On this episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, the legendary singer-songwriter John Lennon joins the show to talk about his life and career, including his time in the punk rock band Public Image Limited, his relationship with his mother, and his new memoir.
00:01:24.000We're trying to just do something original.
00:01:28.000And we're really ripping off, the irony is we're really ripping off Public Image Limit.
00:01:33.000Johnny Rotten became John Lydon again for this band called Public Image Limited back in the late 70s.
00:01:41.000And I'm singing about, you know, it's a suicide note, really.
00:01:45.000And I'm singing about this, and they're saying, like, what's it about?
00:01:48.000And I said, I think it's this guy who's going to follow somebody into the grave.
00:01:53.000You know, they're going to, I think it's about, it's a child following their mother, missing them so much that he'll follow them into the grave.
00:02:03.000And then we realize that our rehearsal room, the Little Yellow House.
00:02:10.000It's beside the cemetery where my mother is buried and I've never visited her once or talked about her once.
00:02:19.000And we've been rehearsing there for months.
00:02:22.000And it's funny, you know, you can deny somebody in conversation, you can deny somebody to yourself, but in the songs, all that shit comes out.
00:02:40.000I've never seen anybody do that like that.
00:02:45.000It'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.
00:04:20.000It's not just your body, your psychology is the canvas.
00:04:24.000And, you know, I grew up, John Lennon, you know, the Beatles were everything for me.
00:04:30.000And, 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.
00:04:40.000And, you know, I do ridiculous quite well, I'm told.
00:04:44.000So that was my definition, you know, of...
00:04:52.000But 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.
00:07:25.000If 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.
00:07:40.000But 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.
00:08:32.000That'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.
00:08:53.000Iggy Pop, when I was growing up, was the, you know, Patti Smith.
00:08:57.000Patti 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.
00:09:18.000Breaking the fourth wall has been everything for our bands.
00:09:23.000trying to smash it by surfing it, you know, by jumping into the crowd.
00:15:49.000I called up and June answered the phone.
00:15:54.000Excuse the poor Texans, all you Texans out there, but she was like, or Nashville in her case, she was like, oh, Bano, wow, thank you for calling.
00:18:30.000And probably if you're interested in singing, I could tell you one miracle that I learned from Frank Sinatra, which is a version of My Way.
00:18:44.000And the original version, you know, it's a boast.
00:18:48.000And years later he sang it, and I have a copy of it.
00:18:54.000And Pavarotti stars in the film, as you know, I play him for a moment.
00:19:00.000But it's a version of my way with, I mean, Pavarotti's the greatest singer on earth, but shouldn't sing in English.
00:19:34.000And that's a thing about singing, and Johnny Cash had that.
00:19:40.000And, you know, I wish, I aspire to the place where my voice, to try and answer your first question, when I become a singer that can do that.
00:19:57.000His voice when he was younger was very high-pitched and beautiful and had so much flexibility to it and so much tone.
00:20:05.000And then probably all the cigarettes in Jack Daniels over the years sort of hardened his voice.
00:21:48.000It 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.
00:22:01.000And that's just the great surrealist anthem of all time.
00:22:08.000But yeah, for me, that was an unusual relationship.
00:22:13.000and 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
00:22:38.000I 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.
00:24:23.000they 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
00:24:56.000Be embraced by them and hang around them.
00:24:59.000You know, a lot of people feel imposter syndrome, like they feel just it's bizarre to be around these legendary human beings.
00:30:53.000And he was constantly trying to make relationships that would cross the divide and make sort of opera popular.
00:31:02.000And 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?
00:31:18.000We'll tell God he is late on the song or, you know, he'd do this kind of carry on.
00:31:23.000And I, again, these figures in my life, I knew that I was in...
00:35:24.000It'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.
00:35:37.000I mean, that's essentially probably where it came from.
00:35:39.000It probably came out of a survival instinct.
00:37:12.000And 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.
00:37:36.000We were raising awareness on this pandemic, this AIDS pandemic that was killed, just, you know.
00:39:32.000And, 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.
00:39:51.000Even as kids, you know, coming here, We'd just play the coasts, you know, the cooler UK bands or European bands.
00:41:54.000George 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.
00:42:11.000And I'm like, people say, that's impossible.
00:44:55.000I'm the annoying fan who follows America into the bathroom.
00:45:00.000And with the liner notes, which are the declaration, going, "Didn't you say this here?" And, "Get out!
00:45:05.000Who followed me into the bathroom?" But I like the idea that this is far from finished, this composition.
00:45:20.000And for some people, the America that is available to you and me doesn't exist yet, but it will, and it can.
00:45:31.000We hope that every election cycle, like this will be the one that finally makes us what we truly believe we are.
00:45:39.000But the country is just so co-opted by this.
00:45:43.000First of all, you have this genuine issue with the fact that it's essentially a popularity contest to see who gets to be running the government.
00:45:52.000You have a popularity contest that's fueled entirely by special interests.
00:45:57.000And the military industrial complex and pharmaceutical drug companies.
00:46:00.000And it's just, it's all the opposite of an authentic song.
00:46:19.000A long time ago, probably 25 years ago, I was on Mushrooms with a friend of mine.
00:46:24.000And we were laying on the side of this hill, overlooking this canyon, and we played "In God's Country." Oh, wow.
00:46:34.000And it was just the peak of the mushrooms and the songs, the melody, the way that song hit, it just gave me this insane appreciation for things.
00:46:50.000Like at that, it was like this very unique...
00:47:21.000it breaks them through the membrane into this new place.
00:47:24.000Like this moment, it broke through this membrane and brought me to this.
00:47:28.000I think about that particular experience all the time.
00:47:32.000The line in that, when I'm singing it, is a line that doesn't just apply to America, but applies to us personally.
00:47:45.000Wherever you are, is, you know, we need new dreams tonight.
00:47:49.000And we can't be living on secondhand dreams.
00:47:54.000And that's, I think, the renewal, I think, is what we're all looking for.
00:48:03.000and 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.
00:48:28.000I don't think the world wants to fall out of love with America.
00:49:45.000And I found it really difficult to be around evangelicals because they were so, you know, just literal about everything.
00:49:55.000And 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.
00:50:05.000And they were like, they were really helpful.
00:50:09.000And 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.
00:50:39.000The most incredible force for good because they just worked harder.
00:50:48.000And 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.
00:51:47.000It was the wildest collection of people.
00:51:51.000And 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.
00:52:00.000I don't care, you know, I don't have those.
00:52:03.000I'm Irish, I don't have a chance to vote.
00:52:05.000But 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.
00:54:04.000So 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.
00:54:20.000So there's food rotting in boats, in warehouses.
00:54:47.000And that is rotting, rather than going to Gaza, rather than going to Sudan, because the people who know the codes for the warehouse are fired.
00:55:29.000for 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.
00:55:50.000But in the United States, this is standard when Biden left office and And there's no oversight, no receipts.
00:56:13.000The whole thing is, there's a lot of fraud, a lot of money laundering.
00:56:22.000And 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.
00:56:31.000Like, no way that should have been cut out.
00:56:34.000And that should have been clear before they make these radical cuts.
00:56:38.000Like, there's got to be a way to keep aid and not have fraud.
00:56:43.000And you can't say we're going to kill everything so that there's no fraud.
00:56:47.000But then you're killing all the good and you're doing it without letting anybody know it's going to happen.
00:56:52.000So it's not like they had three years to prepare.
00:57:09.000You 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.
00:57:22.000But 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.
00:58:24.000I mean, it felt like, with glee, these life support systems were being pulled out of the walls.
00:58:30.000And 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.
00:58:41.000And they're dealing with malnourished kids.
00:58:43.000And they are having the conversation now about, we don't have the funds, we have to choose which child to pull off the IVs.
00:58:51.000And it just seems to me like a kind of...
00:59:11.000you know, the squandering of human life, particularly children.
00:59:50.000Americans, no matter what political color, they just, you see them just, the size, they just grow in stature when they know they're being useful.
01:00:03.000I had a truck driver on that same tour.
01:00:06.000He had tattoos all over his head and whatever, and he was just saying, can I drive?
01:00:09.000I heard 50% of all truck drivers in Africa are going to die.
01:00:13.000Is that right, because of this disease, AIDS?
01:03:47.000I don't know if I'm qualified to give advice.
01:03:50.000But I would say that America goes through these great periods of overcorrection.
01:03:54.000It goes these great periods of like you saw it during COVID, during the lockdowns and the authoritarianism.
01:04:03.000And we fell into a kind of state of tyranny where there was just massive oppression of free speech, including government sponsored oppression.
01:04:10.000They were contacting different social media platforms and banning legitimate doctors and scholars because they had.
01:04:19.000Different opinions about how things should be handled.
01:04:22.000There was wide-scale censorship, a push for a changing of the First Amendment.
01:04:27.000The First Amendment needs to be overhauled.
01:04:29.000The First Amendment doesn't apply to hate speech or to disinformation.
01:04:34.000There was all these new ways of talking about censorship in this country and condoning censorship.
01:04:41.000And it's very dangerous because it's all about money.
01:04:43.000It had nothing to do with protecting people.
01:04:48.000The 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.
01:05:45.000But 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.
01:06:36.000I 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.
01:06:47.000There was a former FBI analyst that said it might be as much as 80%.
01:06:57.000And this is a problem with the concept of free speech.
01:07:01.000Completely wholly in favor of free speech, just like the ADL was back in the day when they let the Ku Klux Klan march.
01:07:10.000The way to combat bad speech is with better speech.
01:07:15.000The 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.
01:07:33.000This 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.
01:07:46.000Free speech is you're also going to get a lot of ugliness because there's a lot of ugliness in the world.
01:07:52.000You're going to get a lot of people that say horrible things.
01:07:54.000And I think the only way we sort through all that is you have to let them.
01:07:58.000And then you have to let people rise up that oppose those horrible ideas.
01:09:12.000The last time I talked to him was a few years back.
01:09:13.000He'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.
01:09:28.000And they were like, I guess I'm wrong.
01:12:06.000And what you see going on in Gaza is you see Palestinian people being held hostage by Hamas.
01:12:20.000It's not just Israeli that are being held hostage by Hamas.
01:12:23.000The Palestinian people and the fundamentalists in Israel, in the cabinet, these far-right fundamentalists.
01:12:33.000Because at a time, you remember a few years back, everything was kind of wishy-washy and kind of the new age and whatever you have in yourself.
01:12:42.000And now these strong, clear points of view have arrived.
01:12:51.000Yeah, there's a real problem with ideology and there's a real problem with fundamentalism and there's a cowardice in it.
01:12:58.000And there's a cowardice in I'm the only one that's correct.
01:13:01.000There's a cowardice in not listening to any other ideas, not listening to any other positions.
01:13:06.000And we're being played against each other in this country.
01:13:09.000The 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.
01:13:54.000This is a guy, maybe his life depended, but certainly the life of many, many people he knew would depend on, and he had to listen to that.
01:14:03.000Well, the whole thing is strange, right?
01:14:05.000I 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?
01:14:32.000That'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.
01:14:55.000You know, you don't have the right hand of cards.
01:16:09.000And those bots, Every election now where this candidate is pro-Europe and pro-European unity, they are just getting a shitstorm of disinformation.
01:16:23.000And I just think, wow, but I think Europe and America are just sexier than these people.
01:23:23.000To deal with the fascists or whatever.
01:23:26.000I mean, certainly Hitler in the late 30s was getting rid of the dadists and the surrealists because the language of fascism was to fight back.
01:23:53.000Well, because if you can mock something, like you can have a position or an opinion on something and someone can disagree strongly.
01:24:00.000But 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.
01:24:14.000Because 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.
01:24:21.000But 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.
01:24:29.000And you're like, then you're introducing ideas into a person.
01:25:38.000And if you don't ever pick up on it...
01:25:42.000Like, 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?
01:25:56.000Like, is this like, you know what I mean?
01:26:19.000That 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.
01:26:34.000He invented ambient music and worked with David Bowie, Talking Heads, you know, and recently Coldplay and other people.
01:26:45.000But he had a profound influence on us.
01:28:51.000Maybe 26. She was 24. And it was about the devastation that was happening in the Ethiopian famine.
01:28:58.000And I just couldn't explain it to myself.
01:29:00.000There was other inferences about the song.
01:29:04.000But 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?
01:33:37.000I try not to pay attention to me as much as possible.
01:33:40.000I think there's a thing that happens, what you're talking about on stage, where everyone achieves a higher state of consciousness through a song.
01:33:51.000I think that's where it is really like a church.
01:33:55.000That's where it is really like a religious experience.
01:33:57.000When a great song and it takes you away from yourself.
01:34:17.000You know, everyone's caught up in their own struggle and their self and how they exist in this world and all the problems of reality.
01:34:24.000And then there's something about these moments of divine inspiration where they impact people in this very profound way.
01:34:32.000And I think that's one of the reasons why people are so deeply drawn to music, and especially live performance.
01:35:08.000But, 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.
01:35:20.000I just said, you want to be Christian, you want to be Christian, but you decide.
01:35:24.000I never got religion rammed down my throat.
01:35:26.000I'm certainly not going to put it down yours.
01:35:29.000So we'd go, and sometimes you just get a feeling in a place.
01:35:40.000But 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...
01:36:25.000And, 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.
01:40:23.000When it happened, the next day when it got out on YouTube, I brought it in here and I go, you've got to listen to this.
01:40:30.000This is just such an amazing rendition of a song because it's just you sitting on these chairs and Jimmy Fallon is next to you on the table.
01:47:39.000We've got to feel that it's our best album that's going to come.
01:47:43.000If it is, it's going to be because we frame it around that moment in the room when that happens.
01:47:53.000I promise you, I can't deliver that, promise you, for every song on the album, I'll come back if you have me and I'll play you some of the songs.
01:48:06.000But for the live rock and roll pieces, it has to have that.
01:48:27.000That was a real moment that resonated through the television.
01:48:29.000I couldn't imagine what it would have been like to be in that room.
01:48:31.000And I was thinking that, like, God, I wish I was there.
01:48:34.000Because, you know, you see Will Smith.
01:48:36.000And Will Smith's in the corner, and you see him just taken over by the music, like, nodding his head, like, oh my God, just in that moment.
01:52:35.000Everything is opposed to the way normal, comfortable human conversation and connection works.
01:52:44.000It 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.
01:52:52.000Like, that's the real human connection where it's open-ended and you're just talking.
01:52:57.000As 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?
01:53:15.000I always felt confined, and I would never do stand-up on them.
01:53:18.000I was always asked to do stand-up on them.
01:53:20.000Like, that's not where stand-up belongs.
01:53:23.000But 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.
01:53:53.000and he did a concert special in the theater, and I think it's his greatest performance.
01:53:57.000And 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.
01:54:09.000People were just falling back, slapping each other, going, "Oh, my God!
01:54:13.000Oh, my God!" Like, they couldn't breathe.
01:54:15.000And 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.
01:56:51.000You 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.
01:57:04.000Deeply fun, just like so accurate in the caricatures of people.
01:57:32.000And 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.
01:57:46.000So 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!
01:57:57.000He starts rocking backwards, what is this?
01:58:01.000It feels like someone's got a dick in my ass!
01:58:03.000You mean life keeps fucking the ass even after you're dead?
01:58:45.000I still didn't think I was going to do stand-up until I saw Kinison.
01:58:48.000When I first saw Kinison, that was when I was like...
01:58:53.000Because I had friends telling me to do it.
01:58:55.000But it was friends that I did martial arts with.
01:58:58.000from 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.
02:00:06.000and 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.
02:00:24.000I was just always trying to crack people up.
02:00:27.000And 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.
02:00:34.000I never thought, I'm like, you think I'm funny because you like me.
02:01:55.000You 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.
02:02:03.000You 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.
02:02:09.000You have to be locked into what you're doing.
02:08:18.000And it's not becoming of, to be kind So I'm learning to put my fist down.
02:08:32.000I'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.
02:11:19.000No, 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.
02:12:38.000And like I was saying before, when you're competing, you know, and I've never competed at that level.
02:12:43.000When 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.
02:12:52.000That is being allocated towards something that's completely useless as opposed to being, like, completely in the moment and in the zone.
02:13:01.000If 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.
02:13:52.000Even 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.
02:15:05.000And I wouldn't normally quote from Nietzsche.
02:15:07.000I'm not that interested in Nietzsche, but he's written some aphorisms that I like and whatever.
02:15:15.000But in our summer place where we go to, there's a little trail called the Nietzsche Trail.
02:15:23.000And 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.
02:19:49.000And we had a manager, Paul McGuinness, for most of our life, and it was one of these things.
02:19:55.000He 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.
02:23:40.000And the democracy, which is such a pain in the hole.
02:23:47.000Is 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.
02:24:01.000And I explain, actually that happens to us too.
02:24:05.000It's a strange thing when we walk out.
02:24:08.000And it seems to me, that I haven't figured this out, that the You fall in love, it's romantic.
02:24:52.000And 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.
02:25:09.000There's something about it, and some nights it's really not easy.
02:25:15.000But, I mean, not the music, but the friendship.
02:25:22.000But we're through it right now, and you'll feel it in these recordings.
02:25:28.000And you'll feel us, in a way, rediscovering each other.
02:25:37.000We just played in London acoustically.
02:25:40.000At the Ivor Novellas, it was the first time in five years the four of us played together, because Larry had a back injury.
02:25:48.000But yeah, there's something in the chemistry.
02:25:51.000Well, 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.
02:25:58.000Yeah, you've got to be a bit careful there.
02:28:30.000So 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.
02:30:45.000But 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.
02:32:06.000It 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.
02:32:16.000Give 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.
02:32:23.000Because everybody's going to be co-opted if you don't.
02:32:31.000And for me, the go-to group was the Beatles.
02:32:34.000And I had this moment where Paul McCartney picked me up.
02:32:43.000At 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.
02:32:54.000And he'd stop and he'd say, oh, this is where this happened.
02:32:56.000And he'd say, do you mind me telling you this?
02:33:01.000And 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.
02:33:45.000And he says, I don't know why I'm telling you that.
02:33:50.000And he drove on and I just thought, oh, I know why you're telling me that.
02:33:55.000Greatest collaboration, not just in music, in the history of music, maybe the greatest collaboration in the history of culture started with Hath.
02:39:56.000It's like, you know, just the more you...
02:40:03.000You 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.
02:40:16.000You know, in faraway places or whatever, and they tithe.
02:42:14.000He 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.
02:42:28.000He 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.
02:42:37.000It's this book is all about where's he from?
02:43:22.000Once you understand the way broadly, you will see it in all things.
02:43:25.000it'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.
02:43:37.000You could apply it to being a better father.
02:43:39.000You could apply it to being someone who writes books.
02:45:27.000And 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.
02:45:45.000Yeah, 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.
02:46:10.000I 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.
02:47:28.000You're in a brightly lit studio, sitting down with a bunch of people beside you, which is like the most un-rock-and-roll thing of all time.
02:48:47.000We think of ourselves as opposing tribes that are in this battle to stay in control of whatever the direction of the country is.
02:48:57.000Orchestrated 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.
02:49:11.000And it's all confusing everybody as to what is the purpose of being a human being that's alive with other human beings.
02:49:26.000All the differences that we have, the political differences, they should be so fucking secondary that it should be a small part of the elections.
02:49:37.000A small part of the election should be policy.
02:49:39.000Because we should just all agree that we should figure out, you want to have a good use of AI?
02:49:44.000Figure out what's the objective best use of resources to support the collective whole.
02:50:58.000There's no plans to try to revitalize these communities and elevate these people out of, like, dire poverty and gang violence and drug use.
02:51:23.000The people who voted for Donald Trump, who I'm not a fan of, and I know you have respect for him, and I respect that.
02:51:32.000But the people who voted for him, I have immense respect for them and their sense that they felt left out of the American dream, a lot of people.
02:53:48.000You know, the Polish people, if two million Ukrainians staying with them and never complain, these are the most remarkable people you'll ever meet.
02:53:56.000There's all that money that was invested in by guess who?
02:54:01.000George 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.
02:54:20.000And the idea was we have to make Europe succeed, and that's how we will defeat communism.
02:54:30.000And 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.
02:54:52.000He knew there was a better life across the wall, the other side of the Iron Curtain.
02:54:58.000And sometimes it takes putting your money where your mouth is to show what freedom is.
02:58:53.000I'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.