00:26:02.000You know, the idea that stand-up comedy was going to go from what, to me, was the Smothers Brothers to Yeah.
00:26:29.000Was created, you know, created here in the U.S. when you went from being a, you know, a 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,
00:27:16.000I was having a talk with Gilbert, you know, Gilbert Gottfried, and we were talking, we said, you know, in Laurel and Hardy, Stan Laurel was the brains, and in Three Stooges, Moe was the brains, and in the Marx Brothers, Groucho was the brains,
00:27:31.000and Abbott and Costello had no brains.
00:30:16.000How long did it take him to get to you?
00:30:18.000He was planning on being there like, he came like a day early.
00:30:22.000So he got there like I was still high, and Trey said, I didn't remember anything, and Trey said the next day, I was right, you should be high.
00:30:32.000Well, there's different kinds of high, just like there's different kinds of music.
00:30:36.000And 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.
00:30:55.000Well, 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.
00:32:08.000Well, the best thing for you would be something that doesn't take very long.
00:32:13.000DMT is the best one because it takes like 15 minutes and it's over.
00:32:16.000And then your body brings it back to baseline almost immediately.
00:32:19.000So 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.
00:32:26.000Your body knows exactly what to do with it.
00:32:28.000It's one of the quickest chemicals that your body can break down and bring back to baseline.
00:32:32.000In my defense, From the very beginning of my not doing drugs, which is an odd kind of baseline there, I always left the door open for psychedelics.
00:32:50.000What I disliked the most was wine with dinner.
00:35:02.000And that statistically has a huge effect on people.
00:35:06.000And then the first people I fell madly in love with, Lenny Bruce, Jimi Hendrix, had been, in my mind, killed by drugs.
00:35:18.000And I kind of said, ooh, people that have this kind of personality, when they get into drugs, they sometimes have trouble.
00:35:25.000And 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?
00:35:35.000As everybody else kind of got out of my way, as they were fucked up some of the time, I could get other stuff done.
00:35:44.000Well, 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.
00:35:52.000They were just doing coke all the time and lost a lot of weight and looked like a vampire.
00:37:38.000There'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!
00:38:01.000I mean, there's a guy who's a journalist who wrote a story about how...
00:38:06.000He 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, like, this is what you're dealing with.
00:38:17.000Like, many people have called him the Adderall president.
00:40:35.000It will allow you to get more things done.
00:40:37.000You know, we had a guy in here who wrote a book on Hunter Thompson.
00:40:40.000And one of the things he was talking about was that he needs Adderall to write.
00:40:43.000And 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.
00:44:55.000You know, I drink decaffeinated coffee, which means I drink 5% of what—you know, I can drink eight cups of coffee and it makes a quarter cup.
00:51:22.000If 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.
00:51:30.000So if I have an idea, which I do sometimes, sometimes I have this temptation, fuck, I've got to get out of here.
00:51:52.000He 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.
00:53:14.000I think we're going to solve it ourselves.
00:53:15.000I think we're going to solve it ourselves through just time.
00:53:19.000I 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.
00:53:26.000It doesn't dismiss horrific acts that take place or terrible things that are going on.
00:53:30.000And it doesn't say that the battle is over.
00:53:31.000I mean, this is one of the things that I would push, in my little microcosm, push for so hard in Penn and Teller.
00:53:41.000Teller and I would have real trouble just crossing a finish line.
00:53:45.000I would just say to him, you know, Teller, we've done five seasons of bullshit.
00:53:51.000And it went, well, let's go out, the two of us, have coffee and donuts, and let's just say, wow, we did that.
00:53:58.000And then push ahead for the next thing.
00:54:01.000And I would just, I just think that Pinker is like that with me.
00:54:05.000Pinker's like saying, you know, human beings, we're doing okay.
00:54:13.000We're most certainly doing better than ever before, and I think that's an accumulative thing.
00:54:18.000If 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.
00:54:28.000The thing that blew my mind about Pinker in that book, Better Angels, blew my mind.
00:54:58.000You 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,
00:55:16.000and we're going to really, with our art, make an effort to make humanity better.
00:55:25.000I 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.
00:55:35.000And then Pinker's book says, why is all this stuff getting better so fast?
00:55:40.000We think it may be art and it may be empathy.
00:55:45.000And it turns out that all this stuff people were saying about, you know, we can change how people see warfare and how people see one another.
00:55:56.000And that's what scares me so much about...
00:56:00.000How some people speak of, and I think it's because I don't understand it.
00:56:05.000Usually when I'm against something, it means I don't understand it.
00:56:08.000But when they talk about cultural appropriation, cultural appropriation seems to me to be the greatest thing you can possibly do.
00:56:15.000To see the world through the eyes of someone who grew up differently than you.
00:57:37.000It'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?
00:57:49.000I mean, there are no tomatoes in Italy.
00:58:01.000There was a great, you know, Paul Simon got so much shit for Graceland, you know?
00:58:07.000And David Byrne got so much shit for stuff.
00:58:11.000And 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?
00:58:22.000But he talks very strongly about the African kinds of music and the influences they have from other places.
00:58:31.000You know, because there is not a culture other than the whole world, especially not now.
00:58:39.000You might be able to have made the argument 200 years ago.
00:58:42.000The thing is, though, that people enjoy cultures.
00:58:46.000So if that is the case and everything does assimilate and becomes one big gray mass, we're worried that we're going to lose Indian food, right?
00:58:53.000We're worried that we're going to lose...
00:58:58.000Because I think that me loving Sun Ra...
00:59:02.000Even 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.
01:02:13.000I'm going to completely change the subject, if I may.
01:02:18.000I want to talk about when you came on my radio show with Phil Plait about the moon landing.
01:02:24.000What 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.
01:03:01.000With a lot of the NASA stuff, a lot of the older stuff in particular.
01:03:05.000There was a lot of manipulation of images and putting things online that may not have actually really happened because it was press releases.
01:03:14.000There's an image of Michael Collins from Gemini 15 that's a very clear image of him doing a simulation, like in a studio with straps and harnesses.
01:03:25.000And then someone from NASA, or someone...
01:03:28.000Put that exact same image, blacked out the background, and used it as a photo of a spacewalk.
01:03:35.000It's not real, you know, but they sold it as real.
01:03:38.000There was some overzealous shit like that, that if you're conspiratorially minded, you might say, ah!
01:05:14.000And 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.
01:05:23.000And you come in, and you come in humble, and charming, and sexy, and with perfect timing on everything.
01:05:33.000And Phil Places, I go, oh man, Joe is wrong, and Joe is gonna fucking win!
01:05:58.000I don't know if you remember, but the whole show ends, and I go, oh, by the way, we did land on the moon.
01:06:05.000And just try to do this final authority thing.
01:06:08.000And Phil said afterwards, I said, yes!
01:06:11.000And 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.
01:06:20.000And 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.
01:06:35.000That kind of verbal, it was a wonderful thing to listen to.
01:06:38.000It 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.
01:06:49.000You had everything going for you that I respect, except you didn't happen to be right.
01:07:56.000Are we going to solve the polarization in America, or are we going to solve the Kennedy assassination, or are we going to solve the moon landing?
01:10:48.000But it's a playful intellectual exercise.
01:10:53.000I 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,
01:11:11.000With the logic that almost feels like a mathematical thing or a pure philosophical thing or angels dancing on the head of a pin thing.
01:11:21.000And 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.
01:11:50.000And the conspiracy theory art form is now seeming to me to be more like rap or rock and roll.
01:11:59.000It's just a form where you play around with this kind of thing.
01:12:21.000It's really easy for me to say we are doing the old-fashioned scientific inquiry, and this is the way falsifiable.
01:12:32.000But 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.
01:12:43.000Well, you've always been a champion of science and reason, right?
01:12:47.000And conspiracy theories for the most part fly in the face of science and reason.
01:13:07.000The conspiracy theory world went south for me when I did a television show about it.
01:13:12.000I did that Joe Rogan Questions Everything show, and I spent six, seven months doing this show, and at the end of it, I was like, okay, I get it.
01:13:19.000This is a bunch of unfuckable white guys.
01:14:42.000And 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,
01:15:27.000And let's not even talk about whether we went to the moon or not.
01:15:30.000What's coming out of your style of inquiry on that kind of thing, your style of skepticism, is just fascinating and beautiful.
01:15:40.000And 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.
01:17:18.000I 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.
01:17:26.000And 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.
01:17:32.000What it's like to work with the Coen brothers.
01:17:37.000I'll learn a little bit about the Coen brothers.
01:17:38.000I'm up to our office, you know, it's like the Brill Building, you know.
01:17:42.000Lorne 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.
01:18:47.000So 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.
01:19:21.000Part 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.
01:19:34.000But there's no way Joe Rogan can know what that means.
01:20:44.000What the fuck was the psychologist thinking that took this guy off suicide watch literally a couple of weeks after he tried to commit suicide?
01:20:51.000If someone tried to commit suicide, you know, speaking as a guy who's had friends commit suicide, They're fucking thinking about it for years, man.
01:21:00.000Some of them, they go back and forth day to day.
01:21:05.000But when someone does actively try it, they're not going to just be fine while they're in fucking prison, awaiting trial for having sex with kids.
01:21:15.000It seems like Jeffrey Epstein's life was going to get really worse from what it was a few months before.
01:21:51.000Well, there's many people that feel like he was an agent and that he was trying to compromise people.
01:21:57.000And that's one of the things about this whole Lolita Island thing is that they would compromise people.
01:22:02.000They 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.
01:22:12.000These girls were like 17, underage, perhaps underage some places, perhaps not underage other places, but incredibly embarrassing for the people.
01:23:17.000I've talked to people many times that work for intelligence agencies, and there's a lot of weird shit that they do.
01:23:26.000And 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.
01:23:35.000If 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.
01:24:07.000And probably absolutely a sex addict himself.
01:24:10.000And 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.
01:24:35.000People get involved in shady activity that are cops.
01:24:38.000There's cops that wind up doing illegal things.
01:24:40.000They 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.
01:25:53.000We'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.
01:26:07.000They're at the end of the fucking road.
01:27:03.000It's definitely not 17. It's definitely not 18. So you're taking on these fucking loans.
01:27:07.000You 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.
01:27:15.000And this also ties in with sexual stuff as well.
01:27:21.000Don't we have to decide when someone's adult and then give them that respect?
01:28:15.000You 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.
01:28:30.000But also, you're taking your colleges out of the free market, too.
01:28:34.000By giving those loans easily, and by having government help, you're also taking away the free market.
01:28:44.000Because, you know, we found out that when you...
01:28:48.000Put the free market in like LASIK surgery.
01:28:50.000When insurance doesn't cover it, it gets wicked cheap.
01:28:54.000And if colleges had to be paid as people went, without easy loans to get, and if colleges did not get government money, they might be wicked cheaper.
01:29:23.000I mean, when you read the paper, there's always one whole thing about colleges getting too expensive and people can't go.
01:29:31.000And 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.
01:29:41.000Do you think that that idea of college is going to hold up for another 10 years?
01:29:45.000I think there's an experience that people have where they go away.
01:29:57.000I was doing martial arts and fighting and traveling all over the world, or all over the country, rather.
01:30:03.000And 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.
01:31:24.000For 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 being with a bunch of other kids and trying to find yourself.
01:31:33.000And I think that comes from traveling to a place and going to college.
01:31:36.000And I think there's some benefit in that.
01:31:39.000I 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.
01:32:56.000And what are the new rules now for this new generation?
01:32:59.000Are we really going to change the world?
01:33:00.000And 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.
01:33:08.000And you can't get a job and you're also massively in debt and severely depressed and trying to figure out your future.
01:36:15.000Yeah, I was like, who's this McKenna and what's a heroic dose?
01:36:18.000At 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.
01:36:32.000I got the record, opened it up, it said that.
01:36:35.000I listened to one side, got to that song, got on my bike, rode down to the Greenfield Public Library.
01:36:41.000Kafka, I got this written down, Kafka, in the penal colony.
01:36:45.000Sat there, read it, went back, listened to the record.
01:36:48.000My 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.
01:36:59.000And I believe that that is available to everybody all the time.
01:37:05.000I mean, I don't know, as I would say, taxpayers should pay for college.
01:37:10.000I think I would say, do we need college?
01:38:08.000And that's the side of Bernie Sanders I want to talk about.
01:38:12.000It's not, can we give endless amounts of money to these fucking people on college campuses?
01:38:17.000Can we pay them all the money in the world to take our children and give them something to do in between smoke and dope?
01:38:23.000Could we rather just say, can't we make this experience cheap enough so that anybody can go and experience it?
01:38:31.000Why 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.
01:38:50.000They'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.
01:39:19.000And 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.
01:40:52.000They'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,
01:41:11.000which is mind-blowing that that can happen.
01:41:42.000Because don't you think that ticks all the boxes?
01:41:45.000That's going to give me everything if I just learn Arabic?
01:41:48.000So I started looking into how I can learn Arabic.
01:41:54.000And it's amazing the kind of network that's developing all over the world to be able to learn anything.
01:42:03.000So 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.
01:42:15.000Well, I don't think that's a bad idea.
01:42:17.000You know, if it's possible to get college that cheap, but I don't want professors to be poor.
01:42:21.000I mean, I think one of the real problems we have with public education is that people don't want to be a teacher because teachers don't get paid much.
01:42:47.000You know, you would pay good money to be in a room with Steven Pinker, you know?
01:42:52.000And I think that locally, this was always a problem that I never figured out.
01:42:56.000You 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...
01:43:08.000To the Rolling Stones and the Beatles and Dylan and all these other bands.
01:43:13.000We could pool our money together and have a really good local band.
01:43:17.000We could have a great band right here in town.
01:43:21.000And 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?
01:44:25.000Getting 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.
01:44:37.000And you're obviously, you know, I'm seeing this, you know, it's okay to speak with an accent, it's not okay to hear with one.
01:44:46.000I'm hearing that from someone who spent an awful lot of time explaining to myself and others why I didn't go to college.
01:44:54.000You know, you wanted to show you weren't a loser.