 I'm Penn. This is my partner Teller. Tonight we're talking about safety. We're Americans. Give us liberty or give us death. We aren't afraid of anything. Well, nothing except for bacteria, mad cows, terrorists. For decades, Penn Gillette, the larger latter half of the performing duo Penn and Teller, has been among the very best known spokesman for libertarian ideas and attitudes in politics and culture. Gun control, college, making prostitution illegal is bullshit. Is bullshit. Bullshit. Bullshit. Welcome to Walmart. May I help you? But Penn says that the 2016 election of Donald Trump, whom he knows well and loathes from his days on Celebrity Apprentice and the COVID pandemic, have forced him to rethink whether he wants to continue to be publicly associated with the broader libertarian movement. Libertarianism has been so distorted. I can see arguments for not wearing seatbelts. And I can see arguments for not wearing motorcycle helmets. But I cannot see any argument for driving drunk. And that is what not wearing a mask is. It's not risking yourself. It's risking the people around you. For many Americans, though, trillions in wasted spending, contradictory guidance from public health officials, arbitrary school and business shutdowns, and absurd policies like closing beaches and outdoor dining have made them more skeptical of government power and expertise. So why did the 2016 election and the pandemic cause perhaps the libertarian movement's most important public figure to go in the other direction? Has libertarianism changed or has Penn? Reason caught up with him in Las Vegas on the set of his popular podcast Penn Sunday School to talk about Donald Trump, COVID restrictions, and whether his view of the world has really changed. Also joining the conversation was Matt Donnelly, the co-host of Penn Sunday School. I feel a little bit like Martin Sheen in Apocalypse Now. Well, you should. I am like, you know, I'm a professional libertarian. I represent libertarians. That's why I'm wearing a fringe jacket because libertarians are fringe, I guess. But a lot of people when I said, you know, we talk every few years. You're Martin Sheen. I know. I would like to be branded. Yeah. Well, this is, you know, it gets confusing very quickly. Sell the house, sell the car, sell the kids. I'm never coming back. I have a dream. It's a snail on the edge of a razor blade. This is the problem, though, is that you're not Brando because you've not only lost the way, but you kept it off. So it gets confusing. But what I was telling people, we talk every few years and we often talk somehow, you know, it's usually about what you've got out and about libertarianism and why libertarianism is good, et cetera. When I was telling people, well, I'm going to be talking to Penn, they were like, you know, my libertarian friends were all like, you know, what happened? He is, you know, he's gone Kurtz. He's like, he's out there in a jungle somewhere voting for Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden. He's talking about mass. And so I feel kind of like Martin Sheen. Like I'm coming in here either to bring you in or to take you out. Are we also going to show at the end you'll give the coordinates, right? That's right. Which end are we doing? Are we doing the... Yeah. The one that was released. I'm sick of, you know, director's cuts and re-dos. Like it's too much. How about the Cone Brothers doing a director's cut that was shorter? I think that I can live with. Always, always. That was great. The blood sample was two minutes shorter. And I do have John Densmore and Robbie Krieger outside. So we're going to have a weird version of the end coming which is also kind of really wonderful. I don't know if it's too soon to talk about a pop-up now. I prayed for a mission and for my sins they gave me one. That's right. Are you familiar? Have you read Heart of Darkness as well? Yes. Isn't that also an intense... Yeah. Yeah. Just fantastic. Apocalypse. You know, with all the talk with the offer and everything. Everybody's talking Godfather. But I've always been an apocalypse guy. Yeah. What an incredible decade for Francis Ford Coppola but also kind of American cinema, right? Yeah. When I got the COVID time two, I guess. One, two, three. Maybe it was time three. No, time two, I think. I would only watch movies from 1972. That seemed like a symptom. I just... And are you done with or is that part of long COVID now is that you can only watch movies from 1972? Yeah. No, I watched, let me see. I watched Serpa Co, Paper Moon, What's Up Doc, Papillon. I was just friends of Eddie Coyle. That was fantastic. I was just totally tied up in 1972. Yeah. I watched when COVID's hit and I was living in New York and it had kind of emptied out and whatnot and I started, my girlfriend and I started watching post-apocalyptic movies. So we watched things like, Jesus Christ, Logan's Run. Oh, yeah. Which is incredible and from a libertarian perspective is kind of a dream because they escape the shopping mall that they're in and they end up in the old capital where Peter Yustinoff for some reason is tending to a million cats and has a southern accent. But it's in the grown over capital building and whatnot. What's way to see the accent of the cats? You know, it's even the cats. I guess it was like a dry run for cats because they were mostly English too, right? But the other thing that was great, well, we could actually talk about things that matter. So in Logan's Run, which I guess, I think it's from like 76 or something. So it's a little, but it's a 70s movie. And I went on a big 70s because we also watched the Omega Man, which is the dream everyone has who lives in LA of being able to drive without having to worry about traffic or parking. But it comes up to Bob Dylan's 15th Dream. Yes. Where he ends that with I can be in my dream. You can be in my dream if I can be in yours. That wonderful post apocalyptic thing that Bob does where he talks about everybody having the dream of being in the post apocalyptic world. But they always have themselves in it and nobody else. And Bob's final end on that is let's have the post apocalyptic dream with all of us in it, which is a pretty beautiful. Which unfortunately he also updated on Slow Train coming to where all of his so-called friends were going to be in the lake of fire begging God to kill them and they won't be able to. Do you know, do you know that the liner notes for the bootleg series of the Christian period were written by me? Is that right? I did not know that because I live, I only listen to streaming new stuff by Dylan, but that's fantastic. Yeah, it was really great. Jeff Rosen, Bob's manager gave me a call and said, Bob wants you to write the liner notes for all the Christian period. What do you wear? I said to Jeff, you know I'm an atheist, right? And he said, everyone knows that. That's why Bob wants you to write it. And it was really an incredible experience. I hadn't really dug into those records at all. And so I had a really, I mean, you can imagine. I was going to say you can't imagine, but you can imagine how thrilled I was to write liner notes for Bob Dylan. How do you feel about that period? Because, you know, I trust the song, not the singer. And I call myself an apotheos because I don't have enough energy to be an atheist and I'm not, I was raised Catholic, but I don't believe in that. But I kind of was introduced to Dylan with Slow Train Coming because I'm about to turn 59. That album came out in 79 or 77, 78. So I was in high school and it was anti-Catholic. And I was like, wow, this is so fucking great. I finally get to, I understand why people love Bob Dylan, even as it was alienating his core audience. But I think it's tremendous. It's one of his best bands, far and away from one of his best bands. He was vocally so strong. And he also, you know, you can separate passion from content. And the passion was so pure. And I found a lot of it. It was a wonderful experience for me. I've been just, you know, hard-ass atheist for so, so long. It was really, I mean, this was not Bob's intention, but it was really, I thought, eye-opening to make me address that period of Dylan. And, you know, it almost was like that period was just a fuck you to me. I mean, I actually got telegrams. When slow train, slow train coming, I actually got telegram from a friend of mine who sends telegrams, even in the 70s, a telegram that said, you know, Bob is Christian, ha, ha, ha, fuck you. That was the telegram I got when Bob went that way. And of course, what I write about in that is that the idea that Bob had a spiritual period is just a lie I was telling myself. There are strong Christian and religious references from the very first record to the very newest record. And it's never stopped. And it never, you know, it just went intense and was actually spoken of that way. And he has some of those weird speeches he gave on stage like in San Francisco. Well, we have talked about this in the past because I had the pleasure of interviewing you a couple of months before Dylan was given the Nobel Prize for Literature. And I think we agree richly deserved. What do you think is the essence of... And I want to bring this back to kind of libertarianism in a roundabout way because I have to. Otherwise, I self-destruct. I have a chip implanted in me and my corporate overlords are like, you've got to bring it back. Well, that's not really self-destructing, is it? No, that's true. I'm part of it. I bought in on this. I signed the contract. I have to hold myself back when people come up to me and say, can I take a selfie with you, Pat? And I say, yes. And they hand the camera to someone else. Right. I don't want to be the kind of asshole that says, it's no longer a selfie if someone else is holding the camera. I always have to bite my tongue. It is probably my only act of kindness is not saying that. One of the brilliant things about Bob Dylan is I was about to say that he's constantly reinventing himself, which isn't quite true. It's that he's continuing his journey and I think unlike a lot of rock stars and I think unlike a lot of authors and creators, he invites the audience to come along with him. I don't think he ever, even in slow train coming where he is kind of ranting at his so-called friends and his audience, I mean, he comes out at the end of the 70s of all time that he says, no, we got to, we got to recommit to Jesus and to, you know, a man who died a criminal's death and strip away all of this, you know, all the cocaine and the parties and the flesh pots and all of that kind of stuff. Even then, he is like, he's moving on and you're welcome to follow him. Some rock writer, and there's a lot of wonderful ones, wrote that we don't go see Bob Dylan. He comes to see us. And that really can be the feeling because it's remarkable how he makes me redefine Charisma. Because you cannot take your eyes off him. He's incredibly powerful. You know, certainly Judy Garland, Frank Sinatra, any of those people that incredibly charismatic. But in such a different kind of way, you know, Joe Baez has talked about that a lot. You could always tell instantly that he's in a room. He's pulling everything. Ratszo, Ratszo's buddy of mine, he introduced Mike Tyson to Bob Dylan. And the story he tells is really fascinating because Mike Tyson had never heard of Bob Dylan. You know, we at least I lose track of how many cultures there are in the United States that don't overlap. And if you were growing up in Tyson's neighborhood, there's no reason you would ever have heard of Bob Dylan. Ever. Anything. And Ratszo tried everything to get Tyson to have some reaction to the name or one of the songs. Nothing. Nothing. So they meet. And Bob Dylan is very, very very pleased to meet Mike Tyson and they talk. And you know, and Dylan leaves and Tyson says to Ratszo, who's never heard of Bob Dylan. Wow, he's really heavy guy. So what I love about that is you take away all of the cultural power that Bob Dylan has and he still fills up the room. Even being a borderline of secrecy to Tyson. Not talking about music, not just you are a great boxer, let's talk about boxing. Even there, even trying to be self-effacing, there's still that power there. It's a fascinating thing how human beings aren't able to codify or qualify what that is. But it sure is something, you know, when you see Brando, sure is something going on. Dylan, unlike I think Judy Garland and Sinatra has remained first lived a longer or has lived, continuing to live a rich, vibrant, creative life where he's still searching, he's still moving. There's like nobody else. It's really hard. You can kind of talk Picasso, you can kind of talk Stravinsky, Shakespeare, of course you don't have that length of time. I'm not Mike Tyson so I don't know who those people are. But I mean, for that length of time. It's amazing. I can remember watching the 30th, Bob Dylan's 30th anniversary concert where, you know, Sinead O'Connor got booed. And that is 40 years ago? 35 years ago or something. That's the winding down of Bob Dylan's career. And what a lot of people don't notice is, I think it'll take 100 years to know this but his stronger albums maybe his strongest albums are in the 21st century. Yeah, that I want to believe we'll see. I mean, for me I don't want to say peak but I time out of mind is the album that I keep coming back to but it varies at different moments. What I was going to say about him and bring it back to you and kind of libertarianism and the way that you've been talking about it since Trump and COVID is that what I find and I have a lot of friends who are like, would you shut the fuck up about Bob Dylan, you know, and even their parents I've had that said. Yeah, I suspect Mike Tyson, it's like I find Bob Dylan charismatic but I wish you would shut the fuck up about it. Okay, sure, Mike. But, you know, what is interesting about Dylan is that he continues to grow and change and evolve and it's, you know, sometimes he's clearly reacting against a former self or a younger self in another way and you're talking about like the Christian imagery of him. It is there from the beginning and then it becomes okay, well what is what's the story of Christ that he's following and I can't believe I'm saying these things because it isn't something I believe theologically but kind of in a metaphorical sense. Dylan is always kind of growing and changing and evolving and observing the world which I found amazing in his most recent record is like that even if it's made of tracks that were from the past couple of, you know, recorded over the past couple of years. It's just kind of amazing and it strikes me and here I am being obsequious to you but in all good faith you're kind of like Dylan. What is interesting is when you go back and look at early statements of you especially, you know, in the 80s I guess, you know, I would see you on PBS and things like that and, you know, when you were in your biggest asshole phase where you were you know, the larger louder half of Penn and Teller and you were, you know, very bombastic you were very confrontational, things like that even there you could see you were you were a man in process, you were changing. So can we talk about what happened? What was it about Trump first that shook your faith in your long held very public, very persuasive belief of libertarianism and then COVID and where are you now because we're coming out of that phase? Well, um I'm going to I'll give you a real answer. No, no. I'll give you the other. This interview is over. Um, the one thing that I always thought was and I believe at the time I was aware of it. I remember once um, being on um, I think it was politically incorrect. It was politically incorrect. I mean it was, it was Bill Maher. Yeah. I think it was politically incorrect. And yeah, it was politically incorrect. And um, there were Wait, are you sure? Yeah. Was it politically incorrect or was it? There are four seats. There are four seats there and then there's Bill's seat and I was out there because I know Bill forever. I was out there before the other guests. No. And I'm sitting in the chair there and I mean this is completely sincere completely sincere. There was no jive in this at all. I'm sitting there and I'm talking to Bill. He's going over his notes. I'm going over my notes and we're just casually and I go, you know, this is this is funny because you got Clinton's drug policy guy here and this person here's a writer for The Times and this other person here. I said, usually you have one nut. There's usually one nut sitting in the seat here and then he just looked up at me and it wasn't even a gag. And he thought I was doing a joke. He just kind of went and I went, oh I'm the nut. And it was an absolute revelation. I mean anyone else would just say how blind can you possibly be but you didn't know that but it's the poker thing. If you don't know who the fish is you're the fish. I was the nut and I was very happy with that role. I saw the asshole period pen, the bullshit period pen as you always want somebody you know in the gay rights movement you wanted to have the Jonathan Roushes you needed them. They were really important but you also needed the flamboyant crazies all of those were necessary and I saw my role in society as you know in culture as I'll be one of the ones who just says whatever pops into his fucking head and that's always needs to be considered and you know many times and I was interviewed on CNN or places like that and then asked me about libertarianism which I also will say unlike you I've never I've never been a spokesman for libertarianism I mean de facto but never claimed to be. I would always say all I want is in every discussion we have somebody to say is it possible this problem could be helped by more freedom instead of less and I believe that the knee jerk reaction is always we need less freedom to solve a problem. I think you even do that we even do that in our personal lives whenever you want to solve something you think of constricting and I thought what opened my eyes the most about libertarianism and at a very deep level what libertarianism was was let's look at novel solutions to things that really exist in more freedom and I always said many times the answer may be no the answer may be no I mean if someone is running through town with a gun shooting people killing people at random and you're trying to stop that person and you say can this problem be solved by giving this person more freedom the answer can be no it can be no but that should always be considered there and there's there's a line by Nick Lowe and I forgot what song it is where he just says it's just not funny anymore you know when Abby Hoffman and Jerry Rubin were doing the raising the pentagon and all that stuff and running a pig for president that was beautiful stuff beautiful kind of theatrical thing and what happened with Trump was the pig won and all of a sudden and I believe if you're looking for an intellectual answer you're not going to get it it's emotional all of a sudden I think a small part I think everybody else had the experience but a small part of me I think it was Trump and knew him fairly well that all of a sudden I said the idea of a loudmouth saying whatever pops into his head and people listening to that playing with that all of a sudden that's not fun anymore all of a sudden people are going to really suffer because of this and I was very fortunate in that one of the jobs that I had as a pundit as a talking head that just went away because nobody was being put on TV unless they were saying something directly about Trump that whole kind of playful politics kind of went away and when playful politics went away and nuts became real players all of a sudden I no longer had a role because what I kind of always wanted and I would talk to my friend LOD Lawrence O'Donnell and you know we were a very unlikely friendship one of my closest friends for many many years the absolute symbol of anti-libertarianism and we were very very close friends and still are and I would always say always say I feel comfortable really comfortable saying these things that I believe I'm not saying just to be provocative I really honestly believe them but I have a safety net that they're a grown up saying okay Penn had your say those are all good points we're listening to it but we're going to be the ships going to take a long time to move and maybe I was hoping that the whole libertarian movement would kind of a smaller government kind of do this kind of more freedom but it would all be kind of slow it's like when Ralph Nader said when he was running that the world was controlled not by the government but by corporations I said well the one thing he's got wrong about that is that that's a good thing you know he thinks it's a bad thing and I kind of thought I really believed and I mean this is I really believe this I don't think I want to qualify it to appear to be smarter but I'm not smarter I really believe this I believe that when one became president there really were a group of people that came into you and said okay you did your speeches you did your stuff you did a good job you're tall you made your point on camera that's really good here's the stuff we really got to do I really believe that happened and that everybody was pulled a little bit more towards sanity and Trump proved that isn't true you can stay you can stay a nut and so I would say emotionally what people are feeling about me being pulled away from libertarianism is that I get scared I get scared and I think that's can I ask what are you scared of because like I you know and again we talked last I think in 2016 and it was before the election and I think we shared broadly a critique of Trump you know and certainly Trump is no libertarian you know some people are like oh he's the most libertarian president ever and it's like I don't even know how to begin to kind of parse that sentence but you know and he was truly terrible on things I mean for me it starts with immigration and his rhetoric about Mexicans and foreigners it's like I look at my family you're out when he comes down the bottom of the escalator it was the first sentence you know and it was kind of amazing because he was like I'm not going to be politically incorrect and by the way Mexicans are rapists and they're not just rapists they're disease-ridden rapists who have drugs in their back pocket I'm like this is not my guy certainly so there was a lot to talk about and critique in Trump and I don't think you can avoid the important fact that he was the first president in the history of the country than me than you that if we may say is a low bar we're talking maybe double high triple digit or high double digit IQ if we believe that kind of thing wherever we want to do wherever you want to put the IQ put it anywhere you want you can go from 90 to 140 and you're still you're still going to be okay on that right so and you know before we get to COVID and you said you know you kind of felt scared because you thought in your head there was this reserve of I don't know responsible people that would keep the government that you spent a lot of time railing against rightly for things like bad immigration under Obama was terrible and under George Bush war under these guys was terrible surveillance terrible economic policy terrible but that the people who were kind of keeping them within bounds disappeared when Trump was elected or what are you afraid of or they could be overruled yeah and also that the fact that I think we're talking once again it's all emotional the nuts could have power the nuts could get power and I mean it is kind of amazing and I do think that there's like and I want to come back to this in relation to Biden in a bit but that you know the idea of Trump winning is like something out of a Philip K Dick Knopf yeah I mean it's like whatever it's you could imagine it and dream it but then when it becomes real you realize a holy shit I'm you know I am being dreamed by a robot who is about to be shot by like a talking penguin or something like that this is a strange world and for you that is like a horrifying reality or recognition yeah it was the many many many people that I really respect and really like would say stop the equivalent of burn it down fuck it fuck it we don't care and then when you saw the fire catching on you were kind of like I never went along with that but I would kind of listen to that and go that's the point of you I can listen to and then when it started happening I remember one guy in Hollywood that I was talking about a project with I mean just while Trump was running I was you know maybe gonna write something or something and he said oh yeah I'm voting for Trump just to fuck everything up that's all I wanted to do is fuck everything up and I believe he was completely sincere and I kind of thought oh geez you know because I I guess I knew him and I guess if you if you didn't know Trump you could believe some sort of horrible conspiracy thing it would be so much more comforting to believe that the reigns have been taken by an evil genius people were always saying second guessing so there was always a difficulty with them no matter what he was doing some people were saying he's being impulsive baby and the people being like no this is another next level so he's 30 dimensional chess type of genius and either way it was resulting in the same crap the movement didn't change anything I feel and I guess I can't prove this but I feel I had an inside track to knowing that it was an impulsive baby it was absolutely and that there was not even one other level he was not at the checkers level never mind three dimensional chess and I just thought I also there's a kind of I'm going to jump top this entirely because I think maybe this is what you asked me to be an atheist and to be libertarian grows out of to me a huge amount of optimism a breath taking amount of optimism you are a pathological optimist yes ridiculous and I really really do not believe in evil that's still true I think that evil is a religious concept I really I would argue with Bill Maher about this all the time I'm as far from cynic as you can get and cynic and skeptic get thrown together if I may I remember this maybe an early time when I remember you I was watching politically incorrect and somebody was on talking about how we're running out of aluminum for cans and they were like this is you know the end times are upon us and you told a little parable about how like we used to use tin cans and we started running out of tin and it got too expensive and people figured out how to use aluminum and you said quite you know and it kind of stunned the other people on the panel the nut saying and I'm confident that whatever comes after aluminum will come up with because humans are really fucking good at you know creating the next thing that helps the species so that kind of huge huge optimism I really really believed that and I think that this combination of swirling things of Donald Trump making me really scared of silly rhetoric in a serious serious realm I think I would have felt exactly the same way if Abby Hoffman had won in 68 you know what I mean I loved Abby Hoffman I fucking loved everything about Abby Hoffman I loved everything he said I loved everything I loved running the pig for president if Abby Hoffman had been our president in 68 I think I might have felt a similar horror to Trump now Abby Hoffman had many IQ points on Trump if we're being honest so does Pegasus right and and Abby Hoffman also had I think if not a large amount of compassion at least some not totally solipsistic and but I would have felt very similar very similar to that so Trump hit I really felt that danger of that and when the virus hit amazingly for the pathological optimist there was an amazing feeling of how connected we were I mean I always knew if you'd asked me intellectually you know is the whole world that connected I would have said well yes of course there's no doubt about it but man when they were getting virus reports every bit of the world it was just like wow we really were on Spaceship Earth we're in the global village we're all interconnected and I was willing if you'd frozen time right then and said how will I gotta do all this shitty kind of language stuff you have to do how will people who call themselves libertarians react I don't want to we'll only go from is this kind of like calling pregnant women birthing but I'm saying that that's important because I don't want to I respect you enough do not do the argument I want to do which is I didn't change at all the movement change that's always bullshit people who call themselves libertarians I would have bet anything at that point I would have given you long odds that the libertarians were going to be at the forefront of masks and vaccines because the libertarians are going to say this is something we can do voluntarily that will help other people and help ourselves we can do that instantly and when I got a phone call not a phone call sorry email telegram I use those when I got an email saying there's going to be an anti a mask rally in Vegas and we're certainly counting on you to lead it and I was like what when was this not pinpoint you know but you know that whole time is a blur it was early on early it was it was before there were serious lockdowns still shut down but we're not talking like this is in February or March 2020 late june or july so I was just horrified and then I said no I'm not going to do that and the answer came back well do you think it's the government's job to mandate masks and I wrote back well no but we're not talking about that I want everyone to wear a mask I want everyone to wear a mask at that point in time I want everyone to wear a mask I don't want the government to to mandate it I just want everybody to do it and I want every motherfucker to be vaccinated and my thought about freedom there was this is it's a very easy parallel to me it's not see belts it's drunk driving and those are two different things and I mean we have to of course put out health care because if we are all paying for each other's health care it is not your right to ride without a helmet but that's an argument so that we're not paying for each other's health care exactly and I'm with you there but I'm just saying that when people who call themselves libertarians people who birth when they when they started saying don't wear masks and don't get the vaccine right or even going to a point if I may to extend the point some people calling themselves libertarian went so far as to say there should be laws passed against businesses we're not even there yet we don't need that yet once you get to that I go completely insane once someone who calls themselves a libertarian says we're going to make a law that says a private company cannot say you can have to wear a mask for their property we're done I just explode I'm trying to give it the benefit of the doubt and go earlier I was just saying the idea the idea that not wanting things to be forced right is the same as not wanting to do them right is something that that was one of the differences I wanted to tease out all the time right I mean how many times had I gone on TV and said I want drugs to be legal I don't want to use them that's so easy for me to say the analogy here is it can be pro-vaccine but anti-mandate exactly and I will tell you right now I believe emotionally I believe that if people representing as libertarian had come out strongly and said you know we're 500 people here we are 100% vaccinated we're all wearing masks and you know something we're going to show up vaccinated and masked and socially distanced and say this should not be done with force I would have been there every day every single time can I reel it back a little bit first to Trump and Trump taking over I'm interested in your take on this as well well then you are the only one I know I hear your opinion I may be joining the majority here but you said when Trump won you're kind of like holy shit there's no restraint or anything like that for me I have to say on a certain level after he won it was amazing I thrilled to the idea that somebody like him who has no qualifications is running against the most if there is a deep state they were in the tank for Hillary like she really fucked it up not to win really overslept she's like the American sprinters in the 1972 Olympics who were like fuck like the final was 2 hours ago maybe we can still make it really really bad but then when he started like first off he didn't change enough things like he was constrained and in many ways when he started to say we're going to take troops home suddenly things erupted there is he was hemmed in by many things like what exactly changed the government kept spending more money spending went up under Trump but he never wanted to go down I guess I guess for me the problem with Trump is that he was not a break with the way things were going he was kind of a continuation the rhetorically he's a bomb thrower he did the thing that was attractive to a lot of people which took away the pleasantries and the double speak of power brokering and was a shameless power broker was an open power broker and kind of gross about it and so I think which is uncomfortable but also kind of like maybe this we'll get to a point where we really do radically change the size scope of government because there were all those early headlines of people in the center and on the left who were scratching their heads saying maybe when we were extolling executive power under Obama maybe we made a mistake that was our hope here that was our hope we carried on a lot about that yeah so yeah Trump shouldn't have executive power neither should Obama I thought I was really hoping that this would be part of reeling back the power of the presidency which had been so out of control 40 years pick a amount of time terrible terrible terrible and I thought maybe we'd learn our lesson on this and when I was watching the debates going up who was going to go up against Trump the Democratic primary debates I was waiting for one person to say well the one thing I'm going to do is cut back executive privilege so this doesn't happen again and not one of them said that which is how they were going to use it and it was that power race to that so before COVID what were the things that Trump was doing that showed there was no continuity between a bad situation under Obama from a libertarian point of view that you've agreed with you were certainly not an Obama hater in any kind of weird way but it's a critic of a government that does too much and spends too much what was the big change under Trump that like you were like holy cow he is going to burn it down boy that's really really tough because you kind of hit it the immigration under Obama was terrible right and I guess if I were trying to perceive myself as cold and intellectual I would say there wasn't much difference but the outright racism of Trump even though the policies might not have changed that much clouded everything clouded everything for me Macho taunting over Twitter the idea that our foreign policy was in the hands of an impulsive tweet threatening in the moment for me and the fact that I was number 7 on his hate list do you want it to be higher or come on no but exactly that was not a small thing and not because it was me but because a political figure had an opinion on a magician I found horrific you do not see Lyndon Johnson going I think Gerald Ford was pretty anti-Doug Henning we got to take this mother I don't care if I don't get reelected this I'm doing boy you were able to pull up a politician magician in the same period of time that's Dennis Miller level now this is I think my brain has been shutting down over the past 40 years I remember early when he either late in his election or early when he was elected he said he went after Penn on Twitter and said that's why I fired you right and I at the time tweeted back like he was on a game show that you hosted and Penn didn't work for you he put in a job application he went on a game show that you hosted that NBC cast the fact that he said Penn was totally unknown before he did Celebrity Apprentice and I tweeted back the name of the show was Celebrity Apprentice but I believed him I believed he was that delusional he held the actual thing I don't believe that Donald Trump ever lies I mean in this to bring it back to Bob Dylan and I could hear various people groaning already I believe Bob Dylan believes absolutely everything he is singing at the moment he is singing it and then his beliefs change I mean this is not to equate Donald Trump but yeah I agree with you that Trump never lies he just doesn't have any coherence you read the book by what's the guy's name Frankfurt or something on bullshit that great thing where he separates bullshit from a lie and that's the truth and bullshit just doesn't care it just rolls over also you know there's a new book out about Bob Dylan the early time and it says that one of his road crew has this wonderful I didn't memorize it this wonderful quotation about Bob that says everybody's looking for the person who wrote the Times Zero Changing only exists when that song is being sung and that just like a diamond bullet we want to cover everything together that was like a diamond bullet to me and I went right when Bob Dylan is singing the Times Zero Changing the person singing that song believes every word of it but the second it goes on to it ain't me babe it's a different guy it's not with Trump the only mistake I would make in that comparison the only thing I would want to make a little finer point on is that when an actor or a singer or performer believes something in the moment we have a box for that of being within a proscenium when someone who's in the public eye and responsible for that the second we no longer have something that's uncontainable the whole world's his stage and that's kind of creepy but did Trump mostly you were saying and I appreciate the honesty and I don't question it that a lot of it is emotional but did policies change discussion a group of friends trying to say he's killing fewer people than Obama he's killing fewer people than Obama but that tweet these are not things that should be commensurate it's like he's killing fewer people that's kind of good that's all of it so I tried to say and I said this a zillion times but we're not really talking publicly I mean that's not all I'm addressing I tried to look before Covid really seriously at Trump and said if I am a peacenik which I am I think I'm the worst kind of peacenik probably to a fault and you said to me you said to me you know Nick came to me in 2015 and said we're going to put a guy in power that you hate more than anybody you could possibly hate he is going to embarrass you with everything he says he is going to make all your friends go crazy but he is going to kill 25% fewer people around the world I think I'd make that bargain really fast really fast and I think that kind of happened yeah and it's hard to say what I would think about this whole thing if Covid hadn't come along which also he developed the vaccine faster than vitally and also I want to get into this because it's weird he he created Operation Warp Speed or kind of like put that in place in a way that certainly Hillary or well he let it happen if presidents get the blame they get the credit for that but then he was hiding that for most of his presidency spending time talking about hydrochloroquine at a weird amount of time you know and that thing is like same with they brought people home from war at the same time he spoke like no other president was spoken about Charlottesville very early on in his presidency and there's no doubt about of you know like outward racism that's brewed up he certainly he gave space for it in a way that was unimaginable six months before you talk about and empowered races there's no doubt about that okay so but here and again because I don't care about Trump and I don't in the Covid years so let's kind of fast forward to the Covid years the hands of time but you know January 2020 February March Trump weirdly you know he was both on the present he was in the room every day talking but then not saying very much and not dictating very much but the parts of the government that maintained monopoly control on public health the FDA and the CDC were kind of at war with Trump right this is what we hear you know like they weren't taking orders from him but they fucked up everything from the beginning in January when the first cases were found in Seattle you know somebody like Anthony Fauci was like hey don't wear masks, masks are bullshit don't wear masks and then it's like come back he was saying that we needed the mask for the no no he was not he was saying masks were ineffective don't do it and he's since cop to saying I don't want to run on PPE he also you know at one point was saying you know what we need for herd immunity was this percentage but I was lowballing that because I didn't want people to get freaked out and so you know I'm not this in no way am I stumping for Trump on any of this stuff but it seems to me part of the issues with the way we responded to Covid was the continuation of the government pre-Trump that is problematic you have one of the one of the true proofs of some of libertarians thoughts libertarians been fighting forever against the nurses and doctors being able to cross state lines and different licensing and that suddenly they were like oh you know that's not so important that you sit for six hours in a room and you know so Massachusetts can rip you off for $800 to practice from New Hampshire and I was saying that a lot there was a lot of stuff in early Covid where libertarians were being shown the stuff the nuts were saying in the past 30 years was completely right this licensing stuff this all this kind of stuff it's all hands on deck we got to do that that was just simple graft just ripping off money the government just ripping it off and slowing things down completely rotten if I may also I live in New York City when Covid started Andrew Cuomo and Bill de Blasio was the mayor of New York at the time Andrew Cuomo was the governor of New York hate each other they are really like the toad and the scorpion in a death match all the time but they both were saying right up until they shut down New York and especially the city they were like hey this isn't a big deal you got to go out we got to support the businesses I mean they were telling people to basically go out and open mouth kiss and by actually you know put the guacamole on everything we need that money injected into the economy and then they shut everything down and it turned out that Andrew Cuomo was you know taking old people who were not infected with you know who were sick and putting them all in the same room so that they could all be together and then it turned you know in diet very high rates and then lied about it and I bring this up not to because like you you know and in a lot of ways I should say I think by libertarianism growing up was informed by Reading Reason magazine and probably a lot of the stuff that you were saying because you were always at odds to say I'm not an anarchist I believe in some government I'm with you completely on that but I'm bringing this up because these were not it wasn't Trump and it wasn't the federal government and it wasn't people who were saying burn it all down it was people who had been in power for a long time exercising that power in ways that were horrific and then kind of running from the consequences of it there's a lot of it and I was I was aware of that too you know and I was also really really interesting to see you know to see how much I learned from that and one of the things that you know I remember when they I would never be a spokesperson for James Randy educational foundation because I said I'm a loose cannon you know and I will say stuff you don't want to be associated with so I've never spoken for American atheists I've never spoken for the humanitarians you know I've never I've never I would love to be in the meeting where the humanitarians are saying we need you it's like God damn it you're a loose cannon you're going to make people be inhuman I'm telling you but the nutty thing was was I the asteroid people the people that are trying to protect us from getting hit by an asteroid they said to me would you be on our board and would you speak about this he said you don't want me and he said no no I really think you want me and I said well do me a favor on this next email CC everybody on your board and all the important people and he sent me an email saying we'd like Penn to do this this is Penn and I wrote back I use the word cunt that was it that was it really great strategy I hope a lot of kids in grammar school are listening to this because this is a way to get out of a lot of stuff in school but I mean you understand and maybe it too by the way and they understood it in exactly the spirit they were not offended I mean you want to tell that story of all they ran screaming from the room but they went oh yeah you are going to make a joke you are going to do this kind of stuff we don't want to be explaining this forever you know so all of this is coming around I believe what's a cop out I believe this is a cop out so you can bust me on it let me know I know you are going to I have tried to always say I am speaking for myself and I have tried to always say I am not speaking for a group I have not been afraid to take I have read and read some magazine and repeated on TV I have not been afraid to do that I have not been afraid when they said that I self identify as a libertarian to not have the camera come up and go no no no so I have allowed myself to be seen by maybe a few people as a spokesperson for certain things but I have also tried to protect myself in a certain way and say I am speaking for myself so I have seen some not much because I try not to read anything with my name in it so I have not seen much of this but I am aware that some people are disappointed in things that I have said but I don't think they can be disappointed in someone for 421 days who has shut down his show for 421 days there was a lockdown in Vegas that wasn't there for a period of time but this may be speaks to the libertarian thing very strongly March March 13 March 12 was the last day of shooting Ben and Teller fool us 2020 was the last day of shooting that probably Matt you remember last two days 11 and 12 we were wondering if we should be shooting at all our studio audience declined by about 75% people who were going to come in and willing to shoot and so they were like something fishy we had people flying in from China we were going I don't know if we should people from 14 countries on that season and your theater in the Rio you have a sister casino in Wuhan right so that was the 12th the 13th was a Friday that we had off and the 14th some of these days maybe you're wrong 14th was a Saturday and that Saturday night I won't over dramatize and say we were sold out probably we had like 800 tickets sold very good night we're coming back after two weeks off boom a lot of tickets sold and there was an article in the Times from France from a guy who wrote what we would do in France if I knew what I knew now know now two weeks ago and we were just about I mean this is all sloppy and poetic we were kind of two weeks behind Europe kind of sort of and we were set to go on Saturday and I was on the phone that Saturday with Glenn and with Teller for five hours we were on the phone you know off and on but pretty much a lot of on saying should we do the show tonight and the Rio and Caesars were going yes you're doing the show tonight and tickets were selling it wasn't like tickets sales had dropped off tickets were selling we went from like I believe we went from like 700 to 900 during this discussion and we were going yeah we're going to do the show there's nothing's changing there's no rules for the government coming down Caesars isn't shutting down and I said well I just I don't think we should do the show I don't think I want to be part of pulling people into that room we're completely safe we can just not do the meet and greet afterwards we're on stage there's good ventilation but I remember I was tortured it was tough also because it wasn't sure who'd lead the way like the NBA was canceling games but not the whole season so we finally said at five o'clock we're not going to do the show and then Caesars was unhappy and I said fine if Caesars wants to sue us for the income for that when everything's okay on Monday okay they can and maybe they're right maybe they win and we give them money I don't care but I don't want to do the show tonight and then I called up David Copperfield and I said don't do your second show tonight man and he said what they're not okay I said I think maybe and I called up Piff and I said just maybe we should start this we should just do it on our own start this and then someone at Caesars that's not speaking for all of Caesars it's just one person we don't really blame them because no one knew what they were talking about said we're going to shut down everything on Monday but do the shows tonight and Sunday and I said no that there's no way that logic makes sense if we should shut down Monday we should shut down Friday the sooner the better so everything in the world was functioning fine then if you wanted to look at how the world should run in my point of view it's that people should care about bringing people together and they should say we are cancelling our shows we don't really need this and I don't think there would have been I don't think you would have this I'm going to go to Vegas what the fuck went wrong I don't think you would even have that thought crossing your mind if I hadn't gotten that email that said lead the anti-mask rally and if the word libertarian and I'm not blaming people within the libertarian party if the word libertarian had not gotten slopified with anti-vaxxers even QAnon conspiracy theories it all got slopified into that where the word became unpleasant maybe it's as silly as not saying master bedroom maybe it's as silly as that but maybe it has a little more guts to it I respect the process that you were just explaining there and things like that and I'm not asking this isn't where to go back to the apocalypse now thing I either got to get you to sign a libertarian membership card which I'm not sure if I have any or else we have to butcher you like Brando or anything like that but at what point does and I totally get the sense of a lot of people who call themselves libertarian I'm not in the business of saying what is or isn't but I know I'm not that at what point do you start to question some of the things COVID is more or less in the rear view mirror or at least the panic period is so weirdly because it's not in any way except the way we see it mortality mortality is way down partly because of vaccines and I want to talk about that kind of stuff but it's masking it's not clear what it does or doesn't in the New York Times every couple of days they're releasing stories about it turns out that mass aren't as effective as we thought and it's one thing to talk about the early moments of stuff where nobody knows what's going on and a lot of stuff happens I just want to clarify for record because the contagiousness of the variants also changed and that also played a factor in mass effectiveness I just want to make sure it's out there but a lot of the mass studies are about the delta variant and things like that and we do I think it's worth from a libertarian point of view to say okay after a certain point we knew pretty early on that kids were not as affected by this and they were also not transmitters in the same way but it's kids took this on the chin more than adults with the exception of most deaths are people over 70 which is tragic and awful and I know I'm sure we all know a ton of people who were not allowed even to say goodbye I choked up thinking about this to their parents who are dying because now it's too dangerous that's all fucked up but it's like K through 12 and I think we all have younger children under say the age of 25 or under 30 whose lives were the most disrupted on a day to day basis even though they were the least likely to get or transmit the disease like we should think about that I think this was a crazy drastic experiment we did about ourselves across the board and I think one of the things that even we were still podcasting through all of it and so we weren't doing anything so we had a lot of philosophical conversations I think the damage we're seeing with children and also the things that also make me tough to look at libertarianism is that like wow are we not as grossly individual as I thought before the pandemic we are so much more closely tethered to our families and communities and activities and coworkers and stuff like that in an actual like literal health way that I did not understand before the pandemic so it makes me more hesitant to speak so quickly individually about anything when I look at my children's lives and my lives and that kind of thing it's a kind of thing that when you bring it up it immediately definitely cuts both ways well it's also because Penn your definition of libertarian has never been that I alone run the universe you always have talked about you use the for decades have used the analogy of saying you know I believe in you know people should people should be allowed to drink but they shouldn't be allowed to drive drunk you know so I mean you've always had a bounded conception of what libertarian means and what individual rights mean and perhaps we come out of all of this with a sharper sense of if we're trying to be serious where we want to give people as much ability to make decisions in their life that matter society but there's also been there's this very very targeted problem of libertarianism when you deal with a virus it is where we got really good arguments for roads we got really good arguments for schools that's all whether they're accurate whether they work or not we don't care but there is a good strong argument and you mean for kind of allowing the private sector to we don't know if it works looks really good on paper and you can stand up and make the argument to anybody and it's not embarrassing it's a reasonable argument when you come down to a virus you've got this this huge problem and we have to and this is so difficult because we have to slice it thinner and thinner from what we knew so I almost want to go to an ideal situation or worse situation that didn't really exist but if there is a virus and if there is a vaccine and if there are some people who can't take that vaccine because they are vulnerable immune systems like that or age or even money they can't take that vaccine especially on the libertarian if they're money involved and if there are people that could get that vaccine and not transmit it or not get that vaccine and transmit it to those people moving freely we come down to what ready riches said which is everybody believes my body my control except that nobody does ready rich came with the example today of we can be very very pro-choice but when a woman is carrying a baby to 8 months and 2 weeks how many of us feel really good about abortion all those kinds of things but within the integrity of your body if your body can be weaponized by a virus to kill other people I don't think I'm making any sort of argument here pro-libertarian or anti-libertarian I'm just saying it gets wicked hard sure but it's wicked hard I agree but this is also maybe the difference between something like polio or smallpox and COVID after vaccines or after we have a certain amount of knowledge so it's like if we say you have a virus that's going around that's going to kill 50% of the people you encounter you know is there a role for the government to say you know what there's we have a vaccine that is perfect and that either has no side effects or very few side effects is there a role for a mandate in that kind of situation I believe there is from a libertarian perspective because again I'm not an anarchist right and then when you get to a position I was just checking this morning to make sure I was up to date 67% of Americans are fully vaccinated against COVID at this point two thirds the infection rates are very low we're talking ultimately the infection fatality rate is somewhere below 1% if you're in a certain class of people it's going to be higher than that it's going to be lower than that depending on various things everybody can get the vaccine which minimizes the problems there are some people who are immunocompromised who can't now we get into a question of saying like how much do we limit the free movement the free choices of people in society to protect that small percentage of people who are immunocompromised do we build our society around this stuff like that yeah and I mean how you know I recognize and again one of the things that I think you've always done which is great within the broad libertarian conversation is bring emotionality into it because you're a skeptic you're a rationalist you're smart but you always talk about stuff really this is going off a little bit on a tangent but the reason I talk about the emotional stuff is so I can have the rational stuff sure you can't buy one without the other and all I try to do is to draw a line there and say now I know I'm talking emotionally I'm talking politically I think we need more of that I think we need more of like honest emotionality and all of you know once you've labeled it I believe you get a pass when you label it maybe I try to reach for too much of a pass but I do think you deserve a pass when you go I'm going to make my logical argument later but I want to tell you where it grew out of but how do you feel now I mean of like where we are as a country what are the restrictions coming out of COVID that should stay in place and what are the ones that should disappear because I was thinking and one of my colleagues you know and I said hey I'm going to be talking to Penn and he said you know one of the first he saw you guys live not long after 9-11 where you know you did you built into your act a whole thing about the metal detector and going through the metal detector and giving away your rights and you talked about the reaction to 9-11 as in many ways an overreaction I was just going to say before you brought that up I was going to say TSA my whole argument on the virus thing is TSA my first time flying my first time flying I went to Budapest to do a movie Please tell me you were doing a command performance for Victor Orban because overseas you're a fascist then we will win a lot of fans if I say I was doing a comic book movie I remember being there with all the masks and stuff there's the TSA stuff I'm just going we should have just said I mean it wouldn't have been wonderful if the world had just said okay now there's the virus fuck the whole TSA thing we're not doing that anymore well the one concession TSA made like and you were talking about occupational licensing went out the window for a while TSA at one point said okay you can bring on like 50 gallon jugs of hand sanitizer other liquids you know it's still you can't have enough moisturizer to wet your cheeks but you just call it hand sanitizer and bring it on yeah I now call napalm hand sanitizer it kills whatever's on your hand for well yeah I guess you know I think what he's poking at as someone who's been an observer I am the people who talk to you my libertarian guide was pen on pen radio when I was living in New Jersey you know to being in the seat now and being around him and basically he got co-opted by people who aren't pro-science and I think pen is more pro-science than anything else more than libertarianism or maybe not more than atheism but you know they're the same thing correct yeah yeah I think it was disappointment I think it was really just you were let down by a lack of of scientific thinking well there was if I may there's definitely a contingent of people you know of libertarian I'm trying to come up with the right phrase of people who designate themselves as libertarian or whatever that went from being anti-mandate to being anti-vaccine maybe they were anti anti-vaccine before COVID or some or anti-science I would I mean we can just and this is this is one of the fun things we do on my podcast is talk about the number of times I'm wrong it is remarkable it is almost supernatural I said and you remember I said this to you Matt Donnelly I said all these fucking anti-vaxxers man when that COVID vaccine hits they just go to shut up remember how many times he said that that'll just shut them the fuck and I believed it Nick every fiber of me I just said you know they're going to come up with the vaccine for COVID which is certainly they didn't three days which is the most amazing thing and it could have come to market much sooner without any compromise in health but for the FDA I think you agree but I thought for sure you know the Jenny McCarty fools the people that were killing children with measles and shit that once this vaccine would come out you would say I'm just going to use an arbitrary name Jenny you're going to say to Jenny I thought you were anti shut the fuck up I was sure that was going to happen and when there was a stronger anti-vaxx movement on that see the thing is if you're going to call yourself a libertarian and then you're going to say I have a right to not get the vaccine because Bill Gates is putting a tiny a tiny chip into me through this to control me and get kiddie porn to be done through a pizza shop there I'm going to say you know that club we belong to that libertarian thing I'm not going to show up for the next meeting right by the way this segment is brought to you by Microsoft and no island we serve peanuts on the plane but you know that's that's what bothered me and I think and I keep coming back to this and I'm not coming back to this literally I'm coming back to this poetically I think when you say Penn we believe and there's 300 of us on this email chain that you're the guy that's going to stand up and tell people not to wear masks on that date not now when we know a lot more but on that date I am going to have a strong reaction to that and did you use cunt in the reply they were like hey you know what maybe don't show up yeah I think that's really the crux of it I want to talk about freedom I want to talk about smaller smaller government which is the same freedom I'll even talk about I'll talk about gun rights I'll talk about any of that kind of stuff but if you've got a term that's going to put me back into that moment where someone's asking me to speak out against masks and I'm not claiming anything special here when people I loved were killed by the virus I'm going to bristle that's my only claim you still think when you read an article about a policy you probably still think immediately I bet this can be solved with more freedom it's harder now to say libertarianism as a singular thing whoever said we're no longer dealing with a marketplace of ideas but we're dealing with a marketplace of realities when every single website you go to caters to your leanings when everything you read tells you to swing one side of the other it feels like it's very hard to even find a place to put a tent pulled down to put a marketplace of ideas up right now but don't you feel and I guess this goes to something I wanted to ask you about because in some of your comments you gave a spectacular interview on Big Think on July 15, 2020 it's up everywhere and that's where which is early on in the sole process and things and you know what's great about it is like you are you speak as you think you don't hide the ball or anything like that but in that I was going to say you made some comments there and elsewhere about how you had started out thinking you know when we got rid of things like the legacy media and what not and we got rid of the guardrails where suddenly the barriers to entry to talking and to having discussions and having different types of journalism, different types of media all of that kind of stuff that that would be utopia or something like it and now you're not so sure can you talk a little bit about that because this and Matthew your point I hear what you're saying and I know from Reason was founded in 1968 I became editor-in-chief in 2000 and we benefited so massively from the internet and more than the internet like the lowering of the costs of being able to put a message out there and gain an audience it became cheaper, it became easier and I understand now we're in a very sour pessimistic period as a country and as a culture and there's you know we're now in a new tower of Babel and there's just too much out there and it's you know there's too much misinformation and disinformation etc I'm still really optimistic about this because I think you know there's a pony in there so I think that my my whole point of view conveniently was written up by Jonathan Rausch and the Constitution of Knowledge Constitution of Knowledge is I can't think of anything better to say about that I mean the optimism that you're speaking of is Wikipedia how can we do Wikipedia more and do less of this and I also, I gotta tell you I can't completely lose my optimism because I do think I did not think there would be a rough period with one man one channel to quote fire sign theater when everybody has a TV station I didn't think there would be this amount of discomfort but there is it's kind of what I was saying about what I would often say about terrorism which was this is the death row of religion I mean it's horrible but it's actually showing a good thing the amount of religion has been going down still is going down and there was that surprising article in the Times a couple of days ago that if you really want to think globally if you really want to think globally things are getting better really fast we don't have Rwanda and once you have that cleaned up Ukraine seems like nothing I mean it's a much smaller thing do you feel at times you've talked things are getting better even this time we want to be as pessimistic as possible the world is better even if the US seems a little dingy well that's what part of Trump seems to be to be more the effect than the cause of a breakdown of something and Biden I think part of the reality that people are grappling with now because Trump he's obviously going to try to come back he's Napoleon and Elba or whatever maybe well maybe won't there's not a lot of future left for Donald Trump in America well no one tried to stop him except McDonald's they're doing that they are really we got to just give a little credit right there they just keep pumping in the big mask you know executive power I mean look no one's thrilled at Biden but that's more of a sign that we're in a long term process and is what we're going through in America and I think Trump he couldn't articulate it but he was hooked into the idea that America may be where England and France were after World War II where you know they're hey we're world powers but we really aren't anymore the world is moving on and we're still going to matter and we're still going to be important but we really can't you know we're not the center of the world anymore and that is hard to deal with and some of the comments I've heard you talk about you know are kind of generational you know you're getting up there in age and the world like a lot of your references like mine are from you know in the 1970's how about that Bob Hope one of the things and I think I picked it up in Matt's Twitter feed originally but from a couple days ago but there's that meme of Penn and Teller being killed in a Sega video game by Lou Reed exactly and I realized to 99% of the people alive today they are like none of those words make sense but it's like I was like oh my god that is such a wonderful world and as we get older we worry about you know that our world is in both literal and figurative ways ending and that's a tragedy it's a tragedy for me when I die no one will be more sad than me but it's also like you're saying you know the world is getting better and you know even life in America in most ways I would absolutely rather be my kids than me if I had to roll the dice and say I'd be born in the same way I would much rather have been me than my parents oh wow that's a frightening thing I think that's true there are few things democracy in the United States is certainly being rolled back what does that mean though I mean people are angry and they fight more I think what it means is the gerrymandering and the individual control of the polls and stuff like that that may be happening I think is a step backwards I think we should have been moving away from the electoral college I think the idea that I mean I'm not the expert on this but the fact that a person in Wyoming has 50 times the power of a person in California you know I think the only reason we're talking about that is because of Trump who won one election and will never be I mean he's demonstrated that he can't win a majority of America he's not going to do better in 2024 assuming the McFlurries haven't put him under whether it's an important thing or whether it's not an important thing it's not a good thing you can say it's trivial but you can't say it's good it's frustrating if I may be a dick here if we're in the 21st century and we created vaccines effective vaccines against COVID in three days and you're saying you know the real problem is those fucking Wyoming people have so much power they have their cowboy boots on my neck we have so one you are so correct you're just 100% correct in that point exactly true enjoy the sense of Wyoming we love you they're the best sadly though they don't have 50% more spending power so actually fuck Wyoming where is it it's just part of Colorado isn't it well you know this is there are five states that Penn and Teller have never played and I want to play the move one of them is Wyoming so let's lay off that is West Dakota one of them as well yeah no but so I do want to point out generally in America is getting better which doesn't mean there aren't many many things that are wrong like nobody should ever say you know shut up your car has a really good stereo system now and you can listen to Spotify on it while you drive so shut the fuck up George Floyd why was George Floyd upset about anything that's a bad way of thinking I'd say like at the moment we're feeling more of like the casual optimism that the cooler heads will prevail seems challenged in a way that's still okay it looks like we're going to have to be really huge advocates again like people we admired in the 60s and things like that I think we have to be advocating for women's autonomy for separation of church and state I think we have to wake up and be passionate advocates again and I think that's where libertarians are more equipped well that's kind of it's kind of funny if you think about it that way right where it's like what we're maybe or what you're pissed off about it's like you know you're John Wayne in the shootest or something you hung up your spurs and your six gun you just want to die in peace right maybe knock a piece off of Lauren Bacall who's running the house you're living in and it's like these fucking guys keep coming for you you can't take a shit into the outhouse without somebody trying to knock you off and it's also that the battles that I feel like I have to be part of now are not the fun ones I mean it's fun to be a nut on the abortion thing I'm not a nut I just want women to have their right that's not a nut position that's not a fun position it's a fun position you don't want them to be able to drive but you do want them to be able to seriously and maybe because one of the things that's a big deal for me the fact that what I'm talking about is now I want I liked when I could say nut stuff that was over here and now the fact that there are battles that need to be fought is that every single libertarian should be aligned with every single democrat in getting the women the right to their bodies now whether the libertarians are going to say the government should pay for da da da da shut the fuck up we don't want laws against this and the fact that in a weird way it's kind of inside out the fact is that the libertarians that share my heart are now with the democrats on a lot of things and that feels creepy what else and I agree it's interesting I've been a professional libertarian since 93 when I joined the staff and I would say when I started being pro-choice was every bit as much as being in favor of lower taxes it was that wonderful there was a wonderful thing that said I believe in a married gay couple's right to protect their marijuana crop with semi-automatic weapons absolutely it used to be the t-shirt was kind of pro-choice on everything and it's interesting to me and I respect libertarian libertarian calling people, designated people who disagree with me on a lot of stuff and it's a surprise to me how many self-described libertarians are anti-abortion or we'll say I believe that abortion is murder because life begins at conception and I disagree with them and I argue with them but it is a change and the world we live in is different than the 90s or the 70s many things I feel this way about open borders or not open borders but mass immigration I thought we had won the battle it's a better world when people are free to move where they want and live and work and prosper legally I thought we had won debates about free trade which is now under attack by people who call themselves libertarians and right-wingers and left-wingers so there's that is part of it that you were not expecting to be fighting it's not that you're fighting but you thought these were kind of settled issues within something that you thought of as a tribal identity and now you're like this tribe these aren't my people I think there was that there was also I am constantly trying to not not be tribal it goes against so much this human but I say to my children all the time I say you are one of one or you're one of seven billion you don't have a choice in between you're either speaking for yourself or you're part of this whole world and we haven't even got into the really hairy things you know I think it's okay to bring up stuff that there does not seem to be an easy solution which is climate change which although I wanted to be doubtful about that for years and years and years seems impossible to be doubtful now about it by that you mean that human activity is having an impact on climate I think it's pretty hard to do that now I know very few people who do and then there are questions about given that what do you do now that's an entirely different thing but I'm telling you that I wasn't even there until the early teens you were kind of a late very late and for no I think just I just wasn't good at it you know I had something better to say it didn't matter that much it didn't matter that much to you it didn't really pay that much attention and you were cruising on your default setting that's all you mentioned and we've talked a bunch about the late 60s and early 70s you bring up tribalism and tribalism the way we talk about it now is always terrible I think rightfully so I don't believe I have my tribes but when people talk about are you a Republican or a Democrat or even a libertarian I'm kind of like I don't want to be part of a tribe where it's like being in a gang where you get beat into the gang and then you have to do whatever the gang wants you don't have any autonomy that seems horrible I'm curious when I think of libertarianism as a more of as a direction or as an adjective libertarianism is a direction it's an adjective it's a temperament that you were saying and I'm sure I'm getting this deeply from you that it's the default setting is like let's think about whether or not whatever we're talking about would be better with more freedom or less sometimes the answer is no talk about tribes there was the human being in January of 1967 in San Francisco that Timothy Leary spoke at and Alan Ginsberg spoke at and the Grateful Dead played out yeah you should have been but it was also called the gathering of tribes and like can we maybe this is something that libertarians should talk about more or think about of like when you say to your kids you're either a tribe of one or seven billions actually you can be part of like 10 or 15 different tribes simultaneously and the tribes don't have to be at war I guess I see you know when you have children and you see them start to start to build an identity with what they are it can make you look at yourself an awful lot you know we use windows we don't use Apple because windows are the gamer thing to do and if you're all the assholes are not gamers and you know there's this video game you've got to play this one you don't and you I hate TikTok but I love Reddit and all I say I think they just think I'm having a stroke and mumbling I just go you know Rolling Stones and Beatles Rolling Stones and Beatles we're the Stones Beatles check the fuck up and I come back to this very often there's a book about Celine Dion it's got a love of the title I know what it is but it was I think I know what you're talking about it was by a guy who was a critic but it's a real homage to her but it's much more have you read it? No obviously not you got to read it because he just makes the point that our taste the fact that we don't like Celine Dion and none of us do the fact that we don't is this class thing signaling all of that totally separate from the music or anything like that we all pretend the rock snob thing taking to the nth degree and all I do is as I roll over and over that I just go when is it not fun when do we cross the line to not fun? Now I know nothing about sports I don't care about sports but I do know that it's supposed to be fun tribalism but then there's a moment when they kill each other at soccer match where I don't think it's fun anymore Ed Carl Wilson is talking about love let's talk about love it's an incredible book so I watch my children do this stuff that is 100% harmless you know when I was when I thought the mothers were a great band and who would ever play James Taylor that was harmless and it's harmless up until you get to QAnon and that's a club you really want to be part of no one understands this but some of the stuff that I've read about QAnon say that it's all about friendship and a lack of loneliness it's not about information at all and you want to go Jesus but that's me on everything too and I just want to I just want to try to constantly remember that and constantly remember that even though I made appearances on TV shows saying stuff and they put libertarian under my picture or something that eventually we have to deal with real issues eventually there is a young woman in Mississippi that needs an abortion and going on and saying outlandish stuff on TV and making a joke I guess we still got to do that but there's real work to do I had the other thing of being in Australia when a lot of the January 6th hearings were going on and when the Supreme Court ruling on Roe v. Wade came down and that also gives you another perspective I've been wanting to say this like it doesn't fit in here I've been wanting to say it I also listened to the Obama book The Promised Land and L.O.D. had said to me a lot of times he said you know every argument you make for libertarianism Obama can make better than you he can make that argument better he really understands it and that always really powerful thing I disagree with Obama on everything but listening to that book was a remarkable experience because he talks about health care and he makes the arguments that I made and want to make and better make it's what's called the steel man instead of the strong man you make the position strong he makes it really strong and then says I'm making that decision it's a different decision but this is I understand the opposite now when he comes down to war and shit I couldn't disagree more but he really he understands the position of Gandhi and Martin Luther King he really does he just made a different decision and I think what needs to be required from a politician is even though I disagree with Obama the argument and I think you can make it very very well that Trump's change in policy was not that different or maybe in many of the things we really care about better than Obama's I think I need to require among the people I put in the power of leadership I need to require that they have the sensibility of Obama where he seems to be sanely I would rather have a decision made incorrectly by someone who is sane and weighing the options that I would have a decision made correctly by a lunatic and I think that may be my summation of the Obama-Trump thing because I really think I need and maybe this is some sort of like people who believe in conspiracy theories having to have a father figure that they can blame maybe it's just that I just want who's sitting in that cockpit as I'm the passenger to be someone who actually understands what's going on even if the net effect is not that good so even if they're crashing the plane they are high enough to put in the plane there was nothing else he could have said you have no free will whatsoever there you have to say even if the plane is crashing we're already in the cheap seats here we're already eating the bodies so we're like a South American soccer team on this side of the microphone who didn't have to eat anybody was that right? they were talking about veganism they were in the jungle it was a plant rich environment they could have gotten better protein how is that going for you well before we move on to that I appreciate what you said tonight in a very special seven hour interview what are you putting fast forward to get to the veganism what can't of bees are you opening now sir what I was going to say is really a great way of clarifying where you are and why that matters and I think that resonates with a lot of people and it's as long as we're all you know to me the real epidemic in America one of them is like nobody is arguing in good faith so that it's just that and the fucking word evil can we just ban that word because as crazy and as misguided as people are evil is a supernatural constant no it's a pre-modern theological imputation of something and the idea that every discussion is about gamesmanship instead of an actual discussion and I have my good friend Robbie who works with us who says all the modern breakdown we're experiencing Trump and everything else is Hillary Clinton's fault it's when she was running for Senate in New York and everybody said well she's kind of scummy but she's our scummy that's when everything broke down yeah I'm willing to roll it back to like the Kennedy assassination I like that search for a moment you know when everything began but I don't know that we need that but I do think we need the process going forward of having these conversations and steelmaning people and then also understanding I appreciate your talking about like where am I coming from in a conversation because that never happens or it rarely happens where people are willing to say this is who I am this is where I'm coming from it means my viewpoint is limited and is going to change for me to bring it all back home to Bob Dylan what I like about that is that he's constantly changing and that's that's a good thing like if you were the same person you were 40 years ago that would be kind of a tragedy and we're also we're learning that on the other side too I think that the idea that someone changes is should not be a gutcha moment it should be the opposite it should be a celebration so you want to celebrate Bill Gates for finally admitting that he went to Richard Epstein Jeffrey Epstein's Island that should actually be praised so I was like that was a mistake but I did it and I lied about it earlier and you should be like let's treat him a little differently than how we were treating him I agree very quickly veganism when I last interviewed you you came out with your book Presto where you had lost 100 pounds and you have mostly kept it off I lost more than 100 lost about 130 30 to come back on now 20 have come off it's always a battle what I wanted to ask you about regarding that partly inspired by you I went on a vegan diet for several years and I enjoyed it I stopped doing it after a while because it wasn't working for me health wise but you have also one of the things that was remarkable you kind of crowed about being an unethical vegan because you said you were just doing it for health reasons essentially you have become an ethical vegan and can you talk a little bit about what that means that was a nutty thing that happened and it's also happened to almost everyone I know that went through that and I think I forgot the woman's name who wrote why do we wear cows eat pigs and keep dogs some book with some title like that but I heard her interviewed I don't read the book heard her interviewed and she made this point that nobody and I mean that nobody is not the real nobody but nobody feels good about industrial farming nobody feels good about that factory farming no one would sit in a pig slaughterhouse I'm sure glad I eat pulled pork nobody would do that so we spend so much time with this resolution of cognitive dissonance where you say I don't like that factory farming but I want a cheeseburger now you know when you take that cheeseburger away and you're not eating it for health reasons all of a sudden the muscles that you had developed to justify the eating of meat and the justifying of the cruelty just go away just simply go away I had this incredible personal personal arguments that allowed me to eat meat then I stopped eating meat and those arguments whether they were valid or not doesn't matter I just stopped making them to myself so when all of a sudden I was confronted with this amount of suffering I didn't have them by fingertips anymore I didn't have my quick answer because I just got lazy kind of like computing capacity for other things and the one thing is I remember arguing with a vegan back when I wasn't when I was a carnist I guess you want to say and him saying the suffering of chickens is like the suffering of people this is the holocaust now and this is the head of PETA years ago made this you know terrible going insane and that is so easy it's a shame because normally when we call something it's a holocaust we're usually dead on it really does bring out the best arguments normally assuming it happened that was the problem with the PETA argument you were so easy to dismiss so easy to dismiss and it just came to me I'm sure others have made this argument but it came to me alone that I just said wait a minute we don't have to argue about chicken suffering versus human suffering or cows love for their calves versus humans love for their children we don't have to make that argument at all what if the suffering of one million chickens adds up to the suffering of one person's stubbed toe doesn't matter we still like a little less suffering I think that the overstating of that argument is what completely fucked me up because if you make it a very minor thing like if you just want to say boy, slaughterhouses smell bad make me feel creepy that's all you need and then the environmental you know if people went vegan it's bigger than all the cars which don't taste good anyway exactly final point oh I would love to now just eating cars every time I see a car like if I'm driving on the highway and a car is just like obviously crashed I'm looking for do they have the if the rapture comes this car will be driverless and I'll be like come on but I know I'm going to be left I was talking about rapture the single by Blondie where she says now they're only eating cars these Cadillacs I think of Bob Dylan's rapture very quickly and this brings us back to libertarianism because it seems to me whatever people might say and whatever you might say you're still profoundly libertarian and that you believe that people should have respect and dignity, autonomy, empathy and choice in their life like that's what matters like to become who you want to become there's limits within it and stuff but when we talk about veganism there's a lot of fair often but they often are stand-ins for people who are so shrewish and so zealous and so self-righteous they're like Christians in this way isn't that all that that joke about how can you tell if someone's a cross trainer or someone's a vegan they tell you there's all those jokes and they're all accurate but you believe it and the statement that you just made that you don't believe that you have the right to force people to believe a certain way how do you maintain that integrity once the truth is revealed pacifism and atheism and libertarianism are all exactly the same how much right do I have to use force on someone else and we've got to bring her back around to this fearing not I become my enemy in the instant that I preach that's one of the lines one of the 5,000 lines of Bob Dylan that come back to me all the time from my back pages I I have to I must if you're arguing for the limit of force yes let's take it out of Bob Dylan for a second as long as we're not putting it in Phil Oaks I'm good with it how about we go to Cracker I don't know what the world may need but I sure as hell know it starts with me and that's a wisdom I've laughed at I tried to get anybody in my social circle to realize that was the most important thing written to me right now the past four years five years that is the mantra that goes over and over again would you repeat it again I don't know what the world may need but I sure as hell know it starts with me and that's a wisdom I've laughed at and it's that pause that fucking kills me because he lets you sit with him and you go yeah I suppose that I laughed at and I'm afraid that my my pacifism and all these things kind of tie together and if people the libertarian movement feel that they that I betrayed them Judas my play fucking loud when they yelled Judas to Bob Dylan he counted off the song by going play fucking loud that was one two three so maybe that's what I'm saying if you want to say I'm with Judas I say play fucking loud no it really does in the narrative which is not true in the narrative that I feel the story that I tell myself about my life when I look back at the time it was having to look at that email and say I will not be at a rally telling people not to wear masks now if we got to the point where are we going to talk about a mandate and stuff we'd have a long long long discussion but at that June to July of 2020 we're not going to be a person telling people not to wear masks I'm sure you were expecting to hear this about 90 minutes ago but I think we're going to leave it there good Matt thank you so much thank you and that was Penn Sunday school