Joe Rogan | Is There a Solution to the Student Loan Crisis? w/Penn Jillette

Look, fucking Trump just passed something and no one wants to give him credit for this. The kidney stuff. What's the kidney stuff? He did. He did wonderful stuff for kidney transplant stuff. I'm sure he did. Push through. Well, I was going to say that he absolved all the student loans for disabled veterans. Fantastic. I love it. You don't hear a word about it. Word of praise. Look, we should absolve student loans for fucking everyone. We're crippling kids. We're crippling the 17, 18 year old kids who sign up for these fucking loans and they get compromised to the point where we have people to this day right now that are getting their social security money. Their social security money is getting docked because they owe student loans. They're at the end of the fucking road. But what do you do? What do you do? And this is a real question. This is not rhetorical. What do you do about the feeling of fairness? The people that work their way through college waiting tables. That's a good question. Working really hard. And they, do we just say their feelings, which I think is valid, which is, yeah, yeah, you got fucked on this, but let's help someone else out. What about the compassion? Because you know, there are people that worked really hard to not have student loans. Yes. And there are people that took them, there has to be somebody who took them frivolously. 100%. I think quite a few. And I think it's also, we also should pay attention to the human mind and the development of the human mind and the frontal cortex. The frontal lobe does not develop properly until you're 25 years old. Right. Or somewhere in that range. Plus or minus four years. It's definitely not 17. It's definitely not 18. So you're taking on these fucking loans. You can't be trusted with money or your future or thinking about what the fuck you're doing in terms of like taking on a debt of hundreds of thousands of dollars. Don't we have to, and this also ties in with sexual stuff as well, don't we have to decide when someone's adult and then give them that respect? Yes. Don't we have to say you're 18 years old, we can't control what decisions you make. Yes. And when is that year going to be? Because I think 25 is too old. I think 25 is too old as well. But I think what we're saying is, I mean, look, there's a lot of 18 year old people that make very good moral decisions. Yes. I should praise that. Here's the problem with the student loan thing in terms of the, that's the only loans that you never get exonerated from. You can get bankruptcy, right? And you can get exonerated. You can, you can escape the loans of credit cards, the debt of mortgages. You could escape a bad business collapsing and owing millions and whatever. You could escape that through bankruptcy. You cannot do that with student loans. It's a corrupt system. You take a child who's trying to learn a trade or trying to learn a profession and you acquire insane debt that's going to track you and cripple you for the rest of your life. And no matter what happens to you, you owe that money. But also you're taking your colleges out of the free market too. By giving those, by giving those loans easily. Yes. And by having government help. Yes, absolutely. So you're also taking away the free market. Yes. Because you know, we found out that when you put the free market in like Lasik surgery, when insurance doesn't cover it, it gets wicked cheap. You know? And if colleges had to be paid as people went without easy loans to get, and if colleges did not get government money, they might be wicked cheaper. I think they would be cheaper. I mean they're really, really expensive. Crazy expensive. Yes, crazy expensive. I think the real solution is in treating education like a thing that's going to make our society better. And think of it as the same way we think about the fire department, the same way you think about police department. But don't you think that, I mean, when you read the paper, there's always one whole thing about colleges getting too expensive and people can't go. And then you turn 20 pages later in the paper and there's an article about how online learning is happening and all this stuff is going to happen. Do you think that that idea of college is going to hold up for another 10 years? I think there's an experience that people have when they go away. I did, but I went to college in my town. I went to UMass Boston. And I really only went because I didn't want to be a loser. I mean, it was really all it was. I was doing martial arts and fighting and traveling all over the world, or all over the country rather, and thinking about doing stand up at the time as well and then transitioning to doing stand up while I was also still taking classes. I was learning nothing. It was a complete waste of time. I was only doing it so I could say, yeah, taking classes at UMass Boston, barely paying attention, barely showing up. And it was just a thing that I didn't want to tell people that I wasn't going to college. That was the number one reason why I did it. But I had a unique life. From the time I was graduating from high school to the time I started doing stand up, I was obsessed with martial arts and competing. And that's all I wanted to do was make the Olympic team for Taekwondo. That was my goal, and that's what I was trying to do. So I wasn't a normal person. I wasn't going to go to Ohio and fucking travel over there and take a full course load and not be able to pursue what I wanted. What I wanted to do was- And also you've got a window, I think- Athletically, yes. Athletically that's fairly small. There was no scholarships for Taekwondo. It didn't exist. The only other option was the army. There was a dude, his name is Clay Barber, this really talented guy who was a fighter who was on the US team at one point in time, I think. And he was competing through the army. They had subsidized his training somehow or another, and I was thinking, maybe I should join the army. That was the only other thing that I was thinking about doing. But for people, I think there's a thing about getting away from your parents. Getting away from them, getting away from their influence, being wild and crazy and being with a bunch of other kids and trying to find yourself. I think that comes from traveling to a place and going to college. And I think there's some benefit in that. I have friends that have had great benefit in that sort of transformative experience of being on a campus, a physical campus in a place that's outside of their hometown where it gives them this new experience where they get to try to reinvent themselves. Yeah, there's no doubt about that. People do that. Being able to be someone else. Yeah. But I wonder if all of that- Why are we giving that a four year period? Why isn't that our whole lives? It could be and should be. And isn't that the way that's going to change? Because people aren't having jobs for their whole life anymore. And by the way, the liberal arts education was never supposed to teach people a trade. It was always supposed to make it so that young men could talk at parties. That was the idea. We could have the same cultural thing. We could talk about Shakespeare. We can talk about this. We can talk about that. But none of this was meant to give people jobs. Well, it's so rigid, right? You get out of high school. High school is this torturous affair where you're being a square peg. They're trying to shove into a round hole. Then you get out and then they fly off to wherever the fuck you're going to go to school. And you go there and you're forced with this overbearing workload of school and then social things. You're trying to figure out what's okay and what's not okay now. Where's the safe space? And am I allowed to say this? And am I allowed to say that? And what are the new rules now for this new generation? Are we really going to change the world? And then all of a sudden you're out in the world and you realize that fucking money that you spent or that loan that you got is not getting you a job and you're fucked and you can't get a job and you're also massively in debt and severely depressed and trying to figure out your future. And then you go on Adderall. And then you're like, I get it. We're setting people up. We're setting people up for a horrible failure. I am with Bernie Sanders in that I think education should be free. And I don't think that's a bad thing. I think you should earn it. I think you should have to earn it. How about if education is really cheap like everything else is getting cheaper? I mean, TV is really cheap. Why is it? We can't get some more expensive. I think we could pay for it with taxes. Or maybe wrong. Or the individuals could pay for it. Maybe the individuals could. If it made sense. If it made sense. I mean, if you want to learn something now, we know this very well. If you want to learn anything now, you can get it for free on the web. You definitely can. You definitely can. Many things other than physical things. There's a lot of physical things that you need to be taught by a coach. But I think there's a lot of things you can learn online. And even the physical things you can get a big chunk of it from online tutorials. I mean, let's talk about all that matters. Okay, let's talk about juggling. You know, I grew up as a juggler. When you were doing the Tae Kwon Do, I was juggling all the time. That's all I did. And that was my whole life was juggling. And what happened was with the internet, juggling got tremendously better. Because people could watch videos of things they knew were possible and get better. If juggling could get better, physics certainly can. It seems like you can take a course at any college online. And if you sincerely want to learn, you know, I don't know if we need to have this. What is the term called when the Amish take their one year of rumble still skin? Yes. Rum spring. Rum spring. I don't think we need a nationally tax subsidized rum spring for every person in the country. That seems like what it is, right? Yeah, you go to college, you just described. It seems like live your fucking life. There isn't this four year magic period or this two year magic period. And go out and learn the stuff you want to learn. I mean, you know, we both have children and they'll be talking about going to college. But of course, not of course, but my wife will push very hard for college. And my thinking is anything they want to learn, they can just learn it. By the way, this was also true with just the libraries in local towns. It's just more true now. It's even easier now. I can't imagine growing up where my son can type in Lenny Bruce and it all just pops up. Right. Or a record store. They wouldn't order it. Order it. Yeah, yeah, order it. Because they didn't. The Gripen's Music Store in Greenfield, Massachusetts did not have the Carnegie Hall concert right there in the stacks. I had to order. Frank Zappa, on back of one of his records, mentions Lenny Bruce and he's on Sgt. Pepper. I guess I should learn about him. Lenny write that down. That's how I learned about Terrence McKenna. I learned about Terrence McKenna from listening to a Bill Hicks record. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And what's a heroic dose? And Frank Zappa, one of his records, I forget what it is, I think it's freak out, but it might be absolutely free, says on the back, do not listen to this song until you've read Franz Kafka in the penal colony. I got the record, opened it up. It said that. I listened to one side, got to that song, got on my bike, rode down to the Greenfield Public Library. Kafka, I got this written down Kafka in the penal colony. Got there, read it, went back, listened to the record. My entire education starts with Mike Nesmith of the Monkees who said, listen to Zappa, listen to Hendrix, from Zappa to Lenny Bruce, from Lenny Bruce to the whole world. And I believe that that is available to everybody all the time. I mean, I don't know as I would say, tax players should pay for college. I think I would say, do we need college? Isn't that fading away? I think there's a real benefit to being in a classroom with a brilliant professor. Yeah, yeah. I think there is. But we're also seeing with Ted Talks, which I know are jive, but there is a, there's all longing there. You say you know they're jive? I mean, there can be a lot of jive Ted Talks. There's some jive Ted Talks. Yeah. But what I'm saying is, I went to one of the first Ted conferences and got to hear all these credible people speaking. It was mind blowing. And I wasn't college age. I was, you know, I was whatever I was, 45 or something, 40. And it was an amazing experience. Jonas Salk, you know, I sat and listened to Jonas Salk talk. I've been in a room with brilliant people speaking and it's really, really great. But I think we can deliver that cheaper. And that's the side of Bernie Sanders I want to talk about. It's not can we give endless amounts of money to these fucking people on college campuses? Can we pay them all the money in the world to take our children and give them something to do in between smoke and dope? Can we rather just say can't we make this experience cheap enough so that anybody can go and experience it? Why don't, why, why isn't it possible for you, for a few bucks, to go and be in a room with a brilliant person? I think that would be a thing that would be beneficial to almost anybody at any point in time instead of the rigid structure of like, you know, this is, you know, you have to get all this work done by X amount of time. That's the other thing that happens to kids too. They're taught about having no sleep and about beating your body up and about cramming and about getting all this work done in a short period of time. We're really preparing them for a horrible job. And all the shit that doesn't work. You know, all that weird, that weird kind of hazing shit that we do for medical professionals. You're going to work for 48 hours. But the fucking never works. It never fucking works. It's terrible for the patient. It's bad for everybody. You know, so my thing, you just made the argument about the frontal cortex and you're not really ready until you're 25. I mean, one of the huge advantages I had in my life was a shitty, shitty education. Horrible education. You know, I went to a bad, bad, bad public school that had an influx of hippies from UMass that came in and experimented on us. So we had no education whatsoever. I graduated from high school on a plea bargain. I had very good SATs, so I had scholarships to wherever I wanted to go, but I chose not to because I misunderstood Bob Dylan. I didn't know he was lying. So I went and hopped trains and hitchhiked around and lived homeless for a couple of years. And I never read Moby Dick until I was 45. Thank you. If I'd read Moby Dick when I was supposed to at college age, I wouldn't have gotten it, but I was able to get it at the right age. And now it's my favorite book because I was ready for it, you know? There's so many things that are on the curriculum that are very, very important. Maybe not that day. I think there's also an issue with people not thinking of education in terms of like that it's a lifetime pursuit. Sure. It's not something that you graduate from college, then you're done. We really should be educating ourselves throughout life. And not just accidentally or incidentally by experiences. We should do it because there's things that we pursue that are interesting. Yes. And now is one of the greatest times ever to do that because of audio books. You can do it while you're in the car. You can do it while you're on the train. You can get educated by... And you can also... They're doing this weird connecting thing where I've not experimented with this, but I'd love to, where people take courses online and then find people who are also taking courses online in their communities and then meet at like a fucking Starbucks to discuss what happened before in the class, which is mind blowing that that can happen. So you can take, you know, one of my huge... I mean, one of the things I wanted to do is I wanted to learn to play jazz. I wanted to play upright bass. I took that up at 45 and I learned to play upright bebop bass passively. Huge accomplishment. And now I really want to learn a language, you know? I was looking at a little bit because I figured maybe there's a government watch list I'm not on, so I should learn Arabic. That was my thing. Because don't you think that that picks all the boxes? That's going to give me everything if I just learn Arabic. So I started looking into how I can learn Arabic. And it's amazing the kind of network that's developing all over the world to be able to learn anything. So my argument with you on the Bernie thing of paying for everybody's college is I think we can get college so fucking cheap you can go to college your whole life. Well I don't think that's a bad idea, you know, if it's possible to get college that cheap, but I don't want professors to be poor. I mean, I think one of the real problems we have with public education is that people don't want to be a teacher because teachers don't get paid much. Sure. There's a way, I would say that's government intervention that's doing that. I would say if you... Government intervention is keeping the salary low? I think so. Really? I really think so because I think that we're not having enough of a competition and stuff there. I mean, you know, you would pay good money to be in a room with Steven Pinker, you know? Yeah, sure. And I think that locally this was always a problem that I never figured out. You know, when I was in Greenfield, Massachusetts, town of 20,000, I would say to all the other... By other high school students, I would say, you know, if we didn't give our money to the Rolling Stones and the Beatles and Dylan and all these other bands, we could pull our money together and have a really good local band. We could have a great band right here in town, you know? And I think that if you thought of education that way, can't we get in our little area really great teachers who can teach this stuff? It might be pretty boss. Well, it would be amazing if we could spread education, right, through any method, whatever we could do. We could encourage people to be more educated. But I think that one of the best ways to do it really is just... Look, there's a lot of podcasts that are educating people. There's a lot of information that you can get that's entertaining. Not mine. But what we're getting is there's more information available now than ever before. I think it's very different than what college is traditionally. College is a thing where you go and it's a rite of passage. And we don't have those in this world. And I think we could do with them. I think we could do with these rites, particularly for young men. Maybe it's a case for young women, obviously, I never was one. But when you're a young man, there's this transitionary period where you're a boy and then all of a sudden, am I a man yet? When am I a man? Certainly a lot of cultures and religions have done that. Well getting out and getting that certificate and getting your diploma, holy shit, I graduated from fucking university. I'm a man now. I'm a grown up. I have a degree. I'm a woman now. I have a degree. I'm an adult. And you're obviously... I'm seeing this... It's okay to speak with an accent. It's not okay to hear with one. I'm hearing that from someone who spent an awful lot of time explaining to myself and others why I didn't go to college. You wanted to show you weren't a loser. I didn't have that. I didn't say, I went to Ringley Brothers Barnum, Bailey, Greatest Show on Earth, Clown College. If you want to make sure you don't get respect, that's where you go. Well, I'd say I talk about it just because I want people to really know where my head was at. I don't want to glorify where I was when I was in college. No, no, I'm not talking about that. I'm just saying, I went without any rite of passage at all. And the closest I had to a rite of passage was earning my living, which was huge. You were on a different pursuit. Your pursuit was the Carney pursuit. You enjoyed that. I mean, it was like you had a lust for it. It obviously worked out well.