#1343 - Penn Jillette

Joe Rogan (0:00)

Here we go. Oh, and we're live.

Penn Jillette (0:03)

Hello, Penn. Was that quick and that easy?

Joe Rogan (0:05)

That's it, it's that easy, yeah.

Penn Jillette (0:06)

We didn't say very much interesting before starting.

Joe Rogan (0:09)

No, we were...

Penn Jillette (0:10)

We were just starting, and then you just said, shut the fuck up.

Joe Rogan (0:13)

I said, hold that thought, please. This concept of things getting better. And we were talking about war, because there's a World War II helmet that, Shane Against the Machine is the gentleman's name. He's made me another sculpture, and he started making sculptures out of these World War II helmets with a lamp underneath it, and an actual real World War II bayonet as well.

And you were saying war is a terrible idea.

Penn Jillette (0:37)

Yeah, and it's going away.

Joe Rogan (0:38)

You think really?

Penn Jillette (0:39)

Yeah, really fast. And you mentioned Pinker. And that's, everything I will say is redundant to Pinker. I mean, that Better Angels of Our Nature is one of, I think, the most subversive books of our time.

People are, there's such a, it's a fetish to suffer. It's a fetish to say how bad things are. People are getting really off on it.

And when you start saying, you know, after you say one death by violence is too many, and we gotta clean up the environment, and da, say all that stuff and it's all true, but you can also take a breath and say things are getting better.

Joe Rogan (1:17)

Yeah, I think we need to recognize that. And the problem is there is violence. There is horrible things. There are horrible things in the world.

They still exist, and now they're magnified because of the fact that we have this ability to look at it on your phone anytime you want to, look at it on your computer.

Penn Jillette (1:32)

You know, it's the same thing. It's the same thing. I think calories and information are identical.

You know, for millions, billion years, the biggest problem every living thing had was too few calories.

And then for, what, maybe 75 years, a very small percentage of the animals in the world had this problem of too many calories. And there's nothing that prepares anybody for that. But we now have more information in one issue of The New York Times than a 17th century peasant would have had in their entire life.

So we have this glut of information that we're dealing with about as well as we dealt with calories.

Joe Rogan (2:16)

I 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.

And if you have a poor diet that's not nutritious, your body becomes unhealthy. Well, if you have a poor mental diet, and I've discussed, how many people do we talk about this with? Like three or four people we've been talking about this, like taking in information, you should almost think of it as a mental diet because if you take in bad information all the time, negative information.

Penn Jillette (2:42)

And I will speak for myself, but I don't think I'm in any way alone. I often forget where I read stuff. So I have to be really careful to not read too much garbage. Or it just pops up in my head as, oh, that's real.

So I try to go with news sources that I think are pretty reliable, even if I disagree with them. Like I try to read The Times, because I know there's a level to how much they're going to lie.

We know where the parameters are, they're lying there. We know where they do the spin. And if you just pop around the web at random, you can't tell what kind of information you're getting. But I also want to add to this, it's exactly the way I feel about drugs. As much as I want to say, this is not right for me, information has to be out there. And all information, absolutely no gatekeepers.

Joe Rogan (3:35)

No, I completely agree. And I think that we're coming very close to a time where technology allows us to understand what's true and what's not true. We're not there yet.

But I think we're really close to being able to have some sort of an ability to read minds, to decipher information really clearly.

Penn Jillette (3:52)

But the problem with reading minds, if we could do it, to ascertain truth, is truth is very different from what someone believes. If you had a perfect lie detector, it would not help you with criminality at all. Because people that think they're innocent may very well think they're innocent, even if they are not. Oh, for sure.